Norman Partridge - Wildest Dreams

He glared back.

I tapped the disconnect and hung him up. As wild chances go, it wasn’t much of one, but it was the best I could do to match my profile on such short notice.

And it did the trick. The guy looked like he was ready to go postal. “Find your own phone, dickhead!” he said. “This one’s going to be tied up for quite a while.”

“I don’t think so.” I smiled. “In fact, I think you’d better get moving, and you’d better do it right now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just left the Cliffside Motor Court. They only had two rooms left. I got the one without the waterbed.”

The guy slammed the handset into the cradle, nearly severing a couple of my fingers. He tried to rush past me but I played it slow as molasses, like I couldn’t figure out which way he was going. I stepped in his way and let him eat my shoulder. Then he moved the other way and so did I, stepping on his right foot, and not at all softly.

I apologized, of course. The writer swore magnificently and hurried off.

I watched him go. He was limping a little bit. He brushed one hand through his hair and swore some more, oblivious to the fact that he’d lost something he was going to miss.

His wallet.

I flipped it open and checked it out.

His name was Clifford Rakes. Clifford’s wallet contained a Florida Driver’s License, Visa and Mastercard and American Express, membership cards for seven different writers’ organizations, business cards for three chiropractors and two psychiatrists, a few mysterious 900 numbers scrawled on the back of a napkin, and a plastic insert that held several photos-Clifford Rakes’s own private stroke gallery.

I’d never run across a man with Clifford’s particular kink before-all the photos in his wallet were clipped from the dust jackets of hardcover books.

They were photos of bestselling women authors, each one backed with a series of carefully clipped blurbs that touted their accomplishments.

Jacqueline Susann. Danielle Steel. Jackie Collins.

Even, God help me, Barbara Cartland.

I closed Clifford’s wallet and slipped it into my pocket.

I didn’t like having those women there.

Not at all.

I tried to forget about Clifford Rakes’s harem and concentrate on the matter at hand. Right now, that meant taking a look at the Cliffside, California phonebook.

There was no listing for a Janice Ravenwood. There was a Ripley, but the first name wasn’t Spider. It was Gilbert.

Gilbert Ripley lived on Surf Glenn Lane, wherever that was. I played around with it. Circe’s bugman bodyguard sure didn’t look like a Gilbert. But I tore out the page just in case, folded it, and tucked it in my shirt pocket. Then I flipped to the yellow pages and checked out the listing for local bookstores.

Cliffside only had one.

The address was on Gull Lane, less than a block away. The place was called Goddess Books. I figured I’d just gotten lucky, twice.

I was right. I only had to walk about twenty feet to find the store, and the display window featured Janice Ravenwood’s books.

Chimes tinkled. The door opened and disgorged a gaggle of twentysomethings dressed in black. Neon hair and piercings and pupils that gleamed like dark little pills. Smiling, they passed me by without a second glance.

One of the young men laughed. “Man, it’s gonna be some freak show.”

“Yeah,” a woman with studded lips agreed. “The circus is definitely comin’ to town.”

“We’re gonna have front row seats,” the man said. “I can’t wait for the fuckin’ funeral.”

“Caskets for two and devil worshippers. You just don’t get entertainment like that anymore.”

The sick thing was that they were right. The circus was coming to town. The tribes were gathering. These kids were one harmless faction, but there were others far more dangerous.

Circe Whistler’s true believers, for instance. I wondered what they would be like, the one’s who had taken Diabolos Whistler’s teachings to heart. One thing was clear-if they knew what I’d done to the man they worshipped as Satan’s chosen one, they wouldn’t pass me by with a smile and a laugh.

Armed with another reason to make my visit brief, I entered the bookstore. The clerk rewarded my bravery with a smile. In boots, a long skirt and flowing scarves, she looked like the lone survivor of seventies’ hippie chic. Either that, or she’d stolen Stevie Nicks’s clothes.

“Are you a reporter?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m looking for ghosts.”

“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow, pleased with the news. Not that I was looking for ghosts, but that I wasn’t a reporter.

It was simple, really. A reporter would want information. He wouldn’t buy anything. I might.

“It’s kind of hard for me to talk about,” I explained. “Especially to a stranger. You see, I was born with a caul-”

“A definite sign of spiritual sensitivity,” she interrupted.

“And lately I’ve had the strangest feelings, as if there are others around me when I know I’m all alone. Sometimes it’s as if I actually see someone…” I laughed. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m crazy.”

“Not at all!”

“Well, it’s just that telling someone that you see ghosts…”

“Around here, it’s the people who don’t see them that I worry about. Cliffside is known in the occult community as a place of dark energies.” She glanced through the window at a passing news van. “It seems that those energies may have gotten a little out of hand last night.”

“It seems.”

“It’s nothing new, really.” She bustled from behind the counter and directed me to a low bookshelf. “Cliffside was born in violence. That’s our history, the root of the energy pattern that determines our collective destiny.”

“How old is the town?”

“Well, we’re dealing with written history, which is sometimes hard to trace. What I can tell you is that the Russians first came to this region in the early 1800s. They built Fort Ross in 1812, and another settlement was established near the present sight of Cliffside in 1815. In 1818, several Russian women accused of practicing witchcraft in the Cliffside settlement were tried and convicted by Russian authorities.”

“Like the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts?”

“What happened here was similar. Six women were executed at Hangman’s Point, just north of town. To this day the hanging tree still stands. Some people claim that the spiritual resonance from the event still permeates everything that happens in Cliffside. I’m open to that kind of logic. I can’t help thinking that last night-”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Well,” she laughed, “it’s only a theory.” She handed me a couple books on the Hangman’s Point witches. “If you like, you can visit the Point. I can give you directions. On nights when the energies are right, people with gifts such as yours have actually seen the shades of the Russian witches.”

The clerk led me to a table at the front of the store, where several Janice Ravenwood books were on display. “These should help you,” she said. “And they’re all autographed. Janice lives in Cliffside.”

I thanked the clerk and looked at the books. Janice had started at the bottom of the book world: Living with the Dead and The Ghost Inside You were both self-published under her own imprint. She turned the second book into a bestseller on the talk show circuit. At least that was the story according to the cover copy for her third, Marble Roads: Journeys From the Grave. New York had snatched that one up. It was all about Janice and her spirit guide, a “noble blonde beauty who died at the dawn of the nineteenth century.” The noble beauty in question was one Natasha Orlovsky, who not too surprisingly was one of the Hangman’s Point witches.