It took her a moment to catch her breath. She berated herself for her cowardice, for closing the aperture between herself and whatever it was that moved in these rooms. But the feeling of the thing! That ugly sexuality. That desperation. That hungry carnality, swollen, tumescent.
She kept the flashlight on as she stepped shakily into the central room, scanning, probing doorways and shadows. A volatile darkness. She went quickly down the stairs, suddenly hating the house and wanting nothing more than to be out of it. At the bottom of the stairway, she leapt toward the entrance as if the animal thing were pursuing her. She opened the door, slammed it behind her, and didn't stop until she was out on the front walk among the gentle lights and noises of the Garden District. She turned to look back at the house, which seemed to hunker down in its shadows, baleful and loathsome.
No wonder the woman's a wreck, she thought. And again the other side of that hit her: Lila had to have enormous, hidden strength to have done as well as she had in the face of that. Whatever that was.
Cree slipped through the iron gate and shut it behind her, hoping she herself could find comparable strength.
13
Mmmph. Cree. Hi. What's,uh, what's going on?' Edgar's voice was deep and sleep muffled. It would be three A.M. in Massachusetts; even ghost hunters had to sleep sometime. Cree pictured him sitting up in some rumpled hotel bed just like the one she was sitting in, his long face bleary and stubbled as he squinted at the digits of some clock radio just like the one she was squinting at. The image made her feel better.
'I had a real good one. I mean a bad one.'
'One of those, huh.' He sounded muzzy but very much there. It wasn't the first time he'd gotten this kind of call.
'Yeah. Hey, I didn't mean to wake you up – '
'No – no, 's fine. Just a little out of it. You know.' She heard him work his lips, trying to get them functioning. 'You want to talk about it?'
Cree had thought she did, but now realized she didn't. 'No. What I really want is for you to… tell me about something.'
'Like, uh – '
'Something regular that happened. Something, you know… normal. Nice.'
'Nice. Nice. Urn.' Ed took a moment to rally to the challenge.
'Well, today I went into Boston. Never really been to Beantown, thought I'd check things out? Took the T to get around. So I'm there on the platform, waiting for my train, and I look up and there's a sign that says, 'Take the Blue Line to Wonderland.' ' He chuckled. 'It sounds so… psychedelic, or something. Shades of Alice, I don't know.'
Cree chuckled with him. It was very Ed to find amusement in that.'What the hell is Wonderland?' he asked.
'Dog-racing track. Up in Revere.'
'Oh, and then there was this guitarist, playing on the street with his guitar case open, people throwing money in? Mother and her two kids stop to listen, right, and the kids are eating ice-cream cones? And one of the kids drops his cone into the case, blop, right on its head! The mother is mortified. So when she picks it up, it's got coins stuck in the ice cream, I mean it's covered, like those, you know, what do you call them – '
'Jimmies.'
'Yeah, jimmies. What a mess. I mean, what could anybody do? Pick out quarters and dimes one by one, get your hands all sticky? Throw it away? The guy was trying to be nice about it. Fortunately the mother left him a fiver, so maybe it wasn't such a bad deal after all. Funny.' He was silent for a moment. 'Sorry, Cree. Guess I'm kind of sleepy. Can't think of anything really great.'
'No, that's good,' Cree assured him. 'Thanks.'
They were both quiet for a long time. She realized she'd been childish, expecting Edgar to solve her late-night insecurities by long distance.
'Maybe you ought to just tell me about it,' he suggested. He sounded more like his regular self.
'The witness is really on the edge. She's been seeing animals and half-animal, half-human figures. Highly interactive. They chase her and call her name – '
'Oh, man. So you're thinking it's psychological?'
'Well, I was. But I went to the house tonight. I got a really light touch in the library, but then I went upstairs and something came at me, scared the living bejeezus out of me. I'm having a hard time getting rid of it. I didn't really get a good visual, but I got enough to know she's not just hallucinating. I suspect the animals are by-products of the stress of being around the real entity. Whatever it is.'
'But it's a bad one.'
'A nasty one,' Cree confirmed. 'And I've got this unusual degree of identification, I mean, I'm picking up her gestures, I'm – '
'You don't have to do it, Cree. There are lots of screwed up things in the world, it's not your job to take them all on. If this one really gets to you, you should just – '
'No. I can't just leave this woman high and dry. She needs some support on this. She's a person at a critical passage.' Cree sensed dubiousness on the other end of the line. 'Plus, this is totally selfish, but she and I have a lot in common, and I keep thinking if I help her, maybe it's an opportunity to… sort through some of my own stuff.'
Edgar sighed. Cree knew what he was thinking: Cree's losing her borders, the empath doing her job too well. And he was right.
'And there are some unusual elements here, I want to find out what we're dealing with. And I don't like feeling afraid – that what's out there is so awful we can't even look at it.' She knew Edgar agreed with that, philosophically anyway, but he still didn't say anything. So she switched gears, tried to put on a chipper tone. 'Anyway. So how're things at your end?'
'Today's… Sunday? I could be in New Orleans by Tuesday.'
'No. I mean, no hurry. I'm okay, Ed, really. There's a lot more I should do here before we bring in all the artillery. I was just checking in. I shouldn't have called so late.'
'Uh-huh.' Skeptical.
'I feel much better, now. Thanks, Ed. You're the greatest.' She was dodging again, they both knew it, but every word was true. Who else could she call with the heebie-jeebies at three A.M.? 'I'm sorry I woke you up. You always make me feel better. I don't know what I'd do without you.'
'You'd do fine, Cree. The real question is, what're you going to do with me.' Just a little sad, a little miffed, mostly resigned.
And there was no answer to that. Cree thanked him again and told him good night, hoping he'd heard her, hoping it was enough.
Lakeside Manor, where Charmian Beauforte lived, wasn't actually on the lake but several blocks below it, not that far from the Warrens' house and just east of the huge park that stretched down from Ponchartrain toward the center of New Orleans. It was a gated retirement community of splendidly maintained lawns, gardens, and waterways centered around a cluster of private residences and larger common buildings. Cree stopped her car at the gatehouse, waited as the guard verified her appointment, then drove through when he raised the barrier.
Charmian Beauforte's house was one of a dozen similar houses built along a short cul-de-sac. All were one- story modern structures of brick with white trim in what Cree now knew enough to think of as a neoCreole cottage style. She checked her tape recorder and suppressed a twinge of trepidation: Over the telephone, Mrs. Beauforte came across as an aristocratic old bird, rather formidable. Whatever her stroke had done to her ten years ago, it hadn't subdued her pride or dulled her razor tongue.
It was almost eleven o'clock. Cree had awakened at eight to the muffled sound of jackhammers from a road repair crew starting up outside. She'd lurched out of bed and made coffee from the hotel brewing setup, sipping it as she looked down on Canal Street, seven floors below. A pair of cops did white-gloved mime to direct traffic
