The Ninth Nightmare

They looked around the room one last time. ‘Maybe we should get a sniffer dog up here,’ said Charlie.

‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. But let’s give it twenty-four hours before we start treating Ms Fortales as a missing person. Like I say, she probably went out without the Yarbers seeing her. The best place for us to go now is CWRU, to see if she’s there, or if any of her friends know where she is.’

They went back downstairs. Mr Yarber was still standing in the hallway, with Mrs Yarber close behind him. ‘Well?’ said Mr Yarber. ‘She well and truly vanished into thin air, didn’t she?’

Walter gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile as he headed out the door for the car. ‘Don’t you fret, Mr Yarber. She’ll turn up. There was no foul play carried out in that room, I can assure you.’

‘Now, are we going to Rally’s or not? My triple cheeseburger is getting cold.’

Charlie didn’t start up the engine. ‘How did Maria Fortales get out of the room, Walter? Just explain that to me.’

‘It’s obvious. She wasn’t in the room in the first place.’

‘So how did she lock the door from the inside? And how come her purse was still on her desk? She wouldn’t have gone out without her purse, would she?’

Walter slumped his head forward in defeat, so that his double chins bulged out. ‘She evaporated, OK? That’s how she did it. She just fucking evaporated.’

‘Did you ever see that happen before? Somebody just vanish like that?’

‘No, but this business is all about the inexplicable, isn’t it? We’re not here to explain anything. We’re here to find Maria Fortales and/or anybody who did her any harm. That’s all.’

EIGHT Helpless

Lincoln became aware that somebody was saying his name, over and over — not as if they were trying to wake him, but as if they enjoyed repeating it simply for the way it sounded.

It was a young woman’s voice, soft and modulated. At first he thought she sounded like Grace, his wife, but then he realized that she had a slight accent. She reminded him of a pretty Creole girl who used to work on the reception desk at K-C Records in New Orleans.

He opened his eyes. At first, everything was foggy. He was lying in an unfamiliar room, lit by bright fluorescent strip-lights. Above him there was a polystyrene-tiled ceiling and when he lifted his head a little he saw that three sides of his bed were surrounded by a pale yellow curtain with an interlocking pattern of seabirds on it.

‘Lincoln!’ cooed the young woman’s voice. ‘Lincoln, you’re back with us! I’m so glad!’

He tried to sit up, but for some reason he found that he couldn’t. He felt no pain, but his muscles wouldn’t work. He lifted his head a little more and he could see his feet at the end of the bed, in white surgical socks, but he couldn’t waggle them. This was more than numbness. He felt as if he were completely absent from the chest down, leaving only his head and his arms.

The girl stood up and leaned over him and to his bewilderment it was the Creole girl from K-C records. She was dusky-skinned, with high cheekbones and feline eyes, and her mass of black dreadlocks made her look like Medusa, who could turn men to solid stone. She was wearing a clinging dress in purple jersey with a large amethyst pendant dangling between her breasts and at least a dozen silver bracelets on each wrist.

Lincoln could smell her and she smelled like jasmine flowers on a warm summer evening, in some enclosed courtyard in the French Quarter.

‘Can’t remember your name,’ Lincoln whispered. He gave a dry, abrasive cough, and then he said, ‘What was it? I know… always reminded me of “ukulele”.’

‘Eulalie,’ the girl smiled. ‘Eulalie Passebon.’

‘That’s it, Eulalie. What the hell are you doing here, Eulalie? And come to that, where the hell is here?’

‘You’re in the emergency room at the Case Medical Center, in Cleveland.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve had a very serious accident, Lincoln.’

Again, Lincoln tried to sit up. He could move his arms, and press down against the mattress with his hands, but he could only raise his head a few inches.

‘I can’t move! What happened to me? I don’t remember.’

‘They found you lying on the patio outside of your room at the Griffin House Hotel. You fell, and broke your spine. You’re paralysed — temporarily, at least.’

Lincoln stared at her. ‘Paralysed?’

Eulalie took hold of his right hand and lifted it to her lips and kissed it. ‘I’m so sorry, Lincoln. This was the very last thing I wanted to happen.’

‘Where’s a doctor? I need to see a doctor! What are you doing here? Has anybody called my wife?’

‘Shh,’ said Eulalie. ‘I’ll call for the doctor in just a minute, I promise you. The hospital staff have contacted Grace to tell her what happened to you. She’s flying in from Detroit and she should be here in less than an hour. But first of all it’s very important that you understand what’s happened to you. You need to understand who you are.’

Lincoln began to panic. ‘I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about! I need to see a doctor!’

‘Lincoln—’

‘I’m paralysed, for Christ’s sake! I don’t know how it happened and I’m lying here in this goddamned hospital bed and you’re a goddamned receptionist for a record company in New Orleans. What’s going on? Have I gone crazy, or what?’

‘Lincoln, listen to me. We don’t have much time. Do you remember the man with the gray face and the green lipstick and the long gray hair?’

Lincoln blinked at her. ‘What? I still don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘It was back at the Griffin House Hotel, room one-oh-four. A woman was lying on your bed. She was badly hurt, wasn’t she? Then the bed caught fire and you tried to hide in the bathroom but the man with the gray face and the green lipstick was there, hiding in the shower stall.’

Lincoln said nothing, but continued to stare at her wide eyed. As he did so, a flickering image began to move inside his mind, as if he were remembering a grainy old movie that he had seen a long time ago, in some unfamiliar movie theater.

The gray-faced man stepped out of the shower stall, all spindly and dressed in black, and his lips were painted with green make-up into a mad, pointed grin, even though his real lips were tightly puckered with anger. His voice when he spoke sounded as if he had a mouthful of dry sand.

‘I warned you not to come, now didn’t I? You would not listen to me, though, would you? You out-and-out refused to listen.’

Eulalie said, ‘He came after you with his handsaw, didn’t he? And the room was burning and the door was locked and there was only one way out.’

‘The fire escape,’ Lincoln whispered. Now he remembered.

‘That’s right. And it collapsed, and you fell three stories to the ground. And that’s how you broke your back.’

Eulalie kissed his hand again, and then she said, ‘The hotel staff who found you on the patio, they did the right thing and didn’t try to move you. So the chances of your recovering look pretty good.’

‘That man who came after me, who was he?’

‘We don’t know for sure. But we think he could have been a murderer called Gordon Veitch.’

‘Who?’

‘Gordon Veitch. He raped and killed at least a dozen women in the nineteen-thirties. Maybe it wasn’t the