The skyscrapers in Chicago's Loop today are so solid that a child growing up in or around the city today must think they have always been there. But those of us who grew up in an earlier era know better. We can remember when a string of mansions adorned the lakeshore instead of the high rise apartments we have today. In fact, when I was growing up in the early twenties, I believed that the mansions had always been there and would remain there forever. Little did I know what ideas were forming in the minds city planners! Neither did I realize that the day would come when few people would be able to afford to maintain such large homes.

When the mansions disappeared one by one, many interesting specimens of architecture became specters in the memories of such as I. Yet it is the smallest loss to the world of art which haunts me the most. As I drive along Lakeshore Drive, I can see it more clearly in my mind's eye than any of the other long-departed mansions. Everyone else seems to have forgotten it, including my childhood friends who joked about it with me. They are wise to forget about it, but I do not have that privilege.

The house I have in mind was built by Phineas T. Honeysuckle, the great manufacturer of men's ties. He referred to his products as cravats to show others how sophisticated he was in his choice of words. Apparently his taste in houses was not as good as his taste in ties, for he seems to have been more than content with his home. In fact, he bragged about its distinctive architecture so solemnly that others found it politic to agree wholeheartedly with his views to his face and tell the truth to others later.

We called this lamentable house Cheese Castle. The reason for that name is that the middle section was fat and round like a huge cistern while each corner was graced with a thin cylinder-shaped tower. As if its shape was not peculiar enough, there were large round windows in the house which undoubtedly gave one a broad view, a point of pride for Mr. Honeysuckle, but from the outside, these windows looked like so many holes of Swiss cheese.

As I knew from my youth, the inside was every bit as odd. The large cistern in the middle was all one story. The reason for this high ceiling was that Mr. Honeysuckle had installed an organ with an organ loft in the living room for his wife. Thus, he needed the room for the organ pipes. The senior Mrs. Honeysuckle was very well-versed in all the keyboard instruments as I had occasion to hear for myself. The living room was adorned with two pianos and a harpsichord as well. Little did I suspect in the days when I frequented the house as a youth that this laughable place would become haunted.

I found this out for myself because I happened to be the piano teacher for the two children who are the focus of the story. I myself was a modest participant in the story only at the end, but afterwards, the children filled me in so that I could get the details as fully and correctly as possible. For all the inevitable confusion of putting together events which were not kept track of at the time, and the need for me to invent small details for events I did not see myself, I can claim that this extraordinary story is, in its main outline, a true one.

Surely no house in all of Chicago could have been less reassuring to a pair of children walking up to the door on a day late in August, knowing they would have to live there with strange relatives for at least a year. Perhaps neither Paul Honeysuckle nor his sister Margaret showed anything in their faces, but their hearts must have sunk. The taxi driver who had brought them all the way from the airport at the cost of a small fortune had already told them the nickname of this notorious house.

Why were the children coming to such a place? Their father had been asked by his company in New York to help set up a branch office in Buenos Aires in Argentina. He was willing to take his wife with him, but apparantly he assumed the air and the people were not good enough for his children who were still at the tender ages of ten and nine. He and his wife decreed that they needed a good American education in the States. So there was nothing for it but to send them off to Uncle Tobias and Aunt Mabel.

It so happens I knew Tobias and Mabel well when the three of us were young, but then circumstances separated us for many years. In fact, I was quite surprised that they had the nerve to call on me when there were so many other competent piano teachers in the city. Perhaps they were so cut off from human feelings that they didn't even think I would have any regarding them. My meeting with them once again to do business transactions over the piano lessons did not sweeten the bitterness in my heart towards them. If I had been richer in pupils and money I would have refused.

As it was, I could understand what the two children were up against with having to live with them in Cheese Castle. Tobias Honeysuckle had developed into the kind of person who gave every indication that he knew the world was made, not of molecules or atoms, but of transactions. This had not always been true of him. Toby, as I called him then, and I, were good friends when we were teenagers. We went to concerts together and shared visions of how music could transform the world. But somehow Toby hardened, or maybe I became softer. His wife, Mabel Honeysuckle, seemed to think that the world was composed entirely of good manners. Music had simply become, for her, part of the cosmic pattern of etiquette rather than a challenge to the human heart. To think that once I had thought to marry that woman! These personality traits of the aunt and uncle may account for their failure to see things the children saw quite clearly.

Upon their arrival, Paul and Margaret were escorted by a black maid to their rooms upstairs in one of the front towers. In performing this duty, the maid said nothing more than was necessary. The maids who worked there were all like that. Tobias and Mabel seem to have pulled a curtain of frigid silence over the house. A winding stairway led the way to the second floor. The children must have been dizzy and tired by the time they reached their rooms. The old style furniture with canopied beds seemed more suited for a movie set than for a place to live in. Each room had a window which thrust all of downtown Chicago in upon them when the curtains were open.

As the maid's footsteps echoed from the stairs, Paul began to unpack his suitcase. His mother had folded his shirts and pants meticulously and everything was in order. He took out a sizeable stack of comic books and placed them on his dresser which had a large mirror over it. The comics seemed out of place in that room but Paul wasn't going to let this strange house intimidate him. It was just as he placed the comics on the lace covering of the dresser that Paul saw, in the mirror, the indistinct shape of what seemed to be a child. Paul froze. No sound escaped his throat. The ghost, or whatever it was, did not move. Neither did its shape become clear enough for Paul to make out its face. The silent intruder seemed to be staring at Paul as if he were the one who was intruding. Paul, wide-eyed, stared back at it through the mirror. This stalemate would not do. In a fit of bravery, Paul wheeled around to confront the apparition. It was gone.

Paul was hardly quick to confide such a vision to his younger sister. If he had, the result would have been quite interesting, for Margaret had an experience of her own just a bit later. Nothing haunted her while she unpacked her things, but later, when it was time to go downstairs for dinner, she saw, or thought she saw, her brother going down the stairs before her. Paul did seem rather insubstantial, as if he had become transparent, but she assumed that was just the effect of light and shadows. But when she reached the bottom of the stairs, Margaret found nobody there. A door opened and closed from upstairs, and Margaret recognized her brother's footsteps. She waited for him to catch up with her, but kept her pale face turned away from her brother. The two children walked to the dining room as cheerfully as if they were going to a funeral.

The dining room was located on the first story in a tower at the back of the house. It was served from a kitchen down below. The long table made the two children feel their insignificance as they sat down, one on each side. If Uncle Tobias and Aunt Mabel ever noticed any discomfort on the part of their young guests, they likely assumed that the children were only nervous because they were in a strange place.

As soon as the maids had heaped the plates with delicacies the children had never seen before, Aunt Mabel offered a running commentary on every subtlety of table manners conceived by the human brain. When she was not discussing etiquette, she was informing Paul and Margaret of her plans for them. She told them about the prestigious school she was sending them to in a couple of weeks, and disclosed which church they would all be attending on Sundays. She also announced that a Mr. Markham was going to give both of them piano lessons. Since I am the Mr. Markham in question, I prefer not to think about what was written on the children's faces, let alone what crossed their minds when they heard that piece of news. Uncle Tobias interjected a few remarks about the unsuitability of some politicians for public office and the evils of all labor unions. Paul and Margaret understood that they were not to be heard, and perhaps not even seen if it could be helped.

When the meal was almost over, and Paul began to relax after the ordeal, he noticed an additional chair on the other side of the table next to Margaret. More unsettling was the presence of the same unformed child he had seen in his mirror, now sitting in that chair. Paul blinked his eyes, hoping to get a clearer vision of the child, but the apparition remained as blurred as before.

"Something stick in your throat?" asked Aunt Mabel.

Paul nodded.

"You should clear your throat as gently as possible so as not to disturb the other dinner guests," Aunt Mabel explained. "Such an occurence can be best prevented by eating at a more leisurely pace than boys are wont to do."

Paul was annoyed at his aunt's assumption that he was merely like "all other boys", and he was gratified when he saw the ghost make what appeared to be a threatening gesture directed at Aunt Mabel. He cleared his throat as quietly as he could, and took a long sip of water. When he looked again, the apparition was gone, and the chair with it.

After supper, Paul and Margaret were granted the privilege of spending their time in the living room. They were quick to christen it the Rotunda. Aunt Mabel played one of the pianos while Uncle Tobias read through the Wall Street Journal, soaking in every detail as he rattled the paper endlessly. Curtains were drawn over the lower windows, but up above, the windows became so many disks of blackness when night fell.

Paul and Margaret settled down to a series of half-hearted games of checkers since that was the only game available. Paul was so deep in thought about what he had seen that Margaret had to prompt him time and again to make his moves. The pianos and the harpsichord and the organ up in a loft and the stuffed furniture arranged in groups throughout the room soaked up any desire for conversation. Every now and then Margaret would turn around and stare at the organ pipes while Paul was daydreaming. She was fascinated by the different sizes, ranging from some which must have been six feet long to the smallest no bigger than a fountain pen.

When it was Margaret's turn to contemplate her next move, she thought she began to hear the sound of faint organ music, though she heard organ less distinctly than the piano Aunt Mabel was playing. She quickly moved a piece at random, nudged Paul to remind him that it was his turn, and looked up. At first she just saw the outline of a pair of human hands. Margaret's jaw dropped. Then the image of an old woman playing at the organ filled in. After that, small boy standing up in the organ loft behind the bench also began to materialize.

"I said it's your move, Dummy."

Paul's interruption made both the vision and the organ music fade away. Unable to think about the game at all, Margaret moved another piece at random.

"That was a stupid move," said Paul as he proceeded to make a quadruple jump. Margaret was so far beyond caring that she failed to notice how uncharacteristically subdued Paul was about his victory.

Neither Paul nor Margaret slept much during their first night in Cheese Castle. They reasoned that if they had seen so many ghosts before bedtime, there would be all the more to see once they were in bed. Such reasoning drove all reason from them and they shivered with fright in their respective beds. Yet, to their surprise, no ghosts appeared to them all night long.

It rained all the next day. That gave the children good excuses for spending time in their rooms to catch up on lost sleep. They also took the liberty of exploring the house since they had been given few restrictions on what not to do. None of the other towers produced unexpected oddities such as skeletons behind closed doors, but going from room to room was like going through an historical museum as each room was done up differently. From time to time, their paths would cross with that of one of the maids, but in no instance did a maid acknowledge their presence with more than a nod. Throughout their tour, both children kept their mouths shut and their thoughts and fears to themselves.

When Paul and Margaret returned to the rotunda for the third time, Margaret insisted on climbing up the narrow spiral stairs to the organ loft. Paul shrugged and went along with her. There was just enough room up in the loft for the organ manual, the organist, and one onlooker off to the side. This is where Margaret had seen the small boy appear the night before. Margaret touched the keys and found a quarter inch of dust on them. Nobody had been playing the instrument for years. This realization gave her something more to think about. She promptly took the stairs back down. Paul looked down at the living room from the loft's dizzying height for another moment before following his sister. He recalled the house's nickname which the taxi driver had disclosed to him and his sister. As he looked across to the windows he felt that he was indeed imprisoned inside a block of cheese and that the holes would never show him the way out.

At this point in the story, it becomes impossible to narrate events in the right chronological order, for neither Margaret nor Paul had kept sufficient track of them. The appearances of the half-formed child occurred just often enough to keep the children on edge, but not often enough for them to get used to him in any way. A whole week or more might go by when nothing happened, and then Paul would see the ghost sitting on his bed when he entered his room. Or, Margaret might hear some random playing on one of the pianos while she was practicing on the other and then see the ghost sitting at the keyboard for a few seconds before it disappeared.

One of the disquieting things about these apparitions is that each time the ghost appeared, it seemed to linger for a longer time than before, as if it were waiting for something. It might wave at one of the children from the top of the stairs or from in front of a window, as if hoping that either Paul or Margaret might come over to it. Aunt Mabel and Uncle Tobias seemed altogether oblivious to the ghost's presence even when it appeared when they were in the room. Needless to say, neither Paul nor Margaret confided their experiences to their aunt and uncle. Neither did they talk to each other.

It was during this unsettling period that these unfortunate children had their first piano lesson from me. I can't say I enjoyed the experience myself. It was obvious to me from the first that the weird house, not to speak of the aunt and uncle, had sapped all of their youthful vitality. My usual methods of coaxing children into enjoying their lessons, or at least finding them bearable, were to no avail. Every joke fell flat. When I played the torrential finale to Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata to show them what years of practice could lead to, they seemed more frightened of the music than impressed. I like to think that I can do at least a little good to each person I encounter, but Paul and Margaret rendered me helpless in the early stages of our relationship.

By this time Paul and Margaret were in school and I shudder to think of how poorly they must have been doing with such a weird distraction on their minds. Their condition must have hurt them socially, not to speak of certain built-in handicaps. I can well imagine their schoolmates becoming so absorbed in their amusing surname of Honeysuckle that they could think of nothing else, such as how it feels to be teased. And how could a child who lived in Cheese Castle be treated seriously by such young savages? However, much as I hate to admit it, I had gone to school with Toby for many years before it occurred to me that there might be a human being behind the name, so I wasn't really any wiser at that age myself.

What I know is that Paul and Margaret were not at all attentive to my lessons and that they could not have been practicing at all well. If I had trusted their Aunt Mabel with having an ounce of human tact, I would have called the matter to her attention. As it was, I held my tongue.

During this time, there was a change in the apparitions which the children encountered. One afternoon, Paul was walking about the ample back yard where the lake's surf crashes against the shore. An intricate walk wove its way between stands of bushes and well-kept flower gardens, for Aunt Mabel was willing to invest money and time on such appearances. Paul said that when it happened, he was thinking of nothing in particular except that he was mad at the whole world. Suddenly he saw the child up ahead of him on the walk. It was running ahead of him as if trying to catch up with somebody. Then five more figures materialized. The back yard seemed to go double and Paul had a hard time sorting out what he was really seeing. The five figures seemed to be three teen-age boys, perhaps, their parents. The child was running after them but it never seemed to catch up. Finally, it shook its fist at them, turned around and faced Paul. Paul froze. The other people disappeared from view and his vision began to appear normal except that the ghost was still standing in front of him. Paul folded his arms and willed with all his might for the ghost go away. The ghost did not leave.

"Please go away," Paul asked the ghost.

On the contrary, the ghost began to walk towards Paul.

"I said: Go away!"

When the ghost persisted in approaching Paul, he ran. Not until he was close to the house did Paul look behind him. The ghost was not there. Paul went into the house feeling strangely alone.

An experience that Margaret had at about that time was hardly more reassuring. She had just come downstairs to practice the piano when the child appeared just outside the door of a parlor she had never visited since the first day she and Paul explored the house. She saw the child open the door and enter, but the door remained closed. At first, she intended to just pass the room by and go about her business, but the thought of the ghost behind a closed door to her back was all the more frightening. In hopes of proving to herself that there was nothing to be afraid of, she opened the parlor door. The ghost was there, bent over and weeping in front of an open casket surrounded with flowers. In the casket was the body of an old woman, the same woman Margaret had seen playing the organ up in the loft with the small boy beside her. The vision of the casket disappeared, and the weeping ghost with it. Margaret rushed to the piano in an attempt to drive out what she had seen with music.

After one of my uninspired piano lessons with Paul and Margaret, Tobias came up to me after the children had gone to give me my fee.

"Good children, aren't they?" he grunted.

"Yes, very good indeed," I replied, not knowing what else to say. And to tell the truth there was nothing wrong with them that was their fault.

"It's a relief to Mabel and me that they're no trouble. Quiet as mice. Even quieter."

"Yes, they are quiet children."

But as I left the house, I reflected for the first time that I was having trouble recollecting what they looked like. I resolved to really look at them next time I came and imprint their features on my mind. At my next visit, however, I found it difficult to look at either of them full in the face and nothing that I saw made any permanent impression on me.

The visions of Paul and Margaret that I have just recounted were just examples of a number of incidents. At various times and places, both of them saw the unformed child haunting the older boys and the parents but to no avail. Both Paul and Margaret admitted to feeling very sorry for the child until it tried to approach them at which point fear took over. They also saw a small boy with more defined features with an old woman. Sometimes the two would walk about the garden, at other times they would sit together at one of the keyboard instruments. For Margaret, the old woman was all the more unnerving, her kindly face notwithstanding, for she was the same woman who had been laid out in the coffin.

One night, when Paul was having his usual difficulty with sleeping, he heard the sound of the piano downstairs. He curled himself up into a shivering ball but that did not make the music go away. Instead, it only grew louder. He turned over in his bed, but visions of ghostly monsters more hideous than anything he had actually seen filled his mind. The only escape from his own fantasy was to grab his bathrobe and tip-toe down the stairs.

Margaret also heard the music. She tried to convince herself that it was Aunt Mabel. But she knew that Aunt Mabel would never play the piano at two o'clock in the morning. Could it be the ghostly grandmother? Would the child be with her? Laying on her back and listening could not calm her fears, so she slipped out of bed.

Margaret heard a creaking on the stairs as she edged her way along the hall. The piano continued to sound but Margaret could not decide if the music made sense or not. She reached the top of the stairs and almost cried out. The ghost was in front of her, half a flight down. Margaret gripped the bannister and watched it climb down the rest of the way. Only when it was out of view did she gain the courage to come down herself.

The piano grew louder but more incoherent, as if whoever was playing was just pounding keys at random in some gigantic rage. Once Margaret reached the entry, she could see the unformed child at the piano. It was as silvery and transparent as the moonlight streaming in through an upper window. Margaret took another step. Another ghost popped up beside her and screamed. She ran to the stairs only to bump into the ghost and fall over it.

They stared at each other, trying to make sense of what they saw in the darkness. It gradually dawned on each of them that the other was solid, and not a ghost. Then they recognized each other. Paul and Margaret fell into each other's arms as if they had been literally dying from lack of affection. They sat together at the foot of the stairs for a long time. The house had grown quiet. At some agreed moment, they went upstairs to Paul's room and gushed out their individual stories to each other. Thus they discovered that their stories were one.

The difference in the two children was most apparent to me when I came for the next lesson. This means I can date the occurence of the event just narrated to the fourth week in October. I was pleasantly surprised to see some life in the children. They looked at each other as if they were a pair of conspirators. When I poured out a bit of charm and told some funny stories about Franz Schubert's absent-mindedness, such as his not recognizing some songs he had written himself, they laughed. For the first time, they played their simple pieces as if they really cared about them and they were ready to listen to me when I gave them some tips for making their melodic lines more expressive. Before leaving, I treated them to a performance of a few Rachmaninoff Preludes which swept them away.

It would be too much to say that Paul and Margaret had ceased being afraid of the ghosts, but they were no longer paralyzed with fear. They spent a good deal time with each other and thus were usually together when these apparitions did come.

One event I find especially noteworthy occurred one morning when they had just gone out the front door on the way to school. They saw the faded child walking on the lawn, tagging behind two other people: a young man and a young woman. Both looked disquietingly familiar. The ghost was trying to draw their attention but, as usual, failed completely. Paul and Margaret remained transfixed for a moment, then hurriedly moved towards the school before the ghost started to chase them again.

I think I am correct in placing this important piano lesson at this point. Three weeks had elapsed since I had seen the change in my pupils. I don't know if they had discussed the matter beforehand or if it happened spontaneously, but right in the middle of my explaining the correct way of fingering a particular passage, Margaret asked me,

"Mr. Markham, do you believe in ghosts?"

The question was so incongruous that I could not suppress a chuckle. Halloween had come and gone by then so I could not fathom what had put the question in her mind.

"Oh," I replied, "I wouldn't go as far as to say I believe in ghosts, but I don't exactly disbelieve in them either."

"What to you mean?" asked Paul, with surprising solemnity.

"Well, the world is a mysterious place and many inexplicable things happen. I mean, things happen that can't be explained. My church teaches that we have something called a soul that goes to Heaven after death. I suppose this soul could haunt the earth for a while for some reason or other."

"What reasons?" asked Margaret.

"Well, I don't know. Maybe the deceased didn't get a proper burial."

"Or he wasn't treated right and he's still mad?" suggested Paul.

"Could be. But let's not unsettle ourselves with ghost stories or the ghost of Ludwig van Beethoven will haunt us for neglecting his heritage."

Little did I know that I would have been more comforting than unsettling to them by continuing the conversation, but we go through life blinded by our own fears and all we can do is stumble on the way.

The next Sunday, Paul and Margaret were in the frame of mind to follow the church service with interest for the first time. They kept their ears open for any reference to the state of souls after death and noted, with satisfaction, that the service even included a prayer for the faithful departed. So they prayed for the mysterious child. But as luck would have it, the long-winded sermon had nothing to say on the burning issue.

I like to think that it was a blustering November night when Paul and Margaret had the next decisive encounter. Cheese Castle, was strong enough to hold up to any weather, but the force of wind and rain against it could be unnerving to a pair of children who were on the lookout for ghosts. They spent the evening listening to Aunt Mabel play Bach on the harpsichord while they did their homework.

When it was time for bed, they were walked together up to their rooms. There, at the top of the stairs, the sudden appearance of a small boy greeted them. Paul and Margaret moved to protect each other. But far from advancing upon them, the ghost screamed and ran away. He threw himself into the welcoming arms of the Grandmother, and then both were gone.

After a holding still a moment to make sure the apparition was not coming back, Paul motioned his sister into his room. He offered Margaret the chair and plopped down on his bed. As his nerves calmed down somewhat, his thoughts became more lucid.

"You know," said Paul. "Remember what Mom and Dad said-"

"Who are they?" Margaret cried out in sudden anger.

Paul frowned before resuming his train of thought.

"Those nice people who took us camping in Colorado before dumping us here," Paul replied. "Remember when we were afraid that bears might come and hurt us?"

"Yea."

"Mom and Dad told us that bears were as afraid of us as we were of them."

"Mhm."

"See the point?"

"Of course I see the point. The ghost was as afraid of us as we were of him. Big help."

"How can a ghost hurt us?"

"He can do anything!"

"He can't punch us in the nose the way some bully at school can."

"He can-"

"What can he do to us besides scare us?"

"But ghosts are so weird! There aren't supposed to be such things!"

Paul rolled over on his bed and stared up at the ceiling while he formulated his thoughts.

"Mr. Markham said that ghosts are supposed to go to Heaven. And they are. So maybe the ghost wants to go to Heaven."

Margaret sighed as she made the obvious inference.

"Then it wouldn't even want to hurt us."

"I should think not," Paul replied. "And it seems that this ghost was badly treated when he was alive."

"Except by that old woman. And she died when he was little."

"And there was nobody left who wanted to pay attention to him."

"You know?" said Margaret. "The only time we've seen his face was when he was little; with his Grandmother."

"Hmm."

"I wonder - "

"So let's stop being afraid," Paul suggested.

"Yea, let's."

Easier said than done, but Paul and Margaret become braver after that conversation. They ceased being haunted children and they became ghost hunters. I don't know how many times they may have found the ghost again before my own modest adventure, but I pass over these meetings now and bring the story to a piano lesson in the first week of December.

The lesson had gone well; nothing remarkable there. Then, just as I was packing my music into my satchel, I saw a transparent boy leaning on the back of the piano staring at me. My music fell to the floor. While I took a step backwards in fright, Paul and Margaret moved towards the apparition. I had no voice to call them back; I could only look on helplessly as they approached the ghostly boy. That face, though not quite distinct, was familiar to me, but I had trouble placing it. I must have seen it long ago. Paul and Margaret each laid their hands on the boy and his features became a bit clearer. Then I recognized him just as he disappeared.

"You saw him, too?" asked Margaret.

I nodded.

"There's nothing to be scared about," said Paul. "He's just a ghost who wants to get to Heaven."

But there was something for me to be scared about that Paul could not understand.

"I know who that boy is--I mean was."

"Who?" asked the children.

It took me a moment to steady my voice enough so I could explain. I covered up my nervousness by picking up my music.

"He was Malcolm Honeysuckle, youngest brother of your Uncle Tobias. I didn't know I was so - so hard-hearted when I was a boy."

"You mean you were one of those guys who kept ignoring him?" Paul accused me.

"I never thought of him," I admitted. "When he got sick, it seemed the natural thing for him. He had already faded away. It's so easy not to realize when we are doing nothing, I mean, when we are not doing what ought to be done."

"Don't feel bad," said Margaret, the first to notice my discomfort. "I think he'll be going to Heaven soon."

At this point I sat down with the children and heard the story, garbled as it was, for the first time. I was shaking inside with fright and burning shame, but as the story went on I calmed down somewhat. I almost felt good when Paul said that Uncle Tobias and Aunt Mabel had never seen the ghost, even when it appeared under their noses. There was hope that I really was becoming a decent person over the years if I was graced with ability to see it. I left the house with assurances that I would see the ghost once more and that I would be able to make up for what I had done, or rather for what I had not done.

Between lessons, I endured the most restless week of my life. I searched my mind for memories of poor Malcolm but came up empty. Much as I knew it was Malcolm's ghost I had seen, I could not remember clearly what the boy had looked like. I could only recall some presence, like a shadow, that Toby, his brothers, and I could do without. The senior Mrs. Honeysuckle had been a benign presence in the house while she was alive. I had accepted the old woman's kindness without a thought. It had not occurred to me then that I should give out the same kindness I received. Obviously, Toby had not thought so either. I stayed awake at night and failed to be properly attentive to my lessons until next I could see Malcolm and do my part to right the wrong done him.

Tobias and Mabel answered the door when next I came to present me with a check for my trouble. I looked past the man who had once been my friend towards the piano. Malcolm was sitting on the piano bench! Paul and Margaret were already with him, each draping an arm around him. At last that boy was receiving the love that had been denied him even past the grave until then. I couldn't show a reaction of any kind in front of Tobias. He droned on about the business world but I had no ears for his useless words. I only made the motions of responding to them without knowing what was said. He and Mabel were the ones who struck me as being a pair of ghosts.

As soon as I was free to pursue reality, I joined Paul and Margaret and Malcolm at the piano. Tobias and Mabel settled in a corner of the living room so I couldn't let on to them what was happening. Even then, they didn't see the apparition. At this point, they fade from the story. A happy inspiration came to my aid in dealing with Malcolm.

"Let's play 'Happy Carnival' as a duet I suggested. "Margaret, you play the left hand and Paul, play the right."

Understanding perfectly, the children nodded in agreement. They began to play each with one hand, which left them each a free hand with which to touch Malcolm. With some trepidation, I put my hands on the ghost's shoulders. There was nothing physical to the touch but there was something there, for I felt a strange tingling in my fingers. I also felt a fierce rage directed at Toby and Mabel. I also felt a rage directed at a pair of parents I had never seen. I recalled with sharp pain the day I realized that Toby was no longer my friend and that he did not know or care what a friend was. Even worse was the memory of the day I learned that Mabel had chosen to marry Toby when she could have had me. Had she been swallowed up by Toby's lovelessness or had she been simply unloving all along?

As the children played, the harpsichord entered with a fugue I had never heard before. I saw an elderly woman playing the instrument, a woman I recognized as Malcolm's grandmother. She was calling the boy in her own way. My hand remained on the ghost's insubstantial shoulders. The anger we were all sharing began to abate. Somehow, Malcolm let go of his own rage. His forgiveness poured into me as a ray of light. He accepted the love I had cultivated for others in the years since his death. The anger of Paul and Margaret was also melted. The music stopped. That piece, short as it was, had seemed infinitely long in that strange moment. We had embraced the doorway to Heaven in the shape of a child who had finally regained his face. For what I saw in Malcolm's eyes went beyond any earthly memory I could have had of him. When he took his quiet leave, we knew that he would never come back.

 Proceed to Interlude the Second

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