Ammie, Come Home (23 page)

“It's no use.” She spoke in a conversational tone, and Ruth's blood froze as she realized that Sara was not addressing any of the three human beings in the room. “It's over, can't you see that? You can't silence all of us.”

She paused, her head tilted in an uncanny listening look.

“It was never any use,” she went on, in the same reasonable voice. “Who were you trying to fool? He beholdeth all the sons of man.”

Ruth wondered who “he” might be. Then she knew, and her breath caught painfully in her throat.

“ ‘Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him,'” Sara said. “It was all known, and the end determined, from the beginning. Now go, and seek the hope that even such as you were promised. Go…in peace.”

The smoky column swayed and shrank. Then, with an absurd little pop, it was gone; and Ruth, running through the space it had occupied, caught Sara in her arms as the girl collapsed.

 

III

They found what they were seeking almost at once, in the very spot where Pat had begun to dig. Sara had recovered from her faint almost at once, and with only the vaguest memories of what she had said. Standing with her arm around the girl, Ruth looked down at the pitiful remnants of mortality. Some quality in the clayey soil had preserved them well.

“So he was here,” she said. “Douglass Campbell.”

“No.” Bruce shook his head. “These bones have never been touched by fire. And Douglass's remains would have been gathered up with the debris of the upper stories of the house.” He stooped, and with careful fingers pulled from the earth a twisted piece of corroded metal. “The buckle of the belt of a military uniform,” he said, holding it up. “This wasn't Douglass, Ruth. It was Anthony Doyle.”

The light shone steadily on the four white faces and motionless hands, but there was nothing in the foul air now beyond its own natural gases.

“He came that night for Ammie,” Bruce went on, “but he never left. He's been here ever since—ever since Douglass Campbell murdered him and buried him in the cellar.”

“And that was the secret Douglass Campbell tried to hide for two centuries,” Ruth said; but she knew the truth, even before Bruce's head moved, again, in the slow gesture of negation.

“No. Douglass Campbell went mad that night, but not because of Doyle's murder. I can almost predict the spot where we'll find her—right under that certain area in the room above—the opposite corner from this, as far away from her lover as he could put her. Even in death he couldn't endure to have them lie together.”

 

IV

It was like being born again, to come up the stairs into the thin sunlight of a winter day. Ruth went to change her clothes and found herself scrubbing her hands over and over, as if the miasma of the cellar and what it contained could be washed away. When the four gathered, in the kitchen, Ruth suggested lunch, like a good hostess; but it was unanimously and immediately refused. Her offer of wine was more acceptable and as she poured the sherry, Ruth remarked,

“If this hadn't ended we'd all have become alcoholics. I've never drunk so much, at such peculiar times of day, as I lave lately.”

“If this hadn't ended,” Sara repeated, and stared rather blankly around the circle of pallid faces. “I can't believe it. This,” she indicated, with a wave of her hand, the smug modern kitchen. “This is anticlimactic.”

“But it is over,” Ruth said. “He won't be back. I don't know why I'm so sure, but I am.”

“Yes, he's gone. And how the hell Sara ever—” Ruth caught Pat's eye and shook her head in silent warning, but he had already stopped speaking. They all felt, somehow, that Sara's last seizure had better not be discussed, at least not then. Instead Pat turned to Bruce.

“He wasn't normal, was he? That was the terror we felt, his madness.”

“He lived the last forty years of his life, and died, insane,” Bruce said soberly. “That was the state in which his spirit lingered. Imagine those years, month after month, cooped up in this house, with what lay below in the cellar, rotting….”

“Don't,” Ruth said faintly.

“That wasn't the worst—not what was in the cellar but what still clung to the house and the old man's mad, decaying brain. He must have seen her in every room, heard her at every moment of his waking life—and in his dreams….”

“He had to kill her, after he killed Doyle,” Pat said more prosaically. “She'd have destroyed him if he hadn't stopped her. She must have known; maybe she saw it done.”

“Oh, yes, she saw it done,” Ruth said; she was shaken by a sudden fit of shivering. “She saw it done…. Dear heaven, don't you remember? We heard her screaming, just as she must have done that night….”

“ ‘Not dead,'” Sara repeated. “She wasn't talking about herself when she said that. A phonograph record, cracked and caught, repeating—repeating the words she said when she saw Anthony Doyle fall, by her father's hand. ‘He can't be dead—he's not dead….'”

“At least she didn't have much time in which to suffer,” Ruth said.

“Only an eternity.” Bruce's face was pinched. “However the dead reckon time…. She never stopped suffering; she was caught in that one unendurable moment like a fly in a spider's web. Both of them, she and her father—murderer and victim….”

“Maybe the first murder—Doyle's—was an accident,” Ruth said. “Surely he wouldn't have had to kill the boy to keep Ammie from eloping.”

Bruce shook his head.

“Part of it will always be conjecture; but—remember Ammie's own words. Doyle was the General's aide. I'll give you three guesses which general,” he added.

“There were lots of 'em,” Pat said practically. “Gates, Greene, von Steuben—”

“I know which General,” Ruth said. “You be logical. I know.”

“Me, too.” Bruce smiled at her. “Hopeless romantics, both of us. Anyhow, the General, whoever he was, sent Doyle to this area. He fell in love with Ammie, and she with him; but he never had a chance with the old man. In the course of his duties Doyle came across the Plot. Imagine his feelings when he discovered that the old rat Campbell, who had thrown him out of the house, was up to his neck in treason! He had a perfect instrument of revenge—but he couldn't use it without destroying his fondest hopes. The other conspirators were hanged, if you recall. How could he expect to marry the girl after he had, in effect, killed her father? So he came that night to warn the old S.O.B. to give up his dangerous activities. Remember Ammie's own words; he wanted to be fair. I would guess that he had already recorded the names of the other conspirators, but he omitted Douglass Campbell's name. He came in good faith; but he underestimated Campbell's hate. He probably never even had a chance to defend himself.”

“And yet you say he is at rest,” Ruth said wonderingly.

“Ruth, I don't pretend to account for this world, let alone the next. But maybe…Doyle died in what you might call a state of grace. His intentions were honorable, his actions harmless; hell, he probably wasn't even mad at anybody. There was no guilt on his soul, to keep it from the peace his faith had taught him to expect. But Campbell—by the terms of his own creed he was damned! He expected to go straight to Hell, and he did. I can't think of any greater hell than to endlessly relive the act that destroyed you.”

“And Ammie?”

Bruce's face assumed the curiously gentle expression it wore when Ammie's name was mentioned.

“Ammie. He wouldn't let her go, in life or in death. And she—she had time, before she died, not only for terror and the last extremity of fear, but for hate. How could she help but hate him, after what she had seen him do?”

“But how did you know?” Ruth demanded. “You did know—both of you. Pat even knew where to start digging.”

“You, of all people, should have seen the truth,” Bruce said. “Good Lord, you were the one who told me about your feeling, when you saw me and Pat squaring off, that it had all happened before. You even suggested that it must have been Douglass and Doyle who were the original antagonists. But if they had ever met in such an encounter—one so violent that it left an imprint on the very air of the house…. Doyle would have been as helpless as I was. He couldn't have killed her father, any more than I could slug Pat.”

“I knew after that last talk with Ammie,” Pat said. “It seemed so hellishly plain to me—maybe because I was still getting flashes of Douglass's memories. She tried so hard to tell us what happened….”

“We should have suspected from the first,” Bruce concluded. “All the clues were there. Ammie's terror and shock indicated a violent end in the house to which she was bound, not a peaceful death in Camden, New Jersey, at the ripe old age of eighty. And there was Douglass's behavior—shutting himself up, not even going to church—that suggested something stronger than grief. He was afraid to face his angry God with that black sin on his soul.”

“His own daughter,” Ruth murmured. “Infanticide. The worst possible sin….”

“No.” The boy's dark head moved in the now-familiar gesture. “It was bad enough, but it wasn't the worst. The thing that drove Douglass Campbell mad was not so much his crime as the reason for it. He didn't kill Ammie to keep her from betraying his other murder. No normal father could have done that. He killed her because—”

His eyes met Pat's; and the older man's head bowed.

“You felt it,” Bruce said.

“I felt it,” Pat agreed heavily. “But I didn't know what it was, not until we had the whole story. The ravenous desire, and the sick hatred of that same desire…. It's in here, somewhere….” He pulled the Bible toward him; Ruth had carried it up from the basement. He began leafing through the pages.

“He never remarried,” Bruce said. “Not in all those years, when other men acquired three and four wives. She was all he wanted, or needed. And then she tried to leave him….”

He broke off, as something in the quality of Pat's silence struck him. Pat had found the reference he wanted; he sat staring down at the page, where a passage was savagely underlined in strokes of dark blue ink—the same ink which had obliterated Ammie's name.

“But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

 

V

The words had all been said; but the final scene was not played until some weeks later. The famous oaks of St. Stephen's raised bare branches into a sky sagging with iron-gray clouds, and the somber green of the pines made a dark background for the white marble of crosses and headstones. When the first flakes of snow began to drift down, Father Bishko excused himself and went in. The others lingered, looking down at the simple stone with its paired names and dates.

“How did you ever get Anthony's birth date?” Ruth asked. “Oh—from the army records, of course. I'm amazed that they go back so far.”

“Not only that, but they can be revised,” Pat said with an air of modest triumph. “I told you about Doyle's being listed as a deserter.”

“Yes. Final confirmation of the truth, if we needed confirmation….”

“Hardly,” Bruce said grimly. “I didn't know it was possible to tell so much, just from bones.”

“Age, sex, manner of death,” Pat said. “I took that course in physical anthropology twenty years ago, but a fractured skull and a broken neck aren't hard to spot. Campbell must have been a giant of a man….” Ruth shivered. He put his arm around her, and went on more cheerfully, “Anyhow, Doyle has been reinstated. I don't know that he cares; but I feel better, somehow.”

“How on earth did you accomplish that?” Ruth asked.

“I found a General with some imagination.” Pat laughed, and gave Bruce a friendly slap on the back that almost sent the boy sprawling. “Bruce is still sulking. He hates to admit that any army officer can have a heart.”

“He's an Irishman,” Bruce said sourly. “As you might expect.”

“And a friend of Pat's?” Sara guessed.

“Like Father Bishko,” Ruth said. “Thanks to Pat's wide circle of acquaintances, we've managed to do this without publicity. I didn't think we could. Father Bishko was splendid.”

“He's a master at tactful planning,” Pat said. “And think how relieved he was to find out that all he needed to arrange was a memorial Mass and a cemetery plot. Not much compared with a full-scale exorcism—and the distinct probability of another encounter with evil incarnate.”

“How you can find it amusing, even now….”

“It's been over a month,” Pat said. “And not a sign.”

“Yes, I can put the house up for sale with a clear conscience.”

Hands jammed in his pockets, black hair powdered with snow, Bruce glanced at Ruth.

“You really intend to sell the house? After all the years it's been in the family?”

“I offered it to you and Sara,” Ruth said, and smiled, a bit wryly, at the boy's involuntary gesture of rejection. “Yes, well, you know how I feel, then. The place is purged, I'm sure. But….”

“Anyhow, family pride is the emptiest of vanities,” Sara said firmly. She bent over to straighten the sheaf of flowers that lay against the stone.

“Where did you find lilac, at this time of year?” Ruth asked.

“You can get anything anytime, if you pay enough for it,” Bruce said. “And we paid enough.”

“You're already starting to sound like a husband,” Ruth warned. Bruce gave her a sheepish smile.

“I was just kidding. Sara had this thing about lilac; she kept insisting it's what Ammie would have liked.”

“Oh, yes,” Ruth said. She looked at Sara. So she was not the only one who had smelled the scent of lilac on a night in November. “Yes, nothing could be more suitable.”