A Stir of Echoes - By Richard Matheson Page 0,8

in her thirties, pale, her hair in black disarray. She was wearing a strange, dark dress with a single strand of pearls at her throat. I sat rooted to the chair, my limbs dead. I stared at her. I don't know how many minutes passed while that woman and I looked at each other. It didn't occur to me to wonder why it was I could see her so clearly in the darkness, why there was a sort of sourceless light on or rather, in her.

Minutes passed. I knew that something had to break the awful silence. I opened my mouth to speak but couldn't. There was a dry, clicking sound in my throat.

Then, abruptly, breath spilled from my lips.

"Who are you?" I gasped.

The woman edged back-although I never saw her limbs move. She was almost to the window. And breath was gone again, gone with a sucking sound of terror. I felt myself pressing back against the chair, my eyes stiffly set, my lips shaking. Because I could see the lamp on the next street through her. My cry was weak and short-a strangling sound in my throat. I sat there looking at the spot where the woman had been standing. How long I sat there I don't know. I couldn't get up. I must have been there for an hour or more before I dared to stand and slowly, tremblingly, as if I were stalking something deadly, move over to the spot where she had been.

Nothing.

I turned and rushed into the bedroom. It was only when I had slid frightenedly under the covers that I realized how cold I was. I started to shiver and couldn't stop for a long time. Fortunately, Anne was sleeping soundly. At least five times I started to wake her up to tell her-but every time I was stopped by the thought of how frightened she would be. Finally, I decided to tell her in the morning. I even tried to tell myself I'd had a nightmare, that it really hadn't happened at all.

Unfortunately, I knew better. I knew that something had happened to me that I'd never believed could happen to anyone. So simple to put the word itself down; all it takes is a few elementary turns of the pencil. Yet it can change your entire life.

The word is ghost.
Chapter Four
I SPOKE IT THE NEXT MORNING AT BREAKFAST.

I'd been unable to when we'd first gotten up. For a few minutes, of course, there was the inevitable rush of rejection toward what I'd seen. What I'd tried to do the night before, I tried again-to believe that it was only a febrile dream. One's mind can far more easily accept that sort of explanation. There's reason to it, something to grasp hold of; even when it isn't true.

I'd been unable to speak, too, because it seemed so completely inappropriate. It just didn't fit in with good mornings and kissing's and dressing and getting Sunday breakfast ready. But when Richard was finished eating and had gone out into the yard to play, and Anne and Phil and I were sitting at the kitchen table over coffee, I did say it.

"I saw a ghost last night."

It's fantastic how the most terrifying of statements can sound absurd. Phil's reaction was to grin. Even Anne smiled a little.

"You what?" she asked.

Her smile was the first to fade. It went as soon as she saw how serious I was.

"Honey, what do you mean?" she asked. "You dreamed it?" I swallowed. It's not what one could call the easiest thing in the world to talk about.

"I'd like to think that," I said, "but I... can't." I looked at them both. "I really saw one. I mean I was awake and I saw one."

"This is on the level?" Phil asked.

I didn't say anything. I just nodded.

"When?" Anne asked.

I put down my cup.

"After I got up last night," I said. "That is, this morning. It must have been about two."

"I didn't hear you get up," she said.

"You were asleep," I told her. Even as I spoke, a rush of crude hope filled me that it really had been a dream.

"This was-after you told me you couldn't sleep?" she asked. I could tell she didn't believe me; rather, didn't believe that I'd seen what I said I'd seen.

I said yes. I looked at both of them and shrugged with a helpless, palms-up gesture. "That's it," I said.

"I saw a ghost. I saw it."

"What did it look like?" Phil asked. He didn't