Peter Atkins
I’d been nursing my coffee at a sidewalk table outside the Atwater Village taco stand for about ten minutes when Dino finally pulled into a parking spot.
His royal blue PT Cruiser was hardly a ’57 Corvette, but it was the first car he’d let himself buy since he got his licence back, and Dino loved it. He’d picked it up from a customer out in Palmdale for a thousand cash and the rest in morphine and, first time he showed it to me, he’d walked me around it as proud as if he’d bought a fucking house.
As a rule, drug dealers are hard to like – you either resent them or are scared of them, maybe both, depending on what kind of drug dealer you’ve been stupid enough to get yourself involved with – but, unless you’re the kind of dick who wakes up every day desperate to dislike somebody, it was really pretty hard to dislike Dino. This was partly because he never seemed to be doing any better than any of his customers, and partly because, no matter how deep in the hole you were, he’d never cut you off if he saw you were hurting. You know, now that I say it out loud, I see that reason B kind of explains reason A.
Anyway, I watched Dino feed his meter, throw his Cruiser an anxious look like he’d just dropped it off for its first day at big-boy school, and walk to my table. He was beaming at me, like finding me here was a happy accident instead of an appointment he’d made.
“Kitty Donnelly,” he said, in case I’d forgotten my name. “Let me buy you breakfast.”
“I’m good,” I said, lifting my coffee mug.
“No food?” he said. “Really?” A little troubled, like I’d put a crimp in his plans. “But you’re still Irish, right?”
“From shamrock to shillelagh,” I said, trusting that the eyeroll was implicit.
“So let me buy you a beer.”
“It’s nine o’clock in the fucking morning, Dino,” I said. “Racist much?”
He shrugged. “I’m going to get something, though,” he said, and strolled to the service window, where he made short work of ordering a fully loaded burrito.
“You met Andrea that one time, didn’t you?” he said, once he was back, sitting down with his food. “At Angie’s party?” Angie, Dino’s sister, was an Andrea too, but the one he meant was her daughter, his niece. She was the reason he’d asked me to meet him.
“She was still a kid,” I said. “Maybe twelve, thirteen?”
“Still a kid now,” he said, nodding. “But at college, you know? Freshman.”
I nodded too, took a sip of coffee. Dino didn’t say anything else right away. Bit a chunk off his burrito instead, chewed for a moment, looked around at the other customers. It was okay. He’d tell me when he was ready.
Eventually he swallowed and brought his eyes back to mine.
“You have to help her,” he said. “She’s being haunted.”
* * *
The thing about living off-campus, Andrea had discovered – one of the things, anyway – was that there was no dorm monitor or student counsellor to give a shit about your fucked-up stairwell lights.
Los Angeles tended to favour the bungalow approach to housing – high-rises being maybe not the greatest idea in a city built on fault-lines – but the only affordable no-roommate sitch that Andrea’d been able to find for herself was at the top of a six-storey walk-up at the sketchy end of Silverlake.
It had been built in 1928 – “As old as the talkies,” the renting agent had said with the rhythm of a joke, though Andrea’d had to Google it – and it didn’t look like Southern California at all, looked instead like it had got lost on its way to Greenwich Village or the Bowery. It was built from bricks, for a start – try getting that past contemporary LA’s earthquake codes and zoning restrictions – and had a fire escape zigzagging down the streetside exterior wall like it was waiting for an impromptu performance of West Side fucking Story to break out.
The stairwell was windowless, and the lights had been out on all but the top floor for more than a month. Every time Andrea came home at night, once she’d rounded the stairwell’s first curve and left behind any overspill from the lobby’s not-generous-to-begin-with hanging lamp, her climb to her sixth-floor nest could only be illuminated by the occasional thin escape of light from behind other people’s doors. If they were home. And – her hand to God – it seemed like nobody was ever home, so when it was dark it was, like, dark.
But it was fine. Well, had always been fine, at least. There was nothing in the dark. There was never anything in the dark. Or, as she liked to joke to her friends, if there was anything in the dark, it had so far failed to display any interest in attracting her attention. Which was exactly the kind of working relationship that Andrea favoured having with whatever kind of thing it might be that might choose to live in the dark.
Andrea’s policy was to take each flight briskly and to stay in the centre of each step, taking pride in the nights she could crest a whole flight without stretching out an arm to tap at the wall to check how she was doing. That’s what she’d done tonight – a little wobbly maybe, one shot too many at Taylor’s karaoke bash perhaps – and here she was, all but out of the darkness, rounding the corner triumphantly onto the last flight, the flight that led up to her floor, the flight with the bulb that worked. It was particularly handy that the bulb was working tonight, because it allowed Andrea to see very clearly the man who was standing on the stairs, about nine steps above her.
Andrea stopped short. She heard her own gasp, but was already telling herself that she wasn’t alarmed, she was just surprised. It was true she’d not heard any movement on the stairs, but that was okay. People tread softly. And she wouldn’t have heard anything anyway, would she? It’s not like he was walking, either up or down. He was just standing there, looking down at her. Well, not even at her, really. Kind of past her. Kind of through her, maybe.
Even though it crossed her mind that he must have been not walking for quite some time for her not to have heard him at all as she’d made her way up in the dark, Andrea wasn’t frightened. Not at first. She wasn’t frightened until his mouth fell open. There was something wrong with the slow and disturbing slackness of its movement, and she might have dwelt on that, might have tried to work out what it was that was wrong with it, except that she was busy finally realising why her stomach was trying to crawl into her throat.
The problem wasn’t that there was a man on the stairs. The problem was that Andrea could see right through him. The water stains and wallpaper scuffs on the stairwell wall behind him were as blurrily visible as if she were looking through a rain-soaked window.
He cocked his head and furrowed his brow as if he too was beginning to understand that something unusual was going on, and his eyes came back from whatever they’d been looking at to finally lock on hers.
And then he disappeared.
* * *
“…and then he disappeared,” Dino said.
He trickled a little more hot sauce over his close-to-collapsing burrito and raised it gingerly to his face. It was practically in his mouth before the thought occurred to him that, while cliffhangers might well have their place, this was maybe just rude, and he managed to make himself pause before actually taking a bite.
“I mean, bad enough, right?” he said. “But it was when it happened again the next night that she thought, you know, something was up.”
This fucking guy. “Something was up?”
He bit down on his burrito’s ruin, other hand raised at me in a cool-your-jets kind of way.
“She’s working her way through college,” he finally said, still chewing. “Waitressing at Palladio – you know, that shit-show for rich idiots who think that what they’re eating is Italian? They’ve got her on the lunch shift today. Go see her, would you? For me? For old times’ sake? She’s a nice girl. Go see her.”
That last little repeat was what did it. Go see her. I could hear his concern and his confusion. He loved his niece, was worried for her, had no idea what the fuck to do, and wanted someone who might.
Look, if I’m being honest, that old times’ sake was kind of pushing it. Dino had at least twenty years on me, and we’d only been in the same profession for those ten stupid months I’d spent running candy for Paulie Benson, and that was three years ago now. But we’d liked each other enough, made each other laugh sometimes, and, let’s face it, how many other reluctant occult detectives was the poor bastard likely to have in his Rolodex? So I nodded a yes over my mug’s rim and broke eye contact before he could say something sentimental, looking over to where a neighbouring table was being cleared like I was checking out the busgirl’s legs.
“Okay. Good,” he said, after a moment. And there he was, back to stoic. Like a trouper. “Thanks. And for Chrissake, eat something while you’re there, wouldya? Skipping breakfast and everything.”
“You said the food was crap there,” I reminded him.
Again with the shrug. I felt vaguely insulted but elected to rise above it.
* * *
I’d decided against food but was living up to Dino’s earlier ethnic stereotyping by having a drink at the bar while Andrea was finishing up her shift. That single shot of Jameson’s – which, to be fair, included an ice cube the size of a baseball – cost eighteen dollars, for which I very much looked forward to invoicing her uncle.
The table she was working was occupied by a little prick in a blazer and two significantly younger women, one of whom was kind of a knockout but who, truth be told, didn’t quite live up to the beret she was wearing at a rehearsed angle. I couldn’t hear what they were saying when Andrea brought them the menus, but I could pretty much read the closed captioning. Little Prick looked her up and down and said something condescending that pretended to be a joke. Andrea said something back which, even though she clipped its wings with a non-threatening smile, was quick and clever enough to win a giggle from Ambitious Beret Girl. Li’l Prick smiled too, but it was surprised and unsure, the kind of smile you’d give to a monkey making a finger painting. If you were an asshole.
The restaurant was at least within walking distance of her college and, as we headed back to campus for her afternoon classes, I told her that, while her charm and composure were admirable given the circumstances, I’d have driven his fork right through his fucking hand.
She gave a whatcha-gonna-do shrug. “I need the tips,” she said.
“But you spit in his food, right?”
“Yeah, he wishes it was spit.”
“Attagirl,” I said. I thought for a moment about getting his address from a credit card scan but I’m in therapy now and Juliana is trying to impress upon me that they don’t all have to die. “Hey,” I said to Andrea. “I want to check something. No judgement, but has your uncle been giving you and your friends any free merchandise lately?” Dino was usually careful about the quality of his stock but, you know, accidents happen.
“Seriously?” she said, in that mock-offended way they do now. “No. Not stoned. Not tripping. Not anything.” She paused. “Well, a little drunk.”
“Sure. And you were scared, right?”
“Of course I was scared,” she said.
“But scared because it was weird? Or like, scared as in you felt threatened?”
Andrea gave that some thought. “Look, I don’t want the memo to be misunderstood,” she said. “I was plenty fucking scared. But I guess I didn’t feel directly threatened. Partly because he looked kind of confused and scared himself.”
“And he saw you too, you said?”
“Right at the end, he did, yeah. He looked at me, like he maybe wanted to say something, and then he just…wasn’t there. He just…I don’t know…faded out.”
“Just gone?”
“Gone. Like a ghost.”
“And the second night was kind of the same thing?”
We’d reached the college grounds by now and crossed on a light toward the quad.
“Exactly the same thing,” Andrea said. “Like I was watching a fucking rerun.”
“Right. And after he was gone, did—” I stopped myself. Went back to something she’d said. “Wait. Why’d you say like a ghost? You think it wasn’t a ghost?”
“Well, I mean, it couldn’t be, could it?”
She was losing me. “What? Shit you’ve gone through the past couple of days, you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“Huh?” she said. “Oh, no. I didn’t mean that. I mean, I don’t know, I’m not sure that I believe per se, but I guess there has to be something that happens after we—”
“Let’s stay focused, Andrea.”
“Right. Sorry. What I meant was that it couldn’t be his ghost.”
“Whose?”
“Professor Dunham’s.”
“Okay. Name’s useful. First I’ve fucking heard. More to the point, why not?”
She pointed across the quad at some middle-aged but trim guy trotting up the stone steps of what the sign told me was the English & Modern Languages Department. “Because he’s not dead,” she said. “That’s him over there.”
Fuck me. “You ever hear the phrase burying the lead?” I asked her.
* * *
Professor Jack Dunham was very much not dead. What he was was a busy senior lecturer with a loaded desk and a full schedule, but one who was nevertheless willing to give me ten minutes once I’d knocked on his office door and asked politely.
Andrea’d already told me she wasn’t enrolled in any of his classes – knew him only by sight and by reputation and by, you know, the whole haunting thing – so I had no reason to disbelieve him when he told me he had no real idea who she was, either by name or by the photo that I’d taken three minutes earlier on my phone. I’d just put it away when his own phone rang – the office landline, not his cell – and he took the call on speaker. Maybe in some spirit of full disclosure, maybe because he hated to waste an audience.
“Am I speaking to Jack Dunham?” said the male voice from the speaker. Bit of a spin on it. Just short of aggressive, like its owner was already impatient with the bullshit it hadn’t yet heard.
“You are,” said Dunham. “And to whom am I speaking?”
“My name doesn’t matter, Mr. Dunham. I—”
“Come, come,” Dunham interrupted. “You mustn’t think so little of yourself.” He winked at me across the desk, let me know I was in on the fun.
The voice didn’t rise to the bait. “I represent the Clarion Collection Agency,” it said. “Your debt to our client, Edwards and Sons, is ninety days past due and the case has been referred to us. I’d advise you to take care of this matter immediately. Collecting debts is what we do, Mr. Dunham. And we will collect this debt.”
“I see,” Dunham said. “Well, perhaps you’ll have better luck with someone more amused by your self-importance than I am.” He killed the call.
I was starting to like the guy.
“Now, how may I help you, Ms. Donnelly?” he said.
Weirdly, I wasn’t sure that he needed to any more, other than to maybe confirm what I was already getting a very strong hunch about. I’d been looking around his room while he had his fun with the collection agency schmuck, and had been registering a few things about him. One, he was a guy who ran up debts. Two, he was a guy who had a sense of fun but not so much a sense of consequences. Three, there was an ashtray on his desk, a heavy glass souvenir from Paris, Las Vegas, which he obviously could no longer legally use in his office, so it must have been there simply because he was fond of it.
Now, you can call my next question to him jumping to conclusions, if you like, but that’s why I’m Kitty Donnelly, Girl Detective, and you’re not.
“You’re a gambler,” I said.
He looked quizzical for a second, and then a little annoyed. “Oh, God,” he said. “You’re not another debt collector, are you?”
“I’m not,” I said. “But I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Well,” he said. “Gambler implies someone with a problem, wouldn’t you say? I might prefer to phrase it as that I’m someone who’s fond of games of chance.”
“Preference noted,” I said. “Debts are a problem, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh, everything’s paid eventually.”
No shit, Jack. “Let me ask you something,” I said, doubling down on my hunch. “You ever make a really stupid bet? Like, something ridiculous?”
He cocked his head at me, curious that I should have asked. “Interesting,” he said. “Not a bet, so much as a deal.”
“Yeah? What did it cost you?”
“No, no,” he said. “I was paid.” He was trying to keep the laughter out of his voice. “And it was money for nothing. I was teaching somebody credulous a lesson.”
Poor bastard. Poor stupid bastard.
* * *
The thing about people who are way too into secret shit is that they can’t keep their fucking mouths shut. Ufologists, conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, they’re all the same. And occultists are the worst. The worst. Like, the literal meaning of ‘occult’ is ‘hidden’, but you wouldn’t think so from the non-stop rumours, bragging, and bitch-fests that constitute most of the dark web’s Satanist message-boards.
I realised that I might actually have already heard whispers about the guy to whose apartment Andrea and I had headed after leaving the campus. The Gatherer. That’s what he called himself, he and his online acolytes. I know, I know. The fucking names they come up with. Probably first thought of it back when he was rolling a twenty-seven-sided dice in his mom’s basement. Bastard should’ve stayed there. Wouldn’t have drawn my attention.
All I’d needed was to ask Andrea one very simple question – “Any particularly creepy neighbours in your building?” – and she hadn’t even needed time to think. Billy Z in 3F was the hands-down winner. Billy Z wasn’t in his apartment right now. But Andrea and I were, because not a single one of Billy Z’s three high-security locks from Best Buy had stood a chance against Mrs. Donnelly’s Youngest and her mad skills at housebreaking.
Billy Z was The Gatherer, all right. His taste in pictures and posters was exactly as you’d expect, and a quick scan of his bookshelves revealed all the usual suspects: Crowley, LaVey, Jack Parsons, a couple of genuine grimoires, and a Necronomicon bound in human skin. Huh. Fourth I’d seen this year. Must be a factory somewhere.
But it was neither the books nor the vintage signed photos of Madame Blavatsky and Jimmy Page that told me Billy was the one we were looking for.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “There they are.”
I was pointing to a special display shelf he’d had fitted above his desk, and more specifically to the nine bell jars all in a row atop it. The jars were high-end fancy, each of them twelve inches of cylindrical clear glass perched on a dark wooden plinth. The kind of expensive display item you reserve for your very favourite creepy shit, whether that be taxidermied animals, puzzle boxes that open the gates of Hell, or homunculi in the shapes of devils and ballerinas. There was nothing visible to the naked eye in any of these ones, though.
“They’re all empty,” Andrea said, which was a perfectly reasonable conclusion for her to draw. But not the right one.
“They’re not empty,” I said.
“Huh?”
“He’ll have a blu-light somewhere. See if you can see it.”
“A what?”
“A UV flashlight,” I said. “You know, like in the forensic cop shows. The thing you shine on the crime scene when you need to know where all the blood landed. The thing you never want to shine on a motel bedspread.”
“Oof,” she said, but pointed at a thin strip-light fixture in a fancy brass housing that ran above the shelf. “Won’t that be it?” she said. “But why would he need—”
“He’d want to see them, want to gloat.”
“Want to see what?” she asked.
I flipped the little toggle on the side of the fixture, and suddenly Andrea and I weren’t alone any more. Within the jars, bathed in the eerie blue light, were wisps of weighty smoke, each of them revolving slowly, each of them rising and falling as if straining against invisible tides.
“They’re twirling,” Andrea said, in a tone that implied she wasn’t entirely sure whether to be entranced or disturbed.
“You’re cute,” I said. “They’re not twirling. They’re writhing.”
“Oh, Christ,” she said. No ambiguity in the tone this time.
I didn’t mean to upset her, but I wasn’t kidding. We were looking at that which The Gatherer had gathered. Nine stolen souls. Trapped. Terrified. Lost. If they weren’t in Hell, they were in the next best thing.
I neither knew nor gave a shit whether nine had some ritualistic significance or whether it was just the maximum size of Ikea shelf that Billy Z could fit in his fucking car; I just knew that these were what he’d managed to collect for himself, by various means – bargained for, bid for, wagered for, inherited from other assholes, whatever. These were the fruits of his Gathering, and I did my best to explain as much to Andrea.
“One of them’s Dunham’s?” she asked and, in response to my nod, “We have to help him. Help all of them. What can we do?”
I turned the UV off, so that the jars looked empty again. Cosmetic fix, I know, but it made us both feel a tiny bit better.
“Thank Christ this prick’s a memorabilia collector,” I said. I nodded at the wall that held the Blavatsky photo. Next to it, a baseball bat stood on display beneath a framed Phillies shirt.
“The fuck?” Andrea said. “I wouldn’t have put Billy down as a Jock.”
“Number Ten,” I said, pointing at the shirt and its embroidered number. “Darren Daulton. Catcher for the Phillies and practising occultist.”
“You’re kidding me,” Andrea said, as I crossed to the case and grabbed the bat.
“Nope,” I said. “This shit’s everywhere.”
I hoisted the bat, wanting to test it for weight, and got an eyeline on the bell jars.
Tell you the truth, I was hoping to impress Andrea by shattering all nine in a single swing, but it took me two. It made a satisfying mess on the bastard’s floor, but I wasn’t the only one who knew that that wasn’t going to be enough.
“The jars were just where he kept them,” Andrea said. “Not how he kept them. Smashing the jars can’t have freed them.”
“No,” I said, impressed by how quickly she was grasping the underlying metaphysics here. “You’re right. A deal’s a deal, lifetime of the owner kind of thing. Felt good though.”
Something else was troubling Andrea. “Dunham shows up for work every day,” she said. “Talks to people, does his job, lives his life. How does he not know? How does he not feel something’s missing?”
“Have you met the twenty-first century?” I said. “For most people, losing a soul is like losing a fucking passport. You don’t even know it’s gone until you need it. And by then it’s always too late.”
She nodded. “But smashing this asshole’s stupid jars,” she said. “That was only…I don’t know…only symbolic or something. It didn’t really help.”
She sounded upset. Can you blame her? I was pretty mad myself.
“Yeah, that’s true,” I said. “Smashing the jars didn’t really help. But then, smashing the jars isn’t really what I wanted the bat for.”
There was a little pause then, a little moment of silence, while Andrea looked at me. It’s possible she was remembering what I’d said about the lifetime-of-the-owner aspect of these kind of deals. It’s possible too that she was maybe remembering certain stories she might have heard about me at the occasional family gathering, if her Uncle Dino had been a little loose lipped and careless – which, on occasion, I knew he was capable of being.
“Andrea, honey,” I said, in my kindest voice. “Why don’t you go see Dino? He was worried about you. Go have dinner with your uncle. He’d love that. I’ll finish up here.”
I locked the door behind her. Wondered if I should have a drink while I waited for Billy.
* * *
Later – quite a bit later, after quite a lot of cleaning up – I thought about Andrea and pondered the question of whether I should tell her something about herself or not.
The thing is, I doubted Billy Z had been in the habit of letting his little pets out for walkies. Andrea hadn’t seen what she’d seen on the stairs because The Gatherer had popped a jar off its plinth, she’d seen it because she could. Because she knew Dunham, however slightly. Because she could feel his sundered soul’s proximity. Because she was close to it, could sense it and see it. See it trying to scream. Because she was somebody who could tune in to the kind of things that a certain type of person could tune in to.
I decided it was probably better to let her eventually realise that on her own, but I did make a mental note about a government contact I had in the UK, an old friend of my grandfather’s, who – though very much on the side of the angels – was kind of a gatherer too, a gatherer of a certain type of person, and I wondered whether Andrea had given much thought yet as to what line of work she might be interested in once college was done.