Dead Voices (45 page)

Stammering, Elizabeth replied, “I ... I have no idea.” She ran the flat of her hand over her face and did the best she could to control the tremors that shook her.

“Well, I don’t usually like to be this blunt,” Graydon said, “but not to put too fine a point to it, I can do just that. I can arrange for you not only to speak to your daughter, but to see her as well.”

He reached down beside him and picked up a book he had hidden on the seat next to his leg. It was a rather large volume with a pebbly black-leather cover that looked almost like a Bible. Until now, Elizabeth hadn’t noticed it there, but as he handed the book to her, he said, “Before we go any further, I have a proposition to make to you. Before you close your mind to any of this, perhaps because of your disappointment with the experiments you conducted with Mr. Cody or anyone else, I’d like you to read part of this book.”

Still feeling stunned and drained, Elizabeth turned the book around in her hand so she could read the title stamped in gold on the spine. Practicing the Black Arts. She wasn’t at all surprised by what she saw; it fit in perfectly, not just with their conversation, but with everything else that had happened to her in the past few weeks. Elizabeth knew her mind had reached and then gone well beyond the saturation point, to where she was numbed to just about everything ...

Unless he can really — somehow — do what he says he can ... Let me see and talk to Caroline!

“The book was originally published in 1884. This is a facsimile of the first edition. As I recall, rather ironically, I pointed out a paperback edition of this exact book to you the night we met in the bookstore. Do you remember?”

Elizabeth numbly shook her head as she stared at the book in her hands.

“No matter,” Graydon said. “I’d particularly like you to take a look at Chapter Twelve, the chapter on necromancy. Now I realize this whole thing might be completely foreign to you, but I must admit, I felt right from the first time I met you that you were ... well, I don’t want to sound too mysterious about it, but I had a very strong gut feeling that you would be open to avenues such as these.”

“I ... I just don’t know,” Elizabeth stammered as she fumbled to slip the book into her purse. She realized the book was much too large to fit, so she held it in her lap. Her fingertips continually rubbed the textured leather cover as though seeking some kind of reassurance there.

“Read that chapter, and then we can get together again to discuss it, “ Graydon said. The dark intensity in his eyes shifted like passing storm clouds. He watched her a moment, then leaned back and smiled with satisfaction, knowing that Elizabeth would do exactly what he had asked.

Elizabeth made a move to get up to leave, but before she did, he froze her with a glance. Slowly, she eased herself back down into the seat.

“Before you go, there’s one more thing,” Graydon said, lowering his gaze.

“What’s that — ?” Elizabeth said, barely able to stop her voice from shaking.

“I told you I would answer one simple question for you,” Graydon said.

“What question was that?” Elizabeth asked. “I mean, God! — after all of this ... this talk —” She exhaled noisily and shook her head as though dazed as she stared at the book she was holding.

“After what you just hit me with, I’ve got a couple of hundred questions. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Graydon smiled, but the smile was far from warm and friendly. A coiling, dark dread encircled her heart; Graydon’s smile was much too much like the cold, hard grin of the wolf he had become in her nightmare.

“You wanted me to tell you how I knew the name
Button
would be significant to you, remember?”

Elizabeth nodded stiffly. “Right —” she rasped.

“The answer is quite simple,” Graydon said with a shrug. “Caroline told me.”

3.

“I’ve been calling all evening,” Frank said. “Your folks must be getting sick and tired of me calling, but-uh, I thought we had a date.”

Elizabeth sighed deeply and cradled the phone against her shoulder. It was almost eleven o’clock. She had just walked into the house and hadn’t even had a chance to say hello to her parents, when the phone rang. She sat down heavily in the kitchen chair, feeling totally drained. As she listened to Frank’s voice, barely hearing his words, her fingers brushed lightly along the edge of the book Graydon had given to her. She didn’t at all like the uneasiness she felt just reading the title.

She had only now arrived home because, after meeting Graydon, she hadn’t been able to face going straight home. With so much hitting her all at once and so much to think about, she had left the Ground Round, gotten onto the Maine Turnpike, and taken a long, aimless drive north. After making it to Waterville, she had stopped, tried to eat something at a Burger King, and then started back to Portland along Route 202, through Lewiston and Gray.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, “I had to meet with ... with my therapist, and —”

“You mean
Dr
. Graydon?”

“Yeah,” Elizabeth said, not liking the emphasis he put on the word doctor. “After that, I was pretty wiped. I had a lot to think about and just wanted to be alone for a while. I forgot that you were coming over.”

In truth, she had remembered her date with Frank and had thought about it but, just like when skipping her appointment with Graydon, she had decided to hell with it and simply not bothered to call.

“You
forgot
! You have no idea how good it is for my ego to hear you say that,” Frank replied. He laughed softly into the phone, trying to inject a note of humor, but she could tell how deeply he was hurt.

Elizabeth’s eyes felt red-rimmed and raw as she balanced Graydon’s book on her leg and casually flipped through the pages as she talked with Frank. Listening to him reminded her of things she now felt were so far gone from her life that she would never experience them again; he made her remember how normal and safe everyday life used to feel, and how nice it was when people could meet and fall in love ... or, even if they didn’t fall in love, they could do things together just to have fun, like going to the movies or out for a few drinks, just to be together.

But that’s not how real life is
! She thought bitterly.

There was an aching chill in her heart, both for herself and for Frank. She knew how honest and sincere he was in his interest in her, but the kind of life he was looking for was already too far out of reach. In real life, people die, sometimes brutally and horribly, sometimes for no apparent reason. People end up hating the person they once loved; they end up verbally, sometimes physically abusing each other and getting divorced. And in the end, as much as they try or pretend, people don’t-they can’t understand what’s happening to them until, finally, life becomes nothing more than a bitter, agonizing experience. She could almost understand how, once you’ve lived long enough, you could actually look forward to dying, if only to stop the pain of living.

Until — finally — you can’t wait for it to be over
, Elizabeth thought bitterly.

Even as the words formed in her mind, she remembered the mindnumbing fear she had experienced when, less than a year ago, she had tried to end it all by cutting her own wrists. Until now, she had never seen any humor in what had happened, but she almost laughed aloud when she remembered that Doug — not the “friend” she had told Graydon — had been the one to find her spread-legged on the kitchen floor, bleeding from the slices in her wrists. Doug had called the ambulance and had gone with her to the hospital. She had changed the truth because she had never been able to accept that he could have — but didn’t — turn her own words around on her from the night Caroline died ...

“
If it hadn’t been/or me, you’d be dead now!”

And she could just as easily have said to him exactly what he had said to her after that night ...

“
Don’t you understand? She meant everything to me! I might just as well die!”

“Elizabeth ... ?” Frank’s voice said, breaking into her thoughts like a wrecking ball slamming into an abandoned building. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Uh — what was that?”

“I said it’s too late for a movie, but maybe we could still go somewhere for a drink.”

Elizabeth’s eyes teared up as she looked idly down at Graydon’s book. She had inadvertently opened it to Chapter Twelve and couldn’t look away from the illustration on the facing page. It was an old-fashioned print of a man dressed like a medieval wizard. He was standing inside a five-pointed star drawn on the ground in front of an iron-gated mausoleum, and at each point of the star there burned a candle. In one hand the man held an open book; in the other he held a magic wand. All around him, swirling in a confusion of smoke and lichen-crusted tombstones, were demonic-looking figures-ghosts, demons, and devils ... all reaching out toward the man whose face, in spite of the horrors surrounding him, displayed a remarkable calm.

As if he’s in complete control
, Elizabeth thought,
like Dr. Graydon wants to be
!

“Well ... ?” Frank said.

“No, I, uh —” Elizabeth took a shuddering breath. “I just want to read for a while and then get some sleep. I haven’t been sleeping very well lately.”

“I don’t have another day off until next Tuesday, but maybe we can do something then,” Frank said.

Elizabeth grunted noncommittally.

“Maybe you should write it down on your calendar, or tie a string around your finger so you won’t forget,” he suggested, laughing.

“Yeah — sure,” Elizabeth replied distractedly.

She couldn’t take her eyes away from the drawing in the book. The longer she looked at the face of the man in the drawing, the more convinced she became that he looked exactly like Graydon. She realized she was just responding to the power of suggestion. Graydon had given her the book, and she was imagining these similarities; she was convincing herself it looked like him. Or, if in fact the man
did
resemble Graydon, it was nothing more than coincidence. Since she had returned home, stranger coincidences had happened, so something as simple as this wasn’t entirely impossible.

“Are you feeling all right?” Frank asked. “You sound ... I don’t know — different. Kind of distracted.”

‘‘I’m fine — really, just beat,” Elizabeth replied.

“Well, think about next week, okay? I’ll give you a call in a day or two.”

“Sure,” Elizabeth said.

She listened as Frank hung up on his end of the line, then reached up and replaced the receiver on the wall phone near the table. She was expected at the store first thing in the morning, and she knew she should go to bed right now. After the last few nights-and the nightmares she’d been having-she needed at least a solid eight hours of sleep. More would be better. But rather than head straight upstairs, she started reading the chapter Graydon had suggested. For the next two hours, she sat at the kitchen table, leaning intently over the book as she read and reread Chapter Twelve, “The Ancient Science of Necromancy.”

From Chapter Twelve, Elizabeth learned more than she ever thought she would want or need to know about raising the dead in order to communicate with them. There was a brief survey of the pervasiveness of such activity in many cultures, all of which, while interesting, struck Elizabeth simply as folklore and superstitious nonsense rather than real
science
, at least as she understood the term.

The last and longest section of the chapter, however, gave detailed descriptions of exactly how to go about summoning up the dead in order to speak with them. Elizabeth felt a deep chill when she read the description of the magical properties of the Hand of Glory. That someone —
who
? — had used her uncle’s severed hand as just such a thing seemed obvious. The book reiterated exactly what Frank had told her when they’d met last Thursday; that the power of the hand was most potent if it was from a hanged man or a suicide. The book also detailed the protective properties of the pentagram, the incantations used to raise the dead, and what the summoner had to do before being allowed to speak with the dead, as well as which questions were appropriate and inappropriate to ask.

It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when Elizabeth finished reading the chapter a second time. She closed the book and sat back in her chair, feeling completely drained. Confusion and fear twisted in her mind like heavy storm clouds. She wanted to get up and get a drink of water, but she wasn’t sure she even had the strength to stand. What she had read was bad enough taken as fiction, but it was staggering to consider that people long ago and, apparently, even now — people as seemingly sane as Roland Graydon — thought they could actually
do
this!

Everything she was learning about the ancient magic associated with necromancy put more and more pieces of her own situation together for her. Some of these realizations hit with all the energy of a bolt of lightning, while others came on more slowly and finally swept through her mind like the icy shock of an ocean wave.

One thing was that what she had
thought
were mere coincidences, were now starting to fit into place for her. Maybe there really was a pattern, some overriding master game plan to everyone’s life. Christians, astrologers, and other so-called psychic people seemed to think so. What if they were right? What if we really are just pawns in some cosmic drama of which we can get only hints?

But even if life
is
all preordained, Elizabeth believed that it was up to her, as it was to each individual, to work out her own life pattern. It was up to her to judge whether she thought such perceived “coincidences” were either “good” or “bad.” If she defined every connection in her life as negative, then, sure, someone like Dr. Graydon would have to classify her as paranoid. But if she saw and made the exact same connections and regarded them all in a positive light, it was no longer paranoia ... it was what people throughout the ages have defined as a “religious” experience. Elizabeth actually wished she could embrace this perception that life truly is all connected, and that it is all for the good!