Staked
Page 10“I didn’t know such a thing was possible.”
“Neither did Luchta until he tried. Look, Brighid wants the Druids to win this time. These stakes were her idea, and Luchta made it happen.”
“Brighid’s idea, eh? Well. I need to pay a visit to your mother in any case. I have to talk to her about starting a grove here, and maybe she knows where Siodhachan is.”
“I don’t think she does. I brought all the stakes to you because we thought you would know where to find him.”
“I can try calling him,” Hal says, pulling out his cell phone. We watch in silence as he taps at the screen. He uses the speaker function so we can all hear, but the call goes straight to voice mail. “Nope. Either his phone’s off, or it’s dead, or he’s not on this plane,” he says.
“Oh, I’ll bet you he’s on this plane,” I growl, feeling the old ire swelling inside when I know Siodhachan’s up to his shenanigans again. “He’s out there somewhere right now with his cheeky hound, doing something dumber than eating a bowl full of llama shite, I guarantee it.”
CHAPTER 5
Purposefully seeking out a poltergeist might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. Well, that and growing muttonchops.
When I woke and checked the man in the mirror, the areas where I’d applied O’Sullivan’s Patented Miracle Beard Tonic had outgrown the top half of my sideburns by about half an inch. That required some trimming. Then I had to flatten my hair down with some greasy goo, part it on the left, and plaster a curl of it on my forehead.
“Can’t believe it ever caught on with humans,” I said, fetching my gray suit from the closet. It took me a couple of tries to get the tie looking right—it had been a lifetime since I wore one.
I took Oberon out for breakfast and a walk, during which he got admiring stares and I got furtive, uncertain glances. The morning’s newspaper declared that a strange rash of ritualistic murders had been carried out yesterday in America and Mexico, mostly in the Pacific time zone, where an alarming number of rich one-percenters had been stabbed in the heart and then beheaded. The Hammers of God had managed to score a few for the good guys, I saw.
I set Oberon up in the room afterward with the DO NOT DISTURB sign and a food channel on the television, his favorite babysitter. He was currently into a show about strange foods from around the world—strange, that is, to American tastes. He would tell me all about them and then demand to be taken to various destinations to try the live squid or the roasted locusts or whatever.
I was careful to keep from him how worried I was about this operation. There were so many things that could go wrong, and I probably hadn’t thought of them all. My hound was happy when I left him, though, highly amused by Americans trying the Korean dish called hongeo, or skate, which is quite possibly the nastiest food in the world.
My first stop was a used bookstore, where I found an old edition of the King James Bible with a red ribbon for a bookmark. I brought that with me instead of my sword, Fragarach. Gwendolyn’s fiancé knew nothing of swords but had a thing for gospels.
Then there was no more time to waste: Werner Drasche was doubtless in Toronto by now and looking for me, so it was time to visit the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor Street, specifically Ihnatowycz Hall, the modern, sponsored name of the old building where Gwendolyn had died in the nineteenth century and become the Lady in Red, and where, some seventy years later, she had mistaken me for her fiancé, Nigel.
Once I walked into the building, a funny thing happened: People stopped staring at me as if I were a walking fashion faux pas and smiled at me instead. In the music world, eccentric dress was a marker of genius. Or something.
“Must be a pianist,” I heard one student whisper to another as they passed me on the grand staircase.
The building had far fewer unoccupied rooms than in the fall of 1953. People were practicing in them or taking in musical theory lectures and living a blissful life of art and chair politics in whatever orchestra or symphony they belonged to. And many of the smaller rooms were faculty offices now.
There was nothing available on the second floor, where Gwendolyn originally found me, so I climbed the stairs to the third floor and found an unoccupied classroom. The number of desks that could be tossed at me was unsettling, but I chose one near the door and knelt down next to it, Bible in hand, and spoke aloud.
“Gwendolyn? It’s me, Nigel. I would like to speak with you, please.” I kept going on in that vein for a long while, repeating my name and hers and my wish to speak. My knees began to throb after an hour, and I considered that perhaps Gwendolyn had moved on. It would hardly be surprising—what would keep her lingering here after the supposed betrayal she’d suffered?
“Well,” I said, getting to my feet. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“Sssssorry for what?” an ethereal voice whispered, and there, across the room, a red vision floated above the professor’s lectern.
“Sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. When you were trampled by that horse in the street.”
“That is alllll?”
“I’ve never forgiven myself for that. Your death could have been prevented if I had only come out to meet you.”
“What? There is no other woman. There never has been and never will be.”
“I ssssaw you, Nigel! I ssssaw you with herrr!” Furniture shifted around, scraping against the tile. I was going to be bombarded with flying desks soon. Before that became too much to bear, I had to convince her that she hadn’t seen her Nigel with another woman—for she truly hadn’t. He’d been faithful to her, as far as I could discover from my historical research.
My plan relied on the idea that ghosts have one thing in common with hounds—they’re not too clear on the passage of time. As far as Gwendolyn was concerned, Nigel was not only still alive, he was still attending his Baptist seminary in the nineteenth century. Things like cars driving on paved roads outside and electricity inside—those simply didn’t penetrate whatever consciousness she had. The only thing that mattered to her was her relationship with Nigel, which was probably why she ignored or simply did not see minor differences in our appearance and voice. If she was ever to have a chance of moving on, she needed to repair that relationship with Nigel and get a sense of closure.
So now I had to be the man himself.
“I don’t know what you saw, Gwendolyn, but whoever it was, it wasn’t me! I would never do that to you. There is a lad here at the college who looks a lot like me, though. Maybe you mistook him for me.”
“Nnno! It was you! You were wearing that suit! Sssshe kept saying your naaame. Sssshe called you Nigel!”
Desks levitated off the floor, twitching and spinning, and one of them rocketed at my head as I shouted a desperate response and ducked. It still clipped me painfully on the forearm I had raised to protect my head. “Gray suits are common as corn, Gwendolyn! And whoever the woman was that you saw called him Nigel, not me. Did he say his name was Nigel?”