“Laugh all you want but, much as I hate to be corny, this room was to have been a sanctuary for me; now it’s not that at all — it’s a place of — of danger, peril.”
This time he listened for more than a minute.
“Well, maybe I rented it too quickly. I should have come back a couple of times, but it’s such a wonderful old house it wouldn’t have been on the market a week. Remember, I heard about Professor Matthews through the university long before they had decided what to do with the place. If I hadn’t spoken up then, I’d never have got it. Then to be able to have the use of his entire library besides! I just had to jump at it.”
He paused. “Funny, I never laid eyes on the guy, but sometimes when I look out the front window of this room… He was hit right in front of the house, you know. I swear I can almost see him hurrying across to his library for the last time.”
The telephone crackled.
“No, I mean library. Hell, Rog, all you have to do is spend an hour in this room and you know the rest of the house was no more than a blur to him. This was an ivory tower to end all ivory towers.” My ghost sighed heavily. “I know as well as you do that his leaving everything to the university was a tremendous stroke of luck for me as his successor, but I wish it had come about some other way. Damn it, this room is still his!”
After another pause he nodded. “I guess you’re right. Well, I’ll give it another week. Then if I haven’t been able to talk myself out of it I’ll leave. Thanks, Rog. See you.”
Now I have to leave my room, my books. As I look down at the pages I have written I realize that either they will never be seen, or if they exist they will probably be blank. So be it. They were my shock absorbers.
I find my cheeks still wet with tears, but most of the fear has gone. I am calm. And now that I know, I realize there must be something ahead. I have, after all, come this far.
(signed) John Kingsley Matthews, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Editorial Comment: Our reading staff’s four different interpretations were: first, and most obvious, that the “ghost” is merely an hallucination, no more; second, that the ghost and Dr. Matthews are somehow one and the same; third, that this is the story of a crease or fold in Time, a disjointment or overlapping of Time; and fourth, that it is not Alec who is the ghost — Alec is alive and it is Dr. Matthews who is the ghost (a neat switch!).
No doubt some of you came up with other explanations.
But surely this type of story should end with an air of mystery. So all we’ll say further is that we think the main clue to the correct interpretation lies in the very first thing the author gave you — the title of the story, Post-Obit…
The Ballad of Corpscandal Manor
by Celia Fremlin[7]
The Scapegoat
by Christianna Brand[8]
Very few writers — in our opinion, too few — are producing the kind of defective story that Christianna Brand specializes in: novelets, each presenting a highly intricate mystery, with a wide range of possible answers, every theory pursued, analyzed, discarded, until only one solution covering all the facts remains — and even then, beware! These fascinating merry-go-round, teeter-totter, crossruff, tightrope novelets are “renaissance” detective stories — relish them!
“Stay me with flagons,” said Mr. Mysterioso, waving a fluid white hand, “comfort me with apples!” There had been no flagons, he admitted, in that murder room fifteen years ago, but there had been apples — a brown paper bag of them, tied at the top with string and so crammed full that three had burst out of a hole in the side and rolled away on the dusty floor; and a rifle, propped up, its sights aligned on the cornerstone, seventy-odd yards away and two stories below.
And at the foot of the cornerstone the Grand Mysterioso tumbled with his lame leg doubled up under him, clasping in his arms the dying man who for so many years had been his dresser, chauffeur, servant, and friend — who for the last five years, since the accident that had crippled M r Mysterioso, had almost literally never left his side — tumbled there, holding the dying man to his breast, roaring defiance at the building opposite, from which the shot had come. “You fools, you murderers, you’ve got the wrong man!” And then he hall bent his head to listen. “Dear God, he’s saying — he’s saying — come close, listen to him! He’s saying, ‘Thank God they only got me. It was meant for you.’ ”
Fifteen years ago — a cornerstone to be laid for the local hospital, just another chore in the public life of Mr. Mysterioso, stage magician extraordinary. But mounting to the tiny platform, leaning his crippled weight on the servant’s arm, there had come the sharp crack of the rifle shot. And in the top-floor room of the unfinished hospital wing, looking down on the scene, they had found the fixed rifle with one spent bullet. And nobody there. Up on the roof a press photographer who couldn’t have got down to the window where the gun was fixed; down at the main entrance a policeman on duty, seen by a dozen pairs of eyes, tearing up the stairs toward the murder room, moments after the shot. In all that large, open, easily searched building — not another soul.
Fifteen years ago; and now they were gathered together, eight of them — to talk it all over, to try to excise the scar that had formed in the mind of the young man whose father had been dismissed from the force “for negligence on duty,” had ever afterward suffered from the results of the act that day, and who now was dead.
For the young man had developed an obsession of resentment against the only other person involved, the man on the roof, who nowadays called himself “Mr. Photoze” — whose first step on the road to fame had come with the picture he had taken that day of the lion head raised, the brilliant eyes glaring, the outraged defiance. “My father didn’t fire that shot — therefore you must have,” was the burden of the young man’s message, and there had been a succession of threats and at last a physical attack.