Lunar Park (30 page)

“Ash? You’ve seen this?” I grabbed a napkin from a dispenser and blew my nose. “What are you talking about?”

“One was a farmer. One was a lawyer.” Miller paused. “Did you read the journal on the site where I recounted these two incidents?”

“No.” I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t.”

I had to get out of the diner. I had to force myself to stand up and steadily make my way toward the Range Rover. I would drive back to the Four Seasons. I would climb under the covers of the bed. I would wait for whatever it was that wanted me and let it take hold. I would become unafraid of madness and death.

I could not understand why the Klonopin was not working this morning.

Every few seconds a semi would rumble past; the only hint that there was a reality outside of where I was sitting.

“These people just burst into flames.” Miller was not lowering his voice, and I glanced worriedly at the lone waitress sharing a conversation with the cook. Sometime during this conversation, the old man had disappeared from the counter and I thought that maybe he was a ghost too.

“How long have you been doing this?” I was asking him. “I mean, I don’t understand what you’re telling me. I mean, you say something like that and I think I’m cracking up and—”

“This information is all available on my Web site, Mr. Ellis—”

But I was lost in the anxiety of the moment. “I mean do you have a résumé or, like, recommendations because when you tell me that you’ve seen people burst into flame I feel like I’m going crazy—”

“Mr. Ellis, I was not handed a diploma. I did not go to ‘ghost college.’ I have only my experience. I have investigated over six thousand supernatural phenomena.”

I lost it again. I was crying and trying not to breathe too loudly. “What am I going to do?” I kept asking.

Miller began to console me. “If you want to hire me my job is to come to your home and invoke the physical manifestations of whatever is haunting your residence.”

“How . . . bad does that get? I mean, do I have to be there?” I forced myself to stop crying and was surprised that I had the power to accomplish this and I wiped my eyes and blew my nose with another napkin. I realized there were nearly a dozen of them crumpled and strewn in front of me.

“How bad does it get?” Miller actually said the following: “I once dealt with an accountant who said he was possessed. On the afternoon of the exorcism in his condominium, he began speaking backwards in Latin and then bled from his eyes and his head started to split open.”

The only way my shock dealt with this was to mumble, “Hey, I’ve been audited. I’ve been through worse.”

Such a tough guy,
the writer muttered.
So cool.

Miller didn’t understand that this was the normal response.

There was a stony silence during which Miller glared at me.

“I’m just kidding,” I whispered. “It was just a little joke. I was—”

“That incident, Mr. Ellis, gave me a heart attack. I was hospitalized. It was not a joke. I have this incident on tape.”

My exhaustion suddenly was forcing me to concentrate intently on Miller, and I was curious enough to ask, “What . . . do you do with that tape?”

“I show it at lectures.”

I was reflecting on the information. “What . . . was this person possessed by?”

“It was the spirit of what he told me was an animal that had scratched him.”

I wanted Miller to repeat this.

“He had been attacked by this animal, and after the attack he believed he was now the thing that had attacked him.”

“How does that happen?” I was almost wailing. “How does that happen? What are you talking about? Jesus Christ—”

“Mr. Ellis, you would not be making fun of me if someone possessed by a demonic spirit had thrown you twenty-five feet across a room and then tried to slash you into a bloody pulp.”

Again it took me a long time to start breathing regularly.

I was reduced to: “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just very tired. I don’t know. I’m not making fun of you.”

Miller kept staring at me, as if deciding something. He asked if I had the diagram of the house. I had quickly drafted a crude one on Four Seasons stationery, and when I pulled it out of my jacket pocket my hand was shaking so badly that I dropped it on the table as I was handing it to him. I apologized. He glanced at the sketch and placed it next to his notepad.

“I need to ask you some things,” he said quietly.

I clasped my hands together to make them stop shaking.

“When do these manifestations take place, Mr. Ellis?”

“At night,” I whispered. “They take place in the middle of the night. It’s always around the time of my father’s death.”

“When is that? Specifically.”

“I don’t know. Between two and three in the morning. My father died at two-forty a.m. and this seems to be the time when . . . things happen.”

A long pause that I couldn’t stand and had to question. “What does that mean?”

“And do you know the time of your birth?”

Miller was scrawling notes along the pad. He didn’t look at me when he asked this.

“Yes.” I swallowed hard. “It was at two-forty in the afternoon.”

Miller was studying something he had written down.

“What does any of that mean?” I asked. “Beyond a coincidence?”

“It means this is something to take seriously.”

“Why is that?” I asked in the voice of a believer, in the voice of a student seeking answers from the teacher.

“Because spirits who show themselves between night and dawn want something.”

“I don’t know what that means. I don’t get it.”

“It means they want to frighten you,” he said. “It means they want you to realize something.”

I wanted to cry again but I was able to control it.

None of this is very comforting, is it?
I heard the writer ask me.

“You mentioned in one of the interviews I glanced at that you based this fictional character, this Patrick Bateman, on your father—”

“Yes, I had, yes—”

“—and you say this Patrick Bateman has been contacting you?”

“Yes, yes, this is true.”

“Were you and your father close?”

“No. No. We weren’t.”

Miller was studying something on the notepad. It was bothering him.

“And there are children in the house? Whose are they?”

“Yes, I have two,” I said. “Well, actually, only one of them is mine.”

Miller looked up suddenly. He didn’t respond but was staring at me, clearly troubled.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

“That’s strange,” Miller said. “I don’t feel from you that you do.”

“You don’t feel what?”

“That you have a child.”

My chest ached. I flashed on Robby holding me in the car after school, and how tightly he gripped me last night because he thought I would protect him. Because he thought that I was now his father. I didn’t know what to say.

Miller moved on. “Is there a fireplace in the house?” he asked suddenly.

Shamefully, I had to think about this. I had been in the house for five months and I had to think about whether there was a fireplace in the house. If there was one it had never been used. This forced me to realize that there were two of them.

“Yes, yes, we do. Why?”

Miller paused, studying the notepad, and murmured offhand, “It’s just an entrance point. That’s all.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Miller said yes while flipping a page in the notepad.

“What if . . . what if this unexplained presence . . . doesn’t want to leave?” I swallowed. “What happens then?”

Miller looked up. “I have to let them know that I am helping them move on to a better place. They are actually quite grateful for any assistance.” He paused. “These are souls in distress, Mr. Ellis.”

“Why are they . . . distressed?”

“There are a couple of reasons. Some of them haven’t realized yet that they are dead.” He paused again. “And some of them want to impart information to the living.”

It was my turn to pause. “And you resolve this problem . . . for them?”

“It depends.” He shrugged.

“On what?”

“Well, on whether it’s a demon, or whether it’s a ghost or, in your case, whether the things you created—these tortured entities—have somehow manifested themselves into your reality.”

“But I don’t understand,” I was saying. “What’s the difference between a ghost and a demon?”

By the time this question was asked the diner had disappeared. It was only Miller and myself in a booth suspended outside of whatever the real world now meant to me.

“Demons are malicious and powerful. Ghosts are just confused—lost, vulnerable.” Miller abruptly reached into his denim jacket and pulled out a cell phone that had been vibrating. He checked the incoming number and then clicked the phone shut. During this movement he continued talking as if he had given this information a million times before. “Ghosts draw their energy from any number of sources: light, fear, sadness, anguish—these are the things that make the spirit precedent. Ghosts are not violent.”

You have demons,
the writer whispered.

“Demons are a manifestation of evil, and they haunt people who have carelessly let them into their lives. Remember what I said about antagonism? A demon appears when it feels it has been antagonized, and what it wants to do, its purpose, is to return this antagonism. Demons are angry.”

“You have to help me,” I was saying. “You have to help us.”

“You don’t need to convince me that you’re a frightened man anymore, Mr. Ellis,” Miller said. “I know you are.”

“Okay, okay, okay, now what?”

“I’ll come to your house and determine the nature of the haunting.”

“And then what?” I asked hopefully before saying, “Thank you.”

“If a demonic presence is in your house—and it sounds like it—then you’re in for a battle.”

“Why?”

“Because whatever this is draws on your fear. They draw on the collective fear that is in the house. And depending on the amount of fear, the damage some of these spirits cause can be catastrophic.”

“Why did this happen to me? Why is this happening to me?”

“It sounds as if you’re being haunted by a messenger.” Miller paused. “By your father and by Patrick Bateman and by something you created in your childhood.”

“But what is the message? What does it want to tell me?”

“It could be any number of things.”

The world no longer existed. I was just staring at him. I didn’t feel anything anymore. Everything was gone except for Miller’s voice.

“Sometimes these spirits become whoever
you
are.”

Miller studied me for a reaction. There wasn’t one.

“Do you understand that, Mr. Ellis? That these spirits might be projections from your inner self?”

“I think . . . that I’m being warned . . .”

“By what?”

“By . . . my father? I think my father wants to tell me something.”

“From the information you’ve supplied, this might be very likely.”

“But . . . something is . . . seems to be stopping him . . . like the . . .” I trailed off.

Miller paused. “Who brought the doll into the house, Mr. Ellis?”

“I did,” I whispered. “It was me.”

“And who created Patrick Bateman?”

In a whisper: “I did.”

“And the thing you saw in the hall?”

Another whisper: “Me.”

I was brought back when Miller pushed his pad across the table.

There was something on it he wanted me to see.

I noticed a word spelled in capital letters: T E R B Y.

Below this, the word spelled backward: Y B R E T.

Why, Bret?

I finally hitched a breath.

“What’s your birthdate, Mr. Ellis?” I heard Miller asking.

“It’s March the seventh.”

Miller tapped the bottom of the notepad with his pen.

Miller had drawn a slash between two numbers.

In red ink: 3/07 Elsinore Lane.

“Could we just move to another house?”

I was panting.

“Can we just get out of the house?”

I couldn’t control it.

“Can we just move somewhere else?”

Miller grabbed my hand to calm me.

“Mr. Ellis, in this case I don’t think that’s an option.”

I couldn’t breathe anymore.

“Why not? Why isn’t it an option?”

“Because the house may not be the source of the haunting.”

I had started weeping again.

“If, if, but, if, the, house, is, is, not the source—”

“Mr. Ellis—”

I could hear Miller but he wasn’t visible.

“But if the house is not the source . . . what is the source of the haunting?”

Miller finally said it.

“You are.”

27. the haunted

T
he world was now dimmed, a shallow island of light floating in a vast darkness, even though it was noon and we were heading toward the house on Elsinore Lane and I was sitting in the back of a converted van behind two assistants (from what I learned was a staff of twelve, and who could have passed as anonymous computer nerds, with requisite crew cuts, from the college). Dale, who had greeted me with “Wicked bruise,” was driving while Sam rifled through a CD case, and they were carrying on a disagreement about a recent movie—just two dudes on their way to the “preliminary investigation” or the “ISR” (initial site reading) and the casualness of their conversation was supposed to be a calming reminder that this was no big deal, just another assignment. But Miller was overlapping them—the two of us side by side, our knees pressed against a generator—explaining to me where the last haunting had taken his team, a remote location where the ghosts and demons of the dead had congregated: an abandoned slaughterhouse. I didn’t care. I wanted this all to be over as quickly as possible. As usual I pretended it was a dream. This made things easier.

“When should we do this?” I had asked Miller after recovering in the Dorseah Diner. “As soon as possible” was his answer. Outside, standing in the gravel-strewn parking lot (which was slowly becoming a carpet of beach sand), Miller made a series of calls as I watched a new line of palm trees rising in the distance. He followed me back to the Four Seasons, where a valet parked his van, and as we went up to the suite to pick up the keys to the house a fee was discussed. If the house was infested and I wanted to retain his services, a check would have to be written for $30,000, which to me seemed like a bargain. When he asked if I had access to that much money, I assured him, gravely, that I did. But I would have agreed to any amount since I was staring at the ashy footprints that had circled my bed in the hotel suite while I was cringing in a booth at the Dorseah Diner (they had come from nowhere) and then I saw the gray handprint on a pillow and almost broke down again and said that I wouldn’t go back to the house, but Miller told me that because I was the focus of the infestation I needed to be there. When I was about to protest again, and offer him a larger fee so I could stay away from the house, Miller had already guided me outside, where a van much larger than Miller’s was waiting for us, and as I stepped into that van my world—already drifting away from me—became inverted.

Miller was explaining what the various pieces of equipment were for, and I strained to pay attention but couldn’t focus on anything except the fact that we were heading back to the house. There were infrared digital cameras and motion detectors and electromagnetic field meters (EMFs as the crew referred to them); there was something called a laser thermometer as well as an audio recorder that could be fed into a frequency analyzer and read off a laptop. I tried to steady myself by asking questions—but this was just a way to pretend that we weren’t rolling toward a situation the writer had already witnessed and was calling, with chilling ambiguity,
complicated.
I heard samples of Miller’s dialogue skipping through my mind. Vaguely gesturing at something, I asked, “What does that do?”

“An EMF,” I heard. “It filters out normal electromagnetic frequencies.”

“What do you mean?” I inquired dreamily.

“Like from a computer or a TV or a phone or even a human body—all of which can give a false reading.” Miller’s voice had a rubbery quality and it was bouncing around inside the van, moving away from me, echoing.

“And what’s that?” I found myself pointing at a large, bulky machine that resembled an oversized air-conditioning unit.

“A galvanometer. It registers unexplained energy flow.”

Of course. Of course that’s what it is. You knew that, Bret.

I was now hunched over and about to lose it again as the van was gliding around the corner of Bedford and onto Elsinore.

The house sat innocently in daylight, but even in daylight the house seemed menacing.

I was scowling with fear because I couldn’t help studying it as the van pulled into the driveway.

“Here goes,” one of the guys said. They both eagerly exited the van. They had been filled in on the various particulars of “the situation” and they were ready to party. They moved to the doors at the back of the van and started unloading equipment with frat-boy expectancy.

I wasn’t aware I had left the van and was floating toward the house until I was standing so close to it that I could have touched the thing.

The front of the house was now the same color as the side of the house.

The writer forced me to notice this since I was blind.

Look,
the writer said.
Touch it.

The wood had turned to stucco.

Because of this, I couldn’t go back into the house.

I walked away.

Miller followed me out into the field behind the house, and then I was pacing, and then I was standing still again. I couldn’t control my breathing. My mouth was dry and chalky from chewing the Klonopin tablets.

“You’ll be protected,” Miller promised.

“This was not a case of possession,” he assured me.

“You need to be in the house” was his gentle order.

“Why?” I pleaded. “Why?”

“Because you are its focus. Because we need to find out what the source of the haunting is.”

They needed to invoke the spirits.

And you’re being used as bait. Do you get it now, Bret?

I didn’t even crave a drink at this point—I would have thrown up if I swallowed alcohol.

Pass that sage advice along: Want to stay sober? Move into a haunted place.

Miller impatiently redirected me to the house, because there was nowhere I would be safe if this was not dealt with.

(The writer prodded me along with a reminder of the ashy handprint on the pillow.)

My response: “If there’s anything inside the house, I don’t think I can take it.”

I hesitated then shuffled quickly toward the front door.

I slipped the key into the lock.

I opened the front door.

I stepped into the foyer.

The house was silent.

Miller stood beside me.

“Where have the main occurrences taken place?” I was asked.

The three men were waiting for me to guide them to the hallway of flickering lights, the master bedroom that had been invaded, the living room that was now the living room of Valley Vista—just a brief intake of breath as I glimpsed the dark green shag that was still growing, and then I had to turn away.

Miller was studying the office door, unhinged, gnawed on.

“Yeah,” I said. “It happened.”

While Dale and Sam began setting up equipment throughout the house, I showed Miller the video attachment I had received.

I couldn’t look at it so I wandered. Upstairs I peered into Robby’s and Sarah’s rooms and then (delicately—I did not go in) the master bedroom.

The unmade beds in all three rooms relieved me.

There was no sign of the Terby anywhere, but that didn’t mean anything.

Back in my office the video was ending.

My father was staring out at us.

“Robby . . . Robby . . .”

Miller turned to me wordlessly, unimpressed.

“All electrical appliances need to be unplugged” was all he said.

“Why don’t we just turn off the fuse box?” I asked.

“We’ll do that as well.”

The equipment would be plugged into the generator that had been dragged into the foyer and was sitting at the bottom of the staircase.

While we began the process of unplugging anything connected to a power outlet, everyone began feeling it.

(I pretended not to.)

There was a new pressure in the house.

It was weighing down on us.

I tried to ignore the moment our ears started popping.

But when Sam and Dale laughed I had to accept it.

Once everything was disconnected, Sam and Dale began plugging various cords into the generator.

The infrared video cameras and sound-activated microcassettes were mounted on tripods.

Sam would oversee the one placed in the upstairs hallway.

Dale would oversee the one placed in the master bedroom.

And Miller would oversee the one placed in the living room with the widest field of vision, including the foyer and the staircase.

Each of them held an electromagnetic field meter—an EMF.

All the curtains and blinds in the house were drawn shut—I did not ask why—and the interior of the house darkened considerably, but with enough light still scratching through from outside.

Once Sam and Dale were in position upstairs, Miller asked me to turn off the fuse box.

It was located in the hallway that led to the garage.

I opened it.

I breathed in as I shut off the power.

Walking quickly back to Miller’s side, I realized that this was the quietest the house had ever been.

During this thought all three EMF meters started beeping—instantly, in unison.

According to the flashing red digital numbers I saw a reading jump from 0 to 100 in what seemed like less than a second.

Immediately the cameras sensed something and started whirring, moving in a continuous circular motion atop the tripods.

“We have liftoff,” I heard one of the guys whoop from upstairs.

The beeping suddenly became more insistent.

The cameras kept flashing as they turned.

The locks on the French windows in the living room made a cracking sound.

Another cracking sound and the windows swung outward, causing the green curtains to start billowing even though it was a cold, still November afternoon.

But then they stopped billowing.

The curtains weren’t there last night,
the writer said.
Don’t you recognize them?
the writer asked.
Think back.

Air gusted over us, and the faint sound of something being pounded echoed throughout the house.

The pounding continued.

It was moving through the walls and then into the ceiling above us.

The pounding was competing with the sounds from the EMFs but the pounding soon overtook it.

I shut my eyes, but the writer told me that the pounding culminated when a huge puncture appeared in the wall above the couch in the living room.

(Later, the writer told me that I had screamed while standing perfectly still.)

And then: silence.

The EMF monitors stopped beeping.

“Hoo-ah!” This from one of the guys upstairs.

The other whooped gleefully again.

They had been on this ride before.

Miller and I were breathing hard.

I didn’t care if I appeared afraid.

“I’m sensing a male presence,” I heard Miller murmur, scanning the room.

“The lights are flickering, Bob,” Sam called down from the upstairs hallway.

From where Miller and I stood we looked up and could see the flickering lights of the sconces reflected in the massive window near the top of the stairs.

It seemed as if something knew we had noticed this and the flickering stopped abruptly.

Miller was now standing in front of the freshly punctured wall.

He stared at it, humbly.

“An angry man . . . someone very lost and angry . . .”

I was so afraid I could not feel myself. I was just a voice asking: “What does that mean? What’s going on? What does it want? Why is it stopping?”

Miller scanned the ceiling with his EMF.

“Why did it stop?” I kept asking.

Miller answered quietly.

“Because it knows we’re here.”

This was part of his performance. He was trying to project self-assurance, confidence, a sense of command, but there was one lucid fraction within me peering through the fear that knew whatever resided in the house was going to defeat us all in the end.

(I flashed on: You
resided in this house, Bret.
)

“Because it knows we’re here,” Miller murmured again.

Miller turned to me.

“Because it’s curious.”

We waited for what felt like eternity.

The house seemed to grow darker as time passed.

Finally, Miller called up. “Dale—anything?”

“It’s quiet now,” Dale called back down.

“Sam—anything?”

Sam’s answer was interrupted when the EMFs resumed beeping again.

This was followed by the cameras whirring.

And then a sound announced itself that unnerved me more than the pounding or the noise emanating from the meters.

A voice was singing.

Music began playing throughout the house.

A song from the past, flowing from an eight track on the long drive up the California coastline to a place called Pajaro Dunes.

. . . memories light the corners of my mind . . .

“Did we unplug the stereo?” I asked, wheeling around in the semidarkness.

. . . misty water color memories . . .

“Yes, we did, Mr. Ellis.” This was Miller, holding his EMF as if it was guiding him toward something.

. . . of the way we were . . .

The living room instantaneously became hot. It was a greenhouse, and the smell of the Pacific slowly traced itself in the muggy air.

. . . scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind . . .

Suddenly, from upstairs: “There’s something here,” Sam called. “It just materialized.” Pause. “Bob, did you hear me?”

. . . smiles we gave to one another . . .

“What is it?” Miller called up.

Sam’s voice, less enthusiastic: “It’s, um . . . it’s a human form . . . skeletal . . . it just exited the little girl’s room . . .”

Actually,
the writer informed me,
Sam was wrong. It came from Robby’s room, since Robby is, in fact, the focal point of the haunting.

Not you, Bret.

Did you grasp that yet?

Not everything’s about you, even though you would like to think so.

From Dale: “I see it too, Bob.”

“What’s its location now?” Miller called up.

. . . the way we were . . .