999 (81 page)
Authors: Al Sarrantonio
Harlow tittered, his voice tight with fear, but then he clamped his lips tight shut to keep the secret within.
It was nearly mid of night when—gun in hand, night goggles riding on his forehead—Harlow walked away from the kitchen, turning on lights ahead, turning them off behind.
Don’t want lights on anywhere when I click that last switch and plunge everything into darkness
.
His heart was hammering in dread.
But a loaded .44 magnum was gripped in his sweaty fist.
Finally he reached the recreation room.
Gasping for breath, he stepped about, turning off every light but one, as shadows crept inward and mustered all ‘round.
Slick with sweat, his mouth dry, Harlow wiped his palms on his denims, then cocked the .44.
With a trembling hand he reached for the last lamp … and hesitated.
Come on, Harlow. It’s you with the gun and the goggles. You can get this punk
.
His lungs heaving, Harlow clicked off the last lamp.
Blackness pitched into the room.
Jesus Jesus, I can’t— The thing—
Biting back a cry, Harlow jerked the goggles down over his eyes and slapped on the night-vision power. The light amplifier bloomed on, and Harlow could see—
God I can see!
—in a limited cone of vision, the greenish images ghostly. But he could see.
With the cocked .44 thrust out before him, Harlow jerked his head this way and that, looking for, seeking … what? He did not know. Whatever it was. The
thing
.
“C-come on, asshole!” he cried, his voice high, strained. “M-motherfucker!”
Left, right, he swept his tunnel vision.
And then he knew—
My God, it’s behind me!
—and he jerked about to see—
Harlow reeled back, his bowels and bladder loosing, the gun falling from his hand to strike the floor, the thunderous explosion lost under terrified screams as he shrieked and shrieked and shrieked. …
When the taxi pulled away in the crisp October night, Gloria, twenty-two, picked up her cheap suitcase and followed the silver-haired man into the elegant manse. With a faint clicking throughout, light flooded the foyer and the rooms beyond, both upstairs and down. Maxon turned to the healthy young lady, a predatory grin on his cadaverous face, and he said, “Your great-uncle was a most peculiar man, Miss Willoughby, and you are the last in his line.”
Is there anyone out there who hasn’t heard of
The Exorcist?
Though an Oscar sits on Bill Blatty’s mantel for the screenplay to the movie version, it will always he the hook that stands out in my mind: without benefit of a screen, William Peter Blatty flat out scared the crap out of me—and millions of others. In the process, he also, along with Ira Levin, cracked open the commercial fiction door to allow horror fiction in. This is the same door that Stephen King would kick in a few years later
.
What many readers may not know is that Blatty (who received the Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1998) had a distinguished career in the movies before
The Exorcist,
producing screenplays for such films as
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?
and
A Shot in the Dark.
After the success of The
Exorcist,
he continued his film success, writing and eventually directing
("Killer” Kane
and
The Exorcist III);
he also continued to produce fiction, which brings us to the stunning piece that follows
.
It is not only fitting hut just that we end a book like this with a new short novel from William Peter Blatty
. Elsewhere
is a slick, extremely well written, unsettling, and at times terrifying haunted house story; it also evidences the sly and sophisticated humor that is Blatty’s hallmark. I was very lucky to obtain it for you—you’re even luckier to read it
.
I was with a tribe on Mount Elgon, in East Africa. … During a palaver, I incautiously uttered the word
selelteni
, which means “ghosts.” Suddenly a deathly silence fell on the assembly. The men glanced away, looked in all directions, and some of them made off.
CARL JUNG,
Psychology and the Occult
Once I was afraid of dying. Now what I fear are the dead.
Why did I come to this place? Was it loneliness? Pride? The money? The creak of the floors, the color of the air, all things are a terror to me here. The house is bright, my companions amusing; why do I find myself thinking in whispers? Is it merely that the dark is coming on? I doubt it; I have touched the other side many times, it’s my business. But this time it’s different: something is wrong, something unfixable, like an ancient grief, like hell.
The rain has finally stopped, there’s the sun, hate-red and breathing silent at the rim of the world. I ask why I’m frightened? Listen! Voices. Whispers. They’re coming from the walls. Inside them.
Jesus save me from this night!
From the Diary of Anna Trawley, Tuesday, 8:22
P.M
.
A
pale pink telephone wedged at her chin, Joan Freeboard edgily stood at her desk while she rustled through message slips, frowning and impatient, as if searching for the one that would explain why she’d been born. A second line began to flash. She eyed it.
“Yeah, I know you already said you’re coming,” she scolded in a petulant, husky voice; in her accent one heard organ grinders strolling through the tenements, the flapping of a wash hung out to dry upon a roof. “So what? You need constant reminding, Terry,” she hounded. “You remember what night and what time?”
She listened, pursed her lips, then tossed the slips to her desk. “I knew it. Write it down: Friday night at six o’clock. And remember, don’t bring the freaking dogs!”
She punched into the flashing line.
“Yeah, Freeboard.”
She wrinkled up her nose in distaste.
“Harry?”
Freeboard shifted her weight and fiddled with an earring, a southwestern dangle of stone and blue beads. Thirty-four, she wore short blond hair in bangs and had lost green eyes in a Kewpie doll face that masked a will with the grip of gravity. She lifted an incredulous eyebrow. “Co-list a contemporary in Greenwich, Harry? Are you out of your freaking
mind?
Ever since that cookbook lady bought a Tudor all the yuppies ever want there is something ‘authentic,’ meaning dark and depressing and falling all to shit. Look, you go and get the cookbook lady to build herself a house made out of glass, something round or triangular or shaped like a saucer and looks like it probably
landed
in Greenwich and then maybe after that we can talk, okay? So what else? Make it quick would you please? I’m in a hurry.”
A middle-aged secretary quietly entered, despondent, her hair in a bun, just divorced. Freeboard handed her the copy for an ad, mouthing
“Times.”
The secretary nodded and drooped away. Freeboard watched her with pity and then spoke into the phone. “No, Thursday’s bad for me, Harry,” she said grimly. “How about never? Is never good for you?” She crashed the pink telephone down on its cradle. “Dumb, boring, arrogant shithead!” she told it. “I’ve already screwed you! Why in shit would you think I’d want to screw you
again
?”
She snatched up her jacket and purse from a chair, told the secretary “Take a long lunch today, Millie,” and strode out into the windowed Trump Tower arcade and then out to Fifth Avenue and its bustle, its squalls of stalled traffic in shadowed May. From the curbside she hailed a Yellow Cab and got into it.
“Where to?”
Freeboard hesitated, staring straight ahead. Something had found her. What was it? Some vague premonition. Of what? And what had she dreamed last night? she wondered.
“Where we goin’?”
“Somewhere else,” Freeboard murmured.
“Somewhere else?”
She came back, and her dimpled chin jutted up slightly, as if with a child’s defiance and grit. “Seven-seventy East River Drive,” she commanded. The cab and her thoughts lurched forward into gridlock, into the patterned sleep of her life.
“This is it,” she said assuredly half an hour later.
She was standing in a slowly ascending construction elevator with a couple from Hinsdale, Illinois, who were searching for a condo in Manhattan. Quiet, staring down at the elevator floor, they wore red hard hats over thoughtful expressions and hair that was white as the Arctic fox. Freeboard adjusted her own hard hat and finished, “You can’t get newer than this.”
The elfin elevator operator nodded. Stooped, middle-aged, looking older than his years, he wore a floppy and torn old gray wool sweater and was missing both his upper and lower front teeth. “Best views,” he grunted gummily. “Yeah. Ya see everythin’—the Williamsboig Bridge, the whole river. Sly Stallone is gonna take a place here. I seen him yestiddy.”
The building soared breathless above the East River. The couple wanted “new;” they had seen enough “old"—apartments for sale by their current occupants. “Why is it,” the husband had grumbled, “that in all of these terribly expensive apartments, every room where a guest might go looks great, but you walk into any other room, like the kitchen, and the place looks like the embryo ward in
Alien.”
Across from the Museum of Natural History, the master bedroom of a luxury apartment had only a single illumination, a naked bulb suspended by a wire coiling down from a crumbling and smoke-stained ceiling; in another a shower stall was situated in the middle of a bedroom wall: the occupant was using it to store women’s shoes; and later, in the chic and stately Dakota, the walls of an apartment the couple had inspected were completely covered over by massive paintings of nude men and women looking earnest and absorbed while engaged in injecting themselves with drugs.
“Oh, well, they could be diabetics,” the wife had noted kindly.
“You smell real good.”
Freeboard turned a dead gaze to the elevator operator. He was eyeing her with grudging surmise. “Peach bubble bath,” Freeboard told him inscrutably. The scent wafted up from her neck.
“Nice earrings,” the operator nodded.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, Eddie, come
on
, fer chrissakes!
Hold up
!”
An irritated workman was pounding on a door as the elevator creakily lurched up past him. The diminutive operator called down loudly, “You guys all smell like crap! You stink! I got real nice people with me here!”
The workman’s voice rumbled up in a guttural threat:
“You’re gonna pay for this, Eddie, you fuck!”
The couple from Hinsdale liked the apartment. Then something extraordinary occurred: standing at a window and breathing in plaster dust as she absently stared at a motor launch plowing white furrows in the murk of the river, Joan Freeboard, relendess pursuer of escrows, indomitable Realtor of the Year many times, whirled around to the couple and asked impulsively, “Are you sure you want to live in the city? It’s mean and it’s dirty and crowded and ugly.”
What the hell am I saying? thought the Realtor, aghast.
She glanced at the launch again. Something about it. What? She wrinkled her brow. She didn’t know. She turned back to the couple and struggled to recover:
“How about a contemporary in Greenwich?”
The strangeness pursued her. Later in the day, the deal done, papers signed, Freeboard found herself walking to Manhattan’s last Automat, where she sat at a speckled-beige table with a heaping plate of steaming white rice and baked beans, stirred and mixed them together and ate them ravenously. For her drink she’d taken wedges of lemon that were meant for iced tea from an open bin, squeezed the juice into a glass filled with ice and cold water and now added sugar from a shaker on the table, just as she had done in her impoverished teens. The rice and beans filled her warmly now. Had they not she might have filled an empty bowl with hot water, added salt and gobs of catsup from the bottle on her table, then stirred it to smoothness: tomato soup. Why am I doing this? she wondered. She looked over at the banks of small-windowed compartments of food that would unlock when fed coins through a slot. She was searching for the hot apple pie with rum sauce. Once a March wind had blown a dollar to her chest and that was the day she’d been able to afford it. Where was it? Perhaps she had room for one bite.
“You come here often?”
Freeboard shifted her glance to the homeless bum now seated across from her like a curse. His greasy gray hair flowed down to his shoulders and he wore an old oversized army overcoat, a soiled denim shirt and khaki pants.
“Ya look like an actress. Ever done any actin’? I’m a castin’ agent,” the bum asserted. He smelled of stale wine and the air of packing crates and of doorways and steamy grates. A big toe poked up through a hole in his sneaker. The nail needed clipping.
“Also a producer,” he added urbanely.
“Yeah, right, you remind me of David O’Selznick.”
“Remind? Who the hell ya think you’re talkin’ to, kiddo? Show a little respect here, okay? Show some class. I see ya ain’t got no money for food. I could help you.”
“You look like you could use a little help yourself.”
Something stirred in the old bum’s eyes, some buried recollection of another life. He leaned in to Freeboard, his jaw jutting forward. “It ain’t over,” he defied her, “till the fat lady sings.”
Stifling a smile of me and compassion, the realtor looked down into her blue leather purse, plucked out something from her wallet and slid it across the beige table to the bum.
“I think you must have dropped this, Mr. O’Selznick.”
It was a one-hundred-dollar bill.
“A C-note!”
Freeboard stood up and she turned to leave.
“Just a second,” said the bum.
The realtor looked back at him.
“I charge
two
hundred dollars for interviews.”
Freeboard nodded, appraising him fondly, as if she had met a kindred spirit. An image of her alcoholic father flashed to mind, harshly slapping at her six-year-old’s face until it purpled.
“You gonna do what I tell you now, bitch?” “No!”
“Attaway, old champ,” approved the Realtor. “Go get ‘em. Don’t ever let the bastards get you down, keep on fighting.” Then she turned and prided out into the jostling street where the rumble of trucks, the gasp of buses braking, and the strident honking of horns and the dreams, the hurts, the spites, the fears, the schemes of the hellbent crush of pedestrians rushing for their trains hit her psyche like a wave that washed away from her mind all clouds, all webs, all thoughts that had nattered at its edge, unfocused, and recharged her with the energy that made her Joan Freeboard, child-woman on the make, do or die.
Do or die.
That night in her penthouse on Central Park West, the only sound was the scuffing of soft leather slippers over wide-planked polished oaken floors as the Realtor, in a belted forest-green bathrobe, pensively wandered from room to room mulling over a curious proposition that had walked her way a few days before:
“Did I hear you say
twenty
percent?”
“You did.”
“What’s the catch?”
“My clients want the best. That’s you.”
“But you told me nothing’s happened there for years.”
“Nothing has.”
“So then put it on a multiple and lower the price. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is the house’s reputation. Dark memories die slowly
,
Mrs. Freeboard.”
“Miss.”
“Miss. Think it over, would you please?”
“Yeah, I will.”
Freeboard drifted to a small, round, white-pine table in the corner of her cherrywood-paneled study. On the table was a map, some printed sheets, a brochure, and several photos of a massive mansion crouched upon an island in the Hudson River. Freeboard slipped her hand into a pocket of her robe, withdrew a lighter and a package of Camel Lites. She lit one, dragged deeply, and picked up a photo, then she exhaled smoke and shook her head. No way, it’s a waste of time, she lamented; this screwed-up house is straight out of
Dark Shadows
. Brooding and oblong, made of gray stone, it was gabled and crenelated like an old Scottish castle, like Glamis, and here and there a sinister conical tower rose up like an eruption of evil thought. Freeboard sighed and let the photo flutter back to the table, where it landed with a soft, thin, papery click. Too bad this piece of shit’s not in Greenwich, she dismally mused; I could sell it for a fortune in a week. Yet she lingered by the table, picking at the photos, tantalized, drawn by this challenge to her boredom. Only You, Dick Daring, she reflected; right? At the edge of her consciousness she heard the crackle of her answering machine, her recorded announcement, a pause and then a hangup. Harry, she thought. She shook her head. Then her glance shifted over to a black leather folder containing the history of the house. She’d only skimmed it; since her youth she’d been afflicted with a mild dyslexia, a gift of brutal beatings by her alcoholic father, undernourishment, and long and frequent absences from school. Reading was arduous for her, a defeat. An assistant handled writing up most of her contracts. All she knew about the house was what she’d been told: that it was built in 1937 by a doctor who murdered his wife in some horrible fashion and immediately afterwards killed himself.
She picked up the folder. On the cover in large white letters was a word that she could read without strain: “
ELSEWHERE
.” And abruptly she remembered a fragment of her dream: a strange place. Some peril. Someone trying to save her, some luminous being, like an angel, like Clarence in
It’s a Wonderful Life
. In the dream he had told her his name, something memorable; now she strained to recall it but couldn’t.
The phone and then the click of the answering machine. She tilted her head to the side a bit, listening. Not Harry: Elle Redmund, the wife of James Redmund, celebrated publisher of
Vanities Magazine:
“… awfully cheeky of me, really, but this friend of ours has popped into town for the night, and we’d both rather
die
or go to France with Club Med or some such thing than miss out on your fabulous party. Would you mind if we …?”
Freeboard dropped the folder to the table, stubbed out her cigarette, lit another, then returned to her brow-creasing, thoughtful pacing, randomly scuffing from room to room like a chain-smoking wraith condemned to this vigil in a well-appointed, rent-controlled corridor of hell. About her were no photographs, no traces of a personal history, of affection or of unhappy times; but now and then she would pause in front of a painting, a small Monet or a Picasso miniature, not admiring its beauty or its craft but only taking wan comfort in the knowledge of its cost. Then again she would wander and puff and think until at last she grew weary and fell into her downy-soft four-poster bed, where she lay staring up at her mirrored ceiling groping for a way to solve the puzzle of the house. Once she heard an elevator cage clatter open, then a front door key slipping into the lock; Antonia and George, her live-in help, coming back from an evening off. She sighed and turned over. It’s a bitch but you can whip it, she brooded.
Think!
She soon fell asleep. And dreamed of her father, drunk and naked, chasing her high school date down the street. Then she dreamed of the angel again. He was winged and tall and magnificent, but his face was an ovoid blank. In the dream she was waiting for a table at the Palm, a narrow little steak house on Manhattan’s East Side, and the angel was attentively taking an order from a young and beautiful dark-eyed woman when abruptly he looked up and met Freeboard’s gaze and warned, “Take the train. The clams aren’t safe.” “What the hell is your name?” the puzzled Realtor had shouted at him then and at that she was suddenly awake. She groaned and peered over at her digital clock. It was six
A.M.
Forget it. Too early
. She lay back and stared up at the mirrored ceiling. “The clams aren’t safe?” she puzzled. What was
that
? Moments later her thoughts curled back to the mansion. The agent in charge of the owners’ affairs had explained how she could see it at any time.
