The pains increased, in what had been my throat, in what had been my head. I heard the back door slam, far away downstairs, and I stirred like air currents in the room, but I didn’t leave, I couldn’t leave.
“Ed? Ed? It’s me, hon!”
I know it’s you. I must go away now, I can’t stay here, I must go away. Is there a God? Is this my soul, this hovering presence? Hell would be better than this, take me away to Hell or wherever I’m to go, don’t leave me here!
She came up the stairs, calling again, walking past the closed guest room door. I heard her go into our bedroom, heard her call my name, heard the beginnings of apprehension in her voice. She went by again, out there in the hall, went downstairs, became quiet.
What was she doing? Searching for a note perhaps, some message from me. Looking out the window, seeing again my Chevrolet, knowing I must be home. Moving through the rooms of this old house, the original structure a barn nearly two hundred years old, converted by some previous owner just after the Second World War, bought by me twelve years ago, furnished by Emily — and Greg — from their interminable, damnable, awful antiques. Shaker furniture, Colonial furniture, hooked rugs and quilts, the old yellow pine tables, the faint sense always of being in some slightly shabby minor museum, this house that I had bought but never loved. I’d bought it for Emily, I did everything for Emily, because I knew I could never do the one thing for Emily that mattered. I could never give her a child.
She was good about it, of course. Emily is good, I never blamed her, never completely blamed her instead of myself. In the early days of our marriage she made a few wistful references, but I suppose she saw the effect they had on me, and for a long time she has said nothing. But I have known.
The beam from which I had hanged myself was a part of the original building, a thick hand-hewed length of aged timber eleven inches square, chevroned with the marks of the hatchet that had shaped it. A strong beam, it would support my weight forever. It would support my weight until I was found and cut down. Until I was found.
The clock read 9:23 and Emily had been in the house twelve minutes when she came upstairs again, her steps quick and light on the old wood, approaching, pausing, stopping. “Ed?”
The doorknob turned.
The door was locked, of course, with the key on the inside. She’d have to break it down, have to call someone else to break it down, perhaps she wouldn’t be the one to find me after all. Hope rose in me, and the pains receded.
“Ed? Are you in there?” She knocked at the door, rattled the knob, called my name several times more, then abruptly turned and ran away downstairs again, and after a moment I heard her voice, murmuring and unclear. She had called someone, on the phone.
Greg, I thought, and the throat-rasp filled me, and I wanted this to be the end. I wanted to be taken away, dead body and living soul, taken away. I wanted everything to be finished.
She stayed downstairs, waiting for him, and I stayed upstairs, waiting for them both. Perhaps she already knew what she’d find up here, and that’s why she waited below.
I didn’t mind about Greg, about being present when he came in. I didn’t mind about him. It was Emily I minded.
The clock read 9:44 when I heard tires on the gravel at the side of the house. He entered, I heard them talking down there, the deeper male voice slow and reassuring, the lighter female voice quick and frightened, and then they came up together, neither speaking. The doorknob turned, jiggled, rattled, and Greg’s voice called, “Ed?”
After a little silence Emily said, “He wouldn’t… he wouldn’t do anything, would he?”
“Do anything?” Greg sounded almost annoyed at the question. “What do you mean, do anything?”
“He’s been so depressed, he’s — Ed!” And forcibly the door was rattled, the door was shaken in its frame.
“Emily, don’t. Take it easy.”
“I shouldn’t have called you,” she said. “Ed, please!”
“Why not? For heaven’s sake, Emily—”
“Ed, please come out, don’t scare me like this!”
“Why shouldn’t you call me, Emily?”
“Ed isn’t stupid, Greg. He’s—”
There was then a brief silence, pregnant with the hint of murmuring. They thought me still alive in here, they didn’t want me to hear Emily say, “He knows, Greg, he knows about us.”
The murmurings sifted and shifted, and then Greg spoke loudly, “That’s ridiculous. Ed? Come out, Ed, let’s talk this over.” And the doorknob rattled and clattered, and he sounded annoyed when he said, “We must get in, that’s all. Is there another key?”
“I think all the locks up here are the same. Just a minute.”
They were. A simple skeleton key would open any interior door in the house. I waited, listening, knowing Emily had gone off to find another key, knowing they would soon come in together, and I felt such terror and revulsion for Emily’s entrance that I could feel myself shimmer in the room, like a reflection in a warped mirror. Oh, can I at least stop seeing? In life I had eyes, but also eyelids, I could shut out the intolerable, but now I was only a presence, a total presence, I could not stop my awareness.
The rasp of key in lock was like rough metal edges in my throat; my memory of a throat. The pain flared in me, and through it I heard Emily asking what was wrong, and Greg answering. “The key’s in it, on the other side.”
“Oh, dear God! Oh, Greg, what has he done?”
“We’ll have to take the door off its hinges,” he told her. “Call Tony. Tell him to bring the toolbox.”
“Can’t you push the key through?”
Of course he could, but he said, quite determinedly, “Go on, Emily,” and I realized then he had no intention of taking the door down. He simply wanted her away when the door was first opened. Oh, very good, very good!
“All right,” she said doubtfully, and I heard her go away to phone Tony. A beetle-browed young man with great masses of black hair and olive complexion, Tony lived in Greg’s house and was a kind of handyman. He did work around the house and was also (according to Emily) very good at restoration of antique furniture; stripping paint, reassembling broken parts, that sort of thing.
There was now a renewed scraping and rasping at the lock, as Greg struggled to get the door open before Emily’s return. I found myself feeling unexpected warmth and liking toward Greg. He wasn’t a bad person. Would he marry her now? They could live in this house, he’d had more to do with its furnishing than I. Or would this room hold too grim a memory, would Emily have to sell the house, live elsewhere? She might have to sell at a low price; as a realtor, I knew the difficulty in selling a house where a suicide has taken place. No matter how much they may joke about it, people are still afraid of the supernatural. Many of them would believe this room was haunted.
It was then I finally realized the room was haunted. With me! I’m a ghost, I thought, thinking the word for the first time, in utter blank astonishment. I’m a ghost.
Oh, how dismal! To hover here, to be a boneless fleshless aching presence here, to be a kind of ectoplasmic mildew seeping through the days and nights, alone, unending, a stupid pain-racked misery-filled observer of the comings and goings of strangers — she would sell the house, she’d have to, I was sure of that. Was this my punishment? The punishment of the suicide, the solitary hell of him who takes his own life. To remain forever a sentient nothing, bound by a force greater than gravity itself to the place of one’s finish.