The Changing (The Biergarten Series) Read Free Page A

her lover's hands, early in the twentieth century. Her name had been Gwendolyn, and the man's name had been Mr. Barclay.
    Ryerson did not go to the house convinced of anything. He was, by nature, a skeptical person and was ready to find any of a number of answers, the most likely being, he guessed, that the owners of the house had cooked the whole thing up to draw visitors in. The owners, a group of five area businessmen, charged two dollars a head for people to walk through what they called "A living piece of America's heritage." Ryerson believed firmly in the supernatural, and he believed just as firmly in its various and usually unpredictable effects on the world of the living. He also believed, perhaps even more firmly, in the potential for greed and ignobility inherent in everyone (including himself—though, at the age of thirty-eight, he liked to think that he hadn't yet fallen to too much greed, or too much ignobility).
    He talked to each of the five businessmen first. He asked them pointed questions about what they'd heard and seen, the same question several times, from different perspectives, trying to catch any of them in a lie. And when he was done, his own very well-developed sixth sense told him that there was a little bit of hoax, a little bit of truth, and a lot of colorful exaggeration involved in the whole thing. Whether there was anything actually supernatural happening at the house was a judgment he would put off until he'd been through it.
    He went there on a Monday, the day the house was closed to visitors, and to his surprise—and without much effort—he found the two ghosts he'd been hired to find. It was late afternoon, the day was dismal and rainy, and the young woman, Gwendolyn, was in her usual place on the huge Victorian sofa in the parlor. She was, as Ryerson liked to say, "flickering"—her image waxing and waning like the light of a candle. Her suggestive words waxed and waned in the same way.
    "Hi," she said when Ryerson walked into the room.
    "Hi," he said.
    "Would you"—her image waned; her words grew inaudible—"me?"
    "I'm sorry," Ryerson said. He had stopped in the doorway. He didn't want to go any farther. The truth was that, although he'd investigated several hundred "events," as he called them, he had never been able to push back the loud whisper of fear. He'd tried smiling, coughing, whistling, he'd tried thinking about Yogi Berra, he had tried logic ( My God, this poor creature is lost, and I'm here to help it! ), but still the fear remained. No matter that Gwendolyn, when he could see her, was probably the most delightful and sensuous of all the ghosts he'd encountered; she was still a ghost, so she made his stomach flutter, and started a hard knot of panic in his throat.
    "I want you to take your pants off," Gwendolyn said, then faded once more. When she reappeared—she was lounging with her legs up on the Victorian sofa and was dressed in an extremely low-cut red floor-length gown—Ryerson asked, "What good would that do?"
    This confused her. Her brow furrowed, she glanced down at the floor briefly. When she looked up, she was smiling happily, as if she'd discovered something that had been missing for a long time. She said, "Well, we could diddle with . . ." the rest of the sentence was inaudible, but Ryerson thought he understood the gist of it.
    "How?" he asked.
    She faded, returned, faded. She swung her feet to the floor; Ryerson was a little troubled by the total silence that accompanied her bodily movements. He'd encountered the phenomenon a lot with "the others," as he called them, but it too was something he'd never grown used to.
    "How what?" she asked at last.
    "How could we ‘diddle' with each other?"
    "You don't like me? You don't want to diddle with me?" This seemed to hurt her. "Aren't I attractive enough?"
    "You're very attractive. You're wonderfully attractive," Ryerson told her. "But, I'm sorry, you're dead. Do you know that?"
    "No," she said without