David Ambrose: Superstition

“That woman you were looking for last night? She paid us a visit after you'd left. It seems that she'd also paid a visit to Joanna's parents.”

“And-?”

Ralph hesitated. “I think it would be better if we talked face to face. Joanna and I are in a hotel right now, but I can be at the house in twenty minutes. Can you meet me there?”

Ralph Cazaubon was waiting on the steps of number 139 when Sam got out of his cab. He looked tired and nervous, very different from the self-assured and confident individual who had opened the door the previous day.

“Thanks for coming over, Dr. Towne.” He pulled a key ring from his pocket and gave a vaguely apologetic laugh as he unlocked the door. “I told myself I'd wait outside until you got here so you could see everything exactly as it was, untouched since last night. But the truth is I'm just plain scared to go in there on my own.”

“Anybody in their right mind would be,” Sam said, trying to conceal his own nervous impatience.

Something appeared to be blocking the door, because Ralph couldn't push it all the way back. When Sam followed him through the gap and into the hall, he saw the coat stand lying on its side.

“That was the first thing that happened. The noise it made woke us up.”

Sam nodded, as though only marginally interested in details of this kind. “Tell me about this woman,” he said. “Describe her to me.”

He listened solemnly as Ralph did so. When he was finished he nodded again. “That's her. Did Joanna see her, too?”

Ralph shook his head. “Not then. When Joanna came into the room the woman wasn't there anymore. We thought she'd just slipped out of the house. But then when all this started…” He gave an odd sideways glance at Sam, as though unable or too embarrassed to look him in the eye. “She was a ghost, wasn't she?”

“If I knew for sure I'd tell you. But I don't.”

Ralph looked at him again, more directly this time, as though trying to decide whether Sam was telling the truth. Whatever decision he came to, he kept it to himself. “Come through here,” he said abruptly, moving toward the drawing room, “you'd better see this.”

He stopped dead when he got there, muttering an obscenity under his breath and staring in dismay at what confronted him.

Sam looked past him into the room. It was a scene of devastation. Chairs and furniture were overturned, light fittings had been torn from their sockets and dangled on the ends of electric wire, every ornament and picture in the place had been smashed. Even the carpet and backing had been ripped up in places to reveal bare floorboards.

“It wasn't like this when we left,” Ralph said. “Just the big mirror that was over the mantel. We both saw it lift off the wall and fly across the room.” He pointed. “You can see where it landed. But the rest of this…” He spread his arms in helpless incomprehension.

“You said ‘not then’ when I asked if Joanna saw the woman,” Sam said. “Does that mean she saw her later?”

“She saw something-in that mirror over there. She came into the room and saw the reflection of a woman over my shoulder. By the time I turned it was too late, the mirror was already flying across the room.”

“Did she describe the woman?”

Ralph nodded. “It was the same woman I'd seen.”

He waited for Sam to speak, but the other man seemed lost in thought.

“There's something upstairs you'd better see,” Ralph said, and led the way, talking as they climbed. “We'd gone back up to the bedroom to get our things together to leave. There was a crash from my music room. I came down to take a look. My desk had turned over, papers and everything on it were everywhere. I couldn't have been away from Joanna for more than two minutes, but when I got back upstairs she came staggering out of the bathroom, terrified. She said she'd been locked in and something had been knocking and scratching in the walls. And this thing had appeared, if it's still there…”

Sam noticed that lights still burned upstairs as they had in the hall and drawing room, evidence of the couple's panic-stricken flight in the early hours. He followed Ralph across the bedroom and into the bathroom, and saw the jagged lettering on the mirror.

He moved closer, reaching out instinctively to touch the surface of the glass.

“It's on the back,” Ralph was saying. “It just isn't possible to do that.”

Sam began feeling around the edges of the mirror with his fingertips.

“It doesn't open,” Ralph said. “There's no closet space behind it. That mirror's set right into the wall.”

Sam turned to him. “Your wife wasn't harmed in any way, was she, when this happened?”

The question drew a faintly bitter laugh from Ralph. “If you don't include being scared out of your wits, no, she wasn't harmed. But my wife's pregnant, Dr. Towne. There's no telling what an experience like this might have provoked. I can promise you one thing-there's no way she's going to set foot in this house again.”

Sam was peering over every surface and into every corner of the bathroom, as though in search of something so far overlooked.

Ralph watched him for a few moments, then asked, with an edge of irritation breaking into his voice, “Look, Towne, are you going to tell me what's going on, or what? Who was that woman?”

Sam glanced at him as though he'd forgotten he was there, then walked past him and back into the bedroom.

“Well, what does this mean, for God's sake?” Ralph said more insistently, following him. “What the hell does ‘Help Me’ mean?”

The two men faced each other across the room, Sam with his shoulders hunched and hands thrust deep in the pockets of his raincoat, Ralph with his hands out, waiting for an answer.

“She's some kind of ghost-right? We're being,” he stumbled over the word, as though unable to believe he was actually saying it, “haunted!”

Sam still didn't speak.

“Well, say something, for Christ's sake!”

“I suppose,” Sam said after a while, “‘ghost’ is as good a word as any.”

“What's the connection between this ghost and Joanna? Why does it-she, whatever-have my wife's name?”

Again Sam looked at him for a while, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug of defeat. “I can't explain that.”

“I think you'd better try.” Ralph took a step forward. The anger that had followed on the heels of his fear was beginning to show itself in his physical attitude as well as in his voice. He was, unconsciously perhaps, squaring up for a fight. “I think you owe me an explanation. This whole thing started with your visit last night…”

Sam shook his head. “No, it didn't start there…”

“Then where the hell did it start?”

“If I could tell you that, I would. But I can't.”

“Can't? Or won't?” Ralph was regarding Sam with open hostility now. “I have a strong impression that you're holding something back, and I'm getting pretty tired of it.”

Sam took a hand from his pocket and held it up, palm out in a calming, open gesture. He knew that Ralph was on the verge of an irrational rage and he had to placate him.

“I can only tell you that I would like to make sense of all this every bit as much as you would.”

He saw Ralph's eyes narrow shrewdly, perhaps wanting to believe him, but not yet able to.

“Does all this by any chance have anything to do with Adam Wyatt?” Ralph asked. “Is that why you asked about him last night?”

Sam nodded. “Yes, it has to do with Adam Wyatt.”

“In what way?”

“Look…anything I say is going to sound crazy. Will you just accept that, please, before we start? There's no point in my trying to tell you what I know if your only response is going to be that I'm a liar or a lunatic.”