R. Lafferty: The 7th Ghost Story Megapack

“Steady yourself, Mr. Knight. Something has happened to your wife. We will ask you to come down to the main station.”

“My wife is here. She has just arrived.”

“In that case there has been a misidentification, and another woman was carrying her credentials. Are you sure she is there?”

“Yes. Just a minute.”

He left the phone and went to the top of the stairs and switched on the light. He called loudly for Vivian there, and down the hall, and downstairs. He went down, switched on the outside light, and went out on the front porch.

There were no footprints there but his own of an hour before now sifted over with a quarter inch of fresh snow. Her car was not in the drive, nor had any car turned in after his own. He went back in to the waiting phone.

“I was mistaken. She is not here. I will be down at once.”

Vivian Knight was dead in a brutal and senseless murder. That was the fact that could not be undone. But that was not the fact that seemed primary to Stephen. Indeed, to his friends, he appeared to be a little callous about the whole thing. Such a shock does not affect all men the same, and an interior desolation may be covered by an outward dullness.

Still it was thought that he should have showed a little more emotion.

“It may be, Stephen, that you still do not realize that she is dead,” one friend told him.

“No. I am not absolutely sure of it, but for reasons too formless to even try to voice.”

“You surely do not doubt the identity?”

“Oh no. That is her body. There is no doubt of that. What I feel is something else. I always knew that I would lose her.”

“You did?”

“Yes. She was too good to be true. I never believed that she was real.”

After that people began to think of Stephen Knight as a little odd. He took no interest in the funeral arrangements.

“Oh, put her anywhere. She won’t mind. Wherever she’s gone she already has them charmed.”

Nor was he vengeful nor even particularly curious as to who her killer might be.

“Any man might have done it. There’s an impulse to take any perfect piece apart to see what motivates it, and to mar what is perfect. She hadn’t a flaw in her. If she’d had any fault at all she might not have been killed. Can’t you understand the feeling that nobody has the right to be perfect? I can understand it.”

“Man, that was your wife that was murdered.”

“I know that. I am not as far gone as you imagine. But I also understand that it had to happen; if not by that unknown, then by another; if not now, then at a later time.”

From the funeral Stephen went directly to the doctor. He was not one to keep mysteries bottled up inside himself, and he knew that time is no ally in things like this. He told the whole story, completely and dully.

“Well, I don’t pretend to understand this, Knight,” the doctor told him. “It isn’t a new story to me in its essentials. An old doctor never hears anything new. In literature and lore there are a few hundred cases (none of them really authenticated by their very nature) of death… instant visitations of the Departed to the one closest. Are you sure you were awake?”

“Of course I’m not sure, in the light of what I know to have happened. But I have never been mistaken in my state before. I have no history of hallucinations, and I have always been considered a well-balanced man. I realize that the latter is meaningless, and that there is no such thing.”

“True enough, there is not. But a few come closer to what we believe should be the norm, and you come quite close. In other words you are less crazy than almost anyone I know. You are hardly crazy at all. In a long life in the practice (and I was born to the profession) I have never known a single human who I could call unqualifiedly sane.”

“Vivian was sane. That was the whole strange thing about her.”

“Possibly. The Scatterbrain may be only another name for a wide-ranging intuitive comprehension. Now then, Knight, there is a set of things which you must say to yourself, and say over and over till you come to believe them. I do not know whether they are true, but you must accept them as true.

“On that night, three nights ago, you were asleep. You stirred to a feeling of anticipation, and you lay half-awake waiting. The bird (tuned to the life of you two) caught your anticipation and broke into song, and this served as a feedback to your own sensations, for the bird only whistled the ‘Dreamer’ when it felt that Vivian was nearing. It was a bright night with the snow mantle, and the light on your window might have been a more distant reflection. It was a gusty night, and the rustle that you thought was your wife was only the wind having its way with the wooden house, and her footsteps were likewise. But she was dead, and had been dead for at least a half hour. You are a comparatively sane man, and you must go over that and over it until you believe it implicitly.”

“But we do not know if it is actually true, do we?”

“No, we do not. But we turn that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ by careful credulity. The world is built on such a system of credulities and we have no wish to pull it down. Now then, this is what happened, and there is no alternative. You may well have fifty years ahead of you, and there is no point in your making problems where there are none.”

“Then you can assure me that she is dead?”

“Yes. And, more important, you must also assure yourself of it. It is closed. You had a wonderful wife and you will have none but wonderful memories of her.”

“I have not slept in the house since that night.”

“Then you must sleep in it tonight. Even if you intend to sell the house and make other arrangements yet you cannot have it hanging over you that you were afraid to go back.”

“Yes, I will stay there tonight.”

But he did not go there early, and the hours were hard to fill. He thought of shooting a few games of pool, it often relaxed him when he was tense, but it seemed an unfeeling thing for one to do who has just buried his wife. He thought of dropping into one of the clubs for a few drinks, but that seemed not quite right either. He was an incomplete man without Vivian, and he knew it. He drove west through town and out the river road where the snow glistened on the trees and hills.

“Well, I had her for a few years, and nobody else had her at all. There is no one in the world who knows how pleasurable those years were. But also there is nobody who has lost as much as I have just lost.”

He went home and opened the house again after dark. He had an ascetic’s supper of tea and dry toast. The bird needed nothing, nothing that he could do for it. It essayed a few bars of the ‘Dreamer’, but its heart was not in it. Still, it was something, to have the bird. It’s voice was really an extension of that of Vivian.

Stephen played some of the stark dry fragments of Strilke. Stephen played the piano incomparably better than Vivian, yet he was sure that the playing that the piano would remember was that of Vivian and not his own.

He went to bed. He wrote on the bedside pad the figure he would ask for the house. He slept fitfully, and when he woke he marked out that figure and wrote another one two thousand dollars lower. People would not understand that it had been a magic house; and vanished magic is not a marketable commodity.

Then later he woke to the sense of her distant approach.

“If only it could be! If wishing could bring her back, then she would be here. But there is the stumbling block. The doctor said that I was hardly crazy at all, and he meant it for praise. But to a man who is not crazy this can not happen. And I know that it will not happen.”