Ghost Story (34 page)

Jim grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him out of the living room back into the hall. Then he let go and led Peter down the hall to the foot of the stairs.

Up there it was dark—up there it was new territory. Peter felt more profoundly uneasy, looking at the stairs, then he had since entering the house.

"You go up and I'll stay here."

"You want to hang around in the dark by yourself?"

Peter tried to swallow, but could not. He shook his head.

"All right. It's got to be up there, whatever it is."

Jim put his foot on the second of the unpainted steps. Here too the carpet had been removed. He lifted himself up; looked back. "Coming?" Then he began to mount the stairs, taking them by twos. Peter watched: when Jim was halfway up, he willed himself to follow.

The lights snapped on again when Jim was at the top and Peter was two-thirds of the way up.

"Hello, boys," said a deep unruffled voice from the bottom of the stairs.

Jim Hardie shrieked.

Peter fell backward on the stairs and, half-paralyzed with fright, thought he'd slide right down into the grasp of the man looking up at them.

"Let me take you to your hostess," he said, giving them a dead smile. He was the strangest-looking man Peter had ever seen—a blue knit cap was shoved down over blond curly hair like Harpo Marx's, sunglasses rode on his nose; he wore overalls but no shirt, and his face was white as ivory. It was the man from the square. "She will be delighted to see you again," the man said. "As her first visitors, you can count on an especially warm welcome." The man's smile broadened as he began to come up the stairs after them.

When he had come up only a few of the steps he lifted a hand and pulled the blue cap off his head. The Harpo curls, a wig, came off with it.

When he took off the dark glasses his eyes shone a uniform golden yellow.

Ignoring it, he unlocked his door; opened it The staircase was empty.

He went to answer his phone.

And with relief too heard Ricky Hawthorne's voice: "I'm going batty sitting here in the dark. I've spoken to Sears and Edward's nephew and Sears graciously said that we can get together at this short notice at his house. I'd say we need to. Do you agree? We'll break a rule and just come as we are, shall we?"

Maybe that makes him one of us, Ricky thought: and he saw that Don was the sort of person they would have befriended, years and years back; if he had been born forty years earlier, he would have been one of them as if by birthright.

Still, there was a streak of secrecy in him. Ricky could not imagine what he had meant by asking if any of them had heard music during the early evening.

Pressed about this, he had evaded explanations; pressed further, he had said, "I was just getting the feeling that everything happening has a direct relationship to my writing."

This remark, which would have seemed egotistical at any other time, was given density by the candlelight; each of the men stirred in his chair.

"Isn't that why we asked you here?" Sears said.

And then he had explained: Ricky listened puzzled to Don's account of his idea for a new book and the description of the Dr. Rabbitfoot character, and how he had heard the showman's music just before Ricky's call.

"Are you saying that events in this town are occurrences from an unwritten book?" Sears asked incredulously. "That's sheer poppycock."

"Unless," Ricky said, thinking, "unless ... well, I'm not really sure how to put this. Unless things here in Milburn have focused lately—have come to a focus they did not have before."

"You mean that I'm the focus," Don said.

"I don't know."

"This is nonsense," Sears interjected. "Focused, unfocused—all that's happened is that we are managing to frighten ourselves even more. That's your focus. The daydreams of a novelist can't have anything to do with it."

Lewis sat apart from all this, wrapped in some private misery. Ricky asked him what he thought, and Lewis replied, "Sorry. I was thinking about something else. Can I get myself another drink, Sears?"

Sears nodded grimly; Lewis was drinking at twice his normal rate, as if his appearance at a meeting in an old shirt and a tweed jacket gave him license to break another of their old rules.

"What's supposed to indicate this mysterious focus?" Sears asked belligerently.

"You know as well as I do. John's death, first of all."

"Coincidence," Sears said.

"Elmer's sheep—all the animals that have died."

"Now you believe in Hardesty's Martians."

"Don't you remember what Hardesty told us? That it was sort of a game—an amusement some sort of creature gave itself. What I'm suggesting is that the stakes have been raised. Freddy Robinson. Poor old Rea Dedham. I felt, months ago, that our stories were bringing something about—and I fear, I very much fear, that more people are going to die. I'm saying that our lives and the lives of many people in this town may be endangered."

"Well, what I said stands. You have certainly managed to frighten yourself," Sears said.

"We're all frightened," Ricky pointed out. His cold made his voice raw and his throat throbbed, but he forced himself to go on. "We are. But what I think is that Don's arrival here was like the fitting of the last piece into a puzzle—that when all of us were joined by Don, the forces, whatever you want to call them, were increased. That we invoked them. We by our stories, Don in his book and in his imagination. We see things, but we don't believe them; we feel things—people watching us, sinister things following us—but we dismiss them as fantasies. We dream horrors, but try to forget them. And in the meantime, three people have died."

Lewis stared at the rug, then nervously spun an ashtray on the table before his chair. "I just remembered something I said to Freddy Robinson on the night he cornered me outside John's house. I said that someone was picking us off like flies."

"But why should this young man, whom none of us had seen until a short time ago, be the last element?" Sears asked.

"Because he was Edward's nephew?" Ricky asked. It came to him straight from the blue sky of inspiration; a moment later he felt a painful spasm of relief that his children were not coming to Milburn for Christmas. "Yes. Because he is Edward's nephew."

All three of the older men almost palpably felt the gravity of what Ricky had called "the forces" about them. Three frightened men, they sat in the molten light of the candles and looked back into their past.

"Maybe," Lewis at last said. He drained his whiskey. "But I don't understand about Freddy Robinson. He wanted to meet with me—he called me twice. I just put him off. Made a vague promise to see him in a bar sometime."

Sears asked, "He had something to tell you before he died?"

"I didn't give him the chance to tell it. I thought he wanted to sell me insurance."

"Why did you think that?"

"Because he said something about trouble coming your way."

They were silent again. "Maybe," Lewis said, "if I met him, he'd still be alive."

Ricky said, "Lewis, that sounded just like John Jaffrey. He blamed himself for Edward's death."

For a moment all three men glanced at Don Wanderley.

"Maybe I'm not here just because of my uncle," Don said. "I want to buy my way into the Chowder Society."

"What?"
Sears exploded.
"Buy?"

"With a story. Isn't that the admission fee?" He smiled tentatively around the circle. "It's very clear in my mind because I just spent some time writing it all in a journal. And," he said, breaking another of their rules, "this isn't fiction. This happened just in the way I'll tell it—you couldn't use it as fiction because it didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened. But if Mr. Hawthorne" ("Ricky," the lawyer breathed) "is right, then five people, not four, have died. And my brother was the first of them."

"You were both engaged to the same girl," Ricky said, remembering one of the last things Edward had said to him.

"We were both engaged to Alma Mobley, a girl I met at Berkeley," Don began, and the four of them settled into their chairs. "I think this is a ghost story," he said, pulling, in Dr. Rabbitfoot's image, the dollar from his jeans.

"So the
Who's Who
entry proved that everything she had said was false," Don concluded. "David was dead, and I never saw her again. She had simply disappeared." He wiped his face; exhaled loudly. "That's it. Is it a ghost story or not? You tell me."

None of the men spoke for a moment.
Tell him, Sears,
Ricky silently prayed. He looked over at his old friend, who had steepled his fingers before his face.
Say it, Sears. Tell him.

Sears eyes met his.
He knows what I'm thinking.

"Well," Sears said, and Ricky closed his eyes. "As much as any of our stories is, I guess. Is that the series of events on which you based your book?"

"Yes."

"They make a better story than the book," Sears said.

"But they don't have an ending."

"Not yet, perhaps," Sears said. He scowled at the candles, which had burned down into the silver holders.
Now,
Ricky prayed, his eyes still closed. "This young man you imagined to look like a werewolf was named— ah, Greg? Greg Benton?" Ricky opened his eyes again, and if anyone had been looking at him they would have seen gratitude written on his every feature.

Don nodded, clearly not understanding why this was important.

"I knew him under a different name," Sears said. "A long time ago, he was called Gregory Bate. And his half-witted brother was called Fenny. I was present when Fenny died." He smiled with the bitterness of a man compelled to eat a meal he hates. "That would have been quite some time before your—Benton— decided to affect a shaven head."

"If he can make two appearances, then he can make three," Ricky said. "I saw him on the square not two weeks ago."

The lights, violently bright after so long a time of candlelight, came suddenly on. The four men in Sears's library, their distinction and whatever of ease the candlelight had given them erased by the harsher light, looked fearful:
we look half-dead already,
Ricky thought. It was as though the candles had drawn them into a warm circle, the warmth of a candle and a group and a story; now they were blown apart, scattered on a wintry plain.

"Looks like he heard you," Lewis, drunk, said. "Maybe that's what Freddy Robinson saw. Maybe he saw Gregory turning into a wolf. Hah!"

The werewolf came slowly, unstoppably toward them, in no hurry at all. "You want to meet her, don't you?" His grin was ferocious. "She will be so pleased. You will have quite a welcome, I promise you."

Peter looked wildly around; saw phosphorescent light leaking from beneath a door.

"She is not perhaps quite in shape to see you yet, but that makes it all the more interesting, don't you think? We all like to see our friends with their masks off."

He's talking to keep us still,
Peter thought.
It's like hypnotism.

"Aren't you the two boys interested in scientific exploration? In telescopes? How nice it is to meet two fine young fellows with inquiring minds, two fellows who want to extend their knowledge. So many young people merely coast along, don't they, so many are afraid to take risks. Well we certainly can't say that about you now, can we?"

Peter glanced at Jim Hardie's face: Jim's mouth hung open.

"No, you have been extremely brave. Now I will be with you in a moment, and I want you to relax and wait for me ... just relax and wait."

Peter slammed the back of his hand into Jim's ribs, but Jim did not move. He glanced back at the terrible figure coming toward him, and made the mistake of looking directly into the blank golden eyes. Immediately he heard a voice like music coming not from the man but speaking directly inside his head:
Relax, Peter, relax, you will meet her ...

"Jim!" he screamed.

Hardie gave a convulsive shudder, and Peter knew that he was lost already.

Settle down, boy, no need for all that noise ...

The golden-eyed man was nearly to them, reaching out his left hand. Peter stepped backward, too frightened for coherent thought.

The man's white hand glided nearer and nearer Jim's own left hand.

Peter turned his back and pounded halfway up the next flight of stairs. When he looked around the light beneath the door on the landing was spilling out with such intensity that the walls were tinted faintly green: green too was Jim, in that light.

"Just take my hand," the man said. He was two steps below Jim, and their hands nearly touched.

Jim brushed his fingers against the palm of the man's hand.

Peter looked up the stairs, but could not leave Jim.

The man beneath was chuckling. Peter's heart froze, and he looked down again. The man was grasping Jim's wrist with his left hand. The wolfish eyes glowed wide.

Jim screeched.

The man holding him moved his hands to Jim's throat and twisted his body with immense force, slamming the boy's head against the wall. He planted his feet on the boards of the landing and again smashed Jim's head into the wall.

Your turn.

Jim fell onto the boards and the man kicked him aside as if he were as weightless as a paper bag. A bright smear of blood like a child's fingerpainting lay on the wall.

Peter ran down a long corridor lined with doors; opened one at random and slipped in.

Just inside the door, he froze. The outline of a man's head showed against a window. "Welcome home," the man's toneless voice said. "Have you met her yet?" He stood up from the bed. "You haven't? Once you do, you'll never forget it. An incredible woman."

The man, still only a black outline against a window, began to shuffle toward Peter, who remained stock-still just inside the door. As the man drew nearer, he saw that it was Freddy Robinson.

"Welcome home," Robinson said.

Found you.

Footsteps in the corridor paused outside the bedroom door.
Time. Time. Time. Time.

"You know, I don't exactly remember—"

Panicked, Peter rushed at Robinson with his arms extended, intending to shove him out of the way: the moment his fingers touched his shirt, Robinson broke up into a shapeless pattern of glowing points of light; his fingers tingled. It was gone utterly in an instant, and Peter rushed through the air where it had been.

"Come out, Peter," said the voice outside the door. "We all want you to come out"; and the other voice in his mind repeated
Time.

Standing in front of the bed, Peter heard the doorknob moving. He scrambled onto the bed and banged the heels of his hands against the top of the window frames.

The window slid up as if on grease. Cold air streamed over him. He felt the other mind reaching for him, telling him to come to the door, not to be silly, didn't he want to see that Jim was all right?

Jim!

He crawled out of the window as the door opened. Something rushed toward him, but he was already across the upper roof and jumping down onto the next level. From there he let himself drop onto the roof of the garage; and from the garage he jumped onto a snowdrift.

As he ran past Jim's car he looked sideways at the house; but it was as solidly ordinary as it had looked at first: only the lights in the stairwell and front hall burned, casting an inviting rectangle of yellow onto the walk. That too seemed to speak to Peter Barnes, to say
imagine the peace of lying down with your hands crossed on your chest, imagine sleeping under ice ...

He ran all the way home.