She laced her fingers under her chin and said: “Spirits prefer a tabla rasa, a body in which the ego is very weak. Alcoholic blackouts, drug freak-outs, attacks of gran mal, all these tend to blow out the ego and leave the body temporarily unoccupied. A roving spirit wanders along, finds one and says, ‘Ah-ha, a vacant house.’ So he slips in and takes up residence. When the ego reawakens, it may not be able to kick the spirit out.”
“What happens then?”
“Sometimes they share the same body, with control seesawing back and forth until the original possessor goes insane or gives up and dies. Sometimes the occupying spirit is lazy and doesn’t try to dominate. It just rides along, looking over your shoulder. Some are even benevolent, and try to help their hosts.”
“Would you say Robert’s is benevolent?”
She shrugged. “It protected him from the fire, apparently.”
“That could be enlightened self-interest. If he’d burned up, the invader would have had to find a new body, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes.” Ann frowned and stabbed out her cigaret. “Whatever it is, it’s been very active.” She closed her pad and slid out of the booth. “Let’s go and see Mr. George again, shall we?”
V
We drove out and I parked in the lane outside the gate. It was her suggestion; Ann wanted to approach without warning. That alone was enough to raise the hair on my neck.
All the way down the hill I kept getting hot and cold flashes. I was so nervous that if a twig had snapped I’d have done a backward somersault and come down running the other way.
Even the cabin looked foreboding. Wild grapevines trailed down from tall sycamores like webs of a giant spider. The scent of damp decay filled my nostrils like glue. Once I’d loved the smell of rotting wood; now it spelled only death.
Ann, stopped suddenly and pointed at the doorstep. Somebody had scraped a slab of yellow clay off his shoe.
“Do you have that kind of dirt around here?” she whispered.
“No, it’s all river bottom, gumbo and sandy loam.”
“So where did that come from?”
“The graveyard?”
She nodded. “Open the door.”
I reached out and turned the knob, then flung the door wide. The body on the cot was a faceless ruin. Judging from the double-barreled shotgun which lay between his legs, Robert George had tucked the muzzle under his chin and pulled both triggers. The blast not only removed his face but the front half of his skull.
But that was not the ultimate horror. Inside the flannel shirt and stained khaki pants lay a body well advanced in decay. The hand dangling at the side of the cot was held together only by a few cords of dried sinew.
Ann stood, her nostrils flaring, then she choked, gasped and, putting her handkerchief to her mouth, ran outside. I walked out a moment later, saw her with one arm braced against a tree, vomiting. I sat down heavily on a cracked wooden bench which had once been a church pew. Ann stumbled over wiping her eyes, collapsed beside me and lit a cigaret. Her voice was flat and unemotional, as if the horror was too much to be conveyed in verbal terms.
“That was Mr. George?”
“Near as I could tell. That’s the shirt he had on yesterday.”
“How far along would you say the decay process was?”
“It takes animals a couple of months to get into that condition at this time of year.”
She let her head drop onto her fist, supporting her forehead. “I never ran into anything like this before.”
She looked suddenly shrunken, defenseless, and I realized with some surprise that she must still be in her early twenties. She drew on the cigaret as if smoke were her only link with life. I sensed a subtle shift in our relationship.
Before, she’d been the leader, and I the faithful, stupid servant. Now at least we were at an equal level of ignorance. For some reason it made me feel stronger. There’s nothing quite so enervating as carrying out complicated instructions when you don’t know the reason for them.
I stood up. “The law’s clear on one point. Find a body and you must report it to the proper authority. In this case, the county sheriff. Let’s go get him.”
Ann stood up. “You go ahead. I’ll stay here and look around.”
“Now listen — I’m not leaving you alone. Not after what happened to Robert.”
“You think you know what happened to him?”
“Well, he shot himself, for one thing.”
“I don’t intend to shoot myself, dear.”
The word brought a sudden splash of warmth in my chest. I stammered, then backed up and started over.
“No, but if you get caught by the thing that had him, if it’s still here—”
“It’s gone. Otherwise I’d feel it.”
“You didn’t feel it yesterday when you stood right next to George.”
“Oh, stop being chauvinistic. Go get the sheriff. I’ll stay within shouting distance.”
I watched Ann walk toward the river, hands shoved in the pockets of her belted beige car-coat, her blue headscarf hanging out like a tail. She paused at the river bank and then stepped over the edge, clutching a birch sapling to keep from sliding.
I resisted the urge to follow her, turned and trotted up to the car. Rather than drive all the way back to town, I drove three miles to the intersection and phoned the sheriff from a service station. I told him Robert George had apparently been fooling with his shotgun and shot himself dead. The sheriff sighed and said he’d be right out with the meat wagon, and there’d better be a corpse this time or I could consider myself under arrest.
I drove back to the place and opened the gate for him, let him drive through with the ambulance behind him, then closed the gate and followed in my car. The sheriff was a squat, heavy man with bristly gray hair, coarse features, and small squinted gray eyes. He wore matching gabardine shirt and pants separated by a wide leather belt to which was buckled a .45 automatic.
When I drove up he was walking toward the cabin with that king-swagger a country boy gets when he hangs a gun on his hip. But when he opened the door all his bravado leaked out of him. He hunched over and shot me a scared look from the corner of his eyes, then backed off and stepped outside the door.
His face was white.
He looked like he wanted to barf like Ann had done, but instead he motioned the ambulance driver and his assistant inside and told them they’d need the plastic bag. I could see he was shook but didn’t want to show it; he pulled out his pad and unclipped his ballpoint and slid his eyes over to me, like he wasn’t sure just who or what I was.
“You sure that was Robert George?”
“Pretty sure. He was wearing those clothes yesterday.”
“Yesterday, huh? Then how come he looks like he’s been dead a couple of months?”
The sheriff looked like he was about to flap his arms and take wing. I couldn’t do anything but shrug, and he shoved the pad to me and told me to fill the damn thing out myself. Then he got in his car and started tuning his police radio, as if the county were seething with crime and unrest which required his personal attention.
I filled in Robert George’s vital statistics and where it said time of death I put the magic word: Unknown. Human nature was funny that way; people could be faced with the entire riddle of existence and the minute you put a label on it, they were satisfied.
By then the ambulance boys were coming out with their burden in the black plastic bag; it seemed to hang light between them, and I decided there was probably nothing left of Bob George but skin and bones. I gave the sheriff his pad and he looked at it with eyes like boiled eggs, then stuck it in his pocket and muttered that he hoped this was the last he saw of that S.O.B. I guess he had some premonition that it wouldn’t be, because after he started his car he leaned his head out the window and said: