A shard of ice passed through Jack’s heart. He snapped around, half-expecting to lay eyes on some strange female gawking at him from the shadows.
Nothing.
Boxes, storage trunks, lamps, old armoire, furnace, oil tank, small workbench, Christmas decorations, washing machine, and dryer. No demon woman. The room was empty of any other presence.
Then from behind him he heard the voice again:
Jack bolted straight up, the album tumbling to the floor. For a moment he stood perfectly still, his body throbbing to the fright in his blood. He took a deep breath and slowly turned to get a fix on the voice, certain that it came from the shadows by the furnace. He crossed the floor by the workbench. Who the hell would be down here, and why hide in the shadows and sing?
He removed a ball-peen hammer from the pegboard. His heart took a huge surge of blood as he crossed the stairs and looked up to the light of the kitchen.
Jack let out a shuddering gasp. “Who-who’s there?”
This time he was dead certain. A woman’s voice, and not just in his head but in his ears. Real sound that still registered vibratory stimulation. Real sound: A clear, thin female voice singing. But not from the kitchen.
He moved into the cellar, his fingers in a tight, cold grip on the hammer. Jack didn’t know the people who owned the house, nor did he know anything about them. The arrangements had been made by Vince, who said that personal problems had forced the couple to move out of state with their daughter. But it crossed Jack’s mind that those personal problems could mean that said woman of the house was psycho and had sneaked back home and was hanging somewhere in the shadows.
Jack moved toward some tall furniture against the far wall. “Okay, game’s up.”
An involuntary cry fluttered up Jack’s windpipe. The woman’s voice was right on top of him. He snapped around, his hand fused to the hammer, but he could not get a direction. He dipped his head into the black gaps between the furnace and the armoire. He wished he had a flashlight. “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”
Nothing.
He tapped the doors of the armoire with the hammer. “Come out, goddamn it.”
Nothing.
He raised the hammer and snapped open the door. The armoire was lined with shoe boxes, but nothing else. He walked toward the rear of the cellar. “All right, I’m calling the police.”
Nothing.
He circled back toward the laundry table.
Jack froze. Movement. He saw movement. He was standing before the opening to a small recess that decades ago had served as a storage room for coal.
“I see you, goddamn it,” he said to the shadows, the hammer in his fist ready to swing if some lunatic woman rushed him. “Get out here!” His heart pounded so hard he had trouble putting breath in his words.
In the coal room hung an old wooden framed mirror, resting at a tipsy angle, the glass cracked and smoky. But he could see himself clearly, his pale face, his eyes like holes in his skull, the solid-bodied silver hammer in his hand.
As he stood there contemplating his image, he heard the thin falsetto. But this time she wasn’t singing.
Jack let out a shudder.
In the reflection he saw his mouth form the syllables, their sounds piercing his ears like slivers of glass. His voice. His voice. He could still feel the muscle sensations in this throat. He could hear the vibrations in his ears.
A black rush of horror passed through him. He had spoken—or someone or something had spoken through him, as if from another brain. Or worse: He really
What made him all the more horrified was the realization that the words he had uttered were not words he comprehended. They were a foreign language. But he was certain that the words were those of his long dead relatives and ancestors. That he had spoken Armenian.
Disbelief flooded his mind because Armenian was a language he did not know, had never learned, had never spoken. Yes, he recognized phonemes and sound patterns picked up from friends of his aunt and uncle when he was a kid. But he was no more conversant in Armenian than he was in Danish or Inuit. But he would bet his life that the words he had uttered were Armenian.
Jack turned off the light and went upstairs one step at a time, thinking that this had nothing to do with medication or blood pressure or tricks of the light and that, given the option, he preferred to think there had been a crazy woman down there and not that he was going insane.
62
JACK SAT BY THE PHONE STARING at Dr. Heller’s number and running through his head what he would tell her: That yesterday he had had a bout of auditory hallucinations—that he was in his cellar, and suddenly he began hearing a woman singing in a voice that appeared to emanate from inside his own head.
Some kind of seizures like what that pharmacist woman, Rene Ballard, had said the dementia patients were experiencing on that new Alzheimer’s drug. Maybe just a coincidence, maybe there was a connection. She had called them flashbacks.
For maybe a full fifteen minutes he sat by the phone. If he told her straight out what had happened, she’d call him in immediately, set him up with neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, dementia specialists, flashback experts, whatever, then submit him to another battery of tests, put his head in the MRI hole again, wire it for bugs. But, frankly, he just didn’t want to go through all that. Besides, he had a scheduled appointment next week. He’d leave it at that.
In the meantime, he’d keep out of the cellar.
The bad news was that because he refused to take any more sleeping pills, Jack had traded bad visions for insomnia. For the next five nights he logged no more than twenty hours of sleep, some nights getting maybe two, spending the remaining hours twisting in his sheets until dawn. He even went online and found a Web site for insomniacs that offered a list of a dozen sleep-inducing strategies: take a warm bath; listen to soft music; drink warm milk at bedtime; visualize something boring … He tried them all, but nothing worked. He just became more
