that can't be! How could it possibly get in there?'
'The spirits didn't say how, Ms. Moon,' Ifasen told her. 'They simply said where.'
'I've gotta go! I've so gotta get home and check that vase!' She ran up to the podium and threw her arms around her psychic. 'Ifasen, you're the best, the greatest!' She turned to Jack and Gia and Karyn and Claude. 'Isn't he fantastic! Isn't he just so incredible!'
Jack joined the applause. Nothing incredible about Ifasen, but he was good. He was very good.
3
'Sweet Jesus!' Lyle Kenton said when their uninvited guests were finally gone. He'd already dropped his Ifasen persona; now he dropped into the recliner in the upstairs sitting room and rubbed his eyes. 'What happened here tonight?'
His brother Charlie, no longer the subservient Kehinde, gave him a reproachful look from where he leaned against the couch, taking tiny sips from a Diet Pepsi. That was the way he drank: no gulps, just lots of quick, tiny sips.
'Ay, yo, Lyle. I thought you was eighty-sixin' it with taking the Lord's name in vain.'
Lyle waved an apology with one hand and twisted one of his dreads in the other as he reran the past hour through his brain. Not the laid-back Friday night he'd planned. He and Charlie had been sitting in the living room, channel surfing in. search of something watchable on the tube when Junie Moon had come a-knockin'.
'I tell you, Charlie, when I saw Moonie standing there on the front porch with that crowd behind her, I thought we were cooked. I mean, I figured she'd tumbled to your little visit and brought down the heat.'
Of course, on further reflection, he'd realized that if it really had been the heat, Junie Moon wouldn't have been with them.
'Coulda been worse,' Charlie said, pacing back and forth in front of the couch, a deep purple velvet affair that had come with the house. Everything in the room-the furniture, the upright piano, the murky landscapes in gilded frames on the walls-had been here when they'd bought it ten months ago. 'Coulda been the banger who done the drive-by.'
Lyle nodded, feeling his neck tighten. Just last Tuesday night he'd been standing by the picture window in the waiting room downstairs when a bullet whizzed right by his head. It had punctured the pane without shattering it, leaving a hole surrounded by a small spiderweb of cracks. He'd dug it out of the wall, but since guns weren't his thing, he couldn't tell what' caliber it was. All he could be sure of was that it had been meant for him. The incident had left him shaken and more than a little paranoid. He'd kept the curtains pulled ever since.
The reason, he knew, was that a lot of well-heeled clients had started migrating from the Manhattan psychics to Astoria since Lyle had joined the game. None of those players was happy about it. A slew of angry, threatening, anonymous phone calls over the past few weeks had made that clear. But one of them-hell, maybe a group of them-had figured that phone calls wouldn't cut it and decided to play rough.
But Lyle hadn't called the police. They say the only bad publicity is no publicity, but this was an exception. A sensational story about his being shot at could be pure poison. People might stay away for fear of being caught in the middle of a shoot-out between warring psychics. He could imagine the quips: A trip to this psychic might put you a lot closer to the dearly departed than you intended.
Oh, yes. That would be a real boon to business.
But worse was the gut-clawing realization that someone wanted him dead.
Maybe not dead, he kept telling himself. Maybe the shot had been a warning, an attempt to scare him off.
He'd find that easier to believe if he'd been in another room at the time.
Nothing else had happened since. Things would settle out. He just had to keep his head down and give it time.
'But it wasn't,' Lyle said. 'It was just Junie Moonie and friends. So there I was, just starting to relax after finding out she's here because she can't wait till tomorrow for her session. I open the door, and what happens? Bam! The world starts to shake. I gotta tell you, bro, I almost lost it.'
Charlie's grin had a sour twist. 'I know you lost that busta accent.'
'Did I?' Lyle had to smile. He'd been affecting a mild East African accent for so long now-used it twenty- four/seven-that he'd thought his Detroit ghetto voice dead and buried. Guess not. 'Shows how much I was worried about you, man. You're my blood. I didn't want this whole house comin' down on your head.'
'I 'predate that, Lyle, but Jesus was with me. I wasn't afraid.'
'Well, you should have been. An earthquake in New York. Whoever heard of such a thing?'
'Maybe it's a warning, Lyle,' Charlie said, still pacing and sipping. 'You know, the Lord's way of telling us to get tight.'
Lyle closed his eyes. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. You were so much more fun before you got religion.
My fault, he supposed. My bad.
A few years ago, when they'd been working a low-budget spiritualist storefront in Dearborn, a faith healer came to town and he and Charlie had gone to see how the guy worked his game, Lyle had kept his eye on all the wheelchairs the healer had brought along, and how his assistants would graciously offer them to unsteady looking old folks who tottered in-the same folks who'd 'miraculously' be able to walk again after the healer prayed over them. While he was doing that, his younger brother had been listening to the sermon.
Lyle had gone home and written up notes for the future when he opened his own church.
Charlie had bought a Bible at the tent show, brought it home, and started reading it.
Now he was a Born Again. A True Believer. A Big Bore.
They used to make the bars together, pick up women together, do everything together. Now the only things that seemed to interest Charlie were reading his Bible and 'witnessing.'
Yet no matter what he did or didn't do, Charlie was still his brother and Lyle loved him. But he'd liked the old Charlie better.
'If that earthquake was the Lord's work and aimed at us, Charlie, he sure shook up a lot of people besides us.'
'Maybe lots of people besides us need shaking up, yo.'
'Amen to that. But what was with that scream? You've got to let me know when you're going to pull a new gag. The house shaking and the ground rumbling were bad enough, but then you throw in the scream from hell and everyone was ready to run for the river.'
'Didn't have nothing to do with no scream,' Charlie said. 'That was the fo' reals, bro.'
'Real?' In his heart Lyle had known that, but he'd been hoping Charlie would tell him different. 'Real what?'
'Real as in not something I cooked up. That sound didn't come from no speakers, Lyle. It come from the house.'
'I know. A bunch of these old beams shifting in the quake, right?'
Charlie stopped his pacing and stared at him. 'You connin' me? You really gonna sit there and tell me that sounded like wood creaks to you? Betta recognize that was a scream, man. A human scream.'
That was what it had sounded like to Lyle too, but it couldn't have been.
'Not human, Charlie, because the only humans here besides you and me were our uninvited guests, and they didn't do it. So it just sounded human, but wasn't.'
'Was.' Charlie's pacing picked up speed. 'Come from the basement.'
'How do you know that?'
'I standin' by the door when it went down.'
'The basement?' Lyle felt a chill ripple along his spine. He hated the basement. 'Why didn't you tell me?'
'Didn't 'xactly have time. We had guests, remember?'
'They've been gone for a while now.'
Charlie looked away. 'I knew you'd wanna go check it out.'
'Damn right, I do.' He didn't, not really, but no way he was going to sleep tonight if he didn't. 'And would you sit down or something? You're making me nervous.'
'Can't. I'm too jumpy. Don't you feel it, Lyle? The house has changed, yo. Noticed it soon as we come back
