Burial by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

you’re good. You know you are.’
    â€˜Maybe it’s time you saw the problem for yourself,’ Michael suggested.
    â€˜For sure,’ I said, and followed him closely to the door.
    He turned, his hand on the handle, and stared at me.
    â€˜You still have a choice. I mean, I begged Karen to get you here, but you don’t have to get yourself involved with this unless you really want to.’
    â€˜Michael — I meant what I said,’ I replied. ‘There isn’t a psychic manifestation alive or dead that can’t be dealt with. All you have to do is make sure that you apply the appropriate ritual of exorcism to the appropriate manifestation.’
    â€˜All right,’ said Michael, and opened the door.
    I stepped in, and found myself in a large family dining room. It was chilly, unexpectedly chilly, and the smell that I had noticed in the living room was very much stronger. It was a really strange smell, like burned herbs and sweat and dust. It reminded me of something … I couldn’t think what … but something that you would never normally associate with East 17th Street on a sweaty August afternoon. It was a smell from very long ago and very far away.
    The dining room was dimly lit by a five-branched chandelier, fitted with low-wattage bulbs, and that was all. The dimness did nothing to enhance the decorations, which — like the decorations in the living room — were staid beyond the Greenbergs’ age — brown patterned wallpaper and thick brown carpet. But it was the furniture which caught my attention first. It was all crowded against the left-hand wall, as if it had been heaped up at a second-hand store, or a saleroom. The dining table, the chairs, the sideboard — even the flower-vases and the cutlery. Everything had been crammed higgledy-piggledy up against the wall.
    Even the paintings on the wall were hanging sideways.
    Only one chair remained in the centre of the room; and on that chair sat a woman in a grubby white towelling bathrobe. Her face was grey and papery. It looked as fragile as a wasps’ nest, as if you could have pierced her cheek with your finger. Her eyes were wide open but milky-white, because she had rolled her pupils up into her head. She was breathing steadily, but her breathing was fast and threatening, rather than peaceful. Her hair was wildly tangled and bone-white.
    I turned to Michael in shock. The room itself had the feeling of a tightly-compressed shock.
    â€˜Who’s that?’ I asked him, in a hoarse whisper.
    Michael took off his glasses, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘That’s Naomi, that’s my wife.’

Three
    I stepped into the dining room and cautiously looked around. This time, I wasn’t acting the part of cautious psychic. I was living out the part of shit-scared psychic. The air was unnaturally chilled and the light was oppressively dim, and right in front of me sat a white-haired woman clutching her chair as if she were determined that nobody was going to prize her free from it, no matter what.
    With her white, blank, terrifying eyes.
    With her lips stretched back across her teeth as if she were going to snatch a bite out of anybody who tried to come close.
    She was so tense, I felt that I could have hit her with a poker and she would have cracked in half. Fallen apart, like a broken bell-casting.
    â€˜How long has she been like this?’ I asked Michael, leaning forward to take a closer look at her. Thinking,
shit, give me Mrs John F. Lavender any day of the week — this is serious shit.
    â€˜Three weeks, ever since it happened. She won’t move.’
    â€˜What do you mean, she won’t move?’
    â€˜She won’t get off the chair. She sits on it twenty-four hours.’
    â€˜Has she eaten?’
    â€˜I’ve fed her, she allows me to feed her, and to give her water.’
    â€˜What about …?’
    â€˜You mean hygiene? I just