The Haunted Air

  Whatever the truth, sixteen-year-old Lyle Kenton had found his calling: the scam. If he could scam the city, he could scam anyone. His first paying gig was as a slider for a downtown monte game, watching the street for the heat, ready to make the call that would fold the game. He quickly learned the shaker's verbal codes and moved up to the stick position where he'd stand around the table and shill the marks into the game, but all his off hours he spent practicing the moves so he could become a shaker and start his own game.

  But after a particularly close call when he'd barely outrun one of the plainclothes D's who'd broken up their game, he cast about for something equally profitable but a little less risky. He found it: a psychic hotline. An audition with a phony Jamaican accent got him hired. After a few hours of practice with a list of cold-reading questions, he joined the crew of men and women—mostly women—in a loft filled with phones and baffle boxes.

  Everything he was taught had been geared to keeping the mark on the line as long as possible. First, get the name and address so the mark can be put on a mailing list as a customer for everything from tarot decks to fortune-telling eight balls. Next, convince them you've got a direct line to the Afterlife and the wells of Ancient Knowledge, tell them what they want to hear, make them beg for more-more-more, say anything you want but keep them on the fucking line. After all, they were paying five or six dollars a minute to hear psychic wisdom, and Lyle was getting a piece of the action. In no time he was bringing down a grand or better a week without breaking a sweat.

  He—as Uncle Bill—and Charlie moved out of the projects and into a garden apartment in the suburbs. It wasn't much, but after Westwood Park, it was like Beverly Hills.

  That was when he'd begun calling himself Ifasen—he'd found it in a list of Yoruba names—and developing a West African accent. Soon hotline callers were asking for Ifasen.

  No one else would do. This did not endear him to his bosses, who were in the business of selling a service, not creating star players.

  So in his off hours he started looking for something new. On a sunny Sunday morning in Ann Arbor he stumbled across the Eternal Life Spiritualist Church. He sat in on a healing session. The needle on his bullshit meter immediately jumped into the red zone but he stayed for the worship and messages meeting. At the end, as he watched one person after another write "love offering" checks to the church, he knew this was his next step.

  He joined the Eternal Life Church, signed up for medium development workshops, and hit it off with the pastor, James Gray. Soon he was serving the church as a student medium, which meant he became privy to and a participant in all the chicanery. After a year or so of this, the Reverend Doctor Gray, a big, burly white guy who thought having a young African-sounding black man as an assistant added to the mystical ambiance of his church, took him aside and gave him some invaluable advice.

  "Get yourself educated, son," he told Lyle. "I don't mean a degree, I mean learning. You're gonna be dealing with all sorts of people from all walks of life with many different levels of education. You want to be a success in this you've got to have a wide range of knowledge on a lot of subjects. You don't need to be an expert in any of them, but you need a nodding acquaintance."

  Lyle took that advice, sneaking into classrooms and auditing courses at U of M, Wayne State, and the University of Detroit Mercy, everything from philosophy to economics to western literature. That was where he began scouring the street from his speech. Didn't earn a single credit, but a whole world had opened up to him, a world he took with him when he and Charlie left Ann Arbor for Dearborn to strike out on their own.

  There Lyle set himself up in a storefront as a psychic advisor. They worked their asses off to perfect their techniques. The money was good, but Lyle knew he could do better. So they moved on.

  And landed here, in an upper corner of Queens, New York.

  Do it before you're thirty, they said. Well, Lyle had turned thirty last month, and he'd done it.

  And now, sitting in the first real estate he'd ever owned, Lyle Kenton slipped his hands forward along the polished oak surface of the table, allowing the ends of the metal bars strapped to his forearms within the sleeves of his coat to slip under the edge of the tabletop. He raised those forearms and his end of the table followed.

  "There it goes!" Evelyn whispered as the table tipped toward her. "The spirits are here!"

  Lyle eased back on his arms and worked one of the levers Charlie had built into the legs of the pawfoot table to raise its far side, right under Vincent McCarthy's hands. Lyle peeked and saw McCarthy's eyebrows arch, but he gave no sign that he was overly impressed.

  "Whoops!" Anya giggled as her chair tilted in response to an electronic signal from Charlie's command post. "There it goes again! Happens every time!"

  Then Evelyn's tilted, then McCarthy's. This time he looked perplexed. Table tipping he might be able to write off, but his chair…?

  Time to make him a believer.

  "Something is coming through," Lyle said, squeezing his eyes shut. "I believe it concerns our new guest. Yes, you, Vincent. The spirits detect turmoil within you. They sense you are concerned about something."

  "Aren't we all?" McCarthy said.

  Lyle kept his eyes closed but he could hear the smirk. Vincent wanted to believe—that was why he was here—but he felt a little silly too. He was nobody's fool and wasn't about to let anyone pull a fast one on him.

  "But this is a deep concern, Vincent, and not about anything so crass as money." Lyle opened his eyes. He needed to start picking up on the nonverbal cues. "This wrenches at your heart, doesn't it."

  McCarthy blinked but said nothing. He didn't have to; his expression spoke volumes.

  "I sense a great deal of confusion along with this concern."

  Again, he nodded. But Lyle had expected that. If McCarthy wasn't confused, he wouldn't be here.

  Lyle half-closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples, assuming his Deep Concentration pose. "I sense someone from the Other Side trying to contact you. Your mother perhaps? Is she still alive?"

  "Yes. She's not well, but she's still with us."

  That could be it. But now to salvage the remark about the mother.

  "Then why do I have this sense of a definite maternal presence? Very loving. A grandmother, perhaps? Have your grandmothers crossed over?"

  "Yes. Both."

  "Ah, perhaps that's who it is then. One of your grandmothers… although I'm not sure which side yet. But it will come, it will come… it's getting clearer…"

  McCarthy, Lyle thought. Irish. Would Grandma McCarthy have been over here or back in Ireland? Didn't matter that much. Lyle knew a surefire Irish grabber. Never failed.

  "I'm sensing a great love for an American president in this person… can that be right? Yes, this woman had a special place in her heart for President Kennedy."

  Vincent McCarthy's eyes damn near bugged out of his head. "Gram Elizabeth! She loved Kennedy! She was never the same after he was shot. This is incredible! How can you know that?"

  What Irish grandmother didn't love Kennedy? Lyle wondered.

  "Oh, you wouldn't believe what he knows," Anya whispered.

  "Ifasen's amazing," Evelyn added. "Knows everything, just everything."

  "I know nothing," Lyle intoned. "It's the spirits who know. I am but a channel to and from their wisdom."

  Lyle could see the hunger in McCarthy's eyes. He wanted more. He was knee deep in belief and wanted to take the plunge, but his Irish Catholic upbringing was holding him back. He needed a push, wanted a push. And Lyle would give it to him, but not quite yet.

  Better to let him dangle for a while.

  Lyle turned to Evelyn.

  "But something else is coming through, a stronger signal, directed, I believe, at Ms. Jusko."

  Evelyn's hands flew to her mouth. "Me? Who is it? Is it Oscar? Is he calling me?"

  Yes, it was going to be Oscar, but Lyle intended to draw this out a bit. Oscar was her dear
departed dog. Two months ago she'd come to Lyle wanting to know if he could contact her pet on the Other Side. Of course he could. Trouble was, she hadn't told him what breed Oscar was or what he looked like, and Lyle hadn't been about to ask.

  He didn't have to.

  During the first sitting—private at Lyle's insistence, because animals were so hard to track down on the Other Side—Charlie had sneaked in while the lights were out and borrowed Evelyn's handbag. Back in his control room he'd rifled through it and found a stack of pictures of a mahogany Vizsla. He'd relayed a description to Lyle's ear piece. Before returning the bag he appropriated a dog whistle he'd found lodged in the bottom of the bag.

  Lyle had amazed Evelyn by describing Oscar to her, right down to his jeweled collar. The woman had been so grateful to learn that he was happy chasing rabbits through the Elysian Fields of the Afterlife that she'd left a $2,500 love donation on her way out the door.

  "Yes," Lyle said now. "I believe it's Oscar. And he seems a little upset."

  "Oh, no!" Evelyn said. "What's wrong?"

  "I'm not sure. It seems you misplaced something of his and he wonders if you still care about him."

  "Misplaced? What could I have misplaced?"

  In a few moments, Evelyn was going to receive her first apport—an object magically transported by the spirit world from one place to another. Following Lyle's cues, Charlie—dressed all in black—would approach when the time was right and drop Oscar's old dog whistle onto the table.

  "I'm not sure. Oscar's not telling me. No, wait, he's got something with him, holding it in his jaws. I'm not sure what it is or what he intends to do with it. He's coming closer… closer…"

  Charlie too should be coming closer—

  "Why is it so cold?" Anya said.

  "Yes," Evelyn agreed, rubbing her upper arms. "It's freezing in here."

  Lyle felt it too. A blanket of dank, frigid air had settled over the table. He rubbed his hands together. His fingers were going numb. But he sensed more than just a drop in temperature. A change in mood seemed to have moved in with the cold air. Anger… no, more than anger… a bitter, metallic rage…

  Lyle jumped as Anya screamed. He saw her and her chair fly backward and crash against the wall. McCarthy's chair tipped back, dumping him onto the floor. Lyle felt himself pushed forward, as if by a hurricane-force wind, jamming his abdomen against the table, and then the table itself tipped, precipitating him onto Evelyn. As they tumbled to the floor, Lyle heard glass breaking all around him. He rolled over and saw the drapes flying back as the blackened window panes shattered, imploding one after the other and littering the floor with glittering shards of glass. Stark yellow sunlight poured in. The statues he'd arranged around the room were tumbling over, some of them cracking on the hardwood floor.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the tumult ceased. Dazed, Lyle struggled to his feet and helped Evelyn to hers. McCarthy was helping Anya up. No one looked seriously injured by the incident, but the Channeling Room… it was a shambles. Lyle did a slow turn and saw that every piece of glass in sight—the windows, even the two mirrors on the walls—had been smashed.

  "It's your fault!" Anya screamed, pointing a trembling finger at Evelyn. "You angered your dog's spirit, and now look what happened!"

  Evelyn began to cry. "I don't know what I did! I can't imagine what the poor dear could be upset about!"

  "Let's stay calm, everybody," Lyle said. "I don't think Oscar was responsible for this."

  He goddamn well knew no fucking dead dog had anything to do with it, but who was responsible? And how had they done it?

  "This is incredible!" Vincent McCarthy was saying. "I never believed… thought this was all bullshit… but now…"

  "I think it was the earthquake last night," Lyle said, trying to salvage the situation. "Seismic waves radiate into the spirit world and cause…"

  What was the word he was looking for? He shoved his shaking hands into his pockets. His heart was pounding and his brain had been scrambled by this cataclysm. Think, damn it! Disruption—that was the word.

  "… and cause disruptions in the transmission of information. Maybe it would be better if we rescheduled this for another time. Next Saturday, perhaps?"

  "Oh dear, I don't think I can wait that long!" Evelyn said. "If poor Oscar is upset—"

  "Maybe a private session tomorrow night, then," Lyle said. "The seismic disturbances will have faded by then. I believe I can squeeze you in. As a matter of fact, I'll make it a point to squeeze you in."

  "Oh thank you, Ifasen! Thank you!"

  Got to salvage something from this debacle, he thought.

  "I want to come back too," Vincent McCarthy said.

  "Me too!" Anya cried.

  Lyle held up his hands. "I'll see that you're all taken care of. Let's just move into the waiting room so I can find places where I can schedule you."

  5

  "Tell me that was you, Charlie," Lyle said after he'd ushered the three sitters out the door. "Tell me that was some new gag that went wrong."

  Charlie shook his head. "Nuh-uh. I was crawlin' my way to the table with the dog whistle when the spirits started wrecking things."

  "The spirits'! Charlie, boy, have you lost your mind?"

  "Forgive me, Lord, I know it's a sin to believe in such things, but how else you gonna explain what happened here?"

  "Last night you said it was God sending us a warning, now it's spirits? Make up your mind, Charlie."

  "Making up my mind ain't the point, yo. I don't know what's happenin', but you gotta be blind or stupid or both not to know something's happenin'!"

  "Yeah. We're being gaslighted. You saw that guy running last night. You saw the gas can. You going to tell me now that was a spirit?"

  "No. Course not. But that different. That—"

  "No different. They couldn't burn us out, so they're trying to scare us out. First the doors and windows, now this. Same people behind everything."

  "Yeah?" Charlie said. "Then we up against some real geniuses. Anybody who can open and close windows and doors and mess up a room like they did today should be workin' for the CIA."

  "Maybe they once did. CIA's into everything." He gestured at the shattered windows. "Sound shatters glass, right? How about ultra-high frequency sound waves that…"

  Charlie was shaking his head. "No way. We got company, man. Told you that last night. The earthquake opened a gate and shook somethin' loose. This house possessed, yo."

  "And I told you I'm not going there! Some very human assholes tried to scare us and scare off our sitters. That's it, pure and simple. But guess what? It backfired. The fish thought they witnessed a bona fide, super-duper supernatural event and they're totally sold. They think Ifasen's the realest of the real deals and they want more-more-more!"

  He started when the phone rang. Without thinking—normally he'd check the ID or let the voice mail pick it up—he snatched it off the cradle.

  "Yeah, what?" he snapped.

  6

  "H-hello?" Gia said. She hadn't been prepared for such a gruff reception. "Is… is this Ifasen?"

  A brief pause, the sound of a throat being cleared, then a more cultured voice. "Pardon me. Yes, this is he. Who is calling, please?"

  Gia almost gave in to an urge to hang up. She had no clear idea why she had called in the first place. This was so unlike her…

  She'd gone to the Beth Israel outpatient lab this morning where they drew her blood for the pregnancy test. Dr. Eagleton's service had said she'd requested stat results, but when 2 p.m. rolled around and Gia hadn't heard, she called in and learned that Dr. Eagleton was off call. The covering doctor did not return her calls. He left a message via the service that he knew nothing about Gia's lab test and saw no reason why it couldn't wait until Monday.

  So she'd called the Beth Israel lab but they'd stonewalled her, saying they couldn't release results to patients, only the ordering doctor.

  Burning with frustration, she'd paced the house. N
ormally she would have talked it over with Jack, but this was not a normal situation. And she didn't know how Jack would take all this. So out of sheer desperation she'd looked up Ifasen's number in his brochure and called him.

  Crazy, she knew, but she could be pregnant… with her second child… and Ifasen had told her she'd have two. Jack's rational explanations from last night faded into background noise; he hadn't heard about Junie's bracelet then, how Ifasen had known exactly where it would be.

  What else did Ifasen know? She had to ask. She could imagine Jack's expression when he learned that she'd called a psychic. But what could it hurt?

  Besides, feeling crummy and worrying about being pregnant had thrown her off balance. The medical profession was doing its best to make her psycho, so she figured she'd give this a shot. Call it alternative medicine.

  She swallowed and said, "I was there at your place last night. At the billet reading with Junie Moon. I was the one who asked how many children I'd have."

  "Yes. I remember. What can I do for you?" His words came quickly, sounding clipped, impatient.

  "I was wondering if I could ask you about your answer."

  "My answer?"

  "Yes. You told me I'd have two children, and I was wondering how you knew that. I don't mean to insult you, but I need to know if you were guessing or—"

  "I am sorry Miss, Mrs…"

  "DiLauro. Gia DiLauro."

  "Well, Gia DiLauro, I am afraid that now is not exactly a good time to discuss this. Perhaps later in the week, when things have settled down a little."

  Settled down? Something in his voice…

  "Has something happened?"

  "Happened?" Abruptly his tone sharpened. "Why do you think something has happened?"

  She remembered Jack's impression that Ifasen was afraid of something, and his theory of what and why.

  "Did someone make more trouble for you last night after we left?"

  "What?" The voice jumped a register. "What are you talking about?"