“When I found her, she already had the knife stuck in her back . . . but there wasn’t anybody else in the room. I checked the whole goddamn place. She was alone.”
“Are you saying she stuck the knife in her own back?” he asked.
“No, I’m saying she was stabbed by a ghost. Okay? You think I like saying it? Course it sounds crazy. Think I’m crazy?”
What Corrigan was actually thinking was that Tanya Mifune had beaten and stabbed her friend and then made up a story about homicidal phantoms. The police must have felt the same way since there were two officers standing by the apartment door.
“She knew this was gonna happen, y’know,” Tanya continued.
Maggie asked, “What do you mean?” Apparently this was new.
“Rickie said last night she’d figured out something. Dunno what, but it scared her. And she told me this crazy story ‘bout someone breaking into their lab and destroying some equipment and how right after that . . . I made fun of it. Called it the Mummy’s curse.”
“You didn’t take this seriously?”
“No. I mean, yeah, I did, because she was upset, and if it was upsetting for her it was real enough. But she’s been funny since Doc Decaf died. They were close, you know? After that she started spending a lot more time cooped up in her apartment. With the other deaths and all, I figured this was just her way of dealing. Make up something crazy like that. But now, you know . . . now I’m thinking she knew what was gonna happen, and she maybe even figured out why.”
“Thanks—” Corrigan said, but the girl held up a hand.
“Something else. Didn’t remember it ‘til about an hour ago. She was shouting something when I got to the door. “ ‘We weren’t looking for you’ or ‘we didn’t mean to do it’ or . . . something like that. Like she was talking to somebody.”
Corrigan went a little pale, not because of what Tanya said so much as because it reminded him of something someone else had told him a long time ago. “ ‘We weren’t looking for you’? That’s what she said?”
“I think so.”
Maggie stared at Corrigan. “Familiar?”
“No,” he muttered. “No, it’s just interesting.”
Maggie kept her gaze steady and waited for more, but he didn’t offer anything else. “All right. Thanks, Tanya.”
They left Tanya to her tea and stepped back into the hallway.
“What is it?” she asked him once they were alone.
“It’s nothing. Honestly.”
“Bullshit. I know you too well.”
“It’s not important. I’d tell you if it was.”
She started to say something else about it, but checked herself. “Okay. Fine. I have to make some calls, find out what this stuff about a lab being destroyed is. The university never mentioned anything about that to any of us, so far as I know.”
“Hey, who the hell is Dr. Decaf?”
“Took me a minute too. Professor Offey. His first name was Michael. Mike Offey. Get it?”
“Right. He was one of the victims you showed me.”
“Yeah. And Smalls was one of his graduate students.”
Corrigan nodded. “And why isn’t Tanya a suspect, again?”
“She is,” Maggie admitted. “But her story does sort of check out. The floors and walls of this place are pretty thin, and Mr. Nguyen from the first floor confirmed he heard Tanya walking around in her apartment at the time the screaming began from the top floor. He also heard Tanya running up the stairs after that. He got there a couple of minutes later and can also confirm that nobody went past him and down the stairs. He was the one who called for the ambulance.”
“This place has only one stairwell?”
“No, two. There’s a back hallway accessible through Erica’s bedroom. But while the inner door was unlocked, the outer one—the one that opens on the back stairs—was locked and chained from the inside.”
“So. A ghost?”
“Like I said, we don’t know what we have yet.”
“But your only witness says ghost.”
Maggie started to say something, but caught herself. Instead, she offered, “She’s not our only lead.”
“Is there someone else?”
“I don’t want to talk about it here.”
It occurred to Corrigan that as much as Maggie didn’t look like the sort of person who believed for a second that a ghost could have stabbed Erica Smalls, she was certainly acting like someone who did. He was obviously missing something important and was about to ask what that might be when they were interrupted by one of Maggie’s FBI agents. She had run halfway down the stairs to the midpoint landing. “Agent Trent,” she said. “It’s happened.”
The agent led Maggie and Corrigan back up to the third floor. The room, which had been a quiet, semi-orderly collective when they’d left, had erupted into a frenzied crowd of onlookers.
“Stand aside!” Maggie had to shout. She pushed her way through the room, Corrigan following with absolutely no idea what was going on.
At the center of the semicircle stood one of the uniformed cops. “I saw it . . .” he said quietly. “Happened right as I was watching.”
“When?” Maggie asked.
“Just now,” he said. He looked genuinely spooked.
“Did you touch the wall?” she asked urgently.
“What?”
“Did you touch the wall!”
“No! What, you think I did it?”
“Fingerprints. I don’t want to pick up any of yours.”
Corrigan couldn’t see what the fuss was about until the cop finally stepped to one side. And then he understood why everyone had been standing around before and why Tanya’s ghost story wasn’t making anybody laugh out loud.
“Same as before,” Maggie said.
On the white wall, in what looked an awful lot like blood, somebody had written a message with what must have been a finger. And having looked over the room pretty carefully already, Corrigan could attest to the fact that it hadn’t been there five minutes earlier.
It read: KILROY WAS HERE.
“What do you think?” Maggie asked Corrigan.
His first thought was to wonder if he would be waking up in his bed in a few minutes. What he said was, “I think either someone here did that, or we’re all going insane.”
“Better get measured for a straitjacket, then,” Maggie said.
Chapter Ten
Thirty-Eight Years Past
Things started to go very wrong right around the time the temperature hit a new low of minus two on the external thermometer nailed to a post in the backyard of the Maine farmhouse. Violet remembered the day well because it was the first time she had ever experienced weather that cold.
For most of her life, she assumed thermometers had negative numbers on them because of some completist need on the part of Mr. Fahrenheit, much in the same way automobile speedometers recorded speeds the car had no hope of ever attaining. Likewise, as a girl born and raised in Southern California—a part of the world that nowadays looked an awful lot like heaven to her—she had never understood snow as anything more than a hypothetical concept that happened Elsewhere.
For the first couple of months, snow was a mysterious and wonderful thing. She spent a lot of time watching it fall, playing around with it in her hands, showing it to Corry, and just marveling at it in general. But the damn stuff never went away; it kept renewing itself every few days, and the sun—who knew the sun was weaker in Maine?—didn’t have any effect on the permafrost at all.
So she’d quickly had her fill of snow and cold weather, despite which, it kept on snowing and getting colder.
The day it hit negative two was the same day the Bluff commune ran out of meat. Half the people there didn’t eat meat, but it was the first indication that supplies, however inexhaustible they seemed, were not, in fact, inexhaustible. And for the first time since they’d arrived, the people of the farmhouse began rationing the food.
The problem was
the food would never have lasted the entire winter either way. Charlie insisted, whenever asked, that his grandparents survived winters just fine for forty years on a single freezer of supplies, but he stubbornly ignored the obvious fact that two elderly people ate significantly less than fifteen stoners. His grandparents could also drive into town for more supplies if needed, whereas Charlie only had a yellow school bus with a quarter tank of gas, almost no money, and no idea where the nearest town was.
By New Year’s Day, they’d run out of potatoes and coffee. By mid-January, there was nothing left but green beans and apples. And two weeks after that, the Bluff commune officially hit rock bottom when something happened that Charlie’s grandparents never had to worry about . . . they ran out of drugs.
There is no greater hell on Earth than being stuck in a farmhouse with fifteen hippies going dry simultaneously. As Violet had already learned, the world got a lot more harsh and scary when one went cold turkey. And she’d always had the option of dropping out for a while by just walking into one of the rooms and partaking of whatever the drug of the moment was. As it was her choice not to do so, the process wasn’t ultimately all that terrible.
Not so for the rest of them.
Upon realizing there were no more drugs, a search party was organized, the net result of which was zero acid tabs and a dozen roaches that were immediately combined to make one joint, which was quickly consumed.
Then they started to get really creative. A couple of them had a little chemistry in their backgrounds, so part of the kitchen was converted into a laboratory to see if they could invent a drug out of various foodstuffs. The crushed apple seed paste seemed to hold the most promise but turned out to be a dead end. And the burnt banana peels, which the group spent hours outside rooting around in the trash for, just ended up making the whole house stink. Even Corry had a comment on that—breaking his customary silence when in the presence of anyone other than his mother to declare that the odor was truly “icky.”
Desperately straight, the house turned en masse to the freezer because if they couldn’t get high any more, at least they could eat a lot of food. But, of course, there wasn’t any food either.
It was then that Charlie, while being pinned down by three guys who had been avowed pacifists only a couple of days earlier, realized something more than an appeal to positive vibrations was needed, if only to prevent himself from being lynched and possibly eaten.
“We’ll go hunting,” he said.
“What did you say?” asked Happy Sammy, who was, at that moment, not at all happy. He was, however, happier than Charlie, given Sammy had him in a headlock.
“Hunting,” Charlie said again, louder. His suggestion effectively defused the situation—being one that prominently involved Charlie being whaled upon in the face, stomach, and kidney areas by various prominent members of the Bluff commune—while the congregation paused to consider the suggestion.
Nobody knew exactly what to say for a while, so the idea just floated around the room, like a helium balloon just beyond the reach of a two-year-old.
It was a measure of the palpable desperation that had consumed the room’s occupants that the suggestion was seriously considered. The house was full of the offspring of middle class urbanites, people who had lived in cities for much of their lives and for whom Getting One’s Own Food meant taking a trip to the grocery store or the nearest burger joint. All of them understood, in the abstract, that it was theoretically possible to hunt, kill, skin, carve, and cook one’s own meat, but that didn’t mean it was something they wanted any part of, personally. Clouding up matters further, every one of them had at one time over the past three months loudly denounced the carnivorous nature of the human animal as innately cruel and evil.
But at the same time, they had to eat.
Happy Sammy loosened his grip on Charlie. Charlie then shook his hands free of Linda and Mary-Mary, stepped into the center of the room, and proceeded to retake command. “I have a couple of rifles,” he said. “They’re in the cellar. Anyone else know how to use a gun?”
Tyrell, who had been standing in the back of the room with Violet and Corry, declared, “I do.”
“What’re you gonna hunt?” asked Mondo suspiciously, rubbing the knuckles on his right hand, said hand having recently connected with Charlie’s chin.
“I dunno,” Charlie said. “Maybe someone’s got a cow out there or something.”
“You gonna hunt a cow?”
“Deer,” Violet suggested.
“There’s deer?” Charlie asked.
“Corry’s seen ‘em. A few times; right, honey?”
Corry, for his part, said nothing nor further indicated the existence of wildlife outside in some nonverbal way. His eyes flitted about the room as if he were following the trail of microbes. More than a couple of the Bluff commune members realized at that moment that it hadn’t been the drugs; the boy was just creepy.
“I’ve seen ‘em too,” Tyrell claimed. “Gotta be a couple dozen around here. It’ll be easy.”
“There you go,” Charlie said cheerily, putting on his very best “things are gonna be all right” face, which looked pretty convincing despite a recently dislodged tooth and an eye that was swollen half shut. “Who else wants to come?”
* * *
There was a reason nobody had discovered the cellar to the farmhouse before. One had to go outside to get into it. For Violet, who had never been in a home with an underground level, much less one without internal access to said level, this was particularly mystifying. She couldn’t imagine anything less practical. Then she spotted the unused outhouse twenty paces from the back door and immediately reevaluated that assessment.
Charlie led her and Tyrell—and Corry, who wasn’t leaving his mother’s side after seeing all the adults in the house go insane at basically the same time—around the side to a snow-covered, slanted . . . something. Violet’s first thought was that it was for a skateboard or a dirt bike, up until Charlie cleared off the snow to reveal twin metal doors built into a cement frame. Threaded through the handles was a chain with a padlock.
Charlie reached into his shirt and pulled out a key tied around his neck, which she’d always thought he wore as a statement of some kind, albeit one that only Charlie fully understood.
“You keep it locked,” Tyrell observed.
“Man, like I said; there’s guns down here. Course I keep it locked.”
Pulling the chain free, he and Tyrell managed to get one of the doors open. It creaked unappreciatively and kicked off a dust cloud of orange rust. For some reason, this made Vi want to hold Corry closer.
“After you,” Tyrell said.
Charlie peered down into the cellar, which was pitch-dark. There were steep cement steps leading down that looked to have claimed many ankles and necks over the years. Rather than try his luck in the dark, Charlie knelt in the snow, reached under the unopened door, and produced a large-beam flashlight. After testing it to make sure it still worked, he disappeared into the ground.
Tyrell and Vi looked at one another. Corry whimpered. “Yeah,” said Tyrell, “I don’t wanna go down there much either, little man.” He smiled and got Corry to smile back. “But you ain’t gotta worry. You know that, right?”
He stepped down halfway and then popped up again. “Light’s on. C’mon.”
Charlie had found the light in the cellar, which consisted of a bare bulb with a pull chain. It was enough to illuminate the center of the room but not much else. Thus, the flashlight was still of use. By the time Violet and Corry got there, Tyrell and Charlie were already checking out the gun cabinet.
“Cold,” remarked Corry. Violet hugged him closer.
“It sure is,” she said. “Weird, isn’t it? Colder in here than it is out there.”
“It’s the ground,” Charlie said without turning. He was trying to work a combination lock while Tyrell held the flashlight for him. “Kinda like being in a really roomy coffin down here.”
“C
an we not talk about coffins right now?” Tyrell said. “ ‘Specially since one of us was about to end up in one up there.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Charlie said confidently.
“It was outta hand, man,” Tyrell said.
“You were a big help.”
“Did you see me linin’ up to take a swing?”
Charlie blew on his fingers to keep them from freezing up and tried the combination again. Either his memory was too frozen to work right or the lock was. “Could’a stopped it. They’d listen to you if you told them to stop.”
“Yeah, well . . . maybe you’re too pale to appreciate this, but it’d take a lot to put this black man between a mob and whatever it is they after. Hell of a lot more than your honky ass, that’s for goddamn sure.”
Charlie got the lock to pop open, finally. “They’re not like that,” he said, while working the bolt from the cabinet. “Nobody cares what color you are.”
Tyrell laughed. “Everybody’s like that. Some just hide it better’n others. So let’s see what we got in here.”
Charlie pulled open the door to the cabinet while Tyrell illuminated the contents. Tyrell whistled. “Damn,” he said.
Charlie smiled. “I call shotgun.”
* * *
Within the Bluff commune, opinions differed as to precisely what happened after that. The problem was that once the hunting party returned, there was a great deal of shouting, confusion, and blood, and that can only lead to misunderstandings.
What they could all agree on was that Charlie and Tyrell had left the basement with Violet and Corry in tow, both of the men holding large guns and planning to seek out and kill a woodland creature. Violet had gone because she’d seen the deer and because she was one of the few people in the farmhouse who could talk sense to both of the armed parties. Corry’s participation had hinged partly on his prior viewings of the local fauna, but primarily on his not wanting to leave his mother’s side.
Most everyone could also agree that when the hunting party left the immediate vicinity, Charlie and Tyrell had been arguing about the very large boiler in the cellar that Tyrell had seen and that Charlie nonetheless still insisted did not exist.
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