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The Ghost of Me 313
forget in an infinity of years when they’re all happening at once.”
“But our own murder!” I protested. “You couldn’t forget our murder!”
“I have. I know we must have been murdered in this room because here I am
haunting it, but I’ve no idea how or when. Excepting,” he added reflectively, “that
it must be after we acquired a taste for tequila.”
“But you must at least know the murderer. You have to know the guy you’re
supposed to be haunting. Or do you just haunt a place? ”
“No. Not in the strict rules. You merely haunt the place because the murderer
will return to the scene of the crime and then you confront him and say, ‘Thou art
the man!’ ”
“And supposing he doesn’t return to the scene?”
“That’s just the trouble. We know the rules, all right. But the murderers don’t
always. Lots of times they never return at all, and we go on haunting and haunting
and getting noplace.”
“But look!” I exclaimed. “This one will have to return, because he hasn’t been
here yet. I mean, this isn’t the scene of the crime; it’s the scene set for a crime that
hasn’t happened yet. He’ll have to come here to … to—”
“To murder us,” my ghost concluded cheerfully. “Of course. It’s ideal. I can’t
possibly miss him.”
“But if you don’t know who he is—”
“I’ll know him when I see him. You see, we ghosts are psychic.”
“Then if you could tip me off when you recognize him—”
“It wouldn’t do you any— What was that?”
“Just a rooster. Dawn comes early these summer mornings. But if I knew who
he was, then I—”
“Damn!” said my ghost. “Haunting must be so much simpler in winter, with
those nice long nights. I’ve got to be vanishing. See you tonight.”
My curiosity stirred again. “Where do you go when you vanish?” But he had
already disappeared.
I looked around the empty consulting room. Even the dematerialized rye had
vanished. Only the butcher knife remained. I made the natural rye vanish too, and
staggered back to bed.
The next morning it all seemed perfectly simple. I had had one hell of a strange vision
the night before; but on the consulting-room desk stood an empty pint which had
been almost full yesterday. That was enough to account for a wilderness of visions.
Even the knife didn’t bother me much. It would be accounted for some way—
somebody’s screwy idea of a gag. Nobody could want to kill me, I thought, and
wasn’t worried even when a kid in a back-lot baseball game let off a wild pitch that
missed my head by an inch.
I just filed away a minor resolve to climb on the wagon if this sort of thing became
a habit, and got through a hard day’s work at the clinic with no worries beyond the
mildest of hangovers. And when I got the X-rays on Nick Wojcek’s girl with her
lungs completely healed, and the report that she hadn’t coughed for two weeks, I
felt so gloriously satisfied that I forgot even the hangover.
“Charlie,” I beamed at my X-ray technician, “life is good.”