Bargain With the Gods Read online

  “No,” Marc answered emphatically.

  “Then spare me the rising young star speech. You’re well over thirty and should already be someone by now. But I can certainly understand that with an attitude like yours… you never will be. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I'm really pressed for time.”

  Raymond simply walked towards his office, leaving Marc to be unceremoniously shown out by an assistant, who smiled politely by way of an apology for her employer’s bad manners, indicating that she had been put in this position on countless previous occasions.

  The truth was that Marc had lied to the gallery owner about the possibility that he had seen him before. He had been correct in his assumption that Marc could have been a soap opera star, and might well have seen him on television during a three-year, on and off stint in what was known in the business as a “recurring role” in a hackneyed daytime melodrama called “Pretty Poison.” He had played a “booker” in a modeling agency, who romanced the girls by getting the dirt on them and then blackmailing them into sleeping with him. Marc had loathed the role, but thought of it as the beginning of a great acting career and was willing to spout the trite dialogue and play the shallow, villainous creep in order to build his resume.

  But by the third year, with no development of his character on the show and no other acting offers coming his way, he consulted with his agent to ask his advice. It had become apparent that his agent had noticeably cooled toward him in recent months, and had curtailed the practice of a weekly lunch that Marc knew was a privilege reserved for only his best clients. Instead, he had been granted a five-minute interview with the busy man in his office. When he asked what he could do to expand his career, the nervous, cigar-chewing little man informed him… “this was your career.” He stated it flatly, without even an attempt at softening the blow. He added that the show had decided to write him out because the audience had grown tired of his character. He explained to Marc, with a studied performance of solemn disappointment, that he believed Marc had plateaued in his potential, and therefore, could not justify representing him anymore.

  “You’re a one-trick pony,” the little man had said. “You’ve got no range… and your good looks are only going to get you so far, for so long.”

  “We’re talking about a god damn soap opera here… how about getting me a real part,” Marc had countered the other man’s logic.

  “The truth is… I need to work with someone who is younger… who has more time to go the distance and build a career,” the agent replied coolly. “It’s a shame you didn’t start earlier. You’ve just run out of time, that’s all… you’re just too old to launch.”

  So, that was it. He had walked in the door of the agency as a potentially valuable property, and ten minutes later, walked out a has-been, without representation. For months after that he had tried to contact other agencies, smiling his way through dozens of interviews, but the answer was always the same… “we’ll get back to you.”

  He had told himself, at the time, that he was actually relieved not to be acting anymore, because it would allow him more time to pursue his real passion, which was painting. He had formally studied art when he was in college but had never thought that he could make a decent living producing it. Now, he had no choice. He was running out of options, and like his fat little former agent had reminded him… he was running out of time.

  Chapter Six

  UCLA Campus

  “You're in a black mood,” Elizabeth said, as Marc walked into the lab.

  “I'd hoped it wouldn't show.”

  “To tell you the truth, I'm relieved,” she laughed. “I wondered, after our first meeting, whether your charm was indelible. I was half afraid I'd have to start hiding my infamous mood swings and walk around with a comatose smile on my face all the time.”

  Marc smiled.

  “I'm sorry I'm late. I had to stop off for a meeting on the way.”

  “Actually, you're just in time,” Elizabeth answered, pulling her sweater on over her head and smoothing the sides of her hair. “I got a call earlier to investigate some paranormal phenomena in the Hollywood Hills. We're documenting the authenticity for one of those TV tabloid shows.”

  Marc blinked in silent bewilderment.

  “This is the Parapsychology department,” she said, dropping a small tape recorder into her briefcase. “It's not all card shuffling, red circles and blue squares.”

  As Elizabeth's car climbed Sunset Plaza Drive into the Hollywood Hills, the houses grew bigger and the vegetation around them, charged with the task of insulating the secret lives of the wealthy from the prying eyes of tour bus patrons, grew thicker and more impenetrable. A stillness lay over the lush landscape as each new twist in the road muffled the noise from the boulevard below, leading them into a world where the suffocating dampness of jasmine-scented air hung heavy with whispers of what went on behind these closed doors.

  Marc let out a low whistle of appreciation as they climbed the hill past an estate protected behind a two-story pink marble wall. Elizabeth shot him a look of amusement as she turned the steering wheel to spiral yet higher off the main road onto a long private drive.

  “It's so quiet,” he said. “I guess money not only buys space but the reverence of silence as well.” He had noticed that even the birds had fallen silent as they passed the last turn, as if the air had suddenly become too heavy to carry their songs.

  Elizabeth's hands trembled on the wheel. The car jerked first left, then veered to the right. Her ears filled with a low sustained roar, as if the earth boiled beneath her. She gripped the wheel and concentrated harder on the road in front of her.

  “We’re having an earthquake,” Marc shouted as he reached across and steadied the steering wheel with his right hand. “Stop the car. Elizabeth, stop the car.”

  Only half hearing, she obeyed his command and eased off the road onto the soft shoulder. The forest of vegetation around them shook its dark leaves and echoed the voice from underground that seemed to speak to the intruders, warning them that they had trespassed.

  After an endless instant, the rumble faded and the violent rocking quelled to a strange unsettling wave of almost imperceptible movements, like the subtle breathing of a ship in calm waters. When it was over, Elizabeth found that both of her hands clutched at the fabric of Marc's shirt, pulling a button loose and exposing his chest. He looked down into her face with a kind, steadying smile.

  “It's passed,” he said. “Unless there are aftershocks, I think it's over.”

  Bewildered, Elizabeth looked at her hands gripping the paisley shirt as if they belonged to someone else, and released the pressure on her fingers.

  “An earthquake,” he repeated to mitigate her look of astonishment.

  “Was it?” Elizabeth shaped her words carefully, still not grasping entirely what he had said.

  She had not thought to stop the car, nor of something as mundane as an earthquake. She was certain it was happening in her mind, like it had a few nights ago in her living room, when all the furniture stirred around her, rattling and quaking like Souls in torment. She wondered whether Marc could sense that she, in some unknown way, might have been responsible for what they had just experienced.

  “Something around 5.4 out in the boonies somewhere,” he said without pretense of authority. He saw that Elizabeth's face was the color of paste, and her lips trembled as if a sudden chill had come upon her. “Are you okay? I thought you said you were an old native Californian.”

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “I guess I overreacted.”

  “It's more than all right with me,” Marc smiled convincingly, as he conspicuously did up the front of his shirt.

  At the crest of the hill, the dark lane of protective lindens gave way to a dazzling view of open blue sky and the carefully planned grid of the city shimmering below in the heat of the afternoon desert sun. Looking down, it was like the view from Olympus or the cliffs of Monte Carlo, Knob Hill, or Beacon Hill, any similar elevation in topogra
phy that equated with a rise in wealth and status. At the end of the cul-de-sac, Elizabeth pulled to a stop in front of a sprawling low house, built into the side of the hill, with all the earmarks of trendy design and impeccably tasteful minimalism.

  “Not exactly where one would expect to find a ghost,” Marc said with a questioning look.

  “Remember we are not to assume there is any phenomenon here at all,” Elizabeth reminded him. “We have no evidence that anything even vaguely resembling a haunting has occurred here. So, in the mean time, we will refer to whatever is going on as a disturbance. That's the way we keep from making fools of ourselves. Do you understand?”

  Marc nodded.

  The electric gate opened, and a middle-aged woman in a white maid’s uniform stepped into the garden.

  “From the college or the TV?” she shouted her question.

  “The college,” Elizabeth called back.

  The woman waved for them to follow and hurried back inside. When they stepped into the living room, they found her hopping on one foot, trying to get the other one into a white high-heeled pump.

  “They don't exactly go with the uniform, but they look better,” she confided without explanation. “I was afraid for a minute you was the people from the TV getting here early. I hardly had time to get the house picked up and a face on before you got here.”

  “I'm Elizabeth Winslow and this is my associate Marc Augenbech,” Elizabeth informed the disinterested woman.

  “I didn't disturb the mess upstairs that you're here to film, but there's no sense in letting the rest of the house look like a sty, is there,” the woman stated matter of factly.

  The living room and adjoining dining room were singularly white in color. Every chair and sofa, every table and fresh cut flower were dazzling and pure, as if in spite of the tropical vistas displayed outside the wall of glass, the contents of the entire house had been only recently covered in a shimmering powdering of snow. The ceiling overhead had been silver-leafed as a luxuriant contrast to the room's startling simplicity.

  “Quite a layout,” Marc whispered. “A ghost would have to have a pretty black soul to even be visible in this place.”

  “Do you mind if we have a look at the site of the disturbance... Miss…?” Elizabeth waited for a long moment before the woman supplied her name.

  “Betty... Betty Christopher. I'd have thought you would want to wait until they get here with the cameras and all, but it’s all the same to me.”

  She led the way to an upstairs hallway where the owner’s eleven year-old niece had her bedroom. All along the corridor sheets and towels lay in a tangle, as if left behind in the path of a stampede of some ferocious animal. On the walls were scribbled foul words and obscene phrases directed at the owner of the house and his friends.

  “It makes me blush just to walk by this stuff, “Betty said, pulling in hard on a cigarette that she cupped in her hand. “I was married to a pilot from the Navy and I never heard anything like that, even out of him. Imagine it coming from a child, a girl yet.”

  “I'm afraid I need to ask you to put out the cigarette,” Elizabeth advised.

  Betty shot her a look of annoyance.

  “Now Betty,” Marc said, speaking openly for the first time. “We don't want to interfere with any of the phenomena still lingering around here, like ectoplasm and all that good stuff, do we? How would it look for two big experts like us to be on TV mistaking a puff from a Marlboro for a smoky presence?”

  Betty laughed and extinguished the cigarette against the bottom of her shoe. Elizabeth could not help but notice the flutter of Betty’s eyes, cast in Marc's direction. He covered his mouth with his hand to hide the amused smile forming on his lips. Elizabeth was secretly pleased that his charm had proven, even in this minor application, to be the asset she had hoped it might be.

  “Where is the girl now? “ Elizabeth asked.

  “School, a live-in school,” Betty answered succinctly. “Been gone for the last three days. I wouldn't say she was sorry though. She hates it here and hates her uncle.”

  “Then how do we know that the girl didn't just tear the place up herself and write all this filth just to get back at her uncle?” Marc asked.

  Betty caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror over a hallway console and poked at her eyebrow with the nail of her small finger.

  “Because I saw it,” she answered. “The girl was nowhere to be seen when I came out into this hall to find all the sheets and what-not flying around as if they was in a hurricane. I saw the writing too. It just appeared letter by letter like someone invisible was writing it. I thought my heart would stop. I was so scared I wet myself. I don't mind telling you, but you don't need to tell that to the TV people.”

  Marc and Elizabeth agreed.

  The arrival of the television truck sent Betty racing down to the front door. She greeted them with the enthusiasm of a starlet awaiting a screen test. Marc and Elizabeth were left behind for a welcomed moment undisturbed.

  “Do you feel something here... like a presence or anything?” Marc asked.

  “Even if I did, that's not my job,” Elizabeth stated emphatically. “I never claim to have any psychic abilities. In fact, most of the time I'm sure they would just get in the way. Do you?”

  “Heavens no,” Marc said, holding up his hands in defense. “I'm strictly along for the ride.”

  The footsteps of the camera crew pounded up the stairs, ending their moment of seclusion. A blonde man with a ruddy Nordic complexion was the first to poke his head around the corner.

  “Another dastardly haunting my dear,” he said with a voice mocking formality. He approached and took Elizabeth's hand warmly.

  “This is Tom Crowley,” Elizabeth explained to Marc as the two men shook hands. “He and I have covered a few of these things for the media in the past.”

  “I hope this one's as good as the department store downtown, where we had to call in the exorcists during filming. Remember that damned Irish setter rolling around howling as if it were possessed.”

  “If you remember correctly, it WAS possessed, or so the experts said,” Elizabeth laughed.

  Marc’s expression of bewilderment prompted Tom to explain what had happened.

  “Sometimes, when there is suspected paranormal activity and our sensors and EVPs suggest there might be a presence of some kind lurking about, we bring in dogs to see if they can pick up any hostile unseen energies. In theory, the lurking entities attach themselves to the poor dogs because the dogs are more sensitive to their presence than people are.”

  Elizabeth broke in.

  “You know… you are always hearing that dogs can hear sounds and see things that humans can’t. That’s why people sometimes think that there is a ghost or a spirit present in their house… because their dog won’t go into that particular bedroom or keeps barking at that dark corner down in the basement. Usually, those occurrences are nothing more than what the Chinese would call bad Feng Shui, or trapped energy that can’t flow freely within an area. If energy gets stuck and can’t move, it will invariably, over time, begin to emit an unpleasant vibratory sensation, and sometimes even a bad lingering smell that a dog might become aware of long before a human. Most of the time that’s all that people call us about… but sometimes, there’s more.”

  “Wait a minute,” Marc interrupted. “You mean to tell me you both actually believe in stuff like possession?”

  Tom nodded his head affirmatively.

  “As a function of the mind, yes.” Elizabeth said reassuringly... “No devils, no Satan, just a hook up in the brain that most of our species has severed eons ago. It's a kind of communication with other lower consciousness, the consciousness of objects and elements that our species has long ago stopped hearing. It is also what makes somebody fall down speaking in tongues and scaring the hell out of everyone else. Because the animal kingdom has not undergone individualization the way Humanity has, the dog could still hear these voices and responded to the agitat
ion of anger and fear they create.”

  “Poor pooch,” Tom replied. “I feel really bad every time we drag those poor creatures into a supposedly haunted space. It’s hard to watch them get first startled by the presence of an entity, and then attacked. Sometimes, they bite at their own backs and run around in circles as if they had a demon riding on them, like a bucking bronco.”

  “Remember Tom, we never use the word haunting,” Elizabeth reminded him. “There may be an energy present, something that we can’t readily explain initially, but more often than not, it can be dispelled by raising the vibrational frequency of those involved. Once we raise the frequency above that occupied by the lower elemental vibrations, the darkness drifts away automatically and we close the conduit that connects us to those lower unseen worlds that we perceive to be rife with fear and evil. The evil we swear is right there in front of us is nothing more than a vibration misalignment, throwing us back into a relationship with matter and the voices speaking its demands that we should have disconnected from millennia ago.”

  “Isn't she great?” Tom said looking at Marc. “This lady here has a way of taking something terrifying, happening right before your eyes, and explains it away as matter of factly as if it were the instructions on your income tax return.”

  “To me, that's the truly terrifying subject,” Marc smiled.

  Tom surveyed the litter in the corridor and the messages smeared violently on the walls.

  “I see we either have a very precocious little girl, who might be the reincarnation of a sailor, or a very literary poltergeist with a penchant for four letter words.”

  A tedious hour passed for Marc and Elizabeth as they were buffeted back and forth, out of the way, as the camera crew prepared for the shooting.

  Finally, as the videotape rolled, Betty explained with larger than life animation how she had seen it all happen right before her eyes.

  “It was evening,” she said in a low melodramatic voice, “just before ten, when I went up to check on the sleeping girl. When I got to the top of the stairs, without warning, the door to the hall linen closet opened by itself and blankets and sheets came flying out. They started twisting themselves around me, up my legs and around my waist. I tried to run, get the hell out of there, but a sheet just flew out of nowhere, wrapped itself around my ankles and took me down. I was scared to death.” Betty paused and smiled inappropriately into the camera as she continued to recount her ordeal. She went on to explain that for weeks running, her sleep had been interrupted by the appearance of a young woman about sixteen years old, who appeared at the entrance to the bathroom door and approached her bed, carrying a large butcher knife at her side.