‘Which sort am I?’
‘Oh, the sort that’s more inclined to appreciate me, obviously. You think about it, and you’ll find I’m right. Ah.’ He felt in a waistcoat pocket of the conservatively tailored suit, and brought out a small bright object, which he handed to me. ‘A little keepsake.’
It was a slender and very beautiful silver crucifix of (I would have guessed) late Italian Renaissance workmanship, but as new as if it had been fashioned an hour before.
He nodded in confirmation. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Though I say so myself. I wish I could find a way of making it genuinely difficult for somebody in my position to run up stuff like that.’
‘Is it you? I mean the …‘
‘Oh yes. A piece of me.’
‘That was coming out into the open, wasn’t it?’
‘Mm. I must have been bored, I suppose. I thought, why not? Then I thought I was heading straight for disaster. I needn’t have worried, need I? He hasn’t made much difference to anything, as you see.’
‘But you were telling me just now that the Church was important.’
‘Well, in a way. It can’t help being. After all, it was me He was a piece of. Goodbye, Maurice.’
The crucifix jerked and spun in my hand, twisted itself away before I could close my fist on it, fell non-perpendicularly to the floor and twirled off towards a corner. As I scrambled in pursuit I heard his genial, sincerely amused laugh, and then, just after the flash of silver had disappeared into a crack between wainscot and floor, a deep ascending grumble which presently resolved and separated itself into the sounds of tractor and TV set rising towards normal pitch. I was at the front window long before they had reached it, in time to see the unique sight of reality moving from slow motion to ordinary motion, dust particles and wisps of smoke accelerating, a man engaged in coming to life, his arm circling at an increasing rate as he returned the handkerchief to his pocket. Then everything was as it should have been.
I left the window, but with nowhere in particular to go. My heart beat twice in a fraction of a second, stopped while I plunged forward and grasped the back of a dining-chair, then gave such a slam inside me that I bent in the middle and at the knees and nearly pulled the chair over. The pain in my back came while I was in the act of moving my hand to the spot, and began steadily expanding and contracting in a new way. I felt sweat spring out on the palms of my hands and my chest and face, and my breathing quickened. All the fear I had escaped during the young man’s visit was upon me now, or its symptoms were. I found the whisky-bottle, drank a little, prevented myself from drinking more and washed down three pills with water. I realized there were two things that had to be done at once.
At the doorway I could not control a momentary hesitation, but then was out and hurrying down the passage. I found Amy, with Victor diagonally across her lap, looking at a cricket scoreboard on the screen.
‘Darling, what time is it?’
She said without moving, Twenty past four.’
‘Please look at your watch. No, show it to me.’
The small clock-face she wore at her wrist said four twenty-two. I looked at my own watch: four forty-six. A huge reason for fear departed, and left me feeling much as before. I started clumsily shifting the hands of my watch.
Still looking at the screen, Amy said conversationally, ‘So I tell lies about the time now.’
‘But you didn’t tell a lie. It was—’
‘You thought I had. You wouldn’t believe me when I told you. You had to see for yourself.’
‘Well, you hadn’t looked at your watch.’
‘Just before you came in I had.’
‘Sorry, darling, but I didn’t know that, and I wanted to make sure.’
‘Okay, Dad..’
‘Sorry.’
‘I don’t suppose you want to watch Pirate Planet with me, do you?’ she asked in the same tone as before. ‘It comes on at five five.’
‘I’ll see. I’ve got a lot to do, but I’ll try.’
‘Okay.’
Next, I went to the office and collected the still-active torch of the two Diana and I had used in the early hours of that day, fetched from the utilities room the same hammer and chisel as before, plus a jemmy, and returned to the dining-room. It took me only a few minutes to get a fair-sized section of the carpet up, but the floor-boards were of solid timber, and in the excellent repair my predecessor had put them in. I made a good deal of noise, did some damage and sweated copiously getting the first one up. There was nothing but whorls of dust and streaks of cobwebby material on the laths and plaster beneath it, or as far as my weakening light would reach between the joists. On the assumption that the crucifix had gone on behaving supernaturally after disappearing, it might be anywhere in the area generally beneath me, if indeed it had not passed altogether beyond my reach. But I could see no alternative to going on as I had started.
Time went unprofitably by. I was working on my fourth floor-board when Nick and Lucy arrived.
‘Hallo, Dad, what’s going on?’
‘Just …‘ I looked up at them, and was aware of how much like a husband and wife they seemed. ‘I dropped something down a crack in the floor. Rather a valuable thing. I thought I’d see if I could find it.’
‘What sort of thing?’ Nick sounded sceptical.
‘Well, it’s a kind of heirloom. Something Gramps gave me.’
‘Can’t you, I mean, which crack did it go down? You seem to be—’
‘No, it rolled, you see. I don’t know.’
Nick glanced at Lucy. ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Dad?’
‘Fine. Bit hot.’
‘This isn’t part of all the ghost stuff and everything that’s been going on, is it? I wish you’d say if it is.’
‘No, honestly. Just this—’
‘Because you know you can tell us and it’ll be all right,’ said Lucy. ‘We won’t think you’re mentally disturbed, or tell anyone else if you don’t want us to. It’ll be all right.’
‘No, really,’ I said, thinking that her use of the plural stretched the facts a little. ‘Don’t worry; if I can’t find it soon I’ll pack up.’
When I turned back to my work, I was aware of a brief silent conference going on above my head, and ending with their departure. At the end of another five minutes or so, I had the fourth floor-board out. Nothing again; or perhaps something, an odd bulge in a joist, a small object leaning against it at arm’s length. My extended fingers touched metal.
What I held in my hand a moment later was just recognizable as the crucifix the young man had given me: speckled, worn and stained almost black in places. In its present state it testified to no sort of miracle; an impartial mind would merely add it to the endless list of mildly surprising discoveries in old houses. I dismissed it from consideration, but was still overwhelmed with what felt like rage and disappointment. These and allied emotions went on showing through while I put all the energy I could into the task of relaying floor and carpet. As soon as this was done, they returned in full.
I left the tools and the torch where I had dropped them, and walked round the room trying to master myself, which meant, or must be prefaced by, discovering what it was that oppressed me. As if in answer, my visitor’s empty glass, standing on the low table between the armchairs, presented itself to my eye. I snatched it up and saw the marks of a human hand on its surface and of a human mouth at its rim. Well, what of it? Was I to take it to a spiritualist medium, a forensic scientist or the curator of the Vatican museum? I threw it hard into the back of the fireplace, breathing fast and starting to cry. Yes, it was disappointment all right, with him for his coldness and his lightness, with myself for my failure to have brought forward any question or accusation of the least significance, and also with the triviality of the ultimate secrets I had supposedly learned. And there was fear besides. I had always thought that personal extinction was the ultimate horror, but, having taken in those few dry hints about an after-life, that pronouncement that I would never escape from him, I now knew better.