R. Lafferty - The 7th Ghost Story Megapack

Hair brushed about her shoulders and a little smile of mystery playing across her mouth, she seemed to glide toward me. A remark on my pulse rate would be needless.

Then as she passed the bureau, a strange thing happened. A ten by twelve inch picture of me which Judy had framed suddenly rose, hurled itself across the room and smashed against the wall.

The picture fell to the floor. There was a moment of dead silence, then a whispered tinkle as a bit of glass settled in the wreckage.

I sat up with the dream movements of a man swimming through molasses. Judy and I knelt beside the picture, neither wanting to touch it.

“Your gown must have brushed against it,” I mumbled.

“And knocked it all the way across the room?” Judy said with fearful logic.

I gathered the bits of broken glass, piled them on the picture, and carried the wreckage to the bureau. Judy watched me, wide-eyed and steeped in her own thoughts.

As I turned from the bureau, the murder mystery I’d been pretending to read jumped up and down on the bedside table. The edge of the book cover jarred against the lampshade. The lamp teetered, fell with a crash. Darkness flooded the room.

I wasn’t sure whether Judy or I moved first, but in an instant we were standing in shivery embrace.

“Maybe we should check into a motel for the night,” I suggested through chattering teeth.

Judy’s warmth stirred in my arms. “Nope,” she said, “I’m not being chased so easily out of our own house. Anyway, our poltergeist doesn’t want to hurt us.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He hasn’t thrown anything at us or on us,” she said with supreme female logic. “He could have socked you with the picture frame if he were antagonistic.”

“He’s a sadist,” I said, “who’d rather scare people to death a little at a time.”

“Or a lonely fellow who’s trying to tell us something,” Judy mused. “He’s certainly picking out a variety of items to toss around, which means he has method and purpose. If we could just get the message, I’m sure he’d go away and rest in peace.”

Red-eyed and haggard, I muddled through my junior accountant’s job the next day. I was worried about Judy’s almost natural acceptance of the existence of a poltergeist. In the warm light of day, I just didn’t believe what I had seen for myself. There had to be an explanation, like the juxtaposition of magnetic forces at the spot where our house stood.

I would have welcomed some advice, but could think of no source. My hard-headed, realistic boss was definitely out. If I went to the cops, the newspapers would pick it off the public record.

We’d be subjected to the same glare of publicity that had roasted every other family so rash as to reveal acquaintance with a poltergeist. I wondered how many, like myself, had preferred to suffer the inexplicable in silence.

The house looked as normal as peaches and cream when I hurried up the front walk. A bouncy and smiling Judy had a not-very-dry martini waiting, the kind I like. She’d also fractured her grocery budget with a two-inch-thick T-bone steak, but I applauded her.

“No flying crockery today?” I asked as she slipped the steak under the broiler.

“Not even a saucer,” she said.

“Maybe the strain proved too much for him,” I said hopefully, munching the olive marinated in vermouth and gin.

We dined elegantly by candlelight, the table graced with snowy linen that had been a wedding present from my Aunt Ellen.

I’d had no appetite for lunch, but I worked like a scavenger on the steak. Judy served coffee, and we eyed each other across the table in affectionate silence.

The steak bone made like a Mexican jumping bean all of a sudden, rapping against the plate.

Judy blinked. I jumped. My chair tipped over backward. I grabbed the edge of the table and hung there, watching the bone jump up and down at eye level.

The bone made no threatening motions, but it was a desecration of our privacy. “Enough is enough,” I snarled. I rose, cupped my hands, and pounced on the bone. It offered no resistance as I smacked it against the plate. I raised my fingers one at a time, and was a little miffed when the bone just lay there after it was freed.

I sneaked a glance at Judy.

“You did see that, too, didn’t you?”

Judy nodded an affirmative, her eyes glinting. “I wonder what he meant?”

“Maybe that he’s hungry,” I growled. “Maybe you should brew him up a spot of newt’s eyes over some sulphur and brimstone.”

“Don’t be facetious, Jim!”

“Facetious? I’m not even rational any longer.”

While Judy washed the dishes and tidied up after dinner, I did a sneaky search of the house from attic to basement. I didn’t find any wires, magnets, or other device remotely resembling the tools of a screwball practical joker.

When I went upstairs from the basement, Judy was curled in our new wing chair before the television set.

“You might have saved your time,” she said with wifely forbearance. “I covered every nook and crack myself today. Not that I needed any more proof that we really have a poltergeist.”

“I favor selling,” I said. “I could put the place on the market by phoning the real estate agent at his home right now.”

She sat up. “Don’t you dare, Jim Thornton! This poor fellow got stuck here, and when he gets unstuck he will go away and leave us alone.”

“Oh, yeah? And I suppose you still think he’s trying to deliver a message?”

“More than ever. That rattling bone meant something…if I could just figure out what. Why’d he wait all day until he had the bone to rattle, if he wasn’t trying to tell us something?”

I eased to a sitting position on the hassock before her. “Judy,” I said gently, “I think I’d better get you out of here before we spend another night in this place.”

“Don’t be sil! It’s a perfectly lovely house.”

“But all this talk…”

“He’s a perfectly nice poltergeist—and I’m not going to leave.” She smiled, leaned forward to pat my cheek. “Be a darling and flip the tuner to channel twelve. There’s an hour-long comedy special coming up in about five minutes.”

I not only switched the TV, I went and made myself a double-barreled martini, very dry this time. I sipped it and also its big brother while the hour-long was on. Six ounces of nearly straight gin later I settled back in the recliner, a wedding gift of Judy’s cousin Ned. I clasped my hands across my midriff comfortably and prepared to think it out.

The TV music faded. The draperies seemed to waver and shake as my heavy lids blotted them out.

Lousy draperies, I thought vaguely, with their floral pattern of red roses. Just like Judy’s Uncle Horace to give them to us…

I awoke with a muscular jerk that popped a crick out of my neck. I dropped the recliner to sitting position, running my tongue around the inside of my gin-wool mouth. A late newscast was on the television. A crashing mortar attack by guerrillas against an American base overseas seemed to have awakened me.

“Judy?” I said.

She was nowhere in the living-room, bedroom, or kitchen. I made the circuit, beginning to sweat hard by the time I’d come full circle.

The emptiness and silence of the house (except for the insistent TV) began to smother me. I turned off the set with a vicious flip of fingers that were trembling.

“Easy,” I ordered myself. “If anything had happened, you’d have heard the ruckus.”

Maybe she’d stepped next door to chin a little with Mrs. Gosness and break the boredom of listening to a husband’s snore.

I hurried to the east window, pulled the drapery aside; no lights over there. Mrs. Gosness was already off to dreamland, not sipping tea with a next-door neighbor.