The Unquiet-CP-6 by John Connolly Read Free Book Online

Parkinson’s, sometimes suffered from an ailment called Lewy body dementia, which caused them to see foreshortened bodies. That explained the prevalence of stories in which the spirits allegedly glimpsed appeared to be cut off at the knees. He spoke of other possible triggers, of diseases of the temporal lobe, of tumors and schizophrenia, and of depression. He described hypnagogic dreams, those vivid images that come to us in the spaces between sleeping and waking; and yet, he concluded, he still could not entirely explain away all reported supernatural experiences using science alone. There was too much that we did not know, he said, about the workings of the brain, about stress and depression, about mental illness and the nature of grief. The psychic, by contrast, was an old fraud, full of the nonsense that seems to come with the worst of her kind. She spoke of beings with unfinished business, of seances and messages from the “world beyond.” She had a cable TV show and a premium-rate telephone line, and she performed her routine for the poor and the gullible at community halls and Elk lodges across the Northeast.
    She said that ghosts haunt places, not people. I think that is a lie. Someone once told me that we create our own ghosts, that, as in dreams, each one of them is a facet of ourselves: our guilt, our regrets, our grief. Perhaps that may be an answer, of sorts. Each of us has our ghosts. Not every one of them is of our own creation, and yet they find us all, in the end.

    Rebecca Clay sat in her kitchen. There was a glass of red wine before her, although it remained untouched, and all of the lights were extinguished.
    She should have asked the detective to stay with her. The man had never approached her house, and she was confident in the security of its doors and windows and the efficiency of its alarms, particularly after they had been checked by a consultant recommended by the detective, but as the night had drawn in such precautions began to seem insufficient, and now she was aware of every noise in the old building, every settling of boards and rattling of cupboards as the wind played through the house like an errant child.
    The window above the kitchen sink was very dark, quartered by the white frame, with nothing visible beyond. She might have been floating through the blackness of space, with only the thinnest of barriers separating her from the vacuum beyond, were it not for the gentle exclamation of unseen waves breaking upon the beach. For want of something better to do, she brought the glass to her lips and sipped carefully, noticing just too late the musty smell that arose from the wine. She grimaced, then spit it back into the glass and rose from the table. She walked to the sink and poured the liquid away before turning on the faucet and washing the red splashes from the metal. Leaning down, she sipped water straight from the flow, cleansing her mouth of the taste. It reminded her, uncomfortably, of the way her ex-husband had tasted, and the rankness of his kisses in the night as their marriage entered its final, terminal decline. She knew that he had detested her then just as much as she now hated him and he had wanted to be rid of this burden that they shared. Rebecca had no longer wished to offer her body to him, and had felt not even the tiniest residue of the attraction she had once enjoyed, but he had found a way to separate love and need. She wondered, sometimes, of whom he fantasized as he moved upon her. Sometimes, his eyes grew vacant, and she knew that even as his body was bound to hers, his true self was far away. At other times, though, there was an intensity to his gaze, a kind of loathing as he stared down at her that made the sexual act feel like a violation. There was no love in it then, and as she looked back upon those years, she found it hard to remember if there had ever been love there.
    She had tried to do the same, of course, to conjure up images of past or potential lovers