Demon's Door (9 page)

He drove back to Briarcliff Road and parked at a steep angle next to Summer's yellow Beetle. Dry leaves were scurrying around and around in front of the steps, as if they were chasing each other. He climbed up to his apartment and opened the door. It was gloomy and airless inside and there was still a lingering fishy odor from Tibbles' shrimp dinner. He switched on the lamps and the air-conditioning.

‘Tibbles?' he called out. ‘You there, boy?' Tibbles always trotted out to greet him when he arrived home but this evening there was no sign of him.

‘Tibbles?' He went through to the kitchen, and as he did so he was sure that he heard his bedroom door closing. Not slammed – not caught by the wind – just closing, very quietly,
ker-lick
. He stood in the middle of the kitchen listening. The air-conditioning was rattling intermittently, as it always did when it started up, but he was sure that he could hear somebody moving around.

He went across to his bedroom door and opened it. He sniffed. He could smell shower gel – his own Armani shower gel that Heidi had given him for Christmas last year before they had split up. Not only that, his bed was a mess, with his red Zuni throw dragged back at a forty-five-degree angle and his pillows all twisted as if he had been wrestling with them. But this morning he had taken the time to make his bed really neatly, with double-folded hospital-type corners and everything.

He looked across at his closet. It had mirrored doors, and he could see himself standing on the opposite side of the room with a frown on his face. He went around the end of the bed and took hold of both door handles.

‘O-
kay
!' he shouted, and flung the closet doors wide open. He didn't know what he had expected to find in there – a strange man who had spent the day tossing and turning in his bed and then had the brass
cojones
to take a shower in
his
bathroom, with
his
shower-gel? But there was nobody inside, only his clothes hanging up, apart from some crumpled old T-shirts on the closet floor which he never wore any more and a paint-spattered pair of Levis which had dropped on top of them.

‘Tibbles?' he repeated. ‘You there, Tibbles?'

Jim came out of the bedroom and as he did so he heard the front door close. Again, it wasn't slammed, and it didn't sound as if the wind had caught it. But he had already closed it behind him when he had come home, hadn't he? It sounded more like somebody had taken advantage of his being in the bedroom so that they could make a stealthy exit.

He hurried to the front door and pulled it open. He thought he could hear footsteps pattering down the stairs, but when he went to the railing and looked down to the landing below his, there was nobody there. The streetlights were going on, all over Hollywood, and this evening they were twinkling like heliographs because the trees and the bushes were thrashing around so much.

Jim was still standing by the railing when Tibbles appeared out of the front door, and rubbed himself against his legs.

‘Hey, there you are,' said Jim, and lifted him up. ‘I was worried that I might have had some kind of hallucination, and that you were still, like, deceased.'

Tibbles stared at him with his green eyes very wide, which Jim took to mean that he forgave him for running him down. Or not. He never quite knew, with Tibbles. But then Tibbles licked his lips, and started to make a rattling noise like the air-conditioning, which meant that he was hungry.

‘You know something?' Jim told him. ‘Even for a cat you're a blatant hypocrite. What do you want? Chicken, chicken liver, tuna or turkey? I'm all out of shrimp, and besides that I can't stand the stink.'

He carried Tibbles back into the kitchen and dropped him on to the floor. It was then that he saw that the kitchen sink was crowded with dirty dishes – a large white dinner plate; a side plate; two saucepans, one with a question-mark of spaghetti still clinging to the inside and the other crusted with lava-like rings of Bolognese sauce; a dessert bowl with caramel-colored circles all around it; a coffee mug; two wine glasses; and a cheese-grater that was sprouting shreds of waxy-looking cheese.

Jim approached the sink very slowly. He picked up the saucepan that had been used to cook Bolognese sauce, and then put it down again. This was insane. These were the dirty dishes that had been left over from the supper that he had cooked himself last night. He had eaten it in the couch while watching
CSI: New York.
Tibbles had been staring at him fixedly the whole time he was eating because Tibbles had a most un-cat-like penchant for Bolognese sauce, even when it was so hot that that he had to cool it off by batting lumps of it around the kitchen floor with his paws.

What was insane, though, was that Jim had washed up all of these dishes. The plates, the saucepans, the glasses, the cutlery, everything. He had washed them all up and dried them and put them back in the cupboards and shelves and drawers where they belonged.

He checked his watch. It was 8:09 p.m., on the evening of September 7. Yesterday, when he had cooked and eaten his spaghetti Bolognese, it had been September 6. So this wasn't yesterday. Not according to his watch, anyhow.

He went into the living room and switched on the TV. He changed the channel to K-Cal 9 and the dateline on that, too, was September 7. Letitia Brown was announcing that a forty-two-year-old Caucasian man had been found in Covina, minus his head. Only two hours later, a disembodied head had been discovered six miles away, in Glendora, but it was that of a twenty-nine-year-old African-American woman. One head, one body, but they didn't match.

Jim looked down at Tibbles, who was still expectantly licking his lips. ‘What the hell is going on here, Tibbles? You saw me wash those dishes. You saw me tidy everything up before I left. Who's been here? Who's been sleeping in my bed?' He paused, and then he said, ‘Jesus. I sound like Goldilocks.'

Tibbles, of course, said nothing. Jim opened up a can of organic chicken for him and spooned it into his bowl. Then, tired as he was, he lifted all of the dishes out of the kitchen sink, filled it with hot water, and started to wash up.

When he had finished, he took a bottle of Fat Tire out of the fridge and sat down on the couch, but he kept the television on mute. Since it was the first day of the new semester, and the first day was always bruising, he had been planning to reward himself this evening with a takeout Japanese supper from Murakami, maybe some sashimi and some braised pork belly in shoyu broth, which was his favorite. But he didn't feel at all hungry any more. He felt disoriented and anxious and as mashed-up inside as Tibbles had been this morning, when he had run him over.

He was one hundred per cent certain that he had washed up those dishes. He was equally sure that he had meticulously tidied his bed. But if somebody else had been here, who the hell was it, and how had he found the time to cook himself spaghetti Bolognese and eat it and sleep for long enough to mess up the bed and take a shower, too? And how had he managed to sneak out of his apartment without Jim catching even a glimpse of him?

Jim was still sitting with his head bowed in front of the silent television when there was a buzz at his front door. He waited for almost half a minute, but then there was another buzz, and another. He cursed under his breath, put down his bottle of beer and shuffled out into the hallway.

‘Who is it?' he called out.

‘It's me, Jee-yum!
C'est moi!
I brought a little treat for our miracle cat!'

He opened the door. It was Mrs LaFarge, wrapped up in a black candlewick robe, with a floppy hood and black sunglasses, so that she looked like the Wicked Witch of the West. She was holding a Tupperware box which contained something dark and bloody. Behind her, out in the night, the trees were surging like the ocean.

‘Chopped chicken livers,' she said triumphantly. ‘I know how much he loves them.'

‘You do?'

‘Well, of course. I always save him a few morsels whenever I'm making my liver pâté.'

Tibbles appeared, with his tail waving, and gave Mrs LaFarge a sweet, ingratiating mew. ‘Here, Tibbles!' said Mrs LaFarge. ‘Look what your
marraine
has brought for you!
Foies de poulet
, you lucky cat! You
very
lucky cat!'

‘Mrs LaFarge . . .' Jim began.

‘Pssh!' said Mrs LaFarge. ‘It is nothing at all.
C'est rien
. He has been smiled upon by God, and he deserves a treat. All I can say is, it's a pity about the funeral. I love a funeral, don't you? It does one so much good to cry.'

‘Mrs LaFarge—'

‘Pssh! When you came down this afternoon and told me that Tibbles had come back to life, I was so delighted. You are right, Jim. It
is
a miracle. And as you said, who are we to question things that we do not really understand, nor have any hope of understanding?'

Jim said, very slowly, ‘I came down this afternoon and told you that Tibbles had come back to life?'

Mrs LaFarge took off her sunglasses, and prodded Jim with her finger. ‘Don't pretend that you have forgotten already! What a joker you are! I don't know why you didn't tell me when you first brought him home in that basket. I know you were still worried that he might not survive, but you could have told me!'

She bent forward and tickled Tibbles under the chin. ‘I am his godmother, after all, am I not? His
marraine
?'

SIX

A
fter Mrs LaFarge had left, Jim closed his front door and stood with his back to it for a few moments, holding the Tupperware box of chopped chicken livers. Tibbles came up to him and stared at him.

‘So, Tibs –
you
were here this afternoon,' said Jim. ‘When exactly did I come home and go downstairs and tell Mrs LaFarge about your miraculous resurrection? I distinctly recall that I was at college all afternoon. I was conducting a class on the incomprehensible musings of Michael McClure. How could I have come back here?'

Tibbles continued to stare at him. Then, after a while, he turned away, went back into the living room, and jumped up on to the couch.

Jim found a space in the fridge for the Tupperware box. He felt light-headed and swimmy, as if he were drunk, or as if he had been smoking something that he had confiscated from one of his students. He had asked Mrs LaFarge when he had come down to tell her about Tibbles, and she had insisted that it was two thirty-five, give or take a minute or two, because she had just started watching
Guiding Light
.

‘You're sure it was then?' Jim had repeated. ‘You're absolutely sure?'

‘Of course I am sure. I never miss one moment of
Guiding Light
, but your news was much more important. Your news was like a message from heaven.'

‘And you're sure it was me?'

‘Oh, you are always teasing me, Jim.'

He went into the living room and picked up the phone. He had written the number of Cedars-Sinai emergency room on the back of a folded envelope. He dialed it, and waited while it rang.

‘I didn't come back here this afternoon,' he told Tibbles. ‘All right, I have this gift, I can see ghosts and stuff. But I can't be in two places at the same time.'

Tibbles was already asleep, but he wouldn't have answered him, even if he had been awake.

‘Emergency Room, can I help you?'

‘Oh, yes. My name is Jim Rook. I'm a member of the faculty at West Grove Community College, and I'm enquiring about a student of mine, Maria Lopez. She was taken into the ER around four o'clock this afternoon.'

‘Maria Lopez?'

‘Yes, I'm her English teacher. She had an accident and got herself pretty badly cut up. I'm just wondering how she is.'

‘Wait up a moment, please.'

Jim waited and waited. He could hear ambulance sirens in the background, and somebody shouting. Then the receptionist picked up the phone again and said, ‘You're sure she was brought to Cedars-Sinai?'

‘Absolutely. That's what the paramedics told me. I sent her mother there, too.'

‘Well, I'm sorry, Mr Rook, there is nobody of that name here.'

‘Are you quite sure about that? Maybe she was registered under another name. She's Hispanic, aged seventeen. She had lacerations and bruises all over.'

‘No, sir, we have received no admissions of that description, not today. Two young Hispanic boys with serious knife-wounds, that's all.'

‘OK, thanks.'

Jim hung up. This didn't make any kind of sense at all. He was sure that the paramedics had told him that they were taking Maria to Cedars-Sinai. But maybe they had decided to take her to another hospital which was closer, or which specialized in reconstructive surgery, or which would take her in if she was uninsured.

He found the card that Lieutenant Harris had given him and called Detective Wong. It took the detective nearly a half-minute to answer, and when he did his voice echoed as if he were sitting in the men's room.

‘Detective Wong? This is Jim Rook, from West Grove Community College.'

‘Who?'

‘Jim Rook. We met this afternoon, when Maria Lopez got herself hurt.'

‘Who?'

‘Maria Lopez. The girl who got herself all cut up.'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Whatever-your-name-is—'

‘Rook. Like in the bird.'

‘Well, I'm sorry Mr Rook-like-in-the-bird, I don't have the least idea what you're talking about.'

‘Didn't you come out to West Grove this afternoon, with your partner? What's her name, Detective Madison? Lieutenant Harris was there, too. One of my students was seriously hurt, Maria Lopez. Either somebody attacked her, or she got herself caught up in some kind of machinery.'