Gia stepped out onto the floor. "I just want to look at these crosses, okay?"
"No," Jack muttered, rising and following her. "Not okay. But I don't seem to have much say in the matter."
Jack joined her where she'd stopped before one of the glistening red cross-shaped stains on the cheap paneling. The upright part ran about two inches wide and maybe ten inches high; the eight-inch crosspiece flared upward at each end and was set high, almost at the top of the upright. Jack counted eleven of them ringing the cellar wall, maybe six feet apart and about five feet off the floor.
"What a strange kind of cross," Gia said. "And they're the only things in the room still wet."
"Not the only thing," Lyle said. His clothes and dreads were still drenched in thick red blood. "I've got to go change and take a shower." He started to turn away, then swiveled back to them. "That's known as a tau cross, by the way. Named because it looks like the T in the Greek alphabet; it's also the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet."
Jack stared at him. How did he know all this stuff?
"Tau…" Charlie said. "I remember reading in the prophet Ezekiel how the faithful of God would all be signed on the forehead with the letter tau" He looked around, nodding. "Yes, this definitely shows that we were saved by the hand of the Lord."
Jack took a closer look. "But the cross piece doesn't quite make it all the way up." Each showed a little nubbin of the upright on top. "Not quite a capital T."
As if on cue, all the bloody crosses faded away.
"Look!" Lyle cried, holding out his arms. His clothes were clean and dry, and not a trace of red on his skin or hair. "The blood! It's gone! As if it never happened!"
"Oh, it happened," Jack said, pointing to the banister railing on the floor. "And now it's time to go."
"No, you can't," Lyle said. "We need to talk about this. Everything that's been happening here since the earthquake—"
"'Everything'?" Jack said. "You mean there's more?"
"Yes. Lots more. And I believe it's all connected to Gia. Maybe even the earthquake."
Jack glanced at Gia and saw her startled look. He turned back to Lyle. "Look, I know you just had a bad experience, so—"
"Listen to me. It's all starting to fall into place. We've been living here almost a year now and in all that time we've experienced not one strange thing." He looked at his brother. "Am I right, Charlie?"
Charlie nodded. "True that. But since Friday night it been one thing top another."
"Right. All the weirdness started Friday night when Gia stepped into this house. The instant she crossed the threshold we had an earthquake, for Christ sake!"
"I crossed with her. We entered together, if you remember. Maybe it's me."
Jack knew it was him, but didn't want to go into that now. He wanted Gia out of here.
"But you're not the one who's seen the little girl. On any other day in my life I'd say Gia's arrival with the earthquake was pure coincidence, but not today. Not after what I just went through. And she's the only one who's seen this little girl. I'm telling you, I feel it in my gut: that child is connected to what's been going on, and Gia's connected to the child. I want to know how."
"So do I," Gia said. "I mean, that is, if it's true. Because I saw a hand sticking out of that pool. It was right in front of you three but none of you could see it. So either I'm crazy or I'm connected. Either way, I want some answers too."
"Okay, fine," Jack said. He knew Lyle was wrong, but could see from the way this conversation was going that he wasn't going to get Gia home any time soon. "We'll discuss it. But not here. I don't think this house is a healthy place for Gia. There's got to be a restaurant or someplace where we can get a booth and hash this out."
Charlie turned to Lyle. "How about Hasan's up on Ditmars?"
Lyle nodded. "That'll do. On a Tuesday night we can have our pick of the tables. But first I want to take a shower."
"Why?" Jack said. "You look perfectly clean."
"Maybe, but I don't feel clean. You three go ahead. It's a easy walk. I'll catch up with you."
Jack nodded absently. Lyle's theory was beginning to bother him. Could Gia have been the trigger? The possibility, remote as it was, shot a gout of acid from his gut into his chest.
11
Hasan's turned out to be a small Middle Eastern cafe and restaurant. The orange awning over the natural wooden front sported English and Arabic. The walls inside were white stucco, trimmed with red and green stripes. A widescreen TV was tuned to some Arab CNN-wannabe channel.
The owners, a smiling middle-aged couple with thick accents, greeted Charlie with the deference earned by a regular customer. The place was only a quarter full and, as Lyle had said, they had the pick of the tables. At Jack's nudging—he didn't want anyone eavesdropping—Charlie chose one in a rear corner. It had a marble top and chairs with woven straw backs.
Jack went into the men's room and took off his shirt. He checked his bandage and found blood starting to seep through. The wound ached but didn't seem too much worse, given how he'd mistreated it. He slipped back into his shirt and packed a couple of paper towels over the bandage.
Lyle arrived a few minutes later, his dreads still wet from his shower. The waitress had brought a Diet Pepsi for Charlie, a Sprite for Gia, and a couple of Killian's for Jack and Lyle.
"I suppose I should tell you about the Otherness," Jack said.
Gia frowned. "Do you think you should go into that?"
"Well, it should explain why I think if anyone triggered the strangeness in that house, it was me instead of you."
Somewhere in the back of his head he heard a voice mutter, It's always about you, isn't it. Not true. Most times he didn't want it to be about him, but this time he did. Because he refused to accept Lyle's alternative that Gia had triggered the manifestations. Or maybe he was afraid to accept it. He didn't want Gia involved.
"I know, but it sounds so…" She rubbed a hand over her face. "What am I thinking? I was going to say it sounds so far out. But after today…"
"Right," Lyle said. "After today you're going to have to go some to be too far out for us. I think we left 'far out' in the dust. Or rather, the blood."
Jack found Charlie staring at him. "You said 'Otherness'? What that mean?"
Jack noticed that the events in the cellar seemed to have scared some of the hip-hop out of the younger Kenton.
The waitress came with the menus.
"Why don't we order, then talk," Jack said.
Gia looked at him. "You can't be hungry after that."
"I'm always hungry."
The menu was bilingual—English on the left, Arabic on the right. Throughout the word vegetable was spelled "ve-gitible." Hasan's offered salad, falafel, hummus, tahini, baba ganoush, fatoush, lebneh, fried calamari, tajin eggplant, and tajin calamari.
Tajin… was that like Cajun?
Lots of kababs—lamb, veal, chicken, and kofta, whatever that was.
Jack nudged Gia. "What are you going to have?"
"I'll have a little hummus and a pita. That's about all I can stomach right now. How about you?"
"I'm thinking about the special."
Gia looked and gasped. "Tongue with testicles? Jack, don't you dare!"
"You know I always like to try new—"
"Don't. You. Dare."
"Okay. Just for you, my dear, I will forego that epicurean delight." He'd had no intention of dining on a dish that sounded like a sex act anyway. "I guess I'll just settle for a lamb kabab."
Once their orders were in, Jack leaned over the table.
"Let me start at the beginning. It may take a minute or two, but a little patience will pay off. It began last summer when a crazy Hindu sailed a boatload of creatures called rakoshi to the West Side docks. They were big and vicious and they threatened someone I care very much about." He glanced at Gia and their eyes met. They'd come so close to losing Vicky, and Jack himself had barely survived. "But they could be killed, and I killed them."
r /> Not all of them. One still survived, but Jack decided not to go into that.
"I thought that was that. It was the strangest occurrence of my life until then, but I put it behind me and moved on. But then, last spring, I learned that the origin of those creatures was not exactly earthly."
Lyle said, "We're not heading for UFOville, are we?"
"No. This is weirder. While looking for a missing wife I fell in with some strange people who told me that the rakoshi had been 'fashioned'—that was the word—of everything bad in humans. Something took human lust and greed and hate and viciousness and distilled it into these creatures without any leavening factors. They were human evil to the Nth."
"You talkin' demons," Charlie said.
"They'd fit the description, I guess."
"And the 'something' you said did this. You talkin' Satan?"
"No. I was told it's called the Otherness."
"Could be just another name for Satan."
"I don't think so. Satan's a pretty easy concept to grasp. He was thrown out of heaven because of his pride and now he spends his time luring souls away from God and stashing them in hell where they suffer for eternity. That about right?"
"Well, yeah," Charlie said. "But—"
"Fine, then." Jack didn't want to get sidetracked here. "But I've had the Otherness explained to me a couple of times and I still don't have a handle on it. Apparently two vast, unimaginably complex cosmic forces have been at war forever. The prize in this war is all existence—this world, other realities, other dimensions, everything is at stake. Before you start feeling important, I was told that our corner of reality is just a tiny piece of that whole, and of no special importance. But if one side's going to be the winner, it's got to take all the marbles. Even our little backwater."
"Don't tell me," Lyle said, his tone bordering on disdain. "One of these forces is Good and one is Eeeevil."
"Not quite. That would make it easy. The way I understand it, the side that has our reality in its pocket is not good or evil, it's just there. The most we can expect from it is benign neglect."
"'Thou shalt not have false gods before me,' " Charlie intoned.
"It's not a god. It's a force, a state of being, a…" Jack spread his hands in frustration. "I don't know if we can grasp anything that vast and alien."
"Does it have a name?" Lyle said.
Jack shook his head. "No. I've heard someone refer to it as the Ally, but that's not quite right. It will only act on our behalf to keep us in its possession. Other than that it doesn't give a damn about us."
"And the Otherness is… what?" Lyle said. "The other side?"
"Right. And it doesn't have a name either, but people who seem to know about these things call it the Otherness because it represents everything not us. Its rules are different than ours. It wants to convert our form of reality to its own, one that'll be toxic for us—physically and spiritually."
"That Satan, I tell you!" Charlie cried. Lyle rolled his eyes. Charlie caught it and pointed to Jack. "He just nailed Satan dead on, bro, and you know it. Why don't you stop frontin' and cop to it?"
To head off a looming argument, Jack said, "Well, the Otherness could have been the inspiration for the idea of Satan. I've heard it described as vampiric, and it sounds to me as if its idea of reality would create a hell on earth. So maybe…"
"But what does all this have to do with this afternoon?" Lyle said.
"I'm getting to that. This past spring I learned the hard way that the elements in the Otherness responsible for creating the rakoshi wanted my head for killing them. They missed me but a few people and a good-size house vanished from the face of the earth."
"Ay, yo, I remember readin' 'bout that," Charlie said. "Someplace out on Long Island, right?"
Jack nodded. "A little town called Monroe."
"Right!" Lyle said. "I remember trying to think up a way to take credit for it, or at least come up with a way-out explanation that would buy me some PR. But about half a dozen mediums in the city beat me to it." He looked at Jack. "You're telling me that was you?"
"I didn't cause it," Jack said. "I just happened to be on the scene. And I wasn't the only one there. Both sides were represented. On the Otherness team was a guy calling himself Sal Roma. Not his real name—he'd stolen it. He seemed pretty tuned in to the Otherness, like he was its main agent here. His name has popped up a couple of times since then, once I think as an anagram."
"An anagram?" Lyle said. "That's interesting. Means there's a good chance his real name is hidden in those letters. I've read that ancient wizards used to operate under aliases for fear that someone who knew their True Name could have power over them."
"I think this guy's just playing games. But if I ever learn his True Name, I'm going to find him and…" Jack stopped himself. "Never mind."
Charlie said, "You gotta personal beef with this Roma?"
The thought of Kate made the old pain new. "You could say that."
Jack glanced at Gia. She smiled her sympathy and took his hand under the table. They'd talked a lot about this in the past month or so. Gia believed. She'd seen the rakoshi, so she'd been well down the road to acceptance when he'd explained all this to her. But even after what they'd seen today, the Kenton brothers probably thought he was nuts.
He took a breath. "But back to the big hole in Monroe: Sal Roma and some nasty sort of pet of his were there for the Otherness; the anti-Otherness side was represented by a couple of guys who looked like twins. I was caught in the middle, and the twins were ready to sacrifice me for their purposes—which showed me firsthand how unbenign this so-called Ally power is. Things got kind of complicated, but the upshot is, I walked away and the twins didn't."
"You know," Lyle said, "this is all really fascinating, but what's it got to do with our house?"
"I'm getting to that. I've since learned—or at least I was told—that I've been drafted into the service of the anti-Otherness."
"Drafted?" Lyle said. "You mean you don't have any say about that?"
"Not a thing, apparently. My guess is that because I'm somewhat responsible for the demise of the twins, I'm supposed to replace them. But if the Great Whatever that drafted me thinks I'm going to go trotting about putting out Otherness-started fires, it better think again. I don't know about my predecessors, but I've got a life."
"What you mean, 'Otherness-started fires'?" Charlie said.
"Not sure, but I've got an idea that most of the strange things that happen in this world—what people like to call paranormal or supernatural—are really manifestations of the Otherness. Anything that terrifies, confounds, and confuses us, anything that brings out the worst in us makes it stronger."
Charlie banged his fist on the table. "You talking 'bout Satan, dawg! The Father of Lies, the Sower of Discord!"
"Maybe I am," Jack said, wanting to avoid a theological argument. "And maybe I'm not quite so sure of as many things as I used to be. But I'm pretty sure that I'm tagged as anti-Otherness, and because of that, I'm the one who triggered everything that's been going on in your house."
Jack looked around the table and found Lyle staring at him. "You're telling me you triggered that earthquake?"
"Either that, or it's all pure coincidence. And I've been told no more coincidences in my life."
Lyle's eyes widened. "No more coincidences… that means your life's being manipulated. Now that's scary."
"Tell me about it." Jack's gut crawled every time he thought about it. He looked at Gia. "So can you see now why I don't want Gia near that house?"
"Oh, yes," Lyle said, nodding. "Assuming what you've told us is true—and so far you haven't struck me as schizo—then yes, definitely. And as much as I hate to say it—because I've always thought they were such a lame joke—we seem to be dealing with a bona fide ghost Would something like that be related to this Otherness of yours?"
Jack felt himself bristling. "First off, the Otherness isn't mine. I did not come up with the idea, it was pushed
on me, and I'd be a much happier man if I'd never heard of it. Second, no one's handed me a book or a manual and said, 'Here, read this and you'll know what you're dealing with.' I'm piecing this together as I go along."
"Okay. I misspoke. I'll rephrase: Why should we think this ghost is related to the Otherness?"
"Maybe it's not. But then again, maybe all the violent deaths in Menelaus Manor somehow created a focus of Otherness. Maybe that focus was concentrated in the fault line beneath the house. When I crossed the threshold I hit a trip wire and… boom."
Lyle shook his head. "I still think that little girl's connected to Gia." He turned to her. "Did she look at all familiar to you?"
Gia shook her head. "Not a bit. If she is a ghost…" She shook her head. "I've never believed in ghosts either, but what else can you call her? If she is one, I think she may have died in the sixties. She looked dressed to ride a horse, so her clothes don't date her, but she kept singing a song—"
"'I Think We're Alone Now'?" Lyle said.
"Yes! You heard it too?"
"Yesterday. But I didn't see her."
"Well, it's a sixties song—late sixties, I think."
"Nineteen sixty-seven, to be exact," Jack said. "Tommy James and the Shondells on the Roulette label."
Lyle and Charlie stared at him in surprise. Gia wore a wry smile; she was used to this.
Jack shrugged and tapped the side of his head. "Chock full of useless information."
"Not so useless this time," Gia said. "It gives us an idea of when she might have been killed."
"Killed?" Charlie said. "You think someone killed her?"
Gia's face twisted. "You didn't see her. Her chest had been cut open." She swallowed. "Her heart was gone."
"That could be symbolic," Jack said, giving her hand a squeeze.
He wished to hell Gia had never come within miles of Menelaus Manor. This was all Junie Moon's fault. And his for agreeing to drive Junie to her medium. If they'd stayed at that damn party…
"After all the blood we just saw?" Lyle said. "If that's symbolism, it's way overboard."
"Tell them about Sunday night," Charlie said.