“Bagrat, I’m never ever going back in that house again and neither are my children and I’m never going to speak to your sister or her sonofabitching husband that rented us that place and never told us anything about any of this.”
Rupen and Bagrat sat, smoking nervously, in the sewing room in the afternoon of that day, not talking much, wondering whether it all was just Rose’s and Karen’s imagination, dreading that perhaps it was not. Bagrat had remembered that Rupen had long ago mastered the art of reading lips and had suggested that if there really was a wraith inhabiting the house and if they could find out what she wanted, maybe she could be persuaded to go wherever good ghosts are supposed to go and cease terrifying the living.
After an hour or more, Bagrat was nodding off and Rupen had given to read the business section of the Times-Dispatch, the Richmond-area morning newspaper, when he noticed that it was suddenly markedly cool in the room. All his nape hairs aprickle, he looked up to see a misty something across the room.
In a low but penetrating voice, he hissed, “Bagrat! Open your eyes but don’t move or speak!”
Slowly, the misty something gained form, lengthened, broadened, to become the small body of a woman, looking very solid in nature. Her pretty, heart-shaped face was very pale, which made the marks of a recent and savage beating stand out very clearly. The flesh was discolored and puffy around both of her dark eyes, and the eyes themselves held infinite sadness.
Beside him, he could hear Bagrat whimpering softly in atavistic terror, and he deliberately reached over without looking to lay a comforting hand on his younger brother’s knee.
As the pale body beneath the pale, battered face became clearer, Rupen shuddered strongly. She, whoever she was, or had been, had been cruelly used by her attackers; in the course of two wars he had fought, Rupen had seen some awful things and this thing before him was, he knew then, one of the worst ever.
Raising his glance back up to the face, he could see that the swollen lips were moving now, and he strove to read the message that the whatever-it-was was trying so hard to convey. She looked so very young and helpless—late teens or early twenties, at best—that Rupen could not imagine how any rational man had been able to bring himself to hurt her, and, vastly experienced big brother and many times uncle that he was, he felt very paternal toward her, phantom or not.
And then, in a blink, the head and face were become a bare skull, the dark, sad eyes, however, still visible in the sockets under the arches of the brows. Bagrat’s moaning whimpers loudened and became more intense, and Rupen felt his brother’s muscles tense under his hand, so he tenderly patted him as one would a frightened animal. Oddly, he himself felt no fear of the thing that stood tenuously before him, only a soul-deep pity.
Extending his right hand, he spoke slowly, “Let me help, my dear. Is there no way I can help you?”
Then her flesh was back over the bones and the lips were again moving. “… is Ross? Please tell me where Ross is. He was so kind, so gentle and tender, and he said he’d be right back. But then the big. bald, mean man came, and the other one, and they . . . they hurt me. they hurt me so bad. Ross will make it well, though. Where is Ross? Please tell me where Ross is.”
Compassion welling up inside him. Rupen said, “Child, you are no longer alive. Those two men you mentiond, they not only hurt you, they killed your body. Your body has been dead for more than ten years, now, don’t you know that?”
He awaited an answer, but when the split and swollen pale lips moved again, it was only a resumption of her pitiful litany. “Where is Ross? Please tell me where Ross is. . . .”
He reflected to himself that these same thoughts of her absent champion had probably been going through her mind as she had lain dying in this very room so long ago, and he could think of nothing else to do. Perhaps, if he could find someone qualified that wouldn’t think he was just a psycho . . .? He felt for her. but his extended hand was only a gesture; he knew he could not reach her.
The old archbishop leaned forward. “You actually spoke with a dead woman’s ghost, Rupen? What ever happened in the matter?”
Rupen took a draught of cool ale and shrugged. “I suppose that that poor, confused spirit is still haunting that room in that house, Hal, I was never able to effect any help for her. Boghos thought we all—Rose, little Karen, Bagrat, and me—were nuts and as good as said so when Bagrat, who had been renting by the month after the first year, found and bought a brand-new trilevel and moved into it. I told Boghos that if he didn’t believe us. he should go over to that house one night and sit in that room for a while, and he did; he would never afterward admit to having seen anything, but he sold the house within less than a week.
“I took the time to check records and look up the third owner of the house, who still lived in Henrico County, Virginia. Once I’d convinced him that I seriously believed in ghosts, that I’d seen at least one and would admit to it in public and that I was not either a journalist of a book writer, he became candid with me. he and his wife, too.
“At the time he had lived, or rather tried to live, in that house, there had been more than just the one ghost, apparently. He and his wife had no children then, had bought the vastly underpriced house as an investment and didn’t use most of the bedrooms for anything but storage, and they didn’t even know about the young girl’s ghost until I told them.
“It seems that when the old woman—the second owner— who had inherited it from her son and daughter-in-law— the first owners—had come back from Israel and seen what her tenants had done to the house and yard and furnishings in only a year or less, she suffered a heart attack or stroke or both and died right in the middle of the living-room floor. As long as the third owners lived there, the old woman’s shade kept stalking the place, shrieking now and then, turning lights on or off and opening or slamming doors and otherwise making her continuing presence known and obnoxious.
“The third owners had bought the place as it stood, seriously in need of certain repairs, a thorough repainting, and a complete recarpeting, but the third owner was and still is a building contractor and was able to do the job up brown despite its magnitude and despite difficulties with the previous owner’s unfriendly ghost. He it was who added the rear den and third bath to the place, tacked on the double garage and utility room and built the redwood deck. When he sold the house, he made a handsome but well-deserved profit on the transaction.
“The fourth owner was, by the time I went looking for him, deceased, but his widow, after some little time of consideration and getting to know me, finally confided in me that at first they thought that one or both of them were going insane. But then an uncle, a Jesuit priest, stayed with them overnight in the guest room, the rear master suite. Through his good offices, they had the house exorcised, and they never saw or heard the old woman again after that. But then her husband was transferred, and so they sold the house and moved.
“The fifth owners, who had let the place sit untenanted for almost three years before they sold it to Boghos, wouldn’t speak to me at all and threatened to call the police if I again telephoned or tried to call on them.
“Due to that and to a number of other, unrelated, factors, I had to give up at that point, but I have always since regretted not being able to help the troubled spirit of that poor young girl to gain peace. I still do, Hal.”
The archbishop nodded. “I know you do, Rupen. You are a truly good man, a caring man. It’s too bad you never remarried and sired children—you would have made a wonderful father. I think.”
“Oh. but I did remarry, Hal, although it was a very short-lived marriage and no children resulted of it, which was probably just as well, considering what an utter kook my second wife turned out to be.”
The archbishop settled himself into his cathedra. “Tell me about her, your second wife, and of your marriage, Rupen.”