“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?”
In the morning, Peter and Robert drive to the local community to check out its newspaper files.
They discover nothing of importance. Holder lived at Harrowgate for fourteen months, LOCAL RESIDENT SUCCUMBS the final headline of his life; no information as to how.
“Rural English periodicals,” Peter comments. “Discreet to the last.” The sort of publication whose headline for a man’s mass murder of his mother, father, brothers, sisters, wife and children would likely be LOCAL RESIDENT SUFFERS FAMILY LOSS.
He will have to put in a call to London to the research service used by ESPS. Maybe they can unearth more evidence about Holder.
“Did you say unearth?” asks Robert. Peter chuckles.
Driving back to Harrowgate, they discuss the words Robert wrote. They are obviously from some old poem or play, possibly Shakespeare. An added mystery: Why would Holder—if, indeed, it was Holder—write those words? And is it coincidence that the words and ghost are both from the Middle Ages?
“Peter,” Robert asks him. “Now that it’s just you and me together, tell me: Do you think it’s truly a ghost in the traditional sense? A surviving personality?”
“Oh, I don’t know, old man,” Peter says. “I wouldn’t dare make such a declaration at this point. I can only say—unlike our lovely but oh, so hard-headed associate—that I do not entirely rule out the possibility.”
When they reach Harrowgate, they see Cathy talking to a very subdued Mrs. Keighley and decide to leave them undisturbed. They take a stroll in the Armory, an enormous room replete with suits of armor and every variety of armament from England’s past.
They are drifting around, Peter asking Robert some trivia questions about suits or armor—none of which Robert can answer—when they come upon a table on which a sheathed, ivory-handled dagger is lying. Idly, Robert picks it up and unsheathes it, making a slight face as he does.
Footsteps behind them. “Gentlemen,” says Dr. Keighley.
They turn and Robert twitches, the dagger falling from his grip as he sees Keighley dressed in a Nazi uniform.
Gasping, he steps back. He looks down at the fallen dagger, then up again. Keighley is dressed as usual—flannel trousers, tweed jacket, tie and shirt and riding boots.
“I presume you will all be out of here by seven,” he says. “We invite you to join us for a final meal before your departure—if you so desire.”
After he’s gone, Robert takes Peter aside and tells him what he saw. Peter listens, intrigued. “I realize now he looked a good deal younger too,” Robert says. “His hair was blonde.”
They examine the dagger which Dr. Keighley has returned to its table. Robert is loath to touch it again.
“It might be German,” Peter says. “It has no military ornamentation but…”
They discuss what happened. Was Keighley, in fact, a Nazi officer at one time? Is that why Teddie took such an instant dislike to him? Keighley has no German accent, not a trace. How could he have been a Nazi?
“I’m thinking of the phrase you wrote,” Peter says. “Drowned in sin, they know me not. They forget clean and shedding of my blood. Why does that make me think of Nazis?”
They look at each other. Then Peter smiles and squeezes Robert’s arm. “We may never have needed Mrs. Warrenton at all,” he says. “You’re providing so much. You must pursue this psychic bent, Robert.”
“Perfect word,” says Robert, smiling wanly. “That’s the way I feel. Bent.” He winces. “Right out of shape.”
Supper. Dr. Keighley is quiet but seems content they are leaving.
Mrs. Keighley is, as she was the first night, keyed up, smiling at the wrong moments, saying peculiar things. “Well, we’ll simply have to sell the house eventually. Who’d buy it though? (Laugh) Maybe someone with a fondness for small, ugly ghosts. (Louder laugh) You know anyone like that, Dr. Clarke?”
Eunice says nothing but an undercurrent of tension in her is clear. She glances at her father often, quickly, covertly.
A telephone call from London takes Peter from the room.
When he returns, all hell breaks loose with the Keighleys.
At first, they sit in silence as Peter tells them what he’s learned.
Benjamin Holder was a Jewish actor who’d spent a year at Buchenwald, released by British troops on the very afternoon he was to be gassed. He moved to England, regained an inheritance and purchased Harrowgate. How he died is still unknown.
The reaction of the family is startling. Mrs. Keighley starts to laugh, to cry, to laugh as she cries, repeating, “Yes, of course, of course, it would be that, it would be that.” Eunice starts crying too. Dr. Keighley tries to silence them, ends up shouting, demanding that they “shut their stupid mouths” and leaves the dining room.
After the three have left precipitously, Cathy stares at Robert, at Peter, flabbergasted. “What was that?” she asks.
“We aren’t sure,” says Peter. “But the pieces seem to be coming together.”
“Did anyone notice?” Robert asks. “When Keighley was shouting, there was a distinct trace of German accent in his voice.”
They go up to Dr. Keighley’s room to talk it over. In the distance, they hear Keighley shouting again, the shrill, protesting voice of Mrs. Keighley, the crying misery of Euni
ce.
“What’s going on?” asks Cathy. “Does anyone have any idea?”
They bring her up to date on Robert’s vision of Keighley as a Nazi officer. Teddie’s antipathy toward the doctor and now this information about Holder seem to fit together.
“But the ghost—so-called—is of a man from the Middle Ages,” Cathy reminds them.
“We know that”, Peter says. “We can’t explain it. Notwithstanding, the family was traumatized by what I told them at the table. Mrs. Keighley’s behavior—”
“Maybe I can explain part of that,” Cathy says.
She tells them that, in talking to Mrs. Keighley, she saw the older woman scratching constantly at her left forearm.
“I think she’s on some kind of drug,” she tells them. “My mother’s had several patients with the same problem and their behavior was like Mrs. Keighley’s too—up, down, up, down.”
“Certainly explains a part of it,” Peter says. “Though not the basic situation.”
Cathy suggests a possibility in that area too. Without actually putting it into words, Mrs. Keighley had indicated that her relationship with Dr. Keighley was a strained one; moreover, that Eunice had something to do with it.
“She is afraid of her father,” Peter says. “No doubt there.”
“It could be sexual,” Cathy says. “I’ve seen that situation, too, in some of my mother’s cases.”
“The father and daughter?” Peter says, grimacing.
“Possibly,” she answers.
Peter nods. “Well, that fits together too,” he says. “Except, of course, for the prime contradiction—the ghost itself.”
“We haven’t seen it,” Cathy says. “It could be hallucination.”
“By both of them?” says Peter.
“More likely than a real—”
Cathy breaks off, gasping, as a water pitcher standing on a nearby bureau shoots across the room and shatters against a paneled wall.
Startled, the three stand rigid as though waiting for something more to happen.
When nothing does, they look at each other. Cathy’s gaze holds on Robert.
“Oh, now, wait a second, don’t start that,” he tells her. “I didn’t do it.”
“Did I say you did?” she asks, surprised.
“I see that damn ‘prime example’ look in your eyes again,” Robert says.
“No.” Smiling, she squeezes his hand. “No, Rob.”
They walk to the wall and look at it.
One piece of broken pottery, like a jagged knife blade, has remained in the wall.
As Peter and Cathy discuss what happened, Robert keeps staring at the pottery dagger imbedded in the wood.
Abruptly, he moves to the paneling and presses both palms against the wood, leaning the weight of his body against it.
“What are you doing?” Cathy asks.
“Help me,” is all he says.
Peter helps first, then, frowning, Cathy. “What are we supposed to be—?” she starts.
She breaks off as, with a loud clicking noise, a small door opens in the paneling.
“Ah,” says Peter, smiling broadly. “A secret passage; I love it.”
“Control yourself, darling.” There is as much irritation as confusion in Cathy’s tone.
Behind the doorway is a steep set of steps.
“We approach the lair,” murmurs Peter.
“Will you stop?” Cathy says; she actually sounds nervous now.
Robert gets a candle from its wall sconce and lights it, leads the way up, Peter second, Cathy last.
It is a strange sight they come upon in the attic.
A small stage has been constructed there, some time in the past from the dusty look of it. In the flickering candlelight, they see costumes hanging, props, some scraps of furniture.
“He was an actor,” Peter says.
“Here,” says Robert.
He holds up the candle so they can see the faded poster on the wall. From a play that Holder starred in.
“Everyman,” says Peter. “That’s what those lines are from!”
“Which also explains the Elizabethan costume on the ghost,” says Robert.
“What are you doing here? I told you to leave!”
The enraged voice of Dr. Keighley makes them whirl.
He is standing at the head of the steps, his wife behind him.
He starts toward them in a fury, then jerks to a stunned halt, staring at the stage.
All of them recoil at the sight.
The small, ugly man, Benjamin Holder, sitting on a stool, unraveling the stained handkerchief from his neck.
To reveal his throat cut deeply from ear to ear.
Mrs. Keighley screams and falls to her knees.
The vision disappears.
“My God,” says Cathy, trembling. “Oh, my God.”
Keighley turns on his wife, his face twisted by savage rage.
“You had to bring them here, didn’t you?!” he shouts, his German accent clear now. “You had to have them in the house!”
He grabs her by the shoulders, shakes her violently.
“I can live with the dead!” he shrieks. “Why can’t you?!”
The car moves along the hedge-sided road, Peter driving.
The mystery of Harrowgate seems to be revealed now. Dr. Keighley (née Keigelmuller) was a Nazi doctor. Fleeing to England after the war, he had paid a dialectician to help him lose his accent, became a London doctor, then married an English woman. He had lied to his wife when they married, telling her only that he’d been a doctor in the German Army and had nothing whatever to do with the Nazis but had fled to England, afraid that he might be tried as a war criminal regardless. She had believed the lie.
And everything had functioned according to the plan until they’d bought and moved to Harrowgate.
“Obviously the man generated that ghost to serve as the punishment he’d avoided,” Peter says.
“Agreed,” says Cathy. “Except, for the word ‘ghost’. Substitute the words ‘guilt hallucination’ and I buy it all.”
“And his wife?” asks Peter
“The same,” she says. “Guilt. Secondary hallucination.”
“Does that include us?” asks Robert.
“Secondary hallucination, yes.”
“And Holder?” Peter asks.
“Served as the stimulus for activating Dr. Keighley’s self punishment,” Cathy says. “I think he knew about the attic, knew about Holder’s background. And used it against himself. And against his family for knowing about his guilty past.”
Peter makes a groaning noise. “Sound like a ‘prime example’ of over-simplification to me,” he tells her.
“All right,” she retreats. “Add more if you like. That, in certain localities, personal psychic factors may actually mobilize residual energies from the past and project them onto a hallucinatory screen. Is that enough for you?”
“Except for one point,” Peter says.
“Which is—?” she asks.
“Which is that these residual energies may, in fact, be part and parcel of a surviving personality.”
“No,” she says. She shakes her head determinedly. “No. No. No. No. No.”
“Once more into the fray,” says Robert. “Who will win? Tune in tomorrow.”
“No one’s going to win this one,” says Cathy with a rueful smile. “We’ll be fighting this battle ‘til doomsday.”
They are still fighting it hours later.
“Enough!” cries Robert. “Give it a rest!”
Cathy and Peter laugh and stop.
“If only he hadn’t heard that voice,” says Robert after momentary silence.
“Who?” they both ask simultaneously.
“Hitler,” Robert answers.
CUT TO World War One, Germany; young Corporal Hitler sitting with his comrades in a trench, having something to eat.
CAMERA MOVES IN ON him. Abruptly, a male voice speaks to him, ordering him to, “Get up and walk o
ver there.”
He does not question the validity of the order, thinking it the voice of some unseen officer. Obeying, he rises and walks some two hundred yards down the trench, re-seats himself to finish his meal.
He has barely sat down when an enemy grenade arcs down into the trench, explodes and kills every one of his comrades.
“Think of what might have been avoided if he hadn’t heard that voice,” says Robert.
“The voice was clairaudient premonition,” Cathy says. “Hitler was probably psychic.”
“And, if he’d died,” says Peter quietly, “Germany would have produced another Hitler.
“I suppose,” Robert says. He looks at Cathy. “What do you mean he was probably psychic?”
“Consider,” she says, “—and I don’t take credit for this observation; I heard my mother make it and I doubt if it’s original with her.
“The point is: Hitler had no interest in distance perception tests, in Zenor cards or moving objects in séance rooms like Home and Palladino. No interest in comforting others like Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Leonard, Cayce.
“He chose not to order ball bearings to roll across glass top tables. Instead, he ordered bomber pilots to decimate cities. He didn’t bend spoons. He dispatched panzer divisions to bend Europe and Asia. The Army, Navy and Air Force were his ectoplasmic extensions.”
Robert grunts. “Interesting notion,” he says.
“Because he was probably psychic,” she says, “he was always certain he was right. It was this paranormal sense of certainty that altered, later, to delusions of grandeur which he maintained to the bitter end.”
Two nights later. Ten p.m.; Robert’s hotel room.
He and Cathy have just made love and are lying, warm and comfortable in each others arms.
“I hope you appreciate, my darling,” Cathy says, “that, in the very bosom of my family and marriage, I am lying in your arms like this.”
He kisses the tip of her nose. “I appreciate,” he tells her quietly.
“And that I have become a member of that legion of errant wives who have lied about what they intended to do when they left the house.”