House of Many Shadows

by Barbara Michaels

  “I haven’t played for years,” she said lightly. “But I’m going to practice some of the music I found upstairs. I can hardly wait to learn ‘We’re Gonna Kick the Kaiser.” You said you were looking for me; any particular reason?“

  “Not really. I owe you a dinner invitation. Haven’t seen you for a few days, and thought you might come over and eat a hamburger with me. My cooking doesn’t run to anything more exciting.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  If Andy hoped his uninspired menu would prompt Meg to take over the cooking, he was disappointed. She sat on a kitchen stool and watched him broil the hamburgers and cook frozen french fries. After they had eaten he showed her the cottage. It was small, with two tiny bedrooms and a bath filling the upper story, and a kitchen and parlor downstairs. Despite an initial impression of clutter, the place was clean and relatively neat. The greatest disorder was in the parlor, where Andy worked; a long kitchen table, near the window, was completely covered by the typewriter and a scattering of books and papers. Coffee cup in hand, Meg wandered toward the table. Andy got there first. Gathering the typewritten sheets together, he turned the pile face down. “No fair looking,” he said.

  “You must become accustomed to criticism. Or is this going to be one of those unpublished works?”

  “I’ll let you read it when it’s done. This is only the third draft.” “Okay, okay.”

  Meg turned to the bookshelves. There were two of them, tall, homemade structures filled with books. The collection surprised her; it was eclectic, to say the least, ranging from Bartlett and Roget to nineteenth-century poetry. Then she saw the volume that lay face down on a table near a big comfortable chair. She picked it up and looked at the title. It was one of the “true” stories of the occult which had become popular in recent years; Meg replaced it with a fastidious sneer.

  “I didn’t think you would read such nonsense.”

  “You think it’s nonsense, do you?”

  “Worse than nonsense; it’s an insult to a normal reader’s intelligence.”

  Andy said nothing, but he looked skeptical, and that was enough to spur Meg on.

  “Really, Andy! I’ve read a couple of these myself— ghost hunters, psychic investigators. The medium goes into the haunted house and gets vague impressions of evil and uneasy spirits; she holds a seance and contacts the spirit of, say, a Revolutionary War captain named John Smith, who tells her all about his military career, and how he was murdered, and like that. Then the ghost hunter checks the records; and lo and behold, he finds that mere was a John Smith who fought in me Revolution! Hurray for the medium! Of course the John Smith in the records was a private, not a captain; he served in the Fourteenth Massachusetts, not the Colonial Cavalry; he never lived within a hundred miles of the haunted house, and he died peacefully in his bed at the age of ninety-six. These little discrepancies don’t bother the ghost hunter one bit. He chalks up another victory for spiritualism. He ought to award the Pulitzer Prize for fiction to the medium.”

  “Oh, I agree with you.” Andy sat down, and Meg followed suit. “Most people have no conception of what constitutes reasonable proof. But you aren’t being fair to the medium. You think she—or he—is always a fraud?”

  “What other explanation is there?”

  Andy sputtered. “You, of all people, can ask that? Hallucinations like yours are much more common than you realize. They can be caused by lots of things besides a bump on the head, and they probably account for most of the stories of ghosts and haunted houses.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Meg admitted. “But my hallucinations have a physical cause, Andy. The parts of the brain mat receive sensory impressions react on their own, without an external stimulus.”

  “Sure, but it doesn’t require damage to the brain cells to cause dysfunction of the perception centers. Drugs can do it; the hallucinatory drugs produce visions, sounds, even smells and tactile impressions that are as real to the visionary as impressions that originate in the sensory organs. Psychological stimuli can do the same thing. A person who is bereaved and grief-stricken, possibly guilty, may imagine he sees the spirit of the dead man.”

  “How do you know all this?” Meg asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, I’ve always been interested in the subject—and very skeptical, let me add.” Andy’s face was in shadow; the sun had sunk below the treetops and the room swam in a blue haze. “Hell, this is a morbid topic of conversation. Let’s talk about me.” “No, I’m interested. I hadn’t thought about the ramifications; I’ve been too worried about my own problems. It makes me feel a little less… weird, if you know what I mean. What you’re saying is that hallucinations can be caused by physical malfunction, or extreme emotional stress. Like a child afraid of the dark, who thinks he sees a monster, instead of his bathrobe thrown over a chair… ”No, wait a minute. You’re confusing illusions with! hallucinations. In the former case, emotional stress causes the brain to misinterpret a genuine sensory impression of something that is really there. A hallucination has no physical reality. It’s all in your head—literally.“

  “I can sympathize with our poor ignorant ancestors, who didn’t know about hallucinations. They would think they were seeing ghosts, wouldn’t they? No wonder they! were terrified. It scares me, even though I know what causes it.”

  “Yeah. And speaking of roc’s eggs,” Andy said, “what have you been doing in the attic lately?”

  Meg accepted the change of subject. Andy considered it| morbid, and perhaps he was right, although she had been! speaking the truth when she said it helped her to view her misfortune in a larger perspective.

  She stayed late, and Andy offered to walk her home. When they left the cottage Meg saw that the halcyon fall weather had changed. The moon rode high, bright silver on black, but the sky was filled with little clouds that rushed westward, moved by a cool wind. As they walked across! the lawn the moonlight flickered on and off, as if someone • were manipulating a celestial light switch. Half-clouded1 moonlight is one of the eeriest of illuminations, summoning and dismissing shadow shapes like the illusions of at master magician. Meg was glad to have human companionship, even though it was silent. Neither of them spoke. The wind whipped Meg’s hair into her eyes and Andy seemed intent on the gathering clouds.

  When the front door swung slowly open, neither of them moved for a moment. The darkened hall was pierced by a long ray of moonlight; it seemed to dart past them, into the house, as the opening door allowed it entry. Then Andy spoke. His voice sounded strange, as if he stood in a vast wall-less space that swallowed up human speech.

  “ ”Is there anybody there?“ said the Traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door. …“

  Meg had to make a conscience effort to speak lightly. She felt as though she must counter the growing spell of witchery before it engulfed her.

  “And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

  Of the forest’s ferny floor,“

  “I learned that in high school too,” she added. “Look, no horse. Cut it out, Andy. It’s a spooky night, without de la Mare.”

  “Too true,” Andy said, in his normal voice. “And a perfect example of what we were talking about earlier. Illusions of shadows and moonlit… Another minute, and we’d be seeing phantom listeners like crazy. Come on in.”

  But before he entered the house he reached a long arm around the doorframe and pressed the light switch. The chandelier came to life, reducing the hallway from a place of magic and moonlight to its normal barrenness. He went into the house without letting Meg precede him—a casual thing, which she wouldn’t have noticed ordinarily. Yet the impression still lingered—the feeling of expectation, of something waiting.

  With a silent reprimand to her overactive imagination; she followed Andy and closed the door behind her. The windy night was shut out.

  Andy had gone into the drawing room, switching on lights as he went. He stood in the middle of the room, gazing around.

  “W
ant to search the house?” Meg asked, half joking.

  “Maybe I should.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! What are you afraid of?”

  “Me, afraid?” Andy put a casual hand on her shoulder. “I’m not the one who sees things that aren’t there.”

  The words were like a summoning, an invocation. The thing that had been waiting in the room swooped down. Meg’s hands moved; but no physical rejection could ward off the unreal. She stood among shadows, struggling for breath. Reality was slow in returning. Andy was shaking I her. His distorted face was close to hers.

  “Twice in one day,” she moaned. “It’s getting worse.! Since I came here…”

  “Meg!” Andy shook her again. “Stop yelling! Listen tot me. It was not a hallucination. Don’t you understand? I saw it too.”

  Chapter 4

  Meg wasn’t sure which of them had led the retreat. The cool night air brought her back to her senses; she stopped at the bottom of the veranda stairs. Andy stopped too. He was holding her hand. The last one out, whoever it was, had left the front door open, and yellow light spilled out across the porch and onto the drive. For a few seconds neither of them spoke.

  “Let’s go to my place,” Andy said finally.

  “No. I’ve got to go back in there.”

  “You’re crazy. There’s something there. Something waiting.”

  “I don’t care. Don’t you understand? If I can’t stay in that house, I’m sunk. I have nowhere else to go.”

  “Wait a minute. Let me think.”

  Meg was shivering. She pulled her hand from Andy’s and wrapped her arms around her body.

  “Running away won’t help,” she said. “I can’t run away from my own brain. Only this was different… Andy. You said you saw it too. What did you see?”

  “Another room.”

  “Collective hallucination?” Meg suggested.

  Andy shrugged—or perhaps he shivered. “Words. What do they mean?”

  “They must mean something, or you wouldn’t be using them to write a book,” Meg snapped. “You were glib enough about hallucinations and related phenomena a few hours ago. It isn’t so easy to be academic when it happens to you, is it?”

  Andy didn’t answer. His hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, he might have been shivering from cold; but he looked like a dog that expects to be kicked, and Meg relented.

  “Maybe it is a shock, when you’re not used to it,” she said more gently. “Go on home and get some sleep.”

  “While you march back into the house and play heroine?” Andy straightened. “Thanks. I guess I deserved that. All right, I’ll come with you; but I’m not buying the hallucination theory.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ll talk inside. Might as well be scared to death as freeze.”

  By unspoken consent they avoided the brightly lighted drawing room and headed for the kitchen. Its utilitarian cheer seemed to deny the extraordinary. Meg sat down at the table while Andy roamed around the room, putting on water for coffee and then searching through drawers.

  Now that she was calmer, Meg felt sure the panic that had sent her flying out of the house had been contagious, sparked by Andy’s fright; and she watched him curiously. The hallucinations were disturbing, no one knew that better than she; but surely Andy’s reaction was strange. Beneath the veneer of sophisticated skepticism he was as superstitious as a peasant. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what he was thinking, and she decided she had better play along with him, for a while at least.

  “Shall we compare notes?” she asked. “You said you saw—”

  “Quiet.” Andy came to the table carrying pencils and a pad of paper. “Comparing notes is precisely what I intend to do, but we’ll go about it scientifically instead of feeding one another verbal clues to build on. Here. Write down exactly what you saw. I’ll stand at the counter with my back to you and do the same thing.”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous!”

  “No, by God, it isn’t.” He was still pale, but there was a gleam of amusement in his eyes as he regarded her. “You were griping a while back about the sloppy methods of the ghost-hunter types. Okay. Here’s our chance to go about it properly. This is a classic case—the typical visions and emotional impressions. Neither of us is consciously faking. At least I’m willing to admit you’re honest, and I trust you’ll do the same for me.”

  “I guess so. You have no reason…” Meg stopped. To cover her confusion, she reached for the pencil. “Okay, we’ll do it your way.”

  “Wait a minute. Don’t start writing till I’ve turned my back. Write down the date and the time, and then go to it.”

  For a while there was no sound except the scratch of the pencils and the mindless whir of the refrigerator turning itself on and off. When Meg had finished, she looked at Andy.

  “I’m through,” she said.

  “Okay.” Andy turned. “We’ll swap papers, then.”

  Meg had not read more than a few words before she knew she was in trouble. The terse descriptive phrases had a cumulative weight that was difficult to resist.

  “Another room. Three walls, a low ceiling with dark beams. A picture, or something, in a frame on the wall to the left. Wide, dark frame; couldn’t make out what was inside. Not a portrait, the shapes were geometric, brightly colored. Window on right-hand wall. Daylight. Table and two chairs near the window. A figure standing in front of the table. Couldn’t see details, but was a man’s figure— wore pants, not skirts. Impression of facial hair—white, gray, possibly blond. Dark coat, something shiny on it—buttons, medals, braid?”

  Meg looked up. Andy was a quick reader; her account had been longer than his, but he had already finished. Their eyes met, and his lips curved in a wry grimace.

  “Interesting, isn’t it? We’ll have to discount the initial coincidence—that we both saw another room. I told you, when we were outside, that that was what I saw, and I seem to remember your mentioning something of the sort once before, the day you arrived. So we could have suggested that to one another.”

  “Aren’t you being too persnickety?” “Persnickety is what we have to be. Even so, making all possible allowance for coincidence, suggestion, and other rational explanations, the details match up. You saw more than I did, but you saw the same things. You say the picture was a sampler. That’s one of those embroidered things, isn’t it—the ones little girls used to make to show off their skill in sewing, and keep their idle hands out of mischief? I couldn’t make out what the thing was, but I did see bright colors and a formal pattern. You saw a house and trees and an embroidered motto—though you couldn’t read the words.

  “You saw the table and the chairs and the window, in the same locations I saw. You saw an elderly man with a long white beard. His coat had silver buttons.

  “You mentioned collective hallucinations. Sure, I believe in them; I’ve seen the mass emotion of a crowd and the way people reinforce one another’s vague impressions till they build up a picture of something that never happened. But I don’t see how that can apply here. The details are too exact to be coincidental.”

  “It needn’t be a coincidence. It was a spooky night, and we are both too suggestible. You knew I have hallucinations—”

  “But Meg, a collective hallucination doesn’t work this way. When you investigate closely, you find that people did not, in fact, see the same thing—unless it was a phenomenon they all expected to see beforehand. Like, you know, the stories about holy images. People come to the church on the saint’s day expecting to see the miraculous statue weep, because the legend says it weeps. And sure enough, they see it. One hysteric yells, ”There—look at the tears flowing down the face!“ His neighbor chimes in, ”Yes, yes, the saint is weeping!“ And before long, half the crowd is caught up in the delusion. But that’s not what happened tonight.”

  Meg shook her head speechlessly. She didn’t know what she believed, or what she wanted to believe; she was still dazed by the parallels in t
he two accounts. Andy sat down across the table.

  “Look at it this way,” he said patiently. “Collective hallucination accounts for the majority of the stories of visions and ghosts. But that doesn’t mean all the stories can be explained that way. Suppose you walk out of the house one morning and see a puddle of water on the porch. You know there is usually a puddle in that spot after it rains. But you can’t assume that it rained because you find a puddle! See what I mean? We can’t scribble ”Q.E.D.,“ collective hallucination, at the bottom of these papers and forget them. We can look for another cause.”

  “What other cause?” Meg’s voice was shrill. “Are you seriously suggesting that we both saw—well—ghosts? I’d rather have my hallucinations.”