Ghost Story (40 page)

Peter ran out of the bedroom and down the hall until he found a bathroom. Then he turned on the hot water and scrubbed his face and hands over and over, working up the lather and rinsing it off, then taking the soap again and working it between his palms. He was sobbing. His mother was dead: she had come to see Lewis, and they had killed her. They had done to her what they did to animals: they were dead creatures that lived like vampires on blood. But they were not vampires. Nor were they werewolves; they could just make you think they were. They had sold themselves long ago to whatever owned them. Peter remembered green light leaking from beneath a door, and nearly vomited into the sink.
She
owned them. They were nightwatchers— night-things. He smeared Lewis's soap over his mouth, rubbing and rubbing to rid himself of the smell of Fenny's hands.

Peter remembered Jim Hardie seated at the bar in a seedy country tavern, asking him if he would like to see all of Milburn go up in flames, and knew that unless he could be stronger, braver and smarter than Jim, that what would happen to Milburn would be worse than that. The nightwatchers would systematically ruin the town—make it a ghost town—and leave behind only the stench of death.

Because that's all they want,
he said to himself, remembering Gregory Bate's naked face,
all they want is to destroy.
He saw Jim Hardie's taut face, the face of Jim drunk and hurling himself into a wild scheme; the face of Sonny Venuti leaning toward him with her pop eyes; of his mother as she left the station wagon on the brick court; and chillingly, of the actress at the party last year, looking at him with a smiling mouth and expressionless eyes.

He dropped Lewis's towel on the bathroom floor.

They've been here before.

There was only one person who could help him— who might not think he was lying or crazy. He had to get back to town and see the writer who was staying in the hotel.

The loss of his mother went through him once again, shaking tears from him; but he did not have time to cry now. He went out into the hall and past the heavy door. "Oh, mom," he said. "I'll stop them. I'll
get
them. I'll—" But the words were hollow, just a boy's defiance.
They want you to think that.

Peter did not look back at the house as he ran down the drive, but he felt it back there, watching him and mocking his puny intentions—as if it knew that his freedom was only that of a dog on a leash. At any second he could be pulled back, his neck bruised, his wind cut off ...

He saw why when he reached the end of Lewis's drive. A car was parked on the verge of the highway, and the Jehovah's Witness who had given him a lift was inside it, looking at him. He blinked his lights at Peter: glowing eyes. "Come along," the man called. "Just come along, son."

Peter ran out into the traffic. An oncoming car squealed around him, another car skidded to a stop. Half a dozen horns cried out. He reached the median and ran across the empty other half of the highway. He could still hear the Witness calling to him. "Come back. It's no good."

Peter disappeared into the underbrush on the far side of the highway. Among the noises and confusions of traffic, he clearly heard the Witness starting up his car to track him back to town.

Flossie sniffed at the base of a tree, checked that he was still there, and trotted on.

The worst part of the story was that he had allowed Linda to go into the child's room alone. Sitting at the de Peyser table, woozy, even more exhausted than he was now, he had sensed that the entire situation was somehow false, that he was unknowingly playing a part in a game. That was what he had not told Otto: that sense of wrongness which had come over him during dinner. Beneath the food's absence of taste had lain the faint taste of garbage, and in the same way beneath the superficial chatter of Florence de Peyser had lain something which had made him see himself as a marionette forced into dance. Feeling that, why had he continued to sit, to struggle to appear normal—why hadn't he taken Linda by the arm and hurried out?

Don too had said something about feeling like a player in a game.

Because they know you well enough to know what you will do. That is why you stayed. Because they knew you would.

The slight wind shifted; turned colder. The hound lifted its nose, sniffed and turned into the direction of the wind. She began to move more quickly.

"Flossie!" he yelled. The hound, already thirty yards ahead of him and visible only when he saw it coursing between the trees, emerged into an opening and glanced back at Lewis over its shoulder. Then she amazed Lewis by lowering her head and growling. The next second she flashed away.

Looking ahead, he saw only the bushy shapes of fir trees, interspersed with the bare skeletons of other trees, standing on ground mottled white. Melting snow moved sluggishly downhill. His feet were cold. Finally he heard the dog barking, and went toward the sound.

When he finally saw the dog, she began to whine. She was standing in a small glacial hollow, and Lewis was at the hollow's upper edge. Boulders like Easter Island statues, crusted with quartz, littered the bottom of the hollow. The dog glanced up at him, whined again, wriggled her body, and then flattened out alongside one of the boulders. "Come back, Flossie," he said. The dog pressed herself onto the ground, switching her tail.

"What is it?" he asked her.

He stepped into the hollow and slipped two yards down on cold mud. The dog barked once sharply, then turned in a tight circle and flattened herself out again on the ground. She was looking at a stand of fir trees growing up on the far side of the hollow. As Lewis slogged through the mud, Flossie crept forward toward the trees.

"Don't go in there," he said. The dog crept up to the first of the trees, whining; then it disappeared under the branches.

He tried to call it out. The hound would not return. No sound came from within the thick cluster of firs. Frustrated, Lewis looked up at the sky and saw heavy clouds scudding on the north wind. The two days' respite from snow was over.

"Flossie."

The dog did not reappear, but as he looked at the dense curtain of fir needles he saw an astonishing thing. Stitched into the pattern of needles and branches was the outline of a door. A dump of dark needles formed the handle. It was the most perfect optical illusion he had ever seen: even the hinges were represented.

Lewis took a step forward. He was at the spot where Flossie had flattened herself out on the ground. The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.

It was the door to his bedroom.

It wanted him to open it. Lewis stood in his wet boots in a cold, lifting breeze and knew that all the inexplicable occurrences of his life since that day in 1929 had led him to this: they put him in front of an impossible door to an unforseeable experience. If he had just been thinking that the story of Linda's death was—as Don said of the story of Alma Mobley—without point or ending, then there behind the door was its meaning. Even then Lewis knew that the door led not to one room but many.

Lewis could not refuse it. Otto, rubbing his hands before a twigfire, was only a part of an existence too trivial to insist on its worth—too trivial to hold to. For Lewis, who had already made his decision, his past, especially the latest years in Milburn, was dull lead, a long ache of boredom and uselessness from which he had been shown the way out.

Thus Lewis turned the brass knob and fell into his place in the puzzle.

He stepped, as he knew he would, into a bedroom. He recognized it immediately: the sunny bedroom, filled with Spanish flowers, of the ground-floor apartment he and Linda had kept in the hotel. A silky Chinese rug stretched beneath his feet to each of the room's corners; flowers in vases, still hungry for the sun, picked up the golds, reds and blues of the rug and shone them back. He turned around, saw the closing door, and smiled. Sun streamed through the twin windows. Looking out, he saw a green lawn, a railed precipice and the top of the steps down to the sea which glimmered below. Lewis went to the canopied bed. A dark blue velvet dressing gown lay folded across its foot. At peace, Lewis surveyed the entire lovely room.

Then the door to the lounge opened, and Lewis turned smiling to his wife. In the haze of his utter happiness, he moved forward, extending his arms. He stopped when he saw that she was crying.

"Darling, what's wrong? What happened?"

She raised her hands: across them lay the body of a short-haired dog. "One of the guests found her lying on the patio. Everybody was just coming out from lunch, and when I got there they were all standing around staring at the poor little thing. It was horrible, Lewis."

Lewis leaned over the body of the dog and kissed Linda's cheek. "I'll take care of it, Linda. But how the devil did it get there?"

"They said someone threw it out of a window ... oh, Lewis, who in the world would do a thing like that?"

"I'll take care of it. Poor sweetie. Just sit down for a minute." He took the corpse of the dog from his wife's hands. "I'll straighten it out. Don't worry about it anymore."

"But what are you going to do with it?" she wailed.

"Bury it in the rose garden next to John, I guess."

"That's good. That's lovely."

Carrying the dog, he went toward the lounge door, then paused. "Lunch went all right otherwise?"

"Yes, fine. Florence de Peyser invited us to join her in the suite for dinner tonight. Will you feel like it after all that tennis? You're sixty-five, remember."

"No, I'm not." Lewis faced her with a puzzled expression. "I'm married to you, so I'm fifty. You're making me old before my time!"

"Absentminded me," Linda said. "Really, I could just kick myself."

"I'll be right back with a much better idea," Lewis said, and went through the door to the lounge.

The dog's weight slipped off his hands, and everything changed. His father was walking toward him across the floor of the parsonage living room. "Two more points, Lewis. Your mother deserves a little consideration, you know. You treat this house as though it were a hotel. You come in at all hours of the night." His father reached the armchair behind which Lewis stood, swerved off in the direction of the fireplace, and then marched back to the other side of the room, still talking. "Sometimes, I am told, you drink spirits. Now I am not a prudish man, but I will not tolerate that. I know you are sixty-five—"

"Seventeen," Lewis said.

"Seventeen, then. Don't interrupt. No doubt you think that is very grown up. But you will not drink spirits while you live under this roof, is that understood? And I want you to begin showing your age by helping your mother with the cleaning. This room is henceforth your responsibility. You must dust and clean it once a week. And see to the grate in the mornings. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," he said.

"Good. That is point one. Point two concerns your friends. Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne are both fine men, and I would say I have an excellent relationship with both of them. But age and circumstance divide us. I would not call them friends, nor would they call me their friend. For one thing, they are Episcopalians, just one step from popery. For another, they possess a good deal of money. Mr. James must be one of the richest men in all of New York, Do you know what that means, in 1928?"

"Yes, sir."

"It means that you cannot afford to keep up with his son. Nor can you keep up with Mr. Hawthorne's son. We lead respectable and godly lives, but we are not wealthy. If you continue to associate with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I foresee the direst consequences. They have the habits of the sons of wealthy men. As you know, it is my plan to send you to the university in the autumn, but you will be one of the poorest students at Cornell, and you must not learn such habits, Lewis, they will lead only to ruin. I will forever regret your mother's generosity in using her own funds to provide the wherewithal to purchase you a motorcar." He was on another circuit of the room. "And people are already gossiping about the three of you and that Italian woman on Montgomery Street I know clergymen's sons are supposed to be wild, but ... well, words fail me." He paused midpoint on the track from the corner of the room and looked seriously into Lewis's eyes. "I assume that I am understood."

"Yes, sir. I understand. Is that all?"

"No. I am at a loss to account for this." His father was holding out to him the corpse of a short-haired hound. "It was lying dead on the walk to the church door. What if one of the congregation had seen it there? I want you to dispose of it immediately."

"Leave it to me," Lewis said. "I'll bury it in the rose garden."

"Please do so immediately."

Lewis took the dog out of the living room, and at the last minute turned to ask, "Do you have Sunday's sermon prepared, father?"

No one answered. He was in an unused bedroom at the top of the house on Montgomery Street. The room's only furniture was a bed. The floorboards were bare, and greasepaper had been nailed over the only window. Because Lewis's car had a flat tire, Sears and Ricky were off borrowing Warren Scales's old flivver while Warren and his pregnant wife shopped. A woman lay on the bed, but she would not answer him because she was dead. A sheet covered her body.

Lewis moved back and forth on the floorboards, willing his friends to return with the farmer's car. He did not want to look at the covered shape on the bed; he went to the window. Through the greasepaper he could see only vague orange light. He glanced back at the sheet. "Linda," he said miserably.

He stood in a metal room, with gray metal walls. One light bulb hung from the ceiling. His wife lay under a sheet on a metal table. Lewis leaned over her body and sobbed. "I won't bury you in the pond," he said. "I'll take you into the rose garden." He touched his wife's lifeless fingers under the sheet and felt them twitch. He recoiled.

As he watched horrified, Linda's hands crept up beneath the sheet. Her white hands folded the sheet down over her face. She sat up, and her eyes opened.

Lewis cowered at the far end of the little room. When his wife swung her legs off the morgue table, he screamed. She was naked, and the left side of her face was broken and scraped. He held his hands out in front of him in a childish gesture of protection. Linda smiled at him, and said, "What about that poor dog?" She was pointing to the uncovered slab of table, where a short-haired hound lay on its side in a puddle of blood.

He looked back in horror at his wife, but Stringer Dedham, his hair parted in the middle, a brown shirt concealing his stumps, stood beside him. "What did you see, Stringer?" he asked.

Stringer smiled at him bloodily. "I saw you. That's why I jumped out of the window. Don't be a puddin' head."

"You saw me?"

"Did I say I saw you? Guess I'm the puddin' head.
I
didn't see you. Your wife's the one saw
you.
What
I
saw was my girl. Saw her right through her window, morning of the day I helped out on the thresher. Gosh, I must be a real moron."

"But what did you see her doing? What did you try to tell your sisters?"

Stringer bent back his head and laughed, and blood gushed out of his mouth. He coughed. "Golly gee, I couldn't hardly believe it, it was just amazin', friend. You ever see a snake with its head cut off? You ever see that tongue dartin' out—and that head just a stump of a thing no bigger than your thumb? You ever see that body workin' away, beatin' itself in the dust?" Stringer laughed loudly through the red foam in his mouth. "Holy Moses, Lewis, what a godforsaken thing. Honestly, ever since it's been like I can't hardly think straight, like my brain's all mixed up and leakin' outa my ears. It's like that time I had the stroke, in 1940, remember? When one side of me froze up? And you gave me baby food on a spoon?
Grrr,
what a godawful taste!"

"That wasn't you," Lewis said, "That was my father."

"Well, what did I tell you? It's all mixed up—like someone cut my head off, and my tongue keeps moving." Stringer gave an abashed red smile. "Say, wasn't you goin' to take that poor old dog and drop it in the pond?"

"Oh, yes, when they get back," Lewis said. "We need Warren Scales's car. His wife is pregnant."

"The wife of a Roman Catholic farmer is of no concern to me at the moment," his father said. "One year at college has coarsened you, Lewis." From his temporary mooring beside the mantel, he looked long and sadly at his son. "And I know too that this is a coarsening era. Pitch defileth, Lewis. Our age is pitch. We are born into damnation, and for our children all is darkness. I wish that I could have reared you in more stable times—Lewis, once this country was a paradise! A paradise! Fields as far as you could see! Filled with the bounty of the Lord! Son, when I was a boy I saw Scripture in the spider webs. The Lord was watching us then, Lewis, you could feel His presence in the sunlight and the rain. But now we are like spiders dancing in a fire." He looked down at the literal fire, which was warming his knees. "It all started with the railway. That I'm sure of, son. The railroad brought money to men who'd never had the smell of two dollars together in all their lives. The iron horse spoiled the land, and now financial collapse is going to spread like a stain over this whole country." And looked at Lewis with the clear shrewd eyes of Sears James.

"I promised her I'd bury her in the rose garden," Lewis said. "They'll be back with the car soon."

"The
car."
His father turned away in disgust. "You never listened to the important things I had to tell you. You have forsaken me, Lewis."

"You excite yourself too much," Lewis said. "You'll give yourself a stroke."

"His will be done."

Lewis looked at his father's rigid back. "I'll see to it now." His father made no answer. "Good-bye."

His father spoke without turning around. "You never listened. But mark me, son, it will come back to haunt you. You were seduced by yourself, Lewis. Nothing sadder can be said of any man. A handsome face and feathers for brains. You got your looks from your mother's Uncle Leo, and when he was twenty-five he stuck his hand into the woodstove and held it there until it was charred like a hickory log."

Lewis went through the dining-room door. Linda was peeling the sheet off her naked body in the vacant upper room. She smiled at him with bloody teeth. "After that," she said, "your mother's Uncle Leo was a godly man all his life long." Her eyes glowed, and she swung her legs down off the bed. Lewis backed away toward the bare wooden wall. "After that he saw Scripture in spider webs, Lewis." She moved slowly toward him, twisting on a broken hip. "You were going to put me in the pond. Did you see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? Or were you distracted by your pretty face?"

"Now it's over, isn't it?" Lewis asked.

"Yes." She was close enough for him to catch the dark brown smell of death.

Lewis straightened his body against the rough wall. "What did you see in that girl's bedroom?"

"I saw you, Lewis. What you were supposed to see. Like this."