Ammie, Come Home (5 page)

“I'm not. It was just one of those things.”

“A séance!” Sara's eyes danced with amusement. “Aunt Ruth, are we going to have a séance?”

“Yes,” Ruth said, sighing. “She thinks this house probably reeks with the right atmosphere.”

“But it's tremendous fun,” Sara exclaimed. “More fun than Spin the Bottle.”

“A parlor game? Is that how you think of it?”

“Sure. Although…I've used the Ouija board, and I must admit…”

“Involuntary movements,” Pat said shortly.

“But I wasn't pushing the board, and I'm sure nobody else was.”

“That's what they all say.”

Bruce's eyes darted from Sara, flushed and erect on the edge of the couch, to Pat's sour face. Ruth sensed that he was inclined to agree with Pat, but he hated to pass up the chance of an argument.

“I agree that the Ouija board is probably explicable in terms of natural laws,” he said pontifically. “But many of the problems of the paranormal have not been properly explored. Take Rhine—”

“You take him. Unscientific and inadequately controlled.”

“What are you talking about?” Ruth demanded.

“Dr. Rhine's experiments in telepathy, E. S. P., he calls it. He uses decks of special cards and tries to get a person sitting in one room to send mental images of the cards to a person in another room, who writes down the impressions he gets. It doesn't work. Despite all the juggling with the results.”

“The statistical methods,” Bruce began hotly; he was now involved in the argument for its own sake.

“Neither you nor I would be capable of judging that aspect. But I know that the controls are inadequate. There are too many ways of faking, deliberate or unconscious. Ask any stage magician.”

His eyes glowing, Bruce expertly shifted ground.

“All new scientific discoveries are mocked when they first appear. Take hypnotism—”

“The favorite example of the apologists for spiritualism. Take alchemy, astrology, and the secret of the Great Pyramid. Still pure superstition, all of 'em.”

“Boys, boys,” Ruth interrupted. “I think either one of you would argue about whether or not the sun is going to rise tomorrow—on either side of the question. Help me decide how I'm going to arrange this ludicrous affair. I haven't even thought about the guest list. How many people does one need for a good séance?”

“The four of us and two guests,” Sara counted aloud. “That's six. Do we need more?”

Bruce shot Ruth a quizzical glance. It was so well done that she had no choice but to say, as graciously as she could, “Of course we'll expect you, Bruce. A week from tonight, Friday the tenth.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Bennett, I'm looking forward to it,” Bruce recited. And then spoiled the effect by adding, with a malicious movement of his lips, “I think you're going to need a skeptic.”

“Skeptics I've got,” Ruth said wryly.

“Pat's no skeptic, he's the Grand Inquisitor. Burn 'em at the stake, that's his motto. And you—”

“Yes?” This was one of the things she most disliked about the younger generation in general and Bruce in particular—their habit of cheap, pseudopsychological analysis.

“You are fastidious. You dislike the whole idea, not because it's irrational but because it's distasteful.”

“Well,” Ruth said, surprised, “I guess you're right.”

“Sara still hasn't quite given up believing in Santa Claus,” Bruce went on. The look he gave Sara was meant to be casually amused, but Ruth caught a glimpse of his eyes, and their expression made her catch her breath. “She's still receptive to wonderment. Trailing clouds of glory….”

“Oh, come on!” Sara was definitely not flattered. Either she had not seen that betraying look or she was too inexperienced to know what it meant.

“So,” Bruce concluded, with a sweeping gesture that mocked all of them as well as himself, “I'm your only genuine open mind, completely without prejudice and able to evaluate the evidence.”

“There won't be much evidence, I'm afraid. Tonight's performance was pretty sad.”

“You caught that, at any rate,” Pat said grumpily.

“Oh, yes, it was all very obvious. I was disappointed. I thought she would do better.”

“She can, given time for preparation. I told you about Mother's impromptu parties. But I'll wager that in a week Madame Nada will have done a discreet but ample amount of research on you and this house. She will be filled up to here with history—everything she can dig out of the Georgetown guidebooks.”

“She'll run into trouble there,” Ruth said. “There isn't much about this place in the guidebooks.”

“Not even the builder's name, building history, that sort of thing?”

“Oh, well, his name was Campbell, like Cousin Hattie's. Daniel, or was it Abediah? But he wasn't much of a public figure, not like the Bealls and the Stodderts and the really famous Georgetown families.”

“Really? Well, that's good.”

“Why?”

“Don't you see, Mrs. Bennett?” Bruce was so interested he forgot his affected accent. “The less she can find out from public records, the easier it is to check her sources. If she should come up with something that really isn't in print—”

“Oh, I'll bet she'll come up with something,” Pat said.

“Well, I'll spend some time reading up on the house,” Bruce said eagerly. “If she slips, I'll catch it.”

“Where does the performance take place?” Pat asked, swallowing a yawn.

“We'll need a table, I suppose,” Ruth said. “A biggish one. Ten or twelve people….”

“How about the dining-room table?” Sara suggested.

“Over the crumbs and coffee cups? No, dear; you and I will be doing the catering, and I've no intention of scuttling to and fro with trays and sponges in front of guests.”

“Then it will have to be in here.”

“Yes. We could move these couches farther apart, and sit in front of the fire.”

“I think you'll find,” Pat said dryly, “that Madame will prefer to be a little farther away from the firelight.”

“It's a problem, isn't it?” Bruce began pacing the room, examining it as if he had never seen it before. “I can see why you put the couches in front of the fire, it makes a nice grouping. And the bookshelves at the far end of the room suggest a kind of library corner, looking out over the garden. But the room has an awkward shape. You're losing about a third of your space at this end, next to the street.”

“I know, it is awkward. I tried rearranging the furniture, but it wouldn't let itself be moved.” The statement, which she had meant as a light comment, sounded unexpectedly alarming. “I mean,” she added hastily, “this was the best arrangement; it had been this way for years.”

Pat was becoming interested. He walked down the length of the room to the front windows.

“One thing you've got,” he said, “if nothing else—an ideal setup for our ghost-raising session. This table in front of the window is round; move it back a couple of feet so we can get chairs all around it, and—”

He was standing with his back to the others, facing the window and the table, on which his hands rested lightly. With the last word his voice broke, and he suddenly bent forward over the table, head bowed and shoulders hunched.

Ruth leaped to her feet.

“Pat!”

“What?” He turned, smiling, and Ruth's nightmare vision of a heart attack faded. “Frog in my throat. A monster. Guess I talk too much.”

“Was that all? I thought you were having a fit.”

“No, no, I'm fine. Yes, this would do admirably. But you ought to have these windows caulked. The draft is enough to freeze your bones.”

“I did have them caulked. It's just a cold spot, that's all. Too cold for your mother, perhaps.”

“No,” he said slowly. “This is ideal.”

“He's right,” Sara agreed. “Ruth, maybe an electric heater….”

“We'll worry about that later.” Pat produced another yawn. “Come on, Bruce, I'll give you a lift home.”

He lingered in the hall for a moment after Bruce had, reluctantly, gone on out to the car.

“I wish you'd call this off, Ruth,” he said, in a voice pitched low enough so that Sara, clearing away cups in the next room, did not hear.

“My dear—why?”

“It's too much for you, too much fuss.”

“Don't be silly, I don't mean to try to imitate your mother's style of entertaining. It will be very simple.”

“I wish you wouldn't,” he repeated, in an oddly flat voice.

“Pat, you look so—Are you sure you didn't have a pain just now?”

“No, damn it, I told you I feel fine! Sorry…. I guess I am tired; I didn't mean to yell at you. Good night.”

Ruth helped to clear the living room, bade Sara good night, and sat down for a final cigarette in front of the dying fire.

She was worried about Pat. Her father had had that same gray pallor, after his first heart attack. Pat was no longer a young man.

And she? Half her life was over, more than half…. And what had she to show for it? An old house which was too large, really, for a single person; a pretty, casual niece who would be gone in another year or two, after she finished college—who would then send a Christmas card and a birthday card every year, with dutiful messages. Yes, Sara would send the cards; she was a thoughtful child.

She loved Sara. Drowsing in the dimming light, she realized that she loved Sara more than was safe or comfortable, with something of that fierce parental love which had always frightened her in others. But Sara didn't love her. Sara would be embarrassed, probably, at the very idea. In the old days it had been right and proper to love one's parents, and God; today the tall candid-eyed young cynics kept their love for erring mankind and their unfortunate brothers; or, occasionally, for their mates. Well, she had tried that too. Never happy, even at its most intense peak of longing, it had turned all too soon into misery so abject that she still felt the echoes of it in her bones, like an incurable, recurrent sickness. Misery, and love and sickness….

I know what's wrong with me, she thought hazily. I'm falling asleep….

 

V

Ruth dreamed that she was lying on the sofa facing the fireplace, as she actually was. Sara stood before her, and that, too, was as it might have been. But only the girl's face was clear; the rest of her body and clothing was dim as a landscape seen through fog that shifts and thickens and disperses, giving tantalizing and misleading hints of what the mist conceals. She saw Sara's face as clearly as if it were illumined by spotlights; and here the imitation of reality ended. Ruth had never seen on anyone's face, let alone that of her pretty niece, a look like the one that disfigured the dream girl's features, and she hoped she never would. The eyes were so distended that the whites showed all around the pupils. The complexion, against Sara's black-brown hair, looked gray as ash, and the pale lips were parted in a gasp of terror.

Ruth was so frightened that, even in her sleep, she tried to move. She could not, and recognized that, too, as a common dream symptom. Almost she welcomed the bodily paralysis as a confirmation of the fact that she was really dreaming.

Then the shadow came. It was formless at first, but she knew it had actual form that was somehow concealed from her. All she could see was its size and its menace, and as it loomed up against the dream shape of her niece, Sara's mouth opened in a scream that was all the more pitiable for being silent. The effect of that soundless shriek was so bad that Ruth woke. And then she entered the worst part of the nightmare.

She lay, as she had seen herself in the dream, on the couch that faced the fireplace. Now she could make out the glow of the fading coals—but vaguely, as if she saw them through air saturated with smoke. The table lamp behind the couch was on, casting a dim but adequate light over the whole scene. She felt the roughness of the brocade covering the couch against her cheek, and the stiffness of her cramped muscles. All these sensory impressions proved that she was indeed awake. Sara's dream image had, of course, disappeared.

The shadow had not.

It hovered between her and the fire—dark, heavy gray, smoke-thick and smoke-dark, it was the medium which dulled the crimson coals into tiny sparks. It had no form, but the form was coming, struggling to shape itself, so that the thick, sluggish coils of twilight-dark twisted and moved….

Then, as she struggled frantically against the paralysis that still held her, deliverance came, in the form of a sound which, if not personally familiar, was at least recognizable as something from the waking world. A voice, dulled by distance and thick glass panes into a mournful echo, calling….

“Come home, come home…Sammie…come home….”

With an effort that felt as if it must wrench her bones out of their sockets, Ruth swung her feet to the floor and sat up.

And woke, finally and genuinely.

For, of course, the last sequence had been only an extension of the original dream. It was common enough, to dream of waking. Ruth told herself that, but when she raised her hand to her forehead she found that the roots of her hair were soaked with perspiration.

She pushed the damp hair back from her face, drew a long shaken breath, and reached for a cigarette. Half shyly she glanced out of the corner of her eye at the fire. It was almost dead—only a faint reddish glow remained—but it was fading normally with no greasy pall of dead air to obscure it. Ruth let out the breath she had not known she was holding. When she struck the match, her fingers were hardly shaking. But—good heavens, that had been a nasty one!

She wondered what Pat would say about the origins of the nightmare—or Bruce, with his cocky assurance. The last thought brought a faint smile to her lips. No doubt Bruce's interpretation would be shatteringly Freudian.