Smoke

front of her face. 'Mrs. Krutchfield, help!'

'I'm, I'm—'

Scrabble, scramble — there! A different channel. On this channel, in a bare room, garishly lit, several men in ski masks and gray robes waved machine guns over their heads and yelled at the camera in some foreign tongue, urging who knew what depredations to be directed against the decent people of the planet, but at least they were clothed, and none of them were women, so they afforded Mrs. Krutchfield that calm moment of leisure she needed to figure out how to get back to Kitty's Diner, where the coach was saying: '— and that's when you throw the long bomb.'

The sound track laughed, God knows why, and most of the people in the parlor dutifully laughed along with it, and life got back to normal.

For eight minutes. Im-plode, click, and now it was two people on what looked like a hockey rink in a large empty arena. These two weren't entirely naked, since they were both wearing ice skates, but what they were doing together was certainly not an Olympic routine.

Cries and shrieks from the sofas. Great wafts of Ivory Liquid essence from the Canadians. Mrs. Krutchfield lunged for the remote, and it was gone again!

Under her chair again — how could she keep knocking the blame thing off the end table like that, without noticing? — but this time she was more sure-fingered in fighting her way back to Kitty's Diner, where Kitty was rasping: '— and that's why you can't get today's special today.'

The sound track laughed, the people in Mrs. Krutchfield's parlor laughed, and the world returned to its accustomed orbit.

For four minutes this time, before the implodeclickpicture, during which half the guests either squeezed their eyes shut or protectively slapped their palms to their faces. But this time it was something entirely different. The picture on the screen was in black-and-white, to begin with, instead of those all- too-real flesh tones. Also, the woman walking along the cliff-edge above the stormy sea was fully clothed. Not only that, she was . . .

'Gene Tierney!' cried a midwestern gentleman who had not shut his eyes.

'She wouldn't do things like that!' cried a midwestern lady, whose eyes were still firmly sealed.

'It's a movie!' cried another midwestern gentleman.

Eyes opened. On-screen, the action had moved indoors, into an extremely cute cottage not unlike The Sewing Kit itself, though perhaps a bit more cramped. In this setting, a recognizable Rex Harrison marched and harrumphed, dressed like a pirate captain or something, and behaving in a rough-and-ready way that didn't at all suit him. Also, you could see through him, which was odd.

A midwestern gentleman said, 'It's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.'

A midwestern lady said, 'I remember that series. But it wasn't Rex Harrison.'

'No, no, no,' said the gentleman. 'This is the original movie.'

'There was a movie?'

A Canadian, somewhat younger, said, 'There was a television series?'

A midwestern lady gave out a sudden shriek. 'It's the ghost!' she cried.

'And Mrs. Muir,' said her companion on the sofa.

'No! The ghost! Colonel Pardigrass!'

That shut them up. For a minute or two everyone in the room just sat and gazed at Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney, finding love — or something — across the centuries. So much pleasanter to contemplate than those other people.

Timidly, a midwestern lady said, 'Mrs. Krutchfield, does this happen often?'

'My goodness, no,' Mrs. Krutchfield said. 'I couldn't bear it.'

'What does the ghost usually do?' asked a gentleman.

'Well, uh,' Mrs. Krutchfield stammered, all undone by events. 'Just, oh, rapping and, and creaking, and that sort of thing. The usual sort of thing.'

'This is a completely different manifestation from anything that ever happened before?'

'Lord, yes!'

The snip from Brooklyn, seated on the floor in their midst, turned toward them an excessively innocent face as she said, 'Looks like, after all these years, the colonel's getting a little randy.'

'The ghost wasn't like that with Mrs. Muir,' a lady objected.

'Frankly,' a gentleman said, 'I don't see how it's possible to suffer the pangs of the flesh if you don't have any flesh.'

'It doesn't bear thinking about,' a lady announced, in an effort to forestall speculation.

Another lady said, 'Mrs. Krutchfield, what should we do?'

Mrs. Krutchfield had been pondering this problem herself. The ghost of Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass had never been any trouble before, had been, in fact, merely another charming part of the decor, like the Laura Ashley curtains and the Shaker reproduction furniture and the print in the entranceway of George Washington crossing the Delaware. An insubstantial insubstantiality, in other words, which was exactly the way Mrs. Krutchfield preferred it.

It wasn't that Mrs. Krutchfield had made up the ghost, or not exactly. The real estate agent, years ago when she'd bought this wreck of a place to fix up for its present use, had told her about the old tales of ghostly goings-on here, though without any specific history or even anecdotes attached. (Privately, Mrs. Krutchfield had always believed that much of what the real estate agent had told her was malarkey, meant to intrigue her, but that was all right. She'd been spending her school-administration retirement funds plus her dead husband's insurance money, and had been in a mood for a bit of malarkey, anyway.)

Then, shortly after buying the place, when Mrs. Krutchfield had been ripping out some horrible old linoleum in the kitchen, with newspapers lining the floor beneath, one ancient newspaper had contained a feature story about ghosts in the Hudson River valley, in which Mrs. Krutchfield had read about this Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass, who had been having some sort of liaison with the wife of a farmer in the area and had been murdered in the farmhouse, presumably by the farmer, though possibly by the wife. In any event, it had been claimed for a while that Colonel Pardigrass roamed the site of his demise on windy nights, still vainly trying to get back to his old regiment, though no one, even at the time this old newspaper had been printed, claimed to have had personal experience of the wayward colonel. As to the farmhouse, the description of the place and its whereabouts had been vague, but this house here could just as well have been the one where it all happened, so why not say so? What was the harm?

And how much cosier for a nice B-and-B like Mrs. Krutchfield's to come equipped with a ghost. A nice gentlemanly ghost, like Rex Harrison over there, though less intrusive. And that was how it had been.

Until tonight, that is.

After a few minutes of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, when nothing further of an untoward nature happened — and now, more than ever before, Mrs. Krutchfield understood the concept of happenings of an untoward nature — one of the Canadians timidly asked if it might be possible to return to Kitty's Diner, but one of the midwestern gentlemen said, 'Seems to me, this is what the colonel wants to watch. I don't know that we oughta cross him.'

Which ended that discussion, and everybody settled down to make some sense out of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, if possible. However, without color to soothe their eyes and a laugh track to let them know when things were supposed to be funny, they soon became restless and uneasy. There were murmurings among the guests, who were clearly suggesting to one another it was time to give up television for this evening and go to sleep instead — what else was there? — until Mrs. Krutchfield, who was not a timid woman, suddenly said, 'Well, I'm sorry, but I'm just not in the mood for this particular movie this evening. I want to go back to Kitty's Diner.'

'So do I,' said several other people.

'Good,' Mrs. Krutchfield said, and reached to the end table, and found nothing. She looked — the remote wasn't there. On the floor again? Grunting, she leaned forward to look under her chair, and it wasn't there either. 'Now where's that remote doodad?' she asked, and implodeclickpicture it was those people on the bed again!