Lone Wolves

by Chesbro, George C. ;

  “They want me to die, Garth!” the eighty-year-old woman had said in a strangled whisper as she clutched at the hem of Garth’s robe.

  Garth Frederickson looked around, saw nothing in the warm September night beyond the glow cast by his porch light, heard nothing but the sibilant whisper of waves washing up on the beach fifty yards away. He bent down, placed his hands under the woman’s frail arms, gently lifted her to her feet, and held her as she trembled violently and grabbed the lapels of his pajama top. Despite the fact that he knew the answer, he asked, “Who wants you to die?”

  “My ghosts.”

  “They can’t hurt you here, Elsie,” Garth said in a soothing tone, leading her into the house, where he eased her down into a chair at the rectangular butcher-block table in the kitchen. He took off his woolen robe and wrapped it around her, then went to the range to heat water for tea. He looked up when his wife appeared in the doorway. Her brilliant blue eyes still blurred by sleep, white-streaked, waist-length blond hair disheveled. Mary Tree was still the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and the love he felt surging in him like a tide at the sight of her came as a welcome relief from the pall cast by the trembling old woman Garth considered to be ill with a kind of spiritual leprosy she had consciously nurtured, indeed reveled in and boasted about, for so many years, and which had now resulted not only in what Garth believed to be the most bizarre and perverse legal decision in the history of the country, but had also cost her the sale of her home and the money he knew she desperately needed, and might also be killing her. “Elsie’s had a fright, Mary. She needs some time to rest.”

  The folk singer sighed sympathetically, then quickly walked into the kitchen and sat down next to the other woman, resting her large hands with their long fingers on Elsie Manning’s still-quaking shoulders. “Oh, Elsie, Elsie, it’s all right now. Everything’s all right. Your ghosts?”

  Elsie Manning seemed unable to speak. Her pale, watery green eyes were still wide with shock and horror as she stared somewhere over Mary’s head, transfixed by her own private haunt that only she could see. Without her dentures in place her cheeks were sunken, and her mouth formed an O as she slowly nodded her head.

  The kettle began to whistle. Garth prepared three cups of tea, brought them to the table, placed one in front of Elsie. “Sip some of that, Elsie,” he said, smiling reassuringly. “It will make you feel better. Just be careful; it’s hot.”

  Mary placed her hands around the old woman’s, helping to steady them as Elsie lifted the cup to her mouth and sipped some of the steaming brew. When she set the cup back down, her hands and body did not seem to be trembling as much, and her pale green eyes had come back into focus. “I just don’t understand it,” she said weakly. “I’ve lived in that house all my life, and the ghosts were always so friendly. They were young lovers who committed suicide in an upstairs room rather than let their parents force them apart. They loved my parents, and they loved me. Sometimes, when I was a child, I’d see them sitting at the foot of my bed, all aglow, smiling at me. Sometimes they’d sing lullabies to put me to sleep. I always felt so comfortable with them. They kept me company. Now … they hate me because I want to sell the house and leave them. I feel their hatred, know that they want me to die. They send cockroaches.”

  “You called the exterminator about the cockroaches,” Garth said. “Didn’t he take care of them?”

  Elsie nodded tentatively. “Yes. But they came back. I was too ashamed to tell you. The exterminator came again, but the cockroaches were back a week later. Now they’re all over the house. And rats, and terrible smells. Garth, you and Mary have been in my home; you know I keep a clean house. And then the phone will start ringing at all sorts of odd hours. I’ll answer, but there’ll be nobody there. I hang up, and the phone starts ringing again. Sometimes that will go on for hours, all night. I just can’t fathom how spirits who had been so loving could have turned so spiteful.”

  Garth and Mary exchanged glances, and Garth reached across the table to touch the old woman’s liver-spotted hand. “Elsie, you’ve been under tremendous stress since what happened with the buyer you had. I don’t think you’ve ever really understood that most people aren’t as comfortable with ghosts—friendly or otherwise—as you are. Humans are a very superstitious breed, and Americans are just as superstitious as the rest of the world. For years, you’ve been enjoying your haunted house, talking about it to anybody who would listen. You loved the attention when the local paper would run a story on your haunted house every year. But now you want to move into a retirement community where all your needs will be taken care of—staff to prepare your meals and clean your apartment, and doctors to look after you—and you need a lot of money to get into the place where you want to go. You’ve already lost one buyer who offered a fair price and gave you a sizable binder because a week before the closing he got wind of the fact that the house was supposedly haunted. We may agree with your attorney that the binder should have been yours because he reneged, but incredibly, the judge ruled that you should have told him the house was haunted. In effect, the state of New York has offered a legal opinion that yes, there really are such things as haunted houses, and one of them happens to be in Cairn. And now you have a worse problem because the wire services have picked up on it, and it’s become a national news story. You’ll probably continue to be deluged with phony seers, sages, astrologers, psychics, and professional magicians who’ve discovered they can pick up a lot of free publicity simply by issuing a press release saying they’re thinking of buying your haunted house. But they don’t want your house, and most couldn’t begin to afford the three quarters of a million it’s worth. They just want the attention. And nobody else wants your house, at least not at the moment. What you have to do, Elsie, is give the story time to die down. Eventually you’ll find another buyer, because it’s a fine old house sitting right on the Hudson River, and there aren’t too many of those. But—above all else—you have to stop advertising the fact that you think it’s haunted.”

  “I don’t think I have much time,” the woman said in a hollow voice. Her eyes had once again gone out of focus, and she put a shaking hand to her throat. “Tonight one of them touched me—here. It woke me up. They were both there, in hooded robes, standing next to my bed in the moonlight. I could see them just as clearly as I see the two of you right now. But this was different from the other times when they’ve come to me. They’ve never worn hooded robes before, never hidden their faces. And they’ve never touched me before. The hand on my throat was so cold, like it had been in ice water. I didn’t think he was going to let me up, but he did, and that’s when I ran over here. I—” She abruptly stopped speaking, looked hard at Mary, then at Garth. “I know you don’t believe me. You think it’s all my imagination. You’ve always been too polite to say so, but I know you think I’m just a batty old woman.”

  “Elsie,” Garth replied in an even tone, “I don’t find what you believe any more improbable than the things believed in by ninety-nine percent of the population of Cairn, or the country, and I don’t consider most of my other friends and neighbors batty.”

  “But you don’t believe there are ghosts in my house, do you?”

  “That shouldn’t surprise you.”

  “But one touched me tonight, Garth!”

  Garth sighed. “Elsie, Mary, my brother, and I have faithfully attended every one of your Halloween séances ever since Mary and I settled in Cairn—in fact, we’ve felt honored to be invited. We find them great fun. My brother would be the first to tell you that he’d love nothing better than to meet a ghost, sit down with it, and have a nice long chat about whatever.”

  “But your little brother doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “No, he doesn’t believe in ghosts either. But he’s open to the possibility of anything because he believes in mystery, and he’d be highly amused to find out that he’s wrong, and that there really are such things as ghosts. But the fact of the matter is that there have ne
ver been any visitations at the six séances we’ve been to, not a peep from anyone or anything that wasn’t present and accounted for.”

  “It’s because you and Mary and your little brother don’t believe in them. They won’t appear if you don’t believe in them.”

  Garth caressed his wife’s cheek with the back of his hand, and then rose from the table. “Elsie, I’m going to get dressed and go check on your house to make sure there’s nobody there.”

  The old woman stiffened in her chair, clutched at Mary’s arm. “No, Garth, don’t go! There’s no use! You won’t find anything. They won’t appear to you. It’s me they’re after.”

  Suddenly Elsie Manning began to cry—not in racking sobs, but softly, more now in hopeless despair than the terror she had displayed earlier. She closed her eyes, threw her head back, and opened her shrunken O of a mouth in a silent howl of torment as a steady stream of tears welled from between her eyelids and coursed down her cheeks. Garth had gone around the table, wrapped his powerful arms around the woman, and held her as close as, a week later, he now held Mary, who had collapsed from her chair to the floor. Mary’s limbs twitched spasmodically, and her eyes railed in her head. Garth kissed her cheeks, gently rocking his wife back and forth in silence that was broken only by Madame Bellarossa’s heavy breathing and Elsie’s quavering voice offering a prayer. Finally Mary grew still, opened her eyes. “They’re here, Garth. My God, they really are here in this room with us.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m so cold …”

  “Don’t try to talk. Just rest here. I’ll get you a blanket.”

  “No, Garth. There’s no time. They won’t wait.”

  “Let her speak,” Madame Bellarossa said in a low voice that had grown slightly hoarse. “It’s important. Mary’s been chosen as the messenger.”

  Garth nodded to the portly black woman with the crimson lipstick and huge hoop earrings who was leading the séance, then looked back at his wife. “What happened?”

  “They … came to me, Garth. I felt them.”

  “Felt them how?”

  Mary swallowed hard, licked her lips. “At first there was just this terrible cold. I’m all right now, but for just a moment there I felt colder than I ever have in my life. And then they came into my thoughts, started to tell me why they’re so angry. It has something to do with selfishness, and terrible greed.”

  “They think Elsie’s being greedy just because she wants to sell her home? All she was asking for was what had been appraised as its fair market value.”

  Mary shook her head. “It’s not that.”

  “Then what greed, Mary? Whose greed?”

  “I. … don’t know. I think they were about to tell me all of it, but then I passed out.”

  “They’re still here in the room,” Madame Bellarossa said in a distant monotone, slurring her words slightly. “They want us to know, but the circle has to be restored.”

  Garth looked up at the black woman; her eyes were half closed and her arms stretched out over the table as if she were in a trance. The black man standing stiffly beside her, Jeffrey Bond, was staring at Mary, his mouth half open and his eyes filled with amazement. Both John and Linda Luft, the young, blond, dark-eyed married couple who looked so much alike they might have been brother and sister, had stepped back from the table and were standing at the very edge of the flickering pool of candlelight. Linda Luft’s eyes were glazed with shock, and she was very pale. Her husband, too, looked pale in the dim light, but the lines of his mouth were drawn down in a frown of skepticism. Elsie was standing at the opposite end of the table from Madame Bellarossa; the old woman’s eyes were closed, and her thin lips continued to move in silent prayer. The only person at the table who had remained seated was Harry Parker, Garth’s friend, a professional magician and world-renowned debunker of psychic charlatans and supernatural occurrences. Parker seemed perfectly calm. He was leaning back in his chair, thick arms folded across his barrel chest. His face was impassive as he stared back at Garth, who asked, “Anybody else see, feel, or hear anything?”

  Jeffrey Bond coughed, cleared his throat. “I felt the cold,” he said, looking around somewhat sheepishly at the others. “I got a blast of it right on the back of my neck. It was just like Mary said; for just a moment, it was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. And we all saw what happened to the candles.” He paused and again looked around the table at the others. “Didn’t we?”

  “You’re the expert, Harry,” Garth said to his friend. “What happened to Mary and Jeff? What’s going on here? Mass hysteria?”

  The big man with the blue eyes and close-cropped black hair slowly blinked and seemed about to reply when he suddenly started. “I‘ll be damned,” he said in a quiet but thoroughly astonished tone as he slowly unfolded his arms and looked down at his chest where blood was slowly seeping across the front of his white shirt, staining the cotton fabric as red as the dawn that had announced its presence and begun to push away the night the previous week when Garth, Mary, and Elsie Manning had sat around the butcher-block table in Garth’s home.

  “I guess I should go home now,” Elsie had said in a small voice. She was still very pale, but she had stopped trembling. Mary had brushed the woman’s hair, and this had seemed to calm her. “I’ve bothered you people long enough, woke you up and kept you up all night.”

  “Elsie,” Mary said, gently squeezing the other woman’s hand, “you’re a dear friend, not a bother. And you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want.”

  Elsie slowly shook her head. “It’s still my home, at least until I’m able to sell it. I belong there. They don’t come during the day anymore, not since they turned mean.”

  “I’ll walk you home,” Garth said, rising from his chair.

  Garth took a flashlight, but it wasn’t needed. As they walked along the beach, the shortest and easiest route to Elsie’s home an eighth of a mile away, the sun appeared in the east over the Westchester hills across the river, causing the waters of the Hudson to glow first reddish orange, then golden. By the time they reached the three-story Victorian mansion that was Elsie’s home, it was day. Garth opened the door, walked with Elsie through the large, lushly carpeted living room decorated with antique tapestries into the dining room, which was dominated by a heavy oak table in the center.

  “Thank you, Garth,” Elsie said with a sigh, easing herself down into a chair. She removed his robe from around her shoulders, handed it back to him. “Thank you for everything.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “Garth, I don’t know what to do.”

  “You know I’m not the one who can help you with your ghost problem, Elsie.”

  “I don’t know who else to turn to.”

  “Maybe a priest or minister.”

  “They don’t believe me either,” she replied, bitterness creeping into her voice. “They only believe in their own ghosts.” She paused, shook her head, and once again tears misted her pale eyes. “Even though I know you don’t believe there are ghosts here, you’re the only person I can feel comfortable with anymore talking about it. I’m so afraid, Garth. What should I do?”

  Garth pulled another chair out from the table, sat down, and leaned close to the old woman, looking intently into her eyes. “Stop believing.

  “… What?”

  “The ghosts in this house live off you, because of you. Stop feeding them with your belief and they’ll go away.”

  “But Garth, one did touch me! He put his hand around my throat!”

  “He touched you because you believe he touched you, because you believe there are ghosts and that they can touch you.” Garth suppressed a sigh, brought his chair even closer, and took both the woman’s hands in his. “Elsie, we all have our haunts. Haunts are just bad memories. It’s when we don’t recognize them for what they are that we start to give them the power to hurt us in the present.”

  Shadows moved in the woman’s pale eyes as she stared back
at Garth. Finally she asked, “You have haunts too?”

  “Of course. But I don’t ask them for stock tips, I don’t let them sit on my bed, and I don’t let them wrap their fingers around my throat.”

  “Would you tell me one of your haunts?”

  “I grew up on a farm in Nebraska. I was maybe nine or ten when one day my favorite uncle, Uncle Bill, for no reason that anybody could fathom, up and left our Methodist church and joined a fundamentalist sect that was into handling rattlesnakes as a way of demonstrating their faith. About two weeks after he joined, Uncle Bill was bit in the throat by a rattler, and he died. The people in the sect he’d joined said he’d died because he lacked sufficient faith.”

  “Do you believe he died because he lacked sufficient faith?”

  “Of course not. He died because he lacked sufficient brains. You have to be very careful what you believe, Elsie, because you become what you believe. Think of it as a question of mental hygiene. My Uncle Bill became a victim of his own belief system, exactly the same as you’ve become a victim of yours. Belief in gods or ghosts is like a brain fever; some have it, some don’t, and some only pretend to have it because it seems to them that everyone else around them has it, and they don’t want to be different. Just as with what happened to you, the fever is passed from generation to generation, and so all over the world we have tens of millions of people believing in ghosts they call God, Satan, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus, devils, or angels. But some infections are more virulent and dangerous than others, and they’ll bite you just as surely as that rattlesnake bit my uncle. For whatever reason, your belief system has turned on you. So stop believing before it does you more harm. Or change it. If you insist on believing in the supernatural, why don’t you try something a little less toxic, like Unitarianism, or Reform Judaism, or maybe Zen Buddhism?”

  Garth waited for some response from the woman, but there was none. Elsie’s mouth opened and closed repeatedly, as if she wanted to say something but could not find the words. It did not surprise Garth, who gave the woman’s hands a gentle squeeze, then leaned back in his chair and sighed. He knew from the confusion swimming in the woman’s eyes that she had no real comprehension of what he was talking about, and the stunned expression on her face was not unlike that on Harry Parker’s as he sat at this same table a week later during the interrupted séance and stared down at the bloodstain spreading across the front of his shirt. There were shocked gasps from the others around the table, and Linda Luft screamed. Garth eased Mary down on the carpet, then rose to his feet and strode quickly around the table toward his friend. He stopped when Harry Parker held up his hand. “It’s all right, Garth,” the burly man said in a tone that was at once distant and disbelieving, yet firm. “I’m okay.”