Just as she reached the AM-FM tuner, the banshee wail stopped. The sudden silence had an oppressive weight.
Gradually, as her ears stopped ringing, Vivienne perceived the soft empty hiss of the stereo speakers. Then she heard the thumping of her own heart.
The metal casing of the radio gleamed with a brittle crust of ice. She touched it wonderingly. A sliver of ice broke loose under her finger and fell onto the nightstand. It didn’t begin to melt; the room was cold.
The window was frosted. The dresser mirror was frosted too, and her reflection was dim and distorted and strange.
Outside, the night was cool but not wintry. Maybe fifty degrees. Maybe even fifty-five.
The radio’s digital display began to change, the orange numbers escalating across the frequency band, sweeping through one station after another. Scraps of music, split-second flashes of disc jockeys’ chatter, single words from different somber-voiced newscasters, and fragments of commercial jingles blended in a cacophonous jumble of meaningless sound. The indicator reached the end of the band width, and the digital display began to sequence backward.
Trembling, Vivienne switched off the radio.
As soon as she took her finger off the push switch, the radio turned itself on again.
She stared at it, frightened and bewildered.
The digital display began to sequence up the band once more, and scraps of music blasted from the speakers.
She pressed the ON-OFF bar again.
After a brief silence, the radio turned on spontaneously.
“This is crazy,” she said shakily.
When she shut off the radio the third time, she kept her finger pressed against the ON-OFF bar. For several seconds she was certain that she could feel the switch straining under her fingertip as it tried to pop on.
Overhead, the three model airplanes began to move. Each was hung from the ceiling on a length of fishing line, and the upper end of each line was knotted to its own eye-hook that had been screwed firmly into the dry wall. The planes jiggled, jerked, twisted, and trembled.
Just a draft.
But she didn’t feel a draft.
The model planes began to bounce violently up and down on the ends of their lines.
“God help me,” Vivienne said.
One of the planes swung in tight circles, faster and faster, then in wider circles, steadily decreasing the angle between the line on which it was suspended and the bedroom ceiling. After a moment the other two models ceased their erratic dancing and began to spin around and around, like the first plane, as if they were actually flying, and there was no mistaking this deliberate movement for the random effects of a draft.
Ghosts? A poltergeist?
But she didn’t believe in ghosts. There were no such things. She believed in death and taxes, in the inevitability of slot-machine jackpots, in all-you-can-eat casino buffets for $5.95 per person, in the Lord God Almighty, in the truth of alien abductions and Big Foot, but she didn’t believe in ghosts.
The sliding closet doors began to move on their runners, and Vivienne Neddler had the feeling that some awful thing was going to come out of the dark space, its eyes as red as blood and its razor-sharp teeth gnashing. She felt a presence, something that wanted her, and she cried out as the door came all the way open.
But there wasn’t a monster in the closet. It contained only clothes. Only clothes.
Nevertheless, untouched, the doors glided shut… and then open again…
The model planes went around, around.
The air grew even colder.
The bed started to shake. The legs at the foot rose three or four inches before crashing back into the casters that had been put under them to protect the carpet. They rose up again. Hovered above the floor. The springs began to sing as if metal fingers were strumming them.
Vivienne backed into the wall, eyes wide, hands fisted at her sides.
As abruptly as the bed had started bouncing up and down, it now stopped. The closet doors closed with a jarring crash — but they didn’t open again. The model airplanes slowed, swinging in smaller and smaller circles, until they finally hung motionless.
The room was silent.
Nothing moved.
The air was getting warmer.
Gradually Vivienne’s heartbeat subsided from the hard, frantic rhythm that it had been keeping for the past couple of minutes. She hugged herself and shivered.
A logical explanation. There had to be a logical explanation.
But she wasn’t able to imagine what it could be.
As the room grew warm again, the doorknobs and the radio casing and the other metal objects quickly shed their fragile skins of ice, leaving shallow puddles on furniture and damp spots in the carpet. The frosted window cleared, and as the frost faded from the dresser mirror, Vivienne’s distorted reflection resolved into a more familiar image of herself.
Now this was only a young boy’s bedroom, a room like countless thousands of others.
Except, of course, that the boy who had once slept here had been dead for a year. And maybe he was coming back, haunting the place.
Vivienne had to remind herself that she didn’t believe in ghosts.
Nevertheless, it might be a good idea for Tina Evans to get rid of the boy’s belongings at last.
Vivienne had no logical explanation for what had happened, but she knew one thing for sure: She wasn’t going to tell anyone what she had seen here tonight. Regardless of how convincingly and earnestly she described these bizarre events, no one would believe her. They would nod and smile woodenly and agree that it was a strange and frightening experience, but all the while they would be thinking that poor old Vivienne was finally getting senile. Sooner or later word of her rantings about poltergeists might get back to her daughter in Sacramento, and then the pressure to move to California would become unbearable. Vivienne wasn’t going to jeopardize her precious independence.
She left the bedroom, returned to the kitchen, and drank two shots of Tina Evans’s best bourbon. Then, with characteristic stoicism, she returned to the boy’s bedroom to wipe up the water from the melted ice, and she continued housecleaning.
She refused to let a poltergeist scare her off.
It might be wise, however, to go to church on Sunday. She hadn’t been to church in a long time. Maybe some churching would be good for her. Not every week, of course. Just one or two Masses a month. And confession now and then. She hadn’t seen the inside of a confessional in ages. Better safe than sorry.
Chapter Eight
Everyone in show business knew that non-paying preview crowds were among the toughest to please. Free admission didn’t guarantee their appreciation or even their amicability. The person who paid a fair price for something was likely to place far more value on it than the one who got the same item for nothing. That old saw applied in spades to stage shows and to on-the-cuff audiences.
But not tonight. This crowd wasn’t able to sit on its hands and keep its cool.
The final curtain came down at eight minutes till ten o’clock, and the ovation continued until after Tina’s wristwatch had marked the hour. The cast of Magyck! took several bows, then the crew, then the orchestra, all of them flushed with the excitement of being part of an unqualified hit. At the insistence of the happy, boisterous, VIP audience, both Joel Bandiri and Tina were spotlighted in their booths and were rewarded with their own thunderous round of applause.
Tina was on an adrenaline high, grinning, breathless, barely able to absorb the overwhelming response to her work. Helen Mainway chattered excitedly about the spectacular special effects, and Elliot Stryker had an endless supply of compliments as well as some astute observations about the technical aspects of the production, and Charlie Mainway poured a third bottle of Dom Pérignon, and the house lights came up, and the audience reluctantly began to leave, and Tina hardly had a chance to sip her champagne because of all the people who stopped by the table to congratulate her.