He walked aimlessly after that, emerging finally on a dirty and busy street. A shabby neighborhood tavern caught his eye. He went into it, grateful for the icy air-conditioning and the relative quiet in which only a few old men talked in low voices along the bar. He took his drink to the last wooden table in the back.
The condition of Deirdre Mayfair tortured him. And the mystery of the apparition only made it worse. He thought of that daughter in California. Did he dare to call her? Doctor to doctor ... But then he did not know the young man's name.
"Besides, you have no right to interfere," he whispered aloud. He drank a little of his beer, savoring the coldness. "Lasher," he whispered. Speaking of names, what sort of name is Lasher? The young California intern would think him a madman! He took another deep drink of the beer.
It seemed to him suddenly that the bar was getting warm. It was as if someone had opened the door on a desert wind. Even the old men talking over their beer bottles seemed to notice it. He saw one of them wipe his face suddenly with a dirty handkerchief, then go on arguing as before.
Then as the doctor lifted his glass, he saw straight in front of him the mysterious man seated at the table near the door to the street.
The same waxen face, brown eyes. The same nondescript clothes of that unusual texture, so smooth they shone faintly in the subdued light.
Even as the men nearby went on with their conversation, the doctor felt the keening terror he had known in Deirdre Mayfair's darkened room.
The man sat perfectly still gazing at him. Not twenty feet separated him from the doctor. And the white daylight from the front windows of the bar fell quite distinctly over the man's shoulder, illuminating the side of his face.
Really there. The doctor's mouth was filling with water. He was going to be sick. Going to pass out. They'd think he was drunk in this place. God only knew what would happen--He struggled to steady his hand on the glass. He struggled not to panic completely as he had done in Deirdre's room.
Then, without warning, the man appeared to flicker as if he were a projected image, then vanish before the doctor's eyes. A cold breeze swept through the bar.
The bartender turned to keep a soiled napkin from blowing away. A door slammed somewhere. And it seemed the conversation grew louder. The doctor felt a low throbbing in his head.
" ... Going mad!" he whispered.
No power on earth could have persuaded him to pass Deirdre Mayfair's house again.
But the following night, as he was driving home to the lakefront, he saw the man again, standing under a street lamp by the cemeteries on Canal Boulevard, the yellow light shining full upon him against the chalk white graveyard wall.
Just a glimpse but he knew he wasn't mistaken. He began to tremble violently. It seemed for a moment he could not remember how to work the controls of his car, and then he drove it recklessly, stupidly, as if the man were pursuing him. He did not feel safe until he had shut his apartment door.
The following Friday, he saw the man in broad daylight, standing motionless on the grass in Jackson Square. A woman passing turned to glance at the brown-haired figure. Yes, there, as he had been before! The doctor ran through the French Quarter streets. Finding a cab at a hotel door, he ordered the driver to get him out of there, just to take him anywhere, he did not care.
As the days passed, the doctor had ceased to be frightened so much as horrified. He couldn't eat or sleep. He could concentrate on nothing. He moved perpetually in utter gloom. He stared in silent rage at the old psychiatrist whenever their paths crossed.
How in God's name could he communicate to this monstrous thing that he would not come near the miserable woman in the porch rocker? No more needles, no more drugs from him! I am no longer the enemy, don't you see!
To ask the help or understanding of anyone he knew was to risk his reputation, even his entire future. A psychiatrist going mad, like his patients. He was desperate. He had to escape this thing. Who knew when it might next appear to him? What if it could come into these very rooms!
Finally on Monday morning, his nerves frayed, his hands shaking, he found himself in the old psychiatrist's office. He had not made up his mind what he would say, only that he could stand the strain no longer. And he soon found himself rattling on about the tropical heat, headaches and sleepless nights, the need for quick acceptance of his resignation.
He drove out of New Orleans that very afternoon.
Only when he was safe in his father's office in Portland, Maine, did he at last reveal the whole story.
"There was never anything menacing in the face," he explained. "On the contrary. It was strangely unlined. It was as bland as the face of Christ in the portrait on the wall of her room. Just staring at me. But it didn't want me to give her the injection! It was trying to scare me."
His father was a patient man. He did not answer at once. Then slowly he began to talk of the strange things he'd witnessed over the years in psychiatric hospitals--doctors seemingly infected with the neuroses and psychoses of their patients. He'd seen a doctor go catatonic one day in the midst of his catatonic patients.
"The important thing. Larry, is that you rest," his father said. "That you let the effects of this whole thing wear off. And that you don't tell anyone else about it."
Years had passed. The doctor's work in Maine had gone well. And gradually he had built a solid private practice independent of his father.
As for the specter, he had left it behind him in New Orleans, along with the memory of Deirdre Mayfair, sitting eternally in that chair.
Yet there remained in him a lingering fear that he might someplace or other see the thing again. There was the lingering fear that if such a thing had happened once, it might happen another time for entirely different reasons. The doctor had tasted real horror in those damp, dark New Orleans days, and his view of the world had never been the same.
Now, as he stood beside the window in the darkened hotel room in New York, he found the whole affair overwhelming him again. And as he had done a thousand times before, he analyzed the strange tale. He searched for its deeper meaning.
Was the thing really stalking him in New Orleans, or had the doctor misunderstood the silent specter?
Maybe the man had not tried to scare him at all. Maybe it had in fact been pleading with him not to forget that woman! Perhaps in some way it was a bizarre projection of the woman's own desperate thoughts, an image sent to
him by a mind which knew no other means of communication.
Ah, there was no comfort in such an idea. Too awful to imagine the helpless woman pleading with him through a spectral emissary, who, for reasons never to be known, could not speak, but only appear for brief moments.
But who could interpret these strange elements? Who would venture to say the doctor was right?
Aaron Lightner, the Englishman, the collector of ghost stories, who had given him the card with the word Talamasca? He had said that he wanted to help the drowned man in California: "Maybe he doesn't know that it has happened to others. Maybe I am needed to tell him that others have also come back from the edge of death with such gifts."
Yes, that would help, wouldn't it? To know that others had seen ghosts too?
But that was not the worst of it, seeing a ghost. Something worse than fear had taken him back to that screen porch and to the wan figure of the woman in the rocker. It was guilt, guilt he would bear all his life--that he had not tried harder to help her, that he had never called that daughter out west.
The morning light was just breaking over the city. He watched the change in the sky, the subtle illumination of the soiled walls opposite. Then he went to the closet and removed the Englishman's card from his coat pocket.
THE TALAMASCA
We watch
And we are always here.
He picked up the telephone.
It was an hour in the telling, which surprised him, but all those details had come tumbling back. He had not minded the little tape recorder going, with its tiny red eye blinking. After all he had used no names, no street numbers, not even any dates. New Orleans, an old house, he had said. And on and on he had talked. He realized now that he had never touched his breakfast, except to empty the coffee cup over and over again.
Lightner had proved an excellent listener, responding gently without ever interrupting. But the doctor did not feel better. In fact, he felt foolish when it was over. As he watched Lightner gather up the little recorder and put it in his briefcase, he had half a mind to ask for the tape.
It was Lightner who broke the silence as he laid down several bills over the check.