Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

The man on the phone, I ask him to please hold. I press the redHOLD button.

Mona rolls her eyes and says, «The biting ghost is in the Spanish house just off Millstone Boulevard.» She starts writing something with a red felt-tip pen, writing so the words spiral out from the center of the page.

I'm counting 9, counting 10, counting 11 …

Squinting at the lines of faint writing on the page she has spread against the window, Helen says, «Tell them I'm out of the real estate business.» Trailing her finger along under each faint word, she says, «The people at Pender Court, they have teenagers, right?»

I ask, and the man on the phone says yes.

And Helen turns to look at Mona in the backseat, Mona flicking another rolled booger, and Helen says, «Then tell him a bathtub full of human blood is the least of his problems.»

I say, how about we just keep driving? We could hit a few more libraries. See some sights. Another carnival, maybe. A national monument. We could have some laughs, loosen up a little. We were a family once, we could be one again. We still love each other, hypothetically speaking. I say, how about it?

Mona leans forward and yanks a few strands of hair out of my head. She leans and yanks a few pink strands from Helen.

And Helen ducks forward over the grimoire, saying, «Mona, that hurt.»

In my family, I say, my parents and I, we could settle almost any squabble over a rousing game of Parcheesi.

The strands of pink and brown hair, Mona folds them inside the page of spiral writing.

And I tell Mona, I just don't want her to make the same mistakes I made. Looking at her in the rearview mirror, I say, when I was about her age, I stopped talking to my parents. I haven't talked to them in almost twenty years.

And Mona sticks a baby pin through the page folded with our hair inside.

Helen's phone rings again, and this time it's a man. A young man.

It's Oyster. And before I can hang up, he says, «Hey, Dad, you'll want to make sure and read tomorrow's newspaper.» He says, «I put a little surprise in it for you.»

He says, «Now, let me talk to Mulberry.»

I say her name's Mona. Mona Sabbat.

«It's Mona Steinner,» Helen says, still holding a page of the grimoire to the window, trying to read the secret writing.

And Mona says, «Is that Oyster?» From the backseat, she reaches around both sides of my head, grabbing for the phone and saying, «Let me talk.» She shouts, «Oyster! Oyster, they have the grimoire!»

And me trying to steer the car, the car veering all over the highway, I flip the phone shut.

Instead of the stain on my apartment ceiling, there's a big patch of white. Pushpinned to my front door, there's a note from the landlord. Instead of noise, there's total quiet. The carpet is crunchy with little bits of plastic, broken-down doors and flying buttresses. You can hear the filament buzzing in each lightbulb. You can hear my watch tick.

In my refrigerator, the milk's gone sour. All that pain and suffering wasted. The cheese is huge and blue with mold. A package of hamburger has gone gray inside its plastic wrap. The eggs look okay, but they're not, they can't be, not after this long. All the effort and misery that went into this food, and it's all going in the garbage. The contributions of all those miserable cows and veals, it gets thrown out.

The note from my landlord says the white patch on the ceiling is a primer coat. It says when the stain stops bleeding through, they'll paint the whole ceiling. The heat's on high to dry the primer faster. Half the water in the toilet's evaporated. The plants are dry as paper. The trap under the kitchen sink's half empty and sewer gas is leaking back up. My old way of life, everything I call home, smells of shit.

The primer coat is to keep what was left of my upstairs neighbor from bleeding through.

Out in the world, there's still thirty-nine copies of the poems book unaccounted for. In libraries, in bookstores, in homes. Give or take, I don't know, a few dozen.

Helen's in her office today. That's where I left her, sitting at her desk with dictionaries open around her, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit dictionaries, translation dictionaries. She's got a little bottle of iodine and she's using a cotton swab to daub it on the writing, turning the invisible words red.

Using cotton swabs, Helen's daubing the juice from a purple cabbage on other invisible words, turning them purple.

Next to the little bottles and cotton swabs and dictionaries sits a light with a handle. A cord trails from it to an outlet in the wall.

«A fluoroscope,» Helen says. «It's rented.» She flicks a switch on the side and holds the light over the open grimoire, turning the pages until one page is filled with glowing pink words. «This one's written in semen.»

On all the spells, the handwriting's different.

Mona, at her desk in the outer office, hasn't said a nice word since the carnival. The police scanner is saying one emergency code after another.

Helen calls to Mona, «What's a good word for “demon”?»

And Mona says, «Helen Hoover Boyle.»

Helen looks at me and says, «Have you seen today's paper?» She shoves some books to one side, and under them is a newspaper. She flips through it, and there on the back page of the first section is a full-page ad. The first line says:

Attention, Have You Seen This Man?

Most of the page is an old picture, my wedding picture, me and Gina smiling twenty years ago. This has to be from our wedding announcement in some ancient Saturday edition. Our public declaration of commitment and love for each other. Our pledge. Our vows. The old power of words. Till death do us part.

Below that, the ad copy says, «Police are currently looking for this man for questioning in connection with several recent deaths. He is forty years old, five feet ten inches tall, weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, and has brown hair and green eyes. He's unarmed, but should be considered highly dangerous.»

The man in the photo is so young and innocent. He's not me. The woman is dead. Both of these people, ghosts.

Below the photo, it says, «He now goes by the alias “Carl Streator.” He often wears a blue tie.»

Below that, it says, «If you know his whereabouts, please call 911 and ask for the police.» If Oyster ran this ad or the police did, I don't know.

Helen and me standing here, looking down at the picture, Helen says, «Your wife was very pretty.»

And I say, yeah, she was.

Helen's fingers, her yellow suit, her carved and varnished antique desk, they're all stained and smudged red and purple with iodine and cabbage juice. The stains smell of ammonia and vinegar. She holds the fluoroscope over the book and reads the ancient peter tracks.

«I've got a flying spell here,» she says. «And one of these might be a love spell.» She flips back and forth, each page smelling like cabbage farts or ammonia piss. «The culling spell,» she says, «it's this one here. Ancient Zulu.»

In the outer office, Mona's talking on the phone.

Helen puts her hand on my arm and pushes me back, a step away from her desk, she says, «Watch this,» and stands there, both hands pressed to her temples, her eyes closed.

I ask, what's supposed to happen?

Mona hangs up her telephone in the outer office.

The grimoire open on Helen's desk, it shifts. One corner lifts, then the opposite corner. It starts to close by itself, then opens, closes and opens, faster and faster until it rises off the desk. Her eyes still closed, Helen's lips move around silent words. Rocking and flapping, the book's a shining dark starling, hovering near the ceiling.

And the police scanner crackles and says, «Unit seventeen.» It says, «Please proceed to 5680 Weeden Avenue, Northeast, the Helen Boyle real estate office, and apprehend an adult male for questioning …»