City of Masks

12

In the darkness, the house seemed bigger, more formidable and somehow more distant, tucked back into the foliage. All the nearby houses had warm lights in their windows, and many had gas lamps flickering on their porches, but Beauforte House struck Cree as hollow and forlorn, lost in the leafy shadows thrown by streetlights. She wondered if it had been wise to turn down the cheerful, if distracting, companionship of Paul Fitzpatrick.

She shivered involuntarily as she opened the iron gate and shut it behind her. It wasn't just the darkness and the empty windows; reading Joyce's materials on the Chase murder had filled her mind with bad images that were hard to dispel.

Joyce had e-mailed a note chastising Cree for not telling her earlier that this case might involve an unsolved murder, which they'd all agreed added unacceptable dimensions of risk and complication to a case. But as Cree had hoped, she'd done the work anyway and had attached a good collection of news stories about the incident: a cluster of articles from two years ago and then increasingly sporadic items from the following months.

The basic facts were simple. After his eleven o'clock show one night, Temp Chase had come home, sat down for a snack, and been shot dead by somebody who came into the house. His wife had been gone, visiting her parents just north of New Orleans, and had returned to find the body. Later articles revealed that Temp Chase's outwardly perfect life had some serious flaws. He had a drinking problem; he had recently lost money in bad investments. Even his prestigious job at WNOW, New Orleans's largest TV station, was in jeopardy; he'd been news anchor there for twelve years, but station management had been talking about replacing him with someone younger. There were rumors he'd been consorting with organized crime elements in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

People died by all kinds of means, but murder victims made for bad ghosts. Not in the same league as suicides, but they were the psychic residuals of people torn suddenly from life, unwilling to let go, dying in an explosion of pain and fear and agonized clinging. Hard for an empath to endure.

So why come here at ten o'clock at night, alone, vulnerable? Cree asked herself. She almost chuckled when she realized the mental voice she'd used was Fitzpatrick's continuing his game of twenty questions. She answered in her own voice: Because while it scares the crap out of me, and my partner thinks it'll kill me one day, I love this. Being at the edge of the ultimate mystery.

Of course, she knew it wasn't that simple. Edgar knew, too, Deirdre and Mom knew. There was a lot more, the Mike stuff, probably a death wish thing, too, but that was all too sad and complex and this wasn't the time to get mired in it.

She turned on her little flashlight, casting a tight spot of light on the door handle, then used the key Lila had given her to unlock it. She pushed it open. The house exhaled its stale breath. She stepped inside, shut the door behind her, and disarmed the security system as Jack had instructed her. She turned off the flashlight.

Darkness.

It would be easy enough to turn on the lights, but she left it as it was. She took a few steps into the hall, the dark absolute and cottony quiet.

Fitzpatrick would not understand what had to come next. It was not rationally explicable or defensible. It was unpredictable and took many forms. Cree could imagine him asking more of his "childish" and completely reasonable questions: Why do people almost always see ghosts at night? Aren't they wandering around all the time?

Because, Cree answered, in the dark our other senses come more alive. Because at night our neurochemistry changes. Because the competing sounds and sights of human activities quiet down, and we can see and hear subtler things. Because the bright mental beacons of the living are quenched in sleep all around, and we can sense fainter, more fitful glimmers. Because in the disorientation of dark we become aware of our own unconscious activity. Because we let go of the ordinary and are no longer bound or protected by it.

Serious ghost hunters did their work in the dark.

Her eyes adapting, she began to make out slivers of mercury vapor light around the curtains in the big room to the right, and she walked toward the silvery outlines. It was at the far end of this room that Lila's signs had shown that first anomalous reading. Cree walked slowly back there and stopped.

The dim faces of Beauforte relatives and ancestors stared back at her, and she felt the flutter, a dark moth beating softly, relentlessly, at an invisible window. But that was all. Something staying just beyond reach, nameless.

After a time, she moved on into the rear parlor, where her vague reflection in the broken mirror startled her, and then felt her way into the hallway and the kitchen. It was a little brighter there, with its light yellow walls and windows that opened to the yard. At the far end a black rectangle loomed, the door to the hallway that led into the north wing.

She turned to the right, toward the breakfast nook where Temp Chase's head had exploded.

All around her, the old house seemed to inhale and hold its breath. Then she felt a wave rock her, a pressure front of compressed images and feelings, striking and passing too quickly to understand.

"That you, Temp?" she whispered.

There was no answer, just a fading aftertaste of fear, confusion, and surprise. She gave it several minutes, but nothing else happened and the feeling waned. After a time her heartbeat stopped shaking her, and she realized she felt oddly impatient, preoccupied, wanting to move on. As if some other part of the house were calling her.

She let it guide her. Through the back hall to the library. She walked silently with the flashlight in her pocket, her hands out to either side, palms forward, the still air moving through her outspread fingers, cool.

The library was pitch black. She found her way inside, located the piano bench with her thigh, and sat. From experience, she knew if anything came to her it would begin with the mood, the psychic weather, of the other presence. Vague at first, then defining itself as she probed its elements, it could happen fast or take weeks. If she were lucky and didn't recoil in panic and didn't get distracted, she could begin to see or hear it, tuning in to its experience of itself. If it preserved any interactivity at all, she could insinuate herself into its experience. Commune and, if possible, converse. Find its core impulse, its psychological engine. Free it from the bondage of its obsession. Break its tape loop.

A psychotherapist for ghosts?

Yes and no. A psychotherapist had to preserve objectivity, but the empathic ghost hunter had to abandon it to a large degree. To experience the ghost, she had to do more than identify with Lila, take on her attributes, feel what she felt – in a way, she had to virtually become her. And the same was true of the ghost: Before she could alleviate the haunting, she had to share the ghost's experience and learn what moved it, what obsessed it, why it lingered.

The crucial thing in either case was to preserve a strong sense of your own identity and local reality. In the case of the ghost, especially, you could resonate so completely you became absorbed into it and came undone. That was the danger: that the ghost would break apart your obsession, your own illusion of life and self, and free you from your corporeal bondage. Everyone who had ever witnessed a ghost instinctively knew that, feared it. It was the fear that underlay all fears of the unknown, and it was a very real danger – especially for a synesthesic empath who as often as not didn't mind the idea of dying, of being subsumed and obliterated.

What sort of ghost takes the form of a talking wolf, a man with a boar's head?

Cree sat, trying to still her conscious thoughts. Outside, a car passed on the street, the bass of its stereo system audible even here, deep in the big house.

Cree felt her mood drift toward a sense of melancholy, a vague impression of psychic motion. She let herself slip into it. Inside it were other emotions: a hard anger or wrath with overtones of righteousness, volatile, full of wild surges. But within that, she found something else, that keening again, a heart's call of sympathy or loyalty or protectiveness maybe, strong and clean and not at all bad. Regret, too. And confusion. It waxed gently and then waned, pale as a faint aurora borealis. Then it was gone.

For a moment she wondered if what she sensed was just Cree Black, alone in a strange house in a strange city, sifting through her own crap. But no, she decided, it had a foreign flavor. Something or someone was there, just very faint. Could be from yesterday or a hundred years ago, could have nothing to do with Lila's experience, or everything.

She waited but couldn't get a better sense of it. At last she decided she could do no more here. She left the library and walked silently back to the kitchen and to the front hall. At the bottom of the stairs, she felt a prickle along her back and neck, a tingle inside her elbows.

Something upstairs.

She went up the stairs with hands outstretched in the receiving pose. With the curtains open, there was more light here, the blue-silver of streetlights and the very faint, diffuse yellow of neighbors' windows. Light bleeding through the several doorways gave even the big, windowless central room enough illumination to navigate by. She turned left at the top of the stairs, toward the hallway that led to the master bedroom. The hallway of Lila's bounding wolf and pigheaded man.

She lingered at the end of the hall, standing just where the shoe tips had appeared that first time. She stared down the dark corridor and tried to conjure in herself the resonance she'd felt with Lila. But beyond the vague, pregnant sense that something was there, nothing much came. After ten minutes her feet hurt from standing, and she moved on down the hall into the big bedroom.

With the foliage over the windows, it was darker in here. She sat on the bed and stared at the fireplace, where the little coal stove was just a square of blackness in the bigger mass of coping. The broken mirrors of the armoires reflected only black.

Time passed. The faint mottle of yellow on the ceiling vanished as the neighbors' lights were turned off. The darkness had a secret turbulence in it but nothing more defined.

She gave it another half hour but then realized that her leg had gone to sleep and her head was bobbing. She had started to drowse. She stood, breathed deeply, flexed the pins and needles out of her foot. When she pressed the button on her watch, the blue-lit dial told her that it was after midnight.

Obviously, despite her unusual projective identification with Lila, she wasn't ready yet. So far she'd found nothing of use. Really, not even a sure indication that Lila had experienced anything other than the symptoms of a psychosis or a neurological disorder.

She went into the hallway and headed toward the front of the house. For a moment she felt the fatigue of the whole busy week descend on her and debated calling it quits. But as she came back into the central room at the top of the stairs, she felt an intuitive pull. The left front bedroom. She crossed over to it, determined to give this one more chance.

Four steps through the doorway, she felt herself suddenly tugged – a feeling of vertigo as if she were swung or suspended on an elastic cord strung between two points. Immediately she saw where the sensation came from: the big mirror on the door of one of the armoires that served as closets in all the rooms. The mirror was seven feet tall and four wide and like the downstairs mirror was split with a single, long fissure. Now it looked like a window into some huge space – a dim, tapering corridor that stretched far beyond the walls of the house. Dim rooms and doorways and the silver-lit face and shadowy body of a woman.

It took her a moment to recognize what she was seeing: By some accident, the mirror on this armoire was aligned with a similar mirror on the annoire on the other side of the room. A mirror tunnel. Cree lifted her hand, a gently curving file of half-silver-bright, half-shadowed women lifted their hands. A chorus line of streetlight-gilded Crees hung in tapering space, diminishing with distance and darkness.

She realized that the door to the armoire was slightly ajar, just enough to align with the other mirror twenty feet away. Shut it and you'd see only the reflection of the bedroom wall. Cree stood at the center of the mirror tunnel, swaying. With the room too dimly lit to anchor her sense of balance, she felt almost dizzy, and without a contrast between solid walls the Dopplering tunnel looked very real. It was a disorienting effect, and it drew Cree into it.

Was this what Lila had seen, one of those nights? For a woman already on edge, the unexpected sight could easily cause shock and disorientation. Was that why so many mirrors in the house were broken – had Lila attacked them? She made a mental note to ask her next time they met.

As a psychologist, Cree knew that mirrors could be symbolically significant, patients' attitudes toward them revealing a great deal about their attitudes toward themselves. As a ghost hunter, she also knew that mirrors often figured in hauntings: Scary things were seen in them, scary things came out of them. Sometimes people fell through them into scary places.

Then, too, mirrors could help induce a hypnagogic state that brought on other states of perception. Cree had used them in several cases and found them very helpful. Thinking clinically, she'd decided that mirrors worked because they squirreled the visual sense and the centers of the brain that determined your body's location and orientation in space. And when they lost control, other perceptual and cognitive abilities could come to the fore. The disordering of ordinary perceptions had been known throughout human history to induce extraordinary mental states. The shaman's fasting, ritual dancing, and deliberately induced exhaustion; the prophet's self-imposed privations and solitude; the fakir's bed of nails; psychotropic drugs; meditation; clinical hypnosis – all were ways to blitz the senses and the reasoning mind. All were ways people sought truth.

Cree hovered in the mirror tunnel, staring into its depths. She became very aware of the big house all around her, hollow and dark and somehow waiting.

A long time later, half drowsing, she noticed vaguely that the woman in the mirror was gripping her own wrists and kneading them uneasily. The silver-blue face seemed to waver above hunched, defeated shoulders.

With the realization, she felt a sensation as abrupt and distinct as if someone had thwacked her in the temple with a finger. It brought her instantly wide awake, alert. Something was moving in the house. One side of the dim mirror corridor reflected part of the door into the central room and the faint outline of the door on the other side. A shape had flitted quickly across the far doorway. She held her breath, trying not to look at it directly. And soon there it was again. Maybe a man-shape.

Its stealthiness was frightening: something wanting to stay hidden.

She tried to calm her heart and struggled to keep staring fixedly into the tunnel, using only her peripheral vision to monitor the doorway. There was no movement there for a long time, but when it came again it seemed closer. Maybe in the central room now.

Part of her was screaming, telling her to run. The silver face of her reflection looked like a theatrical mask of alarm. The thing coming shook the psychic space like a storm front advancing fast. As the feeling swelled, Cree could distinguish some of its separate elements. Overwhelmingly, it was a sadistic, predatory excitement – wild, careless, charged with violent lust. Within that, anger and envy. But more than anything else, that exuberant, savage, animal lust.

She could hardly hold herself still. In the reflected doorway, the shape hunched and darted again, and Cree realized that the slightly musty smell of the room had thickened and soured into the rank scent of sweat, skin musk.

Her fear spiked intolerably, and before she was aware of doing it she had leapt forward and slammed the armoire's mirror door shut. Her flashlight had appeared in her hand and its beam flashed blindingly past her own eyes.

The tunnel vanished. All that remained in the mirror was a fractured Cree Black, chest heaving as she stood alone in a big, dim room. High ceilings, walls cut with streetlight glow and tree shadows, crazy angles of reflected flashlight beams. She spun around and held the light on the doorway.

Nothing.

It took her a moment to catch her breath. She berated herself for her cowardice, for closing the aperture between herself and whatever it was that moved in these rooms. But the feeling of the thing! That ugly sexuality. That desperation. That hungry carnality, swollen, tumescent.

She kept the flashlight on as she stepped shakily into the central room, scanning, probing doorways and shadows. A volatile darkness. She went quickly down the stairs, suddenly hating the house and wanting nothing more than to be out of it. At the bottom of the stairway, she leapt toward the entrance as if the animal thing were pursuing her. She opened the door, slammed it behind her, and didn't stop until she was out on the front walk among the gentle lights and noises of the Garden District. She turned to look back at the house, which seemed to hunker down in its shadows, baleful and loathsome.

No wonder the woman's a wreck, she thought. And again the other side of that hit her: Lila had to have enormous, hidden strength to have done as well as she had in the face of that. Whatever that was.

Cree slipped through the iron gate and shut it behind her, hoping she herself could find comparable strength.