Haunted

  According to the newspaper, the police haven't a single witness.

  Of course, the Keyeses could send a note, but they really didn't see anyone's face. They didn't see the license plate. All they saw was the girl. The blood. Packer and Evelyn, they can't offer any real help. Going to the police, all they could do is humiliate themselves. Already, you could imagine the headlines:

  “Society Couple Goes Slumming for Kicks”

  Or: “Billionaires Playing Poor”

  God forbid if they told about Inky and Scout, Skinny and Shoe and Bones.

  Packer and Evelyn putting themselves up for public ridicule was not going to save this poor girl. Their suffering wouldn't lessen a moment of hers.

  In the newspaper the next week, the kidnapped heiress was found dead.

  Still, Inky wasn't worried. Poor, dirty people have nothing to worry about on the street. The girl who got killed was young. She looked clean and pretty and rich. “Having nothing to lose,” Inky said, “is the new wealth.”

  And Packer said, “Lather, rinse, and repeat.”

  No, Inky wasn't about to give up her happiness and go back to being rich and famous. And more and more, those nights, Packer went with her. To protect her, he said.

  One of those nights, Evelyn's at the Charity Dinner Dance Against Colon Cancer when her cell phone rings. It's Inky, and in the background a man is shouting. Packer's voice. In the phone, Inky is breathing hard, saying, “Muffy, please. Muffy, please, we're lost and someone is chasing us.” She says, “We've tried the police, but . . .” And the call cuts off.

  As if she's run into a tunnel. Under an overpass.

  The headline in the next day's newspaper says:

  “Publisher and Textile CEO Found Stabbed to Death”

  Now, almost every morning, there's a new headline to avoid:

  “Bag Lady Found Butchered”

  Or: “Killer Continues to Stalk the Homeless”

  Somewhere, every night, that black town car is looking for Mrs. Keyes, the only witness to a crime. Someone is killing anyone on the street who might be her. Anyone dressed in rags and asleep under a pile of blankets.

  It's after that Evelyn goes cold turkey. She cancels the newspaper. To replace the television, she buys the glass tank with a lizard that changes color to match any paint scheme.

  Nowadays, Mrs. Keyes, she's the opposite of homeless. She has too much home. She's burdened with home. Buried in home. She reads her catalogues. Looking at the glossy pictures of garden ornaments. Diamond jewelry made from the cremains of your dead loved ones.

  Of course, she still misses her friends. Her husband. But it's like Inky would say: Being absent is the new being present.

  And she still buys tickets for the charity events. The silent auctions and dance recitals. It's important to know she's doing something to make the world a little bit better. Next, she'd like to go swimming with endangered gray whales.

  Sleep in the canopy of some dwindling rain forest.

  Photograph some vanishing zebras. Eco-slumming.

  It's important to be aware. She still wants to make a difference.

  5

  That summer at the Villa Diodati, Mrs. Clark tells us, it was just five people:

  The poet, Lord Byron.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lover, Mary Godwin.

  Mary's half-sister, Claire Claremont, who was pregnant by Byron.

  And Byron's doctor, John Polidori.

  Listening, we're sitting around the electric fireplace in the second-balcony smoking room. The Gothic smoking room. Each of us pulled up in a yellow leather wing chair or a needlepoint sofa or tapestry loveseat we'd dragged from somewhere, the carved, pointed legs leaving ruffled trails in the dusty, matted carpets.

  All of us, here, except for Lady Baglady, who went to bed early. And Miss America, off picking locks.

  The electric fireplace is just a rotating light under a bed of red and yellow glass chunks glued together. Light without heat. All our hanging crystal trees turned off, and the red-and-yellow light dancing across our faces, shapes of red-and-yellow light move across the wood paneling and the floor of flat stones fit together.

  Just those five people, Mrs. Clark says, bored and trapped indoors by the rain. Shelley and company. They took turns reading to each other from a collection of German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana.

  “Lord Byron,” Mrs. Clark says, “couldn't stand the book.”

  Byron said there was more talent in the room than in the book they were reading. He said they could each write a better horror story. They should, each of them. Write a story.

  This was almost a century before Bram Stoker's Dracula, but out of that summer came Dr. John Polidori's book The Vampyre, and our modern idea of a bloodsucking demon.

  On one of those rainy nights, with the thunder and lightning over Lake Geneva, eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin had the dream which would become the Frankenstein legend. Both monsters the basis for countless books and movies that followed.

  Even the house party itself had become a legend. Around the shores of Lake Geneva, the vacation hotels set up telescopes in their lakeside windows so guests could watch what everyone said was an orgy of incest at the villa. Middle-class tourists, bored on their summer tour, they put their worst fears under Lord Byron's roof. Just that handful of young people, trying to live outside the million rules of their culture, and people spied on them through telescopes, expecting to see monsters.

  Here, we were the modern equivalent of the people at Villa Diodati.

  We were the modern version of the Algonquin Round Table.

  Just people telling stories out loud to each other.

  People looking for one idea that would echo for the rest of time. Echo into books, movies, plays, songs, television, T-shirts, money.

  It was these same faces—among three times as many, a mob—when we first met in person, in the back of a coffeehouse. Us: the faces who made the final cut. Even then, Countess Foresight wore her signature turban. The Duke of Vandals, his blond ponytail. The Missing Link, his long-hanging nose and dark wilderness of beard.

  The way people gossip about the Villa Diodati today, in time people will talk about that coffee shop. People who never saw the advertisement will swear they were there. They were smart and didn't agree to go along on the retreat. Otherwise, they might be dead. Or rich. Over time, that coffeehouse, with its racks of free newspapers and bulletin board pinned full of business cards offering colonic irrigation and holistic pet counseling, that shop would have to be the size of a stadium to hold the people who will claim to have been there that night.

  That night will become a legend.

  The Mythology of Us.

  The hemp people and poets and housewives and us, standing with paper cups of coffee, we listened while Mrs. Clark talked. Her out-there breasts and that silicone pout making some people giggle. When someone asked about a phone number for the outside world to reach people on retreat, Mrs. Clark said, yes. She said, “It's 1-800-FUCK-OFF.”

  It's that moment, some people walked away.

  Meaning, No. No contact with the outside world. No television or radio or telephone or Internet. Just you and what you bring in your one suitcase.

  Meaning more people walked away.

  The people who walked away, the first-round survivors. The smart ones who get to tell their own story. The camera behind the camera behind the camera, Mr. Whittier would say. They'll have their ultimate truth—but just about that night.

  Those poor idiots sold short.

  We all saw the advertisement, just in different ways. On different bulletin boards around town, it said:

  WRITERS' RETREAT:

  ABANDON YOUR LIFE FOR THREE MONTHS.

  Just disappear. Leave behind everything that keeps you from creating your masterpiece. Your job and family and home, all those obligations and distractions—put them on hold for three months. Live with like-minded people in a setting that supports total immersion in your work.
Food and lodging included free for those who qualify. Gamble a small fraction of your life on the chance to create a new future as a professional poet, novelist, screenwriter. Before it's too late, live the life you dream about. Spaces very limited.

  The advertisement was printed on an index card. A recipe card. Boxed inside a dashed line, like a coupon you'd cut out. And at the bottom was a phone number. It was Mrs. Clark's number, stapled to the cork bulletin board in the library foyer. By the restrooms in the back of the supermarket. In the Laundromat. That advertisement on an index card, one week it was everywhere. The next week, it was nowhere.

  All the cards had disappeared.

  People who saw it, if they called the phone number, they got a recording of Mrs. Clark saying the coffeehouse, the time and date we should all meet.

  Already, in our minds, here in the red-and-yellow fake firelight, we could picture the future: the scene of us telling people how we'd taken this little adventure and a crazy man had kept us trapped in an old theater for three months. Already, we were making matters worse. Exaggerating. We'd say how the place was freezing-cold. There was no running water. We had to ration the food.

  None of that was true, but it does make a better story. No, we'd warp the truth. Blow it up. Stretch it out. For effect.

  We'd create our own incestuous orgy of people and animals for the world to gossip about.

  The little backstage dressing room we each got, talking about it, we'd load it with poisonous spiders. Hungry rats. Not just Director Denial's cat hair sticking everywhere.

  A ghost. We'd put a ghost in the old theater to build the story, make room for special effects. Oh, we'd haunt this place ourselves, pack it with lost souls.

  We'd turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we'd survive to talk about.

  Except for Lady Baglady with her handful of dead husband. Miss America with her fetus, snowballing bigger and bigger, cell by cell, inside her. And Miss Sneezy with her mold allergy, the rest of us wanted more. More pain and suffering to dredge up, later, on national talk shows. Those television shows Miss America talked about. Even if we never sparked a good idea, never wrote our masterpiece novel, this three months trapped together could be enough to make a memoir. A movie. A future of not working a regular job. Just being famous.

  A story worth selling.

  For now, sitting around the glass fireplace, we're ticking off the details we need to remember to create this scene on national television. So we could advise “on the set” in making the movie “authentic.” The story of how we were kidnapped and held hostage and every day Miss Sneezy got more sick and the baby inside Miss America got bigger.

  No one will say it, but Miss Sneezy's death would make a perfect third-act climax. Our darkest moment.

  The perfect ending would be the landlord stumbling in after the lease has expired, just in time to rescue the fragile Miss America. The demented Lady Baglady. A few of us would come limping out, squinting and weeping, into the sunlight. The rest of us would be carried out on stretchers and slid into ambulances for a siren's trip to the hospital. The movie could jump ahead a little to show us all standing bedside as Miss America gives birth. Then jump again, to show us at the funeral for Miss Sneezy. The ghost of poor Miss Sneezy, sacrificed to juice the plot.

  We'd have Agent Tattletale's camera for video support. The Earl of Slander's audiocassettes for voice-over.

  Then, as completion, Miss America would name her new child Miss Sneezy, or whatever her first name had been. A sense of the circle mended. Of life going on, renewed. Poor, frail Miss Sneezy.

  In the movie–book–T-shirt story, we'd all love Miss Sneezy . . . her deep courage . . . her sunny humor.

  Sigh.

  No, unless one of us coughs up a new-fangled Frankenstein or Dracula, our own story will have to get a lot more dramatic before it would be worth selling. We need everything to get much, much worse before it's all over.

  Screw the idea of creating anything original. It's no use, writing some let's-pretend piece of fiction. That takes so much effort for what little you get in cash money.

  Especially split seventeen ways. Royalty-wise. Sixteen ways, if you subtract the doomed Miss Sneezy.

  All of us silent, but commanding her: Cough.

  Hurry up and die, already.

  No, when everyone else walked out of that coffeehouse meeting, we were the smart ones. Yes, it looked like a crackpot venture that would lead to big trouble, but, hey—it looked like a crackpot adventure that could lead to big money.

  All of us sitting here silent, but commanding Miss Sneezy: Cough.

  All of us, we're aching for her to help make us famous.

  That's why the Reverend Godless botched the wiring to all the fire alarms. The very first hour we were inside. At least, that's what he told the Matchmaker. Godless learned wiring in the military, and the Missing Link helped by holding the flashlight. For good measure, they checked all the phone lines. The one line they found still working, the Missing Link with his hairy muscles yanked it out of the wall.

  That's why Countess Foresight stuck the tines of plastic forks in every door lock and snapped them off. No way could anyone use a key. Just in case her parole officer could track her by that bracelet. No, none of us wanted to be rescued—not just yet.

  Just all of us hedging our bets. Scenes that won't be in the movie. This will all look like Mr. Whittier's doing. Evil, sadistic old Mr. Whittier.

  Already, our team is forming up against the team of Mrs. Clark and Mr. Whittier.

  Miss America and Miss Sneezy already just plot points. Our sacrifice. Doomed.

  In the red and yellow shapes of electric firelight, in the carved wood paneling of the Gothic smoking room, sunk in the cushion of her leather wing chair, Mrs. Clark's chin nods lower and lower, almost settling into her cleavage. She asks, did Sister Vigilante find the bowling ball?

  And the Sister shakes her head, No. She taps the face of her wristwatch and says, “Civil twilight comes in forty-five . . . forty-four minutes.”

  Miss Sneezy coughs—a long, rumbling, wet-gravel cough—and it's all we can do not to cheer. She digs in her pocket for a pill, a capsule, but her hand comes back empty.

  Sister Vigilante excuses herself and starts down the stairs toward the lobby, toward bed, disappearing step by step, growing shorter, until the top of her black-tinted hair is gone.

  Our Miss America is somewhere else, kneeling at a doorknob, trying to pick the lock. Or pulling a fire alarm we know won't work.

  Thanks to the Reverend Godless.

  The red light glows on the Earl of Slander's tape recorder. Agent Tattletale shifts his video camera from one eye to the other.

  And from down the stairs comes up a scream. A woman's long wail. The voice of Sister Vigilante, telling us to come quick. She's stumbled over something.

  The Lady Baglady. A new stain. A knife wrapped in the fingers of one hand. All around her, a dark lake of her blood melting into the lobby's blue carpet.

  Long dark hair seems to twine down one side of her face and disappear into the collar of her fur coat. But at the bottom step, when she's life-sized, the braided dark hair is blood. Under the sculpted hair on that side of her face, her ear is gone. Sprawled there, she holds out one hand filled with red and pink, a shining pearl earring in the center of the oyster-mess, catching the fake firelight. In her palm, cupped next to the pink ear, the diamond of her dead husband.

  With all of us looking down the stairs at her, the Lady Baglady smiles. Her head rolls to one side, to look up at us, and she says, “I'm bleeding . . . so heavily . . .” Beyond her pale face and hands, a path of blood seems to trail off forever. Her fingers relax, and the knife slips to the carpet, and she says, “Now, Mr. Whittier, you must let me go home . . .”

  Elbowing the Earl of Slander, Comrade Snarky says, “What did I tell you? Look.” She nods toward the top of the bloody braid and says, “Now you can see the facelift scar.?
??

  And Lady Baglady is dead. Sister Vigilante says this, holding a finger to her neck. Blood smeared on the Sister's finger.

  At this point, our future is set. Done. This will be our meal ticket, telling people how we witnessed an innocent human being driven to commit suicide, plus adding the story of Lady Baglady slumming. The tragedy of her husband. The Brazilian oil heiress, kidnapped. Screw the idea of inventing monsters. Here, we just had to look around. Pay attention.

  In the viewfinder of his camera, Agent Tattletale rewinds and watches as Lady Baglady tells her story onstage. Telling and retelling it.

  Our puppet. Our plot event.

  The Earl of Slander rewinds his tape recorder and we hear Sister Vigilante's scream, over and over.

  Our parrot.

  And in the red-and-yellow light from the glass fire, Mr. Whittier says, “So it's started already . . .”

  “Mr. Whittier?” Mrs. Clark says.

  Mr. Whittier, our villain, our master, our devil, whom we love and adore for torturing us, he sighs. Watching Lady Baglady's dead body, one of his shaking, quivering, trembling hands rises to cup his mouth, and he yawns.

  Watching the dead body, Director Denial is petting the cat in her arms, tabby-orange cat hair drifting to settle everywhere.

  The Baroness Frostbite and Countess Foresight kneel over the body. Not crying, but their eyes so open you can see white all around the iris, the way your eyes would look at a winning lottery ticket.

  Watching the body, Saint Gut-Free is spooning cold spaghetti out of a silver bag. Bits of cat hair in every dripping red bite.

  This is us against us against us for the next three months.

  From the top of the stairs, sitting in his wheelchair, Mr. Whittier watches. Beside him, the Earl of Slander fiddles with his pen and pad, still taking notes.

  Pointing a blurred finger, Mr. Whittier says, “You, you're writing this down?”