Of Quests and Kings Read online

  In early February, a section of the first floor of the main mansion collapsed one night, dumping tons of crated weapons into the cellar. A city building inspector gave the brothers the bad news: The contractor—by then bankrupt, out of business, and no longer residing in Virginia—had used substandard materials and done very shoddy work. However, the kind of support that they really needed were they to continue to put the old mansion to the kind of use they had in the past two years would call for such extensive remodeling that they would, should they attempt it at all, run afoul of the Historic Buildings types, which types already had contacted Rupen and Bagrat with complaints and thinly veiled threats relative to their "sacrilege."

  As the large, strong, modern reinforced-concrete-and-brick auto-parts warehouse next door (on the spot whereon had once stood the main mansion's other wing) was just then for sale. Bagrat phoned a recital of their difficulties to Kogh, and shortly the warehouse had been acquired by Ademian Enterprises. Immediately all of the stock had been moved out of the mansion and into the new warehouse. Bagrat saw most of the clerical staff moved into the small suite of modern offices built into a front corner of said warehouse, leaving only the showrooms and executive offices in the remaining wing of the mansion.

  "What are we going to do with that fucking white-ass elephant next door?" he demanded of Rupen. "I can't see paying what the fuckers we talked to want to repair it just so's it can sit there and collect more dust. You talked to those Historic Buildings snot-noses—what do we have to do to it to get them off our necks?"

  Before his brother could frame an answer, Bagrat went on, "I tell you, Rupen, was that warehouse office a little bigger, I'd've moved ever damn thing from here down there. Have you noticed how . . . how weird this place is sometimes . . . 'specially of nights or dark days? Lotsa times I've been working in my office or down here, I've got the feeling somebody's come in and is standing, watching me, but ever time I've turned around, looked around, nobody's been there. Doors seem to open and slam shut for no reason, some of them after they've been locked, too, and I'm not the onliest one who's noticed things like that, either. Ever so often, I get the feeling that there's a . . . a something or somebody here that don't want me or any of the rest of us here."

  Recognizing the look in his elder brother's eyes, Bagrat said in a defensive tone. "All right, all right, you can think I'm superstitious and nutty all you want to, Mr. Smartass, but I'll tell you something I never told you before. While you was in Italy last time, I run into a feller trains and sells and rents out guard dogs, lives down in Chesterfield County somewhere, and he offered me a damn good deal on a guard dog to live here on weekends and keep the niggers and all from breaking in. But you know something? He couldn't come up with a single one of his dogs would set foot on the front porch even, Rupen: and when he tried to drag some in, they fought him and whined and howled and damn near bit him, their trainer and handler, a coupla times. He was the first one told me this place is probably haunted. I didn't believe him back then, but I sure Lord do, now. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if half the places in this whole frigging town aren't haunted, after what me and Rose and the kids went through out there in Boghos' place on River Road."

  When Dr. Boghos Panoshian and family had moved to an estate overlooking the James River in Goochland County, they had not sold the executive brick home from which they moved, but rather had leased it. So well had they done on the lease that when another of the houses in the same neighborhood had come onto the market Boghos had bought it and leased it, too. This second one had been leased to his brother-in-law, Bagrat, and his family of two teenagers and four younger children.

  The oversize, sprawling single-story brick house offered more than enough room for even Bagrat's large family—two master suites, four additional bedrooms and two other full baths, a large, airy parlor, formal dining room, spacious kitchen with breakfast area and half bath, a roofed and screened redwood deck that ran the length of the house in the rear, attached two-car garage and utility room, and a den behind the kitchen with another full bath. Like all the other homes in the affluent area, the house had been custom-built and showed it. Rose fell in love with it on sight, and so Bagrat went ahead and signed the lease, shoving aside his strange presentiments and his questions as to why the house had had six owners in ten years, for nearly three years of which it had just sat vacant despite a burgeoning demand for quality housing in the suburban fringes of the rapidly growing city of Richmond.

  He and his family had been living in the house for a month or so when the next-door neighbor, a medium-level executive with Reynolds Metals Company, asked—in what Bagrat took to be a most peculiar tone—if he or his wife or children had found aught to dislike about the new home. However, when Bagrat tried to pin him down to specifics, the man would only mutter something about one of the rooms being hard to heat and quickly changed the subject.

  This incident flashed back into his mind when, one night soon after, Rose happened to stumble against a wall getting out of the shower and remarked that that wall—which wall separated the front master suite from the bedroom of their youngest daughter, Karen—was icy cold and wondered aloud if something had gone wrong with the heat register in that room and if the child had enough blankets.

  When she and Bagrat entered the child's bedroom, it was definitely colder than the rest of the house by ten or fifteen degrees, for all that the register was faithfully performing its function. Moreover, five-year-old Karen was wide awake, huddled under her covers and shivering. With her usual directness, she explained the phenomenon.

  "It's the little pale lady, Mama—every time she comes it gets real cold in here."

  Further patient questioning got matter-of-fact and yet rather unbelievable answers from the usually truthful child. "She's a grownup lady, Mama, you can tell that because she never has any clothes on, but she's small for a grownup, not much bigger than Auntie Perous, at the church." The old woman of whom she spoke was, Bagrat figured, less than five feet tall by two or three inches. "She never says anything, even when her lips move, but I think she's sad most of the time, she just looks sad, even when she's smiling. She visits me a lot, sometimes in the days, but usually at night."

  Bagrat and Rose did not know whether to believe the child's wild, fantastic story or not. Nonetheless, she was brought in to sleep with them in the front master suite the rest of that night, and by the next night, they had made other arrangements, giving their eldest son, Al, the den behind the kitchen as a bedroom and moving Karen into the room thus vacated. Her sometime bedroom was converted into a sewing room for Rose and their eldest daughter, Charlene. This rearrangement worked for almost a week.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rupen and a couple of warehousemen were checking bills of lading against crates of rifles when Bagrat came into the warehouse at a dead run, gripped Rupen's arm in a viselike hold, and gasped, "Come on! We got to get out of my house, right away. Rose just called."

  In the car, on the way out, Bagrat talked while Rupen drove. "So after ever'thing that went down, I started asking some questions all around that neighborhood, see. That house was built eleven years ago by one of the best contractors in the whole frigging town for a Jew dentist and his wife, but they hadn't lived in it even a year when they drove their car into Upham Creek one New Year's, coming home drunk, and both of them was killed."

  "Seems she, the wife, didn't have no people close, and so ever'thing went to his mother—insurance money, cars, house, furniture, ever'thing—the old lady sold ever'thing but just the house and the furniture, and just before she went over to spend twelve, fourteen months in Israel, she advertised the house and rented it out for a year's lease to a man and what she thought then was his wife and his two servants. But no sooner was she out over the Atlantic on El Al than the man she'd rented to moved in with his mistress and five other guys that sold for him."

  "The older neighbors say those bastards threw nonstop parties, real orgies, bringing carloads of booze and beer and
women in for 'em."

  "They say some of the people was neighbors, back then, took that bunch up on invites and went over to some of the first parties, but after a while, wouldn't none of the neighbors go near the place, what with the fights and the public fucking—one old feller told me about two of them, nekkid as jaybirds, was playing sixty-nine out in the backyard on a fucking picnic table, oncet! Him and his wife and boy all seen the shameless bastard and his hussy, and that's why to this day they got that old high, thick privet hedge on the property line, he says. And the mean, common things they done to people as passed out at their parties!"

  "Then, almost to the end of their lease, they had a party one weekend and brought in a bunch of girls from some state civil service picnic. That party was a bloody mess. I hear—coupla guys was hurt real bad in fights, and then one of the girls they'd done brought in was raped, too. The guys done it to her hurt her real bad, then just left her and she bled to death in a bed in that same room we had Karen in! And the old guy I talked to said when the county coroner's guys brought the body out, it could've been a ten- or twelve-year-old kid, that's how small it was."

  Rupen sighed. "Bagrat, when did you hear all this gossip?"

  "Yesterday afternoon and evening, Rupen. That's when I finally caught the old guy, Harry Conyers, home," Bagrat replied.

  "And you hotfooted it right home and told it all to Rose. I'll bet," said Rupen, an edge of sarcasm in his voice.

  "No, as a matter of fact, I didn't," answered Bagrat, adding, "I meant to, but when I got back home, Al and Haighie and Arsen were all on the deck and Arsen had his oud and I started playing a dumbeg and we just kept it up until Rose came out and called us in for chow and I sort of forgot it until she was asleep."

  "That's part of what threw me so bad when she called today, Rupen. The old guy said that the little bitty woman was raped and killed had the prettiest blue-black long hair he'd ever seen, real shiny-like . . . and that's pretty much what Rose said, too."

  Rose was at the house two doors from hers, being alcoholically entertained by Mrs. Ioanna Vitolis, who had lived in the house for nearly twelve years. But even with a good quarter of a liter of ouzo in her, Rose would not consider setting foot back in her own house. Still pale and trembling, with a look of sick horror in her eyes, she told her husband and brother-in-law what had happened late that morning.

  "I'd gotten the kids all off to school and cleaned up and all, and about ten-thirty, I set up the sewing machine and started hemming a skirt for Charlene. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes after I'd heard the clock strike eleven that I heard . . . no, not really heard, just felt that somebody was waiting to speak to me but didn't want to interrupt me, kind of feeling. And I noticed then that even with the sunlight streaming into the window, it had gotten real cold in that room, too."

  "I turned around and . . . and she was just standing there and staring at me! She wasn't five feet tall and white as milk, with black eyes and thick black hair that hung down below her waist, and she was naked, with blood smeared on her thighs and more streaks of blood that had run down from out of terrible bite marks on her tiny breasts and her shoulders and her throat, and it looked like one of her nipples had been bitten right off."

  "Her face was cut in a couple of places and bruised real bad, and her lips were moving like she was talking or trying to, but there was no sound. I just sat there for a minute, I guess, just staring at her. But when her face and head all of a sudden turned into a skull with eyes, I just left the machine running and took off out the room door and out the front door and I guess I'd still be running if Ioanna here hadn't seen me and run after me and caught me and brought me back to here."

  "Bagrat, I'm never ever going back in that house again and neither are my children and I'm never going to speak to your sister or her sonofabitching husband that rented us that place and never told us anything about any of this."

  Rupen and Bagrat sat, smoking nervously, in the sewing room in the afternoon of that day, not talking much, wondering whether it all was just Rose's and Karen's imagination, dreading that perhaps it was not. Bagrat had remembered that Rupen had long ago mastered the art of reading lips and had suggested that if there really was a wraith inhabiting the house and if they could find out what she wanted, maybe she could be persuaded to go wherever good ghosts are supposed to go and cease terrifying the living.

  After an hour or more, Bagrat was nodding off and Rupen had given to read the business section of the Times-Dispatch, the Richmond-area morning newspaper, when he noticed that it was suddenly markedly cool in the room. All his nape hairs aprickle, he looked up to see a misty something across the room.

  In a low but penetrating voice, he hissed, "Bagrat! Open your eyes but don't move or speak!"

  Slowly, the misty something gained form, lengthened, broadened, to become the small body of a woman, looking very solid in nature. Her pretty, heart-shaped face was very pale, which made the marks of a recent and savage beating stand out very clearly. The flesh was discolored and puffy around both of her dark eyes, and the eyes themselves held infinite sadness.

  Beside him, he could hear Bagrat whimpering softly in atavistic terror, and he deliberately reached over without looking to lay a comforting hand on his younger brother's knee.

  As the pale body beneath the pale, battered face became clearer, Rupen shuddered strongly. She, whoever she was, or had been, had been cruelly used by her attackers; in the course of two wars he had fought, Rupen had seen some awful things and this thing before him was, he knew then, one of the worst ever.

  Raising his glance back up to the face, he could see that the swollen lips were moving now, and he strove to read the message that the whatever-it-was was trying so hard to convey. She looked so very young and helpless—late teens or early twenties, at best—that Rupen could not imagine how any rational man had been able to bring himself to hurt her, and, vastly experienced big brother and many times uncle that he was, he felt very paternal toward her, phantom or not.

  And then, in a blink, the head and face were become a bare skull, the dark, sad eyes, however, still visible in the sockets under the arches of the brows. Bagrat's moaning whimpers loudened and became more intense, and Rupen felt his brother's muscles tense under his hand, so he tenderly patted him as one would a frightened animal. Oddly, he himself felt no fear of the thing that stood tenuously before him, only a soul-deep pity.

  Extending his right hand, he spoke slowly, "Let me help, my dear. Is there no way I can help you?"

  Then her flesh was back over the bones and the lips were again moving. ". . . is Ross? Please tell me where Ross is. He was so kind, so gentle and tender, and he said he'd be right back. But then the big, bald, mean man came, and the other one, and they . . . they hurt me, they hurt me so bad. Ross will make it well, though. Where is Ross? Please tell me where Ross is."

  Compassion welling up inside him, Rupen said, "Child, you are no longer alive. Those two men you mentioned, they not only hurt you, they killed your body. Your body has been dead for more than ten years, now, don't you know that?"

  He awaited an answer, but when the split and swollen pale lips moved again, it was only a resumption of her pitiful litany. "Where is Ross? Please tell me where Ross is. . . ."

  He reflected to himself that these same thoughts of her absent champion had probably been going through her mind as she had lain dying in this very room so long ago, and he could think of nothing else to do. Perhaps, if he could find someone qualified that wouldn't think he was just a psycho . . . ? He felt for her, but his extended hand was only a gesture; he knew he could not reach her.

  * * * *

  The old archbishop leaned forward. "You actually spoke with a dead woman's ghost, Rupen? What ever happened in the matter?"

  Rupen took a draught of cool ale and shrugged. "I suppose that that poor, confused spirit is still haunting that room in that house, Hal, I was never able to effect any help for her. Boghos thought we all—Rose, little Karen, Bagrat
, and me—were nuts and as good as said so when Bagrat, who had been renting by the month after the first year, found and bought a brand-new tri-level and moved into it. I told Boghos that if he didn't believe us he should go over to that house one night and sit in that room for a while, and he did; he would never afterward admit to having seen anything, but he sold the house within less than a week."

  "I took the time to check records and look up the third owner of the house, who still lived in Henrico County, Virginia. Once I'd convinced him that I seriously believed in ghosts, that I'd seen at least one and would admit to it in public and that I was not either a journalist of a book writer, he became candid with me, he and his wife, too."

  "At the time he had lived, or rather tried to live, in that house, there had been more than just the one ghost, apparently. He and his wife had no children then, had bought the vastly underpriced house as an investment and didn't use most of the bedrooms for anything but storage, and they didn't even know about the young girl's ghost until I told them."

  "It seems that when the old woman—the second owner—who had inherited it from her son and daughter-in-law—the first owners—had come back from Israel and seen what her tenants had done to the house and yard and furnishings in only a year or less, she suffered a heart attack or stroke or both and died right in the middle of the living-room floor. As long as the third owners lived there, the old woman's shade kept stalking the place, shrieking now and then, turning lights on or off and opening or slamming doors and otherwise making her continuing presence known and obnoxious."

  "The third owners had bought the place as it stood, seriously in need of certain repairs, a thorough repainting, and a complete recarpeting, but the third owner was and still is a building contractor and was able to do the job up brown despite its magnitude and despite difficulties with the previous owner's unfriendly ghost. He it was who added the rear den and third bath to the place, tacked on the double garage and utility room and built the redwood deck. When he sold the house, he made a handsome but well-deserved profit on the transaction."