The Book of Feasts & Seasons (6 page)

“You have to go the cops and say you were murdered! If it is ruled a suicide, the insurance company reneges! And I have bills to pay.”

“And here I was thinking you had grown sentimental.”

“It was Sylvester, wasn’t it? He wanted …” She pursed her lips like she was about to say the word
me
, but then realized how that might sound. The lips just stayed closed, a thin, very red line, still looking very kissable.

I should have kissed her more often, in life. Back when I could.

That was a thought like an icicle stabbing through in my brain. It was more a feeling than a thought. But then I wondered how she could still have this hold over me. Can a ghost suffer from testosterone poisoning? Even dead, were men still saps for dames?

She must have thought so.

I looked at her left hand. She was wearing white gloves. I adjusted my eyes and the glove became transparent to me. “You’re not wearing our ring anymore.”

Her expression grew stiff, her eyes narrowed, like she had just stepped on a tack, and did not want to let out a yelp.

I glanced at the cracked sidewalk underfoot, and noticed something odd. Why here? Why this alley? There was no magic circle painted on the ground, no candles, no crystal ball, none of the rigmarole usually needed to call up something like me.

All the stores and shops across the street were closed, wire mesh drawn over their plate glass windows, all dark as a graveyard except for one lonely pawn shop with a broken neon sign that read AL_ HOURS _PEN! We Sell Go_d! We Fix It! The other storefronts were flea markets, liquor stores, gun shops or strip joints.

I was expecting to see a palm reader’s studio or maybe a tattoo parlor with some Satanist emblems hanging in the window, something that could pull a shade like me all the way into the world so that people could see me. But there was nothing.

I closed my eyes, and I could feel the heat beating from her body, the life in her flesh like an electric tingle in the air. But no one else, not for yards in any direction, no one hiding down the alley, no one watching from a nearby window.

I opened my eyes again. Now her expression changed: her eyelids were half lowered, and her lips half-parted, and her head almost tilted a little to left, as if I had said something amusing. “I had to pawn my wedding ring, because I am out of money. I cannot be happy until your spirit is at rest. You have to go to Judge O’Keefe and tell him who murdered you.”

“Then you can collect on the insurance money.”

She pouted and shrugged and looked coy. “Being a detective’s wife, I knew the risks I ran. Especially a detective like you, with silver bullets in your gun, and a crucifix under your flack jacket. I knew one day you might come home in a box. So we made book on those risks. Your number came up. It’s my money. If you think about it, all the times I wondered, all the times I was up late, in bed, in our cold bed, just me, just worrying about you…I earned every penny!”

I turned my head away. I could not stand seeing her performance. Or, if it were on the level, that would be somehow worse.

I tried to sink below the surface of mortal time, back into the ocean of eternity. Nothing happened. It was like standing on a sheet of ice, with my feet stuck in place. What was holding me here? What had called me here?

Turning back, I took a step toward her. Interesting. That meant I could move. The memory holding me here was not this spot, just this area.

Harshly, I said to her, “Sly will pay your bills. Have you moved in with him yet? Cuddled up to play house? You’ve dug all the gold out of the mine called Mrs. Flint, and now you can move on to him. You can be his kept woman for a few months, until enough time passes and you can come out of mourning and blackmail him into marrying you. He was always stiff in the trousers for you, and that makes him stupider than even his admittedly low standard, because the blood rushes toward his groin and away from his brain, leaving it limp and …”

I saw her eyes start to change with anger. There is a reason why the Irish are said to have a temper, and it is not just because the English beat the snot out of them for a thousand years of history. No, there was something wild and Celtic in the change in her face, and I saw in her the old, fiery blood of fairy kings who danced on the wind-roaring mountainsides underneath an unscarred moon, or who battled with the giants from the sea. Her change of expression looked almost like when some shade like me steps into a body not warded from us: the whole demeanor changes, the stance and look and voice. At that moment, she wanted me dead. Or deader. Or whatever the word is.

She swung her hand through my head, or, I should say rather, through the empty air where I was imagining my head to be. Lorelei snatched her hand back, no doubt because of the cold, but she had not hit my face any more than she could have hit a shadow or a fading memory.

But suddenly the ice, or whatever it was, that held me fixed at that point of time was broken. I sank like a stone beneath the surface of time, and saw the flickering shadows of events, past and future events, floating about me like fragments of dreams.

When you are near the mortal world, it is like looking through a pane of rippling glass a few minutes before and after wherever you were laying before you died.

Dreamers can sometime see this, if they wander away from their sleeping bodies, which is why you sometimes see a repeat of that day’s events, or a glimpse of something yet to come.

If you dive deeper, the place gets closer to the timeless, and you can see far off events in the future or past like vast shapes on the horizon, and you can hear, dimly, the ancestral voices calling warnings, the screams of fear and shouts of joy, or catch the roar like the echoes or reflections of a world-shattering battle or glimpse the lighting-flares as if reflected from low hanging clouds, against which titanic shadows move. Visionaries, and monks in contemplative prayer, can see these things, sometimes.

There is a light far below underfoot. It is like a maelstrom, because it sucks and pulls at you. I can fight it off. I looked through the nearby dreams and clouds, and saw something only a day or so away from the present location. Maybe the future, maybe the past. I let myself get pulled into it.

I was standing in the office. Of course. Where else would a ghost go? There was a new carpet underfoot. New carpet. In all our years together, Sly had never sprung for a bottle of hooch, much less something to make the office look nice. Either he had money, or he was expecting some.

I did that trick with my eyes so I could see through the carpet. There was the bloodstain. My bloodstain. Of course. Where else would a ghost be standing?

There was the plate glass window. The full moon was bright, and it shined through the lettering on the glass so their shadows fell around me and through me.

I did not cast a shadow, of course. Shadows don’t cast shadows. The word ‘Psychic’ was etched into the window in elf-letters, so it did not cast a shadow either. Only someone with the Second Sight could have seen the real sign. SYLVESTER STEEL, Psychic Private Investigator.

There was also a distorted image of the office all around me, a memory. It was a memory of unlocking and opening the door just there. Reaching a hand toward the light switch, but freezing when I saw a long, black shape on the floor, the shape of a fallen body. Litter from the desk was all around it, and the window was broken with bullet holes. One of the bullets had struck just above the letter I in FLINT. Panic and fear choked me.

I was drawn step by awful step, in the frozen way we walk in nightmares, where distances are distorted and walking three steps takes three eternities.

I put out my hand, hoping it was not him, hoping, praying the only prayer I knew.
Now I lay me down to sleep…I pray the Lord my soul to keep…If I…If I…

The body turned over before I could touch it, flopping like a dead fish. He grinned at me, a sick, empty, skull-like grin, full of anger by no mirth.

“Oh my God!” a human voice screamed. “It was not me, Matt! I didn’t do it!”

That voice was in the real world. The memory that had drawn me here rippled and faded. The broken window was whole again. Sly was sleeping, no, not any more, he
had
been sleeping on the rollaway bed we used here in the office for late nights or stowing some client who needed a place for one night. It folded into a couch, and there was a holster on the back where we used to keep the revolver. Now he was naked, and the sheets were all twisted around him, soaked with sweat, and Sly was fumbling for the holster, finding nothing.

“There is another gun in the top drawer,” I said, trying to light another imaginary cigarette. I could get the glow of the match reflecting off my cupped fingers correctly, but the light was pearly-white rather than red, and the taste was off. “The one marked A. A for Automatic. But we keep that filing cabinet locked, remember? So who did you give the key to? Or is it
whom
?”

His eyes had trouble focusing on me. “Matt? Is that you?”

That surprised me, so I dropped my cigarette. It did not fall, but floated near me at shoulder height like an annoying little fish. “Can you hear me?”

He nodded. “I can hear you. Faintly.”

“Lorelei wants me to prove I did not commit suicide, so she could get the insurance money.”

That made him tremble. He went over to the hat rack. His hat was not on the hat rack but his clothes were. He got his pants, put them on, put on his shirt, but did not bother to button it up. I knew him pretty well, knew his little habits and ticks: this was what actors call ‘business.’ He was doing little ordinary things to give his nerves a chance to die down.

I wondered where his hat was. It was an ugly thing with a garish hatband, but he was real attached to it. He would doff his hat with exaggerated courtesy to the maidens passing by with a flourish like a cavalier, but only to the fair ones.

He walked slowly around me, got behind the desk, and sat in my chair. I suppose it was his chair, now. His old chair had two books and a potted plant atop it. Maybe he had always envied me my view. If so, he never mentioned it once. And why a potted plant? He did not strike me as a plant kind of guy. Maybe I did not know him so well after all.

“Light up a cigarette,” I said, “If I smell one, maybe I can remember what they are like.”

He chuckled without mirth. “Like that voodoo case down south. Remember that one? The Baron said that cigar smoke called the Loa. Whiskey, too.” But he did not light up.

“I kind of liked the old sign,” I said, nodding at the window. “Thought it was kind of funny.”

“Gave you top billing,” he said with a grimace. “So, do you have any messages for the living?”

“Sure,” I said, swatting the pathetic, imaginary cigarette out of the air next to me. “Look for a stock market break next year, in 1954. There will be large gains for long-term equity investors.”

“Matt,” he said sadly, “This is 1954. It’s been months since you appeared to Rory. The insurance company paid. Judge O’Keefe looked into her heart with the special way he has, and saw her memories, and he believed her, and ruled in her favor. So I know you did not commit suicide.”

I looked around again, this time with my eyes closed. I could feel the beat of life inside him, like heat from an unseen campfire. I finally understood what drove vampires crazy: Being able to feel being alive, but not being able to truly
be
alive. Drinking the living blood and feeling it inside you, just for a moment. Almost like the real thing. Undead onanism.

I opened my eyes. “You were dreaming about me. That is what called me here.”

“Matt, I did not do it. I am not the one who killed you.”

“Of course not!” I said harshly, letting my face look more like a skull and less like a man. “You never had the guts.”

Hands shaking, he opened the cigarette case on the desk, the nice silver one Lorelei bought me as a present, and lit up. I did like the smell, and it did melt my face back into a more human look. Maybe that voodoo doctor had been right about tobacco and ghosts. Too bad I had not been killed in a tobacco shop.

“So why are you haunting me?” he asked in a small voice. He did not look at me. His eyes were resting on the open cigarette case. Maybe he was counting how many smokes he had left.

“Is that why you are here?” I looked at the safe, made the surface invisible to me, and saw some of the relics and special candles missing. “Good grief! Do you have Father Pat over at your apartment, performing an exorcism? Really? To allay me?”

“Uh, actually, he’s at Lorelei’s house in the suburbs, along with Brother Sean and the Big Black Cat. Your house, I guess. Your name is still on the lease.”

“You called the Big Black Cat on me? You bastard.” I wondered how much that had set the partnership back, either in money or favors owed. The Cat was expensive. And mean. He and I had not even called up the Cat for the Murderer of Saint-Marks-in-the-Bowery.

Then I remembered it was not a partnership any more. It was just his money.

“Why don’t you rest in peace?” he demanded, “Why are you haunting me? You’ve got a nice crypt at Saint Patrick’s. It has not been legal to put any bones there for a hundred years. Do you know the strings I had to pull to get that, and the favors I had to call in?”

“How many?”

“Lots! I was up in the Catskills for two weeks with a bazooka on my shoulder, chasing a hut running on chicken legs, just to get the Great Gray Man to owe me a favor, and listen to me, which I traded to the Lady in the Well, so’s she could put me right with the Commissioner. But I did it! We got you interred, with carved stone with your name on it, and everything. LOVING HUSBAND AND FAITHFUL SOLDIER, it says. Rory and me picked the words. Father Donovan said the blessing. He is blind, but he said he could see you there, smiling. I light a candle for you every Sunday, and two during Lent.”

I did not remember that scene. From my point of view it had not happened yet. The same way a timeless ghost can now and again tell living men their future, men can prophesize to us.