Free Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) by Jack Ketchum Page A

down. I have it in a drawer to this day.

    HELLO MY NAME IS FRANK W AND YOU OFFEND ME I DO NOT LIKE OR APPRECIATE RATHER YOUR LIQUOR AND YOUR NAKED DEGRADED WOMEN OR YOUR NOISY DRUNKEN CROWDS AND ESPECIALLY THE PAINTING ESPECIALLY THAT IT IS STUPID IT IS DISGRACEFUL AND I HAVE CERTAIN SENSIBILITIES WILL YOU PLEASE DESIST AT ONCE INCIDENTALLY WHAT IS THAT REVOLTING MUSIC

    “Rock’n roll,” said Mary.

    OH said the board. And then for a while we got nothing. We asked questions, who he was and why he was here, and got only stubborn silent inactivity for our trouble until finally he said THIS IS MY HOME I HAVE ALWAYS LIVED HERE IVE BEEN HERE FOREVER THE LIGHT IS GOOD AND BY THE WAY WHAT IS THAT PERFUME YOURE WEARING

    “
Possession
,” said Mary.

    OH said the board. ITS VERY NICE

    “One of us naked degraded woman he likes, anyway,” said Paula.

    And that was that.

    We sat over drinks and stewed. Bernie kept setting them up for us. Mary would toss Sam a peanut now and then.We talked well into morning and by the time we were through, Sam, who is pretty good with short-term memory, was re-asking all the questions for us. “
What are we supposed to do? How are we gonna get rid of the sonovabitch? Who is this guy? Anybody got any ideas?
”

    “Shut up, Sam,” said Bernie.

    Suddenly I got it. “The hall of records!” I said.

    “Sure,” said Mary. “We can find out who he is, anyway.”

    I didn’t get much sleep. By noon Bernie and I were over at the hall of records and it took us till 2:30 to find him. We started too far back, taking him at his word the he’d lived there a long time. But he hadn’t. He was the artist, Frank W. Morgan. He’d owned the place for fifteen years just prior to its conversion into a bookshop back in the 1920s. I should have figured it from what he said— THE LIGHT IS GOOD HERE . A painter. Of course.

    We went from there to the library and looked up reprints of his stuff. I couldn’t see why he objected to the body painting. Half his work consisted of nudes. He painted them in mythical, quasi-metaphysical settings, sort of similar to the pre-Raphaelites, that kind of thing, with titles like
Dido and Anaeus, The Lamia, Circe
, and
Penelope at the Spinning Wheel
. All a bit melodramatic for my tastes, a bit precious, but not half bad either. What we had here was the ghost of a pretty eminent man. He had died of heart failure in 1928, a bachelor, at age thirty-seven.

    We told Paula and Mary what we had and they couldn’t wait to get back to the Ouija board.

    The body painting stayed, of course. It was not the business of some cranky ghost to tell me how to make a living. Besides, it was easier on all of us now. Knowing who he was made him much less disturbing. Mary’s performance that night was halfway back to normal.

    After closing we got him talking again.

    We told him what we knew about him. OH REALLY he said. We asked him where in the place he’d died. We were curious. NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS he said. Weasked him if he liked the girls. We got no answer to that one. We asked him why he painted mythical instead of modern scenes and he said THE TWENTIES WERE TOO GAUDY FOR ME AND I FORGOT TO ASK WHAT ARE THOSE RIDICULOUS THINGS YOU WEAR ON YOUR NIPPLES . Paula blushed and told him they were pasties. Finally Mary got what later amounted to an inspiration and asked him if he’d always come when we called him like this. YES he said.

    She asked him why.

    BECAUSE I DAMN WELL HAVE TO he said and suddenly the table began to shake like we had our own private earthquake in the place. You could feel his rage pouring up through the floorboards. Bernie went white as a sheet. It was scary.

    And just before it stopped I heard Sam squawking behind me from his perch, his voice high-pitched and shrill. I had never heard Sam scared of anything before and I almost stopped it all right then and there—and of course I know now I should have. But Mary had planted something in my mind. I’m