They were talking, laughing, and this time, even from inside the cruiser, Grady could hear them, not just the splashes but their voices, their mirth, even the spatter of grease that dripped from the steaks onto the smoking coals in the barbecue.
That had puzzled him: why he'd been able to hear the strokes of the swimmer but not the conversations of the ghosts whom he — but not Clauson — had seen this morning.
Now, though, he understood. It took a while to make contact. You had to acquire sensitivity. You had to become — how had Ben put it in his letter? — receptive. Each time you encountered them, they became more real until…
Grady reached for the paper bag beside him and got out of the cruiser. He unlocked the chainlink fence and approached the compound, smiling.
"Hi, Brian. Hello there, Betsy."
They didn't acknowledge him.
Well, that'll come, Grady thought. No problem. I just have to get more receptive.
He chose an empty chair by the swimming pool and settled into it, stretching out his legs, relaxing. It was evening. The sun was nearly down behind the mountains. The compound was bathed in a soothing crimson glow. The young man he'd first encountered, the potential champion swimmer who'd died in Vietnam, kept doing his laps. A delighted man and woman, gray-haired, in their sixties, kept blurting encouragement to him.
Grady turned again to Brian and Betsy over by the barbecue. "Hey, how have you been? It's good to see you."
This time, Brian and Betsy responded, looking in his direction.
Yeah, all it takes is receptivity, Grady thought.
"Hi, Ben. Glad you could make it," Brian said.
"Me, too." Grady reached inside his paper bag and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. Untwisting its cap, he looked around for a glass, didn't find one, shrugged, and raised the bottle to his lips. He tilted his head back, feeling the year-long tension in his neck begin to dissipate. After the heat of the day, the evening was pleasantly cool. He tilted the bottle to his lips again and swallowed with satisfaction.
Receptivity, he thought. Yeah, that's the secret. All I have to do is be sensitive.
But as he drank and smiled and waited, the miracle that he'd come for didn't happen. He kept looking around, struggling to maintain his calm. Helen and John. Where were they? They're supposed to be here.
They have to be!
He swallowed more bourbon. "Hey, Brian?"
"What is it, Ben?"
"My wife and son. Where are they?"
"I'm afraid they can't be here yet," Brian said.
"Why not?" Grady frowned.
"There's something you have to do first."
"I don't understand."
"Think about it."
"I don't know what you mean. Help me, Brian."
"Think about the shrine."
And then everything was clear. "Thank you, Brian."
Grady set down the bottle, stood, and left the swimming pool, walking toward the shrine. Inside, candles were lit. He passed the church pew in the sanctuary and reverently studied the photographs above the mantel, the pictures that grief-destroyed parents had hung there, the heart-breaking images of the eight dead children.
Is that all it takes? Grady thought. Is that all I need to do?
He removed his wallet from his trousers, opened it, caressed the photographs of Helen and John that he always carried with him, and removed them from their protective, transparent, plastic sleeves. After kissing them, he set them on the mantel.
Now? he wondered, his heart pounding. Now ?
But Brian and Betsy don't have their photographs up here, he thought. The couples who were killed in the accident, their photographs aren't here, either.
Maybe, though, Grady wondered. Maybe if you've been here long enough, it isn't necessary to put up photographs.
On the other hand, the children. They never had the chance to come here. They died before Brian built the shrine. For them, the photographs were necessary, just as photographs were necessary for…
Heart pounding faster, Grady turned and left the shrine, hurrying back to the swimming pool. He felt terrified that his loneliness wouldn't be broken, but at once he saw Helen and John waiting for him, and his chest hurt unbearably. Helen was holding out her arms. John was jumping up and down with excitement.
Grady ran.
Reached them.
Embraced them.
And felt his arms go through them just as their arms and bodies went through him.
"No!" he wailed. "I need to touch you!"
Then he realized. He had to give them time. In a little while, he'd be able to hold them. He spun to face them.
"I love you, Ben," Helen said.
Tears streamed down Grady's face.
"Dad, I've missed you," John said.
"And I love both of you, and I've missed you so much that — " Grady's voice broke. He sobbed harder. "It's so good to — "
Grady reached for them again, and this time, as his arms went through them, he felt as if he'd reached through a cloud. The sensation was subtle but unmistakably physical. It was happening. They'd soon be —
Grady's knees felt weak.
"Sweetheart, you'd better sit down," Helen said.
Grady nodded. "Yes. The strain's been… I think I could use a rest."
As he walked with his wife and son toward the swimming pool, Brian, Betsy, and the others nodded with approval.
"Dad, the kids in the pool are having so much fun. Can I take a swim?"
"Absolutely. Anything you want, son. Your mother and I will watch."
Grady sat in his chair by the pool. Helen sat close beside him, stroking his arm. The sensation was stronger. Soon. Soon he'd be able to hold her.
Betsy called to him, "Ben, would you like a steak?"
"Not right now, thanks. I'm not hungry. Maybe later."
"Any time. All you have to do is ask."
"I appreciate that, Betsy."
"Maybe another drink would improve your appetite."
"I bet it would." Grady raised the bottle to his lips. Helen stroked his arm, and now her touch was almost solid. John dove into the pool.
"Together," Helen said.
"Yes," Grady said. "At last."
It became the most wonderful evening of his life. In a while, Helen's touch was totally firm. Grady was able to hold her, to hug her, to kiss her. And John.
When the sun disappeared, a full moon lit the darkness, illuminating the festive specters.
There was just one problem. Before Grady had driven to the compound from the mausoleum, he'd made several stops in town. One had been to the liquor store. Another had been to the courthouse, to find out who'd owned the land that Brian had purchased to build the compound. Grady had hoped to be able to question whoever had owned the land and to find out if there was anything unusual about this area, anything — even an old campfire story — that might provide a hint, the start of an explanation for this miracle.
But the former owner had long ago moved away.
Several other stops had been to Brian Roth's former hunting companions. Grady had hoped that one of them might be able to describe what had happened to Brian the day they'd taken him hunting in this area. He'd hoped that they might have an explanation for Brian's sudden determination to buy this land.
But none of them even remembered that afternoon.
Grady's final stop had been to his attorney. Ida Roth's lawyer had already been in touch with him. Ida was determined to contest the will and make sure that Grady didn't inherit the property. Grady was shocked to hear his attorney say that Brian had clearly not been in his right mind if he'd amended his will while contemplating suicide. Brian's own attorney apparently agreed. The consensus was that Grady would lose his fight against Ida. The compound would be denied to him.
So as Grady sat beside his wife and son, watching his eerily moonlit companions near the pool, he kept drinking and brooding and telling himself that he couldn't bear to be separated from his family again.
But what was the alternative?
Grady hugged Helen and John. "You might want to take a walk."
"We'll stay," Helen said. "So you won't be afraid."
"You're sure?"
"Yes. I don't want you to feel alone."
Grady kissed her, drank more bourbon, then unholstered his revolver.
He understood now why Brian and Betsy had made this choice. How lonely they must have felt, seeing their dead children and eventually their dead companions. In their presence but not truly with them.
Grady cocked his revolver. The final speck of his sanity told him, your wife and son aren't real, you know. The others aren't, either. This is all your imagination.
Maybe, Grady thought. Maybe not.
But even if it is my imagination, when Ida gets control of the compound, I'll never have the chance to see Helen and John again. Even if I only imagine them.
It was an agonizing dilemma.
It required more thought.
So with his wife and son beside him, Grady held his revolver in one hand while he drank from his bottle with the other. The alcohol made him sleepy. The specters were beginning to fade. He'd soon have to make a choice, and he wondered what it would be. As the stupor from the bourbon overwhelmed him, which would feel heavier? Would the bottle drop from his hand first? Or would the revolver?
Afterword
« ^
From "The Dripping" in 1972 to "The Shrine" twenty years later, these stories represent a significant portion of my life — and significant events along the way. The year the final story was published, I made a further significant choice by leaving Iowa City, where I had lived since 1970, and taking up residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the summer of 1992.
My wife and I did it suddenly. Watching a segment of Public Broadcasting's This Old House that was devoted to Santa Fe's distinctive adobe-pueblo style of architecture, we found the city of holy faith and its surrounding mountains so picturesque that we decided to spend a long weekend visiting there. It was my forty-ninth birthday. I had just finished a long novel, Assumed Identity. A little time off sounded good. But we weren't prepared for the impact that the mystical mountains and the high desert would have on us. In three days, we were looking at houses. On the fourth day, we selected one and flew back to Iowa City to make preparations to move. Three months later, we were living in Santa Fe.
Our decision had nothing to do with a change in our positive feelings about Iowa City. I had wonderful years at the university there. I made lifelong friends there. My wife and I raised a daughter and a son there. It's a special place, and it brought us happiness. But we also lost a son there, and sometimes it's necessary to get away from streets and buildings that cause painful memories.
Sometimes, too, a writer has to redefine himself or, as my wife put it, to start act three. In our new home, at an altitude of seven thousand feet, with wild flowers in front of our adobe house and piñon-treed mountains stretching off in every direction in what the locals call the land of enchantment, the land of the dancing sun, I began to look at things differently. For certain, the move affected my fiction, not just in the obvious way that I stopped writing about the midwest and switched my attention to New Mexico, using Santa Fe as a setting in several pieces.
A deeper change involved theme. The hero of one of my post-1992 novels, Extreme Denial, is a former intelligence operative who comes to Santa Fe to shut out his past and find himself. Substitute "former professor," and it's obvious that I was writing about me. From Matt's death in 1987 until our move to Santa Fe in 1992, I wrote more fiction about grief than I included here. But after settling in our new home, I wrote only one more on the subject, a novel called Desperate Measures in which an obituary writer whose son has died from cancer finds himself trapped in a conspiracy. Surviving, he comes to terms with his loss. In the latter respect, I was writing about myself.
Thus, while this collection doesn't include all my short fiction, it is complete inasmuch as it follows the progress of my imagination until the conclusion of act two when, after twenty-two years, I left Iowa City. Farther into act three, I'll prepare another collection and bring you up to date, sharing more memories with you. Meanwhile, I wasn't prepared for the emotional impact that grouping these stories together had on me. Pieces written years apart acquired new vividness for me when I read them in sequence over a couple of days. In particular, I was struck by how many of these stories are about threats to the main character's family. Philip Klass taught me to think of fiction writing as a form of self-psychoanalysis. "Write about what you most fear," he said. One day, my fear came true.
But I haven't lost my urge to tell stories, and that tells me other fears need to be expressed. The ferret keeps gnawing at my psyche. I persist in going after it.
Let me tell you a story.
The stories in this collection were originally published in the following places:
"The Dripping," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, August, 1972
"The Partnership," Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, May, 1981
"Black Evening," Horrors, Playboy Press, ed. Charles L. Grant, 1981
"The Hidden Laughter," The Twilight Zone Magazine, August, 1981
"The Typewriter," The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror, Dodd, Mead, ed. Charles L. Grant, 1983
"A Trap For The Unwary" (author's note to "But At My Back I Always Hear"), Masters of Darkness III, Tor, ed. by Dennis Etchison, 1991
"But At My Back I Always Hear," Shadows 6, Doubleday, ed. Charles L. Grant, 1983
"The Storm," Shadows 7, Doubleday, ed. Charles L. Grant, 1984
"For These And All My Sins," Whispers 5, Doubleday, ed. Stuart L. Schiff, 1985
"Black And White And Red All Over," "Mumbo Jumbo," and "Dead Image," Night Visions II, Dark Harvest Press, ed. Charles L. Grant, 1985
"Orange Is For Anguish, Blue For Insanity," Prime Evil, New American Library, ed. Douglas L. Winter, 1989
"The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves," Final Shadows, Doubleday, ed. Charles L. Grant, 1991
"The Shrine," Dark At Heart, Dark Harvest Press, ed. Joe and Karen Lansdale, 1992
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