Ghost Music (39 page)

But Kate lifted the blanket, and shook it, and like a parlor trick, it was empty.

“You bitch,” said Victor. The tears were streaming down his face. Jack came up to him and laid his hand on his shoulder.

“Let's get the fuck out of here.”

“She killed my son! She killed my Michael!”

But the murdered families were beginning to crowd forward now, and Jack's eyes were darting apprehensively from one apparition to another.

“Victor, I'm telling you. Whatever the fuck's going on, we need to get out of here.”

At that moment, however, the scream started.

* * *

It wasn't a scream of anger, or of fear. It was an intensely high-pitched sound, right on the furthest horizon of my hearing. It grew louder and louder, and as it did so, I realized that it was coming from Kate, and all of the other dead people in the cellar. Their mouths were slightly open, and they were letting out the same earsplitting scream that Kate had screamed, whenever she made love, and that Tilda Westerlund had screamed, in her panic and frustration, when she shattered the lantern.

I looked from one to the other—to Axel and Tilda, to Elsa and Felicia—to David and Helena and Giles—and to Enrico and Salvina, and Amalea, and Raffaella, and Massimo. They were
standing here, in the cellar, but there was no living expression in their eyes. They were dead, and they had come here to get their revenge, that was all. The sound rose higher and higher, like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, until I couldn't hear it anymore. But Victor and Jack both clamped their hands over their ears, and Victor started to roar with pain.

“Stop it!”
he begged.
“Stop it! You're killing me!”

Kate stopped screaming, and approached him, although everybody else carried on.

“Victor? Where are my parents? Tell me where they are! Where are my parents?”

Victor dropped to his knees, next to Jack.
“Make it stop!”
he wailed, thrashing his head from side to side.
“You're killing me, you witch!”

“Where are my parents?” Kate demanded.

Victor jabbed his finger at the cellar floor. “They're here, goddammit! They're right here!
They're under the goddamn floor!
”

Kate stepped back a little. “There!” she said. “Now Gideon has his proof! You're finished!”

She raised her hands again and closed her eyes. She had the same beatific expression on her face as she did when we made love. She uttered a note that began with piercing clarity, and then grew louder and louder until it sounded like a thousand church choirs. She wasn't directing it at me, but even so my head rang and my vision blurred and my insides felt as if I were being shaken apart, as if I were riding a bicycle down an endless flight of steps.

A whole boxful of china vases suddenly shattered, and two light bulbs popped. Victor screamed even louder and bent over double, hitting his forehead against the floor.
“I can't see! I can't see! I've gone blind!”
But Jack had kept his hands clamped tightly over his ears, and he managed to raise himself up on one knee, and then, very unsteadily, to stand.

He turned toward me, and I had never seen anybody stare at
me with such hatred. He took one lurching step toward me, like a zombie, and then another.

“You
fuck
,” he hissed at me. “I'm going to tear your fucking head off.”

He swung at me, but I stepped back and he missed me by a clear six inches. He almost lost his balance, but then he lurched forward again, and took another swing. I backed off again, but now I was right up against the cellar wall.

“You thought you could mess with me?” he said. “You thought you could mess with Jack Friendly?”

He jabbed at me, but I parried him away with my elbow, and he stumbled so close to me that we were almost embracing each other. I could
smell
him, smell his aftershave and the garlic on his breath. And all the time Kate and all of the others continued to scream that intense, piercing note, so that my eardrums started to ache, too, and my vision started to blur.

I punched Jack in the stomach, just below the sternum, as hard as I could. If anybody had punched
me
like that, I would have gone down like a knackered horse. But Jack's abdomen felt like a sack of cement, and he didn't even flinch.

Jack hit me back, on my collarbone. I bent forward, winded, and he hit me again, right on the cheek. I thought I heard Kate cry out,
“Gideon!”
but then Jack hit me in the mouth, and I toppled backward and struck my head against the wall. For a count of five, everything went black-and-white, like a photographic negative.

When I managed to pull myself up again, I saw Jack heaving Victor up the cellar steps, with one of Victor's arms around his shoulders. They climbed upward as if they were drunk, missing every second or third step and clinging to the handrail to stop themselves falling back down.

Nobody from any of the families tried to stop them, but all of them slowly walked after them, toward the bottom of the steps, where they gathered in a semicircle, still singing. Victor dropped onto his knees, sobbing, but Jack managed to pull him up again.

Kate came up to me and gently touched my cheek with her fingertips. “Gideon—are you all right?”

“Don't know. My head's ringing like a goddamned bell.”

“Hey—you're my hero. But you didn't have to fight him. He's not going to get away, my darling, I promise you. And neither will Victor.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it, but with all that singing going on, I couldn't think straight. Victor and Jack had pushed open the door at the top of the steps and crashed through it.

“It sure
looks
like they're getting away.”

“No, they won't,” said Kate, and firmly took hold of my hand. “This is where Victor and Jack get what they deserve. You'll have your evidence against them. They'll both get life sentences, if they're lucky.”

Together, we climbed up the cellar steps. When we reached the hallway, I saw that Jack and Victor had left the front door wide-open. An icy wind was blowing, and snow was whirling into the living room.

“There—they've escaped, goddamn it.”

“Have a little faith,” said Kate. She hurried toward the open door and I followed her, cupping my hand over my swollen mouth to shield it from the wind.

Red taillights flared, and I heard the
whoomph
of the Explorer's engine starting up. Jack was driving. Victor was lolling in the passenger seat, his face against the window. I thought at first that he was staring at me but then I realized that he was blindly staring at nothing at all.

The Explorer backed up, and then turned, heading for the highway.

“All right, I have faith,” I said. “But how are we going to stop them now?”

But Kate laid one hand on my shoulder and said,
“Look.”

I blinked through the thickly billowing snow. As the Explorer sped toward the entrance gates, a host of figures appeared in its
headlights, blocking its way. More than fifty of them now, maybe seventy or eighty, and more of them approaching out of the gloom. Above the bellowing of the Explorer's engine, that high, eerie screaming was even more penetrating than ever.

The Explorer skidded to a halt, with its exhaust fuming red. The figures started slowly to encircle it. The Westerlunds and the Philipses and the Cesarettis, in different moments from their lives—when they were happy, when they were suffering, when they were close to death. I thought:
why doesn't Jack simply run them down
? But then I saw him twisting around in the driver's seat, trying to back up, and I realized that he was terrified of them. If he tried to run them down, he would have to admit to himself that they were here, that they were real, and that they wanted revenge for what he and Victor had done to them. Either that, or he knew that they were dead already, and he couldn't kill them a second time.

The Explorer's tires slithered and whinnied but the driveway was too icy, and he succeeded only in sliding diagonally toward the ditch.

He slammed the Explorer into drive, and then reverse, and then drive, and then reverse, and at last the SUV began to creep backward. He had only traveled a few yards, however, when I heard a sharp, crackling noise, and saw a shower of yellow sparks. A power line crossed over the driveway, and its glass insulators had shattered, so that the cable had dropped down onto the snow. It was spitting and writhing like an angry anaconda.

The Explorer's rear wheels ran right over the power line, but as it passed under the front wheels, it became entangled with the drive shaft. There was a loud thump, and the Explorer was brought to a halt, with sparks gushing out from under its wheel arches.

The ghostly figures remained where they were, but now I realized that they had stopped screaming. All I could hear now was the venomous fizzing of the power line, and the revving of the Explorer's engine, as Jack tried desperately to drag it free.

Kate gripped my hand. Her own fingers were very cold. “They can't escape, Gideon, whatever they do.”

I glanced at her. For some reason, the movement of her lips didn't quite match what she was saying, as if her words had been dubbed. I felt as if she were two or three seconds ahead of me or maybe two or three seconds behind.

The Explorer's engine screamed again, but the power line was far too securely wound around the drive shaft, and Jack was only pulling it tighter.

Nearly a minute passed, with the Explorer just ticking over. By the light that was coming from the open door of the house behind me, I could see Victor and Jack, sitting side by side behind the snow-blurred windshield like two accused men sitting in the dock. In a way, this garden was now a courtroom, where they were being judged for the crimes that they had committed.

Off to my right, about fifty yards away, I saw two figures struggling. I shielded my eyes with my hand, and realized that they were Jack and Felicia, and that Jack was dragging Felicia away, just as I had seen him dragging her away at the Wasa Museum in Stockholm. Both figures moved in a jerky, fitful fashion, as if they were characters in a home movie, or a flicker book. But I clearly recognized both of them. Jack was wearing his black coat and Felicia was wearing her yellow windbreaker.

I looked back at the Explorer. The real Jack was still sitting behind the wheel, but I could see that he was staring at the image of himself that was pulling Felicia through the snow. He looked ghastly. His face was enamel white, like a Venetian plague doctor's mask.

Felicia let out a blurry scream, and the image of Jack twisted her around and threw her face-first onto the ground. He knelt on her back, pinning her down, and then he grasped her neck with both hands and started to throttle her.

I shouted,
“Hey!”
and made a move toward them, but Kate quickly snatched at my sleeve.

“Just watch,” she said. “Now that you're here, they can show you their stories. But they're only stories. There's nothing you can do to change them.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a light dancing, and when I turned around, there was Helena Philips, blazing from the waist upward. She was
howling
rather than screaming, while a tall flame flapped from the top of her head, and her ears shriveled up. Another image of Jack was standing close beside her, with his hand raised to protect his face from the heat.

All around us, the ghosts of the Westerlunds and the Cesarettis and the Philipses were playing out their different scenarios of pain and desperation. The snow-filled garden had become a theater of agonizing memories. There was Jack, again and again, strangling and mutilating and burning. There was Victor, too, pacing impatiently and vengefully around every act of torture, almost as if he were angry that he couldn't make his victims suffer more.

Off to my left, I saw David Philips with his hands clasped over his eyes, and Amalea, sewn to her mattress, circling through the snow as if she were actually floating on the Grand Canal. I saw Elsa, drowned; and eerily, high in the air, hanging from nothing at all, I saw Enrico and Salvina, slowly rotating from a chandelier that wasn't there. Below them, though, stood Jack, with a coiled rope over his shoulder, his head raised, and a smile on his face that was almost beatific; and not far away, Victor, although Victor wasn't looking up at them. Victor was looking at something else that wasn't there: one of the Cesarettis' antique vases, perhaps, or the view out onto the Campo San Polo. He had the creepiest look of satisfaction on his face.

The ghosts weren't screaming any longer, but the garden was filled with intermittent cries and shouts and sobbing, and the awful shuffling of people fighting for their lives.

I put my arm around Kate and watched all these scenes with a growing feeling of helplessness and rage. There was nothing I
could do to save these families now. Their fathers had damned them all, and Victor Solway had made sure they had all gone to hell. But I was sure of one thing: I was going to see Victor and Jack convicted for what they had done, and pay the price for it.

After a few minutes, one after another, the jerky images faded. The last thing I saw was the yellow of Felicia's windbreaker, like a sunflower seen through a misted-up window. Eventually, only the figures remained, wordless and watchful.

There was a long, long pause, while the Explorer's engine continued to turn over. Then I saw the driver's door open. I thought:
Jesus
—
he's not going to try to climb out? If he does, he'd better jump way clear
.
Those feeder lines carry more than four thousand volts.

It was then that I saw Jack's arm waving, as if he were groping to find his way. The singing must have blinded him, too. That's why the families had stopped. Now, patient and unmoving, they were waiting for him to bring himself his own retribution.