Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  “Do you think that’s what it was?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, probably. Too much excitement. But—”

  Ricky stared up at Jaffrey and took his hand from Edward’s still warm hand. “But what?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say. But, Ricky, look at his face.”

  He looked: rigid muscles, mouth drawn open as if to yell, empty eyes. It was the face of a man being tortured, flayed alive. “Ricky,” John said, “it’s not a very medical thing to say, but he looks as if he was scared to death.”

  Ricky nodded and stood. That was just how Edward looked. “We can’t let anyone come up here. I’ll go down and phone for an ambulance.”

  6

  And that was the ending of Jaffrey’s party: Ricky Hawthorne telephoned for an ambulance, switched off the record player and said that Edward Wanderley had “had an accident” and was beyond help, and sent thirty people home. He permitted no one to go upstairs. He looked for Ann-Veronica Moore, but she had already left.

  Half an hour later, Edward’s body was on its way to hospital or morgue. Ricky drove Stella home. “You didn’t see her leave?” he asked.

  “One minute she was dancing with Ned Rowles, the next minute she was out the door. I thought she was going to the bathroom. Ricky, how horrible.”

  “Yes. It was horrible.”

  “Poor Edward. I don’t think I really believe it.”

  “I don’t think I do either.” Tears filled his eyes, and for some seconds he drove blindly, seeing only a streaky blur. To try to take the image of Edward’s face from his mind, he asked, “What did she say to you that surprised you so much?”

  “What? When? I barely spoke to her.”

  “In the middle of the party. I saw her talking to you, and I thought she said something that startled you.”

  “Oh.” Stella’s voice rose. “She asked me if I was married. I said, ‘I’m Mrs. Hawthorne.’ And then she said, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve just seen your husband. He looks like he’d be a good enemy.’”

  “You couldn’t have heard her correctly.”

  “I did.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  * * *

  And a week later, after Ricky had telephoned the theater where the girl was working, trying to return her coat, he heard that she had returned to New York the day after the party, abruptly quit the play and left town. Nobody knew where she was. She had vanished for good—she was too young, too new, and she left behind not even enough reputation for a legend. That night, at what looked like being the final meeting of the Chowder Society, he had, inspired, turned to a morose John Jaffrey and asked, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” And John saved them all by answering, “I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me,” and told them a ghost story.

  Part Two

  Dr. Rabbitfoot’s Revenge

  Follow a shadow, it still flies you; Seem to fly it, it will pursue.

  —Ben Jonson

  I

  Just Another Field, but What They Planted There

  From the Journals of Don Wanderley

  1

  The old idea of Dr. Rabbitfoot . . . the idea for another book, the story of the destruction of a small town by Dr. Rabbitfoot, an itinerant showman who pitches camp on its outskirts, sells elixirs and potions and nostrums (a black man?), and who has a little sideshow—jazz music, dancing girls, trombones, etc. Fans and bubbles. If I ever saw a perfect setting for this story, Milburn is it.

  First about the town, then about the good doctor. My uncle’s town, Milburn, is one of those places that seems to create its own limbo and then to nest down in it. Neither proper city nor proper country—too small for one, too cramped for the other, and too self-conscious about its status. (The local paper is called The Urbanite. Milburn even seems proud of its minuscule slum the few streets called the Hollow, seems to point at it and say: See, we’ve got places where you want to be careful after dark, the age hasn’t left us high and dry and innocent. This is almost comedy. If trouble ever comes to Milburn, it won’t start in the Hollow.) Three-fourths of the men work somewhere else, in Binghamton mainly—the town depends on the freeway for its life. A feeling of being oddly settled, unmoving, heavy, and at the same time nervous. (I bet they gossip about one another endlessly.) Nervous because they’d feel that they were forever missing something—that the age after all has left them high and dry. Probably I feel this because of the contrast between here and California—this is a worry they don’t have, there. It does seem a particularly Northeast kind of anxiety, peculiar to these little towns. Good places for Dr. Rabbitfoot.

  (Speaking of anxiety, those three old men I met today—my uncle’s friends—have it bad. Obviously has to do with whatever made them write to me, not knowing that I was getting so sick of California I’d have gone anywhere I thought I might be able to work.)

  Physically, of course, it’s pretty—all these places are. Even the Hollow has a kind of sepia thirties prettiness. There’s the regulation town square, the regulation trees—maples, tamarack pines, oaks, the woods full of mossy deadfalls—a sense that the woods around the town are stronger, deeper than the little grid of streets people put in their midst. And when I came in I saw the big houses, some of them big enough to be called mansions.

  But still . . . it is wonderful, a heaven-sent setting for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel.

  He’s black, definitely. He dresses gaudily, with old-fashioned pzazz: spats, big rings, a cane, a flashy waistcoat. He’s chirpy, showbizzy, a marathon talker, slightly ominous—he’s the bogeyman. He’ll own you if you don’t watch out. He’ll get you seven ways to Sunday. He’s got a killer smile.

  You only see him at night, when you pass a piece of land normally deserted and there he is, standing on a platform outside his tent, twirling a cane while the jazz band plays. Lively music surrounds him, it whistles through his tight black hair, a saxophone curls his lips. He’s looking straight at you. He invites you in to have a look at his show, to buy a bottle of his elixir for a dollar. He says he is the celebrated Dr. Rabbitfoot, and he’s got just what your soul needs.

  And what if what your soul needs is a bomb? A knife? A slow death?

  Dr. Rabbitfoot gives you a big wink. You’re on, man. Just pull a dollar out of your jeans.

  * * *

  Now to state what is obvious: Behind this figure I’ve been carting around in my head for years is Alma Mobley. It also suited her to give you what you wanted.

  * * *

  All the time, the capering smile, the floating hands, the eyes of bleached and dazzling white . . . his sinister gaiety. An’ what about that little Alma Mobley, boy? Suppose you see her when you close your eyes, then what? Is she there, hee hee? Has you ever touched a ghost? Has you ever put your hand on a ghost’s white skin? And yo’ brutha’s peaceful eyes—was they watchin’ you?

  2

  I went to the office of the lawyer who wrote to me, Sears James, as soon as I got into town—a severe white building on Wheat Row, just alongside the town square. The day, gray in the morning, was cold and bright, and before I saw his receptionist I thought, maybe this is the start of a new cycle for you, but the receptionist told him that both Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne were at a funeral. That new secretary they hired went too, but it looked a little pushy to her, because she didn’t know Dr. Jaffrey at all, did she? Oh, they should be at the cemetery by now. And are you the Mr. Wanderley they’ve been expecting? I don’t suppose you knew Dr. Jaffrey, either? Oh, he was a dear, dear man, he must have been doctoring here in Milburn for forty years, he was the kindest man you ever saw, not sugary-sweet, you know, but when he put his hands on you, you just felt the kindness flowing out, she rattled on, looking me over, inspecting me, trying to figure out just what the devil her boss wanted me for, and then this old woman sit
ting at her switchboard locked him with an angry smile and slapped the trump card on the table, she said of course you don’t know, but he killed himself five days ago. He jumped off the bridge—can you imagine that? It was just tragic. Mr. James and Ricky Hawthorne were so upset. They still haven’t gotten over it. Now that Anna girl is making them do twice as much work, and we’ve got that crazy Elmer Scales calling up every day, yelling at them about those four sheep of his. . . . what would make a nice man like Dr. Jaffrey do a thing like that, do you imagine?

  (He listened to Dr. Rabbitfoot, lady.)

  Oh, you’d like to go out to the cemetery?

  3

  He did. It was on a road called Pleasant Hill, just out of town on one of the state roads (she gave him good directions), long fields dying under snow that came too early, and every now and then the wind picking up a flat sheet of loose snow, making it stand up and wave its arms. Funny how lost this country seems, though people have been walking back and forth over it for hundreds of years. It looks bruised and regretful, its soul gone or withdrawn, waiting for something to happen that will wake it up again.

  The sign, Pleasant Hill Cemetery, was a length of stamped gray metal on one side of a black ironwork gate; if it had not been for the big gates standing at what looked like the entrance to just another hilly field, Don would have missed it. He looked at the gates as they came nearer, wondering what kind of farmer would be grandiose enough to stick up a baronial gate at his tractor path, slowed down, glanced up at the rising narrow road—more than a tractor path—and saw half a dozen cars parked at the top of the hill. Then he saw the little plate. Just another field, but heavens what they planted there. He swung his car through the gates.

  Don left his car apart from the others, halfway up the hill, and walked to the top: nearest him was the oldest section of the cemetery, tilted slabs with pitted markings, stone angels lifting arms weighted with snow. Granite young women shielded their eyes with forearms hung with drapery. Thin skeletons of weeds mounted up the leaning slabs. The narrow road bisected the old section and led into a larger region of neat small headstones. Purple, gray and white, these were dwarfed by the expanse of land rolling out from them: after a moment, a hundred yards away, Don saw the fences surrounding the cemetery. A hearse was drawn up at the land’s lowest point. The black-hatted driver cupped a cigarette so that it would not be seen by the little knot of people clustered around the newest grave. One woman shapeless in a pale blue coat clung to another, taller woman; the other mourners stood as straight and motionless as fenceposts. When I saw the two old men standing together at the base of the grave, I knew they had to be the two lawyers—if they weren’t lawyers they were from Central Casting. I started to come toward them down the slope of the narrow road. Then I thought, if the dead man was a doctor, why aren’t there more people—where are his patients? A silver-haired man beside the two lawyers saw him first and prodded the massive one who wore a black fur-collared coat with his elbow. The big one glanced up at him, and then the little man beside him, the one who looked as if he had a cold, also took his eyes from the minister and looked curiously at Don. Even the minister stopped talking for a moment, stuck one frozen hand in the pocket of his overcoat, and gaped at Don with rubber-faced confusion.

  Then, finally, a sign of welcome, a contrast to this guarded examination: one of the beauties, the younger one (a daughter?), wafted toward him a small genuine smile.

  The man with silver-white hair who looked to Don as though he should have been in the movies left the other two and sauntered toward Don. “Are you a friend of John’s?” he whispered.

  “My name is Don Wanderley,” he whispered back. “I got a letter from a man named Sears James, and the receptionist in his office said I could find him out here.”

  “Hell, you even look a little like Edward.” Lewis grabbed his bicep and squeezed. “Look, kid, we’re having a rough time here, just hang in there and don’t say anything until it’s all over. You got a place to stay tonight?”

  So I joined them, half-meeting, half-avoiding their glances. The woman in the pale blue coat sagged against the challenging-looking woman holding her up: her face worked and she wailed oh no oh no oh no. Crumpled colored tissues lay at her feet, lifting and scampering in the wind that cut into the hollow. Every now and then one of them shot away like a small pastel pheasant and caught in the mesh of the fence. By the time we left there were dozens of them there, flattened out against the wire.

  Frederick Hawthorne

  4

  Ricky had been pleased with Stella. While the three remaining members of the Society had been trying to adjust to the shock of John’s death, only Stella had thought of the plight of Milly Sheehan. Sears and Lewis, he supposed, had thought as he had—that Milly would simply live on in John’s house. Or that, if the house was too empty for her, she would put up at the Archer Hotel until she decided where to go and what to do. He and Sears knew that she had no financial troubles; they had drawn up the will which left Milly John Jaffrey’s house and the contents of his bank accounts. If you added it all together, she had been willed assets of somewhere around two hundred thousand dollars: and if she chose to stay in Milburn, there was more than enough in the bank to pay the real estate taxes and give her a comfortable living. We’re lawyers, he said to himself, we think like that. We can’t help it; we put the pettifogging first and the people second.

  Of course they were thinking of John Jaffrey. The news had come near noon of the day following that in which Ricky’s premonitions had reached their height: he had known that something dreadful had happened the moment he recognized the shaky voice on the other end of the line as Milly Sheehan’s. “It’s, it’s,” she said, her voice trembling and cloudy. “Mr. Hawthorne . . . ?”

  “Yes, it’s me, Milly,” he said. “What’s happened?” He pushed the buzzer that communicated to Sears’s office and told him to switch on the telephone speaker for his extension. “What is it, Milly?” he asked, knowing that his voice would be much too loud for Sears, but momentarily unable to speak softly—the speakers, while reproducing the client’s voice at a normal volume, tripled the noise made by anyone at the other office extension. “You’re breaking my eardrums,” Sears complained over the line.

  “Sorry,” Ricky said. “Milly, are you there? It’s Milly, Sears.”

  “So I gathered. Milly, can we help you?”

  “Oooo,” she wailed and the back of his neck went cold.

  The phone went dead. “Milly?”

  “Pipe down,” Sears commanded.

  “Are you there, Milly?”

  Ricky heard the telephone clattering against some hard surface.

  The next voice was Walt Hardesty’s. “Hey, this is the sheriff. Is this Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “Yes. Mr. James is on the other line. What’s going on, Walt? Is Milly all right?”

  “She’s standin’ lookin’ out the window. What is she anyhow, his wife? I thought she was his wife.”

  Sears burst in impatiently, his voice loud as a cannon in Ricky’s office. “She is his housekeeper. Now tell us what is happening out there.”

  “Well, she’s fallin’ apart like a wife. You two are Dr. Jaffrey’s lawyers?”

  “Yes,” Ricky said.

  “Do you know about him yet?”

  Both partners were silent. If Sears felt the way Ricky did, his throat was too tight for speech.

  “Well, he was a leaper,” Hardesty said. “Hey, hang on, lady. Sit down or something.”

  “HE WAS A WHAT?” Sears bellowed, his voice booming through Ricky’s office.

  “Well, he took a dive off the bridge this morning. He was a leaper. Lady, calm down and let me talk.”

  “The lady’s name is Mrs. Sheehan,” Sears said in a more normal voice. “She might respond better if you called her that. Now since Mrs. Sheehan evidently wished to communicate with us and is unable to do so, plea
se tell us what happened to John Jaffrey.”

  “He took a dive off . . .”

  “Be careful. He fell off the bridge? Which bridge?”

  “Hell, the bridge over the river, what do you think?”

  “What’s his condition?”

  “Dead as a doornail. What do you think it would be? Say, who’s gonna take care of the arrangements and all that? This lady’s in no shape . . .”

  “We will,” Ricky said.

  “And we might take care of more than that,” Sears uttered furiously. “Your manner is disgraceful. Your diction is shameful. You are a ninny, Hardesty.”

  “Just wait a damned—”

  “AND! If you are assuming that Dr. Jaffrey committed suicide, then you are on shaky ground indeed, my friend, and you’d be well advised to keep that assumption to yourself.”

  “Omar Norris saw the whole thing,” Hardesty said. “We need ID before we can get set for the autopsy, so why don’t you get over here so we can get off the phone?”

  Five seconds after Ricky put down his phone Sears appeared in the doorway, already thrusting his arms into his coat. “It’s not true,” Sears said, pulling on the coat. “It’s some mistake, but let’s get over there anyway.”

  The telephone buzzed again. “Don’t answer it,” Sears said, but Ricky picked it up. “Yes?”

  “There’s a young woman in reception who wants to see you and Mr. James,” said the receptionist.

  “Tell her to come back tomorrow, Mrs. Quast. Dr. Jaffrey died this morning, and Mr. James and I are going to his home to meet Walt Hardesty.”

  “Why . . .” Mrs. Quast, who had been on the verge of indiscretion, changed subjects. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Hawthorne. Do you want me to call Mrs. Hawthorne?”

  “Yes, and say I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.” By now, Sears was in a rage of impatience, and when Ricky moved around his desk, his partner was already in the hallway, twirling his hat. Ricky grabbed his coat and hurried to catch up.