Gethsemane Hall by David Annandale Read Free Book Online Page B

at what you’re wearing.
    André Curval poked his head in the dressing room. He ran La Bourgoise Épatée and was a happy, happy man. “Kristine,” he said. “Phone.”
    She followed him to his office. His desk was an anal retentive’s wet dream of order, pen and papers in perfect regimentation, nothing permitted off the perpendicular. The walls were a collage of old Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergères posters, overlapping and tangling with each other, as if Curval had heard somewhere that impresarios had to be messy, and this was his one concession. Framed behind his desk was his baby: an original poster for the Grand Guignol. Curval waved her to the desk and left her to it. When the woman on the other end of the line introduced herself as one of Adams’s colleagues, she almost hung up. “Stay the hell away from me,” she said. “You people have done enough damage.”
    “You’re probably right,” Meacham answered, hooking Sturghill’s curiosity just enough to keep her listening. “I’m asking you to help undo some of it.”
    “How?”
    “Let me ask you, how devoted are you to his memory?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Are you worried about soiling his life’s work?”
    “For the Agency? Not likely.”
    “That’s not what I meant. I think we both know the Agency was just a job for him.”
    Memories of his ghost obsessions in college. Her frustrations that a man so smart could be goddamn gullible. She had never understood why he’d needed so badly to believe. “Go on,” she said.
    “What did you think about his research?”
    “It was nonsense.”
    “You’re a skeptic.”
    “I’m a magician. You want ghosts, I’ll give you ghosts. I’ll give you the whole rotten parapsychological menu. It isn’t hard. You going to tell me what you want?”
    “I’m trying to clear up what happened to Pete.”
    Sturghill snorted. “Ohhhhh,” she said with sarcastic revelation, “you want the truth.”
    “If it does what I need,” Meacham said, and her cynical honesty disarmed Sturghill. “I’m more interested in shutting down publicity. Ghosts are really good attention-getters. Debunked ghosts, not so much.”
    “Why should I agree to be your debunker? There are plenty of other magicians around.”
    “I thought you might want to know how he really died.”
    “He killed himself. He snapped, probably under the weight of too much bullshit. Spiritual lies or your kind, I don’t know, and I don’t care. Same difference.”
    “Are you sure?”
    Sturghill hesitated. “I’m under contract here,” she said and realized she was setting the terms of her surrender.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Meacham said, and Sturghill found she did believe in the woman’s confidence.
    In the dream, he was back at St. Rose’s Church, going through the funeral again. He knew he was dreaming because he felt the pain of repetition, sensed the sadism of a force that would make him experience ritualized loss once again. Knowing he was dreaming didn’t diminish the pain. The anguish pressed him down, a granite weight, as he tried to stand for the hymn. The injustice of the re-enactment was colossal and could only be for the benefit of a cruel deity’s amusement. Something was laughing at him. He looked up. Standing above the altar was a large wooden crucifix, its Christ bigger than life. The Christ was laughing at him. Now he was looking at the face in close-up, was staring into its wide mouth, could see where the red paint of its throat had chipped, saw lips peeled back from tree-ringed teeth. He couldn’t see Christ’s eyes. He couldn’t see anything but the laugh, the maw of red disappearing to black. The laugh itself was looking at him, the mouth so contorted with mirth that the very expression had become sentient. He tried to yell back at it, to give back his hatred, but the laugh was too huge, too strong, visible even when he closed his eyes. The laugh grew from howl to tsunami roar. Its register climbed