R. Lafferty - The 7th Ghost Story Megapack

I took jerky steps back to the middle of the room. My skin was turning icy and exuding a steam of sweat at one and the same time. If the house hadn’t been haunted before, it certainly felt so now. The empty wing chair where Judy had been sitting seemed to throb in my vision. Then I saw that something new had been added. On the hassock before the chair, she’d laid a piece of paper, a pencil, and the magazine she’d used for a backing as she’d written.

I snatched up the paper. She hadn’t left me a note. Instead, it was a record of her thoughts while I’d slept. Around the margin were curlicues where she’d doodled between words, sentences, phrases.

She’d written:

“The hints…sock…smashed picture…mystery novel…broken lamp…rattling bone…agitated rose-patterned drapes.”

So the drapes had really shaken. I steadied the paper and kept reading.

“Sock…friendly…friendly Andy Bickleford…but picture smashed with a great deal of violence…picture of Jim…Jim’s a male…only picture of male in house…male smashed by violence! Friendly Andy trying to say he was smashed violently? Not killed accidentally at all! Slugged, put in sports car, pushed over cliffs!…Why? Because of something he’d done?…done bone…bone did…bone does…darn you, bone!…Well, let’s see…If Andy didn’t do anything, maybe he was undone because of something he’d witnessed…see bone…bone from T-bone steak, useless…except to a doggie…doggie would go out and bury bone…BURIED BONE…hidden weapon?…Buried weapon that killed Andy before he was stuffed in sports car and driven to those dreadful cliffs?…Buried where…Next hint, final clue, quaking draperies…draped for burial…nope…bedroom draperies weren’t chosen…specific draperies…those in the living-room with roses…buried with roses…buried under roses…weapon buried under only rose arbor in neighborhood!”

I dropped the paper. The gimlet eyes and the scratchy violin-string voice flashed through my mind “…hate brats. Always throwing trash in my fish pond and breaking my rose arbor.”

The night coolness washed across my face before I even realized I’d run outside. A pale moon bathed our backyards, ours and Mr. Tate Curzon’s. I slipped through the shadows cast by our house, my eyes seeking and searching.

Then I heard a muffled cry and jerked my attention from the rose arbor next door. I saw the struggling shadows near Mr. Curzon’s basement door. He heard my pounding footsteps, and as my presence loomed over him, Curzon shoved Judy sprawling and laid a hard little fist in my kisser.

My knees buckled and my nose dug a furrow. He kicked me hard in the ribs. Breath whoofed out, but as he spun and started to run away, my grabbing hand found an ankle. I yanked, and this time Mr. Curzon fell. He writhed around and started lashing me with his fists. I disliked picking on such a little fellow, but he ignored my orders to lie still, so I grabbed him by his thin neck and popped his head against the hard ground. It proved to be an anesthetizing measure. He would remain unconscious for several minutes at least.

Judy grabbed my arms, helped me to my feet. Then she put her arms around me and collapsed against my chest.

“Oh, Jim! I was peeping about his rose arbor and suddenly he was there. He grabbed me, and I screamed just once before he—”

I tipped her face up and kissed her. She began to sob with relief.

I picked her up and my shoulder was a very nice cradle for her head.

“I think we’d better call the police,” I said.

We thought it discreet to omit mention of the poltergeist, inferring to the police that Mr. Curzon had been acting strangely around his roses and launched his murderous attack when Judy’s curiosity got the better of her.

It turned out that the police had previously questioned Mr. Curzon in the disappearance of one of his wives. Their probe of the rose arbor turned up the remains of the fourth Mrs. Curzon. Perhaps it was suspicion or evidence of this that led to Andy Bickleford’s untimely demise.

We can’t know for sure. The poltergeist hasn’t been around since that fateful night, and if the subject came up, Judy and I would be first to agree that nobody in his right mind could believe in poltergeists. Like all the silent others who’ve shared similar experiences, we don’t want our friends thinking we are soft in the head.

I do, however, feel the poltergeist should have assisted a bit longer. An army of cops and insurance investigators are going nuts trying to find out what happened to Mrs. Curzons, numbers one, two, three.

Dear readers, do you agree with Hamlet? Do you believe that there is more between heaven and earth than we dream of in our philosophy? Does it seem possible to you that Eliphas Levy conjured up the shade of Apollonius of Tyana, the prophet of the Magii, in a London hotel, and that the great sage, William Crookes, drank his tea at breakfast several days a week, for months in succession, in the society of the materialized spirit of a young lady, attired in white linen, with a feather turban on her head?

Do not laugh! Panic would seize you in the presence even of a turbaned spirit, and the grotesque spectacle would but intensify your terror. As for me, I did not laugh last night on reading an account in a New York newspaper of a criminal trial that will probably terminate in the death penalty of the accused.

It is a sad case. I shudder as I transcribe the records of the trial from the testimony of the hotel waiter, who heard the conversation of the two confederates through a keyhole, and of forty thoroughly credible witnesses, who testified to the same facts. What would be my feelings if I had seen the beautiful victim with the gaping wound in her breast, into which she dipped her finger to mark the brow of her murderer?

About three o’clock on the afternoon of February 3, Professor Davenport and Miss Ida Soutchotte, a very pale and delicate young girl, who had submitted to the tests of Professor Davenport for a number of years, were finishing their dinner in their room in the second story of a New York hotel. Professor Benjamin Davenport was a celebrity, but it was said that he owed his fame to somewhat questionable means. The leading spiritualists did not repose the confidence in him that manifestly marked their regard for William Crookes or Daniel Douglas Home.

“Greedy and unscrupulous mediums,” the author of Spiritualism in America thinks, “are to blame for the most bitter attacks to which our cause has been exposed. When the materializations do not take place as quickly as circumstances require, they resort to trickery and fraud to extricate themselves from a dilemma.”

Professor Benjamin Davenport belonged to these “versatile” mediums. Aside from this, queer stories were afloat about him. He was secretly accused of highway robbery in South America, cheating at cards in the gambling houses of San Francisco, and the overhasty use of firearms toward persons who had never offended him. It was said almost openly, that the professor’s wife had died from abuse and grief at his infidelity. But in spite of these annoying rumors, Mr. Davenport, by virtue of his skill as a fraud and fakir, continued to exercise a great deal of influence upon certain plain and simple-minded folks, whom it was impossible to convince that they had not touched the materialized spirits of their brothers, mothers, or sisters through the agency of his wonderful power. His professional success received material accession from his swarthy, Mephisto-like countenance, his deep, fiery eyes, his large curved nose, the cynical expression of his mouth, and the lofty, almost prophetic tone of his words.