Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

“I don’t think I have much time,” the woman said in a hollow voice. Her eyes had once again gone out of focus, and she put a shaking hand to her throat. “Tonight one of them touched me — here. It woke me up. They were both there, in hooded robes, standing next to my bed in the moonlight. I could see them just as clearly as I see the two of you right now. But this was different from the other times when they’ve come to me. They’ve never worn hooded robes before, never hidden their faces. And they’ve never touched me before. The hand on my throat was so cold , like it had been in ice water. I didn’t think he was going to let me up, but he did, and that’s when I ran over here. I—” She abruptly stopped speaking, looked hard at Mary, then at Garth. “I know you don’t believe me. You think it’s all my imagination. You’ve always been too polite to say so, but I know you think I’m just a batty old woman.”

“Elsie,” Garth replied in an even tone, “I don’t find what you believe any more improbable than the things believed in by ninety-nine percent of the population of Cairn, or the country, and I don’t consider most of my other friends and neighbors batty.”

“But you don’t believe there are ghosts in my house, do you?”

“That shouldn’t surprise you.”

“But one touched me tonight, Garth!”

Garth sighed. “Elsie, Mary, my brother, and I have faithfully attended every one of your Halloween séances ever since Mary and I settled in Cairn — in fact, we’ve felt honored to be invited. We find them great fun. My brother would be the first to tell you that he’d love nothing better than to meet a ghost, sit down with it, and have a nice long chat about whatever.”

“But your little brother doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

“No, he doesn’t believe in ghosts either. But he’s open to the possibility of anything because he believes in mystery, and he’d be highly amused to find out that he’s wrong, and that there really are such things as ghosts. But the fact of the matter is that there have never been any visitations at the six séances we’ve been to, not a peep from anyone or anything that wasn’t present and accounted for.”

“It’s because you and Mary and your little brother don’t believe in them. They won’t appear if you don’t believe in them.”

Garth caressed his wife’s cheek with the back of his hand, then rose from the table. “Elsie, I’m going to get dressed and go check on your house to make sure there’s nobody there.”

The old woman stiffened in her chair, clutched at Mary’s arm. “No, Garth, don’t go! There’s no use! You won’t find anything. They won’t appear to you. It’s me they’re after.”

Suddenly Elsie Manning began to cry — not in racking sobs, but softly, more now in hopeless despair than the terror she had displayed earlier. She closed her eyes, threw her head back, and opened her shrunken O of a mouth in a silent howl of torment as a steady stream of tears welled from between her eyelids and coursed down her cheeks. Garth had gone around the table, wrapped his powerful arms around the woman, and held her as close as, a week later, he now held Mary, who had collapsed from her chair to the floor. Mary’s limbs twitched spasmodically, and her eyes rolled in her head. Garth kissed her cheeks, gently rocking his wife back and forth in the silence that was broken only by Madame Bellarossa’s heavy breathing and Elsie’s quavering voice offering a prayer. Finally Mary grew still, opened her eyes. “They’re here, Garth. My God, they really are here in this room with us.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m so cold...”

“Don’t try to talk. Just rest here. I’ll get you a blanket.”

“No, Garth. There’s no time. They won’t wait.”

“Let her speak,” Madame Bellarossa said in a low voice that had grown slightly hoarse. “It’s important. Mary’s been chosen as the messenger.”

Garth nodded to the portly black woman with the crimson lipstick and huge hoop earrings who was leading the séance, then looked back at his wife. “What happened?”

“They... came to me, Garth. I felt them.”

“Felt them how?”

Mary swallowed hard, licked her lips. “At first there was just this terrible cold. I’m all right now, but for just a moment there I felt colder than I ever have in my life. And then they came into my thoughts, started to tell me why they’re so angry. It has something to do with selfishness, and terrible greed.”

“They think Elsie’s being greedy just because she wants to sell her home? All she was asking for was what had been appraised as its fair market value.”

Mary shook her head. “It’s not that.”

“Then what greed, Mary? Whose greed?”

“I... don’t know. I think they were about to tell me all of it, but then I passed out.”

“They’re still here in the room,” Madame Bellarossa said in a distant monotone, slurring her words slightly. “They want us to know, but the circle has to be restored.”

Garth looked up at the black woman; her eyes were half closed and her arms stretched out over the table as if she were in a trance. The black man standing stiffly beside her, Jeffrey Bond, was staring at Mary, his mouth half open and his eyes filled with amazement. Both John and Linda Luft, the young, blond, black-eyed married couple who looked so much alike they might have been brother and sister, had stepped back from the table and were standing at the very edge of the flickering pool of candlelight. Linda Luft’s eyes were glazed with shock, and she was very pale. Her husband, too, looked pale in the dim light, but the lines of his mouth were drawn down in a frown of scepticism. Elsie was standing at the opposite end of the table from Madame Bellarossa; the old woman’s eyes were closed, and her thin lips continued to move in silent prayer. The only person at the table who had remained seated was Harry Parker, Garth’s friend, a professional magician and world-renowned debunker of psychic charlatans and supernatural occurrences. Parker seemed perfectly calm. He was leaning back in his chair, thick arms folded across his barrel chest. His face was impassive as he stared back at Garth, who asked, “Anybody else see, feel, or hear anything?”

Jeffrey Bond coughed, cleared his throat. “I felt the cold,” he said, looking around somewhat sheepishly at the others. “I got a blast of it right on the back of my neck. It was just like Mary said; for just a moment, it was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. And we all saw what happened to the candles.” He paused and again looked around the table at the others. “Didn’t we?”

“You’re the expert, Harry,” Garth said to his friend. “What happened to Mary and Jeff? What’s going on here? Mass hysteria?”

The big man with the blue eyes and close-cropped black hair slowly blinked and seemed about to reply when he suddenly started. “I’ll be damned,” he said in a quiet but thoroughly astonished tone as he slowly unfolded his arms and looked down at his chest where blood was slowly seeping across the front of his white shirt, staining the cotton fabric as red as the dawn that had announced its presence and begun to push away the night the previous week when Garth, Mary, and Elsie Manning had sat around the butcher-block table in Garth’s home.

“I guess I should go home now,” Elsie had said in a small voice. She was still very pale, but she had stopped trembling. Mary had brushed the woman’s hair, and this had seemed to calm her. “I’ve bothered you people long enough, woke you up and kept you up all night.”

“Elsie,” Mary said, gently squeezing the other woman’s hand, “you’re a dear friend, not a bother. And you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want.”