Emily's Ghost (9 page)

Emily went very still. Her
hand reached up to the locket that she'd wanted so fiercely; she
remembered the paroxysm she'd felt when Cara fastened it around her
neck. She shook her head, unwilling to accept the
connection.

"Ay, it's the very one,"
said Fergus O'Malley with an ironic look, pointing a ghostly finger
at her throat.

She tried to unfasten it
and hurl it away from her. But the clasp seemed sealed shut, or
else her hands were fumbling too much.

"And, ye were obliging
enough to wear it someplace that mattered to someone like me. I
don't mind tellin' ye, I began to despair of ever being able to
straighten this mess away."

She wasn't understanding
him at all. "Please ... I'm so ... tired," she pleaded, letting her
hands drop helplessly into her lap. She wondered if she were going
to faint again.

"Don't tell me ye're
tired!" he shouted, snapping her awake once more. "Ye've gone an
hour or two without sleep; I've waited a hundred-odd years to get
on with the rest of my eternity. So who's more tired,
hey?"

He crouched down in front
of Emily and seemed to grab the arms of her chair, terrifying her.
He was close enough for her to see a mole on his right temple; she
would have bet her life he was absolutely real.

"Understand me once, and
understand me good," he said in a voice thick with emotion. "That
necklace showing up at that s
é
ance were my ticket back across the
veil. I might not get another chance to prove my innocence for
another hundred years, or a thousand. I had no idea who'd be
wearin' the jewel, who it was I'd have to use as my instrument on
this side. I was prayin' it wouldn't be some addle-headed whore,
which is all I figured would wear a cheap trinket like that. When I
learned ye was with the press, I was glad: some of them what
covered me trial was sharp as tacks. But now, lookin' at ye, I'm
not so sure. Ye're a fearful little thing. I might've done better
with the whore."

"I resent that," Emily
flashed, fully awake now.

"Resent what?"

"All of it, dammit! I
mean, what do you expect? You drop into my condo, scare me to
death, nearly blind me, order me to investigate something or other
--"

"Not 'something or other'!
A murder!"

"A hundred-year-old
murder! I'm not a detective; I'm an investigative reporter. I
thresh out slumlords, and they're usually alive when I do
it."

They were eyeball to
eyeball, she sitting, he crouching. She wanted to swing at him for
half a dozen valid reasons, but the thought that her hand would
pass right through him was more intimidating than if he'd had a gun
pointed at her head. She contented herself with a sullen, "Besides,
do you know how cold a hundred-year-old trail can be?"

"I know exactly how cold a
hundred years can be," he answered quietly, not moving his gaze
from hers.

Emily stared into those
green depths and looked away. There was too much pain there, too
much knowledge for a young man to have. "I don't understand," she
said, almost shyly. "Where have you been staying for the past
hundred years? I guess, not in --heaven?"
Heaven. Here I am, asking a ghost if he's been hanging out in
heaven
.

"No, not in heaven," he
answered wearily. He stood up and rubbed the back of his neck,
which made Emily wonder if he felt chronic pain there. He seemed to
read her thoughts and drew his hand away instantly. Annoyed, he
added, "And not in hell, either. Not anywhere. And frankly, by now
I don't much care where I go, as long as it's
somewhere."

"You can't mean that! No
one wants to spend an eternity in hell."

"No one wants to spend it
nowhere, either."

"Are there others in this
... limbo, with you? Did you ever meet anyone named Jimmy
Hoffa?"

He waved her question away
and fell into a room-long pace. That intrigued Emily; obviously he
could've marched through the walls if he'd wanted to. She was
becoming a little used to him. He didn't seem quite as terrifying
as he had at first.

Maybe the nightmare is
winding down,
she thought.
Maybe it's almost morning and the alarm is
getting ready to go off.

He stopped mid-pace and
turned to her. "Have ye ever tried to understand nothingness? To
imagine yourself
not
being
? No; why should ye? Ye're too busy
living. I was the same when I was alive ... always thinking about
the next job, always planning the break, the entry--"

"Then you
are
a criminal!" she
blurted.

"A thief, not a murderer,
ye dimwit. There's a difference."

"I know that," she
answered, offended. "And I wish you would address me with some
civility. We don't treat women like servants any more," she lied.
"In any case, I thought you said you were innocent."

"Not of all the charges. I
admitted to the court that I broke into the place. I admitted I
stole the silver -- excellent pieces, mostly by Paul Revere but
some Viennese stuff of real value. By the by, the candlesticks in
yer parlor ain't worth a hell of a lot. Plate, and not very heavy
at that."

"They have sentimental
value, thank you," Emily said crisply.

"But I never touched the
girl, never even bothered with the bedrooms, because I knew they
kept their jewelry in a safe. It was the silver I was after; the
old man was a keen collector before he passed on. Trouble was, the
son had no interest in it; he was startin' to sell it off. I had no
choice."

O'Malley was sitting on --
above -- the bed now, looking rueful. "'Twas me own fault, rushin'
the job. I was sloppy. Someone saw me. They nabbed me before I had
a chance to unload any of the goods." He clenched his fists. "But I
did not strangle her."

"Who was she?" Emily asked
in a cautious way.

He shrugged. "The mill
owner's daughter. She was a flighty, silly thing, I'd always heard;
her head was full of cotton wool. But she was real kind, others
said, and generous. Loved animals, loved children. There was talk
of a spurned suitor, but no one bothered to prove it. There was
talk of a secret affair, but no one would believe it. They were in
too much of an all-fired hurry to get someone, and the someone they
got was me. Oh, they all hated me, all right. Her brother come at
me a couple of times during the trial, screaming I'd murdered his
sister and I'd burn in hell for it."

He made a wry face and
stood up. "I guess I showed him."

Emily had been listening
to his story with quiet fascination. "Have you -- you know -- kept
track of all these people where you are?"

"Christ, woman, I told ye:
I don't see no one, I don't hear no one, I don't know
nothing
. I don't know
who's been made President, or if we're at war, or if the British
are running the country again. All I know is what I just read in
your privy: that there are ten traits a
Cosmo
woman should run from in a
man, and that some kind of savings and loan crisis ye're having is
going to last into the next century."

She allowed herself the
luxury of a broad grin. The ghost continued to look baffled and she
thought,
If I have to die, let it be now,
in a moment of non-terror, my first of the night.

Still, when the ghost
began to scowl again Emily quickly wiped the grin from her face. "I
know I seem unsympathetic to you, but I'm not," she said, careful
not to anger him. "It's just that you've made me realize that you
never lived to see the worst war the world has ever known, or the
invention of the atom bomb --"

"What do I care about wars
and Adam bombs!" he cried, whirling around on her. "I never lived
to fall in love, or have a son, or teach him to work with his
hands. He might've become something -- a silversmith, maybe. He
might've made me damn proud." His eyes burned with a century of
indignation.

For one incoherent second
she imagined herself being the wife of Fergus O'Malley in 1887. She
banished the thought as instantly as it formed. "But you can't turn
back the clock," she said, almost gently.

"No. I can't. But I can
get in line for another try at life --
if
I can get the bloody hell out of
this--"

"Limbo? Is that the name
for it?"

He shook his head and
sighed. "There is no bloody name for it. Limbo is someplace
else."

"So, if you can clear your
name and get out of this ... nothingness, you can be reincarnated?
Do I have it right?"

"So they say," he answered
dryly.

"But if you're innocent,
Someone should know that! Why should you be punished this
way?"

He repeated through
compressed lips, "I'm not being punished. I'm not being
anything
."

"But it's not
fair!"

He laughed at her, a laugh
filled with contempt and pain. "Who in hell ever told ye life was
fair?"

She didn't know what to
say to that, so she said nothing.

After a pause Fergus
O'Malley said, "Well? Will ye get started?"

"Now? It's nearly dawn!"
she wailed.

"No better time. Get a
pencil and paper."

She'd been sitting in the
hard-backed chair for what seemed like half the night. One of her
feet was asleep, her rear end was numb, and her eyes hung heavy as
andirons. She glanced at her spindle bed with its downy comforter
and beckoning pillows and said, "I can't, Mr. O'Malley. I just
can't. In the morning, o.k? Just ... an hour of sleep. One hour.
Then I'll do whatever you want."

He flushed angrily at
being opposed and she thought,
I don't
care. Let him kill me, let him blind me. But let me
sleep
. She let her eyelids droop and stay
closed for one exquisite moment, like an exhausted driver on a dark
country road, and when she forced them open again, he was
gone.

Without questioning why or
where, Emily threw back the comforter and collapsed, fully clothed,
onto her bed. She fell like a stone into a deep and dreamless sleep
and when she finally stirred and opened one eye, the sun was not in
the east window where it was supposed to be: it was two o'clock in
the afternoon. At first she remembered nothing. Then, slowly, bits
and pieces of the previous day came back to her, floating at the
edges of her consciousness like dried leaves on a pond. Kimberly,
and Mrs. Lividus, and the senator -- had they all happened only
yesterday?

And then she remembered --
obviously she'd been trying not to remember -- Fergus O'Malley. Her
eyes opened wide and her heart took a flying leap out of her chest.
The ghost! She had dreamed of a terrible, endless, bizarrely
realistic encounter with a ghost. She sat bolt upright and looked
around the room, her breathing coming short and fast. No ghost. She
looked for signs of the mace she dreamed she'd sprayed all over. No
mace. Her bedroom was absolutely quiet. From somewhere outside she
heard children playing their Saturday games, and that was
all.

It was several moments
before she dared to feel reassured. Never again would she deny the
power of the subconscious mind to produce a terrifying reality of
its own. She had wandered into the realm of the mentally disturbed
yesterday, and she hadn't got out again without one hell of a
scare. Some day, but not now, she'd analyze the symbolism of her
spin-off dream of Fergus O'Malley. What a na
ї
f she'd been to skip off blithely
to a s
é
ance
expecting only a little innocent foolery. What a jerk.

She swung her legs
groggily over the side of the bed and realized for the first time
that she was wearing jeans and a shirt. God, she'd been truly
exhausted last night. Automatically she tried to slip her feet into
the slippers that hadn't been placed neatly by the bed before she
turned in. Instead she kicked a can, which went rolling off to the
side.

A can of mace.

Oh, good god. No. No. I
can't go through this again,
she thought,
free-falling into hysteria.

"Come out!" she cried
impulsively. "Come out and get it over with!"

She was standing now, and
her head was splitting as if she'd been on the beach in the sun all
day. She actually stamped her foot. The pain in her head doubled.
"Fergus O'Malley!" she screamed, even though she felt extremely
silly doing it. She glared at the open door.

When he sauntered through
it her first thought was,
I am making this
hallucination happen. This is the first step in the descent into
madness.

He spoke. "What's the hue
and cry?" he asked, surprised. "I was letting ye sleep as ye
implored me, and now ye sound like I've gone and stole yer
horse."

He
looked
real -- even younger in the
daylight, more hopeful somehow.

"Are you here or are you
not?" she demanded. "If I'm crazy, then tell me and I'll go back to
New Hampshire and my people will take care of me." She gave him a
lofty look, fully expecting an answer to that.