House of Many Shadows

by Barbara Michaels

  “Let me see!”

  Meg made a grab for the book, which Andy was holding with his finger marking his place. He pulled it away.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I hope you’re wrong.” Meg slumped against the doorframe and looked disconsolately at Andy. “But I guess you couldn’t be, could you? I—I don’t know what to say. What a horrible thing! I never thought of anything like that. No wonder…”

  “The house is haunted,” Andy finished. “It’s a classic motive, all right. You might as well see for yourself. Come on in.”

  “Not here, the place is a mess. Come on back to the library.”

  “Honey bun, I don’t want to sit in that room tonight. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? This is the anniversary of the murder!”

  They stared at one another, appalled and wide-eyed. Then Meg got a grip on herself.

  “What do you expect to happen?” she demanded. “You think we’ll see the murder or something? So far we haven’t seen anything happen; only still pictures. Oh, I agree, I wouldn’t want to see them lying there in their blood, but what if we did? It wouldn’t kill us.”

  “Are you trying to shame me into showing some guts? Okay. But if you flip and run screaming out of the house, don’t blame me.”

  Giving Andy a contemptuous stare, Meg turned her back on him and started downstairs. She heard him follow, but did not speak. When they reached the library she switched on every available light and then held out her hand.

  “There. It’s nice and bright, and I won’t let anything get you. Give me the book, please.”

  Andy threw it at her. In a way, Meg didn’t blame him. In silence she bent and picked up the book; still in silence, she sat down in her favorite chair by the fire and began to turn the pages.

  She found the reference at once. The name—Huber— seemed to jump up out of the page at her. But the actual text was so brief as to be frustrating. The case was not discussed in detail, only referred to among a group of other crimes the writer considered related—unsolved, apparently senseless murders in remote rural districts.

  Andy had been right about the date. October 11, 1740. The coincidence disturbed Meg as much as it did Andy, but she was determined not to show it. The other details, cursory as they were, were equally disturbing; it was like reading of the horrible death of people she knew personally. The victims—the elderly man, Christian Huber, and an aged family servant—had been found late on the night of the eleventh by a visitor. Although the house was a shambles, nothing seemed to be missing—except the third member of the family, the man’s granddaughter. She had never been found, although neighbors searched the woods for days. This fact, as the author unemotionally remarked, “suggested a possible motive for the crime.” The impromptu gathering which was the frontier equivalent of a coroner’s jury had rendered a verdict of “murder by persons unknown.”

  “So she was his granddaughter,” Meg said. “We should have known he was too old to be her father. That explains the mourning brooch—locket, rather. It has the hair of her parents. Why did you say they were all three killed?”

  “The neighbors would have found her if she had been alive. They wouldn’t have found a grave, though, not in that overgrown wilderness. The criminals had to kill her, after they got through with her, to keep her from identifying them.”

  “Indians?” Meg asked. “They kidnapped women and children sometimes.”

  Andy shook his head decisively.

  “The MO is all wrong. So is the timing. The French and Indian War didn’t start till about 1750.I guess there could have been isolated incidents before that; but Indians used knives and tomahawks, not clubs. They would have scalped the victims and probably set fire to the house.”

  “I guess so. The jury certainly would have mentioned that as a possibility if they had thought so. God, it’s awful! That poor girl, dragged out into the woods…”

  “I wonder why they took her out of the house? With the old man and the servant dead, there was nothing to keep them from doing whatever they wanted to her.”

  “The visitor,” Meg said promptly. “The bodies were discovered by a visitor, later that night. Maybe the victims warned the criminals that they were expecting company, hoping to scare them away.”

  “Mrnm.” Andy nodded grudgingly. “The case doesn’t smell right, somehow. I know there are psychotics in any community, but you think of rural Pennsylvania as a particularly sedate, God-fearing region—all those Quakers and Dunkards and Mennonites. It was a small-town atmosphere, too; everybody knew everybody else. Wouldn’t you think criminals of such vicious tendencies would be suspected by their neighbors? Criminal lunatics don’t usually stop with a single crime, either. Sooner or later they’d give themselves away and get caught.”

  “Maybe they were caught, later.”

  “Why do you keep saying ‘they?” Another characteristic of criminal lunatics is that they don’t usually run in packs.“

  “Why… the jury said ”persons unknown.“ The usual form is ‘person or persons,” isn’t it?“

  “Yes, I guess so. But that could be the author abridging the report. I should think one husky man could handle that pathetic crowd—two old people and a girl.”

  Meg shivered. The room was getting cool as the fire died.

  “I’m just guessing, of course. But criminals do run in packs sometimes. Escapees from prisons or reformatories, looking for a place to hide—”

  “You’ve got an answer for everything,” Andy said disagreeably. “But you’re thinking in modern terms. There were no penitentiaries or mental hospitals in colonial times. The jury would have known of any criminal gangs in the neighborhood. They didn’t try to rehabilitate murderers in the good old days, they strung them up.”

  “You’re guessing too,” Meg said. “We don’t know enough. We’ll have to find out.”

  Andy gave a snort of laughter. “You’re planning to solve a murder almost two hundred and fifty years old, when the people on the spot couldn’t do it? I’m a crime nut myself, but I know my limitations.”

  “We have to try.”

  “Why?” Andy’s eyes narrowed. “I can think of a damned good reason why we shouldn’t try. You’re getting obsessed, Meg. At first you were the skeptic. Now… maybe the word I want is ‘possessed’ instead of ‘obsessed.” You keep this up, and you’ll go crazy.“

  “You’re the one who’s crazy. What are you afraid of? Anyone with a spark of imagination would be fascinated by this business and determined to go ahead with it. But you… What do you know that you haven’t told me? What’s your problem?”

  Andy jumped up.

  “I am crazy—crazy insane, to get mixed up with a weirdo like you. I must have been out of my mind to suggest this. Well, I’ve come to my senses. Play ghosts all you want, but leave me out of it.”

  He started toward the door. Meg ran after him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the cottage. I’m not going to sleep in this damned house tonight, and if you have any sense—which you don’t—you’ll come with me.”

  “Andy, wait…”

  She caught his arm. He tried to pull away, but she hung on with both hands. She meant only to detain him; but she must have known, as he did, what might happen. Once it began, neither of them could move; they were held as still as the image they saw.

  It was daylight in that other place. Sunlight streamed in the narrow windows and let them see more clearly than they had yet seen. A table stood in the center of the room. The old man was seated at it, and the girl sat across from him. They were eating. At least the girl was; she had a spoon halfway to her lips. The old man’s head was bent over a book that lay beside his neglected plate. For the first time, Meg could see their features.

  The girl was charming. Her eyes were lowered so that their color was not discernible; long lashes, of a striking dark gold, cast shadows on her delicately molded cheeks. Her face was narrow and pointed, and her parted lips s
howed her small white teeth.

  The old man’s face was as distinctive as the girl’s fragile prettiness. He must have been a strikingly handsome youth, and he was still handsome, with the austerity old age gives to bones and muscles stripped of superfluous flesh. His mouth was still firm, his nose straight; his shock of white hair shone in the sunlight. The hand lying on the table had the long, thin fingers of an artist or philosopher.

  Meg strained to see, as the image faded. Artist or not, old Mr. Huber would not have been easy prey for a murderer. Those lean fingers would curve knowledgeably around the hilt of a sword, and the broad shoulders had strength enough to wield it well.

  Her reflections were rudely interrupted by a growl from Andy. The image was gone, and Andy was going. Jerking his arm away, he headed straight for the front door. Meg was close behind him, with no clear notion of what she meant to do. She knew better than to touch him; he would probably knock her down if she did, he was in such a state.

  Andy opened the door—and stopped, so suddenly he rocked back on his heels. Meg felt it too, even before she saw what was outside. It poured into the house like a flood of evil-smelling gas.

  The half-grown moon, high in the sky, cast a thin light over the lawn. The shadows it made were faint; but those other shadows were not the products of moonlight. Tall, columnar shapes of blackness, they hovered in the wider, paler shadow of the big oak. The horror emanated from them, whatever they were—and Meg thought she knew what they were.

  She had only one aim—to close a barrier between herself and the terror out in the night. The futility of the gesture never occurred to her. No material obstacle can stop the pressure of spiritual evil; but the horror had entered when the door opened, and Meg knew she had to get it closed.

  Sure enough, the slam of the door snapped the spell. Meg leaned against it. sick and shaking. Andy staggered back.

  “That was what you felt, the other night?” Meg whispered.

  Andy nodded dumbly.

  “I owe you an apology,” Meg said. “That was the worst… Let’s go write it down.”

  “You’re not crazy,” Andy said, staring. “You’re inhuman. Write it down, she says! Give me fifteen minutes with that bottle of bourbon and I won’t be able to write.”

  “You’re going to drink—now?”

  “I’m going to get drunk,” Andy corrected. “Now.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not.”

  “No, I guess I’m not,” Andy said, after a moment. “That would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it? I guess I’m not leaving, either.”

  “Not unless you’re braver than I think you are. I wonder what would happen if—”

  Andy caught her wrist as she reached for the knob, and then dropped it, as if it were hot.

  “You try to open that door and I’ll break your arm.”

  “I haven’t got the courage either,” Meg admitted weakly. “I keep thinking that if we faced them… What can they do to us? They’re only shadows.”

  “Shadows of killers,” Andy said. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “They were man-shaped, man-sized. Yes, that’s what I think. And you?”

  As she had discovered, the way to cure Andy of his fear was to make him start thinking. His face lost some of its sickly pallor as he spoke.

  “The problem in these cases is always the same. How do you separate genuine perception from hallucination based on expectation? You can start out with a legitimate experience, but almost at once it becomes contaminated. We learned about the murders tonight. Presto, chango, the murderers appear. I didn’t see distinct shapes, only shadows.”

  “But the feeling—the horror, the dread—”

  “Just what we imagine the inhabitants of the house would feel if they looked out and saw death walking toward them.”

  “You felt it before. Before we found out about the murders.”

  Andy didn’t like this reminder. “Meg, I can’t think anymore tonight. But I’m not going to sleep much—not till the good old sun comes up and the fatal anniversary is over.”

  “Silly,” Meg said angrily. “You’re scaring yourself, Andy, like a kid watching the late monster movie. You think the murder is reenacted on the anniversary of the day it happened? Okay, suppose it is. Shadows, striking down other shadows. They can’t touch us, they don’t even know we’re here, if this is just a mechanical repetition of what happened in the past. But I think your hypothesis is wrong. The scene we just saw now was unrelated to the murder; it was daylight in that other room, not night. Anyhow, it’s almost midnight now. The murders were committed much earlier. The visitor who found the bodies wouldn’t come calling in the small hours of the morning.”

  “Damn,” Andy said. He looked almost normal now; he even smiled feebly. “How I hate being outthought by a woman. Want to arm wrestle?”

  “Anything to take your mind off your morbid thoughts. Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow, come hell or high water, we are going to Reading. We’re going to find out more about this. Andy, there might even be a report in the Philadelphia papers.”

  “I’ll go to bed and pull the covers over my head, but I won’t sleep.”

  “Oh, come on.” She started for the stairs.

  Andy lingered, glancing uneasily at the door. “Amazing, how it cut off when the door closed. I wonder if they’re still out there.”

  “Go ahead and look if you want to. I don’t care what’s out there, as long as it stays out.”

  “True.” Andy followed. On the landing, under the large stained-glass window, Meg stumbled. Andy’s grab at her elbow was an instinctive gesture…

  The girl stood by a window, but it was not the rose window of the Victorian house. The walls were thick and the window was small. Its panes were streaked with rain. The girl’s face was pressed against the glass. Her body strained forward, as if she were watching for something ardently desired. She was so close to Meg that the latter could have reached out an arm and touched her, but that Meg was not inclined to do. The figures appeared impalpable; but what if they were not? To touch the cold flesh of the dead, or the chilly clinging fog that was the stuff of the spirit… Meg shivered, and saw the bare boards of the upper hall take shape as the girl’s full skirts faded. This time the image had blotted out the real room. The visions were getting stronger.

  “God damn it!” Andy said. “This is getting monotonous. Every single damned time I touch you—”

  “Practice,” Meg said, with a casualness she did not feel. What—or who—was it Anna Maria was watching for?

  II

  Meg was awakened next morning by Andy’s call.

  “If we’re going to Reading, we’d better get started. Hurry up. I’ll get breakfast.”

  She heard him whistling as he went downstairs. At least he’s in a good mood this morning, Meg thought sleepily. Well, the sun is shining and we survived the night; that’s enough to put anyone in a good mood.

  She stretched lazily under the warm blankets and tried to remember the dream Andy had interrupted.

  It had begun with the image of Anna Maria standing by the rain-streaked window. Meg had given up any pretense of thinking of the girl anonymously; she was Anna Maria, Meg had no more doubt of that than she had of her own name. It was not surprising that the vision should have prompted the dream, but its sequence had been somewhat unusual. Instead of breaking up into the incoherent action of most dreams, which seem logical at the time but absurd in the cold light of day, this dream had proceeded with the slow dullness of real life. The girl had turned from the window with a sigh. The room was small, with sharply sloping eaves, and was obviously her bedroom. The narrow bed was covered with a white counterpane, delicately embroidered in shades of blue. The same pattern appeared on the bed-curtains, and even in sleep Meg felt a sharp pang of regret to think that such beautiful work had vanished.

  A straight chair with a rush seat and two large chests were the only other furnishings of the room, except for a curtain across one corner, which hid the
washstand with its load of china utensils and a cord on which the girl’s clothes were hung. Meg knew what was behind the curtain, although she couldn’t have explained how she knew it. In the dream, no explanations were necessary.

  Anna Maria knelt down in front of one of the chests and opened it. It was filled with neatly folded pieces of cloth—petticoats and other undergarments. She was lifting out one of these articles when Andy’s voice shattered the dream.

  As Meg dressed, she debated whether or not to tell Andy about the dream. She decided not to. He would deny that a dream was a valid source of information and, after all, she had learned nothing from it—except what Anna Maria’s bedroom looked like. It was precisely what she would have expected in a house of that era.

  They breakfasted hastily, and got in the car. Meg couldn’t see that Andy’s work had noticeably improved the vehicle’s performance; it groaned and jerked every foot of the way. It got them to Reading, though, and by asking at a gas station they found the building in which the Historical Association was located.