Goodlow's Ghosts (11 page)

Ryerson lurched upon hearing the voice.

"Sorry," Sam said, and his tone announced that he meant it.

Ryerson glanced quickly about the cabin, from corner to corner. He saw nothing. He said, "I can't see you."

"I can see you."

"Are you trying to hide, Mr.
Goodlow
?"

Silence.

"Mr.
Goodlow
?" Ryerson coaxed.

"It's Sam." A pause. "Sam," he repeated, and Ryerson toted a touch of what sounded like reverence in his tone when he said the name. He went on, "And no, I'm not trying to hide. At least, I don't
believe
I am."

Ryerson thought about this a moment. "Are you telling me that you can't control your appearances and
disappearnces
?"

"Apparently not."

"Apparently not what, Sam?" Ryerson asked. He heard sigh.

"Apparently," Sam explained, "I can't control my
apiearances
and disappearances. It takes a lot of effort simply to stay in one place, Mr.
Biergarten
."

"Call me Rye."

From outside, Lutz called, "I think your little dog has to pee. What should I do?"

"Just put him down. He'll stay close by."

Sam said, "Your dog loves you."

"My dog
needs
me," Ryerson corrected.

"Whatever passes best for love, he has in abstinence for you," Sam said.

"Abstinence?"

"Abstinence, penitence, abundance, what's the difference?"

Ryerson saw a form emerging in a corner. It was tall, and it was as thin as a water pipe.

"I don't know how I know that, Rye." He seemed confused. The tall thin form in the corner fattened, took the shape of a man. "I don't know how I know anything. It's very confusing being ... this way. Sometimes, often, in fact, I really don't know if I'm dead or alive. Now, at this moment, that is not so. How could it be so, and me like this?"

Ryerson said, "That is doubtless the same sort of confusion I think we all feel when we are thrust from the womb and into this world."

Silence.

Ryerson felt embarrassed; he wasn't sure why.

He heard a woman's voice. It came from the same corner that Sam's voice had come from. It said, "Don't philosophize about things you've never experienced, Mr.
Biergarten
."

The mannish form in the corner had not changed. It was tall, stocky, indistinct, but it was much the same form he had come to associate with Sam
Goodlow
. Ryerson said, "And who are you?"

"What do you mean?"—the woman's voice. "Who am I?"—Sam's voice. "I'm Sam
Goodlow
. Sam. Spam. Sam."

"I heard a woman talking," Ryerson said. He hesitated. "You were talking in a woman's voice."

"I was?" He paused. "I don't think I was." Another pause. "Who can hear his own voice, really, Mr.
Biergarten
?"

From outside, Lutz called, "Your little dog ran off. I can't see him anywhere."

"Shit!" Ryerson whispered. He quickly left the cabin and called to Creosote several times, waited, called again. At last, the dog came running from around the far side of the leaped into Ryerson's arms, and smothered him with licks and snuggles, while Lutz—obviously offended—looked on.

"Where have you been, little guy?" Ryerson asked. "You act like you haven't seen me for months?"

But Creosote wasn't talking.

Ryerson said, while Creosote snuggled against the under-side of his chin, "I'm sorry, Mr. Lutz, but I don't think there's anything I can do here today. This place simply doesn't ... speak to me anymore. Whatever
was
here has gone somewhere else."

Lutz pursed his lips. "You sound like a damned
fortune
teller now."

"No, Mr. Lutz"—Ryerson could feel his anger mount-
ing
; Lutz had rubbed him the wrong way since their first conversation—"I never claimed to be a fortune-teller. I will continue to do what I can for you, but this place is dead for ate, at the moment, and while I know that you are probably skeptical—"

"Yes, yes," Lutz broke in, "well I think that I'm going to be charged in Stevie's disappearance, anyway. So all of this is rather moot, wouldn't you say?" He gave Ryerson a lopsided grin.

"No," Ryerson began, "I wouldn't say it's moot—"

But Lutz turned from him and started for the path that would lead him back to the house.

"A troubled man," Ryerson whispered to Creosote, and followed Lutz.

The tall, mannish form in a corner of the cabin stayed where it was. For the moment, it could do nothing else. It was stuck.

~ * ~

The woman who called herself Violet
McCartle
looked expectantly at the big man as he came into the living room. "Well?" she said.

The big man said nothing. He sat in a fragile-looking straight-backed chair near her, leaned forward, and looked troubled.

Violet
McCartle
pressed, "Did you do what I asked you to do, dammit?"

The big man shrugged. "I've started to."

"You've
started
to? What in the hell does that mean? If you started to do it, why in the hell didn't you finish?"

The big man sighed. His face grew pale. "You haven't been up there lately, have you?"

"I've never been up there, actually, and I don't
plan
to go up there, either. But I fail to see how that's germane. How can you expect
me
to do the kinds of things that
you
do? We are equipped, you and I, to do very different kinds of things, and if I must be brutally frank—"

"Jesus," he interrupted, "it's just
awful
up there. I mean. . ." He looked as if he were going to throw up. "It's not just . . .
it
. If that were the case, then maybe I could do what you want me to do without any problem. But it isn't, it's—"

"Either you do what I've told you to do or your employment with me will cease. And you know what that means, right?"

He sighed. "Yes. I know what that means."

"Then we'll have no more discussion of this matter. You'll do as I've asked, and that will be that."

The big man said nothing. He was remembering what she had said only moments earlier: "I've never been up there, actually, and I don't plan to go up there, either."

Ryerson said to Jenny
Goodlow
, over the telephone, "I have made contact with your brother."

"Are you saying that my brother is alive?"

"No, I'm not."

A pause. Then, "You're saying that he's not alive, but that you've made contact with him." It was a statement, not a question.

"I'm saying that I've had contact with him. We've spoken. I've
seen
him, after a fashion."

"You're being very cryptic, Mr.
Biergarten
."

"Of necessity. You made it clear how you feel about what I do, Miss
Goodlow
."

"I made it clear how I feel about what you
say
you do. My threshold of willing suspension of disbelief is quite high."

Ryerson smiled.

"You understood that, I assume?" Jenny
Goodlow
asked.

"Yes. It's a literary phrase, am I right?"

She sighed. "Mr.
Biergarten
, we appear to be playing games with each other."

"If we are, then I wasn't aware of it. I called as a courtesy to say that I've had contact with your brother. I'm willing to elaborate, if you'd like."

Silence. He waited for a response from her. After half a minute, he heard the sharp click of the phone being hung up.

~ * ~

Guy Squires realized with grim and fearful fascination that the air in this little apartment was growing very stale and that he would not for long be able to breathe it.

He was sitting against a wall. The dark-eyed and beguiling brunette was still sitting cross-legged on the bare wood floor between him and the door, and she was still reading aloud from the bad novel she had been reading from for the past several hours. She was staring at him as she read; she had yet to look at her book.

Guy Squires thought, again, of trying to talk to her. He had tried talking to her a number of times, but she had simply continued reading to him and staring at him. He had pleaded with her to let him go, had told her that he was the father of twin baby girls—it was a lie—and that his wife was ill and in the hospital—also a lie. His pleas had had no effect.

Perhaps the truth.

"I lied to you," he told her, and felt very good and bold for saying it. Surely it would impress her.

She did not react.

For half a second—barely long enough for him to realize it—she was gone and he was the only one in the apartment.

But then she was back, and he went on, "I don't read. I haven't"—he fought for breath as the air seemed to grow stale—"read anything in years. Not since"—another hard-won breath—"I was in high school. And then only what was necessary."

She continued reading: "'He lifted the room-sized vampire clear off the floor,'" she read, "'and blood poured over him like wine at a bachelor's party…’"

And Guy Squires continued to plead with her, as the oxygen in the room seemed to dissipate, "I am only a . . . man who likes . . . women—"

"'And the blood turned to putrescence and then to dust and then to nothing, for it had come from nothing, and always had been nothing—'" She vanished again. Longer. But now someone took her place. Another woman. Blond, thin.

"Huh?" said Guy Squires.

The thin, blond woman vanished, replaced by the beguiling woman with the brown eyes, and Guy Squires yelled, "Listen to me,
goddammit
!" And when she merely continued reading and staring at him, he pushed himself painfully to his feet, lurched toward her, and threw himself past her, toward the doorway. He had expected her to reach out, as she had before, and effortlessly toss him back to where he had been. But she did nothing. She continued reading.

Then Guy Squires was at the door, and he threw it open, looked back, saw the thin, blond woman again, and the beguiling, brown-eyed woman, too, in the same space that the blond woman inhabited.

"Jesus Christ!" he breathed, and within a minute, he was out of the building and down the street.

~ * ~

The early morning air was cool, dark, and moist, and Ryerson wondered for only a moment why he had awakened so abruptly.

He glanced about the bedroom. The tall, narrow windows bore the first blush of morning. He saw little of the rest of the room, only vague lumps that were its furnishings.

"Sam?" Ryerson whispered.

He heard, "I got stuck, Mr.
Biergarten
." The voice came from near the door. Ryerson looked. He saw darkness.

The voice—not the voice that Ryerson had come to associate with Sam
Goodlow
; it was sexless, neutral—continued, "I got stuck there. At that place. Where the asshole took us."

"Lutz?"

"Yes. Lutz."

"Stuck how, Sam?"

"Stuck, stuck. Where could I toe, go?" The voice was losing some of its neutrality; it was becoming Sam
Goodlow's
lazy tenor. At the same time, Ryerson could see a tall, beige shape emerging from the darkness. It fattened, like a cocoon forming. "That's a hell of a space, that place," Sam continued. "You didn't know, you couldn't see.
I
could see.”

"What could you see?"

"More than you, for sure. It's my world, after all, the fall, that place, place. Lots of hunger and joy and play, and this and that, and bric-a-brac."

"Can you tell me about it, Sam?"

"Tell you what? What you didn't see and couldn't know? I don't know what I saw. I've never seen it before. What do I compare it to? A spring play, a summer's day, feet of clay. Sometimes I believe that I'm alive, Mr.
Biergarten
. I get scared and I believe that I'm alive and that I was never dead."

"I understand that, Sam."

"You say you do."

"But I do. I honestly do."

"You're a damned presumptuous son of a bitch, Ryerson." It was the woman's voice again. "You presume to tell me, and who can tell me?" A pause. "I saw what you didn't see and couldn't know, unless you were me, or were like me." Sam's lazy tenor emerged once more. "I can't get it right, nothing, anything, something, even squeaking, and I want to get it right, Mr.
Biergarten
."

"Do you mean you can't get the voice right, Sam?"

"Sometimes I believe that I am alive, and there I am, alive, hell, I feel ... pain, I have red snakes, headaches, and my stomach growls. And I don't remember being dead. How
would
I, if I believe that I'm alive. It would be a kind of cosmic recognition, contradiction, wouldn't it? Do you have a Lincoln Town Car, Mr.
Biergarten
?"