Forever Odd Read online

  Seeing not the usual cold calculation in Datura’s eyes, nor the childlike wonder that had briefly brightened them as we had descended the stairs from the twelfth floor, seeing instead a bitterness and a meanness that emphasized the new feral quality in her face, I felt no less nauseated than when, with blood-smeared hand, she had pressed the wineglass to my lips.

  “The lingering dead are vulnerable,” I warned her. “We owe them the truth, only the truth, but we have to be careful to comfort them and encourage them onward by what we say and how we say it.”

  Listening to myself, I realized the futility of urging Datura to act with compassion.

  Directly addressing the spirit whom she could not see, Datura said, “Your sister Bonnie is alive.”

  Hope brightened the late Maryann Morris’s face, and I could see that she readied herself for joy.

  Datura continued: “Her spine was snapped when a ton-and-a-half ballroom chandelier fell on her. Crushed the shit out of her. Her eyes were punctured, ruined—”

  “What’re you doing? Don’t do this,” I pleaded.

  “Now Bonnie’s paralyzed from the neck down, and blind. She lives on the government dole in a cheap nursing home where she’ll probably die from neglected bedsores.”

  I wanted to shut her up even if I had to hit her, and maybe half the reason I wanted to shut her up was because it would give me an excuse to hit her.

  As though attuned to my desire, Andre and Robert stared at me, tense with the expectation of action.

  Although the chance to knock her flat would have been worth the beating the thugs would have administered to me, I reminded myself that I had come here for Danny. The cocktail waitress was dead, but my friend with brittle bones had a chance to live. His survival must be my focus.

  Addressing the spirit she could not see, Datura said, “Your other sister, Nora, was burned over eighty percent of her body, but she survived. Three fingers on her left hand were burned completely away. So were her hair and many of her facial features, Maryann. One ear. Her lips. Her nose. Seared away, gone.”

  Grief so tortured the cocktail waitress that I could not bear to look at her, because I could do nothing to comfort her in the face of this vicious assault.

  Breathing rapidly, shallowly, Datura had allowed the wolf in her bones to rise into her heart. Words were her teeth and cruelty her claws.

  “Your Nora has had thirty-six operations with more to come—skin grafts, facial reconstruction, painful and tedious. And still she’s hideous.”

  “You’re making this up,” I interrupted.

  “Like hell I am. She’s hideous. She rarely goes out, and when she does, she wears a hat and ties a scarf across her sickening face to avoid frightening children.”

  Such aggressive gleefulness in the administration of emotional pain, such inexplicable bitterness revealed Datura’s perfect face to be not just a contrast to her nature but in fact a mask. The longer she assailed the cocktail waitress, the less opaque the mask became, and you could begin to see the suggestion of an underlying malignancy so ugly that, were the mask to be stripped suddenly away, a face would be revealed that would make Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera look lamb-sweet, lamb-gentle.

  “You, Maryann, you got away easy by comparison. Your pain is over. You can go on from here any damn time you choose. But because your sisters were where they were, when they were, their suffering is going to continue for years and years, for all the rest of their miserable lives.”

  The intensity of misbegotten guilt that Datura strove to foster would keep this tortured spirit chained to these burned-out ruins, to this bleak plot of land, for another decade, or century. And for no purpose but to attempt to agitate the poor soul into a visible manifestation.

  “Do I piss you off, Maryann? Do you hate me for revealing the helpless, broken things your sisters have become?”

  To Datura, I said, “This is disgusting, despicable, and it won’t work. It’s all for nothing.”

  “I know what I’m doing, baby. I always know exactly what I’m doing.”

  “She isn’t like you,” I persisted. “She doesn’t hate, so you can’t enrage her.”

  “Everyone hates,” she said, and warned me off with a murderous look that dropped the temperature of my blood. “Hate makes the world go ’round. Especially for girls like Maryann. They’re the best of all haters.”

  “What would you know about girls like her?” I asked scornfully, angrily. And answered my question: “Nothing. You know nothing about women like her.”

  Andre took one step away from his lantern, and Robert glowered at me.

  Relentless, Datura said, “I’ve seen your picture in newspapers, Maryann. Oh, yes, I did my research before I came here. I know the faces of so many who died in this place, because if I meet them—when I meet them through my new boyfriend here, my little odd one—I want the encounters to be memorable.”

  The tall broad brick of a man with buzz-cut hair and deep-set bile-green eyes had appeared, but I’d been so distracted by Datura’s unconscionable badgering of the cocktail waitress that I had not been aware of this spirit’s belated arrival. I saw him now as he abruptly loomed closer to us.

  “I’ve seen your picture, Maryann,” Datura repeated. “You were a pretty girl but not a beauty. Just pretty enough for men to use you, but not pretty enough to be able to use them to get what you wanted.”

  No more than ten feet from us, the eighth spirit of the casino appeared to be as angry as he had been when I had seen him earlier. Jaws clenched. Hands fisted.

  “Just pretty isn’t good enough,” Datura continued. “Prettiness fades quickly. If you had lived, your life would have been nothing but cocktail waitressing and disappointment.”

  Buzz-cut came closer, now three feet behind the stricken spirit of Maryann Morris.

  “You had high hopes when you came to this job,” Datura said, “but it was a dead end, and soon you knew you were already a failure. Women like you turn to their sisters, to their friends, and make a life that way. But you…you even failed your sisters, didn’t you?”

  One of the Coleman lanterns brightened markedly, dimmed, and brightened again, causing shadows to fly away, leap close, and fly away once more.

  Andre and Robert somberly considered the lamp, looked at each other, and then surveyed the room, puzzled.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “FAILED YOUR SISTERS,” DATURA REPEATED, “your paralyzed, blind, disfigured sisters. And if that isn’t true, if I’m full of crap, then let me see you, Maryann. Show yourself, confront me, let me see you the way the fire ruined you. Show me, and scare me off.”

  Although I would never have been able to conjure these spirits into a sufficiently material state for Datura to have seen them, I had hoped that Buzz-cut, with his high poltergeist potential, would provide a spectacle that would not only entertain my captors but also distract them so completely that I might get away.

  The problem had been how to fuel his already simmering anger into the fiery rage needed to power poltergeist phenomena. Now it seemed that Datura would solve that problem for me.

  “You weren’t there for your sisters,” she taunted. “Not before the quake, not during, not after, not ever.”

  Although the cocktail waitress only buried her face in her hands and endured the poisonous accusations, Buzz-cut glared at Datura, his expression heating from a simmering to a boiling anger.

  He and Maryann Morris were bonded by untimely death as well as by their inability to move on, but I can’t know that his mood grew darker because he took offense on behalf of the cocktail waitress. I don’t believe these stranded spirits feel any sense of community. They see one another, but each is fundamentally alone.

  More likely, Datura’s viciousness resonated with this man, excited him, and amplified his existing anger.

  “The fifth spirit has arrived,” I told her. “Conditions are perfect now.”

  “Then do it,” she said sharply. “Conjure them right here, right now
. Let me see.”

  God forgive me, to save myself and Danny, I said, “What you’re doing is helpful. It’s…I don’t know…it’s emotionalizing them or something.”

  “I told you I always know exactly what I’m doing. Don’t ever doubt me, baby.”

  “Just keep hammering at her, and with my help, in a few minutes, you’ll not just see Maryann but all of them.”

  She hurled more abuse at the cocktail waitress, in language far more vile than she’d used thus far, and both of the Coleman lanterns pulsed, pulsed, as though in sympathy with the lightning that might at the same moment have been ripping through the sky outside.

  Stalking, turning, stalking, circling, as if caged, as though frustrated beyond tolerance by his confinement, Buzz-cut banged his fists together hard enough to fracture knuckle against knuckle if he had been a material presence, but not even making a sound in his spirit form.

  He could have swung those fists at me, but they would have had no effect. No spirit can harm a living person by direct touch. This world belongs to us, not to them.

  If an earthbound soul is sufficiently debased, however, if the anger and envy and spite and stubborn rebellion that characterized him in life should ripen into blackest spiritual malignancy during the days when he lingers between worlds, he will be able to vent the power of his demonic rage on inanimate objects.

  To the cocktail waitress whom she couldn’t see and never would, Datura said with pitiless persistence, “You know what I think, what I’d bet, Maryann? In that shabby nursing home at night, some scummy guy on the staff sneaks in your sister’s room, Bonnie’s room, and rapes her.”

  Past rage, approaching fury, Buzz-cut threw back his head and screamed, but the sound was trapped with him in the realm between here and Elsewhere.

  “She’s helpless,” Datura said, her voice as venomous as the contents of a rattlesnake’s poison sacs. “Bonnie would be afraid to tell anyone because the rapist never talks, and she doesn’t know his name, and she can’t see, so she’s afraid they won’t believe her.”

  Buzz-cut tore at the air with his hands, as though trying to claw his way back through the veil that separated him from the world of the living.

  “So Bonnie has to endure anything he does to her, but when she’s enduring, she thinks of you, thinks because of you, she was where she was when the quake destroyed her life, and she thinks about how you, her sister, aren’t there for her now, and never were.”

  Listening to herself, her own most appreciative audience, Datura thrived on her viciousness. After each hateful rant, she seemed to thrill to the discovery of a deeper vileness in herself.

  The malignant mass beneath the mask of beauty now rose all but fully into view. Her flushed and twisted features were no longer the stuff of adolescent boys’ dreams, but of madhouses and of prisons for the criminally insane.

  I tensed, sensing that a forceful demonstration of the spirit’s fury was almost upon us.

  Inspired by Datura, energized, Buzz-cut thrashed spastically, as if he were lashed by a hundred whips or tormented by jolt after jolt of electricity. He threw his arms out, palms spread, like an enraptured preacher of an expressive sect, exhorting a congregation to be penitent.

  From his big hands pulsed concentric rings of power. They were visible to me, but only by their effects would they be visible to my hostess and her men.

  Rattles, clicks, creaks, and pings arose from the piles of ruined slot machines, and the two blackjack-table stools began to dance in place. Here and there across the casino, small funnels of whirling ashes spun up from the floor.

  “What’s happening?” Datura asked.

  “They’re about to appear,” I told her, though every spirit other than Buzz-cut had disappeared. “All of them. At last, you’ll see.”

  Poltergeists are as impersonal as hurricanes. They cannot aim themselves or cause precise effects. They are blind, thrashing power, and can harm human beings only by indirection. If furiously flung debris brains you, however, the effect is no less devastating than a well-swung club to the head.

  Broken slabs of plaster ceiling ornamentation levitated out of the craps table into which they had fallen during the earthquake, and exploded at us.

  I dodged, Datura ducked, and the missiles flew past us, over us, crashing into columns and walls behind us.

  Buzz-cut flung bolts of power from his hands, and when he let out another silent scream, concentric circles of energy poured from his open mouth.

  More and larger funnels of gray ashes and soot and scraps of charred wood spun up from the floor, while chips and clods of plaster shook down from the ceiling, while lashing down from above as well were loose wires and electrical conduits, while a battered blackjack table tumbled across the room as if blown by a wind that otherwise we could not feel, while a fire-scorched wheel of fortune spun by in a blur of losing numbers, while a pair of metal crutches stilted past as if in search of the dead gambler who had once needed them, and while an eerie screeching came out of the gloom and rapidly swelled both in volume and in pitch.

  In this furiously escalating chaos, a chunk of plaster weighing perhaps fifteen pounds struck Robert in the chest, knocking him backward and off his feet.

  As the thug went down, the mysterious screaming thing appeared out of the darker reaches of the casino, proving to be a half-melted life-size bronze statue of an Indian chief on a horse, spinning with alarming rotational velocity, the base shrieking against the concrete floor, from which nearly all carpeting had been burned, scouring away debris, striking sprays of white and orange sparks.

  With Robert still falling, with Datura and Andre riveted by the approaching, whirling, shrieking bronze, I seized the moment, stepped to the nearest Coleman lantern, snared it, and threw it at the second lamp.

  In spite of my lack of practice at bowling, I scored a strike. Lantern met lantern with a crash and a brief bloom of light, and then we were in darkness relieved only by the sparks showering from the spinning horse and rider.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ONCE A POLTERGEIST AS POWERFUL AS BUZZ-CUT has committed itself to a violent release of pent-up fury, it will with rare exception rage out of control until it exhausts itself—much like the usual incoherent-rap-star-going-postal at the annual Vibe Awards. In this case, the storming spirit might give me another minute of cover, as long as two or three.

  In the dark, in the rattle-clatter-bang-shriek, I stayed low, scuttling, anxious to avoid being knocked unconscious or decapitated by flying debris. I squinted, too, because enough chips and splinters of this and that were spinning through the air to make me wish that I’d brought an ophthalmologist with me.

  As well as I could in such blinding dark, I tried to follow a straight line. My goal: a gallery of demolished shops beyond the casino, through which we had passed on our way here from the north stairs of the hotel.

  Encountering piles of rubble, I went around some, over others, keeping on the move. I felt my way with both hands, but cautiously lest I clamber across debris bristling with nails and sharp metal edges.

  I spat ashes, spat unidentifiable bits of debris, plucked away fuzzy twirls of fluffy stuff that tickled my ears. I sneezed without worrying that I could be tracked by sound through the poltergeist cacophony.

  Too soon, I grew concerned that I had strayed off course, that it was not possible to remain oriented in pitch blackness. I quickly became convinced that I would bump into a voluptuous form in the dark, and that it would say Why, if it isn’t my new boyfriend, my little odd one.

  That stopped me.

  I unclipped the flashlight from my belt. But I hesitated to use it, even just long enough to sweep my surroundings and reorient myself.

  Datura and her needy boys probably had not relied solely on the Coleman lanterns. Most likely they would have a flashlight or even three. If not, then Andre would let her set his hair on fire and use him as a walking torch.

  When Buzz-cut ran out of steam, when the merry band of three could stop hu
gging the floor and dared to raise their heads, they would expect to find me in their immediate area. With flashlights, in this gloom, they would need a minute or two, maybe longer, to realize that I was neither dead nor alive in the mess of poltergeist-tossed trash.

  If I used my light now, they might see the sweep of it and know that I was already escaping. I didn’t want to draw their notice sooner than necessary. I needed every precious minute of lead time that I could get.

  A hand touched my face.

  I screamed like a little girl but couldn’t make a sound, and thus avoided humiliating myself.

  Fingers pressed gently to my lips, as if to warn me against the cry that I had tried and failed to make. A delicate hand, that of a woman.

  Only three women had been in the casino this time. Two of them were five years dead.

  The would-be goddess, even if invincible by virtue of having thirty thingumadoodles in an amulet, even if destined to live one thousand years by virtue of playing host to a banana-loving serpent, could not see in the dark. She had no sixth sense. She could not have found me without a flashlight.

  The hand slipped from my lips to my chin, my cheek. Then she touched my left shoulder, traced the line of my arm, and took my hand.

  Perhaps because I want the dead to feel warm, they are that way to me, and this hand in mine also felt indescribably cleaner than had the well-manicured hand of the phone-sex heiress. Clean and honest, strong but gentle. I wanted to believe that this was Maryann Morris, the cocktail waitress.

  Giving her my trust, after having paused no longer than ten seconds in the drowning dark, I allowed her to be my pilot fish.

  With Buzz-cut noisily working off his frustrations in the gloom behind us, we hurried forward much faster than I had been able to progress on my own, bypassing obstacles instead of clambering over them, never hesitating in fear of falling. The ghost could see as well without light as with.