The Haunting of James Hastings (19 page)

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Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings
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Due to size limitations and imperfections in the pot’s texture, the scientists were able to replay only a total of thirty-two seconds of the accidental recording. In the last seven seconds, immediately after the man began to chuckle, the woman stopped crying, as if surprised to learn she was not alone. There followed, another observer said, ‘a tearing sound, much like the ripping of fabric. And then a sort of wet patter or splashing.’ The recovered track elapsed, not fading out like a song, of course, but simply ceasing, as if someone had lifted the turntable’s needle. A forensic team was brought in to inspect the clay and surface finishing materials, and tests on the faded brown streaks of organic paint taken from the pot proved positive for human blood.
 
‘The research team might have traveled through the acoustics of time only to eavesdrop on a primitive domestic homicide,’ the article’s author concluded.
 
Knowing Ghost and how he liked to embellish the details, this was a true story right up until the woman’s throat was slit. The story haunted me regardless, even though giving me and the rest of his entourage the creeps was not really even the point of his sharing it with us.
 
‘That’s how they’re going to find my shit,’ Ghost said at the end, just before we broke up lunch to return to the sound check. ‘In another two thousand years, some space motherfucker gonna come to earth and dig up civilization we destroyed and hear one of my songs. And when he do, he gonna hear a whole lot more than a woman crying in the background. He will hear humanity from The Source’ (this was another of his self-applied monikers), ‘and then his fellow aliens gonna know what kind of world we made. He gonna know how Ghost’s America liked to roll.’
 
In the wake of all that happened in West Adams, I have wondered if there is an explanation of the underlying mechanics to be found in the realm of acoustic archeology or a similar field. Something hiding between science and the supernatural. When you consider that every CD or vinyl record or downloaded song contains a ghost of the performer, you begin to accept that the soul can embed itself in many more places, and in infinitely interesting ways, than in the human body.
 
But no performance exists without an audience. As the listener we become complicit, a willing participant, and our applause is the natural response to this transfer of energy, the power source that binds artist and fan, continuing the process of absorption. The rabbit was born in the painter’s imagination. He or she transferred the vision to canvas, touching something in Stacey’s heart, until it existed in her imagination too. How many mornings had she toweled off in front of it, casting her warmth back into its surface, into the fibers of its canvas? Did she speak to it? Did she sing in the shower? Did the steam from her showers embed the canvas with molecules of her skin?
 
Paintings, cassette tapes, signatures on paper. The unused film, the eyepiece of her telescope, the worn grooves in the floorboards. Compact discs, portable hard drives, soot-smoked mirrors, the insoles of her shoes. These are vessels, waiting to capture projections. What is a house but a larger vessel, a blank platter of vinyl waiting to be pressed by the recording needle of a human perception? A hard drive waiting for the software? A marriage is an opera written over months, weeks, years, a lifetime if we are lucky. When one of the performers in that opera disappears and her understudy steps in to take her place, it is only natural that the next iteration, the aria or cover song delivered by the understudy, will become warped. The audience must sense something has gone afoul, lost, rearranging the sonic landscape of the mind and the terrain of the heart. What if it doesn’t require years to leave your mark on a house? What if, when the emotions running within reach a fever pitch or trauma is enacted, it can be accomplished in a year? A week? With a single act of violence?
 
When one important player in the scene drops out, does the house experience a vacuum to compensate for the loss? We enter a house for the first time - for a dinner party with friends, with a real estate agent showing a vacancy - and we feel its character instantly. This is a warm house, we say. Or, this house feels sad, empty. How do we know? What part of us resonates to the house so assuredly, so quickly?
 
The vessels are everywhere. Your wife’s voice in your voicemail. The dent in the notepad from her last letter. The bits of data stored from the deleted text message, the residue of her fingerprint oil on the keypad she used to type it. The depression in the pillowcase. The memory of the bedroom, where you made love and left your heart on the ceiling. The ring around the bathtub that never comes clean, no matter how many times you scrub it.
 
Your wife’s blood in the alley. Your wife’s reflection in your new girlfriend’s hair.
 
Whose human silence had I heard on the home phone? How had I called myself to replay my own grieving from six months ago? Had I mistaken another man’s grief for my own? Or had the . . . call it an
anima
, the conspiring energy inside the house . . . translated a message from Stacey? Were these mere echoes from earlier potent events, or was Stacey reaching out to me, reminding me that I had taken a vow of forever?
 
If the emotions and spirits inside us can embed themselves into a house, there must be a technology, organic or manufactured, that can release them. When fate aims a laser at the grooves of our spiraling grief, what do we become? Most importantly, if Stacey was the music, which one of us was the clay pot?
 
The house? Or one of the people inside it?
 
 
I woke with my cheek stuck to the living room’s wood flooring, which peeled away with a tacky sound as I got to my knees. There were drops of blood, but not enough to pool. I rubbed my cheek and traced a trail of dried crust that ran in a crooked line up to my eyebrow, where my fingers stumbled into a hard knob. I hissed, turning slowly, a chill setting deep into my bones. I needed a hot shower. As I shuffled through the foyer on my way to the stairs, a warm draft enveloped me.
 
The front door was wide open, the last of the day’s light thinning on my porch.
 
18
 
I shut the door and took the front stairs without hurry. My body ached as if I had been in a bar fight. I trudged by the landing’s porthole window without stopping - I did not want to see any reflections, my own or hers - and continued up the second set. The hallway was empty. Halfway to the bathroom my pace further slowed, just as it had when I found Annette conked out in the tub. I had also been very near this door when something slapped me on the back. I opened the bathroom door, half expecting to see Stacey sitting on the toilet, embarrassed and angrily waving at the closet, needing a new roll of paper.
 
The bathroom was even darker than the rest of the upstairs, its single window of frosted bricks a blurry charcoal shade. The flap of shower curtain still dangled free of the last three rings. Annette must have grabbed the curtain for balance as she fell. But what caused her to fall? She had blamed exhaustion . . .
 
The rabbits were in their frames, black and white against a green hillside. Did they have a sex? Is that why Stacey had liked them? Had she thought of them as boy and girl, husband and wife? I reached back and ran my hand up the wall, flipping the light switch. The bathroom light did not turn on. I swept up and down twice more, but the spiral fluorescent energy-saver bulb (the kind that was supposed to last five years) in the ceiling socket did not respond. An electrical short, then.
 
I crossed the bathroom until I was close enough to touch the paintings. The rabbit at the bottom might have been female. She had softer eyes and a bit more of a feminine aspect to her shoulders and hindquarters. The small puff of a white tail. The nearly identical rabbit above her was a tad longer, sleeker, possibly younger or male. Little green eyes on both of them, but one visible in profile. There was nothing remarkable about them. A mediocre talent had been commissioned by one of the catalog companies. The same twin paintings were probably hanging in ten thousand homes across America. Whatever had triggered Annette’s reaction, it had been borne of her bruised mind, not these paintings. I was turning toward the mirror when the bathroom light began to glow.
 
My stomach dipped and I turned, expecting to see someone standing in the doorway, one hand on the wall switch, the other raised and ready to slap me again.
 
There was no one in the doorway. The gases inside the fluorescent bulb were brightening the room as they warmed. I did not remember the house having electrical problems. We had put some money into the plumbing, replacing the old knob and tube with new copper, but the electrical had been updated and passed inspection before we signed papers. I was certain of this because I recalled the inspector, a tired old guy named Robert Knapp who wore a plaid-lined Baracuta jacket, a thick class ring that seemed desperate, and bifocals over his inflamed nose. Very knowledgeable fellow, was Knapp. Helpful, polite. He had a cold that day and spoke like he had a throat full of milk. What was the phrase he had used? Oh yes, ‘The electrical is up to par, or better.’
 
Maybe not so up to par after all, Bob.
 
What had I come here for? A shower? I could do that downstairs. I never used this shower any more. I allowed a minute to pass without moving or speaking and my ears began to ring in the silence. It was very faint until I tuned into it, then growing louder, a faraway but approaching whistle. The sound of a tea kettle reaching steam. Where had I heard this before? I was still trying to remember as I returned to the paintings.
 
I staggered back, blinking rapidly. The rabbit in the bottom painting had changed. Her single green eye had become a red marble with only a pinpoint of black for the pupil. I was certain it had been green only a moment ago, but now was the color of grenadine, darkening even as I stared at it. I kept blinking, expecting the light to stop playing tricks with my eyes, but it did not. The male above her was still black and white and his little eye was green, but hers was—
 
Her red eye blinked. The black pupil dilated swiftly.
 
I stepped back and to the right, growing dizzy, and the eye swiveled, following me. Not in the way quality oil paintings seem to meet one’s gaze from any point in a museum room. The rabbit’s red eye
moved
. First right and then, as I attempted to dodge its gaze, to the left, tracking me, toggling like a bearing. I moaned.
 
The rabbit had taken on a glossy sheen, reddening as if fresh paint were thickening upward, outward from the body, soaking the fur. I continued to back away as its coat became completely saturated, until I found myself against the wall, away from the door I had been expecting to exit. The tea kettle piping was rising up through the canals of my ears, making it difficult to string together a coherent thought. I knew that if I were to cross the room again and reach up, my hand would sink through the glass plate - the glass that wasn’t really there now, if it had ever been - and come away wet, my palm smeared with her blood.
 
The rabbit turned her head. Her lips pulled back, revealing two needle teeth and a black nub of tongue. Her expression was that of a hissing cat, her floppy ears tucked flat against her skull. She was screaming, shrieking loud enough to wake the dead, or maybe it was the dead trying to wake the living.
 
I clapped my hands over my ears and jerked back, bumping my head against the wall. The collision seemed to rectify my perceptions, for in an instant the rabbit returned to her previous coloration, the effect being something of a flash card flipped by an invisible hand. Now she was black and white, her eye green and lifeless. The painting was just a painting, a false lure. The high-pitched whistle, however, did not cease, and I realized it was the sound of her screaming, and had not come from the rabbit at all.
 
It was coming from the woman in the ballroom.
 
19
 
As I ran down the hall the screaming escalated and stopped abruptly, leaving only the familiar ringing in my ears. I halted, trying to understand what I was about to walk into, afraid of continuing only to discover that I was too late. I took three tentative steps, heard no further commotion, and walked steadily to the double doors.
 
They were locked. I yanked the knobs, the doors flexed outward, my hand slipped and they rebounded into place. I yanked harder.
 
‘Annette!’
 
I did not know that it had been her screaming, but the alternative was unappealing. She did not answer. I banged on the door, stepped back, raised my leg and kicked as hard as I could and the doors blew open with a satisfying slam. The room was dark, and I kept one arm raised to ward off an attacker, should there be one coming at me from the darkness.
 
When nothing did, I stepped to my right and found the switch, throwing on the chandelier flame bulbs.
 
Annette was standing motionless in the center of the ballroom, with her back to me, arms at her sides. Her blonde hair was whiter than ever and she wore the yellow dress with pink and blue flowers on it.

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