The 'Geisters (22 page)

Away from Susan Rickhardt, Ann allowed herself to consider the fact: for the first time since the Lake House, she truly was in a haunted house.

A haunted conference centre, excuse me.

Ann started forward, hands fluttering slowly at her side, feeling the warm air for the iciness of invisible spectres.

The hallway continued a long way, turned at a stairwell, then opened up into a space not unlike the tasting room in Rickhardt’s winery.

It was better appointed, though; something the Krenk team at Ann’s architectural firm might’ve done. For the first time in weeks, Ann found herself appraising space like an architect.

The ceiling opened up into an arching dome, like the inside of an overturned boat. Iron-hooped chandeliers hung from crossbeams on black chains. Behind the bar, wooden wine racks sat empty. Thick oak pillars touched the beams on each side, like piers in the nave of a cathedral.

Tall windows lined one wall—but it was still deep in the night and the only illumination came from a banker’s lamp overhanging the space on the bar where one might find a computer and till.

In its place sat a polished brass container, with a gleaming steel lid.

Ann’s running shoes squeaked on the wooden floor. It was the only sound in here. She approached the bar.

“Would you like to be left alone for a moment?”

Ann froze in the middle of the room. Ian Rickhardt stepped out from behind the tasting bar. He was wearing a white, open-necked shirt and a pair of green khakis. His feet were bare. His hair was damp, as though he’d just showered and dressed. He gestured to the light, the container.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Ann,” he said.

Ann blinked. She pointed to the container—“Is that . . .”

Ian nodded. “Michael’s remains.”

Right. It was not a container. It was an urn.

“You cremated him.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Ian. He stepped closer to Ann. “You disappeared,” he said. “In Miami. You went right off the grid. Can’t blame you, really—after that shit show that Hirsch put on for you. But you were gone, we couldn’t find you anywhere, and decisions had to be made.”

“You found me in Mobile,” said Ann, and Ian raised an eyebrow.

“Did we now?”

Did Ian know? Ann kept her face impassive, but she wondered now: did Ian know that when his agent had come into the cabin in the Rosedale Arms, Ann was tucked away . . . by the Insect, who knew enough to hide, then?

Did he not know, and did she just tell him?

Ann cleared her throat. “How is Mr. Hirsch?”

“Oh, you don’t know. Of course you don’t. Full recovery. Back on the squash court like nothing happened.”

Ann looked at Rickhardt. He looked back, shook his head, pursed his lips.

“He’s alive,” said Rickhardt. “Doesn’t have much to report. On account of, well, the
stroke
. But I expect inside that shell of his, he’s happy as a clam.”

Ann stepped close to the cylinder. On one side, there was a little engraved plaque.

MICHAEL VOORS

1979-2013

“I don’t think so,” said Ann, running her finger around the steel lid. “You weren’t there.”

Rickhardt shook his head. “You don’t know Johnny like I know Johnny.”

Ann took a breath. Once again, the reality of her situation caught up to her. Here she was, in an empty hall with Ian Rickhardt, who’d come to Tobago to . . . what? To rape the Insect? While she was on her honeymoon, with the man who couldn’t get through one short flight before he did the same thing to it?

Hirsch had warned her about Rickhardt . . . had promised something better, something she’d find in a spa in St. Augustine. Ann hadn’t believed him about that.

But she did believe him about this: Ian Rickhardt was dangerous.

He’d demonstrated this many times over. He’d sent people after her. He’d sent something else after her. He’d had those people overpower her, and take her virtual prisoner.

“Do you want to cry?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. Maybe not cry, but have that time alone. Over Michael’s ashes. I can leave you for a moment. Given that you’re here now, I should have waited before authorizing the cremation. I’m sorry. That was bad of me.”

“I’m fine.”

“Should I leave? Give you a moment?”

Ann sighed, and took her hand from the urn.

“How do I do this?” she said quietly. Ian didn’t answer, just raised his eyebrows in a question. “How does it go? Michael was a rapist. You’re a rapist. I’ve had to put up with and internalize this shit. So how do I talk about it, to you, in a reasonable and rational way?”

“We’re rapists,” said Ian. “I see.”

“Ian,” said Ann, “can we just drop the pretense? I saw what you did in Tobago. I saw what Michael did on the plane. And I know about you and your friends. What you do.”

“And what is it we do?”

“You rape poltergeists.” She said it very quickly, so that it came out as almost a single word:
yourapepoltergeists.

“No, Ann, we don’t.”

Ann shut her eyes. She felt like she was going to vomit. She nearly did, as sour acid filled her mouth.

She summoned the spectrum, a slow ladder to the depths. She murmured: “Red, yellow . . .”

“Hey,” said Ian, “You’re doing Eva Fenshaw’s trick now, aren’t you? With the colours, and your little prison, aren’t you?”

Ann opened her eyes, expecting to see Ian’s smirk—like when he showed up in Tobago with his wedding video, but really to elbow his protégé out of the way and have first-night privileges. He wasn’t smirking, though. He leaned against the bar, comfortable.

“How do you know about that?”

He shrugged. “Eva told me about some of the stuff she does at the wedding. She’s a great gal, but she likes to talk. We did some healing exercises together, and she told me about the prison.”

“She just told you everything.”

“Well, not just me. But she does like to talk. When she got sick—when that stroke hit . . . she was very talkative indeed. Told us a lot of things that we missed, after that incident with the minivan. Your parents. Philip. That girl—Laurie?

“That girl.”

“Eva’s like a mother to you, isn’t she?”

“Oh, fuck you,” said Ann, and at that, Rickhardt did smirk.

“I have to confess, Ann. I’m actually a little nervous, talking like this, upsetting you,” he said. “Do you have any idea what’s going on right now outside this place? The state of Michigan is on an orange terror alert. The Port Huron crossing’s a mess right now; the Blue Water Bridge is completely shut down. CNN’s saying there are three dead on the U.S. side. Homeland Security personnel. Doesn’t get more serious than that. The Canadian side isn’t reporting any dead. But it’s a mess too. They’re talking about cyber-terrorism, too. Given that you made it here, I’m assuming that means that somehow, you shut down and wiped all the video surveillance. Because otherwise . . . they’d have caught you on the drive here. They might’ve shot you, if they’d seen it all.” Ian shook his head. “Surely there was an easier way to get back into your country of birth. Even if you didn’t want to be detected. But oh—it gets very serious, when the Insect goes a-walking, doesn’t it?”

“It did that to Hirsch,” said Ann, “and it can do that to you.”

Ian nodded. “It did that to him. It also killed my dear friend Michael Voors. And your parents, didn’t it?”

“Don’t,” said Ann. Her voice was low. She surprised herself by the fury in it.

“So don’t
you
,” said Ian. “Don’t call me a rapist. Because, I’ll tell you. Coming from a woman who’s committed . . . let’s see. Patricide . . . matricide . . . and what’s the word when a young bride murders her loving husband? It’ll come to me. Point is this: you really aren’t in a position to call rape.”

“I didn’t do any of that,” said Ann.

“Right,” said Ian, “it was the Insect. A being that has nothing to do with you.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You just threatened me, Ann. That your Insect would also harm me, in the way that it did John Hirsch.”

“Hirsch told me about you,” said Ann. “And the others. And the things you did.”

Ian nodded. “And that’s why we’re having this conversation. Part of the reason. Normally, I wouldn’t worry about you. I’d just leave you with Susan. You two could catch up, play a little Skyrim, get good and toasted on the fine wines of Rickhardt Estates. But the fact is, you’re not going to do that. I figured that out for certain when you, ah, wrecked that rather nice television set in the Cab Franc room.”

Ann looked at him. “Did Little tell you about that?”

Ian laughed at that. “Little? Susan’s ‘Little’? No. With one or two notable exceptions, the ’geists don’t run our errands. We also have webcams. A couple of us were keeping an eye on you. We wanted to see how you’d interact . . . if you could be, uh, integrated.”

“Integrated.”

“Yeah. See, when Michael brought you home, that should have taken care of it. But things took a turn for the worse. . . .” He looked down, then up again. It was like he was checking notes, Ann thought. “Here’s the thing, Ann. We want you back here. And on some level, you want to be back here too.”

“Bullshit.”

“No,” said Ian, “you do. If you didn’t—you would never have come.”

Ann shivered. Was the room chilling? Was the Insect manifesting around her? She rather hoped that it was; she wanted it to reach through Ian’s flesh, and pinch together some blood cells into a clot, as it had with Hirsch.

She rather hoped that it would just kill everyone right now.

“I don’t want to be back here. I want my brother back. Where
is he?”

“All right,” said Ian, ignoring the question pointedly, “you don’t want to be back here. But I’ll tell you, kid—the Insect sure as shit does. That’s why it led you home.”

“You’re playing games,” said Ann.

“I’m not,” said Ian, “at least not with you. The reason we’re having this conversation is simple. Because the Insect, as you call it, is back exactly where it wants to be. But it’s tied to you, Ann. There are some of us who think that in fact, it
is
you. It can’t stay, if you don’t.”

“Such shit,” said Ann, but Ian shook his head, and pointed at the urn.

“Look,” he said, and Ann did.

The urn no longer gleamed metallic in the light. It was covered in hoarfrost—as though it held liquid nitrogen, or some other frozen matter, rather than the cooling ashes of Michael Voors. It looked like nothing so much as an eggshell.

“It’s telling you it’s okay,” said Ian. “It’s calling you to go see it.”

The egg started to throw off tendrils of mist, and Ann opened her mouth to call bullshit once more. But she couldn’t. Not really.

She didn’t need to see words written in the frost to understand that.

“I’d apologize for not telling you about this place,” said Ian as they climbed down a sweeping set of stairs past a long, empty registration desk and a little lobby, “but really, I don’t feel I owe you that. If your boss Krenk had won the bid to make my winery—if he’d shown the vision . . . then you probably would have had an idea all on your own what was happening here. But in the end . . . couldn’t trust him.”

“Because it’s a secret conference centre,” said Ann.

They moved past the registration desk and into a glassed-in corridor. Outside, Ann thought she could see the dawn coming—a hint of pink over treetops.

“Because I couldn’t trust him,” said Ian. “When you’re involved in something like I am—we are—trust is paramount.”

“Like a bottom trusts a top,” said Ann. “You’ve got to keep your safe words straight.”

Ian gave her a look.

“It’s not like that,” he said, and she said, “Of course it’s not.”

The corridor went down a gentle slope, and turned. Double doors at the far end led to the Octagon Ballroom, according to the signage. They stopped there. Ian thrust his hands into his pockets and looked down at his bare feet, as though he were waiting, for something.

“This would have been a good place to hold the wedding,” observed Ann, and Ian chuckled at that.

“Who was it who a moment ago said we should drop pretense?”

In spite of herself, Ann smiled. Ian folded his arms and leaned against the glass.

“It’s not rape,” he said. “But I can see how you’d think it is. Because it’s certainly sexual. And consent . . . well, it’s complicated.”

Ann leaned against the glass opposite him, folded her arms to mirror Rickhardt. “I have to hear this,” she said.

“You ever read any of Stephen King’s stuff?”

“I started the Dark Tower series in high school. I read the book with the story about the boys going to find a body in the woods. Otherwise, you can imagine his stuff might not be my thing.”

“Yeah. He also wrote a non-fiction book, early on, called
Danse Macabre
. He came up with a hierarchy in it, of the sort of thing that a writer of horror fiction aims for. It’s a hierarchy of fear. At the bottom is the simple gross-out—torture, or maiming; up from that is horror: the face of the monster, giant fucking bugs, zombies on the march. And finally . . . there’s terror. King calls that the finest emotion of all. And in that—we are in agreement.”

“All right. So what does this have to—”

Ian kept going. “Yeah, so here’s how he describes terror. It’s the cold hand that touches you in the dark. It’s coming home and realizing all the furniture in your house has been replaced by furniture that’s exactly the same. It’s the knowledge that reality is tearing away underneath you. That there’s a dark place underneath it that has nothing to do with you, except that it maybe wants to eat you.

“That, Ann, is the nub of it. It’s more complicated than that. But that is what we all share—and what you and I share too.”

“I don’t think we share anything.”

“Well it may be true that we don’t share the sexual component. If that’s what you’re guessing.”

“Hirsch seemed to think that there was more to poltergeists than sex, though.”

“Yes,” said Rickhardt, “he does. I think it’s fair to say that the American guys like to think about it that way. I think it’s in their national character; they can only enjoy something if they pin it to manifest destiny, divine will. So of course, the ’geists are a gateway to the divine. What else did he tell you?”

“He told me about you,” said Ann. “He said he’d protect me from you.”

Ian smirked. “Those guys can be pretty judgmental down there in the sunshine state. But you knew enough to not fall into his arms, didn’t you?”

“The Insect decided that for me.”

“It made the right choice. They have a place outside of St. Augustine. Visited there once. They were inducing comas at the time. They thought it enhanced things; unleashed the Id or some shit. But it was a bad idea. I don’t think they’re doing that anymore. But still. Nowhere you’d want to go.”

“So terror,” said Ann. “You’re telling me that this is a kink for terror.”

“It sounds so tawdry when you reduce it to that. The Americans take it too far in the other direction, maybe. But there’s a big difference between what we do in these walls . . . and what goes on at a German fetish bar, say. Those people are playing a game, with their leather costumes and safe words.

“We’re doing the real thing, Ann. When we stare into the abyss—it really is staring back.”

“And yet, in the end it simply arouses you sexually.”

“There you go again, being all reductive.”

“Is there a more nuanced way that I should be thinking about this?”

Ian opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head and smiled, a little sheepishly.

“So it’s like
really
raping children rather than just looking at child pornography,” said Ann, “if you were a pedophile, I mean.”

“A ’geister,” said Ian, not smiling now, “is what I am.”

“That’s a cute name,” said Ann. “But I’m willing to bet that when I came to you ’geisters’ attention, I wasn’t much more than eight years old. Hirsch told me that much . . . that they’d been watching me for some time. And there’s that little girl I met. With what—Mister Sleepy? Tell me—is Dr. Sunderland a ’geister too? I remember that Philip warned me about him. Did he touch
Philip?”

“Wow,” said Ian, “cards on the table.”

Behind him, the sky was lightening. Ann could see it resolving behind the bare branches of the denuded woods around here. The tree branches descended down beneath the floor so it became clear that this wasn’t just a covered walkway between buildings. They were on an enclosed bridge, crossing a ravine.

“He at least worked for you, didn’t he? We thought he was helping us—but he wasn’t, was he?”

“He was helping you,” said Ian. “You either would have burned down your house or been in the nuthatch within a year if you hadn’t gone there. Sunderland put your ’geist, the Insect, someplace safe. Someplace where it couldn’t hurt anybody, and nobody could hurt it.”

“And it worked great.”

“It worked for a long time. We should’ve been following closer. The accident . . . that should’ve tipped us off. But it didn’t fit the profile. So you got away from us for a while.”

“And then—Michael.”

“He was a good kid,” said Ian.

“He was a rapist. A fucking liar,” said Ann.

Ian nodded in agreement. “He was a liar. He had an agenda in your marriage that he didn’t tell you about. But I’ll tell you—he would’ve treated you well, if he’d had the chance.”

“How would that have worked? He’d keep me in white wine and video games upstairs, while he and his friends, what—terrified each other to orgasm in the rumpus room?” Ann shook her head. “Where the hell did you find him, anyway? And did you promise me to him? It really did seem as though we just met, the way . . . you know,
normal
people meet.”

“Michael I found on the internet,” said Ian. “You think of us as this terrible secret society, and while it’s true that we communicate—really, it’s not a big secret. We’re a community. We have websites and chat rooms just like anybody.”

“How perfectly innocent of you.”

“Well I wouldn’t go that far. But we pay attention to those chatrooms—because that, really, is just the modern variation of how all of us got involved with each other. Me, I was bit old for that. I came to this through EC horror comics, those Warren magazines . . .
Famous Monsters of Film Land
. I met people. . . . Well, Michael just signed himself up on “Spectral Women,” and we started up a friendship. Good thing for him, too—he was still in Capetown, and would’ve got himself killed if he stayed there longer.”

“He didn’t speak a lot about South Africa,” said Ann.

“He was taking a lot of risks. His family had a bit of money. His dad was a lawyer, like him. He’d had a post with the government, during Apartheid, gone into practice afterward. They had a nice big house. A compound, really. You could spend your whole life there, not step out at all. Got the sense it was designed for that; Mr. Voors had some enemies. Or at least, he thought he did.”

Ann’s fists clenched, but she kept them at her side.
You have some enemies too, Rickhardt
. “What risks did he take?” she asked.

“There was something going on around his house—maybe those enemies at work. Michael told me about some experiences he’d had as a little kid. Faces at his windows; cold drafts. It might have been the real thing. It probably was. And it was terrifying. But of course—”

“—he got to like it.”

“He did,” said Ian. “He saw it all as a mystery at first, like he was in one of those boy detective books, where the haunting would turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation for the thing that he saw.”

“What did he see?”

“Would it help you understand if I said Michael saw a beautiful, naked girl?” Ian chuckled. “I don’t know exactly what he saw. I’m sure he didn’t know exactly what he saw. He was only twelve, when he started into it.”

“That’s young,” said Ann, and Ian gave her a look that she couldn’t quite apprehend.

“Ten years later, he could have learned everything he needed to know with a Google search. As it was, he did his work the old-fashioned way. He left the compound. He went to the library. Started asking around. He visited shops. Found out about séances, and covens, and ‘secret ceremonies.’ Got him robbed a couple of times. Could have got him killed, given the times. Finally, years later, he got himself mixed up with a
sangoma
—a witch doctor, sort of a healer woman.
She
was a beautiful girl, now. Not much older than him.”

“Did she seduce him?”

“Oh, in a way. But by that time, he’d found the websites—the chatrooms. She was showing him things—and he, the little idiot, was taking pictures and telling stories and bringing them to us, uploading them to a room we had running on GEnie.”

“What?”

“Before your time,” said Rickhardt. “But the point is, they were up there. Where anybody could see. That was when I noticed him. They were real treasures. There was one in particular—of a human femur, dug out of a grave it looked like, floating in the air above a woman, who was floating herself, just a foot off the ground. It was taken in a Capetown slum, in what looked like early morning. The sun made it all golden. I got in touch with him directly, because I wanted to know if it had been manipulated. He offered to show me the negative.”

“Negative?”

“He shot it on film,” said Ian. “No camera phones in those days.”

“That sounds risky,” said Ann, and Ian allowed as it was.

“I tried to steer him away from that—if nothing else, it wasn’t making it any easier with his family, who didn’t like him consorting with the
sangoma
and her friends, and there was trouble there too. Michael very nearly didn’t make it out of there. Do you know what necklacing is?”

Ann nodded. “Michael told me about it on our first date,” she said. “He didn’t use the term. He just called it a tire thing. But I looked it up.”

Back when that was the worst thing that I thought Michael brought to this relationship.

“Yeah, it’s never far from his mind. You fill up a tire with gasoline, put it around your victim’s neck and light it on fire. Watch him die. It takes a long time.

“They got as far as pouring the gasoline in the tire and putting it over his head, before they let him go. It was a warning. He’d followed his
sangoma
girl to an exorcism for a little girl. The family had been ANC, during Apartheid, and they were, shall we say, private people. They caught him taking pictures. They wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again, but didn’t quite want to kill him. Still—the display made an impression.”

“He didn’t tell me about that part.”

“Of course he didn’t; he was ashamed of what he did. He was a liar, and he was compelled toward these things . . . the ’geists. That compulsion—we all accept it, but nobody’s proud of it. But he wasn’t some monster. None of us are.” Ian rubbed the back of his neck and looked outside, over Ann’s shoulder. What was he looking for? “Most of what he was, you knew: an immigrant from South Africa who took his law degree at Osgoode and didn’t speak with his father anymore. I sponsored him, and I helped him with his tuition, and he stayed with me in Toronto while he was studying, and he became—yes, like a son to me.”

“And from pretty early on, you had him zeroed in on me.”

“It was all he ever wanted,” said Ian. “He would have treated you well.”

Dawn broke over the woods. It was a winter sky, although winter had not yet come. Ann wondered if it would storm. She thought that it should. Storm had followed her from Alabama, through the midwest and across the border, in hail and rain and funnel clouds. It should be here now.

But there was no storm outside; thin branches reached up from the depths in a deathly stillness. The clouds overhead hung quiet and thin. It all lay beyond clean, dry glass. There were no messages for Ann, or anyone, in this landscape.

Ian was watching the landscape too. In the morning gloom, he seemed hunched, small, and very old. His face was sallow, and dark rings cradled his eyes, which cast over treetops—looking for any sign of life out there. It seemed, for that instant, as though the breath caught in both their throats, each of them trapped in droplets of psychic amber: a kind of limbo. Neither of them wanted to take
a step further. They’d been killing time at the threshold, telling ghost stories about Michael Voors here at the end of the night.

Now the light had come.

Ann imagined them on another bridge—the one that she needed to cross every time she needed to obtain entry to the Insect’s prison. The pallid morning light grew over the ravine, and it seemed as though the treetops themselves sank as the earth distended below them. The plate glass on either side might as well have been open gallery windows, extended from the flagstone floor to the thatch and timber roof, separated by Grecian columns, wrapped in dark ivy. The door at the end was thick oak, bound in iron, held tight by a bar, and twelve sturdy locks. And the light, awful and sickly as it was, filled the hallway here and gave it its name.