The Crying Child, page 20
“Hell, no,” Will said indignantly. “But I won’t turn down that steak.”
He was definitely cool to me for the next five minutes; I was being punished for daring to intimate that four or five hours of work and worry could tire him. But he ate with the gusto, if not the table manners, of Henry VIII tearing into a haunch of beef.
Ran talked the whole time. When Will finally slowed down enough to comment, he remarked,
“Seems to me you do better when I’m not around…. Jo, if I hadn’t seen the lady in black myself, I’d begin to wonder about you. How come you’re getting all the attention from the ghosts?”
“That’s what Jed wondered. I don’t like any of the possible answers. As for Hezekiah’s portrait—”
“Yeah,” Will said. “What about Hezekiah? I had him pegged as a villain, but it’s beginning to look as if he might have been the victim.”
“Will, I’m not sure,” I said. “That business with the picture…It’s a classic type of hallucination, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Will said.
“So maybe that’s what it was. You know,” I said, struck by the idea, “I wonder if that’s why psychic phenomena are discredited. People see one genuine manifestation and it shakes them up so much they start imagining others. Naturally the false manifestations are easy to disprove, so the whole subject gets a bad name.”
Will grinned.
“The SPR would love your descriptions. I commend your honesty, Jo, but this time I’ll be the attorney for the defense. Your impression was not that you were being threatened; it was rather a feeling of warning, right? But that doesn’t fit your conscious predispositions about Hezekiah. You thought of him as a villain too. If you had imagined that incident, you’d have seen him baring his teeth and reaching out to grab you.”
Ran was beginning to fidget.
“I don’t want to rush you, Will, but if we’re going to spend any time in the library…”
I used to think of libraries as friendly, cozy places. But they can be eerie on a foggy night, when there are only three people in all the empty spaces. The fog seeped in through closed windows; long pale streaks of it drifted down the shadowy aisles of the stacks. Footsteps echoed in those tunnellike areas. The musty, dusty smell of books, which is usually one of my favorite smells, took on a different significance in the gloom and seeping fog.
In the 1840s, the island had not boasted its own newspaper, but Richmond, the nearest mainland town, put out a weekly. Ran explained that it was our best bet. The Portland newspaper might have carried Hezekiah’s obituary, since he was a fairly prominent citizen, but it was unlikely that they would print less important island news—certainly not the news of the death of a servant.
It was Miss Smith’s obituary we were looking for. Ran had already seen the notice of Hezekiah’s death; the clipping was among the family papers in the museum.
“I should have thought of a newspaper then,” he admitted in disgust. “But the clipping was separate. Whoever cut it out didn’t even include the name of the paper.”
We were working with microfilm copies, not originals, but as soon as Ran saw the type and general setup of the pages, he was fairly sure that the notice of Hezekiah’s death had been cut from this paper. We had to go through all the 1846 issues to reach the month in which Miss Smith had passed away, so when Will, who was operating the viewer, found Hezekiah’s obituary, he stopped the machine, so that Ran could verify his assumption. Will and I hadn’t seen the clipping, so we hastily scanned this copy of the obituary. Will is a faster reader than I am; I was still plodding through the names of local dignitaries who had attended the funeral when I heard him burst out with a single expressive expletive. It brought Ran back from his nervous pacing, and at the next moment my slower eyes found it too.
At the end of the column, the editor named the surviving relatives. There were a brother in Ohio and a sister in Rhode Island. The names of Hezekiah’s wife and children followed. And last on the list was the name that had caused Will’s outburst: “And his adopted son, Kevin.”
II
“I swear it wasn’t there,” Ran said in utter bewilderment. “The clipping I saw ended…yes, right there. Third line from the bottom.”
“Someone cut the last lines off,” I said. “But why? Adopted son…Good Lord, we never thought of that.”
“It makes sense,” Will said. The microfilm reader was still switched on; the yellow light, shining upward, cast the weirdest shadows across his face. “When did you say Miss Smith first makes her appearance—1840? Suppose she had just had the baby. Hezekiah adopts it and brings it home, from Boston or wherever; and with it he thoughtfully brings a nursemaid-governess.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it,” I said angrily. “Not even Hezekiah could do such a filthy thing. Why, it—it’s horrible. And there isn’t a scrap of proof.”
“Proof, hell. I’ve known of people being hanged on less convincing circumstantial evidence. Go ahead, Will. We still haven’t found Miss Smith.”
Will touched the switch and the pages began to glide past. The next item appeared only a few weeks later, but it wasn’t Miss Smith’s obituary. Will almost missed it. The headline didn’t include a name:
“Hope abandoned for missing heir.”
“Wait,” Ran said, and grabbed Will’s arm.
We read the story together, in fascinated silence.
Kevin Fraser, missing since Friday night, is now believed to have been swept to sea after falling from the cliff near the Fraser mansion. Young Fraser was last seen on Friday morning heading toward the cliff. A search party, led by Joshua Beale, found the only trace of the boy—his cap, caught on a shrub just below the edge of the cliff. Kevin was the adopted son of Captain Hezekiah Fraser, whose accidental death occurred less than a month ago. The captain’s will named the boy as one of his two principal heirs.
“Something a little pointed about that word ‘accidental,’ don’t you think?” Will suggested.
Ran was disturbed.
“My God, the poor little devil…How they must have hated him. They even tried to wipe out the memory of him.”
“By ‘they,’ I gather you mean your ancestors,” I said. “Mercy and her son Jeremiah and all the rest. Ran, do you realize what you’re suggesting?”
“It fits,” Ran said. “It fits too damn well.” In the reflected light his face was ghastly. “He inherits a large chunk of the captain’s estate and a month later he disappears. Talk about motives for murder…”
“Not to mention motives for haunting,” I muttered. “Revenge? Oh, no, surely not—not a child…Justice, then? Is that what he wants? No wonder he cries…. How do you bring a murderer to justice when he’s been dead for almost a century—even if you could identify him?”
Will started the machine again.
“Aren’t you being a trifle melodramatic?” he said drily, without looking up. “If you are willing to admit a disembodied intelligence that survives physical death, you ought to concede the likelihood of a Justice which can cope much more effectively with sin than any human court.”
“And which is not deceived,” Ran said.
“All right.” I threw up my hands. “Maybe the child doesn’t want anything except peace. Don’t they say that violent death is a traumatic experience for the spirit? And time is meaningless in eternity. Maybe he’s still in a state of shock—lost.”
“That,” said Will, continuing to scan pages, “is why I part company with spiritualism. If their benevolent creator can let a victim suffer that kind of torment all those years…”
“You want logic,” I said angrily. “There isn’t any. None of this makes any sense. But there has to be some point….”
“Exactly. And so far we haven’t found it. We haven’t even found…Ah, yes. Here she is.”
“One week after the boy disappeared,” Ran said. “My God, it is like a curse. Isn’t there an old superstition about death coming in threes?”
“Now you’re being melodramatic,” I said. “It sounds silly, but to me this is almost reassuring. She must have been very close to the boy, whether she was his mother or not. And she must have felt guilt as well as grief. She was responsible for him; a baby like that, she should have watched him more closely.”
“What makes you think it was suicide?” Will asked.
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t buy three accidents within a month, all in the same house. What does the paper say? Ah—here you are. Empty glass and a bottle which had contained laudanum on the table beside her. The verdict…Hmmph. Accidental death?”
“Now wait a minute.” Will was several lines ahead of me. “They didn’t find a note, so they charitably assumed an accident. She mightn’t have received Christian burial otherwise.”
“You call that beyond-the-pale grave Christian burial? Oh, all right. You’re arguing on my side.”
“I don’t know what I’m arguing for or against,” Will muttered, scowling at the page. “Those three deaths are too coincidental. They ought to be connected, somehow.”
“If it were a murder mystery, they would all be murders,” I said, with a lightness I assuredly did not feel. “You know, the thing the police call the m.o. is the same in all three cases—making it look like an accident.”
Will gave me a warning jab in the ribs and I stopped talking; Ran’s grim face showed that he was taking all this seriously. I think the thing that bothered him most was the vindictiveness his family had displayed in wiping out all trace of the child. It had been deliberate; some record would surely have survived otherwise.
“Do you mind?” he said. “I can’t take any more tonight. And we’ve been gone long enough; I don’t like leaving Mary this late.”
Will switched off the machine.
“We’ve got all we’re going to find, unless we take a lot more time than we have at our disposal right now. Mary isn’t alone, surely?”
“Of course not, Anne is with her. But it isn’t fair to expect her to cope with Mary if she gets one of her spells.”
“Funny thing,” Will said casually, as Ran turned out the lights and locked the door. “I ran into a guy today, at the hospital, who used to know Anne in med school. He asked me about her husband. I said so far as I knew she wasn’t married, and he seemed surprised. She was engaged when he knew her, to another student, and it was quite an affair.”
“She was married,” Ran said. We went down the steps and walked toward the car. “For less than a year. The guy who recommended her to me told me about it. Her husband was killed in Viet Nam—or was it Korea, back then? She was badly shaken up. Had a breakdown. It was that that made her decide to go into psychiatry.”
Right then I got the first faint prickle of alarm. I couldn’t understand why I felt uneasy, but my subconscious must have been working on it. I remembered that it had been Anne’s suggestion that had sent us to the library that evening. I remembered Mary’s acquiescence—eagerness, even. I remembered certain things that had been said—and the look on a woman’s face as she stared out a darkening window. And I knew, all at once, why Anne’s face had reminded me of something. The resemblance had not been one of physical features. It had been an expression. The same expression, on Anne’s face, that I had seen one other night on my sister’s face as she stared out into the darkness where the crying child had its existence.
I caught at Ran’s arm as he stopped the car in front of the librarian’s house.
“Ran. Did Anne say anything more to you about holding a séance?”
“No…You mean lately? Not since that first time she mentioned it, and we all decided—”
“She’s mentioned it to me several times,” Will said. “Jo, what is it?”
“I’m overanxious. I must be. But tonight—she did seem glad to have us go, didn’t she? She said it was her last night. She said—oh, God, what was it she said? ‘I don’t dare believe it; you don’t know what it would mean to me—’ Will. You don’t think—”
“I think we’d better get back to the house as fast as we can. Never mind the key, Ran; let’s get moving.”
Ran drove that road like a madman, and I kept urging him to go faster. In the faint glow from the dashboard his face looked like a death mask, and he never spoke a word. I kept babbling. I couldn’t stand the silence.
“There’s another theory, one we never considered. Suppose she’s the murderess—Miss Smith? Hezekiah died in that room, falling down those stairs. A man like that, who had walked his quarterdeck in gales and storms, tripping on a stair? Suppose she pushed him. Suppose she hit him, with a poker or something, and made it look as if he’d fallen. The child might know. She would have to dispose of it to keep it from talking. Remorse, suicide—or maybe one of the family found out the truth and took the law into his own hands, to avoid scandal. I can see Mercy doing it, she must have hated the woman anyhow. Ran, can’t you go any faster?”
We met only one car on the road. It let out a long startled bleat of its horn, which faded as we swept past. Then we were among trees, swinging up the private road. The trunks loomed up and vanished like colossal columns in a pagan temple. And then, after far too long a time, we were in front of the house. Ran drove straight across the lawn. He was out of the car before the engine died, and we were right behind him.
Jed met us in the hall. His somber face lit up at the sight of Ran.
“Glad you’re back,” he said, in what was clearly an understatement.
“Where are they?” Ran demanded. “Where’s Mary?”
“They went upstairs an hour ago,” Jed said. “I thought they went to bed. But Bertha went up a while back, just to check, and neither of them was in her room. I’m afraid—”
Ran made an inarticulate sound and started up the stairs. He, like the rest of us, had no doubt as to where to go.
The lights on the fourth-floor landing were on. That was the only sign that anyone had come this way. Everything was quiet; the tower door was closed. Then I heard a voice—it was Anne’s, I learned later. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was calm and regular, with a cadence almost like that of poetry.
The feeling hit me then—the same icy chill I had felt before, and with it came the sick malaise that was a sickness of the soul rather than the body.
I forgot that the others hadn’t felt it, at least not so strongly. I saw Jed recoil, and saw the perspiration break out on Ran’s face. He grabbed at the doorknob. It turned, but the door didn’t open. They had barricaded it from within.
They heard us—or something heard us…. Anne’s voice rose, its tempo increasing; and from within the room there was a sickening grating groan and then a sob—a long, sobbing wail, the same sound we had heard before.
Will said something, through stretched lips; I didn’t catch the words, but Jed did. He caught hold of Ran and pulled him back from his wild clawing at the door; and Will stepped back, raised his foot, and slammed it into the door.
I don’t know whether it was karate, or what, but it was as effective as a battering ram. The door flew open.
The sound that burst out of that open door was hellish, and I use that word in its literal sense. It was the weeping we had heard before, but magnified beyond all endurance, like a powerful hi-fi set turned up as high as it will go. Even the sweetest sound is hideously distorted under those conditions. This sound had never been sweet. Now it sounded more like cackling laughter than grief.
The room was lit by candles—and by one other thing.
Not moonlight; the fog obscured the moonlight, and pushed at the barred window like a white monstrosity trying to break in. The other light came from an amorphous shape that hovered near the foot of the iron staircase.
It was like a cloud of luminous gas, or a patch of fog that has phosphorescent qualities. Its sickly gray light showed nearby objects clearly. The white bulk of the rocking horse looked obscenely out of place in that terrible atmosphere; the painted mouth seemed to grin, and I could have sworn that it was moving back and forth, as if something rode on its back.
The two women were sitting next to one another at a small round table in the center of the room. After the first glance at Mary’s frozen stare, I couldn’t take my eyes off Anne’s face. Mary had been through this, or something like it, before; but poor Anne…Half believing, half doubting, telling herself that this was only an experiment which couldn’t harm Mary however it worked out. But the part of her mind that did believe believed in the pretty afterlife of the spiritualists, in flowers and singing and happy spirits who have passed over. Then the cold came to her, and the sickness, and the thing that was struggling to take shape against the darkness.
It was like a monstrous birth; the creature squirmed and writhed, fighting the bonds of the invisible. And all the while it kept up that mindless squealing. Sounds have direct emotional impact; animals make certain noises to attract sexual partners—or prey. I wondered how I could possibly have heard this call before and failed to realize that it fell into that same category—not a crying child but a counterfeit of one, deliberately created to attract a certain quarry, as a hunter reproduces the call of game birds to lure them within his weapon’s range.
The whole thing couldn’t have taken very long, but it seemed to go on forever. Then, with a snap and a crackling flash, like an electrical short-circuit, the thing came into focus, complete and self-illumined. It was distinct; and it was nothing like anything I had expected to see.
I had seen “Miss Smith” materialize before; it had been unpleasant, but it hadn’t been nearly as bad as this. Yet I did expect to see her, because the only other face I might have anticipated was the cherub face with the golden curls, the face of the child in the miniature. That face would have suited the forlorn weeping, but it seemed blasphemous to associate it with this outrageous cacophony.
The thing we saw was a man; at least it was man-high and man-shaped, hulking and big. Shaggy dark hair fell over its forehead and ears. The mouth was open in a grimace of triumphant laughter. It was a brutish-looking shape, but its appearance was not the worst thing about it. The worst thing was the aura of abnormality that hung upon it.
