If Mrs. Morton would stop verbally jacking off her husband and son, this would all be done so much more quickly, but then Chess figured it was just about the only sex the woman got. Mr. Morton, silent and pale in his sweater-vest, looked like the kind of man who ate ribs with a knife and fork. Not exactly a wild beast in the bedroom, she guessed, but then what did she know?
“Did you actually see the specter, Mrs. Morton? Or was it just Albert?”
“Well, I didn’t see it that time, no. But he described it so well I felt like I did. Then later I did see it. In the bedroom. Just as I was drifting off to sleep.”
“And what did it look like?”
“It was just horrible. Like a…a ghoul, or something. It made the room so cold, it felt so…evil.”
She gave a delicate shudder. “Gray, and sort of wrinkly. Moldy, if you know what I mean. It wore just rags, might have been a dress once but I couldn’t tell. I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman, but it had been dead a long time. Did it escape from the City of Eternity? I thought they couldn’t escape from there, but then if they really couldn’t we wouldn’t be haunted, right?”
“Some spirits never made it to the City. We’re still cleaning up the old religions’ messes.”
Chess made another note on her pad. Intensely interested in placing blame on the Church. Cannot describe entity with any degree of detail. Then, below that, she added: Vodka. Laundry soap. Toothpaste.
Mrs. Morton must have seen something in Chess’s blank expression, because she added, “Not that we blame the Church! Of course we don’t. But this…this is pretty scary. Poor Albert is afraid to sleep in his own bedroom, and none of us are too comfortable being here by ourselves, and, well, this is our home. And we can’t even sell it, not with some unnie hanging around!” Her hand flew to her mouth.
Chess ignored both the epithet and the exaggerated look of shock on Mrs. Morton’s carefully painted face. When it came down to it, “unnie”—short for “undead”—was one of the less offensive terms she’d heard for them. Sure, it was worse than the Church-sanctioned “ghost,” “spirit,” “specter,” or “entity.” But as slang went it was pretty harmless.
“We hope you can help us.” Mr. Morton spoke up for the first time, his voice surprisingly deep and pleasant for such a slight man.
“I’m sure I can. Perhaps you could show me all the places where the entity has appeared? I’d also like to see any locations where its presence was felt in some other way. Sounds, any symbols etched on the walls or maybe in the mist on the shower doors or mirror? They often try to communicate like that.”
The Mortons stared at her, their eyes so wide they looked artificial.
“Has anything appeared on any other walls or windows? Any feelings of being watched? Movement seen out of the corner of your eye? Odd smells? Touches? Anything of that nature, now’s the time to show me where it happened.”
She pulled her tape recorder and Spectrometer out of her bag and switched them on.
The Mortons didn’t move. Chess fought the urge to look down and see if something had spilled on her blouse when she wasn’t paying attention.
“Is there a problem?”
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Morton said. “I just…you scared me. We haven’t had anything as bad as some of that. Is that going to happen?”
“It might.” Chess watched them carefully. Sometimes she could see the little wheels spinning in their heads as they planned how to stage a more potent manifestation. She’d caught someone out that way in her second year of work, when she’d finished her list and the client had blurted out “Messages in frost? I never even thought of doing that!”
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Morton clutched at her sweater. Her blue eyes examined the room, sweeping back and forth as though something was going to materialize and jump out at her any second. Either she was a great actress, or she was genuinely frightened. Was it possible the son—Albert—was doing it without his parents’ knowledge? Or that Mr. Morton was behind it? That had happened once, too, a husband faking a spooking so his wife would be too afraid to ask for the house when he left her for another woman.
She scribbled on her pad: Girlfriend Mr. M?
“I’m sure we can take care of it before things start going really badly,” Chess said. “Now, if you could please show me around the house…?”
All three of the Mortons came along on the tour, much to Chess’s chagrin. Extra bodies crowding around her in small spaces like the Morton’s cramped hallway were not what she needed in the slightly nervous state the Nips had left her in. And if little Albert accidentally-on-purpose brushed against her breast again she was going to hit him. The quality and quantity of porn she imagined she’d find under his bed, when she got around to searching, would probably be staggering.
Mrs. Morton’s pale fingers trailed over the picture frames in the hall. “We trace our family back over three hundred years,” she said. “Roots are so important, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.” She wondered what Mrs. Morton would say if Chess told her she had no idea who her parents had been, much less anyone further back.
Her tattoos didn’t so much as tingle, nor did the Spectrometer beep, when they entered a small bedroom on the right, which looked as though some bizarrely pretentious child lived in it. Batman wallpaper warred with posters of mallard ducks and prints from the Tate gallery. A teddy bear slumped on the dresser next to a rack of silver cuff links. Books tilted on the scarred pine bookcase like crooked teeth, but when Chess stepped closer there were dust lines on the shelves. Someone had recently—probably very recently—removed quite a few titles.
Little Albert was into sci-fi and technology. All the big fantasy names were there—Tolkien, Card, Anthony, Weis—along with Sagan, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Straub…but no how-to tech books, not even a single Idiot’s Guide, which was unusual because the more she looked around the room the more she noticed the bundle of cables peeking out from under the bed, the empty shelf under the flat-screen TV in the corner. Albert looked like an A/V Club boy, and A/V Club boys read books about hacking and splicing and F/X. They read about digital imagery and home theaters and how to rewire speakers so they went up to eleven.
When she came back later, or the next night, she’d have a more thorough look around.
She let the Mortons lead her through the spare bedroom and the bathroom, into the master bedroom. The signs of desperate upward mobility were strewn all over the house as if an L.L.Bean catalog had exploded; a beautiful dresser in a bedroom with mismatched bedside tables, expensive lotions on a cracked bathroom countertop. The copy of The Book of Truth next to the bed had been arranged so the light shone off the gold lettering and reflected back at her when she stepped through the doorway.
“This is where it was.” Mrs. Morton waved a nervous hand at a spot on the floor to her left, about a foot from where she was standing. There was something vaguely familiar about the movement, about Mrs. Morton herself. Maybe the family really did attend Church sometimes and Chess had seen her there. “I was in bed, there, like I said, and it just…hovered here, and stared at me. It looked so angry, I just didn’t know what to do…”
This was ridiculous, a waste of her time. She switched off the Spectrometer and tape recorder, shoved them both back into her bag.
“Well, I’ve seen enough for now. If we could go back to the living room and you could sign the complaint, we’ll get started processing it.”
“But…you didn’t see the ghost, does that matter?”
Chess pulled the zipper on her purse shut, realizing as she did that her hand was shaking slightly. She glanced at the clock by the bed. Five