Darkroom (12 page)

Eleanor gave Tibbles one more stroke and then she stood up. ‘Do you think the painting could have had anything to do with it?' Her tone of voice was not only serious, but demanding, as if he was obliged to answer her, by law.

‘I can't understand how. But the way that Tibbles was looking at it, you'd have thought that she blamed it for setting her alight. She hid under the couch for a while and she wouldn't come out. I mean, she was very, very scared, and however she got burned, it was the painting she was scared of – no doubt about it.'

‘Does it scare you?'

‘Well … not really. But like you said yesterday, it does have a certain … I don't know …' He flapped his hand, trying to think of the right word.

‘Power?' said Eleanor.

‘I don't exactly know if I'd call it power. In my experience, some objects appear to have a power of their own, when they don't, really. Not in themselves. It's only the way they make people feel. Voodoo masks, witch doctors' bones, crucifixes, things like that. They strike certain primitive chords.

Eleanor was staring at him.

‘What?' he asked her.

She came closer, still staring at him. He wondered if he had a zit on his nose.

‘You can
see
, can't you?' she asked him.

He knew what she meant, but he pretended he didn't. Over the years, his sight had caused him so much pain, and so much fear, and so much heartache. He wished more than anything else that he could be blind to the afterlife, so that when he walked along the street he couldn't see the dead any more, or the hideous things that crawled out of the human imagination, like boogie men, and ghosts, and creatures that hid beneath the bed, waiting to bite at children's ankles. Because they were really there, to those who could see them.

‘Let's go through,' he suggested, and led the way back into the living room. But Eleanor refused to be put off.

‘You can
see
,' she insisted.

‘All right,' he confessed. ‘I can see. How can you tell?'

‘Because I'm sensitive myself, that's why.'

‘Oh, yes?'

‘I've been sensitive ever since I was a little girl. I can't actually see spirits, not the way that you can, but I can tell when they're close by, and I can usually tell what they're thinking, especially if they're unhappy.'

Jim took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. In the past five or six years he had come across dozens of psychics and so-called ‘sensitives,' but only one or two of them had proved themselves to be halfway genuine. The rest had been fruitcakes or dangerous frauds.

He liked Eleanor. He thought she was the kind of woman who could easily help him to get over Karen. Sexy, smart, elegant, eccentric. But if she was going to make out that she was a sensitive, that could give present a serious problem, especially if she was a fake.

‘Why don't you sit down?' he asked her.

Eleanor looked around. ‘I can sense a presence in this apartment. Here and now.'

‘Really?'

She frowned, and cupped one hand around her ear, listening. ‘Two presences, in fact. Well, more than two – many more – but two that are really important.'

She plonked herself down on the couch, very abruptly, as if she were playing a game of musical chairs. Her dress was really very short.

‘You don't believe me, do you?' she demanded.

‘I didn't say that.'

‘No, but you were thinking it,' said Eleanor. ‘But answer me this: if I don't have the gift, how could I possibly know that you can see?'

‘How should I know? Maybe Vinnie told you. Most of my friends know about it. Some of my students used to know about it, too. It isn't that easy to hide.'

‘I've never even met Vinnie. Who's Vinnie?'

‘Mr Boschetto's nephew. He inherited this apartment. Well, along with two of his sisters.'

‘Jim, I'm telling you the truth. I can feel two strong presences here, but they're keeping themselves very well hidden, because they're worried that you'll see them – and that you'll want to talk to them, and that you'll find out what they're doing.'

‘So who are they? And what
are
they doing?'

Eleanor put down her glass of wine on the side table and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. Jim noticed for the first time that, deep between her breasts, she was wearing a large silver pendant. It was emblazoned with a bland, round face, rather like the face of the moon in medieval paintings. It was the face of a fool, but a sly, cruel fool.

Eleanor closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Jim waited patiently, occasionally glancing around the room to see if there was any visible sign of her ‘presences'. The Italian clock ticked away each minute as if it could barely summon up the energy. Eleanor's lips were moving slightly, but Jim couldn't hear what she was saying. He was tempted to look up at Robert H. Vane, but he found the strength of will not to. He wasn't going to allow a nineteenth-century daguerrotypist with a cloth over his head to win a ‘made-you-look' contest.

He was just about to pick up his glass of wine when Eleanor clutched at his wrist and almost broke his watch strap.

‘They're
good
spirits,' she said hoarsely. ‘They're very good spirits. I can
feel
their goodness.'

‘Where are they?' Jim asked her.

Silence.

‘Eleanor, where are they?'

‘He came …' she continued. ‘There was something – something about a wedding. A wedding, that's it! And he was there, but he wasn't related – or a guest, or a friend of the family. He was all dressed in black … and
she
said—'

‘She? Who's she?'

‘
She
said, “he looks like a mortician,” and she didn't realize then how true her words were.'

Jim laid his hand on top of Eleanor's. ‘Eleanor, can you hear me? Listen, Eleanor, I need to know who they are, these spirits. Ask them what their names are.'

‘They're
good
spirits,' Eleanor insisted. Her eyes were still closed and her fingertips were still pressed to her forehead. ‘They don't wish you any harm. They keep asking you to forgive them. Please, forgive us! But somebody has to find him … Somebody has to stop him.'

‘
Who,
Eleanor? Who are they, and who's
him
?'

‘He has to be found, Jim. It isn't going to be easy. He can hide almost any place at all. But he has to be found, and he has to be killed. Otherwise …'

‘Otherwise what?'

‘Otherwise he'll go on forever, and he'll gather in more and more spirits like a rat-catcher. Innocent spirits, good spirits.'

‘For God's sake, Eleanor,
who
?'

Eleanor didn't answer, but began to breathe deeper and deeper, taking in huge lungfuls of air through her nose and exhaling them with a quivering gasp.

‘Eleanor. Eleanor! Listen to me! Snap out of it, OK?'

But Eleanor continued to hyperventilate, and her gasps grew more and more desperate, as if she were being gassed, or drowning.

‘Eleanor! Listen to me! Eleanor!' Jim grasped her shoulders and shook her. ‘Eleanor! Open your eyes! Come on, Eleanor, come back to me! One … two … three!'

Her eyes remained closed, but her shoulders hunched and her arms and legs started to slacken, as if she were a marionette. It was then that Jim's eye was caught by a flicker of movement on the opposite side of the room. A dark, dancing flicker against the drapes.

There was a pause, and then he saw it again. A tall, attenuated shadow, like the shadow of a man on a winter's day – impossibly stretched-out, and out of proportion. It moved silently across the curtains with a long, giraffe-like lope, even though there was nobody between the table lamp and the window, and the curtains were far too thick for it to have been showing through from outside.

In a few seconds it had vanished, but Jim sat staring at the window bay for nearly half a minute afterward. He had never felt such dread in his life. It was the shadow's way of walking that had frightened him so much – the fluid but wildly uneven gait of somebody who has learned to overcome a terrible disability. Maybe not some
body
, but some
thing
– because it had seemed to Jim to be an assembly of human, animal and insect. It was the shadow of a creature that, seen in the flesh, would lead you straight to madness.

‘Eleanor!'

Eleanor stopped panting and opened her eyes. She blinked at Jim as if she had never seen him before.

‘Are you OK?' he asked her.

‘Yes … I think so.' She looked around the living room. ‘I talked to them. The presences. They were amazing.'

‘There was something else here, Eleanor. I saw it.'

‘My God, Jim. You're shaking!'

‘For God's sake!
There was something else here!
Not just your “presences.”'

She looked bewildered. ‘What was it? Was it a spirit? What did it look like? Where?'

‘A shadow. It walked across the drapes. But it wasn't just a shadow. It was …' He couldn't find words to tell her how much it had frightened him. It was everything that comes after you in the middle of the night. Everything that limps and hobbles and hurries through the darkness, and eventually catches up with you, when you're least expecting it.

Eleanor nodded. She looked even more serious than she had before.

‘You know what it was?' Jim asked her.

‘I think so. I think it was
him
, Jim. The man you have to hunt down.'

Jim sat back. ‘Me? Why me? Forget it. Absolutely not.'

‘But who else could do it?'

‘I don't know, Eleanor, and I truly don't care. I'm not hunting
anybody
down, period. I'm out of this supernatural malarkey, for good and all, you got it? Let me tell you this: whatever it takes to stop me from seeing dead people, and demons, and boogie men and … and sinister shadows that hobble across my curtains – if I need therapy – if I need a lobotomy, even – then that's what I'm going to do.'

E
leanor waited until he had finished. Then, very calmly, she said, ‘OK.'

‘OK what?'

‘OK, if you really don't want to hunt this person down, then nobody can make you – least of all me.'

‘That's OK, then,' said Jim. He waited for Eleanor to say something else and when she didn't, he stood up, went back into the kitchen, and took another can of beer out of the fridge. When he returned to the living room, Tibbles followed him in, and jumped up on his chair beside him.

‘Look at the state of this cat,' he said. ‘She looks like a bomb went off in a toilet brush factory.'

‘Yes,' said Eleanor. ‘But she's the key to what's happening here.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I don't know, exactly … but the presences kept trying to make me look at her. Almost as if they were physically trying to turn my head around.'

‘So … these “presences”.' Do they talk to you, or what?'

‘No, they don't talk. It's more like I
feel
them. It's like being in a darkened room, with a whole lot of people you've never met before. You can only get to know them by touching them and smelling them. I can't hear any actual words … I can only get the gist of what they're trying to tell me.'

‘Do you know who they are … or who they
were
?'

‘No. They didn't live here when they were alive. I'm pretty sure this apartment was familiar to them, but it wasn't their home.'

‘Well, Vinnie's uncle lived here for over forty years, almost as long as the building's been standing. And he lived here alone, so far as I know. Well, he probably had his fancy women. Or men. I don't know anything about him, except that he couldn't bear to throw away his shoes.'

Eleanor stood up and paced slowly around the perimeter of the room, her eyes on the floor, as if she were looking for a lost earring. ‘They could have been
related
to Vinnie's uncle. They were very passionate, very expressive. Very Latin, if you know what I mean.'

‘You don't have
any
idea what their names were?'

Eleanor shook her head. ‘The woman may have been called something like Flora or Floretta. She gave me a feeling like lots of little multicolored flowers, but that could have been anything. A favorite dress, maybe. Even an apron. The man … I don't know. I get the feeling that he might have had a moustache, that's all.'

‘So who's this person who scares them so much?'

‘Again, I don't know his name. But the first time they saw him was at somebody's wedding. A close relative, I think, maybe a niece or a nephew. The woman gave me a mental picture of the bride, and the groom, and I could hear accordion music, and people clapping. Then everybody gathered together to have their photograph taken, and it was then that this man appeared. He was all dressed in black, and for some reason the woman felt afraid of him. And I mean,
deeply
afraid.'

‘Was he the photographer?'

‘I'm not sure. That wasn't very clear.'

‘Did you see him yourself?'

‘Through
her
eyes, briefly. He was very blurred.'

‘Would you know him again, if you saw his face?'

Eleanor stopped by his chair. The hem of her dress was lightly touching his arm, and he could smell that perfume again, as if she had lightly sprayed it on her inner thighs. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘I think I might.'

He pointed to the painting. ‘Do you think it's him? Robert H. Vane?'

She gave him an almost imperceptible nod. ‘Either him, or something that's possessed him.'

Jim arrived early the next morning so that he could park his car in the spare space marked Vice-Principal. The previous vice-principal, Dr Friendly, had left West Grove at the end of last semester, and Dr Ehrlichman still hadn't been able to find a suitable successor. As far as Jim was concerned, anybody had to be friendlier than Dr Friendly. Jim had always called him the Grinch.