7 Souls (24 page)

“Just stay right here,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.”

Dylan was gently prying her hands away. His attention was still on the torn-out page of Horus’s book, and whatever strong impression its tiny symbols had made on him; he brought the page with him as he circled the desk and moved toward the study door. Mary watched him leave the room that she’d avoided entering for ten years, on his way to do the heroic male thing and answer the door.

“No!”
Mary called out as she sprinted after him, tripping over one of Dad’s stacks of old books and nearly toppling to the floor, correcting her balance and stumbling out into the corridor just as Dylan opened the front door. A deafening explosion filled Mary’s head like a grenade going off. Dylan was propelled backward, flipping in the air like a drop-kicked action figure and landing on his back on the floor. The gunshot had been deafeningly loud—Mary heard a distant scream from
another
apartment. Bright scarlet blood was spreading out of Dylan. Released from his hand, the page of Horus’s book drifted gently to the floor like a falling leaf.

Dylan screamed. The agony in his voice was terrifying.

Mary spun on her heel and ran down the corridor in a blind panic. Dylan was still screaming behind her as she slammed against her own bedroom door, propelled herself inside and then slammed and locked the door.

She could hear footsteps, entering the apartment, walking closer.

“Oh, Jesus—oh, God, it fucking
hurts—
”

Dylan, screaming.

Standing at her bedroom door, trembling with panic like an animal on a busy highway, Mary suddenly noticed something—an object on the floor.

A package wrapped in purple paper.

Ellen’s gift
.

Stooping, Mary picked it up, tore off the paper and uncovered a small tarnished gold necklace. The pendant was a crude carving of an almond-shaped eye.

The eye of Tnahsit
.

My amulet
.

It was all true, then. She’d known it already, but this confirmed it.
She made sure I received the eye as a gift
, Mary thought.
To complete the curse
.

Mary leaned against the door and listened as the footsteps approached—slow, measured steps on the creaking floorboards, getting closer and closer.

What do I do now?
Mary looked around the small bedroom, panicking.
What the hell do I do now?

A fist was banging on her bedroom door.

Then she heard a familiar voice—a weak soprano.

“I’ve called the cops!”

What?

Mary recognized the voice—her own mother’s.

She woke up
, Mary realized. She’d forgotten all about her mother, but of course Mom was
here
, in her bedroom, probably having locked the door herself.

“Whoever you are, the cops are coming! I called nine-one-one!”

Good for you, Mom
, Mary thought, impressed. Outside the bedroom door, the creaking floorboards made their noises again: whoever was out there was leaving. Mary could hear the footsteps hurrying away. Then the front door slammed.

Well done, Mom
, Mary thought. She hadn’t realized how overcome with sheer terror she’d been until the door closed and she felt safer. Having an assailant with a gun
right
on the other side of her door had been so terrifying that Mary wasn’t sure she could deal with anything more.

But you don’t have much to deal with now
, she told herself weakly, as Dylan continued to scream and sob and Mary stumbled back against her own bed and fell down along it, overcome with weakness and fear.
It’s almost over
.

So I have to get it right
.

She was sure of that—it was the one thing she was sure of as a familiar haze began to flood her senses and her eyes fixed on the blinding glare of the room’s overhead lights.

I’ve got a chance to make this right—just barely
.

She was trying to concentrate as the world filled again with pale whiteness, and the bedroom and Dylan’s moans and the glare expanded into a silent inferno of blinding light.

5
PATRICK

S
HE COULDN’T SEE—THE
air was white and thick. The smell hit her, immediately—cigarettes and pot smoke and booze and sugar, all mixed together into a swill that conjured up every party she’d ever been to or thrown up at or had to clean up. A hissing sound, like a punctured tire, was coming from her right hand, and when she cleared her eyes and looked down, she saw that she was holding an aerosol can and spraying something wet and black onto the wall in front of her.

It happened again
, Mary thought, noting the rasping, boozy taste in her mouth and the itching of her stylish clothes against her tall male body. Her dead spirit (or whatever you wanted to call it) had moved somewhere else, occupying another of the seven souls by means of whom Mary had been cursed.

I’m Trick
.

It was obvious even as Mary’s surroundings came into focus: she was in the living room of Patrick’s suite at the Peninsula Hotel, after the end of the party. The room was quiet—that particular, eerie hotel silence that Mary recognized well from the many afternoons and evenings she’d spent here.

The suite looked totally empty. The smoke was clearing, though it lingered near the wall, where she was standing. The party was over; the guests were long gone. Glancing at Trick’s left wrist, Mary saw that his steel TAG Heuer read a few minutes to two (and the blackness outside the window confirmed that that meant two
A.M.
).

Her hand—Patrick’s hand—was holding a spray can that said
KRYLON
; Mary realized that she—Patrick—was spray-painting the wall. She was adding a large black spot to the end of the word
GOODBYE
.

I saw this before
, Mary realized, shuddering slightly at the memory of her final moments on earth. I
came in here and saw the room like this
—looking around now, gazing through Patrick’s eyes, Mary could see the floor’s entire expanse covered in party trash—
and this word was spray-painted on the wall
.

But it had never occurred to her that
Patrick
had painted it.

Why?
Why would Patrick trash his own hotel room? It was such a
sweet
room, as he always said; the arrangement with the hotel meant he could basically stay there forever without—

(
such a sweet room)

—worrying about the consequences. Mary just couldn’t imagine Trick vandalizing his own room. It didn’t make any sense, but something about that phrase was stirring a memory in a way she’d come to recognize.

(
such a sweet room)

S
UCH A SWEET ROOM;
such a beautiful room. Everyone who came in here, no matter how jaded, always took an involuntary deep breath as they looked around. A decorator had done it all, back in the early nineties; like the rest of the Dawes apartment, it had ended up as a glossy spread in a magazine. The red walls, the enormous handmade child’s bed, the bay window facing the park—all of it was perfect, delightful.

And Patrick
hated
it.

Not that he’d
always
hated it. Standing on the soft carpet in his gigantic bedroom in his parents’ house on Fifth Avenue, hands in faded jeans pockets, looking around at the cluttered floor and the jaunty red walls, he had to admit that he’d been very happy here. He used to sit for hours on the floor near the huge bay window that overlooked Central Park, playing, coloring and drawing, and if you bent down close to the polished mahogany boards, Patrick knew, you could still see the grooves and scratches he’d made as a five-year-old, pushing toy cars and action figures around. It was, as his mother used to tell visitors, “a perfect environment for a child.”

Out in the living room, Mary was talking to his mom. He could barely hear their voices echoing down the corridor, which was the size of a subway tunnel. The Dawes apartment occupied the entire top two floors of an opulently carved white-granite prewar apartment building right across from the ripest edge of Central Park. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, pretty much right after school, and they were here, at Patrick’s parents’ house, because Patrick needed to get his passport.

Since Dad had kicked him out, Patrick had been putting off coming back here. It wasn’t that he
cared
—he was just avoiding running into the old man. Patrick’s dad didn’t have any sense of time or place, as in “there’s a time and place for everything.” For Ken Dawes,
any
time and
any
place was appropriate for lashing out at his son (or any other underling who’d displeased him). At restaurants (with patrons turning to watch), driving on the freeway in the Bentley (with the driver eventually putting up the motorized privacy screen), even on a crowded sidewalk, Dad would bellow at Trick at the top of his lungs.

“You’ve
got
to go there before we leave,” Mary had reminded him in the cafeteria that afternoon. “Without your passport there’s no
trip
, damn it. Just get it over with.” Mary had sucked the last of her milk through her straw, cheeks dimpling prettily around her pouting lips as she did it. They’d been talking about flying to Cabo for spring break, and he needed his passport, as she was reminding him. “I’ll come with you and hold your hand.”

He’d agreed, and here he was poking through all the old junk on his desk, sifting through printed party invitations and packs of rolling papers and sheets of drawing paper and cocktail napkins and CDs. Just being in the apartment was sucking the life out of him—he felt like he was being smothered—and he sighed impatiently as he pulled drawers open and picked through the contents of shelves, trying to find his passport.

He wanted to be miles away. He wanted to be downtown at the Peninsula, where he felt happy and comfortable and nobody bothered him. If he wanted food, he ordered it. If he wanted company—wanted friends to talk to, even in that random minor way you talk while watching bad TV—he could get on the cell and call his buds, Mason and his crew, or some guys from the Chadwick football team, and they would show up, never too high pressure, never too much or too little energy.

Even Mary could chill in that place, Patrick thought. That was the real miracle. The most high-maintenance, high-strung, high-energy girl in the world, the world’s loudest attention magnet, became nearly
subdued
at the Peninsula. It was an incredible thing to see. She collapsed onto one of the white couches and took a few deep breaths and Patrick could see the tension, the constant anxiety she always seemed to be drowning in, flowing out of her.

But here … Trick looked over at his old bed, the gigantic custom-made wooden behemoth with the bold blue paint and the full-size FAO Schwarz tin soldiers flanking its headboard. It had cost something like seven thousand dollars. As a kid, he’d
loved
it, but come on—once you’ve started shaving, how can you sleep in something like that?

It was the whole problem. Patrick couldn’t complain about
anything
in his life, because everything he had was such a gift. The world—or, more specifically, his parents—had been overwhelmingly good to him. So anything that went wrong was
his
fault.

Shaking his head to clear it, Patrick looked around at his old bedroom—“old” because, well, he’d been thrown out, hadn’t he? Kicked out by the old man—half the people Patrick knew (his relatives, his parents’ friends) were appalled and concerned; to the other half (everyone he knew under thirty) it just made him more intriguing—more tortured and romantic and dashing.

Why did Mom have to be here?
That was the other thing: the gorgon, the hellion. His mother. Mary was out there right now, discussing God knows what with his adversary, the woman who’d brought him into the world and seemed to regret it more with every passing day.

“Yes
—” Patrick said involuntarily. There it was—his passport—wedged into a drawer beside a forgotten pair of gold-framed Ray-Bans, a box of Trojans and two metal one-hit pipes. (His mother
never
snooped—it wasn’t the WASP way—and he’d always been completely comfortable storing drug paraphernalia in his bedroom.) Stuffing the passport into his back pocket, Trick flicked the light off. He headed out of the bedroom and down the train-tunnel-size corridor, back toward the living room. As always, he could
feel
the weight lifting from his shoulders, just
knowing
that he’d soon be gone from this place.

“—overstep my bounds.”

Mary’s voice, coming from around a corner, straight ahead—from between the widely spaced Doric columns that framed the oversize entrance to the living room. She was only twenty feet away, but she couldn’t see him.

“Oh, not at all, dear!” Patrick’s mother’s voice. “I’m
so
glad you came to talk.”

What the hell?

Patrick stopped in his tracks, not breathing.

“Like I said: what I’m most afraid of is that he’ll bottom out,” Mary continued. Her voice echoed harshly against the hard surfaces of the apartment—Patrick could hear her perfectly. “I mean, he’s been on such a downward slope, with snorting and with booze; without any kind of break, I just don’t know how far he’ll slip.”

How far I’ll—What?

Patrick couldn’t believe his ears.
She’s talking about me
, he realized.
She’s talking to Mom about me; she’s selling me out
.

“I had no
idea
,” Mom said in her most honeyed voice. Patrick had heard her do this before: she was really good at playing the reasonable, kind saint when she was dealing with anyone outside the family. They never saw the
real
Mrs. Dawes—the one who shrieked or threw plates against the wall. They only saw the sweet-voiced, philanthropic angel whom Mary was talking to now. “I mean,
none
—the poor guy. I just thought he’d gotten, you know, at least somewhat clean.”

“Me too,” Mary’s voice answered. Standing just out of view, not breathing, motionless, Patrick could feel his fingers clenching into fists. His face was heating up. “But in the past few weeks it’s just gotten worse and worse. I’ve been trying to, you know, get him to cut down, to stop at a certain point rather than getting another bottle or whatever, but, you know …”

“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” his mom murmured.

“You understand, it’s pure concern,” Mary went on. The anger and confusion rushing through him was wild, chaotic. The white corridor walls seemed to be closing in on him. Patrick was struggling as hard as he could not to run around the corner and grab Mary by the shoulders and scream in her face,
What the hell are you doing? Are you out of your fucking mind?

“Thank you, Mary,” his mom said solemnly. “Thanks for being so concerned.”

Patrick could hear footsteps and fumbling noises, clicking jewelry and the unmistakable sound of a kiss.
Now she’s getting thanked for it
, he thought incredulously.
That fucking bitch—she sold me out and she’s getting a kiss on the cheek
.

“Found my passport,” Patrick said loudly, coming forward into the room.

Patrick’s mother (in her standard taupe-colored Chanel suit) and Mary were standing very close to each other in the middle of the living room, near the grand piano—they both turned guiltily and looked at him as he came in, stepping quickly apart.

“Oh, good,” Mary said loudly.

“Honey, is there anything else you need, now that you’re here?” Mom asked Patrick. He had to give her credit: her face looked completely normal, peaceful and human between her gold Henri Bendel earrings. The beast within was totally hidden. “Do you want to stay for dinner? Your father won’t be home until very late.”

“No, that’s okay—thanks, Mom,” Patrick managed to say. He was still trembling with fury. He stared straight at his mother, at the trademark flat expression that made her such a devastating bridge opponent. “We actually have to go. Mary, you want to get the elevator? I just have to say goodbye.”

“Sure—bye, Mrs. Dawes,” Mary said, heading immediately for the apartment’s front door, not lingering for another air kiss.
Not pushing her luck
, he thought. He didn’t want to look at her as she moved past, a brunette blur, and headed toward the vestibule to summon the elevator. “Patrick, I’m right outside—”

Patrick and his mother locked eyes across the gigantic living room and it was like one of those old monster movies where the beast slowly emerges—Patrick could see his mother’s pupils glinting with fury as Mary’s footsteps receded and Mrs. Dawes’s genteel public mask fell away.

“Mom,” he began helplessly, “I don’t know what she told you, but—”

“Don’t even start,” his mom said tightly, stepping toward him and pointing at his chest with her finger, the way she’d been doing his entire life. “Don’t even think about it, you little punk. I
knew
I couldn’t trust you. I knew you’d break my heart.”

“Mom—” Patrick’s thoughts were racing furiously. His behavior in the next ninety seconds was crucial: if he was going to successfully win his way back into his mother’s good graces, he had to choose his words carefully. So far, whenever Mom had reprimanded him—and had threatened to take away the golden goose—he’d always been able to talk her down.

“Don’t ‘Mom’ me!”
Mrs. Dawes’s eyes were now blazing so wildly that she could have been a soap-opera villainess—a realization that would have been funny under any other circumstances. “Damn it, Patrick, I’ve been
nothing
but kind,
nothing
but understanding of your—of your ugly,
decadent
habits. I know I’m supposed to be trendy and understand your ‘disease’ or whatever you want me to say, but I just can’t do it anymore. No mother could. Thank God for that girlfriend of yours, that’s all I can say.”

Yeah, let’s hear it for Mary
, Patrick thought. He felt like he was going to cry, not because he felt so helpless and angry—although he did—but because it just
hurt
to have your mother yell at you like this, call you a “little punk.” It didn’t matter how little you cared. It didn’t matter how old you got. It still hurt, every time, as much as it had when he was a boy. “Again, Mom,” he started over, “I don’t know what she told you, but Mary’s hardly a reliable—”