Gethsemane Hall (4 page)

Corderman’s eyes still shone, but now with a warrior’s hope.

god’s good plan

Meacham decided to hedge her bets. She felt good about the inspiration the radio had given her. One skeptic was good. Two would be better. She wasn’t just going to clean the Adams fiasco. She was going to sterilize it. She found the other name she wanted in the background files. The face was in a picture taken at Adams’s funeral.

In Paris, Kristine Sturghill was working the saw down to the bone. She was well down into the flesh and gristle. The sounds were a chuckling gurgle of wet snaps. The woman she was working on didn’t twitch. She looked dead sexy, every pun intended. Blood flowed, poured, pooled. The floor was covered in a growing puddle that reflected the lights from its darkness. She cut through the last of the gristle, and there was the grind as the blade sank its teeth into bone.

The audience roared.

Sturghill was performing at La Bourgeoise Épatée. The theatre was a hole in the wall in the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth in the 3rd Arrondissement, spitting distance from the stolid respectability of the Arts et Métiers museum, only two blocks from the bustle of the Boulevard St. Martin, but far enough east to be removed from the sleaze factor of the peep shows and porno palaces that sprang up the closer the Grands Boulevards came to Pigalle. The building had been a theatre off and on for a hundred and fifty years, and was making its mark in its new incarnation by revelling in its own filth, while tapping into its age for class. The in-crowd was squirting with pleasure. La Bourgeoise Épatée put on shows that were unapologetically pornographic and cheerfully debased, but had an aura of hipness that meant the city guides carried the listings in the same sections as the grand dame of La Comédie Française, rather than relegating it to the sex-tour back pages with the likes of Chochotte and Sexodrome. The decor was restored neo-classical, the seats new and spacious. The lighting was excellent, and Sturghill had to admit that even the dressing rooms were not only clean (a bonus, given what she’d dealt with in the past) but comfortable. Actually comfortable.

The hall was packed, the box office fat, and she was making nice coin. So where was the love?

She leaned into the saw, and the sound of grating and snapping bone filled the space. Not a twitch, not a visible breath, from the woman. A huge crack, and she was through. There was an enthusiastic gout of blood. The offal stench was building. Sturghill had already severed the upper torso, and now she pulled the centre of the box out. More blood pooled. The butchered woman, motionless, sexy, dead, glowed in the spotlight. Sturghill stepped forward and grinned at the audience. She was wearing the full Dietrich: tux, fishnets, stilettos, blonde killer as sexy as her red-headed victim (have to match the blood, don’t you know), dressed in just enough masculine garb for that extra piquance of double-edged homoeroticism. She raised the saw blade and licked some blood from it. God’s thunder of applause. She doffed her top hat and bowed low. Fade to black on the scene of slaughter. That was the orgasm. Resurrection was old hat and unwanted.

Where was the love? She wondered that again back in the dressing room. Her feet were aching from the heels, but nothing new there. That wasn’t enough to sour her on the gig. Maddy Tibbert had climbed out of the coffin and was towelling off the blood, in a hurry for her first post-show cigarette. “Went pretty well,” she said.

“I thought so,” Sturghill agreed, her voice flat.

“You sound chipper.”

Where was the love? “The show’s getting to me, I guess.”

“Girl, this was your baby.”

“I know. I know.” The trick was so old it was cool again: the box painted with lengthwise stripes so the connecting sections between the removed middle and the head and legs looked thinner than they really were, leaving plenty of room for Tibbert to bend herself into position. The gimmick was the blood. Sturghill’s inspiration had been an old Herschell Gordon Lewis movie,
The Wizard of Gore
. In the film, the gory illusions had turned out to be real. Sturghill ran with the idea, and pretended to mutilate her assistant. She’d loved Lewis’s bloody tongue-in-cheek attitude, wanted shock and satire in her own act. The early shows in the goth clubs had been fun, the audience buying exactly what she was selling. She was pretty sure they were in on the joke. She hoped they were. Either way, word spread, the gigs improved, and then the call had come in from Paris. And here she and Tibbert were, gravy train at full throttle.

So where was the love? Not in the audience. That was the problem. They weren’t buying the satire. They might claim to be. All the reviewers did. But Sturghill wasn’t buying what
they
were selling. She knew what was going on. Rocks were being got off, far too many of them, over the sight of one woman carving up the other. Her fault for playing up the sex.
What happened to irony?
she wondered. She knew the answer: it had become a first-rate alibi for guilt-free indulgence.
I’m not a misogynist,
the audience said.
I don’t really like seeing women pretend-butchered. I’m appreciating the social commentary. Now get me hard again, you bitch.

The love had been leaking away for a while. The breaking point, the moment where the love had died and the freeze had set in, had been Pete Adams killing himself. The poor bastard had no family and was buried in England. At least that meant Sturghill had been able to attend the funeral. The event had been too depressing. Adams had been a smart guy, too smart to wind up believing his own bullshit, but there he was, another audience with no irony. Dead in his seat. They’d met in college, had hung out a fair bit before he’d joined the Agency, a decision that Sturghill still had trouble forgiving. She didn’t want to believe that someone she liked, someone she respected, would work for that outfit. At least she was aware of the little bit of irony in her disappointment. She must have some faith after all, if someone could betray it.

They’d stayed in touch, though. Just enough so that the network of friends spread the word when he died. A few made it over from the States. A handful more sent wreaths and cards. Most were absent and silent.

Sturghill changed out of her fishnets. She balled them up and threw them on the chair.

“They do something to you?” Tibbert asked.

Sturghill made a face. “Isn’t any of this bothering you?”

“I never bought your whole make-a-statement idea, you know that. So it’s all good.”

“There are guys creaming to see you bleed.”

Tibbert shrugged. “Like this is news. At least they’re paying for it. They don’t touch us, and neither of us is naked. Things could be worse. Shit, Kristine, we’re making coin, and we’re living in Paris. I’m trying to see the problem here.”

Sturghill didn’t answer
. Look at what you’re doing, girl,
she thought.
You were working on a humanities degree. You were going to change things. Look at what you’re doing. Look at what you’re wearing.

André Curval poked his head in the dressing room. He ran La Bourgoise Épatée and was a happy, happy man. “Kristine,” he said. “Phone.”

She followed him to his office. His desk was an anal retentive’s wet dream of order, pen and papers in perfect regimentation, nothing permitted off the perpendicular. The walls were a collage of old Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergères posters, overlapping and tangling with each other, as if Curval had heard somewhere that impresarios had to be messy, and this was his one concession. Framed behind his desk was his baby: an original poster for the Grand Guignol. Curval waved her to the desk and left her to it. When the woman on the other end of the line introduced herself as one of Adams’s colleagues, she almost hung up. “Stay the hell away from me,” she said. “You people have done enough damage.”

“You’re probably right,” Meacham answered, hooking Sturghill’s curiosity just enough to keep her listening. “I’m asking you to help undo some of it.”

“How?”

“Let me ask you, how devoted are you to his memory?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you worried about soiling his life’s work?”

“For the Agency? Not likely.”

“That’s not what I meant. I think we both know the Agency was just a job for him.”

Memories of his ghost obsessions in college. Her frustrations that a man so smart could be goddamn gullible. She had never understood why he’d needed so badly to believe. “Go on,” she said.

“What did you think about his research?”

“It was nonsense.”

“You’re a skeptic.”

“I’m a magician. You want ghosts, I’ll give you ghosts. I’ll give you the whole rotten parapsychological menu. It isn’t hard. You going to tell me what you want?”

“I’m trying to clear up what happened to Pete.”

Sturghill snorted. “Ohhhhh,” she said with sarcastic revelation, “you want the truth.”

“If it does what I need,” Meacham said, and her cynical honesty disarmed Sturghill. “I’m more interested in shutting down publicity. Ghosts are really good attention-getters. Debunked ghosts, not so much.”

“Why should I agree to be your debunker? There are plenty of other magicians around.”

“I thought you might want to know how he really died.”

“He killed himself. He snapped, probably under the weight of too much bullshit. Spiritual lies or your kind, I don’t know, and I don’t care. Same difference.”

“Are you sure?”

Sturghill hesitated. “I’m under contract here,” she said and realized she was setting the terms of her surrender.

“Don’t worry about it,” Meacham said, and Sturghill found she did believe in the woman’s confidence.

In the dream, he was back at St. Rose’s Church, going through the funeral again. He knew he was dreaming because he felt the pain of repetition, sensed the sadism of a force that would make him experience ritualized loss once again. Knowing he was dreaming didn’t diminish the pain. The anguish pressed him down, a granite weight, as he tried to stand for the hymn. The injustice of the re-enactment was colossal and could only be for the benefit of a cruel deity’s amusement. Something was laughing at him. He looked up. Standing above the altar was a large wooden crucifix, its Christ bigger than life. The Christ was laughing at him. Now he was looking at the face in close-up, was staring into its wide mouth, could see where the red paint of its throat had chipped, saw lips peeled back from tree-ringed teeth. He couldn’t see Christ’s eyes. He couldn’t see anything but the laugh, the maw of red disappearing to black. The laugh itself was looking at him, the mouth so contorted with mirth that the very expression had become sentient. He tried to yell back at it, to give back his hatred, but the laugh was too huge, too strong, visible even when he closed his eyes. The laugh grew from howl to tsunami roar. Its register climbed hysteria’s ladder from exultation to frenzy, and finally it was the scream of the heart of the universe.

Gray woke up. His room was pitch dark, the gloom a velvet blindfold on his eyes. Something was wrong. The space felt too big. His bed was an isolated island, the walls too far away. He wasn’t where he should be, but the alien room also felt familiar. He pulled his arms out from under the sheets. Cotton rubbed against his skin, confirming that he was awake, but the room did not click back to itself.

He placed his arms at his sides. He splayed his hands against the bedspread and froze. His palms slicked. He shouldn’t be touching a bedspread. His own bed had a comforter, not this. He moved his fingers, trying to chivvy his imagination out of its delusion. Instead, he traced contours of terrycloth material. He became aware of the musty smell of age. His throat dried. He knew where he was. As a child, on those rare occasions when he and his parents had gone to visit Aunt Gloria, he had stayed in this room in Gethsemane Hall. It had been decades since he had last slept there, but his body remembered the touch of the bed, the aloof distance of the walls.
I am not here,
he thought. He swallowed, hurting his throat, and the precision of pain shot down any last hope that he was still dreaming. He whispered, “No.” His voice was hoarse, small in the big dark.

He sat up, strained his eyes, could still see nothing. A smothering claustrophobia mixed with his terror. He turned to his left. In his room at the Hall, there had been an oak bedside table here, with a table lamp. In the London flat, there was no table. Instead, the head of the bed had shelves. He reached above his head and didn’t find the shelves. He touched oak instead, and when he moved his hand to the left, he touched one of the posters that belonged to the Hall’s bed. He reached further, and there was the bedside table. And there was the brass of the lamp.

He had been holding his breath, and he let it out now in a moan. He moved his hand up the lamp, and his fingers found the switch. He hesitated, terrified that sight would be the final nail in reality’s coffin. He waited three more breaths, giving sanity one last chance to reassert itself. Then he turned the switch.

Light. He was in his London bedroom, and its dimensions were generous for the city, but far from cavernous. A comforter covered the bed. There was no bedside table. Gray’s heart downshifted from arrhythmia. Then he realized that the light that was on was the ceiling light. Its switch was on the wall, on the other side of the room from the bed.

They woke up.

In Roseminster, Anna Pertwee and Edgar Corderman were in separate rooms at the Nelson. Pertwee was gasping when she came to. The nightmare left no memory, but it did leave a trace: the sensation of being dragged down into a whirlpool. Corderman woke himself up with his whimpering. He didn’t know why.

In London, Louise Meacham snapped her eyes open and leaped out of bed. She turned on the light and saw that there was no one in her room. This did not comfort her.

Patrick Hudson was yanked out of sleep by a stiletto-bladed sense of sudden, irrevocable loss.

In Paris, Kristine Sturghill’s heart was giving the good pound. She had dreamed of the show, and this time, Tibbert’s legs had fallen off. She wasn’t ditching the gig any too soon. England called to her.

Ripples reached as far as Washington. Jim Korda stirred, uneasy, but went back to sleep.