Cemetery of Angels (38 page)

It didn’t make sense. He stared at the bottle. A creepy feeling overtook him. But his rational self battled back. He must have been so distracted from work that he didn’t remember finishing the brew.

He set the bottle aside. He looked back to the file before him.

He listened to the music.
Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street.
He sat for several seconds with his hands folded across his chest, wondering if by any chance he had missed something in the Moore case. He decided he hadn’t.

He closed the file. Yes, he told himself again, he had made his decision. The next day he would proceed with arrests.

He showered and changed for bed. He took a final walk out to his desk and stopped short when he entered his den. Somehow, the beer bottle had taken leave of the desktop and lay shattered on the floor.

Another creepy feeling was upon him, but again he rejected it. He examined the desktop. He breathed slightly easier. Somehow, a stack of books had slid to the left and must have knocked the bottle off the work area. Why it had landed so hard that it would break several feet from the desk was another question. But that was also a question that he didn’t feel like exploring at that hour. And as for the sound of the breakage, well, he had been in the shower, blasting himself with warm water.

He cleaned up the glass and turned off the light in the room. He discarded the glass in the kitchen wastebasket and turned off the lights throughout his apartment, except for the bedroom.

Midnight arrived and passed. But he was in bed before 1:00 A.M.

The first part of the night came easily. It was restful and calm. But as the dark hours of the morning progressed, other forces began to claim the detective’s sleeping hours.

Something was taking command of his head. Van Allen began to dream. The sequences of the reverie made no sense, but they were rife with phantasmagoric images: A parrot with a human head was talking to him.

Deviation.
Absurdity of life, a voice told him. Another image: Both his parents stood on the edge of a cliff, looking over a vast horizon. They joined hands and jumped.

“Death, as it always comes to those we love,”
the voice spoke again.

Everything went black, and he turned over in bed.

The unlinked visions continued.

A brightness came upon his subconscious, then a darkness much the way an old television screen would come on and off. Then, when light was present, something resembling the grave of Billy Carlton was peaceful one minute, then swirling with dirt a moment later, as if blasted up from underneath the ground.

While he slept, something grabbed him by the ankle!

“I’m here, Van Allen. I’m in your apartment with you.”

Van Allen shook in bed. In his dream there was a cold firm hand on his ankle. He shook again. His eyes flickered open into the darkness of his bedroom.

Lord God in Heaven! The hand was still on his ankle.

He bolted up from sleep and waved his hands at the foot of the bed. He screamed! The feeling suddenly lifted, as if the hand had released Van Allen’s leg.

He turned the light on and looked through the room. He was alone. Or at least he couldn’t see anyone. He felt his heart pump, and he was aware of the wetness on his brow. Wetness? More than wetness! His face was flooded with a fearful sweat.

Yet the room was empty. He settled back to try to sleep. He turned the light off. Thing was, his ankle hurt.

Visions of the Moore case danced before his eyes. He held his eyes open in narrow slits in the darkness of his bedroom and waited to see if any images came to him.

None did. An hour passed. His eyes closed, and he drifted again.

Time warped. Many minutes later he felt himself turn suddenly in bed, as if startled. He tried to dream again, more peacefully this time. But now he was transported to some strange field in the moonlight, and there were white things all around him, things familiar that he couldn’t place. He was ill at ease with it because the white things were moving.

“Come with me, Edmund. I will show you a new reality. A world of spirits!”

And then he realized again that the hand was on his ankle.

“Still here, Van Allen! You’re flying tonight whether you want to or not!!”

He turned in his sleep and was trying to sit up again. But now there was a tremendous force upon his leg, as if a strong man — an unearthly strong man — now had two hands on Van Allen’s ankle, and gave it a tremendous pull.

Van Allen heard his voice cry out again as in a nightmare! But the force was as powerful as any man he had ever physically challenged. Van Allen felt himself yanked hard. The lower part of his body lifted several feet into the air. The force in the darkness pulled him halfway off his bed.

Then another sharp yank.

He was pulled by the invisible hands onto the floor, where he hit hard. Then the force was gone from his leg, and he looked up. He was certain as certain as anything in his life that he saw before him, hovering in the room in an eerie brightness, a winged figure identical to the fallen image from San Angelo Cemetery.

A human with wings, one arm extended high, either in peace or in foreboding. But the image was like an acid flashback because, as with such images before, it was gone in an instant.

Van Allen barely had time to recover. He rolled across the room and found his automatic pistol and the light switch at the same time.

He threw on the lights. As far as he could see, the room was empty as a violated tomb.

It contained only one body. His, still living.

He took several minutes to let his heart and nerves settle. His senses were on full alert the entire time, waiting for something unexpected from the next room.

But the something didn’t come. Or at least it didn’t come yet. Gradually, Van Allen got to his feet. He held his pistol at his side as he walked to the door and looked into the next room.

He put on the lights. Nothing there, either.

He went to his den and froze again.

His precious Mont Blanc pen was lying on the blotter in the center of his desk. It had been broken in half, as if by a pair of strong angry hands.

Hands as strong as those that had pulled him from bed.

Van Allen stared at it with anger and disbelief. But he barely dared to touch it. This was no ordinary night. This was no run of the-mill, sleeplessness from tension or anxiety or ten cups of coffee or ten rounds with José Cuervo.

He sank into the chair across from his desk. He looked back to the desktop and waited for the items upon it to fly in every direction as they had once before.

He sat in the chair. He saw the clock that said 3:45 A.M. He sensed the incredible darkness of the spirit that underpinned almost any night at this subversive hour. He understood why the ancients of so many cultures felt that the night belonged to Evil, and that in that darkness, spirits rose from decrepit old tombs and walked among the living.

Scaring them. Mocking them.

On his desk there commenced another small moment of terror, designed especially for him.

He breathed heavily as he helplessly watched it.

A pencil. Never had a pencil conveyed so much menace.

But in a single instant, it began to roll.

Van Allen sat perfectly still and broke a final violent sweat. He watched the pencil proceed to the edge of the desk, hover slightly at the precipice, and then fall.

It clattered on the floor.

It rolled several inches and stopped. Van Allen kept his eyes trained upon it and expected it to rise in the air. Or perhaps propel itself abruptly at him.

“Poltergeist phenomenon,” he thought to himself. “Ghosts! They exist!”

Yeah, Van Allen thought, sure!

“Who are you?” he asked aloud.

A voice as soft as a rustle of a breeze on the leaves of trees on the most beautiful summer night of one’s life.

“It’s me, Ed. It’s Billy!”

“Sure, Billy,” Van Allen whispered aloud. “Why don’t you show yourself, then?”

In the back of his mind, a prayer. “Holy Jesus, please save me!”

Bad enough that he lived among the wackos of Southern California. Now he had to have restless spirits, too! The gun that weighed so heavily in his hand seemed as useless as a brick.

He felt his forehead pour with perspiration. He felt one river of sweat moving slowly down his left temple. He made a gesture.

“Pick up the pencil,” Van Allen said to whatever being could hear him.

The pencil didn’t move.

“Come on. I’m waiting,” Van Allen said.

Still it didn’t move.

“Can’t pick it up?” he asked, gaining some courage. “You can knock things over but you can’t pick them up?”

The Ticonderoga lay on the floor. Words came to him from somewhere. An idle, terrified thought.

“How about Billy Carlton’s angel?” Van Allen asked. “You knock that over, too?” In response there was a rapping somewhere in the apartment. And somewhere distant he thought he heard laughter.

Then a kindly voice:

“
Edmund, I am Billy.”

Van Allen’s heart hammered away within his chest!

That banging again. The raps came hard and in apparent response to Van Allen’s question. More thoughts came to him from somewhere. Now it was as if some other force were guiding his brain, turning his thoughts sharply into reverse, sending the patterns of his conscious mind spiraling backward into his own youth.

Nightmares. The recurrent nightmares of his youth. When he was a kid he had a few of them. Some recurring. He hadn’t thought of them for years.

And now the room before him went almost blank. Instead, he could see the terrors of when he was a boy.

He was certain. Whatever was in this room, whatever force that he was facing, it was putting on a display of power. It was so powerful that it could get into his head and guide his thoughts.

“Please. Go away,” Van Allen said.

He spoke boldly. Inside, he was terrified. He stood and hoped the dislodged spirit couldn’t read all his thoughts. But actually, it could.

The first nightmare:

He was a boy again, sleeping in a small comfortable room in Palo Alto. He emerged from bed and ran to the top of the steps in the Van Allen family’s rambling old house. He took a flying, spinning leap into the air, soared above the staircase and always woke up before his feet touched the ground …

The second one. Pure terror this time.

In his dream, he walked through the same childhood house, feeling abandoned. He searched everywhere for his mother. Then he found her. She was lying motionless on a sofa in the library, an old cloth coat pulled up to her chin. She was lifeless. Her head turned toward him, and she smiled. Then her face dissolved into something horrible the face of a monster, the face of something inhuman.

In the chair where he sat, he twisted in anguish.

Then a third dream rose up from an unknown somewhere, a refinement of the dream he had endured less than an hour earlier:

He was standing in some sort of burial ground and it was night. Above him, the stars burned like small torches. The moon was a ghostly bonfire. His feet were riveted to the earth, and all around him there were tombstones, which began to sway. They transmogrified themselves from granite and marble to something lighter than air and they became ghostly presences. Demons perhaps! — or were they angels? — and they transformed themselves into spirits all around him. Laughing. Taunting. Same as in his own apartment in Pasadena right now. A hell of a nightmare from his youth, except…

His eyes opened. A hell of a nightmare from his youth, except he was certain that this wasn’t something out of his youth, at all. It seemed horribly familiar, but he suspected it was a vision. A flash forward, not a flash back.

His gaze drifted to the floor again, where the pencil had come to rest.

“Oh…” he muttered. The pencil was gone. It was back up on top of the desk again. It had lifted itself back up via that invisible hand again while Van Allen had been wrestling with visions from the past and the future.

Van Allen spoke bravely to whatever presence was there.

“I want to see you,” Van Allen said. “If you’re here, I want to see you.”

A beat. Nothing happened. He waited. A moment of tension and anticipation dissolved into nothing. The only sound Van Allen was aware of was the rhythmic thumping of his heart in his chest.

His eyes raged with fatigue. They burned the way skin burns against a Valley sun. He closed his eyes for a moment and brought his hand to his face.

Van Allen rubbed his face. Then something else happened in the room. His eyes were closed so he didn’t see it, but he knew he felt it. It was as if he were surrounded by a crowd of people, and they were staring at him and holding their collective breath at once.

It was as if they were waiting to get his attention. He could almost hear mumbling around him. Distant, disconcerted discordant voices, like a party going on in a room down the hall. Even laughter. A music from an old player piano. That’s what it sounded like.

Slowly he pulled his wet hand from his face. He could feel his scalp tightening and the hair rising on the back of his neck. Now he knew that he was not alone. He felt himself age ten years on the spot.

“Oh, my good God…” he mumbled.

What was confronting him was a ghost, and Van Allen accepted that as the new reality of what was opposing him.

A ghost.

Somewhere in the room with him, except he couldn’t see it.

A ghost!

And the worst part about it was that it all seemed so normal. Within the context of everything else that had transpired, so logical.

A moment passed. A big loud empty nothing. Perspiration burst again from the policeman’s forehead, this time as if someone had opened a thousand tiny hoses.

Van Allen wasn’t able to speak. There remained a dreamlike, surreal quality to all of this, much akin to one of those bad dreams in which one is riveted in place with a great menace approaching, but one is unable to move or scream.

Van Allen also felt as if some force had captured him, as if a giant hand were wrapped around him. Yet, Van Allen knew this was real!