Poe Page 20

  Tell me about it.

  “You know anything about wiring?” Wolf asks hopefully.

  “No,” I reply. “I’m a writer.”

  This, apparently, makes me a god, because his eyes widen. Even Celia takes a step back. “For real?” she says. “I have some poems. I’m really into ants right now. You know, busy, busy ants. People are just doing, you know? Doing but not thinking. Not dreaming.” Her eyes glaze over at the word “dreaming.”

  Wolf kisses her lightly on the cheek. “Busy, busy ants.”

  They seem like nice people. Disgustingly in love with each other and full of nauseating hope, but otherwise nice people.

  “Oh,” says Celia, “I found something in the kitchen!” Without further explanation, she skips away.

  “She’s a freak in bed,” says Wolf confidentially.

  I so did not need to know that.

  A cool wind blows through the wide, spacious entry, and the beagle whimpers for no discernible reason, then Celia is back, holding an old saltine tin. The top is slightly rusted.

  My heart instantly begins to beat faster. I recognize the saltine tin—it’s the same one Lisa showed me.

  “Oh that is cool, babe.” Wolf’s got a look in his eyes, like he’d prefer to just ditch the home repairs and explore her freaky side, which probably explains the overall lack of progress on the site.

  “Not this,” says Celia, pulling at the lid. “This.”

  Celia pulls out the pages wrapped in black velvet, shyly proud of her find.

  “It’s Greek and some other weird language,” she says. “But I can read the Greek.”

  I must look puzzled, because Wolf says, “I rescued her from college.”

  “All girls,” adds Celia with a visible shiver. “I was thinking we could get out the Ouija board tonight. Have some shiny time.”

  “You’re so witchy,” says Wolf, kissing her neck. He really can’t keep his hands off her.

  Just as I’m about to open my mouth and warn them, the music in the background changes to a white-noise hum and everything around me flickers, becomes staticky, like I’m watching a TV show with bad reception, and the whole world tilts, gets fuzzy. There’s a piercingly bright flash of light, and then I hear a singer, a swing band; the night sky is dark with stars and my head pounds—or is that the drums?—and I get a fragmentary glimpse of the Aspinwall driveway lined with intricately carved, glowing jack-o’-lanterns. I distantly hear Amelia’s bright voice calling out over the crowd, “Captain, come join the séance; you have no idea the trouble I’ve gone to,” and then I’m spinning again, falling, falling, falling. When it stops I find myself lying on the weedy front lawn, feeling like I just stepped off a roller coaster, like I can’t find my balance. Everything around me flickers but eventually clears—there, the cans of paint… But the ladder is gone. The beagle cowers on the front porch, whimpering—its eyes wide with terror.

  I catch a wavering movement by the door, and a hazy form steps out of the shadow.

  Poe.

  For a moment she just looks at me with an icy stare. Water clings to her dress, drips from her fingers and onto the ground. Then she lifts her hand, beckons for me to follow, and disappears inside.

  But there are sounds. Horrific sounds. Sounds that make me hesitate, wonder if I wouldn’t be safer standing on the front lawn. I firmly tell myself, This is just a dream; it’s not real. As soon as I step past the doorway I feel a deep arctic chill, and I find myself alone in the vast and nearly empty hall.

  I say nearly, because Wolf’s body is on the floor. Beside him, a bloody knife.

  And then I see Celia. Folded over his body with grief, rough sobs—but the sound isn’t right; there’s something gritty to it—and then I realize she’s not sobbing, she’s snarling. A shaft of the light from the setting sun catches the glittering chandelier, refracts through the crystals, and casts a wider circle of light on the body. I can see his entrails now, covered with red slime, pulled from his stomach and lying in a heap on the floor.

  Celia sits back on her heels, a look of orgiastic ecstasy on her face. Her mouth—Christ, her mouth—is covered with blood; her white, blousy shirt drips with it. She wipes a wrist against her face, smearing more blood across her cheek, and then licks her lips, before leaning back over the body. She starts gnawing at something in the cavity of his corpse and then uses a finger to pull out some muscle so she can get to it better.

  I’m going to be sick.

  The air shifts next to me, and when I turn I find Poe watching me, expressionless. A light breeze blows through the open door, lifts some papers in the air, twirls them around. One lands by my feet.

  Medieval drawings. Greek and Russian typeset. The edges are burnt. They’re the pages I found in Daniel’s room—the pages Celia found in the saltine tin.

  Poe looks at me fiercely.

  You must be ready. You must see.

  Not a sound, not a voice—I don’t hear her speak; instead I see the words hover in the air like mist.

  God, I’m sick of this ghost bullshit. “And how the fuck do I go about getting ready? Would you tell me that, Poe?”

  She takes a step closer. I can see water beading her eyelashes and there’s a smell, something musty and organic, like mud at the bottom of a pond.

  Say my name. Say my name and I can tell you everything.

  “I don’t know your name.”

  But I do. It’s there, just outside the edge of memory, like the words to a song I’ve long forgotten, her name. And maybe I could remember, but the sound—oh dear God—the sound of human teeth on human bone, the iron-rust smell of blood, Wolf’s blood. It rushes out to meet me, pools darkly around my feet, and then suddenly there’s the roar of the white-noise hum, and everything flickers again, crackling into shards of images.

  I cover my ears with my hands, and there’s a hot flash of light—my head throbs, pulses, and when I open my eyes next I find that I’m standing on the neatly manicured front lawn of Aspinwall. I’m wearing a white waiter’s jacket, holding a silver tray of shrimp hors d’oeuvres. And there, underneath a shadowy bower, is Alice dressed as Little Bo Peep, as if she just stepped out of the photograph I’d seen her in. Her hand is lightly pressed to a vampire’s chest, and he holds her staff protectively.

  “Oh, Jack, you can’t be serious. Why on earth wouldn’t I marry you?”

  The band plays.

  You’re gonna feel sad,

  You’re gonna be blue,

  After I’ve gone,

  After I’ve gone and left you.

  “You!” An angular, slightly balding butler approaches me. “Are you just going to stand there, or do you have plans to actually serve tonight?”

  “Oh, right,” I mumble. I’m still dizzy, and my ears ring, but I move through the crowd carrying my tray, wondering where Amelia might be. But then a woman stops me, grabbing my arm. She wears a simple white cotton dress with wide peasant sleeves, an odd choice to go with her plain black mask and devil’s horns, but then it strikes me—this is the woman from Alice’s photo. Khioniya.

  She reaches out to the platter with long delicate fingers, hesitates briefly, and then takes two of the hors d’oeuvres. She has to remove her mask to eat, so she pulls it from her face, lets it rest on her forehead. And my body freezes.

  Poe.

  But not like I’ve seen her. Her flesh is pale but alive; it catches the warm glow from the paper lanterns and despite the cold, a trickle of sweat makes its way down her neck. On her feet she wears golden slippers.

  “You can’t run away from me that easy!” shouts a booming voice, and then Zorro appears behind her, catches her by the waist, and twirls her about roughly.

  “You’re a divine dancer,” he says, trying to flatter, but she regards him with icy disdain.

  “I am tired,” she says coolly with a thick Russian accent, “and I must prepare for séance.”

  “I say, when is that? I don’t want to miss the fun.”

  “Midnight,” sh
e replies with a catlike grin.

  He leans in to kiss her, and she slaps him soundly on the cheek.

  “Well, I’ll see you then, you little devil.” He laughs like he’s made a great joke and then disappears back into the crowd of dancers.

  Poe takes another hors d’oeuvre from the platter, places it in her mouth. “They are children playing dress-up,” she says. “They want to play at being Arabs; they want to play at having séance. But it is not play what I do. It is real.”

  I stand still, not daring to move.

  “You, you work here just tonight or all the time?” she says to me.

  “Just tonight,” I say quietly.

  “Well,” she says, wiping her hands on her dress, “if you see gardener, you give him message.” She thinks for a moment, then laughs. “Tell him Khioniya says hello.”

  She claps me on the shoulder, not lightly, not in a feminine way, and then slips her mask back on and steps invisibly through the crowd, completely unnoticed. Delia, dressed as a fairy, runs up to greet her, and Khioniya takes her hand, kisses it lightly, and together they walk into the house.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE SECRET BOOKS

  There’s an owl in the room fluttering about the ceiling. It hits the window, trying to escape. It makes a gentle knocking sound in the process, but then I realize this doesn’t make sense. How can there be an owl in my apartment? My tongue is dry and scratchy, like it’s wearing a wool sweater, my feet ache, and I can’t feel my right arm at all, because Lisa’s using it as a pillow and blood probably hasn’t been able to circulate for hours—not that I’m complaining. I try to open my eyes, which is hard to do; they’re unwilling, heavy, and thick with sleep. But finally they open, and I find the dim morning light edging through the grimy window—God, it must be early—and there’s no owl but the knock again, polite yet insistent, like a maid checking that the room is clear before entering.

  It’s a real sound.

  My heart stops—Daniel?

  Instantly I sit up and disentangle myself from Lisa—Fuck, where’s the gun?—but then Daniel doesn’t seem like the knocking-before-entering type. I should check the window, easy enough since I’ve never invested in actual curtains. The windowpane is as cold as a sheet of ice, but nobody’s scrambling down the tree—a good sign—and the sidewalk is deserted.

  Suddenly a man wearing a thickly hooded jacket leaves my building, briskly crossing the street. The hood covers his head, his face. Then I notice his thick boots.

  Fuck.

  But I need to be sure. Without thinking I grab a paperback, push up the windowpane, ignoring the blast of frigid air, and throw it at him. Not since my infamous Twinkie shot have I ever hit someone so squarely on the head. Startled, the man turns around and for a brief flash our eyes meet.

  The dude from Sacred Heart Collectibles?

  “What are you doing?” Lisa asks sleepily from the couch. “I’m cold.”

  “Lisa come here, it’s that guy…”

  But when I turn back to the window, he’s gone. A Buick runs over my book, burying it in a mound of black slush.

  “What guy?”

  “Nothing,” I say quietly, trying and failing to do the arithmetic that would make any sense of his sudden appearance at my apartment building. Of course, it is a small town, in which case I just hit an innocent man with a book projectile. Now he probably thinks I’m racist or something. But what are the odds? Slim to none. So then what did he want to tell me?

  “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” I mutter to myself. Columbo would never have slept in.

  “Are you going to shut the window, or is this some kind of Hindu deprivation morning ritual?”

  “Right,” I say, pulling the window closed. Lisa’s looking at me expectantly—somebody got some sleep.

  “Breakfast?” she asks with more hope than one should in my apartment.

  “Not likely.”

  “What about that lasagna?”

  “Right… that lasagna.” It strikes me that I never turned the oven off, but somehow the kitchen isn’t on fire. A quick check reveals I never actually turned the oven on. The lasagna is still frozen rock solid.

  “Looks like we’ll have to pick up something,” I say sheepishly, turning around empty-handed.

  And then I notice something’s been slipped under the door, a folded piece of newspaper.

  “What’s this we?” says Lisa, reaching down to get the remote. “I think the least you could do is cross the street to get me some donuts and coffee.”

  “In my condition?” Lisa hasn’t noticed the paper, a good thing, because God knows what it contains. I quickly hobble over, ignoring the dull ache in my feet, and discover it’s a crossword puzzle, with “Mesa” neatly written in pencil for fourteen down.

  Delightful. Now someone else is leaving me indecipherable clues. Should only take me a few decades to work out. My head pounds, and I’m starting to give that move to Florida some serious consideration—I’m getting tired of every waking (and now sleeping) moment being spent on this crap. I’m not a puzzle freak like Ernest; why can’t anyone come out and just tell me what they want me to know?

  Ernest?

  Vaguely I hear a click and then the newsy drone of the television.

  Ernest, keeper of “The Stacks” at the Eagle, taught Greek for decades—maybe he could translate the books… or at least tell me what they are—

  “Oh, Jesus. Dimitri?”

  It’s the tone that stops me dead. I look over and see Lisa slowly lean forward, ashen faced.

  “Owner Fred Janson was shocked to find a trail of blood this morning when he arrived at the station to open it at five thirty A.M.”

  Double fuck. Another murder. I reach over for the remote and turn up the volume.

  Ace reporter Jennifer is standing in the snowy field by Friendly Fred’s, the gas station that’s just barely a quarter mile from Lisa’s house. The parking lot is filled with police cars, and there are a couple of blue tarp tents set up in the field.

  Jennifer holds the microphone tightly, and in the background I can hear the buzz of a helicopter. “The community is shocked at this latest murder, none more so than Fred Janson, who discovered the body early this morning.” Jennifer, of course, doesn’t looked shocked—she looks like an actress auditioning for the role of her life, which of course she is.

  They cut to Fred; he’s small and wiry, with a deeply weathered face and cropped gray hair. “I thought maybe a dog got hit by a car, so I followed the blood to the back. That’s when I found Maddy.” He chokes on her name. “I’ve known her for thirty years. Never thought something like this would happen to her, could happen here.”

  Maddy. I’m not proud that I exhale when I hear her name—no one deserves to go that way—but it’s not Elizabeth or Amelia.

  Next they flash a series of photos of Maddy from when she was younger, and judging from the flashy white miniskirt and tight sweater, they were probably taken in the sixties. She stands arm in arm with her sister Myrna (God, poor Myrna), who even then showed poor taste in eyewear; she wore thick black owlish glasses that would probably have gotten her voted most likely to become a nun or librarian by her high school classmates.

  “We have to go,” says Lisa quietly.

  “Go? Go where?”

  Lisa closes her eyes, like it’s causing her physical pain to speak. “I don’t know. Somewhere else. Somewhere safe.”

  The television cuts to an overhead helicopter shot, shaky and not really adding much to the story except the thrill of seeing the ambulance pull away, lights flashing.

  “Define safe.”

  “Dimitri Petrov,” says Lisa, giving me a look as if I’ve lost what’s left of my mind. “Anywhere is safer than New Goshen.”

  I drop Lisa off to pack (her street is jammed with enough police vehicles to ward off an army), trying to justify in my own mind the small white lie I left her with (I need to go to the bank for some cash, when in fact I’m going to run the books by Ernest), and the even l
arger, nowhere-near-white lie of the gun in my glove compartment (what will Elizabeth think when she discovers it’s gone? That Daniel broke in and stole it?).

  When I get to the office, the bored security guard actually looks at me for a moment, and there is something almost fearful in the way he appraises me. Apparently the police aren’t the only ones thinking I might be the killer. The elevator dings, and I’ve never been so happy to step inside it.

  I really don’t want to push the button for the third floor, not because I don’t feel bad for Myrna—I do—but because I’ll be in close proximity to the energy of mourning. Definitely not my favorite thing, but after all my immature cracks, I feel like I owe her. While the elevator ascends I try to think about something else, namely white-sand beaches, fresh coconuts containing fruity alcoholic beverages, and turquoise ocean waters. Lisa and I strolling down the beach, watching the sunset. She’d be wearing a bikini of course… maybe white with red polka dots. Would the company credit card work in Miami? I wonder how long we could ride on it until Mac notices the charges from Florida and cuts me off.

  My reverie is interrupted by the rude chime of the elevator when it hits the third floor, and the first thing I notice as the doors open is how quiet it is. Either the phones aren’t ringing—hard to imagine, given the breaking story—or they’re being answered on a different floor. Even the grinding of the old laser printers is gone, so that for the first time I can hear the hiss of the radiator and the ticking of the fabulous fifties clock.

  Bob approaches me first, wearing a black polo shirt tucked under a belt that’s cinched three notches past reason; the straining seams around the buckle look like they can’t possibly hold on much longer. He holds out a sweaty hand, which I reluctantly take, although even Bob would probably think it in poor taste to palm his standard buzzer. “Glad you could make it. Such a sad day, sad day.”

  I see Nate in the corner staring at the wall and drinking something from a small paper cup, an appropriate expression of sadness arranged on his face. And then I see Myrna standing stiffly by the water cooler, surrounded by office staff I’ve never encountered, all seemingly frozen in place. Her dress is lumpy and black, adorned with that awful brooch in the shape of a turtle I last saw Maddy wear, and there are sad bits of cookie crumbs dotting her unusually red lipsticked lips. The mood is somber, and even Mac seems subdued; his normal shout is reduced to a reasonable decibel, and he clasps Myrna by the elbow, as high, apparently, as he can reach.