Clay’s throat clicked as he dry-swallowed. “That’s your plan? Dress me up and wait for the spook to show? Scooby fucking Doo-style?”
Shit. Is that where I’m gettin’ it from?
Clay grunted. “I thought you said ghosts have anchors. How can she leave the house?”
I’ve been up on the roof of the Generator, in the gardener’s shed out back. For now, let’s assume the patio is an extension of the house.
“Assuming you’re right, how would I even know she’s there?”
I imagine she’ll open the door. Or a window.
“She can’t walk through the wall and ambush me?”
If you blow smoke at a wall, does it end up in the next room? It needs an opening, a vent, some portal to pass through. In my experience, we’re no different. Make sure all the doors and windows are sealed and she can’t creep up.
“What about the chimney? The stove pipe?”
Deidre? My Deidre? I couldn’t get her to go camping and she’s gonna crawl up a soot-filled tunnel?
“Look, whatever, she’ll never believe I’m you. She already thinks I’m this Rooster guy.”
That’s the trick, man. With the Ganeks in the house, Dee was passive for years. You don’t look a thing like Rooster, so I imagine she’s not seeing… completely clearly. It took a long time for me to see in this state. We’re not physical beings, after all. We don’t have eyes, so it’s more about learning to use a… kind of third eye. If Deidre spots my guitar, my jacket, my hair in shadowy light, don’t underestimate the power of suggestion. You want to see something bad enough, you do.
“‘Sometimes truth is only what you want it to be.’”
Don’t quote my songs at me, but yes.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way you could stretch your anchor to the back patio and play the show yourself?”
I’ve tried going outside. It’s fade to black every time… Boyle trailed off, as if something occurred to him. Although… always been curious… stand there a second, will you?
“Where else am I going to go?”
This is probably a new level of crazy, but keep still.
Clay shoved his hands anxiously into his pockets. “If it’s crazy, maybe tell me what it is first.”
No response. A moment later the floorboards creaked rapidly, the footfalls crossing the room right at him. “Rocco, what—”
Clay was interrupted by something hitting him. He fell back a step, exhaled roughly, but felt no pain. Instead, the sensation that spread through his chest was unlike anything he’d known before. The only thing he could compare it to was being hit, bare-skinned, by a powdery snowball the size of Frosty’s head. “What the fuck, man?”
When Boyle spoke again, it was from the far side of the room, and he sounded winded himself, like he’d gotten the worst of their collision. After Smiles… I got curious about the afterlife…. Read way too… too many books on the occult. One had a chapter… devoted to a ghost who could jump from body to body.
“That’s what that was? You were trying to jump into me?”
Don’t make it sound so rapey, Clay. I only wanted to know if it’d work, so I could see Deidre again. It failed miserably, by the way. Something got in the way.
“Yeah, my chest,” Clay said, rubbing at the Icy Hot tingle. He peeked through the neck hole in his shirt, but saw no oncoming bruise or mark.
It wasn’t anything physical. It was… your spirit? Essence? Soul? Whatever it is we really are at our core.
On another day, Clay might have appreciated Boyle’s impromptu attempt at possession. “I should just move out,” he sighed. “Let Deidre terrorize realtors for all eternity.”
No, Boyle told him, and now his voice changed. I need you to try—as much for me as yourself. You didn’t know Dee when she was alive. She was sweet and good. She looked out for me always. He hesitated, the next words coming hard. And she died for me. She deserves a better fate than being perpetually afraid in that house.
Clay fingered his stitches. “Say your plan works. She sees me, dances genie-like into the bottle. If I somehow live to tell the tale, are you going to ask me to put you to sleep too?”
Boyle considered the idea. Not me, he said, after what felt like a long time. I’m a glutton for punishment. A dead man hanging around life always is. Clay felt a pressure grip his hand and pump it up and down. You’re just startin’ to get interesting. So I’m not goin’ noooowhere.
Clay threw the jacket on. Boyle’s arms had been longer than his, but it wasn’t a half-bad fit. He gave a nod and ventured out into the fading light to retrieve their guitar.
Worse case, she doesn’t go for it, Boyle called from the doorway. That happens, do what I did at The Fillmore: Throw the Rick in one direction, haul ass in the other.
“Okay, man.” The snowball sensation still tingled in Clay’s chest, and everywhere. “What could go wrong?”
If Farewell Ghost taught him anything, it was that fear, no matter how intensely felt, could not endure. It was a fuel that burned too bright, and the heart was not inclined to sustain its demand. After an hour of playing Throne tunes, even all the naturally anxious atoms that fused Clay Harper together needed respite. So, instead of a throbbing pulse and cold sweats, his nervous system downshifted to a vague feeling of butterflies and a perspiration born out of wearing a thick leather jacket on a warm summer night.
The bottle sat there, like the useless thing it was, on the round patio table beside the mini-amp, backlit by a large, but purposely dim Coleman lantern. With the nearest motion sensor dismantled, the lantern cast the porch in an eerie jaundice, while Clay, as in-character as any self-deluded Boyle impersonator, watched his own superimposed shadow writhe against the house.
If nothing else, he was getting better at Throne covers. Again and again he ran through “Face the Music” and “Tried to Fix You” and “American Rapture,” hoping it was enough to fool the woman who had known Rocco Boyle better than anyone.
Fat chance, he could hear his old man telling him. I’m going to come home and find your mutilated body. And have you even bothered to consider how hard that will be for me, Clay?
Yet, to this point, Deidre remained indifferent to Clay’s tribute set. Was she watching from one of the windows, afraid to step outside? Or did she sense the trick and, in turn, the trap? Nine o’clock worked its way to ten. Before long, Peter would be home from work, Essie in tow, assuring her that his master suite no longer looked like the climax of a Nirvana set—only to find that Clay had scarcely finished a third of the job, the law books as scattered as ever, the mattress still angled in the bathtub. Clay imagined himself rushing inside with some fabricated excuse, and that would be when Deidre pounced, when they were all together, and maybe then Peter would understand that the destruction had not been his troubled son’s doing—right before their skulls were fractured by a flying highboy.
Gritting his teeth, Clay turned the single-watt amp to 10 and started into “American Rapture” again. The famous four power chords heard ’round the world. And he wondered if he’d ever write a song like this, three-and-a-half minutes of sound powerful enough to unite the voices of a hundred-thousand people in a divided country. How did that feel? To start with a few notes, composed alone in your basement or garage, and watch it grow and grow and grow? Let me experience that just one time, Clay thought. Even one-hit wonders were better than never-weres.
One of the French doors thumped softly against the side of the house.
Clay hadn’t seen it opening, but all of a sudden it was agape. Thrown wide. And something had stepped though the entryway. Nothing visible. But something palpable.
Clay started to lift his head, but some preserving force screamed out, No! If she saw his face—not half as handsome or a quarter hirsute as Rocco’s—the whole feeble plot was cooked.
He focused on keeping his head turned, and in so doing fell off rhythm. And stopped singing entirely. Reaching the “Rapture” chorus, famous or not, Clay couldn�
�t remember a goddamn word of it.
The deck creaked.
Baby? Deidre asked. And it was amazing, how a voice so high could fill you with such a low-belly dread. Is it you?
Clay’s tongue was flaccid. It was the worst sort of stage fright imaginable—the kind that could get you killed. And when he missed the solo, the whole song went to pieces.
Rocco? Deidre asked. She dared to advance another step. And another. Until she was standing directly behind the imposter. The moment her cold fingers touched the back of his neck, Clay knew his acting career would be over.
Meanwhile the bottle was sitting there, ignored. Why wasn’t she going for it?
Have you been here all this time? Why haven’t you played for me before?
Clay’s pick hung over the strings. All was quiet but his heartbeat, pounding at the night like a tom-tom of doom. And even if the jacket was uniquely Boyle’s, this close, Deidre had to notice the differences between them.
Rooster was in the house, she went on. He chased David and his family off, so I chased him off. The collar of Boyle’s jacket lifted. She was leaning toward Clay, and even if it wasn’t possible, he’d have sworn he could feel her breath, sour and warm, against his ear. I’ve dreamed of you so many times. Now she touched Clay, gripping his chin tightly to turn his face toward her. Baby, why won’t you look at me?
Clay resisted her pull, waiting for her to comprehend, to turn furious and violent. But Deidre’s fingers slipped away. Hey. This isn’t… it is, isn’t it? Large shadows rattled along the side of the house as she nudged the bottle against the lantern light. The one we found on the beach.
That was when the paralysis in his hands broke and Clay started playing the only thing he could think of. The three open strings that Boyle had used to lure him into the Generator in the first place. Low E, A, D. Thrum-Tum-Tee. Then back up. Tee-Tum-Thrum.
Did you leave something inside for me? One of your letters? Deidre’s voice grew thick. On the verge of tears. I thought this bottle was gone. Like you, baby, just like you.
Clay played faster. It was working. God, it was working. Deidre’s energy shifted away from him and the bottle seemed to tremble as she traveled down its narrow neck.
Thrum-Tum-Tee…
Don’t wait, Clay’s mind screamed.
Tee-Tum-Thrum…
Don’t wait dammit!
Deidre’s voice rose from the mouth of the bottle. There’s nothing here….
Clay missed the low E and the guitar made him pay with a jarring twang.
Rocco?
Clay snatched at the cork and fumbled it. It bounced once and went off the table.
“Oh, fuck me, no!” he hissed and dropped to all fours. The Rick’s cord snagged and the mini-amp jumped off the table and struck Clay in the kidney.
You’re not Rocco, Deidre told him.
Guitar dangling from his torso, Clay probed frantically in the dark beneath the table. He could see exactly nothing. For all he knew, the cork had skittered into the grass.
Rooster, Deidre realized. And then she was screaming full-bore: How dare you! How fucking dare you!—echoing against the glass so that it sounded like there was two of her in there. And she was moving back up the neck again. In a second she would be out and—
It was Clay’s jammed fingers that found the cork. They wouldn’t flex, but Clay forced them, enough to lift the cork from the deck.
Then he leapt up and rammed it down into the opening—
Deidre stopped it halfway home. No! she yelled, shoving back as Clay shoved both hands down. Flashes of light strobed inside the glass, like the static sparks you saw when you opened a folded blanket in the dark. Lightning in a bottle. I’ll fucking tear you apart! Deidre shrieked, and for a moment Clay saw the glass shattering against her rage—all that spectral energy bursting out at him like a murderous swarm of bees.
In the end, though, the glass held and Clay used all his weight to drive the cork down.
The bottle had gone quiet and was cold to his touch, very cold, the glass covered in a fine layer of frost. “Here,” Clay said, lifting it.
She can’t stay here, Boyle told him.
“Why not?”
Would you want your girl’s coffin sittin’ around?
“Then what do you expect me to do with her?”
Boyle was quiet awhile. Two invisible fingers touched the bottle, their tracks running down the frost as Boyle drew parallel lines down the glass. I’m sorry, baby, but I caused you enough pain in this life. Better you rest.
Clay heard the tears in the ghost’s voice. He wondered if Deidre could hear Boyle inside the glass.
Gradually the frost rose against the finger tracks, until they were gone entirely.
Take her away from here, Boyle told him. Bury her. Tonight.
The idea made Clay cringe. But right now, he was just happy to be alive. When he opened his mouth, one word emerged: “Where?”
Stepping past the citrus trees, through the magnetized gate along the back wall of the property, Clay heard his father’s Benz pulling into the driveway out front. He heard two doors slam, heard Essie’s drunken giggle, and even if Clay’s biggest problem was literally bottled up and in hand, the master suite was another issue. Peter would be out-of-his-mind furious to find “Suck The Mans Dick” still scrawled on his wall.
Forever the disappointing son, Clay understood, and continued into the ecotone foothills behind the house.
By the soft glow of lantern light, he negotiated the dense chaparral valley and found a natural runoff that took him steeply uphill to the public trail above his neighborhood. The view from up top offered a sightline of Griffith Park and the Hollywood Hills to the south, all the way to the twinkling skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles.
From there, he moved north along the trail, following Boyle’s directions at the first fork, then the second.
Somewhere on the far side of the mountain, a coyote offered a lunatic howl. Beyond that, the night was profoundly quiet. Bats fluttered noiselessly in the canyon below. The gritty, moonlit trail wound along a narrow shelf of cliff—a steep incline of rock to the right, an equally steep drop-off to the left. And Clay marveled at the fact: Just over the ridge lay one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet here he was, by his lonesome in an isolated wilderness.
He wondered if mountain lions hunted nocturnally and was fairly confident they did. So, for no other reason than to exacerbate his already frayed nerves, Clay imagined a hundred-pound wild cat pouncing on him from the nearest pile of rocks. On the plus side, I’ll probably be the only guy in history attacked by a ghost and a lion in the same week.
The trail climbed, and in the distance Clay caught sight of a shape that didn’t belong. A chimney standing against the moonlight. A few dozen paces, and he broke out of the underbrush, and the vast valley lights appeared before him like a million sparkling jewels on a dark ocean floor. His journey ended in the clearing that presented itself a minute later. Though the chimney increased in height and proximity, no house ever materialized beneath it. All that remained of what Boyle had referred to as “the scout camp” was its foundation and brick hearth—as if some terrible wind had swept every wall, stick of furniture, worldly possession, and house-dweller clear off the mountain.
Rocco had told Clay that he and Deidre visited these ruins when they were getting sober. It was a vantage where a lot of the city could be seen, and up so high, the urban sprawl looked harmless, manageable—like it could be folded into a few neat squares and tucked away in your back pocket—and for one more night their demons would be conquered.
Approaching such a forlorn place in the dark, however, was not Clay’s cup of tea. In more rational circumstances, he wouldn’t have been caught dead here at such an hour. That he was gripping a bottle with an angry ghost inside didn’t help.
He listened to the silence of the canyon awhile—and in doing so, pulled up short.
There was a crackling on the trail behind hi
m.
Human? Animal?
He switched the lantern off. And a moment later, a shadow rose over the brush.
It was human, Clay was mostly certain. Some lost soul seeking refuge from the bustle below. And wasn’t that the way life was? The whole fucking mountain range is deserted and the one place I need privacy—
Then the shadow drew closer, and Clay found something familiar in the way it moved.
He turned the lantern up and held it out to her. “Savy?”
“Hey, Clay. Thought that was you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Told you, I come up on the trails sometimes.” She stepped fully into his light, her black hair tied in pigtails, wearing a vintage Megadeth shirt and a self-conscious grin. “I was sitting up on the bluff that overlooks your ’hood. You know the one—”
“—that you saw Boyle’s ghost from. I remember.”
“It’s so quiet up here. You can hear phones ringing in the houses below. So naturally I heard the Throne covers you were playing in your back yard. You were good.”
Clay lowered his lantern and studied Savy’s face in the moonlight. There was so much about this girl he didn’t know and he wanted that to change. “Not good enough though, huh.”
Savy paused, confirming his suspicion. “Listen, my band is—”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry”—trying to smile his way out of heartbreak—“it’ll give me something to work toward. Maybe I can open for you guys one day.”
Savy broke eye contact and noticed the bottle in his hand. “That’s an interesting way to keep hydrated.”
“I’m going to bury it. It’s kind of a… secret that needs to be laid to rest.”
FAREWELL GHOST Page 10