Ghost Story (60 page)

1. The Management requests that all guests depart by noon, or pay another night's cabin rental.
2. We respect your property, please respect ours.
3. No frying, grilling or boiling in the cabins.
4. The Management wishes you a hearty welcome, a happy stay and a purposeful departure.

The Management.

Don opened the door and walked through. Broiling Florida sun fell on him, lay across the shining asphalt of the parking lot. Angie was standing before him, holding open the door of his car. Don staggered and leaned on the baking red flank of a Chevrolet van; the man who resembled Adolf Eichmann, immured in his concrete booth, turned his head to stare at him. Light gleamed from his thin gold spectacles.

Don got in the car.

"Now just drive on out," Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, leaning back into the car seat. "You found that door you needed, didn't you? It's all gonna work out fine."

Don pulled out into the exit lane. "Which way?"

"Which way, son?" The black man giggled, and then gave his breathy, explosive laugh. "Why,
our
way. That's the only way you got. We're just gonna get off by ourselves somewhere in the countryside, you see that?"

And of course, he did see it: turning out onto the highway in the direction away from Panama City, he saw not the road but a broad field, a checkered tablecloth on grass, a windmill turning in a scented breeze. "Don't," he said. "Don't do that."

"Fine, son. You just drive."

Don peered ahead, saw the yellow line dividing the highway, gasped for air. He was tired enough to fall asleep driving.

"Boy, you stink like a goat. You need a shower."

As soon as the musical voice had ceased, a shattering rain hit the windshield. He switched on the wipers, and when the windows cleared for a moment, saw sheets of rain bouncing off the highway, slicing down through suddenly darkened air.

He screamed and, not knowing he was going to do it, stamped on the accelerator.

The car squealed forward, rain pouring in through the open window, and they shot over the edge of the highway and plummeted down the bank.

Alma Mobley stood on the tracks, holding up her hands as if that would stop them: she flickered out like a light bulb as the car jounced over the tracks and went on gathering speed toward the access road.

"You damned cracker," Dr. Rabbitfoot shouted, violently rocked into him and then rocked back against the door.

Don felt a sudden pain in his shirt, clasped his hand over it, and found the knife. He ripped open his shirt, shouting something that was not words, and when the black man lunged at him, met him with the blade.

"Damn ...
cracker,"
Dr. Rabbitfoot managed to gasp. The knife bumped against a rib, the musician's eyes widened and his hand closed around Don's wrist, and Don pushed,
willing
it: the long blade scraped past the rib and found the heart.

Alma Mobley's face appeared across the windshield, wild and raddled as a hag's, screeching at him. Don's head was jammed into Dr. Rabbitfoot's neck; he felt blood pouring out over his hand.

The car lifted six inches off the ground, hoisted by an internal blast of wind that battered Don against the door and tore his shirt up into his face. They bounded off the access road and rode on the nightwatcher's death down into the Gulf.

A thousand screaming voices surrounded him.

"Now, you bastard," he whispered, waiting for the moan from the spirit inhabiting that disappearing form.

A whirling pencil winked into invisibility: vibrant greenish light colored everything like a flash of green lightning.
Cracker,
hissed a voice from nowhere, and the car pitched violently, and shafts of color as violent as that, as if the car were a prism, burst out from the center of the pinwheeling water.

Don aimed at a spot inches above the vortex and shot out his hands, throwing himself forward just as his ear recorded that the last hissing of the voice had become an angry, enduring buzz.

His hands closed around a form so small that at first he thought he had missed it. His motion carried him forward, and his joined hands struck the edge of the window and he tumbled off the seat into the water.

The thing in his hands stung him.

LET ME GO!

It stung him again, and his hand felt the size of footballs. He scraped his palms together and rolled it into his left hand.

RELEASE ME!

He squeezed his fingers down into his palm, and was stung again before the enormous voice in his head dampened into a thin, wriggling shriek.

Crying now, partly from pain but far more from a savage sense of triumph that made him feel he was shining like the sun, streaming light from every pore, he used his right hand to take the knife from the sodden car seat and push the passenger door open against the lapping water of the Gulf.

Then the voice in his mind widened out like a hunting horn. The wasp stung him twice rapidly, hitting the base of two fingers.

Don crawled sobbing across the seat and dropped out into the waist-high water.
Time to see what happens when you shoot the lynx.
He stood up and saw a row of men standing seventy yards off outside the sheds, staring at him in the sun. An overweight man in a security guard's uniform was running down to the edge of the water.

Time to see what happens. Time to see.
He waved the security guard away with his right hand, and dropped the left into the water to stun the wasp.

The guard saw the knife in his hand, and put his own hand on his holster. "You okay?" he shouted.

"Get away!"

"Look, buddy—"

RELEASE ME!

The guard lowered his hand, backed a few inches up the beach, bewilderment chasing the belligerence from his face.

YOU HAVE TO LET ME GO!

"Like hell I do," Don said, and came up onto the sand and went to his knees, cramping his left hand down again. "Time to shoot the lynx."

He raised the knife over his swollen, flaming left hand and curled back the fingers a fraction of an inch at a time. When a part of the wasp's body, struggling legs and a bloated hindquarters, was uncovered, he slashed down with the knife, laying open his hand.

NO! YOU CANNOT DO THIS!

He tilted his palm and dropped the severed section of the wasp onto the sand. Then he slashed down again and cut the remainder of the wasp in half.

NO! NO! NO! NO! CANNOT!

"Hey, mister ..." said the security guard, coming nearer across the sand. "You cut your hand all to hell."

"Had to," Don said, and dropped the knife beside the pieces of the wasp. The enormous flaring voice had become a shrill piping scream. The guard, still red-faced and fuddled, looked down at the pieces of the wasp, twitching and rolling feverishly over the sand. "Wasp," he said. "Thought maybe that freak storm took you off the ... uh ..." He rubbed his mouth. "It prob'ly stung you right then, huh? Jeeze, I never knew those things live when they're ... uh ..."

Don was winding his shirt around his wounded hand, and he dropped it back into salt water to help it heal.

"Guess you wanted revenge on the l'il sonofabitch, huh?" the guard said.

"I did," Don said, and met the man's baffled eyes and laughed. "That's right, I did."

"Yeah, you got it too," the guard said. Both of them watched the severed pieces of wasp rolling in the wet sand. "That thing ain't
ever
gonna give up the ghost."

"Doesn't look like it." Don used his shoe to scrape sand over the wriggling sections of the wasp. Even then dimples and depressions in the sand showed that the thing continued to struggle.

"Tide'll come in and take it," the guard said. He motioned toward the sheds, the rank of curious men. "Can we do anything for you? We could get a truck out here, call from the plant to get your car hauled out."

"Let's do that. Thank you."

"You got somewhere you got to go in a hurry?"

"Not in a hurry," Don said, knowing all at once what he had to do next. "But there's a woman I have to meet in San Francisco." They began to go toward the sheds and the quiet men. Don stopped to look back; saw only sand. Now he could not even find the spot where he had buried it.

"Tide'll take that l'il bastard halfway to Bolivia," the fat guard said. "You don't want to worry about that anymore, friend. It'll be fishfood by five o'clock."

Don tucked the knife into his belt and experienced a wave of love for everything mortal, for everything with a brief definite life span—a tenderness for all that could give birth and would die, everything that could live, like these men, in sunshine. He knew it was only relief and adrenalin, but it was all the same a mystical, perhaps a sacred emotion. Dear Sears. Dear Lewis. Dear David. Dear John, unknown. And dear Ricky and Stella, and dear Peter too. Dear brothers, dear humankind.

"For a guy whose car is turning into salt rust, you look awful happy," the guard said.

"Yes," Don answered. "Yes, I am. Don't ask me to explain it."

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. It you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed." Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this "stripped book."