Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

“Don’t be evasive,” Stella called, and in another minute or two was back beside the bed, fully dressed. “When you start to scream in your sleep, it’s time to start taking whatever is happening to you seriously. I know you won’t go to a doctor—”

  “I won’t go to a head doctor, anyhow,” Ricky said. “My mind is in good working order.”

  “So I said. But since you won’t consider that, you should at least talk to Sears about it. I don’t like to see you eating yourself up.” With that, she left for the downstairs.

  Ricky lay back, considering. It had been, as he said to Stella, the worst of the nightmares. Simply thinking about it now was unsettling—simply having Stella go down the stairs was, at some level, unsettling. The dream had been extraordinarily vivid, with the detail and texture of wakefulness. He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life. That had been horrid: it had been somehow immoral, and the shock to his morality even more than the horror had made him open his mouth and scream. Maybe Stella was right. Without knowing how he would bring up the subject with Sears, he nevertheless picked up the receiver of the bedside phone. After Sears’s phone had rung once, Ricky realized that he was acting very much out of character and that he didn’t have the faintest idea why Stella thought Sears James would have anything worthwhile to say. But by then it was too late, and Sears had picked up the phone and said hello.

  “It’s Ricky, Sears.”

  Evidently it was the morning for demonstrating inconsistency of character; nothing less like Sears than his response could be imagined. “Ricky, thank God,” he said. “You must have ESP. I was just going to call you. Can you come by and pick me up in five minutes?”

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” Ricky said. “What happened?” And then, thinking of his dream, “Did anybody die?”

  “Why do you ask that?” Sears said in a different, sharper voice.

  “No reason. I’ll tell you later. I take it we’re not going to Wheat Row.”

  “No. I just had a call from our Vergil. He wants us out there—he wants to sue everybody in sight. Step on it, will you?”

  “Elmer wants us both at his farm? What happened?”

  Sears was impatient. “Something earthshaking, apparently. Pull the plug out, Ricky.”

  5

  While Ricky hurried into a scalding shower, Lewis Benedikt was jogging on a path through the woods. He did this every morning, jogging a regular two miles before making breakfast for himself and whatever young lady might have spent the night at his house. Today, as always after Chowder Society nights and far oftener than his friends imagined, there was no young lady, and Lewis was pushing himself harder than usual. The night before he’d had the worst nightmare of his life; its effects still clung to him, and he thought that a good run would blow them away—where another man would write in a diary or confide in his mistress or have a drink, Lewis exercised. So now, in a blue running suit and Adidas shoes, he puffed his way along the path through his woods.

  Lewis’s property had included both woods and pasture along with the stone farmhouse he had cherished from the moment he had seen it. It was like a fortress with shutters, a huge building constructed at the start of the century by a rich gentleman farmer who liked the look of the castles in the illustrated novels by Sir Walter Scott admired by his wife. Lewis neither knew nor cared about Sir Walter, but years of living in a hotel had left him with a need for the sense of a multitude of rooms about him. He would have had claustrophobia in a cottage. When he had decided to sell his hotel to the chain which had been offering increasing amounts of money for it over the six preceding years, he had enough money left after taxes to buy the only house in or near Milburn which would truly have satisfied him, and enough to furnish it as he wished. The paneling, guns and pikestaffs did not always please his female guests. (Stella Hawthorne, who had spent three adventurous afternoons at Lewis’s farm shortly after his return, had said she’d never been had in an officers’ mess before.) He’d sold the pasture land as soon as he could, but kept the woods because he liked the idea of owning them.

  Jogging through them, he always saw something new which quickened his sense of life: one day a pocket of snowdrops and monkshoods in a hollow beside the stream, the next a red-winged blackbird as big as a cat peering wild-eyed at him from the branches of a maple. But today he was not looking, he was simply running along the snowy path, wishing that whatever was going on would stop. Maybe this young Wanderley could set things right again: judging by his book, he had been to a few dark places himself. Maybe John was right, and Edward’s nephew would at least be able to figure out what was happening to the four of them. It could not just be guilt, after all this time. The Eva Galli business had happened so long ago that it had concerned five different men in a different country: if you looked at the land and compared it to what it was in the twenties, you’d never think it was the same place. Even his woods were second growth, though he liked to pretend that they were not.

  Lewis, running, liked to think of the huge climax forest that had once blanketed nearly all of North America: a vast belt of trees and vegetation, silent wealth through which moved only himself and Indians. And a few spirits. Yes, in an endless vault of forest you could believe in spirits. Indian mythology was full of them—they suited the landscape. But now, in a world of Burger Kings and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets and Pitch ‘n Putt golf courses, all the old tyrannical ghosts must have been crowded out.

  They aren’t crowded out yet, Lewis. Not yet.

  It was like another voice speaking in his mind. Like hell they aren’t, he said to himself, passing one hand over his face.

  Not here. Not yet.

  Shit. He was spooking himself. He was still affected by that damned dream. Maybe it was time they really talked about these dreams to one another—described them. Now suppose they all had the same dream. What would that mean? Lewis’s mind could not go so far. Well, it would mean something: and at least talking about it would help. He thought he had scared himself awake, this morning. His foot came down into slush, and he clearly saw the final image of his dream: the two men withdrawing their hoods to show their wasted faces.

  Not yet.

  God damn. He came to a halt, exactly halfway on his run, and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of the running jacket. He wished he had already completed the run and were back inside his kitchen, brewing up coffee or smelling bacon frying in the pan. You’re tougher than this, you old buzzard, he counseled himself, you’ve had to be, ever since Linda killed herself. He leaned for a moment on the fence at the end of the path, where it circled back into the trees, and looked aimlessly out over the field he had sold. Now it was lightly covered with snow, a bumpy expanse from which hard light momentarily bounced and sang. All that too would have been forest. Where the dark things hid.

  Oh hell. Well, if they did, they weren’t anywhere in sight now. The air was leaden and empty, and you could see nearly all the way across the dip in the valley to where the trucks on Route 17 steamed on toward Binghamton and Elmira, or the other way toward Newburgh or Poughkeepsie. Only for a moment, the woods at his back made him feel uneasy. He turned around; saw only the path twisting back into the trees; heard only an angry squirrel complain that he was going to have a hungry winter.

  Pal, we’ve all had hungry winters. He was thinking of the season after Linda had died. Nothing puts off guests like a public suicide. And is there a Mrs. Benedikt? Oh yes, that’s her bleeding all over the patio—you know, the one with the funny bend in her neck. They had cleared off one by one, leaving him with a deteriorating two-million-dollar asset and no cash inflow. He’d had to let three-fourths of the staff go, and paid the rest out of his own pocket. It had been three years before business had returned, and six years before he had paid his debts.

  Suddenly, what he wanted was not coffee and bacon, but a bottle of O’Keefe’s beer. A gallon of it. His throat was dry and his chest ached.


  Yes, we’ve all had hungry winters, pal. A gallon of O’Keefe’s? He could have swallowed a barrel. Remembering Linda’s senseless, inexplicable death made him yearn for drunkenness.

  It was time to get back. Shaken by memory—Linda’s face had come back to him with utter clarity, claiming him through the nine years since that moment—he turned from the fence and inhaled deeply. Running, not a gallon of ale, was his therapy now. The path through the mile and a half of woods seemed narrower, darker.

  Your problem, Lewis, is that you’re yellow.

  It was the nightmare that had brought back the memories. Sears and John, in those cerements of the grave, with those lifeless faces. Why not Ricky? If the other two living members of the Chowder Society, why not the third?

  He was sweating even before he started the run back.

  The return path took a long angle off to the left before turning back in the direction of the farmhouse: normally this loafing misdirection was Lewis’s favorite part of his morning run. The woods closed in almost immediately, and by the time you had gone fifteen paces you forgot all about the open field at your back. More than any other part of the path, it looked here like the original climax forest: thick oaks and girlish birches fought for root space, tall ferns crowded toward the path. Today he ran it with as little pleasure in it as it was possible for him to feel. All those trees, their number and thickness, were obscurely threatening: running away from the house was like running away from safety. Going over the powdery snow in white air, he pushed himself hard toward the cut back home.

  When the sensation first hit him, he ignored it, vowing not to allow himself to be whammied any more than he was already. What had come into his mind was that someone was standing back at the beginning of the return path, just where the first trees stood. He knew that no one could be there: it was impossible that anyone had walked across the field without his noticing. But the sensation persisted; it would not be argued away. His watcher’s eyes seemed to follow him, going deeper into the crowded trees. A squadron of crows left the branches of an oak just ahead of him. Normally this would have delighted Lewis, but this time he jumped at their racket and almost fell.

  Then the sensation shifted, and became more intense. The person back there was coming after him, staring at him with huge eyes. Frantic, despising himself, Lewis pelted for home without daring to look back. He could feel the eyes watching him until he reached the walkway leading across his back garden from the edge of the woods to his kitchen door.

  He ran down the path, his chest raggedly hauling in air, twisted the doorknob, and jumped inside. He slammed the door behind him and went immediately to the window beside it. The path was empty and the only footprints were his. Still Lewis was frightened, looking out to the near edge of his woods. For a moment a traitorous synapse in his brain told him: maybe you should sell out and move into town. But there were no footprints. Nobody could possibly be out there, keeping out of sight in the shelter of the trees—he wouldn’t be scared out of the house he needed, forced by his own weakness to trade his splendid comfortable isolation for a crowded discomfort. To this decision, made in a cold kitchen on the first day of snowfall, he would hold.

  Lewis put a kettle on the stove, got his coffee pitcher off a shelf, filled the grinder with Blue Mountain beans and held the switch down until they were powder. Oh hell. He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of O’Keefe’s and after snapping off the cap drank most of it without tasting or swallowing. As the beer hit his stomach, a two-sided thought surprised him. I wish Edward was still alive: I wish John hadn’t pushed so hard for his godawful party.

  6

  “Well, speak up,” said Ricky. “What is it, trespassers again? We explained our position on that. He must know even if he won that he couldn’t make enough on a trespassing suit to pay expenses.”

  They were just entering the foothills of the Cayuga Valley, and Ricky was handling the old Buick with great care. The roads were slippery, and though ordinarily he would have had his snow tires put on before making even the eight-mile drive to Elmer Scales’s farm, this morning Sears had not given him time. Sears himself, huge in his black hat and black fur-collared winter coat, seemed as conscious of this as Ricky. “Keep your mind on your driving,” he said. “There’s supposed to be ice on the roads up around Damascus.”

  “We’re not going to Damascus,” Ricky pointed out.

  “Even so.”

  “Why didn’t you want to use your car?”

  “I’m having the snow tires put on this morning.”

  Ricky grunted, amused. Sears was in one of his refractory moods, a frequent consequence of a conversation with Elmer Scales. He was one of their oldest and most difficult clients. (Elmer had come to them first at fifteen years of age, with a long and complex list of people he wished to sue. They had never managed to get rid of him, nor had he ever altered his perception of conflict as a situation best addressed by an immediate lawsuit.) A skinny, excitable man with jutting ears and a high-pitched voice, Scales was called “Our Vergil” by Sears because of his poetry, which he ritually sent off to Catholic magazines and local papers. Ricky understood that the magazines just as ritually sent them back—once Elmer had shown him a file stuffed with rejection slips—but the local newspapers had printed two or three. They were inspirational poems, their imagery drawn from Elmer’s life as a farmer: The cows do moo, the lambs do bleat. God’s Glory walks in on thundering feet. So did Elmer Scales. He had eight children and an undimmed passion for litigation.

  Once or twice a year either partner was summoned out to the Scales farm and Elmer would direct him to a hole in a fence where a hunter or a teenager had cut through his fields: Elmer had often identified these trespassers with his binoculars, and he wanted to sue. They usually managed to talk him out of this, but he always had two or three litigations of other sorts under way. But this time, Ricky suspected, it was more serious than Scales’s upsets were normally; he had never before asked—commanded—both partners to come out.

  “As you know, Sears,” he said, “I can drive and think at the same time. I’m doing a very sedate thirty miles an hour. I think you can trust me with whatever has Elmer worked up.”

  “Some of his animals died.” Sears said this tight-lipped, implying that his speaking would be likely to result in their going off the road at any minute.

  “So why are we going out there? We can’t bring them back.”

  “He wants us to see them. He called Walter Hardesty too.”

  “They didn’t just die, then.”

  “With Elmer, who knows? Now please concentrate on getting us there safely, Ricky. This experience will be grisly enough as it is.”

  Ricky glanced at his partner and for the first time that morning saw how pale Sears’s face was. Beneath the smooth skin prominent blue veins swam at intervals into visibility; beneath the young eyes hung gray patches of webbed skin. “Keep your eyes on the road,” said Sears.

  “You look terrible.”

  “I don’t think Elmer will notice.”

  Ricky’s eyes were now safely on the narrow country road; this gave him license to speak. “Did you have a bad night?”

  Sears said, “I think it’s beginning to melt.”

  As this was a blatant lie, Ricky ignored it. “Did you?”

  “Observant Ricky. Yes, I did.”

  “So did I. Stella thinks we should talk about it.”

  “Why? Does she have bad nights too?”

  “She thinks that talking about it would help.”

  “That sounds like a woman. Talking just opens the wounds. Not talking helps to heal them.”

  “In that case, it was a mistake to invite Donald Wanderley here.”

  Sears grunted in exasperation.

  “That was unfair of me,” Ricky said, “and I’m sorry I said it. But I think we should talk about it for the same reason y
ou think we should invite that boy.”

  “He’s not a boy. He must be thirty-five. He might be forty.”

  “You know what I mean.” Ricky took a deep breath. “Now I want your forgiveness in advance, because I am going to tell you the dream I had last night. Stella said I woke up screaming. In any case, it was the worst dream yet.” By a shift in the car’s inner weather, Ricky knew that Sears was immediately more interested. “I was in a vacant house, on an upper floor, and some mysterious beast was trying to find me. I’ll skip the development, but the feeling of danger was overwhelming. At the end of the dream it came into the room where I was, but it wasn’t a monster anymore. It was you and Lewis and John. All of you were dead.” Glancing sideways toward his passenger, he saw the curve of Sears’s mottled cheek, the curve of the hatbrim.

  “You saw the three of us?”

  Ricky nodded.

  Sears cleared his throat, and then cranked the window down a quarter of the way. Freezing air rushed into the car. Sears’s chest expanded beneath the black coat: individual spiky hairs of the furry collar flattened in the rush of air. “Extraordinary. You say there were the three of us?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Extraordinary. Because I had an identical dream. But when that dreadful thing burst into my room, I saw only two men. Lewis and John. You weren’t there.”

  Ricky heard a tone in the other’s voice it took him a moment to identify, and when he had named it, the recognition carried enough surprise to silence him until they turned into Elmer Scales’s long driveway. It was envy.

  * * *

  “Our Vergil,” Sears pronounced, to himself Ricky thought. As they went slowly up the drive toward the isolated two-story farmhouse, Ricky saw an obviously impatient Scales, dressed in a cap and a plaid jacket, waiting for them on the porch and saw also that the farmhouse resembled a building in an Andrew Wyeth painting. Scales himself looked like a Wyeth portrait; or, more accurately perhaps, a Norman Rockwell subject. His ears stuck redly out beneath the tied-up flaps of his cap. A gray Dodge sedan was pulled up in the cleared space beside the porch, and when Ricky parked next to it he saw the sheriff’s seal on the door. “Walt’s here,” he said, and Sears nodded.