She was standing at the screen door for the hundredth time, peering malignantly at the corner of the house where the old man would come into sight – when it happened.
There was the screen door and the deserted veranda. That was one instant. The next, the old man materialized out of the thin air two feet away. He opened the screen door, and then half fell against the door, and slowly crumbled to the ground, writhing, as the woman screamed at him, meaningless words—
“That was her story,” Kent said wearily, “that the old man simply fell dead. But the doctor who came testified that Mr Wainwright died of choking, and besides, in her hysteria, Mrs Carmody told everything about herself, and the various facts taken together combined to discredit her story.”
Kent paused, then finished in a queer voice: “It is medically recognized, I believe, that very old people can choke themselves to death by swallowing saliva the wrong way, or by a paralysis of the throat produced by shock—”
“Shock!” The doctor sank back into his chair from which he had half risen. “Man!” he gasped, “are you trying to tell me that your interference with the old man that day caused his abrupt appearance before Mrs Carmody, and that it was the shock of what he had himself gone through that—”
“I’m trying to tell you,” said Kent, “that we’ve got minutes to prevent this woman from hanging herself. It could only happen if she did do it with her own hands; and it could only happen today, for if we can get there in time to tell her, why, she’ll have no incentive. Will you come . . . for Heaven’s sake, man—”
The doctor said: “But the prophecy. If this old man actually had this incredible power, how can we hope to circumvent the inevitable?”
“Look!” said Kent, “I influenced the past by an act from the future. Surely, I can change the future by – but come along!”
He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. She sat there in her bright little room, and she was still smiling, as she had been when they first came in, a little more uncertainly now, as the doctor talked.
“You mean,” she said finally, “that I am to be freed, that you’re going to write my children, and they’ll come and get me.”
“Absolutely!” Kent spoke heartily, but with just the faintest bit of puzzlement in his voice. “I understand your son, Bill, is working in a machine factory, and that he’s married now, and that your daughter is a stenographer for the same company.”
“Yes, that’s true.” She spoke quietly—
Afterward, while the doctor’s maid was serving Kent a warmed-up lunch, he said frowningly: “I can’t understand it. I ought to feel that everything is cleared up. Her children have small jobs, the girl Phyllis is married to that Couzens chap, and is living in his family home. As for Mrs Carmody – and this is what gets me – I had no impression that she was in danger of hanging herself. She was cheerful; she had her room fixed with dozens of little fancily sewed things, and—”
The doctor said: “The records show that she’s been no trouble while she’s been here. She’s been granted special privileges; she does a lot of sewing – What’s the matter?”
Kent wondered grimly if he looked as wild as the thought that had surged into his mind. “Doctor!” he gasped, “there’s a psychological angle here that I forgot completely.”
He was on his feet. “Doctor, we’ve got to get to that woman again, tell her she can stay here, tell her—”
There was the sound of a door opening violently, then running footsteps. A man in uniform burst in.
“Doctor, there’s a woman just hanged herself, a Mrs Carmody. She cut her dress into strips and using the light fixture—”
They had already cut her down when Kent and the doctor arrived. She lay stiff in death, a dark, heavily built woman. A faint smile was fixed on her rigid lips— Kent was aware of the doctor whispering to him:
“No one’s to blame, of course. How could we sane people remember that the greatest obsession in her life was security, and that here in this asylum was that security she craved.”
Kent scarcely heard. He felt curiously cold; the room seemed remote. In his mind’s eye he could see the Wainwright house, empty, nailed-up; and yet for years an old, old man would come out of it and wander over the land before he, too, sank forever into the death that had long ago struck him down.
The time would come when the – ghost – would walk no more.
The Party
William F. Nolan
Location: Manhattan Apartment, New York.
Time: April, 1967.
Eyewitness Description: “The place was pretty wild: ivory tables with serpent legs; tall, figured screens with chain-mail warriors cavorting across them; lamps with jewel-eyed dragons looped at the base. And, at the far end of the room, an immense bronze gong suspended between a pair of demon-faced swordsmen. A thing to wake the dead . . .”
Author: William Francis Nolan (1928–) is a former racing driver, commercial artist and cartoonist, and now multi-award winning author: having twice won the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award, been voted “Living Legend in Dark Fantasy” by the International Horror Guild and “Author Emeritus” by the SF Writers of America. He became famous with Logan’s Run (1967), about a future world where a youth culture has taken over and orders the death of all those over 21 to avoid overpopulation, which inspired a movie, TV series and two sequels, Logan’s World (1977) and Logan’s Search (1980). Nolan has written a number of contemporary ghost stories, though none have received higher praise than “The Party”, published by Playboy in April 1967. The following year, Newsweek named the story as one of the seven most effective horror tales of the century (“The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs and Saki’s “The Open Window” were two of the others). The story was bought for the American TV series, Darkroom, but the programme was cancelled before it could be filmed. A highly visual tale with mounting tension, this decision is almost as puzzling as the situation in which partygoer David Ashland finds himself.
Ashland frowned, trying to concentrate in the warm emptiness of the thickly carpeted lobby. Obviously, he had pressed the elevator button, because he was alone here and the elevator was blinking its way down to him, summoned from an upper floor. It arrived with an efficient hiss, the bronze doors clicked open, and he stepped in, thinking blackout. I had a mental blackout.
First the double vision. Now this. It was getting worse. Just where the hell was he? Must be a party, he told himself. Sure. Someone he’d met, whose name was missing along with the rest of it, had invited him to a party. He had an apartment number in his head: 9E. That much he retained. A number – nothing else.
On the way up, in the soundless cage of the elevator, David Ashland reviewed the day. The usual morning routine: work, then lunch with his new secretary. A swinger – but she liked her booze; put away three martinis to his two. Back to the office. More work. A drink in the afternoon with a writer. (“Beefeater. No rocks. Very dry.”) Dinner at the new Italian joint on West Forty-Eighth with Linda. Lovely Linda. Expensive girl. Lovely as hell, but expensive. More drinks, then – nothing. Blackout.
The doc had warned him about the hard stuff, but what else can you do in New York? The pressures get to you, so you drink. Everybody drinks. And every night, somewhere in town, there’s a party, with contacts (and girls) to be made . . .