Croaked (5 page)

And the boy was Jere Rundle...sort of. It was six months before he spoke a word, and another two years before he said anything coherent. By the time he reached eighteen, the specialists, including Tanna, succeeded in convincing him that his memories of demonic abuse and torture were just delusions, and he made tentative steps toward recovery.

No one ever explained how or why he survived over a month inside the Descent building. Or why he’d gone in a fourteen-year-old boy, and come out looking for all the world like a thirty-year-old man.

~IV~

SAME OLE SONG

According to Mick Jagger, it’s the singer, not the song. Maybe. Or maybe not....

***

A man I’d never seen before stood outside my wife’s office in the West Tennessee University Humanities building. He was tall, portly, and had a belligerent expression firmly set on his round face. His beard seemed stretched, like it would’ve been adequate for a normal face but wasn’t thick enough for the man’s jowly visage. He leaned against the wall, texting someone on his phone. The kids in the hall between classes gave him plenty of room.

As I reached the Psychology Department door, he put a ham-sized hand on my chest. “Hold up there, hoss. Why don’t you come back some other time?”

I looked down at the hand, then up at the man. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“No admittance. Private conference going on.”

“Really?” I looked down at his hand again. “I’d appreciate it if you’d take your hand off me.”

He grinned. His teeth showed the evidence of a lifetime of tobacco chaw. “Don’t get tough with me, Tiny, I’ll bend you in half and shove your head up your own ass.”

I was more perplexed than angry. “Who
are
you?”

His grin widened. “The man blocking the door, smart-ass. Try to get past me. I dare you.”

I stared for a moment, then shrugged and went back the way I came. I entered the English as a Second Language suite, nodded at the secretary and went down the short hall that connected it to the Psych Department.

Two other men I’d never seen before, both too old to be students, sat on the couch. One flipped through a magazine, the other played
Angry Birds
on his smartphone. Both were big, in both height and girth, and were so totally focused on what they were doing that neither noticed me.

The secretary, Jane, saw me and was about to speak, but I put my finger to my lips. I nodded at the ape outside in the hall, whose meaty elbow was visible through the open department door he so assiduously guarded. She shrugged, then indicated the closed door to my wife’s office.

I knocked and said, “It’s me.”

At the sound of my voice, the watcher in the hall looked around, saw me and shouted, “Hey!” I flipped him off with a smile and went inside.

I should give a little background. Every fall semester the Student Government Association at West Tennessee University commits nearly the whole year’s activities budget to book an actual big-name star, usually a country music act, to appear in concert, and its success helps fund the smaller activities for the rest of the year.

This year the star of choice was Lorenzo “Son” Emerson, Jr., scion of the late country music legend Lorenzo “Dad” Emerson. During the 1960s, Dad Emerson wrote and recorded some of the most haunting and emotionally honest songs in all of country music; he completed the legend by dying onstage, after his doctor insisted he cancel a sold-out show. This, of course, was one
hell
of a shadow for Emerson, Jr., to emerge out from under.

“Son” Emerson had an undeniably powerful voice and a certain talent for writing Red State/redneck anthems, but his dominant trait was an ego that made Donald Trump look like Gandhi. A typical Son story: a few years earlier he’d been recruited by the Angel Heart Foundation, a group that grants wishes for terminally ill children, to meet a 10-year-old boy who idolized him. He didn’t show up for the meeting in his hotel room, although the boy’s mother saw him outside talking to girls at the pool.

And here he sat, in my wife’s office.

He looked at me through his trademark dark glasses. A cowboy hat the size of my first car rested on his lap.

“Hi, hon,” I said. “You called me?”

“Yes, come on in,” Tanna said easily. She stood to give me a quick kiss. “Mr. Emerson, this is my husband, Ry Tully.”

Emerson stood. He was taller than me, big and barrel-chested, with a beer belly and a carefully-groomed beard. He wore brand new blue jeans and a flannel shirt unbuttoned halfway down. He extended a big, meaty hand and shook mine firmly. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Tully,” he said in his distinctive voice. “Your wife says you’re a reporter.”

“Yes, I’m the editor of the local paper.”

“Everything here is off the record,” Tanna said. “Right?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

“Mr. Emerson has a rather interesting problem,” Tanna said. To Emerson, she said, “Ry generally helps me out on any unusual work. He’s a first-class observer of phenomena.”

When he looked blank, I added, “I’m her seeing-eye husband.” I sat on the edge of her desk and tried to project the same level of cool as Paul Drake perched on Perry Mason’s. It would’ve helped, I suppose, if I’d been in black and white. “So what’s up?”

The door opened, and the big man from the hall stood there, pretty much blocking all light from outside. “Sorry, Son, he snuck up past me. I’ll throw him out.” He reached for my arm.

“You dumb raccoon turd, this is Doctor Tully’s husband,” Emerson said. “She done called him to come up here and talk to us.”

“But he didn’t say--”

“Just go on back out there and hold up the wall,” Emerson said. When the big man didn’t move, he snapped, “Go on, now, Duke! Don’t make me tell you again.”

Duke shuffled his weight from one foot to the other, pointed a sausage-shaped finger at me and said, “This ain’t over, hoss.” Then he went back to his position.

“Sorry about that,” Emerson said. With his sunglasses on, I couldn’t tell where he was looking. That was ironic: Tanna really couldn’t see, but gave no outward sign here in her office that she knew so well, while Emerson, who could see, wore sunglasses like a blind man. “I got a lot of fans who think they know me from my music and stuff. Lots of times he has to run them off for me.”

“I’m sure he’s a decent man,” Tanna said. "I've been explaining the nature of parapsychology to Mr. Emerson here, and pointing out that
Ghost Hunters
doesn't really demonstrate what we actually do. Mr. Emerson, would you mind repeating what you told me about the nature of your problem?"

Emerson shifted uncomfortably. “Well. Er. Uh...like I was telling Professor Tully here, I got her name off the internet, and since I was playing a show here tomorrow night, I looked her up. I think my daddy’s guitar is haunted.”

Something quite serious can sound extremely funny when simply stated like that. I didn’t exactly laugh out loud, but the single sharp barking noise that escaped did enough damage.

“Damn, I knew this ghostbuster stuff was ignorant,” Emerson muttered, and put on his hat. “Sorry for wasting your time and mine.”

Tanna, as usual, said just the right thing to salvage the situation. “Mr. Emerson, you’ve got to admit it does sound kind of funny, but just because we recognize that, doesn’t mean we’re not taking it seriously.”

Emerson removed his hat and mumbled something apologetic.

Tanna continued, “Now. The story so far, Ry, is that after years of looking for it, Mr. Emerson finally found the guitar that his father wrote his most famous songs with. In a garage somewhere, I believe, right?”

“Yeah,” Emerson said. “My daddy’s old driver had it.”

“And that’s as far as we’d gotten when you walked in. Please go on.”

“Well...I knew it was my daddy’s, ‘cause he’d carved a certain date in the wood on the back. It was the date of the first time he...uh...you know. Had relations.”

We both nodded seriously.

“Anyway, I was real tickled to have it, so I stayed up late playing around with it that first night, and I was celebrating having it, too, so I kind of...passed out. Anyway, I woke up needed to pi--er, I mean, go to the bathroom--real bad, and when I got up....” He stopped, embarrassed.

“You saw the ghost of your father?” I prompted. It seemed a reasonable assumption.

“Naw. It wasn’t that. It was the ghost of a naked girl.” He pronounced naked as
nekkid
.

“Ghost of a naked girl?” I repeated, saying the word correctly.

“Yeah, a butt-naked girl. A
little
girl, you understand, like nine or ten. She hadn’t gotten...you know,” he said, and cupped his hands in front of his chest. “She was milk white, and you could see right through her.”

“Did she look familiar?” Tanna asked.

“Naw,” he said. But he seemed to hold something back, and Tanna sensed it.

“But?” she prompted.

“Well...I kinda felt like I knew her, but I knew I didn’t, you know? And man, when she looked at me, she looked so
sad
.”

“What did she do?”

“Nothing. Soon as I woke up good, she just faded away. I thought I was dreaming or something, but every damn time I’m alone and start playing that guitar, don’t matter where I am, she shows up. She’ll kind of fade in, look real sad, and fade out.”

“She fades out when you stop playing?” Tanna said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And it never happens around witnesses?”

“Naw. And the last few times I ain’t been drinking none, neither. Y’all could walk out of this room right now, and if I started playing, I bet you real money this girl would show up.”

Tanna nodded thoughtfully. Emerson nervously tapped his foot. At last she said, “Tell me something, Mr. Emerson. Does this girl frighten you?”

“Naw!” Emerson thundered immediately. Then he added, “Well, yeah, a little, I reckon. I mean, wouldn’t it frighten
you
?” He looked up at me for validation.

“I guess,” I said. “Ghosts are scary, even if they don’t try to be.”

“Exactly. That’s what I mean. I don’t get no sense that she’d try to hurt me, but damn, she
is
a ghost.”

Tanna said, “Mr. Emerson, I’ve got an idea about what this might be, and I’d like to try an experiment to confirm it. Do you have your father’s guitar with you?”

“Yeah, got it out in the Hummer. Didn’t want to bring it in ‘til I knew what was what.”

“I understand. I have a class that’ll go until three o’clock. After that, if you’re willing, I’d like to test my theory. It won’t damage the guitar in any way, and it won’t hurt you.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” he said guarded
ly. “What’re you going to do?”

“We have an observation room for behavior experiments. It has one-way mirrors on each wall, so you’re never sure where the observer is, or even if there is one. If you go in there and start playing, this girl might show up.”

“Not if you’re watching, she won’t.”

“Oh? How do you know we will be? We might be out in the hall laughing at you.”

He turned a little red around the ears and muttered, “Hell, I guess I won’t.”

“That’s the point. As far as you know, you’ll be alone. And if I’m right, she’ll feel safe to come out.”

***

The observation room was a holdover from the sixties, when psychiatrists would watch people in sterile isolation to monitor their behavior. Monitoring equipment then, such as video or audio recorders, was large and bulky, which made it impractical to go “on location,” as they say. Now webcams and tiny microphones meant subjects could be observed in comfort anywhere. Still, the old room had one decidedly unique feature: two-way mirrors on three of its four walls, so that the subject could never be sure if he or she was being observed. That was crucial to Tanna’s test.

She sent her graduate assistant Daniel and another student, Trudy, to clean the room and set it up while she taught her Introduction to Parapsychology class. Emerson was half an hour late getting back, and smelled of marijuana. But he dutifully went into the white room with the haunted guitar.

His posse, easily seven hundred pounds of sycophantic redneck, milled about in the hall. The one who’d blocked the door earlier said, “Y’all really think this’ll get him back on track?”

“Yeah, this is like that stupid bullshit they have on
Haunted History
,” another one added. The third
hmphd
in agreement.

Even though she couldn’t see them, Tanna fixed him with her glare. “You know, you’re the biggest bunch of children I’ve ever encountered. I mean that.” She turned to the one who’d played security guard. “You’re, what, six foot three, and yet you can barely go to the bathroom without Son Emerson giving you permission. You all think you’re his friends, but you’re really just fat, bloated ticks living on his money and reputation. Now, I’ve put up with a lot from you gentlemen today, but it stops right now. You just go on over to the cafeteria and ogle the pretty girls while we take care of business.” When they didn’t move, she snapped, “Go on!
Git!
”

They lumbered to the elevator, shoulders contritely hunched. Tanna put her hands on her hips and stood “watching” until they’d filed away into the elevator car and the doors shut after them. Then she laughed. “Did I sound like my mother?”

“Only in the best possible sense,” I said.

Daniel appeared in the hall. “Everything’s set, and Mr. Emerson is in there right now. He’s a big guy, isn’t he?”