by Noel Hynd
Dr. Harold, the boys called him. Over several years, sightings on the third floor of the Birthday House dormitory became quite common, almost to the point where it was an initiation ritual. You weren’t really a resident of Birthday House until you had “met the professor.”
Some young men who “met the professor” were so terrified that they requested transfers to other locations. The university, understanding that some sort of problem existed, granted all requests.
Whether or not the ghost interacted with the living seemed to be a moot point, or rather one of interpretation of action and events. Several dozen students, over the course of six years, did see the ghost, however. To a man, they all recalled that Dr. Harold looked and sounded “like an ordinary, solid, normal human being. “
No transparent limbs, no shimmering. The ghost was indistinguishable from any other human being, right up until the moments when he would walk through a solid wall. The university students were emphatic. Dr. Harold was made of sterner stuff than one’s preconceived notion of a misty translucent spook.
So consider that if this is the nature of our university’s ghost,
wrote Dr. Mann,
it is very possible that many of us have seen ghosts many times. But as ghosts can pass for ordinary living people, we remain unaware of this. How many of the strangers we pass each day on the street may be stranger than we could ever imagine?
“Dr. Harold” hung around the University of Pennsylvania until one of his teaching assistants finished his body of research. Once that was done, the ghost disappeared, satisfied that his earthly commitment was finally complete, and moving on apparently to wherever he went next.
All of which, Brooks brooded, reflected only obliquely on the events of Cort Street. Speculation about the electromagnetic energy caused by a sexually aroused young girl might—if the point were stretched and if a certain disbelief were suspended—just might explain how bottles could fly off shelves or how a book could jump off a shelf.
But they didn’t answer Brooks’ most pressing questions—as a policeman, or as a friend—concerned with Annette.
How had Mary Elizabeth DiMarco, Bruce Markley and Emmet Hughes all died? Why had they died? What manifestation of the supernatural or unconscious mind could be tied to them?
Brooks felt himself more baffled than when he had begun. He began to move more quickly through the material that remained before him.
He glanced at something called The Spirits’ Book which had been published more than a hundred twenty years earlier. The author, a Frenchman who was a devout Christian writing in English, argued that man was a “fourfold being,” consisting of body, aura, intelligence and spiritual soul.
The purpose of existence on earth was to allow the spiritual soul to evolve toward perfection, the author postulated, and upon earthly death the spirits were said to wander in a nether region, then eventually be reincarnated on earth or in another region of existence.
Brooks rolled his eyes.
The book had been a best-seller in 1866. The author founded an influential Christian spiritualist movement in Europe after its publication and went more deeply into the tenets of reincarnation. He found himself at bitter odds with some Christian orthodoxy and warmly embraced by others. He promised his audience that eventually he would prove his theories dramatically by returning to earth and identifying himself after his death.
He died in 1872. In the seven score years that had followed, Brooks noted, he had not been heard from. Yet. Well, he never said exactly when he would return.
Brooks sighed. A glance at his watch showed that it was past noon. Annette would be finishing with Dr. Rossling near this time. They were to meet for lunch at two o’clock. Brooks went back to his reading.
He found a paper by William James, the philosopher, who was converted to believe in spiritualism by a medium named Mrs. Leonora Kachner. He found a pamphlet by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, and founder of analytic psychiatry, expressing his privately held views that “the metaphysic phenomena can be better explained by the hypothesis of spirits than by the peculiarities of the unconscious.”
Then he found an article of 1970 detailing the final months of the life of Bishop James Pike, the American Episcopalian bishop, who died in the Judean desert searching in vain for the spirit of his son, with whom he had said he had communicated.
On Brooks’ watch, one thirty arrived. He closed his final book.
Facts, he asked himself again. What were the facts?
He had read of more than two dozen hauntings. Yet none bore much extra light on Cort Street.
Parallels. Where were they?
Theory: Places that had ghosts—or poltergeists—were places where usually some extreme trauma had taken place. Or the ghosts themselves sprang from individuals who had suffered violent deaths. Or extra heartbreak. Or extreme sadness. Therefore, there always seemed to be an extreme emotional input into the situation surrounding a restless spirit. That was the one constant that seemed to have evolved from everything he had read.
Fact: Three deaths on Nantucket were probably attributable to the Cort Street haunting. On the back of an envelope, Brooks sketched a crude map of the island. The field in which Beth DiMarco died was about a hundred yards from 17 Cort Street. The shore at Surfside was about four miles away.
Brooks drew a lopsided triangle on the map, linking the three places. He wondered: Was there another way to link them? One buried in the history of the island? One touching upon tragic or traumatic events?
He saw none. He folded away the envelope without thinking much more about it and slid it into his pocket.
But he couldn’t shake the idea. In terms of trauma, in terms of some long-hidden event, something horrible in the past, mustn’t there have been something linking the places? He called up the name of a man about whom he knew nothing.
Henry Flaherty.
“Where are you, Henry?” Brooks whispered aloud. His voice carried so well in the library that someone in an adjoining study cubicle glanced his way, then looked back down to his work. “Come on. Talk to me.”
Henry didn’t answer, though. Henry wasn’t in the mood to issue responses. Then again, this time he probably wasn’t present. Then Brooks’ rational mind flitted off on a completely unrelated track, one so obvious that he shuddered over not having explored it earlier. Maybe there was an earthly explanation for all three deaths on the island. And maybe only two were related.
Might not he have been more prudent to canvas house to house following the deaths of DiMarco and Hughes? Might not it have been wiser to look for a human being all along? Might not there be some human killer lurking on the island?
Whatever happened to an old-fashioned concept like that? For some reason it was Dr. Youmans’ voice that then repeated upon him. “You’re an educated sort of young swine for a policeman. Ever read Poe’s Murder in the Rue Morgue?”
There Timothy Brooks was again, stuck with the supernatural. Shortly before two o’clock, Brooks returned every item he had accessed. He felt more confused than when he had started the day. What had he accomplished? By his own calculation, very little.
His head was lowered in mild dejection as he wandered out of the library and into Harvard Yard. It was a clear August day and he felt like walking a few blocks. He did, strolling toward Dr. Rossling’s office. It was halfway in that direction that a mild epiphany overtook him.
One additional small truth emerged from all he had read that morning, one which would grow as time passed. He thought back on the frequently seen ghost of Dr. Harold Pepper at the University of Pennsylvania.
A few of the phrases came back to him. A few of the things that the witnesses to the Philadelphia ghost had noted. The ghost of Dr. Pepper had looked and sounded “like an ordinary, solid, normal human being.” No transparent angles, no shimmering. The ghost was indistinguishable from a normal human being.
Brooks felt a surge of understanding. And shock. And fear.
So consider tha
t if this is the nature of our university’s ghost,
he recalled Dr. Mann writing,
it is very possible that many of us have seen ghosts many times.
But as ghosts can pass for ordinary living people, we remain unaware of this. How many of the strangers we pass each day on the street may be stranger than we could ever imagine?
Brooks stared ahead of him for several seconds. He wondered whether the truth itself was like a ghost: obvious, yet shocking, so blatant that it is difficult to believe even when it is clear and out in the open.
He met Annette at Dr. Rossling’s office twenty minutes later. They had lunch at a small French bistro on the fringe of the Harvard campus. She spoke well of the psychiatrist and said she would visit him again. But she had not yet set a date for a third appointment.
“You seem quiet,” she finally said to him over coffee. “I am quiet,” he said. “If you’d been reading about ghosts and discarnate spirits for four hours, you’d be quiet, too.”
She smiled. “I suppose I would be.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just turning over everything I’ve been reading. I went through an enormous amount of material.”
“Find anything?”
“I’m still thinking about it,” he answered. “Still thinking and frankly overwhelmed.”
They went from the restaurant to the airport and arrived back in Nantucket by four-thirty in the afternoon. It was only then, standing in the airport, that he thought of something.
He reached back into his pocket and withdrew the envelope upon which he had drawn a map of Nantucket and triangulated the areas where three murders, tinged possibly with the supernatural, had occurred.
He took out a pencil. He drew lines from the midpoints of each side of the triangle to one opposite side. He stood and stared as Annette, looking over his shoulder, watched also in silent astonishment.
The intersecting lines in the middle of a triangle formed a Christian cross. And at the intersection point of the cross, strangely enough, within the context of the crude hand-drawn map, would have been the location of George Osaro’s home.
“Coincidence?” Tim asked aloud.
Annette said nothing. They walked to his Jeep in silence.
Chapter Fifty-two
Slowly, the spirit rose several hours after dark from the earth beneath 17 Cort Street. It passed through the stone basement walls of Annette’s old house and emerged into the shadows of the aged trees on her front lawn.
There was a breeze that evening. The presence drifted to the street before Annette’s house.
It rested almost invisibly beside an elm tree on Main Street. To anyone who did not look that carefully, it appeared like any other shadow. It floated a few feet from the ground. No one saw it.
A pair of teenage girls wandered up Main Street. The girls giggled, in a conversation about their boyfriends. One cracked a large bubble from her gum and both laughed. A car passed. The specter followed the girls for a full block—in life, it had been drawn to girls early in their sexual prime—and then let them go.
Night. Blackness. Dark. Perfect for a restless unhappy animus to wander. It drifted across the old Quaker cemetery, the graveyard without the tombstones. Other spirits rumbled on this land, normally imperceptible to the living who passed. It was aware of a murmur of other spirits—some angry, some sad, some displaced, others passing through. It was like dozens of little wisps of smoke or steam flitting across the surface of the world, cast about by every slight breeze.
Dozens here. Dozens there. How many were there across the earthly surface of the planet? The same number—as Reverend Osaro might have paraphrased in his sickening divinity school way—as could dance on the head of a pin?
A car passed, radio blaring, a college boy and girl. On the island for the summer.
Care for some terror, young lady? Care for a night you will never forget?
The shadow passed through a red brick wall through the courtyard of a two-million-dollar mansion. It drifted through a parking lot for the supermarket and then across an open meadow.
Several minutes later, like a little dark cloud it neared the Jeep Wrangler parked in the driveway before Tim Brooks’ house. It loitered outside. It formulated itself, then defined itself. It gained mass and it divided, summoning up its own sense of willpower.
Then it passed through the outer walls of Brooks’ home. It loomed in the hallway beyond his bedroom.
It could hear voices. A man and a woman.
Annette. Timothy.
They couldn’t hear him. It kept its thoughts—its impulses, particularly the hideous homicidal ones—to itself. It cast a long shadow in the hallway just outside their bedroom door. But neither Annette nor Timothy looked to see it.
They were lying together on his bed.
Their actions, their continuing fulfillment of their physical affection, made the ghost very angry. One of the lovers reached to the bedside lamp and extinguished it. The spirit passed through the wall. The lovers were so busy with each other that they didn’t even see it when it came through to the other side and took a position in the corner of their bedroom.
Watching them.
Brooks didn’t even sense it. Not now, anyway. Not while the policeman was indulging in the carnal satisfactions that woman offered him.
The lovers were visible in the moonlight from outside. The man held the woman very close to him. He kissed her lips and breasts as his hand slowly caressed her legs. She moved and toyed with him, heightening his passion and his urgency.
The shadow loomed near the bed. Still the lovers were unmindful.
Fury raged through the spirit: “I’ll kill them both! Right now. Pine coffin? Or rosewood? One coffin for the two of you! Nothing you can do to stop me! I’ll smash your heads in! Rip your necks off! You don’t even know I’m here, you fools!
Tim Brooks broke away from the woman he loved. He whirled in the bed and lunged for the bedside light. He turned it on and bolted upright in stark terror.
Annette, shocked, naked and alarmed, abruptly sat up.
With a speed that has no measurement in time, the spirit withdrew directly through the wall.
“Timmy?” she asked. “What the…?”
He looked all over the room.
Brooks had felt… was certain that…
“Timmy. Talk to me, honey,” she said. “What is it?”
He settled back. Apprehensively.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought… Just for a second I felt something.”
He did not have to tell her what he meant. She knew what the something was.
She scanned the room. Her fear subsided when she didn’t see anything. He didn’t see anything, either.
She placed her hands on his strong shoulders. She pressed herself to his back and held him. She kissed him on the side of the neck.
“I know I felt something,” she said, trying to cheer him. Yet some residual fear remained.
“I want to make certain,” he said. He kissed her to comfort her. “Okay?”
“Okay. Make certain.”
He rose from the bed. Naked, he turned the corner from his bedroom. He walked down the hall. Again, he sensed something.
He had a very faint sense of…
Yes, the presence was there! But he couldn’t find it. Couldn’t place it. Wasn’t sure if his sense was real, was on the mark, or if his imagination was running wild thanks to the morning’s reading at the library.
He turned on the light in his living room. Nothing.
He examined the doors. Locked. Untouched.
The kitchen. Quiet and empty.
“I ought to get a cat from the animal shelter,” he thought to himself. “Then I’d know for sure.”
He turned on the outside lights and scanned. All he saw were an array of summer moths, fluttering upward toward the lights in their crazy suicidal patterns.
Still...
He sighed. This must be what it’s like, he thought, to g
o slowly crazy. Searching for something that rational minds claim does not exist. Insisting that something is there when no one else can see or feel it.
“Not in my house tonight,” he whispered aloud to the ghost. “I do not will you into my house tonight.”
No answer.
Brooks gave up.
He returned to the bedroom. Annie was there waiting. She had pulled a pale blue sheet up over her. The sheet was up to her chin, but it left one leg and one breast uncovered to his view. Much better than chasing a malevolent ghost.
“I want to leave the light on,” he said, settling in next to her. “Okay?”
“Mmmm. Okay,” she murmured. “Now. Where were you?”
He pulled away the sheet. He found just the spot where he had left off.
“I believe I was right here,” he whispered. “Exactly,” she agreed.
The light stayed on. They fell asleep with their bodies intertwined, the sheets and covers fallen away. It was in the middle of the night when they were dozing soundly that the spirit rose again.
In the twenty-five-watt light of the bedroom, the tall, ominous figure cast a shadow across the lovers. It moved close to the bed. The aura of malevolence, the mood of homicide, moving gently with it.
In sleep, they were indeed a beautiful couple. The shadow liked the woman in particular. It inclined toward her and touched her on the lips.
In sleep, her hand moved and brushed at its touch.
The phantom turned its attention to the man. The man made the spirit very angry, lover as he was to such a gorgeous woman. A blow to the man’s skull would be amusing. Twist his neck the way he had twisted the necks of the other three victims. Crunch their throats.
The spirit’s touch hovered above Brooks, ready to smash downward and twist.
Or maybe just get on with it. Kill them both here and now in their sleep.
But the presence desisted in the light of a wonderful new notion. But it seemed too kind to send them to death together. Let one have to mourn the other. Let one have to traverse the chasm of death.
