Bascomb said he was terrified.
Not just for himself, but for his wife, Meg. She was a sweet kid, he said, the sort of patient, loving, devoted wife a bum like him had no business having. Bascomb moved them into another house out in the suburbs, had the phone number unlisted. It worked, at least for a month or so, but soon enough, it began again. The phone calls. The chattering teeth. The laughter. It was building into something just as it had with the dog and he damn well knew it, he just didn’t know what to do about it. At night, sometimes there were faint tapping or clawing sounds at the doors… scratching sounds at the windows. But there was never anything there when he looked. One morning, his car—brand new customized Buick Regal—had been vandalized. There were deep scratches running from the front quarter panel to the back, on the trunk and hood, the doors. Deep ruts that had peeled the paint down to metal like a garden trowel had been dragged across it. The cops said it was kids. Kids out looking for kicks. That he should keep his car in the garage, damn kids these days.
But it wasn’t kids and Bascomb knew it.
Just like he knew the claw marks on the front door weren’t from dogs and the sounds he heard at night were not mice. He would wake up, hear the sound of footsteps, light but audible footsteps coming up the stairs, tapping sounds on the walls and more than once, the chattering of teeth out in the corridor. But he never had the balls to open the bedroom door and see what it was. The stress of it all was taking a toll on him, and Meg and he were fighting something awful—he wanted to move again, but she adamantly refused. It got so bad Meg started sleeping in the spare bedroom.
Bascomb paused, dredging up all the cold filth of his soul now, then went on in a broken, delirious voice: “One night I woke up and I just knew the worst had happened, I knew it. I could feel it in the air, that my world had just gone stark raving mad. I rushed down the hallway and I saw Meg on the spare bed, sprawled out like she’d been dropped from fifty feet up. And I saw, I saw…” Bascomb’s breath was coming in short, sharp gasps now and his eyes were rolling madly. “…I… oh Jesus… oh God in Heaven, I saw, I saw someone bending over her. Except it wasn’t someone, but Piggy… his eyes lit up like full moons, that terrible black grin on his narrow dummy face. He was doing something to Meg, those skinny hands pressed over her mouth and nose… he was suffocating her. I made to rush him, to tear him into kindling, but then he started speaking… speaking in the voice of Eddie Bose, a shrieking voice telling me how Eddie was in Hell, how he was trapped in Hell…”
Kitty tried everything she could to calm Bascomb down, for his face was hooked in a leering mask, his eyes wide and dark and wet, but he shrugged her off. “Maybe… maybe I passed out… I don’t know, I don’t fucking now… fainted or something. When I woke up the dummy was gone and Meg… oh my poor baby, my goddamn wife… her face was twisted up in a sneer, all blue and black and bloated, her tongue hanging from her mouth and her eyes bulging from her head…” Bascomb broke into tears and shuddered, crying into his hands. When he recovered, he lit a cigarette, looking pinched and bloodless and wan like somebody who’d just battled a deadly disease. “The police said she asphyxiated, that she simply stopped breathing probably due to some undiagnosed involuntary motor defect. That was that. But I’ll tell you in all honesty, Miss Seavers, I died that day, too. I was broken by what I saw, by having my life destroyed before my very eyes. Yes, Piggy pulled out my soul, spit on it, fouled it, then put it back inside me and told me to go and live with myself.”
Kitty was stunned, breathless, her brain full of shadows and shapes and crawling things. She wasn’t honestly sure who was more crazy—Bascomb and his tales of vengeful living dummies or herself for believing every word of it. Somebody was screwy here and she was pretty sure it was both of them.
Bascomb blew out a column of smoke. “But that was years ago and I probably hallucinated it all, don’t you think?” He laughed at the idea, as if trying to convey to Kitty that you could talk yourself into just about anything after a time. “And now you come to me and say your sister is missing and maybe Ronny McBane has something to do with it. I’d say you’re probably right. I feel for you and I feel for your sister and that’s why I’m telling you now not to turn a tragedy into a catastrophe. Ronny McBane told me to leave well enough alone and I should have. God help me, but I should have. And now I’m asking you to do the same thing.”
“But…”
“Walk away, honey. For the love of God, just walk away from this while you still can. There’s things at work here. Things you can’t understand.”
And what could Kitty say to that?
Nothing and that’s exactly what she said. She thanked Bascomb for his time and left, thinking she was losing her mind now, too. And behind her, Bascomb was sobbing, all his options run out and his life stolen from him along with his sanity.
7
What now?
What came next?
What was Kitty to do armed with this new, impossible knowledge? Sitting in her hotel room that night she told herself that she was not going to turn away from this. That if she swallowed what Bascomb had said, then she might as well go check herself into the madhouse right now. Because, really, that’s what it all was: madness. Sure, Bascomb was completely convinced of what he was saying and Kitty had been, too… you couldn’t sit there and listen to that nightmare pouring out of him without feeling its effects, without finding yourself drawn down into some fathomless blackness.
But now that she was back in the real world, her thinking mind had questions.
There’s a common thread to all this and it has nothing to do with spooks. Bascomb needs therapy. He’s crazy. That entire Eddie Bose situation must have unhinged him in ways he wasn’t even aware of, she thought. That’s got to be it. Whether Bose ever told him any of that business about spirits and possession is open to conjecture. Regardless, it unhinged him. He let his mind direct all its shock, trauma, and sense of loss at Ronny and the dummy and their twisted, unhealthy relationship. He needed to find a target for his despair and that was the dummy. By that point he’d already talked himself into the idea that it was some evil devil doll. But it was delirium, mania. That’s all.
Yet… despite her very rational turn of mind, she wasn’t entirely convinced. If Bascomb was telling her the truth about the midnight sessions in the family crypt, then there was definitely something weird and downright scary going on with Ronny McBane. That he wasn’t right in the head, she knew from her interview with him, and that he had some inexplicable power over the dummy she had seen firsthand. But that didn’t necessitate anything supernatural. Something was going on here and that common thread led to the disappearance of her sister. She didn’t doubt that. But she wasn’t about to believe that Ronny McBane was anything more than deranged and Piggy was anything more than a dummy.
Now it was time to turn up the heat and dig a little deeper.
She’d hired a private investigator three days before and now it was time to find out what he had learned. And when she did, she’d act on it because that’s the kind of person she was. Her sister Gloria was hardly an angel. Kitty knew some of the dirt and it was pretty much the same old shopworn dirt that came with the entertainment business… but that did not make Gloria a bad person.
Whatever had happened to her, she deserved better.
She deserved to be more than a statistic in the police files.
Kitty took out her cell and looked through her photos. Gloria, Gloria, Gloria. Funny, as a kid, she’d been so jealous of her she sometimes broke out in hives and now she languished over her sister’s photos on a daily basis. Gloria was older than she and far prettier. Just ask anyone. Maybe Mom would never admit it, in so many words, but Gloria got the attention because she not only looked good but looked good regardless of what she was doing. Peeling potatoes, doing the dishes… it didn’t matter: she had looks, grace, and poise. All Kitty ever wanted to be was Gloria because her face opened every door and warmed every heart, it brought the boys in slavering packs that she commanded with but one flick of her slender, graceful hand. It brought friends who wanted to be with her, to be part of her world, to bask in her glow that was golden. It was pure sunshine.