Clifford D. Simak

The waiter arrived with an armload of beer bottles and dumped them on the table.

“There!” he said, disgusted. “That’ll hold you for a while. Cook says the food is coming up.”

“You don’t intend,” Maxwell asked Shakespeare, “to appear for your lecture?”

“Forsooth, and if I did,” said Shakespeare, “they would forthwith, once that I had finished, whisk me home again.”

“And they would, too,” said Oop. “If they ever get their paws on him, they’ll never let him go.”

“But how will you earn a living?” Maxwell asked. “You have no skills to fit this world.”

“I,” said Shakespeare, “will surely devise something. A man’s wits, driven to it, will come up with answers.”

The waiter arrived with a cart, laden with food. He began putting it on the table.

“Sylvester!” Carol cried.

Sylvester had risen swiftly, put his two paws on the table and reached to grab two slabs of rare roast beef which had been carved off a standing roast of ribs.

Sylvester disappeared beneath the table, with the meat hanging from his jaws.

“The pussy cat is hungry,” Shakespeare said. “He harvests what he can.”

“In the matter of food,” Carol complained, “he has no manners whatsoever.”

From beneath the table came the sound of crunching bones.

“Master Shakespeare,” said Ghost, “you came from England. From a town upon the Avon.”

“A goodly country to the eye,” said Shakespeare, “but filled with human riffraff. There be poachers, thieves, murderers, footpads, and all sort of loathsome folk…”

“But I recall,” said Ghost, “the swans upon the river and the willows growing on its banks and-”

“You what?” howled Oop. “How can you recall?” Ghost rose slowly to his feet and there was something about his rising that made all of them fix their eyes upon him. He raised a hand, although there was no hand, just the sleeves of his robe, if robe it was.

His voice, when it came, was hollow, as if it might have come from an empty place far distant.

“But I do recall,” he told them. “After all these years, I do recall. I either had forgotten or I had never known. But now I do…”

“Master Ghost,” said Shakespeare, “you act exceeding strange. What queer distemper could have seized upon you?”

“I know now who I am,” said Ghost triumphantly. “I know who I am the ghost of.”

“Well, thank God for that,” said Oop. “It will put an end to all this maundering of yours about your heritage.”

“And who, pray,” asked Shakespeare, “might you be the ghost of?”

“Of you,” Ghost keened. “I know now-I know now-I am William Shakespeare’s ghost!”

For an instant they all sat silent, stricken, and then from Shakespeare’s throat came a strangled sound of moaning fright. With a sudden surge, he came out of his chair and leaped to the tabletop, heading for the door. The table went over with a crash. Maxwell’s chair tipped back and he went sprawling with it. The edge of the tipping table pinned him to the floor and a bowl of gravy, skating off its edge, caught him in the face.

He put up both his hands and tried to wipe the gravy off his face. From somewhere above him he heard Oop’s raging bellows.

Able to see again, but with his face and hair still dripping gravy, Maxwell managed to crawl from beneath the table and stagger to his feet.

Carol sat flat upon the floor amid the litter of the food. Beer bottles were rolling back and forth across the floor. Framed in the kitchen door stood the cook, a mighty woman with chubby arms and tousled hair, and her hands upon her hips. Sylvester was crouched above the roast, ripping it apart and rapidly swallowing great mouthfuls of meat before anyone could stop him.

Oop came limping back from the door.

“No sign of them,” he said. “No sign of either one of them.”

He reached down a hand to haul Carol to her feet.

“That rotten Ghost,” he said bitterly. “Why couldn’t he keep still? Even if he knew…”

“But he didn’t know,” said Carol. “Not until just now. It took this confrontation to jar it out of him. Something Shakespeare said, perhaps. It’s something he’s been wondering about all these years and when suddenly it hit him…”

“This tears it,” Oop declared. “Shakespeare never will quit running. There’ll be no finding him.”

“Maybe that is what Ghost is doing now,” said Maxwell. “That is where he went. To follow Shakespeare and stop him and bring him back to us.”

“Stop him, how?", asked Oop. “If Shakespeare sees him following he’ll set new records running.”

They sat dejectedly about Oop’s rough-lumber table. Sylvester lay on his back on the hearthstone, with his front paws folded neatly on his chest, his back feet thrust up into the air. He wore a silly grin of satisfaction pasted on his face.

Oop shoved the fruit jar along the boards to Carol. She picked it up and sniffed. “It smells like kerosene,” she said, “and, as I remember it, it tastes like kerosene.” She lifted the jar with both her hands and drank, then pushed it across to Maxwell.

“I do believe,” she said, “that after a time one could become accustomed to drinking kerosene.”