Sole Survivor

Worse than absurd. Insane. There were no such things as ghosts.
        Yet now he recalled another disquieting incident that occurred as he'd fled the Delmann house.
         Racing from the kitchen with the smoke alarm blaring behind him, along the hallway and across the foyer to the door. His hand on the knob. From behind comes a hissing cold, prickling his neck, drilling through the base of his skull. Then he is crossing the porch without any memory of having opened the door .
        This seemed to be a meaningful incident as long as he considered it to be meaningful-but as soon as scepticism reasserted itself, the moment appeared to be utterly without import. Yes, if he had felt anything at the back of his neck, it should have been the heat of the fire, not a piercing chill. And, yes, this cold had been different from anything that he had ever felt before: not a spreading chill but like the tip of an icicle-indeed, more finely pointed yet, like a stiletto of steel taken from a freezer, a wire, a needle . A needle inserted into the summit of his spine. But this was a subjective perception of something that he had felt , not a journalist's measured observation of a concrete phenomenon. He'd been in a state of sheer panic, and he'd felt a lot of peculiar things; they were nothing but normal physiological responses to extreme stress. As for the few seconds of blank memory between the time when he'd put his hand on the doorknob and when he'd found himself most of the way across the porch… Well, that was also easily explained by panic, by stress, and by the blinding power of the overwhelming animal instinct to survive.
        Not a ghost.
        Rest in peace, Henry James.
        As he progressed through Santa Monica toward the ocean, Joe's brief embrace of superstition loosened, lost all passion. Reason returned.
        Nevertheless, something about the concept of a ghost continued to seem significant to him. He had a hunch that eventually he would arrive at a rational explanation derived from this consideration of the supernatural, a provable theory that would be as logical as the meticulously structured prose of Henry James.
        A needle of ice. Piercing to the grey matter in the centre of the spine. An injection, a quick cold squirt of… something.
        Did Nora Vadance feel that ghost needle an instant before she got up from the breakfast table to fetch the camcorder?
        Did the Delmanns feel it?
        And Lisa?
        Did Captain Delroy Blane feel it, too, before he disengaged the auto pilot, clubbed his First Officer in the face, and calmly piloted Flight 353 straight into the earth?
        Not a ghost, perhaps, but something fully as terrifying and as malevolent as any evil spirit returned from the abyss of the damned… something akin to a ghost.
        When Joe was two blocks from the Pacific, the cell phone rang for the third time.
        The caller said, “Okay, turn right on the Coast Highway and keep driving until you hear from us again.”
        To Joe's left, less than two hours of sunlight lay over the ocean, like lemon sauce cooking in a pan, gradually thickening to a deeper yellow.
        In Malibu, the phone rang again. He was directed to a turnoff that would take him to Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea, a Southwest restaurant on a bluff overlooking the ocean.
        “Leave the phone on the passenger's seat and give the car to the valet. He knows who you are. The reservation is in your name,” said the caller, and he hung up for the last time.
        The big restaurant looked like an adobe lodge transported from New Mexico, with turquoise window trim, turquoise doors, and walkways of red-clay tiles. The landscaping consisted of cactus gardens in beds of white pebbles-and two large sorrel trees with dark green foliage and sprays of white flowers.
        The Hispanic valet was more handsome by far than any current or past Latin movie star, affecting a moody and smouldering stare that he had surely practiced in front of a mirror for eventual use in front of a camera. As the man on the phone had promised, the valet was expecting Joe and didn't give him a claim check for the Mustang.
        Inside, Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea featured massive lodgepole-pine ceiling beams, vanilla-coloured plaster, and more red-clay pavers. The chairs and tables and other furnishings, which fortunately didn't push the Southwest theme to extremes, were J. Robert Scott knockoffs though not