Wildwood Road (17 page)

With his eyes pinched shut, the images from Friday night were too sharp, too clearly etched in his mind. He opened them.

The phone rang, and he let out a shout as though someone had crept up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. The ring was tinny and shrill. Part of him was drawn by instinct to answer the phone, but the rest of him was unwilling to rise off of the sofa.

On the third ring he sprang up and raced into the kitchen. He snatched the portable phone from its cradle and pressed Talk.

“Hello?”

“Michael, it's Hannah.”

Hannah. He felt a wave of hope go through him. If he told Hannah about her sister, she might be able to help. Just telling someone, sharing what he was feeling, sharing the burden, would be a relief.

“Michael?”

“Yeah, hi, Hannah,” he said. “Listen, I'm . . . I'm glad you called.”

“I'll bet. What did you do to her?”

He blinked several times, frowning deeply. “What? What are you talking about?”

“I talked to her this morning. She was a total bitch, Mike. Not at all like her. In all my life, I've never heard her like this. So what's the story? Are you messing around on her or something? 'Cause Jillian's not going to just go off like that without a reason, and I racked my brain to figure out what it could be, and all my questions lead back to you.”

Michael shivered. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself so that he would not scream.

“It's nothing like that, Hannah. I don't know what it is. Something's happened to her.”

There was a long silence, as though his wife's sister was trying to decide if she believed him or not.

“I'll talk to her,” Hannah said. “Try to figure out what it is. You really don't have a clue?” She sounded a bit lost as she said the latter, as though the idea of Michael being unfaithful was infinitely preferable to having her sister's behavior a mystery.

“I don't. And I think . . . I'm not sure there's anything you can do to help.”

“She's my sister, Michael.”

“Right. Of course.” He sighed. “I'll . . . talk to you soon.”

He hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment. Instead of making him feel less alone, Hannah's call had made him feel more isolated than ever. What could he have said to her that wouldn't have sounded insane?

It's on you, Mikey. You've got to do something.

Like what?

Both hands on the kitchen counter, he leaned there for several seconds, just breathing. Listening to the clock and the fridge and his heart.

Stay away,
those nightmare women had said. But if what they had done to Jillian was connected to the lost girl, then staying away was not the answer. The answer was going to be in finding her. It might lead him to nothing. It might make them come back and do to him what they had done to Jillian, but it was a far better option than living on his sofa and letting his mind break down while he waited for the bitch his wife had become to come home from work.

Come find me,
Scooter had said. And now Michael believed that he had to, that
everything
relied upon him doing exactly that.

He started back into the living room and the phone rang again behind him, startling him once more. When he went to pick it up, he saw on the caller ID that the call was from Krakow & Bester. He let the answering machine pick it up.

“Michael?” came Teddy Polito's voice. Angry. Cold. “Michael, pick up the goddamn phone if you're home. Look, I've been worried about you, but I'm getting past it pretty quick and moving onto being pissed off. You said you'd have the designs to me today, but you didn't show up, and I haven't heard from you all day. If you don't get those designs in by the end of the week, you're going to blow the whole account. Even if Gary assigns someone else, it's still going to reflect badly on me. He might even go with a completely different team. Which would suck for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that we've got a good campaign for them. Look, if you want to piss away your own career, that's your business. But don't fuck up my livelihood in the process.”

There was a pause, as though Teddy spent a moment wondering if his tirade would convince Michael to answer the phone. Then he hung up. The answering machine recorded the day and time, and then it was quiet in the house again.

Michael stared at the phone.

“I'm sorry, Teddy,” he whispered aloud. “But it just isn't important.”

My wife is losing her mind. Something took away everything sweet in her, everything kind. Every damn thing that makes her Jillian.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing.

CHAPTER TEN

Johnny Carson is on the TV. Which is weird, isn't it? Johnny hasn't been on TV since Michael was a teenager. And the man looks good, that's the strangest thing about it. Looks like he hasn't aged a day. Michael laughs as he watches Carson on TV, sitting behind that old desk. He's tapping a pencil and making a point about something, but it's hard to hear with the audience laughing like that. He arches his eyebrows and glances at the camera, to let the folks watching at home in on the gag.

That Johnny. He's the best.

The camera cuts away to Ed McMahon for a reaction shot. The big man's guffawing, shaking in his chair. When the angle shifts back to Carson, he's wearing that crazy feathered turban, the Carnac the Magnificent turban. Michael laughs just looking at him. Carson holds up several envelopes, inside which are the questions, for which Carnac/Carson now has to supply the answers.

Michael leans back on the sofa. It's the red sofa, the itchy, uncomfortable pullout that used to be in the basement of his parents' house, the one he fell asleep on so many nights while he was growing up, watching Johnny Carson. The King of Late Night. The hell with all of the other guys who came in later. Nobody can hold a candle to Johnny. Nobody can replace him.

Weird. Replace him? Why replace him? He's right there on the TV. Michael sprawls across that itchy red sofa in plaid flannel pajama pants. He hasn't worn pajamas since the age of twelve, but damn, aren't they comfortable? A ripple of laughter comes from the TV. Johnny has broken character as Carnac and is snickering about something, his face flushed red. Michael has no idea what the joke was but laughs anyway. Carson is just funny. He's Carson. He's like everyone's naughty uncle Johnny.

In the shadows of the corner behind the television, Scooter stands and watches him. She's in that same peasant blouse. Those same jeans.

Michael doesn't want to look at her. He keeps his eyes right on the TV. On Carson. Uncle Johnny.

“Next, oh Great Carnac?”prompts Ed McMahon.

“Mm-hmm,”Carson replies, mugging for the camera as he pretends to concentrate on the small envelope he holds against his forehead. “I love you, the check's in the mail, and I promise I won't come in your mouth.”

The television flickers. On the
Tonight Show
set—the classic one, not the slick setup that the replacement will use later—the lights darken. Ed McMahon is laughing again, that deep, bust-a-gut-cough-up-a-lung laugh that seems simultaneously the fakest and most genuine thing Michael has ever heard. His eyes are damp and he's brushing at them as though at any moment he'll weep with merriment.

Carnac tears open the envelope. “‘Name the three biggest lies men tell women,'”he reads from the card.

Michael frowns. This isn't Carson. Uncle Johnny could be a wiseguy with the double entendres and the naughty, knowing looks, but . . . not this. Not crude.

His stomach burns, suddenly, and twists with the need to vomit. There's something in his throat, some phlegm he can't hack up or swallow, like there are . . . what? Like there are fingers in there.

On screen, the
Tonight Show
set darkens even further, but now the camera pulls back and Michael can see that the set is not complete. It's just the desk and the chair and a bit of background, and beyond that it's a house. A massive, rambling old house with cracked windows, a place where time has moved on and no one has updated anything—curtains, wallpaper, carpet—in half a century.

What the hell is this?

Carson's still wearing the turban, but he's in his suit now. The rest of the costume is gone. He holds the next envelope up to his forehead. “And what is your next stunning revelation, oh great sage of the East?”McMahon asks in that bellowing voice.

“Susan,”Carnac/Carson/Uncle Johnny says.

His eyes shift and he's staring out at the TV audience again. But not at everyone. Just at Michael. Twelve-year-old Michael in his pajamas. Grown-up Michael, impossibly sprawled on the itchy red pullout sofa from his parents' basement.

“Her name is Susan, you jackass. She told you, don't you remember? She whispered it to you. Her little sister, Lily? Millie? No, Hilly—I knew it was something like Jilly. You did, too, didn't you? Hilly couldn't say Susan, she always said Scoosan, and that's where Scooter came from. Jesus. Wake up, moron. You promised you'd find her. Take my advice and do it. Quick. Damn skippy.”

Carson isn't smiling. He isn't mugging for the camera. He isn't smirking. Good old Uncle Johnny, Carnac the Magnificent, the King of Late Night . . . Johnny Carson is pissed off.

“Wake up, Michael. Go find her.”

Ed McMahon just laughs and laughs.

The screen goes dark.

Michael flinches. He lifts his gaze and sees Scooter—Susan—standing behind the television with the cord in her hand, plug dangling from her grasp. The TV is dead. The image is gone.

Susan.

“Susan what, though?”Michael asks. “Susan what?”

Scooter mouths a word. A name. Maybe her last name. But no sound comes from her lips and Michael can't read lips. One word, though. One syllable, even. That name.

The lost girl glances around and now it is her eyes that go wide. Scooter's eyes. Susan's eyes. Michael sees terror there on the face of that girl, the pretty little angel who is limned with golden light that is the only illumination in the darkness of that room. His living room.

But it isn't, is it? His parents' old pullout sofa was in the basement of their house. Basement. Living room. He looks around and sees that this is neither one.

The itchy red sofa and the unplugged TV are next to Johnny Carson's desk on a stolen swatch of
Tonight Show
set in the middle of a crumbling, creaking old house. Things shift in the dark.

Michael smells popcorn.

H
E OPENED HIS EYES AND
sucked in a lungful of air with a rasp, as though someone had been holding a pillow over his face while he was sleeping. Michael’s heart was hammering and his body was shaking. A chill went down his back in spite of the trickle of sweat that raced it from skull to tailbone.

“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, rocking himself over and over on the sofa in his living room. His living room. His and Jilly's. Not the itchy sofa at all, but a soft, plush, blue thing they had gotten at Jordan's Furniture in Nashua. On the TV, a pair of cute, scrappy British women instructed a third how to dress, and it all came back to him. It was Wednesday night. Five days since those gray, misshappen things had fallen upon Jillian in the dark, had touched Michael. Three days since the two of them had even spoken to one another. Michael was afraid to try, afraid to look into her eyes and see nothing of the kindness that had always resided there.

His appointment with the psychiatrist, Dr. Lee, had been scheduled for today, but he'd blown it off. After what had happened five nights ago, he was certain no doctor—for mind
or
body—was going to be able to help him.

No. It was up to Michael to figure out what to do next. If he could just get up off the sofa.

This afternoon he had switched on BBC America and promptly fallen asleep.

It was dark in the living room, save for the strange blue light from the television. How odd, he'd always thought, that the color of the light didn't seem to change with the colors on the screen. Outside the windows there was only the night and the darkness.

Michael frowned as he glanced at the digital readout on the cable box. It was nearly a quarter to ten. Late. Not one light had been turned on in the house. He groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, stretching, bones popping. Questions swirled in his mind as he crossed the room and hit the switch, throwing the light from half a dozen recessed bulbs into the living room. The night had been visible outside the windows before, but with the glare within they were just black now. It might have been a coal mine outside, or the inside of an oil well, or the end of the world.

He felt better with the lights on. Instantly he was more awake. Scattered fragments of his dream went cascading down into the well of his consciousness; in his mind he snatched at them, not wanting to let them go. Most of it went away despite his efforts. There had been something about Johnny Carson.

And there had been the girl in the shadowy corner behind the television. Now the shadows were gone, the room drenched in light, but he was reluctant to look over there in any case. She might still be there, a wisp, a shimmer of color. A ghost.

Scooter.

“No,” Michael corrected himself, his voice a tired rasp. “Susan.”

Even with the British women chattering on BBC America, the sound of his own voice was startling. It echoed strangely in the house and though he had no proof of it, he felt inside a strange confirmation of what he had suspected from the moment he awoke.

Jillian had not come home.

There was no alarm in him. Until the events of Friday night he would have panicked, thinking that some terrible fate had befallen her. Was she dead in a ditch on the side of the road? Had she been in a car accident? But now . . . now he only felt a bone-deep dread that resonated inside of him.

“Jilly?” he called into the empty house, receiving only an echo in reply. It was a lonesome certainty, the knowing she was not there. And yet he felt that he had to go through the motions, had to confirm it, because you simply could not go through life functioning on instinct.

He went up the stairs and checked their bedroom, turning on lights as he went. The spare room was also empty. The home office. But there was no one there. No one home but Michael and the shadows. Michael started back down the stairs, but stopped halfway and sat heavily, hanging his head.

Find the girl. Like you promised you would,
he thought.

It all came down to that. It was all connected.

Michael was a pragmatic man, or had been until recently. It was one thing to attribute that Saturday night's events to hallucinogenics, but the situation had gone way beyond that. Ghost or not, the little girl was haunting him. She needed his help. Whoever these gray, twisted women were, they did not want him to get involved.

They want to frighten you away, to drive you off. You've got them worried. Which means that you can help, Michael. Or they wouldn't have bothered with you.

He had tried to find her and come up empty. That had likely been what prompted them to come after him and Jilly. But they didn't understand people. Didn't understand love and marriage for sure. If they had, they would have understood that by doing whatever they had done to Jillian, they had taken away the one thing in his life that he would sacrifice anything for.

Michael Dansky had nothing left to lose.

There had been enough lying around on the sofa. He had been shell-shocked by what happened. But his dream was lingering. He did not know if it was something unnatural, some way in which the ghost of the girl had touched his sleeping mind, or if it was simply his unconscious telling him, but he knew it was all tied together. His wife had not been mugged or raped. There were no police for whatever had happened to her, no detectives, no one out to get justice for that violation.

It's up to me,
he thought.

Michael rose from the stairs and continued down. He would wait for Jillian, all night if he had to. But while he waited, he would set out the map he had been using when searching for the old house where he had brought Scooter—Susan—and see if there were any small side streets he might have missed. There had to be something. It was there. He had been inside. The house was real. He wasn't sure how he could have missed the street, but—

They don't want you to find it.

No, of course they don't.

Now he nodded. Those ugly women in their shapeless coats weren't normal. He had no idea what they were capable of. It was possible they had misled him while he was searching, thrown him off the trail. He would be more thorough tomorrow. Very thorough. No matter what the cost. He was frightened of them. The feeling of fingers inside his throat, of his voice being used by someone else, of this thing just taking him over, still left him feeling unclean. But what other choice did he have?

His stomach rumbled. He hadn't eaten anything all day.

Again he glanced at the clock.
Where are you, Jilly?

The smell of popcorn lingered in his nostrils—or, rather, in his mind, leftover from his dream. Michael went into the kitchen and began opening and closing cabinets and
the refrigerator. He wasn't up to making himself a meal, but he was hungry. When he came across the box of microwave popcorn a wave of nostalgia swept through him. That wasn't what he had been smelling. His bizarre olfactory “hallucinations” were very specific. It was old-fashioned, homemade popcorn he had been smelling.
But what the hell,
he thought.
Why not?

Michael put a bag of popcorn into the microwave and hit the timer. It hummed to life, the numbers on the timer ticking silently down toward zero. For a few moments the microwave seemed to be doing nothing, but then there came a single pop, followed by a burst of several at once, and then a steady, staccato sound, like tiny fireworks in a drum.

Ding!

Even after the bell, several last kernels popped. Michael's stomach growled loudly. He opened the microwave door and reached for the puffy, overstuffed bag.

His hand froze inches away from it. The heat from the popcorn steamed against his fingers.

There were greasy stains soaking into the bag from the inside. But these were not random streaks. They formed a pattern.

Letters. A name.

Barnes.

Even as he stared, the greasy streaks ran and the name was obscured. But it had been there. Michael was certain of that.

A tremor in his hand, he reached out and slammed the microwave closed. In the glass door he saw his reflection . . . and the reflection of the little lost girl, the blond angel who stood behind him in the kitchen.