Janis Carter drew all the first floor drapes while her
Heritage Homes Association Vice-President and Treasurer followed at her heels.
"Can't I talk you women out of this? You have no idea the damage hysteria
could do to our reputation, and who can tell what some female will do during one
of these so-called `seances.'"
Her sympathies were with him. "I'm only the paid
director, Mr. Thorpe. The Board, except for your vote, accepted Dr. Wythy's
application to do the astral photography project—and any other research
she wished to do at Wharton House after hours this week."
Tall and loose jointed, a lot more than twice Janis's age,
Millard Thorpe usually bore a remarkable resemblance to an elderly horse. On
this occasion, he more closely resembled a mule. He whispered, "She's a
flake!"
"She's a noted psychology professor emeritus with a
legitimate interest in parapsychology. She's absolutely ethical. And when she
doesn't raise any ghosts, she will give us fair and helpful publicity in her
reports, because she will still believe in the possibility of spirits wandering
around even if she couldn't raise them. I don't believe any more than you do
that she'll be successful. I've chosen the most level-headed, minimal number of
people possible to be present. Everything will be all right. I promise."
Janis wished it were over. She was still shaken from the
minor car accident that morning - due, she was sure, to a careless mechanic
doing the routine earlier tuneup, no matter what the garage owner had said. She
had no way of going home to soak out the stiff neck, for in a weak moment she
had invited her one-time psychology professor from Claremont to be her house
guest while in San Diego. Her long, difficult day would not end when the doors
to Wharton House were locked for the night.
Mr. Thorpe raised both hands in a gesture that said, Then
it's all on your shoulders! and went for four folding chairs. While he
carried them from adjacent Badger House’s kitchen to the Wharton House front
parlor, the chief docent at Wharton House clumped about in her elephantine way,
rearranging the authentic Victorian parlor clutter. Nancy Rogers also doubled as
the Association's volunteer PR person and carried a flash camera around her neck
like an albatross.
The over-the-shoulder camera bag bumped like a marching drum
on her all-too-solid rear as she moved the antique oil lamp to safety atop the
Queen Anne writing desk. Millard Thorpe arranged the folding chairs around the
lamp table. Dr. Maggie Wythy adjusted the light from her seance lamp. Its eerie
glow distorted shadows and colors. Dr. Wythy's layers of burgundy and ocher
tie-dyed chiffon shifted to monochromatic grays.
"No pictures during the seance itself," Dr. Maggie
ordered. "There's no telling how the flash might affect the spirits. Run
the tape recorder if you like, but be absolutely silent except for the mantra
chant. If anyone breaks the concentration, I'll not answer for the
consequences."
Millard Thorpe winced. Her words set up those present for
"consequences" of hysteria such as caused the mischief prompting the
Historical Association Board of a generation earlier to refuse further requests
for para-psychological research. The Board majority had not turned completely
over, but neither had it learned permanently how hysteria and suggestibility
could create rotten publicity.
Dr. Wythy told Nancy to give Janis her photographic equipment
and sit at the table. Janis stored the camera bag behind the stove.
"Just stand where you are," the professor told
Janis. "I may have special instructions for you later. Keep an eye out for
my signals."
Once Dr. Wythy went to work, Janis was impressed with the way
her persona changed from someone with a weird gait to her gallop, to a
professional exhibiting deadly serious dignity. Her diminutive stature became
more commanding. Even Millard Thorpe sat where told.
"Normally, I use a channeler," Dr. Wythy commented,
"but I had no time to arrange one."
Janis didn't dare smile. Dr. Wythy had known the time she
might have to get her ghost was apt to be cut short if the board members' less
than wholly enthusiastic cooperation was changed by unexpected negative
pressures.
"I'm sure one isn't needed," the doctor said
airily. "Paranormal signs are terribly strong both in Underwood and Wharton
House."
Paranormal signs at Underwood House? Janis frowned. She made
the third attempt of the day to correct Dr. Wythy's misconception. If it did not
change Dr. Wythy's mind, Janis would at least have registered facts in front of
her two docents, one of whom — Millard Thorpe — was also the Association
Treasurer and the Vice President of the Board. She had twice already told the
psychologist that Underwood House couldn't possibly be haunted.
From her student days at Claremont, where everyone called the
eccentric psychology professor, "Dr. Maggie," Janis knew she might as
well be talking to the wind, but she once more repeated, "Underwood House
is only a reproduction of Old Town San Diego's first hotel."
The original Underwood had been razed well over a hundred
years back, but the plans had survived, and Janis had found them uniquely
suitable for the Association's future needs. A museum, library, and book shop
were slated for the ground floor. The second floor was slated to display typical
mid-nineteenth century hotel rooms furnished with vintage items from Old San
Diego's early days. Her father had provided for the museum establishment in his
will, particularly to house his own extensive collection of what Janis' brother
called "junk." Millard Thorpe had been an ally for the extensive
project because of his vision for utilizing the still unfinished third floor as
Association office space.
Janis disliked stairs that carried her higher than a second
floor and shuddered at the thought of an office on the third floor, but finished
her firm denial to the psychologist. "No ghosts."
Dr. Maggie serenely arranged her seance table. "The
workmen said some of the bricks they're using for facing came from the original
Underwood Hotel. I took crumblings to serve as focals."
Janis had to admit they had utilized bricks from many of the
oldest structures in the city. The likelihood of bricks from the old hotel was
about as likely as Dr. Maggie recognizing one when she saw a crumbling bit in
the work area. Even if possible, one brick did not make a ghost.
Arguing about it was futile, though. Dr. Maggie was only too
well known to Janis, a Claremont grad who in her salad days had taken a required
Psychology 101 course from the professor. Once the campus character captured a
bee in her bonnet, there was no way in the world to make her let go of it. Janis
could not deny that everyone who visited the Wharton House complex hoped to see
one of the numerous ghosts it claimed.
What Dr. Maggie would write about her experiments was sure to
bring in more tourists and more income. Nevertheless, Janis could not help
balancing the risk of becoming a laughing stock after all the energy and effort
she had expended during her first year as Director to put the Association on a
forward track.
Dr. Maggie placed a box shade over her lamp. Shadows deepened
and writhed along the walls. In the center of the table, she positioned the
crumbs of the brick she insisted after hours of prowling about the Underwood
House construction site that afternoon was authentic salvage from the original
Underwood site.
"Place your palms flat on the table," she ordered
Nancy and Millard Thorpe. "Be sure all our little fingers are touching.
Don't break the circle!"
At Dr. Maggie's pre-arranged signal, the three at the table,
and Janis, obediently standing by the iron parlor stove, began to hum steadily.
Because each participant chose whatever note seemed most
comfortable, the effect of their humming resembled a sustained, dissonant organ
chord. Dr. Maggie called it her mantra. Janis considered it inexpressibly
silly.
She suppressed an impulse to giggle. At thirty, her giggling
days should have long faded...if indeed she ever had such inclinations even
before her marriage to Dexter Carter. Nevertheless, the giggle tickled in her
throat, the result of nerve-wracking concern about publicity that could go awry.
She hummed away with the others, observing as best she could,
what with the shifting shadows, that Dr. Maggie was not in a trance.
"Spirit, are you there?" Dr. Maggie asked in a
hollow voice. "Spirit! We call you forth!" Still a third time she
commanded, her voice changing to peremptory. "Spirit? Show yourself!"
If Janis had been a ghost, Dr. Maggie's order would have made her put in an
appearance on the double.
After an unproductive interval, Dr. Maggie's voice shifted
into monotone. "We. concentrate. on. the spirits. of. these. historic.
buildings. We. call on. a. particular. un-named spirit. for. any. message. to
those. who guard. these. houses. Spirit! show. your. presence."
Dr. Maggie stopped and sing-songed in the same pitch as the
mantra's hum, "Janis, go to the piano in the music room and play—ah—‘The
Ash Grove.’" She opened her eyes wide and stared at Janis as though
she had never thought of naming that particular tune until it issued from her
mouth. "‘The Ash Grove!’" she repeated in the same chanting
rhythm.
Janis silently snorted at Dr. Maggie's blithe assumption she
could play the piano, though such assumption didn't take any psychic intuition.
In her long-gone and unlamented childhood, like any other little girl growing up
in culturally and financially top-drawer Mission Hills, Janis had taken piano
lessons. Her father, Ocho (he always insisted she and her brother call him by
his nickname) expected them both to become accomplished. No lack of trying to
please had kept Janis from becoming a world-class pianist, although Keith never
liked his violin. Their skills never came near Ocho's expectations. Janis had
been disappointed when Ocho canceled her piano lessons, but Keith gleefully
smashed his violin.
Janis sing-songed back at the seance leader, "I can't
play without sheet music. There is none here."
Dr. Maggie responded, still sing-song, "Fa-a-ake
it."
The optimistic parapsychologist might well get a one-finger
fumble, but Janis obediently passed under the music room arch on which spot one
of Wharton House's reputed ghosts, an ox-cart thief, had been strung up in the
bad old days. Little more than Mrs. Wharton's great black piano, one supposedly
played by Jenny Lind on tour, furnished the music room. The moment Janis sat on
the piano bench a sharp gust of cold air came through the pierced wood divider
screen across the office door to the back hall. She ought to have reminded
Millard Thorpe to shut the back door window screen after bringing in the chairs.
From her central position, Janis could see through to the
back hall door of Nate Whartons' office without moving her head. She could also
see the others at the seance table in the parlor. Her fingers hovered over the
keys while she summoned recall of "The Ash Grove" and surprised
herself to find she could actually play it—and not one-finger hunt and peck—even
if far from concert caliber. She must have played the piece at an early piano
recital, and on demand the memory unexpectedly returned.
The draft from the back door grew colder. More than cold—her
left arm and shoulder sprouted goose pimples. Oddly, her right side
remained warm. She wondered if she might be suffering a mild delayed reaction to
the car accident that morning. Even as she attempted to ignore the draft, an icy
hand grasped her left wrist.
Instantly she stared down. Everyone known to be in the
building was accounted for, and all were in her peripheral line of sight. Her
stomach went into free-fall. Someone had sneaked in through the back door—?
But all she saw on her wrist was her Rolex watch.
Nevertheless...Someone had a grasp on her just short
of pain, certainly impossible to discount as anything else but what it was—a
masculine grasp...A female or child's grip would have been lighter, less
authoritative. She could see Millard Thorpe with the others at the seance table,
still humming.
The increasing pressure of what was definitely a thumb over
her pulse point caused it to hammer. The noise was surely loud enough that the
group had to hear it and be as alarmed as she was. A great deal of time seemed
to pass during which she was aware of many irrelevant details—yet paralyzed.
This is no wandering spirit. There's a rational
explanation!
She stared at her icy left arm, unable to breathe. Her
visually unencumbered arm. Her fingers, flexed in the chord position, frozen
momentarily just above the keys. Panic rose and choked her.
She whipped around again to call for help. Dr. Maggie sat
immobile, her head up and back, facing her, but with closed eyes. The other two
at the seance table hunched around the table rim, concentrating on the flat
necklace of their six hands circling the table top.
I'm having a hallucination...or something...can't the rest
of them tell? Help me, someone!
Instinct for self-preservation kicked in. She twisted her arm
frantically to break the grasp. Out of control, she thumped the piano with her
right elbow.
A decidedly dissonant chord issued. Dr. Wythy cried out and
fell from her chair with a resounding crash.
The others interrupted their humming with cries of confusion.
Mr. Thorpe overturned his chair in his rush to turn up the wattage of the lamp.
He and Nancy stared at Dr. Wythy sprawled like a rag doll on Mrs. Wharton's
much-prized oriental carpet.
Nancy hit the switch on the hall side of the parlor door. The
parlor rooms flooded with light. Nancy returned and bent over Dr. Maggie,
uttering little squeaks of distress. Unnecessarily, Millard Thorpe announced,
"This seance is definitely over!"
The invisible grappler no longer held Janis. She wouldn't
think about him...it...whatever seemed to have happened!
She massaged her wrist while maneuvering around Mr. Thorpe to
help revive Dr.Maggie. Mr. Thorpe knocked over one of the folding chairs in his
haste to move in the opposite direction. He returned with a paper cupful of
water from the discreetly hidden cooler behind the hundred-and-sixty-year-old
elephant's foot umbrella stand in the hall. When Janis leaned over her, the
parapsychologist's eyes fluttered open. "Have you eaten today, Dr.
Maggie?"
"I was so excited, so busy—" Dr. Maggie
ineffectually fluttered her hands. "Blood!" she said faintly. "I
smell blood."
"You smell engine exhaust from the street."
Dr. Maggie struggled up. "Something happened. I
know something important happened."
Nancy said, "Jan hit a clinker? You fainted? I'm real
disappointed because I hoped for something well...more." She chafed Dr.
Maggie's hands. "Ladies our age shouldn't go without regular meals, you
know. We'll take you across the street to the Jalisco Cafe and see to it you eat
a nice, substantial supper. This excitement certainly made me
hungry."
Dr. Maggie allowed herself to be gathered off the rug,
brushed off, and reassembled.
"Tell The Jalisco to put supper on my running
account," Janis ordered Mr. Thorpe. He was the dragon guarding the
Association's treasury, but half of the Logan millions were hers to spend as she
pleased.
She needed to be alone. She needed to examine the
perfectly reasonable and ominous reasons she had experienced the episode at the
piano. She might even call her doctor. He had been the family physician all her
life, and would know she would never call on him after hours unless it was an
emergency. She could explain that it hadn't seemed necessary before,
but..."While you all eat, I'll stay here, record the day's receipts, and
set things in order. Dr. Maggie's Astral Photography session can wait until
tomorrow."
No purpose could be gained by upsetting them with the idea
that the morning's auto accident might have included a concussion and
consequently malfunctioning Executive Director.
Millard Thorpe turned to Nancy Rogers and thundered,
"You, Ms. Rogers, will say nothing about this seance. No press releases to
the newspapers to make us a laughingstock! No more seances ever."
Amen to that! Janis rubbed her arm, and wished them
all across the street and out of the building as fast as they could move.
She gathered to herself what control she could salvage. Not
that there was a ghost, but if impressionable people did hear of the interrupted
seance they could imagine all sorts of things. Mr. Thorpe was absolutely right.
Figuratively she kicked herself for her own undeniable surge of imagination at
the piano. Dr. Maggie had pushed all the right buttons, and Janis had reacted
like Pavlov's pup. If her ex-husband was around, he would say it was because she
was basically suggestible and easily manipulated. She said, "Nancy, be a
dear and get Dr. Maggie's cloak?"
Dr. Maggie was not to be so easily derailed. She grasped both
Janis's hands and let out an explosive sigh. "I knew it. I knew it!"
Her head bobbed and her green eyes sparkled. "You were touched by the
spirit, Janis! Admit it. Your skin is icy."
"Not at all!" Janis denied—absolutely denied—her
first impression that someone unseen had grasped her arm while she was at the
piano. She had manifested a neurological problem, hopefully minor.
She pulled away and briskly rubbed her hands to return
circulation to her left wrist and fingers. "There was a ghastly—not
ghostly—draft from the back door window you left open, Mr. Thorpe. Sit at that
piano, and you can feel it yourself. It blows right through the pierced wood
screen. That's the only reason my hand and arm seem cold."
"You were touched by a spirit, and he had a
message!" Dr. Maggie insisted. "Tell me, quick!"
"No message! No spirit." Janis was thoroughly
embarrassed at the implication she had succumbed to the power of suggestion for
even a moment. "Go to supper, all of you! Before I change my mind about it
being my treat!"
Nancy Rogers peered at Janis with near-sighted concern.
"You look awfully pale, Jan. Is Dr. Wythy right? About your having seen or
heard something odd?"
Janis gritted her teeth. The last thing she wanted was
revelation of her strange moment at the piano. She refused to put into words
what she for a moment thought had happened or she as well as the
Association might end up as laughingstock.
"I told you, you shouldn't try to work another of your
long days right after wrecking your car," Nancy scolded while wrapping Dr.
Maggie in a flamboyant purple cape. Nancy was probably right. If Janis had
allowed the Auto Center owner to take her home instead of insisting he just give
her the loaner car and cart her Lexus off to be repaired or totalled, the whole
silly business might have been averted.
She had gone through a long day, including the Altrusa
meeting where she had barely touched her lunch. Pure hunger and shock explained
her muddling at the piano, not insidious brain damage. Pure wishful thinking and
hunger explained Dr. Maggie's aberration. Janis brightened. "I'm fine.
Someone bring me back a takeout Gordo Combo Plate and plenty of diet soda."
Frantic to get rid of them all, she physically pushed them
out of Wharton's front door and locked it behind them. Immediately she felt
calmer...until she thought of Dr. Wythy versus Mr. Thorpe on the validity of
contacting spirits. She envisioned the possibility of flying tacos as the
weapons of war.
Holy smoke, I should have gone with them! Sat between them
to head off fireworks! No, they could jolly well fight it out themselve. She
would do the day's receipts and not have them to do later in her home office.
The sooner the day was over, the better she'd feel.
She checked the back door—properly locked, though the
screen window was open to the night air. The relatively minor discovery
reassured her, even though the night draft blowing through that back door window
screen was nowhere near as cold as it had seemed when she sat at the piano.
She retrieved her briefcase and papers from the credenza in
the dining room, hit the switch on the wall that wired the period chandelier
over the dining room table where she was going to work, and turned. In the great
oval mirror framed in ornately carved wood on the room’s east wall, she caught
a glimpse of herself and—
Behind her stood a naked man, streaming blood from a hideous
pattern of stab wounds in his chest. Though he was losing quantities of blood,
he showed no inclination to collapse. His opalescent blue eyes were fierce with
determination, the eyes of a man who refused to die no matter how ghastly his
injuries. Before Janis had any opportunity to break her paralysis, the stab
wounds—she was sure they were fatal stab wounds—faded before her eyes
until there wasn't a mark on his body.
Those blue eyes gleamed in the intruder's lean, tanned face.
His thatch of blond hair glittered in the light from the chandelier, but she
particularly—and inanely—noted his eyebrows, sideburns and body hair, dark
with golden highlights in a masculine pattern of triangles that could awaken the
libido of a stone.
She had no control over filling her eyes with all of him,
even with the sight of herself in the mirror, practically enveloped by him, her
face unnaturally pale, her eyes darkened by shock.
His glowing blue eyes on hers in the mirror, he reached to
grasp her left wrist. She knew that touch instantly from when she had been at
the piano across the hall. This time, his grip was warm, but still demanding
attention.
More adrenaline coursed through her, preparing her for flight
or fight. She whirled and slammed her Italian leather briefcase...into thin air.
Her defense stopped her in mid-action, facing the dining room
table. No one had stood behind her—she was quite alone in the room, lunging at
nothing!
But the strong, warm fingers still gripped and twisted at her
left wrist, and the coiling heat which had somehow overjoyed her was replaced by
utter terror.
I don't believe this! I won't believe this!
If she wasn't hallucinating, she faced instant changes in the
way she looked at life, heaven, hell, eternity— Halloween!
It had to be a delayed reaction to that morning’s accident.
The thought comforted. She must have struck her head. She ran her free hand over
her skull, but found no swellings, no evidence of any bruises.
Only one option remained. She was definitely off her rocker.
With a gasping intake of breath to fortify herself, she
turned toward the mirror again. The naked man still stood behind her. Wings of
dark blonde hair channeled down his chest and muscular torso to below his navel,
where it widened again. In a room illuminated clearly by the antique chandelier,
a room without shadows, the mirror image was wildly erotic. She couldn't believe
how susceptible she was to the— hallucination.
Her head came only to his shoulder, and she was taller than
average. When she compulsively twisted to see him directly, the warmth of him
remained, the pressure on her wrist was firm, and she had every sensation of
being pulled back against that strong body. She could only see the dining room
table, set with the Wharton family's antique silver.
Bloody stab wounds? Gone. Image in the mirror. There. Man
behind her?
She twisted helplessly, trying to make sense of it, but oddly
enough her panic faded even though her blood continued to heat with excitement.
This...somehow...must be Dr. Maggie's predicated spirit.
There were no such things as ghosts!
In Millard Thorpe's words describing Dr. Maggie...she was
unhinged.
She said the words aloud to the mirror. "I'm
unhinged."
She trembled, unable to take action to free herself. For one
thing, the image wasn't ghostly. It was totally, shatteringly physical, and not
only could she see him via the mirror, she could feel his body heat and sense
the additional essence of him—rubbed sage, a hint of old brandy and
fresh-shaved tobacco on the warm exhalation of his breath. A smaller chill
raised the hair on her neck. How would she know it was fresh-shaved
tobacco?
The opal blue eyes mesmerized. The masculine essence
entrapped. "I won't believe this is happening. Nothing can make me believe
it!" she tried to convince herself in the mirror.
For the first time, the apparition seemed to see himself in
the mirror. He moved expeditiously behind her mirror image, but spoke. She
shivered from nape to knees and was sure her toes were curling. His words
emerged, heating her neck. His voice, though a little raspy, as if it hadn't
been used for a hundred years or more, melted her bones still further.
". . . someone wants you dead," the apparition
intoned.
"She managed to croak, "W-wha—?"
"Wants you very dead."
She shut her eyes. His breath continued to puff, warm and
steady, against her neck. She remembered her collision with the tree, the
crumpled metal hood suddenly adorning her practically new car. She once again
heard the Auto Center Owner's declaration that failure of everything—brakes,
gears, the works—couldn't be his mechanics' fault.
"The descendant of my enemy is your enemy," intoned the solid
apparition. "I'm here to warn you. He's going to kill you."