Spirit (34 page)

‘Nothing like this,' said Miles. He lit one Camel from the burning end of another, and blew out smoke. ‘This'll go down in the record books.'

‘Bronco's seen his brother,' Elizabeth told Miles.'

Miles narrowed his eyes. ‘From the way you said that, I assume that has some special significance.'

‘The same significance as seeing Peggy,' said Elizabeth.

‘You mean your brother's deceased?' Cigarette smoke trailed between them, and was suddenly lifted by the chilly draught.

Bronco said, ‘I met him in Cuba. He didn't look like Billy, not at all, but I knew that it was him. Now he's back again, pestering me all the time.'

‘Who does he look like?' asked Miles.

‘I don't know, some Cuban.'

‘When he was alive, did he read any books or see any movies about Cuban people?'

‘Not that I know of.'

‘Did he ever visit Cuba?'

‘He didn't even visit Poughkeepsie.'

Miles said, ‘From what I've been reading, it appears that when a person dies, they have to base their imaginary identity on people they've known or read about or thought about while they're alive. Once they're dead, they
are
their own imagination, that's all they are, and their imagination can't imagine themselves to be anybody else, if you get my meaning.'

‘I'm not sure that I do.' said Bronco. ‘Particularly after all this wine.'

‘What I'm saying is, your brother had to base his appearance on somebody he knew when he was alive – whether that person was fictitious or real. Some people base their after-death appearance on the way they looked when they were alive. This has the fascinating side effect that many spirit-forms look younger or better-looking than they did on the person who died. It seems as if the dead are just as vain as the living.'

‘I can't think of anybody my brother would have based himself on. He didn't know any Cubans, as far as I know, and he never read a book in his life, apart from
Practical Mechanics
. He spent all his time listening to jazz records.'

‘How about jazz musicians?' asked Miles. ‘Any particular ones?'

‘I don't know . . . there was some rhumba-type record he used to play. Maybe that was it. I don't know who played on it, though.'

Miles swallowed more wine. ‘Do you still have his record collection?'

‘Sure, I have everything he ever owned. Even some ridiculous zoot suit he used to wear, with a belt at the back.'

‘Well, what I suggest is, when you get back to Arizona, check through his records and see if you can find anything Latin. Once you know who his spirit-form is based on, you can take the necessary steps to stop him from bothering you.'

‘And what are these steps'?'

‘To put it simply, you have to play the spirit-form at its own game. It's rather like scissors-cut-paper, paper-wraps-rock. You have to choose a character for yourself, fictitious or real, but someone who's capable of negotiating or dealing with the spirit-form who's bothering you. For instance, if your brother is manifesting himself as some Cuban musician, you can take the form of an impresario or a bandleader or a record producer, and tell him that he has to leave you alone or else he's going to lose his job.'

Bronco guffawed. ‘And how, precisely, am I supposed to take the spirit-form of some rhumba-playing bandleader?'

Miles remained serious. ‘You have to use the glamour. It's one of the oldest and best-documented forms of occult deception.'

‘The glamour?' asked Elizabeth.

‘That right. We use the word “glamour” today to describe illusory beauty. But actually it's a Scottish variant of the word “gramarye”, meaning shape-changing, as practised by witches. What the witches did was to wind a cord made of braided animal-hair around their necks until their breathing was restricted and they were starved of oxygen. In other words, they were in a state of near-death. Their imagination was then free to leave their body and take on any form they wished.'

‘That doesn't sound very glamorous to me,' said Bronco. ‘Is there any kind of evidence that it actually works?'

‘I've found four authenticated cases so far. The earliest was in 1645. The latest was in August, 1936. A man was arrested in Schaumburg, Illinois, for trying to pass a dud cheque. He gave his name to the police as Babbitt, a real-estate agent from the town of Zenith.'

‘You mean Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's novel?' asked Elizabeth.

‘The same, or so he claimed. He was examined by two psychiatrists, and both of them claimed that he was perfectly
sane. He not only resembled Babbitt, he talked like Babbitt, he knew everything that had happened in the novel – and not only that, he knew things that hadn't happened in the novel but which logically could have done. The police even sent a copy of the man's statement to Sinclair Lewis himself, but there's no record of what
he
thought about it, and of course he died in January so we can't ask him for ourselves.

‘The day after “Babbit” was released on bail, the body of a middle-aged woman was discovered in a house close by. She was wearing a man's suit which one of the attending officers recognized as “Babbitt's”. He also recognized the signet ring she was wearing, which was much too large for her. He checked her fingerprints and found that they were identical to “Babbitt's”.

‘If the Renaissance writings on glamour have any truth to them, both of these people had deliberately half-strangled themselves in order to leave their bodies in the shape of fictitious characters . . . for what reasons, we can't even guess. But then nobody would guess what you were doing, would they, Bronco, if they found you dressed as a bandleader?'

‘Well, you're right,' said Bronco. ‘But this isn't very encouraging news, is it? If you have to risk strangling yourself just to get rid of a bothersome spirit, I think I'd rather put up with the bothersome spirit.'

‘These days, you may not actually have to strangle yourself,' said Miles. ‘There are several drugs which dramatically lower your rate of respiration. You could actually deprive yourself of oxygen by chemical means, which would be much more controllable. I'd have to find out more about dosages, of course.'

‘I'm sorry,' Bronco told him. ‘This glamour business doesn't appeal to me at all. Too weird by half, too dangerous. I think I'll try a good old-fashioned exorcism. Bell, book and candle, and a well-bribed priest.'

The long-case clock in the hallway chimed eleven. Miles
finished his wine and said, ‘I'd better leave now, Lizzie. Thanks for everything. I really appreciate your inviting me. Your father deserved a good send-off.' He went into the hallway, shrugged on his overcoat and found his hat.

Laura kissed him. ‘Goodnight, Miles. It was good to meet you. Come out to sunny California sometime.'

They didn't stay long at the open door. The wind was rising, and the snow was falling as thick as swarming bees. He climbed into his old brown pre-war Ford, pulled out of the driveway, tooted his horn, and made his way through Sherman on the way back home.

He had been deeply saddened by David Buchanan's death, but he had found a great deal of comfort in the funeral service, and he had enjoyed talking to Elizabeth and Laura and Johnson Ward. Most of the time, he lived a very reclusive life these days, writing and researching. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he gave lectures on creative writing at Western Connecticut State, but he never fraternized with any of the faculty, or formed any kind of social relationship with any of his students. Some of the girls fluttered their eyelashes and said, ‘
Hi
, Mr Moreton', but that was as far as it ever went. He couldn't imagine taking any of them out and trying to talk about Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra and whatever else it was that excited girls these days.

A long time ago Miles had been in love. But it was so long ago that it almost seemed like medieval times, a gilded past of chivalry and high romance. Her name was Jennifer and she had hurt him so much when she rejected him that his bones had ached for months afterwards. Now, unbelievably, he could scarcely remember her. Blonde hair through which the sunlight always seemed to shine, and cornflower-blue eyes, and a ringing laugh, and that was all. Time had worked the glamour on her, too.

Miles was excited by his new research. When he was writing
Human Imagination
he had occasionally come across some extraordinary demonstrations of what the human psyche could do, but he had never come across such strong evidence that spirit-forming was not only possible but actually happening here in Litchfield County. He was excited, but he was frightened, too. He was beginning to understand just how tenuous our grip on life actually is: how fragile we are. One slip, one choke, one step in the road, one breath too few, and everything we ever were is gone for good. All of our consciousness has closed itself off, like a camera shutter. Gone, dark, finished. Yet it was clear that some element of what we had once been could sometimes survive our clinical death, in some changed and glamorous form – although whether this form would be happy or not, he didn't like to think.

Of course, what excited him more than anything else was the prospect of writing a new book, and he had thought of the title already:
The Proof of Ghosts
. All he had to do was establish that Elizabeth and Laura were telling the truth; and that Johnson Ward had really seen his dead brother; and he would be famous worldwide. He could answer at last the question that everybody had been asking since sentient life began: is there life after death – and if there is, what form does it take?

His car whined through Sherman and out towards Boardman's Bridge. In the summer he might have turned toward Gaylordsville and driven over the hill to New Preston, but in this weather it was out of the question. There was no other traffic on the road, and the snow was flying down in big, thick lumps, so thick that the windscreen wipers could barely cope. The side and rear windows were blotted out, and Miles felt as if he were covered in a blanket. The heater worked, but the rubber door-seals were perished, and so his ankles were exposed to thin, icy draughts.

Oh well, he thought, as he trundled towards New Milford and the Housatonic bridge, once I've written
The Proof of Ghosts
I can afford a new automobile. Maybe a new bed, too: and an icebox. But that was the sum of his material ambitions. What he really wanted was to travel. To Rome, to Vienna, to Lisbon. He wanted to see Casablanca, and stand on the edge of the Sahara desert, listening to heat and emptiness and the slow susurration of the human soul.

He had almost reached the Housatonic bridge when he saw a figure beside the highway. To his astonishment, his pale-yellow headlights illuminated the figure of a young girl, no more than nine or ten, standing in the snowstorm in a white summer dress. She was neither walking nor waving, just standing, with her arms by her sides, her eyes as smudgy as smoke.

He stopped the car and waited for just a moment, his hands gripping the steering-wheel, to see whether she might climb in, but when she didn't, he opened his door and climbed out.

‘Can't say you're dressed for a night like this!' he called out, one hand lifted to protect his face from the driving snow. The girl said nothing but stood watching him with those smudgy eyes. The snow had clogged her hair like a beret made of dandelion-puffs. Her skin was deathly white, and her lips were faintly purple. Her fingers were tinged with purple, too, as if she were frostbitten.

Miles high-stepped across the snow towards her, sliding once, and nearly falling over. ‘Listen,' he said. ‘You can't stay here, you'll catch your death. Let me take you home, huh?'

Still the little girl said nothing. Miles laid a hand on her shoulder and as soon as he had done so he wished he hadn't. It was thin and bony and very, very cold. In fact, it seemed colder than the snow. It was like laying his hand on a dead, skinned shoulder of lamb.

‘Do you live close by?' Miles asked her. ‘I can take you wherever you want to go. If you don't want to go home, I can take you to the cops, they'll take care of you, give you something warm to wear.'

The girl at last turned her face towards him. He was shocked how white she looked. ‘Oh, I have left my boots behind,' she whispered.

‘What, sugar?'

Oh, I have left my gloves behind.'

Miles gave her a tight, humourless smile. ‘We can soon sort that out, can't we?' He looked around. The highway was deserted. No traffic, nobody walking, not even a sledge. Just a girder bridge and an empty road, and snow that pattered softly down and changed the landscape into somewhere strange. ‘Where do you live? Is it very far from here?'

The little girl raised one arm and stiffly pointed north.

‘You live in New Milford?'

She shook her head.

‘Further? You live further than New Milford? Marble Dale? No? New Preston? No? Cornwall Bridge?'

The girl shook her head again and again but continued to point north.

‘You live in Canaan? No? You live in Massachusetts? Vermont? What are you trying to tell me, you live in Canada?'

The snow was falling so thickly now that the car was beginning to look like nothing more than a huge white hump at the side of the highway. ‘Come on, honey,' Miles said, in exasperation. ‘Let me take you to the cops. They'll know what to do with you.'

The little girl shook her head. Miles had started to reach out to her, to take hold of the arm, but there was some ferociously negative quality in the way she shook her head like that, and there was a look in her dark, unfocused eyes that made him hesitate. This wasn't some innocent little child being standoffish. This was some being that was in full possession of its powers and its senses saying
no, don't touch me – you dare to touch me
!

‘Okay, please yourself,' Miles told her. ‘All you have to do is get in the car. It won't take us more than a couple of minutes.'