by Thomas Page
It was one of those ugly moments in life when a truth has been dragged from someone against his will. Jameson had a silly, embarrassed smile fixed on his face. “No, I’m not.”
“You are, you’re like a rabbit next to a sleeping fox. He’s got you . . .” Jones stopped as Evan Branch’s cane whacked him smartly across the seat of the pants.
Branch growled, “Gentlemen. Remove yourselves from each other’s presence.”
Jameson sputtered, “Good idea. I refuse to have anything more to do with this car mechanic of a doctor.”
Jones barked, “Get out, Jameson, before I put your face on the back of your head.”
Jameson would have slammed the door behind him had it not been restrained with springs. Jones tried to bury his face in the green screen.
Another forty minutes passed in self-conscious silence during which they all tried to pretend things were normal. But Evan Branch slowly worked himself toward a cataclysmic burst of temper, like steam and heat pushing against a hardened lava dome. He counted the minutes off on his watch and said, “This entire business is degrading.”
“Sir,” said Jones, staring into the data.
“This is the most futile gathering of physicians since the alchemists’ convention. Jameson considers the treatment of illness beneath his dignity as a doctor, you play with it like it’s an electric train, and Dutton is lost in space somewhere. What are we waiting for, Jones?”
“Sir, if we could just be a little more patient . . .”
But Branch’s elephantine patience was shrinking in direct proportion to the buildup in his blood pressure. He considered death a sacred event. “We are not students playing with frogs’ legs. Forrester belongs underground. Shut that thing off.”
Jones chewed his thumbnail trying to think up a reply. Branch’s face looked loose and mottled from his strained heart. Dutton saw a collision coming and Branch just might die from it today.
“Jones, shut that thing off or I will myself,” Branch roared, pounding each syllable out with his cane.
Beyond Branch’s shoulder, Dutton saw the vital sign monitor. The heart line jumped once and the light winked yellow. Dutton cried out, “The heart jumped!” and pointed at the graph.
Again the yellow light blinked, and on the cardiogram graph two faint blips appeared.
Branch said, “It’s merely nerves jumping, Lawrence. His heart did not start.”
Impulse waves washed over Daniel Forrester’s nervous system. Slowly his body functions stirred to life. His diaphragm gave a small contraction like a hiccup. Then the heart stopped again and with it the body functions.
They felt the cold draft swirl through the ward, raising goose pimples on their skin, bearing that cold stale odor with it. Dutton looked at the sealed windows again.
Evan Branch’s hand reached for the back of his neck. He whirled round on Dutton, veins throbbing in his temples. “Lawrence, what did you do that for?”
Mystified, Dutton answered, “Sir?”
“You pushed me. Why did you push me!”
Appalled and helpless, Dutton stammered, “Sir, I’m standing here.”
Branch jabbed his cane at the console. “You tried to push me into the instruments!”
“Sir, I did not, I’m watching the . . .” At that moment, Dutton felt a hand slap the back of his neck, the palm warm, the fingers frigid and trying to enclose his flesh. He whirled around. No one was there. “I felt it. Someone’s in here.”
“Nobody’s in here,” Branch shot back. He looked at the console and what happened next may have been pure instinct or something he had been planning for several moments. The cane rose in the air and came slashing down at the instruments. Jones had been expecting that. Gently he caught the stick before it could touch the console.
Again Daniel Forrester’s heart burst into activity. Blood coursed through the rigid vessels, sluggishly at first, then, after several faltering beats, with increasing pressure. The lung pump shut down as Forrester began breathing on his own. One by one the vital sign lights switched oil.
He had been gone for over an hour. Dutton’s knees felt watery and loose. He sank into the chair beside Jones. Evan Branch mopped his face with his handkerchief.
Jones alone seemed to rise to the occasion. He punched out his own program again. The printout clearly showed the magnetic phantom reforming over Forrester’s forehead seconds before the heart came to life. He passed it to Dutton, who passed it to Branch, who crumpled it up without looking at it.
“Sir,” said Jones respectfully. “Forrester is no longer dead. The machine has brought him back.”
“The ghosts I have called, I cannot get rid of them—”
Goethe
CHAPTER 6
Señor Velasquez stood by the living room window and watched the little car pass by, stop, back up, and stop again in front of the house. He snapped his fingers at his wife, who sprang to the door and opened it just as the woman in the car shaded her eyes to read the address.
Just to be safe, the Velasquezes had coffee and little cakes set out in the dining room. Neither had ever met a medium before and did not know what to expect other than a baggy, bull-shouldered woman with stringy hair and a sack dress. Nora Stone could not have been less like that. She was tiny with large round glasses, a pink pokebag full of needlepoint, and a chronic shyness that all but prevented her from stepping into the house.
“Is this the Velasquez residence?” she asked, blinking at them.
Velasquez swept her in with a wave of his hand. They offered her the snacks. Gratefully she accepted, her face as pink as her pokebag. She complimented the Señora on the crystal service and admired the furnishings. The Velasquezes were at ease immediately. She was such a sweet lady, painfully middle-class. They exchanged pictures of their children. “Steven, James, and Elsa,” said Nora Stone, proudly putting them back in her pink billfold. “Where are your little ones?”
“They are staying with my sister,” said Señora Velasquez. “Until this unpleasantness is cleared up.”
“That’s good,” said Nora Stone, sympathetically touching her forearm. “Children are too impressionable. So imaginative. They love to play ghost games but when the real thing happens, it is not good at all.”
Velasquez opened his coat and loosened his tie now that they knew each other. “You did not bring anything, Mrs. Stone?”
“Oh, dear me, no, all I need is myself and my needlepoint.”
“What precisely will you do?”
“Oh, I’ll just sit in the room and see what I see. You can stay if you wish but it usually is not a pleasant experience so if you decide to leave . . .”
“We had thought it best to stay with the children,” said Señora Velasquez. Her husband nodded vigorously.
“That’s good.” Nora Stone had a breathless, cute way of emphasizing her words. “It usually isn’t good for adults either. Why, Mike is always telling me it can’t lead to anything but harm as I get older. And I tell Mike, I can’t help it, I was born with it.”
Velasquez inserted a pipestem into his mouth and pulled his chair up closer. Perfume wafted from Nora Stone in waves. “If I may ask, Señora, how did such a nice lady as yourself get involved in this profession?”
Nora Stone had obviously answered this question many times before. She took a bite of cake—“this is so good”—and daintily wiped her lips. “Well! We were living in Venice when Elsa was born and Mike decided it was time we bought a house. It was mainly an investment Well, I have always had such an imagination, in college I used to sell stories to romance magazines. So Mike and me looked and looked and looked, you have no idea how tight housing is in the valley, until we found this darling little three-bedroom place and we moved in. Well! There was a feeling about this house I did not like at all.”
Velasquez took a piece of cake and swallowed it whole. “
What kind of feeling?”
“It was very cold for one thing . . .”
The Velasquezes said, “Ahh,” and nodded knowingly.
“. . . and there were times when I would walk into a room and have the feeling someone had just left! I was anxious all the time and I could not sleep to save my soul. Mike and the children did not feel anything”—Nora Stone waggled her finger as she said it—“at all. So it was just me. Fortunately I have a husband who never laughs at such things.”
Nora Stone sipped coffee, bringing the Velasquezes up to a peak of suspense. “Well, one night I decided to stay up late. I thought I would let this feeling grow on me. I was sitting in the living room, I will never forget it. I was on my third gimlet of the night when I looked out the window and saw this face looking in!”
“A face,” Velasquez repeated, loosening his tie even more.
Nora Stone touched her breast with her hand as though to catch her breath. “Yes!”
Velasquez’s wife turned pale and decided not to eat any more snacks.
Nora Stone said, “It was a man of twenty-five or twenty-six and I was petrified. We looked at each other for about five minutes and then he went away.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, the next day I called the Psychic Association and they sent over a medium. He came over and wouldn’t you know he was more interested in me. He stayed the night. I saw the face again but he didn’t—although he did say the house had a haunted feel. He told me that I was a receiver, the best receiver he ever met. He said I could sense a presence earlier than anyone he ever knew and could see a manifestation earlier than anybody else. He couldn’t see the ghost like I could. And that is how I ended up doing this. For nothing!”
“That is interesting,” Velasquez reflected. “You charge nothing.”
“No. The association pays my transportation.”
“Who was the face?” asked Señora Velasquez. “Did you ever find out?”
“Yes! The realtor checked the house records and told me that in 1947 this twenty-five-year-old man and his wife had owned the house. And his wife fell in love with a hardware salesman and the two of them murdered her husband with a shotgun!”
Velasquez shook his head and stole a look at his wife, concerned that she not be too affected.
“I found an old photo of him in the papers and it was him exactly.” Nora Stone caught her breath and sat back against the sofa. “You see, I don’t like doing this. I don’t do seances, I wouldn’t know how. My adviser said anything like that would only stifle my gifts. Now! Tell me what has been happening in this house.”
Velasquez made it short and concise. They had lived in the house for six months and there was never a hint of anything odd until night before last. It was only a feeling, sí, sí, of fear, of unease. The children awakened screaming about a man walking the halls, about cold clammy air, thumpings on the floor, and flickering lamps. The Velasquezes did not believe in ghosts. Even during these two nights of fear, they could not bring themselves to accept what was happening. And sometimes they heard a man’s voice muttering indistinct words, sometimes words of blood-freezing rage.
And had there never been any events like this before?
No, they said positively, never. The neighbors had never heard of such a thing—“Why, Mrs. Stone, this house is only thirty-five years old, who would bother haunting it?” This was not a creaky old castle in Eastern Europe, this was the little town of Santa Eulalia.
Nora Stone took from her pink purse a little notepad in a leather binding with a gold pen attached by a chain and wrote some notes. “When did these things happen?”
Two nights, each time for half an hour. Twice yesterday afternoon for ten minutes. Once for thirty minutes this morning.
“And did you see or feel anything concrete?”
Not they, but their oldest son—he saw a man in the doorway to the bedroom. Just a dark figure, no details. They themselves felt him, that was what was so terrifying. But why would this creature bother them?
“I’m certain he or she—or they—isn’t here to bother you. Are these events centered in any one place?”
“Yes. The children’s bedroom on the second floor, corner.”
They took her upstairs and Mrs. Stone looked over the sunny yellow room with two windows in the corner, stuffed bears, dolls, and space toys lying about, beds rumpled, a cyclone-spill of books, pictures of superheroes, and roller skates. Her eyes went to a crucifix prominently displayed on the wall. She had noticed several in the house, one in the living room, one on the stairpost, and another in the hall. The Velasquez family was truly frightened.
“I should explain. Or did I already? A fully manifested apparition looks just like anyone else! They don’t float around or anything dramatic like that. In fact, you cannot tell it’s a ghost unless he walks out a door and is gone when you get there or you later find out the person is dead! Up until I learned that poor boy had been murdered, I was certain I was about to be raped that night. So there’s no need to worry. Yet!”
“How do you go about this?” asked Señor Velasquez.
“I’ll just pull up this little chair here”—Nora Stone moved a chair over to the wall—“and sit myself down.”
It was almost six o’clock. The Velasquezes looked at each other as Nora Stone removed a skein of yarn from her bag and began working on a neat needlepoint of a rabbit. “For Elsa,” she said. “Mike got her a pet rabbit last week. Have you any pets?”
“No, madam.”
“Oh, dear. I had a practical reason for asking. The Kentucky experiment. It’s one of my favorites because it shows how animals react to these things. An investigator took a group of animals to a house in Kentucky which was reputedly haunted and placed them in the room where the activity was focused. A dog, a cat, a rat, and a rattlesnake. And guess how it turned out.”
“How?” asked Señora Velasquez.
“The dog became very upset and refused to stay in the room, the cat made a terrible ruckus over a simple chair, and the rattlesnake tried to strike the same chair. The only animal that did not react at all was the rat. Isn’t that just like a rat?” She touched their hands. “Now you go off and have a good time. Old Nora will stay right here in this room, no thank you, no dinner, I had a peach on the way up.”
Nora Stone loved the fall of dusk, the long, golden light as the sun dipped beyond the horizon. It was God’s will that she be here in this darling house using God’s own gifts to her. Such a nice innocent little house. This one certainly was a tickler. Why a ghost would suddenly show up at this time was beyond her. No violence of any kind had occurred in the place, and a preliminary check had revealed no unusual incidents of any kind.
Along with her needlepoint she had brought a nice woolen shawl, a gift from Mike for those times when the apparitions cooled the air so much that she feared a chill. Mike was such a tease. He told her that someday she’d meet a real live ghoul chewing on some cadaverous foot and, boy, would the air turn cold then. So he’d dubbed it her barf scarf. She believed it was healthy to retain one’s sense of humor in the presence of apparitions.
She sat and worked on her needlepoint as the cool evening air caused the joints of the house to creak. Her practiced senses discerned the sounds of the house, the birds flittering in the trees outside the window, the distant barking of a dog, the creak of a door. She was working on the bunny’s fuzzy tail when the visitation began.
The air temperature plunged so quickly she gasped. Now that was very sudden, no buildup at all. She tightened the barf scarf around her and noted the time in her little book and in parentheses “very quick.”
The hall light dimmed to a fizzing, sputtering yellow. The air seemed to become saturated with sticky humidity, very damp, very unpleasant. Nora Stone tiptoed to the door and looked down the hall. In the splintering light, she saw at first nothing out of the
ordinary, then her eyes fell on the bannister post.
A hand was coming up the railing. Just a hand, moving in graspy jerks, as though a body was walking beside it holding the rail. Nora Stone ducked back into the room and quickly wrote “partial manifestation.” Down the hall a door slammed with a shattering bang. And then from the very air permeating the second floor she heard a long, drawn out exhalation. Nora closed her eyes and felt the presence. More particularly she tried to sense the visitor’s mood. It was not cheerful. This was going to be a bad one.
Nora Stone stuffed her needlepoint in her bag as the bedroom door slammed back and forth. Now that was silly. Whoever it was was trying to scare her. But it didn’t know Nora Stone, no sir. “Just one,” she murmured to herself. “There is only one presence here.”
Nora Stone noted her own feelings. Murderous fury. Her personal feelings were, she knew, readings of the thing’s state of mind, not her own. They would pass when the visitor passed.
The Donald Duck spreads flew off the children’s beds to the floor and the flowered sheets were peeled back and tossed in a heap. Then the toys began flying around the room, hurled with enraged force. The panda bear was lifted off the floor and bounced fluffily off the wall by her head. Nora Stone did not even flinch. The roller skates rolled under the bed. One wooden fire engine with noisemaking wheels flew through the window with a crash. Then the visitor tore the place apart. Dolls, clocks, game boards volcanoed out of the room into the hall, children’s shoes were tossed against the walls, one of them striking Nora Stone on the brow and opening a gash.
When a hand knocked over the bedside lamp, Nora finally got a look at the apparition. It was a man’s hand, with tight curls of blond hair on the back. Rubbing her eyes, she peered through the gloom at the bed.
On the pillow she saw half of a man’s head with one eye looking balefully at her, rather a nice-looking face as far as she could tell from this lengthwise crown-to-chin slice. The eye was blue. It blinked, then fixed on her like a spider eye on a fly. The half-mouth was wrenched open in a rictus of anger.