Goodlow's Ghosts (8 page)

He was on the earth. He was stuck here, something was keeping him here. He could feel it. It was like a physical weight, a strong hand on the top of his head holding him down.

He sat up on his green cot and swung his feet around to the floor. They hit with a satisfying
whump
. He smiled.

He opened his hands and brought them sharply together. They made a clapping noise.

He smiled again. "Good," he whispered.

He had things to do. And sooner or later he thought he would find out what those things were.

~ * ~

"Mr.
Biergarten
?" Ryerson heard from outside the cabin.

Ryerson called back, "Stay away. Don't come in here, Mr. Lutz."

"What's wrong?" Lutz called.

Ryerson stared hard into the tall sunlit grasses beyond the doorway. He hoped to see Jack Lutz. The man would be an anchor for him, a real part of the real world that he—Ryerson—usually inhabited and so badly needed now. But the sound of Lutz's voice indicated that he was not close by.

"Mr.
Biergarten
?" Lutz called.

Ryerson leaped toward the doorway. He went through it, through the yellow police ribbon.

"Jesus Christ!" Lutz shouted.

Ryerson found himself in sunlight, in the tall grasses outside the cabin. He heard Lutz coming toward him. "Mr.
Biergarten
, are you all right?"

Ryerson was on his stomach. He glanced behind at the cabin doorway, then at Lutz, who was above him now. "Don't go in there, Mr. Lutz."

"You're bleeding," Lutz said.

"I am?"

"Yes. Your forehead."

Ryerson touched his forehead, looked at his fingers, saw — blood, remembered hitting the doorjamb. "It's okay," he said.

Lutz produced a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Ryerson, who took it and dabbed at the blood with it.

"You'll need stitches," Lutz said.

Ryerson looked at the cabin doorway again. He said nothing.

Midmorning, the following day, Ryerson answered the door-bell but found no one at his door.

He stepped out onto the little wedge-shaped open porch and looked right and left down the street. There was an old couple walking not far away; their backs were to him and the man's gray head was bobbing animatedly beneath his red umbrella as he talked to the woman. No one else was on the rain-soaked street.

Creosote appeared beside Ryerson on the porch and whimpered his confusion. The dog often read the man as well as the man read the dog. Ryerson glanced at him. "Someone's come into the house, pup."

Creosote snorted, sneezed. Ryerson got down on his haunches and scratched the dog's ears; Creosote tilted his head into Ryerson's hand to ask for more.

Ryerson was uneasy. He believed in ghosts because he'd spoken with them. He knew something of the world they existed in because he had been a part of it, if briefly. And he was uneasy now because what little he knew about the world of the dead told him only how very ignorant he was.

~ * ~

Rebecca
Meechum
said to Jenny
Goodlow
, over the telephone, "So he knows nothing? He's not going to help you?"

Jenny
Goodlow
answered, "As I said, I didn't
ask
him to help. I think he's a fraud. And I don't think it's any of your business anyway."

"You're being very uncivil, Jenny," Rebecca said. "My God, we were almost . . . sisters." Rebecca chuckled shortly.

Jenny hung up.

~ * ~

The beguiling dark-eyed brunette sat alone on the train. She was reading a paperback book, and Guy Squires thought it would be all right to sit with her because most of the other seats were taken.

He sat beside her, glanced at her luxurious shoulder-length hair, and said "Hello" in the stiff but polite way that he imagined strangers seated next to one another on trains were supposed to say hello. She looked up from her book, smiled vaguely at him, then looked away.

"Good book?" Guy Squires asked.

She glanced at him again. "Sorry?"

He nodded at the book. "Good book?"

She shook her head. "Not very. It's about a vampire who ages, and that's something vampires simply don't do, isn't it." She shrugged. "So I don't believe a word of it."

"Then why read it?"

"Because it amuses me to read." She paused. "Do you read?"

"Only timetables," Guy Squires answered. "And the stock market report, of course." He was letting her know, in his subtle way, that he was a man accustomed to dealing with money.

The brunette looked appraisingly at him a moment, then sighed. "Too bad. I like men who really read."

"I used to read," Guy Squires told her hurriedly. "Hell, I read all the time. I read whatever I could get hold of. You couldn't
tear
me away from anything with words on it." He grinned nervously because he was lying and was sure that she could tell. "I once read
War and Peace
and
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
in one sitting, if you can believe it." He paused a half second, then hurried on, "And ... and I even
wrote
a book once. It wasn't a long book. It was pretty short. Six hundred pages, I guess. Not so long that you would have to set aside a great deal of time to read it ..."

The brunette cut in, "Then you're a writer. How
excitng
." She seemed suddenly animated. "What was it about?—this book of yours."

"What was it about?" He grinned nervously again. `Well, it was about a group of people, I guess. And they were ... they had a kind of conflict—"

"Conflict? I love conflict. It's what life is all about, wouldn't you agree?"

"Of course," Guy Squires said. "Conflict. Where would we be without conflict?" He thought that he was on a roll, now, that he had gotten onto her wavelength. Lord only knew what would follow. He hurried on, "Conflict makes us all ... human, doesn't it? I ... I
read
about it all the me—"

"You said you didn't read," she cut in, pouting.

He stared dumbly at her a moment. She seemed very disappointed, suddenly, even annoyed. "Yes, yes," he
stamiered
. "Not since last week. Only timetables and stock
iarket
reports since then. No time to read purely for ..." he cast about in his brain for the word she had used. “Amusement. No time. Too much work, dammit. Too much making money." He grinned nervously. "I hate it, really. This need to make money. You can make only so such and then it becomes ... redundant." He smiled; that surely had been a remark to remember. He chattered on, as if accustomed to making memorable remarks, "So, I haven't actually read anything for amusement since last week. It amuses me to read. Mysteries, science fiction, romances, the whole . . . gamut, everything. I once read
Collier's Encyclopedia
—"

"Would you like to come home with me?" the brunette cut in.

Guy Squires' mouth dropped open. "You mean it?" he asked breathlessly.

"Obviously, you're a real reader," said the brunette.

"I am, I am."

~ * ~

Ryerson stood in his office doorway, finger poised on the light switch, and looked at the man seated in his desk chair. The man's back was turned.

"Can we leave the light off?" the man asked.

"Of course," Ryerson answered. He could see only the back of the man's head, a wild mop of dark hair—it might have been red, he thought.

"Do you know me?" the man said.

"I don't know the back of your head. Especially in the dark."

"Do you know my voice?"

"I've never heard it, no," Ryerson answered. The man's voice was deep, but not baritone. It had a strained quality which suggested, strangely, that the man wasn't accustomed to speaking.

"Do any names come to you?" the man asked. "Listen," Ryerson answered, "I could ask you these same questions—"

"You're Ryerson
Biergarten
," the man cut in. "I know that much, anyway." He seemed to be pleading.

Ryerson turned on the light.

There was no reaction from the man. Ryerson could see that his guess about the man's hair color had been correct; it was red.

Ryerson turned the light off.

"Thank you," the man said.

"For what?"

"For leaving the light off."

Ryerson took a couple of steps into the room. He stopped. He smelled the ocean. He had also smelled the ocean at Jack Lutz's cabin, he remembered. He asked, "Why are you here?"

The man answered at once, "I thought you'd know."

Ryerson was uncertain how to interpret this, whether the man was, indeed, asking why he was here, or whether the man knew why he was here and was being coy.

"I don't understand what you're saying," Ryerson told him.

"I'm not sure," the man said.

"What aren't you sure of?"

"Do you know?"

Ryerson sighed. "If you're playing a game—"

"I don't believe so," the man said. "I don't know. What do I know?"

Ryerson got the uneasy feeling that the man's question was genuine and that he—the man—actually felt that Ryerson could answer it.

"Where have you come from?" Ryerson asked.

"Did you turn on the light a moment ago?" the man asked.

"Yes."

"I only remember it now. Is that odd?"

"I don't understand," Ryerson said.

"I believe that my name is Sam
Goodlow
," the man said. "Do you know that name?"

Ryerson didn't answer. He was suddenly afraid. Creosote came into the room and stood next to Ryerson, gaze upturned.

"Sam
Goodlow
," the man said. "I would face you, I would swivel around in your chair here, but I can't, and I wish I could."

Creosote wheezed.

Ryerson's mouth went dry.

"Mr.
Biergarten
?" the man said.

"Yes?" Ryerson managed.

"But what is the question?" the man said. "Who knows?"

Creosote turned his flat face toward the voice of the man and cocked his head.

Ryerson came forward quickly and leaned over the front of his desk.

The man in the chair turned around at once and faced him.

Ryerson screamed and ran from the room.

Creosote followed.

Sam
Goodlow
stared at the empty doorway and wondered what in the hell he had done.

Guy Squires and the beguiling dark-eyed brunette got off the train together and took a taxi to 114 Troy Street, on Boston's lower east side.

"You
live
here?" Guy Squires asked, flabbergasted.

The brunette, who was clutching her bad paperback book in her right hand and had her left arm around Guy Squires' waist, answered, "I do. Yes. Up there, on the top floor."

The building they were looking at was a narrow, gray, late-Victorian town house which had—many years earlier, Guy Squires imagined—seen better days. It was sandwiched between two squat brown brick buildings. Both buildings bore NO TRESPASSING and FOR SALE signs.

The brunette's building also bore a FOR SALE sign. The sign was yellowed from age and weathering and the real-estate broker's name was barely readable.

Troy Street was short and narrow, and Guy Squires noticed that he and the brunette were the only people on it.

"Well, let's go up," chirped the brunette, took her arm from around Guy Squires' waist, and grabbed hold of his land.

Guy Squires resisted. He felt uneasy. The street and the building, the decay and the abandonment made him uneasy. And the brunette made him uneasy, too, though he wasn't sure why. Perhaps because she simply didn't
look
like she belonged here. She looked like she belonged on the upper west side.

"I'm not sure about this," he said.

The brunette laughed. It was an easy laugh, quick and believable, and Guy Squires smiled in response. "This is where I come when I want to be alone," the brunette told him. "I have a place on the upper west side, too, of course. But it's so stuffy there, wouldn't you agree?"

Guy Squires nodded and began to speak, but the brunette went on, "I know this doesn't look like much. But at least there's no one around. We won't want for privacy." She gave him a coy look.

Guy Squires nodded again, with enthusiasm, and said, "Yeah, privacy." He realized that he needed to use a bathroom.

And they went, hand in hand, up the moldering steps of the Victorian town house, through the front doors, inside, and up three flights of lousy stairs to the third floor.

The brunette pushed open a door marked 3c.