“Ail right. Grant that. Let’s pretend it’s just my natural curiosity. But tell me about my murder.”
“Well—” My ghost was hesitant and sheepish again. “The fact is—” He took a long time to swallow his dematerialized rye, and followed the process with a prolonged dematerialized burp. “To tell you the truth—I don’t remember anything about it.
“Now, now!” he added hastily. “Don’t blow up. I can’t help it. It’s dreadfully easy to forget things in eternity. That’s what the Greeks meant by the waters of Lethe in the afterworld. Just think how easy it is to forget details in, say, ten years, when the years are happening only one at a time. Then try to imagine how much you could forget in an infinity of years when they’re all happening at once.”
“But our own murder!” I protested. “You couldn’t forget our murder!”
“I have. I know we must have been murdered in this room because here I am haunting it, but I’ve no idea how or when. Excepting,” he added reflectively, “that it must be after we acquired a taste for tequila.”
“But you must at least know the murderer. You have to know the guy you’re supposed to be haunting. Or do you just haunt a place?”
“No. Not in the strict rules. You merely haunt the place because the murderer will return to the scene of the crime and then you confront him and say, ‘Thou art the man!’”
“And supposing he doesn’t return to the scene?”
“That’s just the trouble. We know the rules, all right. But the murderers don’t always. Lots of times they never return at all, and we go on haunting and haunting and getting noplace.”
“But look!” I exclaimed. “This one will have to return, because he hasn’t been here yet. I mean, this isn’t the scene of the crime; it’s the scene set for a crime that hasn’t happened yet. He’ll have to come here to . . . to—”
“To murder us,” my ghost concluded cheerfully. “Of course. It’s ideal. I can’t possibly miss him.”
“But if you don’t know who he is—”
“I’ll know him when I see him. You see, we ghosts are psychic.”
“Then if you could tip me off when you recognize him—”
“It wouldn’t do you any— What was that?”
“Just a rooster. Dawn comes early these summer mornings. But if I knew who he was, then I—”
“Damn!” said my ghost. “Haunting must be so much simpler in winter, with those nice long nights. I’ve got to be vanishing. See you tonight.”
My curiosity stirred again. “Where do you go when you vanish?” But he had already disappeared.
I looked around the empty consulting room. Even the dematerialized rye had vanished. Only the butcher knife remained. I made the natural rye vanish too, and staggered back to bed.
The next morning it all seemed perfectly simple. I had had one hell of a strange vision the night before; but on the consulting-room desk stood an empty pint which had been almost full yesterday. That was enough to account for a wilderness of visions.
Even the knife didn’t bother me much. It would be accounted for some way— somebody’s screwy idea of a gag. Nobody could want to kill me, I thought, and wasn’t worried even when a kid in a back-lot baseball game let off a wild pitch that missed my head by an inch.
I just filed away a minor resolve to climb on the wagon if this sort of thing became a habit, and got through a hard day’s work at the clinic with no worries beyond the mildest of hangovers. And when I got the X-rays on Nick Wojcek’s girl with her lungs completely healed, and the report that she hadn’t coughed for two weeks, I felt so gloriously satisfied that I forgot even the hangover.
“Charlie,” I beamed at my X-ray technician, “life is good.”
“In Cobbsville?” Charlie asked dourly.
I gloated over those beautiful plates. “Even in Cobbsville.”
“Have it your way,” said Charlie. “But it’ll be better this evening. I’m dropping by your place with a surprise.”
A surprise:
“Yeah. Friend of mine brought me a present from Mexico.”
And even that didn’t tip me off. I went on feeling as chipper and confident as ever all through the day’s work and dinner at the Greek’s, and walked home enjoying the freshness of the evening and fretting over a twist on a new kind of air filter for the factories.
That was why I didn’t see the car. I was crossing the street to my house, and my first warning was a bass bellow of “John!” I looked up to see a car a yard away, rolling downhill straight at me. I jumped, stumbled, and sprawled flat in the dust. My knee ached and my nose was bleeding; but the car had missed me, as narrowly as the knife had last night.
I watched it roll on down the hill. There was no driver. It was an old junk heap— just the sort of wreck that would get out of control if carelessly left parked on a steep grade. It was a perfectly plausible accident, and still— The car hit the fence at the bottom of the hill and became literally a junk heap. Nobody showed up to bother about it. I turned to thank Father Svatomir for his shout of warning.
You’ve seen those little Orthodox churches that are the one spot of curious color in the drab landscape of industrial Pennsylvania? Those plain frame churches that blossom out on top into an exotic bloated spire topped by one of those crosses with an extra slantwise arm?
Father Svatomir was the priest from one of those, and his black garments, his nobly aquiline nose, and his beautifully full and long brown beard made him look as strange and Oriental as his own church. It was always a shock to me to hear his ordinary American accent—he’d been born in Cobbsville and gone to the Near East to study for the priesthood—and to realize that he was only about my age. That’s thirty-two,
