A Stir of Echoes (13 page)

  I'd sat there about an hour, I guess; head back, eyes staring at the ceiling.

  Abruptly, I felt the tingling in my head.

  I didn't fight it. Calmly, I decided that I wanted it to come. I felt a need to have it come. I even reached over casually and switched off the table lamp, then lay back in the darkness again and concentrated on making it come.

  That seemed to impede it, so instead of trying to help it along, I relaxed and let it take its own course.

  Never was I more aware that I was only a resourceless channel for its flow. But I didn't fight that. I was resentful; at Anne, at the world, it seemed, for doubting me. All right, if they wanted to think that I was losing my sanity, let them.

  Anger made it fade too. Any conscious flare of volition seemed to limit its ascent. Again I relaxed. I lay back, waiting, not caring. I realized that the reason it had taken so long that first night was that I had been opposing it, albeit without direction.

  It was very much as it had been that first night- but greatly accelerated. There were the flashings and sparks of emotion and thought. There were the visions and the burning interweave of memories, the faces rushing by, the ideas, the conceptions-all like shooting stars across a black firmament of half-drugged observation.

  Then it all seemed to reach its zenith again and I realized that, rather than disappearing, it hovered at that peak, holding me in a vise of taut awareness.

Now.

  Slowly, as if Anne had just come into the room and I were raising my head to look at her, I looked toward the window.

  A dream? No dream ever had such stark reality to it. I could almost
feel
the smooth, white flesh of her, the texture of her black-patterned dress, the tangled softness of her hair. I felt a grim satisfaction seeing her there; as if she had come to prove me, to disprove others. And I realized that the reason I hadn't seen her that other night was that Anne's presence had weakened the woman's influence.

  Then the piercing look of those dark eyes began to weaken satisfaction and a chill of fright began to creep along my limbs. I sat there rigidly and I could even hear the sounds of Elsie's party next door.

  "Who are you?" I asked. My voice was almost a whisper.

  No answer. I felt a cold prickling sensation along my scalp.

  "What do you want?"

  No answer. I stared at her. I ran my eyes over her, taking in every detail; the odd dress, the pearls, the watch on her left wrist, the pearl ring on the third finger of her left hand, the dark suede shoes, the stockings, even the fullness of her figure. She stood without moving as I looked at her.

  "What do you want?" I asked again.

  Her eyes pleaded again. I saw her white lips stir. And, suddenly, I was leaning forward, my heart pounding.

  "Tell me," I said, suddenly anxious, realizing she wouldn't stay much longer.
"Tell me. Please."

  But I was talking to a dark and empty living room. I stared at where she'd been. Nothing.

  Except for one thing.

  A faint, pathetic sobbing in the darkness.

  Gone in an instant.

  I was going to ask Mrs. Sentas what her sister looked like before I realized that it was rather a strange question for me to be asking. What was I supposed to tell her when she asked why I wanted to know?
Well, you see, I keep seeing this ghost in my living room and
…

  Thirty days, next case, as they say.

  By then, as a matter of fact, I no longer thought of the woman as being a ghost. My mind shrank now from bridging that chasm again. Remembering the emotion that had filled me when I'd believed I'd found proof of what men call "the beyond"-I rejected re-involvement in such belief. I retained, at least, that much scepticism. I no longer doubted the woman's existence at all. That was acceptance enough for then, considering what it implied.

  I woke up about nine the next morning-Sunday- and lay there quietly looking at the patterns of sunlight on the ceiling. For a few moments the inevitable rise of disbelief came again. It faded quickly. I could not doubt now. Even if there were not the ever-present headache and nagging stomach tension, I would have had to believe.

  And it was very strange to lie there and know that everything that had happened to me had a measure of objectivity; that I wasn't losing my mind. Yet here I was in this sunlit bedroom and, across the street, I heard someone mowing his lawn. And, on the next street, some boy was working on his model airplane, the air rent faintly by the shrill buzz of the engine. And the sun was shining and people were going to church. And, through it all, I knew that these evidences of what we call "life" were only a scant portion of the over-all. I knew it. All doubts were gone now.

  This is quite an acceptance.

  After breakfast, after rejecting the idea of asking Mrs. Sentas, I went across the street to Frank and Elizabeth's house.

  Elizabeth was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee as I came up on the back porch. I knocked softly and she looked up. A faint smile eased her features.

  "Come in, Tom," she said.

  I did.

  "Good morning," I said.

  "Good morning."

  "The loafer still in bed?"

  She nodded. "How's Anne?" she asked. "I didn't see her around yesterday."

  I told her about Anne's mother.

  "Oh,
no"
Elizabeth said, dismayed. "How terrible for her." I sensed that she wanted to ask me why I hadn't gone to Santa Barbara too but felt it too undiplomatic a question.

  "So you're all alone," she said. "Frank said he spoke to you yesterday and you…" Her voice trailed off.

  "I didn't hear him," I said. "I guess I was in a fog."

  "I told him you probably hadn't heard him," she said. She smiled. "Would you like some coffee?"

  "Yes. Thank you." Drinking coffee with her would give me a chance to ask about Helen Driscoll.

  Which I did after she'd poured me a cup of coffee and sat down again.

  "What did she look like?" Elizabeth asked.

  "Yes."

  She deliberated.
Why do you want to know?
The gist of those words occurred to me and I knew she thought them. I almost answered before I stopped myself.

  "Well, was she-?" I stopped again. I didn't want to feed a description to her.

  "What were you going to say?" she asked.

  "Nothing."

  "Oh." Her eyes held on mine a moment and I thought how pretty she could be if there were only a little colour, a little animation in her face-which is to say, a little happiness.

  "I didn't really see much of her," she said. "We- we only moved in about six months before she left and-we never had anything to do with her. She kept to her-herself pretty much."

  "I see."

  "As to what she looked like," Elizabeth bit her lower lip contemplatively, "oh, she was-sort of tall. Dark hair. Dark eyes."

  I found myself leaning forward, staring at her.

  "Did she have a-sort of dark dress too?" I asked, trying-ineffectually, I'm afraid-to sound casual.

  Elizabeth stared at me and her mind was a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.

  "Dark dress?" she asked.

  "Yes. Black with a-sort of-sort of pattern on it?"

  "Well." She swallowed. "She had a dress she'd gotten in Tijuana," she said. "I saw one like it when Frank and I drove down there once."

  "It was dark?"

  "Yes," she said. "It was black. And it had little patterns on it. Like-Aztec symbols I guess they were."

"And she wore it with a string of pearls?"

  She seemed to shrink back a little. I must have looked somewhat maniacal. I could barely hear her voice when she answered.

  "Yes, she did," she said.

THIRTEEN

  I LEANED BACK, MY HANDS TREMBLING ON MY LAP.

  "I guess you're wondering why I asked," I said, trying to keep the excitement from my voice.

  "Well, I-" She seemed a little frightened of me.

  "I found a small photograph in one of the cupboards over at the house," I said, "and I was just wondering if it was our previous tenant."

"Ok."I
think she believed me. At any rate, the aura of suspiciousness seemed to fade from her mind.

  I finished my coffee, managing to talk about the neighbourhood in general terms. Then, as I got up, Elizabeth asked about her comb.

  "Oh… good lord," I said, "do we still have it?"

  She smiled. "It doesn't matter."

  "I'll go get it right now."

  "Oh, no, I can-"

  "No, by God, I'm going to get it right now," I said.

  "You've waited long enough." I opened the door. "I'll be right back."

  "All right then."

  As the door closed behind me, all the excitement flooded out; my fists clamped shut, breath shook in me. It
was
Helen Driscoll! That may have not proved life after death but it proved something just as exciting to me; that Helen Driscoll still wanted to be in that house and that, from a distance of three thousand miles, was transmitting that desire so strongly that I was actually
seeing
her in the living room.

  I wished that Anne were back so I could tell her; so she could see what it was and stop worrying about my sanity. I no longer resented her attitude; it was natural under the circumstances. But those circumstances were far beyond what she imagined. For a few moments I had the premonition that she might not believe me. Then I realized that she must. Elizabeth was my witness. I'd never seen Helen Driscoll in my life.

  Yet I'd asked about that dress and been right.

  I was thinking about that as I came into the kitchen. The comb was on the window sill over the sink. I walked over and picked it up.

"Uh!"

  My cry was short and breathless; the cry of a man who has touched something alive when he least expects it.

  For, as my hand had closed over the comb, I'd felt a sudden, jagged tingle in my fingers; as if I'd touched an open wire. I'd recoiled and the comb had dropped into the sink.

  I stood there shivering, staring down dumbly at the comb. I don't know what expression I had on my face but it must have been one of awed stupefaction. Stupefied was how I felt; and awed by dread that had been too quick to identify, yet too powerful to miss.

  I reached down gingerly, then drew back my ringers as if the comb were something lethal. I swallowed dryly and kept staring at it, all thoughts of Helen Driscoll vanished. A new element had entered my mind, brushing everything away but itself.

  I stood there about two minutes, staring, my mind stumbling over itself in an attempt to wrench reason from the situation. It couldn't. Imagine coming from your house one morning on the way to work, turning a corner and finding yourself confronted by a seven-headed dragon. Imagine your attempt to rationalize, to adjust, even to understand basically what it was you were looking at and realize at the same time that it was still you, going to work on an ordinary morning.

  There are no established channels of acceptance in the mind for a sudden appearance of the bizarre. Which was why I stared and couldn't move; why I reached down to touch the comb at least a dozen times, then didn't touch. Why my mind seemed wooden and incapable.

  Finally, I got a knife out of the cupboard drawer and reached down into the sink. I nudged the comb with it. Nothing. I touched it again. I felt nothing. I squinted at the comb and couldn't understand.

  Then I put down the knife and picked up the comb again.

  It was not so violent this time but it was still there. As I stood, stricken with helpless alarm, the room seemed to blacken and a coldness pressed at me.

Death.
The concept was unmistakable.

  I dropped the comb again and stood there shivering, looking down at it as it lay on the linoleum, looking quite harmless.

  I couldn't stop trembling. Once again I was terribly aware of the uncertainty, the uncontrollability of my perception. It came always when I was far from expecting it. I recalled the experiment psychologists use to drive dogs insane. Whenever the dog least expects it-usually as it is bending over its bowl to eat-they strike a great pipe and the high, vibrating tones unnerve the dog. By the time this act has been repeated a few dozen times, the dog has gone mad and has degenerated into a twitching, slavering hulk of its former self, incapable of the slightest reasoning.

  I felt this now; with the terrible added dimension that I could see it happening. I knew that, every once in a while, when I was not prepared for it, when I was emotionally off balance, these things would occur-jarring me badly. If it went on long enough, I too could be reduced to a pitiful creature of twitchings and apprehensions.

  In a while, I put the comb in an envelope and took it back to Elizabeth.

  It wasn't until I came into the kitchen and handed it to her that the awful connection occurred to me.

  When the word
Death
had branded itself so unmistakably on my mind-
it was her comb in my hand.

  The day was an agony.

  My exultation at having discovered who the woman was had been short-lived. I sat in the living room most of the day,
waiting
for something else to happen. That it didn't helped not at all. It isn't the shocks which can undo a man so much as not knowing when the shocks are coming.

  By late afternoon, I was nerve racked. A child's shout in the street made my muscles go spastic. The sound of a car horn made me jolt with a sucked-in gasp. The rattle of a breeze-stirred blind made me turn my head so quickly that needles of pain exploded in my neck. And, when the phone rang about five, the cup of coffee I was drinking jerked out of my hand as though endowed with sudden life and rolled across the living room rug, spewing its brown contents.

  I stood, trembling, and answered the phone. It was Anne. She told me that the funeral was over and she was going back to her father's house now to see some relatives. She'd start home about eight. I said fine.