Ralph nodded. “It was the same woman I'd seen.”
He waited for Sam to speak, but the other man seemed lost in thought.
“There's something upstairs you'd better see,” Ralph said, and led the way, talking as they climbed. “We'd gone back up to the bedroom to get our things together to leave. There was a crash from my music room. I came down to take a look. My desk had turned over, papers and everything on it were everywhere. I couldn't have been away from Joanna for more than two minutes, but when I got back upstairs she came staggering out of the bathroom, terrified. She said she'd been locked in and something had been knocking and scratching in the walls. And this thing had appeared, if it's still there…”
Sam noticed that lights still burned upstairs as they had in the hall and drawing room, evidence of the couple's panic-stricken flight in the early hours. He followed Ralph across the bedroom and into the bathroom, and saw the jagged lettering on the mirror.
He moved closer, reaching out instinctively to touch the surface of the glass.
“It's on the back,” Ralph was saying. “It just isn't possible to do that.”
Sam began feeling around the edges of the mirror with his fingertips.
“It doesn't open,” Ralph said. “There's no closet space behind it. That mirror's set right into the wall.”
Sam turned to him. “Your wife wasn't harmed in any way, was she, when this happened?”
The question drew a faintly bitter laugh from Ralph. “If you don't include being scared out of your wits, no, she wasn't harmed. But my wife's pregnant, Dr. Towne. There's no telling what an experience like this might have provoked. I can promise you one thing-there's no way she's going to set foot in this house again.”
Sam was peering over every surface and into every corner of the bathroom, as though in search of something so far overlooked.
Ralph watched him for a few moments, then asked, with an edge of irritation breaking into his voice, “Look, Towne, are you going to tell me what's going on, or what? Who was that woman?”
Sam glanced at him as though he'd forgotten he was there, then walked past him and back into the bedroom.
“Well, what does this mean, for God's sake?” Ralph said more insistently, following him. “What the hell does ‘Help Me’ mean?”
The two men faced each other across the room, Sam with his shoulders hunched and hands thrust deep in the pockets of his raincoat, Ralph with his hands out, waiting for an answer.
“She's some kind of ghost-right? We're being,” he stumbled over the word, as though unable to believe he was actually saying it, “haunted!”
Sam still didn't speak.
“Well, say something, for Christ's sake!”
“I suppose,” Sam said after a while, “‘ghost’ is as good a word as any.”
“What's the connection between this ghost and Joanna? Why does it-she, whatever-have my wife's name?”
Again Sam looked at him for a while, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug of defeat. “I can't explain that.”
“I think you'd better try.” Ralph took a step forward. The anger that had followed on the heels of his fear was beginning to show itself in his physical attitude as well as in his voice. He was, unconsciously perhaps, squaring up for a fight. “I think you owe me an explanation. This whole thing started with your visit last night…”
Sam shook his head. “No, it didn't start there…”
“Then where the hell did it start?”
“If I could tell you that, I would. But I can't.”
“Can't? Or won't?” Ralph was regarding Sam with open hostility now. “I have a strong impression that you're holding something back, and I'm getting pretty tired of it.”
Sam took a hand from his pocket and held it up, palm out in a calming, open gesture. He knew that Ralph was on the verge of an irrational rage and he had to placate him.
“I can only tell you that I would like to make sense of all this every bit as much as you would.”
He saw Ralph's eyes narrow shrewdly, perhaps wanting to believe him, but not yet able to.
“Does all this by any chance have anything to do with Adam Wyatt?” Ralph asked. “Is that why you asked about him last night?”
Sam nodded. “Yes, it has to do with Adam Wyatt.”
“In what way?”
“Look…anything I say is going to sound crazy. Will you just accept that, please, before we start? There's no point in my trying to tell you what I know if your only response is going to be that I'm a liar or a lunatic.”
“Try me.”
There was a leather chair by the wall, its back and arms forming a single curve. Sam sat in it, taking a deep breath as he did so. Then he rested his forearms on his knees and turned his gaze upward on Ralph.
“I'm not going to offer any explanations for what I tell you. Not because there aren't any-there are too many, and none of them mean a damn thing. Beyond a certain point explanations are just new ways of asking the same question-they don't explain anything.”
“Okay,” Ralph said, folding his arms, “that's the preamble, now give me the speech.”
Sam looked down at the carpet, deciding where to begin. Then he sat back, spreading his arms along the arms of the chair.
“About a year ago, a group of us-including Joanna, the Joanna who was here last night-invented a ghost called Adam Wyatt. It was an experiment in psychokinesis-mind over matter. We made him up, his whole life story. We went through every record book imaginable to make sure that he didn't exist historically, and we found no trace of him. The point of the experiment was to see if we could create something that would, in one way or another, communicate with us.”
He paused, not taking his eyes off Ralph, who himself didn't move a muscle.
“Well, we succeeded beyond, you might say, our wildest dreams. Adam Wyatt didn't exist…but he began to communicate with us. And now, it seems, he does exist-or did. And that fact has had several remarkable consequences. You, for example. You wouldn't exist if Adam Wyatt hadn't lived. You're his direct descendant.”
Ralph was staring at Sam. He began to unfold his arms-very, very slowly. The movement reflected an awestruck utter disbelief in what he was being told.
“What in the name of all hell are you handing me here…?”
Sam held up a hand to forestall his protest. “I warned you that none of this would make sense.”
“Are you saying you made me up…?”
Sam made a loose gesture, part apologetic, part just conveying that he had no comment to make.
“And my parents,” Ralph continued, his voice rising with incredulity, “and their parents, and right on back to…?”
“I know,” Sam said. “I know how it must sound.”
“That's as crazy as the idea that God made the world yesterday, and hid the fossils in it to fool us!”
“Another of the consequences of Adam's coming into being,” Sam said, ignoring the other man's indignant astonishment, “is that those of us who created him…are ceasing to exist.”
Ralph snapped back his head as though injury had been added to the insult already on offer. “What the hell is that supposed to mean-ceasing to exist?”
“So far all the members of the original group who created Adam have died. With the exception of myself, and Joanna-the Joanna you met last night. And God alone knows what's happened to her.”
Ralph made an involuntary half-turn and looked back into the bathroom. From where he stood he could see “Help Me” scratched onto the mirror in reverse.
“I'm not insane, Ralph,” Sam said. “I know I'm not. Just as you know that you're not a figment of my imagination. The fact is that we're both of us stuck with-perhaps more accurately in-a very singular situation.”
Ralph looked at him and began to shake his head, slowly at first, then faster. “No…no, no, no, no no…this is nuts…this is just impossible…!”
Sam felt a profound sympathy for him at that moment, understanding how every fiber of his conscious being must be putting up a fight to reject what he was being told.
“The most frightening thing is,” Sam said quietly, leaning forward again, “is that anything's possible. When I tip over a bottle of ink, it's not impossible that all the molecules will get back together and retrace their path out of
