FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Read online

  In truth I was skipping lunch because I was trying to slip in a book signing before a course I taught on Truffaut. I didn’t care if the signing ran late. I’d said about all I had to say about Truffaut. Someone in class once asked me what I thought Truffaut’s best work was. I told him Close Encounters. The scary part was, no one laughed.

  My signing was at the big Barnes & Noble on Adams Avenue.

  The bookselling giant was on the block again even though its direct competition, Borders, had long since bitten the dust. Typical Bledsoe luck: quit screenwriting, move from California where it’s perfect, to Texas where it’s humid, and get your book published just as the industry is teetering on the brink of collapse. No one reads anymore. They watch Netflix or go to movies and watch that other kind of writing I used to do for the screen; before I moved from failed novelist to failed screenwriter to failed book-on-screenwriting author to teaching film theory. Where I at least enjoyed modest success.

  And excruciating ennui.

  And the approaching dread of 40.

  At the big Barnes & Noble (seeming all the more cathedral-like for its lack of traffic) they put me way in back next to the children’s books section. In fact, owing to some last minute slip up, they put me in at a children’s table (knees gouging by the underside) in what could only have been a cramped and scrotum-strangling children’s chair. I was sure it was all some big mistake. When I asked if I could be moved closer to the front entryway, a very nice lady in granny classes and a sharp suit told me she was sorry but the front was where the store kept its bestsellers; said it with a prideful smile and no hint of apology. I did not pursue the conversation.

  I sat there for a full hour and found the little table almost constantly surrounded by pushing elbows and eager faces; all from the children from the section behind me, wondering what I was doing at one of their tables.

  Actually I signed a few copies of The Craft of the Screenwriter. Mostly from students who could have bought the book at the student bookstore…if the student bookstore had stocked it, which they had not. The granny glasses and sharp suit came by smiling about every ten minutes with a new can of Coke. I felt too embarrassed not to drink them and it gave me something to do with my hands. I could have pursued a novel from the large selection around, I suppose, but somehow that didn’t seem right and I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there and read that boring tome of my own, which except for a brief insight or two came off as sour grapes and was mostly cribbed from better books on the art of achieving the lowest rank on the totem pole in Hollywood. After the fourth Coke I had to pee like a big Indian. That’s when I discovered a dilemma worse than writer’s block; what if I got up to relieve myself and missed a couple of customers? Or worse, what if I came back and found the children had reclaimed their chair and table and refused to give it back? I could see the headline: FAILED WRITER ACCUSED OF ATTACKING CHILD—AND LOSING.

  Still, the pressure was building…

  “Go ahead, I’ll watch the table for you.”

  I looked up to find a pretty young woman gazing down at me, my book clutched in her arms.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You look like you have to pee.”

  I was dying to ask her how such a thing could contort my normally composed expression, but I took the book from her instead and opened it before me. “That’s okay, I was just getting ready to leave anyway.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh. Exhausting crowd, huh?”

  I hesitated at the title page, looked up slowly. Squinted suspicion. “You seem vaguely familiar.”

  “University parking lot, earlier. I deigned to lean against your antique Corvette.”

  “Thunderbird.” I held up her book. “That probably explains why this is already signed.”

  “Famous and quick.”

  “’Quick’ anyway.” I handed back her book. “You looked…different then.”

  “Your eyes were glazed with antique hatred. Also I wasn’t wearing jeans then.”

  I caught a quick flash of fanning red fabric. “Right. So. What can I do for you Miss…” I glanced down at the book, “…Katie?”

  “You can let me buy you dinner.”

  “Really? Liked the book that much, huh?”

  “Not really.”

  “I see.”

  “Haven’t read it yet, actually.”

  “Haven’t read it. But you want to buy me dinner?”

  She shrugged. “In return for the signing.”

  “The signing is free, Miss Katie.”

  “Please. Call me Katie. How about lunch, then?”

  I was already standing, re-boxing most of the books I’d brought with me. “Thanks, I have a class to teach.”

  “Really?”

  “Honest injun.”

  “Why?’

  I looked at her. “Why? Because I’m a teacher, a college film theory teacher. Says so on the flyleaf of the book, for those who bother reading it.”

  “A teacher of film theory.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who hates Truffaut.”

  “Hey! I never said I hated him! And how would you know anyway?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  I folded the open tabs of the packing box neatly in place. The trick is to start at one end and go slowly and methodically clockwise, lifting and folding in one tab at a time for a perfect fit.

  “Wow. You do that really well.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Little anal, isn’t it?”

  I hefted the heavy box, bladder yodeling. “Little personal, aren’t you, Miss—“

  “Katie. Can I at least walk with you? I’d really like to talk with you a few minutes. How can I induce you?”

  “I’m an engaged man.”

  “Congratulations. ‘Induce’. Not ‘seduce.’”

  I shook my head, pushed past her to the men’s room, could see immediately I’d never make it.

  “Why don’t you leave the box on the kiddie table? I’ll stand guard until you’re through. Shame to soil those nice slacks. Not to mention the books.”

  “Thanks, Miss—“

  “Katie.”

  “—but I’m…” and then I remember something. Something absolutely horrible. Something beyond the worst fears of mankind.

  I turned and set the box back on the table with unabashed relief.

  “Katie? How are you with cats…?”

  TWO

  Ours was a small condo not far from campus but it was all we needed. We’d decided we didn’t want children pretty early on in our engagement.

  Or, anyway, Rita decided.

  I’d thought we were still somewhere in the negotiation stages but it was becoming more and more apparent that Rita’s own child, Garbanzo, was making things crowded enough as it was. Garbanzo being her cat.

  I always entertained the same mental flash every time I thought of Garbanzo: it was based on a sendup of one of those 80’s slasher movies I’d seen in a humor magazine somewhere, the much lamented National Lampoon, I think. Lots of blood and dripping title letters, but instead of a knife wielding Michael Myers, the poster showed a group of kids being attacked by a pack of wild-eyed, razor hooved, demonic does. “First they’re eating your roses,” the blurb screamed, “now they’re eating your children!”

  Garbanzo had never eaten any kids yet, that I know of, but I was certain I’d seen the look in his eyes. Or maybe his looks were for me alone.

  I think my original rationale, after inheriting Garbanzo upon moving in with Rita, went something like this: here’s a chance to meet my cat phobia head-on! Lock horns and tame and master it! I was a man! Men aren’t afraid of cats! Men are afraid of rational things like income taxes and taking out the trash and penis size. Not animals. Well, maybe spiders. But not, for the love of mercy, cats! This wasn’t a phobia, this was an affront to the male species. But I could lick this thing! I’d won wrestling competitions in high school. I’d braved an entire evening at
the Ice Capades. I could certainly shake a silly fear of the common feline!

  And so the battle began.

  It was trench warfare all the way, the furry beast a worthy antagonist. It could easily outstare me, for one thing. When it wasn’t doing that, it would sit there silent and stoically mysterious, staring into absolute dead space, evil eyes aglow like a necromancer’s familiar, patiently awaiting the arrival of a film teacher-eating demon.

  Eventually the creature took to sleeping atop and or urinating on the morning paper…always just before I could open it, and always on the real estate section, which I was took as not too subtle hint about to whom the condo really belonged and I could just relocate myself elsewhere, thank you. While all the time, night after night, tossing restlessly, I dreamed of silently padding feet stealing onto our bed, sneaking between us, silently studying me in the dark, waiting patiently for me to doze off so it could climb upon my chest and suck the breath from my lungs.

  I tried everything from chemical warfare--trudging about the house with fake sneezes, salt-induced red-eye and pretended fur allergies—to reading everything available on Ailurophobia (“from the Greek ailouros, a type of specific phobia: the persistent, irrational fear of cats”) to Louis London’s article in Psychiatric Quarterly to Nelson Crawford’s book Cats Holy and Profane. Nothing helped. Something in the house was definitely repelling me. I had seen the enemy and its name was Garbanzo.

  The problem was I had no one to talk to about it. I disliked the idea of admitting my phobia even more than I disliked the cat. It made me feel weak, implied a lack of mental discipline, an out-of-control state. I’ve always deplored the out-of-control, always been an obsessive compulsive. Rita was right; I was anal, and proud of it. Proud member of Rectal’s Anonymous. Maybe it wasn’t the cat’s fault at all. Maybe it was all me.

  And so we settled into a kind of dubious truce.

  The cat endured, and I endured the cat.

  “Is your wife home?”

  I turned to the woman in the passenger seat beside me and cut the Blackbird’s big engine. “Fiancée. And no, she’s at work. Rita teaches physics at my college, the University of Texas.”

  “Too bad. I’d like to meet her.”

  “Oh, why?”

  “You can tell a lot about a person by their significant other.”

  “’By?’”

  “’Bye’? Am I leaving?”

  “No. You said you can tell a lot about a person by their significant other.’ You meant ‘from.’ And you can’t tell from yet in this case because you haven’t met her.”

  She looked at me. “That’s very…academic of you. Did you used to be an English teacher too?”

  “No,” I pushed out of the car, “I used to be a screenwriter.”

  “Really?”

  “Please don’t be impressed. You don’t have to be an English major to write screenplays, you don’t even have to be a high school graduate.”

  She shut her own door, turned to look up at the little red-roofed, stucco condo. “What do you have to be?”

  “Precise. Screenplays—movies—are a strictly by-the-book craft.”

  “Like your book?”

  “Well, he said modestly, twenty thousand copies can’t be wrong.”

  “No kidding. Wow. Must be a lot of precise people out there.”

  “Makes the world go ‘round.”

  “What does?”

  “Preciseness.”

  “What about imperfection? Didn’t someone say it’s individual imperfection that holds the world together?”

  “No.”

  “No? So what holds the world together?”

  “The moon and gravity.”

  “We aren’t going to get along at all, are we, professor?”

  “Doesn’t look good. Let me get the door…”

  * * *

  “So what did you think?” I called from the dining room, scratching out the afternoon’s syllabus at the table.

  “Of what?” Katie called back from the kitchen. Behind the closed swinging door. Alone. With the cat.

  “The book!”

  “I told you, I didn’t read it!”

  I looked up from my scribbling. “’Didn’t’ or ‘won’t’?”

  Silence from the kitchen. Then: “This is a really nice cat. You should try him sometime!”

  “Thanks, I’m full!”

  “Abyssinian, isn’t he? Aloof and self-involved, I like that!”

  “Thought you might. What is it you wanted to see me about, Miss—what is your last name?”

  “Bracken!” she called.

  “Oh! Well! That’s a nice name!”

  “He said disingenuously! I like your name, though! It suits you!”

  “Does it?”

  “’Poor Elliot! As they nailed him to his cross he Bled-soe.”

  I looked up again from my pencil. “Miss Bracken, if you’re not interested in my book and you so clearly don’t like me, why are you feeding my cat? Just wondering!”

  “Fever Dreams.”

  I put down the pencil “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me! It’s a terrific little film! Why’d you stop directing?”

  “You saw my film? When? Where?”

  “Amazingly unselfconscious for a first film! The scenes with the little girl in the swamp were inspired! Where’d you steal them?”

  “I didn’t! I wrote the script that way!”

  “I know, just kidding! But it got no distribution! Who convinced you it was an art film?”

  I looked down at the dinghy dining room rug. “Just about everyone! Emphatically!”

  “Yeah? Well, there’s a lot of emphatic people out there! Right? Elliot? You still there?”

  “It was a long time ago!”

  “Yeah! Pauline Kael was still alive! You should have gotten a print to her!”

  “I didn’t know her!”

  “Neither did Paul Schrader at first! Send it to Scorsese, he’d eat it up!”

  I found myself moving unconsciously toward the kitchen door. “I teach college kids now. In Texas!”

  “So? That make you a leper? It’s an unequivocally brilliant film, Elliot! The world deserves to see it! Don’t let it die in the can! Have you still got the negative?”

  I stood before the closed kitchen door, tried of yelling. “Where did you say you saw it?”

  “There are a few prints still floating around!”

  “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about, my undiscovered movie?”

  She turned from running tap water, cleaning out the cat food cans in the sink. I hadn’t realized I’d entered the kitchen. “Yes. Partly.”

  “You a producer, something like that?”

  She wiped her hands from Rita’s roll of paper towels. “Something like that.”

  She had the sleeves of her blouse rolled up, a stray reddish curl over one eye, thin lips looking wonderful when she smiled.

  “You want to buy my film, that it?”

  She wadded the towel, eyed the trash basket across the room, saw my alarmed expression as she raised her arm; the wonderful smile turned rueful. “You won’t know where it falls, Elliot,” she cocked her arm, “unless you let go of it.” And tossed.

  The wad missed the basket by a good foot.

  “Not producing a basketball film, I’m guessing.” I swept forward, snagged the wad from the spotless linoleum, dropped it neatly in the basket.

  Miss Bracken was watching me when I looked up. “Perfect. Now the kitchen’s immaculate again; nothing out of place. Just like your classroom. I’m guessing.”

  “Who are you?” I asked evenly.

  She fished a card from her jeans, handed it to me:

  Paranormal Investigator

  Kathleen Bracken (212) 870-6666

  “Uhhh…”

  “I think you can help me, Mr. Bledsoe.”

  “Uhhh….”

  “Help me a great deal, Elliot.”

  “Miss Bracken?”

  �
�Yes?”

  “Call me Mr. Bledsoe.”

  “Help me with a case I’m working on, Elliot. A particular case.”

  “I really don’t think so. Thanks for feeding the cat. Now I--”

  “I do think so. Thought so the moment I saw your picture.”

  “On the back of my book?”

  “That one too. But I was speaking of your first film.”

  “Miss Bracken, let me be honest. You’re nutty. But in an intelligently-kooky kind of way. I like you. But see, the thing is, I know absolutely nothing about paranormal—“

  “Maybe more than you think.”

  “—I teach college film theory, not metaphysics.”

  “Which you hate.”

  “—I really don’t think I could be of any use to you. Hate what?”

  “Film theory.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Your whole work says it.”

  “I thought you didn’t read the book.”

  “The movie.”

  “Really. Huh. And how can a 16mm under-90-minute student film I made twenty years ago say all that?”

  “You were born to make films, Elliot. It’s all over your aura.”

  “I’ll try to clean it off. Miss Bracken, I don’t think it would work out between us.”

  She looked at me. “In what sense?”

  “We can’t be of use to each other.”

  “But we already have, Elliot. It’s called destiny.”

  I didn’t quite hear her. “Dentistry?”

  “Look at yourself, Elliot.”

  “I have.” I fingered my mouth. “It’s just a longer than average eyetooth. Runs in my whole family.”

  “Look down at yourself.”

  I sighed. Looked. The big Abyssinian was coiled between my ankles sinuously, rubbing his head ecstatically against my calf.

  I yelped, began backing away.

  “Don’t turn from him, Elliot. It’s called Fate.”

  “What happened to dentistry?”

  I made a show of looking at my watch as I backed out through the kitchen door into the dining room again. “Oh dear, late for class…”

  “Take my card.”

  “You know, coincidentally, we just had the place exorcised only last week—“

  “Elliot…“