Chapter 6
Six
Colin’s house didn’t have a yard—it had grounds. A fieldstone wall that was almost eight feet high surrounded the sprawling, wooded property. The briars that gave the house
its name were piled up against the inside of that wall, black, thorny, and bare this late in the year. Arthur steered the
Christmobile between the stone columns flanking the drive. A pair of wrought-iron dragons squatted atop them. Later, Arthur
wondered if that was a coincidence.
For all that, the house was surprisingly modest: a two-story brick Federal-style building, barely large enough for a family
of eight and a dozen servants. The slate roof was exactly the same icy gray-blue as the ocean, which was visible in glints
through the trees behind the house.
They piled out, Arthur, Van, and the girls, and mounted the sort of granite steps one usually finds at the entrance of a nineteenth-century
courthouse. Colin opened the front door before they could pound the big brass knocker. He was wearing a black turtleneck,
tucked into his jeans, his head as sleek as a bullet.
Arthur craned his neck, taking in the white Doric columns holding up the roof of the portico and the great fan-shaped window
above the front door, which looked like it might be Tiffany. “Does your granddad have a lot of money?” he asked. A tactless
thing to say, and he knew it the moment it was out of his mouth.
Colin wasn’t bothered. “Enough is as good as a feast,” he said, and let them into the lobby.
That was what it felt like, not a front room, but a lobby. The floor was done in large, rough flagstones. A grand staircase
of darkest mahogany wound upstairs to a gallery above.
“What did your granddad do?” Donna asked.
“He wrote a book that’s never been out of print,” Colin said, “but I don’t know that he made a lot of money on it.”
“What about?” Arthur asked.
“The art of brainwashing,” Colin said.
“How to resist it?”
“No,” Colin said. “How to apply it. He was a psychologist for the military during Vietnam. He literally wrote the textbook
on how to obliterate someone psychologically.”
They followed Colin Wren into a kitchen large enough to serve a good-size restaurant. A woman in her mid-forties was unloading
an industrial-size dishwasher. A girl sat at the center island, bent over a mess of books and papers. Gwen Underfoot—Arthur
didn’t know her name then—wore a chambray shirt over a V-neck tee, and a pair of enormous glasses with black plastic frames.
Arthur figured her for a high school kid. Her unlaced Dr. J Converse high-tops looked old enough to be in high school themselves.
She had a precalculus textbook open in front of her, but she had put her homework aside to pick at a crossword.
Colin greeted the woman at the stove, who had to be the girl’s mother. She was built the same, if twenty pounds heavier and
twenty years older, with a matching pair of specs on the end of her nose. She kissed Colin on the cheek as if she was his mother, put the kettle on, and asked if anyone wanted tea or hot chocolate.
“Who’s this, Colin?” asked the girl, without looking up from her puzzle. “Your Bible study group?”
“Psychics, Gwen,” Colin said. “Donna and Van here can read each other’s minds.”
“Try not to get ectoplasm all over the house, ’cause if you do, you’ll have to clean it up yourself. I’m driving Mom home
as soon as the spice cake is out of the oven.” So her mother was the help and Gwen was at least old enough to drive, which
made Arthur feel a little better about admiring the fine line of her neck, and the way she wiggled her bottom getting comfortable
on her stool. Even her smudgy cheap glasses were adorable—he wanted to pull them off her face and wipe ’em clean on his shirttail.
Arthur got as far as the door to the hallway, then looked back at Gwen and said, “Strip.”
She blinked at him. “Never on a first date, pal.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Twelve down. Five letters? ‘Something funny on Sunday.’ The answer is ‘strip.’ You know, like Garfield.”
“Oh!” she said, and filled it in. “Thanks.”
“Anytime,” he said, and got out of there.
One wall of the library was lined with cherry bookcases that had to be twelve feet high. The opposite wall was a bank of French
windows looking out onto the stony headland and the chilly blue of the bay, creaming with whitecaps. The only break in the
French windows was a stone hearth. A curious upright piano stood against the wall to the right of the door; a panel was open
above the keys to show a spool of paper, fed through studded iron drums, like the insides of the world’s biggest music box.
The wall above the piano was crowded with black shadow boxes, two or three butterflies mounted in each one. Butterflies with
wings like beaten bronze, butterflies with iridescent wings of silver and chrome.
Unsure where to plant himself, Arthur settled on the piano bench, beneath that beautifully displayed butterfly holocaust.
His mental calculations made him the brokest person in the room. Allie Shiner’s father had played for the Dallas Cowboys and
spent ten years in Congress before becoming some kind of lobbyist; he owned a summer house in Kennebunkport, a town house
in DC, and a mansion in Houston. The McBrides came from money too—a bit of it, anyway. Their father owned a TV station and
a few regional newspapers in the Deep South.
One end of the library was occupied by a massive desk made of cherry, with a leather surface.
Donna wandered behind it to inspect a tall wooden case with glass doors.
Arthur thought the items on display within were probably rare, likely valuable, and certainly not for touching.
But Donna was the sort of person who thought it was better to ask forgiveness than permission—although, come to think of it, she rarely bothered to ask for either.
She threw open the doors, removed a helmet, and clapped it on her head.
It was a rust-spotted olive with a red star in the center.
She dug around in the cabinet some more and produced a ball-peen hammer with a cork handle.
Donna gave it an experimental slash through the air.
“Which army did you say your granddad fought for?” Donna abruptly went ramrod stiff, clapped her heels together, and threw the Nazi salute.
Her other hand pressed the hammer to her breast as if it were an army rifle. “Sieg Fail!”
“That’s not Nazi, it’s Russian. It belonged to Wolf Messing, Stalin’s personal seer. Although he may never have worn it. The
hammer was the murder weapon at the Los Feliz murder house. It’s famously—and violently—haunted. The house, not the hammer.
I think my granddad was hoping it would have a little malevolent sparkle on it but, alas, nothing.”
Donna grimaced and set the hammer back in the cabinet.
“What the hell is all this stuff?” she asked, bending to explore the lower shelves.
“My grandfather’s Cabinet of Curiosities. He’s always on the hunt for haunted dolls and UFO photos, stuff like that. He’s
sort of a weird shit enthusiast, after years of being a professor of weird shit and researching weird shit for the government.”
“How’d you wind up living with your granddad, anyway?” Van asked.
Colin said, “My mother was going to leave my father, and made the mistake of telling him while they were in the Porsche. So
he drove them off a cliff at a hundred and ten miles an hour. Or at least that’s the theory. Obviously, no one can know for
certain. Maybe he was swatting at a mosquito and lost control.”
“Jesus,” Van said. “I’m so sorry. That’s fucking awful.”
Colin nodded. “The Porsche was a classic.”
Donna picked up a reel of film in its battered can. She squinted to read the faded label. “Visit. From. Corporal. Hondo.”
She glanced up. “This your granddaddy’s gay porn, Colin?”
Colin said, mildly, “My grandfather is a homosexual, in fact.” That produced a moment of startled silence. Colin pointed to the reel and went on: “That’s film from
one of the later Philip Experiments, the ones conducted by the military, here in America. Inspired by the work Whitton and
Owen were doing in Canada.”
“What’s a Philip Experiment?” Allie asked.
“A team of researchers in Toronto in the 1970s got together to invent a ghost. They made up a character, Philip Aylesford,
invented a whole made-up history for him, full of intentional errors and rubbish. Then they tried to contact him with a séance.
Only it worked. Philip could make the table levitate. He could dim the lights, slam the shutters on the windows, drop the
temperature by ten, twenty degrees. This is all true—look it up. Never debunked. My granddad repeated the experiments with
his research group in Langley. They dreamt up a fun-loving ghost of their own named Corporal Elwood Hondo.”
“What’d Hondo do?”
“It’s on the film. We should watch it sometime.”
While they were talking about ghosts, Arthur was poking at the piano. It had an iron lever that moved back and forth between
off and play and another for tempo. Arthur prodded the lever and without warning the piano keys began to crash, producing a chipper, maniacal sonata. He gave
a choked cry and almost fell off the bench. The keys went on rising and falling for another moment or two, the sound steadily
dwindling, as if the coked-up poltergeist was beginning to wipe out, slide away into a coma.
“He’s here!” shouted Van, and he dived behind the desk, grabbing Allie and hauling her down with him. “Hondo is among us!”
Allie shrieked, but she didn’t sound scared—closer to delighted.
“That’s a player piano,” Colin said. “You pump the pedals to keep it playing. There are different scrolls for it, if you don’t
care for Mozart. I think Granddad even has some boogie-woogie.” By now, Colin had moved behind a games table with a green
felt surface that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a European casino. He had a deck of cards and was shuffling them with