Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

The speaker was a tall, thin woman. A stola of black wool covered her from neck to feet; about her shoulders was a wrap of dark blue. Her black hair was drawn back from her face and piled atop her head, held together by silver pins and combs. Her eyes were a glittering blue. Her face was young, but she was no longer a girl. She held herself as rigorously upright as a vestal, and spoke with the imperious tone of a patrician.

“This,” said Lucius, “is Gordianus, the man I told you about.” The woman acknowledged me with a slight nod. “And this,” he continued, “is my dear young friend, Cornelia. From the Sullan branch of the Cornelius family.”

I gave a slight start.

“Yes,” she said, “blood relative to our recently departed and deeply missed dictator. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was my cousin. We were quite close, despite the difference in our ages. I was with dear Sulla just before he died, down at his villa in Neapolis. A great man. A generous man.” Her imperious tone softened. She turned her gaze to the corpse on the bier. “Now Titus is dead, too. I am alone. Defenseless...”

“Perhaps we should withdraw to the library,” suggested Lucius.

“Yes,” said Cornelia, “it’s cold here in the atrium.”

She led us down a short hallway into a small room. My sometime-client Cicero would not have called it much of a library — there was only a single cabinet piled with scrolls against one wall — but he would have approved of its austerity. The walls were stained a somber red and the chairs were backless. A slave tended to the brazier in the corner and departed.

“How much does Gordianus know?” said Cornelia, to Lucius.

“Very little. I only explained that Titus fell from the balcony.”

She looked at me with an intensity that was almost frightening. “My husband was a haunted man.”

“Haunted by whom, or what? Lucius spoke to me of lemures.”

“Not plural, but singular,” she said. “He was tormented by one lemur only.”

“Was this spirit known to him?”

“Yes. An acquaintance from his youth; they studied law together in the Forum. The man who owned this house before us. His name was Furius.”

“This lemur appeared to your husband more than once?”

“It began last summer. Titus would glimpse the thing for only a moment — beside the road on the way to our country villa, or across the Forum, or in a pool of shadow outside the house. At first he wasn’t sure what it was; he would turn back and try to find it, only to discover it had vanished. Then he began to see it inside the house. That was when he realized who and what it was. He no longer tried to approach it; quite the opposite, he fled the thing, quaking with fear.”

“Did you see it, as well?”

She stiffened. “Not at first...”

“Titus saw it, the night he fell,” whispered Lucius. He leaned forward and took Cornelia’s hand, but she pulled it away.

“That night,” she whispered, “Titus was brooding, pensive. He left me in my sitting room and stepped onto the balcony to pace and take a breath of cold air. Then he saw the thing — so he told the story later, in his delirium. It came toward him, beckoning. It spoke his name. Titus fled to the end of the balcony. The thing came closer. Titus grew mad with fear — somehow he fell.”

“The thing pushed him?” I said.

She shrugged. “Whether he fell or was pushed, it was his fear of the thing that finally killed him. He survived the fall; he lingered through the night and the next day. Twilight came. Titus began to sweat and tremble. Even the least movement was agony to him, yet he thrashed and writhed on the bed, mad with panic. He said he could not bear to see the lemur again. At last he died. Do you understand? He chose to die rather than confront the lemur again. You saw his face. It was not pain that killed him. It was fear.”

I pulled my cloak over my hands and curled my toes. It seemed to me that the brazier did nothing to banish the cold from the room. “This lemur,” I said, “how did your husband describe it?”

“The thing was not hard to recognize. It was Furius, who owned this house before us. Its flesh was pocked and white, its teeth broken and yellow. Its hair was like bloody straw, and there was blood all around its neck. It gave off a foul odor... but it was most certainly Furius. Except...”

“Yes?”

“Except that it looked younger than Furius at the end of his life. It looked closer to the age when Furius and Titus knew one another in the Forum, in the days of their young manhood.”

“When did you first see the lemur yourself?”

“Last night. I was on the balcony — thinking of Titus and his fall. I turned and saw the thing, but only for an instant. I fled into the house — and it spoke to me.”

“What did it say?”

“Two words: Now you. Oh!” Cornelia drew in a quick, strangled breath. She clutched at her wrap and gazed at the fire.