Microcosmic God (28 page)

“No,” I said. “I sweep ’em off their feet onto the floor when I feel like dancing, which I don’t right now. I want to talk about ghosts.”

“A safe subject,” she observed. I nodded my head toward one of
those pieces of furniture euphemistically called love seats, and we threaded our way through the crowd of people—it was one of those parties that Reggie Johns used to throw for people he didn’t know. That is, he’d invite six couples he knew and forty or fifty would arrive.

“In 1853,” I said oratorically, “Joachim Grandt—spelled with a ‘d’—was murdered by person or persons unknown in the first floor back of an old Swiss chalet up on Grove Street. A rumor circulated to the effect that the room was haunted. This so depreciated the value of the house and grounds that Joachim’s great-nephew, Harrison Grandt—also spelled with a ‘d’—tried to prove that it was not haunted by spending a night there. He was found the next morning by one Harry Fortunato, strangled to death in exactly the manner used by the aforementioned person or persons. Fortunato was so exercised by this strange turn of events that he rushed out of the house and broke his neck on the front steps.”

“All this is quite bewildering,” said Miriam softly, “but it seems to me that it is hardly the thing to whisper into my shell-like ear when we could be dancing.”

“Damn it, Miriam—”

“—also spelled with a ‘d,’ ” she interjected.

“Let me finish telling you about this. After Fortunato’s death there were two more murders and two supposed suicides, all of them either stranglings or neck-breakings. Now, the house is supposed to be really haunted. They say you can really see the spooks and hear voices and rattles and so froth—all the fixin’s. I found out where the place is.”

“Oh? And what might that have to do with—”

“You? Well, I’ve heard tell that you aren’t afraid of man, woman or beast. I just wondered about ghosts.”

“Don’t be childish, Bill. Ghosts live inside the heads of foolish people and pop out when the foolish people want to be frightened.”

“Not these ghosts.”

She regarded me amusedly. “Don’t tell me you’ve seen them?”

I nodded.

She said, “That proves my point. Let’s dance.”

She half rose, but I caught her wrist and yanked her back. I don’t think she liked it. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid to go and see for yourself, Iron Woman?”

“Nobody suggested it.”

“I just did.”

She stopped yearning toward the dance floor and settled back. “Ah—so that’s the idea. Go on—let’s have it,” she said in a I-won’t-do-it-but-I’d-like-to-hear-about-it tone of voice.

“We’d just go out there and investigate it,” I said. “Frankly, I’d like to see your hair curl.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You and I are going out at this time of night to a deserted house in a deserted neighborhood to catch us a ghost. Right?” Her raised eyebrow added, “Monkey business, hey?”

“No!” I said immediately. “No monkey business. My word on that.” Of course, Tommy’s electrical ghosts were monkey business, but that was not what she and her eyebrow meant by monkey business.

“Real ghosts,” she mused. “Bill, if this is some kind of a joke—”

“With me, lady,” I said, with real sincerity, “this is no joke.”

She insinuated herself out of the love seat onto her feet and said, “Stand by, then, while I tell Reggie we’re leaving. I came with Roger Sykes, but he doesn’t have to know anything about it.”

While she was gone I got some grinning done. Just like clockwork, it was—this was the night Tommy had said he’d pick to throw a scare into her. She’d fallen for the bait better than I ever could have hoped, and it certainly looked as if everything was breaking my way. Maybe if I could get her scared enough we could head for Gretna Green. Could be—could be.

I saw her at the door, waiting for me. She was dressed in something skintight and yet flowing, with a long white panel front and back, and black shoulders and sides—I dunno—I’m no dressmaker, but the dress was like the rest of her—smooth. And now she had slipped a great black cloak over her shoulders that fell away from her body and looked like wings. What a woman! I sighed, envying myself because I was going to have her to myself for a few hours.

We climbed into my ancient but efficient old struggle buggy. “Where is this place?” Miriam asked as I pulled away from the curb.

I glanced at her, taking in the way she wound her cloak about her and writhed deeper into it. Every move a miracle, I thought. “I told you,” I said, keeping my thoughts to myself. “Up on Grove Street, on top of Toad Hill, across the street from a junk yard.”

“I know about where it is,” she said. “Tarry not, my fran’—pile some coal on and let’s get there. I’ve always wanted to meet up with a ghost.”

Her tone was one I’d heard before, once in a while. The time, for instance, that one of the boys had been trying to lasso a post with a length of clothesline and she had grabbed it from him impatiently, saying, “Dammit, Joe, you make me nervous. Here,” and had whirled it once and snagged the post on the first cast. And that other time when one of the horses from the riding academy broke its leg taking a hedge. While half a dozen people looked on, she picked up an edged stone and with one clean blow killed the horse. “It was the only thing to do,” she explained bluntly. “None of you blockheads have even started back to the academy for a gun yet. What do you want to do—leave the animal to lie here screaming for a solid hour?”

“What makes you that way?” I asked her. She looked at me questioningly. “I mean, why are you always ducking in to do more or less violent things? Why don’t you learn to knit?”

“I can knit,” she said shortly, in a voice that said, “Oh, dry up.”

So I dried up, contenting myself with the joyful play of street lights on her darkened profile, and wondering if I were a heel to pull this sort of a trick. We drew up eventually in front of the house. Miriam got out and stared up at it. It loomed gray and forbidding in the light of a half-moon. Before it, striving their dark utmost to hide the front walk, were the tangled, twelve-foot hedges. The whole place had a greedily unkempt look—it was a dirty old panhandler of a house, begging the right to exist another moment. Miriam walked up to the hedge and stopped, and I don’t know whether she was hesitating or just waiting for me. We went up the path together.

I noticed with satisfaction that Tommy had either taken a taxi or parked his car on another street. That had bothered me a little—he
was damn clever, but a little short on foresight. When we reached the top of the steps I covertly touched the doorbell. There was no sound—it would light a bulb on Tommy’s board so he’d know we were in. I handed Miriam one of the two flashlights I had stowed in the car and pushed open the door.

Miriam caught my arm. “Ladies first, you clod,” she laughed, and slid in ahead of me.

The floor of the foyer settled two inches under her feet with a bump; she flailed one arm a little to get her balance and turned to me, smiling coolly. “Coming, Bill?”

We found ourselves in a high, narrow hallway containing a flight of stairs far too big for it.

“Hello-o-o! Who’s the-e-e-ere—”

“Huh?” Miriam and I asked each other. The voice had been tiny, just the echo of an echo, but clear as a bos’n’s pipe. “I didn’t say anything,” we chorused, and then Miriam said, “Either we’re not the only investigators or the ghosts are wasting no time on us. Either way, I like it here. Where to first, Bill?”

She’ll have to get a little more scared than that before I can show her up, I thought. “Upstairs,” I said. “We’ll start at the top and work down.”

Side by side, we headed up the old steps, scything great lumps of darkness away with our lights. At the first landing, Miriam walked ahead, as the stairs narrowed here. As she crossed the landing, I saw her heel sink as her weight whipped a loose board up on end. I caught it just before it could belt the back of her head.

“Thanks, pal,” she said evenly. “I’ll do the same for you some time.” Never turned a hair!

Almost to the top, I thought I heard something. “Don’t look now,” I said in a hushed voice, “but I don’t want you to miss anything, and I think I hear someone laughing.”

We froze and stopped breathing to give the faint sound a chance. “That isn’t laughing,” said Miriam.

I listened more carefully. “Check,” I said, “but from the sound of it, whatever is being laughed about should be cried over. Good heavens, what a crazy sound.”

It was a burbly noise, so quiet it was almost intimate, and it sobbed in peals. Miriam snorted as if she were trying to blow an evil smell out of her nostrils. I wiped sweat off the palms of my hands. Where the hell had Tommy picked up
that
recording?

We tiptoed across the second-floor hall and Miriam pushed open a door. Dust swirled up as it swung noiselessly back, far faster than was warranted, and a great dim shape loomed up out of it.

Smash!

A splintering crash behind us, and that unimaginable something ahead of us. I jumped to the right and Miriam to the left, and for a second the whole world was made of flailing electric beams and hidden menace. Miriam, to be frank, calmed down first; at least, enough to steady her flashlight on one of the sources of our panic. It was the old print that had been hanging in the hallway. Its nail had pulled out of the loose plaster, probably because of one of my dainty No. 10 footfalls, and it had fallen to the floor, smashing the glass in the picture frame. I shot my light at the open door. Just inside was a tall piece of furniture, an old-fashioned secretary desk, covered with a dusty white cloth.

“A little jumpy, aren’t you, Bill?” called Miriam cheerfully as she came over to me.

I thrust my tongue between my teeth so they wouldn’t chatter so loudly, and tried to grin doing it. In that crazy light I think I got away with it. Miriam must have thought I felt fine, because she rather readily let me lead the way into the room.

There was nothing much there but dust and a couple of broken chairs. At the back of the room was another door. With Miriam treading on my heels, I went through it. I stood just inside, fencing with the blackness with my torch and seeing nothing, stepped aside to let Miriam in. Something touched me lightly on the shoulder—

Bong! Whee-hoo! Bong! Whee-hoo! Bong!

Miriam said “Gha!” with an intake of breath and grabbed at my arm, making me drop my light. It thumped to the floor and went out, and she pawed at hers, accidentally flipped the switch. Darkness hit us so hard our knees sagged under the weight of it, and my cold-blooded darling wrapped both arms around my head, which was the
first thing she contacted; and she began making a noise like a duckling at the ripe old age of two hours. The bonging and whee-hooing went right on, until Miriam’s hand, in a convulsive contraction, turned on her light again. We found ourselves staring up at an old-style cuckoo clock. It and its cuckoo were telling us the falsehood that it was eleven o’clock. I must have bumped into the pendulum and set it off.

Miriam stood there with her arms around me until the silly wooden bird had finished and retired; and yet a moment longer. This was my moment, and by damn if I wasn’t too upset to appreciate it. Then she let me go, and said through a funny little smile, “Bill—I think maybe this is comic. Laugh a bit, huh?”

I licked some moisture off my upper lip onto a dry tongue. “Ha, ha,” I said without enthusiasm.

Miriam said firmly, “The laughing noise was water in a pipe somewhere. That crash was a picture falling off the wall. We both saw it. The … ah … thing in the doorway was an old bookcase covered with a dust cloth. This last ghost of yours was a cuckoo clock. Right?”

“Right.”

“And that ‘Who’s there’ we heard when we came in was … was—What was it, anyway?”

“Imagination,” I said promptly. “Although I know damn well
I
didn’t imagine it.”

“I did, then,” she said stubbornly, and added, “Enough for both of us.” Her wry grin was a sight to behold.

“Must be,” I said, picking up my flashlight and trying to make my fingers behave enough to unscrew the reflector and slip in a spare bulb. I managed it, somehow. “And are you by any slim chance imagining—
that
, too?” I pointed. She pivoted.

“That” was a blob of light on the wall, so dim it was all but invisible. The beam from her torch had been on another wall, or I wouldn’t have seen it at all. As I stared breathlessly, looking at its shades and shadowy outlines, I began to make out what it was.

“It looks like a … a neck!” whispered Miriam, backing onto my feet. The thing was indeed a neck, flesh-pink and mottled with deep fingerlike gouges of blue-black. It held for just a few seconds and then faded out.

I gulped and said, “Pretty!”

Miriam whipped her light around and splashed it on the wall. The beam wasn’t steady, and she didn’t say anything.

“Miriam—I feel like dancing, I think.”

“There’s no music here,” she said quietly. “We’d have to go somewhere else.”

“Yeah,” I said, and gulped. “We would, wouldn’t we?” But neither of us moved.

Finally she shrugged and took a deep breath. “What are you waiting for, Bill? Let’s go!”

“Go? Dancing, you mean?”

“Dancing!” she contraltoed scornfully. “We were going to explore this house, weren’t we? Come on, then.”

“Quite a feller, aren’t you?” I said to her under my breath. I think she heard me, because she squared her shoulders and went out. I tagged along.

It occurred to me that it was all very well to put on this show for her, but I was damned lucky that I’d picked her to pull it on rather than some more impressionable female. The place was getting under my skin as it was. Suppose I’d been with some twist who fainted or got hysterical or lost or something? Suppose I got left alone in this place? I began stepping on Miriam’s heels.

We gave the rest of the second floor the once-over and nothing much happened. That pep talk of hers helped a lot. We casually dismissed sundry creaks and groans and rattlings as the wind in the chimneys, banging shutters, and settling floors. Neither of us saw fit to mention that there was no wind that night, and that a one-hundred-twenty-five-year-old house does not settle. In other words, we thought that nothing was bothering us at all until that sob-laughing started up again. That was pretty awful. Miriam had been holding hands with me for ten minutes before I realized it, and I only knew it at all when I felt her bones grate together as I clutched her when the laughing started. It ran up and down a whole tone scale, sounding like a palsied madman playing on a piano full of tears.