I won't take up too much time telling how I found this story.
I was on my farewell tour, well, the last of several farewell tours - I couldn't afford to give them up, tax and alimony being what they are - and I found myself in Dublin. I'd had a bust-up with my manager in some English dump or other and he had gotten his own back by cancelling my hotel booking.
It had been a bitch of a gig - only a few bald-headed old faithfuls and their girl-friends and a spatter of polite applause at the end. Sure, they were disappointed, as they had a right to be - my guitar playing reduced to a few chords and my voice so husky that the mike could hardly pick it up. The Irish whisky was meant to help but only gave me a worse case of the shakes.
When I slunk out of the stage door, not bothering to change out of my sleazy gear, I was alone - can't think when I last had a backing group to drink with. It was the last straw when the hotel turned me down and, after that a string of boarding houses. At last, late as it was, a door opened and, after being told that all rooms were full, I managed to pull a fat enough wad of notes from my pants pocket to be led up the stairs, shown the john and told the time of breakfast.
I couldn't wait to flop out on the bed and she didn't hang about once she had shown me the room - very high and narrow, partitioned off I guess because the boarded up fireplace was huge with a heavy, carved overmantel, out of style and proportion with the room. The bed was rock hard but with no time to bother taking off my cowboy boots I was soon dead to the world......
I woke with a start to pitch blackness! Hell, someone was shaking me roughly. Did they have breakfast in Dublin in the middle of the night for Christ's sake? I turned over with my fists up, ready to sock the intruder whoever it was. My blows met empty air and, when I switched on the lamp, the room was empty. Shit! If that's what Irish whisky does to a guy, I'd better stick to Scotch! I wrapped myself in the sheet and thin, old blankets and was soon snoring.
Not again! Son of a bitch, that really hurt! I flipped on the light switch but, once more, the room was empty and, hell, it was freezing! Before I could bend to see who was hiding under the bed, no word of a lie, I was seized in an icy grip, pulled out of bed and propelled towards the fireplace. Then some invisible THING took my left hand and ran it over the carving of the mantelpiece. How the hell did IT know I was a southpaw? My blood ran cold. This sure had the feeling of an acid trip and I'd given that up for whisky years back.
As my hand was moved, I thought I heard a sharp intake of breath, not mine. Part of the overmantel swung open and my hand was pushed into a cavity behind the panelling until I grazed my knuckles on something hard and rusty. The satisfied intake of breath again on the back of my neck, ice cold and scary. This time my hands moved of their own accord and I pulled out a metal box, just in time, before invisible hands clicked the carving back into place.
I found myself trembling on the edge of the bed, my heart hammering against my ribs. This time I must have flipped my lid at last. I'd never had the shakes so bad. But, at least the room was warm now. I couldn't believe they would switch on under floor heating in the early hours of the morning in a dump like this. Still, I was glad of it and began to come round, looking at the rusty box beside me, which felt solid enough not to be part of a nightmare.
There was no key and I wrestled to open the lock with the sharp knife I kept down the side of my boot. I'd been in some tight spots and it was a comfort to know it was there. It took a while to get the lid open. On top of a parcel wrapped in a faded, rotting cloth, was a letter, addressed simply to 'Rob D.' and sealed with a large blob of red wax. As I was about to open it, a cold shiver ran down my spine and I left it alone.
After that, it took some courage to unwrap the cloth, but, as the warmth in the room returned, I somehow felt this was O.K. On top was a small , beautifully jewelled frame containing the portrait of a lovely girl. Unbelievably, the old University days I thought I had wiped out came flooding back! Some girl had dragged me along to an exhibition of Elizabethan miniaturists and, yes, I would bet my life that this was a genuine Nicholas Hilliard - his style was unmistakable.
All that came before the days of drugs for all, when I fell for the message, 'Turn on, tune in, drop out!' (I might have known anything so simple was a cop out. Kids in their twenties now wear business suits, not flowers, beads and headbands.) Always an ideas man, what I liked best was to turn tradition ass over tip and see how things looked from that angle, which didn't please the old creeps who were guiding me on my way to a Doctorate in sixteenth century History. Did I drop out of my own accord or was I pushed? Old Henry Ford (even if he was a God-damn capitalist) got it right - 'History is the bunk.' In the days that followed I answered to 'draft-dodger', 'hippie', 'yippie' - whatever badge they cared to pin on me. By the time it got to 'yuppie' I was on the skids.
I turned to the rest of the package. Next came a book written in Spanish, which I had almost forgotten and some kind of funny musical notation which I couldn't have read even if it had been normal. Why should I learn to read music when there was always one of the group proud to write down one of Bob Dee's songs in the days when I was among the great names of the Sixties? There was a picture of a queer looking guy on one page of the book that gave me the jumps - the face reminded me of the way I used to look without the fungus and I didn't like to remember the time before LSD and protest songs took over.
Underneath was a pile of manuscript in strange writing that I couldn't decipher. Wait though! I had seen this before my drop-out days. Strange that acid and booze didn't wipe out the memories. As a student, I had been a sucker for any kind of puzzle and was a whiz at making sense of old documents. These papers were written in the sixteenth century secretary hand and I got the idea that the writer was either ill or drunk some of the time.
I sat on the hard bed, deciphering the first page with difficulty, first picking out dates and then names, which is the easiest way. The room was still warm and - the darndest thing - I felt round me a kind of glow of approval, something I only remember way back, when my mom was alive, maybe. As I turned the yellowing pages, the thought came to me that, if I'd come across this in my University days, I'd be a smart-ass, top-notch Professor by now, instead of a broken-down has been with two divorces behind me and a pile of debts to keep me on the road. The room suddenly went cold. What was it with this Irish heating?
Before I went down to a big breakfast I couldn't tackle, I replaced the contents of the box and pushed it under the bed with my gig gear and my guitar on top. When I told Mrs.F. that I wanted to keep the room for a while it knocked her out. Not till I paid her in advance, did she answer my questions about the sixteenth century overmantel.
As the story came out bit by bit , I learned that the house had way back belonged to a family of merchants. All the old panelling had been taken out and sold and, when the house was converted for boarders, only the overmantel in my room was left for the reason that no one would touch it. Some workmen said they got a kind of electric shock if they went near it. Some said invisible hands pushed them away. There were tales that those bold enough to try to prise it from the wall took a stroke or even died. In the end, the room remained unused except in an emergency and no one slept there more than one night. She surely thought I was out of my skull to want to stay. Maybe I was. To hell with the rest of the tour! They'd never find me here. So I told Mrs. F. I was writing a book about ghost hunting and went out to buy a typewriter.
The painful deciphering got easier with time but it was a tough assignment and I had never worked so hard in all my life. You see, there was an invisible slave driver standing over me and, whenever, I stopped, the room went icy. If I worked hard, he was warm and friendly and when there was a difficult passage, I'll swear he put the right ideas in my head. I called him J.D. Maybe my mind had gone at last and I was on a permanent high. I didn't care. What I wanted was to get to the end of the story and find what it was all about.
One thing I knew for sure. It was never going to moulder in a University vault or be destroyed by dried up academics whose theories it overturned. It sure was dynamite from their point of view. And, what's more, I was certain by now it was J.D.'s gift to me to do with as I thought best.
When I had finished the typing, done the final check and had copies made, I felt I had to go down to the river. Remembering that J.D. had once wanted to drown his book, I stood there, looking down at the water and, as if the yellowing document I held was no longer of value, I tore it deliberately to shreds and sent them drifting down the Liffey to the sea. Once more came the satisfied sigh over my shoulder and the warmth of approval now my task was done. I knew now that I had permission to read the letter addressed to Rob. D. It might have been written for me, as I found, and I felt pretty sick by the time I got to the end.
What more can I say?. I told the truth for once when I rented that room in Dublin. I did put together a book about ghost hunting. The question is, was J.D. the only ghost?
