People, that was one weird flashlight! It lit up what wasn’t there and didn’t light what was.
Now Ted was a scientist, so while he was surprised and a little uneasy, he was also a little curious. He did cry out, but let’s be generous and say he cried, “Wow!”, because after he had caught his breath and his heart (which had skittered halfway down the hall before coming back), he set out to discover what the hell was going on.
First, he turned the flashlight off and contemplated the room. The twilight was just strong enough to show that it was indeed empty. He turned the light back on and the room was…
Full of furniture. Okay, so the furniture had been chopped up and the wood stacked in the corner; but you could tell that the pieces had once been chairs and drawers and the like. Ted pursed his lips and wondered if his mind was playing tricks, but discarded that hypothesis as inherently untestable.
He tried the light several times, and each time the room was a little different. An empty, cobwebbed room, an artist’s studio, stacks of wood… Once, he even saw the furniture intact, a bedroom for two small children. There was no continuity among the glimpses, no order. Hey, if what he saw wasn’t real, why should it come in any sort of order? The worldlines might not be temporally congruent.
(Temporally congruent? Sure, Ted thought that way all the time. This was science, man! But maybe Ted pulled that science around him a little more tightly; because this was not exactly dropping cannonballs from towers or watching gorillas in the mist.)
Naturally, he opened the flashlight up and looked inside. Don’t think for a moment he could resist doing that. But, all things considered, he didn’t really expect to see a couple of D-cells, and he didn’t. Though a pink bunny rabbit could have jumped out beating a drum and it would not have been as perplexing as the mass of gizmos and wiring he did see. Some gizmos looked familiar—rather like a whatchamacallit—but the twilight had deepened to the point where most of the mechanism was shrouded in shadow, so he couldn’t really tell what was in there.
Did he pull the modules out? Did he lay them out in the fading twilight so he could study the circuit, find the power source, puzzle out the logic? Fat geese and golden eggs! What kind of fool do you think he was? That sepia light might be dim, but Ted wasn’t. A lot of things could happen if he tried to take that thing apart, and most of them were not good. That flashlight was heavy, and it wasn’t big enough to be so heavy. Whatever powered it, it wasn’t a dry cell battery; so he wasn’t about to poke around inside.
In the end, he decided to postpone matters until the morning, and made his way along the hallway to the master bedroom, playing the ghostlight on his surroundings. Doors, woodwork, main staircase, wallpaper—most of it looked the same as he remembered from daylight; but he didn’t know the house that thoroughly yet, and once he left the south wing, it was too dark to make the comparison by twilight. He saw just one more oddity, but it was a showstopper.
He saw a woman.
She strode right past him, arms swinging, legs pumping, a purposeful stride. (She must have walked right through him; and didn’t that give Ted pause!) Dark, heavy-looking boots with light-colored, canvas trousers tucked in at the ankles, a dark jacket, unbuttoned and flapping loosely. He didn’t see her face, not then. The view was strictly from the rear.
But, oh, what a rear that was! It rolled in five directions. Ted had been married and faithful for seven years—but he wasn’t blind. And even though he was a scientist, he never once tried to estimate the relevant equations and boundary conditions for that rolling gait. (A quartic polynomial, since you ask, but there were transcendent elements in there, as well; and the complex and irrational. Unsolvable—as Galois proved. But that’s women for you.)
Ted turned the flashlight off, and the darkness enveloped him. Partly he was upset at the impure thoughts that wiggled through his mind. But partly, too, he wanted to check if a real woman was walking through his house at night. You never could tell.
But the dark was also quiet, except for the sometime rattle of the wind on the windowpanes and the odd creak or two of an old building. No footsteps. Nothing he could mistake for footsteps. And when he turned the light back on, the woman was gone.
He checked each of the rooms down that hallway. He checked the back stairwell. He even checked the linen closet. But he caught no further glimpse of her. In the back stairwell, though, he saw a weapons cache. Two crossbows and a clutch of bolts. A stand of bolt-action rifles. A pistol that looked like an automatic. Four cartoon bombs—black spheres with exposed fuses. I don’t know who that woman was, people, but I wouldn’t mess with her!
Ted found his way back to the master bedroom. The same four-poster was there in the sepia light, in the same position—though maybe the drapes hung a little differently. But by then he was too tired to do anything but drop on the bed, and too wired to do anything but lie awake.
He woke to sunlight streaming through the tattered drapes. Too strong a sunlight, he quickly discovered, for the ghostlight to overcome. So, he went around the house pulling the drapes and the shades, casting the interior into an artificial twilight in which the flashlight could—just barely—pick out ghostly images.
Exploration convinced Ted that it was the same house he saw, but it was not clear whether it was the house as it was or as it would be. The furniture was mostly the same, though sometimes in different positions, and the wallpaper had not yet begun to peel. That argued for the house-that-was. But the ground-floor windows had been painted black or boarded up, and there was no sign in the real light that any of that had ever happened. That argued for the house-that-would-be. But would Sharon ever replace that horrid, peeling fabric with its identical twin?
He saw the woman again, this time in the master bedroom and late in the afternoon. The sun had moved away from that side of the house, but enough sunlight broached the window shades that the shapes of things that were could be seen through those that weren’t—as if the world had been double-exposed. She was a wraith, sitting on the bedside and garbed in a dark, ankle-length dress with oddly placed bows and flaps, and white, decorative borders at the hem, cuffs, and decolletage. Slim, lace-up ankle-boots peeked from the folds of her skirt. Her hair (also dark) was cropped in a page-boy cut—except that it was shaved short in the back, exposing the curve of her neck and jaw and her bangle-less ears. It was no style—either of clothing or hair—that he had ever seen. The hands that covered the woman’s face bore stains that might have been dirt or paint or blood.
She was weeping.
For a moment, Ted watched the woman rock to and fro; then, embarrassed at his inadvertent intrusion, he thumbed the switch and plunged the room into darkness. When he turned the light on again, the room was empty and ghostly cobwebs draped a ghostly bed.
Ted went back to tagging the furniture after that, but I have to tell you, his mind wasn’t on it, and maybe he put some green tags where he was supposed to put red. Hey, why throw away a perfectly good gasogene? And maybe he really did forget to get the phone connected and the lights turned on. Or maybe he just wanted to sit alone in the dark again that night.
Ted was in the kitchen when the real light dimmed and a phantom kitchen emerged in the pale ghostlight. A kitchen sink, identical to the real one—but with buckets, tubs, and pails of water stacked all about. The same electric stove—but a quaint old brick fireplace in the west wall that looked like it was being used. Ted turned the flashlight off and studied the wall, and, yes, now that he knew where to look, he could see the outlines of the fireplace. It had been bricked up a long time ago. Maybe Sharon would want it restored: distressed brick, andirons, maybe a copper kettle on a decorative hook—it would be just too cute for words.