This time he was dead certain. A woman’s voice, and not just in his head but in his ears. Real sound that still registered vibratory stimulation. Real sound: A clear, thin female voice singing. But not from the kitchen.
Someone’s down here with me.
He moved into the cellar, his fingers in a tight, cold grip on the hammer. Jack didn’t know the people who owned the house, nor did he know anything about them. The arrangements had been made by Vince, who said that personal problems had forced the couple to move out of state with their daughter. But it crossed Jack’s mind that those personal problems could mean that said woman of the house was psycho and had sneaked back home and was hanging somewhere in the shadows.
Jack moved toward some tall furniture against the far wall. “Okay, game’s up.”
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
An involuntary cry fluttered up Jack’s windpipe. The woman’s voice was right on top of him. He snapped around, his hand fused to the hammer, but he could not get a direction. He dipped his head into the black gaps between the furnace and the armoire. He wished he had a flashlight. “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”
Nothing.
He tapped the doors of the armoire with the hammer. “Come out, goddamn it.”
Nothing.
He raised the hammer and snapped open the door. The armoire was lined with shoe boxes, but nothing else. He walked toward the rear of the cellar. “All right, I’m calling the police.”
Nothing.
He circled back toward the laundry table.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
Jack froze. Movement. He saw movement. He was standing before the opening to a small recess that decades ago had served as a storage room for coal.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
“I see you, goddamn it,” he said to the shadows, the hammer in his fist ready to swing if some lunatic woman rushed him. “Get out here!” His heart pounded so hard he had trouble putting breath in his words.
In the coal room hung an old wooden framed mirror, resting at a tipsy angle, the glass cracked and smoky. But he could see himself clearly, his pale face, his eyes like holes in his skull, the solid-bodied silver hammer in his hand.
As he stood there contemplating his image, he heard the thin falsetto. But this time she wasn’t singing. “Ahmahn seerem anoosheeg …”
Jack let out a shudder. The voice was coming from him.
In the reflection he saw his mouth form the syllables, their sounds piercing his ears like slivers of glass. His voice. His voice. He could still feel the muscle sensations in this throat. He could hear the vibrations in his ears.
God Almighty!
A black rush of horror passed through him. He had spoken—or someone or something had spoken through him, as if from another brain. Or worse: He really was losing his mind.
What made him all the more horrified was the realization that the words he had uttered were not words he comprehended. They were a foreign language. But he was certain that the words were those of his long dead relatives and ancestors. That he had spoken Armenian.
Disbelief flooded his mind because Armenian was a language he did not know, had never learned, had never spoken. Yes, he recognized phonemes and sound patterns picked up from friends of his aunt and uncle when he was a kid. But he was no more conversant in Armenian than he was in Danish or Inuit. But he would bet his life that the words he had uttered were Armenian.
Jack turned off the light and went upstairs one step at a time, thinking that this had nothing to do with medication or blood pressure or tricks of the light and that, given the option, he preferred to think there had been a crazy woman down there and not that he was going insane.
62
JACK SAT BY THE PHONE STARING at Dr. Heller’s number and running through his head what he would tell her: That yesterday he had had a bout of auditory hallucinations—that he was in his cellar, and suddenly he began hearing a woman singing in a voice that appeared to emanate from inside his own head.
Some kind of seizures like what that pharmacist woman, René Ballard, had said the dementia patients were experiencing on that new Alzheimer’s drug. Maybe just a coincidence, maybe there was a connection. She had called them flashbacks.
Maybe that’s what was happening, except it gets worse, Doc. Oh yeah, much worse, because then I began speaking in a language I’ve never spoken before and in a voice that wasn’t my own. What do I think, Doc? That I’ve got a haunted head. And what I did was pop three Xanax tabs and fall into an eight-hour hole.
For maybe a full fifteen minutes he sat by the phone. If he told her straight out what had happened, she’d call him in immediately, set him up with neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, dementia specialists, flashback experts, whatever, then submit him to another battery of tests, put his head in the MRI hole again, wire it for bugs. But, frankly, he just didn’t want to go through all that. Besides, he had a scheduled appointment next week. He’d leave it at that.
In the meantime, he’d keep out of the cellar. Oh, yeah. In fact, he’d minimize his time in the kitchen to avoid the pull of the damn door. He’d also double his dosage of Dilantin to keep the ghosts in their coffins. Sure, he should have consulted Dr. Heller. Sure, only a fool was his own pharmacist. Sure, he could probably trigger some nasty side effects—although he had none. On the contrary, the extra hit had the effect of a pop-up stopper. For eighteen hours he was dream-free, flashback-free-not even a slice-and-dice still out of the blue.
The bad news was that because he refused to take any more sleeping pills, Jack had traded bad visions for insomnia. For the next five nights he logged no more than twenty hours of sleep, some nights getting maybe two, spending the remaining hours twisting in his sheets until dawn. He even went online and found a Web site for insomniacs that offered a list of a dozen sleep-inducing strategies: take a warm bath; listen to soft music; drink warm milk at bedtime; visualize something boring … He tried them all, but nothing worked. He just became more alert in his desperation.
He also dreaded dusk. In fact, it got so bad that when the evening news came on his heart rate increased and his mouth went dry. At about nine-thirty on the fifth night he actually felt sleep weigh heavily on his eyelids. So he slipped into the bedroom, trying not to think about how he was pretending to yield to drowsiness like most normal people. He took his medicine, resisting the temptation to down a few tabs of Xanax, turned off the lights, and got into bed.
He closed his eyes, trying to settle into his drowsiness as if he were just your average Joe—stable, relaxed, retiring after a long and exhausting day at the office. At 10:18 he was still awake and even more alert than ever. He stared at the dark ceiling, trying to pretend that he was fighting sleep, forcing his eyes to remain open until the last possible moment when he’d close them and slip into the warm well of oblivion.
But it didn’t work.
And his mind filled with the illuminated dial of the radio clock, the cable box, light strips framing the window shades from the street, sounds of the house settling, the fridge compressor kicking in, Logan jets … goddamn butterfly wings in Peru.
He got up and draped towels over the radio, then found some duct tape and sealed the shades against the window frame. The black was now total, but his brain was hot with frustration. He closed his eyes and tried not to think of the sounds of his heart clicking in his ears, hoping the white noise would lull him to sleep as with any other normal person. Except that he wasn’t like any other normal person but a man cursed to lie awake holding his breath for the subtlest decibel to pin his affliction on.