The waiter arrived with an armload of beer bottles and dumped them on the table.
"There!" he said, disgusted. "That'll hold you for a while. Cook says the food is coming up."
"You don't intend," Maxwell asked Shakespeare, "to appear for your lecture?"
"Forsooth, and if I did," said Shakespeare, "they would forthwith, once that I had finished, whisk me home again. " "And they would, too," said Oop. "If they ever get their claws on him, they'll never let him go."
"But how will you earn a living?" Maxwell asked. "You have no skills to fit this world."
"I," said Shakespeare, "will surely devise something. A man's wits, driven to it, will come up with answers."
The waiter arrived with a cart, laden with food. He began putting it on the table.
"Sylvester!" Carol cried.
Sylvester had risen swiftly, put his two paws on the table and reached to grab two slabs of rare roast beef, which had been carved off a standing roast of ribs." Sylvester disappeared beneath the table, with the meat hanging from his jaws.
"The pussy cat is hungry," Shakespeare said. "He harvests what he can."
"In the matter of food," Carol complained, "he has no manners whatsoever."
From beneath the table came the sound of crunching bones.
"Master Shakespeare," said Ghost, "you came from England. From a town upon the Avon:"
"A goodly country to the eye," said Shakespeare, "but filled with human riffraff. There be poachers, thieves, murderers, footpads, and all sort of loathsome folk..."
"But I recall," said Ghost, "the swans upon the river and the willows growing on its banks and-"
"You what?" howled Oop. "How can you recall?"
Ghost rose slowly to his feet and there was something about his rising that made all of them fix their eyes upon him. He raised a hand, although there was no hand, just the sleeves of his robe, if robe it was.
His voice, when it came, was hollow, as if it might have come from an empty place far distant.
"But I do recall," he told them. "After all these years, I do recall. I either had forgotten or I had never known.. But now I do..."
"Master Ghost," said Shakespeare, "you act exceeding strange. What queer distemper could have seized upon you?"
"I know now who I am," said Ghost triumphantly. "I know who I am the ghost of."
"Well, thank God for that," said Oop. "It will put an end to all this maundering of yours about your heritage."
"And who, pray," asked Shakespeare, "might you be the ghost of?"
"Of you," Ghost keened. "I know now-I know now-I am William Shakespeare's ghost!"
For an instant they all sat silent, stricken, and then from Shakespeare's throat came a strangled sound of moaning fright. With a sudden surge, he came out of his chair and leaped to the tabletop, heading for the door. The table went over with a crash. Maxwell's chair tipped back and he went sprawling with it. The edge of the tipping table pinned him to the floor and a bowl of gravy, skating off its edge, caught him in the face.
He put up both his hands and tried to wipe the gravy off his face. From somewhere above him he heard Oop's raging bellows.
Able to see again, but with his face and hair still dripping gravy, Maxwell managed to crawl from beneath the table and stagger to his feet.
Carol sat flat upon the floor amid the litter of the food. Beer bottles were rolling back and forth across the floor. Framed in the kitchen door stood the cook, a mighty woman with chubby arms and tousled hair, and her hands upon her hips. Sylvester was crouched above the roast, ripping it apart and rapidly swallowing great mouthfuls of meat before anyone could stop him.
Oop came limping back from the door.
"No sign of them," he said. "No sign of either one of them."
He reached down a hand to haul Carol to her feet.
"That rotten Ghost," he said bitterly. "Why couldn't he keep still? Even if he knew..."
"But he didn't know," said Carol. "Not until just now. It took this confrontation to jar it out of him. Something Shakespeare said, perhaps. It's something he's been wondering about all these years and when suddenly it hit him."
"This tears it," Oop declared. "Shakespeare never will quit running. There'll be no finding him."
"Maybe that is what Ghost is doing now," said Maxwell. "That is where he went. To follow Shakespeare and stop him and bring him back to us."
"Stop him, how?" asked Oop. "If Shakespeare sees him following he'll set new records running."
Chapter 21
They sat dejectedly about Oop's rough-lumber table. Sylvester lay on his back on the hearthstone, with his front paws folded neatly on his chest, his back feet thrust up into the air. He wore a silly grin of satisfaction pasted on his face.
Oop shoved the fruit jar along the boards to Carol. She picked it up and sniffed. "It smells like kerosene," she said, "and, as I remember it, it tastes like kerosene." She lifted the jar with both her hands and drank, then pushed it across to Maxwell.
"I do believe," she said, "that after a time one could become accustomed to drinking kerosene."
"That is good booze," said Oop defensively. "Although," he admitted, "it could do with just a touch more aging. Seems that it gets drunk up quicker than I can get it made."
Maxwell lifted the jar and drank moodily. The hooch burned its way fiercely down his gullet and exploded in his stomach, but the explosion did no good. He still stayed moody and aware. There were times, he told himself, when there was no such thing as getting drunk. Pour it in two-fisted and you still stayed sober. And right now, he thought, he would dearly love to get sodden drunk and stay that way for a day or so. Maybe when he sobered up, life wouldn't seem so bad.
"What I can't understand," said Oop, "is why Old Bill should take this business of his ghost so bad. He did, of course. He was scared pink with purple spots. But the thing that bothers me is that he wasn't upset with Ghost. Oh, a little jittery at first, as one might expect of a sixteenth-century man. But once we had explained it to him, he seemed rather pleased with it. He accepted Ghost much more readily than would have been the case, say, with a twentieth-century man. In the sixteenth century they believed in ghosts and ghosts were something that could be accepted. He never got the wind up until he found that Ghost was his ghost and then..."
"He was quite intrigued," said Carol, "by our relations with the Little Folk. He made us promise we'd take him down to the reservation so he could get acquainted with them. As was the case with ghosts, he believed in them implicitly."
Maxwell took another hooker out of the jar and slid it across to Oop. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "Being free and easy with a ghost, with just any ghost," he said, "would come under a different heading than meeting up with one particular ghost that turned out to be your ghost. It is impossible for a man to accept, to actually accept and believe in, his own death. Even knowing what a ghost is..."
"Oh, don't please start that up again," said Carol. Oop grinned. "He sure went out of there like a shot " he said. "Like you'd tied a firecracker to his tail. He went through that door without even touching the latch. He just busted through it."
"I didn't see," said Maxwell. "I had a bowl of gravy in my face."
"There wasn't anyone got anything out of the whole mess," said Oop, "except that saber-toother over there. He got a haunch of beef. Rare, the way he likes it."
"The cat's an opportunist," Carol observed. "He always comes out smelling pretty."
Maxwell stared at her. "I've been meaning to ask you. How do you come to be mixed up with us? I thought you washed your hands of us last night after the affair with the Wheeler."