Ghost Story (41 page)

Peter tried to visualize the landscape on his side of the highway, and remembered that only for a mile or so in the vicinity of Lewis's house was there heavy ground cover—most of the rest of the land, until an eruption of gas stations and drive-ins marked the edges of Milburn, was field. Unless he crawled in ditches for seven miles, the man in the car would be able to see him as soon as he left the stretch of woods.

Come out, son.

The Witness was aimlessly sending out messages, trying to coax him into the car. Peter shut his mind to the whispers as well as he could and plunged on through the woods. Maybe if he kept on running, the Witness would drive down the road far enough to let him think.

Come on, boy. Come out of there. Let me take you to her.

Still protected by the high brambles and the trees, Peter ran until he could see, strung between the massive trunks of oaks, double strands of silvery wire. Beyond the wire was a long curved vacancy of field— empty white ground. The Witness's car was nowhere in sight. Peter looked sideways, but here the trees were too thick and the brambles too high for him to see the section of highway nearest him. Peter reached the last of the trees and the wire and looked over the field, wondering if he could get across unseen. If the man saw him on the field, Peter knew he would be helpless. He could run, but eventually the man would get him as the thing back in the Montgomery Street house got Jim.

She's interested in you, Peter.

It was another aimless, haphazard dart with no real urgency in it.

She'll give you everything you want.

She'll give you anything you want.

She'll give you back your mother.

The blue car edged forward into his vision and stopped just past the point where the field began. Peter shuddered back a few feet deeper into the wood. The man in the car turned sideways, resting his arm along the top of the seat, and in this posture of patient waiting looked out at the field Peter would have to cross.

Come on out and we'll give you your mother.

Yes. That was what they would do. They'd give him back his mother. She would be like Jim Hardie and Freddy Robinson, with empty eyes and amnesiac conversation and no more substance than a ray of moonlight.

Peter sat down on wet ground, trying to remember if any other roads were near. He would have to go through the woods or the man would find him when he crossed the field; was there another road, running parallel to the highway, going back to Milburn?

He remembered nights of driving around the countryside with Jim, all of the footloose journeying of high school weekends and summers: he would have said that he knew Broome County as well as he knew his own bedroom.

But the patient man in the blue car made it difficult to think. He could not remember what happened on the other side of this wood—a developer's suburb, a factory? For a moment his mind would not give him the information he knew it had, and instead offered images of vacant buildings where dark things moved behind drawn blinds. But whatever lay on the other side of the woods, the other side was where he had to go.

Peter stood up quietly and retreated a few yards farther into the woods before turning his back on the highway and running away from the car. Seconds later he remembered what he was running toward. There was an old two-lane macadam highway in this direction, in Milburn, called "the old Binghamton road" because once it had been the only highway between the two towns: pitted, obsolete and unsafe, it was avoided by nearly all traffic now. Once there had been small businesses dotted along it, fruit markets, a motel, a drugstore. Now most of these were empty, and some of them had been razed. The Bay Tree Market alone flourished: it was heavily patronized by the better-off people of Milburn. His mother had always bought fruit and vegetables there.

If he remembered the distance between the old and new highways correctly, it would take him less than twenty minutes to get to the Market. From there he could get a lift into town and make it safely to the hotel.

Now, seeing in the blank gray air ahead of him that the woods were ending, he went nearer the fence and crept slowly along it for the final thirty yards. He still was not sure if the fruit market was to the left or the right, or how far off it was. All he hoped was that it would be in sight, and show a busy parking lot.

He squelched forward, peering around the few remaining trees.

You're wasting your time, Peter. Don't you want to see your mother again?

He groaned, feeling the feathery touch of the Witness's mind. His stomach went cold. The blue car was parked on the road before him. On the front seat Peter saw a bulky shape he knew was the Witness, leaning back, waiting for him to show himself.

The Bay Tree Market was in sight about a quarter mile down the old highway to Peter's left—the car faced the other way. If he made a run for it, the man would have to turn his car around on the narrow old road.

That still would not give him enough time.

Peter looked again at the market: there were plenty of cars in the lot. At least one of them would belong to someone he knew. All he had to do was to get there.

In fact, the only thing he could do, apart from rushing the man, was to go openly across the field to the market and see what happened. The man was looking the other way, and at least he would have some time before he was seen.

Peter separated the strands of wire clipped to the trees and climbed through. A quarter of a mile away, in a straight line, was the rear parking lot of the Bay Tree Market. He held his breath and started walking across the field.

The car did a three-point turn behind him and drew up alongside him, just visible in the periphery of his vision.
Nice brave boy. Nice boys shouldn't go hitchhiking, should they?
Peter closed his eyes and went stumbling over the field.

Stupid brave boy.
He wondered what the man would do to stop him.

He did not have to wait long to find out.

"Peter, I have to talk to you. Open your eyes, Peter." The voice was Lewis Benedikt's. Peter opened his eyes and saw Lewis standing twenty yards before him, dressed in baggy trousers, boots, an unfastened khaki army jacket.

"You're not here," Peter said.

"Talk sense, Peter," Lewis said, and began to come toward him. "You can see me, can't you? You can hear me? I'm here. Please listen to me. I want to tell you about your mother."

"She's dead." Peter stopped walking, unwilling to get closer to the Lewis-creature.

"No, she is not." Lewis stopped too, as if not wishing to frighten Peter. Off on the road to their side, the car also halted. "Nothing's that black or white. She wasn't dead when you saw her in my house, was she?"

"She was."

"You can't be sure, Pete. She passed out, just like you." Lewis opened his hands and smiled at Peter.

"No. They cut—they cut open her throat. They killed her. Just like those animals were killed." He closed his eyes again.

"Pete, you're wrong and I can prove it. That man in the car doesn't want to hurt you. Let's go to him. Let's go there now."

Peter opened his eyes. "Did you really sleep with my mother?"

"People our age sometimes make mistakes. They do things they're sorry about later. But it didn't mean anything, Pete. You'll see when you get home. All you have to do is come home with us, and she'll be there, just like she always is." Lewis was smiling toward him with intelligent concern. "Don't judge her badly because she made one mistake." He started coming forward again. "Trust me. I always hoped we'd be friends."

"I did too, but you can't be my friend because you're dead," Peter said. He bent over and picked up a double handful of wet snow. He squeezed it together in his hands.

"You're going to throw a snowball at me? Isn't that a little juvenile?"

"I feel sorry for you," Peter said, and threw the snowball and blew the thing that looked like Lewis into a shower of falling light.

As if shell-shocked, he trudged ahead, walking straight through the space where Lewis had stood. The air tingled on his face. He felt another feathery tickling in his mind, and braced himself.

But no words followed. Instead came a wave of bitterness and anger which nearly knocked him down with its force. It was the same blackness of feeling he had seen when the creature holding his mother had taken off its dark glasses, and the violence of the emotion made him stagger; but there was a wide current of defeat in it.

Peter snapped his head sideways in surprise; the blue car accelerated down the macadam road.

Relief buckled his knees. He did not know why, but he had won. Peter sat heavily, clumsily down in the snow and tried not to cry. After a while he stood up again and continued on toward the parking lot. He was too numb for feeling; he made himself concentrate on getting his legs to move. First one step, then another. His feet were very cold. Another step. Now he was not far from the lot.

Then an even greater sweetness flooded through him. His mother was flying through the parking lot running toward him. "Pete!" she shouted, half-sobbing. "Thank God!"

She reached the cars at the edge of the lot and ran past them onto the field. He stood watching her run toward him, too crowded with feeling to speak, and then trudged forward. She had a large bruise on one cheek and her hair was as tangled as a gypsy's. A scarf tied around her neck showed a line of red at its center.

"You got away," he said, stupefied with relief.

"They took me out of the house—that man—" She stood a few yards away from him, and her hands went to her throat. "He cut my neck—I fainted—I thought they were going to kill you."

"I thought you were dead," he told her. "Oh, mom."

"Poor Pete." She hugged her arms around herself. "Let's get out of here. We'll have to get a ride back to town. I guess both of us can just about move that far."

That she could joke, however feebly, moved him again to the point of tears. He put a hand over his eyes.

"Cry later," she said. "I think I'll cry for a week after I sit down. Let's find a ride."

"How did you get away from them?" He walked beside her, about to hug her, but she stepped backward, leading him toward the lot. He fell into step with her.

"I guess they thought I was too frightened to move. And when they got me outside, the fresh air sort of revived me. That man relaxed his hold on my arm, and I swung around and belted him with my bag. Then I ran away into the woods. I heard them looking for me. I've never
never
been so scared in my life. After a while they just gave up. Were they looking for you?"

"No," he said. "No." And the tension melted in him. "There was someone else, but he left—he didn't get me."

"They'll leave us alone now," she said. "Now that we're away from there."

He looked into her face, and she glanced down. "I owe you a lot of explanations, Peter. But this isn't the time. I just want to get home and put a real bandage on my throat. We'll have to think of something to tell your father."

"You won't tell him what happened?"

"We'll just let it die, can't we?" she asked, and looked pleadingly at him. "I'll explain everything to you —in time. Let's just be thankful now that we're alive."

They stepped onto the surface of the parking lot.

"Okay," Peter said. "Mom, I'm so—" He struggled with his emotions, but they were too dense to be expressed. "We have to talk to someone, though. The same man that hurt you killed Jim Hardie."

She looked back at him, having walked forward toward the crowded middle of the lot "I know."

"You know?"

"I mean I guessed. Hurry up, Pete. My neck hurts. I want to get home."

"You said you knew."

She made a gesture of exasperation. "Don't cross-examine me, Peter."

Peter looked wildly around the parking lot and saw the blue car just nosing past the side of the market. "Oh, mom," he said. "They did. They did. You didn't get away from them."

"Peter.
Snap out of it. I see someone we can get a ride with."

As the blue car swung up the lane behind her, Peter walked toward his mother, staring at her. "Okay, I'm coming."

"Good. Peter, everything will be the way it was again, you will see. We both had a terrible fright, but a hot bath and a good sleep will work wonders."

"You'll need stitches in your neck," Peter said, coming closer.

"No, of course not." She smiled at him. "A bandage is all I need. It was just a scratch. Peter. What are you doing, Peter? Don't touch it, it hurts. You'll start the bleeding again."

The blue car was now at the top of their row. Peter reached out toward his mother.

"Don't, Pete, well get our ride in a minute ..."

He clamped his eyes shut and swung his arm toward his mother's head. A second later his fingers were tingling. He yelled: a horn sounded, terrifyingly loud.

When he opened his eyes his mother was gone and the blue car was speeding toward him. Peter scrambled toward the protection of two parked cars and slipped between them just as the blue car raced by, scraping its side against them and making them rock.

He watched it squeeze down to the end of the aisle, and when it cut across to drive up the next aisle, he saw Irmengard Draeger, Penny's mother, walk out of the back door of the market carrying a sack of groceries. He ran toward her, cutting through the rows of parked cars.