by Noel Hynd
Then she had the sense again of a pair of eyes upon her, stronger than ever before. And she knew she was no longer alone in the yellow room. Nor had she ever been alone in that chamber.
“Now, my love. Turn… Now you may look upon me”.
Turning, Rebecca jumped. Her heart kicked so hard that it felt as if it were going to explode in her chest.
There was a man standing in the room, midway between her and the doorway. He had arrived in complete silence, which made no sense because all of the upstairs floorboards would creak beneath a footfall.
All Rebecca could do was stare. But there was no fear. Her fear was gone. Nor did she feel any menace. Instead, there was only an odd echo of familiarity, of attraction. She was reacting more on intuition now than logic, but also had the sense of having entered another world.
Words formed on her lips. She didn’t know where they came from, but she spoke them.
“I know you, don’t I?” she asked.
“Yes, you do.”
He was a handsome man, about six feet one with tousled brown hair and gorgeous dark eyes. He was simply dressed in a plain white shirt open at the collar. His waist was trim, and he wore dark slacks, and his eyes were settled upon her.
Ronny, she found herself thinking. So now I have finally met Ronny. He was just the way her children had described him. Somehow, perhaps intuitively again, Rebecca Moore knew she was looking at a ghost. The visitor’s lips moved. He spoke softly.
“Rebecca?” he asked.
Logic against emotion. Her soul split in half. Her brain against her heart. It felt like another explosion building up inside her.
“Rebecca?” he asked again.
Now other words formed inside her. Her own words. Her own thoughts. Her response.
“What are you doing here?” was all she could say.
“I’ve come for you.” She shook her head.
“No!” she answered. She shook her head a second time, now violently.
“No, this can’t be,” she insisted. “What do you mean, you’ve ‘come for me’? Are you telling me I’m dying? It can’t be my time.”
“That’s not what I mean. You’re alive. You have a long life in front of you.”
“You know that?” she asked.
“I know that,” he said.
She moved her eyes away. Her gaze traveled through the window and out across the brick wall, out to the distant grave stones, and it was her thought that somehow, somewhere, in a quirky universe, that some spirit had slipped up out of the earth and had begun to wander.
She looked back quickly, thinking that the man might be gone, and that she might have been hallucinating. But he wasn’t gone. And she wasn’t hallucinating.
“Talk to me, Rebecca,” he asked.
“Where are my children?” she asked. His answer was a beautiful smile. “Do you have my children?” He didn’t speak. “Where are they?” she demanded. “Are they dead or alive?”
“They’re safe, Rebecca,” he said.
Emboldened, she stepped toward the ghost. But as she approached him, he receded. He seemed solid, not opaque, and if she hadn’t intuitively realized that he was a ghost, she might never have known.
Then, before her eyes, he disappeared. She experienced something unlike anything she had ever felt in her life, something like a strong breeze or wind, carefully channeled and rushing right into her. She seemed enveloped by it, sort of like a gust of leaves sweeping past her. Yet this current actually felt as if it were sweeping through her, like a powerful positive emotion, though that was impossible in the world she had always known.
And yet again, when she turned in the turret room, the ghost was directly behind her, flickering slightly now, like an image in an old film.
“You’re a ghost,” she said.
“I’m a spirit,” he answered.
“You’re dead.”
“You see me. Hence, I exist. I have life.”
“Why are you here? What do you want?” Silence from the visitor. Then…
“You were right, you know. You know me,” he said.
She felt as if a bizarre window had opened into another world. Know him? From where? Yet there was something about him she couldn’t place, an aspect of familiarity that had an eerie edge to it.
“I want Patrick and Karen,” she answered.
“You’ll have them.”
“When?” He shrugged. “When?” she demanded. She took a long look at the intruder. “Where are they?” she asked. He smiled. “You have them, don’t you?” she accused.
The ghost didn’t speak. But it communicated an answer. Rebecca knew the response was yes. The next question was difficult for her. But she knew she had to pose it.
“If they’re with you, are they dead or alive?” she asked.
No answer. Instead, the ghost misted before her eyes, fading from a solid and tactile presence into nothing but empty air. He was gone in a matter of seconds. Yet Rebecca also knew the ghost was still there.
Somewhere.
She felt something like a gentle breeze flow past her. Then suddenly something was touching her bare hand as it hung at her side. She pulled back, not in fear but in surprise.
Then she realized that the touch was similar to a female child’s, reaching for a mother’s palm.
“Patrick? Karen?” she asked in the empty room. “Where are you guys? Your mom and dad miss you!” Another touch, or what seemed like one, on the other side of her. She turned in that direction, too. It had been a firmer touch. More assertive. A male child, she was sure. Patrick’s touch!
She flailed at the empty air. More nothing. Or nothing that she could see. But what had been there? Two small invisible hands seeking to hold hers?
Was she loony? And if her children were now invisible, if they had been turned into spirits, did that mean they were irretrievably so?
Dead in the middle of her thought, Rebecca heard footsteps on the stairs leading down from the second floor. It sounded like a man with two children.
She fled the turret room and went to the landing at the top of the steps. She looked to the spot from where the sound had emanated. She could still hear it. But she couldn’t see anything.
Then another thought came to her.
Go to the window, Rebecca. Look to San Angelo. Find comfort among the angels.
She walked back to the turret room, moving cautiously, her entire concept of reality forever changed. She moved to the center of the room and hesitated about going to the window. She was afraid of what she might see. In some ways, the sequence had a dream-like quality. She felt she was gliding rather than stepping; she had the sense of seeing herself as if from above, rather than living the experience directly.
But she found herself in front of the lone window in the turret room. Her gaze traveled through the backyard of her home and to the rear of the cemetery beyond. The moment that followed would forever seem frozen, a lingering still photograph, an image more than an actual event.
But she could not mistake what it was.
The ghost she had seen in her home now walked in the rear of San Angelo. It was unmistakably the same figure. He was clothed the same way and was of the same stature. Rebecca’s eyes went wide, however. The ghost was not alone. He walked hand in hand with two young children. Rebecca’s Patrick and Karen. They strolled as if with a father figure, and they walked back toward the burial area of the cemetery.
Rebecca held this view for several seconds, before she screamed.
She called out their names.
“Patrick! Karen!”
Their heads turned in response. Their cherubic faces illuminated with smiles. Ronny released their hands, and both daughter and son waved to her. But they voluntarily remained with Ronny. And they looked happy.
The children’s words echoed from the night of their disappearance.
“He wants us to come with him.”
She called their names again. They waved and walked farther with Ronny, back toward the tombstones. She c
alled their names a third time.
This time they didn’t acknowledge. They were much farther away now, linked hand in hand with their guide. Rebecca watched them go. Like a bird or an airplane, disappearing on the horizon, they became harder and harder to see.
Like Ronny, they misted, flickered, and disappeared, long before they reached the burial ground. Another snippet of words came back to her, the message that had emerged on the wall from under the fresh coats of primer and yellow paint.
“YOU ARE IN DANGER.”
She had taken it to mean that she, Rebecca, was in danger. Actually, she now decided, it had been meant for the children. They were the ones who had disappeared.
Rebecca gazed out the window like a madwoman, staring at San Angelo, a constellation of thoughts swirling around her. She held the view of San Angelo until she heard someone from below speak her name. .
“Mrs. Moore?”
A woman’s voice. At first she thought it was Melissa’s. But Melissa would have called her by her first name. “Mrs. Moore?”
She looked downward until she found the source. It was one of the reporters, followed quickly by the whole knot of them, drawn by her screams out the rear window of her home.
A gaggle of bemused, curious almost accusatory faces stared upward at her. Cameras clicked. Television cameras whirred softly, their lenses fixed upon her.
“Did you see something, Mrs. Moore?” a male stranger with a notepad asked.
“Did you see your children?” the first woman asked.
“Get off my property!” Rebecca screamed.
But the press didn’t move. They studied her every move and recorded it, like visitors to a zoo, until she slammed the window and drew the curtain.
Then she stood in the turret room for several minutes, alone in the silence, isolated in the madness of what she had seen. Her reaction was not so much one of fear, but one of shock.
She was again aware of the shadows passing through the backyard, and the lengthening of them, which suggested that afternoon was turning to evening. When she next consulted her watch, she realized that she had lost track of time. But she knew she had walked into Patrick’s room to work in his closet at four-thirty. But now it was five-fifteen.
Somewhere forty-five minutes had disappeared.
She couldn’t account for the lapse. It did not feel as if she had been in the turret room for anything resembling that amount of time. The only thing she could think of was that when she had entered the realm of the ghost other standards of time or voids in time existed.
She left the room in a daze and walked downstairs. She put on a light and sat down in the living room. She turned on the television for companionship, but didn’t listen to it. Instead, she waited for evening, eager for her husband to return home.
When Bill returned, she said nothing immediately. She sat in the living room of their home, mute, barely acknowledging his presence.
She forced him to come to her and speak.
“Rebecca?” he finally asked. “Becca, what’s going on? Talk to me.”
She then turned on her husband, felt a shiver of terror overtake her so violently that she felt like she was being shaken by a huge unseen hand. She screamed uncontrollably, and then her screams dissolved into sobs, sobs which she muffled on his shoulder until they had cascaded out of her and diminished into nothing.
Only then, as she gradually regained control of her emotions, was she able to describe the events of the afternoon to the man with whom she currently shared her life. And of course he believed none of it.
PART TWO
Salvation
Chapter 29
With the blessing of her husband and the Los Angeles police, Rebecca scheduled an emergency meeting with Dr. Henry Einhorn for Friday at lunchtime. Detective Van Allen had allowed her to put off the polygraph test from Friday till Saturday.
Melissa drove Rebecca to Century City and accompanied her friend to the psychiatrist’s office. Del Morninglori greeted Rebecca at the door to Dr. Henry Einhorn’s suite. Del was solicitous and indulgent. It was obvious that he knew all about her children’s disappearance, but he asked no questions about it.
Rebecca’s session with Dr. Einhorn began at half past noon. Melissa waited in the reception room. Einhorn expressed his sympathy over what had happened involving her children. Sitting across from her in a chair in a shaded room, the psychiatrist angled her into the interview.
“When you called this morning you suggested that there was some urgency to this meeting,” Dr. Einhorn said. “I’m aware of the larger personal problems you’re having. Was there something else also?”
Rebecca held a long pause. She took a sip from a nearby glass of water to steady herself. “I saw a ghost,” she said.
Einhorn’s eyes were upon her, soft and brown, fixed and set like a terrier watching a duck.
Very slightly, he settled back in his chair.
“What sort of ghost?” he said.
“It was a man,” she said. “I saw him in my home. He was there as plain or as real as you’re here right now, Doctor.”
“Did he scare you?”
“The situation scared me,” she said.
“But the man himself, the vision, didn’t?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He had my children with him. I found that frightening.” She paused. “May I call what I saw ‘a ghost’?” she asked.
“If you want to.”
“Do you believe in such things?” she asked.
“I don’t discount the possibility of anything, Rebecca,” he said.
“So you’re not laughing at me?”
“Of course not. It’s not my place to laugh. You tell me what you think you saw.”
She felt reassured.
“Then I’ll call it a ghost,” she said.
“Why are you so sure?” he asked. “What is a ghost? What do you think it was?”
“My friend, Melissa, whom you just met?” Rebecca answered. “She says a ghost is a disembodied spirit. I think that’s a good definition.”
Dr. Einhorn glanced toward the anteroom. “Why does Melissa know so much?”
“She’s a little psycho. I guess she’s studied these things.”
“Did she suggest that you might be seeing a ghost?” the psychiatrist asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Did you have any previous discussions on the subject?”
Rebecca thought back to the night of the party. Melissa, now that Rebecca thought of it, had suggested the possibility. Rebecca recalled the incident and detailed it for the doctor.” But I know what I saw,” Rebecca added quickly. “I saw a ghost.”
“And does your friend’s definition work for you?” Dr. Einhorn asked, “‘A disembodied spirit’?”
Rebecca said it did.
“Have you always believed in such things?”
“Not until I saw one.”
“Tell me a little more about what happened.”
Rebecca described in detail how she had been in the turret room, the troubled yellow turret room, and had sensed something coming to see her. The house and the room had been empty. And suddenly the specter was there.
“And you said that it had your children with it?”
“Yes. He did.”
‘“He’? It was definitely a man?”
“Yes,” she said.
“A lot of people would have found this terrifying,” Dr. Einhom said at length. “But you didn’t?”
“It was much less terrifying than the incident in Connecticut. That was so much more physical.”
“Physical how?”
“The threat. It was so clear, so immediate. The incident with the ghost was, I mean, well it freaked me out. But the man almost seemed, I don’t know. Familiar, maybe.”
Einhorn’s eyes narrowed.
“Familiar how?” the psychiatrist asked.
“It’s hard to say.”
“Well,” he suggested, “familiar, as if you had seen t
his man on television? Or in a movie? Or familiar in the sense of knowing him personally?”
Rebecca pondered the point for a moment. “Familiar,” she said, “as if I knew him personally.”
“Knew him well?” Einhorn asked.
She thought about it. The correct answer seemed to come to her from somewhere. So Rebecca nodded. “Yes. I think so.”
“Where could you know him from?” Einhorn asked.
Rebecca opened her hands in a gesture of not knowing. “I wish I could tell you,” she said.
“Another life?” the doctor said. “Like Shirley McClain?”
“Is that a serious suggestion?”
“Not really.” The diminutive doctor tried to steer her. “Maybe he reminds you of someone else whom you know?”
“No, no,” Rebecca answered softly, shaking her head. “It was him personally. Thinking back on it, you see, that’s what I find so strange. That’s why I wasn’t scared.”
“Then maybe it is someone whom you used to know. But who is deceased now.”
Rebecca sighed.
“That explanation would work, except I don’t know who it would be,” she said. She thought about it for several seconds. “Know what it’s like? It’s like trying to think of a name. Or a certain word. It’s on the tip of your tongue. Or it feels like it’s on the front of your mind. But you can’t quite find it.”
“Yet, your husband says you were hysterical last evening. Is he exaggerating?”
“That was in the evening,” Rebecca answered. “I was… I was deeply upset about the experience. Of seeing my children with what I took to be a ghost.” She paused. “But as for fear of the man, himself? No,” she said. “I remember it with considerable calm.”
“How tactile was the experience?” Einhorn asked. “Did you touch or embrace the man?”
“No.”
“Did you touch your children?”
“No. But something touched me.”
“Did you feel as if you wanted to?”
“Wanted to what?”
“Strike him? Embrace him? Anything of the physical nature?”
“Nothing like that occurred to me.”
“Do you remember anything else? Smells? Senses of hot or cold?” he asked.
Rebecca shook her head again. Her hands were moist. She played with a paper tissue.
