The Haunting of James Hastings (40 page)
Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online
Authors: Christopher Ransom
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense
Safe
, I can’t help but think on Rick’s couch.
, I can’t help but think on Rick’s couch.
They roll forward until the camera moves over the garage, up to the back of Whitey, which is dark inside every window. It’s got to be three or four in the morning.
‘This isn’t a party,’ Rick says. ‘It’s dead.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Annette says. ‘What if he lives here? This is, like, his LA crash pad or some fucking thing. He’s probably got some whore in there.’
‘Annette, no. You’re not going up there. He’ll shoot you.’
‘Oh, stop it.’
‘And it will be legal. You’re not getting out of the car.’
She doesn’t say anything for a minute. ‘But he has to come back out sometime, doesn’t he?’
Daylight. A sunny morning, maybe eight or nine. The garage door is opening. We are twenty or thirty feet down the alley from the garage and fence that surrounds our backyard.
‘Wakey wakey,’ Annette says, and turns the camera to her brother.
Rick is sleeping in the driver’s seat, his head leaning into the ball of his leather jacket. He looks pale, unwell. The rusty stubble along his chin is showing the first signs of gray. He does not wakey wakey.
‘You’re no fun,’ Annette says. She turns the camera toward the windshield again and sets it on the dashboard, like a cop camera catching footage of a speeder who’s just been pulled over. Up ahead in the alley I see the couch, the riot orange couch with sprung cushions, a shoe, some cinderblocks and a pile of rotting grass clippings. Every so often, but not often enough, a car or two passes the mouth of the alley, people leaving the neighborhood, cutting through side streets before they meet up with the real morning rush hour on Washington or Venice.
Annette opens her door and leaves it open. At first I think I am imagining it, but no. I can actually hear the faint sound of another motor growling. It’s the Audi, hidden in the garage.
Annette walks ahead of her car, strutting in her dress and bare feet. For any other woman, this would be the walk of shame. Annette moves as if she is just now starting to have fun.
The garage door is up. The Audi’s white trunk backs slowly into the alley. Annette prances out, blocking its path. The red brake light glows. The car doesn’t move for half a minute. Stacey must be checking the rearview mirror, trying to decide what this means, who this woman is, what’s wrong. Annette just stands there, arms hanging at her sides, feet planted.
Stacey emerges, on foot. She is wearing her vanilla cargo pants, a nice V-neck t-shirt with a chic tie-dye print, her hair pulled back in a loose tail too short to qualify as a pony’s. Her yellow-framed sunglasses sit high up on her head. She approaches Annette slowly, and I know from her posture she is concerned but cautious, willing to help this strange woman. Stacey stops about six feet away, both women in profile now.
Annette says something. Stacey doesn’t respond. Annette keeps speaking, her lips moving soundlessly. Stacey is tensing, her shoulders bunching up the way they do. She crosses her arms defensively. Annette keeps speaking, her head now Oprah-thrusting, berating Stacey. She points at the house, stabbing with her finger, then at Stacey.
Stacey looks back over her shoulder for help, shakes her head. She steps forward, giving it back now, speaking forcefully. Annette slaps the sunglasses off the top of Stacey’s head. Stacey recoils, putting a hand to her face. She disappears into the garage for a moment and reappears with her cellphone. Stacey shakes the phone at Annette in a threatening manner. Annette stabs her finger at Stacey twice more, then turns on her heels and marches back to the car.
Stacey begins typing something into her phone. She is theatric, looking at Annette’s car, for a split second at me (and for a split-split second her eyes meeting mine are skewers through my guilty heart), then back down at the phone. She’s getting the license plate, typing it into her phone.
Annette makes it back to the car. I hear but do not see her yank the driver’s side door open, and imagine Rick toppling out.
‘Move over!’
‘Whuh? What happened? What’s wrong?’ Rick says, waking up.
‘Get out of the way. I’m driving.’
There is a shuffling sound as Rick gets out of the way. The engine starts.
Up ahead, Stacey has put the phone to her ear and turned back to the garage.
‘That fucking bitch is writing down the license plate,’ Annette says.
‘Who?’ There is a pause during which I assume Rick notices Stacey. ‘Jesus. Who the hell is that?’
‘She says she doesn’t know him, but she’s lying,’ Annette snaps. ‘She’s hiding him. He’s not getting away with this.’
‘What did you do?’ Rick moans.
‘Make sure you get this in case he assaults me. I want it on record.’
‘Have you lost your mind?’ Rick says, quietly.
‘Do it!’
Rick picks up the camera.
Stacey steps back into the alley. She has the phone to her ear, possibly giving a description of the car. Or calling me. Maybe this is the 9.12 message. She paces, disappears back into the garage.
Rick says, ‘You said only if he was alone. I’m not with you on this. Not with her.’
‘All right, all right, screw it,’ Annette says. ‘We’ll come back later.’
The car revs, pops into gear and speeds forward.
It’s fifty feet from the garage. Then twenty.
Ten.
Stacey steps out and jerks back, her body going rigid as they clip her with the right front fender. She spins out of view and Annette brakes. The sound of the impact is dull, the sound of an apple thrown at a barn.
‘Fuck!’ Annette screams. ‘No!’
Stacey is nowhere in sight. No one moves or reacts.
‘Where did she go?’ Rick says very quietly.
Annette doesn’t answer.
‘For fuck’s sake, back up! She could be under the car!’
‘Don’t yell at me!’ Annette shouts.
Their car surges forward, then back, reversing with a whine. They stop a little more than half the distance to where they started. One of them is breathing hard. Stacey is not in the alley.
‘Relax,’ Annette says. ‘We barely grazed her.’
Stacey staggers out of the garage. She is holding her hip and limping. I can’t see any blood. She’s looking back at them in disbelief and shock and, yes, I know that look, boiling anger. She’s fucking steamed now, ready to throw down.
‘You fucking bitch!’ Stacey screams. Her voice is dim, far away, but still clearly audible from inside this car. ‘You’re dead! My husband’s going to kill you!’
Rick babbles on. ‘Too many people involved, can’t clean this up, not in this—’
‘You’re already guilty,’ Annette says. ‘I’ll give them your name, too.’
‘Turn off the car and give me the keys.’
‘Just let me think,’ Annette says. She is no longer in a rage. She is calm.
Stacey’s hand is shaking. She can’t dial. She holds the phone with both hands, concentrating, then staggers and covers her mouth. Wailing, she points the phone at them, then looks back to the garage. She’s talking to someone. Help is coming.
Someone else is in the garage.
Rick yells, ‘It’s over! We have to leave!’
The white shade slides out of the garage, he’s suddenly there.
Holding Stacey. A man.
‘I knew it! That lying cunt!’ Annette’s voice goes guttural. ‘He’s dead, fucking dead.’
Ghost. Ghost in his red track pants and his bare feet, rushing to her side, holding Stacey up, and his hair is cowlicked, a bedhead mess, but blond, white-blond, and his arms and bared abdominals are painted with tattoos. She falls to his shoulder and he holds her. She’s safe, she will be safe now. He reaches into his waistband and his right arm comes up with a gun in hand. It’s his favorite gun, black and square-nosed, a Glock 27. He’s turning, pushing Stacey back toward the garage but he can’t stop looking back at the psycho people in the alley.
‘C’mon!’ he yells. ‘Get out of the car! I dare you!’
‘Kill her, fucking shoot the bitch!’ I scream in the basement. My back is grinding bones of broken glass agony and I am ass-hopping on his couch, screaming at the plasma window to the world.
‘I told you he’d have a gun,’ Rick says, and the camera jostles. ‘Back up!’
Annette does not back up.
The engine revs and everything lurches into gear.
Ghost is turning Stacey around with one arm and holding the gun at them with the other as the distance closes. The Glock goes off -
POP-POP!
- and Stacey shrinks into a ball, falling from his embrace. The windshield is cracked and two holes appear in it and Ghost screams and a third shot
POPS
and Annette screams and the collision is astounding. Stacey is just a dull sound and Ghost jumps forward, leaping head-first as if he is going to fly over the car like Superman, but he isn’t, his head bounces off the top of the windshield and he crumples in midair, then folds over the hood before flying off it and disappearing under the front of the car. Annette slams the car into a telephone pole, smashing Stacey my love and the camera flies free and ricochets off the spider-webbed windshield and falls to the floor.
POP-POP!
- and Stacey shrinks into a ball, falling from his embrace. The windshield is cracked and two holes appear in it and Ghost screams and a third shot
POPS
and Annette screams and the collision is astounding. Stacey is just a dull sound and Ghost jumps forward, leaping head-first as if he is going to fly over the car like Superman, but he isn’t, his head bounces off the top of the windshield and he crumples in midair, then folds over the hood before flying off it and disappearing under the front of the car. Annette slams the car into a telephone pole, smashing Stacey my love and the camera flies free and ricochets off the spider-webbed windshield and falls to the floor.
A man is moaning. The engine revs and the car reverses again. As it does, the camera view - of the seat or the carpet, I can’t tell which - flips with a double bounce that makes someone scream grotesquely. They have just gone over a very large bump on one side.
Rick is moaning harder now.
‘Be quiet!’ Annette says, ‘Or I’ll fucking kill you too!’
The idle of their engine.
The screen goes black.
Steady on the ground, the weedy alley gravel and oil-stained dirt. Everything is quiet. Pan slowly. Ghost is lying on his back. He is bleeding from his ears and mouth and nose. His chest is not rising or falling. His eyes are blank, unblinking, looking up toward the sky, and one of them is filled with red, a pool of blood in and around the eyeball. A large black ant crawls over his chin and down his neck.
‘Do you see that?’ Annette says. Her voice is dull, heavy, sexual. No one answers her. ‘Look who’s a Ghost now.’
The camera slowly pans to the right. Stacey is arranged next to him. She is worse than he is. She is the Stacey of my nightmares. Stacey as I found her. They are shoulder to shoulder. They could be lying on a bed together.
‘That’s just a shame,’ Annette says. ‘That’s what he gets for cheating on his wife.’
There is a sound of scraping somewhere. The sound of something heavy dragging across dirt. A roll of carpet flops over Stacey and Ghost and the weeds next to the orange couch. Rick’s hairy hands withdraw.
‘Ding dong, the Ghost is dead,’ she says.
They stand in silence.
‘We have to go now,’ Rick says. ‘This is a neighborhood. ’
Annette makes a disgusting throat sound. A ball of white spit flies onto the carpet and skips twice dryly before smearing in the soot and dirt.
‘That’s for Aaron, you demon fucker.’
For a while there is only the faint humming of wind on the mic, a lament that rises and fades. Time elapses. The television goes black.
Everything goes black.
36
I sat in the darkness, feeling something irreversible leach out of me as I coughed on the choking bile of my tears. Stacey was gone and I didn’t understand. Stacey was dead and I did not understand. There had to be more. Something was missing. I could not have seen what I had just seen. But I knew that I had finally been granted all,
seen the thing
, the missing support beam that had buckled under us, that was it, the end, my beautiful friend. Gone.
seen the thing
, the missing support beam that had buckled under us, that was it, the end, my beautiful friend. Gone.
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