From where they had fallen, the small objects flew at Marcia again.
As suddenly they dropped. Gran choked, eyes bulging. She sagged against the door, clutching at her heart. Then, buoyed up by a last spurt of venom, she jeered at the staring trio.
"Ay!” she gasped. "It was me! It’s always been me and no other! 'Poltergeist!’ Heh-heh-heh! All these years I’ve made them believe in it and feel it and almost see it—Anne, and Silvia, and Lollie, all as thought they was better than me! Fools—” Marcia gaped at her, sickened by the cruelty in that old face.
"I see!” she whispered. "I understand now! Oh, it’s diabolical, Doctor Mason! You said she married into your family by trickery; and she was furious at being snubbed by your womenfolk. She hated all you Masons as a symbol of what she wanted to be but never could. Hate was like poison in her veins. So she set out to break you, to destroy you little by little.
"Your Great-aunt Anne must have been a sensitive, high-strung young girl, easily bullied and frightened by something she could not understand. And Gran here had a peculiar talent to scare her with! It’s bestowed on very few people at birth. Certain wizards of ancient times could do what she did just now; also a few professional mediums of today. It’s called the power to 'levitate.’ Some kind of electrical wave in the body of the subject can be directed at small objects with such force as to move, lift or throw them a short distance. I happened to read an article about it, okayed by the Society of Psychic Research. Science knows very little about the phenomenon; but then, we have much to learn about telepathy and hypnotism. In the next century we may know as much about the electrical powers of the human body as we have learned about radio in this century.”
Victor Mason gaped at her, then at the mouthing old woman. "I don’t understand,” he mumbled. "You mean, there’s no—?”
"No poltergeist, and there never was any,” Marcia nodded. "But this fiendish old woman has created such a strong illusion of one that you’ve all believed it. She must have levitated objects around Anne Mason until she frightened the girl into believing she was haunted by a demon. By subtle suggestion that the Thing might scratch her, she got the girl into such a hysterical state that stigmata appeared. When you told me the poltergeist didn’t throw things where strangers could watch, Doctor Mason, I suspected what it was. I guessed who, too, when you said there had been no 'haunted’ Mason before Gran’s advent. Genuine psychic phenomena can be witnessed by anyone.
"But your great-aunt here was too clever to risk detection. She confined her performances to your terrified family, or to those few whom she thought too stupid to suspect anything. At the asylum, of course, the poltergeist never did perform—because Gran wasn’t around. So the doctors concluded that that part was only a hysterical hallucination of Anne’s, or Silvia’s.
"Their stigmata, however, kept on even when not accompanied by the other Thing, the levitating. Naturally the girls were still hysterical, even under treatment. Without the flying objects to scare them, they gradually got better and were sent home 'cured.’ What the psychiatrists couldn’t know, of course, was that the poltergeist—in the form of your great-aunt—was waiting to begin its reign of terror all over again. You see?”
The ex-doctor leaned weakly against the bed, his arm around his little brother’s shoulder. They stared, stunned, from the girl to the old hag.
"It’s so inhuman,” Marcia shuddered, "I can hardly believe it myself! Those innocent high-strung young girls, thinking, they were haunted by a demon... when they were only being tortured by a wicked sadistic old woman with—well, call it a supernatural power to levitate small objects.
Some day, perhaps, the general public will understand and control the same power.
"Your great-aunt used it to good advantage! She’s frightened and bullied all you Masons, using the poltergeist to enforce her selfish whims... like that brandied peach tonight, that Lollie wanted so badly. And the jeweled brooch she stole from me, after I tried to give it to your sister. And the way she tormented Lollie by ’throwing’ things at her, to make you and Renny suffer from your inability to protect the child.... Oh! You diabolical old witch! Three helpless young girls—”
She whirled on the old woman, sick with indignation.
GRAN cowered against the door, tittering. Her beady eyes flickered from the girl to Renny, to Victor’s stunned face. And she broke out in a wdld cackle of mirth.
“Ay, it’s true!” she shrilled. "A pack of fools, the lot of ye! I’ve had my w-ay in this house, for all your hoity-toity manners! Poltergeist! 'Demon!’ Heh-heh-heh!...”
The beady eyes bulged suddenly, and Gran clawed at her throat, panting. With a strangled sound she slid to the floor in an ugly heap. Victor Mason, moving like one hypnotised, strode to her, knelt, and felt her pulse. He stood up, shaking his head.
"She’s dead,” he whispered. "Heart attack. But... I can’t believe it!” He turned to Marcia, bewildered. "That stupid old woman! All these years!”
With a gesture of repugnance he covered Gran’s evil face with her shawl and did not look at her again.
Marcia shrugged. "She wasn’t stupid; she was fiendishly clever. Oh, those poor girls! And Lollie! If only someone had guessed!”
She broke off as Renny, who had slipped from the room unnoticed, came back at that moment, leading his fawn-eyed sister by the hand. In his other hand was Marcia’s purse. His boyish face puckered, fighting tears, as he thrust it out to her. Smiling gently, she took out the brooch and slipped it into Lollies hand.
Lollie gasped in delight. "For me? I can have them now? Oh, look, Vic! Look, Renny! The pretty jewels—they’re mine too... ooh!”
Pain flashed across her face, and she jerked back her hand. Four angry weals were appearing along her forearm again. Renny and Victor Mason stared at them fearfully. But Marcia smiled, and put a protective arm about the girl, shaking her head.
"Don’t be afraid, dear,” she soothed. "The poltergeist is dead. It can't hurt you... Just the stigmata,” she whispered to Mason. "A nervous reflex, and nothing more. Poor child.
"It will be a long time before you can get the child back to normal. But... you must do it, Doctor Mason. It’s your incentive to start life over again. Now you’ll stop drinking, perhaps build yourself a country practise. And Renny must go to school; Lollie too when she’s better. You have no shadow to hide now in this lovely old house.”
Victor Mason raised his head. The despair in his dark eyes had given way to a clear alert look, full of hope and a deep gratitude... and something else. Marcia saw it and lowered her eyes hastily to Lollie’s upturned face. But she heard the tall doctor chuckle softly, like a man with a purpose—like a man awakened in a sunlit room from a long and horrible nightmare.
The Green Window
IT IS one of those old Colonial structures, with great fluted columns in front and a kitchen detached from the house by a long hall-porch. There are half a dozen just like it in Stuartsboro—but if you are driving through here, if you will ask any of our leisurely-moving inhabitants, they will gladly direct you to "the house with the green window.” Anyone, that is, except myself. I would not go near the place for any reason whatsoever.
I’ll never go back there.
Never.
There is nothing to see. The beautiful old grounds have grown up now in mustard and Jimson seed. The large plaster fountain on the lawn runs no more; it is full of stagnant rain water, probably, at this season, and choked with last autumn’s leaves that drifted down from the giant white oaks standing like sentinels before the house.
Furthermore, the windows have been boarded up—even that queer, opaque one to the left of the fan-lighted door. Especially that one... There are ten-penny nails in the heavy planks that cover it from sight. Otherwise, Aunt Millicent insists, passing tourists would swarm in with claw hammers and rip them off, to take a peek at those panes. The American tourist is a predatory, animal; he would break pieces off the Venus de Milo to take home a souvenir to the folks. Severa
l times the "window lights,” as panes are called locally, have been broken out by the curious, by would-be detectives of the supernatural who yearn to give that weird green glass a laboratory test.
I wish I could see their faces when they smugly take it out of pocket or handbag, back home again, with a tale to tell the neighbors. For, whatever it is that causes the glass in that one particular window of the old Dickerson home to cloud over, it disappears about half an hour after the panes are removed from the window-frame. I don't know why. Jeb and Mark and I, as children, have scraped them with razor blades, peered at them under our toy microscopes, and smeared all sorts of acids on them. But the green scum—that is what it looks' like; a foul grayish-green scum on the surface of a pool-—seems to be inside the glass, under surface. I could not tell you how many times the opaque discolored panes have been replaced by ordinary glass, only to cloud over again , by sunset of the next day.
BUT that is not its attraction. The "green window” is supposed to be a prophetic window, an opening into the future; or, more accurately; a mirror for tomorrow. The story is: when Great-great Grandpa Dickerson was thrown from his horse and lay dying in that room, over a century ago, he called for an old slave on the Place, a wizened old negress purported to be a mamaloi. The plantation was heavily in debt, and it seems the old boy was worried about the welfare of his wife and two small sons. Lying there on the brocaded couch, with his spine broken from the fall, he had begged the old voodoo woman to look into the future for him, to help his widow make necessary plans.
She had done so, the story goes, using that window as a sort of "psychic screen.” All the Evil Ones that crowd about someone who is dying, she had summoned to that spot—-it was their fetid breath, she explained, that clouded the glass panes. But there was only one trick of dark magic in her power: to make a mirror of that opaque window, in which could be seen the dim reflection of the room where her master lay dying. A reflection of the room, yes—not as it looked at the moment, but as it would look, at some unnamed future date, when the next person in the house should die.
The mental picture of that mumbling old black crone, of the sobbing wife cuddling her two terrified children before that slowly darkening window, has always been vivid to me.
All my life, of course, I have heard family tales about its prophecies. But the old Place itself has become a white elephant, tax-ridden and run-down. Mother married a Virginian and moved away, but she would never sell her equity in the property to Mark’s father or to Jeb’s mother, my uncle and aunt Jeb’s mother married a local lawyer and moved across town, but Mark and his father lived on at the old Homeplace, soiling off some of the land when the old man had his stroke. It was, I may add, somewhat of a disappointment that his actual death occurred in a hospital. I think half the people in Stuartsboro had planned to "drop in” at the moment of his demise, for a peek into that prophetic window. No death had occurred in the house for seventy-two years— a fact I believe people resentfully accused our family of arranging, just for spite.
As a matter of fact, none of my generation believed in the hoodoo. We grinned about it fondly, the way others smile at myths about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Mark, Jeb, and I—children of the Depression and the Second World War— were not inclined to believe in anything we couldn’t see and touch. Jeb took over his father’s meagre law practice in Stuartsboro, and managed to support himself and his widowed mother. Mark sold off more and more land, then went into the Air Corps. He came back with a charming little bride, a redhead with a bright gamin-face and a Brooklyn accent you could cut with a knife.
They were such a gay fun-loving young couple that I began visiting them, or Jeb, every summer after my teaching job closed in June. Mark was small, arrogant, with the lazy good looks of a Spanish don. Jeb was tall, lanky, good-humored, and wore glasses
that ruined whatever good looks he might have inherited from Aunt Millicent.
As a girl, I often toyed with the idea of marrying one or the other of them, if they had not been my first cousins. Occasionally we would pretend among ourselves that they were my brothers.
But after Sherry came, with her light laugh and boundless energy, I had to take a backseat as their "best girl.” Mark worshiped his little red head; he became restless and bored unless they were - in the same room.
It was easily apparent, too, that Jeb was in love with her, in that quiet awkward way of his. I felt sorry for him, because it was just as easy to see that Sherry’s attention was all for her husband.
The plantation had dwindled now to only the grounds around the house, hardly an acre. Small houses had sprung up like mushrooms all about it, making it look like a dignified old dowager drawing her skirts haughtily away. from a flock of tenement children. Mark started a real estate office, failed at it; built a movie drive-in outside of town and had to sell it at a loss; found two more jobs, and lost them. Then the family—especially Jeb Randolph and I— became distressed because of his drinking. He drank all the time now, lounging around the house in an old dressing-gown .with a highball, tinkling in his hand.
We all worked at getting him back on his feet. Jeb and I dropped in several times a day to pull him out of one of his moody spells. And Sherry was never more cheerful and loving. I often noticed the stiff pained look on Job’s face when she sat down in Mark’s lap, throwing her arms around him and kissing him with the childlike abandon that was her greatest charm. She invented things to amuse him around the house—small tasks to take his mind off his failures; little games to coax him out of his despondency.
ONE afternoon when we dropped by, she had been cleaning out the attic, and had come across an old letter wedged into a skylight. It was brown with age, streaky with rain, and almost illegible. But Sherry had made out the fine cramped old-fashioned
handwriting, and was perched on Mark’s chair arm, reading it aloud to him excitedly.
"Liz, Jeb—it’s about the green window!’’ she called as we entered. "Some relative of yours, way back there... It’s signed 'Lucy.' There’s a blot on it, See? It’s unfinished; she must have been writing, to somebody, and spilled ink on her letter. Then the skylight rattled, and she or the servants stuffed the page in to wedge it...”
"Detective,” Mark laughed, jerking a thumb at her. "She’s got it all figured out... Jeb,” he chuckled, "the 'Lucy’ was Aunt Lucy Dickerson, Grandfather’s maiden sister. She never did have all her buttons, I remember Dad used to say. And this letter proves it!”
"Something about the window?” I asked, amused at Sherry’s, excitement, "What’d the old gal say? Read it!”
"Well, it starts off in the middle of a sentence,” Sherry said importantly. "Must have been the second page of her letter, or some such. She’s thanking somebody for the funeral flowers they sent, as I make it out. '...beautiful wreath,’ it starts out. 'There were so many lovely flowers, and poor dear Ellen looked so natural, lying there in the casket...' ”
Mark, Jeb, and I yelped with laughter in chorus.
"That’s Aunt Lucy, all right!” Jeb nodded. "She was always going on about somebody’s funeral. Liked to cry, so she went to ’em all! What else does it say?”
Sherry made a face at us. "All right! Laugh! I’ll, skip a few sentences, where she tells whaf-the pastor said about... Allen? No, it’s Ellen...”
"That was Grandma,” Mark told her. "Died of cancer, poor old gal... Say!” he burst out, suddenly interested. "She was the last person to die here in the house, wasn’t she? Aunt Lucy nursed her for years. Old maid. She lived for the family; never had any life of her own.”
Jeb and I nodded. Sherry was poring over the stained letter-fragment again, trying to make out the words in faded ink.
"... my dear, what I saw in the window! You’d never believe..." she read.
"Never believe... something something; it’s blotted out. "... ’twas an Oriental,” she made out another phrase or two. "Sitting there in Father's chair with a turban on his head—if indeed 'twas a man, dear Martha —and..
."
We laughed again uproariously.
"Good old Aunt Lucy!" Mark hooted. "Wasn’t that about the time of the Yellow Peril talk? When everybody thought the Chinese were going-to take over the country? And the gals sneaked around, reading Indian love-lyrics?”
Jeb grinned, nodding. "Guess Aunt Lucy took it from there, planting a rajah in our parlor! She had so little romance in her life...”
SHERRY gave him a sharp look I could not translate. "Aunt Lucy isn't the only one,” she muttered cryptically. "Don’t you even want to hear the rest of it? All about a thief breaking in to steal the rajah’s treasure, and the Oriental shoots him—she saw it all in the mirror, the letter says. There’s a cap pulled down over the burglar’s face. When the Oriental sees who he’s shot, he falls sobbing on the body of the young boy. Maybe his brother, she says, or his son."
"Good grief! How corny!” Jeb held his nose expressively. "Mother told me Aunt Lucy used to read dime novels all the time —and I can well believe it! Kept ’em hidden between the leaves of a Goaey’s Ladies' Book..''
Sherry gave us one glance of disgust. She flung the wadded letter into the fireplace, then whirled on us, directing most of her temper at Mark.
"All right, of course it’s silly! But we could pretend, couldn’t we? You three are so... stuffy about everything! Mark half drunk all the time, and we never go anywhere any more! I never have any new clothes or... or...” Tears welled into her pretty brown eyes. "Or anything but family pride!”
Mark went white, averting his eyes from our faces. I could not think of a word to say, but Jeb, with admirable tact, leaped into the breach.
"Sure,” he said gently. "We’re getting to be a bunch of stick-in-the-muds. That’s why Liz and I ran by this morning: to persuade you two to go to the Lindsay’s dance at the country club. We..."
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