Six
I
The brown cardboard carton was medium-sized- two feet square by about a foot and a half high. Pat stared blearily at it, wondering how her fogged brain had been able to produce even that approximation of dimensions. She turned an even less enthusiastic gaze on her son. He was at the stove. The smell of bacon, usually so appetizing, did not improve Pat's disposition that morning.
She had taken a sleeping pill the night before, the first time she had done so for over six months. It had left her groggy and cross. She would still be asleep, and glad of it, if Mark had not shaken her awake. He had given her time to put on a bathrobe, but she was groping under the bed for her slippers when Mark had snatched her up and carried her downstairs, showing off for Kathy, who followed them giggling and making admiring comments.
The bathrobe was an old green terrycloth garment, snagged by Albert's claws, and not very clean. It added at least fifteen pounds to Pat's apparent weight. She had not been able to find her good robe; probably it was still in Kathy's closet, or, if she knew teenagers, crumpled on the floor of Kathy's room. She had not had time to comb her hair or wash her face or put on makeup, and she hated Mark. Kathy too.
She added Josef to the list as he entered, neatly dressed, freshly shaved, every hair in place. If the lines on his face were perhaps a little deeper than they had been when she first met him, that didn't count for much when weighed against the snagged old bathrobe and the straggly hair.
"Good morning," he said brightly.
Pat lifted her lip in a silent snarl and snatched at the coffee Kathy put in front of her.
"Is that it?" Josef transferred his attention from Pat to the carton. Not that she blamed him. Even a worn, battered cardboard box looked better than she did this morning.
"That's it." Mark turned, waving his spatula. "I barely caught Jay; he was ready to take off when I got there, and I had to bribe him before he would let me have the material."
"What with?" Pat demanded. Even her voice sounded rusty and antique. She cleared her throat. "An invitation to dinner tonight?"
"I mentioned your name," Mark said innocently. "He really thinks you're a cool lady, Mom."
An eloquent, ancient Anglo-Saxon four-letter word leaped into Pat's mind. She managed not to say it.
"I hope you didn't give anything away," Josef said. He seated himself at the table. "You have asked this young man to violate the rules by loaning out such material; you must have given him a pressing reason."
"I just told him Mom wanted it," Mark said.
Pat, who was fairly familiar with the moral codes of the younger generation, knew that to Jay and to Mark this was a perfectly adequate reason. They were all so hostile to rules and regulations; they took a perverse delight in breaking the rules, especially for someone they liked.
She felt no need to explain this to Josef, even if she had been capable of rational conversation. She drank her coffee.
"We'll have breakfast and then open the carton," Mark went on. He flipped an egg. Grease spattered, followed by a horrible smell of burning oil.
"Can I help?" Kathy asked.
"You could set the table," Mark answered, turning. Their eyes met; for a long moment Mark stood still, his spatula poised, dripping grease onto the kitchen floor.
"The eggs," Pat said.
"Oh." Mark turned back to his cooking while Kathy set the table. Pat knew Josef was looking at her, but she refused to meet his gaze. She kept her eyes fixed on her coffee cup.
It wasn't only lack of sleep or the sleeping pill or even her awareness of how she looked that made her silent and sullen. Convinced, and yet unwilling to believe, her mind raged against the events of the previous night.
The two men had entered swaggering, as they had left; but Josef admitted he needed a drink, and Pat had observed that his hands were not completely steady when he poured it. All the same, he had insisted, he was not completely converted to Mark's theory of a sentient, conscious intelligence as the agent behind the manifestations.
"But it came and went without completely materializing," Mark had argued. "Damn it-excuse me-Mr. Friedrichs, you must have felt it. I was outside the room, and I felt it. Something came-realized you were not what it was after-and left."
"It was bad enough, even half formed," Friedrichs muttered.
"Compared to what Kathy and I encountered, that was nothing," Mark insisted. "We saw it, and felt it. It hit every sense."
Josef had the last word.
"If your ideas are correct, Mark, we'll see the proof of them tonight. Your hypothetical entity will come, dismiss you as it dismissed me-or it will have learned, from to-night's experience, that Kathy has left the house, and it will not return."
Remembering this conversation, Pat felt a surge of panic. Did they really intend to risk Mark tonight, as Josef had risked himself the night before? Both men insisted there had never been any danger; the manifestation had started to fade almost as soon as it began, leaving the victim sickened but unharmed.
Even if that was true, it was not proof that the thing wouldn't react as violently to Mark as it had to Kathy. Had not Josef said that poltergeists were activated by youth? Besides-Pat went on with her silent argument-even if Kathy was the sole catalyst, where did that leave them? It left them with the conclusion that Kathy could never again enter her father's house.
"A nice thing that would be," she said suddenly. The others, who had been tactfully ignoring her bad mood, looked at her in surprise.
"Ah, she is showing signs of life," Mark said. "Eat your eggs like a good girl. As soon as you finish we'll open the carton."
"That fails to inspire me," Pat said. "What do you expect to find, Mark? A magic formula for exorcising demons?"
"Facts," Mark said.
After all, he was too impatient to wait for her to finish a meal for which she had little appetite. Kathy helped him clear away the dishes. Then he began to unload the box.
It was a motley and rather unsavory collection that appeared. The books and papers were spotted with damp and smelled sour, as if they had been permeated with mold.
"Jay figured Miss Betsy must have kept this stuff in the basement," Mark explained as his mother withdrew, her nose wrinkling fastidiously. "Some of it is in bad shape."
"And of the wrong period," Josef said, examining a long thin volume whose covers were held in place only by tatters of cloth. "This is someone's book of recipes-some handwritten, some cut out of newspapers and magazines. The type is too modern to be nineteenth century."
Kathy pounced on a packet of letters.
"These are dated 1934," she said, disappointed.
"I never promised you guys a rose garden," Mark said. "Did you think we'd find a document entitled 'The Family Ghost and what it wants out of life'?"
"Empty the carton," Josef suggested. "We'll put the irrelevant materials back into it."
The kitchen table was heaped with miscellany by the time Mark reached the bottom of the box. The last thing he took out was an elaborately bound book some eighteen inches long and several inches thick. Its padded covers, banded in brass, were of velvet turned green with age.
"Here we go," Mark said, his face brightening. "This must be the family photograph album."
The others discarded the unproductive documents they were investigating. By returning most of these to the car-ton they cleared enough space for the album, and Mark opened it to the first page.
It was like meeting, if not an old friend, at the least a familiar acquaintance. They had seen a reproduction of John Bates's photograph in the Morton genealogy; here was the original, and its impact was just as strong on the second viewing-even stronger, perhaps, because the reproduction had been slightly blurred. John Bates's dark eyes looked straight out at the viewer, as if demanding an answer to some vital, if unexpressed, question.