by Mike Ashley
“I’m Miss Pettiweather,” I said, hoping my ordinary demeanor and harmless, frumpy middle-agedness would be enough to reassure her. In such a neighborhood, it was no wonder she was leery of opening her own front door.
She was badly hunchbacked and the spinal deterioration caused her obvious pain. The smell of medicine assured me she had a doctor’s care at least. Her neck was so badly twisted that her left ear was pressed against her shoulder and she could by no method straighten her head. But it was a kind soul inside that ruined body, and they were kind eyes that glared up at me.
I followed her into the dimly lit, grubby interior. Her shuffling gait was slow and awkward, as it was difficult to walk with such a horribly calcium-leached spinal column. For her own part, she seemed to count herself lucky to be able to walk, and bore up boldly.
She was eighty-five.
“Jeremiah died when I was seventy,” she said in her familiar cracked voice. I sat with her at her kitchen table. “Fifteen years ago, Christmas eve, in Swedish Hospital.”
“What did he die of?” I asked, moving my rickety chair closer to Mrs. Adamson, to better hear her thin, distant voice.
“He was old,” she said.
“Yes, I know, but, well, it will help me to know more. Was he in his right mind? I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, Mrs. Adamson, but it’s only a few days to Christmas. I assure you I can help, but I’ll need as much information beforehand as you can give me. Was he able to think clearly until close to the end?”
“Lord, no,” she said, her sideways head staring with the brightest, sharpest, bluest eyes. “He had Alzheimer’s.”
I sighed. I would have to grill her a bit more, to find out what Mr. Adamson’ final days were like. But I could already guess, and later, after an interview at Swedish Hospital, I would be certain. The raving last moments, the delusions—in this case, the delusion that he had gotten into such a state because his wife had poisoned him. It was often the case with the more malignant spirits that they died in abject confusion, anger, and horror, hence they could not go on to a better existence elsewhere.
The tea kettle whistled and though I insisted I could make it myself, Mrs. Adamson obviously wished to entertain me. She got up, for all the agony of motion, and toddled weirdly round the vile kitchen. A moldy pork chop sat in hard grease in a rusty pan on the stove. A garbage bag was filled with tuna fish and Chef Boyardee spaghetti cans. Something totally beyond recognition reposed on a plate upon the counter, and, though it was days old, whatever it was appeared to have been nibbled on that very morning, whether by Mrs. Adamson or some rat I didn’t want to speculate.
In some ways she was sharp as could be. In others, she was indubitably senile. I kept her company the long afternoon. She rambled on about all kinds of things, mostly pretty dull, but was so terribly lonesome I couldn’t allow myself to leave. Fifteen years a widow! And all those years, she had spent Christmasses alone in that crumbling house—every year awaiting . . . Jeremiah. The toughness of someone that frail is really surprising, though such stoicism had left its mark.
She was cheered no end that I promised to spend Christmas Eve with her. I think her relief wasn’t entirely because I convinced her I could lay Jeremiah to rest. Fifteen years is a lot of Christmasses spent alone. Such loneliness is hard to bare, even had there not been the terror of a ghost. So it seemed as though Mrs. Adamson was more interested in our Christmas Eve together than in the laying of a ghost. Indeed, she took for granted I could save her from the long-endured horror, and was more worried about the months or years she might have yet to live by whatever means available.
Later that evening, at home in my own warm bed, I was filled with sorrow to think of her. I fought back my tears as I pondered that wreck of a body, the years of desperation, the terrible thing she faced year in and year out, darkening her whole life. What will our last years be like, Jane? Who will come to visit us? Who will keep us company when we’ve lost even the skill to write our letters?
I was so involved with the pitifulness of her material situation, I was not preparing myself sufficiently for my encounter with Jeremiah. What could be worse than a sick old age, separated from the rest of the world? Well, Jane, something can be worse, as you and I have learned and relearned in our explorations. But I wasn’t thinking so on the day I met old Gretta Adamson.
Her odd, sad sort of strength was the other thing that left me unprepared, and the simple way she took for granted that I would put an end to the horrors. She had looked so frail, and had endured so long, how could I have expected her particular demon to be a bad one? I wasn’t ready, that’s all, though I did do my research, and never imagined there were surprises waiting.
I visited Mrs. Adamson on two other occasions before the holiday in question, and reassured her about my research at the hospital where her husband died. She hadn’t known the worst of his last hours, as she had been ill herself, and unable to be constantly at his side. The day he died, she had been with him only a short time in the morning, thus was spared the worst of his venomous accusations, hallucinations, and the screaming hatred that preluded his death-rattle.
I had talked to a head-nurse, who had been a night nurse at the beginning of her career fifteen years before; she gave me a vivid, startling account of Jeremiah Adamson’s raging thirst for revenge against a wife he imagined to be his murderess. I certainly wasn’t going to fill in Mrs. Adamson at this late date, and was therefore careful to avoid telling her too much of what I had discovered.
That that head-nurse remembered so much should have been a warning to me, as death is too common in hospitals for a nurse to recall one old man in detail. But I chalked it up to her youthfulness at the time—we all remember our first encounters with grotesque tragedy—and Jeremiah had been memorably inventive in his repellent promises, given his otherwise impaired faculties.
So I had learned all too well Jeremiah’s state of mind in his last moments of senile dementia. Mrs. Adamson was able to tell me a bit more, and remembered other things piece by piece whenever I probed as gently as the situation allowed. But I couldn’t delve far at a time, for some of it was too much for her to bear recalling, and much else, I presumed, was genuinely lost to her own age-related difficulties with memory.
“I would like to see Jeremiah’s personal papers, whatever you may have,” I asked a couple of days before Christmas Eve. Mrs. Adamson was aghast, for she herself had never interfered with his privacy, had never sorted through his personal letters and what-nots in the fifteen years since his death. This should have been another clue informing me that Jeremiah’s tyranny began well before senility set in. But I continued to be blind. I thought only to convince Mrs. Adamson of what was essential.
“You see,” I explained, “I have to find out more about him. You mustn’t think of it as really being Jeremiah. It’s only a shadow of him, and a shadow of his darkest mood at that. The afterlife mentality is very simple compared to life. It fixes on a few things. In his private papers, there may be some clue to the thing that he most feared, or most wanted, and whatever it is can become a tool to erase his lingering shade.”
“He wouldn’t like us to know those things about him,” Mrs. Adamson insisted, protecting her husband with a peculiar devotion, and looking at me sadly with those sharp blue eyes in her sideways expression.
“Do you know the meaning of an exorcism, Mrs. Adamson?” She wasn’t Catholic and wouldn’t know much, but of course everyone knows a little. “There are many ways to lay a ghost, but exorcism is the cruelest. It is a real fight. It’s a terrible thing for the exorcist and for the ghost. But there are other means. Sometimes you can reason with them, but it is like reasoning with a child, and you have to be careful. But think a minute, Mrs. Adamson, about the classic type of exorcism you may have heard about, with holy water and the cross of Jesus. To tell the truth, such a procedure is worthless unless the individual had some personal belief in these things while living. The cross of Jesus is a powerful amulet against th
e ghost of a Catholic. But if he wasn’t mindful of holy things in life, then his ghost won’t care about them either.
“But other things can become equally significant. Once I got rid of a ghost by showing it a rare postage stamp it had never been able to get when living. A pretty rotten spirit it was, too, but gentle as a lamb when it saw that postage stamp. And the ghost never showed up again.
“Only by careful research can I find out what that special item might be. The more personal the papers, Mrs. Adamson, the better it will be.”
She sat like a collapsed rag doll in a big overstuffed chair, pondering all that I had told her, her bright eyes expressing what a dreadful decision I was forcing her to make. At length I helped her stand, reassuring her the whole while, and she led me to a musty closet in which we were able to dig out two shoeboxes held together with rubber-bands so old they had melted into the cardboard of the boxes.
Inside these shoeboxes were faded photographs and mementoes and yellowed letters and a lock of baby’s hair in a red envelope labeled “Jeremiah.”
“I recollect that,” said Mrs. Adamson. “Jeremiah showed it to me. He had a lot of hair when he was a baby. Lost it all.”
And her dry, horrible old voice managed a sweet laugh as she fumbled the envelope open and gazed at the little curl of hair tied with a piece of thread.
She told me, as best she could, who were the people in the family photos.
She became very silent on discovering, for the first time in her whole long life, that Jeremiah had once been unfaithful, the evidence being a love-letter written by her rival several years after Jeremiah married Gretta.
I patted her liver-spotted hand and assured her, “It is sometimes just this sort of thing that brings them back. He may have wanted to spare you knowing.”
But that kind of haunting was rarely menacing, so I kept sorting through the two boxes. Jeremiah kept no diaries—it is usually women who do that, and they’re the most easily laid as a result—and it didn’t seem there were going to be many clues to the sort of thing it would take to lay Jeremiah come Christmas Eve.
In the bottom of the second box I found an old black and white photograph of the handsome young man and the strikingly good looking woman I’d learned were Gretta and Jeremiah when they were courting. What a smile he had! He wore a soldier’s bloomers. Her hair was short and little curls hung out from under a flowered hat. Very modern, both of them, in their day. As I looked at this photograph a long time, the bent old woman beside me leaned to one side to see what I had, and she went misty-eyed at once.
In the photo, Gretta was holding a round Japanese fan. The camera had focused well enough that I could make out a floral design painted upon it.
“Jeremiah gave me that fan,” she said. “I still have it.”
And she rose painfully from the chair beside me and tottered back into her bedroom. She returned with the antique fan, dusty and faded from having been displayed in countless ways over countless years. To see that crooked old lady holding that fan, and to see the young beauty holding it in the photo in my hands, well, I cannot tell you how I felt. And she was so moony and oddly happy in her expression, I was once again convinced Jeremiah’s ghost couldn’t be all that bad, or she wouldn’t still think of him tenderly.
“It was the day we were engaged, that picture was taken. He’d been to fight in Asia and for all we knew might fight somewhere else soon, and die. He gave me this fan and I’ve always kept it.”
“It’s our Cross of Jesus,” I said, somehow overawed by the loving emanations from the woman as she held that fan.
“Do you think so?” she asked.
“Jeremiah died with the delusion that you wanted to hurt him, Gretta.”
I told her this as unhurtingly as possible.
“That fan will remind him that such a delusion couldn’t have been true.”
I’d been doing this sort of thing a long time, Jane. I really thought I had it worked out.
On Christmas Eve I came early and brought a chicken casserole and a small gift. Gretta was overwhelmed and wept for joy. And we did not mention Jeremiah during our humble repast, for it would have put a pall upon our cross-generational friendship and Gretta’s first holiday with anyone in many a long year.
She tittered pleasantly and made her usual horrible tea in dirty cups. The Christmas spirit was so much upon me that I actually drank the terrible stuff without worrying if her tea were infested with beetles. She opened the smartly wrapped present—nothing special, just an old Chinese snuff bottle that I’d had for years and been quite fond of. It had roses carved on two sides and it had seemed appropriate because we’d talked about roses a few days before.
Then to my surprise, Gretta came up with a box as well—wrapped in some quaint, faded, crinkled paper recycled from two decades before, and crookedly taped all over with yellowing, gooey, transparent tape.
In the box was a tiny ceramic doll that must have been fifty or sixty years old if it was a day, and far more valuable than the bottle I’d wrapped for Gretta. I raved about the beauty of the tiny doll, coddled it tenderly, and really didn’t have to put on an act, I was honestly overwhelmed.
“It was my grandmother’s,” said Gretta, at which my jaw dropped open, realizing my guess of “fifty or sixty years” was off by a full century.
“You shouldn’t part with it!” I exclaimed. “It must be terribly valuable.”
“I won’t need it any longer, Penelope. In fact, I haven’t needed it for years. I almost couldn’t find it for you. So, you be pleased to take it and don’t go thinking it’s too much.”
Our eyes held one another a long while. How ashamed I was of what I thought of that neck-bent, hunchbacked woman when first I laid eyes on her. Not that I ever thought ill. But it wasn’t her humanity that struck me at the start. The things I had first noticed were her crippled pitifulness, her loneliness, her wretched old age, and the decades of accumulating dirt and clutter that surrounded her fading existence. Somewhere down the list of first impressions, I must have noted her own unique individuality, but it hadn’t been the first thing.
And now, despite that she looked at me with her head fused to one side, with her face turned upward from her permanently crooked posture, I could see, how clearly I could see, that this was indeed the young beauty of that old photograph.
We sang carols out of tune and reminisced about our childhood winters; we laughed and we bawled and had a grand day together. She remembered her youth with far greater clarity than she could recall her widowed years. Then long about nine-thirty, she was terribly worn out. Though she ordinarily didn’t require a lot of sleep, this had been quite an exciting day. I could see she could barely keep her eyes open.
“Gretta,” I said, “we’ve got to put you to bed. No, don’t argue. If you’re thinking of waiting up for Jeremiah, there’s no need. I’ve got your fan right here, and with it I will lay him flat; you won’t even have to be disturbed. When you wake up in the morning, I’ll be there on your sofa, and we’ll celebrate a peaceful Christmas day.”
It was a half-hour more before I actually got her to bed, somewhat after ten. Though she insisted she would be wide awake if I needed her at midnight, she was snoring in homely fashion even before I closed her bedroom door.
I walked down the hall, passed the kitchen, and entered the dining room. I surveyed the room and began quietly to push Gretta’s furniture against one wall. She had told me in one of our earlier interviews that Jeremiah would first appear at the living room window and make his way to the kitchen and thence to her bedroom. I went into the living room to move that furniture out of the way also. Such precautions were probably excessive, but I didn’t want to stumble into anything if for some unforeseen reason I had to move quickly.
It was still some while to midnight, so I turned on Gretta’s radio very quietly and listened to a program on change-ringing. The day had been tiring for me as well. Like Gretta, I thought I would be wide awake until midnight. But the next
thing I knew, the radio station was signing off the air, and I was startled awake by a change in the house’s atmosphere.
I was not immediately alert. The realization that it was suddenly midnight, coupled with a vague movement beyond the front room window, caused me to stand abruptly from where I’d set napping. The sudden movement made my head swim. A black cloud swirled around me. The brittle old paper fan had fallen from my lap onto the floor. I bent to pick it up and nearly lost consciousness. I was forcing my mind to be more fully awake, slowly realizing my dizziness wasn’t the natural cause of standing too quickly, but was imposed upon me by something other.
As I picked up the fan and moved toward the window, I was brought up short by Jeremiah’s sudden appearance there. His black gums were bared, revealing a lack of teeth and reminding me of a lampray. His eyes were fogged white, as though he were able to see only what he imagined and not what was. It was a very complete materialization and he might easily have been taken for a mad peeping tom. He raised both his hands, which were bony claws, and shoved them writhing toward the glass. I expected it to shatter, but instead, the specter vanished.
By the increasing chill, I knew he was in the house.
I hurried toward the kitchen, recovering my senses more than not, holding the paper fan before me. I was shaking frightfully, beginning to comprehend the depth of his malignancy.
There he was, in the kitchen, bent down, scrabbling wildly but noiselessly at the door under the sink. The cupboard opened under his insistence, and he tried to grasp a little faded blue carton, but his clawed hands only passed through it.
Then he stiffened and slowly stood, his back to me. He sensed my presence, and his very awareness gave me shivers. His shoulders stiffened and he began slowly to turn about. I took a strong posture and held the paper fan in front of me, so that it would be the first thing he saw.
He turned and, for a moment, was no longer a spidery old man. He was a young soldier, and he looked at me with sharp but unseeing eyes. I can only describe it thus, because, although his gaze fell directly on me and was no longer clouded white, he seemed to see something infinitely more pleasing to him than I could have been. I supposed he thought I was Gretta, and he was imposing upon my form his memory of her when she was as young as he himself now appeared to be.