by Peter Straub
He ignored my remark. “One night a year ago, Gregory Bate was doing some work in the schoolyard. While doing it, he looked up and noticed—I imagine this is what happened—that the rain gutter required some attention, and he went around to the back of the school and got the ladder and went up. Fenny and Constance saw their chance to escape his tyranny, and knocked the ladder out from under him. He fell, struck his head on the corner of the building, and died.”
“What were they doing there at night?”
He shrugged. “He always took them with him. They had been sitting in the playground.”
“I don’t believe that they killed him on purpose,” I said.
“Howard Hummell, the postmaster, saw them running off. It was he who found Gregory’s body.”
“So nobody actually saw it happen.”
“Nobody had to actually see it, Mr. James. What happened was clear to all.”
“It’s not clear to me,” I said, and he shrugged again. “What did they do afterward?”
“They ran. It must have been obvious that they had succeeded. The back of his head was crushed. Fenny and his sister disappeared for three weeks—they hid out in the woods. By the time they realized they had nowhere to go and returned home, we had buried Gregory. Howard Hummell had told what he had seen, and people assumed what they assumed. Hence, you see, Fenny’s ‘badness.’”
“But now—” I said, looking down at the crudely lettered grave. The children must have made and lettered the cross, I realized, and suddenly that seemed the most gruesome detail of all.
“Oh yes, now. Now Gregory wants him back. From what you tell me, he has him back—he has both of them back. But I imagine that he will wish to remove Fenny from your—influence.” He pronounced this last word with a meticulous Germanic precision.
It chilled me. “To take him.”
“To take him.”
“Can’t I save him?” I said, almost pleading.
“I suspect at least no one else can,” he said, looking at me as from a great distance.
“Can’t you help, for God’s sake!”
“Not even for His. From what you say, it has gone too far. We do not believe in exorcisms, in my church.”
“You just believe—” I was furious and scornful.
“In evil, yes. We do believe in that.”
I turned away from him. He must have imagined that I was going to return and beg him for help, but when I kept on walking, he called out, “Take care, schoolteacher.”
Walking home I was in a sort of daze—I could scarcely believe or accept what had seemed irrefutable while I talked with the preacher. Yet he had shown me the grave; and I had seen with my own eyes the transformation in Fenny—I had seen Gregory: it is not too much to say that I had felt him, the impression he made on me was that strong.
And then I stopped walking, about a mile from Four Forks, faced with proof that Gregory Bate knew exactly what I had discovered, and knew exactly what I had intended. One of the farmers’ fields there formed a large wide bare hill visible from the road, and he was up on the hill staring down at me. He didn’t move a muscle when I saw him, but his intensity quivered out of him, and I must have jumped a foot. He was looking at me as though he could read every thought in my head. Far up in the clouds above him, a hawk was circling aimlessly. Any trace of doubt left me. I knew that everything Gruber had told me was true.
It was all I could do not to run. But I would not show cowardice before him, no matter how cowardly I felt. He was waiting for me to run, I imagine, standing up there with his arms hanging straight and his pale face visible as only a white smudge and all that feeling arrowing toward me. I forced myself to continue home at a walk.
Dinner I could scarcely force myself to swallow—I had no more than a bite or two. Mather said, “If you’ll starve yourself there’s more for the rest of us. It’s no matter to me.”
I faced him directly. “Did Fenny Bate have a brother as well as a sister?”
He looked at me with as much curiosity as he possessed.
“Well, did he?”
“He did.”
“What was the brother’s name?”
“It was Gregory, but I’ll thank you to refrain from speaking about him.”
“Were you afraid of him?” I asked, because I saw fear on both his face and his wife’s.
“Please, Mr. James,” said Sophronia Mather. “This will do no good.”
“Nobody speaks of that Gregory Bate,” her husband said.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
He stopped chewing and put down his fork. “I don’t know what you heard or who you heard it from, but I’ll tell you this. If any man was damned, it was that Gregory Bate, and whatever happened to him was deserved. That’s an end to talk of Gregory Bate.” Then he pushed more food into his mouth, and the discussion was over. Mrs. Mather kept her eyes religiously on her plate for the rest of the meal.
I was in a stew. Neither of the two Bate children appeared in school for two or three days, and it was almost as though I had dreamed the whole affair. I went through the motions of teaching, but my mind was with them, especially poor Fenny, and the danger he was in.
What above all kept the horror before me was that I saw Gregory in town one day.
Because it was a Saturday, Four Forks was filled with farmers and their wives who came in for their shopping. Every Saturday, the little town had almost a fairground look, at least in contrast to the way it looked normally. The sidewalks were crowded and the stores were busy. Dozens of horses stamped in the street, and everywhere you saw the eager faces of kids, all piled into the backs of wagons, their eyes wide open with being in town. I recognized many of my pupils and waved to some of them.
Then a big farmer I’d never met before tapped my shoulder and said that he knew I was his son’s teacher and that he wanted to shake my hand. I thanked him and listened to him talk for a bit. Then I saw Gregory over his shoulder. Gregory was leaning against the side of the post office, indifferent to everything about him and staring at me—just intently staring, as he must have been doing from the hilltop. My mouth dried up, and something obviously showed in my face, because my pupil’s father stopped talking and asked me if I felt all right.
“Oh yes,” I said, but it must have looked as if I were being deliberately rude, because I kept looking over his shoulder. No one else could see Gregory: they just walked by him, carrying on in the normal way, looking right through him.
Now where I had seen that abandoned freedom I could see only depravity.
I made some excuse to the farmer—a headache, an abscessed tooth—and turned back to Gregory. He was gone. He had vanished during the few seconds I was saying good-bye to the farmer.
So I knew that the showdown was coming, and that he would pick the time and place.
The next time Fenny and Constance came to school I was determined that I would protect them. They were both pale and quiet, and enough of an aura of strangeness enveloped them for the other children to leave them alone. It was perhaps four days since my seeing their brother leaning against the Four Forks post office. I could not imagine what had been happening to them since I had last seen them, but it was as though a wasting disease had hold of them. They seemed so lost and apart, those ragged backward children. I was determined to keep them under my protection.
When the lessons for the day were over, I kept them back as the others raced for home. They sat uncomplaining at their desks, stricken and dumb.
“Why did he let you come to school?” I asked.
Fenny looked at me blankly and said, “Who?”
I was dumbfounded. “Gregory, of course.”
Fenny shook his head as if to blow away fog. “Gregory? We ain’t seen Gregory for a long time. No, not for a long time now.”
Now I was shocked—they were wan from his abs
ence!
“Then what do you do with yourselves?”
“We go over.”
“Go over?”
Constance nodded, agreeing with Fenny. “We go over.”
“Go over where? Go over what?”
Now they were both looking at me with their mouths open, as if I were very dense.
“Go over to meet Gregory?” It was horrible, but I could think of nothing else.
Fenny shook his head. “We don’t never see Gregory.”
“No,” said Constance, and I was horrified to hear regret in her voice. “We just go over.”
Fenny seemed to come to life for a moment. He said, “But I heard him once. He said this is all there is, and there ain’t no more. There ain’t nothin’ but this. There ain’t nothin’ like you said—like on maps. It ain’t there.”
“Then what’s out there instead?” I asked.
“It’s like what we see,” Fenny said.
“See?”
“When we go,” he answered.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“It’s nice,” Constance said, and put her head on the desk. “It’s real nice.”
I didn’t have the faintest idea of what they were talking about, but I didn’t like the sound of it much, and I thought I’d have time later to talk about it further. “Well, nobody’s going anywhere tonight,” I said. “I want both of you to stay here with me tonight. I want to keep you safe.”
Fenny nodded, but stupidly and halfheartedly, as if he didn’t care much where he spent his nights, and when I looked to Constance for agreement I saw that she had fallen asleep.
“All right then,” I said. “We can fix up places to sleep later, and tomorrow I’ll try to find beds for you in the village. You two children can’t stay out in the woods on your own anymore.”
Fenny nodded slackly again, and I saw that he too was on the verge of falling asleep. “You can put your head down,” I said.
In seconds both of them were sleeping with their heads on their desks. I could almost have agreed with Gregory’s dreadful statement at that moment—it was really as though this was all there was, all there was anywhere, just myself and the two exhausted children in a cold barn of a schoolhouse—my sense of reality had had too many knocks. As we three sat in the schoolhouse, the day began to end and the whole area of the room, dim at the best of times, became dark and shadowy. I did not have the heart to turn on the lights, so we sat there as at the bottom of a well. I had promised them that I would find beds in the village, but that miserable little hamlet not fifty paces down the road seemed miles off. And even if I’d had the energy and confidence to leave them alone, I couldn’t imagine who’d take them in. If it were a well, it was really a well of hopelessness, and I seemed to myself as lost as the children.
Finally I could stand it no longer, and I went over to Fenny and shook his arm. He came awake like a frightened animal, and I held him on his chair only by using all of my strength. I said, “I have to know the truth, Fenny. What happened to Gregory?”
“He went over,” he said, sullen again.
“Do you mean he died?”
Fenny nodded, and his mouth dropped open, and again I saw those terrible rotting teeth.
“But he comes back?”
He nodded again.
“And you see him?”
“He sees us,” Fenny said, very firmly. “He looks and looks. He wants to touch.”
“To touch?”
“Like before.”
I put my hand on my forehead—it was burning. Every word that Fenny spoke opened a new abyss. “But did you shake the ladder?”
Fenny just looked stupidly at his desk, and I repeated my question. “Did you shake the ladder, Fenny?”
“He looks and he looks,” Fenny said, as if it were the largest fact in his consciousness.
I put my hands on his head to make him look up at me, and at that moment the face of his tormentor appeared in the window. That white terrible face—as if he wanted to stop Fenny answering my questions. I felt sick, dumped back into the pit, but I also felt as if the battle had come at last, and I pulled Fenny toward me, trying to protect him physically.
“Is he here?” Fenny shrieked, and at the sound of his voice Constance dropped to the floor and began to wail.
“What does that matter?” I yelled. “He won’t get you—I have you! He knows he’s lost you forever!”
“Where is he?” Fenny shrieked again, pushing at me. “Where is Gregory?”
“There,” I said, and turned him around to face the window.
He was already jerking himself around, and we both stared then at an empty window—there was nothing out there but an empty dark sky. I felt triumphant—I had won. I gripped Fenny’s arm with all the strength of my victory, and he gave a shout of pure despair. He toppled forward, and I caught him as if he were jumping into the pit of hell itself. Only a few seconds later did I realize what I had caught: his heart had stopped, and I was holding a dispossessed body. He had gone over for good.
* * *
“And that was it,” Sears said, looking at the circle of his friends. “Gregory too was gone for good. I came down with a nearly fatal fever—that was what I’d felt on my forehead—and spent three weeks in the Mathers’ attic room. When I had recovered and could move around again, Fenny was buried. He really had gone over for good. I wanted to quit my job and leave the village, but they held me to my contract and I went back to teaching. I was shattered, but I could go through the motions. By the end of it, I was even using the ferule. I’d lost all my liberal notions, and when I left I was regarded as a fine and satisfactory teacher.
“There is one other thing, though. On the day I left Four Forks I went for the first time to look at Fenny’s grave. It was behind the church, next to his brother’s. I looked at the two graves, and do you know what I felt? I felt nothing. I felt empty. As though I’d had nothing at all to do with it.”
“What happened to the sister?” asked Lewis.
“Oh, she was no problem. She was a quiet girl, and people felt sorry for her. I’d overestimated the stinginess of the village. One of the families took her in. As far as I know, they treated her as their own daughter. It’s my impression that she got pregnant, married the boy and left town. But that would have been years later.”
Frederick Hawthorne
1
Ricky walked home, surprised to see snow in the air. It’s going to be a hell of a winter, he thought, all the seasons are going funny. In the glow surrounding the street lamp at the end of Montgomery Street, snowflakes whirled and fell and adhered to the ground for a time before melting. Cold air licked in beneath his tweed topcoat. He had a half hour walk before him, and he was sorry that he hadn’t taken his car, the old Buick Stella happily refused to touch—on cold nights, he usually drove. But tonight he’d wanted time to think: he had been going to grill Sears on the contents of his letter to Donald Wanderley, and he had to work out a technique. This, he knew, he’d failed to do. Sears had told him just what he wanted to, and no more. Still, the damage, from Ricky’s point of view, was done; what point was there in knowing how the letter was worded? He startled himself by sighing aloud, and saw his breath send a few big lazy flakes spinning off in a complicated pattern as they melted.
Lately, all the stories, his own included, had made him tense for hours afterward; but tonight he felt more than that. Tonight he felt especially anxious. Ricky’s nights were now uniformly dreadful, the dreams of which he had spoken to Sears pursued him straight through until dawn, and he had no doubt that the stories he and his friends told gave them substance; still he thought that the anxiety was not due to his dreams. Nor was it due to the stories, though Sears’s had been worse than most—all of their stories were getting worse. They frightened themselves each time they met, but they continued to meet because not to meet w
ould have been more frightening yet. It was comforting to get together, to see that they were each bearing up. Even Lewis was frightened, or why would he have voted in favor of writing to Donald Wanderley? It was this, knowing that the letter was on its way, ticking away in a mailbag somewhere, that made Ricky more than usually anxious.
Maybe I really should have left this town ages ago, he considered, looking at the houses he passed. There was scarcely one he had not been inside at least once, on business or pleasure, to see a client or to eat a dinner. Maybe I should have gone to New York, back when I got married, as Stella wanted to do: it was, for Ricky, a thought of striking disloyalty. Only gradually, only imperfectly had he convinced Stella that his life was in Milburn, with Sears James and the law practice. Cold wind cut into his neck and pulled at his hat. Around the corner, ahead of him, he saw Sears’s long black Lincoln parked at the curb; a light burned in Sears’s library. Sears would not be able to sleep, not after telling a story like that. By now, they all knew the effects of reliving these past events.
But it’s not just the stories, he thought; no, and it’s not just the letter either. Something is going to happen. That was why they told the stories. Ricky was not given to premonitions, but the dread of the future he’d felt two weeks earlier while talking to Sears came thudding back into him again. That was why he had thought of moving out of town. He turned into Melrose Avenue: “avenue,” presumably, because of the thick trees which lined either side. Their branches stood out gesturally, tinted orange by the lamps. During the day the last of the leaves had fallen. Something’s going to happen to the whole town. A branch groaned above Ricky’s head. A truck changed gears far behind him, off on Route 17: sound traveled a long way on these cold nights in Milburn. When he went forward, he could see the lighted windows of his own bedroom, up on the third floor of his house. His ears and nose ached with the cold. After such a long and reasonable life, he said to himself, you can’t go mystic on me now, old friend. We’ll need all the rationality we can muster up.
At that moment, near where he felt safest and with this self-given reassurance in his mind, it seemed to Ricky that someone was following him: that someone was standing back on the corner, glaring at him. He could feel cold eyes staring at him, and in his mind it seemed that they floated alone—just eyes following him. He knew how they would look, clear pale luminous and floating at the level of his own eyes. Their lack of feeling would be dreadful—they would be like eyes in a mask. He turned around, fully expecting to see them, so great was his sense of them. Abashed, he realized that he was trembling. Of course the street was empty. It was simply an empty street, even on a dark night as ordinary as a mongrel pup.
