A Manhattan Ghost Story by T. M. Wright Page A

me.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you.” I believed it. I tried to stand, but her incredibly stiff arms and hands kept me seated. “Please don’t do that, Phyllis.”
    “Do you love me, Abner?”
    “Please, Phyllis, let me up.”
    “Do you love me, Abner? Do you love me?” It sounded strangely like an ultimatum.
    I answered, “Yes, I love you.”
    “And will you take my pain away?”
    “I will, Phyllis. Yes. I’ll try.” I had no idea what she was talking about.
    “Because I want so much to love you, too, Abner.” Her fingers tightened. “But I reach backward, and I reach inside, and I try to find it; I try to find what love is, and it’s not there—it’s just not there, and I wonder what it is. I wonder what it was .”
    Silence.
    “Phyllis?” I said.
    I became aware that her hands were no longer over my eyes.
    “Phyllis?”
    I heard nothing. I turned my head. The dining room was empty. I called, “Phyllis?” and stood, went into the kitchen, called to her again. I went into the bedroom, the bathroom. I did not find her.
    I went out, into the hallway. It was empty, too. I went to the elevator, pressed the button for service, waited. Eventually, it came. Empty.
     
    The Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965
    I asked, “You know what I’m talking about, Sam?”
    “No,” he answered.
    “I mean about the spooks not wanting to hang around here.”
    He answered again, “No,” grinned, added, “Why don’t you tell me.”
    I readjusted my position on the cement floor so my left leg was out straight and pointing to the left. Another of the candles set around Flora’s skull went out; Sam ignored it. “What I mean is,” I began, “that they didn’t die here, so why should they want to hang around here?” I grinned a big, self-satisfied grin because I had just uttered what I felt quite certain was the crowning profundity of my young life and I wanted to let it linger for awhile.
    Sam said, “Asshole!”
    “No,” I said, my voice low, “I don’t think so.”
    “Sure you are. Shit, what do you know? You don’t know anything, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Neither do you, Sam.”
    “The shit I don’t, the shit I don’t. I know this, Abner—I know that all these people here—” he gestured expansively to indicate the six vaults—”could be standing around laughing. That’s what I know. And I know that they could be making love or they could be hunting out something to eat—”
     “Why would they need to eat, Sam?” Another profundity, nearly as great as the first, I thought. “Why in the hell would they want to eat?”
    He ignored me. He picked up where I had interrupted him. “They could be doing just about anything, Abner. That’s what I know.”
    “That’s not much to know, Sam. All you’re saying is you don’t know anything.”
    “I know I’m going to die,” he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    The following morning, at a little after 9:00, I called to arrange to have the locks in Art’s apartment changed. I was given a tentative date of February 3: “If we can get to you by then, and I’m not say in’ we can , I’m sayin’ we might ,” the locksmith said. “That’s a little longer than I was hoping for,” I said, and told him I’d get back to him, which was a lie. The whole idea seemed pretty foolish anyway, because I knew well enough that if Phyllis found she couldn’t get in, there’d be no chance I’d keep her out. And that scared me. She scared me. She scared me in a way that I’d never been scared before; it was like having a constant, dull ache that probably signifies something serious but you won’t have it looked at because you don’t want to know the truth. I didn’t want to know the truth about Phyllis. I wanted to believe that she was exactly what she appeared to be—a captivating, incredibly passionate, and vaguely eccentric woman with whom I was sharing Art DeGraff’s apartment, at least occasionally. I wanted to believe that