The Walker in Shadows (22 page)

"That's right," Kathy said. "I was reading a book at the library the other day, written by a woman who was ten years old at the time of the war. She lived in a town on the main road to Richmond, and she remembered a lot of Marylanders passing through on their way south. One of them was a sweet little old lady from Baltimore -I think her name was Alexander-whose son was in prison at Fort McHenry. She went to Richmond to get him a commission in the Confederate army so he would be considered a prisoner of war instead of an enemy agent. I mean, they hanged spies."

Pat shivered. Long blue shadows lay across the table. Mark, his eyes lowered, continued to doodle. Kathy glanced at him uneasily and went on, as if hoping to rouse him from his fit of the sulks.

"She got the commission, too. She carried it back in the lining of her bonnet, can you imagine? But her son escaped. He jumped off the parapet of the fort and broke his leg, and managed to crawl to a nearby house, where the people helped him. They smuggled him to another Southern sympathizer, who passed him on, and so forth. It just shows you how many people in Maryland really believed in-"

"Mark," Pat said suddenly. Her son's eyes were now fixed vacantly on the lilac bushes; but his hand continued to move.

"What the devil…" Josef began.

The chill that ran through Pat had nothing to do with the temperature of the evening air. Mark's face no longer resembled his father's. The features were Mark's, but they did not look like his; an alien, unfamiliar expression overlay them like a thin mask. And his hand continued to move.

"Mark!" Pat leaned across the table and caught that horribly moving arm.

Mark let out a yell. It was as if her touch had been a knife that slashed his arm to the bone.

"Damn it! What the hell do you think you're doing?"

His tone was offensive, and so was his dark frown; but Pat didn't mind, because both the voice and the frown were Mark's. The alien cast had left his features. He was nursing his right hand against his body, as if it pained him.

"What's wrong with your hand?" she asked.

"It hurts. You didn't have to hit me."

"I didn't. I barely touched you. What happened?"

"Nothing happened. We were talking about your lady spy, Mrs. Greenhow, and then you leaned over and-"

"You lost about ninety seconds of time," Josef said. "Let me see that paper, Mark."

"I was just doodling," Mark began. He glanced at the paper. His eyes dilated until they looked black.

Josef picked up the sheet of paper and glanced at it. Without comment, he handed it to Pat.

The top of the page was covered with Mark's scribbling. A psychiatrist would not have found it particularly interesting, for the symbols were overt expressions of Mark's feelings-question marks, spirals that went on and on without resolution. Then, abruptly, halfway down the sheet of paper, the penciled tracings became words.

"Tell her I came back. I want her to know. It was hard oh God it was hard, so hard, but I came I want her to know I came I want her I want her I…"

The last word trailed off in a black scrawl, where Pat had joggled Mark's arm.

Pat dug her nails into the palms of her hands. The pain helped her control herself.

"You wouldn't do this for a joke, Mark." She made it a statement, not a question. "You wouldn't do this to me."

"Bite your tongue," Mark said. He was as white as the sheet of paper, but the insatiable curiosity he had inherited from his father was rearing its head. "Did I really write that?"

"No," Pat said. "You didn't. It's not your handwriting."

"Then who…?"

No one answered. They all knew the truth. They had seen the handwriting before. Spiky, bold, unmistakably distinctive… The handwriting of Peter Turnbull.

Moved by a single impulse, they fled for the house, snatching up their belongings more or less at random. The gracious blue dusk had become an enemy, inhabited by shadows.

Pat went around the kitchen switching on every light she could find. Mark, who had grabbed the ominous paper, dropped into a chair at the kitchen table and studied the writing, his chin propped on his hands.

"Amazing," he muttered. "I never knew I had the talent."

"I could kill you," said his mother in a choked voice. "How you have the nerve to joke about it…"

"I'm not joking. This is the most fantastic piece of luck! You know what it means."

"What it probably means," Josef said coldly, "is that your uncontrolled subconscious has expressed itself. You've had this idea in mind all along, haven't you?"

Mark looked injured.

"I didn't do it on purpose. That was automatic writ-ing."

"One of the favorite tricks of the fake mediums," Josef said. "They claim the spirits are directing their muscles."

"Honest to God, Mr. Friedrichs-"

"Oh, I'm not accusing you of fraud. In some cases a medium honestly believes he or she has been taken over by some external force. But that force can be the subconscious, just as the spirit guides who speak through the medium can be a secondary personality."

"What are you talking about?" Pat demanded shrilly. Her nerves had been badly shaken, and she was in no mood for generalizations. "What idea?"

"I'll state it," Josef said. "Actually, Mark, I'm doing you a favor; it may sound more sensible coming from me.

"Mark believes that the poltergeist is the conscious intelligence of Peter Turnbull, and that his-er-activities are directed toward and stimulated by the girl who is the spiritual reincarnation of Susan Bates. He thinks Susan and Peter were lovers."

"I don't see that you made it sound any more sensible," Mark grumbled. "They weren't lovers. Not in the physical sense, anyhow. But… yes, I do think they were in love. I mean, a man doesn't come back from the grave to argue about secession."

Mark wasn't the only one who had considered the idea. Pat realized that it had been simmering in her own subconscious for some time.

"But they were first cousins," she said slowly. "Wouldn't that-"

"Prevent them from marrying? No," Mark said flatly. "Not then. And it would have been marriage that was in question, not casual fooling around; in 1860 a guy didn't dally with a young lady of good family-especially when it was his own family. But can you imagine the parents approving of such a match?"

"Star-crossed lovers?" Josef shook his head. "Mark, you stole the plot from
Romeo and Juliet
. It's highly suspect, and so is this presumed message." He picked up the paper and eyed it critically. " Tell her I've come back.' From the dead, one presumes. It would be difficult, I agree. 'I want her, I want her…' Come, now. It was admittedly a melodramatic era, but that's a bit too much."

"I don't believe it," Kathy said. "I won't believe it. Why would he act so-so violently, if he really loved her?"

Pat started to speak, and then changed her mind. Kathy was visibly distressed; it would be cruel to frighten her further. But if Mark's theory was correct, there was an explanation for the violence of the manifestations.

Peter Turnbull, arrogant, spoiled, unaccustomed to deprivation of any kind, had been deprived of the girl he wanted, first by the intolerance of their parents and then by the final frustration. If one granted that some aspect of personality did survive death-and that was becoming harder and harder to deny-then perhaps the boy was still blindly seeking his lost love. It was not necessary to assume that young Turnbull had been malignant and vicious in life. Didn't some spiritualists claim that ghosts were by definition psychotic spirits, lingering on this plane of existence because the shock of violent, untimely death had made them unable to accept their removal from the body? If the spirit of Peter Turnbull was trapped in some such hellish impasse, their problem was insoluble. In the act of seeking Peter would destroy what he sought, and there was no way of giving him what he wanted, or convincing him that it was unattainable.

Kathy sat hunched over, her arms wrapped around her body as if she were cold, her eyes staring. Pat started up.

"It's getting late," she said, with forced cheerfulness. "I could do with a snack and a cup of hot tea. Kathy, how about giving me a hand?"

"Scotch for me," Josef said.

Mark said nothing. Like Kathy, he stared into empty space, his lips moving as if he were praying.

Canned soup and sandwiches were the best Pat could offer, but the food restored their spirits, and, as Josef said, the Scotch didn't hurt. Mark remained abstracted throughout the meal, although he managed to eat twice as much as anyone else.

When they had finished Kathy collected the dishes as if she had done that job all her life. Josef's eyes followed the slim little figure as it moved back and forth between the table and the sink. His expression was unguarded, and the baffled terror in his dark eyes made Pat ache with sympathy.

"I made reservations at the motel," he said abruptly. "For all of us."

Pat half expected that Mark would object. Instead he nodded soberly.

"I guess we'd better. At least you three-"

"You, too," Pat said firmly. "You're not staying here alone with vases and mirrors flying around the room."

"It isn't doing that anymore," Mark said. "The last couple of times there was no poltergeist stuff. Hmmm. That's interesting."

"Why?" Pat asked.

"He's got you well trained as a straight man," Josef remarked disagreeably. "You ought to know how he thinks-if the process can be called that. He interprets everything as a sign of a guiding intelligence-an assumption which, like all his other assumptions, he has yet to prove. The idea is that this nasty apparition was awkward and maladroit at first, unaccustomed to its powers. Gradually it is focusing them, concentrating on its real aim, so that it doesn't have to waste energy in random acts of violence."

Jerry's frown altered his son's face.

"You wouldn't be able to figure that out if you hadn't reached the same conclusions," Mark said. "Why do you keep fighting it? Hell, I don't like it any better than you do! The trouble is, we're caught in a vicious circle. We don't know enough to take the steps that would enable us to learn more. We ought to be testing the thing, experimenting, finding its limitations. But we can't take the risk."

"Mark." Josef rose and began to pace back and forth, his hands in his pockets. "I've gone along with your research because the only thing we stand to lose by it is a few days of time. And because-oh, yes, I admit it- because there is a remote chance that we might be able to learn something that would enable us to deal with this- this thing. Any other method is out. It's too dangerous."

"Why do you say the chance is remote? It seems to me-"

"Because I too, in my long-distant youth, read ghost stories." Josef leaned against the counter; a faint, reminiscent smile curved his lips. "I'd climb into bed at night with a volume of Poe or Lovecraft and read till my hair stood on end and I was afraid to turn out the light. I'm tolerably familiar with the literature, including the so-called 'true' ghost stories. The White Nuns, and the ghostly carriages, the banshees and the headless horsemen… I can't remember a single case in which a ghost was laid by an intrepid investigator who found out what was troubling the troubled spirit. In fiction, yes. Not in fact. Now be honest. You're a screwball, but you have a good mind. Do you know of any such cases?"

The compliment was not exactly wholehearted, but Mark was rather flattered by it, although he tried to appear blase.

"Well," he began.

"I'm not talking about the pop books written by professional ghost hunters," Josef added. "The cases they discuss are so vague, and their evidence is so illogical, that no sane person could take them seriously. I'm talking about ghosts-the kind that walk around old houses politely dematerializing when someone tries to touch them. And that, my boy, is just about all they do. Their activities are singularly aimless. Do you know of any real case like the one you have postulated-a case of a personality returning after death because of some unfinished business or frustrated ambition?"

"Well…"

"I don't either," Josef said.

Mark looked straight at his tormentor.

"Are you going to write this case up, Mr. Friedrichs? Or talk about it at cocktail parties?"

Josef's response was wordless. It might best be described as a growl.

At nine o'clock the others were ready to leave, but Mark had had seconds thoughts.

"You guys could sit in the car with the engine running, ready for a getaway," he proposed. "I'll wait on the stairs, just to see what happens. If it gets sticky I can run out and-"

"And lead the thing to the motel," Josef said.

For once Pat saw her son outmaneuvered. He bit his lip and refrained from further argument.

Perhaps because he had won that round, Josef was actively cooperative with Mark's next proposal-to set up a tape recorder and camera in his room. The tape recorder was simple enough; Mark's elaborate, expensive hi-fi system included recording equipment that would run for almost four hours. The camera was something else. There was no way of triggering it to go off at one a.m., although Mark proposed several unrealistic and impossible suggestions. The final result looked like a mad inventor's contraption; wires and cords ran all over the room, hooked up to the camera.

When the final cord across the doorway had been placed, Josef stood back and contemplated the maze with wry amusement.

"That might work if you were trying to catch a blind burglar," he remarked. "Although I doubt it. Pulling one of those cords will probably just jerk the camera off the tripod."

Pat glanced over her shoulder. Mark was out of earshot; he had gone down to console Jud and shut him in the kitchen.

"You helped him set it up," she said.