Crying Child

by Barbara Michaels

  “That little boy?”

  “How old do you think he was?”

  “Five… six…”

  “That’s one of those prejudices I was talking about. Stop and think, Jo; have we found anything that gave us the slightest indication of the boy’s age?” Will held up the worn paper on which the child’s birth had been recorded. “He was born in 1832.”

  I stared, horrified, as the truth dawned.

  “He was fourteen years old,” Jed said. “And he took after his father. A husky hulking body and a violent temper. Couldn’t you see—tonight—that he had the look of the old man?”

  Will stood up. “I’m going upstairs.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Jed said.

  “Take the Book with you,” Mrs. Willard said calmly.

  I had an insane desire to laugh.

  “What good is that going to do?” I demanded. “Anne! You aren’t going back up there?”

  She was on her feet, pale and unsteady but very calm.

  “Yes, I am. I don’t know what I’ll feel like when this injection wears off, but I’d like to show a little dignity while I can.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “All right. But you’re all crazy.”

  At the door Will turned and glared at me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “With you. I’m just as”—I gulped—“as nosy as the rest of you.”

  “No, you’re not. Not going, I mean. God knows you’re nosy enough. That’s probably why poor old Miss Smith picked you to come to.”

  “You think she was trying to warn me?”

  “Yes, I do. She couldn’t help scaring you to death; that’s an inevitable result of materialization.”

  “Then I’d better go along as interpreter.”

  “Jo.” He took me by the shoulders, and at the look in his eyes a selfish pang of pure joy went through me. “Stay in one piece, will you? I worry about you. You haven’t got any sense of self-preservation.”

  “I’m going.”

  “I thought you would,” Will said coolly. “Well, just in case we don’t come back—”

  He kissed me. When my head stopped spinning I followed them.

  Jed had flashlights for everybody this time. We stood in the doorway and shone our lights around the room; and I said irritably, “Why can’t we wait till daylight? It’s the darkness that makes this place so awful.”

  “We’ll never be sure,” Will said. “Not unless we can come here at night.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I handed Anne my flashlight. “I want to try something.”

  Will made a grab for me, but it was too late; I walked out into the middle of the room and stood there. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I’m very proud of myself for doing it. I was quaking like a jelly, especially when I passed that hideous iron staircase.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of any words that weren’t theatrical or corny. I just stood there and thought of that poor woman; only a girl, really, when she got involved with Hezekiah. Yet she wasn’t so much his victim as she was a victim of the times, times which condemned women to a single role in society and damned them for eternity if they accepted the role without the magic scrap of paper which legitimized it. If there could be such a thing as a psychotic ghost, she was it—caught in the vicious trap of the guilt her culture had brainwashed her into accepting.

  I stood there for perhaps a minute and a half; it’s a long time when you are quaking with fear and pity I never saw a thing, not certainly. I might have imagined a slight thickening of the shadows in the far corner. There was no cold, no fear; only a long, shaken sigh and then silence. The room was empty; and I had a feeling that it would always be empty now.

  When I went back to the door Will grabbed me and held me so tightly I couldn’t breathe for a minute.

  “We’d better get moving,” he said. “It will be light soon. Jed, you and Bertha won’t be afraid here alone?”

  “We’ve been alone all this time,” Jed said calmly. “And you’ll all be back.”

  “You think it’s gone?”

  “I think so. But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do anyhow. I’m going to haul out every book and every removable item in these two rooms and burn them. Starting now.”

  Will didn’t say anything; he just reached out and took hold of a chair. When we went back down the stairs we each carried a load. Jed and Will went back again and again as the windows slowly lightened, and Anne sat staring at her hands in a silence I didn’t care to break. When the helicopter lifted, with a full complement of passengers, I looked down; and I saw a great tongue of flame rise up from the stableyard, like a beacon, or a banner.

  EPILOGUE

  Mary’s fine. She and Ran are in Switzerland now. Will and I will join them next week for our honeymoon. We’ll be married in Zurich. I’m sorry the Willards can’t be there, but we’ll be seeing a lot of them after we get back.

  Mary has no memory of what happened at the house. She thinks she had a conventional nervous breakdown, and she’s rather ashamed of herself. One day we’ll tell her. We don’t believe in lying; there’s always a danger that you’ll get caught.

  I have found a new kitchen table. The first thing I’m going to do when we get back is relegate that green plastic horror to the barn. The second thing I’m going to do is buy a few new records for Will’s collection. The Beatles, of course, and Cream, and a few more. He’ll get used to them.

  There have been no manifestations since that night. Opinions differ as to what did the trick. Will thinks the bonfire was the decisive factor; he’s really a materialist at heart. I am convinced that my courage and sensitivity in communicating with “Miss Smith” gave her the strength to detach herself and her wretched offspring from the pattern in which they had been trapped. Mrs. Willard says nonsense, it was prayers, and the Good Book.

  “It was simple,” Jed says, in his calm voice. “All we had to do was find out the truth.”

  When he is questioned, he will sometimes elaborate.

  I remember one time, when we were sitting in the kitchen eating doughnuts as fast as Mrs. Willard could turn them out. Will had just finished reading through the last of the account books. He hadn’t been putting me on about his fondness for the dry bones of history; he actually enjoyed reading them. He was telling us, that day, about certain entries which in his opinion confirmed his diagnosis of Kevin Fraser’s illness.

  “It hit me when Jo mentioned cretinism,” he explained. “That wasn’t it, of course, but the word made me think of a physical ailment, and then I realized that the stigmata were all there—the high brow, saddle nose, radiating scars around the mouth, bowed tibia. Even the teeth had the characteristic shape. You don’t see it often nowadays; treatment is so effective. It can be prevented, if the mother is treated during pregnancy. But it wasn’t till after 1910 that Ehrlich made the first significant breakthrough. In the mid-nineteenth century it might not even be recognized for what it was. Yet when you talk about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children…”

  “And eventually it causes insanity?” I asked.

  “Paresis is only one of the possible results,” Will said. “In such cases there is a general deterioration of mental function; that was one of the things that finally struck me about that room, that it was designed for an individual who was physically mature and mentally retarded. In the final stages the brain is actually destroyed, and violent rages are one of the symptoms. Of course all this is theory; I’ve never tried to diagnose a ghost before. But all the evidence indicates mental illness of some kind. What I found in that 1845 account book confirms it; in that year, when Kevin was thirteen, the tower rooms were fitted up and the bars were put on the windows. Evidently his condition wasn’t considered dangerous until then.”

  “Poor child,” I said, shivering.

  “It’s curious,” Will said. “You know Mercy never mentions his name? There are certain items purchased ”for the child,“ but not once
did she write the name.”

  “Not surprising that she should feel that way,” Jed muttered. “You suppose she was the one who put the papers and the miniature in the box?”

  “I think so. She would be the first one called when Georgianna’s body was found; she wouldn’t let that note become public property. But she didn’t destroy it. She put the relevant documents into the box, and there they remained. A beautiful example of the New England conscience at work: avoid scandal, but never destroy the truth.”

  “Sounds like Jed,” I said, smiling at him.

  He nodded soberly.

  “You remember, Jo, I said to you once that these creatures couldn’t do any physical harm; all they could do was scare people. And a lot of the fear comes from ignorance. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about the reasons for this kind of disturbance—hauntings, if you want to use that word. But they all hinge on the same thing. When the lost treasure is discovered, or the murderer is brought to justice, or the truth is known—then the trouble stops. So that’s why I say our trouble is over and done with. It’s more like one of those old Greek tragedies than a mystery story, with a villain that’s got to be discovered and punished. There aren’t any villains in our story—not even Hezekiah, though he was as near to one as we can get. But even he was driven by the patterns of his time, and his station in life; he didn’t act that much worse than a lot of men, and in the end he got his punishment, no question of that. The boy? You can’t blame a poor creature like that for what his father unwittingly made of him. And the woman is the most tragic figure of them all.”

  “Not so much a Greek tragedy,” Will said, “as one of those grim biblical stories of nemesis and doom. The sins of the fathers… I can’t get that verse out of my mind.”

  “It’s not such a terrible verse,” Jed said. “If you think of it as a warning instead of a threat. It’s true, in more ways than we like to admit. But there are a lot of verses in that Book, Will, and there’s another one that sticks in my mind.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know the one you mean. ”You shall know the truth…“ ”

  “ ”And the truth shall make you free.“ ”