glimpses—behind the hedge, for instance, hiding among leaves. Then she became more sure of herself, lurking behind me while I worked in the garden. Even though I couldn’t see her I knew she was there: I could feel her peering over my shoulder. She began to talk: if you could call it talking. No words. She twittered like a sparrow or a starling. How can I be certain it wasn’t a sparrow or a starling chirping away? Some things one knows. Working in the garden I’d hear birds all day and take no notice—after all one expects to hear birds in the garden—but I didn’t need to be told when she was holding forth: the prickling at the back of my neck warned me. She wanted something. Twitter, twitter, twitter. Well, if it was a bird-bath in the middle of my newly-laid turf, she’d have to twitter on. No baths, no feeding tables, no tit-houses. There are limits.
“Wraith, spook, essence—call it what you like—reached the limit when it followed me into my garden house. Have you seen that rustic arbor where I store the tools? I was just putting away the fork and rake when the thing materialized in the doorway. Twitter, twitter, twitter. I turned round, facing up to her, and this time she didn’t even have the decency to fade. She stood there nodding and her outrageous old hat bobbing. Twitter, twitter. I asked what she wanted. Twitter, twitter, like a robin. I told her there was nothing here. She was dead, wasn’t she? Why didn’t she get back where she belonged? Twitter, twitter. You can’t hurt a ghost, can you? I had to show who owned the place now. I picked up the first thing handy and hit her with it. It was only a gesture. I knew I couldn’t hurt a ghost, but I hit her. With the spade. In the middle of that ridiculous hat.
“She still didn’t fade, though. She crumpled. Twittering all the way down. And where the edge of the spade had sliced into her head, blood was spurting. Can a ghost bleed? As she lay there, giving a last few feeble tweets, her face melted and changed. Gray hair into black. Parchment cheek into tanned skin with a little moustache. Her staring eyes into his staring eyes. Until it was Roger lying there—bloody and dead.”
Hugo Pentrip made a feeble gesture. What use were words?
“I know I should have ’phoned the police,” she went on. “It was an accident. Anybody can have an accident. But when I tried to rehearse my story it became more and more confused. How could I explain why I hit anybody with a spade in the first place—whether I knew it was Roger or not? How could I have mistaken my husband for an old lady? Especially when I had been to her funeral. While I talked to myself I tied myself in knots, so I had no illusions about the chances I stood with the police. All this time a tiny voice at the back of my mind was telling me to bury him. So I did.
“I hung on for days, knowing what lay behind the laurel bushes. I daren’t see anyone or even answer the ’phone in case I should be asked where he was. I tried to tell myself the—misunderstanding—hadn’t really happened. Until I began to wonder whether it had really happened. That’s when I uncovered him again. How could I have made such a mistake? Roger never looked like his aunt.”
Pentrip made consoling noises. Inga Coule sat back at last and closed her dark-ringed eyes.
“I must have been mad,” she murmured. “But I don’t feel mad.”
Pentrip cleared his throat. “For the purpose of your defense, I would suggest that you remain a little mad. Diminished responsibility.”
Inga almost smiled. “I wasn’t responsible at all. She arranged everything, didn’t she? Even my digging him up again for you to see. Will you come with me to the police?”
Pentrip nodded solemnly, belying his mind’s frantic activity. What unsavory details might emerge during cross-examination? Might his own conduct be shown up in an unfortunate light?
“I suggest that you make a clean breast,” he advised. “Then plead guilty. At least you’ll be spared the strain of a wearing trial.”
“What will that mean to me?”
“It will mean…”
“A permanent residence with constant attendance,” cut in Inga. Or was that elderly voice Inga’s?
Subsequent events moved as smoothly as Pentrip could have wished. In next to no time Inga Coule was put safely away, out of reach of garden tools. Pentrip even assumed heroic stature in Brenda’s eyes. Had he not single-handedly subdued a dangerous criminal lunatic? He took full advantage of his improved status. One morning soon he intended to waken with Brenda’s chubby face on the pillow next to his.
When bedded he was grateful to discover that Brenda was virginal but enthusiastic. She went to sleep in his arms.
Such an awkward position is bound to affect anyone’s dreams, but the intrusion of old Miss Coule into his was unwarranted and inexcusable. Especially as Pentrip’s late client was wagging a twiglike finger at him.
“Ah, but I left nothing to you, Mr. Pentrip,” she insisted.
His sleeping self protested that he had merely done his best in a professional capacity and desired no higher reward.
“I want you to see things my way,” she decided firmly. “So I shall leave you my eyes.”
She faded rapidly as such dreams sometimes do. It was sufficiently vivid and nasty to wake Pentrip. The light of dawn filtered through his half-opened eyes. Brenda’s yielding body was still pressed against his. He turned his head to admire his lately conquered pink and white cherub.
But the face on the next pillow was even further gone in decay than Roger’s had been. Her cheekbone gleamed whitely through the rotten flesh. Eyesockets gaped dark and hollow. Was this how Miss Coule saw Brenda? But Miss Coule could not see anything. She was dead. Quite dead. Long since rotted away.
Pentrip jerked back in revulsion away from the horrid object near his face, his only consolation being that this was still part of the nightmare. He would wake up any moment now. His sudden movement disturbed Brenda. As she stretched and yawned, withered lips parted to reveal blackened gums. In the decomposing recesses of her mouth a pale shape wriggled suggestively. And it was not her tongue.
Brenda’s giggles eventually assured Pentrip that he was not still asleep. He had received Miss Coule’s final bequest: her eyes, long accustomed to the dark of the grave.
Could she do this? He remembered a letter that had been something quite different. Inga had taken her husband for an old woman. Now what should have been a fresh-faced girl…
“Kiss me, love,” gurgled Brenda, pulling him toward her.
As their lips met Pentrip began to squeal. He was still screaming when he was taken away. Two orderlies were necessary to restrain him.
Even now he lives a solitary life, with a peculiarly timid way of glancing at people and a tendency to scream if anyone approaches too near. He only eats under compulsion and then with his eyes shut. Psychiatrists have not yet agreed on the cause of his condition, but they keep him under observation. A peculiar case.
SLIPPAGE
by Michael Kube-McDowell
Michael Kube-McDowell is one of the newer writers on the scene, and one who is fast making a name for himself—as a writer of “hard” science fiction. First published in 1979, he has already appeared several times in
Born in Philadelphia in 1954, Kube-McDowell attended high school in Camden, New Jersey and graduated from Michigan State University with an M.A. in science education. He and his wife, Karla (who contributed the “Kube” to the family name), currently are living in Goshen, Indiana (a state that seems to be attracting more than its share of science fiction/fantasy writers), where he reviews science fiction for two area papers in addition to doing “whatever other writing I can scrounge that pays.” He plans to begin writing full time soon, and he takes his work seriously: “The only hobby I have any time for anymore is hugging Karla. I once knew how to play the viola and the roster for the Phillies, but both are slipping away.”
It did not begin as a time of madness.
Richard Hall tossed his rain-dampened ski cap into the nearest chair and ran his fingers back through his
