THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  “Time isn’t the same when you’re dead,” said Giselle.

  “Of course, I know that, but—oh, I look terrible!” White tears fell from the statue’s eyes and bounced off the face of the corpse like hailstones.

  Giselle took an unsteady step backward and lowered the statue to the carpet. “Sorry, Mom. You’re just too heavy.”

  The statue made no reply. It stood motionless in the pose it had assumed through all the years Giselle had known it.

  “Mom? Are you still… in there?”

  The statue blinked. “Yes. Sorry. But I need a moment to myself, dear. Seeing myself like that was a bit unsettling. Here, why don’t you take the ring Adah gave me and see if you can’t find something to wear in that suitcase Bing was lugging around.” The statue gave her its emerald ring and went to sit at the side of the room beneath a large basket of gladiolas.

  With the confidence of having a magic ring and the caution of not knowing exactly how to use it, Giselle looked for Bing’s suitcase and found it in a little checkroom to the side of the main entrance. With the ring on she could actually lift the suitcase by its handle, but the ring’s efficacy stopped there. The suitcase was locked, and she couldn’t open it. However, it was a cheap lock, no more than a glorified zipper and, with the leverage of a broomstick, quite easy to snap.

  Bing’s shirts were bright and assertive, like ties that had grown large and sprouted buttons. She set aside two she liked, then tried on a pair of pants. They were impossibly tight. As a teenager Giselle had always been able to wear her brother’s old blue jeans. Had she actually gained that many inches around her middle since then? Or had he got that much thinner?

  Finally she settled for a short orange Dacron-and-cotton bathrobe and repacked the suitcase the way it had been.

  Leaving the checkroom, she saw her husband in the front lounge where people went to sneak cigarettes. He was arguing with two other men. The older of the two looked vaguely familiar. The other, an anxious young man in a dark suit, was probably in charge of the funeral home.

  “Naturally, I understand how you feel, Bob,” said the older man (as soon as he spoke she remembered who he was—Judson Flynn, the Ankers’ family lawyer), “but as I’m sure Mr. McCarron here will agree—” The young man nodded vigorously at this cue. “—what you’re suggesting is simply out of the question. Whatever else, he’s her son, and that gives him every right to be here. Legally.”

  “And morally,” added the young man. Glandier and Flynn ignored him.

  “She wouldn’t have wanted him here,” Glandier insisted angrily. “She’d have thrown him out on his ass.”

  “Actually, Bob, that remains to be seen.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that maybe you’re making an unwarranted assumption about Mrs. Anker’s wishes.”

  “Stop throwing out your goddamn hints, Flynn, and come out with it. Did Joy-Ann change her will? Is that what you’ve been getting at ever since you got here?”

  “All right, Bob, this is strictly in confidence, but that’s about the size of it. It seems Mrs. Anker sent a letter to one of the nuns at Our Lady of Mercy just before she died. So help me, I only heard about it this morning; Sister Rita only got the letter this morning. I’ve read it now, and while I wish that Mrs. Anker had come to me directly, my professional judgment would be that her letter would stand up in court.”

  “So I’m going to be screwed out of the house by that faggot, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No.” Flynn smiled. “Mrs. Anker wanted you to share it, fifty-fifty. Unless he decides to live there.”

  “Fucking hell,” said Glandier, quite loudly.

  “Please, sir,” said the young man in the dark suit.

  “Fucking hell,” he repeated still more loudly.

  “Sir, if you can’t control yourself, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  “You’re asking me to leave? Who do you think is paying for all this shit—the flowers, the casket, the fucking announcement in the fucking newspaper?”

  “Mr. Flynn,” said the young man, “would you take Mr. Glandier outside, please, till he’s calmed down?”

  The lawyer put his hand on Glandier’s shoulder. “Bob,” he began.

  Glandier pulled away before he could say more. There was a crazed look in his eye, a knife-edge balance between hatred and horror. “Don’t you touch me,” he hissed, presumably at Flynn, though it seemed to Giselle that the warning was really aimed at her, as if he had begun to sense her hovering presence.

  Should I? she asked herself, a finger poised above the filament of his fear. Would it be wrong to make him, again, convulse with terror—to which today would be added the shame of being witnessed? How many times might he be shattered and still rebound to daily life?

  But no, to have exercised such power would have been to draw still tighter the knot between them. Even to imagine such revenges made her feel twinges of her earlier carsickness. She resisted the temptation and returned to her mother, who no longer sat pensive beneath the gladiolas but stood behind Bing and Alice Hoffman, eavesdropping on their whispered conversation.

  “Oh, Giselle, there you are. You should have been here just now. Poor Alice! I never realized what a friend she was. She’s been so upset. Whereas Bing—” The statue shook its head mournfully.

  “Mother, please. We have to leave now. Bob’s about to go, and I’m feeling sick again. In fact, I feel awful.”

  “Best just to stay here in that case. Here, come sit on this step—” The statue led her to the platform on which the casket was displayed. “—and close your eyes and hold my hand.”

  Giselle did as the statue suggested, though she did not keep her eyes closed for long. In the darkness she could feel Glandier’s anger whirling about, like a giant disengaged gear. She opened her eyes just as he passed the doorway and paused to throw one brief, baleful glance toward the casket. The statue tightened its tiny white fingers about her hand. Giselle took a deep breath and looked down at her bare feet. Glandier walked on down the corridor.

  When she heard the Chrysler starting up, there was a wrenching sensation deep inside her stomach.

  “All I can think of,” said the statue, when the car could no longer be heard, “are the times he would come over, on Sunday mornings, and I’d make waffles for him, never suspecting a thing.”

  Giselle, who had neither eaten nor thought of eating since she’d entered the afterlife, was overcome by a sudden overwhelming craving for waffles. Waffles with pools of melted butter inside each crispy square. Waffles and maple syrup and strips of bacon and a steaming mug of fresh-perked coffee at hand.

  At the thought of the coffee the craving altered to its opposite. There wasn’t even time to say excuse me. She pulled her hand free and turned to the side and vomited gluey strings of bitter green spittle over the salmon-colored carpet. She vomited until there were tears in her eyes. Then, as quickly as it had come over her, the nausea was gone.

  “Are you feeling better now?” the statue asked.

  “Much, thank you.”

  “You know what it is, don’t you?”

  “Earlier I was sure it was carsickness. That’s what it felt like. Now, I don’t know. It must be just the effect he has on me.”

  “Well, you could put it that way.” The statue pursed its lips in a knowing smile. “What it really is, though, is that you’re pregnant.”

  “But… that’s not possible.”

  The statue lifted its hands, disclaiming responsibility. “Who’s to say what’s possible and what isn’t possible, dear? When the doctor told me the first time, that was my reaction too. Dewey and I had been extra-careful, but I guess not careful enough.”

  “But, Mother, be reasonable. I’m a ghost. Ghosts don’t have babies.”

  “Stand up and turn sideways.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it, dear. We don’t have all day. I’m supposed to be back inside of an hour.”
r />   Giselle rose and let the statue scrutinize her.

  “This is just an estimate,” said the statue, “but I’d say you’re in your fourth or fifth month. Let me just—” It laid a marble hand on Giselle’s stomach.

  There was a squirmy motion within.

  “Did you feel that?” said the statue.

  Giselle nodded.

  “And I’ll tell you what else: it’s a boy. You can call it guessing, if you like, but I’ve never been wrong yet.”

  Bing and Alice Hoffman had stopped talking. In the quiet of the funeral home all you could hear was the murmur of Sister Rita’s Hail Marys.

  CHAPTER 29

  As usual on a Saturday morning, Jack’s mother was off at Byerly’s parking lot with Maryann and Judy, crusading against abortion. His father was jogging. Jack was in favor of abortion and against jogging, but he knew better than to express such unorthodox opinions in the Sheehy household. Eleven-year-olds are jailbirds one and all. They don’t have freedom of speech or freedom of religion. All they’ve got is the distant hope of parole. Meanwhile Jack had a choice of (a) studying algebra (he’d accelerated way ahead of his age level in math and science), (b) watching a sappy cartoon adventure on TV, (c) visiting his friend Larry Willard, or (d) pursuing a life of crime. Crime was definitely the most exciting possibility, but it would have involved bicycling to a shopping mall beyond Willowdale, where he could be sure no one would recognize him if he got caught shoplifting. Jack no longer believed in gratuitous crimes, such as vandalism. For a while, when he was nine, he’d gone around sabotaging the neighbors’ cars, puncturing swimming pools, and other such petty and profitless nastinesses. He’d been lucky enough to have grown out of that stage before he’d ever been caught. Actually he owed his present more virtuous life-style to his father, who had explained one morning at the breakfast table the principles of cost-benefit analysis, which was one of those ideas, like the x in algebra, that made so much immediate sense that you had to wonder how you’d ever not known about it.

  Given these alternatives, Jack chose (e) none of the above, so it was altogether without plan or purpose that he’d gone out the back door to wander through the little forest of willows formed by the unfenced back yards of the houses lining Willowville Drive and the parallel Pillsbury Road. He tried to imagine what all this would have been like back in the prehistoric days before the Second World War when all Willowville had been a swamp instead of a suburb. There would have been lots of vines and giant lizards ripping at each other’s long green throats with razor-sharp teeth. Jack didn’t actually suppose that the Cretaceous had ended some time in the nineteenth century. He knew quite well that the heyday of his beloved Tyrannosaurus rex had taken place from 140 to 65 million years ago. It was only that he so much wished there could be a forty-foot-long Tyrannosaurus leaping about like a kangaroo and ripping the roofs off the houses while the residents of Willowville ran screaming out of their front doors carrying their most expensive portable appliances. Why didn’t they ever show scenes like that in horror movies? Scenes from a realistic, scientifically correct point of view.

  Jack walked along the edge of the cement-bottomed pond of lily pads at the middle of the commons (as their communal back yard was know by those who shared it) and daydreamed about lobsters. Could you create a lobster-sustaining ecosystem in a pond this size? If you could, it would be fascinating, since lobsters had such weird behavior. As soon as a lobster molts and is vulnerable to attack, other lobsters try and eat it, unless it’s a lady lobster, in which case they have sex. Lacking real lobsters to study, Jack would have enjoyed seeing a documentary about the secret lives of lobsters or, even better, a movie about were-lobsters. It would start off with this scuba diver being nipped by a lobster in this experimental breeding pond that happens to be near an atomic power plant. There’s been an accident at the plant, which the authorities have covered up, and—

  This scenario was interrupted when Jack, coming to Glandier’s back yard, noticed that the back door to the garage had been left open. That was unusual. Old man Glandier ordinarily kept his house locked up like a missile launching pad when he wasn’t home. Jack took a quick scan of back windows overlooking the commons, then walked quickly across Glandier’s yard and in at the open door. Sure enough, Glandier’s car was gone. Could his carelessness have gone so far that he’d left the door into the house unlocked as well? There was only one way to tell. Jack looked around the garage for a pair of cloth gloves (he knew better than to leave fingerprints on anything), but all he could come up with was a brittle scrap of chamois. He scrunched it up to soften it, then tried the screen door, which was unlocked, and the door inside, which was also unlocked.

  Jack stood on a landing of a stairway that went down to the basement in one direction and up to the kitchen in the other. Upstairs was definitely more interesting. He tiptoed up the stairs and stood in the kitchen doorway holding his breath, listening to his heart, enjoying the first big rush of fear through his body. With Glandier’s car gone and no one else living in the house there couldn’t be much real danger, but breaking into a strange house was always a creepy experience, and it didn’t take a lot of investigation to see that this house was way up on the Strangeness Quotient scale. The kitchen looked like there’d been a battle in it. The floor was covered with garbage and broken dishes. Both sections of the sink were heaped with dirty dishes and stank with a week’s gray scuzz. These were definitely signs of psychotic disturbance, definitely. And if old man Glandier was actually going psycho, wouldn’t his father be tickled! Not that Jack particularly cared one way or the other about Techno-Controls office politics; he just responded instinctively to the possibility of mischief.

  Nothing very strange about the living room. It was obvious that this was a house without a housewife, but the mess here was an average sort of mess—dust on the furniture, the stink of old cigars, piles of newspapers and magazines, a few potato chips crunched into the rug.

  But the bedroom, oh boy! The bedroom was straight out of a horror movie. The dresser mirror was smashed to hell, and the pieces of it spread over the carpet and the unmade bed. There was an open can of white housepaint on the dresser, which someone had been using to paint over the flower-patterned wallpaper on three walls. Based on his own past experience, Jack recognized the irregular rectangles of paint as the shapes that happen when you’re trying to paint over graffiti.

  Graffiti on bedroom wallpaper?

  Sure enough. At the left-hand end of the largest such patch of paint there was a ghost of the letter Y visible under the paint. Jack climbed onto the dresser chair and rubbed at the paint, which was still tacky, with the chamois scrap. YOU ARE… But that was as far as he could get before the chamois became useless.

  YOU ARE… What? Jack felt as though he’d stepped into the middle of his own Hardy Boys adventure: The Mystery of the Haunted Bedroom.

  And then, just as Jack was about to leave, and just the way it would have happened to one of the Hardy Boys, he heard a car pull into the garage. He pushed up the nearest window, but the screen behind it was part of a combination, so that line of retreat was cut off.

  The back door slammed shut. Jack was trapped in a lunatic’s bedroom! The idea put him into an ecstasy of terror so overpowering that he almost didn’t have the wits to hide under the bed before Glandier came stumbling into the bedroom. With a groan of weariness the fat man flopped down on the mattress, and the bedsprings sagged under his great bulk, driving the breath out of Jack’s lungs and pinning him to the dusty carpet.

  CHAPTER 30

  There are numbers—the best known is i, the square root of minus one—that would seem not to be able to exist, being inherently paradoxical, and yet these numbers are needed to describe and measure actual events in the physical universe. Numbers, of course, are not in themselves real, yet it has always been the conviction of people at all acquainted with mathematics that the realm of numbers is in some ways realer than our own. “Realer” begs the question of how nu
mbers can claim to be real at all, but if that question is not begged, the trapdoor of philosophy will spring open under our feet and we will find ourselves having to question whether anything is real—the sunrise that graphs itself upon the bedroom’s venetian blinds; the leaves that rustle above a pool where a frog patiently waits to catch a fly; the taste of that fly; or a needle’s pricking of a fingertip. But allow that there may be some “level of reality” where i is not irrational, and we stand on firm ground again, secure in our common sense, with no need for philosophy.

  So it is with evil. Evil (as liberals insist) is a quality and not a substance; an adjective and not a noun. Hell and its legions of devils are a myth, a myth expressive of the capacity of every individual to perform or imagine actions his conscience or his conscious mind would utterly condemn. In most moral transactions, this theory serves reasonably well as a basis for interpreting our lives. However, in some circumstances evil does exist, not as an adjective but as a noun. This can happen when there has been some real interaction between the two realms—between, in this case, Glandier and Giselle. Then it may be that what had existed at the level of the number i is potentiated and released into our own world; the irrational becomes real. Not, of course, in such a form as even to cast a shadow across the grass, but rather (like i) as an electrical potential, a cloud, so to speak, with a charge of lightning—with this difference only, that the lightning is conscious, malign, and in communication with the entire realm of unpotentiated evil.

  Such an evil grew now in Giselle’s womb. Already the epidermis of the fetus had established its unique and changeless pattern of folds, ridges, creases, and flexor lines. Already a kind of consciousness glimmered behind the thin membranes of its eyelids, and spasms of infantine desire convulsed its mouth and fingertips from time to time. Already it felt an antipathy for the being in which its own being was enclosed and longed to tear loose from its confinement.