The 'Geisters (27 page)

“What are you doing?”

Philip shrugged. “The rug was all bunched out. You might have tripped.”

“You should put clothes on. I can see your wee.”

“Fuck off.”

“You fuck off.”

“You can’t see anything. And cut out the swearing.”

“Fine.” She leaned against the door. “I didn’t make the rug bunch up.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“I think the ghost did.”

Philip, shrugging. “Maybe. Whatever. Shouldn’t be left like that.”

“Someone might trip.”

“You know it.”

“I hate the ghost.”

Philip stood up straight. “Don’t,” he said, and tightened the towel again. “I’m going to put on pants.”

“I didn’t do it,” said Ann as Philip stepped into his bedroom. “Stupid ghost did it.”

Philip closed the door and Ann was alone in the hall. She looked straight at them.

“I hate you!” she shouted. When she went back into her room, she slammed the door.

See? None of us are pure.

The circle of men had fallen to their knees, in an approximation of prostration. With the exception of Philip, who sat lolling in his chair, looking at Ann, still asleep on the couch. She was turned away now, so her face pressed into the backrest cushions.

“Belaim,” said Charlie Sunderland, his head downcast to the floor. “Redawn,” he continued, working his way through the words he’d taught Ann to chant, as a way to rope the Insect in when the chairs started shifting, the windowpanes vibrating.
Sheepmorne . . .
Overwind . . .

It had been a game when they’d sat up late at Sunderland’s lodge, practising the words—the whole family, chanting them together, in their own little circle, learning Sunderland’s nonsense words to banish the demons into the night.

Philip had sat in that circle—straight-facedly reciting the words with everyone else. When they were alone, he would make up other words—“fuckitutilly,” “scroticalific,” “snotufical”—and Ann would crack up.

Now, he couldn’t even articulate the words with the other men—but he looked deadly serious.

And why shouldn’t he?

He had learned what happened when he didn’t take the Insect seriously. When he’d brought Laurie into the Lake House . . . brought her to his bedroom, held her close as she squirmed out of her sweater and jeans . . . kissed him, and took hold of him, and with touch and caress and kiss, brought him from shivering arousal to shuddering climax.

He had learned, the price of betrayal, of abandonment.

Now, see how he comes crawling back. See how they
all
come crawling back.

The words from the ’geisters continued: a sweet, insensible cadence that lulled, like an old song, like a strong, sugared liqueur. Philip swayed, and sang them too—each time around, his pronunciation getting stronger, as though he, too, were training himself to absorb the words.

On the sofa, Ann stirred.

She stretched a leg out, and then another, and rolled over onto her side. She brought a hand to her forehead, brushing hair out of the way, and blinked. She swung her feet to the floor, and sat straight, and shakily, stood, looking around at the circle with measured disinterest.

The men didn’t stop chanting as Ann rocked back and forth to build a bit of momentum, finally got to her feet, and made her way through the circle to the kitchen, and the refrigerator.

She opened the first bottle of beer and finished it in two long swallows.

The men stopped chanting as she opened a second bottle. Ian Rickhardt looked to Charlie Sunderland, who nodded at him.

From the ceiling, she and the Insect watched, as though they were pinned there, as Charlie got up, crossed the room and whispered into her ear.

The corporeal body of Ann Voors nodded, and swallowed half of another beer. And leaning on Dr. Sunderland for support, she let herself be led from the room.

At the ceiling, Ann tried to reach for herself as the door opened—to follow. It was no good. Ann watched herself take a final swig of the beer, dangle it between two fingers, and disappear as the door swung shut.

Fuck.
If she’d had arms, she would have wrapped them around herself, curled up, as the reality dawned on her. She would have shut her eyes tight.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

“Don’t fuckin’ swear, Sis. Not very ladylike.”

Ann opened her eyes.

She stood in the middle of the dark gymnasium, casting her gaze among the shadows, the beams of sickly light that came in through the high windows. It was cold in here. Snow blew outside. Climbing ropes dangled from the darkness of the ceiling like trailing man-o-war tentacles. At either end, basketball hoops were bent up.

“Where are you?” she called. Her voice sounded very small and weak to her, more frightened than she thought.

“I’m here,” said Philip. His voice had an odd echoing quality that took Ann a moment to place. There was a loud thumping sound then, a great drumbeat, and it hit her: he was talking over a PA system—tapping the microphone in the office for the school
PA system.

“Is this the high school?”

“Fenlan & District Secondary School, that’s right. If . . . if you hadn’t gone to live with Nan, you’d have gone here too.”

“It’s awfully dark,” said Ann.

“There’s a light switch over by the door.”

“Can’t you turn it on?”

“What do you want, me to hold your fuckin’ hand?”

It wasn’t entirely dark. As Ann became accustomed to it, dim light entered from high windows. Barely enough to see by.

Ann crossed the floor of the gym to what looked like a big set of double doors at the very edge of the brightest pool of light. It wasn’t exactly clean; things crunched under her feet, like peanut shells. Ann looked down as she stepped into the light. They weren’t shells; they were bugs . . . beetles and flies, curled up dead. Ann brushed out a path for herself with the toe of a running shoe she hadn’t worn in fifteen years. She crossed back into shadow, and felt on the wall until she found a row of switches, and flipped them on.

“That’s better,” she said. Fluorescent lights flickered in rows on high over the court. At the opposite end, wooden bleachers had been pushed against the wall emerged from shadow, as did a deep green banner crossing the wall, announcing that this gymnasium was home to the Fenlan Panthers. Philip had been a Panther.

It didn’t look like any Panthers had been through in a few years, though.

The walls were also streaked with rusty water-marks, where pipes seemed to have burst. Wind whistled through a broken pane up high. It was cold in here—cold as January, cold as a visit from the Insect.

“What’ve you done, Philip?”

“Oh, chill.”

“Literally.” Ann tried the double doors behind her. They opened a little ways, then stopped. “Seriously. What’ve you done? I watched myself walk away—my body walk away. Where am I?”

“You’re at the high school,” he said. “You’ve been here before.”

“So we did speak—when I was on the road.”

“Yeah. It’s a place I’ve put together. It’s where . . . where she and I talk.”

“She?” Ann leaned on the doors, hard. They gave a little bit, then stopped again. It was as though something were wedged against it.

“Yeah. After the accident . . . the crash. Sometimes, I’d wake up here. Back at school. She’d be here.”

“Laurie,” said Ann, although she knew that wasn’t so, and a yowl of feedback over the PA system confirmed it.

“Not Laurie. No. She doesn’t have a name,” said Philip, “but I can tell you—she fucking hates being called the Insect.”

“Ah. So
her.
” Ann stepped away from the doors. There was no getting out that way, she thought, as they pushed back shut.

“You’re going to have to stay here,” he said. “Good that you figured that out.”

Ann moved along the wall of the gym. There were doors farther along, the two change-room doors: HOME first, then VISITOR.

“I don’t really want to stay here, Philip,” said Ann. “I want to wake up.”

More feedback. “Wake up? Who said you’re asleep?”

Ann pushed open the HOME door. It opened easily, into a big square room with a bench all around, and coat hangers. There was another door through it, which Ann guessed probably led to showers.

“I want to go back to myself,” Ann said. Her voice was shaking. She wondered, was this how the Insect felt, when she locked it in a tower overlooking the loamy fields of Tricasta? “I want out of this place, Philip. You got to know, this isn’t right.”

“You know Sis, you might be right.” His voice was louder here because it came out of another speaker, set in the wall in this smaller space. “This might be wrong. But it’s all I’ve got. It’s all I had for years. Her.”

“So you’re just like them,” said Ann. “You’ve used the Insect . . .
you’ve used
her
for your own sexual pleasure. You . . . you raped her too.”

“No,” he said. “I never raped her. But we’ve been together for so long. Since I can remember, she was there for me. And I let her down. That’s why . . .”

“That’s why the accident.”

“I should have known better. Laurie was great. But I should have left her to her life.”

Ann found the light switch, and the change-room filled with a dim yellow glow. She didn’t have to listen to the rest of the story. She knew it, in a way that made her think she’d always known it on some level: how Philip, mesmerized by the red-haired beauty from History of Europe, had one night turned away from the quiet touch of her—of the Smiling Girl . . .

He had rejected her. Like Peter Pan casting off Tinker Bell for the womanly temptations of Wendy . . . he’d cast her off.

And yeah—the Insect, the Smiling Girl, had shown Philip just exactly what that meant.

Which is to say: everything.

Ann sat down on the bench. She stretched her legs out, and thought about it.

“You there, sis?”

“Yeah,” said Ann. “Right here in the change-room.”

“Okay.”

“Did she . . . did the Smiling Girl visit you in here?” Ann thought that she did.

“Yeah,” said Philip. “Sometimes. She was always with me.”

“She was never just mine,” said Ann, “was she?”

“No.”

More quiet, as Ann thought about that. She wondered how much of it Dr. Sunderland really knew. He’d treated both Ann and Philip. Did he understand that the Insect, the Smiling Girl, was really a part of both of them? That both of them—Ann and Philip—were vessels to this poltergeist he and his friends coveted?

“She sure as shit wasn’t yours to give away in matrimony,” said Philip. “To those fucking rapists.”

“Those fucking rapists,” said Ann, “are the fuckers that you threw in with.”

“Don’t curse.”

“I was duped,” said Ann. “You weren’t duped at all. You threw right in.”

“Oh did I?”

“You wore their bathrobes—while they were doing their
Eyes Wide Shut
shit.”

“What?”

“
Eyes Wide Shut
? The Kubrick movie? Tom and Nicole?”

“Must’ve missed it on movie night at the Hollingsworth.”

“Sorry.” Ann thought about that. “Fuck you, Philip. I’m not sorry. You threw in with Ian fucking Rickhardt and Charlie Sunderland and everybody else who took . . . whatever it is we share, and made it into their sex toy.” She stood up from the bench, and went through the door to the showers. It smelled of chlorine in here—like a pool. She couldn’t find the light switch immediately, but she didn’t care. She just stepped farther into the darkness.

“And for what? So the Insect could carry you around like you’re walking under your own power, and . . . I don’t know, get you off? You sold me
out
. I trusted you. I always trusted you. And you sold me
out
.”

The darkness deepened as she rounded a corner and the dim light from the change-room vanished. She could hear Philip mouthing something, but the place she was entering didn’t seem to be hooked up to the PA system.

He made a garbled noise that might have been a protest:
You don’t understand, it was all for the best . . .
blah fucking blah
blah blah.

As Ann kept on, the wall she was following fell away, and she had no guide for her progress. The floor transformed as well, to what felt like hard, dry clay. She felt a breeze of cold, sweet-smelling air that cut through the chlorine smell and eventually drove it away. The breeze intensified, as the darkness became absolute and the clay hardened to stone. The sound of her running shoes shuffling along it took on an echoing quality, and Ann came to imagine that she was in an immense cavern.

She stopped walking.

“I didn’t throw in with them.”

There was no PA system this time. Philip’s voice came from close—very close, because he was whispering. There was no light, so Ann reached out, trying to touch him. Her hand closed on empty air.

Philip went on. “They think I did. They think I’ll do what Michael . . . what he couldn’t do . . . and tame her for them. But I’ll tell you something, Sis.” Ann felt his breath, cold as winter on her neck.

“She was already tame,” he said, “when you flew off to Tobago—what with their tricks, and yours . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll put it to you simple,” he said. “Our friend never would have killed Michael Voors, without my help.”

“What the hell, Philip?”

“I couldn’t stop you from marrying him. Couldn’t stop you from flying off to Tobago. But when
she
told me what Rickhardt had made her do, in that beach house . . . how she couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

“She burned down the beach house.”

“She didn’t like it,” said Philip, “and she demonstrated that, yeah. But she couldn’t stop it. The . . . rape. They’d conditioned her. That far at least.”

“But you undid that. How?”

“How do you do things, when it comes to her? I dreamed it. As you can imagine, I do a lot of dreaming.”

“Like that school.”

“Like that.”

“How did you learn to do that?”

“She taught me. She learned how to do it from you and passed it on to me. You know. The stuff you learned from that old lady. Eva.”

“I know,” said Ann. “But it doesn’t seem to be working right now.”