Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (40 page)

As if by some instantaneous chemical reaction the faint yellow drained out of the air. Joe got in his Jag and sat there for ten seconds, his finger over the starter button, and then he got out again and went back in the house. He expressed his reaction with harsh peals of laughter, but they changed to a choking fit. This time he didn't throw the aquavit in the fire.

He went to bed rather early that night and blacked out almost at once, remembering before that, however, to pull the curtain across the one tiny window and double-lock the door that opened on the side patio.

A series of dark wind-filled nightmares were finally succeeded by an extremely satisfying dream in which Joe sat wagging a pointer behind a teacher's desk in front of a classroom of big girls, including the dimwit and Agnes' trio, who were wearing little girl dresses. He had set six of them the task of writing on the blackboard a hundred times, "I Will Do Everything Joe Grimaldi Tells Me." He studied their six cute behinds as they laboriously copied and re-copied the letters.

Joe woke up. The dream lingered while in the dark bedroom, then faded. The squeak and scrape of chalk changed to the dragging of fingernails across the screen of the little window.

In the mood in which the dream had left him Joe was sure it must be one of Agnes' trio or maybe even the dimwit. He grabbed the flashlight, stepped quietly across the room, jerked aside the curtain and shot the light through the 18-inch opening into the face of Eleanore Dovgard.

She looked as beautiful as he ever remembered her, just a trace thinner and with the faintest of dark smudges under her wide gray eyes. Her lovely hair, beautifully dressed, was like a turban of spun silk, ghostly in its fineness. The upturned leather collar brushing her chin glistened whitely.

She showed no surprise at the light but pleaded softly, "Joe, oh Joe, let me in. I've made myself beautiful for you, Joe, but I don't know how long I can hold it. Quick, Joe."

Joe Grimaldi was above all else a practical man, even in his reactions to the supernatural – which up to this point in his life had been a meaningless term. The girl outside the window was a beautiful dish and he was still very close to his dream. Analyzing was for dopes who didn't know how to grab opportunity.

"Just a second, Nore, I'll have the door open," he said as he moved to it.

He was slow on the double lock and as it yielded she pushed her way through. He ran the flashlight up her body – and writhed backward from her.

The stinking thing that had pushed through the door was so grossly fat the soiled leather coat covered only the back of its shapeless dress. The face was puffy and yellow white and streaked with dirt. The hair was a rat's nest.

"I couldn't hold it, Joe," the thing croaked, pawing at him frantically. "Love me, Joe, so I can come back."

Joe tore himself away, plunged into the living room, clawed open the door to the car port, jumped in the Jag, punched the starter button, and took off down the hill, nursing the motor as it alternately choked and whined. The cold air whipped his green silk pajamas but he didn't feel it.

He was rounding the third hairpin turn when he saw the big black funeral car moving up behind him, still without lights. He risked a look back and it came round the turn after him. The beam of his backing light struck its windshield and behind the steering wheel he saw Nore, slim and golden-haired as she'd been outside the window.

On the fourth turn he skidded and scraped the fence. He knew he shouldn't be in the third gear. But the black car was coming up.

Approaching the fifth turn he tried to double-clutch back to second. The back of the car seemed to lift sideways as he braked. His backing searchlight again struck just over the hood of the black car, spotlighting behind the wheel Nore as she'd been inside the door.

The white-painted cable twanged as the Jag went over the fence. The car turned over in the air so that it was like a pale yellow canopy over Joe Grimaldi as he fell in his green pajamas. Then a pale gray rock came out of the dark below and smashed him.

With a long squeal of brakes like a tuba's bray the black car came to a stop fifty yards ahead. The bloated thing in the filthy leather coat craned her neck out of the right-hand window and frowned. Little flames started fifty yards back and about the same distance below. They swiftly grew bright enough to show the red blood on the pale rock. The frown on the face of the bloated thing vanished.

"You can sit up now, Nore," she said.

The slim golden-haired girl in the spotless white leather coat unfolded herself from the left-hand corner of the front seat. "It's about time, Marge," she said. "I don't want to double up like that any more and I don't want you to drive doubled up and just peeking, even if it's part of the game. It's too scary."

"The game's over, Nore," Marge Dovgard said, taking out a handkerchief and beginning to rub her fat cheeks. She sighed. "Now maybe I'll be able to take off some of this weight."

"Aren't you going to play any more with Joe?" Eleanore Dovgard asked. "It's his turn to scare us now. Joe! Oh, Joe!"

"Shut up, Nore! The game's over."

"Well, if the game's over, I want my coat back," Eleanore complained. "They're going to be mad at you, Marge, stealing me out of the hospital and saying I was dead in the papers."

Marge shrugged. "Come on, slip across me," she said. "We've got to change seats right now. You and me."

The fire behind and below them flared. Marge looked straight ahead as she switched on the headlights.

"Cheer up, kid," she said, as the car eased forward, "we're going home."

 

 

 

DARK WINGS

 

ROSE LOCKED the stout screen door of heavy mesh behind them, then closed and double locked the solid door, put on the chain, shot the three bolts (high, medium, and low) and squatting somewhat precariously on her high heels, tugged at the door's hinged buttress-bar to free it from its clamp.

Vi said mischievously, "Now we're locked in for the night," but when Rose looked up startledly, explained , "just the tag line of one of the standard ghost stories," and remarked, "you really do things thoroughly."

"A girl can't be too careful," Rose stated, tugging some more. "There have been three burglaries since I moved here a year ago, two muggings just outside the lobby, and one attempted rape. Oh blast! – this always sticks. I won't let a strange man inside my apartment unless the manager's with him – she's a woman. Ow! – now I've pinched my finger." She winced and sucked it.

"Par for the Village," Vi said. "Here, let me."

She knelt effortlessly, one leg stretched out behind, her back straight, freed the buttress-bar with a controlled jerk, and forced its end into the socket in the floor-plate. There was a harsh, grating, rather high-pitched scrape and click. Rose winced again.

Vi said, "That sort of sound sets my teeth on edge too. But why do you shut your eyes?"

Rose replied, "I've got synesthesia – I see sounds, hear colors, that sort of thing. My psychiatrist says I'm a classic case. She says most people only imagine the colors, but I actually see them. The bar was a lilac flash, my pinched finger a bright red one. It didn't break the skin, though," she announced after studying it closely. "Come on, Vi, let's compare some more. There really wasn't a proper mirror in Nathan's," and rather shyly taking the other young woman's hand, she led her to a large mirror that made up one third of the inner wall of the pleasantly furnished, medium-size one-room apartment.

"It really is remarkable," she said softly after a bit.

"As we already decided at Nathan's," Vi reminded her, but her voice was a shade awe-struck too.

Anyone studying the two faces side by side, as they were now, would have concluded that beyond the shadow of a doubt these two were identical twins. Their figures were alike – slender, petite. Vi was two inches shorter – her flats – but Rose toed off her shoes and that difference vanished. Rose wore a knee-length blue dress that buttoned down the front and her blonde hair in a page-boy bob that brushed her shoulders. Vi, a trim blue slack suit, a shirt of paler blue, and her blonde hair cut short, almost
en brosse
. They looked like one of those delightful, genetically impossible sets of boy-girl identical twins from Shakespeare, only in this case Violet was Sebastian and Rose, Viola.

Rose said, "Blue is my favorite color."

Vi said, "So is mine."

Rose said, "I had my appendix out a year ago."

Vi responded, "They took mine too – year and a half."

Rose said, "My first pet was a kitten named Blackie."

Vi echoed, "And so was mine, believe it or not, Little Black."

Their eyes were getting wider all the time.

Rose continued, almost chanting, "I have a mole on my left breast."

Vi grinned, held up a palm, and swiftly unbuttoned her shirt. Rose gave a start, drew off a little, and watched uneasily in the mirror. Vi, studying her sidewise, pulled down her paler blue singlet of ribbed lightweight cotton, exposing her small, attractive breasts, a dark brown mole on the inner curve of her right one.

She said insistently with an odd undercurrent of amusement, "For a moment you were scared I was a man after all, got in past your locks. Well, weren't you?"

"Well, yes," Rose admitted uncomfortably, blushing, then said eagerly, "but you do have a mole, and on your left breast too."

"Wrong, right," Vi corrected. "You're looking in the mirror which reverses. We're mirror-image twins, like all identicals. Now, how about you?" She smiled.

"Oh, yes," Rose said apologetically, quickly beginning to fumble at the neck of her dress. "There's a tiny hook and eye here. I can never–"

"Let me," Vi said cooly, still smiling, and undid it, then went on efficiently to unbutton the top of the blue dress. Rose was wearing a dark blue brassiere. Vi's eyebrows lifted.

Rose explained hurriedly, "Mother – I mean my foster mother got me to always wearing one. I still don't ever wear pantyhose," as she took over, saying, "this hooks in front. With my all-thumbs fingers I never can work the ones that hook behind. There. See the mole?"

The touch of awe briefly returned to Vi's voice as she said, "And to think that two hours ago neither of us knew we had a sister, let alone an identical twin."

Rose said, "Vi, why do you suppose our foster mothers never told us about each other?"

Vi chuckled harshly. "Mine would never have told me anything nice. She hated me, because foster papa liked me – and more and more the more I grew. Dig?"

"Oh," Rose said feebly, hooking her brassiere again. "My foster father was sort of weak and timid. Mother – my foster mother, I mean, ran everything, especially me. She smothered me with love, very possessive and jealous, and wanted me to be like her exactly. I guess that's why she never told me about you. You'd have been a rival. You might have taken me away from her."

Vi's chuckle was bitter, though the undercurrent of distant amusement was still there. "The wonder is they told us our right birthdays."

"So we could find out tonight they were the same," Rose took up. "Just think, Vi, in three weeks we can have a birthday party together – two Children of the Moon."

"That's right, dear sister, two Cancers, the dark sign," Vi agreed, giving Rose's waist a brief squeeze with one arm as she moved away from the mirror towards the day bed with its light paisley spread and scatter of gay pillows.

"Gee, it's so strange to have someone calling me sister," Rose said, smiling in wonder.

"Not just someone," Vi reminded her, grinning mischievously back over her shoulder.

"That's what I mean," Rose protested, "a sister calling me sister ... sister darling," she added, getting a lump in her throat as she said the two words.

Vi nodded as she looked the bookcase over and then studied more closely the dozen volumes between collie-dog book ends on the low table in front of the day bed, as she sat down on it.

"You have a lot of books," she observed.

"I'm in the publishing business," Rose explained. "That is, I make indexes for a man who is. Say, would you like some more coffee? I'm going to make some," she continued, opening some light folding shutters in the nook that also held the bathroom door and revealing a small refrigerator top, electric stove, and sink all in line with cupboards above and below.

"That would be fine," Vi said. "I dance for a man who does TV toothpaste commercials. I'm the third vampire. We dance slow motion in filmy negligees that float out very artistically all over a huge bathroom, baring our teeth. Then Dracula comes in, flashing
his
teeth, in a black dressing gown, a head taller than any of us and very thin, and we make love to him with our large dark liquid eyes, flashing our teeth some more, and he holds up the toothpaste we all four use as (in the newest version) we come together for a group tooth-baring, facing camera. Actually he's gay. And then four evenings a week I have my ballet classes."

"Why, I've seen that commercial," Rose said, filling and putting on the stove the silvery hemisphere of the teakettle. "But you don't look like you. Your hair–"

"–is a long black wig," Vi interrupted. "And then those three-quarter-inch eyelashes do something to my face. Not to mention all that blood-red lipstick, which they varnish on so it won't smudge our teeth. It takes us fifteen minutes to get it all off afterwards. But not Dracula – the make-up boy is his very special friend. Say, these books are interesting – more twin identicalities." And she read off, "
The Plays of Shakespeare, Newman on Twins, Fear of Flying, Women and Madness
by Phyllis Chesler,
The Wind in the Willows,
Jung's
The Archetypes, Animus and Anima,
by Joan S. Rosenbloom, M.D. – that's one I don't have–"

"She's my psychiatrist. My firm published it. I did the index," Rose said proudly, sitting down on the day bed two feet from Vi, between her and the casement windows, which were open a third of the way and locked in that position. Traffic sounds floated in irregularly and the faint steady thud of a hi-fi's woofer. "You know the animus, of course, if you've read Jung – the male self that haunts and inspires and sometimes terrifies each of us women, overshadowing the shadow. The equivalent of the anima in a man." An intense look came into Rose's face, contracting her soft brow. She looked a little like a blonde Barbie doll being very fierce. "I'd like to be some man's anima, some young stud's," she said with surprising venom. "I'd terrorize him. I'd make him suffer."