The Link (32 page)

Startlingly, when she speaks it is in a low masculine voice. “I bring you greetings,” she says. “It is I, Blue Feather.”

“Blue Feather?”
Teddie says aloud. Peter backhands him on the arm, his expression stern. Teddie looks at him in surprise, then closes down abruptly, features like stone.

“I say this,” says the deep-voiced medium. “I say there is bad sorrow in this house. I say that someone comes because a place is made for him. A place of memory where he re-lives his suffering. It is an echo from the past.”

She sighs heavily. “Your phantom lives a life he borrows from the people in this house.”

She grunts. Nods. Grunts again.

“He is here,”
she says.

None of them are prepared for what happens next: the sudden alteration in Mrs. Warrenton’s posture. It is as though, through some incredible necromancy, she shrinks in size, her face contorting to a glaring, hating mask.

“That could be the man they saw,” says Peter quietly.

The medium spews out a torrent of words, her voice now harsh and growling, Germanic—not unlike Teddie’s.

“I carried food for the kitchens, to the huts, a giant kitchen, white, immaculate, the cooks in uniform with white caps, pistols sticking from their holsters, it was winter and our feet were numb, the floor was smooth and polished and the tea urns weighed a hundred pounds, we carried them across the kitchen, hup-hup-hup-hup, hup-hup-hup-hup, and my brother, sixteen, slipped and fell and tea was spilled and two cooks picked him up and plunged him head down in another urn of boiling tea.”

No one has noticed Teddie staring at the medium as though he is about to leap at her throat.

“I had to carry him or die, a mile to the huts with his body floating, head down, in the urn and had to make believe I didn’t see him or they would put me in another urn and drown me in the boiling tea—”

They look around in shock as, with a sound somewhere between a growl of fury and a sob of anguish, Teddie lunges up and rushes to the door, yanks it open and runs out. In the sudden silence, Peter, Robert and Cathy exchange confused looks.

Then Robert stands and hurries after Teddie.

He finds him on the balcony outside his room, staring across the countryside. “Are you all right?” he asks.

“No, you are Allright, I am Berger,” Teddie mutters distractedly. He is having difficulty with his breath.

“What happened?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Teddie answers. “The damn woman was filching from my brain.”

He tells Robert that he was a bearer at Dachau. He didn’t have a sixteen year old brother but he’d seen men drowned in boiling tea.

“I couldn’t stay and listen to her any longer,” he says. “God knows what garbage she would have dredged from my psyche.”

He shivers violently. “It’s cold out, Teddie, come inside,” Robert tells him quietly.

He leads the shaken man into the room and seats him. Teddie’s teeth are clenched, his breathing heavy.

“Seventeen,” he says. “I was seventeen.” He looks at Robert with haunted eyes. “It was not a brick wall, it was marble, in Gestapo headquarters. They marched us in and lined us up in front of the officers and we stood at attention.”

As though time has suddenly re-claimed him, Teddie jumps up and assumes a pose of stiff attention, speaking between gritted teeth. “And we stood there at strict attention, wondering if we would die or live.”

Suddenly, he is sitting on the chair again, his face a mask of casual cruelty. “And the officer at the desk said—” His voice becomes a frightening sound. “These are Jews and they never exercise. All they do is steal our money and perform abortions on Gentile girls because they want to kill off all the Gentiles. We must help them exercise. We will make them strong and vigorous.”

Teddie is up, then down, doing push-ups on the floor. “Down we went,” he mutters. “‘
One
-two-
one
-two-
one
-two!’ the officer barked at us. ‘
One
-two-
one
-two-
one
-two!’”

Robert stares at Teddie, wordless.

Teddie is on his knees now. “It was simple for me,” he says. “I was young, I was strong. It was no effort. But the old people. The old, the very old. They could not do it. Old men fell.”

Again, he is doing a push-up, now collapsing, gasping, acting out the awful memory. “His arms gave out,” he says laboredly, “and he fell and lay there on the marble floor, huffing and puffing for breath.”

Robert starts as Teddie leaps up and moves with casual steps, the officer’s face printed on his again, the thin smile of cruelty. “And the officer came out from behind his desk and moved to the old man and said, in a very gentle, very kindly voice—”

The voice makes Robert shudder as Teddie enacts the officer saying, “Oh. You are having trouble, my old Jewish friend. Here. Let me help you with your exercise.”

Robert twitches as Teddie sweeps down and, from memory, enacts the officer grabbing the old man by the hair with rigid, talon-curled fingers, starting to jolt him down and up, down and up.

“And the officer,” he says, “started to count. ‘
One
-two-
one
-two-
one
-two-
one
-two-
one
-two!’” His voice is rabid now. “
And
on
eve
-ry
count
of
one
he
smashed
the
old
man’s
face against
the
floor!”

He stands up, panting. “And the old man’s face was crushed,” he says. “His skull broke open and his brains spilled out across the marble floor.”

He stares at Robert, chest rising and falling heavily. Abruptly, then, he makes a half-turn and looks up strangely. Automatically, Robert does the same, then looks back at Teddie who is still peering upward, now pointing, smiling.

“And up there on the balcony, standing with their cigarettes in their pretty little fingers were the young Nazi girls, watching.” His face contorts. “
Giggling.”

Robert shudders again as Teddie imitates their giggles. “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh; isn’t that funny?”

Teddie looks back at Robert. “Their fine young boy-friend Nazi officers were showing off to them, you see. Beating out men’s brains and eyes against the marble floor in order to impress their girls.”

He swallows hard. “It was there I made the mistake of looking disturbed at this because the old man was my grandfather. So, naturally offended by my bad taste, they threw me, head-first, against a wall.” His smile is terrible to see. “And I was
blessed
from that day forth with E.S.P.—Extra-Sickening-Perception.”

He slumps back into the chair, looking exhausted.

“I have told you nothing, nothing,” he says. “It is children’s play I have described to you. Can you imagine—possibly imagine?—how it was to be clairvoyant in a death camp and be able to see into the shower rooms and watch the people being gassed—the men, the women, the children, the suckling babes?
See
them?
Watch
them?
Hear
them? Yet I am told that what I have is a gift from God!”

He looks darkly amused.

“Once it was a gift,” he says. “A moment I shall treasure to my grave. When I killed a Nazi officer. A fat man with a bad heart. He woke up in his room one night and there I was—this dirty, scruffy little Jewish boy in rags, staring at him. What do you call it, an OOBE? Yes, that is what I had. Except that fat swine thought I was a ghost and had a heart attack and dropped dead on the floor.”

Teddie’s laugh makes Robert’s flesh crawl. “I told my friends the next day what I’d done but they thought I was crazy. I
was
crazy. But I had killed him, nonetheless.” He closes his eyes. “And other than that, being psychic has been nothing but—”

A piercing scream is heard below.

All of them rush down. Dr. Keighley is lying unconscious on the library floor, his wife and daughter bending over him.

“He said he saw the man again,” she tells them in a trembling voice. “Down here. Down
here
now!”

Robert, Cathy and Peter have supper together in the Breakfast Room.

Teddie has left, returning to London by train. He’ll meet them at the airport when they leave for Russia. He’s apologized for disrupting the sitting, told them that Robert would explain what happened.

Mrs. Warrenton has also gone. It seems as though the Harrowgate Hobgoblin (as Teddie has called it) may never be explained.

Cathy accepts what has happened as perfectly explicable. Teddie’s buried memories of Dachau were picked up by Mrs. Warrenton while she was in trance.

“How does that tie in to Dr. Keighley seeing the ugly man downstairs?” asks Peter.

That is another part of the problem, Cathy says. Peter knows as well as she that scientific observers rarely report anything coherent in so-called haunted houses because their own appearance invariably changes the emotional atmosphere within the house. Obviously, Teddie’s presence ‘muddied the psychic waters’ considerably.

“Perhaps,” says Peter. “But Mrs. Warrenton was positive that she was
not
just reading Teddie’s mind.”

Cathy shrugs. “What else would she say?”

They look around as Dr. Keighley enters the Breakfast Room. Quietly, he thanks them for coming to the house to help but requests that they now depart. He has discussed it with his wife who insists they remain another day. He is amenable to that. No longer though.

After he’s gone, Robert says, “He sure seems anxious to get us out of here.”

Considering that the “haunting” effect appears to be enlarging rather than diminishing, isn’t that a little odd?”

Another night in Dr. Keighley’s room. “It may be arbitrary to observe there now since the ghost has appeared downstairs as well. But since it all began here—” Peter says.

Robert is on watch while the others sleep, writing a letter to Ann.

As he writes, his eyes go out of focus and his hand scribbles rapidly across the paper.

Now his eyes focus and he starts.

There is another kind of writing on the paper, tight and cramped, not his at all.

Even more unusual: the words are written
upside down and backward
.

Robert looks around, stands and carries the paper to a wall mirror, holds it up and reads.

—of ghostly sight the people be so blind… drowned in sin, they know me not… they forget clean and shedding of my blood red…Holder…

Robert reads it several times before waking Cathy and Peter.

“Holder,” Peter says. “Holder.” He opens his briefcase and, yawning, rubbing his eyes, checks a list. “Ah,” he murmurs.

“What?” asks Robert.

Peter shows them the list. Living in Harrowgate from 1946-47 was a man named Benjamin Holder.

Peter grunts, bemused. “This is where we came in,” he says.

He explains what he meant. The beginnings of parapsychology had to do with communication with “the disincarnate”.

“Are we back where we started?” he asks.

“Never,”
Cathy says.

“I think we’re missing the point,” Robert breaks in. As they look at him, he finishes. “If Holder lived here from 1946 to 1947 and the small, ugly man is dressed in Elizabethan clothes, what the hell is going on? Are there
two
ghosts?”