Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  Omar Norris, one of the town’s small population of full-time drinkers, was seated on a stool at the bar, looking at them in amazement; plump Humphrey Stalladge moved between the booths, dusting ashtrays. “Walt!” he called, and then nodded at Ricky and Sears. Hardesty’s bearing had changed: within the bar, he was taller, more signeurial, and his physical attitude to the two older men behind him somehow suggested that they had come to the place for his advice. Then Stalladge glanced more closely at Ricky and said, “Mr. Hawthorne, isn’t it?” and smiled and said, “Well,” and Ricky knew that Stella had been in here at one time or another.

  “Back room okay?” Hardesty asked.

  “Always is, for you.” Stalladge waved toward a door marked Private, tucked in a corner beside the long bar, and watched the three men across the dusty floor. Omar Norris, still astonished, watched them, Hardesty striding like a G-man, Ricky conspicuous only in his sober neatness, Sears an imposing presence similar to (it only now came to Ricky) Orson Welles. “You’re in good company today, Walt,” Stalladge called behind their backs, and Sears made one of his disgusted noises deep in his throat—as much at that as at the negligent wave of his gloved hand with which Hardesty acknowledged the remark. Hardesty, princely, opened the door.

  But once inside, after indicating that they should go down the dim hallway to the dark room at its end, his shoulders slumped again, his face relaxed, and he said, “Can I get you anything?” Both men shook their heads. “I’m a little thirsty, myself,” Hardesty said, grimaced, and went back through the door.

  Wordlessly the two lawyers went down the hall and into the dingy back room. A table, scarred by a thousand generations of cigarettes, stood in the center; six camp chairs circled it. Ricky found the light switch and flicked it down. Between the unseen light bulbs and the table stood cases of beer stacked nearly to the ceiling. The entire room smelled of smoke and stale beer; even with the light on, the front portion of the room was nearly as dark as it had been before.

  “What are we doing here?” Ricky asked.

  Sears sat heavily in one of the camp chairs, sighed, removed his hat and put it carefully on the table. “If you mean what will come of this fantastic excursion, nothing, Ricky, nothing.”

  “Sears,” Ricky began, “I think we ought to talk about what Elmer saw out there.”

  “Not in front of Hardesty.”

  “I agree. Now.”

  “Not now. Please.”

  “My feet are still cold,” Ricky said, and Sears gave him a rare smile.

  They heard the door at the end of the hall sliding open. Hardesty came in, a full glass of beer in one hand and a half-empty bottle of Labatt’s and his Stetson in the other. His complexion had become slightly reddened, as if by a rough plains wind. “Beer’s the best thing for a dry throat,” he said. Beneath the camouflaging mist of beer which floated out with his words was the sharper, darker tang of sour-mash whiskey. “Really wets the pipes.” Ricky calculated that Hardesty had managed to swallow one shot of whiskey and half a bottle of beer in the few moments he had been in the bar. “Have you two ever been here before?”

  “No,” Sears said.

  “Well, this is a good place. It’s real private, Humphrey makes sure you’re not disturbed if you got something private you want to say, and it’s kind of out of the way, so nobody is likely to see the sheriff and the two most distinguished lawyers in town sneakin’ into a tavern.”

  “Nobody except Omar Norris.”

  “Right, and he’s not likely to remember.” Hardesty swung a leg over a chair as if it were a large dog he intended to ride, lowered himself into it and simultaneously tossed his hat onto the table, where it bumped into Sears’s. Then the Labatt’s bottle went onto the table; Sears moved his own hat a few inches nearer his belly as the sheriff took a long swallow from his glass.

  “If I may repeat a question my partner just asked, what are we doing here?”

  “Mr. James, I want to tell you something.” The gun-fighter eyes had a drunk’s shining sincerity. “You’ll understand why we had to get away from Elmer. We’re never gonna find who or what killed those sheep.” He swallowed again; stifled a burp with the back of his hand.

  “No?” At least Hardesty’s awful performance was taking Sears’s mind off his own troubles; he was miming surprise and interest.

  “No. No way, no how. This ain’t the first time something like this happened.”

  “It isn’t?” Ricky brought out. He too sat down, wondering how much livestock had been slaughtered around Milburn without his hearing of it.

  “Not by a long shot. Not here, see, but in other parts of the country.”

  “Oh,” Ricky leaned back against the rickety chair.

  “You remember a few years back I went to a national police convention in Kansas City. Flew out, stayed there a week. Real good trip.” Ricky could remember this, because after Hardesty’s return the sheriff had spoken to the Lion’s Club, the Kiwanis, the Rotary, the Jaycees and the Elks, the National Rifle Association, the Masons and the John Birch Society, the VFW and the Companions of the Forest of America—the organizations which had paid for his trip, and to a third of which Ricky by obligation belonged. His topic was the need for “a modern and fully equipped force for law and order in the small American community.”

  “Well,” Hardesty said, gripping the beer bottle in one hand like a hot dog, “one night back at the motel, I got talking to a bunch of local sheriffs. These guys were from Kansas and Missouri and Minnesota. You know. They were talking about just this kind of setup—funny kinds of unsolved crimes. Now my point is this. At least two or three of these guys ran into exactly the same thing we saw today. Bunch of animals lying dead in a field—wham, bam, dead overnight. No cause until you look at ’em and find—you know. Real neat wounds, like a surgeon would do. And no blood. Exsanguinated, they call that. One of these guys said there was a whole wave of this in the Ohio River valley in the late sixties. Horses, dogs, cows—we probably got the first sheep. But, Mr. Hawthorne, you brought it all back to me when you said that about the no blood. That’s right, that reminded me. You’d figure those sheep would bleed like crazy. And in Kansas City, the same thing happened just a year back before the conference, around Christmas.”

  “Nonsense,” said Sears. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this rubbish.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. James. It’s not nonsense. It all happened. You could look it up in the Kansas City Times. December 1973. Buncha dead cattle, no footprints, no blood—and that was on fresh snow too, just like today.” He looked across at Ricky, winked, drained his beer.

  “Nobody was ever arrested?” Ricky asked.

  “Never. In all of those places, they never found anybody. Just like somethin’ bad came to town, put on its show and took off again. My idea is that things like this are somethin’s idea of a joke.”

  “What?” Sears said explosively. “Vampires? Demons? Crazy.”

  “No, I’m not sayin’ that. Hell, I know there’s no vampires, just like I know that damned monster in that lake in Scotland isn’t there.” Hardesty tipped back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. “But nobody ever found anything, and we ain’t gonna either. There isn’t even any sense in looking. I figure just to keep Elmer happy by telling him how I’m workin’ on it.”

  “Is that really all you intend to do?” asked incredulous Ricky Hawthorne.

  “Oh, I might have a man walk around some of the local farms, ask if they saw anything funny last night, but that’s about all.”

  “And you actually brought us here to tell us that?” Sears asked.

  “I actually did.”

  “Let’s go, Ricky.” Sears pushed his chair back and reached for his hat.

  “And actually I thought the two most distinguished lawyers in town might be able to tell me something.”

  “I could, but I doubt th
at you’d listen.”

  “A little less high and mighty, Mr. James. We’re both on the same side, aren’t we?”

  Ricky said, over the inevitable phht of expelled air from Sears, “What did you think we could tell you?”

  “Why you think you know something about what Elmer saw last night.” He fingered a groove in his forehead, smiling. “You two old boys went into deep freeze when Elmer was talking about that. So you know something or heard something or saw something you didn’t want to tell Elmer Scales. Well, suppose you support your local sheriff and speak up.”

  Sears pushed himself up from the chair. “I saw four dead sheep. I know nothing. And that, Walter, is that.” He snatched his hat from the table. “Ricky, let’s go do something useful.”

  * * *

  “He’s right, isn’t he?” They were turning the corner at Wheat Row. The vast gray body of St. Michael’s Cathedral hung in the air to their right; the grotesque and saintly figures above the door and beside the windows wore caps and shirts of fresh snow, as if they had been frozen in place.

  “About?” Sears waved toward their office building. “Miracle of miracles. A parking space right in front of the door.”

  “About what Elmer saw.”

  “If it is obvious to Walt Hardesty, then it is obvious indeed. Yes.”

  “Did you actually see anything?”

  “I saw something not there. I hallucinated. I can only assume that I was overtired and somehow emotionally affected by the story I told.”

  Ricky carefully backed the car into the space before the tall wooden façade of the office building.

  Sears coughed, placed his hand on the door latch, did not move; to Ricky, he looked as though he already regretted what he was going to say. “I take it you saw more or less the same thing that Our Vergil did.”

  “Yes, I did.” He paused. “No. I felt it, but I knew what it was.”

  “Well.” He coughed again, and Ricky grew tense with waiting. “What I saw was Fenny Bate.”

  “The boy in your story?” Ricky was astonished.

  “The boy I tried to teach. The boy I suppose I killed—helped to kill.”

  Sears took his hand from the door and let his weight fall back on the car seat. Now, at last, he wanted to talk.

  Ricky tried to take it in. “I wasn’t sure that—” He stopped in midsentence, aware that he was breaking one of the Chowder Society’s rules.

  “That it was a true story? Oh, it was true enough, Ricky. True enough. There was a real Fenny Bate, and he died.”

  Ricky remembered the sight of Sears’s lighted window. “Were you looking out of the library windows when you saw him?”

  Sears shook his head. “I was going upstairs. It was very late, probably about two o’clock. I had fallen asleep in a chair after doing the dishes. I didn’t feel very good, I’m afraid—I would have felt worse if I’d known that Elmer Scales was going to wake me up at seven o’clock this morning. Well, I turned off the lights in the library, closed the door, and began to go up the stairs. And then I saw him sitting there, sitting on the stairs. He appeared to be asleep. He was dressed in the rags I remembered him wearing, and his feet were bare.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was too frightened to do anything at all. I’m no longer a strong young man of twenty. Ricky, I just stood there for—I don’t know how long. I thought I might collapse. I steadied myself by putting my hand on the banister, and then he woke up.” Sears was clasping his hands together before him, and Ricky could tell that he was gripping hard. “He didn’t have eyes. He just had holes. The rest of his face was smiling.” Sears’s hands went to his face and folded in beneath the wide hatbrim. “Christ, Ricky. He wanted to play.”

  “He wanted to play?”

  “That’s what went through my mind. I was in such shock I couldn’t think straight. When the—hallucination—stood up, I ran back down the stairs and locked myself in the library. I went to bed on the couch. I had the feeling that it was gone, but I couldn’t make myself go back out on the staircase. Eventually I fell asleep and had the dream we were discussing. In the morning of course I recognized what had happened. I was ‘seeing things,’ in the vulgar parlance. And I did not think, nor do I think now, that such things are exactly in the province of Walt Hardesty. Or Our Vergil, for that matter.”

  “My God, Sears,” Ricky said.

  “Forget about it, Ricky. Just forget I ever told you. At least until this young Wanderley arrives.”

  Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead spoke in his mind again, and he turned his eyes from the dashboard where they had been resting while Sears told him to do the impossible, and looked straight into the pale face of his law partner.

  “No more,” Sears said. “Whatever it is, no more. I’ve had enough.”

  . . . no put her feet in first . . .

  “Sears.”

  “I can’t, Ricky,” Sears said, and levered himself out of the car.

  Hawthorne got out on his side, and looked across the top of the car at Sears, an imposing man dressed in black, and for a moment he saw on the face of his old friend the waxy features his dream had given him. Behind him, around him, all of the town floated in wintry air, as if it too had secretly died. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” Sears said. “I wish Edward were still alive. I often wish that.”

  “So do I,” Ricky whispered, but Sears had already turned from him and was beginning to go up the steps to the front door. A rising wind bit at Ricky’s face and hands, and he quickly followed, sneezing again.

  John Jaffrey

  1

  The doctor, whose party it had been, woke out of a troubled sleep just at the time when Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James were beginning their walk across a field in the direction of what appeared to be several piles of dirty laundry. Moaning, Jaffrey looked around the bedroom. Everything appeared to be subtly altered, subtly wrong. Even the bare shoulder of Milly Sheehan, who slept on beside him, was somehow wrong—Milly’s round shoulder looked insubstantial, like pink smoke floating in the air. This was true of the bedroom as a whole. The fading wallpaper (blue stripes and bluer roses), the table bearing neat piles of coins, a library book (The Making of a Surgeon) and a lamp, the doors and handles of the tall white cupboard opposite, his yesterday’s gray striped suit and last evening’s dinner jacket draped carelessly over a chair: it all seemed drained of several shades of color, wispy as the interior of a cloud. In this room, at once familiar and unreal, he could not stay.

  Jesus she moved, his own words, coiled and died in the washed-out air as if he had just spoken them. Pursued by them, he quickly got out of bed.

  Jesus she moved, and this time he heard it spoken. The voice was level, without shading or vibrato, not his own. He had to get out of the house. Of his dreams, he could remember only the last startling image: before that there had been the usual business of lying paralyzed in a bare bedroom, no bedroom he’d ever seen in his life, and the coming of a threatening beast which resolved into dead Sears and dead Lewis: he had assumed they’d all been having this dream. But the image which propelled him across the room was this: the face, streaked with blood and distorted with bruises, of a young woman—a woman as dead as Sears and Lewis in the familiar dream—staring at him with glowing eyes and grinning mouth. It was more real than anything about him, more real than himself. (Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead)

  But she moved, all right. She sat up and grinned.

  It was coming to an end for him at last, as it had for Edward, and with part of his mind he knew it. And was grateful. A little surprised that his hands did not melt through the brass handles of the dresser drawer, Jaffrey pulled out socks and underwear. Unearthly rose light pervaded the bedroom. He quickly dressed in random articles of clothing, selecting them blindly, and left the bedroom to go down the stairs to the ground floor. There, obeying an impulse stampe
d into him by ten years’ habit, he let himself into a small rear office, opened a cabinet and took out two vials and two disposable hypodermics. He sat on a revolving typing chair, rolled up his left sleeve, took the syringes from their wrappers and put one on the metal-topped table beside him.

  The girl sat up on the blood-smeared car seat and grinned at him through the window. She said, Hurry up, John. He pushed the first needle through the rubber cap over the insulin compound, pulled back the barrel and socked the needle into his arm. When the hypodermic was empty, he retracted it and tossed it into the wastebasket beneath the table; then he put the other syringe into the second vial, which contained a compound of morphine; this went into the same arm.

  Hurry up, John.

  None of his friends knew he was a diabetic, and had been since his early sixties; neither did they know of the morphine addiction which had gained on him since the same period, when he had begun administering the drug to himself: they had only seen the effects of the doctor’s morning ritual gradually eating into him.

  With both syringes at the bottom of the wastebasket, Dr. Jaffrey came out into his entrance hall and waiting room. Empty chairs stood in rows against the walls; on one of these appeared a girl in torn clothing, red smears across her face, redness leaking from her mouth when she said Hurry up, John.

  He reached into a closet for his overcoat and was surprised that his hand, extended there at the end of his arm, was such a whole, functioning thing. Someone behind him seemed to be helping him get his arms through the sleeves of the coat. Blindly he grabbed a hat from the shelf above the coathooks. He stumbled through his front door.

  2

  The face was smiling down at him from an upstairs window in Eva Galli’s old house. Get along, now. Moving a little oddly, as if drunk, he went down the walk, his feet in carpet slippers not registering the cold, and turned in the direction of town. Until he reached the corner, he could feel that house across the street as a presence behind him; when he managed to get as far as the corner, his open coat flapping about the trousers to the gray suit and the dinner jacket, he suddenly saw in his mind that the house was blazing, all of it blanketed in a transparent flame that was even now warming his back. But when he turned around to look it was not burning, there were no transparent flames, nothing had happened.