Emily's Ghost (8 page)

Still, somewhere in the
deepest part of her brain she was toting up the irregularities as
she found them. She had long ago decided that messy people lacked a
certain gene, which is what enabled them to live long and happy
lives. Neat people, on the other hand, were always noticing things
and worrying about them, just as she was doing now.

When Emily went into her
bathroom, she suddenly got a lot more worried.

She was reaching for her
nightgown behind the bathroom door when she saw that the jewelry
box she kept on the top of a small bureau -- the little inlaid
wooden jewelry box her brother had sent her from Korea -- had been
thrown open and its three drawers pulled out and left that way.
Short of fleeing an earthquake, Emily was incapable of having left
that kind of mess behind. Shocked, she went through the box quickly
and inventoried the few things she kept there. Coins, earrings,
broken watches, her mother's wedding rings, an old charm bracelet--
all present. Frightened and relieved and very much awake, she
thought: They took one look and decided it wasn't worth
it.

Mere bravado. Exactly four
seconds after that thought, Emily had another: that they -- or he
-- didn't actually finish the burglary. She ran back to her living
room. The VCR was still there. The TV. The stereo.
Oh, God. Oh, no
. If they
hadn't finished, where were they now? Had they been scared off by a
neighbor in the hall? Were they trying to find a closer parking
place for their van?
Oh,
God
. They weren't in the kitchen. The
kitchen opened out into the living room. She could see the kitchen.
They weren't in the kitchen.

She looked across to the
bedroom, the dark, unlit bedroom. The bedroom with no wall switch,
where the nearest light was a lamp on a dresser located exactly six
and a half steps to the left of the door. The bedroom where to date
the only phone was plugged into the only jack. She cursed the lamp,
the phone, the darkness. She would not go in there.

She would go to a neighbor
instead -- Mr. Olafson, who had to get up at 5:30 for the commute
to New Hampshire -- and bang on his door, and beg him to come to
her apartment to find the burglar for her. He would ask if her door
had been open. She would not be sure. He would ask what they took.
She would say, "Nothing." He would ask why he, Mr. Olafson, was
standing in the hall instead of lying in his bed.

No, she could not go to
Mr. Olafson.

If this were a boarding
house we'd have a pay phone at the end of the hall and I could call
the police,
she realized, furious with the
management. But
would
she call the police?

Mace! I have mace!
Her brother the policeman had given it to her, a
big, unwieldy can that she kept next to the Raid under the bathroom
sink. She crept back into the bathroom, her heart hammering wildly
and erratically in her breast, and took out the can of mace. She
had practiced it a thousand times, grabbing the can so that the
button fired away from her. But she grabbed it backwards anyway,
and dropped it in her panic, and picked it up again, backwards
again, and finally got it right side out, and marched out of the
bathroom with it at arm's length, just in case she hadn't got it
right after all.

She stood in the lighted
living room at the threshold to the bedroom, clutching her mace,
her eyes failing completely to adjust to the darkness within. She
took one step inside, then another. The air flowing from the
bedroom was ocean-cold and damp; it wrapped itself around her like
a Nantucket fog. A new and utterly horrifying sensation took hold
of her. Inside her bedroom there was no burglar lying in wait.
There wasn't even someone so comforting as a Boston Strangler.
There was something else. Something more. Something worse. Her
heart became absolutely still in her breast. She took one step
back.

The lamp was six and a
half feet to the left, but she saw -- she was certain she saw -- a
shadow move in the emerging dimness to the right. She aimed
recklessly and fired; the wet hiss of mace managed to go somewhere
other than her face. She saw someone leap away, heard his startled
oath. Petrified, she fired again, this time sweeping the area.
Again the figure leapt away, unaffected by it.

"Jesus, woman! Put that
thing away!"

She knew the voice. Oh
God, she knew the voice.

"Kimberly," she whispered,
frozen in terror.

"Kimberly, my ass! I'm
Fergus. Fergus O'Malley."

For an eternity or two,
Emily stood silent and still.

Then: "I don't believe ...
I know ... an O'Malley," she managed to whisper.

"Ye do
now
." The voice was low, almost a snarl.
"Get in here, girl. Let's see what we have."

"Ayyy ... don't think so,"
Emily said faintly, taking another step back. Her knees were all
rubbery; she was close to collapse. The can of mace fell from her
hand to the floor with a sharp rap.

Once again the figure
started in the shadows. "What in bloody hell
is
that?"

"I ... it's ... mace," she
answered in stupified obedience.

"Mace? A spice, that can
hiss like a snake?"

"What?" Her head was
reeling.

"Girl, are ye deaf? Never
mind, then. Come here, I say. Why do ye dress in trousers, like a
cowboy?
Come here, damn
ye
."

Emily began to sway; she
grabbed the top of her dresser to steady herself and tried
desperately to rally her wits. In a low and terrible voice of her
own, she warned, "Get out of here right now -- or I'll start
screaming."

It happened
instantaneously: the shadowy figure seemed to increase in size and
hover over her, around her, through her. It was all done in
thundering silence. Emily felt powerless, consumed. She shrank
beneath the possession, shutting out the terror of it all. It was
an unbelievable nightmare; she had to wake herself up from
it!

So she fainted.

****

When Emily came to, she
was on the floor, and every lamp in every room was ablaze. There
were not that many watts in her lightbulbs: this light was
fantastic, blinding. Warding off the brightness with her hand and
squinting as if she were looking into the sun, she peered into the
corner where the figure had been lurking and begged, "Please ...
the light ... it's hurting me ...."

At once the lights in the
other rooms returned to normal, and the bedroom became dark once
more.

Oh,
hell
, Emily thought,
this is where I came in.
She
staggered to her feet and stood there, woozy and unsure what to do.
"Mr. O'Malley --" she hazarded in the darkness.

"Plain O'Malley to ye,"
the voice answered roughly. "We ain't exactly on formal
terms."

"O -- O'Malley, then. Can
you just ... stay wherever you are? Until
I
turn on the lamp?" If he permeated
her again--it was the only word that could describe how she'd felt
-- she would probably burn out and die. He had a power that no man
still on earth could ever hope to possess. She had to keep him --
it -- whatever, at a distance.

"Light the bloody lamp,
then, and let's get on with it."

"Get on with what, Mist --
O'Malley?" she temporized, creeping the six and a half steps to the
right. If she could just reach the phone; if she could just dial
911 ....

Then what?

The voice was muttering,
"Gawd. So you're the best I could do. A female, no less." The
figure seemed to be talking almost to itself.

Emily picked up the
lighted Princess phone -- it was an old and beloved rotary, her
mother's, though she was cursing its slowness now -- and dialed the
"nine." The rapid clicking sound set off the figure in the shadows
again.

"What's this?"
the voice demanded in an angry roar. "More
bloody
mace
?"

"Nothing! It's nothing!"
Emily cried, slamming down the phone. "I'm turning the light on.
Please ...," she begged, near tears. "Don't do anything
rash."

The voice made an
impatient sound. "Turn up the lamp," it threatened, "or so help me,
I'll turn it up once and for all."

She did as she was told:
and when she turned around, she saw the thing that claimed to be
Fergus O'Malley, boots and all, standing on her bed.

He was a young man -- as
nearly as she could tell. Because although he was there, somehow he
wasn't quite there. At first it was nothing she could pin down. She
saw his image in extreme clarity: he was no more than thirty,
attractive and slender and of medium height, with reddish-brown
hair and green eyes and very fair skin. His hands were resting on
his hips, and his mouth, finely cut, was curled in an expression of
amused contempt. He was wearing a full-cut muslin shirt under a
vest of brown corduroy that had four flaps on the front. His pants
were a dark grey, woven of some coarse material; the pockets lay
flat and empty. His boots looked like work boots, with a high
shin-piece and low heels, the kind of boots a farmhand might wear.
Except for the fact that he was standing on Emily's bed, he might
have looked perfectly normal, if old-fashioned.

But there was one tiny
other thing: his boots left no imprint in the bedding. Fergus
O'Malley was not standing
on
the bed so much as standing over it. Emily had
the proof -- not that she wanted it -- that the threat that faced
her was anything but physical.

"Oh, shit," she whispered,
awestruck, as she lowered herself into a caned chair without taking
her eyes from the apparition.

He scowled. "Not only do
ye dress like a cowboy, but ye talk like one."

"I talk like everyone else
nowadays," she said, defending herself.

"And what days are
'nowadays'?" The image descended -- it wouldn't be fair to say he
stepped down -- to the floor and stood before Emily, hands still on
his hips. "The newspaper in your privy is dated a hundred years
later than the last one I picked up. Is it possible?"

Emily looked up at him,
her mouth agape, and said, "You're asking
me
what's possible? Who are you?
Where are you from? Why are you here? Who
are
you?"

"Hey now!" he said
suddenly, with a sharp chopping movement of his arm. Emily cringed
in her chair and he said in a voice rich with anger, "Ay, ye'd be
the press, all right. Ye bring to mind the rest of 'em in full cry
-- hounding me like a pack o' wolves all the way to the scaffold.
Well, all that's over. Now it's Fergus O'Malley can hound a man
easily to his death. So
back off,
girl
!"

"I'm sorry," she said
humbly. "I meant no disrespect." Her knees had begun to shake
uncontrollably. To be taken hostage was one of Emily's great fears
in life, and now here she was. What should she do? She'd read that
in a hijacked plane it was best not to be in first class or in an
aisle seat or on a technical mission. She hadn't read a thing about
ghosts in bedrooms.

She thought of the
senator, longingly. He'd know what to do. No doubt there was an
incantation for times like these. But Lee Alden was nowhere near,
so Emily smiled nervously and didn't make a move.

"That's better," the
visitor said, appeased. "All right, then, ye're going to need a
certain amount of history about me for the investigation. I'm goin'
to tell ye things I wouldn't have told me own mother, which I
suppose can't be helped. Ye need to know."

"Investigation?"

"Into my wrongful death by
hanging."

"You were
hanged?"

"Haven't I told you that
twice now?" he snapped. "Do ye need to see the mark of the
rope?"

Automatically her glance
went to his neck. She saw nothing, but he saw that she was looking
for marks and reddened. That surprised her; she had no idea that a
ghost could be embarrassed.

In a solemn voice he
continued, "I was hanged by the neck until dead in front of
seventy-six townsmen, one o' which was my eleven-year old brother,
in the year of our lord eighteen hundred eighty-seven, for the
crime of murdering a young lady of station in her
bedchamber."

Not just a ghost; a
murderous ghost. "How did you murder her?" Emily whispered,
dreading the answer.

"Goddammit, I did not
murder her! Do ye hear
anything
I say?"

"Yes, of course; no, I
understand perfectly," Emily said quickly. "I only meant, how ...
was she murdered?"

"Strangled," he replied
with something like distaste. "A vicious job, with no thought
behind it."

A
thoughtful
, murderous ghost. Emily
heaved a sigh of utter exhaustion. It was obvious that the night
was never going to end.

"She was wearing a
medallion of pale rose crystal. It hung on a heavy plated chain,
which ended up bein' the weapon," he added calmly.