“There are a couple of reasons. Some of them haven’t realized yet that they are dead.” He paused again. “And some of them want to impart information to the living.”
It was my turn to pause. “And you resolve this problem . . . for them?”
“It depends.” He shrugged.
“On what?”
“Well, on whether it’s a demon, or whether it’s a ghost or, in your case, whether the things you created— these tortured entities—have somehow manifested themselves into your reality.”
“But I don’t understand,” I was saying. “What’s the difference between a ghost and a demon?”
By the time this question was asked the diner had disappeared. It was only Miller and myself in a booth suspended outside of whatever the real world now meant to me.
“Demons are malicious and powerful. Ghosts are just confused—lost, vulnerable.” Miller abruptly reached into his denim jacket and pulled out a cell phone that had been vibrating. He checked the incoming number and then clicked the phone shut. During this movement he continued talking as if he had given this information a million times before. “Ghosts draw their energy from any number of sources: light, fear, sadness, anguish—these are the things that make the spirit precedent. Ghosts are not violent.”
“Demons are a manifestation of evil, and they haunt people who have carelessly let them into their lives. Remember what I said about antagonism? A demon appears when it feels it has been antagonized, and what it wants to do, its purpose, is to return this antagonism. Demons are angry.”
“You have to help me,” I was saying. “You have to help us.”
“You don’t need to convince me that you’re a frightened man anymore, Mr. Ellis,” Miller said. “I know you are.”
“Okay, okay, okay, now what?”
“I’ll come to your house and determine the nature of the haunting.”
“And then what?” I asked hopefully before saying, “Thank you.”
“If a demonic presence is in your house—and it sounds like it—then you’re in for a battle.”
“Why?”
“Because whatever this is draws on your fear. They draw on the collective fear that is in the house. And depending on the amount of fear, the damage some of these spirits cause can be catastrophic.”
“Why did this happen to me? Why is this happening to me?”
“It sounds as if you’re being haunted by a messenger.” Miller paused. “By your father and by Patrick Bateman and by something you created in your childhood.”
“But what is the message? What does it want to tell me?”
“It could be any number of things.”
The world no longer existed. I was just staring at him. I didn’t feel anything anymore. Everything was gone except for Miller’s voice.
“Sometimes these spirits become whoever
Miller studied me for a reaction. There wasn’t one.
“Do you understand that, Mr. Ellis? That these spirits might be projections from your inner self?”
“I think . . . that I’m being warned . . .”
“By what?”
“By . . . my father? I think my father wants to tell me something.”
“From the information you’ve supplied, this might be very likely.”
“But . . . something is . . . seems to be stopping him . . . like the . . .” I trailed off.
Miller paused. “Who brought the doll into the house, Mr. Ellis?”
“I did,” I whispered. “It was me.”
“And who created Patrick Bateman?”
In a whisper: “I did.”
“And the thing you saw in the hall?”
Another whisper: “Me.”
I was brought back when Miller pushed his pad across the table.
There was something on it he wanted me to see.
I noticed a word spelled in capital letters: T E R B Y.
Below this, the word spelled backward: Y B R E T.
I finally hitched a breath.
“What’s your birthdate, Mr. Ellis?” I heard Miller asking.
“It’s March the seventh.”
Miller tapped the bottom of the notepad with his pen.
Miller had drawn a slash between two numbers.
In red ink: 3/07 Elsinore Lane.
“Could we just move to another house?”
I was panting.
“Can we just get out of the house?”
I couldn’t control it.
“Can we just move somewhere else?”
Miller grabbed my hand to calm me.
“Mr. Ellis, in this case I don’t think that’s an option.”
I couldn’t breathe anymore.
“Why not? Why isn’t it an option?”
“Because the house may not be the source of the haunting.”
I had started weeping again.
“If, if, but, if, the, house, is, is, not the source—”
“Mr. Ellis—”
I could hear Miller but he wasn’t visible.
“But if the house is not the source . . . what is the source of the haunting?”
Miller finally said it.
“You are.”
27. the haunted
The world was now dimmed, a shallow island of light floating in a vast darkness, even though it was noon and we were heading toward the house on Elsinore Lane and I was sitting in the back of a converted van behind two assistants (from what I learned was a staff of twelve, and who could have passed as anonymous computer nerds, with requisite crew cuts, from the college). Dale, who had greeted me with “Wicked bruise,” was driving while Sam rifled through a CD case, and they were carrying on a disagreement about a recent movie—just two dudes on their way to the “preliminary investigation” or the “ISR” (initial site reading) and the casualness of their conversation was supposed to be a calming reminder that this was no big deal, just another assignment. But Miller was overlapping them—the two of us side by side, our knees pressed against a generator— explaining to me where the last haunting had taken his team, a remote location where the ghosts and demons of the dead had congregated: an abandoned slaughterhouse. I didn’t care. I wanted this all to be over as quickly as possible. As usual I pretended it was a dream. This made things easier.
“When should we do this?” I had asked Miller after recovering in the Dorseah Diner. “As soon as possible” was his answer. Outside, standing in the gravel-strewn parking lot (which was slowly becoming a carpet of beach sand), Miller made a series of calls as I watched a new line of palm trees rising in the distance. He followed me back to the Four Seasons, where a valet parked his van, and as we went up to the suite to pick up the keys to the house a fee was discussed. If the house was infested and I wanted to retain his services, a check would have to be written for $30,000, which to me seemed like a bargain. When he asked if I had access to that much money, I assured him, gravely, that I did. But I would have agreed to any amount since I was staring at the ashy footprints
