After her day of dull work, a few glasses of Chianti, and the evening's escapades, Elizabeth was nearly dead on her feet and jaw-cracking yawns interrupted her ablutions. When she lay down in bed, however, her eyes went wide open and her mind was too wired to come down to sleep. She tried her usual trick of counting backwards from one hundred, but either thoughts of the business with the shoes interrupted her before she got to ninety-three, or her knees would itch and she would have to move around to find a non-itching position. When she finally did drop off, her sleep was light and punctuated by dreams of wakefulness.
In the very early morning, she woke for real with the word Gymnopée on her lips. Eyes straining to see, she blinked in the darkness and her ears caught the surrealist melody, slender as a question mark, drifting sweet as breathing through the house.
She sat up and looked at her alarm clock. It was 4:00 a.m. Assuming that Bob must be back from his shift and listening to music to unwind, she lay back down and closed her eyes, but sleep would not return. She gave up on getting any rest and figured she would go talk to Bob for a while. She groped around for her blue terrycloth Cookie Monster robe and, not wanting to turn on every light in the house to find him, reached for the stubby white candle that stood on her nightstand in a brass, saucer-shaped holder with a ring for her finger.
By touch, she pulled open the drawer of the nightstand and found a cardboard matchbook which felt as though it had about three matches. She fumbled in the darkness and lost two before the third burst into flame. She lit the candle and blew out the crumpled match before it burned her fingertips. Her eyes adjusted to the light as the dumpy round flame climbed higher.
Knotting the sash of her robe more securely, she wormed her feet into her boring gray booties, took up the candleholder, and followed the thread of the melody. She had to walk slowly and cup her free hand around the guttering flame to keep it from going out. Electric lights were definitely more practical, but the candlelight effected marvelous transformations. The stained and faded wallpaper of the hall was restored to its former richness and the geometric designs of the runners blurred into pleasing curves. The shadows danced around her as she started down the front stairs.
Something brushed her ankle. Rififi scampered past her, his hind feet hopping off each step at the same time giving him the look of a long-tailed bunny. He waited for her at the bottom of the stairs and rubbed his whisker pads on the newel post. When she reached the first floor and turned towards the back of the house, he walked ahead of her, pausing periodically to check whether she was still headed in the direction of the kitchen.
A faint light limned the edge of the music room door, which was standing slightly ajar. The Gymnopée continued, luring her closer, until the pianist hit a wrong note, struck a few random chords, and then launched into a lively rendition of "The 'In' crowd".
"Huh?" Elizabeth had thought it was a recording. She put her hand on the door. Rififi batted at her ankle as she pushed the door open, but she ignored him and entered the music room. "Bob?"
Behind her, Rififi hissed and spat. He dithered in the doorway for a moment, then stalked off towards the kitchen, emitting disgusted growls and snapping his tail back and forth.
The dainty crystal chandelier which hung over the bench lit the piano, but left the rest of the room in darkness. The gold velvet in the wallpaper faded into mottled shadows and the odd, hunchbacked shape of the harp loomed eerily in its corner. The expectant hush that had filled the house during the Satie crumbled almost visibly in the face of the jazz tune and Elizabeth drew in a sharp breath.
The cover of the piano was raised and from where she stood, she could not see the pianist. Raising her candle, she advanced across the floor. "Bob?"
The pianist came into view. He was not Bob, or any of her other housemates. He was dark haired and had a thin, ascetic face lined with a gravity that made him seem old, although he moved with the fluidity of youth. A small smile played around his mouth. He glanced up as she approached, made a rude face, and continued playing at a greater volume, throwing in bizarre baroque flourishes that dripped with sarcasm.
"Who are you?" she demanded. "How did you get in here?"
A scattering of notes leaped from his hands as he jumped with surprise. "You can see me?"
"Of course I can see you. Who are you?" she asked again.
Brows knotted with perplexity, he rose and bowed to her. He looked familiar, but she was certain she had never seen him before. He was dressed in knee breeches and hose with low leather shoes open on the sides and tied with ribbons. He wore a loose white shirt under a plain dark waistcoat fastened with a long row of buttons.
Elizabeth opened her mouth to make a crack about Halloween, realized where she recognized him from, and stood there like a surprised Statue of Liberty, with her mouth hanging open and the candle still raised above her head. Her other hand rose of its own accord and she pointed a shaking finger at the portrait above the fireplace.
"..." she stammered.
"Yes. That is I. Thomas Penrose, at your service." He bowed again. "Please accept my apologies for that childish display. If I had had any idea that it would be seen, I would certainly not have behaved so poorly. Although I suppose that does not excuse me from behaving badly when people cannot see me," he added thoughtfully.
"..."
He folded his arms across his chest and raised his eyebrows. "Surely you haven't been struck completely dumb."
"You're a ghost," she finally choked out.
"Not precisely, but that will suffice for now. Er, may I? This house is flammable." He advanced and deftly removed the candleholder from her shaking hand. His hand did not touch hers, but she felt a bitter chill emanating from his skin. He pinched out the candle and placed it on a table.
She lowered her hands to her sides and closed her mouth. She remembered reading somewhere that one got rid of ghosts by spitting beans at them, but she couldn't think of a polite excuse to run to the pantry and get some. Then she wondered why she was concerned about being rude. Something else occurred to her. "Are you the one who's been messing with the Velvis?"
He looked sheepish. "I loathe the thing. And there was no reason for Dirk to hang it over my portrait."
"Why didn't you move it yourself instead of throwing it on the floor?"
"There are limits to my corporeality. Small objects, short distances."
"You couldn't ask him to move it?" she asked before she stopped to think how silly that was. If Alice had met Penrose, she would have talked up the house ghost when she'd been convincing Elizabeth to move back to Richmond. "The others can't see you, can they?"
"No. Most people can't."
"But you look as solid as anything. How can they not?" she said.
"I don't know. A few people may be more sensitive to unusual patterns in the ether than others, or perhaps it's merely a question of paying attention. I've never noticed any consistent similarity among those who can see me." He looked at her with hunger in his eyes and added, "It's been thirty years since a resident of this house could see me. The last one smoked marijuana incessantly and every word out of his mouth that wasn't 'groovy' was 'like wow'. He thought I was an hallucination."
"You haven't spoken with anyone since the early '70s?" Elizabeth was appalled. "Why didn't you just leave and find someone to talk to?"
"I can go no farther than a certain distance from the portrait, so I am more or less limited to this house. I can go out into the side street, the gardens, and the near rooms of the house next door, but these afford only minimal opportunities for interaction."
Elizabeth tried to digest this information, but she was still hung up on the ghost part. As a child she had enjoyed ghost stories and working herself and her friends into a state of giggling spookiness as much as anyone, but she had never believed any of the stories even when she was telling them. She was tempted to poke a finger into Penrose and see just how corporeal he really was, but she thought it would be a bad idea to make him angry. She swayed with confusion brought on by fatigue and the unreality of the situation.
A key turned in the lock of the front door.
"Are you all right? Please sit down." Penrose reached out a hand to take her elbow, but she backed away.
"No, thank you. I think I need to go back to bed."
"Alice?" Bob walked into the music room and flipped the switch for the large chandelier. "Oh, Elizabeth, sorry. Didn't I hear you talking to someone?" He looked around as if he expected one of the other housemates to pop out from behind the piano.
She looked at Penrose, but he only said, "You can tell him you're talking to a ghost if you want to, but he will probably try to analyze you. He's planning to specialize in psychiatry."
She nearly went cross-eyed with the effort of forcing her face to stay impassive and pulled her robe more tightly around herself. "Uh, no. I was just talking to myself. I do that sometimes. I wasn't sleeping well so I thought I would take a walk around the house," she chattered glibly, hoping that this didn't sound any nuttier than the truth.
"Oh, I see," he said, although Elizabeth could plainly see that he did not. "Well, good night. I hope you get some rest." He yawned.
She yawned. "Good night."
He left and Elizabeth held her breath until she heard his feet on the stairs.
"That was not helpful," she whispered to Penrose. "I hope you are a hallucination. I'm going back to bed."
"Wait! Don't go," he pleaded. "Wouldn't you care for some coffee?"
"It's four in the morning."
"You'll have to get up in a few hours anyway. Please?"
She tried to imagine what it would be like, having one's first conversation in thirty years and getting stuck with a grouchy insomniac. In his expression, the snarkiness of what she suspected was his true nature fought with the wide-eyed hopeful air of a puppy angling for a bite of hamburger. After a long moment of indecision, sympathy won out over the desire for sleep. Stifling another yawn, she accepted his invitation and followed him back to the kitchen where Rififi was lurking beside his gilt dish. At the sight of her companion, the cat's fur puffed out and he dashed up the back stairs with a yowl.
"I don't think Rififi likes you," Elizabeth commented.
"Cats don't like anything that can sneak up on them." He held a chair for her and after easing her up to the table, busied himself with the coffee: grinding beans, placing the filter in the basket, and filling the carafe with water.
The conversation that followed was extraordinary, at least for Elizabeth. At first some quality of his voice struck her as terribly foreign. It was not his accent and diction, which veered between what she had always imagine the Restoration poets sounded like, sort of an American southern drawl blended with what would develop into received pronunciation, and a modern southern California influence that he must have picked up from television, of which the house had several. She was beginning to get used to it, then she realized that the foreign sound was from the odd pacing of his speech because he wasn't breathing and had to get used to it all over again.
Penrose drew her out and she described her days at university, her job, and the chain of events that had brought her back to Richmond. In turn, he told her a little about his own history, she was certain there was a good deal more to tell, about three hundred and fifty years worth to be sure, but he restricted himself to his early days. He had been born in London during a plague year, 1665, to a medical family who had stayed in the city and continued their practice. By some incredible dint of luck, their household had not lost more than a few members to the pestilence.
Sitting under the web of extension cords and the harsh light from the bare bulbs in the overhead fixture, she poured coffee down her throat and listened to him with increasingly greater concentration as the caffeine cleared the drowsiness from her mind. A small rational voice in her head kept reminding her there was no such thing as ghosts or the ether, but she ignored it. Elizabeth found her head filling with questions. How had his mother been able to train as a surgeon and practice after she married? and what had they done during the Great Fire the following year? He would not remember, having been an infant, but they must have told him. What she wanted to know right away, however, was how he ended up a ghost in Virginia. When his discourse did not head in that direction soon enough for her taste, she asked him outright.
He hesitated and chose his words carefully. "I'm not a ghost because I never died," he said emphatically. "I'm ensorcelled. It's completely different."
She nodded, although she could not imagine there was much of a distinction. It seemed important to him, however. Maybe the spirit world had some kind of class system.
"But it's not a very interesting story," he said, politely ignoring her snort of disbelief. "The painter of that portrait was dabbling in sorcery, a matter of lenses and other spells, all unbeknownst to me. And he held a grudge about a personal matter, of which I was aware, but I didn't expect anything worse than an unflattering portrait. He wove a spell into the painting of it and trapped me so that I was thrust beyond the veil of this world for eternity. Or at least, that's what I've been able to determine." He fetched the carafe from the coffee maker and emptied it into her mug.
Elizabeth could think of nothing to say. The conventional thing to do would be to offer to break the spell, but somehow that seemed trite. Besides if he wanted it broken, he would no doubt have managed it before now.
The sound of footsteps on the back stairs distracted them both from the silence that lengthened between them. Penrose replaced the carafe and vanished, only to reappear at her side a moment later with a volume of Pope which he placed in her hands. "Tell them you were reading because you couldn't sleep." He vanished again.
The book fell open to the first epistle of An Essay on Man, and a familiar verse caught her eye:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
While she was digesting that passage in light of their conversation, Dirk walked into the kitchen, tripping over Rififi who was hovering cautiously between his feet. Despite the two grams or so of caffeine coursing through her system, Elizabeth was far from bright-eyed and the sight of Dirk, steaming from a hot shower and glowing with the sleep of the innocent (or was that the sleep of the just?), left her feeling gray and frazzled.
"Good morning," he said, reaching for a canister of cat food and pouring some into Rififi's dish.
Rififi sniffed the air and looked carefully around the kitchen before settling over his dish and munching down the kibble. He purred as he ate.
"Good morning," she said and closed the book.
"Was that you playing the piano last night?" Dirk asked. He ran water into a saucepan and set it on the stove, then measured some grits into a dish.
"Yes, I mean, no," she said. "I couldn't sleep last night, so I was listening to music. I didn't realize it was so loud. I'm sorry." She looked at him more closely. While he didn't have the smudges under his eyes that she could feel had formed under her own, a shadow lay across his features. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Nothing really. The caffeine made the edges of everything shimmer.
"Brubeck at 4:00 a.m. is a bit much, and the acoustics in this house amplify everything. You have to be more careful."
"I'm sorry," she said again. She rose from the table and started another pot of coffee, prompting Dirk to deliver a grouchy lecture on what excess coffee consumption would do to her skin. About halfway through his description of the effects of dehydration, she began dreading her next look in the mirror, but when the pot finished brewing, she poured out another mug for herself anyway.
Alice joined them shortly thereafter. She claimed that her sleep had been unaffected by the piano music, although she also looked shadowed with fatigue, and she dismissed Dirk's complaints. They all had a tense and grouchy breakfast, cooking the exact same meals side-by-side with no offers to share. Alice scarfed down no fewer than four eggs, a cup of grits and three thick slices of toast before chasing Elizabeth off to get ready for work.