haven’t had a genuine paying-guest,” she confessed gaily, “for over ten years!”
*
The tall Negro grinned feebly, nodding. “Naw’m. Sho’ ain’t.” His face brightened as Tom shoved a damp bill into his hands. He felt it lovingly with a big calloused thumb. “Money!” he said with a happy grunt. “Us sho’ could use some! Them as ain’t alive might not need it no mo’, Miss Addie. But us two is still livin’!”
“From hand to mouth,” Miss Addie said cheerfully. “Still . . .” She lifted her silver head proudly, “I haven’t had to mortgage Faraday House. We manage. Of course, my hospital bills took all our savings—everything but the place and a few acres. Saul hunts and farms, even raises a little livestock. Now and then I sell off one of the family heirlooms when we’re desperate for cash. . . . But, there!” she broke off, engagingly. “I mustn’t burden two lovebirds with my silly troubles! I only hope,” she smiled apology once more, “that what you’ve seen here hasn’t . . . upset you too much?”
Jean and Tom smiled back at her unsteadily. There was something so disarming about this sprightly old lady. And yet, obviously, she was a mental case! They stiffened once more at her next words; offered in a light conversational tone as if she were talking about the weather.
“You see, they’ve been coming here—the lost, bewildered ones like those you saw downstairs in the parlor—for eight years. Or is it nine?” she interrupted herself to peer up, bird-wise, at the giant Negro. “How long, Saul? Wasn’t it 1945 when that policeman wandered in here, saying he had been shot in a holdup, in Traceyville? Poor thing! He kept trying to call headquarters, to give them a description of the bandit who shot him and wounded that gas-station attendant! As if it mattered to him then! Although,” Miss Addie laughed, “we didn’t realize . . . what he was. Not until after Saul took him upstairs. I called a doctor. But when we went up to the room, he was gone! There wasn’t even any blood on the bedsheets and pillow, of course. Because . . . they have no substance. He only thought of himself as bleeding; so that’s how I saw him, before he went on.”
Over her head, warily, Tom and Jean locked glances. Crazy! their eyes exchanged wordlessly. But, harmless? When would her lunacy take a dangerous turn . . . ?
“Entirely weightless and without force of any kind,” Miss Addie went on brightly. “That business about chain-rattling is ridiculous! They can’t move solid objects, any more than a . . . a TV image could! Why, they can’t possibly harm anyone or help one, either. That’s what bothers them. One minute they can eat, drink, move heavy objects, fight, and so on. Then . . . pouf! They’re no more than smoke. A thought-form, as I said. What we see is simply a . . . a picture of them, as they remember themselves. If they thought of themselves naked,” the old lady tittered naughtily, “why, that’s how we’d see them! But they think clothes, as well as hair and skin and so on. Even watches and jewelry, sometimes! Anything they feel strongly was a part of their personality in the . . . the material world they have just left. Of course, to see them, one must be either psychic . . . or very tired, ill, or feverish—any condition that would let the Sixth Sense come into play.”
“Oh! I . . . I see,” Jean gulped. “What you’re trying to tell us,” she stammered lamely, “is that . . . those people downstairs are . . . are all . . . ?”
“Yes,” old Miss Faraday inclined her head daintily. “Quite right, my dear. I don’t know why they come here!” She laughed, with a merry flirt of the little fan. “Unless,” she pursed her lips pensively, “it’s because I died, and they feel a . . . a sort of kinship . . .”
Jean rolled her eyes at her husband. Tom, sipping his wine, choked.
“You . . . d-died?” he coughed. “Then you think you . . . uh . . . I mean, you’re like them, too?”
“Oh, no!” Miss Addie emitted a silvery laugh full of innocent merriment. “No, no, I’m very much alive now. As alive as you are, you two nice young people! But I did die, about ten years ago—1943, wasn’t it, Saul? Medically, you understand. There are degrees of death, as it is accepted by . . . ha, ha! What we call scientific fact.” The fan brushed away Science airily, as if it were an annoying insect. “Some years ago, if breathing stopped, one was considered dead. But then they found a way to use artificial respiration, and make the lungs work again. Before that, consciousness was considered ‘life’—and the unconscious were medically ‘dead.’ Many people in a state of trance were even buried alive, during the early days of medicine. But medicine is making such strides, there may come a day when the soul can be switched from one body to another! Naturally, a body is only a clumsy container for one’s real self . . .”
Tom ran his finger around under his collar, moving across the room to Jean’s side. They sat, very close together, under the canopy of the big bead where General Beauregard, or Robert E. Lee, might very well have slept once. The old lady’s matter-of-fact voice, reeling out mad words that, somehow, sounded so amazingly sane, held them spellbound with attention.
“Later in this century,” Miss Faraday was saying, “a person was not pronounced ‘dead’ unless he had no pulse. Stimulants were used to start it up again; but if they failed, that was all. And that,” she announced blandly, “was what happened to me. My heart stopped beating during an emergency operation to remove my appendix. Right there on that very bed you’re sitting on! It was too late to rush me twenty-eight miles to the hospital in Mentonia. So . . . I died. My spirit left my body.”
The newlyweds gaped at her. Miss Addie chuckled at their expressions.
“That is,” she continued, her faded eyes twinkling, “I was dead for about thirty seconds. The doctor Saul phoned was out, and a young assistant came in his place. It was he who operated . . . and he had once happened to witness a miracle-operation by one of the big surgeons at Johns-Hopkins. A . . . a tho . . .”
The old lady wrestled with her failing memory, then came up with the medical term: “A thoracotomy. You know? Where the surgeon opens the chest cavity and massages the heart until it starts beating again? This young doctor of mine decided to try it on me. I was dead—so there was nothing to lose, he figured. And it worked!” Miss Addie bowed, fluttering her fan complacently. “I was brought back from the dead. Like Lazarus—poor man!” she added thoughtfully. “I know now why he was so quiet, afterward. There’s so much I could tell you!” she sighed. “But I can’t prove it, so nobody would believe me. Therefore, I’ve just learned to keep my mouth shut, and let them find out for themselves! Everyone will find out—sooner or later.”
The newlyweds pressed closer together, disturbed yet soothed by an air of calm knowledge in their hostess’s manner. Rain whispered against the window-panes. Somewhere a dog howled mournfully, as though to emphasize the old lady’s last sentence.
“Dat Feather!” Saul grunted suddenly, jolting them from their dream-like trance. “Hollerin’ his haid off ‘cause he wet and cold! I’m got to go down and fotch him into de kitchen . . .” Still mumbling, the blind giant lumbered out, groping his way with uncanny accuracy through the old house he had grown up in, and which was his whole world.
Miss Addie glanced after him fondly. She sighed. “My, I don’t know how I’d get along without Saul! He’s the grandson of a Faraday slave, and I’m willing this place to him when I die. . . . When I really die!” she added, with a twinkle of humor in her eyes. “He does put up with a lot from me, Saul does. Especially about my . . . overnight guests! He can’t see them, of course, and he claims he can’t hear them! Whether it’s only because they make so much extra work for him, I don’t
