Ghosts

Carella was in no mood for a confrontation with a restless spirit looking for a John. What did one do when staring down a ghost? He had not held a crucifix in his hands for more years than he cared to remember, and the last time he’d had a clove of garlic around his neck was when he’d had pneumonia as a child and his grandmother had tied one there on a string to ward off the evil eye. Besides, were you supposed to treat ghosts like vampires, driving stakes into their hearts and returning them to their truly dead states? Did they even have hearts? Or livers? Or kidneys? What the hell was a ghost? And besides, who believed in them?

Carella did.

He had never been so frightened since the day he’d walked in on a raving lunatic wielding a hatchet, the man’s eyes wide, his mouth dripping spittle, someone’s severed hand in his own left hand, dripping blood onto the floor as he charged across the room to where Carella stood frozen in his tracks. He had shot the man six times in the chest, finally dropping him an instant before the hatchet would have taken off his nose and part of his face. But how could you shoot a ghost? Carella did not want to go up to the second story of this house. Hillary was already halfway up the stairs, though, and neither did he want to be called chickenshit. Why not? he thought. Call me chickenshit, go ahead. I’m afraid of ghosts. This goddamn house was carried here stick by stick from Salem, where they hanged witches, and I just saw somebody dressed like Rebecca Nurse or Sarah Osborne or Goody Proctor or whoever the hell, and she was wailing for a man named John, and there ain’t nobody here but us chickens, boss. Adios, he thought, and saw Hillary disappear around the corner at the top of the stairs, and suddenly heard her screaming. He pulled his gun and took the steps up two at a time.

Hillary, courageous ghost hunter that she was, had collapsed in a dead faint on the floor. An eerie blue light bathed the second-story hallway. The hallway was icy cold; it raised the hackles at the back of his neck even before he saw the women standing there. There were four of them. They all were dressed in what looked like late-seventeenth-century garments. He could see through them and beyond them to the window at the end of the hallway where snow lashed the ancient leaded panes. They began advancing toward him. They were grinning. One of them had blood on her hands. And then, suddenly, a sound intruded itself from someplace above—the attic, he guessed. He could not make out the sound at first. It was a steady throbbing sound, like the beat of a muffled heart. The women stopped when they heard the sound. Their heads moved in unison, tilting up toward the beamed ceiling. The sound grew louder, but he still could not identify it. The women shrank from the sound, huddling closer together in the corridor, seeming to melt one into the other, their bodies overlapping and then disappearing entirely, sucked away by the same strong wind that had banished the specter below.

He squinted his eyes against the wind. It died as suddenly as it had started. He stood trembling in the corridor, Hillary on the floor behind him, snowlight piercing the window at the farthest end, the steady throbbing sound above him. No, it was more like a thumping, the slow, steady thump of—

He recognized the sound all at once.

Someone was bouncing a ball in the attic.

He stood just outside the door to the story above, debating whether he should go up there, thinking maybe somebody was working tricks with lights and wind machines, causing apparitions to appear, a theater of the supernatural, designed to cause a psychic to faint dead away and an experienced detective to stand shaking in his sodden loafers. He told himself there couldn’t be anything like ghosts—but he had already seen five of them. He told himself there was nothing to fear, but he was terrified. Fanning the air with his pistol, he made his way up the steps to the attic. The stairs creaked under his cautious tread. The ball kept bouncing somewhere above him.

She was standing at the top of the stairs. She was no older than his daughter April, wearing a long gray dress and a faded sunbonnet. She was grinning at him. She was bouncing a ball, and grinning, and chanting in tempo with the bouncing ball. The chant echoed down the stairwell. It took him a moment to realize that she was repeating over and over again the words “Hang them.” The ball bounced, and the child grinned, and the words “Hang them, hang them” floated down the stairwell to where he stood with the pistol shaking in his fist. The air around her shimmered, the ball took on an iridescent hue. She took a step down the stairwell, the ball clutched in her fist now. He backed away, and suddenly lost his footing, and went tumbling down the stairs to the floor below. Above him, he heard her laughter. And then, suddenly, the sound of the ball bouncing again.

He got to his feet and turned the pistol up the steps. She was no longer there. On the floor above he could see a blue luminous glow. His elbow hurt where he had landed on it in his fall. He dragged Hillary to her feet, held her limply against him, hefted her painfully into his arms, and went down the steps to the first floor. Above he could still hear the bouncing ball. Outside the house he carried Hillary to where he’d parked the car, the snowflakes covering her clothes till she resembled a shrouded corpse. He heaved her in onto the front seat and then went back to the house—but only to pick up their coats. The ball was still bouncing in the attic.

He heard it when he went outside again, stumbling through the deep snow toward the car. He heard it over the whine of the starter and the sudden roar of the engine. He heard it over the savage wind and the crash of the ocean. And he knew that whenever in the future anything frightened him, whenever any unknown dark terror seized his mind or clutched his heart, he would hear again the sound of that little girl bouncing the ball in the attic—bouncing it, bouncing it, bouncing it.

It was close to 10:00 when they got back to the hotel. The night clerk handed him a message over the desk. It read: Calvin Horse called. Wants you to call him at home. Carella thanked him, accepted the keys to both rooms, and then led Hillary to the elevators. She had been silent from the moment she regained consciousness in the automobile. She did not say a word now on the way up to the second floor. Outside her door, as she unlocked it, she asked, “Are you going straight to bed?”

“Not immediately,” he said.

“Would you like a nightcap?”

“I have to make a call first.”

“I’ll phone room service. What would you like?”

“Irish coffee.”

“Good, I’ll have one, too. Come in when you’re ready,” she said, and opened the door and went into the room. He unlocked his own door, took off his coat, sat on the edge of the bed, and dialed Hawes’s home number. He debated greeting him as Mr. Horse, but he was in no mood for squadroom humor just now. Hawes picked up on the third ring.

“Hawes,” he said.

“Cotton, this is Steve. What’s up?”

“Hi, Steve. Just a second, I want to lower the stereo.” Carella waited. When Hawes came back on the line, he said, “Where’ve you been? I called three times.”

“Out snooping around,” Carella said. He did not mention the ghosts he’d seen; he would never mention the ghosts he’d seen. He shuddered involuntarily now at the mere thought of them. “What’ve you got?”

“For one thing, a lot of wild prints from that pawnshop counter. Some very good ones, according to the lab boys. They’ve already sent them over to the ID Section; we may get a make by morning. I hope.”

“Good. What else?”

“Our man took another shot at it. This time he tried to hock the gold earrings with the pearls. Place on Culver and Eighth. They’re worth close to six hundred bucks, according to Hillary Scott’s list.”