He was inside The House. Not hallucinating, exactly, but vividly imagining. Not in the front hall behind the door, but all the way inside, in a narrow corridor in back, standing before another door. The door to The Backroom.
His hand worried the knob. It was locked, thank God. But he still wanted in. With a colossal effort he turned around, inched his way from the door as though held by a great magnet. Finally, he hightailed it down a long, long corridor, out The Front Door and into the night.
Here on the couch he sat up straight, gripped the velvet skin of the arm, and did everything in his power to stay here, in this house, in his room with its window on Warren Street.
Sometime later, a strange light appeared in the oculus, and he panicked. And then laughed. Just a bedraggled sun crawling to the job. The window had reverted. It was no longer magic. Just a window, a dreary window looking out on an empty street.
He lay down and tumbled into the mercy of oblivion.
Ray woke around eleven. He headed to Jo’s. She came over to take his order, looked at him then quickly away.
He said, “I know.”
“You look like…”
“A ghost.”
“I wasn’t going to say it, but yeah. You look like somebody took a big hose and sucked the juice right out of you. What have you been doing?”
“You do not want to know.”
“I don’t think I do. If you need anything, though, I’m here.”
“Thanks. What I need now is coffee. A pot of coffee.”
“That I have.”
He reached up to his throat. What?
The glass chunk was gone.
He headed home. The LSD had left behind a residue of magical thinking. This throat had been guzzling the nectar of the Green Faerie. The acid genie had freed it of its pain. In turn, he must pay the price: go on the wagon. The beer wagon, anyway. He was laughing at himself, at these crazy thoughts, even as he took the full bottle of absinthe to Bodine’s.
His friend and Mingus met him at the door. Bodine glanced at him with a little nod. “So you did the acid.”
Ray fished the empty vial out of his pocket and handed it to Bodine.
Mingus sniffed at Ray. Bodine laughed. “Even Mingus can tell.” He looked at the vial. “You took both.”
“Unfortunately. I can’t believe you do that every year.”
“Practice makes perfect. Bet you didn’t wait before taking the second one, like I told you.”
“No. Hindsight.”
Ray handed him the absinthe bottle. Bodine said, “What, this brand isn’t up to snuff?”
“I haven’t opened it.”
Bodine frowned, then laughed. “You’re giving it up! You know, back before it got all illegal, LSD was quite effective in curing alcoholics.”
“I’m downgrading to beer, anyway.”
Ray followed Bodine and Mingus up to the office, and they sat.
Bodine said, “Kicking absinthe is a nice side benefit. But did it do the main trick?”
“What trick?”
“You know. Get you into Karl’s old haunted house.”
“Fuck. I forgot that’s why I took it. It did. At the tail end after…you don’t want to know what nonsense.”
They sat, the silence only broken by the dog’s gentle snores. It was amazing that you could suck on a couple of wisps of paper and overcome a psychological barrier like that. Ray’s eyes got wide. There was something even more amazing.
Bodine asked, “You having an acid flashback?
“No. That trip didn’t just get me into Karl’s. That thing calling me?”
“Your curiosity.”
“Yes, but beneath that.”
“The creative urge. To write.”
“Even beneath that.”
“Whoa. Going deep on me.”
“It all comes down to this. I want to be free. Free of Karl. And in order to do that I have to know that his way was bogus, that he was bogus. And that’s where I’m getting with this writing. It’s the reason I Googled Susan in the first place. As long as any part of me still sees something divine in Karl, I will never be free.”
Ray had to credit Bodine. His friend didn’t snark on him for being so dramatic. He just stood and put a hand on Ray’s shoulder.
“So, go write your book.”
Ray headed home. Spring was hiding again. A bitter wind spit rags of rain at him. He didn’t care. He knew now what he was doing, and why. And paradoxically he’d come out of the other side of a semi-psychotic experience feeling newly sane. As he climbed the stairs, his house felt like just a house. No ghosts here. That had been just a conceit, like that ridiculous genie in the bottle, carrying on, singing to him. It was only a potent chemical.
It was a plain old house, but he wanted to keep it. Which required not only writing about that other house but publishing it. His new sanity informed him that though he’d breached that threshold—Karl’s portal—whoever had tossed a brick through his window was still out there. It was going to be hard enough creating this book without worrying that they might return at any moment with a brick or worse.
They wouldn’t get him in public. He could bring the laptop to Jo’s. That would mean closing the gallery. Missing out on the slim chance of a sale. Never mind. Writing was really his new job.
He crossed the street. Luddite Jo had never seen this computer and wasn’t likely to approve of its entry to her realm. He clutched it to his side nervously as he made his way to his table. But it was getting onto lunch, and she just waved on the way into the kitchen.
As I pulled open the heavy door that first time and crossed the threshold, The House exhaled a sour, diseased breath. It was the opposite of the sweet incense of that first meeting backstage. Inside, the plaster was half-gone from the walls, revealing the bare lath skeleton.
But the floor was swept clean. Shoes were lined up along one wall. I’d been in hippie houses where they asked that shoes be left at the door. They were: in a pile. These were arranged with each pair perfectly squared, and every pair the exact same distance from the others. I removed mine and placed them at the end. I looked twice to make certain I had them right. I still wasn’t sure.
I entered a great two-story chamber with a grand staircase. It was early evening and last shafts of sunlight from windows high up pierced the gloom, revealing that the place was a ruin.
I wandered into a smaller room. Half the ceiling had come down. A once-grand couch, set of easy chairs, and walls splotched with green, black, and white mold. It must be the source of the bad smell. I began coughing.
I flashed on Xanadu at the end of Citizen Kane, Dracula in his ruined abbey. An old Grateful Dead song, “Brokedown Palace,” started playing in my head. Except I had just arrived. What good could come in a place like this?
My thoughts were interrupted when Karl’s lieutenant, Ethan, stalked in the room with a scowl. In a clipped British accent, he hissed, “What are you doing in here? You’re late! Don’t let it happen again.”
We musicians always made fun of ourselves, wondering how it was that people whose living depended on expert timing could be late all the time. Late to practice and gigs. For a musician, I was fairly punctual, so I had never worried about it. Until now. I had just discovered that you were never late for anything with Karl.
I followed Ethan to another room. It was in somewhat better shape, the walls recently painted white. People were sitting on cushions, lined up in rows as meticulous as the shoes in the front hall. Everyone’s back was ramrod straight. I took a cushion in the last row.
In front sat a larger, empty cushion. Karl’s! To my disappointment, instead of him, one of his elder students came in and took it. He settled into it with an exaggerated care I’d soon be exhibiting myself. He rattled on for an hour, in a vague and pedantic manner, about what we were doing there. He
had none of Karl’s charisma. By the end of his spiel, I was wondering why we’d driven all that way.
It was the same the next few times. Drive three hours, and no Karl. I finally asked Winker where Karl was.
He gave me a knowing look. “Patience.”
We’d been going up there a couple of months when we were invited up for a full day. We had to get up before five in order to arrive by eight sharp. One minute late and they locked the door, and you had to drive all the way home.
We were still on musicians’ schedules, crashing well after midnight. So I was glad Bodine drove. I dozed in the car. Dawn was breaking as we approached the switchbacks leading up to The House. I asked Bodine, “Why is the place such a wreck?”
He explained, “One of Karl’s ‘blokes’ told me the house was abandoned back in the twenties. Water breached the slate roof in the fifties. It worked its way down through the floors. The damage is apparently worse on the upper floors. Whole walls have collapsed. The beds have lagoons of stuff living in them. But don’t worry—we won’t be going up there any time soon.”
“Why not?”
“Upstairs is reserved for the inner circle. Karl’s band, that guy Ethan? I’m not sure exactly how it works.”
An inner circle. I wanted to be up there. To belong.
Ray looked up and blinked like he was coming awake. The room was filled with the lunchtime roar of conversations. Sun gleamed on a couple of empty tables. It seemed a vast distance, returning from Karl’s dark house to this cozy, familiar place.
He had a disconcerting sensation, like his innards no longer quite fit in his skin.
He’d crossed the Rubicon. He’d pried open Karl’s door using the acid. Now just under the influence of a little caffeine he’d willfully written about that house. Which explicitly broke Karl’s taboo.
Never speak about what we do. His fingers, lying idle on top of the keys, started trembling. Random letters appeared on the screen.
He froze at the distinct sense that someone was standing next to him. Karl. He’d slipped silently into Jo’s in that way of his, was right now looking over Ray’s shoulder, and if he turned he’d see that face, and hear that voice. Ray…
“Ray?” He jerked his head to the side. It was Jo. “I didn’t want to interrupt. You seemed miles away.”
“Mm.” About a hundred, actually.
“Writing again?”
“Yeah.” He eased the laptop lid down so she couldn’t see.
“Need anything?”
“More coffee.”
“I know that. Food?”
“No thanks.”
Customers arrived, and she went to their table. Jo hated cellphones even more than computers. Ray was always careful to silence his whenever he was over there. He checked it and found a message from Susan’s coworker, Joan Telford. He walked outside into the alley by the restaurant and called her.
He said, “I wasn’t sure I’d hear back from you.”
“You almost didn’t. I’ve been wrestling with this thing. And I’ve…decided.”
“Oh.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you, because even though Susan is gone, the notion of anyone thinking badly of her… Then I realized I actually had no idea what this thing meant. And that I wanted to know what it was. Maybe you have some idea.” She sucked in a loud breath.
A truck rumbled by, and Ray cupped the phone to his ear as she continued. “So one day in the July before the accident, Susan was late to work. A young guy came by with the company mail. I was shuffling through mine when I found an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven manila envelope with Susan’s name and our address handwritten on it. I looked for the guy, but he’d gone. I was going to put it on her desk but decided to give it to her in person. In case…in case it was important.”
“Why’d you think it would be?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t the kind of thing we get here.”
“Where was it from?”
“I don’t remember. When Susan showed up she apologized for being late—not that I was her boss. She was just that way. I gave her the envelope, and she looked at it and froze. It was like she released an electrical charge into the room. She recovered, smiled, and headed for her cubicle. But then…she didn’t go in. She walked down the hall. Came back a few minutes later, and the envelope was gone.”
“What did she do with it?”
“There was a trash can in her office, like mine. She would have thrown it there. There’s…a shredder down the end of that hall.”
Some people came by on the sidewalk and Ray turned away.
“What would she want to shred?”
“Nothing. You know Susan. She would never have been involved in anything that wasn’t above board.”
“I’m sure she just threw it out.”
“I have to go.”
He wasn’t sure. But he couldn’t think about it now. He had to write.
He went back to Jo’s.
As I approached the door that morning, the last of my sleepiness vanished in a torrent of anticipation. I whipsawed between promise and threat. The promise that great secrets were about to be revealed. And the threat of…what? Nothing concrete, but it was there from my first moments inside The House.
I sat on my cushion and closed my eyes as we did at the beginning of meetings. That voice shattered the silence, though it was barely a whisper. I slitted my eyes. Karl sat up front. In the same room as me. Why did it feel so extraordinary? He hadn’t done anything yet. In fact, it was the first time I’d seen him since that meeting back when we were on tour.
We were still allowed to talk then, so maybe people told me things. Or maybe I’d been waiting a lifetime for my Answer Man, and when Karl showed up with all the trappings, I projected all my desire onto him.
Karl said, “Those meetings were preparation for the real practice.” Which was what? I didn’t care. As he spoke, his voice began to fill me with a delicious warm calm. I was just getting comfortable when he abruptly stood and left. So soon? I felt abandoned.
But everyone was standing and walking out toward the Front Hall. I followed them.
They were milling around something. I worked my way to the front of the crowd. An ordinary corkboard, but tacked to it was a page of elegant paper with Karl’s odd calligraphy on it.
A list of names with words next to them: our jobs.
Ray—Drawing Room.
I asked Ethan where it was. He frowned as if it was a stupid question and led me to the room I’d stumbled on the first day. He picked up a sledgehammer and handed it to me, pointing to the collapsing wall. “Tear down this plaster. But do not touch the wainscoting.” I looked at the stained paneling. What was the big deal? It was all a wreck.
But I was careful. My arms were shaking with fatigue after a half hour. All I could think about was that inner circle upstairs. Never mind the occasional crash that told me they were up there doing the same thing as me. They must be with Karl, experiencing unimaginable wonders.
It seemed impossible not to let the hammer slip and touch the wood. And then two hours of sleep caught up with me, and it did. I’d only left a tiny bruise near the floor, but I felt horrible. Could I pull one of the rotting chairs in front of it, hide it? No. They’d know. I kept working, berating myself for my mistake.
“Preparation for the real practice.” That practice turned out to be fixing up Karl’s house. Up until then, trips to his place had seemed like a lark. No more. We came up nearly every weekend. It made for a horrendously long day—over sixteen hours by the time we were home. With the exception of the morning meeting and lunch, it was all backbreaking physical work.
When I was done taking the plaster down from that room, I started removing the old finish from the wainscoting. I innocently asked one of the “elders,” as we referred to people in the inner circle, why I couldn’t use an
electric sander. He explained how Karl called electricity “artificial energy,” and using it might compromise our delicate nervous systems. I nodded my head and went back to work, but then it hit me: less than a year ago I’d seen Karl on tour happily screaming through a monster PA system, and it certainly wasn’t powered by steam. Shrinks call it cognitive dissonance, and for a bad moment I was sweating. Yet before I could start asking myself about other things that didn’t quite make sense—like that butt-ugly house, for starters—my mind just flicked the whole business away like a speck of dust. And I didn’t think of it again.
As winter set in and the days grew shorter, we worked in the late afternoon by candlelight. The only warmth came from the big marble fireplaces. No matter how we stoked the fires most of the heat flew up the chimney.
The hardest thing was having no running water. There was an outhouse in back. We hauled cooking and washing water into The Kitchen from a well in five-gallon plastic jugs. Their narrow handles cut into our fingers until they were numb.
It would have been a real problem if I was still playing guitar. But I’d stopped. That is, Karl had stopped me. He said, “Writing, painting, poetry and, yes, music are ‘Ego Arts.’ Unbecoming for a man.”
Unbecoming. It was one of his favorite words and spoken such that it was radioactive with judgment. “Ego Arts” evoked more cognitive dissonance. Karl had been a rock star! He’d left the big stage with its blinding lights and lasers for his humble perch on a cushion, lit only by a few candles. Somehow, while we recalled our previous lives with shame, his life before the group was just a natural part of his miraculous evolution.
How could I give up playing with my band, playing guitar? My guitar was central to my identity, the one thing I excelled at in the world. I suffered its loss viscerally in my hands. They alternately ached and felt numb. I looked at them, and they seemed to belong to a stranger. I wasn’t alone. Talented poets laid down their pens and vowed to never write another word. An up-and-coming painter from New York just gave it up.
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 12