What Child to the Hearthstone Returning

How does one go about invoking the proper atmosphere for the telling of a ghost tale?

It's been so long since I've heard one myself: a real one, I mean. I've never heard a firsthand account from a source I could consider reliable, and I find this terribly, terribly sad. What's become of ghosts, fragile creatures that they are? Do they linger as long as they can, waiting to be seen, sensed, discovered -- then, at last abandoning hope, simply slip silently, sadly out of existence, dying a second death? Or is it a matter of there being nothing, really, to sense or discover in the first place: that scientific terminology and extrasensory perception aside, there is, after all, no such thing as a ghost?

It's been so long.

In the olden days, when spirits of the dead walked freely and worldly wisdom had not yet touched on things of other worlds, the telling of a personal-experience ghost story would have come easily. It might begin when the gentlemen had assembled in the drawing room for cigars and brandy, after a rather heavy dinner. The curtains would be drawn, the gas lamps turned up; there would be some desultory talk about business affairs and problems on the estate, then someone would mention ghosts. A round of uneasy laughter: "I don't set much store by such things," one bold and partly drunk fellow might maintain, waving his cigar in the air. "Haunted mansions. Abandoned graveyards. A lot of lower-class hysteria, don't you know."

At this point, as if from nowhere, one gentleman would step forth from the shadows, clothed in grey, thin-faced, tight-lipped; he's been through hell and it shows. All heads turn toward him and he says quietly: "Perhaps you'll listen to my tale, sir, and consider changing your opinion."

His eyes move across the company. There is a ripple of anticipation and the gas lamps are turned low. Brandy is passed all around, chairs scrape as they are pulled nearer. A hush falls. And the thin-faced man in grey, sure of his audience, begins to speak.

✶✶✶

Stories can so easily be concocted from the sparsest of ingredients; a single experience, out of place, retold, is embellished, and embellished further with each further telling until over the years it becomes encrusted with impressions, associations and outright lies, like a ship's prow scummed with succeeding layers of barnacles, so that even the one to whom it happened can neither scrape it clean again nor remember its original shape.

And so it is with mine. I state only that what happened, happened a good many years ago, and I may have embellished it; but I have tried to scrape down to the bare planks of the prow and I find there rudely carved three words, each representing one of the strangenesses upon which this story is built, in as far as it is a story, as much as it is built:

Portcullis; apartment; cat.

Portcullis.

There was no longer any reason why I should after so many years have returned there to live, and plenty of reasons why I shouldn't, mainly having to do with the kinds of ghosts a bad childhood leaves behind on the scene of the growing up. There were far too many of these ghosts for my liking. I left at 17 to escape them, proceeded to lose myself in travels, the European continent, Asia, Australia. When my money ran out several years later I returned to America -- but not to Portcullis; never to Portcullis; wandered from one meaningless job to another, passed untouched through a meaningless marriage and a civilized divorce, circling Portcullis with a watchful eye and never touching down. It was as if I were tethered to the city by the past and could not -- would not -- break the bond that kept me circling.

If I choose not to elaborate on that childhood I was so anxious to forget and yet could not put behind me, it's because the specifics are in large part lost to me now, leaving only faint impressions. Enough to say that those impressions are in turn of chaos, violence, oppressive silence and, ultimately, loneliness. I was an only child. There had been another, a girl-child, Virginia, born when I was almost two, but she had died before her first birthday, and the silence that began with her death continued to grow, swallowing my mother, my father, eventually swallowing me. I returned just once to the house where my childhood was spent, to stand on the street and stare at it; for my mother, too, haunted by the ghosts that lived there, had moved far away to Oregon shortly after I left. The house met me impas¬sively, shielded behind its now-overgrown trees and hedges. I walked up and down before it several times, trying to take the measure of what it had become: it gave me nothing -- not a single shade of a half-remembered childish laugh. I saluted it cynically, nodding it out of my life, and walked on.

So: it wasn't to be reunited with my family that I had returned to Portcullis. Nor was it because of any innate love for the city itself, sprawling self-conscious high-priced whore that it was. I had never felt at home there, yet I was tired of traveling, of being displaced, of seeking anything and never find it; I was weary, and of all the places I'd lived, Portcullis was nearest to what the weary call home. For that reason, and for no other, I finally, after ten years, returned.

✶✶✶

Someone shifts in his chair and sighs, and the tight-lipped gentleman smiles wryly: "You grow impatient with my story. But no, let it move at its own pace, friends. You must feel as I felt, see as I saw. Be patient with it. It takes time."

✶✶✶

There in Portcullis, then, I came to earth, brought down in the end by its familiarity, though there was nothing familiar about the 16-dollars-a-night motel room in which I spent my first week back in town. The first order of business was to get myself established, solidly into the mainstream of what I believed was life, to buy a car, to land a job, to find a place of my own: I did all three by the simplest method available, through the classified section of the newspaper. I looked at seven cars and interviewed for five jobs before deciding about either, and then probably made my choices through sheer desperation.

About the apartment, though, there was no doubt. I saw it, and I took it.

The landlady, a brisk-voiced woman named Mrs. Tysoe, had described the room to me on the phone: small, fully furnished, complete kitchen, bath shared with the next-door tenants; 40 dollars a week. Even in those days, 40 dollars a week was aston¬ishingly cheap. I could have afforded more, but didn’t care.

"If you're interested, come take a look quick as you can," she'd urged. I heard a child crying, and the sharp yapping of what sounded like a yardful of dogs. "These places rent out fast, and who knows. If you wait an hour, it might be gone."

By the time I left, though, the midday sun had burned away most of the high autumn haze, and as I turned my new old car west the windshield caught and reflected a ferocious glare. I rolled the window down and let my left arm dangle out, fingers opened to feel the cool crisp rush of wind. The address Mrs. Tysoe had given me -- on the southwest side, in the decaying older section of town -- had put me off at first. But after all, the far¬ther I got from the northern mountains that shadowed my old home, the better were my chances of dispelling those childhood ghosts and finding freedom in Portcullis.

The street, when I found it, was a surprise: I hadn't expected it to be across from a cemetery, in the first place; also I didn't much care for the ramshackle green- and lavender-painted houses, glass-littered sidewalks and unweeded yards of the neighborhood. But what did I think I'd get for 40 a week? For 40 dollars a week you get a roof over your head and a place to keep your books, and that's all. That's all I needed.

I found the address, the numbers painted (years ago) on the edge of the sidewalk. I parked the car and got out, and stood for a moment to catch my breath and take my bearings.

✶✶✶

There is a growl from the partly drunk listener as he stretches across his neighbor to pour himself another brandy, and under his breath he mutters, "This had better be good -- I don't want any haunted houses or overturned tombstones or common spook-stuff of that sort." The man in grey glances up at the interruption, coolly; his heckler, cowed, falls silent, and the tale continues.

✶✶✶

The building was nothing like any "apartment house" I'd encountered before, neither the turn-of-the-20th-century boarding houses you can still find in the center of most large cities, now inhabited by drunks and junkies and old folks fanning themselves on the fire escapes, nor the modern singles-and-young-couples complexes with paper-thin walls and names like La Mediterranean. The building was tiny, nothing but a short, flat shoebox. I walked the dusty pavement fronting it and read the tin numbers tacked to the doors: 1, 2, 3, all the way to 6, which was flanked by a pair of banged-up washing machines and a brace of trash cans. I felt like an intruder, a trespasser. Curtains were drawn tightly across all six windows, and I couldn't shake the feeling that from behind each curtain a pair of eyes watched me pass. The leggy shrubs and long-dead summer grass cast only faint shadows in the south-swung morning sun, yet in all the pale clean openness of daylight I still felt a troubling chill, like the drop of a quiet ice-dripped word suddenly at the back of my neck.

Without thinking, I turned up the collar of my coat.

The landlady's house sat in the rear, and as I passed the high redwood fence of the back yard I heard again that horrid frenzied yapping of dogs. I climbed the yellow-painted concrete steps to the front porch, picking my way through a trail of cushions, rusted tricycles and potted plants, and knocked at the side of the open screen door.

Out popped a lopsided cowboy hat, topping a small face round and brown as a beanseed.

"Hello," I said, "is your mother home? I came to see the apartment."

Like some great clockwork toy the head popped in, the door banged shut, the door banged open and Mrs. Tysoe popped out.

"Hello," I repeated. "I came . . ."

"Yes, I know. I've been waiting." She jangled a massive bunch of keys and, pushing past me, said, "Come along, then." Back past the redwood fence, yap yap, down the row of tired grey doors and wobbly numbers and sparse shrubs and shadows, I watched her neat small figure moving briskly ahead of me, her brown ponytail bobbing and trailing a yellow ribbon in her wake, to Number 5. She stopped.

"This is it," she said.

She selected a key, fitted it to the lock. She paused a moment, her hand on the knob, before opening the door, then turned to me with a sudden smile, adding, "Like I said, it isn't exactly elegant."

On the phone Mrs. Tysoe had described the place as "small and fully furnished" and I recalled now that she’d said nothing about it being clean. So I at least had to credit her with honesty, if only through understatement and omission. At first glance, the room was a shambles, and a musty, greasy smell rose slowly, almost reluctantly, from every corner. It was only courtesy to Mrs. Tysoe, standing in the doorway watching, that kept me from snapping out some nasty remark and stalking out.

A strange thing happened. though, as I walked around the room looking at this, touching that. I began to like it. I began to like the musty smell of it. I began to like the closed-in feel of it. Against all reason, touching the chair whose upholstery had split to expose bare wood, seeing the brown fingers of waterstreaks staining the dingy kitchen walls, I began to think of the room not as the filthy firetrap that it undoubtedly was - but as something living. Crazily. Something feminine, perhaps. I felt almost as if she were moving forward shyly, a little suspiciously, to greet me, the way a mistreated animal will sense a sympathetic hand and skulk forward belly to the ground to lick at it.

I touched the stove, forcing my voice to be cool: "Does this work?"

"Everything works."

I nodded, not sure what to say next.

"Well?" Mrs. Tysoe prompted, her arms folded across her chest.

"This?" I pointed to a narrow, flimsy door beside the refrigerator.

"Connects to the bathroom. A shower and toilet -- go on, have a look."

I undid the hook and peered inside, catching a quick glimpse of water stains and rusty pipes and a brand new pink shower curtain, topped improbably with pink plastic roses. I drew a deep breath, then pulled the door shut again.

"Shared, you said. What about the person next door?"

Mrs. Tysoe must have sensed that I meant to take the room, because she dropped her wariness and again became brisk and chatty.

"Mr. and Mrs. Wendover -- an old couple -- they've been here years and years and never caused any trouble, bless their hearts. As quiet as a couple of guinea pigs, those two. I don't really care what you do to this room itself --" She gestured vaguely, and laughed. "-- There isn't a hell of a lot you could do to it, but I only ask for their sakes that you leave the bathroom tidy when you're finished with it." She glanced at me apprais¬ingly, then nodded. "You look like someone who'd take good care of this place anyway."

"Well."

"Well, do you want it?"

"Well . . ." I found it hard to speak. A roof over my head, a place for my books. . . . I passed a hand across my forehead, which had begun to ache, and said:

"I'll take it.”

Later that afternoon I packed my car, checked out of the motel, made the long drive back across town, stopping along the way to grab a few groceries and cleaning supplies, and, using the key Mrs. Tysoe had given me, let myself into my new room for the first time.

It was as if I had been expected.

For four straight hours I cleaned and scrubbed, wiped and soaped and rinsed, and by the time my muscles ached and cried out Hold, enough, I had barely scraped away the first layer of grime. I stood in the middle of the room inspecting my meager progress and sighed; then I went out for a hamburger, came back to eat it, and after carefully wiping the last crumbs from the tabletop I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee. I'd so far unpacked the car of only what I'd need for the night, and in the early evening sun sifting through the kitchen window the room looked softer, more desolate for the presence of my sleeping bag unrolled across the opened-out sofa, my overnight case on the bureau, the contents of my tin mess kit spread across the kitchen cabinet. Tomorrow, I thought as I stretched out on the sofa, I will get my things out of storage, buy some sheets and blankets, finish cleaning, and move in.

I closed my eyes, feeling a wash of bone-weariness, and without bothering to undress I crawled into the sleeping bag. In the last moment before sleep slid in beside me I heard a sound I couldn't place immediately, a shuffling, a scrabbling, a dull little halfhearted clink of metal on metal. One of my ancient neighbors was cautiously locking the bathroom door on the inside.

Later that night I was awakened out of deep dreaming by another sound, more intrusive, of singing. It came from the opposite side, a woman’s voice, low, husky, singing in the dead of that October night: "With all my heart, I swear I do, with all, all my heart . . ." over and over and over. At last she spoke, her voice slurred but emphatic: "Really, I really mean it," and then laughed, and the laugh trailed off at its uppermost peak into a shriek and fell swiftly to a sob.

My stomach tightened.

God, I thought, suddenly afraid, what am I doing here? what am I doing in this place, in Portcullis … in this room?

Toward morning I dreamed, disturbingly, about the old house on 22nd Place. I cried in my sleep, and when I awoke listlessly half an hour later with the wetness on my face I lay still in my sleeping bag, remembering the dream and feeling lonely, lost.

I think I read somewhere once, or perhaps I made it up, that solitude is both purge and penance. A pretty phrase; yet if I made it up myself it was for the prettiness of it, and not for its truth, because every solitude I had ever experienced had been purgative until I moved into that shabby drab of an apartment. During childhood, solitude was my shield; as I grew older I considered it a pleasure, an indulgence, when I could reflect on the dull emptiness I pretentiously thought of as my life and, before the reflections could grow too serious, scamper back again into the society of acquaintances whose company I pretended to disdain. Now, though, I had no such society in which to lose myself, and on cold autumn nights in my room alone I was forced to drop the delusion that I was an island untouched by the need for contact with other shores, and paid penance for that delusion in solitude.

A strange time, those first few weeks. I had my room, and my work; and little else. My world was small and sparsely populated. I could say good morning and make casual conversation when required without divulging anything of myself, without compromising my precious privacy. I must have carried it off well, because before long I realized that the people at work, the landlady and her teenaged daughter, the only people I had regular contact with, regarded me with a kind of mixed awe and admiration, and that had I for a moment loosened my self-restraint I might have been popular with them. This knowledge pleased me, gave me a sense of power, yet perversely made me resolve all the more not to loosen that restraint, for if I had (I suspected), I might have found I wasn't superior to them after all, and that would have been unbearable.

At times I was content, at times distressed and desolate, yet content even in my desolation: martyrdom has always come easily to my soul. I enjoyed my self-imposed exile. I enjoyed my aloneness. I enjoyed smiling sardonically, keeping myself aloof from the laughter and good-natured joshing that went around the office. I enjoyed playing at being mysterious, saintly, ascetic. It did me good to imply by a gently refused invitation that I was saving myself for something better. It didn't bother me that nothing better came along.

It was only at night, when I lay in my bed staring up at the blackness of the ceiling and hearing nothing but the groaning and clanking of my gas heater, and later, never before midnight, the laughing and singing and sobbing of the woman next door, that my façade slipped. Just for a moment. And just for a moment I felt something turning over in my soul that meant something else was missing. I'd taught myself not to dream; now I learned to read myself to sleep with the light on and keep that turning something crying for something else well at bay.

Perversely I'd sent my mother my new address, and she'd written immediately. Our correspondence was regular and carefully masked. She was happy, working, meeting people, going out, building a good life; I was happy, working, reading, learning, getting my life on its feet again. Neither of us would admit to what each of us knew, that neither of us could go to sleep three nights running without remembering the old house.

I also had a letter from my father, forwarded from my post office address, asking for news of myself and my mother and masking nothing. I read it through once, then folded it, creased it, ripped it four times across itself and threw it away.

Each morning on my way to work I passed the cemetery, and again every afternoon on my way home; I never saw it except bathed in the clouded silver sun of late dawn or early twilight. It intrigued me, it appealed to the macabre in me, this thing of modern tragedy: one of those massive memorial gardens with miles of white stuccoed wall running low around its boundaries and a big pink saltblock of a mausoleum plopped smack in the middle. Once when I was small I had stacked together matchboxes, tucking a tiny toy into each one. I imagined the mausoleum to be like my matchbox construction. The bronze plate might read William B. McDonald, but if you opened the drawer you would find, not a coffin, but a giant blue plastic cowboy, complete with hat and holster and a factory seam running along its side. I thought that those coming here seeking the spirits of their dear departed would have to look elsewhere, like the poor Egyptian soul-birds painted on the sarcophagi in the British Museum, although unlike the Egyptians, the exile of the bodily tenants of this cemetery would be voluntary: no self-respecting spirit would find a proper haunting ground here.

It had occurred to me several times that I might find it interesting, in a way, to walk of an evening through the rising mists of the lawns and hills and tombstone rows; but for the first week or so after moving in and starting work I had no energy left at day's end for walking, and preferred to make myself a quick cup of soup and crawl straight into bed to read myself into a stupor. Later, when I started to feel the first stirrings of restlessness, I found myself heading off in other directions, down alleys and past tennis courts and streets of houses old but well-kept. I would walk for hours on end, returning to my room only after darkness had fallen and all the old

folk, bundled up in shawls and blankets, had left the front porch swings from which they watched the daylight spend itself.

Gradually, almost without my noticing it, the cemetery began to exert a tremendous pull on me which it became a challenge to resist, and before setting out on my walks I'd pause a moment by the door, looking out to the western sky and feeling that pull, and say, smiling a little, "Not tonight. Tonight I'm going to the schoolground to sit in the swings. Maybe tomorrow," knowing full well that tomorrow I'd go to the shopping center, or the water plant, or the horse pastures. Still, it was more satisfying to titillate myself with half-promises and not fulfill them. In an existence virtually devoid of challenge, the small triumph of having for one more day resisted the draw of the cemetery grew to be a necessity.

After awhile, though, my restlessness grew into an unmanageable beast, and I was quickly losing the power to deal with it. My evening walks became longer, faster, more frantic, and still I would return, at midnight or later, unwearied, agitated, to lay for hours in darkness waiting for the sleep that seldom came before dawn. All night long, then, I'd be hearing the woman's husky singing, lush throaty lullaby that lured not sleep but all kinds of other demons, and I began to know exactly when the drunken lyrics and laughter would dissolve into the sobbing that still clutched at my stomach and made me tremble uncontrollably. The refrain never altered by more than a word or two: "With all my heart. I swear. With ah-ahh-allll my heart. No, I really mean it.” Sometimes she'd argue with herself: “What? What'd you say? But I do. I swear I do."

Do what? I wondered. What do I really, with all my heart? She never got as far as telling me, before the sobbing destroyed the sense of her words.

Of my other neighbors -- the Wendovers, whom Mrs. Tysoe had aptly described as "quiet as a couple of guinea pigs" -- I heard nothing in the night except an occasional phlegmatic cough, a creaking of rusty springs as they turned over in bed, once in a great while that shy apologetic locking of the bathroom door on the inside.

During the week my restlessness was at least constrained, if not controlled. The sheer discipline of having to get up each morning and spend eight hours at work saw to that. It was during the weekends that I chafed and pulled and strained toward I didn't know what, during the long Saturdays and endless barren Sundays that my fever of restlessness -- for it was becoming very like a fever -- reached its pitch. I had never been a person to rant and rage, even in solitude, but there were times I came very near to it, aching to beat my head against the walls of my room, to stomp, to storm, to escape.

Escape? On the day that word first occurred to me I stopped short in my pacing and laughed a little, bitterly; was I dramatizing now, conjuring up in the spirit of that pitiful room the four walls of a prison?

Yet in a very real way the room had become a prison, where once I'd thought it a haven, an eyrie: a prison that held me by force of the fact that if I left it for long I would, inevitably, find myself moving down the street … toward the cemetery.

For three weekends I fought back, telling myself illogically that I couldn't very well visit the cemetery during the day and that, at night, it would be foolish to venture out into the cold that the new November had dropped like a numbing prayer over the valley. Then one Friday the weather turned unexpectedly warm, and I felt my resolve soften. The next morning I awoke with sunlight streaming across the blankets, and knew that though I had to continue fighting, before Monday I would have given in.

It took me until Sunday night, and I do not remember how I spent those two days; I only know that not for a minute did I leave the room, despite the unexpected warmth and clarity of the sky, childish laughter in the streets, my landlady's daughter's tentative invitation to picnic with her in the park.

The moment of my surrender, though, I remember well.

Suddenly it was dusk, and I stood at the kitchen window watching the last fragile rays of sunshine sifting through the screen and settling in duststreaks across the backs of my hands. I was holding a coffee cup and turning it over and over absently, letting the light play against its curves, when from somewhere several streets away, improbably, drifted the cheery Pied-Piper tinkling of an ice cream truck. I thought: Charon's ferrybell calling across the river to those lost souls on the opposite shore. Then I thought: Upon which shore do I stand? I listened; the merry little nursery-rhyme chimes faded away, and for a long moment I stood in silence waiting for an answer to my question. None came. There was only in the air a smell of woodsmoke, and the taste of winter deferred, and next door an ancient hand dropped a saucepan clattering to the floor.

The absence of answer was answer enough. I set the cup down and pulled on a coat and muffler. Locking the door behind me, I paused, looked back for a long moment. Then, raising my collar high against the chill, I set out for the cemetery.

The mist that always seemed to rise with twilight from the damp ground had grown hazier, heavier in the red-gold rays of the setting sun, gentling the green-dyed grass to grey. I began to relax a bit: Perhaps there would be solace after all. Solace . . . a strange word to choose, but it sprang to mind spontaneously, and the more I walked, and the more ease I found in the cushion of grass beneath my feet, in the cool moist fingers of mist circling about my throat and cheeks, the more I thought my subconscious must have been wise beyond my awareness, to acknowledge for me the pain that I would not, to know where I must go for that pain to be assuaged, my thirsting slaked, terror soothed away. These thoughts rose without volition and I couldn't identify their source: pain, thirsting, terror: I didn't know what I meant by those words, but something assured me of the truth in them, and while I felt I was walking through a waking dream I felt as well as if I'd left the world of dreams behind, beyond the ceme¬tery wall.

My aimless wandering brought me eventually to the cemetery's outer periphery and, by accident, up against the edge of a streetlight's white glare. I rebounded away from the light, groping along the wall and seeking out its shadows; this route took me around to the back end of the cemetery, bordered by a high hedge of oleander behind which an alleyway ran. Again I felt that sense of having stepped across a boundary of some sort into yet another world, another era: here the grass was overgrown, slightly shabby, catching wetly around my ankles; here the tombstones, rather than squatting low against the ground as if they wanted to sink into it, rose high in curves and arcs and crosses, the way tombstones were meant to do, stone prayers and paeans, not cold square apologies. I stooped and squinted at the date carved across the face of one, the numerals worn smooth by dry winter winds and summer duststorms: May 6 1862-Sept 15 1895. Ah, better, I thought, straightening again. Better. Better. Here the dead, long dead, lay undisturbed, and when one goes to a cemetery for solace one finds that solace more readily in the company of the long-dead.

I spent quite a few moments in that small plot of ground, wandering about from gravestone to gravestone, stopping, bending, reading dates, conjuring faces and lives and loves for each I visited. Distanced by time, I felt safe in doing this; these folk who knew nothing of freeways and high-rises and civilized divorces would not understand my pity, the thing in me my being here had touched, and so would be unhurt by it. I found myself wanting to sit awhile, to muse, to close my eyes and dream, feeling nothing but the fine cool breath of the breeze against my face and through my hair. It was one of those evenings of long light and slow purple sunset which I had perhaps without thinking remembered, which had perhaps after all been my sole reason for returning to Portcullis, and the fact that the sky had darkened only slightly since I'd first entered the cemetery lent an aura of timelessness to my sojourn there, as if there were yet something in the presence of these for whom time had ended which could arrest its passage for those to whom time was moving all too swiftly.

I could have laid myself down and gone to sleep, quite content in believing that my sleep would last only a century or two.

Just beyond this little section, separated from it by a stretch of grass some twenty feet wide and tucked into the far corner where the unclipped oleanders met in a high dark arch, was another grouping of gravestones, sunk still deeper in the shadows; something moved among them. I dropped quickly into a crouch, and in that moment of not knowing what it was, I felt that age-old rising of ecstatic terror brushing across my body with a quiet whisper that raised gooseflesh. This was, after all, a graveyard.

A cat. After all, only a cat, crouched shadow-hunched atop a headstone. It must have been prowling through the grounds after crickets and, like me, stopped for a rest.

I breathed out slowly, chuckling in my throat. Stretching out one hand, I crept nearer, calling softly, "Here, kitty, kitty"; my voice sounded hollow even to me in the vast silence of the night, quavering, and the cat must have sensed and mistrusted the tremor in it, because immediately it huddled down closer to its stone perch, motionless. For a moment I thought I'd deluded myself and there was nothing before me but grass and gravestones; then without warning a car turned into the alleyway behind the hedge, its headlights cutting a wide yellow swathe across the graves, the grass. The cat, for an instant, was caught in the headlights’ sweep, grey, froz¬en; for an instant its eyes blazed in green animal phosphorescence and I knew it was looking at me; then the car's lights struck me and dazzled me and for two seconds I was blind.

Two seconds only: two seconds. Then I heard the tires grating on gravel as the car turned and the light swung away from me. I shook myself free of my bedazzlement and stepped forward, hand outstretched.

But the cat had vanished.

Now all at once the soul-weariness I'd been putting off descended over me like a clammy clinging shroud, and exhausted in every bone and beyond I wanted to rest, rest. It was as if the tension of those few seconds from the moment I sighted the cat to the moment it disappeared had drained me of all energy and all possibility of energy, and I was sorrier than I should have been to have lost that brief measure of living contact.

I walked across the remaining stretch of grass to the tombstone on which the cat had been huddling, and placed my hand against the top of it: warm, still -- only slightly and swiftly fading. The touch of a minute could survive only half that time on granite cold and untouched years long, and I sighed a little, as much for loss as for weariness, as I sank thankfully to the grass and leaned my shoulders against the gravestone. I closed my eyes, feeling exhaustion fall away from my aching soul and a great unexpected peace rising to enfold me.

I slept, I thought I'd slept for hours, and dreamed, sweetly; but when I roused myself and opened my eyes I saw the sky still purpling. I couldn't have been asleep for more than a very few minutes, but I awoke refreshed, relaxed, grateful. It must have been the dream, I thought, though I couldn’t remember it; remembered only its essence, its warmth, its comfort; it had been of a time past which had never been, I thought, and the lingering lull of it left a pure sweet sadness that stirred me to half-formed memories not my own.

I stretched my arms toward the darkening sky, the first stars, the new moon, feeling so much at home I couldn't bear to think of leaving, and turned to read the inscription on the gravestone, to discover the name given to this place which had afforded me a few moments' respite. My own thin shadow obscured the letters, and I moved to the side and traced them out, one by one, by sight and by touch:

Virginia.

Virginia -- and then the last name.

My own.

That sounds familiar, I thought with surprise; have I known someone called that?

Then, quick as a star winks out of existence, a memory, tentative, unsure: two tiny child hands stretching for each other and not quite meeting, and a sick-sweet smell (of antiseptic? of sour milk?) rising from a pile of white and shiny satin, then someone laughing and saying my name and pulling me away and hugging me close. A mother-smell, a mother-feel.

Who is this? – my child’s-mind thinking, without words. What have you brought into my house?

Virginia, my sister, had died before I was old enough to carry the memory of her with me, and for all my life I had thought of her only as the reason for the quiet thoughtful sadness that drew my mother into herself for a few days in November every year. She would mope about the house, every strained word falling into far-off silence; perhaps she'd wander into her bedroom and stay there behind closed doors for an hour or so; and I remember one year -- the last I can remember clearly -- when she'd shut herself away and my father had stormed in after her and I heard him shout "You still blame me, don't you?" and she mumbled something in a choked voice which I couldn't understand. By then I'd stopped bothering about what went on between my parents, didn't care, and even if I had, didn't dare ask what my father meant.

Young as I was, barely three years old then, they never told me how my sister had died, never told me where she was buried. She was simply there one day and gone the next.

And now, years later, it seemed I'd found her. Two small hands stretching for each other and touching, at last.

The hush that had fallen around me was deep, boundless. I stood, silent, not shaking, feeling nothing but an intense quiet inside that was for a moment incomprehensible until I remembered how accustomed one can become to the relentlessness of a noise that never stops, so that at its stopping the silence sounds like thunder; and I knew the silence for what it was.

Virginia, my sister. My sister.

For a long time I stood staring at the shadows that spelled my name in stone. I laid a kiss upon the gravestone. It was still warm to my lips with cat-warmth and smelled rich and musty. At once I felt both foolish and a little afraid: foolish for attaching such meaning to a small place of grass and gravel, afraid for remembering the wisdom of fools. I straightened, drew my coat close about my throat and turned away. It was time to leave. I hurried across the grass and through the pools of light and shadow, away from the stone with my name on it, my sister's name on it, and the handful of dust and clutch of cloth that lay beneath it, away from the place where the past had reawakened a dream of what never was, where the thundering of my pain had ceased.

Just once before reaching the wall I stopped, and glanced back, and thought I saw a small shadowy shape watching me from the shelter of a tree. It might have been the cat, I don't know, it might have been the cat, or a cat-shaped shrub, or nothing at all.

Darkness had now closed over all but the westernmost band of the sky, where, just above the horizon, graded ribbons of deep purple edging into lavender streaked across the last blushes of red and orange. In ten minutes night would come; already the solitaire of the evening star had multiplied into many, and the moon, a thin sliver of oriental ice, hovered above the mountains to the south.

I crossed the street and walked down the sidewalk quickly, my heels making cold slapping sounds against the concrete, hurrying away, hurrying toward, my hands now stiff with chill. I could scarcely unlock the door. My room was cold as well. I lit the gas fire and heated up some leftover soup and drank it from a cup, folding my fingers about the smooth porcelain for warmth. But what warmth they received touched only the skin and went no deeper, and I knew then that the night ahead would be a long and cold one.

And that's all.

No it isn't.

The story should have ended there; perhaps it did after all, but at the time I thought not. There's more to tell, in many ways the most important part; in many ways the hardest part to tell.

The daytime warmth of that one weekend was at best a transitory boldness in the face of winter, and by the next morning winter had come, more fiercely for having been thwarted over two of its rightful days. As always, a dramatic change in weather provoked changes in the moods of the people, and in the midst of mopiness and irritability and touch-fire tem¬pers among even my most stable acquaintances, my own downshift into low-keyed pensiveness went unnoticed, unremarked. I was left alone to deal with it on my own terms, which were reasonable: I ignored it. My twilight walk through the cemetery never crossed my conscious thought. It had of its own accord filled up all the empty spaces except one, and that, for me, was enough.

One night after three or four days of ice storms and wind storms I came home late from work. It was my birthday; I had let myself be talked into going out with a few fellow employees for a small celebration, which meant several drinks in a bright warm room and some hours of requisite camaraderie. Strangely, I didn't mind; not more than twice did I feel the urge to make some caustic comment, and not once did I give in. This, in ordinary times, would have inspired some curiosity and perhaps another joke about my being in love, but the rain which came consecutively with the taming of my spirit had riled the spirits of the others, and my birthday, I soon discovered, was little more than an excuse for midweek revelry of a small and frantic sort.

It was after eleven-thirty, then, when I got home, the sidewalks slick with mud, rain streaming down my neck, under my collar; the porch light was off and as I fumbled for the lock I felt something brush against my leg. I looked down, and smiled in spite of my damp cold misery: a cat had sought shelter under the overhang, and now, bedraggled and shivering, rubbed itself against my leg.

I swung the door open and switched on the light. The cat slipped inside matter-of-factly and immediately finding a cushion to curl up on went about the business of grooming itself into respectability. Fine then, I thought. Stay the night. All creatures could use companionship on a night like this. I peeled off my coat and clothes, draped them dripping across a chairback and went into the tiny bathroom to take a hot, hot shower.

I was in the shower for quite awhile, and when I came out again, toweling myself vigorously, the cat had recovered most of its catlike sleekness. It was a relatively good-looking creature after all, smoky grey with a fine white face; it reminded me of the cat in the cemetery and I wondered briefly if it could of all the southside cats be the same one. At that thought the cat looked up -- expectantly? dubiously? -- and I knelt beside it, laughing as I stroked its back, scratched its ears. Don't worry, it doesn't matter, you can stay here anyway. As if reassured, it began to purr loudly, and feeling better for the sound of it I opened a can of tuna, spooned half of it onto a saucer, and set the saucer on the floor under the little table. Then I lit the gas fire, turned out the lights and climbed into bed.

I slept immediately, but was awakened less than an hour later by that long-familiar grip of terror around the base of my stomach. I felt it even before its source could be identified:

"Truly I do, I do, with all my heart and soul. With ah-all --"

That tripping voice, that trilling laugh, rising . . . What was it, I begged silently, clutching my fists against my throat, why me, why do you do this to me?

Mouthing the words I braced myself against the climax and that lost, that terrible swift plummeting descent into sobbing that shaped my sleep at night and haunted me by day. But tonight the laughing rose and rose, louder than before, playing treble harmony over the low thrumming of the rain against the roof and windows, rising, stretching, stretching till it had to break and not breaking, and was changing pitch into a shriek, and I knew if she shrieked I couldn't bear it, I would have to leave the room and not come back, ever.

I felt the edges of the blankets stir.

I'd forgotten the cat.

I put my hand out now and touched its head. It made a low throaty sound and licked my fingertips with its rough warm tongue.

With all, with all, with ah-allll my heart . . .

"Poor thing," I whispered, "are you frightened too? do you want to come inside with me?"

I pulled the blankets away, and the cat leaped with a soft drop onto the mattress beside me. It went through settling-down motions, turning and curling and rearranging; after a moment or two it had nestled itself close into the curve of my neck, warm fur, warm breath. I cupped my hand around its belly and felt the steady rhythmic rise and fall of its breathing, and began to breathe steadily myself, my stomach relaxing, my tension relaxing, till with a final trembling sigh the cat purred once and fell asleep. In all the cold dark room I lay awake a little longer, quiet, at peace, feel¬ing the soft warm creature beneath my hand, hearing the evenness of my own breathing, in all the cold dark room, and all the night long hearing and feeling nothing more – nothing.

✶✶✶

The grey-cloaked gentleman stops talking, smiles a little, bows, self-mocking.

"Well?" his skeptic demands. "Is that the end? is that the story?"

"That's the story," he says.

"Damned pitiful excuse for a ghost story, I say," the skeptic grumbles, and reaches for more brandy.