It should be obvious to any rational person that Thomas Alderman’s “diary” is the work of an insane mind, and almost certainly fabricated in an effort to shift to other and fabulous shoulders the guilt for a murderous crime, which he also sought to conceal entirely—by arson.
Interrogation of Alderman’s former city associates confirms the picture of a weak-minded and antisocial dreamer, a miserable failure in his vocation. Very possibly the motive for his crime was jealousy of a fellow hackwriter who, although his stories were largely a puerile bilge of pseudoscience designed for immature minds, had at least some small financial success. As for the similarly childish “story” that Alderman claimed to be writing, there is no evidence that it even existed, though it is impossible, of course, to disprove that it did indeed exist and was destroyed in the fire.
Most unfortunately, some of the more lurid details of the “diary” have been noised around in Terrestrial, giving rise to scare stories among the more ignorant and credulous inhabitants.
It is equally unfortunate that an uneducated and superstitious miner named Evans, a member of the rescue party and of the group that followed Alderman’s footprints away from the charred cabin, should have strayed from that group and shortly returned in panic with a wild account of having found a set of “big, sprawly, ropey tracks” paralleling Alderman’s trail. Doubly unfortunate that a sudden resumption of the snowfall prevented his yarn from being disproved by such visual evidence as even the most brutish minds must accept.
It is no use pointing out to such low-grade mentalities that no reputable citizen of Terrestrial has seen anything in the least out of the ordinary in the snowfields, that no unusual auroras whatever have been reported by meteorologists, and that there were no radio broadcasts which could possibly have agreed, either in hour or content, with those “scientific programs” of which Alderman made so much.
With the exasperating and ludicrous consistency characteristic of epidemics of mass hallucination, stories of “strange tracks” in the snow and distant fleeting glimpses of “a big black spidery thing” continue to trickle in.
One wishes, with an understandably angry fervor, that the whole episode could have had the satisfying and all-decisive conclusion that the public trial of Thomas Alderman would have provided.
That, however, was not to be. About two miles from the cabin, the group following Alderman’s footprints came upon his body in the snow. The expression on his frozen face was sufficient in itself to prove his insanity. One stiff hand, half buried in the snow, clutched the notebook containing the “diary.” On the back of the other, which was clapped to his frosted eyes, was something that, although furnishing more fuel for the delusions of morons like Evans, provides the educated and scientific intellect with a clue as to the source of one of the more bizarre details in Alderman’s fabrication.
This thing on the back of his hand obviously must have been a crude bit of tattooing, though so old and inexpertly done that the characteristic punctures and discrete dye granules were not apparent
A few wavy violet lines.
THE GHOST LIGHT
Afterwards Wolf and Terri couldn’t decide whether little Tommy’s slightly off-beat request about the green and blue night light (that later came to be called the ghost light) had come before or after the first dinner table talk about ghosts with the white-haired old man (Wolf’s widowed professor emeritus father, Cassius Kruger, a four-years reformed alcoholic) in the living room of the latter’s dark, too big, rather spooky house on the steep wooded hillside of canyon-narrow Goodland Valley up in Marin County just north of San Francisco that was subject to mud slides during seasons of heavy rain.
For one thing, there’d been more than one such conversation, scattered over several evenings. And they’d been quite low key and unscary, at least at first, more about memorable literary ghost stories than real or purported ghosts, so that neither Terri nor Wolf had been particularly worried about Tommy being disturbed by them.
Little Tommy Kruger was a solemn, precocious four-year-old whose rather adult speech patterns hadn’t yet been corrupted by school and the chatter of other kids. Although not particularly subject to night terrors, he’d always slept with a tiny light of some sort in the room, more his mother’s idea than his. In his bedroom at his grandfather’s this was a small, weak bulb plugged in at floor level and cased in tiny panes of dark green and deep blue glass set in tin edges crafted in Mexico.
When in the course of the putting-to-bed ritual on the second or third (or maybe fourth) night of their visit Wolf knelt to switch on the thing, Tommy said, “Don’t do that, Pa. I don’t want it tonight.”
Wolf looked up at his tucked-in son questioningly.
Terri had a thought based on her own unspoken feeling about the light. “Don’t you like the colors, Tommy?” she asked. “Wolf, there’s a plug-in fixture like this one, only with milky white glass, under that strange old painting of your mother in the living room. I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind if we changed—”
“No, don’t do that,” Tommy interrupted. “I don’t mind these colors at all, Ma, really. I just don’t want a light tonight.”
“Should I take this one away?” Wolf asked.
“No, don’t do that, Pa, please. Leave it there, but don’t turn it on. But leave the door to the hall open a little.”
“Right,” his father affirmed vigorously.
When good-night kisses were done and they were safely beyond Tommy’s hearing, Wolf said, “I guess Tom’s decided he’s too grown up to need a light to sleep by.”
“Maybe. Yes, I guess so,” Terri agreed somewhat reluctantly. “But I’m glad it’s off, anyhow. Loni said it gave the room a corpse look, and I thought so too.” Loni Mills was Terri Kruger’s attractive younger sister. She’d come with them on their visit to meet Wolf’s father, but had decided the day before that she needed to get back to campus a couple of days before winter vacation ended at the Oregon college where she was a sophomore.
Terri added, frowning, “But why did he make a thing of your not taking the fixture away?”
“Obvious.” Wolf grinned. “Little guy’s keeping his options open. So if he should get scared, it’s there to turn on. Good thinking. Also shows the colors don’t bother him. Why’d Loni think of blue and green as corpse colors, I wonder?”
“You’ve seen a fresh drowned person, haven’t you?” Terri responded lightly. “But why don’t you ask Cassius that one? It’s the sort of question gets him talking.”
“Right,” Wolf agreed without rancor. “Maybe I will.”
And true enough, there’d been a couple of times during the visit (though not as many as Wolf had feared) when conversation had languished and they’d been grateful for any topic that would get it going again, such as oddities of psychology, Cassius’ academic field, or ghost stories, in which they all seemed to share an interest. Matter of fact, the visit was for Wolf one of ultimate reconciliation with his father after a near-separation from both parents for a period of twenty years or so, while Terri was meeting her father-in-law, and Tommy his grandfather, for the first time.
The background for this was simply that the marriage of Wolf’s father and mother, Cassius Kruger and Helen Hostelford, had progressively become, after Wolf’s early childhood, a more and more unhappy, desperately quarrelsome, and alcoholic one, full of long, cold estrangements and fleeting reconciliations, yet neither partner had had the gumption to break it off and try something else. At the earliest teen age possible, Wolf (it was short for Wolfram, a fancy of his father) had wisely separated himself from them and largely gone it on his own, getting a degree in biology and working up a career in veterinary medicine and animal management, feeling his way through an unsuccessful early marriage and several living arrangements, until he’d met Terri. His mother’s death several years back from a mixture of alcohol and barbiturate sleeping pills hadn’t improved his relationship with his father—the opposite, rather, since he’d been somewhat closer to Helen and inclined to side with her in the unutterably wearisome marriage war—but then the old man, whom he’d expected to go downhill fast once he was alone, had surprised him by pulling out of his alcoholism (which had again and again threatened to end his academic career, another wearisomely repetitive series of crises) by the expedient of quitting drinking entirely and slowly rebuilding the wreckage of his body into at least a fairly good semblance of health.