House Haunted by Al Sarrantonio Page B

the uniformed cops got in heavily beside him. The other got behind the wheel, the man in the trench coat beside him in the front seat.
    The car wouldn't start. The driver cursed, the uniformed man next to Jan, mocking his friend's ability as a chauffeur. Sharply, the man in the trench coat told them to shut up. The engine turned over, the driver shouting in triumph as they pulled away.
    Jan lay on the backseat, watching the slate gray of the sky go past through the rear window. The face of the uniformed cop hovered over him. “Enjoy it now.” The cop smiled. He nodded at the sky with his head. “You won't be seeing that where you're going.”
    After a while Jan slept, the needs of his beaten body aided by the soothing motion of the automobile. At first, his sleep was dreamless. But later, as they approached their destination, the underground place in whose elevator only the bureaucrats and the dead ever rose, he dreamed not of his mother but of Bridget, the red-haired girl, holding her naked body out to him and telling him, gently in his ear, “Soon.”

8. WEST
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    It was hardest to stay away from the cocaine when his legs hurt.
    Some days it was his neck that hurt, or his lower back. Some days, when the clouds were low and gray and wet over the Pacific, he hurt all over, a dull aching as if he were a giant throbbing tooth.
    He had switched to coke when the doctors took the morphine away from him in the hospital; some of them had even remarked what a wonderfully easy withdrawal he had had from the morphine, which, they insisted, he had become dependent on.
    Withdrawal, my ass, he had thought at the time. All I did was change accounts. One of the doctors, the shrewd young one who had come out of the Peace Corps and was stupid enough to be in medicine for reasons other than ego or money, guessed what had happened, but Ray had become very clever himself and began to hide the cocaine, taking it only when the doctor, Madelaine, wasn't around. She had taken to showing up unexpectedly, and once had walked into the living room while a long line of coke lay waiting on the coffee table for the straw Ray was looking for. But he had been able to distract her away from it, eventually having to dust it off the table onto the rug while she turned to look at a Mondrian print he pointed out to her on the far wall. Later in the day he had spent two hours cursing and crying, pulling his useless legs out of the wheelchair till he collapsed on the floor, sucking at the dirty fibers with the straw he had finally located, getting as much grit and nylon up his nose as diluted coke. The two hours had hardly been worth it, and finally he had fallen asleep, exhausted and worn with frustrated rage. Madelaine had found him the next morning when she came in with the housekeeper, and the only satisfaction he had gotten out of the entire affair was her inability to find any more coke in her search of the house.
    But that had been early in the rehabilitation, when the doctors still hovered around him, when he knew he needed something to drown out the awful memories in his head, the awful sound of Bridget's laughter.
    After a while he had come to an accommodation with the drug. They lived in peaceful coexistence, and he was proud of the fact that he had fought it to the point where he had convinced himself that it was a medicine only, to be taken only when the pain got bad . . .
    The pain was bad today. He rolled himself from the window, leaving the clouds making moving shadows over the rolling lawn ( his dream to run down that lawn to the beach beyond, to the ocean, his legs moving him, throwing him into the blue Pacific . . .), and went to his desk and pulled out the file drawer. He pushed the green hanging folders back and lifted the thin plywood panel on the false bottom beneath. The white powder was already measured (doctors measure, medicine is measured), and he dusted it out expertly in a line on the top of the desk, lowered