Later Page 12

  “She knew I wasn’t lying because I knew what the guy was wearing on top, even though that part of him was covered up. But I really don’t want—”

  “Understood, totally understood. Now concerning Regis Thomas’s last book. It was unwritten—”

  “Yeah, except for the first couple of chapters. I think.”

  “But your mother was able to glean enough details to write the rest of it herself, using you as her medium?”

  I hadn’t thought of myself as a medium, but in a way he was right. “I guess. Like in The Conjuring.” And off his puzzled expression: “It’s a movie. Mr. Burkett…Professor…do you think I’m crazy?” I almost didn’t care, because the relief of getting it all out there was so great.

  “No,” he said, but something—probably my expression of relief—caused him to raise a warning finger. “This is not to say I believe your story, at least not without corroboration from your mother, which I have agreed not to ask for. But I will go this far: I don’t necessarily disbelieve. Mostly because of the rings, but also because that last Thomas book does indeed exist. Not that I’ve read it.” He made a little face at that. “You say your mother’s friend—ex-friend—could also corroborate the last and most colorful part of your story.”

  “Yes, but—”

  He raised his hand, like he must have done a thousand times to babbling students in class. “You don’t want me to speak to her, either, and I quite understand. I only met her once, and I didn’t care for her. Did she really bring drugs into your home?”

  “I didn’t see them myself, but if my mom said she did, she did.”

  He put his pad aside and fondled his go-to cane, which had a big white knob on the top. “Then Tia is well rid of her. And this Therriault, who you say is haunting you. Is he here now?”

  “No.” But I looked around to be sure.

  “You want to be rid of him, of course.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know how to do it.”

  He sipped his tea, brooded over the cup, then set it down and fixed me with those blue eyes again. He was old; they weren’t. “An interesting problem, especially for an elderly gentleman who’s encountered all sorts of supernatural creatures in his reading life. The gothics are full of them, Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula being just the pair who show up most frequently on movie marquees. There are many more in European literature and folk-tales. Let’s presume, at least for the moment, that this Therriault isn’t just in your head. Let’s presume he actually exists.”

  I kept myself from protesting that he did exist. The professor already knew what I believed, he’d said so himself.

  “Let us go a step further. Based on what you’ve told me about your other sightings of dead people—including my wife—all of them go away after a few days. Disappear to…” He waved his hand. “…to wherever. But not this Therriault. He’s still around. In fact, you think he may be getting stronger.”

  “I’m pretty sure he is.”

  “If so, perhaps he’s not really Kenneth Therriault at all anymore. Perhaps what remained of Therriault after death has been infested—that’s the correct word, not possessed—by a demon.” He must have seen my expression because he hastened to add, “We’re just speculating here, Jamie. I’m going to speak frankly and say I think it far more likely that you’re suffering from a localized fugue state that has caused hallucinations.”

  “In other words, crazy.” At that point I was still glad I’d told him, but his conclusion was maximo depressing, even though I’d been more or less expecting it.

  He waved a hand. “Bosh. I don’t think that at all. You’re obviously operating in the real world as well as ever. And I must admit your story is full of things that are hard to explain in strictly rational terms. I don’t doubt that you accompanied Tia and her ex-friend to the deceased Mr. Thomas’s home. Nor do I doubt that Detective Dutton took you to Therriault’s place of employment and his apartment building. If she did those things—I am channeling Ellery Queen here, one of my favorite apostles of deduction—she must have believed in your mediumistic talents. Which in turn leads us back to Mr. Thomas’s home, where Detective Dutton must have seen something to convince her of that in the first place.”

  “You lost me,” I said.

  “Never mind.” He leaned forward. “All I’m saying is that although I lean toward the rational, the known, and the empiric—having never seen a ghost, or had a flash of precognition—I must admit there are elements of your story I can’t dismiss out of hand. So let us say that Therriault, or something nasty that has inhabited what remains of Therriault, actually exists. The question then becomes: can you get rid of him?”

  Now I was leaning forward, thinking of the book he’d given me, the one full of fairy tales that were really horror stories with very few happy endings. The stepsisters cut off their toes, the princess threw the frog against a wall—splat!— instead of kissing him, Red Riding Hood actually encouraged the big bad wolf to eat Grandma, so she could inherit Grandma’s property.

  “Can I? You’ve read all those books, there must be a way in at least one of them! Or…” A new idea struck me. “Exorcism! What about that?”

  “Probably a nonstarter,” Professor Burkett said. “I think a priest would be more apt to send you to a child psychiatrist than an exorcist. If your Therriault exists, Jamie, you may be stuck with him.”

  I stared at him with dismay.

  “But maybe that’s all right.”

  “All right? How can it be all right?”

  He lifted his cup, sipped, and set it down.

  “Have you ever heard of the Ritual of Chüd?”

  38

  Now I’m twenty-two—almost twenty-three, in fact—and living in the land of later. I can vote, I can drive, I can buy booze and cigarettes (which I plan to quit soon). I understand that I’m still very young, and I’m sure that when I look back I’ll be amazed (hopefully not disgusted) by how naïve and wet behind the ears I was. Still, twenty-two is light years from thirteen. I know more now, but I believe less. Professor Burkett would never have been able to work the same magic on me now that he did back then. Not that I’m complaining! Kenneth Therriault—I don’t know what he really was, so let’s stick with that for now—was trying to destroy my sanity. The professor’s magic saved it. It may even have saved my life.

  Later, when I researched the subject for an anthropology paper in college (NYU, of course), I discovered half of what he told me that day was actually true. The other half was bullshit. I have to give him credit for invention, though (full marks, Mom’s British romance writer Philippa Stephens would have said). Check this out, and dig the irony: my Uncle Harry wasn’t even fifty and totally gaga, while Martin Burkett, although in his eighties, could still be creative on the fly…and all in service of a troubled boy who turned up uninvited, bearing a casserole and a weird story.

  The Ritual of Chüd, the professor said, was practiced by a sect of Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhists. (True.)

  They did it to achieve a sense of perfect nothingness and the resulting state of serenity and spiritual clarity. (True.)

  It was also considered useful in combating demons, both those in the mind and the supernatural ones who invaded from the outside. (A gray area.)

  “Which makes it perfect for you, Jamie, because it covers all the bases.”

  “You mean it can work even if Therriault’s really not there, and I’m just crazypants.”

  He gave me a look combining reproach and impatience that he probably perfected in his teaching career. “Stop talking and try listening, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sorry.” I was on my second cup of tea, and feeling wired.

  With the groundwork laid, Professor Burkett now moved into the land of make-believe…not that I knew the difference. He said that chüd was especially useful when one of these high-country Buddhists encountered a yeti, also known as the abominable snowman.

  “Are those things real?” I asked.

  “As wi
th your Mr. Therriault, I can’t say with any surety. But—also as with you and your Mr. Therriault—I can say that the Tibetans believe they are.”

  The professor went on to say that a person unfortunate enough to meet a yeti would be haunted by it for the rest of his life. Unless, that was, it could be engaged and bested in the Ritual of Chüd.

  If you’re following this, you know that if bullshit was an event in the Olympics, the judges would have given Professor Burkett all 10s for that one, but I was only thirteen and in a bad place. Which is to say I swallowed it whole. If part of me had an idea of what Professor Burkett was up to—I can’t really remember—I shut it down. You have to remember how desperate I was. The idea of being followed around by Kenneth Therriault, aka Thumper, for the rest of my life—haunted by him, to use the professor’s word—was the most horrible thing I could imagine.

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  “Ah, you’ll like this. It’s like one of the uncensored fairy tales in the book I gave you. According to the stories, you and the demon bind yourselves together by biting into each other’s tongues.”

  He said this with a certain relish, and I thought, Like it? Why would I like it?

  “Once this union has been accomplished, you and the demon have a battle of wills. This would occur telepathically, I assume, since it would be hard to talk while engaged in a…mmm…mutual tongue-bite. The first to withdraw loses all power over the winner.”

  I stared at him, my mouth open. I had been raised to be polite, especially around my mother’s clients and acquaintances, but I was too grossed out to consider the social niceties. “If you think I’m going to—what?—french-kiss that guy, you’re out of your mind! For one thing, he’s dead, did you not get that?”

  “Yes, Jamie, I believe I did.”

  “Besides, how would I even get him to do it? What would I say, come on over here, Ken honey, and slip me some tongue?”

  “Are you finished?” Professor Burkett asked mildly, once again making me feel like the most clueless student in class. “I think the tongue-biting aspect is meant to be symbolic. The way chunks of Wonder Bread and little thimbles of wine are meant to be symbolic of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples.”

  I didn’t get that, not being much of a churchgoer, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Listen to me, Jamie. Listen very carefully.”

  I listened as if my life depended on it. Because I thought it did.

  39

  As I was preparing to leave (politeness had resurfaced and I didn’t neglect to tell him thank you), the professor asked me if his wife had said anything else. Besides about where the rings were, that was.

  By the time you’re thirteen I think you’ve forgotten most of the things that have happened to you when you’re six—I mean, that’s more than half your life ago!—but I didn’t have any trouble remembering that day. I could have told him how Mrs. Burkett threw shade about my green turkey but figured that wouldn’t interest him. He wanted to know if she’d said anything about him, not what she’d said to me.

  “You were hugging my mom and she said you were going to burn her hair with your cigarette. And you did. Guess you quit smoking, huh?”

  “I allow myself three a day. I suppose I could have more, I’m not going to be cut down in my youth, but three is all I seem to want. Did she say anything else?”

  “Um, that you’d be having lunch with some woman in a month or two. Her name might have been Debbie or Diana, something like that—”

  “Dolores? Was it Dolores Magowan?” He was looking at me with new eyes, and all at once I wished we’d had this part of our conversation to start with. It would have gone a long way toward establishing my credibility.

  “It might have been.”

  He shook his head. “Mona always thought I had eyes for that woman, God knows why.”

  “She said something about rubbing sheep-dip into her hands—”

  “Lanolin,” he said. “For her swollen joints. I’ll be damned.”

  “There was one other thing, too. About how you always missed the back loop on your pants. I think she said ‘Who’ll do that now?’ ”

  “My God,” he said softly. “Oh my God. Jamie.”

  “Oh, and she kissed you. On the cheek.”

  It was just a little kiss, and years ago, but that sealed the deal. Because he also wanted to believe, I guess. If not in everything, in her. In that kiss. That she had been there.

  I left while I was ahead.

  40

  I kept an eye out for Therriault on my way home—that was second nature to me by then—but didn’t see him. Which was great, but I’d given up hoping that he was gone for good. He was a bad penny, and he’d turn up. I only hoped I would be ready for him when he did.

  That night I got an email from Professor Burkett. I did a little research with interesting results, it said. I thought you also might be interested. There were three attachments, all three reviews of Regis Thomas’s last book. The professor had highlighted the lines he had found interesting, leaving me to draw my own conclusions. Which I did.

  From the Sunday Times Book Review: “Regis Thomas’s swan song is the usual farrago of sex and swamp-tromping adventure, but the prose is sharper than usual; here and there one finds glimmers of actual writing.”

  From the Guardian: “Although the long-bruited Mystery of Roanoke won’t be much of a surprise to readers of the series (who surely saw it coming), Thomas’s narrative voice is livelier than one might expect from the previous volumes, where turgid exposition alternated with fervid and sometimes comical sexual encounters.”

  From the Miami Herald: “The dialogue snaps, the pacing is crisp, and for once the lesbian liaison between Laura Goodhugh and Purity Betancourt feels real and touching, rather than like a prurient joke or a stroke fantasy. It’s a great wind-up.”

  I couldn’t show those reviews to my mother—they would have raised too many questions—but I was pretty sure she must have seen them herself, and I guessed they had made her as happy as they made me. Not only had she gotten away with it, she had put a shine on Regis Thomas’s sadly tarnished reputation.

  There were many nights in the weeks and months following my first encounter with Kenneth Therriault when I went to bed feeling unhappy and afraid. That night wasn’t one of them.

  41

  I’m not sure how many times I saw him the rest of that summer, which should tell you something. If it doesn’t, here it is in plain English: I was getting used to him. I never would have believed it on the day when I turned around and saw him standing by the trunk of Liz Dutton’s car, close enough to touch me. I never would have believed it on the day when the elevator opened and he was in there, telling me my mother had cancer and grinning like it was the happiest news ever. But familiarity breeds contempt, so they say, and in this case the saying was true.

  It no doubt helped that he never did show up in my closet or under my bed (which would have been worse, because when I was little I was sure that was where the monster was waiting to grab a dangling foot or arm). That summer I read Dracula—okay, not the actual book, but a kick-ass graphic novel I bought at Forbidden Planet—and in it Van Helsing said that a vampire couldn’t come in unless you invited him. If it was true of vampires, it stood to reason (at least to thirteen-year-old me it did) that it was true of other supernatural beings. Like the one inside of Therriault, keeping him from disappearing after a few days like all the other dead people. I checked Wikipedia to see if Mr. Stoker just made that up, but he didn’t. It was in lots of the vampire legends. Now (later!) I can see it makes symbolic sense. If we have free will, then you have to invite evil in.

  Here’s something else. He had mostly stopped crooking that finger at me. For most of that summer he just stood at a distance, staring. The only time I did see him beckoning was kind of funny. If, that is, you can say anything about that undead motherfucker was funny.

  Mom got us tickets to see the Mets play the Tigers on the last Sunda
y in August. The Mets lost big, but I didn’t care, because Mom bagged a pair of awesome seats from one of her publisher friends (contrary to popular belief, literary agents do have friends). They were on the third base side, just two rows up from the field. It was during the seventh inning stretch, while the Mets were still keeping it close, that I saw Therriault. I looked around for the hotdog man, and when I looked back, my pal Thumper was standing near the third base coach’s box. Same khaki pants. Same shirt with blood all down the left side and spattering the suicide note. Head blown open like somebody lit off a cherry bomb in there. Grinning. And yes, beckoning.

  The Tigers infield was throwing the ball around, and just after I saw Therriault, a chuck from the shortstop to the third basemen went way wild. The crowd whooped and jeered the usual stuff—nice throw busher, my grandmother can do better than that—but I just sat there with my hands clamped so tight the nails were biting into my palms. The shortstop hadn’t seen Therriault (he would have run into the outfield screaming if he had), but he felt him. I know he did.

  And here’s something else: the third base coach went to retrieve the ball, then backed off and let it roll into the dugout. Shagging it would have brought him right next to the thing only I could see. Did the guy feel a cold spot, like in a ghost movie? I don’t think so. I think he felt, just for a second or two, that the world was trembling around him. Vibrating like a guitar string. I have reasons to think that.

  Mom said, “Okay, Jamie? You’re not getting sunstroke on me, are you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and clenched hands or not, I mostly was. “Do you see the hotdog man?”

  She craned around and waved to the nearest vendor. Which gave me a chance to give Kenneth Therriault the finger. His grin turned into a snarl that showed all his teeth. Then he walked into the visitors’ dugout, where the players who weren’t on the field no doubt shuffled around on the bench to give him room, without any idea why they were doing it.