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“Yes.”

For a moment Trawley stood there, silently staring, Then abruptly she turned and walked out of the kitchen, quietly closing the door behind her. Hearing the sound, Morna turned and looked after her with unreadable ice-green eyes.

When Trawley retook her seat at the table, Case and Dare were still arguing over ghosts and Freeboard was again half asleep in her chair. “Dr. Case,” Dare was saying, “with all due respect to your learning and intelligence, am I gathering correctly that you’ve actually made up your mind that ghosts in fact exist?”

“Mr. Dare,” Case replied, “with all respect to your literary genius, I’m proposing that the mechanistic, clockwork universe of materialistic science is probably the greatest superstition of our age. Do you know what the quantum physicists are telling us? They’re saying now that, atoms aren’t things, they’re really ‘processes,’ and that matter is a kind of illusion; that electrons are capable of moving from place to place without traversing the space in between and that positrons actually are electrons that appear to be traveling backwards in time and that subatomic particles can communicate over a distance of trillions of miles without there being any causal connection between them. Do ghosts exist? Are they here with us now? In this room? Right beside you, perhaps? Who can say? But in a world like the one that I’ve just described, can there really be a place for a thing like surprise?”

As Dare was considering this statement, a soft but distinct, clear rap was heard. All eyes shifted to the center of the oaken table; it was as if it had been struck by an invisible knuckle. For moments no one spoke and the only sound was the patter of the rain on the mullioned windows. Then at last, beneath her breath, Freeboard murmured, “Shit!”

Trawley eyed her with a look of fond indulgence.

Dare cleared his throat and sat up in his chair. His gaze remained fixed on the center of the table as he asked, “Have you ever seen a ghost, Dr. Case?”

“Oh, I see them constantly.”

Dare looked up and saw that Case was smiling. “Oh, come on now, let’s have a straight answer,” he chided. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”

“Carl Jung, the great psychiatrist, saw one.”

“You jest, sir.”

“No, he saw one right beside him in his bed.”

“Oh, well, some people will say anything at all to get published.”

“Jung suspected that the dead aren’t really in a different place at all from the living,” Case went on, “but in fact were in some sort of parallel state that coexists alongside our world but remains unseen because it exists at a higher frequency, like the blades of a propeller or a fan.”

“You mean the afterlife is just another alternative lifestyle?”

Case smiled, put his head down and shook it. “Mr. Dare!”

“Doggie bow-wow,” Freeboard murmured with a soft, lilting menace. Then she grimaced, briefly crossing her eyes, while her finger made a rapid slashing move across her throat. Dare shifted hooded eyes to her briefly, then ignored her. “Dr. Case,” he said, “assuming the preposterous for a moment, what on earth makes you think that any ghost is going to act up on cue just because we’re all here on this mission?”

“Oh, no solid reason, really.” Case shrugged. “But I’ve charted all the really nasty happenings at Elsewhere, and, oddly, as it happens, almost all of them occurred at the same time of year.”

“So when is that?” Freeboard asked. She was stifling a yawn.

“Sometime in June. Early June. In fact, right about now.”

No one spoke. The only sound was the scraping of Case’s spoon against the porcelain bottom of his cup as he stirred his coffee in an absent gesture. Freeboard shot a wary glance to Dare, appraising him, and felt an incipient rush of dismay as she couldn’t discern that he was actually breathing. But at last he cleared his throat. “These people that you said went insane,” he asked Case without a trace of his customary mocking tone: “Are they living? Is it possible they could be interviewed?”

“Yes, there is one who is still alive—Sara Casey. She’s in Bellevue Psychiatric at the moment.