Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online
Authors: Christopher Ransom
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense
The Haunting of James Hastings (27 page)
Your addiction is your excuse, baby. Buck up.
Yes, have another beer, James. Go sleep in another motel and spank it to more internet porn so you don’t have to deal with a complex human being, you numb, hypocritical asshole.
Annette. She could be suicidal. Have you considered that? What if you leave, just bail and go back to your happy life in West Adams, pretend you never met her, and then wake up next week to Detective Bergen knocking on your door? Hiya, James. That friend of yours, the kooky neighbor? Yeah, killed herself. She went Lucy on us. Way to string another woman along. You really know how to help a woman in need, Hastings. You know what you are? A jerk-off. Another jerk-off in a city of millions.
And that was what it came down to for me, right then. As messed up as this woman was, she had come to me for help. She had lost her husband. Our fates were intertwined. She had come to me for help and I had let her in. What kind of man would I have been if I just wished her the best of luck and walked out the door?
‘Annette? Can you hear me?’
She did not respond.
I closed my eyes and summoned something. In the silence, here on the hot second floor where my thoughts were hazy and her condition teased me, impossible things seemed possible. I leaned closer and spoke very quietly.
‘Stacey?’
No change of expression. She merely continued to sweat.
‘Is that you? Can you hear me, Stace? Are you trying to tell me something?’
The facial muscles under her left cheek began to twitch. Just three or four quick flutters, as if someone were pulling an invisible thread attached below her eye. Then it stopped and she was still. Her breathing was slow. This was insane but I had to try it. I had to know. I leaned in until I was less than six inches from her face.
‘Stacey,’ I whispered. ‘Stacey. I’m here, love. Open your eyes. I’m right here.’
Annette’s breath trickled in and out. Nothing changed.
Something in the room smelled bad. There was a new odor, subtly biting and alkaline. It was so familiar but out of place that it took another minute for me to classify - my mind leaping back to Henry’s puppyhood and stained carpets - as urine. I stood up and rubbed my mouth.
Oh, I see. This is real. She is very sick now.
I reached forward and peeled the bedding back, down to her knees, and then bit my hand to keep from screaming.
25
The large wet spot that had spread around her bottom was not what made me bite my knuckles until my eyes watered. I was staring at her skin. Annette was wearing only a ribbed tank top and a pair of blue cotton panties. The rest of her was bare and pale. No, pale is inadequate. The skin covering her legs, arms, neck and everywhere else visible to me then was
alabaster
.
alabaster
.
Like so many redheads, Annette had hundreds of freckles. I had gotten so used to them I no longer noticed them. But now their absence stood out in one great negative space. Her freckles were not faded or pale against the paler epidermis.
She had no freckles.
The very pigment that had once set them off against her already light skin had vanished as if she had spent the last twenty-four hours soaking in a tank of Clorox.
She had no freckles.
The very pigment that had once set them off against her already light skin had vanished as if she had spent the last twenty-four hours soaking in a tank of Clorox.
Her cheeks were the only part of her to retain any sort of color, and there she maintained only the slightest pink, but, yes, now that I studied her face, I could swear that this too was fading. I stood above her for unknowable minutes and tried to comprehend what illness could have such an effect. She had the skin of a corpse that had been floating in a lake for a week without the gaseous bloating, and yet she breathed. She was alive.
A crawling fear, one I did not know existed, slowly but inexorably claimed me. It was the fear of a child cursed with adult knowledge, discovering some terrible truth before he is mature enough to cope with it. I had nothing to compare it to. Not even finding Stacey dead in the alley behind our home, which had been a horror but not a fear. I did not know what this meant, what it was. My mind groped for reason and reference but found neither. I stood with it and it rearranged me. I was powerless and alone with an awful secret, the secret of her changing.
She’s dying. Call for help. Call an ambulance.
Annette’s eyelids went up in one smooth motion. Her eyes did not move to me. She only stared straight ahead, unblinking, her pupils reduced to pinhead specks. Blue. Both eyes were blue now. Her lips parted and I retreated another pace from the bed.
‘He’s here,’ she said in a voice too quiet and soft for me to identify as her own. I waited, but nothing followed and another minute passed.
‘What?’ I prompted.
‘He’s in the house again.’
This sentence, and the ones that followed, seemed to form over a period of minutes.
‘He’s in the bedroom with her,’ she said. ‘Wearing the red suit. So red . . . it’s almost wet. His skin burns. It shines with the blood from the boys and girls.’
‘No one is going to hurt you,’ I said.
Her chest rose and fell between the words. She displayed no sign of agitation.
‘He won’t stop until he eats every part. Every part of me.’
‘Who?’ I heard myself ask. ‘Who is he?’
Her eyelids came down and went back up. Her breathing accelerated, the little gusts now audible. Her head rotated on the pillow and her eyes found me. My legs began to shake. I could not control them.
‘And then he’s going to get the boy, too.’
I licked my lips. ‘Who? Who are you talking about?’
‘Her son.’ Her eyes shimmered. ‘Oh, Aaron . . .’
The bicycle. In the garage. It belonged to a boy. She had a son named Aaron and she was talking about herself in the third person now. Who did she think she was then? Who was this white form on the bed?
‘Who are you?’ I said.
She sat up in the bed and hissed, reaching for me. ‘Sssss-staaaayyy . . .’
I ran from the room, slamming the door behind me. I ran down the stairs and stumbled out the front door, into the night that had fallen.
26
I don’t know at what hour I stepped out, only that it was now true night. I ran to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned right and kept running until it became obvious that she was not following me and my lungs were burning. I settled into a brisk pace and walked for an hour. I moved through the development unseen, or at least undisturbed. The windows of every home I passed were dark. I saw few cars, all of them parked, and no people walking their dogs or otherwise stretching their legs. I followed the sidewalks and at some point crossed a field of grass I did not know was a park until I almost ran into the cold, abandoned bars of playground equipment. I sat at the bottom of a slide and made trails in the sand with my shoes.
I hadn’t thought about the Mustang when I ran out the front door, and now I couldn’t bring myself to go back, not even to the garage. She might be walking around the house now, looking for me. She might be standing in the living room, at the window, stiff behind a curtain like a department store mannequin, waiting for me to return.
Oh, Aaron.
I did not know anyone named Aaron, and I didn’t want to. I was not going back there, not tonight, perhaps ever.
Sheltering Palms was too deep in the desert to have bus service. I did not have my cellphone to call a cab. I considered walking out, down the road, into Palm Desert or whatever the nearest town was, but I knew it was miles away and I was tired. I did not want to speak to police or medics. I did not want to deal with their questions. I wanted to be alone, somewhere warm, in a soft bed. Everything I had witnessed collected into some vague cloud, the knowledge that something was wrong and that I had caused it.
This is your guilt. You are condemned.
The desert air cooled. I wore only jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt. I couldn’t stay out all night. I decided to find a home with a phone and call it in as an emergency. I would offer no explanation other than
there is a woman and she needs help
.
there is a woman and she needs help
.
I found myself walking again, through backyards, around and over low, split-rail fences set in brittle grass. I was looking for a light, some sign that another, normal person was awake, watching late-night television. I imagined a man like myself, a sort of laid-back dude who wouldn’t scream when I knocked on his door and told him I needed to use his phone. He would be dressed in sandals and a polo shirt with barbecue sauce on it, would be on his third or fourth gin and tonic. He would listen to my story and nod in sympathy. Sure, brah, you can borrow my car. We’ll sort it out.
But I found no houses with lights on. I saw no people through any of the windows.
It’s a ghost division.
I decided to test the truth of that.
The house I chose was another stucco sprawl, its peach walls light in the night, with wooden beams extending from the façade like rounded cigar ends. It reminded me of the Alamo. I rang the doorbell, which gonged solemnly behind the thick wooden door. No lights were on and I knew no one would answer, but I used the heavy iron knocker anyway. The knocks echoed hollowly, and another five minutes passed. Once I was certain no one was watching me, I stepped to the left, and jabbed my right heel at the base of the foyer window. It vibrated. My second kick sent one thousand cracks through the pane. The third turned the webbed mass into a rain that seemed very loud in the night. I braced myself for the howl of an alarm.
No alarm sounded.
I turned sideways and slid through the narrow window frame, my feet crunching on pebbled safety glass and tile. Inside, I searched for a blinking alarm panel, but saw only dim walls and a wider opening into the sunken great room. I reached for a light switch on instinct, thought better of it, and waded deeper into the house with my hands in front of me.
‘Hello?’ I said, loudly. ‘If anyone is home, I’m sorry. I’ve had an emergency and I need to use the phone. Please don’t shoot. I just need to call an ambulance.’
I waited a while, but no lights came on and no one answered me. My vision became attuned to the darkness and I realized there was not a single stick of furniture in the great room. The air carried new paint and carpet chemical smells. The house might never have been inhabited. I stepped down into the great room and looked up at the high-vaulted ceiling and the railing of the exposed second-floor hallway. No one watched over me. I looped around to the breakfast area and into the kitchen. I found a panel of four switches and flipped the first one up. A small recessed light came on, illuminating a desk area near a phone jack, but no phone. It was a bill-paying area just off the kitchen and the light was minimal. I did not think it would attract attention, and I doubted there were any neighbors on this street. The light boosted my confidence.
The refrigerator was empty, the yellow and black Energy Star tag still dangling over the door. The freezer’s ice maker had not even produced its first cube. The unit was still warm, not even plugged in.
The house had a first-floor master suite. I arrived at it through a long, carpeted hallway, passing a laundry room and a bathroom on the right and a small den on the left, none of which had any furniture in them either. I threw the master bedroom light on and was confronted with a king-sized bed. My eyes registered sheets and pillows and a blanket with a south-western motif and my skin prickled as I jerked back, expecting someone to sit up and start screaming at me. But the bed was empty, the creased pillows and sheets square, unused.
Absurdly I lowered my voice and said, ‘Hello?’
No, if someone was home, you would have been beaten with a baseball bat by now. A realtor staged it for showing, that’s all. They just never got around to staging the rest of the house.
I went into the master bathroom and turned another light on. A large oval tub with dust and dead moths in it abutted a hexagonal shower stall with streaks of drywall dust on the glass panels. The low, almond-colored vanity featured his and her sinks. After making sure the water wasn’t brown, I used one to splash cold water on my face and used my shirt to blot my face and hands dry. I turned off the bathroom light, but the darkness was too severe. I found the toilet alcove and flipped the switch. It cast just enough light on the end of the bedroom to put me at ease.
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