Ghost Story (45 page)

"What you'll find in there is a long walk on a short pier," Sears said.

"No, I don't think they'll be there anymore. The three of them will know that we'll try the house first. They'll have found somewhere else already."

Don looked at Sears and Ricky. "There is just one thing left to say. As Sears asked, what would have happened if you'd shot the lynx? That's what we'll have to find out. This time we'll have to shoot the lynx, whatever that will mean."

He smiled at them. "It's going to be a hell of a winter."

Sears James rumbled something affirmative. Ricky asked, "What do you suppose the odds are that we three and Peter Barnes will ever see the end of it?"

"Rotten," Sears answered. "But you've certainly done what we asked you here to do."

"Do we tell anybody?" Ricky asked. "Should we try to convince Hardesty?"

That's absurd," Sears snorted. "We'd end up in the booby hatch."

"Let them think they're fighting Martians," Don said. "Sears is right. But I'll give you a much better bet than the one you gave me."

"What's that?"

"I bet your perfect secretary won't come to work tomorrow."

When the old men left him in his uncle's house, Don built up the fire and sat in Ricky's warm place on the couch. While snow piled up on the roof and tried to wind its way around doors and window frames, he remembered a warm-chilly night, the smell of burning leaves, a sparrow lighting on a rail and a pale already loved face shining at him with luminous eyes from a doorway. And a naked girl looking out of a black window and pronouncing words he only now understood: "You are a ghost." You Donald. You. It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.

This year there still were a few cocktail parties and women still made Christmas cookies, but December in Milburn was different. People who met in Young Brother's department store didn't say "Isn't it nice to have a white Christmas?" but "I hope this snow doesn't keep up"; Omar Norris had to stay on the municipal snowplow all day long, and junior clerks said they'd get into his Santa suit only if someone fumigated it first; the mayor and Hardesty's deputies set up an enormous tree, but Eleanor Hardie didn't have the heart to decorate the front of the hotel—indeed she began to look so harried and lost that a tourist couple from New York City took one glance at her and decided on the spot to keep on going until they found a motel. And Norbert Clyde, the first time ever, didn't take his sleigh out of his barn and grease up the runners: ever since seeing that "thing" on his land, he had gone into a funny decline. You could hear him at Humphrey's or other bars on the outskirts of town, saying that the County Farm Agent didn't know his ass from his elbow, and that if people had any sense they'd start paying a little more attention to Elmer Scales, who didn't open up his gate to let the sledders onto his hill, but skipped dinners and scribbled crazy poetry and waited up nights with his loaded twelve-gauge over his knees. His tribe of children sledded on the hill by themselves, feeling ostracized. Snow fell all day, all night; the drifts at first covered fences, and then reached the eaves of the houses. In the second two weeks of December, the schools were closed for eight days: the high school's heating system failed, and the board shut it down until mid-January, when a heating engineer from Binghamton was finally able to get into town. The grade school closed a few days later: the roads were treacherous, and after the school bus went into a ditch twice in one morning, the parents would have kept their kids home anyway. People of the age of Ricky and Sears—those who were the town's memory—looked back to the winters of 1947 and 1926, when no traffic had come in or out of Milburn for weeks, and fuel had run out and old folks (who were no older than the present ages of Sears and Ricky) had, along with Viola Frederickson of the auburn hair and exotic face, frozen to death.

This December Milburn looked less like a village on a Christmas card than a village under siege. The Dedham girls' horses, forgotten even by Nettie, starved and died in their stables. This December, people stayed in their houses more than they were used to, and tempers wore thin—some broke. Philip Kneighler, one of the new Milburnites, went inside and beat up his wife after his snow blower broke down on his driveway. Ronnie Byrum, a nephew of Harlan Bautz's home on leave from the Marines, objected to the harmless remarks of a man standing beside him in a bar and broke his nose: he would have broken his jaw if two of Ronnie's old high school buddies had not pinned his arms back. Two sixteen-year-old boys named Billy Byrum (Ronnie's brother) and Anthony "Spacemaker" Ortega concussed a younger boy who insisted on talking through the eight-twenty-five showing of
Night of the Living Dead
at Clark Mulligan's Rialto Theater. All over Milburn couples locked together in their houses quarreled about their babies, their money, their television programs. A deacon of the Holy Ghost Presbyterian Church—the same church of which Lewis's father had once been pastor—locked himself in the unheated building one night two weeks before Christmas and wept and cursed and prayed all night because he thought he was going crazy: he thought he had seen the naked boy Jesus standing on a snowdrift outside the church windows, begging him to come out.

At the Bay Tree Market, Rhoda Flagler pulled a clump of blond hair out of the scalp of Bitsy Underwood because Bitsy had challenged her right to the last three cans of pureed pumpkin: with the trucks unable to make deliveries, all the stocks were getting low. In the Hollow, an unemployed bartender named Jim Blazek knifed and killed a mulatto short-order cook named Washington de Souza because a tall man with a shaven head who dressed like a sailor had told Blazek that de Souza was messing around with his wife.

During the sixty-two days from the first of December to the thirty-first of January, these ten citizens of Milburn died of natural causes: George Fleischner (62), heart attack; Whitey Rudd (70), malnutrition; Gabriel Fish (58), exposure; Omar Norris (61), exposure following concussion; Marion Le Sage (73), stroke; Ethel Bin (76), Hodgkin's Disease; Dylan Griffen (5 months), hypothermia; Harlan Bautz (55), heart attack; Nettie Dedham (81), stroke; Penny Draeger (18), shock. Most of these died during the worst of the snows, and their bodies, along with those of Washington de Souza and several others, had to be kept, stacked and covered with sheets in one of the unused utility cells in Walter Hardesty's tiny jail—the wagon from the morgue in the county seat couldn't make it into Milburn.

The town closed in on itself, and even the ice skating on the river died out. At first, the skating went as it always had: every hour of daylight saw twenty or thirty high school students, mixed in with kids from elementary school, dashing back and forth, playing crack the whip and skating backward: a print by Currier and Ives. But if the high school juniors and seniors who swept off the ice never noticed the death of three old women and four old men and did not much mourn the passing of their dentist, another loss hit them like a slap in the face as soon as they glided out onto the frozen river. Jim Hardie had been the best skater Milburn had ever seen, and he and Penny Draeger had worked out tandem routines which looked to their contemporaries as good as anything you saw in the Olympics. Peter Barnes had been nearly as good, but he refused to come skating this year; even when the weather paused, Peter stayed at home. But Jim was the one they missed: even when he showed up in the morning with bloodshot eyes and a stubble on his cheeks, he had enlivened them all—you couldn't watch him without trying to skate a little better yourself. Now even Penny did not show up. Like Peter Barnes, she had drifted away into privacy. Soon, most of the other skaters did the same: every day more snow had to be shoveled off the river, and some of the boys doing the shoveling thought that Jim Hardie was not in New York after all; they had a feeling that something had happened to Jim —something they didn't want to think about too much. Days before it was proven, they knew that Jim Hardie was dead.

One day during his afternoon break Bill Webb picked up his battered old hockey skates from his locker behind the restaurant and walked over to the river and looked dully at the two untouched feet of fresh snow blanketing it. For this winter, the skating was dead too.

Clark Mulligan never bothered to book the new Disney film he always brought in at Christmas, but ran horror movies all through the season. Some nights he had seven or eight customers, some nights only two or three; other nights he started up the first reel of
Night of the Living Dead
and knew he was showing it only to himself. Saturday's matinee usually brought out ten or fifteen kids who had already seen the movie but couldn't think of anything else to do. He began letting them in for free. Every day he lost a little more money, but at least the Rialto got him away from home; as long as the power lines stayed up, he could keep warm and busy, and that was all he wanted. One night he walked down from the booth to see if anybody had bothered to sneak in through the fire door, and saw Penny Draeger sitting beside a wolf-faced man wearing sunglasses: Clark hurried back up to his projection booth, but he was sure the man had grinned at him before he could turn away. He didn't know why, but that frightened him —badly.

For the first time in most of their lives, Milburn people saw the weather as malevolent, a hostile force that would kill them if they let it. Unless you got up on your roof and knocked off the snow, the rafter beams would crack and buckle under its weight, and in ten minutes your house would be a frigid ruined shell, uninhabitable until spring; the wind chill factor sometimes brought the temperature down to sixty below, and if you stayed outside for much longer than it took to run from your car to your house, you could near the wind chuckling in your inner ear, knowing that it had you where it wanted you. That was one enemy, the worst they knew. But after Walt Hardesty and one of his deputies identified the bodies of Jim Hardie and Christina Barnes, and word got around about the condition of their bodies, Milburn people drew their drapes and switched on their television instead of going out to their neighbor's party and wondered if it was a bear after all that killed handsome Lewis Benedikt. And when, like Milly Sheehan, they saw that a line of snow had worked in around the storm window and lay like a taunt on the sill, they began to think about what else might get in. So they, like the town, closed in; shut down; thought about survival. A few remembered Elmer Scales standing in front of the statue, waving his shotgun and ranting about Martians. Only four people knew the identity of an enemy more hostile than the murderous weather.

"Stop babbling, Ricky," he said, and blasted his horn and rolled across Wheat Row to the north end of the square.

"You didn't have to blow the horn, that was a green light," Ricky pointed out.

"Humpf. Everybody else is going too fast to stop."

Don, in the back seat, held his breath and prayed that the traffic lights on the other end of the square would turn green before Sears reached them. When they passed the steps to the hotel, he saw the lights facing Main Street flash to amber; the lights switched to green just as Sears put the entire palm of his hand down on the button and floated the long car like a galleon onto Main Street.

Even with the headlights on, the only objects truly visible were traffic lights and the red and green pinpoints of illumination on the Christmas tree. All else dissolved in swirling white. The few approaching cars appeared first as streamers of yellow light, then as shapeless forms like large animals: Don could see their colors only when they were immediately alongside, a proximity Sears acknowledged with another imperious blast of the Lincoln's horn.

"What do we do when we get there, if we ever do?" Sears asked.

"Just have a look around. It might help." Ricky looked at him in a way that was as good as speaking, and Don added, "No. I don't think she'll be there. Or Gregory."

"Did you bring a weapon?"

"I don't own a weapon. Did you?"

Ricky nodded; held up a kitchen knife. "Foolish, I know, but ..."

Don did not think it was foolish; for a moment he wished that he too had a knife, if not a flamethrower and a grenade.

"Just out of curiosity, what are you thinking about at this moment?" Sears asked.

"Me?" Don asked. The car began to drift slowly sideways, and Sears turned the wheel very slightly to correct it.

"Yes."

"I was just remembering something that used to happen back when I was a prep school student in the Midwest. When we had to choose our colleges, the staff would give us talks about 'the East.' 'The East' was where they wanted us to go—it was simple snobbery, and my school was very old-fashioned in that way, but the school would look better if a big proportion of its seniors went on to Harvard or Princeton or Cornell— or even a state university on the East Coast. Everybody pronounced the word the way a Muslim must pronounce the word Mecca. And that's where we are now."

"Did you go East?" Ricky asked. "I don't know if Edward ever mentioned it."

"No. I went to California, where they believed in mysticism. They didn't drown witches, they gave them talk shows."

"Omar never got around to plowing Montgomery Street," Sears said; Don, surprised, turned to his window and saw that while he had talked they had reached the end of Anna Mostyn's street. Sears was right. On Maple, where they were, hard-packed snow about two inches deep showed the treads and deep grooves of Omar Norris's plow; it was like a white riverbed cut through high white banks. On Montgomery, the snow lay four feet deep. Already filling up with fresh snowfall, deep indentations down the middle of the road indicated where two or three people had fought through to Maple.

Sears turned off the ignition, leaving the parking lights on. "If we're going through with this, I see no point in waiting."

The three men stepped out onto the glassy surface of Maple Street. Sears turned up the fur collar of his coat and sighed. "To think I once balked at stepping into the two or three inches of snow on Our Vergil's field."

"I hate the thought of going into that house again," Ricky said.

All three could see the house through the swirls of falling snow. "I've never actually broken into a house before," Sears said. "How do you propose to do it?"

"Peter said that Jim Hardie broke a pane of glass in the back door. All we have to do is reach in and turn the knob.

"And if we see them? If they are waiting for us?"

"Then we try to put up a better fight than Sergeant York," Ricky said. "I suppose. Do you remember Sergeant York, Don?"

"No," Don said. "I don't even remember Audie Murphy. Let's go." He stepped into the drift left by the plow. His forehead was already so cold it felt like a metal plate grafted onto his skin. When he and Ricky were both on top of the drift they reached down to Sears, who stood with his arms extended like a small boy, and pulled him forward. Sears lumbered forward and up like a whale taking a reef, and then all three men stepped from the top of the drift into the deep snow on Montgomery Street.

The snow came up past their knees. Don realized that the two old men were waiting for him to begin, so he turned around and began to move up the street toward Anna Mostyn's house, doing his best to step in the deep depressions made by an earlier walker. Ricky followed, using the same prints. Sears, off to the side and stumping through unbroken snow, came last. The bottom of his black coat swept along after him like a train.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the house. When all three were standing in front of the building, Don again saw the two older men looking at him and knew that they would not move until he made them do it. "At least it'll be warmer inside," he said.

"I just hate the thought of going in there again," Ricky said, not very loudly.

"So you said," Sears reminded him. "Around the back, Don?"

"Around the back."

Once again he led the way. He could hear Ricky sneezing behind him as each of them plowed on through snow nearly waist-high. Like Jim Hardie and Peter Barnes, they stopped at the side window and looked in; saw only a dark empty chamber. "Deserted," Don said, and continued around to the rear of the house.

He found the window Jim Hardie had broken, and just as Ricky joined him on the back step, reached in and turned the handle of the kitchen door. Breathing heavily, Sears joined them.

"Let's get in out of the snow," Sears said. "I'm freezing." It was one of the bravest statements Don had ever heard, and he had to answer it with a similar courage. He pushed the door and stepped into the kitchen of Anna Mostyn's house. Sears and Ricky came in close behind him.

"Well, here we are," Ricky said. "To think it's been fifty years, or near enough. Should we split up?"

"Afraid to, Ricky?" Sears said, impatiently brushing snow off his coat. "I'll believe in these ghouls when I see them. You and Don can look at the rooms upstairs and on the landings. I'll do this floor and the basement"

And if the earlier statement had been an act of courage, this, Don knew, was a demonstration of friendship: none of them wanted to be alone in the house. "All right" he said. "I'll be surprised if we find anything too. We might as well start."

Sears led as they left the kitchen and went into the hall. "Go on," he said—commanded. "I'll be fine. This way will save time, and the sooner we get it over with, the better." Don was already on the stairs, but Ricky had turned questioningly back to Sears. "If you see anything, give a shout."