“This information is all available on my Web site, Mr. Ellis—”
But I was lost in the anxiety of the moment. “I mean do you have a résumé or, like, recommendations because when you tell me that you’ve seen people burst into flame I feel like I’m going crazy—”
“Mr. Ellis, I was not handed a diploma. I did not go to ‘ghost college.’ I have only my experience. I have investigated over six thousand supernatural phenomena.”
I lost it again. I was crying and trying not to breathe too loudly. “What am I going to do?” I kept asking.
Miller began to console me. “If you want to hire me my job is to come to your home and invoke the physical manifestations of whatever is haunting your residence.”
“How . . . bad does that get? I mean, do I have to be there?” I forced myself to stop crying and was surprised that I had the power to accomplish this and I wiped my eyes and blew my nose with another napkin. I realized there were nearly a dozen of them crumpled and strewn in front of me.
“How bad does it get?” Miller actually said the following: “I once dealt with an accountant who said he was possessed. On the afternoon of the exorcism in his condominium, he began speaking backwards in Latin and then bled from his eyes and his head started to split open.”
The only way my shock dealt with this was to mumble, “Hey, I’ve been audited. I’ve been through worse.”
Such a tough guy, the writer muttered. So cool.
Miller didn’t understand that this was the normal response.
There was a stony silence during which Miller glared at me.
“I’m just kidding,” I whispered. “It was just a little joke. I was—”
“That incident, Mr. Ellis, gave me a heart attack. I was hospitalized. It was not a joke. I have this incident on tape.”
My exhaustion suddenly was forcing me to concentrate intently on Miller, and I was curious enough to ask, “What . . . do you do with that tape?”
“I show it at lectures.”
I was reflecting on the information. “What . . . was this person possessed by?”
“It was the spirit of what he told me was an animal that had scratched him.”
I wanted Miller to repeat this.
“He had been attacked by this animal, and after the attack he believed he was now the thing that had attacked him.”
“How does that happen?” I was almost wailing. “How does that happen? What are you talking about? Jesus Christ—”
“Mr. Ellis, you would not be making fun of me if someone possessed by a demonic spirit had thrown you twenty-five feet across a room and then tried to slash you into a bloody pulp.”
Again it took me a long time to start breathing regularly.
I was reduced to: “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just very tired. I don’t know. I’m not making fun of you.”
Miller kept staring at me, as if deciding something. He asked if I had the diagram of the house. I had quickly drafted a crude one on Four Seasons stationery, and when I pulled it out of my jacket pocket my hand was shaking so badly that I dropped it on the table as I was handing it to him. I apologized. He glanced at the sketch and placed it next to his notepad.
“I need to ask you some things,” he said quietly.
I clasped my hands together to make them stop shaking.
“When do these manifestations take place, Mr. Ellis?”
“At night,” I whispered. “They take place in the middle of the night. It’s always around the time of my father’s death.”
“When is that? Specifically.”
“I don’t know. Between two and three in the morning. My father died at two-forty a.m. and this seems to be the time when . . . things happen.”
A long pause that I couldn’t stand and had to question. “What does that mean?”
“And do you know the time of your birth?”
Miller was scrawling notes along the pad. He didn’t look at me when he asked this.
“Yes.” I swallowed hard. “It was at two-forty in the afternoon.”
Miller was studying something he had written down.
“What does any of that mean?” I asked. “Beyond a coincidence?”
“It means this is something to take seriously.”
“Why is that?” I asked in the voice of a believer, in the voice of a student seeking answers from the teacher.
“Because spirits who show themselves between night and dawn want something.”
“I don’t know what that means. I don’t get it.”
“It means they want to frighten you,” he said. “It means they want you to realize something.”
I wanted to cry again but I was able to control it.
None of this is very comforting, is it? I heard the writer ask me.
“You mentioned in one of the interviews I glanced at that you based this fictional character, this Patrick Bateman, on your father—”
“Yes, I had, yes—”
“—and you say this Patrick Bateman has been contacting you?”
“Yes, yes, this is true.”
“Were you and your father close?”
“No. No. We weren’t.”
Miller was studying something on the notepad. It was bothering him.
“And there are children in the house? Whose are they?”
“Yes, I have two,” I said. “Well, actually, only one of them is mine.”
Miller looked up suddenly. He didn’t respond but was staring at me, clearly troubled.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“That’s strange,” Miller said. “I don’t feel from you that you do.”
“You don’t feel what?”
“That you have a child.”
My chest ached. I flashed on Robby holding me in the car after school, and how tightly he gripped me last night because he thought I would protect him. Because he thought that I was now his father. I didn’t know what to say.
Miller moved on. “Is there a fireplace in the house?” he asked suddenly.
Shamefully, I had to think about this. I had been in the house for five months and I had to think about whether there was a fireplace in the house. If there was one it had never been used. This forced me to realize that there were two of them.
“Yes, yes, we do. Why?”
Miller paused, studying the notepad, and murmured offhand, “It’s just an entrance point. That’s all.”
“Can I ask you something?”
Miller said yes while flipping a page in the notepad.
“What if . . . what if this unexplained presence . . . doesn’t want to leave?” I swallowed. “What happens then?”
Miller looked up. “I have to let them know that I am helping them move on to a better place. They are actually quite grateful for any assistance.” He paused. “These are souls in distress, Mr. Ellis.”
“Why are they . . . distressed?”
“There are a couple of reasons. Some of them haven’t realized yet that they are dead.” He paused again. “And some of them want to impart information to the living.”
It was my turn to pause. “And you resolve this problem . . . for them?”
“It depends.” He shrugged.
“On what?”
“Well, on whether it’s a demon, or whether it’s a ghost or, in your case, whether the things you created—these tortured entities—have somehow manifested themselves into your reality.”
“But I don’t understand,” I was saying. “What’s the difference between a ghost and a demon?”
By the time this question was asked the diner had disappeared. It was only Miller and myself in a booth suspended outside of whatever the real world now meant to me.
“Demons are malicious and powerful. Ghosts are just confused—lost, vulnerable.” Miller abruptly reached into his denim jacket and pulled out a cell phone that had been vibrating. He checked the incoming number and then clicked the phone shut. During this movement he continued talking as if he had given this information a million times before. “Ghosts draw their energy from any number of sources: light, fear, sadness, anguish—these are the things that make the spirit precedent. Ghosts are not violent.”