Stone and a Hard Place (4 page)

Ethan chuckled. “No, it’s fine. It’s just a lot to take in, is all.”

“Best to get used to it. Before we’re done, I’ll be filling you so full of information that you’ll be dreaming in magical formulae.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Stone was in his office at Stanford late one afternoon a couple of weeks later when there was a knock on his door. He glanced up, curious. This wasn’t during his normal office hours, and the building that housed his office was far enough off the beaten track—Occult Studies wasn’t exactly a prestigious subject around these hallowed halls—that people didn’t drop by without a reason. “Come in,” he called, pushing aside the stack of student essays he was reading.

The figure that shoved open the door wasn’t a student. “Hey there, you old fraud,” he called, erupting into the small space like a tousle-headed force of nature. “Long time no see!”

Stone grinned. “Tommy! How are you?”

Professor Thomas “Tommy” Langley taught Medieval History (which meant he had digs in an only marginally nicer end of campus than Stone did). He was a little older than Stone, about twice his width, and often joined him on sporadic weekend pub-crawling excursions. Stone hadn’t seen him in a few weeks though, and figured he must be busy with his course load.

Langley shrugged, dropping down into one of the chairs in front of the desk. “Can’t complain. You?”

“Wondering what you’re doing here, actually,” Stone said. “It can’t be that you want to invite me out drinking, because you’d call for that. It would take something much more important for you to actually drag your carcass up here in person.”

“Can’t I just have missed you?” His grin got bigger. “I mean, come on, Al—you know I’ve always had a thing for tall, skinny English guys.”

Stone glared. “Damn it, don’t call me ‘Al’.” Sighing, he slumped back in his seat. “So, really—what are you doing here? You
didn’t
drag yourself all the way up here just to invite me pub-crawling, did you?”

Langley shook his head. “Nope. Believe it or not, I’ve got a problem that demands your uniquely strange set of skills.”

“And what set of skills would that be?” Stone asked with a raised eyebrow.

“You know—the way you’re always going on about all that spooky stuff.” Langley wiggled his fingers in “ghostly” emphasis.

“‘That spooky stuff’ is kind of what I do here,” Stone reminded him, wondering where this was going.

“Exactly. Which means you’ve got
expertise.
That’s important.”

“Why is that important?” Stone spaced the words out slowly.

Langley spread his hands. “Okay. So I’ve got this aunt. She’s almost ninety. Rich as Midas. Lives in an ancient, enormous house way up in the Los Gatos hills with her caretaker lady and seven or eight part-time staff. I visit her a few times a year. She’s sweet as they come, but—well—a little dotty, if you know what I mean.”

“If she’s almost ninety, she’s earned the right to be a little dotty.” Stone shrugged. “But I don’t see—” His eyes widened. “Tommy—you don’t want me to frighten her, do you? Because I’m not exactly in the business of—”

“Don’t be an idiot.” Langley’s tone was indignant. “I’m quite fond of the old lady. I don’t give a damn that she’s rich—it’s not like I’d have any chance of inheriting anyway, and even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.”

Stone had to allow that that was probably true. Aside from a voracious appetite and a fondness for good beer, Tommy Langley had never shown any inclination toward greed. “All right, then, what
do
you
want?”

Langley picked up a weathered statuette from Stone’s desk and toyed with it. “Well—she’s convinced herself that something’s going on in her house. Something... supernatural.”

“Supernatural?” Stone frowned. “What, did she think she saw a ghost or something?”

He shrugged. “She can’t explain it. She says she hears things in the middle of the night sometimes, and that the house has developed a—her words—‘chilly feeling.’ Naturally, the caretaker lady and the rest of the staff think it’s all in her head, but they humor her because she pays them a lot of money. It was actually the caretaker who called me about it. She’s worried.”

“Worried about what? It’s probably just the house settling. Old ladies get cold easily. P’raps she should just turn up the heat a bit and—”

Langley shook his head. “You’re probably right, but she won’t hear any of that. She’s convinced something’s going on.”

“So, what do you want me to do about it?”

“Well—I thought it might help if you went with me and talked to her a little.”

“Me? Why the hell would she believe some stranger off the street?”

“Because it’s your field. You know about the occult. You can go on about all that weird shit like you know what you’re talking about. I think she’d believe you if you told her there was nothing going on.”

Stone pondered. This was the first time in years that anyone had asked him to do anything in a professional capacity, aside from delivering occasional papers at very strange conferences. “Tommy, I teach Occult Studies. I’m not an occult investigator. The whole business is rubbish anyway. Half my students are goths trying to get into each other’s pants, and the other half are horror writers looking for material.”

“
I
know that. And
you
know that. But Aunt Adelaide doesn’t know that. She hasn’t got a clue that there’s even a difference between what you do and somebody who runs around hunting ghosts. Besides,
she
doesn’t think it’s rubbish. She still has an astrologer who comes by a couple of times a year to do her charts and read her tea leaves or whatever the hell they do. She
believes.
Also,” he added with a grin, “You turn on that British charm of yours, and you’ll have her eating out of your hand before you know it. Everybody knows all women are suckers for British accents. That’s why you’ve got a hot girlfriend, while I stay home at night watching
Seinfeld
reruns with my dog.”

Stone’s eyebrow crept up again. “Well, if you put it that way, how can I decline?”

Langley’s grin widened. He levered himself up out of the chair. “Excellent. I’ll owe you one for this.”

“You certainly will. And don’t think I’ll forget it, either.”

Megan was amused by the whole thing, but declined to come along when invited. “I’d probably burst out laughing when you started talking about all that occult bullshit like you actually took it seriously,” she said, grinning.

“Yes, well,
I
might have trouble with that myself,” Stone admitted. He was wandering around his townhouse, hunting for items that might look sufficiently convincing as the tools of an occult investigator. So far he’d gathered a couple of old meters that lit up but didn’t otherwise work, the skull of something that might have been a ferret, a handful of feathers attached to a leather strap, a set of ancient, oversized headphones, and a microphone that he’d connected to one of the meters. He’d stowed all of this in an impressive-looking, cracked leather satchel that he’d dug up in the attic. “Might take Ethan along, though—he’s into that sort of thing. He might find it interesting. I can pass him off as my assistant or something.”

“A regular little Scooby gang, you three,” she said with a chuckle. “All you need is a Great Dane and a green van.”

“She’ll have to settle for an overweight pug and a black Jaguar,” Stone said, distracted as he tossed items out of an old chest. Emerging with an odd-looking pair of goggles with purple lenses, he tossed them in the bag along with the rest.

“Yeah, like you’d let Tommy bring old Charlemagne anywhere near your car.”

“Point,” he admitted. “Scooby-free, then.”

Ethan, as Stone had guessed, was eager to come along on the mission. “What do I have to do?” he asked. “I don’t know anything about pretending to be a ghostbuster.”

Stone shoved a notebook into his hand. “Just—scribble something down whenever I say anything that sounds important,” he said.

“So, it’s basically just like being your apprentice,” Ethan said with a grin.

“Silence, insolent pup,” Stone growled.

They picked up Langley at his place in San Jose after dinner that Friday evening so they could drive up to Los Gatos together.

Stone introduced him to Ethan. “Every proper occult investigator needs an assistant,” he said. “Hope your aunt won’t mind. Oh, and that said—” He pulled the old satchel from his shoulder and handed it to Ethan. “Make yourself useful, assistant.”

“Yes, master,” Ethan said in his best ‘Igor’ voice.

Langley looked Stone up and down under the porch lamp’s glow, taking in his tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, argyle sweater vest, old-style overcoat draped over one arm, skinny black tie, and crazier than usual hair. “You really went all out, didn’t you? Where’d you find that get-up—Doctor Who’s garage sale?”

“What, you expected me to show up in jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt? We’re putting on a show here—let’s do it right. Do I look sufficiently eccentric?”

“You look like a raving nutball. The hair’s a particularly nice touch. All you need is some round, wire-rimmed glasses and a lab coat. And wait a minute—that sunken-eyed thing you’ve got going on: did you stay awake for three days, or are you wearing
makeup?
”

“Borrowed it from Megan—just a bit to finish off the look. What do you think? Am I convincing?”

“You’re gonna scare the crap out of her. Better not forget the charm. Remember, we want to reassure her, not give her a heart attack.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Langley hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said his aunt’s house was ‘way up in the Los Gatos hills.’ Los Gatos was a tony little village a few miles from San Jose that was home to many of the area’s more affluent residents. Affording even the more modest homes in its vicinity required a healthy household income, but the hills that surrounded the town were dotted with the mansions and estates of the truly wealthy. Stone, directing the Jaguar around yet another sharp inclined curve, glanced at Langley. “You weren’t kidding about her being loaded, then.”

“Nope. Her husband was some kind of industrial magnate type. Died years ago, she never remarried, so she’s sitting on some pretty serious bank accounts. That’s part of why I want to get this handled quietly—if it got out, she’d be hip-deep in quacks who’d feed her a line about hauntings and infestations and separate her from a hefty chunk of her cash.”

“As opposed to the quacks who want to help her,” Stone said with a wry grin.

“Exactly. Slow down—we’re getting close. The turnoff’s right up ahead here.”

Even with Langley pointing the way, Stone almost missed it in the darkness. He had to turn the wheel sharply when he spotted the narrow dirt road, and it took them nearly five minutes to wend their way through the open gate and carefully up toward the house. “Wow,” said Ethan from the back seat.

“Pretty impressive, huh?” Langley agreed. “Old, too. It’s one of the oldest houses in the area.”

The house was indeed impressive. Though it was hard to see it clearly with only the perimeter lights and the cozy glow from the windows for illumination, they could tell it was three stories tall, built in a solid, old-fashioned style, and well-preserved.

As they all got out of the car and stood staring up at it, the door opened. “Hello?” came a female voice from a shadowy figure in the doorway. “Tommy, is that you?”

“Yep, it’s me.” Langley waved at Stone and Ethan to follow him to where a heavyset, smiling Asian woman of about sixty waited for them. “Guys, this is Iona Li. She’s a nurse. She’s been friends with Aunt Adelaide for years, and takes care of her. Iona, this is Dr. Alastair Stone, the—occult investigator, and his assistant, Ethan.”

Stone bowed slightly. “Pleasure,” he said with his best charming smile.

Iona motioned them in. “Mrs. Bonham has been waiting for you. She’s very excited to have someone come around who can explain what’s causing her...odd feelings.” She exchanged a glance with Tommy, and Stone realized she was in on the ruse as well.

She led them down a wood-paneled hallway, lined with paintings that were quite probably Aunt Adelaide’s forebears, into a large but cozy sitting room full of antique furniture, opulent but somewhat dusty oriental rugs, and lamps with fussy shades. The whole room looked like it hadn’t been updated in at least seventy-five years, and practically screamed “rich old lady.”

“Hello!” a quavery, cheery voice called from near the heavy drapes covering the front picture window. They’d almost missed her sitting there in the chair: a thin and birdlike old woman with fluffy white hair and a city map’s worth of lines and creases on her face. Her bright blue eyes lit up her narrow face as she waved to the newcomers. “Please, come in. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t get up.”

“Hello, Aunt Adelaide,” Langley said, moving to approach her and motioning for Stone and Ethan to follow. “How’ve you been?” He leaned down to plant a kiss on her wrinkled cheek.

“I’m eighty-nine,” she said, chuckling. “I’m still alive, so about as well as can be expected, all things considered.” Her gaze settled on Stone and her smile widened. “Well. You’re quite a looker, aren’t you? You’re a friend of Tommy’s?”

Stone was only taken aback for a second, then he returned her smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bonham. I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Alastair Stone. This is my—assistant, Ethan Penrose.”

“Oh, yes!” She made a tiny little jerk, and Stone could almost see the light bulb go off over her head. “You’re the young man who’s going to figure out what’s going on with my house. He didn’t tell me you were English. I
love
Englishmen. I could listen to you talk all day.”

Langley flashed him a triumphant
See? I told you so!
look.

“Yes, well—suppose we get started. I don’t want to disturb your home for too long.”

She waved him off. “You needn’t worry about that. I’m sort of a night owl. And I’m used to having people trooping through the house. We’ve always got little projects going on around here. Had the windows done last year, and the young men doing the earthquake inspection in the summer—”

Stone nodded, remembering the moderate shaker that had hit the area earlier that year. Megan, a lifelong California native, had been amused at how much it had unnerved him. “You should see what a
big
one is like,” she’d teased when he’d had trouble getting back to sleep. “I don’t even notice them anymore unless they knock me out of bed.”

“Old house,” Langley said. “They had to do the inspection to make sure there wasn’t any damage, but Aunt Adelaide’s right: this place is built like a fortress.”

Stone perched on the edge of a floral-print couch covered in doilies. “All right, then: before I set off to look around, suppose I start by asking you exactly what’s been going on?”

Adelaide shivered and drew her jacket tighter around herself. “I know Iona and the others think I’m getting balmy in my old age, but I know better. I might be old, but there’s nothing wrong with my mind. And I
felt
it. I
heard
it.”

“Felt and heard what, Mrs. Bonham?”

She took a deep breath and shivered again. “I hear—voices, sometimes, when I’m in bed. Late at night. They—they
whisper
.”

“Can you understand what they’re saying?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not even sure they’re speaking English, honestly.”

“All right,” Stone said. “And what did you feel?”

“Cold. Like there’s a draft in the house, only it feels like it’s going right through my clothes and into my
soul.
” Her round, frightened eyes came up. “Is any of this making any sense to you, Dr. Stone? Have you ever encountered anything like it before? I keep thinking that I’ve somehow angered a spirit or something, though I can’t imagine how I might have done that.”

When Stone answered after a pause, his tone was careful. “Mrs. Bonham—you say you felt a draft. Please, I don’t intend any offense, but I have to explore all the angles: are you sure you
didn’t
just feel a draft? This is an old house, after all—”

“No, no,” she insisted. Again she shook her head, more emphatically this time. “It wasn’t a
real
draft. For one thing, Tommy is right: this place might be old, but it’s like me. It’s solid. The only way there could have been a draft was if Iona had left a window open. And since
she’s
the one who gets cold, she doesn’t even open the windows. We have central air in most of the house, so we don’t need to. Plus, as I said, we had the windows replaced recently.”

“All right...” Stone glanced over and was pleased to see Ethan busily scribbling in his notebook. “Anything else you want to tell me before I go have a look around?”

“Well—” She shifted in her chair.

“Come on, now,” he said with an encouraging smile. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me everything.”

She was silent for several seconds, clearly trying to decide whether she wanted to say more. Then she motioned him closer. When he leaned in, she spoke under her breath: “I didn’t even tell Tommy about this. I thought he’d just laugh at me. But sometimes I get the feeling that there’s something—
wrong
—in the house. Something...
evil
, even. Please don’t laugh.”

Stone didn’t laugh. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if the old girl hadn’t picked up on something that the others were too brain-blind to notice. It wasn’t common for mundanes with an interest in the supernatural to pick up garbled signals from the real thing, like radios badly tuned to a distant station, but he’d seen it happen before.

He gently patted her liver-spotted hand. “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Bonham. If there’s something here, I’ll find it. And if I don’t find anything, then I’ll be reasonably certain that there’s nothing to find. That sort of feeling can come from all sorts of things. Even we occult investigators—the ones who are any good, anyway—start by looking for ordinary, normal reasons for strange manifestations. For example, I once read about a family who moved into a new house and one of the kids started feeling constantly on edge and stressed. Turned out he was just sensitive to the subsonic frequency from a nearby electrical transformer.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Langley agreed, clearly glad to have a straw to grasp at.

“I don’t even know if there are any transformers near here, “Adelaide said. “Do you, Tommy?”

“No idea. But we could check tomorrow.”

Stone rose. “Come on, Ethan. Bring the bag and let’s have a look around. Mrs. Bonham, if you could spare Tommy, I’d like him to come along as well. I don’t like wandering about in people’s private spaces without a guide.”

“You go ahead,” Iona Li said, moving over next to Adelaide. “I was about to get Adelaide’s evening cup of tea ready, anyway.”

“And my show is on soon,” the old lady said with a twinkle in her eye. “I do hate to miss my murder mysteries. Tommy can show you where we’ll be when you’re done. Take your time, Dr. Stone. I promise, you won’t be keeping me awake past my bedtime.”

Stone motioned for Ethan and Langley to follow him back into the hallway, but stopped halfway to the door. “One more question if I may, Mrs. Bonham.”

“Of course, dear.”

“Was there anywhere in particular in the house where you experienced these odd feelings? You said you heard voices in your bedroom, but what about the drafts?”

“Upstairs mostly, in the east wing and that hallway,” she said. “I have a lovely library sitting room where I used to like to read, but I don’t like to go up there any more now.”

“Thank you. We’ll check it out.”

In the hall, Stone gathered Langley and Ethan into a small huddle. “All right,” he said. “If Aunt Adelaide isn’t going to be accompanying us, and she’s the only one not in on what we’re doing, we can skip all the toys in the bag. But Tommy, if you could show me her bedroom and this library—it makes sense to start where she says she notices it most.”

“Wait a sec,” Langley protested. “I thought we were just going to wander around up there for a while, and then come back down and tell her nothing’s up. Do we actually have to go anywhere in particular?”

Stone shrugged. “Let’s make it look realistic. Besides, what’s to say we won’t find a perfectly normal, non-supernatural explanation?” Truth be told, he wanted to check out his hypothesis that the old lady was picking up vibes from somewhere, but he didn’t think telling Langley that would get him anything but laughed at. He glanced sideways at Ethan, who looked intrigued by the whole thing.

“Fine. C’mon—the main stairway’s this way.”

Stone and Ethan followed Langley down the hallway and into a wide open hall; on the other side was an elaborately carved stairway. “How does she make it up all those stairs?” Ethan asked.

“She doesn’t. There’s an elevator. But it’s easier for us to take them. Let’s go to her bedroom first.”

Adelaide’s bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a wide hallway lined with more family portraits, landscapes, and pastoral scenes. Langley pushed the door open and stepped aside to let them in.

As Stone expected, it was your classic ‘rich old lady’ bedroom: heavy drapes, brocade bedspread, elaborately carved antique furniture. The only things that didn’t fit the decorating scheme were a couple of pill bottles on the nightstand and a small oxygen tank in a rack next to the right side of the bed. A large-print paperback copy of
The Cat Who Brought Down the House
lay open next to the pill bottles. The drapes were closed. The whole place smelled vaguely musty, with a floral overlay.

Langley came in last and plopped himself down in a chair, looking skeptical. “You wander around all you want with your magnifying glass and your magic deerstalker hat. Me, I’m gonna take a load off.”

Stone got right to it, pacing the room and reaching out with his magical senses to see if anything caught his notice. Nothing did—of course, he was doing his best to be subtle about the whole thing so Langley wouldn’t ask uncomfortable questions. His examination of the bedroom, which included getting down to look under the bed and tapping on various walls, lasted about ten minutes. Then he disappeared momentarily into the bathroom and emerged only a minute or so later. Ethan trailed him, looking like he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be doing.

“Anything?” Langley asked, sounding bored.

“Not a thing,” Stone said. “If she’s hearing voices, they’re not coming from in here.”

“Or—you know—there aren’t any.”

“That too. All right—take me to the east wing.”

Langley seemed eager to get out of this all too intimate space of his old aunt’s. “This way.” This time he took the lead, with Stone following. Ethan once again brought up the rear.

No doubt about it—the house was vast. It took them several minutes to get to the third floor and find their way down another wide painting-lined hallway to the library. “Why does she stay in this place?” Stone asked. He himself was no stranger to large houses, being the owner of a decaying old manor back home in England that he could barely afford to keep one step ahead of collapse, but this one made his place look like a three-bedroom in the suburbs. “Obviously she’s got the money to keep it up, but wouldn’t it be more comfortable for her if she didn’t have to lay in supplies to make the trip from the bedroom to the kitchen?”

Langley chuckled. “Iona adores her, and if she needs to go anywhere she gets pushed around in a fancy wheelchair. Plus, she absolutely refuses to move out. She says she’s got too many good memories here, and she’ll leave when they wheel her out in a casket.”

“I guess nobody does stubborn as well as a rich old lady,” Stone conceded, following Langley inside. “This is the—”

A wave of lightheaded weakness struck him from nowhere. He swayed, reaching for something to grab as he felt himself toppling over.