The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘A son, yes. Stop interrupting. I had to start in the middle because the item about the son was the first one I came across. There was a “death reported” item in the Times this morning. For once they scooped the webs. Somebody at Huffpo or Daily Beast is apt to get taken to the woodshed for that, because it happened awhile ago. My guess is the family decided to wait until after the burial to release the news.’

‘Katie—’

‘Shut up and listen.’ She leaned forward. ‘There’s collateral damage. And it’s getting worse.’

‘I don’t—’

She put a palm over my mouth. ‘Shut. The fuck. Up.’

I shut. She took her hand away.

‘Jeroma Whitfield was where this started. So far as I can tell using Google, she’s the only one in the world. Was, I mean. There are tons of Jerome Whitfields, though, so thank God she was your first, or it might have been attracted to other Jeromas. Some of them, anyway. The closest ones.’

‘It?’

She looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘The power. Your second …’ She paused, I think because the word that came immediately to mind was victim. ‘Your second subject was Peter Stefano. Also not the world’s most common name, but not completely weird, either. Now look at this.’

From her desk she took a few sheets of paper. She eased the first from the paper clip holding them together and passed it to me. On it were three obituaries, all from small newspapers – one in Pennsylvania, one in Ohio, and one in upstate New York. The Pennsylvania Peter Stefano had died of a heart attack. The one in Ohio had fallen from a ladder. The one from New York – Woodstock – had suffered a stroke. All had died on the same day as the crazed record producer whose name they shared.

I sat down hard. ‘This can’t be.’

‘It is. The good news is that I found two dozen other Peter Stefanos across the USA, and they’re fine. I think because they all live farther away from Gowanda Correctional. That was ground zero. The shrapnel spread out from there.’

I looked at her, dumbfounded.

‘Wicked Ken came next. Another unusual name, thank God. There’s a whole nest of Wanderlys in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but I guess that was too far. Only …’

She handed me the second sheet. First up was the news item from the Times: SERIAL KILLER’S SON DIES. His wife claimed Ken Wanderly Jr had shot himself by accident while cleaning a pistol, but the item pointed out that the ‘accident’ had happened less than twelve hours after his father’s death. That it might actually have been suicide was left for the reader to imply.

‘I don’t think it was suicide,’ Katie said. Beneath her makeup, she looked very pale. ‘I don’t think it was exactly an accident, either. It homes in on the names, Mike. You see that, right? And it can’t spell, which makes it even worse.’

The obit (I was coming to loathe that word) below the piece about Wicked Ken’s son concerned one Kenneth Wanderlee, of Paramus, New Jersey. Like Peter Stefano of Pennsylvania (an innocent who had probably never killed anything but time), Wanderlee of Paramus had died of a heart attack.

Just like Jeroma.

I was breathing fast, and sweating all over. My balls had drawn up until they felt roughly the size of peach pits. I felt like fainting, also like vomiting, and managed to do neither. Although I did plenty of vomiting later. That went on for a week or more, and I lost ten pounds. (I told my worried mother it was the flu.)

‘Here’s the capper,’ she said, and handed me the last page. There were seventeen Amos Langfords on it. The biggest cluster was in the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut area, but one had died in Baltimore, one in Virginia, and two had kicked off in West Virginia. In Florida there were three.

‘No,’ I whispered.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This second one, in Amityville, is Penny’s bad uncle. Just be grateful that Amos is also a fairly unusual name in this day and age. If it had been James or William, there could have been hundreds of dead Langfords. Probably not thousands, because it’s still not reaching farther than the Midwest, but Florida’s nine hundred miles away. Farther than any AM radio signal can reach, at least in the daytime.’

The sheets of paper slipped from my hand and seesawed to the floor.

‘Now do you see what I meant about those squeezie things people use to make their hands and arms stronger? At first maybe you can only squeeze the handles together once or twice. But if you keep doing it, the muscles get stronger. That’s what’s happening to you, Mike. I’m sure of it. Every time you write an obit for a living person, the power gets stronger and reaches further.’

‘It was your idea,’ I whispered. ‘Your goddam idea.’

But she wasn’t having that. ‘I didn’t tell you to write Jeroma’s obituary. That was your idea.’

‘It was a whim,’ I protested. ‘A goof, for God’s sake. I didn’t know what was going to happen!’