A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

Author:Richard Matheson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Ghost, Spiritualists, Ghost stories, Psychological fiction, American Horror Fiction, Horror, Fiction - Horror, Fiction, Psychological, Horror & Ghost Stories, Horror - General, Psychics
ISBN: 9780765361172
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-04-29T19:00:10.945000+00:00

TWELVE

NIGHT.

I sat in the kitchen, drinking beer and staring at the tablecloth.

Hating Anne for leaving me alone.

"Why," I remember saying, as if she could hear me, "why didn't you let me go with you? Was it my fault I knew your mother was dead? Did I ask to know it? Was that enough reason to leave me here alone?"

I closed my eyes. I'd walked a mile and a half to a local movie just to get out of the house. I'd gone to a bar after that and had a few beers and watched the fights on television. I'd stopped at a liquor store on the way back and bought two quarts of beer and the Sunday papers. I'd read the papers through, glancing at everything, assimilating nothing. I'd finished one quart of beer, then been unable to see clearly enough to read. I'd watched television, staring glumly at a panel show, insulting the performers angrily. Finally, I'd turned it off and stood there, staring at the contracting blob of gray light, watching the few remaining flickers before the tube grew black. Then I'd gone into the kitchen where I was now, sitting, working at the second quart of beer.

And waiting.

I knew there was no escaping. I couldn't sleep in the street. Sooner or later I had to lie down on the bed and go to sleep.

When I did, she'd return.

It was as much an assurance in my mind as it was an assurance that, after the funeral, Anne would come back with Richard.

"Too late," I berated her from eighty miles away. "Too late. You'll come back and it'll be too-" I stiffened. Was that a sound in the living room? I bit my teeth together and listened so hard my eardrums hurt. I sat there frozenly, staring at the tablecloth, unable to look into the semi-lit living room.

"Are you in there?" I muttered. "Are you?"

I flung up my head suddenly.

"Well, are you!"

She wasn't. Something that sounded terribly like a sob broke in my chest. I heard it. I was afraid. I was a baby terrified of the dark, a little boy afraid of ghosts. All the years of reason and dogma had been stripped away. I'd been drinking beer in the hope of stultifying awareness. It had only increased it by lowering the barriers of conscious resistance. Don't ever get drunk if you want to avoid the tensions within; I found that out. Drinking only opens the gates and lets out the prisoners you can keep locked in with conscious will.

"I hate you," I said, drunkenly. "I hate you for leaving me. What kind of wife are you who'd leave me here alone? You know she's here. You know she wants me for something. You-"

I gasped as I heard a loud laughing in the next house. I heard Elsie saying brightly, "Oh, you stop that now!"

I shuddered. We are all monsters underneath, I thought.

"And the most monstrous of monsters is the female monster," I mumbled, "because they are shrewd

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