The 7th Ghost Story Read online

  “How do they know, I wonder, that I want to be taken to the Rhonefoot? They are bringing the small boat.”

  The skiff shot out of the gloom. It was a woman who was rowing. He stood transfixed, thrown cold in a moment by a memory. But he was far beyond all superstitious and sentimental considerations. It was always women who looked after ferry-boats in Galloway.

  The boat grounded stern on. Gregory Jeffray stepped in and settled himself on the seat.

  “What rubbish is this?” he said angrily, clearing a great armful of flowers off the seat and throwing them among his feet.

  The oars dipped, and without sound the boat glided out upon the lapping waves of the loch towards the Black Water, on whose oily depths the oars fall silently, and where the water does not lap about the prow. The night grew suddenly very cold. Somewhere in the darkness over the Black Water Gregory Jeffray heard someone call his name.

  * * * *

  It was noted as a strange thing that, on the same night on which Sir Gregory Jeffray was lost, the last of the Allens of the old ferry-house died in the Crichton Asylum. Barbara Allen was mad to the end, for the burden of her latest cry was, “He kens noo! He kens noo! The Lord our God is a jealous God. Now let Thy servant depart in peace.”

  But Gregory Jeffray was never seen again by water or on shore. He had heard the cry from over the Black Water.

  A FRIENDLY EXORCISE, by Talmage Powell

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1968.

  I was putting up the traverse rods for the living room draperies when Judy let out a screech. She sounded like a woman who’d had the world’s biggest mouse scurry between her feet.

  The sound lifted me off the hassock where I’d been standing to add height to my somewhat bony six-one. I jetted toward the source of the sound, skidding off the hallway into the empty bedroom.

  Judy, the delectable, hadn’t been frightened by a mouse. Instead, the culprit was a sweatsock. That’s right, an ordinary white woolen sweatsock, misshapen and slightly bedraggled from having been laundered many times. It lay in the middle of the bare floor, and it had to be the source of her trouble. Besides Judy there was nothing else in the room. She stood pressed against the wall, elfin face pale, blue eyes round. Pointing at the sock, she tried to talk, getting hung up on the “J” in my name.

  “J-J-J-Jim, that darn thing floated out of the closet and g-g-g-gave me a hug across the face!”

  She was making no sense whatever to me. I gawked at her, and the expression on my face bugged some of the fright out of her. Her eyes began to flash.

  “Don’t you care that an old sweatsock floats out of a closet, halfway across an empty room, and nuzzles up to your bride, Jim Thornton?”

  “Well, I…uh… Sure I care! But how could it have happened?”

  “You tell me. You’re the brain. All I know is what happened. When I’d finished putting things away in the bedroom, I came in here. I was thinking how we’d fix this room for a nursery some day. Then that sock…” She shuddered. “I wouldn’t let my baby take a twenty minute nap in this room.”

  I detoured the sock, grinning at her. “Baby? Judy, you’re pregnant already!”

  She shook off my clutching hands. “Don’t be silly! We’ve been married less than a month. I haven’t had time to know if I’m pregnant or not. But when we do have a baby, James Arnold Thornton, you’d better have an explanation for anti-gravity sweat socks, if we stay in this house.”

  I turned and sank to one knee beside the sock. I poked it with a finger. Nothing supernatural occurred. The sock was as commonplace and ordinary as…well, as old sweat socks.

  “When the Bicklefords moved out,” I pronounced, “the sock was overlooked. It was probably in a dark corner of the closet shelf.”

  “Brilliant,” said Judy, putting her sunny blonde head next to my drab brown thatch. “Of course it was overlooked by their movers.”

  “And a breeze happened to blow it across your face.”

  “Breeze?”

  “Capricious breeze.”

  She tilted her head and gave me a look. “Capricious breeze in an empty room with the windows closed.”

  Her matter of fact tone was worse than sarcasm. My male ego recoiled. “Naturally,” I said with a certain hauteur, “the first home I finagle with a mortgage company for my wife has to be fouled up with a poltergeist!”

  She gingerly picked up the sock, stood, held the sock dangling at arm’s length. “Now you’re a little closer to the beam.”

  I stood up beside her, dusting my hands. “Come on, you can’t be serious. You don’t believe in zombies or voices from beyond the grave.”

  “Nope,” she said, “but this sock is real as life. And poltergeists are too well authenticated to deny that something every now and then acts up in somebody’s house. There have been any number of cases in England. And how about those people in Massachusetts whose house made the newspapers? And the house on Long Island—or was it in the Bronx—that was shown on the television newscast? Crockery flying all over the place in that one—and a team of tough New York cops staked out the joint and saw some of it happen! You going to fly in the face of hard-bitten, super-realistic New York cops?”

  “Not me,” I said helplessly.

  “So there,” Judy said. She had riveted her gaze on the sock all this while. Now a strange mood seemed to have overtaken all of her initial fright. “You know, I really don’t think he was trying to frighten me. The touch of the sock was ever so gentle, a caress. I think he was trying to say hello and make friends. Still,” she glanced about, “I’m not sure we should plan a nursery in here.”

  That’s where the subject rested for the moment. I wandered back to work, more concerned than I cared to show. In our recent college days, Judy and I had both been as far from the LSD crowd as you could polarize. Just a couple of the hard-studying non-jets that made up ninety-five percent of the student body, sans publicity, and floating sweat socks didn’t fit into our pattern of living at all.

  I finished hanging the living-room draperies, heard Judy safely rattling pots, pans, and crockery from their packing crates in the kitchen, and ambled quietly out the front door.

  If it hadn’t been for that sweat-sock, the day would have been perfect. Even if secondhand, the house was a cozy picture of antique brick and redwood. Judy and I hadn’t dared hope to start off so well. It had been pure luck that we’d picked up the house for practically nothing down and payments no higher than rent on a decent apartment. Wedding gifts and credit provided enough furniture to keep us from sleeping on the floor as a starter. Great luck, I’d thought. Now I was having second thoughts. Frankly, I was wondering why that Bickleford fellow had been so anxious to get out.

  The house next door, to the west of us, was as quietly white collar as the rest of the neighborhood. The nameplate over the bell button said, “Tate Curzon.”

  I used the button, and chimes sounded inside. The door opened a few inches and stopped.

  “Yes?” he said. He had a voice like a loose violin string being stroked with a scratchy bow.

  “Mr. Tate Curzon?”

  “So what if I am?”

  The door offered no further welcome, remaining just slightly open. From what I could see of him, he was a wiry, narrow shouldered little guy in his late forties or early fifties. He had a long red neck rising out of his starched white collar, a narrow and cruel looking face, and a pinched-up bald pate that was so freckled it looked bloody. It was easy to behold the snappish visage and imagine a vulture’s head.

  I shuffled a bit uncomfortably. “Just thought I’d say hello. We’re your new neighbors, James and Judy Thorton.”

  He looked me up and down, without approval. “I don’t loan tools, carpet sweepers, fuse plugs or lawn mowers.”

  “No, sir.” I jammed my hands into my slacks pockets. “I didn�
��t want to borrow anything.”

  “Then you’re not disappointed. You got any kids?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Curzon.”

  “Good thing. I hate brats. Always breaking down my rose arbor and throwing trash in my fish pond.”

  “Yes, well… I guess the Bicklefords had kids?”

  “One. Stupid oaf. Boy. Eighteen. Always roaring in and out of the driveway in that stupid sports car of his.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, agreeable as butter. “I guess all boys are that way with their first car.”

  “His first and last,” Mr. Tate Curzon said on a note of malice.

  “You mean—he smashed it up?”

  “And himself with it. Skidded one rainy night and went over the cliffs south of town. They picked up Andrew Bickleford—and his sports car—in little pieces.”

  “Gee, that’s too bad!”

  Mr. Curzon’s eyes beaded. “You should care. Andy’s mother had a nervous breakdown, and that nincompoop father couldn’t put the house on the market fast enough.” The inference that I’d profited by a young stranger’s death caused the heat to rise. I felt red from cheek to jowl. I let my eyes give Mr. Curzon’s gimlet gaze tit for tat, and said stiffly, “Good day.”

  He slammed the door.

  When I carried my burn back into my own premises I heard a couple of female voices in the kitchen. Judy and a blowsy and slightly brassy redhead of middle age were dunking teabags in Judy’s new cups.

  “Oh, hi, Jim. This is our neighbor, came over to say hello.”

  “Mrs. Curzon?” I asked, moving out of the doorway toward the kitchen table.

  “Heavens, no,” the woman laughed. “I’m Mabel Gosness. I live on the other side of you.”

  She chatted through the ritual of sipping tea and departed with the remark that it was wonderful to have young people in the neighborhood.

  Judy carried the cups to the sink and began washing them. “We had real talk before the male presence befell us.”

  “Did you now?”

  “She seemed terribly lonely, eager for someone to talk with. She lives alone—her husband ran away with another woman nearly a year ago.”

  “Maybe one who talked less.”

  Judy looked over her shoulder long enough to stick out her tongue. “And guess what else?”

  “I give. What?”

  “On the other side of us is a mean little man named Tate Curzon. He hates everybody. Had four wives, no less, children by one of them. But even his own kids—they’re grown up now—never go near him. Mrs. Gosness says we’re to have nothing to do with him.”

  “Thanks for the advice, but I’ve met the gentleman.”

  “Honest?”

  “Sure,” I said, taking the cups and saucers from her to dry. “Went over and said hello. Wondered if he could tell me why Bickleford was so anxious to sell this house.”

  Judy practically wriggled. “And did you find out?”

  I hesitated, balanced on the point of a fib, then realized she would find out from Mrs. Gosness anyway. So I told her about young Andy Bickleford who’d been picked up in pieces and a mother whose mind hadn’t been able to take it and a father-husband to whom the end of the world had come.

  “I’ll bet that sock was Andy’s. The room must have been his.” A suspicion of tears touched Judy’s eyes.

  By bedtime, our first day of settling into our new home had got our minds off the tragic Bicklefords. They were, after all, strangers, and the present was much too vivid. I lounged in the master bedroom in shorts, my sleeping apparel, nonchalantly pretending to read with the pillow stuffed behind my head. Actually I had the dressing room doorway framed in my vision over the edge of the book; and then the door opened and Judy stepped into the soft bedroom lighting wearing a nylon nightgown that was next to nothing. My civilized veneer barely stifled a roar of pleasure.

  Hair brushed about her shoulders and a little smile of mystery playing across her mouth, she seemed to glide toward me. A remark on my pulse rate would be needless.

  Then as she passed the bureau, a strange thing happened. A ten by twelve inch picture of me which Judy had framed suddenly rose, hurled itself across the room and smashed against the wall.

  The picture fell to the floor. There was a moment of dead silence, then a whispered tinkle as a bit of glass settled in the wreckage.

  I sat up with the dream movements of a man swimming through molasses. Judy and I knelt beside the picture, neither wanting to touch it.

  “Your gown must have brushed against it,” I mumbled.

  “And knocked it all the way across the room?” Judy said with fearful logic.

  I gathered the bits of broken glass, piled them on the picture, and carried the wreckage to the bureau. Judy watched me, wide-eyed and steeped in her own thoughts.

  As I turned from the bureau, the murder mystery I’d been pretending to read jumped up and down on the bedside table. The edge of the book cover jarred against the lampshade. The lamp teetered, fell with a crash. Darkness flooded the room.

  I wasn’t sure whether Judy or I moved first, but in an instant we were standing in shivery embrace.

  “Maybe we should check into a motel for the night,” I suggested through chattering teeth.

  Judy’s warmth stirred in my arms. “Nope,” she said, “I’m not being chased so easily out of our own house. Anyway, our poltergeist doesn’t want to hurt us.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “He hasn’t thrown anything at us or on us,” she said with supreme female logic. “He could have socked you with the picture frame if he were antagonistic.”

  “He’s a sadist,” I said, “who’d rather scare people to death a little at a time.”

  “Or a lonely fellow who’s trying to tell us something,” Judy mused. “He’s certainly picking out a variety of items to toss around, which means he has method and purpose. If we could just get the message, I’m sure he’d go away and rest in peace.”

  Red-eyed and haggard, I muddled through my junior accountant’s job the next day. I was worried about Judy’s almost natural acceptance of the existence of a poltergeist. In the warm light of day, I just didn’t believe what I had seen for myself. There had to be an explanation, like the juxtaposition of magnetic forces at the spot where our house stood.

  I would have welcomed some advice, but could think of no source. My hard-headed, realistic boss was definitely out. If I went to the cops, the newspapers would pick it off the public record.

  We’d be subjected to the same glare of publicity that had roasted every other family so rash as to reveal acquaintance with a poltergeist. I wondered how many, like myself, had preferred to suffer the inexplicable in silence.

  The house looked as normal as peaches and cream when I hurried up the front walk. A bouncy and smiling Judy had a not-very-dry martini waiting, the kind I like. She’d also fractured her grocery budget with a two-inch-thick T-bone steak, but I applauded her.

  “No flying crockery today?” I asked as she slipped the steak under the broiler.

  “Not even a saucer,” she said.

  “Maybe the strain proved too much for him,” I said hopefully, munching the olive marinated in vermouth and gin.

  We dined elegantly by candlelight, the table graced with snowy linen that had been a wedding present from my Aunt Ellen.

  I’d had no appetite for lunch, but I worked like a scavenger on the steak. Judy served coffee, and we eyed each other across the table in affectionate silence.

  The steak bone made like a Mexican jumping bean all of a sudden, rapping against the plate.

  Judy blinked. I jumped. My chair tipped over backward. I grabbed the edge of the table and hung there, watching the bone jump up and down at eye level.

  The bone made no threatening motions, but it was a desecration of our privacy. “Enough
is enough,” I snarled. I rose, cupped my hands, and pounced on the bone. It offered no resistance as I smacked it against the plate. I raised my fingers one at a time, and was a little miffed when the bone just lay there after it was freed.

  I sneaked a glance at Judy.

  “You did see that, too, didn’t you?”

  Judy nodded an affirmative, her eyes glinting. “I wonder what he meant?”

  “Maybe that he’s hungry,” I growled. “Maybe you should brew him up a spot of newt’s eyes over some sulphur and brimstone.”

  “Don’t be facetious, Jim!”

  “Facetious? I’m not even rational any longer.”

  While Judy washed the dishes and tidied up after dinner, I did a sneaky search of the house from attic to basement. I didn’t find any wires, magnets, or other device remotely resembling the tools of a screwball practical joker.

  When I went upstairs from the basement, Judy was curled in our new wing chair before the television set.

  “You might have saved your time,” she said with wifely forbearance. “I covered every nook and crack myself today. Not that I needed any more proof that we really have a poltergeist.”

  “I favor selling,” I said. “I could put the place on the market by phoning the real estate agent at his home right now.”

  She sat up. “Don’t you dare, Jim Thornton! This poor fellow got stuck here, and when he gets unstuck he will go away and leave us alone.”

  “Oh, yeah? And I suppose you still think he’s trying to deliver a message?”

  “More than ever. That rattling bone meant something…if I could just figure out what. Why’d he wait all day until he had the bone to rattle, if he wasn’t trying to tell us something?”

  I eased to a sitting position on the hassock before her. “Judy,” I said gently, “I think I’d better get you out of here before we spend another night in this place.”

  “Don’t be sil! It’s a perfectly lovely house.”

  “But all this talk…”

  “He’s a perfectly nice poltergeist—and I’m not going to leave.” She smiled, leaned forward to pat my cheek. “Be a darling and flip the tuner to channel twelve. There’s an hour-long comedy special coming up in about five minutes.”