Twelfth Night (A Wendover House Mystery Book 2) (5 page)

“I was startled, but not panicked, when it went dark. I
called up to my friend hoping he would hear me since I had left the door to the
basement open. But almost at once the door closed. It was heavy, solid wood and
the
thunk
was audible when it latched. I couldn’t
help thinking that the air around me was dead, still, very grave-like.

“That was when I began to get frightened. There were matches
in my pocket and I began to fumble for them when I had an overwhelming feeling
that I was not alone. Something was watching me—something suspicious and
hostile. I peered into the dark and let me tell you I have never looked at
anything so hard. Eventually I saw a pale shape—an outline—of a man in Roman
dress. I think he was a sentinel, maybe standing watch. I could only see him
from the knees up, of course, since he stood at ground level in his time. He had
a kind of pike and a sword and he was staring in my direction. I couldn’t see
his face but his head kept turning and I was sure he knew I was there and was
getting ready to challenge me.

“I was terrified of moving lest he
see
me more clearly, but more afraid of the dark, so I got out my matches and got
them lit. Seconds later the basement light came on and, of course, nothing was
there.
Just more dusty wooden crates.
My friend had
changed the fuse as quickly as he could. Apparently it went out all the time.
Not the whole house.
Just the light in the basement.

“The door was a larger problem because it had gotten jammed,
but my friend found a crowbar thing he called a spanner and eventually we got
the damned thing open by popping the hinges. I made him stay at the top of the
stairs while I gathered up as many bottles as I could carry. No way was I
making a second trip down to get more wine. I never made it back down to take
pictures either. Just couldn’t talk myself into it. I asked my friend about
ghost stories but he denied any knowledge of ghosts in the basement.

“Anyhow, I can’t prove any of it happened—I heard nothing, no
phantom footsteps, icy touches, or ghostly wailing. Really didn’t see much
either. It was all just impressions. Sure it was terribly cold down there, but
the basement was naturally cold. It was just a feeling and I could have
hallucinated all of it because I was frightened and in a ripe state of mind.
But whatever it was that happened, it scared the bejesus out of me and I’ve
never written about it.”

“A hostile centurion would scare the hell out of me,” Bryson
said.

Jack nodded.

There was a whining noise that I realized was coming from
Brandy. I looked at her, startled. We all looked, at first puzzled and then
alarmed by her pallor.

“I saw a ghost once and it wasn’t like in your stories. It
wasn’t so
normal
, so safe. Ghosts can
hurt you,” Brandy announced breathlessly. For once she sounded frightened and
not like she was faking Marilyn Monroe to be sexy. Her eyes were big and
owl-like and she didn’t blink for several seconds, making me think of the glass
eyes used in taxidermy. I had a cupboard full of heads upstairs and hated
looking at them—and them looking at me. The flickering candles heightened the
effect and I had an impulse to turn on the electric lights.

“Brandy?” I asked softly.

Finally she blinked.

“I swear this really happened. I swear. It was real. And it
was evil.”

And I believed her. There was gooseflesh on my arms even
before she started her tale. Brandy didn’t talk much about her Hollywood days—really
only once while drunk and lamenting her first divorce—but I knew her time out
west had been about as happy as the most tragic Russian novel.

She had never spoken about ghosts though. Given how bad
everything else had been, I knew that this must have been something beyond
awful.

“You don’t have to go into.…” I began and stopped, realizing
from the surprised looks that I was being clumsy and about to speak of things
that others didn’t need to know about my friend.
Especially
not judgmental Mary who liked to gossip.
I felt cloddish, unsure how to
go on with the party and the stories and yet how to stop my friend from
confiding something she might regret.

Of course, would anyone else be less inept in the situation?
If this were a case of offering physical first aid I could cope better. Barbara’s—Brandy’s—scars
were emotional and the choice to show them was hers.

I glanced at the faces around the table. They were staring, losing
their definition as the candles burned low, but not enough that I couldn’t see
they were interested. Brandy’s face was stark, a perfect artist’s exercise of
fear. Or maybe it was just that my psyche was tender and overreacting to her
words. In any event, I realized that I had just drawn an inside straight. This
was what was needed to really involve the others. Ben’s and Harris’s stories
had been good, but they were something that might have been pulled from a
generic ghost book and their telling had rather robbed them of the feeling of
true horror they must have felt. Or perhaps it was just me, because I had some
kind of shared experience with Hannah. No one else seemed as horrified by what had
happened during their encounters with spirits as I was when I saw mine. They
didn’t take it personally.
Maybe because they were able to
leave their ghosts, which were haunting a place and not a person.
They
had described preservations, fragments of a personality endlessly repeating the
same act, but not connected personally to the living who witnessed their deeds.

I wanted genuine, firsthand accounts of awful things that
were both sentient and after specific victims. That kind of testimony would
strip away the last of the disbelief anyone had, and assure me that I wasn’t
alone in this experience.

Still, I knew this story wouldn’t be comfortable and I hoped
Brandy wasn’t about to start oversharing because of the mulled wine. I wanted
support, corroboration of the supernatural, but not at the expense of my
friend’s dignity.

She began speaking, her words a tumble.

“It was when I went out to Hollywood to be an actress. Tess
knows—a little. I’d been there a couple months and I was…. It was hard to get
callbacks and…. Well, but then I got invited to this producer’s house for a
party. The mansion was pretty old, pretty creepy really. Lillian Bowes, the
silent film star, committed suicide there—and a maid drowned in the pool. There
was also a rumor that the Black Lotus Strangler had been a guest there and,
well, you know…. But it was my big chance so.…”

Note:
I’m going to
take over the storytelling here. Brandy has never been good at linear narrative
and there are few things that she would never explain about her desperate early
days in Hollywood—and probably doesn’t even admit to herself. Also, the broken
um
s and
well
s
don’t paint a picture of
the mood her story caused. So I’ll tell it for her. I’ve also changed some
names because I don’t want lawsuits from the survivors’ families.

Let me start by saying that I realize that most people are
the same everywhere. We all require food, shelter, and clothing. We are
defensive and offensive, and fall victim to the same diseases. But the people
who are drawn to Hollywood—to stardom—have other needs too, among them being a
requirement for outside approval, external validation, even adoration. And like
thirsty people after water, they take insane risks, and even sell themselves to
get it.

Brandy was no exception. There was a frightening restlessness
in her back then, a dark drive for fame. She wasn’t interested in becoming a
good actress, in perfecting the craft, in going on the stage. She wanted the
ink, the video, the big screen. She wanted to be a star.

But stardom doesn’t happen overnight, and not without hard
work and some lucky breaks—which she couldn’t seem to get. So she had to find
other ways to live, other ways to get money that didn’t interfere with random
casting calls and showing herself in the “right” places. She chose a career
that many other girls have done before, but she can’t live with the ugly words
for what she did back then to get noticed, not now that her moral vision has
returned to twenty-twenty.
Escort
is
the politest term for her means of making money when the first of the month
came and there was no rent money. And even with this sideline, her plans for
being a star were coming undone. Everything was expensive and she needed
clothes and a professional portfolio, as well as pesky necessities like food and
a place to stay.

Then Fate intervened. She bumped into a man at a casting
call—an unpleasant, touchy-feely kind of man who had a pocket full of cocaine
and a good line of chat—and he invited her to a party at a client’s house….

That kind of Hollywood gathering was a first for her and
represented the pinnacle of opportunity for an unknown actress/escort. The promise
of illustrious company dazzled her into incautious stupidity. She was a naïve
twenty-two, college educated but her mind was still stuffed with small town
values and beliefs about how the world worked. When someone said that they
could make her a star, she believed it, even though the person promising her
hadn’t even a passing acquaintance with the truth. And, in her defense, it
would have been hard not to believe when she wanted stardom so badly and she was
staring at the defeat of her dreams. When you are young, the public death of a
fantasy is humiliating beyond all words. Going home to the family’s I-told-you-
sos
was unbearable, unthinkable. So she chose to be blind
to the danger she was courting and even smiled as the sweaty hands of the
procurer caressed her.

Hale House was huge, elegant, and imposing, but kind of like
the third circle of Hell because of the lighting and the people in it. You can
look it up online, though now it is used as a headquarters for a nonprofit and
all the gaudy trappings have been stripped away. Even if the furnishings could
have been cleaned, who wanted to sit on a sofa once covered in blood and semen?

Brandy climbed out of the taxi and used the last of her
money to pay the driver. A hot wind was blowing that night and it felt like
what the natives refer to as earthquake weather. She had a moment of unease and
hesitated at the edge of the property, watching,
thinking
.
She was nervous but she also felt like a kid outside a toy shop full of things
she wanted.
Needed.

She went up to the security guard and gave her name. He
looked her up and down, and without consulting his list, let her inside.

Everyone within the gates was gorgeous—the women lustrous
and pampered, the men often not only handsome but glossy with a patina of
power. And jaded as they were from their years of wallowing in the fleshpots
and shoving things up their noses, Brandy must have seemed like a shiny new
penny, an innocent among the heathens. Hungry eyes watched her. At first she
was flattered but then began to feel self-conscious. People looked her over but
they didn’t speak to her.

Her naïveté drew someone else that night who was stranger than
the others present and, though it is hard to believe because the experience
frightened her so badly, perhaps it saved her from something worse since her
host was later arrested and charged with multiple counts of rape and battery,
and later for a murder that happened that night. It turned out that he had
bought the house
because
the Black
Lotus Strangler had lived there and he was living out some dark fantasies of
his own.

The room where she found herself herded by the guards and
caterers was large, full of modular furniture covered in red and black vinyl.
Lights
strobed
and there was a disco ball. Brandy
thought it was like being inside a jukebox. It was bright, loud, and the
cocaine—which she had never tried before—and the Quaaludes were making her head
throb and her heart beat way too fast while also making her sluggish and sleepy.
The room also had a strange acoustic that brought on what her daddy called a
dry drunk, a state where you didn’t really need drugs for everyone got kind of
fuzzy and high. There were drugs though.
Lots and lots of
them.
Pretty pills in china bowls and salt cellars filled with cocaine,
laid out like pillow mints on the glass-topped tables.

There was a boy in fishnet stockings and platform shoes
dancing on a table in front of a giant plate glass window that looked out on
the manmade glitter of Los Angeles that grew brighter as the hellfire sun
finally set. Most of the people there were really classy, but there were a few
that looked like the feature spread in a cheap porn mag. They were being stared
at—like exhibits in a zoo. Or, more accurately, like lobsters headed for the
pot.

Brandy wondered what she looked like in her borrowed dress.
Did she look sexy—like a starlet? Or was
she
just
cheap entertainment—like that boy? Would she end up dancing on a table? She
knew from the looks she got that she was inspiring immoral thought in others,
which was weird given that she was not really immoral. A part of her was
ashamed that this was so, but another part of her knew that she could use this.
Had to use this.
Even if her role for the night was
poorly written and didn’t have many lines, it was still a break. There was
money here—green so dense it was like a jungle. That meant opportunities for a
smart girl.

Brandy sat on the edge of a chair, a giant hand made of
black resin. She crossed her legs and tried to look alluring, hoping someone
would come talk to her because she wasn’t good at chatting up strangers. A waiter
in a bow tie and gold thong brought her some champagne. She sipped at it, feeling
thirsty but not wanting to get drunk.