Someone in the House (17 page)

Shortly before four o’clock the doorbell rang. I pried myself off my chair and went to answer it. I hoped it was Roger. For even though I had been genuinely absorbed in my work, part of my mind had been speculating about what he had found on his photographs.

It wasn’t Roger. It was Father Stephen.

Bea reached the door before I did. From the drawing room, unseen by either, I saw her greet him and lead him upstairs.

So Bea had taken the bit in her teeth and proceeded with her own plan, despite Roger’s objections. She hadn’t actually broken her promise; she had waited to consult the pastor until Roger had had a chance to do his own thing. I doubted that Roger would look at it that way, however.

I showered and changed, and then I knocked on the door of Bea’s sitting room. Father Stephen rose when I came in. One look at his beaming face told me that Bea had not yet confided in him. No doubt she planned to stuff him full of cakes (freshly baked) and tea (China) before she hit him with her news.

“Oh, Anne, I was just about to ask you to join us,” she said coolly.

“And where is Kevin?” Father Stephen asked. “Still at work? Such dedication.”

“He’s probably at the pool,” I said. “He spends every afternoon there and every morning on the tennis court.”

Father Stephen’s eyebrows rose a fraction. I had intended my comment to be one of humorous tolerance, but it had come out sounding bitchy.

“What’s wrong, Anne?” Bea asked.

“Sorry, I’m just not in the mood for polite chitchat. Go ahead and tell him. That’s what you intended to do, wasn’t it?”

Bea had every right to resent my manner and my grouchy voice. Instead she gave me a sympathetic look. “Is Debbie still here?”

“I didn’t know she had arrived,” I said mendaciously.

“She came to the kitchen door awhile ago. Kevin was still in his room. She introduced herself very prettily and said he had asked her over to swim.”

“I don’t know why you brought her up,” I said.

Father Stephen had followed this exchange with a faint smile and a furrowed brow. Another sort of man might have attempted to cast oil upon the troubled waters. He went right to the point.

“Tell me what?”

Bea’s eyes shifted. She nibbled on her lower lip; and after a moment Father Stephen glanced at me. “Perhaps…”

“No, that’s all right,” Bea said. “Anne is very much involved; her presence isn’t what is inhibiting me. I can’t think how to tell you without your suspecting my sanity.”

“I can’t imagine that I would ever do that,” Father Stephen said, smiling.

“Start at the beginning,” was my brilliant suggestion.

Bea took a deep breath.

Before she could utter the first word, there was a thud of rapidly approaching footsteps and the door burst open. Roger stood on the threshold. He surveyed the three of us—Father Stephen with a smile of welcome curving his lips, Bea with her mouth open, ready to speak, me—I don’t know why I should have felt guilty, but I realized I was trying to squeeze myself into a smaller space. Never have I seen such a malignant look on a man’s face.

“Frailty, thy name is woman,” he said, glowering at Bea.

“That,” I said, recovering myself, “is a misquotation if I ever heard one. She didn’t promise—”

“She did too.”

Bea started to speak. I think she was about to say, “I did not”; but, realizing where this would lead, she changed her mind.

“Sit down, Roger.”

“You promised—”

“That is irrelevant.”

Roger threw himself into a chair with such force that the springs wheezed protestingly. “Have you told him?”

“Not yet.”

“But you intend to. I can’t talk you out of it?”

“I certainly hope not,” said Father Stephen. “Between the three of you you have now worked me up to a pitch of unbearable apprehension. Is this to be a confession, or an accusation, or what? For heaven’s sake enlighten me before I burst with curiosity and alarm.”

“Certainly,” said Bea. She faced him squarely, turning her back on Roger. “It began a few days ago, when…”

I don’t know what Father Stephen expected, but I can assert with some confidence that he had never in his wildest dreams anticipated a story like the one Bea told. Years of experience had taught him to control his countenance, but the look of amiable, imperturbable calm with which he began soon changed to frowning consternation.

As for me, I felt an illogical relief, as well as a childish hope that here, at last, we would find help. This was Father Stephen’s specialty. It was rather like telling God. Moreover, at one point in my own narrative I saw the most extraordinary expression pass over his face, a look of reminiscence, as if he were not hearing the story for the first time. But I was doomed to disappointment. His first comment when the story had been told, was one of horror.

“How ghastly!”

There was a pause. I waited for a further comment, but he just sat there, shaking his head dumbly. Roger, who had been consuming tea cakes with absentminded greed, gave a nasty chuckle.

“Want to hear my chapter before you commit yourself, Steve? I warn you, it will knock all your theories into a cocked hat.”

The challenge restored the pastor’s powers of speech, if not his composure. “Roger, that cynical manner of yours is an unmitigated pain in the neck. How do you know what theory I may have formulated?”

“You have no choice,” Roger said. “You’re condemned by your profession to spend your life trying to come to terms with the contradiction between your benevolent God and a vicious universe. I’m going to spare you the humiliation of being proved wrong in this case. I’ll tell you what I discovered last night.”

Father Stephen listened with wary suspicion as Roger went on with his narrative. Skilled rhetorician that he was, Roger saved the best for last. “I developed the film this afternoon,” he said. “Here it is.”

From his jacket pocket he withdrew a fat sheaf of prints. Bea held out an eager hand, but Roger shook his head, a maddening smile on his face.

“One at a time, in order, and with commentary,” he said.

Pushing teacups out of the way, he cleared a space on the table. We crowded around, Father Stephen as openly curious as Bea and I.

“First,” said Roger, “the two cameras I had mounted on the wall, with threads attached to trip the switches.”

His voice had a peculiar note that made me look at him suspiciously. He dealt the picture down onto the table.

It was an excellent snapshot of Annabelle proceeding along the hall. Her tail was lifted and her face had a look of profound contemplation.

Before anyone could comment, Roger added a second photograph to the first. This time Annabelle had apparently heard the click of the shutter or seen the faint red glow of the flash. Her head was turned toward the camera. She appeared to be mildly curious, but not put out.

Nobody but me seemed to think this was funny. I stopped laughing after a minute and Roger said, “I should have anticipated something of the sort. Those damned animals are all over the house. Next time I’ll raise the threads a few feet.”

“All right, Roger, you’ve had your fun,” Bea said coldly. “You wouldn’t have shown us these if you had not caught something important with the other camera. Stop playing games.”

Roger looked sheepish. Again I sensed that this was primarily an exciting game to him. Even the bruises on his throat, now concealed by a scarf, had not convinced him that the problem was not academic.

“Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

He dealt the pictures out like cards, talking as he did so. “The first three show the hall before Kevin opened his door. Nothing unusual there. Now, here’s Kevin. And here, and here…”

Father Stephen’s breath caught sharply. Neither my description, nor Roger’s, had conveyed the appalling significance of Kevin’s actions. His movements and his expressions, caught in shots only seconds apart, were as graphic as a motion picture. They left no doubt of what he thought he was doing.

“No sign of any other—uh—object, you see,” Roger said, continuing to deal out prints. “Now Kevin’s arms fall to his sides. He turns. And now, in this—”

The photo he indicated showed Kevin fully turned, his back to the camera. Beyond him, between a small Chippendale table and a mirror, was the faintest streak of light.

“It could be a flaw in the film,” I said.

“Look at these,” Roger replied.

There were twenty-four more photographs. The last two showed an empty hall and a closed door to Kevin’s room. But the three before these…

I grabbed one. Father Stephen and Bea did the same. They were almost identical.

The thing that had begun as a dim streak of light was a luminous column in the last three prints. There was some resemblance to the object I had seen on the first night of my vigil, before the apparition began to shape itself. A narrowing at the “waist” and a blob above the wider shoulder portion that might have been a head were suggestive of a human form, but no details were visible.

“I blew the last one up,” Roger said, producing an eight-by-ten glossy. “Unfortunately, enlargement only blurs it.”

We passed this print around. The figure was even less distinct, but there were a couple of interesting aspects now to be observed. In the center of the figure was a core of virtually opaque material; one could not see objects through it, as one could through the edges. Also, there was something about the lower part of the form…

“Folds.” Roger pointed. “See them? Like a long skirt, or robe—or toga.”

III

“Toga?” Father Stephen’s voice had lost its mellow smoothness. “Roger, there are times when you try my temper. What madness are you hinting at? Roman ghosts that ‘shriek and squeal about the streets’? You must be out of your mind to approach this subject so frivolously.”

“Who says I’m frivolous?” Roger exclaimed indignantly. “I’m approaching it as I would any other problem, rationally, logically—”

“The problem of good and evil is not susceptible to logic.”

“Ha! There you go; I knew you would. Next you’ll start mumbling about the devil and evil spirits and the souls of the damned—”

“Roger, you are incredibly rude,” Bea cried. “What else can it be but—”

“That’s all right, Bea; Roger and I are used to one another.” Father Stephen recovered himself. He smiled faintly. “Actually, there are a number of things ‘it’ could be.”

“Including hallucination?” I suggested hopefully.

“There speaks modern, skeptical youth,” said Father Stephen. “No, Anne, forget that. It seems to me quite impossible that three sensible adults could suffer from the same delusion.”

“Four,” I said.

Father Stephen’s smile vanished. “Four, yes. That unfortunate young man…Something must be done. He is in grave danger.”

I said in a rush, “I’m so grateful, so surprised and glad—you believe us, don’t you?”

“Roger would say that I am credulous by nature and by training. Certainly I find it harder to believe in the superstitions of modern psychiatry than in—well, even in Roger’s theory of an unknown psychic energy field.”

“Humph,” said Roger. “All the same, Steve, that’s what we have. The thing takes different forms to different people. It must; it has no physical shape of its own. It is an impersonal, psychic phenomenon, seemingly unnatural only because science has not yet—”

“Nonsense,” Bea said crisply.

The pastor glanced at her. “Quite right,” he said, and raised a warning hand as Roger started to protest. “Wait a minute, Roger. You have each told me one chapter of a most interesting story. Now it’s my turn. Bea, would you mind terribly if I smoked? It’s a filthy habit, but I need something to help me compose my thoughts.”

Bea brought him an ashtray while he filled his pipe with the loving, tedious slowness pipe smokers seem to consider ritually important. When the pipe was going, he sat back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and began.

“A few days ago we spoke of Miss Marion Karnovsky, the former owner of this house. My manner must have struck you as somewhat strange—no, Bea, don’t be polite, I know I was abrupt and ill at ease. Ordinarily I wouldn’t dream of discussing the private affairs of a former friend and parishioner. However, your situation is extraordinary, and what I am about to tell you may shed some light on the case. Besides, in a sense the story is already a matter of public record.