One niqht, Templeton said, a voice from out of the ether called me to the stage. For a time that was all he would tell about the start of his career; whenever I asked it was always the voice bubbling out of nowhere, out of the air, some legless ghost or deity leading him to his fate. It was the only concession to mysticism he ever made, an ordinary man with a long dignified face who at any other time seemed perfectly happy with facts, and with making sure that other people stuck to facts as well. Onstage he specialized in brash, fast-talking types and in dignified eccentrics, though lately he found himself playing grandfathers or retiring gentlemen caught in the process of looking back. It did not seem to disturb him that, more and more, he was playing old men. He was not given to thinking about his parts, or about the effect that they had on him.

And so there was always this mystical moment (though he would never have seen it that way) when Templeton came off of the stage, tossing aside his character as if it were an old robe. He would be in the light and then out of it, one foot down and then before he completed the stride it would be gone, and as Templeton again he would stalk on into the back. But it happened sometimes that a kind of invisible residue of the character would remain floating about him, and once when the character was evaporating, looking back, I caught Templeton looking back as well.

It was not more than a shift in the pattern of his breathing, a slight push of air that might have been a laugh, or might have been a sigh. When I looked over at him his black-lined eyes were fixed on something close, something in the air that had already started to fade away. He looked out onto the glowing stage, and it would have vanished completely if I had not said:

"What?"

He only shook his head and pulled a grey handkerchief out of his back pocket. When it came away from his face it was smeared with orange paint, a swatch of color cut out of his brow. Then he saw that I was not going to let it go, and said, "The buzz would always come just as I was getting to sleep. It was never any other way."

So I had no idea at first that he was talking about the voice. He said it as if it had made perfect sense, and he offered nothing more. In the end I had to ask again:

"What?"

This time Templeton made such a discomforted face that I knew he was wishing for another cue to draw him away. "All right," he said, whispering so that his words wouldn't carry out over the boards. "It wasn't from out of the ether. It was over a wire. At three thirty in the morning the effect is the same, believe you me."

He pulled himself to his feet and turned away into the back of the building. I watched him disappear, then followed after, tracking him first by the shuffle of his shoes and then by the gurgle and clatter as he filled the company coffeepot and set it out on our hotplate. It had already begun to heat up by the time I came through into the back room; he sat there in the dark with the exposed coil glowing red above the table top, the water starting to rumble and groan against the pot's tin sides.

"Jones told me that you were a discovery of hers. She said that she found you practicing thaumaturgy in an unappreciative little town."

"Jones only tells the truth as far as she knows it," Templeton said. He raised a silhouetted finger and touched it to his nose. "And what she does tell is pretty well colored with show paint. There were no miracles about what I was doing. And she was a few years late to claim any right of discovery."

I remember feeling disappointed at that; I had always assumed that the voice was hers. Nothing could have been more interesting than what Jones had said, or so I thought. Then I remembered what he had said about the buzz.

"Yes," Templeton said. "The first came while I was still at school. I was taking my degree at the University, and at night I ran the switchboard in a basement room in the administration building. It was tedious work for the first two or three hours; after that I could unroll a sleeping bag on the floor and stretch out. There was never much in the way of light, but I managed to get some studying in, always keeping one eye on the board. Sometimes it would buzz, and then I would have to scramble. But sometimes I could sleep straight through from three o'clock to about five.

"In the winter it was terribly cold down there. So if I wanted to sleep I really had to work at it. And I was just drifting off one night, oh about a quarter to four, when the machine lit up over my head.

"It was a woman. She didn't sound tired at all. 'You've got a nice voice,' she said, 'but it's not the one I called to hear.' She gave the name and number that she wanted and I connected her. We let it ring a long time. It didn't bother her that there was no answer. She thanked me for trying and rang off.

"The same thing happened the next night and the next and the next, the call always coming through just as I was fading out. And it struck me at last that I didn't mind. On the fifth night I even tried staying awake. But she still managed to catch me napping. That was the night she said, 'You know, maybe yours is the voice I'm calling to hear after all.' I was still pretty groggy and not thinking well, so I went and put her through anyway. But at the first ring I could hear her laughing, and knew that I should stop.

"I wouldn't say that we talked until dawn, but in those hours even a short talk seems like forever. She said she was an actress, the leading actress of the Baxter Company down in town. She said her name was Ruth. And she invited me down to see her.

"I went in secret the very next night, and took a gander at her from the wings. She was very much the prima donna, already quite skilled in the art of upstaging. She must have frightened other young men my age. I suppose that she frightened me. But I gave up the switchboard job so I could go down to the theater every night. I was fortunate. They paid me to lug some scenery around, and in time I was introduced to the great Theodore Baxter, a king in his profession, the most mannered of all actors. I was given some small parts in his shows, not for money of course, just the experience; and I played everything as if I believed in it absolutely.

"After the shows, we took walks together across the park and back. Ruth would be in an exultant mood. She wore dresses that whispered when she moved in them, timeless things designed to feed a man's illusions. None of them belonged to her; costumes were her delight. It was a strange, chaste sort of courtship that I had very little control over"

"That was Mrs. Templeton," I said, grinning. "You married her and joined the Baxters, and years later the two of you were rediscovered by Jones."

"No. I asked her, of course. But I was still two years away from my degree, and anyway she would never have left the company. For my part, I had squatted with them long enough to see how actors lived. Baxter had a mansion outside of town, but none of that wealth ever trickled down to the rest of the company. And so one day I stopped coming down. I was not irreplaceable; I doubt Baxter even noticed. I worked at the University, took my degree and inherited a position with my Grandfather's firm, from which I looked back only rarely. Though oftentimes in later days Ruth was to remind me that my few parts with the Baxter Company had made for excellent training in my profession."

The pot had long since begun to boil, and now Templeton found his mug and poured it full to the top with steaming black water. I could not see his face. He was standing with his back to the emergency light, had posed himself that way on purpose. He said, "The law, son. That's how I know this new play of yours isn't any good. Full of legal improbabilities."

He let that one go and just stood there waiting for it to take effect. It didn't take long. "I don't think so," I said.

"Ha! Which part of it are you having trouble swallowing? Don't bother." He slurped, made a face, and set the cup down. "Come on."

I followed him into the cramped maze of rooms that filled the back of the theater building. "Of course, Ruth and I still saw one another," he said, clumping on ahead, "in a fragmentary way. Sometimes after court she would meet me at our place in the park. Always with a silk flower in her hands, always wearing those old costumes that would have made anyone else look overdressed. But she still could not see herself as the wife of a lawyer, even after old Baxter finally closed down the theater. That was a terrible day for her. She came to me in tears, in plain dress for the first time ever. We stood together in the park, and she wept, and I held her. But the answer was still no."

Templeton's dressing room, like all of the others, was an eight by eight windowless box furnished with a cloth screen and a vanity with a mirror up above that took up much of the east wall. The rest of it, bare of paint or wallpaper, had been covered with photographs, none of them of stage figures, banners and framed newspaper clippings that looked like reviews of stage shows but were not. Their headlines were brash and hinted at murders and extortion; in the small print the same name recurred again and again, sometimes underlined in red ink. There was an old American flag with not enough stars on it draped across the frame of the big mirror. In the dusty glass I saw Templeton wrestling with something behind the screen, and as I watched he pulled a battered trunk into the center of the room and stood puffing over it.

"There you are," he said. "Rummage to your heart's content. There's nothing to incriminate me." He turned away as if I did not exist at all, stripped off the blue tailcoat that had worn onstage, settled into the thickly padded chair before the dresser. There were several open packets of cigarettes laid out among the tins of make-up; Templeton selected the most crumpled of these, took one into his mouth and lit it.

And so I had to open the trunk myself, aware that I was poking into someone else's memory-box but eager for all of that, too much drawn into his play to be bothered by the niceties of private property. It was clean inside and lined with pale blue paper, stacked full of old newspapers that had yellowed a little, had curled at their spines. They gave off a pleasing musty smell like attic furniture, so that when I lifted out the leather binding that rested on top it seemed that I was handling something impossibly old. It creaked as I opened it; inside was a diploma embossed with Indiana State University and Templeton's name.

I set it carefully to one side, moved on into the stack. Now Templeton shifted in his chair. He leaned forward almost to the edge of the trunk. "You see," he said as I touched the brittle pages, "I saved the whole newspaper. Not just the clippings. It's hard to keep the true memory that way, and impossible to keep perspective. The standing one has. There, you see? Not page one. Page three."

I opened to page three and saw acquittal before he snatched the paper out of my hands. He had joined me now, was kneeling uncomfortably beside the trunk, rifling through the papers. "They're stacked just as I bought them," he said, half grinning. "The latest on top. Here, look at this one."

He lifted away the four latest issues, and there in big letters I saw BAXTER PLAYHOUSE THEFT. "There, you see? You see that? The crime, now that's front page material. The acquittal, my achievement; that ends up on page three. perspective; you could never know that if I just kept clippings."

"Who were you defending?"

He parted his hands in a theatrical gesture that might have belonged to Fagin. "Read on, MacDuff."

Under the big letters, less bold but still a part of the headline, it said: 5,000 and Props Stolen; Actor Held in Custody. Then: Actor Lon Burden was held for questioning last night after theater manager Jack Moran notified police of a break-in that left more than $5,000 missing from Moran's office safe. Moran claims that Burden, member of a vaudeville company playing here during the past week, has been behaving suspiciously ever since his arrival. Moran's office occupies one room at the back of the playhouse building; the famed Baxter Collection of theatrical props, costumes and memorabilia (several pieces of which Burden is also accused of stealing) occupy three rooms on the floor below. Burden was apprehended just after 1:00 AM on his way out of the theater; witnesses claim he was carrying a golden crown worn by the late Theodore Baxter in his production of King Lear, but no money was found on his person. Margaret Darwin, spokesman and secretary of the Jones Company players, refused comment. No trial date has been set. Burden will be arraigned tomorrow on charges of unlawful entry and theft.

I looked quickly through the rest of the paper, then checked the date. February 9th, 1934. "I thought you were the Grand Old Man of the company," I said. "You've only been part of it for five years?"

Templeton ignored me. He climbed back into the chair, crossed his legs, folded his hands. In that position, dressed as he was, he looked legal indeed. "Now then," he said. "point to the factual errors in that article."

"Jones was never just a spokesman, " I said. "One. This isn't a vaudeville company, two. Lon isn't an actor, three. He didn't do it, so he couldn't have been carrying the crown, four."

"Well the number is right," Templeton said. "But he was carrying the crown. Claimed to have found it lying in the middle of the stage. Of course the vaudeville part is hogwash. The company had been playing to empty houses, but the next night the Baxter Playhouse was packed. I was there. What I saw was no vaudeville.

"It was Jones's first season out. They were doing a little number about the witches from Macbeth, a sort of sequel. The idea was that the witches were immortal, and still around in 1934 mucking about in the lives of men. The sort of thing she likes. That was the first time I saw her. The second was the next day, when she walked into my office.

"She was dressed almost like a tramp, in a man's workpants and a torn jacket. My secretary thought her terribly rough. And I must say neither my partners nor I were ready for her theatrical bluntness. She insisted on meeting us all you see, insisted with that attitude she has of of boredom and and foreknowledge, standing there with her hands in her pockets. I said to myself, this is a woman of true composure. Then when we had all gathered in the senior partner's office -- my grandfather's old office -- she sat down and gave us the same story that she'd given the papers that morning."

That was my cue; it was meant to send me to the next edition, to see what I might find. "Can't you just tell me?" I said.

Templeton only leaned forward and snatched the paper out of my hands. He unfolded it so the back page crackled and shook in the air above me.

It said: ACTORS CLAIM BUILDING HAUNTED.

"No," I said. "She didn't."

"She did. Mind you she made it clear that she thought it all hogwash. But this was what she had heard from the members of her own company, and talk around the local bars and such like had gone a ways towards confirming it."

Now I could even see her in the chair opposite the lawyer's desk, her face stone calm, her voice low and ordered, telling about the shadowy figures that some stagehands thought they had seen, about the head that floated across the stage on a levitated sword, about the vaprous madwoman in the first box whose mascara had run over her cheeks, who cried in perfect silence

"Hasn't any of this disturbed you? Why haven't you left the theater to its ghost?" (a partner of Templeton's might have asked.)

Jones only moved her left shoulder a bit. "Things like that don't frighten me. Even if I had seen them, which I haven't. Lon stays late, so he's the one to ask. He only claims to have heard scuffling sounds, and then to have found the crown center stage. If I were you I'd ask Moran about it. Now, my head man is in jail. I have all his work to do. I'm sorry, but I can't spare you any more time."

"My partners thought she was a fool," Templeton said. "But I was convinced that this Miss Darwin absolutely knew what she was doing. She had played a very theatrical turn in the papers. The town was all up with it. It was my kind of case."

So Templeton was alone when he went down to the jailhouse and spoke with Lon for the first time in a grey cell with a lopsided table in it and three chairs. Lon would not have said much for himself under any circumstances; but when Templeton came down he found Lon so taciturn as to be almost frozen, sitting up at the table with his back slightly hunched, his thick hands folded and his lips sealed.

"He would not even look at me," Templeton said. "He would not even say hello. Have you seen anything, I asked. Have you heard anything, even if it was just scrabblings, rats in the walls. No, he said. And then his grip tightened; the most disturbing thing of all. No change in his face. Just the noticeable pressure as his fingers closed in on each other and then the cracking. Like he was breaking the bones in his hands.

"So there I had this client with a case of lock-jaw worse than a snapping turtle, his people babbling about ghosts and lust blinding my judgement."

"Did Mrs. Templeton know this?" I said.

"Lust for the boards, son. For the spotlight. I had nothing to go on but I could hardly wait to get into court. Miss Darwin had done such a fine job of promoting that I was assured of a full house. Under the circumstances, the only thing I could do was follow with more promotion. I called a friend of mine down at the Herald, Jameson Tripp, announced my intention to spend the night in a haunted theater and asked if he would like to tag along."

I had leafed through the next day's paper back to front and then front to back. "There's nothing here"

"I keep it to mark the occasion," Templeton said. "What happened that night did not belong in the newspapers."

"This reporter, this Tripp, he agreed to that?"

All Templeton did was smile. "He was a strange duck. Plain faced, shaved smooth without ever once cutting himself. He didn't smoke, and except for that night he didn't drink. Style meant nothing to him, but form did, the Form that he set up for himself. Fifty dollars wouldn't have bought him off of this story if it had come from anyone but me.

"We spent the afternoon getting our provisions together, all the right gear for a haunted expedition. He'd heard that spirits chilled rooms as they flitted through, so he brought along two raccoon coats, one for each of us. I bought us some flashlights, and I got a baseball bat for myself because I kept thinking about some of the things that Jones -- Miss Darwin -- had said, and even though she had been skeptical they had set down black roots in the back of my mind. Build-up. I knew it for what it was, but sometimes seeing the labels on things doesn't keep them from working.

"Well he and I went down to a little restaurant I knew and talked about things. Not about the theater; a newspaperman and a lawyer, we had bigger fish to fry. But I could see that it was working on him, too. I had a flask in my hip pocket and long about midway through the meal he asked if maybe we hadn't better break it open.

"It was mostly gone by the time we got down there. The girl in the box office wouldn't let us in unless we paid for tickets, even though the show was nearly over. So we went around into the alley that ran alongside the building, and we finished the flask and waited. Well before long we had a feeling like as if we weren't alone. And sure enough when we looked up, there was Jones just standing in the stage door. She was still in costume, her face still painted so it looked longer, sharper. Her eyes looked like gleaming glass. Jameson turned stark white. He wasn't used to women with power any more than he was used to drink. Then she smiled, and that was worse.

"He was in love, the way you can only love a woman you know is out of reach. You understand."

He looked at me like a prosecuting attorney. It was a good job. I mumbled back, half-heartedly, "Speak for yourself."

"'Come on,' Jones said. 'I'm not the ghost. Do I scare you that much?' And we all went inside.

"It was not my first time in the hind end of a theater, pulleys and sandbags didn't awe me. Jameson was craning his head all around, had a hard time keeping his eyes in. We talked to a few of the company as they went around; none of them had seen ghosts, though Mr. Moscow did himself look haunted. 'There's your ghost,' Jameson said, and a few other things not so polite. He was out of his element and it showed.

"Now, what we should have done was search the theater from top to bottom, and the office and storerooms in back. But our expedition had become rather more companionable and less scientific. We climbed from the stage into the orchestra pit -- Tripp would have stayed there if he could have, he felt hidden there -- and went on, oh, about halfway back along the aisle. We made our camp in a row of seats there, and talked some more and waited. And this is where Jameson surprised me. I felt sure that he would be the one to razz me about this whole "ghost" thing -- he had started as a sports writer for the Herald and I had him figured as a man who didn't believe in anything he couldn't catch or throw. But he turned out to have quite a secret history of tracking spiritual manifestations. Swore his old house in Kansas City was haunted by the soul of a murdered rum-runner; said he'd met a widow in town who was being terrorized by a pernickety gentleman ghost who wouldn't let her sit on any of the furniture. He would appear, blue in the face, beside her as she sat, bloating himself up like a liver-spotted old bullfrog, and hurl her off.

"So in the end I was the one making objections. We argued about it for half an hour before Miss Darwin appeared on stage -- out of costume -- to tell us she was locking up now and would it be better if she were to leave some lights on. No, I said. It must all be just as normal. And she gave that best smile of hers -- I could hear Tripp's heart flopping about in the chair beside me -- wished us a good night and went off. A moment later the lights above began to flick out, one row after another from back to front, until only the stage was lit, and that in the flat, clear light that the public never sees; then the entire hall was dark. We heard her go out; the big door in back made a soft click that echoed through the whole building. And we were alone.

"Then, Tripp thought to start in with more of his occult tales. Silence, I said. We're here to investigate and not to babble. And so we sat quietly in the dark, watching for what would happen."

Templeton paused, leaned forward and snapped his fingers in the air as if calling a bellhop. "Now, take a peek in the left back corner. There should be a little box. Open it up." I did as he said, found it far down in the bottom of the trunk, packed in a wad of tissue paper. Inside, under a square of cotton, was a beautiful silver-cased pocket watch. It felt cold and comfortable in my hand; the back and sides had been well polished and cared for, but the glass was missing and the face was worn and smudged. "I have that from my grandfather," Templeton said. "It was his idea that I should become a lawyer. He ended out his life as a blind man, and doctored this watch so he could feel the time. I had it with me that night, for the same reason. Tripp and I sat in the dark for forty minutes, and then another forty, and nothing at all happened. I did not even feel as if we were being watched, didn't feel any sort of nasty presence as it were. I sat with the liquor dying in my stomach, felt of the time every few minutes and wondered about Mr. Burden's honesty. Jameson had fallen asleep beside me. And I was just about to perpetrate a bit of mischief on him when I saw something there, down on the stage.

"At first it was nothing more than a soft blue glow, rising and growing steadily as I watched, until an odd form began to take shape in its center. By this time I had wakened Tripp. He sat up and gaped. Because it was a face appearing there, slowly from the eyes, white, crazy eyes, outward to a ring of blood-spattered hair and a curiously wide jaw. Blue fire flowed under where its neck should have been; then I saw that the head was resting on the flat of a sword.

"I believe that Tripp had still not left his seat. I was halfway down the aisle, and the eyes were watching me come and they looked upset. I had seen a few magic shows in my time and this was the oldest trick in the book.

"The head was floating at about waist level, and as I approached it made three little jumps backward. It made an awful racket on the floor for something that was supposed to be suspended in air. That was when Tripp started shouting. The head worked its lips at me; I managed to get hold of a length of cloth that was so black as to be invisible, and I gave a good hard yank.

"The sword was not even real; it bent in six places as it hit the boards. As for the ghost, it was the oddest apparition you could ever hope to see. Its face was painted deathly white, save for the lips, which were black. The tangled mass of hair fell well below its shoulders. It was wearing an old-fashioned man's nightshirt. It was in fact a man."

"Don't tell me," I said. "It was Moscow."

"Ah, no. No, it was a man you never met named Cameron MacTeagle. Of course Tripp came clambering up over the lip of the stage and said, 'You see, I pegged him from the start. I told you he was your ghost.' He practically danced. 'Doesn't look so hot for your man Burden,' he said. And he went out. I knew where he was going.

"The ghost could hardly contain himself. Of course he'd been hitting the bottle like the rest of us, only more recently. By giving the spirit angle a little substance he was honestly trying to help. I would have told him that he had helped his friend right into twenty years in the pokey, but just then I had more important things to do.

"Because I had seen something else as I came down that aisle. Someone had been sitting in the box up above, and the blue glow had provided just enough light for me to catch a moving shape as it rose and ducked behind the drapes there. I was now certain of what I had suspected all along: someone, some tramp, was living in the theater, and Burden was protecting him.

"But in the end it was not quite that," Templeton said to the wall. A kind of settling came over his bones; I heard it in the sounds that came from the chair. "There was a place where the wings connected with a maze of old passages. When I got out there I could hear that ghost running hard into the back, into the museum rooms where the old Baxter collection was kept. Kept," he said, "not cared for. I ran along flicking lights on behind me, so pretty soon that whole end of the building was lit up bright as day. Finally I came to a room that might have been a mausoleum. It was not just dust, but layers of dust, cobwebs, mold; everything had a solidified look just like a crusty mass of coral, dead coral on the hull of a sunken ship. Except for this one clear path, this one trail worn through it; clean because it had been walked over so many times. It cut straight through from the door to a rack of old costumes in back. So you'd think I would have known. But it was

"They were all so clean that they seemed to glow. All those nights in the park. Pressed. It was such a little room, and I stood there in the center of it, shaking. I still had on that raccoon coat, see, and underneath it I was wringing wet. I breathed, and listened to the other breathing. And all I could think of was how old I was getting.

"Then I heard a little, sad little voice rise up and out from behind the dresses. 'I always brought them back,' it said. 'It wasn't really stealing.' Then they parted themselves, and she looked as if she felt as old as I did."

Now Templeton lit another cigarette. He closed his eyes, and would say no more. There was only the most recent edition of the Herald, dated two weeks later, with its modest letters almost whispering Acquittal in Theater Case there on page three. Mr. Lon Burden freed following testimony of an important new witness; police seeking former manager Jack Moran on charges of embezzlement. I could not reconcile such a soft ending to the headlines Templeton had taken me through. The room fell very quiet, Templeton's smoke drifted down over my head, and from under it I said, "It does look as though you were working wonders."

Templeton blew a ring of smoke, watched with some satisfaction as it dissipated. "The morning after the trial there were blossoms out on the dogwood bushes. It was a glorious day, but my office didn't have much of a view. I spent the morning going through the mail, starting a new brief. Miss Darwin came down to see me around eleven o'clock. She had a carnation in her lapel. She was carrying a purse."

"Jones?"

"Mm. I thought she was going to pay me. Instead she walked around my office, touching things, pulling the curtains back. She said it looked awfully grey. I kept watching her gloved hands moving about; Tripp was convinced that the Jones Company was a lot of vagabonds, and though I hadn't agreed I found some of that feeling washing off on me.

"'You have a very dramatic manner in court,' she said. I said sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't, and she said, 'I'm told that you considered a theatrical career.'

"Then she pushed aside some of the trash I kept on my desk, opened her purse on it, and took out a thick, folded piece of paper. It was a contract, beautifully hand written, drawn in the simplest of language. And she said, "Do you think that you might consider one now? I don't usually make contracts with people, but I thought it might make you feel better.'"

I folded up the final Herald again and set it at the top of the stack. "That voice was not from the ether," I said. "That voice was not even over a wire."

Templeton smiled. It was not more than a tug at the corners of his mouth. "No. That voice was an echo. When I speak of the voice that called me to the stage, Jones always assumes that I mean her. But she was just the second chance."