His mind paused in a wild dismay: Good heavens, would he have to explain the Dunne theory of time with its emphasis on time as a state of mind. The rest was unimportant, but that part—
He grew aware that the doctor was speaking, saying: “I’ve read several volumes by Mr Dunne. I’m afraid I cannot accept his theory of multi-dimensional time. I—”
“Listen,” said Kent in a tight voice, “picture an old man in his dotage. It’s a queer, incoherent mind-world he lives in; strange, frequently unassociated ideas are the normal condition; memory, particularly memory, is unutterably mixed up. And it is in that confused environment that somehow
“An old man whose time sense has been distorted by the ravages of senility, an old man who walks as easily into the future as you and I walk into the next room.”
The doctor was on his feet, pacing the rugged floor. He stared at Kent finally.
“Mr Kent, this a most extraordinary idea. But still I fail to see why Mrs Carmody—”
Kent groaned, then with a terrible effort pulled himself together. “Do you remember the murder scene?”
“Vaguely. A domestic tragedy, I believe.”
“Listen. Mrs Carmody woke up the morning after she thought she’d made everything right for herself and her family, and found a note on her dressing table. It had been lying there all night, and it was from her son, Bill.
“In it, he said he couldn’t go through with her plan. Besides, he didn’t like the farm, so he was going immediately to the city – and in fact he walked to Kempster and caught the train while she was in the theater.
“Among other things, he said in his note that a few days before the old man had acted surprised at seeing him, Bill, still around. The old man talked as if he thought Bill had gone to the city—”
That was what kept stabbing into the woman’s mind. The old man, the interfering old man—
He had, in effect, told Bill that he, Bill, had gone to the city, and so in a crisis Bill had gone.
Gone, gone, gone – and all hope with him. Phyllis would marry Charlie Couzens; and what then? What would become of a poor, miserable woman of forty-five?
The old man, she thought, as she went down the stairs from her room, the old man planned it all. Fiendish old man! First, telling Bill about the city, then suggesting who Phyllis was to marry, then trying to scare
Hanging—
The woman stopped short in the downstairs hallway, her blue eyes stark, a strange, burning sensation in her brain. Why—
If all the rest came true, then—
Her mind whirled madly. She crouched for a moment like an animal at bay, cunning in her eyes. They couldn’t hang you unless you murdered someone, and—
She’d see that she didn’t pull anything so stupid.
She couldn’t remember eating breakfast. But there was a memory of her voice asking monotonously:
“Where’s Mr Wainwright?”
“He’s gone for a walk, ma. Hey, ma, are you ill?”
Ill! Who asked a silly question like that. It was the old man who’d be ill when she got through with him.
There was a memory, too, of washing the dishes, but after that a strange, dark gap, a living, evil night flooding her mind . . . gone . . . hope . . . Bill . . . damned old man—
She was standing at the screen door for the hundredth time, peering malignantly at the corner of the house where the old man would come into sight – when it happened.
There was the screen door and the deserted veranda. That was one instant. The next, the old man materialized out of the thin air two feet away. He opened the screen door, and then half fell against the door, and slowly crumbled to the ground, writhing, as the woman screamed at him, meaningless words—
“That was her story,” Kent said wearily, “that the old man simply fell dead. But the doctor who came testified that Mr Wainwright died of choking, and besides, in her hysteria, Mrs Carmody told everything about herself, and the various facts taken together combined to discredit her story.”
Kent paused, then finished in a queer voice: “It is medically recognized, I believe, that very old people can choke themselves to death by swallowing saliva the wrong way, or by a paralysis of the throat produced by shock —”
“Shock!” The doctor sank back into his chair from which he had half risen. “Man!” he gasped, “are you trying to tell me that your interference with the old man that day caused his abrupt appearance before Mrs Carmody, and that it was the shock of what he had himself gone through that—”
“I’m trying to tell you,” said Kent, “that we’ve got minutes to prevent this woman from hanging herself. It could only happen if she did do it with her own hands; and it could only happen today, for if we can get there in time to tell her, why, she’ll have no incentive. Will you come . . . for Heaven’s sake, man—”
The doctor said: “But the prophecy. If this old man actually had this incredible power, how can we hope to circumvent the inevitable?”
“Look!” said Kent, “I influenced the past by an act from the future. Surely, I can change the future by –
He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. She sat there in her bright little room, and she was still smiling, as she had been when they first came in, a little more uncertainly now, as the doctor talked.
“You mean,” she said finally, “that I am to be freed, that you’re going to write my children, and they’ll come and get me.”
“Absolutely!” Kent spoke heartily, but with just the faintest bit of puzzlement in his voice. “I understand your son, Bill, is working in a machine factory, and that he’s married now, and that your daughter is a stenographer for the same company.”
“Yes, that’s true.” She spoke quietly—
Afterward, while the doctor’s maid was serving Kent a warmed-up lunch, he said frowningly: “I can’t understand it. I ought to feel that everything is cleared up. Her children have small jobs, the girl Phyllis is married to that Couzens chap, and is living in his family home. As for Mrs Carmody – and this is what gets me – I had no impression that she was in danger of hanging herself. She was cheerful; she had her room fixed with dozens of little fancily sewed things, and—”
The doctor said: “The records show that she’s been no trouble while she’s been here. She’s been granted special privileges; she does a lot of sewing – What’s the matter?”
Kent wondered grimly if he looked as wild as the thought that had surged into his mind. “Doctor!” he gasped, “there’s a psychological angle here that I forgot completely.”
He was on his feet. “Doctor, we’ve got to get to that woman again, tell her she can stay here, tell her —”
There was the sound of a door opening violently, then running footsteps. A man in uniform burst in.
“Doctor, there’s a woman just hanged herself, a Mrs Carmody. She cut her dress into strips and using the light fixture—”
They had already cut her down when Kent and the doctor arrived. She lay stiff in death, a dark, heavily built woman. A faint smile was fixed on her rigid lips— Kent was aware of the doctor whispering to him:
“No one’s to blame, of course. How could we sane people remember that the greatest obsession in her life was security, and that here in this asylum was that security she craved.”
Kent scarcely heard. He felt curiously cold; the room seemed remote. In his mind’s eye he could see the Wainwright house, empty, nailed-up; and yet for years an old, old man would come out of it and wander over the land before he, too, sank forever into the death that had long ago struck him down.
The time would come when the – ghost – would walk no more.
The Party
William F. Nolan
