The 'Geisters

THE PLAINS

Ann checked her Gmail at a public library in Atlanta. She didn’t sign in to chat. There was an email from Jeanie, though.

Ann pressed the “reply” button, and thought about what to write. She finally typed:

She didn’t send it.

Jeanie didn’t know about the Insect. She didn’t know about Mister Sleepy. How would that email read to her? Ann didn’t want to seem crazy; didn’t want to set off any alarm bells that weren’t already ringing. What the hell had she been thinking?

She had been following Penny’s advice along the road. Roy’s friend Pete ran a used-car lot out of an old filling station up the highway, and he had a surprisingly extensive stock of vehicles. After some hemming and hawing, she settled on an old Chevrolet campervan. Roy agreed, it would be easier to find camp grounds that took cash than it would motels. He and Pete had a quiet word out of earshot of Ann, and they figured $2,000 would be a fair price, given the vehicle’s age and the smell in the upholstery and level of rust and so forth. Ann thought it was a steal, but kept her mouth shut on the matter.

Ann hadn’t bought a gun, and she hadn’t bought a Taser either. She did manage to find a wig shop in Mobile, and got a red wig and a pair of big disguisey sunglasses too, and in the outlet store up the road, a pale blue jean jacket that was unlike anything else she owned. She did buy a mobile phone with a disposable number on it, and did max out her card on a cash advance—another $5,500 was what she could arrange. She bought a bus ticket to New Orleans and put it in the pocket of that jean jacket. Then she headed northeast in her fancy new van, her credit card broken in two at the bottom of her purse.

Was all that enough? If she’d done all this straight out of Miami, would Mister Sleepy and his master have been able to find her in the Rosedale Arms? Had they really tracked her by the license plate of her rented Toyota and a Gchat in the business centre? Or had they used something else?

Were they still on her trail even now?

Ann closed the email without sending it, then changed her password—something that she should have done a long time ago. She logged back in, just to make sure when she noticed the sender of a new message in her inbox.

mailto:evafenshaw23@hotmail.com

She didn’t have much time left, and it was a long note. So she opened the email, and despite the risk, summoned a library page to find out how to use the printer in this town. When it was finished, she deleted the email, signed out, and cleared the cache—just like Penny’d shown her.

She hurried back to her van with the printout, to read it through. Because that was the one piece of advice from Penny she hadn’t yet been able to follow.

She had not yet sought out an exorcist.

Ann folded the sheets and slid them into the glove box of the van. It was late in the afternoon outside the library in the parking lot. Minivans and SUVs were pulled up by the sidewalk, letting kids off. On the steps outside, an elderly man with a ponytail and a thick beard sat on a bench, thumbing through a thick volume. Ann pulled the disposable cell phone from her handbag. It was an old-style flip phone.

She opened it, and from memory, dialled Eva’s number.

“Hello?”

“Hello Eva. Don’t say my name if there’s someone else in the room right now.”

“Mm. All… all right.”

“So there is.” Ann sighed. “All right. Eva, I got your email. I’ve made a copy and printed it. You do the same when we’re done.”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Good. Now. There are some things we need to talk about very quickly. I need you to listen to me.”

“Yes.”

“First. Ian Rickhardt is not to be trusted. He is a—”she wanted to say prick, but knew better than to use that kind of language with Eva “—a wicked man. So was… so was Michael. They—” Ann paused. She tried to form the words to describe what had happened, exactly, in a way that Eva could understand.

“They’re perverts,” she said finally. “They both knew full well about the Insect. They… they exploited it sexually. Does that make sense?”

There was a silence on the other line.

“Ian has taken Philip. They’ve taken him from his home care. Apparently he consented to it. But I’m worried he doesn’t understand. I think he’s in trouble.”

“All right.” She sounded less certain. But then she added, “Just a moment.”

The phone muffled—a longish silence as these things went—and she was back.

“All right. I’ve sent David away. He was here just now, helping clean up. I’ve asked him if he could take out the garbage, and he hopped to it.”

“Who is David?”

“He’s with the home,” said Eva. She was still speaking slowly, hesitantly, stumbling a bit over consonants. “He’s been helping me ou’. Out.”

“Okay.” Ann thought about that. Hadn’t a David told her he was Eva’s nephew? She wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to get into it with Eva now. “Well. Don’t talk to him about any of this.”

“Of course not. Now tell me, Ann. Did the Insect cause that plane crash?”

“It didn’t quite crash. But Michael caused it. He raped the Insect, Eva. Ian did too.”

“Goodness,” said Eva. “Goodness.”

“He wasn’t a good man. Neither of them were.”

“Ann,” said Eva, somewhat more deliberately, “how precisely did he rape it?”

Ann felt her throat rise. Outside, a woman crossing the parking lot glanced at her, and looked away quickly. Ann might’ve done that herself, seeing a woman like Ann in the cab of a burned-out campervan, crying. “I—I don’t know, precisely. But it told me. It told me it was happening.”

“How did it tell you?”

Ann drew a breath. She swallowed, and steadied herself.

“I can’t stay on this phone very long,” she said. “You’ve got to trust me. There are a group of men, who do this to the Insect. To poltergeists. I’ve met them. They have some sick relationship with them. They… they call people like me a ‘vessel’ for their… for their real brides. Michael was one of them. And Ian Rickhardt’s one of them. And I think he’s kidnapped Philip.”

“Do you want to call the police?”

Ann wiped her eyes. The tears were gone as fast as they’d come. Something else came up in its place. A hard certainty. Eva wasn’t alone in the room, wherever she was. This wasn’t her; there was more than a stroke at work here.

“Eva,” she said, “you’re not really alone, are you?”

“I’m alone,” said Eva. “But I’m also listening to you. And this… this doesn’t make sense. You’ve had an accident in Tobago, and another one on the airplane back. With tragic consequences. But it’s only that you’ve slipped—you’ve let go. So what you need to do, is get it back under control. And you’re on the phone right now, and I think we might just be able to do that.”

“All right,” said Ann.

“Good. Now, Ann, I want you to visualize the safe place.”

Ann shut her eyes. There was nothing but darkness.

“Do you have it there?”

“Yes,” said Ann. “I’m in the tower, and there’s sunlight streaming in the windows, and there are unicorns dancing outside.”

“Unicorns?”

Ann opened her eyes. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the wind was whipping up.

“I’m sorry, Eva. I can’t.”

“You don’t want to, you mean.”

There is no can’t, only won’t, thought Ann crazily.

“It’s past that,” said Ann. “The Insect has escaped. I tried to get it back in. And I couldn’t.”

“Ann,” said Eva sharply, “the Insect hasn’t done anything. It can’t escape, if you don’t let it. Now let’s take a breath—fill ourselves up with energy. Breathe deep—”

“It’s killed, Eva. The Insect has killed.”

On the bench by the library, the man shut his book, and peered up at the sky. The quality of light was changing; Ann could feel a prickling on her arms.

“Ann, you need to take control of this thing. You need to put it down.”

The Insect had killed. That was true; it had killed Michael, while he tried to rape it. It had taken Hirsch, the lawyer, to the very edge of death and held him there.

And when Ann was facing a kidnapper all her own, it had lifted her high in the air, free from harm—and it had saved her.

It would take more than a placebo to keep the Insect anywhere it didn’t want to be. More to the point, it would take more than that to keep it anywhere Ann didn’t want it to be.

Outside the car, a woman with a stroller shouted to her husband, and pointed to the west. Thick drops of rain splattered on the car windshield.

“Eva,” said Ann, “I want you to be careful. Don’t trust David. Don’t trust Ian. If you can, call up your nephew Ryan and get him to take you away from home.”

“Ann?”

Ann swallowed, and smiled as the western clouds fattened into deep, greenish-black things.

“Just go,” she said. “Go stay with Ryan.”

Ann clicked the phone off, and cracked its back and pulled its battery out. She dropped the battery out the window, turned the ignition, and pulled out of the parking lot and onto the long and twisted road ahead of her.

She had to take it. Philip needed her.

Whatever anyone else said, she knew it to be true.