A Stir of Echoes (18 page)

  "Yeah." He started into the hall. "I'll call one in the morning."

  Which was when it happened; all the more horrible because it came without warning, because it followed so closely on the heels of our mundane discussion regarding the clogged sink.

  "Sentas," we heard.

  Sentas froze. So did I.

  "Sentas. Harry Sentas," said the voice.

  I felt myself shuddering.

  "You know me, Harry Sentas."

It was the voice of my two-year-old son.

  Yet not his voice. It came from his vocal cords, yes, but it was another's voice. Have you ever seen a marionette show where the adult operators speak in piping voices, supposedly through the immobile lips of their stringed dolls? It was like that; like the voice of a dummy speaking in the distorted falsetto of its ventriloquist master.

  "You know me, Harry Sentas. You know me."

  Sentas drew in a ragged breath. His face was blank, losing colour.

  "What the hell is this?" he asked in a trembling, guttural voice.

  I opened my mouth to answer but nothing came out.

  "You know me, Harry Sentas," said my son, said the voice. "My name is Helen Driscoll."

  Sentas and I both jolted with shock at the same time. He started for the bedroom, then stepped back as if executing some grotesque dance step. He whirled on me.

  "What is this, a gag?" he challenged.

  "I swear to-" I muttered.

  "You know me, Harry Sentas," said the voice.

  Sentas glared at me for a long moment. Then, abruptly, he turned and walked across the living room floor.

  "Damn jokes," he snapped. "Fix your own sink!"

  The house shook with the crash of the slamming front door.

  I moved into the bedroom on numbed legs; to the side of Richard's crib. I heard him muttering in the darkness.

  "Come back," he said in that hideous, doll voice. "Come back, Harry Sentas."

  Then he was still. A great shuddering breath passed through him and he slept again, heavily and undisturbed.

  I was sitting on the sofa when Anne got back.

  I think she knew from the instant she saw me.

  "No," she said feebly, "oh, no." There was a sadness in her voice; a tired, capitulating sadness.

  "Anne, sit down," I said.

  "No."

  "Honey, please. Don't run away from it. That will only make it worse."

  She stood there trembling, staring at me.

  "Sit down," I said. "Please."

  "No."

"Sit down."

  She came over and sat on the other end of the sofa, perched on the edge of the cushion like a fearful but obedient child. She gripped at her forearms with whitening fingers.

  "I'm telling you this," I said, "because-well, if it happens to you and you haven't been told, it may frighten you."

  She covered her eyes suddenly and began to cry.

  "Oh… God help us," she sobbed. "I thought it was over, I thought it was over."

  "Honey, don't."

  She looked up, teeth clenched, a look almost deranged on her face.

  "I can't take much more," she warned in a voice that was all the more frightening for its softness. "
I can't take much more/'

  "Anne, maybe-"

  I stopped nervously. For one hideously forgetful instant I'd been about to suggest she go to her mother's until this thing was settled.

  "Maybe what?" she asked.

  "Nothing. I-"

  "Oh, are we going to have the s-secrets again?" she asked and I could tell from the sound of her voice how close to the edge she was. "The little secrets?"

  "Honey, listen," I begged. "If we face this thing now we can-"

  "Face it!" she exploded. "What have I been doing! I've been living with it! Dying with it! I can't stand any more!"

  I shifted quickly to her side and held her shaking body against me.

  "Shhh, baby," I whispered futilely, "don't. It'll be all right. It's different now, it's different. I'm not helpless anymore." The words seemed to flow out of me and, even as they did, I knew that they were true. "I can control it now, Anne. It can't hurt us if we only face it. Believe me, I'm not helpless anymore."

  "Well, I am," she sobbed. "I am."

  I held her for a long time without speaking. And, during that time, I made a decision; a decision I knew had been inevitable. It made sense to me now. What 'I'd said to Anne was true. I was sure of it. I wasn't a helpless pawn now.

  I was going to make things work my way.

SEVENTEEN

  BUT I COULDN'T TELL ANNE ANYTHING THEN. She was too upset. All the built-up tension in her seemed to have burst its shell and there was no stopping it. The death of her mother, the shocks heaped upon her because of me; then, the off-guard relaxing when she thought it was done with and, in this off-balanced state, a second plunging into dread. It would have broken anyone.

  I put her to bed with a sedative and stayed with her until she'd fallen into a heavy sleep. As soon as I was sure she was asleep I went back into the kitchen and got the grocery pad. There was something more to this than Alan had said. If Helen Driscoll wanted to be living here again why should I be getting written messages from her? Most importantly, why should she be speaking through the mouth of my child? And to her brother-in-law?

  Unless something had happened to her back east. Unless she was-

No.
I fought that. I wasn't ready to topple off that brink again. It was a trap. I had to face this thing hardheadedly this time; not with a gullible willingness to swallow, in an instant, what philosophers spent lifetimes seeking out. I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. All I would admit was that there was more to the situation than Alan and I had thought.

  I picked up the pencil and held it lightly on the paper. I looked out through the door window. That was what you had to do in what is called automatic writing. It is beyond will, beyond conscious penmanship. People have read while they were writing. Some have slept.

  I tried to take my attention off the pencil. I wanted to put it out of my mind in order to allow my subconscious to control it. I stared into Elsie's kitchen and saw her sitting there with Ron and her parents. They were playing their weekly game of bridge. I saw Elsie's face contort with a wild laugh and heard, floating through the window, the sound of it. I wondered if their noise would distract me, then realized that distraction was precisely what I wanted. I paid careful attention to Elsie.

  I thought about the times I'd seen into her knotted little mind. I thought what a terrible world it would be if men realized their potential overnight, and everyone knew what everyone else was thinking. What a terrible breakdown of society. There could
be
no society when every man was an open book to his neighbours. Unless, of course, by the time such a condition prevailed, men could gain maturity and be able to cope with their new-found abilities.

  An hour passed. My hand grew cramped and began to ache; but the pencil remained motionless.

  Another hour passed. Abruptly, I gave it up. Obviously, nothing was going to come of it. While I was getting into my pyjamas it occurred to me that Helen Driscoll was becoming more tenuous all the time. One moment she was appearing to me; the next speaking with the tongue of my child; the next commandeering my hand and writing that it was she. If she was a spirit,-and I wouldn't admit that even to myself- she was a very confused one. The thought made me smile. Was it possible? I thought that, certainly, it was. Presuming survival, the fact that people retained their personal consciousness beyond death would in no way guarantee sudden omniscience to them. If anything, this abrupt immersion in limbo would probably jar them frighteningly. I'd read once, in a book on spiritualism, the souls often refuse to admit they are dead and attempt continued existence on their prior level. Thus, if Helen Driscoll were-

  I broke that off urgently. I wasn't going into it. I decided that, for my immediate problem, I had best try the original method of contacting Helen Driscoll- actually to see her. I felt no qualms about this now. I didn't fear any physical depletion. Perhaps-I suspected it-I was becoming, at least in part, what Alan had called a "developed" medium, one who was not helpless prey to his awareness. I had no idea of why this should be so.

  It was about twelve-forty when I sat on the sofa, turned out the lights and began to concentrate.

  I didn't put back my head or close my eyes. I felt that these gestures were extraneous. Probably it wasn't necessary to turn out the lights either; hadn't Alan said something about true mediums' having quite successful manifestations even in broad daylight? I had also read, however, that light weakens psychic phenomena and decided to take the easiest way. I was, after all, still a novice.

  My search for Helen Driscoll was not a positive, thrusting process. I didn't murmur Where are you? If you're there, rap the coffee table leg, once for yes, twice for no. In a sense, I merely emptied my mind of nonessentials and waited for her to manifest herself. I was no general marshalling his psychic forces, but only a medium through which they could express themselves.

  It was in that semi-dormant state that the intrusions began. Since I was attempting to contact Helen Driscoll I wasn't looking for what happened.

  Which was a sense of tension, a double feeling-of dismay and reaction to that dismay. I shifted on the sofa and looked around as if I expected to see her in the room. But there was nothing. Only this feeling of restless malaise, similar to what I'd felt that first night. Yet different now. My system only mirrored the feeling; the tension was elsewhere than myself.

  I thought it had to do with Helen Driscoll. I tried to apply it thus. Was it her feeling, her emotion? I couldn't tell; but it didn't seem to fit. There was an aura about it that was alien to her. Still I fumbled with it. Was she upset, was she having trouble in revealing herself to me? Trouble getting through this way now that I was not as I had been?

  I started to rise to get the pad and pencil again.

  Pure animal emotion hit my mind and I sat back down heavily. It was too strong, too close. It expanded fluidly, running together before my mind, settling into brief cohesion, breaking up. As if what I saw were reflections in water and someone was plunging his hand into it, dispelling the image just before it came together.

  Still unaware, I thought only of Helen Driscoll. It was her emotion I felt, I was sure. She was trying to convey something to me; but what I couldn't tell. It was vague and inchoate; it wouldn't hold together. There was anger; violent anger; there was resentment, hatred. But against whom I couldn't tell either. I was only sure it was Helen Driscoll. Maybe, the idea came, she resented Sentas for some reason. After all, she'd spoken to him saying,
You know me, Harry Sentas.

  All sorts of conjectures passed quickly across my conscious mind, obscuring impressions. Conjectures that she had been close to her sister and Sentas had resented that closeness and, by unpleasant behaviour, forced her to leave. That she was in love with Sentas and, rather than face the inevitable shame of having it slip out in the presence of her sister, had left. Even that Sentas had been having an affair with her and that Mrs. Sentas had found out about it and that was why Helen Driscoll left this house. And why there was always a seeming air of strain between Sentas and his wife. As if they were actors portraying a well-adjusted couple, erring in their characterization in the direction of over-formality.

  I kept thinking this and it kept distorting the images further, breaking them up into unintelligible smears. The only things which remained constant were the waves of mounting fury.

  Suddenly, frighteningly, I thought that it was Anne; and that the object of the animosity was me.

  I tried to fight that but the concept stuck. It could so very well be, I knew. In her despair, in her possible twisted resentment of having expressed her innermost hopes to me in vain, in the general tension of being pregnant in this house of shocks-she might very well, under the morality-relaxing influence of sleep, be releasing currents of hatred toward me.

  I stood. I sat down again. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't.

  The fury rose. Words, like bodiless limbs, flopped past, at first too disjointed, too pointless to understand. I tried hard to understand them and over-concentration weakened them further. I realized quickly that I had to relax. I tried. Impressions jumped across my mind again. Words.
Cruel. Heartless. Home. Wife, you. Scorn for. Brutal and I. You just don't know..
.

  And then
adultery.

  Suddenly I knew. And, in knowing, it seemed as if a million fragments of mirror fell together and I could - see the true reflection. I gasped.

  The hall light clicked on.

  I started violently. On the carpet of light that flooded across the living room floor, my wife came walking slowly.

  "Tom?" she asked.

  A terrible moment. A moment of being suspended in two places at once-of being conscious of two separate but simultaneous events.

  "Tom, are you in there?" Pale-voiced, frightened voiced.

"Don't."
It was all I could say.

  "Tom, what-" She stopped and I saw her form get hazy and indistinct before my eyes. The other scene flared into clarity.

Frank and Elizabeth
…

  Then Anne was clear again. I saw her hand reach up in tiny, hitching movements and press against her cheek.

  "What are you doing?" she asked in a faint, trembling voice.

  I didn't speak. I was watching Elizabeth's anguish-deranged face as she looked at Frank. His half-sullen, half-shocked look in return.

She knew about him.

  "Tom, what are you doing?" Anne's voice rang out piercingly in the dark room. It pulled me back. Suddenly I heard the rustle of her nightgown in the darkness and one of the end table lamps flared on. She was bent over it, face taut, looking at me.