Haunted Air

"Maybe not. We look hard enough, we might find that some of these blocks aren't mortared like the others. That they slide out and there's some sort of hidey hole behind them. Who knows what we'll find there? Maybe what's left of Tara Portman."

Charlie said, "It's not Tara Portman, I tell you, it's a-"

"Wait." Lyle held up a hand. "Something's happening."

Jack looked around. He hadn't heard anything.

"What?"

"Don't you feel it?"

Jack glanced at Charlie who looked just as confused.

"Feel what?"

Lyle turned in a slow circle. "Something's coming."

Then Jack felt it too. A chill, a sense of gathering, as if all the warmth in the room were being sucked into its center to drain away through an invisible black hole there, leaving a steadily growing knot of cold in its place.

Cold stabbed Jack high on his right thigh, so cold it burned. He clutched at the spot and felt a frozen lump in the pocket. The key ring! He clenched his teeth as he dropped to his knees-God, it hurt-and clawed at the pocket, reaching in, trying to grab the key ring but the skin of his fingers stuck to it like a wet tongue to a frozen wrought iron fence. He peeled his fingers away, losing some skin, and yanked at the fabric, pulling it out, inverting the pocket. Finally the Roger Rabbit figure appeared and tumbled toward the floor.

But it never landed. Instead it dipped and then rose and darted toward the center of the cellar. There it hovered in the air. Jack saw a rime of frost form along the figure's limbs, then the head, finally engulfing the trunk.

A high keening wail began to echo the air, growing in pitch and volume as Jack pushed himself back up to his feet. The frost thickened on the Roger Rabbit figure, and Jack thought he heard the plastic creak and crinkle as it became brittle from the intense cold.

Suddenly the wail became a screech of rage as Roger's head snapped off and hurtled across the cellar. It struck one of the granite blocks and shattered into powder that scattered and swirled like drifting snow. Then an arm snapped off and flashed in the opposite direction, just missing Charlie's head. Jack ducked as an arm narrowly missed him.

More pieces flew as the frenzied screech rose in pitch and volume. And then there were no more pieces and yet still the enraged howl rose until Jack had to cover his ears. The sound became a physical thing, battering him until...

It stopped.

As suddenly as the sound had begun, silence returned. The sense of presence dissipated as well until Jack felt that the cellar was again occupied by just the three of them.

He shook his head to relieve the ringing in his ears. It didn't work.

Lyle and Charlie looked shaken, but Jack felt oddly calm. Deadly calm.

"What the hell was that all about?" Lyle said.

"Yeah," Charlie said. "What'd you have in your pocket? Looked like that cartoon rabbit..."

"Roger Rabbit."

"Yeah."

Lyle snorted a laugh and shook his head. "Roger Rabbit. Just the sort of thing to drive the average demon into a frenzy."

Charlie took a step toward his brother. "Warning you, Lyle-"

Jack jumped in. "Tara Portman's father told Gia that Tara was a Roger Rabbit fan. I was wondering if that key ring might be hers."

"Judging from what just happened," Lyle said, bending and rubbing his finger through the powdery remains of one of Roger's legs, "I think she answered you with a very big yes."

"That she did," Jack said, nodding. "And she also identified her killer."

But his satisfaction at solving the mystery was marred by the unanswered question of how and why he'd come to be involved.

12

Gia sat in a pew three-quarters back from the altar under the vaulted ceiling and waited for peace.

She'd taken a slow walk from Sutton Square down to St Patrick's Cathedral. She wasn't sure why she'd come, hadn't consciously headed this way. She'd simply gone for a walk as a break from painting and found herself on Fifth Avenue. She ambled past St. Pat's and then doubled back to visit, hoping to find some of the serenity and i

The sense of isolation was welcome, though. Here in this huge, stone-wrapped space she felt cut off from the bustling reality just beyond the tall oak doors and insulated from the need that called to her from that house in Astoria.

She sat alone and watched the gaggles of tourists wandering in and out, the Catholics blessing themselves with holy water and lighting candles, the rest standing around and gawking at the gothic arches, the stations of the cross spaced along the side walls, the larger-than-life statues, the giant crucifix, the gilded altar.

The images drew Gia back to her years in Our Lady of Hope grammar school in Ottumwa. Not a particularly Catholic town, but then Iowa wasn't a particularly Catholic state. There'd been enough Catholic kids to fill the local church school though, and keep the nuns of the convent busy as teachers. Of all that black-robed crew, she best remembered Sister Mary Barbara-known to all the kids as Sister Mary Barbed-wire. Not because she'd liked the nun; quite the opposite: she'd scared the hell out of Gia.

Sister Mary Barbed-wire had been the Catholic equivalent of a Baptist hellfire preacher, always harping on the awful punishments awaiting si

Luckily Our Lady of Hope hadn't had a high school; that allowed Gia to escape to the secular den of iniquity known as the public school system. But she'd still remained a practicing Catholic, attending CCD classes and CYO dances.

Sometime during the eighties, however, she drifted away and never returned. Not that she stopped believing in God. She couldn't buy into atheism, or even agnosticism. God existed, she was sure. She was also pretty sure He didn't care much about what went on here. Maybe He watched, but He certainly didn't act.

To her child's eyes the Old Testament God had appeared stern and imposing; now He seemed like a cranky, petulant adolescent with poor impulse control, creating cataclysms, sending plagues, striking down an entire nation's first-born males. She found the New Testament God much more appealing, but somewhere along the way the whole redemption and damnation thing had stopped making sense to her. You didn't ask to be born but once you were you had to toe the belief line or spend eternity suffering in hell. Easy to believe back in the Old Testament days when He burned bushes, parted seas, and sent commandments on stone tablets. But these days God had become remote, no longer weighing in on human affairs, yet still demanding faith. It didn't seem fair.

Of course, if You're God, You don't have to be fair. You hold all the marbles. What You say goes.

Still...

Gia had tried to come back to the church after Vicky was born. A child should have some moral foundation to build on, and the church seemed a tried and true place to start. In the back of her mind too had been the idea that if Gia returned to the fold, God would protect Vicky.

But Gia couldn't make it work. And it was terrifyingly obvious that God did not protect children. They died from brain tumors and leukemias and other cancers, from being run over, shot, electrocuted, dropped from buildings, incinerated in house fires, and in other uncountable, unimaginable ways. Clearly i

So where was God?

Did the Born Agains have it right? Jesus was their personal savior who watched their every move and answered their prayers? They prayed to Jesus that their old jalopy would start on a cold morning and if it did they praised Him and gave Him thanks for the rest of the day. Gia couldn't get comfortable with a view of God that turned the Creator of the Universe into some sort of cosmic errand boy for His True Believers. Children were starving, Tara Portmans were being abducted and murdered, political prisoners were being tortured, wives were being abused, but God ignored their pleas for relief in order to answer the True Believers' prayers for good weather on the day of the church picnic. Did that make sense?