THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  Then he had thrown the ashtray into the mirror, and as suddenly as she had materialized in the bedroom she had dematerialized out of it into this new region that seemed neither here nor hereafter; the kitchen, it would seem, but a kitchen not quite substantial, a kitchen of twilight and mists through which she drifted like a ribbon of cigarette smoke, never impinging on any surface, unable to formulate any fixed intention, the merest atom in the dance of other atoms in the air.

  She remembered…

  Or rather there was something she knew she must try to remember: a place, a pattern, a purpose. And there was something here in the kitchen—a key to that place, a sketch of the pattern, a hint of the purpose.

  Then, as it drifted, the mote of her consciousness fixed on it: a red-checked potholder that hung on the side of the icebox, next to the stove. It was stained now, stained quite dreadfully, but if she could ignore that stain, if she could focus her thoughts, she could…

  She could go there.

  She could leave this world and enter the other she’d first glimpsed at rare moments when she had lain in the bondage of the grave.

  Like an infant that has first seized hold of the concept of “inside” and tries, and fails, to enter the cup into which he has introduced his fist, Giselle tried, and failed, to enter the potholder that hung on the icebox. She was, indeed, less capable now of entering that further realm that this shining spoke of than when she had first sensed its glimmering in the grave. Then, at least, she had not made the simple confusion between thought and thing, pattern and potholder. Now she accepted appearance as fact. Her mind drifted from seeming to seeming like a bored and resentful teenager let loose in the dullest of museums, wandering among the shards of third-rate Roman statues. Nothing made sense. Nothing was of any use. She felt herself dwindling. It seemed possible that she might be utterly dispersed to the elements and randomized like the gas released from a balloon.

  And all this was his fault. Her husband, Robert Glandier.

  She did not want to hate him. But it was necessary. How else, unless she hated him, could she destroy him? For that, unless she were to be destroyed herself, is what seemed to be required.

  CHAPTER 27

  Three blocks from the theater along the gleaming main street of Paradise was the most beautiful department store Joy-Ann had ever been inside of. All you could see when you entered were endless acres of perfume, cosmetics, and jewelry. They sat on a velvet loveseat beneath a gold-plated palm tree surrounded by tiers of amber flasks and bottles on Lucite shelves. There were white marble statues and magnificent floral arrangements of all the flowers beginning with B and an open box of Fanny Farmer’s Family Assortment. Far overhead the ceiling slowly revolved in time to the strains of “I Dreamt I Dwelt…”

  “Luxe,” said Adah, with a lazy smile, “calme, et volupté.”

  Joy-Ann, though she didn’t understand French, nodded agreement. This came closer to her idea of heaven than anything she’d seen yet. Inside of each relaxation there was another relaxation and a peacefulness deeper than the balmiest sleep.

  “But,” said Adah, just as though she’d been reading Joy-Ann’s mind, “first things first. We have work to do!” She pressed a button and a television, cased in the same white marble as the floor, rose up before them; another button, and the TV screen glowed with an inverted image of Adah’s face. The camera drew back, and you could see that Adah had been bound naked to the saddle of a horse that was galloping furiously around a circle of men in top hats, while a large orchestra played a suitably thunderous accompaniment.

  “Ah, those were the days,” said Adah.

  “You really did that?” Joy-Ann demanded, having figured out that the TV must have been tuned to Adah’s own Home Box Office channel. On Home Box Office you could watch all the events of your past life in any order and as many times as you liked. Joy-Ann had spent practically all her time in the convalescent ward reliving her own happiest hours.

  “Oh, hundreds of times—but never so well as there at Astley’s. For six nights a week and at Saturday matinees I was bound to that horse, as you see me there, and borne about the stage fully thirty laps to the delight of all London. Including, I might add, the delight of Mr. Charles Dickens, who became my very special and devoted patron.”

  “And you didn’t wear anything?” Joy-Ann marveled. “I thought things were stricter then.”

  “I wore a body stocking, of course—and I’ll wager you’re the first person it ever fooled. Though maybe not. Theater is ninety percent imagination, isn’t it? And life’s a stage. Ah, well, I’ve all eternity to watch reruns. Time and tide, time and tide.”

  Adah switched channels, and now it was Giselle on the screen. She was sitting in the back seat of Bob’s Chrysler, looking fraught, and wearing (it seemed) nothing at all. It was not, in this case, a body stocking. Her breasts were completely bare; that much was unmistakable through the car’s window.

  “I suppose it’s old-fashioned of me,” said Joy-Ann, looking anywhere but at the screen, “but I can’t get used to indecency. Especially here in heaven and on TV.”

  Adah smiled. “Now, Joy-Ann, you know better than that. Think of Adam and Eve. They were naked all the time in the Garden of Eden. We’re made in God’s image, after all, so how can nudity be wrong? From the eternal point of view, that is.”

  Though Adah tried to adopt a mollifying tone, she was obviously amused by Joy-Ann’s prudery, which only made Joy-Ann more defensive. “But we’re wearing clothes,” she pointed out. “Why can’t she?” She cast a reluctantly accusing glance at her daughter. People (fully clothed) walked past the car, seemingly oblivious of the naked woman within.

  “Our clothes are only an appearance,” Adah explained patiently, “just as your daughter’s nakedness is only an appearance. The difference is that we can choose how we wish to appear, whereas Giselle, as a ghost, must appear in the form imagined by the person she haunts.”

  Joy-Ann foresaw a lecture and sighed.

  “You must know that, in the Bible, Christ says ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ That’s what you’re doing right now, Joy-Ann. You’re judging by appearances.”

  “Oh, I suppose you’re right. I’m not blaming her. But it is so like Giselle to be in the back seat of someone’s car without a bra. I remember when she was only fourteen—”

  “And I remember what Samuel Goldwyn said to me, after he first came to heaven and we were talking about drive-in movies. He said, ‘The common touch begins in the back seat.’”

  Joy-Ann allowed this a grudging smile, and Adah pursued her advantage. “Now listen carefully, because I’ll only say this once. If you want to help your daughter, the first thing you have to do is get her out of that car. She’s stuck inside until someone opens the door and lets her out. Which you can do, if you’re willing to take an earthly form. But I must warn you that if you do, it will slow up your progress in moving on to the higher levels of heaven. Temporarily you’ll be stuck here on this intermediate plane.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be so bad. It’s lovely here in Paradise, even if it’s not heaven. Tell me what I have to do.”

  “First put this on.” Adah took an emerald ring from her middle finger and handed it to Joy-Ann. “It’s a magic ring that lets you take on an available earthly shape. Not literally, of course, but from your daughter’s point of view it will look like you’re opening the car door, and she’ll be able to get out. There’s no time to get into the theory of what’s real and what isn’t. Her husband may come back any moment and drive her off somewhere else.”

  Joy-Ann shook her head sympathetically. “That poor man. As though he hasn’t suffered enough already, now he has to be haunted. It’s not fair.”

  “Suffered? Him! Whatever are you talking about?”

  “Well, the way she ran off. And then later, learning how she’d died, in that motel. That had to be a terrible shock.”

  “You mean you don’t know he murdered her?”

  “Bob? Murdere
d Giselle? I don’t believe it.”

  “Don’t take my word. You can watch the whole thing on HBO. In fact, I’d been assuming you already had.”

  “Oh, I didn’t want to look at what Giselle was up to there in Las Vegas. I could imagine that well enough! And I certainly didn’t want to see her being murdered. I never liked the violence on TV.”

  “Well, there’s no time now to explain all that. Go to her. Offer what help you can, but don’t stay more than an hour or so, Earth time. Longer than that and you’ll get side-effects.”

  “But—”

  Adah waved aside her objection and, with the same motion, made the Lucite shelves part at the center and revolve 90 degrees to reveal an escalator with a large red neon sign over it that said DOWN. Joy-Ann stood on the steel plate at the top of the moving steps and looked down at the earth far below, all blue and gleaming and mottled with clouds.

  Years ago on the eight-foot diving board at Lake Calhoun, Joy-Ann had learned there was only one way she could get up the nerve to jump from such a height. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes and stepped onto the escalator. After she’d counted to ten she opened her eyes (it took an enormous effort, for her eyelids felt heavy as lead) and found that she had already arrived at her destination. There, parked alongside a yellow line on the curb, was Bob Glandier’s Chrysler with Giselle in the back seat, naked as the day she was born.

  CHAPTER 28

  Giselle closed her eyes and placed her hands palm down on her stomach and tried to will the queasiness away. Instead, a rocking sensation came over her, like the rocking of the seat on a ferris wheel, followed by an intenser queasiness. Could ghosts throw up? It was so unfair. She felt like a child, a carsick child abandoned in the back seat of the car while her parents were getting drunk in a bar. She was certain she’d feel better the moment she could get out of the Chrysler. Being naked wouldn’t matter, since she was invisible to everyone but her husband (and he was aware of her only from time to time). But the door handle was a physical object, and she could not move physical objects, so she was trapped inside the car.

  To be physically ill when you weren’t even physical yourself—that was what rankled, that was the worst unfairness.

  But was it unfair? What if she were being punished? This wasn’t the hell of tortures and torments that nuns had described in school, but it was quite awful and getting worse. Please, God, she prayed (the first time she’d thought to pray since she had died), no more!

  Then, almost as though in answer to her prayer (though it had been there all along; she simply hadn’t noticed it till now), she saw a statue of the Virgin Mary standing in a niche in the windowless brick wall of the building the car was parked in front of. The statue was half life-size and made of white marble flecked with dazzle like sunlight on snow. The Virgin’s arms were opened in a gesture of gentle invitation, as though she were encouraging a child to walk toward her.

  All right then, Giselle told herself, more in a spirit of defiance than of devotion, I’ll pray to her. And, quite loudly, so as to be heard through the closed window, she called out, “Mary, mother in heaven—help!”

  The statue lifted its head, rather stiffly, to smile at Giselle and, with the awkwardness of great effort, raised its hand to signal that it could hear her prayer.

  There was a narrow strip of grass below the statue’s niche, separating the sidewalk from the building. The statue looked down, frowning, at the grass, then carefully lowered itself to a sitting position, closed its eyes, and jumped, landing without a sound on the little throw rug of lawn edging the building. More limber now, it crossed the sidewalk and came up to the car to peer inside with blank white marble eyes. “Giselle?” it said, and before Giselle could think what to reply, it opened the car door.

  Despite her passionate desire to be out of the car, Giselle hesitated. Once, at Caesar’s Palace, she had got into an elevator with Red Buttons and been overcome by exactly the same shyness. Not the shyness of being naked (she’d been fully clothed in the elevator) but of encountering a major celebrity.

  “Where are your clothes?” the statue demanded (in an oddly familiar voice), as Giselle stepped out of the car.

  “I wish I knew. I was wearing something when I went to sleep in the living room. Then I woke up like this in the bedroom, just as Bob was waking up. I don’t seem able to control my own actions any more. I couldn’t get out of the house then, and I couldn’t get out of the car now. It’s as though there were some kind of string tying me to him. Wherever he goes I’m pulled along. Like when Bob got into the car, suddenly, poof, I’m in the back seat. It’s awful. It’s not as though I wanted to haunt him. I don’t.”

  “Even though he murdered you?” the statue demanded. “He did, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, yes, but now it’s as though he were murdering me again every day. I just want to get away. Can’t you take me back to heaven with you? That’s where you’ve come from, isn’t it?”

  Worry lines creased the statue’s brow. “I honestly don’t know. I mean, yes, that is where I’m from, or I guess I should say Paradise. There’s a difference, though I can’t explain it very well. It’s still all very strange. In any case, one thing is quite clear: you can’t go to heaven like that. Here—” The statue tried to take off its veil, but all its clothes were part of the same solid block of marble and could not be removed. “Damn,” said the statue, giving up in frustration.

  Its voice seemed so familiar, but still Giselle couldn’t place it.

  “O my Lord,” said the statue. “Do you believe it!” It pointed to the street corner where a taxi had stopped and a small man in a shiny blue-gray suit was maneuvering a bulky canvas suitcase out of the back seat. “Talk about coincidences, this has got to take the cake.”

  The man paid the taxi driver and turned to face them. It was her brother.

  “Bing!” Giselle called out.

  But he walked straight toward them, utterly oblivious. She had forgotten how short he was, how delicate.

  “Bing,” she called again, even as she stepped aside to avoid being walked over.

  “He can’t see us,” the statue said sadly. “We’re on another plane, you know. But isn’t it strange to see him here in St. Paul? How long has it been? It was either ‘67 or ‘66 when he left home.”

  At last Giselle recognized the statue’s voice. “Mother! Is that you?”

  The statue laughed. “Who did you think?”

  “Well, you look like—” She could not quite keep from sounding disappointed. “—like the Virgin Mary.”

  “Oh, Giselle, don’t be ridiculous. Though actually I suppose I am a saint now, in the technical sense. Though maybe not. I haven’t been in heaven yet, not even as far as the ballroom. I was just on my way, when Adah—that’s Adah Menken, who was a famous actress way back when—told me about you. It’s a long story, and yours must be another. But couldn’t we, just for now, follow Bing inside that building and see what he’s up to?”

  “Really, Mother, I’d rather not. Bob’s in there too.”

  “But you’re with me, and I’ll protect you. That’s what I was sent to do, and I’ve got this to help me do it.” The statue held out its beringed hand and tilted it from side to side so that the ring’s emerald flared in the light. “According to Adah Menken, it’s a magic ring, though I forget in exactly what way. Anyhow it will protect you from him, for sure. We’re on the spirit plane now. Keep that in mind and you’ll be all right. On the other hand, if you’d rather wait out here on the street, that’s okay too. I’ll just take a quick peek at what Bing’s up to, and then—”

  The statue had pushed open the door of the building, and Giselle was able to see down the length of the inner lobby. Suddenly she realized where she was. This was the side entrance to McCarron’s Funeral Home. She must have walked past it and seen the statue standing in its niche a hundred times when she was a girl. McCarrion’s, they’d called it at Our Lady of Mercy.

  “No, wait,” Giselle said. �
��I’ll go with you.”

  She took the statue’s hand and together they walked down the long salmon-colored carpet toward the central foyer, off which branched the four rooms where the corpses were laid out for viewing. Giselle felt a growing, dismal certainty as to why Bing and her husband had come to McCarron’s, but her mother seemed not to have an inkling. Or might it be that Joy-Ann had become so spiritual already that the sight of her own dead body was a matter of indifference to her?

  “Oh, my,” said the statue, pausing at the threshold of the first of the four rooms.

  There was Bing, standing by the casket, and there, kneeling at the prie-dieu before it and saying a rosary, was Sister Rita from Our Lady of Mercy, and behind Sister Rita, sitting on a red velvet chair, with her makeup smeared from crying, was Alice Hoffman, Joy-Ann’s across-the-street neighbor. Even though she was naked, Giselle felt oddly at home and comfortable. The room’s furnishings and its baskets of pastel flowers put her in mind of one of the more old-fashioned cocktail lounges in Las Vegas, the way you might find it at 6 or 7 A.M.—the same hush, the same soft light, the same sense, among the few people left, of a loss that nothing can change.

  She walked to the casket and stood at her brother’s side and looked down tenderly at Joy-Ann’s dead, painted face in its frame of pink satin ruffles. How thin she’d gotten! And what a good job the undertaker had done with the makeup. Joy-Ann really did look as though she were asleep. The smile was so typical, all tight across the teeth with just the slightest tilt of good humor at the corners of the lips. The same smile that Bing was smiling as he looked down at her. Half sarcastic, half indulgent—the family smile.

  The statue, too short to see into the casket, asked Giselle to lift it up. Obediently she stooped down and got her arms around it in a bear hug, then lurched up, staggering only a little under its weight. The statue placed its delicate hands on the side of the casket and bent forward, intent and amazed. “It’s me! But I’ve been dead for weeks. It can’t have taken that long to arrange a funeral.”