Demon's Door (24 page)

Jim took hold of her hand and squeezed it. ‘Let's put it this way: I'm a little upset, to say the least.'

‘I'd better go then. I only came up here in case you thought that demon woman was going to come back, and you felt like you needed someplace safe to sleep.'

‘I'll be fine. Even if she does come back, I've made up my mind. I have to face up to her.'

Summer put her arms around his neck, and looked up at him with her big blue eyes. ‘That's OK. But I thought you might want to finish what we started. I hate to leave things hanging, if you know what I mean.'

He kissed her. ‘Yes. Me too. But right now I really need to work out what the hell is going on and what I'm going to do about it.'

‘All right. Maybe I'd better keep this champagne for later, when we have something to celebrate.'

‘No, let's drink it now. Who cares if it's warm? Every day is worth celebrating, don't you think? Even if it wasn't the day you thought it was.'

He was woken up the next morning by an earth tremor, which made him feel as if somebody was moving his bed underneath him. It was followed a few minutes later by another, stronger tremor, and he heard a loud clatter from the kitchen as his skillet dropped off its hook.

He swung himself out of bed and switched on the television news. There was no mention of the tremor so far, nor any earthquake warnings. But as he went through to the kitchen to make himself some coffee, the entire apartment building shook and all the bottles inside his fridge rattled noisily and the pictures on the walls swung off-center.

He opened his front door. All across the neighborhood, car alarms were honking. It was 7:20 a.m., but the sky was still dark, with gray clouds unraveling across it in an endless woolly stream. The wind was up again, too, and the trees were tossing wildly from side to side as if they were trying to uproot themselves.

He went down the steps and met Summer just as she was coming out of her front door, wearing nothing but a pink T-shirt and panties.

‘Did you
feel
that?' she said. ‘I thought I was having a nightmare at first but then I woke up and I was bouncing up and down on my bed like that
Exorcist
movie.'

‘That must have been nearly a five, that last one,' said Jim. He noticed that there was a fresh crack in the stucco, underneath her kitchen window. ‘Why don't you come upstairs? I'm just making some coffee. If we get any more tremors we can sit in the doorway together and drink it.'

Summer went back to find herself a purple satin robe and then she followed him to his apartment. By now the tremors were being reported on Channel 2 news. The second tremor had been measured in downtown Los Angeles at 4.7, although it had been felt no further away than Camarillo to the north and San Juan Capistrano to the south.

Jim and Summer sat on the couch together and drank coffee and ate chocolate-chip cookies, which was the only food that Jim had in his cupboard, apart from seven cans of cat food, two cans of garbanzo beans and one can of Pride brand chicken'n'dumplings.

Summer said, ‘I was beginning to think that you were a little crazy. I mean, not that I minded or anything. I've gone out with people who are a whole lot crazier than you are. But you're
not
crazy, are you?'

‘No,' said Jim. ‘I genuinely wish that I was.'

‘You'll work it out,' she told him, laying her hand on his knee. ‘I know you will.'

‘Well, I'm glad you have that much confidence in me. You're the only one in this room who has.'

An hour passed and there were no more tremors, although the sky remained overpoweringly dark and the wind was blowing so hard that dust-devils were dancing up and down the street. When they had finished their coffee Jim took a shower and dressed and collected his books and his papers together. Today he was going to be asking Special Class Two to give him their thoughts on time, and if there was any period in history they would prefer to have lived in, rather than today. He always asked his class to do this, every year, but given what had been happening in the past three days, it seemed grimly appropriate.

He knocked on Summer's door before he left.

‘Hey – have a good day's pole-dancing. I'll try to catch you later.'

‘You take care, Jimmy,' she told him. ‘Don't do anything dangerous.'

‘I'm only going to teach some kids how to read and write.'

‘That's what you say.'

He drove to West Grove College and parked. It was so dark that it could have been the middle of the night, and he could see snakes' tongues of lightning flickering on the horizon, far to the south. As he climbed the steps to the main entrance, Bob Nussbaum caught up with him.

‘Some freaky weather, Jim! Did you feel those tremors this morning?'

Jim pushed his way in through the door. ‘It's the end of the world, Bob. Didn't you know it?'

‘Well, I hope it doesn't end before Saturday afternoon. I've been invited to play golf at the Wilshire Country Club.'

‘Why don't you ask Father Simmons to have a quiet word with God for you? I'm sure that the Almighty won't mind postponing Armageddon for something as important as a round of golf. Stop the world, I want to tee off!'

‘You're a cynic, Jim. It's important to
me
. It's social. Senator Mulligan's daughter Jacquie is going to be there.'

‘And you have a chance with her? I don't think so, Bob.'

Jim went into his classroom and walked across to his desk. Special Class Two were uncharacteristically subdued this morning. Teddy was still scribbling but the rest of the class were sitting around as if they were waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. Some of them had laid flowers across Maria's desk – red roses and white lilies and perfumed purple stocks. They had left cards, too, with pictures of rabbits on them, and little children, and messages written on torn scraps of paper.
Maria, Miss U Girl
.
So sorry, Maria, XXX. CU in heaven.

The windows at the back of the classroom were so dark that Jim could see his own reflection in them, and sparkling droplets of rain began to creep down the glass.

‘Sad day,' he announced. ‘We're all going to miss Maria. But I want to tell you this. None of you should ever think that your life isn't worth living, even when you're feeling really frightened, or depressed. At this age, you think you can see what the future has in store for you, but you can't. It's an old cliché, but life is full of surprises.'

‘I agree with that, Mr Rook,' said Kim.

‘You do? I thought
you
thought that life held no surprises at all.'

‘But of course it does, Mr Rook. Life is full of surprises for those people who don't know what's coming. Mostly unpleasant, I have to say.'

‘But what if you
do
know what's coming? What then?'

‘Then you have a choice. You can go on, or you can decide to do the same as Maria.'

‘Let me tell you this, Kim. No matter how bad you think things are going to turn out, walking into a lawnmower is never an option.'

Kim shrugged. ‘There are other ways of ending your life, Mr Rook. There are
always
other ways. There is a Korean proverb which says that the same fate can be found behind many different doors.'

Jim sat down and took the register out of his drawer. Even before he opened it, however, he realized that Patsy-Jean was missing.

‘Anybody seen Patsy-Jean this morning?'

Tamara put up her hand. ‘Me, sir. I saw her looking at the notice board in the corridor. But she hasn't come into class yet. The last time I saw her, she was going into the little girls' room.'

‘What was she going in there for?' asked Arthur. ‘Patsy-Jean is a
big
girl!'

Nobody laughed, and Jim said, ‘That's enough size-ism for one day, thank you.' He looked up at the clock on the wall and said, ‘What time was that, Tamara?'

‘I'm not too sure, sir. I guess about a half-hour ago.'

Jim stood up and said, ‘Today, we're going to talk about the past, the present and the future. If time-travel were possible, and you were ever given the choice, I want each of you to think what period you would prefer to live in – whether it's some time in history, or now, or some time that hasn't yet happened.'

There was no response. Kim gave him a knowing look that – for some reason – he found deeply unsettling, as if Kim were aware that something had gone badly wrong but wasn't going to tell him about it.

‘Have a think about it, anyhow,' Jim told them. ‘I'll be back in a couple of minutes.'

He left the classroom and walked along the hallway to the students' restrooms. Through the main doors at the end of the corridor he could see that the sky was still black, and that lightning was still stalking across the horizon. As he reached the door of the girls' restroom, he felt the floor move under his feet. It was only a slight tremor, but it was enough to make him feel that the ground was no longer trustworthy.

He knocked on the door and called, ‘Patsy-Jean? Patsy-Jean Waller? Are you in there?'

There was no reply, so he knocked again. Eventually he pushed open the door and went inside. ‘Anybody in here?'

Nobody answered. He went along the row of cubicles, opening each door in turn, in case Patsy-Jean was sitting unconscious on one of the toilets, but there was nobody there. He was just about to leave when one of the girls from Sheila Colefax's class came bursting in.

‘Mr Rook!'

‘I'm sorry, Nadine. It
is
Nadine, isn't it?'

‘Nadia.'

‘Oh, yes. That's right. Nadia. I was looking for Patsy-Jean Waller. You haven't seen her by any chance?'

‘Sure I have. I was just coming out of the gym after my morning workout when she was going in.'

‘Patsy-Jean was going into the
gym
? When was that?'

‘About ten minutes ago, I guess. I was surprised because I didn't never see her in the gym before, like
never
. I asked her what she was doing there, and she said she was going to get rid of all of her excess weight, like right now, and forever.'

‘“Right now and forever?” You're sure that's what she said?'

‘That's exactly what she said, because I said, “Good for you, girl, but it's going to take you a whole lot longer than that.”'

Jim said, ‘Excuse me, Nadia,' and dodged his way past her.

‘Mr Rook?' she said. ‘What's going on?'

‘Call Nurse Okeke! Do it now! Have her meet me at the gym!'

‘Nurse Okeke? What for?'

‘Do it
now
, Nadia!'

Jim pelted along the hallway, his loafers squeaking on the polished floor. There were a dozen steps at the end of the corridor and he leaped up them four at a time. He took a sharp right, pushed open the double doors, and ran along the arcade that led to the college gymnasium. The left side of the arcade was open, and rain was slanting across the concrete paving slabs. As he reached the doors to the gymnasium, Jim saw more crackles of lightning over the Hollywood Hills, and heard the stentorian bellowing of thunder.

The gymnasium was gloomy inside, because Dunstan hadn't come around to switch on the lights. It smelled of leather and coconut matting and stale teenage sweat. Every now and then, lightning flickered through the windows, and Jim could see the headless vaulting horse standing in the corner, and the basketball hoops, and the climbing ropes that were looped up and tied on to the parallel bars on either side, like the legs of a giant spider dangling from the ceiling.

But one rope wasn't looped up. Somebody had untied it so that it was hanging straight downward, as taut as a plumb line. On the end of it, slowly rotating, was Patsy-Jean. One yellow Croc lay on the floor beneath her.

‘Patsy-Jean!' Jim yelled at her. ‘Patsy-Jean, hold on there!'

Jim ran across the gymnasium. He wrapped his arms around Patsy-Jean's knees and tried to heave her up a few inches, to take the strangulating pressure off her neck. He managed it for almost half a minute, but she weighed so much and she was so inert that he had to lower her down again, gasping with effort.

He looked up at her. She was staring at him with her piggy little eyes open. Her double chins bulged over the rope, and the tip of her tongue was protruding from one side of her mouth. She looked more like a greedy little girl who was just about to lick an ice-cream cone than an overweight young woman who had hanged herself out of despair.

He hurried to the far end of the gymnasium and dragged the vaulting horse across the floor, its feet scraping and bumping on the parquet blocks. He climbed up on it, and took hold of the rope. Patsy-Jean had tied it in a large simple knot. She hadn't been able to fashion it into a proper hangman's slipknot because it was much too thick and inflexible, but it had been enough to strangle her, even if it had taken five or ten minutes.

Jim was still desperately trying to tug the knot free when the gymnasium doors opened and Nurse Okeke came running in, followed by Nadia.

‘Oh, my God!' said Nurse Okeke. She came loping across the gymnasium and took hold of Patsy-Jean's legs in one swoop, lifting her upward. She was strong as well as tall, Nurse Okeke, and she supported enough of Patsy-Jean's weight for Jim to tug the end of the rope free, and unfasten the knot. Immediately, he caught Patsy-Jean under her armpits, almost losing his balance and toppling off the vaulting horse, but between them, he and Nurse Okeke managed to lower her on to the floor.

Jim jumped down. He took out his cellphone and punched out 911, while Nurse Okeke tried to feel Patsy-Jean's pulse. The lightning flashed again, and Jim could see that Patsy-Jean's lips were blue, and that the pupils of her eyes were speckled with red. He had watched enough episodes of
CSI
to know that petechial hemorrhages were a certain sign of strangulation.