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By Root 2116 0

muttered. She waited, then at last she swung her legs off the bed, stood up, trudged into the bathroom, turned on a tap and splashed cold water onto her face. Drying off with a towel, she looked in the mirror. Get a hold! she admonished herself. It didn’t work. The dream was recurring and always disturbed her, yet she couldn’t remember when she’d started to have it. Involuntarily, she shivered. She needed to be out of this room, to be with people. She hurried from the bathroom, picked up a clean ashtray and banged it once sharply against the wall.

“You in there, dickhead?”

Freeboard waited. Nothing. Silence. She put back the ashtray, strode to the door and walked out into the hall. There she looked up and down but saw no one. It’s so quiet, she thought. She walked to the railing and glanced down at the Great Room. It was empty and still. The sconce lights were on.

“Terry?”

Freeboard waited. Then she heard something, voices, to her right. They were low and murmury, indistinct. She turned toward the sound. It was coming from the long empty hall that ran past Dare’s and Trawley’s rooms. At the end was a door. Freeboard stared at it, puzzled, then strode toward it purposefully as she heard the low voices again; they seemed to be coming from that direction. She got to the door and pushed it open, and as she did the voices ceased and there was sudden, deep silence. Freeboard frowned. She was peering down a long windowless corridor at the end of which stood another door. “Terry, you flaming asshole,” she called, “is that you screwing around in there?” Freeboard heard a door softly closing behind her. Turning quickly, she saw Trawley coming out of her room. The psychic saw her and approached, looking tense and troubled. “Something in there?” she asked. She was looking past Freeboard into the darkened inner hall.

“No.”

Freeboard closed the hall door.

“Joan, I thought I’d take a stroll around the island. Want to come?”

“Yes, I’d like that a lot,” said Freeboard. “Yes!”

It would prove to be no ordinary walk on the beach.

“Your health,” toasted Case.

“You keep saying that,” said Dare.

The author’s voice was faintly thickened and slurry.

They were sitting across from one another on the library sofas, close to the crackling of a fire. Case was leaning across a pine coffee table pouring scotch into Dare’s tall glass.

“No one’s forcing you to drink,” Case observed.

“I wasn’t bitching, I was merely observing; that’s a thing that we painters can do so awfully well.”

“Oh, you paint?”

“Must you challenge almost everything I say?”

Slightly inebriated, feeling loose, the author sipped at his glass and savored the scotch. And then the earth seemed to shift in a quick, sharp jolt. Dare lowered his glass and stared.

“I think a sumo wrestler just landed on the island,” he intoned.

He looked over at Case. “Did you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“Never mind.” Dare kicked off his shoes, swung his long legs around and stretched out full on the sofa. “There. I am invulnerable, I hold back the night. You may now tell me more about Carl Jung’s ghost.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes, really, sir. Indeed. My very word.”

“Well, it looked like a one-eyed old hag,” began Case. “Jung was looking for a place to relax for a time, and a friend of his in London—another doctor, I believe—offered use of his cottage in the country. One beautiful moonlit night with no wind as he lay in bed, Jung said he heard trickling sounds, odd creaks, and then muffled hangings on the outer walls. Then he had the strong feeling that someone was near him and so he opened his eyes and immediately saw, there beside him on the pillow, the hideous face of an elderly woman, her right eye wide open and balefully glaring at him from just a few inches away. The left half of the face, he said, was missing below the eye. Jung leaped up and out of bed, lit a number of candles and spent the rest of the night out of doors on a cot he’d dragged out of the house. Later on he found the cottage that he was vacationing in had long been known to be haunted and was formerly owned by an elderly