Desperation is energized despair, and despair is the abandonment of hope. Without hope, he had no defense against fear, which quickly swelled into a purity of terror from which I had to look away.
Over the years I have had reason to believe that most of the lingering dead are those who are destined for a better world than this one, if only they will receive it. They resist moving on for a variety of reasons, none of them rational.
Elvis had loved his mother so profoundly and had lost her so early, that after his death he longed to leave this world and to be in her company once more. But because he felt that he had not lived his life in a manner that she would have approved, because he was loath to face her judgment of his drug use and his promiscuity and his general dissolution, he had lingered here until at last he became convinced that what waited for him was forgiveness that surpassed understanding.
Those whose lives had included insufficient acts of kindness and good will to outweigh the evil they had done, or who had done nothing but evil, did not often linger here after death. And those of their kind who did linger were not here for years, but usually for days or hours.
Because they never believed in hope while alive, I assumed their hopelessness stayed with them after death. Maybe they traveled into darkness eternal without protest because they lacked the imagination to envision anything else.
Another possibility was that, upon death, they had a debt to pay. I could envision a collector of those debts who had no patience for lingering debtors.
Whittle’s behavior suggested that he faced something worse than an easy passage into peaceful darkness. As he accepted mortality and could no longer deny the corpse in the bathtub, his terror escalated.
Perhaps half a minute or forty seconds had passed since he had first appeared in the bathroom doorway.
What happened next happened fast, and it was a center-stage moment worthy of Second Witch, she who had no other name in Macbeth.
Whittle moved around the bathroom with the frenzied urgency of a bird that, having flown in through an open window, could not detect the draught that would lead it back to freedom.
In the play, Second Witch had stood over a cauldron, squeezing drops of her blood into the brew: By the pricking of my thumbs…
Desperately circling the room, Whittle made no sound equivalent to the swoop-and-flutter of a bird, and in fact no sound whatsoever. Yet I half thought there were wings that I should hear if only I knew how to listen.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
Enter a player more terrible than Macbeth.
The bathroom light dimmed as if a great machine had surged on elsewhere in town, drawing power from the grid.
In half-light halved again, shadows swelled and swooned, and I thought I felt the wings that I could not hear, the rhythmic pulses of pressure from air beaten by great pinions.
I cannot testify with certainty to what I saw, because it defied interpretation both by my five senses as well as by those perceptions of mine that might be called extrasensory. I had never seen anything like it before—and hoped never to see its like again.
The spirit of Sam Whittle might have thrown itself against the mirror above the sink, but I think not. What seems more true is that the mirror reached out to seize the spirit of Sam Whittle.
Further: that the mirror was for a moment more than a mirror, that it unfolded from the wall, that the glass unfurled like fabric, forming mercurial membranes full of dark reflections of both the bathroom and of some more fantastical place.
Also: that those undulant plumes were simultaneously as reflective as polished silver and yet dark with tarnish, that they embraced Whittle’s spirit and swept it up into the chaos of images that swarmed across their fluttering surfaces.
And finally: that his spirit was gathered into the membranes, that the membranes furled into the mirror, and that as the mirror quivered into stillness like a pond after swallowing a stone, there was for only an instant a face peering out at me, not Whittle’s face but another so hideous that I cried in alarm and reeled back.
The Presence appeared so briefly that I cannot remember the grisly details of it, so briefly that it was only my reflection at which I shouted, from which I stumbled backward.
I almost fell, reached for something to steady myself, and grabbed the handle of the shower door. The latch released. The door came open. I stood face to face with another corpse.
TWENTY-TWO
FOUR MINUTES.
In the kitchen, the man’s shoes had been under that side of the table on which the glass of bourbon had been overturned. This woman must have been drinking from the other glass.
The killers had cinched a braided-leather belt around her neck and had hung her from the shower head. Her feet dangled two inches off the floor.
Ceramic tiles had cracked under the strain of her suspended weight. Ancient grout had crumbled to the floor of the shower stall. The water pipe had bent, but no leak had sprung.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to examine the victim to see how she had died. Her face was a ghastly portrait of strangulation. Perhaps her neck had broken, too.
In life, she must have been attractive. She might have been in her twenties; but in one brutal minute, she had aged a decade.
Like Whittle, she had been bound with duct tape at the ankles and the wrists, and also gagged.
The line of sight between the tub and the shower stall made it likely that Sam Whittle had been forced to watch them hang the woman.
I had seen enough, too much.
The irrational conviction arose that if I looked at the cadavers again, their eyes would roll in their sockets to fix on me, and they would smile and say, “Welcome.”
Above the sink, the streaked mirror appeared to be an ordinary looking-glass, but it had transformed once, so might transform again.
I was alive, not a lingering spirit, but I could not be sure that the collector who had taken Whittle lacked the power to take me.
Leaving the bathroom, I did not turn off the lights, but pulled the door tight shut.
For a few seconds I stood in the bedroom with the flashlight extinguished, less afraid of the dark than of the sights that light could show me.
They would not have killed Flashlight Guy merely because he had failed to subdue me on the beach when I had swum to shore from the inflatable dinghy. Whittle and the woman must have disagreed with the other conspirators about something, and must not have foreseen the ferocity with which their associates would settle a difference of opinion.
Usually I am pleased when bad guys fall out with one another, because disharmony in their ranks can make them easier to defeat. But if this crew was planning many deaths and vast destruction such that the sky and sea would burn with bloody light, as in my dream, I would feel better if they were not also hair-trigger hotheads in addition to being criminal scum.
I switched on the flashlight and hurriedly searched the dresser drawers. They contained only clothes, and not many of those.
Although I had been in the house no more than five minutes, the time had come to get out. Maybe these murders had been impromptu; if so, the killers might return to remove the bodies and clean up the evidence of violence.
Twitching as if electrical impulses short-circuited through the frayed fibers of my nerves, I thought that I heard stealthy noises elsewhere in the house.
Chastising myself for being too easily spooked, I nevertheless decided not to leave by the way I had entered.
Dousing the flashlight, I swept aside the draperies. The window sash slid up as smoothly as it had moved previously.
From the back of the bungalow came the crash of a door being kicked open, and an instant later the front door was booted in as well.
I had spoken of one devil, and another had arrived. Murderers, returning to the scene of a crime, intent on removing the evidence, would never call attention to themselves by kicking down the doors any more than they would arrive blowing party horns.
/>
From within the house, men shouted: “Police!”
I slipped out of the bungalow as quickly and as quietly as an experienced sneak thief, which is perhaps not a skill that I should trumpet with pride.
As though it were a living entity that could reproduce itself, the fog seemed to have fathered new generations of fog, crowding the night more completely than when I’d gone inside five minutes earlier.
The police had arrived without sirens and also without switching on the emergency-light arrays on their patrol cars. No revolving red or blue beacons stained the fog.