The Walker in Shadows

by Barbara Michaels

  He stepped forward, in front of the others. Josef gathered Pat into one arm and Kathy into the other. "If we survive this," he muttered, "I'm going to kill that boy."

  Pat leaned against him, incapable of speech, as the indescribable aura invaded the room. Mark's flashlight was dimmed by the ghastly whirling light. As the light strengthened, two burning blue spots formed in its core.

  Pat felt cold stone against her back. They had retreated as far as they could, and still the thing came on, moving forward with horrible, jerky movements.

  Mark stood his ground. The light was strong enough to cast shadows, horribly distorted shadows, like parodies of the forms that shaped them-strong enough for Pat to see that the shadow stretching out from Mark's feet was, surely, that of a man inches shorter, broader of shoulder, with close-cropped hair instead of Mark's unruly mop.

  A voice spoke, softly. It had to be Mark's, though it sounded nothing like his. Pat was unable to make out the words; but at the sound the whirling light stopped its forward progress with an uncanny, horrid suggestion of human surprise. The voice rose in volume, and changed, in tone and in rhythm.

  "Don't you get it? It's all over; we know. You can't stop the truth; you can't hurt anybody; you're dead, dead and damned. Go back to wherever you belong. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, and all the saints, and…"

  Mark went on, mouthing an insane litany of mixed-up religious formulas, invoking every deity he could think of. Pat lost track of what he was saying; for, incredibly, the thing began to shrink and fade. For one fantastic moment-and she was never sure whether she really saw it, or whether she only imagined it-just before it went forever she saw it clear, in its true shape: the form of a woman, so emaciated as to be virtually skeletal, her straggling white hair framing a visage completely without color except for the blazing blue eyes.

  Then it vanished, taking all light with it, even the feeble beam of the flashlight. A rumbling crash shook the very earth, as if the darkness had solidified and fallen upon them.

  Pat would have been thrown to the ground if she had not had the support of the wall and Josef's arm. Choking, she thrust out both hands against air thick with dust.

  "Stand still," Josef ordered, tightening his grasp. "Don't even speak loudly. Mark. Mark, are you there?"

  At first there was no reply, only the rattle of subsiding debris', and Pat's racing heart stopped. The catastrophe-whatever its nature-had begun at the other end of the room. Mark had been closest… Then her son's voice came out of the dark and she went limp with relief.

  "I'm here. Part of me, anyhow…"

  "The flashlight?" Josef asked.

  "Under a ton of dirt and stone."

  "Hang on. I've got a lighter."

  The flame flickered and flared. It was sufficient; there was little left for it to illumine. Half the room had vanished under a heap of earth. Mark's legs were buried up to the thigh and the face he turned toward them was streaked with blood from a dozen cuts. But his grin was broad and cheerful.

  "Her last gesture," he remarked. "Dumb stunt."

  "We're buried alive," Pat said. "Not so dumb."

  "Don't be dramatic, Mom," Mark said coolly. "The part that collapsed was the wall where the tunnel was. The vibration dropped the trapdoor, but it's not barred or anything. We'll be out of here in five minutes."

  His estimate was fairly accurate, but it seemed much longer to Pat. They didn't even need the stepladder, which was fortunate, since it was half buried under the earth slide. This proved to be quite stable, thanks to the clayey quality of the soil; Mark was able to climb the ramplike slope to a point where he could lift the trapdoor and pull himself out. The others followed. When he had lowered the trap again it was as if he had wiped out the past half hour. Pat might have thought she had dreamed the whole incredible episode had it not been for the grubby, disheveled state of her companions and her son's scratched face. She realized that Mark's eyes were fixed on her accusingly as he mopped the cuts with a dirty sleeve, and she was about to offer first aid and maternal concern when he said,

  "I'm starved. What's for dinner?"

  II

  When they got back to their house, the telephone was ringing.

  "Don't answer it," Mark ordered. "It's probably Mrs. Groft wanting to know what's been going on around here She must have noticed that the wall is down."

  "I guess so." Pat felt as if she had put in eight hour of hard manual labor. Even her eyelids ached. With an el fort, she roused herself. "Mark, you had better shower and change clothes. Then I'll tend to those cuts."

  "I can do that," Mark said. "You get something to eat."

  "Mark," Josef said quietly.

  "What?"

  "My generation has hang-ups about hitting a man when he is off guard. Get your dukes up."

  "Dukes," Mark repeated. His face went scarlet, and Pat realized that he was struggling desperately to keep from laughing. "Now, Mr. Friedrichs, you just take it easy. I don't want to hurt you. This is silly."

  "Not at all. If your mother is going to render first aid, she may as well tend all your wounds."

  For a variety of reasons, which she never bothered to analyze, Pat said nothing. Kathy moved forward as if to intervene, but she was too late; Josef's fist slid under Mark's raised hand and hit him hard on the chin. He fell backward into a chair, where he sprawled, his arms and legs at oblique angles.

  "Do you know why I hit you?" Josef asked.

  Mark's glazed eyes focused and a ghost of a twinkle appeared in their depths.

  "It's a long list," he croaked, rubbing his jaw.

  "No. I slugged you because you had the consummate gall to quote Shakespeare at us at a tense moment. 1 can't stand smart-aleck kids. Now go clean up. If you're hun gry, you and Kathy can go out for pizza or egg foo gai gunk, or whatever ghastly mess you fancy."

  "Yes, sir." Mark struggled to his feet. "Right away, sir." He destroyed the effect by grinning and sketching an impudent imitation of a salute before heading toward the stairs.

  "If you are going with him, you had better change," Josef said to his daughter.

  "You're horrible," Kathy said. "I hate you!"

  "Move."

  He took a step toward her. Kathy scuttled after Mark.

  Josef looked at Pat. Leaning against the wall, her arms folded, she regarded him unsmilingly.

  "Crow," she said.

  "What?"

  "Flap your wings and crow. It's not going to be that easy, you know."

  "My dear love, I am well aware of that. With your son, it is going to be a daily battle."

  "If you can stand him, I guess I can put up with Kathy's giggling," Pat said.

  Smiling, Josef reached out for her, and then contemplated his dirt-streaked sleeve in some dismay. "I'll meet you down here in ten minutes," he said. "And if we're lucky, the kids will take a long time getting the food."

  III

  They had half an hour alone before Mark and Kathy returned with pizza and spaghetti and other Italian delicacies. "Enough food for an army," Josef grumbled; but Mark managed to get rid of most of it. He refused to talk while he was eating, and Josef let him enjoy this small revenge. But when Mark had shoved the last bite of garlic bread into his mouth, the older man said, "Here's your chance to shine. Or are you going to sit around smirking while we make wild guesses?"

  "It was so obvious," Mark said patronizingly.

  "Not to me."

  "Well, look. The ghost had to be one of the Turnbulls. All the Bateses died in their beds, after lives of sickening virtue. That isn't necessarily conclusive, I admit, but the suggestion of blue eyes confirmed my suspicion that we were dealing with a Turnbull. Mr. Turnbull was fair, and so was Peter. It wasn't unreasonable to suppose that Turnbull's daughter by his first marriage had also inherited his coloring.

  "Mary Jane was a ghostly figure in every sense of the word. We knew nothing about her except for the occasional references in Susan's diary. Susan thought she was an old
witch-she even called her that once. Well, a lot of kids think of bossy big sisters as witches. But I got to thinking-Mary Jane did seem to hassle the kids a lot, and there she was, a spinster at almost thirty, with a younger half brother who was the answer to a maiden's prayer- handsome, domineering, sexy…"

  "Of all the cheap, slipshod, pseudo-Freudian nonsense," Josef exclaimed. "Why shouldn't the ghost have been Peter, as you first believed?"

  Kathy stirred. She had changed into jeans and an over-sized tailored shirt. The masculine clothing only made her look more delicate. Her lowered eyes and clasped hands appeared demure, but something in her expression half prepared Pat for Mark's next statement.

  "It was really Kath who figured it out," he said.

  "You?" Kathy's father stared at her with unflattering surprise.

  "I was the brains of the combination," Kathy said sweetly. "Mark was the muscle."

  "Well, we sort of worked together," Mark said. "But Kath gave me the first… I mean, she had the hunch that it wasn't Peter after all. Like she said once, how could he do this if he was in love with the girl? I mean, that made sense, you know?"

  "Not necessarily." Josef was still staring at his daughter. "If Peter was the domineering, arrogant young man we thought, and if he had died before he could get the girl he wanted-"

  "All surmise," Mark interrupted. "Peter was probably pretty cocky; who wouldn't be, in his position, with everything going for him? But we didn't find out anything about him that would support the idea that he was wicked or demented. The atmosphere the ghost produced was sick-malevolent. We got to wondering, Kathy and I, if maybe it hadn't been that way in life. Sick, hating. Peter was a soldier, he didn't have to repress anything; he could take out his anger and frustration by fighting."

  "I knew it wasn't Peter," Kathy said dreamily.

  "Sheer irrational romanticism," her father grumbled.

  "Maybe," Mark said. "Maybe the idea came from… somewhere else. Anyhow, once we had decided Peter wasn't the ghost, we had to find another candidate. Mary Jane was a distinct possibility. That's why I was so mad when you didn't buy her letters." He gave Josef a sidelong glance, and added, "The book filled in the missing pieces in Susan's story, and gave us the final clue. Only I was too dumb to see it at first."

  "The clue was the fact that Mary Jane was a Confederate spy," Kathy explained. "Remember the reference to Cousin Alex? That was Colonel Alexander. I told you about him-the man who escaped from Fort McHenry and broke his leg when he jumped from the parapet. The book said he was passed on from one Confederate sympathizer to another. One of them was Mary Jane. She had to be careful when she referred to him, in case her letters to Cordelia were intercepted."

  "And how do you suppose she got those letters to Richmond?" Mark asked. "Enemy territory, in wartime?"

  Josef gave Pat a hunted glance. He was being beaten back on all fronts, but he fought every step of the way

  "Okay, I'll buy the spy part. But how you got from that to Mary Jane's illicit passion for her brother

  "The letters reeked with it, Dad," Kathy said, in a fair imitation of Mark's most superior tone. "And, like Mark said-"

  "As Mark said," her beleaguered father interrupted

  "As Mark said, she was always spying on the kids and tattling to their parents. She was the one who caught Susan and Peter-you got that, didn't you?"

  "Well, I-"

  "Susan said in her diary that someone must have seen them together," Kathy persisted. "And Mary Jane bragged about being the one who saved Peter from the fatal consequences of-"

  "All right, all right." Josef put his head in his hands. "I'm dizzy trying to follow your logic. Let's see. Given the fact that Mary Jane was a spy, you leaped to the conclusion that there was a secret room in the house."

  "That was really dumb," Mark said. "I should have thought of that much earlier. The houses were twins, weren't they? There was a tunnel in the Bates house-

  "But I assumed that was constructed by Mr. Bates, years after the house was built," Pat exclaimed. "It wouldn't follow that there was a matching tunnel-

  "Not necessarily, no," Kathy said. "But I was reading a book about old houses, and secret rooms and passeges weren't uncommon in architecture of that period. It was all part of the fake Gothic stuff. There was a place called. Pratt's Castle, near Richmond, built in about 1850, that had a secret spiral staircase and a hidden room where guns and ammunition were stored during the Civil War. And Mary Jane would have to have someplace to hide fugitives, especially with the Bateses so close. Mark is right, we should have figured it out sooner."

  This time Josef made no objections. The certainty in Kathy's voice overruled simple logic. Pat knew that he had been convinced, not by the girl's reasoning so much as by his own irrational sense that this theory somehow fit-not the facts of the case, but its atmosphere.

  "I'll buy it," Pat said. "But, Mark, how did you know he-his body was still there? You did know, didn't you? You couldn't have identified those poor anonymous bones unless you expected to find them."

  "Come to think of it," Josef said, recovering. "They still haven't been officially identified. Have you any solid evidence on that, Mark?"

  "It's rather complicated," Mark said patronizingly.

  "Translation: he hasn't got any evidence," Josef said, in an audible aside.

  "I'll try to simplify it," Mark went on, without appearing to hear the comment. "The fact that Peter Turnbull's body was never found has bugged me all along. Then there was the discrepancy in the stories of how the Turnbulls were killed. One said it was at Gettysburg, the other that it happened during a minor skirmish. So I-I mean, Kathy-got the idea that maybe there was some truth in both stories, but they got garbled, as history often does. We know the Turnbulls were alive in late June of 1863, just before Gettysburg.

  "Not all the men who died in the war died in the famous battles. The cavalry especially was running around the countryside all the time. So we thought, suppose Peter was killed in a skirmish after the battle, during the retreat? We looked up Company K, the unit we thought the Turnbulls might have joined. And…" Mark reached for one of the books that always surrounded him, and opened it. "The unit fought at Gettysburg, all right. It also skirmished heavily at Williamsport while covering Lee's retreat. This is Manakee's Maryland in the Civil War. He says: 'For more than a week after Gettysburg, Maryland roads were alive with soldiers, all the way from Washington County to Baltimore and Washington Con-stantly ranging between the two armies were cavalry units of both sides. Often they clashed in small, briefly fought engagements.' " Mark looked up from the book "By July seventh, the Confederate army had reached the area near Hagerstown, but they couldn't cross the river because Union cavalry had destroyed their pontoon bridge, and the river was swollen by heavy rains.

  "Now that campaign was Lee's last invasion of (he North. If Peter was killed 'somewhere in Maryland,' it had to be during that period, since we know he was alive in June of 1863. If you consider the retreat part of the Gettysburg campaign, well, you could say he was killed 'at Gettysburg.' "

  Mark paused. He looked meaningfully at his mother and then directed his gaze toward the kitchen. She remained oblivious, and with a pained sigh Mark went on.

  "This part is-well, I admit it's somewhat hypothetical. But, I mean, like, you have to have a theory so you can search for evidence that will prove or disprove it, right?"

  Josef looked as if he were about to expostulate at this peculiar description of the scientific method, but Mark swept on.

  "The trooper who told about Peter being shot didn't actually see him fall. Suppose-just suppose-that he wasn't killed. Suppose he was only wounded."

  "But he did disappear," Josef argued. "He'd have reported to his unit, or been identified as a prisoner of war, if he had survived."

  "Well, we know what happened to him, don't we? I mean, Mr. Friedrichs, all this is Monday-morning quar-terback stuff. I'm just trying to explain how I- we-figured it out in advance.

&nbs
p; "I kept thinking about the fact that all this happened in Maryland. Not so far away from here, really. And I thought, suppose it was me. I'd try to make it home if I was hurt." He looked at his mother; and although she knew quite well that Mark was deliberately working on her emotions, her eyes grew moist. "I mean," Mark went on pensively, "care of the wounded in those days was grim, even in regular hospitals, and the Confederates were on the run. They piled wounded men into springless wagons and bumped them along those muddy roads… Maybe, even, Peter was cut off from his men and couldn't get back. So-he started home. He knew about the tunnel, and the secret room, and Mary Jane's work with the spy ring. He'd figure he could get back to his unit via that route, after he had recovered. Can you picture that journey? It must have been terrible for an injured man. But he made it -into the arms of his loving sister… who killed him."

  "Wait a minute," said Josef, after he had recovered his breath. "This isn't history, this is straight out of Sophocles or Euripides. How do you know the poor kid didn't simply die of his wounds?"

  "He did," Mark said. "I never claimed she actually murdered him. She let him die, when she could have saved him-or at least made a good try at saving him. Oh, for God's sake, it's so obvious! If she didn't have something to hide, why did she brick up the hidden room, with his body still in it? They didn't hang enemy corpses over the city gates, the way they did in the Middle Ages. Peter would have been buried properly, in the family graveyard with his father, and with the conventional religious rites. That sort of thing meant a lot to people back then. It would have meant a lot to Mary Jane. She could have raised a big corny gravestone over him, with some sloppy epitaph on it. Yet she left him on the bed where he died like a-a dead animal. She shoveled the dirt over the trapdoor-it had to be her, there was nobody else to do it-and ordered the slaves to lay the brick floor. Why? Why would anybody do a thing like that, much loss Pe-ter's adoring big sister?"