Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(50)
Among the equipment on the helo were two gas-powered portable generators, compressors, hydraulic jacks, and large inflatable bags of tough material that could lift thousand-pound slabs of concrete rubble.
“We’ll be going home in a flying morgue,” Pax said.
Gibb, whose mother sometimes saw his father’s spirit lingering around their property in Georgia, who himself believed in ghosts and hauntings, said, “No big deal, Pax. Valiant boys like us don’t spook easy.”
Pax smiled. “Valiant boys never spook. They do the spooking.”
“Won’t always be true,” Gibb said. “But mostly.”
Bibi tweaked open one of the slats in a window shutter and stared out at the sidewalk and the pier parking lot, where the fog sparkled like diamond dust in the glow of the streetlamps. She stood there until she felt sure that Pet the Cat was not under observation, until she stopped trembling.
She recalled now….
The memory of the crawling intruder in her bedroom had inspired a repetitive nightmare that had tormented her for eight months, until she was six months short of her seventh birthday. Then, for the first time, she used the captain’s magical technique for shedding memories so distressing that they poisoned your life. On an index card, with the captain’s help, she had written a description of the events in her room on that bleak night when Mickey Mouse had failed to keep the boogeyman at bay, not just what it had been but how and why it had happened. Holding the card in a pair of tongs, repeating the six magic words that Captain taught her, she set it afire with a candle flame. When the captain swept up the ashes with his hands and blew them from his hands into the trash compactor, the unwanted memory was blown from her mind.
This slate-wiping trick was a childish device, nothing but a wishing-away, no more magical than were the paper and the fire. But she had wanted so desperately and intensely for it to work that it had worked for many years. Bibi didn’t understand the psychology of repressed memories. Maybe she didn’t want to understand, because if she had deceived herself in this fashion, perhaps she was not, after all, the bring-it-on-I-can-take-anything girl that she had always believed she was.
More than fifteen years after burning that memory in the candle flame—and more than sixteen years since the creepy encounter had occurred—the extraordinary stress of this strange night had brought the dormant memory back into flower. But it had not restored to her all the details of the repressed experience. That long-ago night, she had known what crawled the room and creeped beneath her bed. She had seen it then. But she could not see it now in her mind’s eye.
Maybe sooner than later, the full truth would come back to her. Although if it did, she might wish that it never had.
What she could see clearly now was that some extraordinary event in her past must be related to the remission of her cancer and to all that had occurred since Calida Butterfly had begun to pull Scrabble tiles from that silver bowl. In the dream that was a memory, maybe the crawling thing in her bedroom had in fact been a horror and far beyond ordinary human experience, but perhaps calling it a thing was a way of clouding the truth, an attempt to evade what had actually happened by transforming the threat into a harmless cliché, into the generic monster of all nightmares. She tried to force recollection, to expand the most crucial moments in the dream, but for the time being, no more details could be recovered.
By the time her tremors stopped, it was 4:04 A.M. She returned to her father’s desk, searched the drawers, found a pack of unused flash drives, and made two copies of the 248-page manuscript that was on her laptop. She crawled into the kneehole and, with Scotch tape, securely fixed one flash drive to the underside of the desktop. She slipped the other one into a pocket of her jeans.
She took a shower in the small bathroom adjacent to her father’s office and then put on again the clothes she had been wearing since she’d fled her apartment.
Hungry, she searched the refrigerator in the kitchenette, but found nothing that she wanted to eat except a pint of dark-chocolate ice cream with peanut-butter swirl. Not a healthy breakfast by any standard. So what? If the supernatural insisted on weaving its web through her life, denying her the solace of pure reason—then to hell with such reasonable things as low-fat diets and exercise regimens.
While she ate, she sat at her father’s desk, searching the address book on his computer. Violating his privacy disconcerted her, so that more than once she hesitated to continue. But her future was at stake, if not her life. Her embarrassment never matured into shame, and she searched for the four names that were thus far most central to her dilemma. She found a phone number and address for Calida Butterfly. When she could not find an entry for Ashley Bell or Birkenau Terezin, or Chubb Coy, she was relieved. To have found any of them—especially all of them—would have forced her to question not just the judgment but the reliability of her parents, which would have been painful in the extreme.
Online, she googled Birkenau Terezin. Although she did not find a man with that name, she found two places with a history of evil.
Terezin proved to be a town in the Czech Republic, which seventy-five years earlier had been called Theresienstadt and had been part of German-occupied Bohemia. The Nazis had ejected the seven thousand residents of Terezin in order to use the town as a Jewish ghetto, where as many as fifty-eight thousand were forced to live at one time and where more than one hundred fifty thousand passed through during the war years. They lived there only temporarily, because Terezin was a transport center to which Jews were taken from all over Czechoslovakia and from which they would be conveyed to various death camps as the gas chambers and furnaces could accommodate them. One of the camps to which they were transported by the tens of thousands was Auschwitz-Birkenau.