The Frighteners Read online

  She hurried into the kitchen just in time for things to start happening there, too. The kitchen TV, the one she watched the news on while making dinner, switched itself on and flipped around the dial wildly before finally settling on a show called MTV Raps. The volume blared. Then other things happened. The toaster began spitting out toast—though no bread had been put in it. The coffeemaker switched itself on and began bubbling away, turning out a perfect cup of java despite not having so much as a single bean loaded in the hopper. And knives and forks began doing a brisk dance on the countertop. Stunned, Ray summoned up the courage to creep to the refrigerator and steal himself a beer only to have the can open by itself and spray him in the face. He took it and retreated to the kitchen door, a spot of relative safety, where he could watch his wife on the phone.

  She dialed the number nervously and drummed her fingers on the side of the phone while waiting for the ring.

  “Hello, Mr. Bannister?” she said when at last the man picked up.

  “Yes?” he replied.

  “Is this Frank Bannister?”

  “Yes, and I got to tell you, I’m sick and tired of you people calling me at home all the time. I told the last collection agent that I mailed the check in yesterday. Is it my fault that the U.S. Post Office sends its priority mail on the backs of garden slugs?”

  “Uh . . . Mr. Bannister, I’m not calling to collect a bill,” Lucy said, half-surprised and half-amused.

  “Oh, yes you are,” Ray said in the background. “You have to collect the bill for what that idiot did to our property.”

  Praying that Bannister didn’t hear her husband over the racket being made by the hyperactive kitchen appliances, Lucy continued, “I’m calling because I need your help.”

  “Oh, what’s wrong? Was there a death in the family?”

  “Not yet,” she snarled, glaring at Ray as he worked with pencil and paper to estimate the cost of Kentucky bluegrass and Chewings fescue.

  “What then?” Bannister asked.

  “I have . . . I think I have . . . I guess you would call it an infestation.”

  “Well, you’re calling me, so I guess you’re not talking about termites. Can you tell me what you’ve experienced?”

  “Listen,” she said, holding the phone to the coffeemaker, the dancing utensils, and the rap music. “We didn’t do any of this. Things are happening all over our house. Scary things. The bedclothes took off like a flying carpet and flew around the room. Then the bed took me for a ride. Now things are jumping on their own all over the kitchen. Mr. Bannister, I can’t shut off the TV and I hate rap music.”

  “We don’t even get cable,” Ray said. “Ask if he can lose MTV but keep the Sports Channel.”

  “Shut up, Ray,” Lucy said.

  Bannister said, “Hmmm, this sounds familiar, especially the rap music. Yes, I think I can help you.”

  “Would you come right over?” Lucy pleaded.

  “I’m on my way, Dr. Lynskey,” Bannister replied, and stopped talking as Lucy’s phone hung itself up.

  Lucy sighed. Off in the dining room, the doors to the breakfront in which she kept the good dishes were flapping like a butterfly, trying to take off.

  Ray said, “You’re making me mad, Lucy. I don’t want that con man in my house.”

  Ray now stood in the middle of the kitchen, where cupboards opened and shut wildly, chairs floated in the air, and knives and forks continued their dance on the counter. Fortunately, the TV had switched from rap to a show on computer technology.

  “There’s a rational explanation for this,” he said. “We don’t need a goddamn spoon bender telling us what to do.”

  “Ray, we’ve got a poltergeist,” Lucy said. “Although it’s more like he’s got us.”

  “There’s no such things as poltergeists, Lucy. That’s all nonsense from the movies. There’s a rational explanation for all this.”

  “Such as what?” she asked angrily, watching as a cup and a spoon took turns jumping over one another.

  He thought for a second, then said, “It’s nothing the police can’t handle.”

  With the mention of the word police, a crazily whirling saucepan spun through the air, whacking Ray on the back of the head with a metallic dong. His eyes rolled back in his head and he dropped to the floor.

  Four

  It seemed like only ten minutes later that Lucy was tending to her husband’s injury when she heard the roar of an engine, the squeal of tires, and a sickening crunch as another section of hedge was turned into mulch for her expensive, but increasingly plowed, lawn. Two new furrows appeared in the grass as Frank Bannister shut off the engine and ran to the front door, black bag in hand.

  He pounded on the door, and soon heard Lucy cry out, “Come in.”

  Bannister followed her voice into the kitchen, where she was applying ice to the back of her husband’s head. Ray winced, holding a wet facecloth against his forehead. All was quiet, save for the sound of water from Ray’s cloth dripping onto the floor.

  “Dr. Lynskey?” Bannister asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’m Frank Bannister.”

  “We’re the Addams Family,” Ray moaned.

  “Shut up, darling,” Lucy snapped. “Everything you say hurts.”

  “You’re right, it does. I can feel it here.” He pointed at the back of his head.

  “So can I,” Lucy said. “Mr. Bannister, it stopped about five minutes ago. The whole house went quiet.”

  Bannister walked around, surveying the scene and making notes in a black pad he pulled from his equally black bag. “Unsystematic displacement,” he announced.

  “Is it over?” Lucy asked.

  Bannister shook his head. “What you experienced are persisting residues of the departed, always a problem at this time of year. You appear to have a bad case of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis.”

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  “I can do a clearance,” Bannister said. “It’s not cheap, but I do offer a six-month guarantee.”

  “How much?” Ray asked.

  “Two forty-nine ninety-five,” Bannister replied. “That’s including a thirty-percent penalty for a call after midnight—oh, what the hell, let’s just call it quits over the hedge.”

  “What about the lawn?” Ray asked.

  “Plus a hundred bucks for materials,” Bannister added. “I can’t afford to do it out of my pocket.”

  “A hundred bucks for materials? What kind of materials does a ghost chaser use?”

  Bannister shot him a stern look and said, “Better you don’t know.”

  “We need the job done,” Lucy said. “Please do it, Mr. Bannister.”

  “Just get it over with,” Ray said sullenly.

  “You’ve made a smart decision.” Bannister set down his black box on the countertop and removed a smaller black box that had two electrodes sticking from the top. He plugged the box into the socket where the now quiet toaster was plugged, and switched the device on. All three of them watched as an electrical arc fizzed and crackled between the two electrodes. In the meantime a small fan in the side of the box spun around.

  Frank eyeballed this contraption suspiciously.

  “Why us?” Lucy asked. “Why are they in our house?”

  “Emanations are confined to the graveyard, ma’am,” Bannister said, his voice taking on an authoritative tone. “But sometimes they get out. It’s usually the young ones.”

  “You mean, like the ghosts of people who died before their time?”

  “Exactly. Usually they go off in search of some harmless fun. I often see them on the streets, in people’s houses, down at Granger’s Thrifty Mart.”

  Bannister’s black box seemed to be gaining power. It rattled on the countertop.

  “Granger’s?” Lucy asked, shocked. “They have poltergeists at Granger’s?”

  “Yeah. There’s always a bunch of them hanging around the pet-food stand on Saturday night.”

  “For God’s
sake, Bannister.”

  Bannister took umbrage at this aspersion against what he considered very serious business. He narrowed his eyes to slits in a theatrical manner and said quietly, “There’s a whole other world out there that you folks can’t see.”

  He pulled a water pistol out of his bag. “Step aside,” he warned.

  Brandishing the water pistol like a TV cowboy, Bannister started squirting water around.

  “What’s that?” Lucy asked.

  “Holy water,” he replied.

  “Where’d you get that, steal it from the church?” Ray asked.

  “I have a deal going with the pastor,” Bannister added. “He gets it for me at cost.”

  Bannister disappeared into the dining room, squirting as he went, and soon was in the bedroom and the rest of the house.

  “This is bullshit, total bullshit,” Ray said.

  Bannister’s black box suddenly stopped humming. A small green light began to flash.

  Lucy called out, “Mr. Bannister, the machine has stopped. There’s a green light flashing.”

  Frank ambled back into the kitchen, a look of triumph on his normally haggard face. “That’s good,” he said.

  “It is? What does it mean? We caught the ghosts?”

  He opened the top of the box and pulled out a silver foil bag. He quickly sealed the box and offered the bag to Lucy. “Here,” he said. “I bet he”—meaning Ray—“never gave you anything like this.”

  “What is it?” she asked, her interest in Bannister and his work rising.

  “These belong to you—six ectoplasmic emanations. We don’t like to call them ghosts if we can avoid it. The word ghost comes from the Icelandic word for fire, and that has an unfortunate connotation. I mean, we must be sensitive to the needs of emanations. Not all of them are going where the fire is. Relatively few do, in fact, mainly the truly evil ones.”

  “Poltergeists, then?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s better but far from perfect. It comes from the German and means ‘noisy ghost.’ But not all emanations are noisy or troublesome, like these ones.” He shook the bag in front of her eyes. “In fact, most of the emanations I have known are quite happy to spend Saturday nights at the pizza parlor watching girls.”

  Ray shook his head.

  Lucy accepted the present of the silver bag. Bannister said, “Some people like a souvenir.” He grinned, then added, “They can’t escape. Where shall I put ’em, or maybe you’d like to keep them on the mantelpiece as a remembrance of the work we did here tonight.”

  “I don’t think we really want to hang on to these, do we, hon?” Lucy asked nervously.

  “Maybe we could give them to Old Man Stickler down the block,” Ray said. “He’s been a pain in the ass for as long as I can remember?”

  Bannister waggled an admonishing finger in the air. “It’s not wise to use our emanistic friends as weapons unless you really know what you’re doing.”

  He sauntered over to the sink. “You could run them through the garbage disposal,” he said. “That should do the trick.”

  “Get rid of ’em,” Ray said.

  Lucy handed the bag back to Bannister, a bit tentatively. He sensed that she felt for whatever it was in the silver bag, unlike her husband, who would have run a steamroller over them if that had been possible.

  Bannister dropped the bag into the disposal unit. A quick burst of the motor and they were gone. Lucy gasped.

  “Don’t worry, they don’t feel pain,” Bannister said. “At least, that’s what the books say. But I guess we’ll never know for sure.” He grinned at Ray and Lucy.

  Irritated, Ray said, “Okay, you can go.”

  Ray took the facecloth off his forehead and, as he did, caused Frank to stare at it. There, etched on Ray’s forehead in raised welts of skin, was the number thirty-seven. Bannister moved closer to see it better.

  “What the hell are you staring at?” Ray snarled.

  “What’s with the number?” Bannister asked.

  Lynskey didn’t know what the man was talking about and made that clear. Lucy then inspected her husband’s forehead.

  “What number?” she asked.

  Now mad, Ray said, “Are you trying to freak me out?”

  “Not me. I was just telling you what I see. You have the number thirty-seven on your forehead.”

  “It won’t work, buddy,” Lynskey continued. “You’re not getting any more money out of us.” He stood then, flexed his muscles, and said, “Get outta here!”

  Bannister quickly swept up his equipment and backed out of the house. As he walked across the front lawn he heard footsteps and looked around to see Lucy Lynskey running after him. He said, “Look, if this is a complaint from your husband, tell him I did my job. Your house is free of emanations. And I can almost certainly guarantee these particular ones aren’t coming back.”

  “No, nothing like that,” she said. “I just wanted to thank you for coming here in the middle of the night. And whatever you did worked. I mean, the mere knowledge that you were coming over—the ghosts . . . I mean, the emanations heard me make the call to you.”

  Bannister said, “Maybe I should get a nine-hundred number and do this over the phone.”

  “Thank you for helping me.” Lucy touched his arm warmly, warmly enough to give even the hardened Bannister a little flash of heat in his heart.

  Fifteen minutes later Bannister had driven back up the hill, through more of Fairwater’s famous winding hillside roads, and reached his house. His home sat on a bluff overlooking Fairwater, which was as dead as a headstone as he looked down on it at three in the morning. Bannister also was exhausted, and pulling into his driveway did nothing to lift his spirits.

  For the house was only half-built. As revealed in the moonlight, there was a roof and four walls—for the most part. Either money or interest ran out, possibly both, a long time ago. Whole areas of the house—a would-be family room, for example—were nothing but framework covered loosely by protective tarps. Whenever a wind came up, as it certainly had the night before, they flapped wildly, shaking the entire house.

  Stacks of bricks and timber were left untended here and there, and a rusty old concrete mixer had, over the years, filled up with dirt and turned itself into a planter. Wild grass, complete with dandelions, grew from its cast-iron maw. Everywhere was rust and decay, rust on the metal parts and decay on the timber that had been left in the harsh Maine weather for a decade.

  Bannister pulled into the driveway and drove the car to the head of the drive, stopping at the cement mixer.

  “I’ve got to mow that one of these days,” he muttered as he shut down the engine, got out of the car, and hurried to the trunk. As he popped it open a ghoulish emanation rushed out with a whooshing of stale air.

  Bannister jumped to one side as a second emanation joined the first. Then he slammed the trunk shut and stood there looking at them, his arms crossed sternly, like a schoolmaster about to deliver a dressing-down.

  The emanation that popped out first had been Stuart Harper when he was alive. He was in his early twenties when he died, a computer tycoon whose brilliance and millions couldn’t save him from an early grave. Now he had a slightly rotten appearance and continually dribbled ecto-plasmic slime. Bannister could see through him, although not always well. At times Stuart seemed thicker than at other times. His density could have been related to his moods, which was not good after a long day and night’s work as well as several bumpy rides cramped in the trunk of the old Ford. Stuart stumbled to a pile of lumber by the side of the driveway and sat down, clutching his stomach.

  “I think I’m gonna throw up,” he moaned.

  “Not on my driveway you’re not,” Bannister shot back. “Go into the bushes.”

  “What, and get bitten by a tick and get Lyme disease,” Stuart wailed.

  “There aren’t any deer around here, and anyway you’re dead. Didn’t you learn anything with those degrees in art history and theology?”

>   “No. That’s why I went into computers. Jesus, my stomach is killing me. When will you ever learn how to drive slow?”

  “When bill collectors stop chasing me,” Bannister said. “Which is where you guys come in.”

  “Man, I hate that trunk,” said the second apparition, ignoring Bannister’s words.

  Cyrus Parks was a black dude from the 1970s, a disco warrior proudly wearing a white disco suit, built-up heels, and an outrageous Afro with immense sideburns. He brushed himself off, taking time to flick an especially large gob of ectoplasm from his wide lapel.

  “I mean, I been in some tight spots in my time—”

  “Like jail,” Bannister said.

  “I ain’t never been in jail, man. That one time you keep buggin’ me about was a misunderstanding.”

  “I think the word you’re searching for is misdemeanor,” Bannister said.

  “No, man, it was a misunderstanding between me and the police. My lawyer got it all straightened out and I never spent one night in jail. Well, not all night.”

  “The victim didn’t press charges or else it would have been a felony.”

  “Can I help it if the man had a wallet so fat it kept falling out of his pocket? Guys like that had no business stuffin’ themselves in dance clothes anyway. I mean, the dude was as fat then as John Travolta is now.”

  He carefully straightened his pants, then whipped out a white Afro comb and began fixing his do.

  “I want to ride in the front of the car from now on,” Cyrus said.

  “I’m not having you spreading your ectoplastic muck over my seats.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Frank, but we’re not traveling in the trunk anymore,” Stuart said. “It’s impossible to work under these conditions.”

  He stood and stretched. Apparently his tummy felt better. Bannister could hardly see through him, despite the several fashionable moth holes in his wide-knit, L. L. Bean sweater.

  “We wanna cruise in style, man,” Cyrus said.

  Stuart reached into his pants pockets and angrily flung a pile of Frank’s business cards onto the driveway. “I quit,” he said.

  Bannister wasn’t buying any of this. He had heard it before. The staff was always complaining.