Ghost Story (56 page)

It was in the East Fifties, and it was so familiar to him because quite near—somewhere very near—was a cafe with outdoor tables where he had met David for lunch whenever he was in New York.

This was not a hallucination—not a mere hallucination. He
was
in New York, and it was summer. Don felt a weight in his left hand, and looking down, saw that he was carrying an axe.
An axe? Now what ... ?
He dropped the axe as if it had jumped in his hand. His brother called, "Don! Over here!"

Yes, he had been carrying an axe ... they had seen green light ... he had been turning, moving fast ...

"Don!"

He looked across the street and saw David, looking healthy and extremely prosperous, standing up at one of the outdoor tables, grinning at him and waving. David in a crisp lightweight blue suit, aviator glasses smoked over his eyes, their bows disappearing into David's sun-blond hair. "Wake up!" his brother called over the traffic.

Don rubbed his face with his freezing hands. It was important not to appear confused in front of David— David had asked him to lunch. David had something to tell him.

New York?

But yes, it was New York, and there was David, looking at him amusedly, happy to see him, full of something to say. Don looked down at the sidewalk. The axe was gone. He ran between the cars and embraced his brother and smelled cigars, good shampoo, Aramis cologne. He was here and David was alive.

"How do you feel?" David asked.

"I'm not here and you're dead," came out of his mouth.

David looked embarrassed, then disguised it behind another smile. "You'd better sit down, little brother. You're not supposed to be talking like that anymore." David held his elbow and led him to a chair beneath one of the sun umbrellas. A martini on the rocks chilled a sweating glass.

"I'm not supposed ... Don began. He sat heavily in the chair; Manhattan traffic went down the pleasant East Fifties street; on the other side, over the top of the traffic, he read the name of a French restaurant painted in gold on dark glass. Even his cold feet could tell that the pavement was hot.

"You bet you're not," David said. "I ordered a steak for you, all right? I didn't think you'd want anything too rich." He looked sympathetically across the table at Don. The modish glasses hid his eyes, but David's whole handsome face exuded warmth. "Is that suit okay, by the way? I found it in your closet. Now that you're out of the hospital, you'll have to shop for some new clothes. Use my account at Brooks, will you?" Don looked down at what he wore. A tan summer suit, a brown-and-green-striped tie, brown loafers. It all looked a little out of date and shabby beside David's elegance.

"Now look at me and tell me I'm dead," David said.

"You're not dead."

David sighed happily. "Okay. Good. You had me worried there, pal. Now—do you remember anything about what happened?"

"No. Hospital?"

"You had about the worst breakdown anyone's ever seen, brother. It was the next thing to a one-way ticket. Happened right after you finished that book."

"The Nightwatcher?"

"What else? You just blanked out—and when you'd say anything, it was just crazy stuff about me being dead and Alma being something awful and mysterious. You were in outer space. If you don't remember any of this, it's because of the shock treatments. Now we have to get you settled again. I talked to Professor Lieberman, and he says he'll give you another appointment in the fall—he really liked you, Don."

"Lieberman? No, he said I was ..."

"That was before he knew how sick you were. Anyhow, I got you out of Mexico and put you in a private hospital in Riverdale. Paid all the bills until you got straightened out. The steak'll be here in a minute. Better get that martini down. The house red isn't bad here."

Don obediently sipped at his drink: that familiar cold potent taste. "Why am I so
cold?"
he asked David. "I'm frozen."

"Aftereffect of the drug therapy." David patted his hand. "They told me you'd feel like that for a day or two, cold, not too sure of yourself yet—it'll go away. I promise you."

A waitress came with their food. Don let her take away his martini glass.

"You had all these disturbed ideas," his brother was saying. "Now that you're well again, they'll shock you. You thought my wife was some kind of monster who had killed me in Amsterdam—you were convinced of it. The doctor said you couldn't face the fact that you'd lost her: that's why you never came out here to talk about it. You wound up thinking that what you wrote in your novel was real. After you mailed the book off to your agent, you just sat in a hotel room, not eating, not washing—you didn't even get up to shit. I had to go all the way down to Mexico City to bring you back."

"What was I doing an hour ago?" Don asked.

"You were getting a sedative shot. Then they put you in a cab and sent you down here. I thought you'd like to see the place again. Something familiar."

"I've been in a hospital for a year?"

"Nearly two years. For the past few months, you've been making great progress."

"Why can't I remember it?"

"Simple. Because you don't want to. As far as you're concerned, you were born five minutes ago. But it'll all come back slowly. You can recuperate in our place on the Island—lots of sun, sand, a few women. Like the sound of that?"

Don blinked and looked around. His entire body felt unreasonably cold. A tall woman was just now coming down the block toward them, pulled along by an enormous sheepdog on a leash—the woman was slender and tanned, she wore sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and for a moment she was the emblem of what was real: the epitome of all not hallucinated or imagined, of sanity. She was no one important, she was a stranger, but if what David was telling, him was the truth, she meant health.

"You'll see plenty of women," David said, almost laughing. "Don't burn out your eyes on the first one who crosses your path."

"You're married to Alma now," Don said.

"Of course. She's dying to see you. And you know," David said, still smiling, holding a fork with a neatly speared section of meat, "she's kind of flattered about that book of yours. She feels she contributed to literature! But I want to tell you something," and David hitched his chair closer. "Think about the consequences of it, if what you said in that book was true. If creatures like that really existed—and you thought they did, you know."

"I know," Don said. "I thought—"

"Wait. Let me finish. Can't you see how puny we'd look to them? We live—what? A miserable sixty-seventy years, maybe. They'd live for centuries—for a century of centuries. Becoming anything they want to become. Our lives are made by accident, by coincidence, by a blind combination of genes—they make themselves by will. They would detest us. And they'd be right. Next to them, we would be detestable."

"No," Don said. "That's all wrong. They're savage and cruel, they live on death ..." He felt as though he were about to be sick. "You can't say those things."

"Your problem is that you're still caught up in the story you were telling yourself—even though you're out of it, that story is still hanging around in your memory somewhere. You know, your doctor told me he never saw anything like it—when you flipped, you flipped into a
story.
You'd be walking down the hall in the hospital, and you'd be carrying on a conversation with people who weren't there. You were all wrapped up in some sort of plot. Impressed the hell out of the doctors. You'd be talking to them, and they'd talk back, but you answered back like you were talking to some guy named Sears or another guy named Ricky ..." David smiled and shook his head.

"What happened at the end of the story?" Don asked.

"Huh?"

"What happened at the end of the story?"
Don set down his fork and leaned forward, staring at his brother's bland face.

"They didn't let you get there," David said. "They were afraid to—looked like you were setting yourself up to get killed. See, that was part of your problem. You invented these fantastic beautiful creatures, and then you 'wrote' yourself into the story as their enemy. But nothing like that could ever be defeated. No matter how hard you tried, they'd always win in the end."

"No, that isn't ..." Don said. That wasn't correct: he could only remember the vague outlines of the "story" David was talking about, but he was sure David was wrong.

"Your doctors said it was the most interesting way for a novelist to commit suicide they ever heard of. So they couldn't let you push it to the end, do you see? They had to bring you out of it."

Don sat as if in freezing wind.

"What?" said Ricky, snapping up his head and seeing before him Sears's beloved library: the glass-fronted bookcases, the leather chairs drawn into a circle, the dark windows. Immediately across from him, Sears drew on his cigar and gazed at him with what looked like mild annoyance. Lewis and John, holding their whiskey glasses and dressed like Sears in black tie, appeared to be more embarrassed than annoyed.

"What dream?" Ricky said, and shook his head. He too was in evening dress: by the cigar, by the quality of the darkness, by a thousand familiar details, he knew they were at the last stage of a Chowder Society meeting.

"You dozed off," John said. "Right after you finished your story."

"Story?"

"And then," Sears said, "you looked right at me and said, 'You're dead.' "

"Oh. The nightmare," Ricky said. "Oh, yes. Did I really? My goodness, I'm cold."

"At our age, we all have poor circulation," said Dr. Jaffrey.

"What's the date?"

"You really
were
out," Sears said, lifting his eyebrows. "It's the ninth of October."

"And is Don here? Where is Don?" Ricky looked frantically around the library, as if Edward's nephew might be hiding under a chair.

"Really, Ricky," Sears grumped. "We just voted on writing to him, if you remember. It is extremely unlikely that he should appear before the letter is written."

"We have to tell him about Eva Galli," Ricky said, remembering the vote. "It's imperative."

John smiled thinly, and Lewis leaned back in his chair, looking at Ricky as if he thought he'd lost his mind.

"You do make the most amazing reversals," Sears said. "Gentlemen, since our friend here evidently needs his sleep, perhaps we'd better call it a night."

"Sears,"
Ricky said, suddenly galvanized by another memory.

"Yes, Ricky?"

"Next time we meet—when we meet at John's house—don't tell the story you have in mind. You cannot tell that story. It will have the most appalling consequences."

"Stay here a moment, Ricky," Sears ordered, and showed the other two men out of the room.

He came back carrying the freshly fired-up cigar and a bottle. "You seem to need a drink. It must have been quite a dream."

"Was I out long?" He could hear, down on the street, the sound of Lewis trying to start up the Morgan.

"Ten minutes. No longer. Now what was that about my story for next time?"

Ricky opened his mouth, tried to recapture what had been so important only minutes before, and realized that he must look very foolish. "I don't know any more. Something about Eva Galli."

"I can promise you I was not going to speak about that. I don't imagine any of us ever shall, and I think that really is for the best, don't you?"

"No.
No. We have to—" Ricky realized he was going to mention Donald Wanderley again, and blushed. "I suppose it must have been part of my dream. Is my window open, Sears? I'm actually freezing. And I feel so tired. I can't imagine what ..."

"Age. No more or less. We're coming to the end of our span, Ricky. All of us. We've lived long enough, haven't we?"

Ricky shook his head.

"John's dying already. You can see it in his face, can't you?"

"Yes, I thought I saw ..." Ricky said, thinking back to a time at the start of the meeting—a plane of darkness sliding across John Jaffrey's forehead—which now seemed to have happened years before.

"Death. That's what you thought you saw. It's true, my old friend." Sears smiled benignly at him. "I've been giving this a lot of thought, and you mentioning Eva Galli—well, it stirs it all up. I'll tell you what I've been thinking." Sears drew on the cigar and leaned massively forward. "I think Edward did not die of natural causes. I think he was given a vision of such terrible and unearthly beauty that the shock to his poor mortal system killed him. I think we have been skirting the edges of that beauty in our stories for a year."

"No, not beauty," Ricky said. "Something obscene— something terrible."

"Hold it. I want you to consider the possibility of another race of beings—powerful, all-knowing, beautiful beings. If they existed, they would detest us. We would be cattle compared to them. They'd live for centuries—for a century of centuries, so that you and I would look like children to them. They would not be bound by accident, coincidence or a blind combination of genes. They'd be right to detest us: beside them, we would be detestable." Sears stood up, put down his glass, and began to pace. "Eva Galli. That was where we missed our chance. Ricky, we could have seen things worth our pathetic lives to see."

"They're even vainer than we are, Sears," Ricky said. "Oh. Now I remember. The
Bates.
That's the story you can't tell."

"Oh, that's all finished now," Sears said. "Everything is finished now." He walked to Ricky, and leaned on his chair looking down at him. "I fear that from now on all of us are—is it
hors commerce
or
de combat?"

"In your case, I am sure it is
hors de combat,"
Ricky said, remembering his lines. He felt terribly ill, shivering, he felt the onslaught of the worst cold of his life: it lay like smoke in his lungs and weighted his arms like a winter's worth of snow.

Sears leaned toward him. "That's true for all of us, Ricky. But still, it was quite a journey, wasn't it?" Sears plugged the cigar in his mouth and reached out to palp Ricky's neck. "I
thought
I saw swollen glands. You'll be lucky not to die of pneumonia." Sears's massive hand circled Ricky's throat.

Helplessly, Ricky sneezed.