“I don’t suppose it is you who tosses his losing lottery tickets into my bushes,” said Dr. Cherubino.
“Boys, boys, there’s no need to fight over little old me,” O’Brien said. She laughed. Dr. Cherubino and the bartender looked genuinely puzzled. She frowned at them.
“I do understand the desire for a chaperone,” said Dr. Cherubino. “In fact, I commend it.”
“Oh, yeah,” said the bartender. “Me and her? We’re old buddies. I’m like her big brother basically. Right, sis?”
He reached over to put his hand on her shoulder and O’Brien jerked it away. The bartender laughed. He stood up and yelled at the old men rolling dice on the bar. “Gentlemen, I hate to break it to you but gambling is illegal!”
This got an appreciative reaction from the old-timers. The stouter of the two, the one who wore overalls, scooped up most of the pile of dollar bills, leaving some of them behind for the bartender. His unhappy, sallow friend wore a shiny old suit. With a shaky hand he plucked his fedora from the bar and put it on. His friend in overalls helped him off the stool.
“Guess that does it,” the bartender said when the old men finally made it out the door. “It’s deader than hell tonight. What do you say let’s shut this sucker down? Won’t take me two seconds. I got it down to a science.”
“What about that couple in the back? Their glasses were already empty when I got here.”
“What couple in the back?” said the bartender.
There was no couple in the back.
While the bartender was closing up, O’Brien walked out front. The summer storm was over. She called her boyfriend. He didn’t answer. He was at the Hialeah racetrack in Florida, shooting an ironic serial killer movie. He never answered. So she texted him that she was going to an unknown location with two strange men.
AVENGE ME, she texted.
When the bartender emerged, he took the tarpaulin off of his motorcycle and sidecar. He felt the seat of the sidecar to make sure it was dry for O’Brien. He gave her a helmet, much too large.
It didn’t take long to get to the doctor’s house, and O’Brien was disappointed because she enjoyed the ride, pushing the big helmet around on her head to watch the stars come out where the sky had cleared, smelling grass and ozone, noticing the black leaves of the trees wetly sparkling.
As remote as the town was, though, it was a town. There were occasional sidewalks. It wasn’t the way she and her boyfriend had imagined. The doctor’s neighborhood could have been any quiet neighborhood — say a Polish neighborhood in Toronto.
They stopped in front of the doctor’s cozy-looking little house.
The bartender disembarked. He removed his helmet, retrieved his funny hat from the compartment where he kept it, and put it on very carefully. Only then did he help O’Brien out of the sidecar.
“That was a blast,” she said.
“Don’t take much to make you happy,” he said.
His hand remained on her arm.
“I’m having an adventure,” she said.
“House is dark. Did he say he was walking?” He left her in the yard, sprinted up the walkway, and rang the doorbell. He cupped his hands next to his eyes and tried to look in. “I think I hear somebody bumping around in there.”
“Here he comes,” said O’Brien.
Streetlights were few, but the gaunt bird took the middle of the empty street, wings of his cloak fluttering behind him.
“We can’t get in the front way,” he said. “My apologies. The screen door is permanently stuck.”
He took them around the house, up the back steps, and through a small screened-in porch, perfectly square and cluttered. He let them into a tidy kitchen which had the faint but unpleasant scent of vinegar, possibly used as a cleaning agent.
The doctor placed his cane in an umbrella stand and hung his cape over it so that it resembled a dingy ghost.
He said, “I promised you cheese.”
They watched as he removed a pale wedge from his refrigerator, watched as he shuffled with it to the counter, where he carefully removed each of his rings and lined them up in a particular order before choosing a utensil from a wooden knife block.
He got out a sheet of wax paper, smoothed it on the counter, unwrapped the cheese, and set to work cutting it, wincing once as the tip of the knife entered his thumb.
He held a blood-speckled cube of whitish cheese to the light and frowned.
“Bad augury,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” said the bartender.
Dr. Cherubino put his thumb in his mouth and sucked thoughtfully.
Once he had cheese and crackers lying on a plate, Dr. Cherubino returned his rings to his fingers and had O’Brien and the bartender follow him down a dark hallway toward the front room.
The narrow hall was made narrower by bookcases on each side. The bookcases were full. Books were piled on top of many of them, and stacks of books sat on the floor against the wall wherever there was space. Above the bookcases there appeared to be old prints or etchings, though it was too dark to tell what they were. The air was thick with the sweet rot of paper. O’Brien sneezed three times, rapidly.
“Bless you, bless you, bless you,” said Dr. Cherubino.
They came into a large, scantly furnished room with an expensive-looking rug on the wooden floor and a podium set up as if for an audience of two, for it faced a loveseat, the room’s only place to sit. Hanging on the walls in bulky, chipped frames were torn old photographs of wildly bearded men with glittering expressions and sternly coiffed women who seemed to have peach pits where their eyes should have been.
At a distance behind the podium were two closed French doors with blue velvet drapes hanging inside them and hiding the next room from view.
“The haunted sewing room,” Dr. Cherubino said, gesturing at the closed doors. “I do not own a coffee table. If you don’t mind, we’ll place your refreshments on the ottoman.”
O’Brien and the bartender sat on the mahogany loveseat, which was cushioned in stripes of purple velvet — dark and lighter purple alternately. They were close by necessity, facing Dr. Cherubino’s maple podium, carved on which was the motto IN ARENA AEDIFICAS. Another large room behind the guests — an open dining room, unlighted — made the hair on the backs of their necks stand up. They could feel it behind them, and both were compelled to turn their heads and look into the dark for a moment. It contained a table and chairs, a Victrola, and as far as they could tell, nothing else.
Purplish beams from a streetlight striped the room. Dr. Cherubino lit several large black candles — on the mantel, a small table, and the windowsills — to help.
O’Brien and the bartender stared at him with some anticipation as he solemnly took his place behind the podium and opened the ponderous book with a creak and a great thud.
“Herein I have recorded, largely from eyewitness accounts, tales of untimely visitations from the phantom realms and other unusual occurrences. Amnesia, holy smells, stigmata, somnambulism—”
“Holy smells?” said O’Brien.
“Intimates of the Catholic saint Padre Pio could smell him when he wasn’t there. The false messiah Sabattai Sevi was said to exude a marvelous aroma, so much so that the peasants began to gossip that he was using perfume. Naturally, neither of these fascinating mystics falls under the scope of my humble study. I bring them up merely as notable examples from human history. Locally, I have an interesting case involving hand lotion. But I think that to laymen such as yourselves, even a gifted one such as Miss O’Brien, an old-fashioned ghost story would be most pleasurable, most free of dry and pedantic speculations. There are several from which to choose.”
“What’s the scariest one you’ve got?” said the bartender.