Demon's Door (10 page)

There was a lengthy pause, accompanied by a hollow rattle which sounded like a toilet-roll. Then Detective Wong said, ‘No, sir. I wasn't called out to any incident like that, not today. I was catching up on paperwork for most of the afternoon.'

‘You
are
Detective Wong who has a red and green plaid coat?'

‘That's right. But I absolutely did not come out to West Grove Community College this afternoon and I know nothing at all about any Maria Lopez.'

Jim couldn't think what else to say. He hung up the phone and stood in the middle of the living room feeling as if he were going mad. He almost felt like banging his head against the wall, just to prove to himself that he wasn't having a nightmare.

‘Come on, Jim,' he told himself. ‘There has to be
some
explanation for this.'

He rummaged under the couch and pulled out a dog-eared copy of the yellow pages. Then he picked up the phone again and called every hospital with an emergency room within a twenty-mile radius – starting with Kaiser Permanente on Sunset Boulevard and then working his way through Santa Monica Medical Clinic, Glendale Memorial, and even the Brotman in Culver City.

He located a Susanna Lopez, who had suffered third-degree burns in an auto wreck on the Hollywood Freeway. He also found a Michael Lopez, who worked at B&B Lumber in North Hollywood and had cut off his thumb and two fingers with a circular saw. Then he discovered a Dorothea Lopez, who had suffered a heart attack at her home in Boyle Heights, and fallen downstairs, breaking her hip. But after ringing round eleven hospitals, he could find no trace of any Maria Lopez.

He thought of calling Dr Ehrlichman, but by now it was nearly midnight, and what could Dr Ehrlichman do? Even if he knew where Maria had been taken, he would be majorly ratty at being disturbed so late, and if he didn't know any more about Maria than Detective Wong did, or the emergency department at Cedars-Sinai, he would think that Jim was finally ready for the nuthouse.

Jim opened the fridge and took out another bottle of Fat Tire. It was his last, so he would have to buy more tomorrow. Maybe he should give it up. Maybe it contained some secret ingredient that gave him hallucinations, because right
there
on the shelf in front of him was the Tupperware box full of chopped chicken livers, and that was incontrovertible proof that somebody had told Mrs LaFarge that Tibbles had been resurrected. Somebody who looked like him. Somebody who knew what he knew. Somebody, for all he knew, who
was
him. A
doppelgänger
.

While he drank his beer, he switched on his laptop and Googled
Kwisin
. There were very few references to it (or her, or whatever she was.) But he came across a PDF of a memoir entitled
Folk-tales and Mysticism in Korea
, written in the 1950s by an English anthropologist called Peregrine Fellows.

In his chapter on Ghosts And Demons, Fellows had written, ‘
Kwisin
are the ghosts of women who have not married before their death. They haunt their relatives every night, keening and crying for them to arrange a marriage for them, so that they can find eternal peace. It is said that, occasionally, their relatives manage to effect this, especially if they are able to find a man from a far-off town or village who has not heard of the woman's passing.

‘For some considerable time after her death, a
Kwisin
can sustain a physical form, so that she will be indistinguishable to her unsuspecting husband from a living woman. As time goes by, however, she will sleep longer and longer every night until she never wakes at all. She will, however, have found peace in the spirit world.

‘If her relatives fail to marry her, however, she will increasingly take on a demonic shape, such as a dog or a fox or a hawk, and she will take her revenge on a world that has deprived her of happiness and peace by preying on the souls of those who have met a premature death, in particular other unmarried women and those who have died by their own hand.

‘She will deliberately encourage the separation of those couples who are betrothed, by whispering lies to each partner about the other's faithfulness; and she will deliberately encourage suicides by showing vulnerable and depressive people that their future lives will be filled with nothing but sickness and despair.'

That was all about Kwisin. The rest of the chapter was devoted to ghosts who haunted people who were unwise enough to travel through the mountains at night; and to the ghosts of S
ǒ
n Masters, Zen Buddhist monks who had found a way through to ‘the Great Way that has no gate.'

Jim was too tired to make any sense of the higher concepts of Zen, so he switched off his laptop and snapped it shut. Tibbles had been sleeping and he opened his eyes in annoyance.

Before he went to bed Jim changed the sheets and the pillowslips. Even if the only other person who had slept in them was a double of himself, he didn't relish the idea of sharing somebody else's sweaty bedclothes. As he stood in front of the bathroom basin, brushing his teeth, he peered at his reflection intently to make sure that it was really him, but he couldn't detect any differences from the usual him. No moles, no scars, no additional gray hairs.

It took him over an hour to get to sleep. He kept hearing noises like somebody walking around the living room, and opening the fridge door in the kitchen. Twice he got out of bed to make sure that no intruders had forced their way into his apartment. Both times he found that all the windows were locked and the security chain on the front door was still fastened. Tibbles was still lying on the couch, purring like a death-rattle.

He lay in bed staring at the ceiling. If he had imagined what had happened to Maria Lopez, maybe he had imagined the whole day, from start to finish. Maybe he hadn't killed Tibbles at all. Maybe he hadn't gone to college and marked the register. Maybe he had imagined all of those new students – T.D. and Arthur Watt and Janice Sticky and Teddy Greenspan. But how was that possible?

He fell asleep, but after what seemed like only a few minutes he jerked violently and opened his eyes. The digital clock beside his bed said 2:37 a.m. and it was still dark outside. He lay there for a while, listening, wondering what it was that had woken him up. His knees and his elbows ached, and his nose was clogged up, as if he had a cold. He
felt
cold, too. In fact he was so cold that he was shivering, and he reached down the bed and dragged the red woolen throw up to his neck.

Something was wrong with him. Something was badly wrong. He lifted his head from the pillow and his neck creaked, as if he had been lying in a draft. He didn't want to get out of bed but he urgently needed to take a leak. He felt that if he didn't go to the bathroom immediately, he would wet his shorts.

‘Goddammit,' he cursed under his breath. He tried to swing both of his legs out of bed but his knees hurt him so much that he could only manage one leg at a time. When his feet were on the carpet he heaved himself up and hobbled toward the bathroom door. He felt terrible. Not just aching, but exhausted.

He barely made it to the toilet, but when he did, he managed only three or four spurts. He stood there, waiting, feeling as if he wanted to pee some more, but he simply couldn't.

He flushed the toilet and went over to the basin to wash his hands. When he saw himself in the mirror, however, his knees gave way, and he had to grab the edge of the basin to stop himself from collapsing on to the floor.

The face in the mirror was that of an elderly man, at least eighty-five years old. His hair was sparse, and what there was of it was wild and white. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery, and his cheeks were sunken. There were deep lines all around his mouth as if his lips had been sewn together by head-hunters. His chin was covered in white stubble, and his neck was wrinkled.

‘That's it,' he said. ‘Now I
know
I'm having a nightmare.' He turned his head to the right, and the old man in the mirror turned his head to the left. He nodded his head up and down and the old man did that, too.

‘I'm thirty-five years old,' he insisted. ‘You are not me. I don't know who the hell you are, but you are not me.'

When he spoke, the old man moved his lips to mime what he was saying; and when he reached up and touched his cheek, the old man copied him.

‘
You cannot be me!
' he shouted, although his voice was thin and strained, just like an old man's voice. ‘
You cannot be me!
'

He lowered his head. On the shelf above the basin he saw a green plastic mug caked with toothpaste. It contained a toothbrush with splayed-out bristles and a crumpled tube of Blanx. On the other side of the shelf there were seven or eight bottles of tablets. He reached out and picked up the nearest, which was labeled Lorazepam. He knew that Lorazepam was prescribed for panic attacks, but he had never taken it in his life.

It was then that he looked at his hand. His skin was wrinkled and liver-spotted, and his nails were chalky, with deep ridges in them. He dropped the bottle of Lorazepam in the basin, and held up both of his hands in front of his face, staring at them in horror. He was old – at least fifty years older than when he went to bed. How could he be so old? Not only that, he was
sick
, too. He picked up one medicine bottle after another, and saw that he had tablets for arthritis, high blood pressure, heart arrhythmia, ulcers and gout.

There was no doubt that they had been prescribed for him, either. Each bottle was clearly marked James Rook, although he had never heard of the doctor, S. Fabrizzi, MD, with an address on Sunset Boulevard.

Jim left the bathroom and shuffled across the corridor and into his living room. It smelled stale and stuffy, and when he switched on the lights he saw why. The windows were all covered in thick brown drapes, and the air-conditioning unit was turned off. He didn't recognize any of the furniture. There was a heavy armchair, upholstered in worn brown velveteen; a grubby yellow couch with heaps of old newspapers on it; and a cheap upright dining chair with a red vinyl seat.

The carpet was filthy and threadbare, and there were stacks of magazines and newspapers everywhere, as well as brown paper grocery sacks from Ralph's, dozens and dozens of them, all neatly folded.

Jim went across to the window and pulled back the drapes. Outside, on the balcony, there were five or six terracotta pots with dead plants in them, including a ghost-like yucca, and an ivy that trailed across the floor like the tentacles of a stranded squid.

He tried to switch on the air-conditioning, but the knob dropped off on to the floor, and when he looked closer he could see that the unit's connecting wires were frayed and hanging adrift. He left the knob where it was. His back was too stiff for him to bend over and pick it up.

He limped slowly around the room. He knew
where
he was. He was still in his third-floor apartment on Briarcliff Road, although it looked as if he hadn't redecorated it in twenty years or more. The walls were streaked with grimy gray condensation, and the chandelier was thickly furred with dust. It looked as though he hadn't thrown anything away for twenty years, either. Not just newspapers and magazines and grocery sacks, but empty boxes of painkillers and indigestion tablets, as well as carefully creased candy wrappers and envelopes and flyers from local pizza restaurants.

He knew
where
this was, but he didn't know
when
. It appeared to be sometime in his own future, but there was no way for him to tell if he was dreaming, or hallucinating, or if he was suffering from amnesia, and had lived through the past half-century day by day and year by year but had simply forgotten it all.

He turned around. He was wheezing with effort, and he made his way over to the heavy brown armchair. He was just about to sit down, however, when he realized that there was a white plastic cushion-cover on the seat, stained with yellow. So not only had he lost most of his hair, and not only was he suffering from anxiety attacks, and arthritis, and a half-dozen other complaints, but he was incontinent, too.

He stood swaying in the middle of the living room and he thought:
If this is real, if I really have arrived at the age of eighty-plus and this is what my life is like, then I'm going to go back into that bathroom and take every single tablet on that shelf.

He started back toward the bathroom, but then he stopped, holding on to the back of the couch for support. He couldn't count on it, but there might be a bottle of Fat Tire in the fridge to wash the tablets down his throat, if they were still brewing Fat Tire after all these years. If not, he would have to make do with soda or a glass of water, or whatever he could find.

He was halfway to the kitchen when he saw a dark gray blur crossing the kitchen doorway, as if somebody had flashed past it, so quickly that they were almost invisible. He heard the front door open, and for a moment he felt the briefest of warm drafts. Then he heard it close again.

‘Who's that?' he shouted, in that thin, reedy voice. God, he sounded like his own grandfather, George. ‘You come back here, whoever you are! You just come back here!'

He hurried as fast as he could manage into the hallway. The security chain beside the front door was hanging loose, and still swinging. He tugged open the door, which was stiff for lack of oil. Right next to it stood an umbrella stand with four or five walking sticks in it. He lifted one of them out, a heavy ebony cane with an elephant's head carved on the top of it, and stepped out on to the landing.

‘Who's there?' he called out. ‘You come right back here and show yourself!'

The light at the far end of the landing was broken, so the steps that led down to the second story were swallowed in deep shadow. Jim strained his eyes to see if there was anybody there, but it was far too dark, and he suddenly realized that his eyesight wasn't too good, either.