A Manhattan Ghost Story Read online

  “He—” she grinned crookedly—”punched me out, I guess you’d say.”

  “He punched you out?”

  She nodded once, that crooked grin still on her lips. “He hit me in the stomach, then in the jaw—with his fists—and then in the stomach again. I doubled over—Jesus, I couldn’t breathe. Then he hit me in the arm. Then in the jaw again.” A short pause. “And that was that. He stalked out of the apartment, and I fell to the floor. I moved out the next day, after spending the night in the Emergency Department at Bellevue. They said I was pretty tough; they said he didn’t do any permanent damage.”

  “My God. Nobody ever told me a thing—”

  “I didn’t tell anybody, Abner. Not even my parents. I toyed with the idea of having him arrested—maybe I should have …” She shook her head. “I still loved him. I love him even now, I think. I know that’s stupid—but you don’t stop loving someone because they’re messed up, do you, Abner?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess you don’t.”

  “And he was messed up. He still is. Except now he’s killed someone, and he’s in trouble.” She downed half of the daiquiri. “Are you going to help me, Abner?”

  “Help you?”

  She nodded. “Yes, to find him.”

  “But he’s in Nice.”

  She shook her head, smiled slightly, knowingly. “I doubt that very much, Abner.”

  “I don’t. He called me …”

  “And have you tried to call him?”

  “No. Not yet. But I could.”

  She took a pack of Merits from her purse, offered me one.

  “No, I stopped smoking; I didn’t know you’d started.”

  She nodded. “A little while ago. I don’t like it. I don’t know why I do it.” She lit one of the cigarettes, inhaled of it very deeply.

  “This detective who came up to Bangor said that Art’s here, in New York.” She took another drag of the cigarette, wiped a tear from her eye, apparently caused by the smoke. “He said Art’s hiding out somewhere. He said Harlem, probably.” She saw that I was shaking my head. “You don’t believe a word of this, do you, Abner?”

  “How can I, Stacy? I told you, I’ve talked with him in Nice.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Abner.” She angrily butted out the cigarette. “How do you know he was in Nice? How do you know? Did an operator come on the line and say she had a call for you from Nice? Did he reverse the charges? How do you know? Shit, don’t be so damned dense.” She shook her head, downed the rest of the daquiri, attempted an apologetic grin. “No, forgive me, Abner. Please. That was uncalled for.”

  I picked up my glass of scotch. Some of it sloshed onto my lap. I cursed, dabbed at the stain with the drink napkin. “It’s okay, Stacy. I’ve always been dense. Not stupid. Just dense.”

  “And klutzy,” she offered.

  “That, too,” I said.

  She grinned quickly. “So are you going to help me or not?”

  I didn’t answer at once, though I knew what my answer would be. I took a moment, dabbed at the stain some more, glanced around the bar, looked back, said, “I can’t, Stacy. I’m sorry. I can’t. I’m … involved.” I felt a self-conscious smile start and fought it down. “I’m very involved.”

  Stacy looked confused. “With your work? You mean you’re involved with your work?”

  I shook my head. “No. With a woman,” This time I could not fight that smile down. “A very … special woman.”

  Stacy said, “I don’t understand you, Abner.” She was getting upset. “I need your help here. I’m asking for your help.”

  “It’s a … complicated relationship, Stacy. It’s an awfully complicated relationship—”

  “I don’t give a shit how complicated it is! I thought we were friends. Jesus, I thought we were more than friends. And I thought Art was your friend, too.”

  I took a breath, then said, “I’ve got to go now. I’m sorry.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “Home. To Art’s apartment.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m confused, Stacy. I’m very confused. Some things have been happening and I have quite a lot to think about. I’m sorry. I wish I could explain it to you because I do love you. We are friends, and if I could help you, I would. But I can’t.”

  “Fuck you, Abner!”

  I continued looking at her a moment. Then I said, “Whatever you do, Stacy, don’t go into Harlem alone. Promise me that.”

  She stood abruptly, glared down at me. She said nothing.

  “Stacy,” I said. “Please—”

  She cut in, “I’m going to find him, Abner. I need to find him!”

  “Yes,” I said, “I imagine you do.”

  At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

  I asked, “You think it’s mice, Sam?”

  “Mice don’t whisper,” he said, and grimaced as if at some abominable stupidity. “I think it’s Joe Hammet. I think he’s trying to communicate with us. I think he’s trying to tell us something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. How the hell should I know? Maybe he wants to send out for a pizza. If you’d shut up, maybe I could find out.”

  I shut up. We listened a few moments. I heard, faintly, the rush of traffic on Route 23A; I even heard Sam’s breathing. My own, too. I said, at a whisper, “It’s stopped, Sam. I don’t hear it anymore; I don’t hear it anymore.”

  “Me neither.”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked, still whispering. “You think maybe we should just … go away now?”

  “Maybe we should try talking to him.” Sam was whispering, too. He looked to his right, at the plaque marked “Joseph William Hammet.” He said to it, aloud, “What you want, Joe?” and giggled softly. “You tell us what you want, Joe.” His voice had risen in volume and it echoed hollowly against the cement walls. “C’mon now, don’t be a damn wimp, Joe, just ‘cuz your dead, okay?”

  “God, you’re disrespectful, Sam.” I grinned. I liked Sam’s sense of humor, but I thought I had to say something. “They’re gonna getcha for that.”

  “Whatchoo want, Joe?” he said to Joe Hammet’s vault. “You want pepperoni; you want anchovies? If you want anchovies, you sure as shit better stay away from me.” He chuckled quickly. I chuckled. The sound of our chuckling came back to us almost at once from the cement walls.

  “Did you really break into that funeral home, Sam?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems kinda … I don’t know, purposeless, I guess.”

  He laughed out loud. “You’re a shit, Abner. You’re a real shit.”

  I shrugged again. “Maybe,” I said.

  “You know what a nebbish is, Abner?”

  “Sure I know what a nebbish is, Sam.” I was surprised that Sam knew. “Why?”

  ” ‘Cuz you’re in real danger of becoming one, that’s why.” Then he turned his head, faced Joe Hammet’s vault again. “C’mon, Joe, don’t be a wimp just ‘cuz you’re dead, okay?”

  “Okay,” we heard.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I’m not going to try and make you believe that this is a love story. It isn’t. Not, at least, in the usual sense of the phrase. When I hear the words love story, I think of Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, Taylor and Burton, Streisand and Redford. I do not think of Abner W. Cray and Phyllis Pellaprat.

  Phyllis didn’t come back that night. When I got back from talking to Stacy, I waited for her. I sat on the big, black leather couch, watched some cable TV—Jesus, I watched Smokey and the Bandit—and, at a little after midnight, I shrugged out of my clothes and went to bed.

  I woke at 8:30, called Serena Hitchcock’s office, and begged out of a 10:00 appointment, pleading sickness. “Some kind of flu, Serena; I’m very sorry, but I have quite a few shots for you to take a look at—” which was a lie: I’d done preci
ous little work on the book in the week and a half since I’d last talked to Serena. “Maybe we can get together early next week—Monday or Tuesday, okay?” She said okay, she’d call me. But she was pissed.

  I’m not going to tell you, either, that this is a ghost story. Because when I think of a ghost story, I think of the flesh falling off a young woman’s bones like so much wet and coagulated macaroni, and I think of nine-year-old boys floating outside second-story bedroom windows with rictus grins on their mouths, and I think of Nosferatu et. al., who try so hard to put something over on Mr. Death.

  I do not think of four perilously thin teen-age girls hailing a taxi or of men in gray suits who are caught eternally in the act of asking if an elevator can be held.

  Phyllis came back to me that evening. It was past eleven, close to 11:30, and I was lying on top of the blankets, naked—Art’s apartment got pretty warm at night, and I like to sleep naked. I heard the front door being unlocked, then the clop-clop of stacked heels on the foyer’s hardwood floor.

  Moments later Phyllis appeared in the doorway.

  She was dressed in her white coat and green dress—the same outfit she’d worn to her parents’ apartment—and she stood very still in the doorway, one hand on her hip, the other clutching a big, dark leather purse.

  Only a soft, diffused light came in through the bedroom and dining room windows, so I saw her mostly in silhouette.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello, Abner.” Her voice had the same slight raspiness that it had the first time we’d made love.

  “Care to tell me where you’ve been?”

  “Does it matter?” she asked.

  “No.” I paused. “Not really.”

  She stayed in the doorway. She looked for all the world like a whore, which didn’t bother me. I asked, matter-of-factly, “Who are you?”

  And she asked again, “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I am who I told you I am,” she said.

  The odor of damp wood was in the room, and it was much stronger than I remembered, much more offensive.

  She repeated. “I am who I told you I am. I’m Phyllis Pellaprat.”

  “Phyllis Pellaprat is dead.”

  She came into the room, let her coat slide to the floor. “Well, then,” she said, “that’s her burden, isn’t it, Abner?” And she quickly and gracefully slipped her boots and dress off. She was naked beneath the dress. She came over to the side of the bed. In the semi-darkness I saw her glance at her breasts and nod. “Touch me, Abner. Please touch me.”

  The odor of damp wood assaulted me. I turned my head away. She laughed. It was a quick, humorless noise, as if she were imitating laughter and doing a poor job of it. She stopped laughing. “You won’t like it out there, Abner.”

  I looked back. I said nothing. I was confused. And I think that, for the first time since I’d known her, I was scared, too.

  She stepped backward, toward the window, so she was facing me and so her body was well-illuminated.

  “You won’t like it out there, Abner,” she repeated. She made her arms very straight, held her hands flat against her thighs, and locked her knees so her legs were stiff. Then she closed her eyes and lifted her chin slightly and drew her lips back so they pointed at the base of her ears. It was not a smile. It was more a kind of hard and joyless grin.

  I managed, “Phyllis?”

  Her mouth dropped open an inch. A white, pasty substance appeared at the edges of her lips. I said again, “Phyllis?” and swung my feet to the floor, stood, took several steps toward her. I put my hands on her waist. It was a desperate gesture. Her skin felt like tepid water; the odor of damp wood was heavy and cloying about her.

  And suddenly I felt alone in that room, and I took my hands from her and stepped back, and tried to say her name once more, but it came out as a scream that caromed shrilly off the walls.

  Her eyelids popped open. Her eyes rolled upward in their sockets.

  I heard a long, low, rasping noise come from her, like air escaping.

  But I loved her, you see. The truth is, I loved her. I loved her as I have loved no one else.

  And that’s why I came forward again, put my hands around her waist—she was cold now—and held her close.

  For what might have been hours.

  Until I felt her skin begin to warm again and her muscles loosen. And I heard a low, ragged humming noise come from her, which, over the space of a minute or so, became speech: “You won’t like it out there, Abner.”

  “I love you, Phyllis.”

  “Of course you do.”

  She pushed me gently backwards, toward the bed, and said this, her voice low and husky and playful: “I’m sure a fucking horny bitch, aren’t I?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  And when I think of a ghost story, I think about children shivering around a campfire while an aging man with a long, austere face summons up—in resonant, wonderfully spectral tones—the way the misdeeds of the dead will soon be visited upon the living, and I think about old, gray houses that have somehow had Evil implanted in them, and I think about rocking chairs that rock all on their own, and about crying in empty rooms, about cold spots, warm spots, hot spots, hounds out of hell, men who hang themselves in attics, and in cellars, again and again and again.

  And it’s all true.

  I know that it’s all true.

  But there’s a shitload more going on over there, over on the Other Side, than any of us can imagine.

  And some of it’s very interesting, very entertaining, but some of it smells bad—some of it stinks, in fact—and if you tried to put your finger on it, if you tried to pin it down and say, yes, definitely, this is what it’s all about, this is what Death is all about; sit back now, I’ll tell you, my God, they’d swarm all over you like angry bees, the dead would, like angry bees.

  Phyllis left before dawn. She got quietly into her green dress and her fake mink coat, her stacked high-heel boots, and as I watched from the bed, she walked to the bedroom doorway and said, with her back to me, “I love you, Abner. Please love me.” And then she left. It was a routine that I didn’t understand, but I was growing to trust it, to believe in it. So I didn’t get out of the bed and go after her. I said, to myself, “I do love you, Phyllis.”

  I fell asleep quickly.

  The phone on a little table beside the bed rang at a quarter past nine. I cursed it, answered it. “Yes?” I said.

  “Abner?” It was Jocelyn Horn.

  “Hello, Jocelyn.”

  “Did I wake you, Abner? I’m sorry.”

  “No. It’s okay.”

  “Stacy is in New York, Abner.”

  I could have told her that I knew that, but I realized that it had probably taken a great force of will for her to call me, and I didn’t want to puncture whatever good feelings that gave her, so I said, “Where in New York?”

  “At a hotel called the Algonquin.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Jocelyn.”

  “It’s okay, Abner. I do like you. Just, please—be careful!”

  “Yes, Aunt Jocelyn, I’m always careful.”

  “Jesus, no, you aren’t!” she whispered, as if to herself. Then she hung up.

  “Be careful!” is something that Jocelyn Horn has been saying to me all my life. She said it to me for the first time when I was two months old, lying naked on my back on a changing table, while she was leaning over me, giving me a change of diapers. “Be careful you don’t pee in your own face, Abner,” she said. So I peed in her face. My mother told me that story a couple of years before she died, when I was fourteen or so and she thought I could handle the whole thing. I told her I thought it was a good story, a funny story, but when I repeated it to Jocelyn herself some time later, she grimaced and looked offended. Jocelyn’s not an easy woman to figure out.

  I got dressed—jeans, a red flannel shirt, sneakers, the wool-lined denim jacket—got my Nikon F. and went out for breakfast to the same Greek restaur
ant I’d gone to a week earlier. I sat at the same table, ordered the same food—scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast, fresh-squeezed orange juice, coffee—and ate slowly because I was trying to figure out what I was going to do after breakfast. I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to work. I was supposed to get started, at last, on the big, coffee-table photo book that I’d been given several thousand dollars to start. It was why I’d come to New York in the first place.

  I finished breakfast quicker than I’d hoped, ordered some more coffee, did some more thinking. I started thinking that New York was not only the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building and Grand Central Station, the U.N., the West Village; it was Harlem, too. More specifically, it was the area around East 95th Street. So I checked the Nikon, found that it was loaded with Tri-X pan, that I had three more rolls of it in my jacket pocket, took a last sip of coffee, and watched as a big, brown roach scooted across the top of the table and disappeared around the underside. I leaned over. The roach had stopped a couple of inches beyond the underside edge of the table; its little antennae were going this way and that. I straightened, reflexively lifted my knee into the roach, heard it crack, heard a dull snapping sound as it hit the grimy tile floor. It came to me that I’d done exactly the same thing on my last visit to that restaurant.

  I heard, from my right, “Pardon me.” I looked. A man in a stiff, gray suit and a bulky, black overcoat was standing beside the table. He was middle-aged, with a wide, flat face and dull, gray eyes, and he was trying to smile, though he was not very convincing about it.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “My name is Kennedy Whelan,” he said. “I’m looking for your friend, Art DeGraff. Do you think you could help me?” His smile broadened; he had nicotine stains, like liver spots, on his teeth.