Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (10 page)

"Uh-huh. Or two and a half. It happened somewhere around here and there was some kind of stupid mess about it. I seem to remember that a fool country coroner – a local Sherlock Holmes – said there were signs of strangulation, or suffocation, or some other awful nonsense, and wanted to hold Wolcraftson's rodman. Of course, we put a stop to that."

Tom did not answer. Certain words he had heard a couple of hours earlier were coming back to him, just as if a phonograph had been turned on: "Two years ago there was a man come up here, trying to find out about
Them
. He had a kind of spyglass on sticks.
They
made him dead. That's why I didn't want you to go down there. I was afraid
They
would do the same thing to you."

He angrily shut his mind to those words. If there was anything he detested, it was admitting the possibility of supernatural agencies, even in jest. Anyway, what difference did her words make? After all, a man had really died, and it was only natural that her defective imagination should cook up some wild fancy.

Of course, as he had to admit, the screwy entry on the map made one more coincidence, counting the girl's story and the cockeyed altimeter readings as the first. But was it so much of a coincidence? Perhaps Wolcraftson had listened to the girl's prattling and noted down "The Hole" and the reading for it as a kind of private joke, intending to erase it later. Besides, what difference did it make if there had been two genuine coincidences? The universe was full of them. Every molecular collision was a coincidence. You could pile a thousand coincidences on top of another, he averred, and not get Tom Digby one step nearer to believing in the supernatural. Oh, he knew intelligent people enough, all right, who coddled such beliefs. Some of his best friends liked to relate "yarns" and toy with eerie possibilities for the sake of a thrill. But the only emotion Tom ever got out of such stuff was a nauseating disgust. It cut too deep for joking. It was a reversion to that primitive, fear-bound ignorance from which science had slowly lifted man, inch by inch, against the most bitter opposition. Take this silly matter about the hill. Once admit that the dimensions of a thing might not be real, down to the last fraction of an inch, and you cut the foundations from under the world.

He'd be damned, he told himself, if he ever told anyone the whole story of the altimeter readings. It was just the silly sort of "yarn" that Ben, for instance, would like to play around with. Well, he'd have to do without it.

With a feeling of relief he turned off for the farm. He had worked himself up into quite an angry state of mind, and part of the anger was at himself, for even bothering to think about such matters. Now they would finish it off neatly, as scientists should, without leaving any loose ends around for morbid imaginations to knit together.

He led Ben back to the barn, and indicated the bench mark and the hill. Ben got his bearings, studied the map, inspected the bench mark closely, then studied the map again.

Finally he turned with an apologetic grin. "You're absolutely right. This map is as screwy as a surrealist painting, at least as far as that hill is concerned. I'll go around to the car and get my stuff. We can shoot its altitude right off the bench mark." He paused, frowning. "Gosh, though, I can't understand how Wolcraftson ever got it so screwed up."

"Probably they misinterpreted something on his original manuscript map."

"I suppose that must have been it."

After they had set up the plane table and telescope-like alidade directly over the bench mark, Tom shouldered the rod, with its inset level and conspicuous markings.

"I'll go up there and be rodman for you," he said. "I'd like you to shoot this yourself. Then they won't have any comeback when you walk into the office and blow them up for issuing such a map."

"Okay," Ben answered, laughingly. "I'll look forward to doing that."

Tom noticed the farmer coming toward them from the field ahead. He was relieved to see that the little girl was not with him. As they passed one another, the farmer winked triumphantly at him. "Found something worth coming back for, eh?" Tom did not answer. But the farmer's manner tickled his sense of humor, and he found himself feeling pretty good, all irritation gone, as he stepped along toward the hill.

The farmer introduced himself to Ben by saying, "Found signs of a pretty big gusher, eh?" His pretense at being matter-of-fact was not convincing.

"I don't know anything about it," Ben answered cheerfully. "He just roped me in to help him take a reading."

The farmer cocked his big head and looked sideways at Ben. "My, you State fellows are pretty close-mouthed aren't you? Well, you needn't worry, because I
know
there's oil under here. Five years ago a fellow took a drilling lease on all my land at a dollar a year. But then he never showed up again. Course, I know what happened. The big companies bought him out. They know there's oil under here, but they won't drill. Want to keep the price of gasoline up."

Ben made a noncommittal sound, and busied himself loading his pipe. Then he sighted through the alidade at Tom's back, for no particular reason. The farmer's gaze swung out in the same direction.

"Well, that's a funny thing now, come to think of it," he said. "Right out where he's going, is where that other chap keeled over a couple of years ago."

Ben's interest quickened. "A surveyor named Wolcraftson?"

"Something like that. It happened right on top of that hill. They'd been fooling around here all day – something gone wrong with the instruments, the other chap said. Course I knew they'd found signs of oil and didn't want to let on. Along toward evening the old chap – Wolcraftson, like you said – took the pole out there himself – the other chap had done it twice before – and stood atop the hill. It was right then he keeled over. We run out there, but it was too late. Heart got him. He must of thrashed around a lot before he died, though, because he was all covered with dust."

Ben grunted appreciatively. "Wasn't there some question about it afterward?"

"Oh, our coroner made a fool of himself, as he generally does. But I stepped in and told exactly what happened, and that settled it. Say, mister, why don't you break down and tell me what you know about the oil under here?"

Ben's protestations of total ignorance on the subject were cut short by the sudden appearance of a little tow-headed girl from the direction of the road. She had been running. She gasped. "Papa!" and grabbed the farmer's hand. Ben walked over toward the alidade. He could see the figure of Tom emerging from the tall weeds and starting up the hill. Then his attention was caught by what the girl was saying.

"You've got to stop him, Papa!" She was dragging at her father's wrist. "You can't let him go down in the hole.
They
got it fixed to make him dead this time."

"Shut your mouth, Sue!" the farmer shouted down at her, his voice more anxious than angry. "You'll get me into trouble with the School Board, the queer things you say. That man's just going out there to find out how high the hill is."

"But, Papa, can't you see?" She twisted away and pointed at Tom's steadily mounting figure. "He's already started down in.
They're
set to trap him. Squattin' down there in the dark, all quiet so he won't hear their bones scrapin' together – stop him, Papa!"

With an apprehensive look at Ben, the farmer got down on his knees beside the little girl and put his arms around her. "Look, Sue, you're a big girl now," he argued. "It don't do for you to talk that way. I know you're just playing, but other people don't know you so well. They might get to thinking things. You wouldn't want them to take you away from me, would you?"

She was twisting from side to side in his arms trying to catch a glimpse of Tom over his shoulder. Suddenly, with an unexpected backward lunge, she jerked loose and ran off toward the hill. The farmer got to his feet and lumbered after her, calling, "Stop, Sue! Stop!"

Crazy as a couple of hoot owls, Ben decided, watching them go. Both of them think there's something under the ground. One says oil, the other says ghosts. You pay your money and you take your choice.

Then he noticed that during the excitement Tom had gotten to the top of the hill and had the rod up. He hurriedly sighted through the alidade, which was in the direction of the hilltop. For some reason he could not see anything through it – just blackness. He felt forward to make sure the lens cover was off. He swung it around a little, hoping something had not dropped out of place inside the tube. Then abruptly, through it, he caught sight of Tom, and involuntarily he uttered a short, frightened cry and jumped away.

On the hilltop, Tom was no longer in sight. Ben stood still for a moment. Then he raced for the hill at top speed.

He found the farmer looking around perplexedly near the far fence. "Come on," Ben gasped out, "there's trouble," and vaulted over.

When they reached the hilltop, Ben stooped to the sprawling body, then recoiled with a convulsive movement and for a second time uttered a smothered cry. For every square inch of skin and clothes was smeared with a fine, dark-gray dust. And close beside one gray hand was a tiny white bone.

Because a certain hideous vision still dominated his memory. Ben needed no one to tell him that it was a bone from a human finger. He buried his face in his hands, fighting that vision.

For what he had seen, or thought he had seen, through the alidade, had been a tiny struggling figure of Tom, buried in darkness, with dim, skeletal figures clutching him all around and dragging him down into a thicker blackness.

The farmer kneeled by the body. "Dead as dead," he muttered in a hushed voice. "Just like the other. He's got the stuff fairly rubbed into him. It's even in his mouth and nose. Like he'd been buried in ashes and then dug up."

From between the rails of the fence, the little girl stared up at them, terrified, but avid.

 

 

 

THE ENORMOUS BEDROOM

 

HEAVEN HAS just one set of Pearly Gates, but Hell has a variety of entrances to suit its various guests. Some of the gates of Hell are jumping with red devils against a background of yellow flames, some are lined by languorous catlike women who look very seductive in their nakedness until they grow green or orange-and-black fur and unsheathe their dagger-claws, some have warders as emaciated and grim as the inmates of a Nazi death-camp – which they may very well have been in real life.

But no one ever found a door to Hell quite so peculiar and deceptive as the one discovered by the late playboy and racing car driver Nicholas Teufler.

It began with a tiny silver bell ringing inside his head, it felt. Very fast, very shrill, worse than a fire siren. And why did that particular comparison come into his mind, he wondered?

Nevertheless he ordered the tinkling to fade away and for a wonder it did. Then he cautiously worked open his eyes, which felt glued by hangover.

He was in a strange bedroom and it certainly wasn't a man's. That was not altogether unusual on mornings when he woke with bells ringing in his head – though never wedding bells as yet, by a stipend due stroke of good fortune for which Nicholas had never been properly grateful.

But this time he wondered if his run of luck hadn't come to an end.

He was looking at a vanity table cluttered with perfume bottles. He was sitting on the edge of a fully made-up bed topped with a fluffy-stuffed white satin coverlet dimpled with tiny gold buttons and he was wearing black pajamas with red piping. These details bothered him. They were ominous, in fact – the mingled aromas added up to lilies with the rotten-sweet under-scent of gardenias, while the white satin coverlet reminded him of the inside of a coffin. He shuddered. Nicholas had often said that marriage was a prison, but he hadn't had quite that tight a cell in mind. Well, this room seemed spacious enough at the moment, at any rate, to his still-blurry eyes.

His left wrist felt hot and a little painful, as if he had tried to punch someone in the snoot last night and missed and scraped a door-post. He pulled back the sleeve of his pajamas and saw a gunmetal wristwatch with a red face and black numerals and with thin black hands pointing at eighteen minutes to four. He'd never seen it before in his life. It felt almost hot to the touch.

As he started to unbuckle the black band, which felt like reptile hide, he blinked his eyes to clear them and looked at the wall behind the vanity.

There was no wall. For a moment he thought that he had wandered into a department-store window display, but there were no peering faces of mothers and kiddies, or scornful teenagers, or anyone at all. Then he saw that there was no plate of glass and that the room simply went on and on, with clusters of furniture and soft lights here and there, as far as he could see.

Maybe he was in a department-store furniture section. Where
had
last night's party ended. He remembered driving on a freeway ... and a lot of noise ... including sirens?

He looked up. There was a ceiling at least. Not more than eight feet above his head, for he could touch it. A gray slick ceiling like the screen of a dead television set.

Very slowly he turned around. In every direction the room stretched endlessly, furnished at about thirty-foot intervals with easy chairs, sofas, studio couches, beds -Hollywood beds, oval beds, round beds, contour beds, beds with canopies and curtains -and each lit by lamps that glowed in pastel shades of blue, violet, pink, topaz, green -every color imaginable except red. The lamps farthest away clustered and ran together like distant nebulas in a giant telescope.

Overhead and underfoot, the slick gray ceiling and thick gray carpeting stretched off toward infinity. He felt like a bug in a crack. What if the crack should snap shut? What if the room did go on forever? What mightn't be hiding behind the furniture? For a moment he knew fear.

He asked himself what kind of engineering could hold up a ceiling that stretched without visible support for ... miles? Even in Texas -

Suddenly he noticed that he was no longer alone. Beside a long gray velvet sofa about ten yards away stood a girl in a low-cut red velvet evening sheath. A golden zipper ran down the front of her dress, glinting here and there in the rich scarlet. She was blonde, looked about twenty-one, and was smiling at him. It was a warm inviting smile, hinting at secrets – not the sort of smile you'd expect on even a perfectly built shop-window mannequin, though that had been his first thought on seeing her.