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

He shook his head. “It was never so powerful before. Last night was more terrible than ever!”

“Probably because, in the past, you happened to burn only a few of the yellow leaves at a time, and the cold wind carried away much of the smoke; the visions came upon some but not all of the household, and in varying degrees. But last night the smoke hovered in the garden and the haze spread through the house; and perhaps you happened to burn a great many of the yellow leaves at once. Everyone who breathed the smoke was intoxicated and stricken with a kind of madness. Once we escaped the smoke, with time the madness passed, like a fever burning itself out.”

“Then the lemures never existed?”

“I think not.”

“And if I uproot that accursed bush and cast it in the Tiber, I will never see the lemures again?”

“Perhaps not,” I said. Though you may always see them in your nightmares, I thought.

“So, it was just as I told you,” said Bethesda, bringing a cool cloth to lay upon my forehead that afternoon. Flashes of pain still coursed through my temples from time to time, and whenever I closed my eyes alarming visions loomed in the blackness.

“Just as you told me? Nonsense!” I said. “You thought that Titus was pushed from his balcony — and that his wife Cornelia did it!”

“A woman pretending to be a lemur drove him to jump — which is just the same,” she insisted.

“And you said the soldier’s old slave was lying about having seen the lemures himself, when in fact he was telling the truth.”

“What I said was that the dead cannot go walking about unless they have been properly mummified, and I was absolutely right. And it was I who once told you about the burning bush that speaks, remember? Without that, you never would have figured the cause.”

“Fair enough,” I admitted, deciding it was impossible to win the argument.

“This quaint Roman idea about lemures haunting the living is completely absurd,” she went on.

“About that I am not sure.”

“But with your own eyes you have seen the truth! By your own wits you have proved in two instances that what everyone thought to be lemures were not lemures at all, only makeup and fear, intoxicating smoke and guilty consciences!”

“You miss the point, Bethesda.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lemures do exist — perhaps not as visitors perceptible to the senses, but in another way. The dead do have power to spread misery among the living. The spirit of a man can carry on and cause untold havoc from beyond the grave. The more powerful the man, the more terrible his legacy.” I shivered — not at lurid visions remembered from the soldier’s garden, but at the naked truth, which was infinitely more concrete and terrible. “Rome is a haunted city. The lemur of the dictator Sulla haunts us all. Dead he may be, but not departed. His wickedness lingers on, bringing despair and suffering upon his friends and foes alike.”

To this Bethesda had no answer. I closed my eyes and saw no more monsters, but slept a dreamless sleep until dawn of the following day.

Sore Loser

by Seymour Kapetansky

Detectiverse

He went to jail for stealing pursesWith painful bruises he still nurses;Caught sneaking bags from out the hall,

He learned he’d crashed the Black Belts’ Ball!

My Son, My Son

by Robert Barnard

Congratulations are due to Robert Barnard for his nomination for the 1991 Agatha Award for best short story. Mr. Barnard’s story, “The Habit of Widowhood” (November, 1991), is one of three EQMM contenders for the award, which is intended to recognize merit in the field of the traditional, or “cozy,” mystery story. (“The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown” by Peter Lovesey and “Long Live the Queen” by Ruth Rendell were also named.) Here he is with another entertaining offering about a fantasy with very real consequences...

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