"I just told him Mom wanted it," Mark said.
Pat, who was fairly familiar with the moral codes of the younger generation, knew that to Jay and to Mark this was a perfectly adequate reason. They were all so hostile to rules and regulations; they took a perverse delight in breaking the rules, especially for someone they liked.
She felt no need to explain this to Josef, even if she had been capable of rational conversation. She drank her coffee.
"We'll have breakfast and then open the carton," Mark went on. He flipped an egg. Grease spattered, followed by a horrible smell of burning oil.
"Can I help?" Kathy asked.
"You could set the table," Mark answered, turning. Their eyes met; for a long moment Mark stood still, his spatula poised, dripping grease onto the kitchen floor.
"The eggs," Pat said.
"Oh." Mark turned back to his cooking while Kathy set the table. Pat knew Josef was looking at her, but she refused to meet his gaze. She kept her eyes fixed on her coffee cup.
It wasn't only lack of sleep or the sleeping pill or even her awareness of how she looked that made her silent and sullen. Convinced, and yet unwilling to believe, her mind raged against the events of the previous night.
The two men had entered swaggering, as they had left; but Josef admitted he needed a drink, and Pat had observed that his hands were not completely steady when he poured it. All the same, he had insisted, he was not completely converted to Mark's theory of a sentient, conscious intelligence as the agent behind the manifestations.
"But it came and went without completely materializing," Mark had argued. "Damn it-excuse me-Mr. Friedrichs, you must have felt it. I was outside the room, and I felt it. Something came-realized you were not what it was after-and left."
"It was bad enough, even half formed," Friedrichs muttered.
"Compared to what Kathy and I encountered, that was nothing," Mark insisted. "We saw it, and felt it. It hit every sense."
Josef had the last word.
"If your ideas are correct, Mark, we'll see the proof of them tonight. Your hypothetical entity will come, dismiss you as it dismissed me-or it will have learned, from to-night's experience, that Kathy has left the house, and it will not return."
Remembering this conversation, Pat felt a surge of panic. Did they really intend to risk Mark tonight, as Josef had risked himself the night before? Both men insisted there had never been any danger; the manifestation had started to fade almost as soon as it began, leaving the victim sickened but unharmed.
Even if that was true, it was not proof that the thing wouldn't react as violently to Mark as it had to Kathy. Had not Josef said that poltergeists were activated by youth? Besides-Pat went on with her silent argument-even if Kathy was the sole catalyst, where did that leave them? It left them with the conclusion that Kathy could never again enter her father's house.
"A nice thing that would be," she said suddenly. The others, who had been tactfully ignoring her bad mood, looked at her in surprise.
"Ah, she is showing signs of life," Mark said. "Eat your eggs like a good girl. As soon as you finish we'll open the carton."
"That fails to inspire me," Pat said. "What do you expect to find, Mark? A magic formula for exorcising demons?"
"Facts," Mark said.
After all, he was too impatient to wait for her to finish a meal for which she had little appetite. Kathy helped him clear away the dishes. Then he began to unload the box.
It was a motley and rather unsavory collection that appeared. The books and papers were spotted with damp and smelled sour, as if they had been permeated with mold.
"Jay figured Miss Betsy must have kept this stuff in the basement," Mark explained as his mother withdrew, her nose wrinkling fastidiously. "Some of it is in bad shape."
"And of the wrong period," Josef said, examining a long thin volume whose covers were held in place only by tatters of cloth. "This is someone's book of recipes-some handwritten, some cut out of newspapers and magazines. The type is too modern to be nineteenth century."
Kathy pounced on a packet of letters.
"These are dated 1934," she said, disappointed.
"I never promised you guys a rose garden," Mark said. "Did you think we'd find a document entitled 'The Family Ghost and what it wants out of life'?"
"Empty the carton," Josef suggested. "We'll put the irrelevant materials back into it."
The kitchen table was heaped with miscellany by the time Mark reached the bottom of the box. The last thing he took out was an elaborately bound book some eighteen inches long and several inches thick. Its padded covers, banded in brass, were of velvet turned green with age.
"Here we go," Mark said, his face brightening. "This must be the family photograph album."
The others discarded the unproductive documents they were investigating. By returning most of these to the car-ton they cleared enough space for the album, and Mark opened it to the first page.
It was like meeting, if not an old friend, at the least a familiar acquaintance. They had seen a reproduction of John Bates's photograph in the Morton genealogy; here was the original, and its impact was just as strong on the second viewing-even stronger, perhaps, because the reproduction had been slightly blurred. John Bates's dark eyes looked straight out at the viewer, as if demanding an answer to some vital, if unexpressed, question.
Mark turned the page. Again familiar faces-those of Louisa and Lavinia, nee Peters, caught for posterity, so long as paper and chemicals would survive. The stilted, simpering smiles seemed unbearably poignant to Pat. Could they have manufactured even a pretense at happiness if they had known what the next few years would bring?
"Mr. Morton must have had this album," she said.
"Or copies of the same photos," Mark said. "Louisa was his grandmother, and Mr. Bates was his grandfather. He didn't go farther back with the Bateses; I guess they weren't distinguished enough. No Revolutionary War heroes, or anything."
They were clustered close around Mark, who had taken upon himself the position of master of ceremonies and official turner of pages. Kathy, too polite to elbow her elders aside, stood on tiptoe to see over Mark's shoulder. Mark lifted his arm and pulled her close to the table, so that she was in front of him instead of behind him. His arm remained draped casually around her shoulders. Pat glanced at Josef. His lips had tightened, but Mark's gesture had been made so smoothly and so naturally that he could hardly complain without sounding foolish.
Mark turned the page.
There were two photographs, one facing the other. The first was that of a young man standing straight and proud in the dark of a Union uniform, his face stiff under the unbecoming short-brimmed forage cap. But the audience paid that photograph little heed. Three pairs of eyes focused, aghast and unbelieving, on the picture on the opposite page.
The girl wore her prettiest party dress, dotted with tiny flowers, ruffles framing her white shoulders, billowing skirts reducing her waist to ridiculous proportions. Ringlets tied with ribbon framed a smiling girlish face… Kathy's face.
Pat's eyes moved from the yellowing photograph to the living features of the girl who stood sheltered by Mark's arm.
Kathy had heard the gasps of surprise, but she alone, of them all, seemed unaware of what she saw. Naturally, Pat thought, her mind reeling; people don't really know how they look to others, they see only a mirror image, reversed…
Kathy let out a yelp of pain. Mark's fingers, which had been resting lightly on her arm, crooked like claws.
"What's the matter?" she demanded shrilly. Her eyes moved from Pat to her father.
"They aren't the same," Pat said. Her own voice sounded strange in her ears.