Free Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) by Jack Ketchum Page B

an entrepreneur. I can’t help it. It comes with years of practice and gets in the blood and stays there.

    He said he had to come when we called him. And he
shook tables
.

    The following night he pulled the tablecloth out from under the candlesticks. It shot maybe three feet into the air and then came drifting down behind me. The night after that he floated the table two feet off the floor. On the third night he mashed the planchette on the Ouija board into a flat clear plastic plate.

    And the point is, we
asked
him to do these things.

    Mary did, actually. He always seemed to respond to Mary while with the rest of us it was iffy. But I figured I could use that too.

    “Suppose we do a seance,” I said to her, “
before
the end of the show?”

    “Huh?”

    “We fit him into it.”

    “You’re crazy, Stu.”

    “Why not? We try it once. If nothing happens, no big loss. If it works, we’ll advertise the hell out of him.”

    We were sitting at the bar and the dinner crowd was slowly arriving. Whatever the cook was doing in the kitchen he was doing right, and it was making me hungry. Mary’s scent was working on me in a different way. At the moment I felt lean and smart and avaricious. I smiled at her and she looked at me for a while and then smiled back. And there was that look in her eyes again, that sense of hey, what the hell.

    “I don’t know, Stu,” she said. But she was being coy now. “Suppose you just tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

    We set it up.

    We gave him the spot right after Paula’s, right before the body-painting number. That way if he flopped we’d still have our topper. We dimmed the lights and had a couple of the waitresses carry on the table with the cloth and candles, the Ouija board and the mashed planchette, and meantime I went into a little act of my own, trying to spook the crowd.

    I told them all about Frank W. Morgan, all this stuff about him being a painter and dead since 1928 and you should have heard them hoot and holler. They thought we were pulling one, naturally. But I got to them eventually. I made up this story about how he’d been murdered by a former lover, a jealous model. I made it all grim and gothic and by the end of it I had them interested. The place was quiet for once. So quiet that when somebody dropped a soup ladle in the kitchen you could feel half of them jump.

    Bernie and Paula and Mary came on dressed in white robes and took their places at the table and I did likewise, lighting the candles while the dimmers faded to black.

    And I could feel him there. Even before we called him.Something cold and tough right beside me. And I had the horrible feeling he was smirking.

    We got our response from the crowd right off, all the
ooohs
and
ahhhs
, just as soon as the table started to rise, and then again when the candles switched places and when the tablecloth started flapping, and again when the Ouija board just folded up and flew across the room, slamming against the bar. That shut them up entirely. I think they were truly scared by then, scared mostly for Mary, who was doing all the talking, but maybe for themselves too because the feeling in the room had grown so thick and strange and Sam’s cawing was so unearthly, starting off like a low groan and going louder and shriller until finally—according to plan, mind you—Mary stood up and told the ghost of Frank W. Morgan to take her robe off and to
do it now
and he did, and of course she was naked underneath. And by then it was a screeching sound Sam was making, a high shrill bird-sound of stark terror.

    “Paint me,” she said.

    I had no idea it was coming. I honestly didn’t.

    We all knew how he felt about the body painting, and I’d have told her not to if she’d given me any warning. Some people don’t believe me but it’s the truth. But it was just like her to pull out the stops like that, to make it all theatrical and exciting. It was that boldness again, that daring. The paint cans