Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

of one of those psychics who work with the police. He talked about what he feels and sees as he works, and it’s a little like what you describe. It’s as if he’s in two different rooms at once, two different times—you know what I mean?” She checked his eyes, though why he should fail to understand her plain English was unclear to him. “He sees the people standing around him—the police, for instance—and he sees something else just as clearly, the way when you’re driving down the road and imagining something, you see the road, but you also see the thing you’re imagining.” Again Jessica leaned forward to see him better. “Did you feel anything funny? In your body, I mean? Did you feel old, for instance?”

Mickelsson shook his head. “Not that I remember.”

“Maybe it’s different with different people,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t remember?”

He thought of Dr. Rifkin. “I’ve tried. I can’t.”

As if disappointed in him but grudgingly forgiving, she lay her head back on his arm again. “I wish you’d pay closer attention to things,” she said. Then she turned, rolled her eyes toward his, and smiled, as if afraid if she pushed too hard he might get balky and be of no use to her. “But it is interesting.” She rounded her eyes still more. Then abruptly sober: “If only I could make out what it means!”

“It has to mean something?”

“God knows it doesn’t have to,” she said, “but maybe it does. Why is it these ghosts that people get glimpses of? Is it possible they’re trying to warn us about something? I know that sounds dumb—I don’t mean it, exactly. I think. But why is it this particular house that’s so alive? Or maybe it’s you—something about you, or people like you. …”

“Tell you a different theory,” Mickelsson said. “It all started as a haunted-house story by a bunch of kids, and when I heard the story, being more or less ‘suggestible,’ having a history of delusions of this kind—”

She declined the gambit, clenching her fist on her knee. “But I don’t think it is ‘nothing.’ There’s something about the house that feels … I mean, it’s a nice house, it’s beautiful. But there’s this strange“—she frowned, then slid her eyes at him—”there’s this smell, Peter.”

“Probably the spring in the basement,” he said. “It rots the wood.”

“Are you crazy? It smells like cake.”

He shrugged, apologetic. The uncivil forthrightness no doubt had its advantages, but it was wearing.

Jessica looked at him, then patted his arm as if conscious that she’d slightly hurt his feelings. “You have noticed it, haven’t you?” she asked.

He’d had, he knew now—one after another—strange sensations he’d dismissed at the time: fantasies of indistinct voices, smells, an occasional sense of people near him, observing, nodding. … Suppose it were not just flickering dream-work but something more active. Suppose they had, whatever it might mean, some kind of stake in him.

He felt her hair brushing lightly against his wrist, tickling it, and when he breathed in deeply he again smelled her perfume. Lilacs? He was stirred, as one always is, he thought; but at the same time he was hurled deeper into the pit of himself. He imagined himself making love to her, huffing and blowing away in the bed upstairs, both of them mmming and groaning with delight, Jessica generously faking by the ancient Rules of Order for sexual politicians. He remembered for no reason what old man Sprague had said: Sometimes people get taken over. … Some kinda feelin that’s in the woods. That was what was happening to him, the reason he was beginning to see ghosts.

He shuddered severely enough that Jessica noticed. She turned to him and, like someone reaching out to touch a nervous stallion, put her hand on his chest. “Are you cold or what?” she asked.

Down in the valley the train was rumbling through the darkness with its freight of lost childhood.

Abruptly, to free himself from the sweetness of her touch, he leaned forward, reaching for his pipe on the coffeetable. He got a match lit and held it over the bowl.

“Don’t pull away, Pete,” she said, as if she were now the injured one. She leaned forward too, moving her left arm around behind him and pressing her right hand flat on his chest, over his heart, where the pain was. She drew back a little, away from the pipe-smoke, and blew at it.

Against his will, he savored the calm spreading out from her hand. So it had once been with Ellen. Age-old story. He said, “I was thinking about what old Sprague said, the feeling that’s in the woods. I know what he means.” He scowled, bold sign of sincerity, though he had no intention of saying what was in his mind. No more cowpastures apparelled in celestial light. That was why he hated it when her judgments of people were clinical, unwilling to consider anything not physically there: because she was right. “Why are you massaging my chest?” he thought of saying. “What’s it to you? Except that maybe someday your chest may ache. Good long-range investment.” His chest ached more, and the magical healing power of her hand—so it seemed—became all the more annoying. Christ, what wouldn’t he give for Jessica to be in love with him! But he’d learned what Jessica, of the tribe of Freud, had no doubt always secretly known. No love, just fuck. He decided to put the pipe down; he could survive for at least a few minutes without it. What difference? He said, “It’s not like entropy—not like simple loss of energy, simple giving up. It feels more like something alive, like those dogs, or rattlesnakes.” He looked at her forehead. The side of her breast was touching the side of his. They were inching up on the time of decision. Someone must make the first move. Was the game already started?

“I’m dull company, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Cheap move, but piss on