“Enough,” Andy said with a groan. “Please—”
“He figured God was chastising him,” Meg went on remorselessly. “I would have, if I’d been God… You’ll be sorry to hear that in later life he became rich and respected throughout the colony.”
Andy refused to comment. Meg took pity on him and turned the page.
“No Hubers,” she announced, after an interval.
“What?”
“No Hubers in the family tree. That finishes your idea that Anna Maria married an Emig. I believe this man; nobody could write a book as dull as this and get his facts wrong.”
“How do you know there aren’t any Hubers?”
“There’s an index.” Meg demonstrated, lifting the book and riffling through the back pages. As she did so, a white rectangle slipped out of the book. It was a letter, addressed to Meg. Mrs. Adams had cheated the United States mails; the package had been sent at the lower rate appropriate to printed matter. Meg opened the letter.
“You’ve got to see this,” she said. “She’s underlined every other word. What an old darling she is. All these vague hints… That’s funny.”
Altered by the change in her voice, Andy looked up.
“Here it is again,” Meg said. “The suggestion that your family is related to the Hubers. She says, ”It is, of course, only a legend, part of the family tradition, that I pass on; perhaps I ought to have mentioned it when I saw you, but I hesitate, even now, to recall such a tragedy.“ What do you suppose she means?”
“God only knows. Why don’t you shut up and let me read these letters?”
Meg paid no attention; she was too absorbed in what she was reading. After the first few words she began to read aloud.
“… the legend concerns the young soldier of militia, stationed in a nearby town, who was the girl’s lover. Word reached the doomed family, early that evening, that danger threatened. The legend does not name the messenger; he was presumably a neighbor who suspected the assassins’ intentions. He feared their vengeance too much to remain, but he consented to carry an appeal from the young woman to her betrothed, in the nearby town. She would not leave her grandfather, who refused to take the warning seriously. There was ample time, she declared, for help to reach them. And so there would have been, had the captain heeded the appeal. It was faithfully delivered, although it took the unknown messenger too long to find his quarry; and when he finally ran him to earth he found the young soldier drinking and dicing in a tavern. He laughed at the wild message, and the messenger dared not linger. Later, when the wine was gone, the young man reconsidered. He set out for the lonely farmhouse, though he thought the message foolish; and when he arrived, he found—but you know what he found.
“There is an equally tragic sequel, according to the same legend. For several days the neighbors searched the woods for the missing girl, to no avail. On the third day a body was found—not the body of the girl, but that of her lover. He had been shot with his own pistol. Since the rites of his faith condemned the suicide to unhallowed ground, his family insisted that he had been the victim of an unfortunate accident. Their appeal was successful; but those who knew felt that the young man had taken his own life, overcome by his sense of guilt at having failed to—‘”
Andy’s chair went over with a splintering crash. When Meg looked up she saw him leaning toward her, across the table; his hands were pressed hard against its surface and his eyes looked almost black.
“What is this?” he asked, in a queer, quiet voice. “Some crazy idea of therapy? Sylvia told you, I suppose. What did she tell you? That smug, sanctimonious… She never knew the half of it. Both of you, thinking you know what’s good for other people… I was all right till you came here. I had it under control. I stopped dreaming. It wasn’t my fault! How did I know she was really taking the damned stuff? It wasn’t the first time she called me. Five, six times before… False alarms, all of them. I’d go tearing over to her place, scared out of my wits, stomach pump in hand—and find her sitting there doing that damned embroidery, grinning at me. How was I supposed to know that the last time she really had taken an overdose? I had an appointment that evening. With the publisher, about my book. If I had gone…”
He stopped for breath. His voice had gradually risen, become shriller and quicker. Meg felt sick. The tumbling, incoherent words made terrible sense to her.
“If you had gone, you’d have been in time to save her life,” she said, through stiff lips. “Who was she? Someone who loved you? Someone you loved—once? But you had stopped loving her. You must have, or you would have gone to her. She wouldn’t have died.”
“Love!” Andy laughed wildly. “What are you talking about? She was just a girl, a girl I… knew. One of those things… But she wouldn’t let go. She kept talking about love too. You women always do. She didn’t love me. She used me—as an audience for her sick performances. The way you’re using me now! You invented that bloody legend. You must have; it fits too damned well. You—always you! The catalyst, the focus— you and your obsession with a dead girl. I was all right, everything was all right, till you came!”
“No,” Meg said. “Not me—you. Not my obsession with a dead girl—your guilt and your shame, the catalyst that invokes his guilt and his shame. That’s what you feel, in the drawing room, out there under the tree—his horror, when he learned what had happened. She waited, and he didn’t come. She’s still waiting. I didn’t make it up, Andy. Read the letter, if you don’t believe me. No wonder he can’t rest. He died in mortal sin, taking his own life; guilt and remorse had driven him mad. My God, if ever a house deserved to be haunted, this one does!”
Andy’s body sagged until his whole weight rested on his hands, flat against the table. He began to shiver.
“The house isn’t haunted,” he said, trying to control his voice. “You’re right. It’s me, not the house. I try to justify myself, make excuses; but the hard fact remains, I failed another human being who needed help. It doesn’t matter what she was, or how I felt about her. She needed help and I didn’t give it. I’m doing it again now—trying to blame you for something I caused. You caught it from me, like a bad cold in the head. All my fault, always my fault. There’s only one way of dealing with a spiritual leper… Everything I touch… I won’t let it happen to you.” He turned and walked out of the room. The movement was so sudden Meg didn’t understand at first. When realization dawned she felt a stab of terror that made her former fears tolerable by comparison. She ran after him.
Gray moonlight filtered in through the curtained rectangles of glass flanking the front door. The wind was rising, sweeping away the last of the clouds. Meg could hear it battering the trees and whistling around the eaves. She paused long enough to turn on the lights. She craved light as a starving man craves food; there was too much darkness, all around. Andy stopped, putting his hand up to shield his eyes. As Meg ran to him he turned a blank face toward her and waited, with a dreadful remote courtesy, to hear what she had to say.
“That’s not the way,” Meg shouted, shaking him; she would have said anything, done anything, to bring some emotion into that white mask of a face. “We’re both wrong, Andy. It isn’t you or me alone; it’s both of us. The thing is here, it’s been here all along; we only gave it an opening, a way through. Feeling guilty doesn’t help. It just makes things worse. Guilt is a cheap way of copping out. Andy, help me. I think I’m in love with you. Don’t walk out on me.”
A flicker of emotion marred the calm of Andy’s face.
“I think I’m in love with you too. That’s why I can’t stay around you.”
He shook Meg off with a dispassionate violence that sent her staggering back, and opened the front door.
From where she stood, flattened and breathless against the wall, she felt it like a wave of icy water. She saw, too— straight past Andy’s motionless body, out across the lawn.
They were not shadows. They were men, or the exact similaera of what had once been human. Three of them
. Tall, burly men, bearded; dressed in somber black, with broad-brimmed black hats pulled low over their foreheads. The moonlight was bright, but not bright enough to show them so distinctly, for they stood in the shadow of the oak tree. Another kind of light, faint yet sufficient, shone around them, so that Meg could make out even their features. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that she knew one of them—recognized the heavy jutting jaw and the bulbous nose. He looked incredibly like his descendant, the Benjamin Emig who had built Trail’s End, but he had never known this house. He and his companions were standing before another house. Trapped in a spiderweb of time, they eternally repeated the crime they had committed over two hundred years before. The murderer of Christian Huber was his neighbor, Andy’s ancestor, John Emig.
Chapter 13
Meg never remembered how she got the door closed. She crawled the last few feet; it was like making progress underwater, in freezing Arctic cold. But she did it, somehow, and when she stood gasping, her back against the wooden panel, she saw that something had happened to Andy. His face was not a pleasant sight; too many emotions warred for supremacy on his features.
“They moved,” he said.
“I know.” Meg’s teeth were chattering. “None of them ever moved before. Andy, you were wrong about the date, you must have been. This is the night. This is what they’ve been working up to, all along.”
“The date.” Andy clutched his head in both hands. “My brain’s all shook up, I can’t think… I’ve got to. What is it, about a date… ?”
Spinning around, he ran toward the drawing room.
Meg followed, the old fear revived, but when she saw what he was doing, fear yielded to relief and then to bewilderment. He was kneeling on the floor in front of the bookcase. Before him was an open volume of the encyclopedia.
When he looked up, his face was alight with an incredible amusement.
“October eleventh,” he said. “That was the date of the murder, wasn’t it? I wasn’t wrong about that; you checked the newspapers, they agreed. But in 1752 England revised the old Gregorian calendar. It was based on a year of three hundred sixty-five and a quarter days. The astronomical year is longer than that by several minutes; in 1752 the calendar was more than a week off. So they fixed it, by adding ten days. Every date before 1752 is ten days off, according to our reckoning. Modern historians automatically correct for that. Apparently my source didn’t, and the newspaper account naturally had the old date. The old October eleventh is our October twenty-first. Today.”
Meg nodded dumbly. The news didn’t reassure her. She couldn’t understand why it had had such an electrifying effect on Andy. He saw her confusion; rising to his feet, he came toward her.
“Don’t you see? If my confused subconscious made that complex calendrical adjustment when it invented a stable of ghosts, I take off my hat to it. I read something about the change in the calendar—somewhere, sometime—but I don’t recall ever reading the precise number of days involved. The ghosts are real, Meg. I’m not—completely crazy.”
Meg’s knees gave way. She caught at the back of a chair for support.
“All right,” she said. It was an inadequate response; but at moments of extreme emotion the mind is often reduced to inconsequentialities. Meg’s emotions were all at fever pitch; overriding the others was simple animal terror. “So do something. I can’t stand much more. You saw—you recognized him, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Ordinarily I’d be mildly distressed to find a murderer among my ancestors. Right now I can’t seem to worry about it. Let’s see…” He went to the window and drew the draperies back. After a moment he turned to Meg. “They’re moving, all right,” he said flatly. “Slowly; but they are coming. I still say they can’t hurt us, Meg. They aren’t real. What can they do?”
“Do you want to stick around and find out?” Meg asked. Her teeth were still chattering.
“My poor love.” He held out his arms. “Shall we risk it?”
Meg didn’t hesitate. She stumbled across the space that separated them and fell into his embrace. She wanted to close her eyes, but they weren’t working very well; they stared, wide, as the shadows shivered and the penultimate vision shaped itself.
It was night in the other room, which was lighted by firelight and the glow of candles. They were all there— Christian Huber, his granddaughter, and the old servant, who was huddled by the hearth in boneless, mindless terror. Huber stood by the table. The girl clung to his arm. She was no longer pretty; her open mouth was a black hole, and her face was witless with fear. Christian’s other hand held his sword. He had been a fine figure of a man in youth, and he still looked magnificent—straight and slim as a boy one quarter of his age, his white hair rampant and his face flushed with defiance. In the last minutes before the end, the old man’s philosophy had deserted him. He knew the truth and faced it like a soldier.
Meg blinked. When she opened her eyes, the room was back to normal.
“So long as that’s over…” said Andy, and kissed her.
For a few seconds Meg forgot ghosts, murders, and all minor details. Then memory returned; she pushed at Andy till he let her go.
“Howcanyoudo that at a timelikethis?”she demanded, outraged.
Andy laughed. His face was flushed; his hair, damp with perspiration, stuck up in absurd wisps. He looked drunk. “I’m fey. How much can a poor worn-out brain stand before it cracks? Old Huber shaped up, didn’t he, at the last minute? I wonder how much damage he inflicted before they got him. Clubs against a single blade—he couldn’t last long. But I’ll bet a few of the sanctimonious jurymen at the hearing had bandages under their black clothes.” “Andy…” Meg groaned.
“Okay, okay. Suppose we try to get out of here. Maybe the back door is unguarded. Unless you want to retreat to the attic? It’s above the space occupied by the earlier house.”
“I want out,” said Meg emphatically. “No, don’t look out the window. Let’s go.”
Hand in hand they ran through the hall and into the passage that led to the kitchen. Andy kept turning on lights as they went; he shared Meg’s hatred of darkness. The final light, the one in the kitchen, brought an incongruous figure out of the darkness—a man who stood paralyzed by their sudden eruption into the room.
Culver was a pitiable sight. He was wearing a stained, torn jacket over his familiar T shirt. His eyes were rimmed with red. His mouth gaped open; a thin trickle of saliva oozed out of one corner. He looked sick, undernourished—and dangerous. The reddened eyes were as mad as those of a rabid fox.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said suddenly. “Why didn’t you stay in the other room? I have a rope.” He pulled his jacket aside and showed them; the rope was coiled around his meager waist. “I was gonna lower the stuff from the window and then get out the same way. You wouldn’t ever know. Now you’ve loused it up! Why couldn’t you stay where you belong?”
He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket. Meg gasped, and grabbed at Andy, who was making queer gurgling noises. He shook her off.
“First ghosts,” said Andy, getting his voice under control with an effort. “Haunted houses, homicidal maniacs on the family tree, murderers besieging the house— and now this. A goddamned rotten little junky burglar! I tell you, I’ve had it. This is too damned much!”
Meg doubted whether he ever saw the gun, but he probably would have done the same thing even if he had seen it. He was literally beside himself.
The gun went off with a flash and a roar. Andy’s body jerked back; he stood swaying by the counter, which had stopped his backward movement. An expression of intense surprise spread over his face; he looked down at his sleeve, where a trickle of blood had started to spread.
Culver looked just as surprised. The gun dangled loosely from his hand. Meg couldn’t decide whether to jump at him or to help Andy. He did not appear to be in immediate danger of collapse. On the other hand, Meg was a self-confessed coward, and Culver’s reactions, with or witho
ut a gun, were totally unpredictable.
Culver solved the problem for her. Waving the gun in all directions, he backed out of the room. His footsteps pounded along the hall and went up the stairs. A single-minded man, he was still after the antiques.
“He’s flipped,” she said, staring at Andy. “Does he really think we’re going to let him—”
“I’m going to let him do any little thing he wants, as long as he has a gun,” Andy said. “Damn. I didn’t think he had the guts to use it.”
He was clutching his upper arm, but the blood still spread. It was dripping from his fingertips now. Meg started toward him, but he shook his head.
“We’ve got to get to a phone. Come on, the extension in the library is the closest.”
He was gone before she could say anything. Meg stared at the small red puddle on the floor by the counter. Jerking open one of the drawers, she grabbed a fistful of cloth— dishcloths, potholders, anything—and went after Andy.
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