I look at Travis and tell him, Ms. Josephine has another kind of sight. She hears voices from other places. Places people would rather not talk about.
“So, that's like . . . ” Travis says, counting on his fingers, “ . . . quadruple redundancy.”
I nod all self-importantly.
“You guys are good,” he says.
Ricky, still taking measurements of the ambient light in the living room—as if it makes a difference—tells him, “It's just a job to us, Travis. What matters is you and your serenity.” Humble and modest, that's Ricky to a 'T'.
1 hour, 23 minutes later . . .
I'm walking around with a small bag of wireless audio microphones. They have these little amber lights right next to the power switch and frequency adjustment buttons. I'm not turning them on yet. That will happen closer to dusk. Right there in that time between dogs and wolves and demanding angels.
So right now, all I'm doing is opening up each room, laying a microphone on the floor, and marking it in my small notepad. I'm having trouble using the Palm Pilot that Ricky gave me, so the trusty old pen and paper will have to suffice.
So far, I've dropped mics in the kid's bedroom, a small bathroom, a guest bedroom and adjacent bathroom, two walk-in closets, and the master bedroom. I didn't want to freak-out Travis's wife and kid, so I just knocked lightly on the door, opened it slightly, and dropped the mic to the carpet saying, “I'm just leaving a microphone for later.” They didn't seem to mind, so neither did I.
Now I'm left with the daunting task of placing two mics in the attic where strange noises are purported to emanate from. I look up at the attic access panel, wondering how difficult it's going to be to jimmy the thing open, and all of the sudden Travis is on my heals, startling me a bit.
“Hold on, Jack,” he says, reaching up, “ . . . I'll get that.”
He tugs a couple of times at a nearly invisible bit of string and then pulls the panel down until he can unfold the stairs. I'm half watching him, half staring at the painted image of God touching man on the living room's vaulted ceiling. It's like we're kind of breaking into heaven, through a side entrance.
Moments later he's got the stairs unfolded. I give him that, I do this all the time wink, and then I head up into the darkness.
“There's a light switch on your right when you get up there,” he yells to me.
I half expect to find cat hair and dried-up fur balls up here, but it's disconcertingly clean. As in, no dust, no cob webs, no nothing. It's immaculate, in fact. And I find that level of care and fastidiousness rather alarming. Who cleans their attic like this?
I lay down the two mics and grab my Motorola radio, giving it a double-click like Ricky taught us to when we need to reach him. I wait a moment.
“Go for Ricky, over.”
“Yes, Ricky, this is Jack, I'm in the attic . . . ” And then I remember my radio etiquette, “Over . . . ”
“You're in the attic? Over . . . ”
Yes . . . over.
“Okay, two wireless microphones, at the far ends of the attic and we should be fine. Over . . . ”
Right. Thing is, this place is really clean, over . . .
“Clean? Tide with Bleach clean, or Norman Bates clean? Over . . . ”
I glance around, “The second one. Over . . . ”
Then I hear Ms. Josephine's voice, “The yard is clean, too. No bad vibes.”
Ricky gets back on the radio, “You need to say, Over . Over . . . ”
“Alright,” Ms. Josephine replies. “My inspection of da premises is over-over. I'm coming back inside. Over-over . . . ”
I can just picture her laughing, Ricky's eyes rolling.
“Let's all meet back at the base camp and we'll wait until sunset to switch on the gear. Over . . . ”
“Over-over.”
“Okay, over,” I say. I think I'll just call him on my cell phone next time so that I don't have to keep saying, over , all the time. It's really irritating.
I have a feeling things are going to be odd.
Soon.
19
114 West Briargrove.
8:49 pm . . .
The sun has finally given up its rule of the sky. Red and orange clouds are spread out here and there giving the sky a Kodak moment feel to it. The gold light turning yellow, yellow morphing into green and now everything above us might as well be the deep abyss of the ocean.
This neighborhood is much more quiet than even where Ricky and I live. Wealthy people who move this far out of town, they hold their silence sacred. In our neighborhood, ground plants, flowers, and cedar bark mulch cover the concrete, dirt, wires, sewage pipes, and jagged metal. Here, the trees are bigger, the landscaping is more expensive, but they're concealing their dirty little secrets all the same.
We are, all of us, hiding in plane sight, burying our secrets just below a faux surface. I walk through the large house, just listening to the ticks of a lonely clock in one room, the hum of a refrigerator, or the faint shhhh sound of the air conditioning system that is cooling this place.
And as I'm meandering I wonder about Travis and his family. I try to imagine myself, maybe married with a child. Maybe I'd have a furry little cat like Steele, running around scaring the sanity and rational thought out of us.
I wonder, as I pass through a lavish study, if I have a family and a home somewhere, and they're all waiting for me to come back through the front door at any moment.
My lost wife.
My abandoned child.
My forgotten cat.
But thinking like that is pointless. The one thing that the doctors and the angels all agree on is: I'll never get it back. All of my past, my long-term memories, my greatest accomplishments, my joys and my pain, and my defeats . . . none of it will ever return to me. There will be no great epiphany. No unique, life changing moment of enlightenment or awareness.
The landscaping that covers my secrets can never be removed.
Bits and pieces, sparks and flashes, that's all I'll ever get. And it will only be second hand, barely more than hearsay.
And it will all be completely random. The me that I was is dead. The only thing I have is what I see in the mirror to remember me by. And that is changing faster than I can keep up with. Between the gym and the tattoo parlor, I won't even recognize myself much longer.
Perhaps that's what Uriel was trying to tell me. Maybe I'm different than human because I'm still evolving. No past, just the possibility of a future. I'm a paradox. The only constant in my life is continual change and adaptation.
The sky outside is a deep dark blue, and I feel something in the pit of my stomach. Those flashes I've been having, they've been leaving me sick and nauseated. Like being on a carnival ride that's spinning way too fast.
I hope I'm not shorting out one side of my brain at a time. Only my left eye seems to get these flashes. That means my right is experiencing technical difficulties. The thought of losing my grey matter has certainly crossed my mind. However, I expected not to notice it. If my whole brain goes at once, I won't notice it, so it wouldn't bother me that much. But if my right brain melts and pours out of my ears while my left brain sits around watching . . . well, that would really suck.
“ . . . Jack, what's your location? Over . . . ”
“I'm in the study!” I yell. It's easier than that walkie-talkie.
As I walk into the living room, Ricky's lifting his radio to tell me, “I've got the Full-Spectrum, Standard, and Thermal Imaging cameras all set. The Full-Spectrum will film a one second burst every three seconds. Thermal and Standard will run throughout the night. It will all store digitally, and then we'll process tomorrow at the office.”
Ms. Josephine is sitting comfortably on one of the big brown couches in the living room, talking to Travis about tarot cards and astrology. And—just for the record—she confided in me that she doesn't believe in either. Our future, she always tells us, is the one we create and manipulate in front of us.
Ric
ky walks up to me, his voice low, “You get any vibes about this place?”
Nothing supernatural, no.
“Alright,” he says, glancing out the windows. “Can you go and switch on all of the wireless microphones and we'll do a quick sound check on each one?”
Sure, I say. Same order as I laid them?
“Doesn't really matter, just keep track in your notepad.”
I decided to get the attic mics out of the way first. Maybe, now that it's dark, I might see or hear something up there. I have a feeling I'm more likely to witness cat pornography than floating translucent poltergeists. But I suppose that could be fun, too.
I head across the living room, past several tripods with way-too expensive cameras facing upwards. I ascend the stairs and head to the sectional stairway that leads to the attic. The steps creak, one by one, as I slowly climb.
I've brought along a bright halogen flashlight that's heavy enough to smash through concrete if need be. The beam is like, brighter than the sun. As I shine it through the attic all I see is clean, flat boards and the two mics that I dropped off earlier.
The light is so intense that the super bright circle that it illuminates shows me more than reality. I can see everything.
Every notch in the wood.
Every bend and inconsistency.
Every nail, and divot, and bump.
What was clean and perfect under normal light, is now edgy and twisted under the scrutiny of my halogen torch. I'm seeing this place in a way I shouldn't be. I'm violating it. What I see, it's real enough, but it doesn't exist in the real world.
This is the actors without their make-up.
A famous painting from an inch away.
I flip on the mics, one at a time, and yell down, “Both attic mics are on!”
Over my radio I hear, “We're good on the attic microphones. Hit the bedrooms. Over . . . ”
So I make my way out of the attic, cut off the flashlight, and consult my notepad to see which room was first. I mosey on down the hall to the kid's bedroom, open the door, turn on the mic, and yell again.
“Okay,” Ricky instructs, “place that microphone in the back of the room, facing the door for the best coverage. Over . . . ”
Still yelling, I tell him, Microphone is in the back corner!
“Roger that. Next room. Over . . . ”
We repeat this process for each and every room, closet, and bathroom. Him talking into his radio. Me yelling.
The last room on my list is the master bedroom. I knock gently on the door, carefully pushing it open so as not to scare Travis's wife and kid. The mic is right where I left it. And I hear the television on, the volume turned down to almost nothing. The room is dark other than the dancing colors radiating from the TV screen.
The shadows in here are long and erratic, timed perfectly to the Deadliest Catch . I can almost see the waves exploding, the salty white foam of cold Alaskan waters filled with juicy looking crabs.
“Place that microphone at the foot of the bed facing the door. Over . . . ” Ricky instructs patiently.
I don't want to yell, and I'm way too frustrated to reply on the radio, so I just switch on the mic whispering into it as I walk it to the edge of the bed. I'm trying my best not to be invasive. I aim the little slits in the wireless mic at the door, and then I bend down and place it.
Slowly I stand, stretching my back.
Something tells me not to glance over at the bed. Over and over in my mind I repeat the warning:
Do not, for any reason, turn and look at the bed. It will only cause problems.
Do not, for any reason, turn and look at the bed. It will only cause problems.
And so, of course . . . I do. And then I realize what's going on here.
My god!
20
3.8 seconds later . . .
I get on my radio as quick as I can, “Ricky, Ricky, Ricky! Over . . . ”
“Go ahead for Ricky. Over . . . ”
“Get up here right now!” I tell him. “We've got bigger problems than cats fucking!” And I'm not trying to sound alarmed or pull a freak-out, but it's probably coming across that way.
I hear the thump-thump-thump of Ricky taking the stairs three at a time, and I wave him to the door of the master bedroom.
“What's going on, Jack?” he says, catching his breath. “We don't want to spook Travis, or his family.”
Oh , I say as I open the door, I don't think there's any chance of that happening.
And we both enter the master bedroom. The icy waters of the Northern Pacific are providing the gloomy sporadic back-light to the room. It takes a moment for Ricky's eyes to properly adjust.
Ricky finally sees what I see, and he's frozen solid in his carpet tracks.
I'm looking at Ricky, at the bed, at Ricky staring at the bed, at the dead woman, at Ricky staring at the decaying necrotic corpse. And neither of us really have words for this. There aren't any appropriate things to say when you find your client's wife laying long dead in the master bedroom clutching what looks like the remains of a dead infant.
The dead mother holding her dead child.
One generation in the arms of the next.
“Our client is a goddamned lunatic . . . ” Ricky says hollowly.
The bodies are so deteriorated and mummified that they don't even look real anymore. They're like Hollywood props.
Fake dead people.
These are the actors' body doubles.
A copy of a famous painting, from far away.
But these aren't dummies, or knockoffs. They're bodies. This is cruel honesty.
“We'll be very lucky,” I say quietly, “if he's only a lunatic.”
And wouldn't you know it, we start hearing a groaning, scratching sound coming from above us, between the ceiling and the attic. Maybe it's a cat clawing around. Maybe.
We both glance at each other. This guy, Travis, he might be a murderer, but he's definitely crazier than a shithouse rat in a rubber factory.
“Do we call the cops?” Ricky asks the thick, stale air. He's shaking his head, sadly. He's used to seeing hospital death—car accidents, shotgun injuries, cancer, burns. But this is different. There's an unnerving aspect to this.
Call Billtruck, I say. Let him do what is appropriate. He'll be much more logical about all of this.
Ricky nods almost imperceptibly, slowly pulling out his phone. And right before he starts to dial, it starts glowing and his ringtone—the Ghostbusters theme music—starts to play. On the screen it says 'ALG Office.' It's Billtruck. Ricky morbidly laughs to himself as he answers the call.
I can almost hear what Billtruck is saying.
“Yeah,” Ricky says softly, “I know. We just found her . . . for six months?” More nodding, a few more forced swallows, and then he says, “ . . . what about their son . . . uh?”
Paulino, I remind him.
“Right. Paulino. What about him?”
He listens intently for about 15 more seconds, his face as white as snow in the clouds. “Hey, can you send all the obvious . . . agencies to sort all of this mess out?” He looks at me and does little circles with his index finger. I guess all the sirens are on their way.
“ . . . yeah, we'll be careful with him. If he gets dodgy I'll head butt him and knee him in the nuts. We'll see you in a few.” And then Ricky slides the phone back into his baggy khaki pants. He crosses his arms over his chest and sighs audibly. Almost a groan.
He turns his head slightly, “He's nutbag crazy. Sophia, she died last December, and there's no record of them having had a son . . . ever.”
On the plus side, I say, there probably are ghosts running around this mansion. Just not on a frequency I can tune in to.
And right then the doors start to rattle and Ricky decides he's seen enough of this.
“Let's go wrap Travis up until the cops get here.”
I rub the spot just above my nose, between my eyes, where I've been having headaches ever since my flashes started.
My theory about the cat is no longer a tenable one. This house is most certainly haunted. Either by this woman and this mysterious child, or by Travis, himself. In this place, things do go bump in the night.
When we get down the stairs Travis is passed out on the couch, Ms. Josephine running her fingers gently through his curly blond hair. She puts her finger in front of her mouth, letting us know he's asleep.
Ricky goes into one of the yellow bags and pulls out a roll of black duct tape. But as he lifts it up, Ms. Josephine shakes her head, No.
And so we all sit there quietly. The attic groaning and scratching. Ricky resting his head in his hands. The doors rattling and vibrating as things we'll never see beg for help that we can never give them. Travis in his peaceful slumber dreaming about Sophia. The police and paramedics racing towards us to forever taint this quiet neighborhood with blood and tragedy. Ms. Josephine, just stroking her soft fingers through this sad man's hair. The expensive cameras recording all of it in real time.
And then there's me.
21
Moments later . . .
I decide to get a head start on gathering the wireless microphones together and packing them up, so I head across the living room and back up the stairs. Up on the ceiling, God looks like he's pointing at me as I get to the hallway and start retrieving the mics. I don't waste any time going from room to room.
I'm even quicker in the master bedroom, knowing that it's a crime scene, now. Like we did ours, CSI will be along shortly to pull out all manner of fancy cameras and lights and chemicals to figure this all out.
What we were doing for ghosts, they'll do for the dead.
But I have my theories on this, too. When you lose the only things in your life that you care about, it's easier to believe a fantasy than to except reality. No matter how fantastic the dream is, it's easier to lie to yourself than to accept the horrible truth that . . . what you love is gone, forever.
Travis, he lost the only things he really loved. And all the money in the world won't make a difference. I don't know how his faith is these days, but I expect him not to recover from this ordeal. Once they drug him up, counsel him, and convince him of what really happened . . . he's through.
See Jack Hunt (See Jack Die) Page 9