“You don’t understand,” he said. He walked away through a wall.
“What?” said Anna. “What does he say?”
“He’s gone.”
Malcolm rose from the rocking chair. “I’ll see what I can find out,” he said. He followed Arturo through the wall, leaving the chair rocking gently.
“He’s gone?” Anna whispered. “He doesn’t forgive me, does he?” Her voice got a little louder. “He never could stand weakness in any form.” She bent her head to the side, her eyes gazing at the red plaid rug. “He said we were like two pillars together. We could build a life and a family on our shoulders. He said we were strong like two foundation stones, and we could share our strength by holding hands. But his hand is not here any longer, and I am not a stone, and neither was he.” She placed her hand flat over her face, covering her right eye. “Now you tell me,” she murmured to the carpet, “he has been here all along, and I didn’t even sense him. He told me to always lean on him when I was troubled, but how can I lean on someone I can’t even see?”
Wendy rubbed her thumb over the back of Anna’s hand, gently stroking the cabled veins and arteries, feeling the tendons beneath her touch.
“I have to go and live among strangers. I have to trust unknown caretakers to watch out for me. I live in the ruin of my own body and I cannot rebuild. Pride cannot mortar my walls any longer.” Her hand tightened on Wendy’s. “It was so hard to make this decision, but I have been contemplating it for a long time. Arturo died three years ago, and I knew…I knew I couldn’t support everything we had built together. Now I’ve made the hardest decision of my life, and here he comes, making it much harder again. If only I could hear him and answer his arguments myself! A good fight used to clear the air for us.”
Wendy frowned. “Wait. Wait.” She sucked on her lower lip.
“What is it? Is he back?”
“No. What you said gave me an idea. Your body is a structure. This house is a structure. Marriage is a—I wish Malcolm and I knew all the rules!”
“What are you thinking?”
“If an idea structure could work like a physical structure—if Arturo could move into the house of your marriage, or your heart—but I’ve never heard of that. Of course, this is the first time Malcolm and I have met another ghost. We don’t know if anybody else’s ghostliness works like Malcolm’s.”
“If I build a house in my heart, Arturo could move into it and come with me to the retirement village, you think?” Anna glanced at Wendy. “I have him in my heart already, always; I wear him there as I wear my wedding ring on my finger.”
“Does he know that? Maybe the idea won’t work, anyway. But anything’s worth trying. If he moved into something you built together, maybe you could see him—”
Malcolm walked back through the wall, pulling Arturo by the arm. Arturo’s mouth was set in a stubborn line. “Home wreckers,” he said, and tried to pull his arm out of Malcolm’s grip.
Wendy straightened. “Sir,” she said. Anna studied the direction of Wendy’s gaze, followed it.
“You are an evil young woman,” said Arturo.
“Do you want your wife to kill herself?” Wendy asked. “Is that what you really want?”
“Of course not!”
“Please be very sure. What you are doing now is the same as telling her to kill herself. She wants to take care of herself, to get the help she needs to survive. If she listens to you and chooses something too hard for her to handle, she courts death. Do you love your wife?”
The fury slowly left his face. He stopped trying to jerk his arm free of Malcolm’s grasp. After a long moment, he said, “Alive, I loved her. Dead, I love her. But it is the house that sustains me. If I leave the house I kill myself, and that is a sin against God.”
“What does he say?” Anna whispered.
“He says he loves you but he’s not sure he can leave the house.” Wendy bit her lip and said to Arturo, “We thought about structures that might sustain you. You built yourself into the house. Did you build yourself into your marriage? Anna says she carries you in her heart.”
Arturo looked at Anna. His face softened into a smile again, and then saddened. He walked to Anna and reached out a hand. It disappeared into her chest.
Suddenly another ghost smoked up out of Anna and stood half in the couch behind her, facing Arturo. It was a younger man, his hair black and thick, his eyes alight. “Who are you, old man?” he said.
Arturo staggered back. After a moment, he said, “That is how she remembers me.” He turned an angry face at Wendy. “There is no room in her heart for me!”
“You stiff-necked old donkey!” said his other ghost. “Have to have her all to yourself, do you? Death has not granted you any virtues, has it!”
“Will you leave and let me in?” Arturo asked.
“I will not leave!” said the young man. “But if you ask me very nicely perhaps I will make room for you.”
“Wait just a minute,” said Wendy. “Anna, a ghost came out of your heart and is talking to this other Arturo about both of them living in your heart together. Do you want that?”
“I don’t understand,” said Anna. She sounded very young.
“I wish, I wish you could see them,” said Wendy.
“Does she want to see us?” asked the younger Arturo. “Easy.” He reached into the back of Anna’s head, worked around in it, then said, “There.”
Anna looked up and screamed. Then she clapped her hands over her mouth. “Arturo,” she whispered. She glanced back and forth between the old Arturo and the young one.
“Arturo?” she said.
“How did you DO that?” older Arturo asked. He held up fists and shook them in frustration. “How is it everyone knows secrets except me?”
“Arturo,” said Anna, her voice a little stronger. “What did I tell you about jealousy, always?”
Older Arturo sighed. “That it is a viper’s bite on my heel and weakens me as long as it holds on,” he said. “But Anna, I am like a baby. I do not like it.”
“Of course not,” she said. She stood and took a step toward him, lifting a hand—and then the hand sank back to her side and she slowly folded toward the floor. Wendy jumped up and Malcolm did too, but it was the younger Arturo who caught her and eased her collapse onto the couch.
* * * *
“As I am the man she believes and wishes I was,” said the young Arturo as Wendy rubbed Anna’s hands between hers, “I have more generosity of spirit than you do.” He beamed at Older Arturo, who gave him a ferocious frown.
“Even though it will diminish me to mingle with you, I shall do it,” said Younger Arturo.
“In you I can see clearly what Anna told me about pride being a hobble that makes you take short steps,” said Older Arturo.
Wendy and Malcolm looked at each other. They flicked their eyebrows up and down.
Younger Arturo laughed. “We heard her, but did we ever listen? If you become part of me, some things will change for you. One thing is that she becomes the center of our life. We don’t have the work, and we don’t have the house. We don’t have the evenings at the Taverna with the other men. We enter a smaller existence.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing since I died?” Older Arturo asked. “I cannot even step beyond the lawn.”
“So you are ready to join me?”
Older Arturo looked at the ceiling, lifted his arms and spread them wide as if embracing the house. “I built this well. You don’t know what it is like to be inside a board, to hear it think of the tree it once was, to speak to nails and hear their tales of hiding in the earth before the forge, to ride the currents of heat like sparks rising from a chimney.…”
“You can tell me,” said Younger Arturo.
Older Arturo slowly lowered his arms and smiled at his younger self, then looked at Malcolm. His eyes narrowed. “You better be good to this place,” he said, frowning.
“Maybe you can brief me before you go,” said Malcolm.
Anna’s eyes fluttered open. “Arturo,” she said.
“Anna,” said both Arturos.
Bewildered, Anna looked at Wendy. Wendy gripped her hand. “Watch,” she said, nodding to the Arturos.
They studied each other, then walked toward each other. They grasped each other’s hands, paused a moment, staring into each other’s eyes, then pushed closer. In a shimmery moment they melted into each other, gasping, and finally a single Arturo, a midway mix between the two who had stood there a moment before, turned to look at her. “Oh, Anna,” he said, touching his hand to his heart. “I feel your heart touching mine.”
She held her hands out to him and he came to her, reached for her hands, but his passed through them. They both cried out. In distress and anger, they stared at Wendy.
“It’s not the same as being alive,” she said, “but it’s much, much better than losing a person entirely.”
“I caught her when she fell,” said Arturo.
Wendy nodded. “Sometimes you can do that.”
He frowned. “Wait. I will return in a moment,” he said, and walked out through the kitchen wall.”
“Can he come with me?” Anna asked.
“I think he’s gone to find out,” said Wendy.
Malcolm was watching the wall where Arturo had disappeared. He turned to Wendy after a moment. “Can I try something?”
“Sure,” she said.
He walked to her and reached into her chest. She gasped, then tried to figure out if she could feel him. She thought not. He pulled his hand out of her and they both looked around. There was no new Malcolm.
“I wish we had a book like the one in Beetlejuice,” he said, not for the first time.
“So this is your young man,” Anna said faintly. “Please introduce us.”
Wendy had just made introductions when Arturo returned. “I walked to the end of the block,” he said. He beamed at them all.
Wendy found herself smiling back at him. She thought about all the things she locked inside herself, groans, frowns, smiles; thought about Malcolm’s leash—how he couldn’t stray far from the locket. By buying a house, she and Malcolm would be tying themselves to a specific place. And that was a dream they had. Were they crazy?
Arturo had just slipped a leash.
“Let’s go for a drive!” he said.
“We can drive past the retirement village,” Anna said, “and you can look inside.”
They were still learning new rules. New restrictions—but new freedoms, too, Wendy thought as she rose. Malcolm put his hand on her shoulder and she felt it. She grinned over her shoulder at him.
BIRTHMARK, by Seabury Quinn
Last minute shopping at Liberty’s and the Garelies LaFayette had taken more time than I’d reckoned, and the six-seated compartment to which I’d been assigned on the Treves rapide was nearly filled when I finished checking through the provost marshal’s booth at the Gare del’Est and scuttled down the inner platform. Three of the four early arrivals I recognized: Amberson, who as a former New York police lieutenant had been assigned to the Intelligence; Weinberg of the Medical Corps, like me assigned to base hospital work in Treves; and Fontenoy apKern, an infantryman about to take up duties at the provost marshal’s office at the old walled city.
The fourth man was unknown to me and, for no reason I could think of, I disliked him with the sudden spontaniety of a chemical reaction. The double braid on his cuffs marked him as a captain, and where the raccoon collar of his short coat was thrown back, I saw crossed rifles on the neckband of his blouse. His uniform was well-cut and expensive—English-made, I guessed—his blond hair neatly trimmed, his slim, long, white hands sleekly manicured. More of a fop than a soldier he seemed, some dandy from the fashionable East Fifties with a bullet-proof commission going from the secretariat at Paris to staff headquarters at Coblenz; but in the army one goes where he is sent and does the work they set him at.
It wasn’t mere resentment of a grime-and-blood veteran for a pantywaist soldier that stirred my quick, instinctive dislike. It was the smug arrogance of him. Clear-cut as the image on a coin, his profile silhouetted against the window, high-cheeked, hard-eyed, sharp-chinned. Prussian as an oberleutnant of the Elite Guards Corp, that face would have seemed more in its proper setting above the field gray of a German uniform than the olive drab of our army.
The stranger glanced up quickly at my advent, and I had a momentary glimpse of faintly sneering mouth and hard, cold, haughty eyes, then he resumed his reading of the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail.
Greetings were in character: “Hullo,” said Amberson, sweeping me with the quick look of suspicion which is the mark of the professional policeman.
“Thought you’d gone A.W.O.L.,” grinned Weinberg. “Wouldn’t blame you if you had. Lot o’ flu up Treves way; lots o’ work for us poor suckers in the M.C.”
“Hi lug!” apKern saluted me. “Mopped ’em all up on the Paris sector and goin’ up to croak a few in Germany?”
The blond captain of infantry took no notice of me, nor any of us.
I stumbled over an assorted lot of feet, stowed my duffel in the rack above my seat, and dropped down on the hard cushions. The place across from me was vacant, but a white card indicated it had been reserved. “Wonder who’ll draw it?” apKern wondered. “Pity the poor bloke, havin’ to look at your ugly mug from here to Treves. Gosh, when I came to up at Catigny and saw you starin’ at me, I thought I still was under ether and havin’ a bad dream! If I could a’ talked I’d a’ asked the nurse to slip me a fresh dose of anesthetic—”
“Quiet!” cut in Weinberg. “Who’d know when you were conscious or anesthetized, anyhow? If I’d been there, I would a’ operated on you as they brought you in, you—” His amiable insults stopped half uttered, and a sudden blankness wiped expression from his face as he looked past apKern to the compartment door.
Followed by a railway porter, a girl stood at the entrance. I felt my own heart skip a beat as I looked at her. Mentally I commented, “There ain’t no such animal.”
She was quite young, not more than twenty-three or -four, quite breathtaking in her loveliness. A red cross gleamed upon her overseas cap, and beneath her heavy dark coat with its wide fur collar showed a white stock and the well-cut, smoothly-fitting whipcord uniform of the Red Cross Motor Corps. Three service chevrons on her left cuff showed she was no post-Armistice importation, and her utter lack of self-consciousness showed she was at home with soldiers. More like an effeminate boy than a young woman she seemed as she stepped lissomely between the rows of booted feet and dropped down in the seat across from me. I realized her eyes were golden, a light brown that was almost orange, harmonizing to perfection with her copper hair, her smooth pale cheeks, and slim red lips.
When she took her cap off and shook her hair, I saw that it was close-cropped, almost like a man’s, and riotous with curls.
I cast a glance at apKern, sitting two seats from her, and he must have read the malice in my eyes, for almost instantly he sounded off.
“See this?” he tapped the dispatch case that rested on his knees. “Lot o’ valuable dope in here; list o’ suspected enemy agents and so forth I’m takin’ up to Treves. ‘Captain apKern,’ the general says to me, ‘I’ve got some very confidential documents to go to Germany. They’re so secret that I daren’t trust ’em to an ordinary courier. Only a man of proved sagacity, indomitable courage, and more than usual cleverness can be entrusted with these papers, Captain. You’re going up to Treves, aren’t you?’
“‘Sure, General,’ I tells him. I’m fed up with all this work in Paris; want to get where there’s a chance for action, so I’m joinin’ the M.P.’s at Treves. I’ll be happy to accommodate you by taking those papers, and you need fear nothing. They’ll be safe with me as if—’”
“‘You published ’em in the New York Times,’” completed Amberson sarcastically.
I glanced across the narrow aisle at the girl. She was joining in the lau
gh that followed Amberson’s deflation of apKern. Her lips were opening like a flower, and a smile glowed in her orange eyes. “Lovely!” I whispered to myself. “Perfect—” as I eyed the long sweet line from her waist to knee, from knee to ankle, the small gentle bosom and the long slim hands and feet—“she’s just perfect.”
The guard blew his absurd tin trumpet, and we slid out of the station, past the platform bright with French officers in fur coats or long capes of horizon blue, like birds of brilliant plumage among the somber O.D. of our own and British uniforms, through the blinking lights that marked the station yard and out into the fog-blurred night.
The train had a wagon-restaurant, and presently the girl went forward, followed in a moment by apKern, Weinberg, and Amberson. I’d lunched late at the Café de la Paix and had no wish for food, so settled back in my seat with a copy of the Bystander.
Our coach was German, taken over by the Allies, and a sign phrased with Teutonic arrogance stared at me from the farther wall of the compartment with the information that such indiscretions as smoking or falling from the window were stringently verboten under penalty of heavy fine. I grinned at it. I was an American soldier on my way to conquered territory. Presently their officers would be saluting me as I walked down the street, their civilians crowding to the curb to give me sidewalk-room. Their signs meant nothing to me, and I broke out a packet of Fatimas.
“Smoke?” I proffered the pack to my silent companion.
“No,” he returned shortly, never glancing up from his paper, and with renewed irritation I realized that he had not added “thank you,” to his refusal.
In a little while the diners came back from their meal, on the best possible terms with each other, and I was duly presented to Miss Felicia Watrous of Philadelphia. Moved by common courtesy, I bent to catch the aloof infantryman’s eye, intending to introduce him. For just a moment he looked up at me above his paper, and I was fairly chilled by the cold challenge in his agate stare. To hell with him! All of us, except Amberson who was a major, were his equals in rank. Where did he get off treating us like a lot of railway porters? Let him read his London Daily Mail and be damned to him!
The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories Page 3
