Ghost Music (19 page)

It was then that the boy turned his head and looked at me directly, and called out. He was too far away for me to be able to hear what he said, but he sounded as if he were distressed.

I said, “That's it. I'm going to call the police.”

But Kate took hold of my arm and said, “No, Gideon, don't.”

“You can see it for yourself,” I protested. “The kid's in some kind of trouble.”

“Gideon, leave it. It's far too late for you to be able to help him now.”

I stared at her. “What do you mean by that? How do you know?”

“I just do. You were right, what you said last night. This is the same kind of thing that happened in Stockholm.”

“You
know
that kid? You know who he is?”

“I can't tell you.”

I watched the two men and the boy as they walked to the main road, and crossed over, and were lost from sight among the traffic. They seemed to disappear in a matter of seconds.

“Kate,” I said, “I can't go on like this. Whatever's happening, I need to know what it is.”

“You said that you trusted me. Please, Gideon—don't stop trusting me now.”

“I want to. But give me a
reason
to trust you. Just one.”

“I can't. I shouldn't have to. Trust is trust.”

“Well . . . just tell me one thing. Is that kid in any danger? Have those guys been hurting him?”

Kate looked at me but I couldn't read her expression at all. It was like the statue of Peter Pan, elvish and secretive. Behind her, with a loud explosion of flapping wings, scores of waterbirds suddenly rose from the surface of the lake.

“He's not in any danger,” she said. “I can promise you that.”

“But you can't tell me who he is? And you can't tell me how you know him, or where he and those two guys are going, and how they just happened to be in the same park as us two days running?”

“No.”

“No? Just like that—
no
?”

She started to walk away, toward The Mall, and for one stomach-churning moment I was tempted to let her go. I felt angry and frustrated and hurt, and more than anything else I felt that she was lying to me. How could she expect me to trust her if she couldn't trust me in return?

I waited until she was almost a hundred yards away, and then I called out,
“Kate!”

She didn't answer, didn't turn around, but stopped, and waited for me.

I caught up with her. She still didn't look at me.

“Kate—you can't expect me to go along with this. Not anymore.”

“I'm not forcing you, Gideon. If you really can't bring yourself to trust me, then go back to New York, and forget that we ever met. I won't pretend that everything isn't going to fall apart, if you decide to do that. But it's your decision entirely.”

A fire truck went past, with its siren warbling, so I missed what she said next, but I caught the word “wasted.”

“Wasted? What would be wasted?”

She looked at me at last. “All the time we've spent together. All the visions you've seen. If I explained everything to you, before you came to understand it for yourself, then we might just as well not have bothered. It's one of the rules.”

“What are you talking about? What rules?”

“The rules of life, Gideon. The rules of human existence, and what happens after it, when it's over.”

“I still don't get it.”

“Well—how about this for a rule? Unless you're terminally sick, or you've decided to kill yourself, you never know in advance what day you're going to die. But that day is determined at the very instant of your conception, and even if you could find out what it was, there would be nothing you could do to change it.”

“So who makes these rules? Are we talking about
God
?”

“We're talking about who we are and what we are, that's all. The limitations of being human.”

“You're twisting my brain into knots. I don't follow any of this.”

“Trust me. Please, Gideon. I know I'm probably asking too much of you, but I don't know anybody else I can turn to.”

I saw a flicker of lightning, over toward Hyde Park. This was followed a few seconds later by a threatening barrage of thunder. I looked around. I was still angry, still confused, but I didn't want to let Kate go.

“Come on,” I said. “It's starting to rain.”

We walked together back to The Mall. As we reached it, a contingent of Royal Horse Guards came trotting past, in their
shiny silver helmets and breastplates and bright red tunics, with their spurs jingling. We stood and watched them, and Kate said, “There—you can't say I haven't shown you London.”

“What do they say? If you're tired of London, you're tired of life.”

A black taxi approached us, with its amber for hire light on. Kate raised her hand and gave a piercing whistle that any New York doorman would have been proud of.

That evening, the atmosphere at the Philipses' apartment was even more unsettling than it had been the evening before. David joined us in the kitchen for a supper of thick lentil soup, but every few minutes the phone would ring in the library and he would get up to answer it. Each time, when he returned, he looked increasingly anxious.

Helena kept glancing out into the backyard, and when Kate tried to talk to her, she hardly listened.

“You two went on a Mediterranean cruise last winter, didn't you?” Kate asked her.

“What?”

“I just wondered if you enjoyed it.”

“Oh . . . yes. We didn't care for the other passengers much . . . kept to ourselves. But the food was very good. And so
much
.”

“What cities did you visit?”

Helena frowned, as if she hadn't understood the question at all. But then she said, “Oh! Gibraltar, Barcelona, Ajaccio. Yes, we did enjoy it. But I don't think we'll ever do it again.”

David came out of the library and sat down at the table. He stirred his soup for a moment, and then he pushed his bowl away.

“Is everything all right?” I asked him.

“What? Yes, I suppose so. It's life, that's all. It's just one damned thing after another.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Help?” he said, bitterly. “God knows how anyone can help.”

* * *

We started to make love when we went to bed that night, but I was very tired and Kate seemed to have her mind on other things, so after a few minutes I fell back onto my pillow and said, “Maybe in the morning.”

“Okay,” she said, kissing my shoulder. I still had the purple teeth marks where she had bitten me, and they were still sore.

“When we go shopping tomorrow, I want to buy myself one of those Pringle sweaters that David wears. And one of those check shirts, and a pair of those sandy-colored corduroy pants.”

“You want to look like a middle-aged middle-class Brit?”

“Why not? I think he looks very superior.”

“Poor David.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I think there's something tragic about him, that's all. Like a doomed king in a Shakespeare play. No matter what he does, he can't change fate.”

“There you go again, making out that we don't have choices.”

“We don't. Like I told you, it's the rules.”

“You never saw that movie. What's it called,
The Butterfly Effect
? The guy keeps trying to change the past, to make his life work out better, but whatever he does it always turns out worse.”

She kissed me again. “Well, there you are, then. That proves it.”

“That proves what, exactly?” I asked her, but she turned over and she wouldn't answer me. “That proves what? I mean,
what
?”

* * *

I had the same dream that I was trying to cross a frozen lake, and the ice was crackling beneath my feet. This time, however, I felt a
cold flood of panic. And I could hear thumping, too, like drums beating, and somebody shouting.

I sat up abruptly. The crackling was still going on, and so was the thumping, and an orange light was jumping and dancing outside the window.

“Kate!” I said. “
Kate
—it's happening again!”

I clambered across the bed and pulled back the drapes. This time, there
was
a fire outside, in between the stone cherubs. Again, it was reflected on the Philipses' bedroom window, and again, David was standing close to the window, staring out. But he wasn't just crying, he was shouting and beating on the glass with his fists.

I looked back at the fire, and it was only then that I realized what it was. It was a woman, on her knees, with her arms upraised, and she was blazing fiercely. The flames were leaping up so high that at first I couldn't see her face, but then a breeze must have blown across the yard because they dipped down a little, and I could see that it was Helena.

Her hair was now charred, and crawling with orange sparks. Her face was blackened like a minstrel's, and she was screaming.

“Kate!”
I shouted, and shook her shoulder, but she lolled from side to side and wouldn't wake up.

I didn't hesitate. I dragged the comforter off the bed and pulled it after me along the corridor into the kitchen. I tried to unlock the French doors, but the key was jammed solid. Outside, I could see Helena still ablaze, waving her arms as if she were drowning, rather than burning.

I gave the doors a kick, but they were bolted as well as locked, and they wouldn't budge. Helena's screaming was shriller than ever, and I knew I had only seconds to save her, if I could save her at all. There was a heavy black saucepan on the stove, and I picked it up, so that I could smash the windows and get out into the yard.

Before I reached them, however, Helena let out a scream so
high-pitched that it actually hurt my ears, and the windows shattered right in front of me. The glass showered onto the floor like a bucketful of crushed ice, and the next thing I knew I was crunching through it in my bare feet.

Kate appeared in the kitchen doorway, blinking, her hair sticking up on end. “Gideon, what are you
doing
?”

I ducked down, trying to maneuver my way through one of the empty window frames. But before I was even halfway through, I realized that the flames were dying down.

I managed to climb through the window and tug the comforter after me, but when I stood up straight, I saw that the fire had burned itself out, and the yard was lit only by streetlamps.

Not only was there no fire, there was no smoke, and no sign of Helena either. Between the two cherubs there was nothing but a darkened mark on the paving bricks, and I didn't have to reach down to touch it to know that it was stone cold.

I turned around. The Philipses' bedroom drapes were closed, and there was no sign of David staring out. Behind me, Kate was unlocking the French doors, and opening them up.

“Are you okay?” she asked me. “Your feet aren't cut, are they?”

My left foot was bloody, but when I lifted it up to take a look, I could see that the cuts were all superficial. “I'm fine. I just don't know what happened. I saw Helena, right out here in the yard, and she was on fire. It looked like somebody had poured gas all over her and set her alight. You know, like those Buddhist monks.”

Kate said, “Come on, Gideon. Come back inside.”

I looked around. “I saw her burning, goddamn it. She was waving her arms around and she was screaming. But she's not even here, is she?”

Kate held her hand out to me. “Come on, Gideon. You need to come back to bed.”

Reluctantly, I hobbled back into the kitchen, and Kate closed the doors.

“No point in locking them, really,” she said. “But I'll call a glazier first thing, and arrange to have them repaired.”

I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. My heart was still banging hard against my ribs. “This is it, Kate. I don't care why I'm seeing things, or what you're trying to show me. I can't take any more of it. Tomorrow morning, I really am going home.”

She went to the sink and came back with a damp kitchen towel. “Here, lift up your foot. Let's clean up these cuts before you get tetanus or something.”

“You're not going to beg me to stay?”

“No,” she said. “I think you've probably seen enough.”

“Then you believe that I saw Helena?”

“Yes.”

“Well, hallelujah. That's the first straight answer you've given me. So how come I could see her when she wasn't really there?”

“Because you
can
, my darling. That's why.”

* * *

We locked the kitchen door behind us, and then went back to our bedroom. I don't know how David and Helena had managed to sleep through all of that noise, but we were both reluctant to wake them up.

Kate found some Band-Aids in the bathroom cabinet and stuck them crisscross on the soles of my feet.

“So I was right?” I asked her. “I
can
see things that have happened at different times? Like yesterday, or even tomorrow?”

“In a way. Like I told you before, it's a very rare gift, and only a very few special people have it. The people who
do
have it are very often musicians—or composers, like you.”

“Oh, yes? And why is that?”

“Because, my darling, everything that happens in this world has its own resonance, like a tuning fork that goes on singing long
after you've struck it. Hardly anybody can pick up that resonance, but you can. I knew that, the moment I first saw you looking out of your apartment window.”

“So—how did you know that, exactly?”

“I just did, that's all.”

“And so you took me to Stockholm and you brought me here to London, so that I could see things happening that nobody else could?”

“That's right.”

“But
why
? That's what I really need to know.”