by Anthology
“Would you mind taking the car into the village and getting this filled again?” she asked. Her eyes had dark shadows beneath them; she had evidently not slept, the night before.
I flatter myself that I did not betray to her in any way my perturbation. Indeed, the event had fallen on a mind so ripe for solutions that, in the very instant of my facing her, I realized that what I had just seen above-stairs (and seen by mistake, I can assure you; she had fled from me) was Lithway’s old ghost—no less. I took the bottle, read the label, and assured Mrs. Lithway that I would go at once. Mrs. Lithway was wrapped in a darkish house-gown of some sort. The lady in the upper hall had been in white, with a blue sash . . . I was very glad when I saw Mrs. Lithway go into her husband’s room and shut the door. I was having hard work to keep my expression where it belonged. For five minutes I stood in the hall; five minutes of unbroken stillness. Then I went to the garage, ordered out the car, and ran into the village, where I presented the bottle to the apothecary. He filled it immediately. As I re-entered the house, the great hall clock struck; it was half-past eleven. I sent the stuff—lime-water, I believe—up to Mrs. Lithway by a servant, went into my room, and locked the door.
I cannot say that I solved the whole enigma of Braythe in the hour before luncheon; but I faced for the first time the seriousness of a situation that had always seemed to me, save for Lithway’s curious reactions upon it, more than half fantastic, if not imaginary. I had seen, actually seen, Lithway’s ghost. I had not been meant to see her; and I was inclined to regret the sudden impulse that had led me to leave Lithway’s library and go to my own room. The identity of the “ghost” with Mrs. Lithway was appalling to me—the more so, that there could have been no mistake about the nature of the personality that had reluctantly presented itself to my vision. I found myself saying: “Could that look in her eyes be the cross light on the stairs?” and then suddenly remembered that I was only echoing the Lithway of years ago. It was incredible that any man should have liked the creature I had seen; and I could account for Lithway’s long and sentimental relation with the apparition only by supposing that he had never seen her, as I had, quite off her guard. But if, according to his hint of the night before, he had come to confound the ghost with the real woman—what sort of marriage was that? I asked myself. The ghost was a bad lot, straight through. It brought me into the realm of pure horror. The event explained—oh, I raised my hands to wave away the throng of things it explained! Indeed, until I could talk once more with Lithway, I didn’t want to face them; I didn’t want to see clear. I had a horrid sense of being left alone with the phantoms that infested the house: alone, with a helpless, bedridden friend to protect. Mrs. Lithway didn’t need protection—that was clearer than anything else. Mrs. Lithway was safe.
Before night, the consultation had been held, and it was decided that Lithway should be rushed straight to town for an operation. The pain was not absolutely constant; he had tranquil moments; but the symptoms were alarming enough to make them afraid of even a brief delay. We were to take him up the next morning. To all my offers of help, Mrs. Lithway gave a smiling refusal. She could manage perfectly, she said. I am bound to say that she did manage perfectly, thinking of everything, never losing her head, unfailingly adequate, though the shadows under her eyes seemed to grow darker hour by hour. A nurse had come down from town, but I could hardly see what tasks Mrs. Lithway left to the nurse. I did my best, out of loyalty to the loyal Lithway, to subdue my aversion to his wife. I hoped that my aversion was quite unreasonable and that, safe in Europe, I should feel it so. I ventured to say, after dinner, that I hoped she would try to get some sleep.
“Oh, yes, I shall!” She smiled. “There will be a great deal to do to-morrow; and the day after, when they operate, will be a strain. There’s nothing harder than waiting outside. I know.” Her eyes filled, but she went on very calmly. “I am so grateful to you for being here and for going up with us. I have no people of my own, you know, to call on. You have been the greatest comfort.” She gave me a cool hand, said “good night,” and left me.
I do not know whether or not Mrs. Lithway slept, but I certainly did not, save in fitful dozes. I was troubled about Lithway: I thought him in very bad shape for an operation; and I had, besides, nameless forebodings of every sort. It was a comfort, the next morning, to hear him, through an open door, giving practical suggestions to his wife and the nurse about packing his things. I went in to see him before we started off. The doctor was down-stairs with Mrs. Lithway.
“Sorry to let you in for this, my boy. But you are a great help.”
“Mrs. Lithway is wonderful,” I said. “I congratulate you.”
His somber eyes held me. “Ah, you will never know how wonderful—never!” He said it with a kind of brooding triumph, which, at the moment, I did not wholly understand. Now, long afterwards, I think I do.
I left him, and crossed the corridor to my own room. A slight rustle made me turn. Mrs. Lithway stood in the upper hall, looking down at me—the same creature, to every detail of dress, even to the folded paper in her hand, that I had seen the previous morning. This time I braced myself to face the ghost, to examine her with a passionate keenness. I hoped to find her a less appalling creature. But, at once, Mrs. Lithway leaned over the rail and spoke to me—a little sharply, I remember.
“Would you please telephone to the garage and say that the doctor thinks we ought to start ten minutes earlier than we had planned? I shall be down directly.”
The hand that held the paper was by this time hidden in the folds of her skirt. She turned and sped lightly along the corridor to the trunk-loft. Save for the voice, it was a precise repetition of what had happened the day before.
“Certainly,” I said; but I did not turn away until she had disappeared into the trunk-loft. I went to the telephone and gave the message; it took only a few seconds. Then I went to my own room, leaving the door open so that I commanded the hall. In a few minutes Mrs. Lithway came down the stairs from the third story. “Did you telephone?” she asked accusingly, as she caught my eye. I bowed. She passed on into Lithway’s room. There was no paper in her hand. I knew that this time there had been no ghost.
Well . . . Lithway, as everyone knows, died under the ether. His heart suddenly and unaccountably went back on him. He left no will; and, as he had no relations except the cousin whom he had married, everything went to her. I had once, before his second marriage, seen a will of Lithway’s myself; but I didn’t care to go into court with that information, especially as in that will he had left me his library. I should have liked, for old sake’s sake, to have Lithway’s library. His widow sold it, and it is by now dispersed about the land. She told me, after the funeral, that she should go on at Braythe, that she never wanted to leave it; but, for whatever reason, she did, after a few years, sell the place suddenly and go to Europe. I have never happened to see her since she sold it, and I did not know the people she sold it to. The house was burned many years ago, I believe, and an elaborate golf-course now covers the place where it stood. I have not been to Braythe since poor Lithway was buried.
I took the hunting-trip that Lithway had been so violently and inexplicably opposed to. I think I was rather a fool to do it, for I ought to have realized, after Lithway’s death, the secret of the house, its absolutely unique specialty. But such is the peacock heart of man that I still, for myself, trusted in “common sense”—in my personal immunity, at least, from every supernatural law. Indeed, it was not until I had actually encountered my savage, and got the wound I bear the scar of, that I gave entire credence to Lithway’s tragedy. I put some time into recovering from the effect of that midnight skirmish in the jungle, and during my recovery I had full opportunity to pity Lithway.
It became quite clear to me that the presences at Braythe concerned themselves only with major dooms. If Lithway’s ghost had been his wife, his wife must have been a bad lot. I am as certain as I can be of anything that he was exceedingly unhappy with her. It wa
s a thousand pities that, for so many years, he had misunderstood the vision; that he had permitted himself—for that was what it amounted to—to fall in love with her in advance. She was, quite literally, his “fate.” Of course, by this time, I feel sure that he couldn’t have escaped her. I don’t believe the house went in for kindly warnings; I think it merely, with the utmost insolence, foretold the inevitable and dared you to escape it. If I hadn’t gone out for big game in Africa, I am quite sure that my nigger would have got at me somewhere else—even if he had to be a cannibal out of a circus running amuck down Broadway. That was the trick of the house: the worst thing that was going to happen to you leered at you authentically over that staircase. I have never understood why I saw Lithway’s apparition; but I can bear witness to the fact that she was furious at my having seen her—as furious as Mrs. Lithway was, the next day, if it comes to that. It was a mistake. My step may have sounded like Lithway’s. Who knows? At least it should be clear what Lithway meant when he said that he didn’t always know whether he saw her or not. The two were pin for pin alike. The apparition, of course, had, from the beginning, worn the dress that Mrs. Lithway was to wear on the day that Lithway was taken to the hospital. I have never liked to penetrate further into the Lithways’ intimate history. I am quite sure that the folded paper was the old will, but I have always endeavored, in my own mind, not to implicate Margaret Lithway more than that. Of course, there could never have been any question of implicating her before the public.
I never had a chance, after my own accident, to consult Wender. I stuck to Europe unbrokenly for many years, as he stuck to America. Both Wender and I, I fancy, were chary of writing what might have been written. Some day, I thought, we would meet and have the whole thing out; but that day never came. Suddenly, one autumn, I had news of his death. He was a member of a summer expedition in Utah and northern Arizona—I think I mentioned that he had gone in for American ethnology. There are, as everyone knows, rich finds in our western States for anyone who will dig long enough; and they were hoping to get aboriginal skulls and mummies. All this his sister referred to when she wrote me the particulars of his death. She dwelt with forgivable bitterness on the fact of Wender’s having been told beforehand that the particular section he was assigned to was free from rattlesnakes: “Perhaps you know,” she wrote, “that my brother had had, since childhood, a morbid horror of reptiles.” I did know it—Lithway had told me. Wender’s death from the bite of a rattlesnake was perhaps the most ironic of the three adventures; for Wender was the one of us who put most faith in the scenes produced on the stage of Braythe. I never heard Wender’s theory; but I fancy he realized, as Lithway and I did not, that since the “ghosts” we saw were not of the past they must be of the future—a most logical step, which I am surprised none of us should have taken until after the event.
Wender’s catastrophe killed in me much of my love of wandering. At least, it drove me to Harry Medway; and Harry Medway did the rest. I am not afraid of another warrior’s cutting at me with his assegai; but I do not like to be too far from specialists. I have already been warned that I may sometime go blind; and I know that other complications may be expected. Pathology and surgery are sealed books to me; but I still hold so far to logic that I fully expect to die some time as an indirect result of that wound. The scar reminds me daily that its last word has not been said.
I am a fairly old man—the older that I no longer wander, and that I cling so weakly to the great capitals which hold the great physicians. The only thing that I was ever good at I can no longer do. Curiosity has died in me, for the most, part; one or two such mighty curiosities have been, you see, already so terribly appeased. But I think I would rise from my death-bed, and wipe away with my own hand the mortal sweat from my face, for the chance of learning what it was that drove Mrs. Lithway, in midwinter, from Braythe. If I could once know what she saw on the staircase, I think I should ask no more respite. The scar might fulfill its mission.
ON THE WATCHTOWER AT PLATAEA
Garry Kilworth
There was the chilling possibility, despite Miriam’s assurance that she would dissuade the government from physical confrontation, that I might receive the order to go out and kill my adversary in the temple. They might use the argument that our future existence depended on an answer to be dredged up from the past. I wondered if I could do such a thing: and if so, how? Would I sneak from the watchtower in the night, like an assassin, and murder him in his bed? Or challenge him to single combat, like a true noble warrior is supposed to? The whole idea of such a confrontation made me feel ill and I prayed that if it should come to such a pass, they would send someone else to do the bloody job. I have no stomach for such things.
It was a shock to find that the expedition could go no further back than 429 BC: though for some of us, it was not an unwelcome one. Miriam was perhaps the only one amongst us who was annoyed that we couldn’t get to Pericles. He had died earlier, in the part of the year we couldn’t reach. So near—but we had hit a barrier, as solid as a rockface on the path of linear time, in the year that the Peloponnesian War was gaining momentum. It was the night that Sparta and its allies were to take positive action against the Athenians by attacking a little walled city-state called Plataea. Plataea, with its present garrison of 400 local hoplites and some eighty seconded Athenians, was virtually the only mainland supporter of Athens in the war amongst the Greeks. It was a tiny city-state, even by ancient world standards—perhaps a mile in circumference—and it was heavily outnumbered by the besieging troops led by the Spartan king, Archidamus. It didn’t stand a chance, but by God it put up resistance which rivalled The Alamo for stubbornness, and surpassed it for inventiveness.
Miriam suggested we set up the recording equipment in an old abandoned watchtower on a hill outside the city. From there we could see the main gates, and could record both the Spartan attempts at breaching the walls and the defenders as they battled to keep the invaders at bay. The stonework of the watchtower was unstable, the timber rotting, and it was probably only used to shelter goats. We did not, therefore, expect to be interrupted while we settled in. In any case, while we were “travelling”, we appeared as insubstantial beings and were seldom confronted. The tower was ideal. It gave us the height we needed to command a good view, and had aged enough to be a respectable establishment for spectral forms.
There were three of us in the team. Miriam was the expedition’s leader; John was responsible for the recording equipment; and I was the official communicator, in contact with base camp, AD 2017. By 429, we were not at our harmonious best, having been away from home for a very long time: long enough for all our habits and individual ways to get on each other’s nerves to the point of screaming. I suppose we were all missing home to a certain extent, though why we should want to go back to a world where four-fifths of the population was on the streets, starving, and kept precariously at bay by the private military armies of privileged groups, was never raised. We ourselves, of course, belonged to one of those groups, but we were aware of the instability of the situation and the depressingly obvious fact that we could do nothing to influence it. The haves were no longer in a position to help the have nots, even given the desire to do such. One of the reasons for coming on the expedition was to escape my guilt—and the constant wars between the groups. It was, as always, a mess.
“What do base say?” asked Miriam.
I could see the watch fires on the nearby city walls through her ghostly form, as she moved restlessly around the walkway of the tower. John was doing something below.
“They believe the vortex must have an outer limit,” I said. “It would appear that we’ve reached it.”
This didn’t satisfy her, and I didn’t expect it to. Miriam did not operate on beliefs. She liked people to know.
“But why here? Why now? What’s so special about the year 429? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“You expect it to make sense?”
“I had hoped . . . oh, I d
on’t know. An answer which wasn’t still a question I suppose. Doesn’t it worry you? That suddenly we come up against a wall, without any apparent reason?”
I shrugged. “Surely natural limitations are a good enough reason. Human endeavour has often come up against such things—the sound barrier, for example. They believed that was impassable at the time, but they got through it in the end. Maybe this is a comparable problem?”
“It’s a bitch, I know that much,” she replied in a bitter tone. “I really wanted Pericles—and the earlier battles. Marathon. Thermopylae. Damn it, there’s so much we’ll have to leave. Mycenae and Agamemnon. We could have confirmed all that. If we can’t go back any further, Troy will remain covered in mist . . .”
Which was not altogether a bad thing as far as I was concerned. Already too many illusions had been wiped away. Why destroy all myth and legend, simply for the sake of facts? It’s a pretty boring world, once the magic has been stripped off.
“Well, perhaps we shouldn’t do it all at once,” I suggested. “I feel as if I’m drowning as it is . . . let someone else destroy Homer.”
She said, “We’re not destroying anything. We’re merely recording . . .”
“The truth,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my tone.
She glared at me, a silvery frown marring her handsome features. We had clashed in the same way several times recently and I think she was getting tired of my outbursts.
“You have an attitude problem, Stan—don’t make it my problem, too.”
“I won’t,” I said, turning away.
In the distance, I could hear the jingle of brass: the Spartan army tramping through the night, their torches clearly visible. These sounds and sights were the cause of some consternation and excitement amongst the Plataeans on the walls of the city. The enemy had arrived. Little figures ran to and fro, between the watch fires. They had known for a few hours that Archidamus was coming: Theban traitors, spies and double agents had been busy during the day, earning a crust. The warnings had come too late for flight, however, and it was now a case of defying the vastly superior force or surrendering the city. Some of the defenders were relying on the fact that Plataea was sacred ground—it had been consecrated after a successful battle with the Persians earlier in the century—but Archidamus was not a man to take much notice of that. There were ways of appealing to the gods for a suspension of holy rights, if the need was there.
