Crying Child

by Barbara Michaels

  “Calm down,” Jed said sharply. “Don’t you see, Jo, that is the only kind of damage a thing like that can do? It isn’t solid; its only weapon is fear. If you’re prepared for it you won’t panic and you won’t get hurt. You’re young and healthy. But I’m worried about Mary. I wish I knew what she has been seeing and hearing.”

  “She’s heard the crying. As we all have.”

  “Sure. But she must have heard more than that.”

  “Why?”

  “How does she know its name is Kevin?”

  It was one of those self-evident facts that none of us had put into words before. I was sorry Jed had done so now. I didn’t like the picture those words brought to my mind.

  “You mean,” I said, “You mean it—it talks to her?”

  “Seems as if it must.”

  “Oh, God.” I put my head in my hands, and didn’t apologize this time; nor did Mrs. Willard reproach me for taking the name of the Lord in vain.

  “You see the problem,” Jed went on. “With all these manifestations—sounds and sights and feelings, including that abnormal cold—we can’t even define what we’ve got here. Is it one apparition or two? Is the hostile entity we call Miss Smith responsible for the pitiful weeping that fetches Mary out of her bed at night, into considerable danger? Or are there two ghosts?”

  “There are two pictures,” I said.

  “Doesn’t mean a thing… I think maybe I’ll have another look at that room in the tower.”

  “Ran said he intended to do that too. I must admit I’m not anxious to see it again. I guess I’ll go back to my dear account books.”

  On my ways upstairs I went to the front door and looked out. San Franciscans boast of their fogs, but I had never seen one like this. Maybe it just seemed thicker because we were out in the country, where there were no lights or nearby objects. I couldn’t see anything beyond the porch; the world might have ended ten feet away from the house. I was straining my eyes to see through the white opacity, and yet I was afraid of what I might see if I succeeded. In his own quiet way Jed was a master of the macabre. His suggestions were enough to make me abandon indefinitely the idea of sleeping. What if I woke up and found—her—standing by the bed—close enough to touch me?

  That afternoon seemed to last for forty-eight hours. When Jed knocked at my door I was half asleep, nodding over the next account book. The look on his face woke me up fast enough, though.

  “I’ve been up there,” he said, without preamble. “That’s a funny place, Jo, I never realized how funny. You know most of the furniture upstairs was sold or else stored away? There is still furniture in those rooms. The topmost one is a kind of bedroom. There’s a brass bedstead up there, and some wardrobes and chests of drawers. How the Hades they got them up those stairs I hate to think, but there they are.”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “Sure I did. I just never wondered about it. Why would I? None of these things we’ve found would mean anything unless we had a reason to notice them.” He sounded exasperated. I knew he was annoyed with himself.

  “That’s a good point,” I said soothingly. “What have you got there?”

  One hand was behind his back. At my question his frown faded and a slight smile took its place.

  “Something I think may surprise you. There were books in one of those cupboards. Look at this one.”

  It was an old-fashioned reader, or primer. I didn’t pay much attention to the book itself, I was too fascinated by the inside front cover, which Jed displayed to me. There was a name on it, scrawled in big tipsy letters, like the printing of a small child who is just learning his alphabet. It said: “Kevin.”

  “Good gosh,” I said. It was an inadequate expression of my feelings.

  “Yep. We’re getting there, Jo. I know it seems slow, but we are making progress.”

  “A child named Kevin did live in that room. Why not in the other nursery? And who was he? Not one of Hezekiah’s children, we know their names… Wait a minute.”

  I picked up the genealogy from where I had tossed it on the floor, and we studied it together. Jed made mumbling sounds of satisfaction.

  “Kevin was a family name before 1840. Must have come in with some Irish ancestress, before the Frasers ever emigrated. Yep; one, two, three—five times. The old man’s own granddad was named Kevin. And he was the last.

  Never again.“

  “The one we want can’t be any of the early ones.” I said. “The house wasn’t lived in by Frasers until Hezekiah’s time. The book—yes, it was copyrighted in 1830.”

  “No, we haven’t found the right Kevin yet,” Jed said. “But we will. Back to your books, Jo. How far along are you?”

  “Eighteen thirty-nine,” I said, with a groan.

  It was in the 1840 ledger that I found it. The name seemed to jump out at me from the yellowing page.

  “Wages, Miss Smith.”

  I sat back and rubbed my eyes. Yes, there it was; I had begun to think I would never find it.

  I cheated then. Instead of continuing my entry-by-entry search, I jumped ahead. Miss Smith had first been paid in September of 1840. I checked that same month in succeeding years and it was there, regular as clockwork: “Miss Smith, wages.” In 1842 she got a raise, from fifty dollars a year to fifty-five. In 1846 her name wasn’t listed. I remembered the date on the tombstone, and I started looking back through that year. The search went much faster when I had a single specific question in mind; it took only minutes to find the entries.

  “Coffin, for Miss Smith. To sexton, for digging grave. To Reverend Brown, for services.”

  So they had had the proper words said over her grave, improperly placed though it was. No black crepe. The family wouldn’t go into mourning for a servant.

  We’d been right about that. She was a dependent, who received wages; and since no housemaid or cook would be called “Miss,” she had to be a governess or housekeeper.

  And there was still no proven connection between Miss Smith and the woman in the miniature.

  I sat back on my heels and rubbed my aching eyes. The problem was like a puzzle—not a jigsaw, but one of those involved exercises in symbolic logic. “Mr. Smith lives in the green house. The brown house is next to the blue house. The Frenchman drinks Scotch.” Everyone has seen puzzles of that sort; they drive me wild, because I can never figure them out, and yet they have an unholy fascination for me. I can spend hours brooding over them. Usually I get about halfway through the necessary deductions, and then I get stuck. I never do find out who lives in the red house, or what the Canadian drinks.

  I had the feeling that our puzzle was just as susceptible to reason, that it was only my lack of skill that kept me from reaching the answer. The woman in the miniature was the woman in the black dress. The woman in the black dress was Miss Smith. That would have made a neat equation, except that the second statement wasn’t a fact, it was only a strong assumption. Miss Smith was a governess or housekeeper. The apparition in black had appeared, on one occasion, in a child’s room. The woman in the miniature was connected with a child. Hezekiah had fallen to his death from the stairs in the tower room. The tower room was the room in which the apparition had appeared.

  It was just like the puzzle about the houses. Only I couldn’t be sure I had all the necessary statements.

  I heard voices in the hall and glanced at my watch. It was much later than I had thought. The others must be getting ready to go downstairs. Wearily I got to my feet, kicking account books in all directions, and went to the bathroom to wash my dusty hands.

  There was a knock at the door. I knew it must be Mary, from the sound of it, and I made a leap for the door. I didn’t want her to see the books and the old trunk.

  “What have you been doing all afternoon?” she asked. “You look like a grubby urchin.”

  “You look beautiful enough for both of us,” I said, admiring her crimson hostess gown. “Do you want me to change? Who’s going to be here?”

&n
bsp; “Not Will,” Mary said. “That old car of his finally broke down. He just called to ask if Ran could meet him at the ferry. It doesn’t get in till eight thirty.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll clean up, and then meet you downstairs. I could use a drink, on a dreary day like this.”

  “I want to show you something first.”

  “What?” I asked warily.

  “I’ve found Hezekiah.”

  If my teeth had been removable, they’d have fallen out. I got control of myself fairly well; but my voice sounded like a frog’s when I responded.

  “Where?”

  “One of the guest rooms,” Mary said. “It’s an interesting picture, but Ran says his aunts couldn’t stand it. That’s why the guest room, instead of the parlor.”

  At the end of the corridor we turned into the cross-corridor and went down two steps into the east wing. When Mary opened the door of one of the guest rooms, I realized why I hadn’t noticed Hezekiah’s portrait on our house tour the first day. The old ladies really had disliked him; he was inconspicuously placed on a side wall, practically behind the door.

  Artistically speaking, the painting wasn’t much. It was stiff and wooden, and it lacked the charm of a genuine primitive. It was simply poor work, done by a bad painter. It also needed cleaning. The varnish had darkened so badly that it was hard to make out the details of the figure, which was shown from the waist up against a background that seemed to be a melange of seascapes, with a full-masted ship, a pagoda, and a palm tree as insignia.

  As we stood there in front of the picture I heard someone calling Mary’s name.

  “That’s Ran,”“ she said. ”He must have lost a button or a sock or something. If you’re going to ponder over that handsome face, Jo, I’ll leave you to it, before Ran bursts a blood vessel. He’s like all men, no patience. Turn out the light and close the door, will you, when you’re through?“

  “Sure,” I said vaguely.

  At second and third glance the picture was more interesting than I had thought. The painter had caught the harshness of the features quite well. The face was almost square, the angles of the jaw and chin were so extreme. The nose wasn’t good; it looked like a blob of modeling clay instead of the prowlike protuberance it must have been; but I imagined that the mouth, in real life, must have been almost as stiff and harsh as the artist had depicted it. The eyes, under heavy beetling brows, were failures; it’s hard to capture expression in the eyes. All in all, it was close to my imaginary picture of the hard sea captain. Yet no one could call it lifelike or evocative; neither of those qualities existed to account for what happened to me then.

  I was about to turn away when the air darkened around me. It was no ordinary power failure; the painted features were glowing, as if with a light of their own. There was a beating in the air, like the sound of great dark wings; and then, to my horror, the painted face moved. The features writhed soundlessly, as if in pain; the mouth opened in a silent scream of warning. I heard the words echoing inside my head:

  “Get out… hurry, hurry… before it’s too late…”

  TEN

  I don’t remember how I got out of the room. I was halfway down the stairs before I came to my senses; I stopped there, hanging on to the banister and trying to catch my breath. I could hear voices from upstairs; Ran and Mary hadn’t come down yet. So I decided it was safe to go on into the parlor, where I could collapse. I didn’t want Mary to see me until I had myself under control.

  The parlor wasn’t deserted, however. Anne was standing by the window looking out. Against the darkness, her profile was as sharply outlined as a face on a Roman coin. I was struck by an odd feeling of familiarity, and I wondered who or what it was she reminded me of as she stood there. But I didn’t give the matter much thought. I was too far gone to worry about anything but my nerves.

  She turned as I dropped heavily into a chair.

  “Good heavens, Jo, what’s the matter?”

  I told her.

  She didn’t say anything. I assumed her lack of response indicated a perfectly natural skepticism, and I said wearily, “You must think I’m as crazy as my sister. I’m beginning to wonder myself… Maybe I imagined this last thing. I’m in such a state I don’t really know what I’m seeing.”

  Her expression wasn’t skeptical or hostile. It was abstracted, as if she were thinking about something else.

  “I talked to Ran,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “About your research investigations, what else? I think you’ve all been most ingenious.”

  “And naive?”

  “Not at all. In any case, you’ve got a pretty little family mystery on your hands. I’m particularly intrigued by the semi-anonymous grave.”

  “There’s more,” I said, and told her what Jed and I had ferreted out that afternoon. If she wasn’t genuinely interested she was a good actress.

  “It really is curious,” she said. “Of course you realize that these things may have a perfectly innocent explanation? And that they may not be connected with your ghostly phenomena?”

  “I do know that. That’s our problem, that we can’t get any definite facts.”

  She turned away, reaching for a cigarette. It seemed to me that she was smoking too much, but that was none of my business.

  “There is one source of information you don’t seem to have considered,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The newspapers, of course. You aren’t delving into ancient Babylonian history; there must have been a local paper in 1846.”

  “Of course!” I exclaimed. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of that. I’ll bet they have copies at the local library. We can check tomorrow.”

  “It’s a pity you can’t check tonight.”

  “Why?”

  She looked away.

  “Now it’s your turn to be skeptical,” she said. “Maybe the atmosphere is affecting me… But I have a feeling that time is running out, and that the sooner you can arrive at some conclusion, the better.”

  “Why, Anne—”

  “Don’t be alarmed,” she said quickly. “I’m not saying that because of any specific change I’ve observed in Mary’s condition. All the same… This will be my last evening here; I called my secretary today and I find that I must be in Boston by tomorrow afternoon. Through fog and hail and dark of night, you know. At least I can be a good watchdog while the rest of you pursue your investigations. I can’t seem to help in any other way.”

  I felt as if I ought to protest that last sentence, if only out of politeness; but she didn’t sound bitter, only obscurely amused. And before I could think of anything to say, Ran and Mary came in.

  Dinner was surprisingly pleasant. I say surprisingly because underneath the laughter and the casual talk I was very much concerned with Anne’s remarks. She had said she wasn’t worried about a worsening of Mary’s condition, but I couldn’t accept that statement at face value. If she didn’t expect a crisis, why was she so concerned about the passage of time? I too had that sense of time running out, of the necessity for quick action. I knew the feeling was illogical. I had no reason to think that matters were any worse; if anything, Mary looked better that evening, bright-eyed and responsive and happy…

  That in itself should have warned me. There had been other times when she seemed better; they had been followed by some of our most disastrous nights. I didn’t think of that at the time, however. The other problem that preoccupied me was how I was going to get out of the house after dinner. I had had time for a quick private exchange with Ran; Anne’s suggestion about the newspapers had impressed him as much as it had me, and he was sure he could get the key of the library from the local woman who was in charge of it. He had to go into the village after dinner to pick up Will, so that would give him an excuse to leave the house. But I was determined to go with him and I didn’t see how I was going to manage it.

  It was easy. So easy that it should have made my suspicions flare up like a t
orch.

  We had finished dessert and were having coffee at the table. Casually Ran glanced at his watch and then pushed his chair back.

  “I’d better be leaving. Want to come along for the ride Jo?”

  “Well…” I glanced at Mary.

  “Go ahead. The boat will probably be late, in this foul weather. You can both sit in the bar at the Inn and drink till it arrives. Then I’ll know Ran isn’t being seduced by any of the local sirens.”

  “If you’re sure—”

  “Of course I’m sure. I’m sorry things are so dull here, Jo; it isn’t much fun for you sitting in the house all the time. Isn’t there a movie in town, Ran? Why don’t you treat your poor bored guest to a nice X film?”