Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  “When you fall off a horse, you get back on,” Lewis told himself. “You get right back on that mother.” What had happened? He had heard—voices? No; he had heard himself thinking. He had spooked himself by remembering too exactly Linda’s last night alive. That and the nightmare—Sears and John advancing toward him—had bamboozled his emotions so that he behaved like someone in a Chowder Society story. No evil stranger had stood behind him on the path back home; you could not walk through the woods without being heard. Everything was explicable.

  Lewis went upstairs to his bedroom, kicked off his loafers and pushed his feet into a pair of Dingos, pulled on a sweater and a ski parka and went back down and out the kitchen door.

  His morning footprints were already filling with new snow. The air felt delicious, crisp as a winesap apple; light snow continued to come down. If he could not go coon hunting with Otto Gruebe, he might be able to get in some skiing before long. Lewis walked across his brick patio and stepped onto the path. Above him the sky was dark and scattered with shining clouds, but clear gray light filled the day. Snow on the pine branches gleamed, particular and white as moonlight.

  He deliberately set off on what was normally his return path. His own fear surprised him, tingling in his mouth and belly like anticipation.

  “Well, I’m here, come and get me,” he said, and smiled.

  He felt the presence of nothing but the day and the woods, his house at his back; he realized after a moment that even his fear had vanished.

  And now, walking over new snow toward his woods, Lewis had a fresh perception. It may have come because he was seeing the woods from an unfamiliar angle, going at them backward, and it may have been because he was just walking through them for the first time in weeks, not jogging. Whatever the reason, the woods looked like an illustration in a book—not like a real woods, but a drawing on a page. It was a fairytale woods, looking too perfect, too composed—drawn in black ink—to be real. Even the path, winding off in a pretty indirection, was a fairytale path.

  It was the clarity which gave it mystery. Each bare and spiky branch, each tangle of wiry stalks, stood out separately, shining with its own life. Some wry magic hovered just out of sight. As Lewis went deeper into the woods, where the new snow had not penetrated, he saw his morning’s footprints, and they too seemed haunting and illustrative and part of the fairytale, these prints in snow coming toward him.

  * * *

  Lewis was too restless to stay inside after his walk. The emptiness of the house proclaimed that the house held no woman; for some time, there would be no woman, unless Christina Barnes came out for one last scene. A few jobs around the house had been waiting for weeks—he had to check the sump, the dining room table was badly in need of polish, as was most of the silver—but these jobs could wait a while longer. Still wearing the sweater and parka, Lewis prowled his house, going from one floor to another, never settling in one room.

  He went into his dining room. The big mahogany table reproached him; its surface was dull, lightly scratched here and there from times he’d put Spanish earthenware down on it without using a mat. The spray of flowers in a jug on the center of the table had wilted; a few petals lay like dead bees on the wood. Did you really expect to see someone out there? he asked himself. Are you disappointed that you didn’t?

  Turning out of the dining room with the jug of wasted flowers in his hands, he saw again the fairytale tangle of the woods. Branches glistened, thorns shone like thumbtacks, implying some narrative on which he’d already closed the book.

  Well. He shook his head and took the dead flowers into the kitchen and dumped them into the waste bin. Whom did you want to meet? Yourself?

  Unexpectedly, Lewis blushed.

  He set down the empty jug on a counter and went back outside, crossing the patio to the old stable some previous owner had converted into a garage and tool shed. The Morgan was parked beside a toolbench covered with screwdrivers, pliers and paintbrushes in cans. Lewis bent his head, unlocked the door and cramped himself in behind the wheel.

  He reversed out of the garage, left the car and heaved the door shut, then got in and swung the car around on the bricks and drove down the tree-lined lane to the highway. He immediately felt more like himself: the canvas top of the Morgan bucked in the wind, cold breeze parted his hair in the middle. The tank was almost full.

  In fifteen minutes he was surrounded by hills and open country marked off at intervals by stands of trees. He took the little roads, opening the car up to seventy, sometimes eighty when he saw a nice stretch of straight road before him. He skirted the Chenango Valley, followed the line of the Tioughnioga River as far as Whitney Point, and then cut off west toward Richford and Caroline, deep in the Cayuga Valley. Sometimes on curves the little car’s back end skittered around, but Lewis corrected the skid expertly, not even thinking about it. Lewis instinctively drove well.

  Finally he realized that he was traveling the same route, and in the same way, as when he’d been a student returning to Cornell. The only difference was that exhilarating speed then had been thirty miles an hour.

  After nearly two hours of driving, taking little roads past farms and state parks just to see where they’d go, his face was numb with cold. He was in Tompkins County, close to Ithaca, and the country here was more lyrical than around Binghamton—when he reached the tops of hills, he could see the black road arrowing through vales and over tree-lined rises. The sky had darkened, though it was only midafternoon: Lewis thought he’d see more snow before nightfall. Then ahead of him, just far enough away to build up the right amount of speed, was a wide place in the road where he knew he could make the Morgan spin completely around. But he reminded himself that he was sixty-five years old—too old to do stunts in cars. He used the wide place in the road to turn around toward home.

  Going more slowly, he drove across the valley toward Harford, cutting back east. On the straight ways he opened the car up a little, but was careful to keep under seventy. Still, there was pleasure in it, in the speed and the cold breeze on his face and the dainty handling of the little car. All this nearly made him feel that he was a Tau Kappa Epsilon boy again, skimming over the roads toward home. A few heavy snowflakes drifted down.

  Near the airfield outside Glen Aubrey he passed a stand of denuded maples and saw in them the gleaming clarity of his own woods. They seemed suffused with magic, with some concealed meaning that was part of a complex story—hero foxes that were princes suffering a witch’s curse. He saw the footprints racing toward him.

  . . . suppose you went out for a walk and saw yourself running toward you, your hair flying, your face distorted with fear . . .

  His viscera went cold as his face. Ahead of him, standing in the middle of the road, was a woman. He had time to notice only the alarm in her posture, the hair which billowed around her shoulders. He twisted the wheel, wondering where in hell she’d come from—Jesus she just jumped out at me—at the same time as he realized that he was bound to hit her. The car was going to slew around.

  The rear end of the Morgan drifted slowly toward the girl. Then the entire car was traveling sideways and he lost sight of her. Panicked, Lewis cramped the wheel the other way. Time whittled down to a solid capsule encasing him as he sat helpless in a flying car. Then the texture of the moment changed, time broke and began to flow, and he knew, as passive as he’d ever been in his life, that the car had left the road: everything was happening with unbelievable slowness, almost lazily, and the Morgan was floating.

  It was over in a moment. The car stopped with a boneshaking jolt in a field, its nose pointed toward the road. The woman he might have struck was nowhere in sight. The taste of blood filled Lewis’s mouth; locked on the wheel, his hands were trembling. Maybe he had hit the woman and thrown her body off into a ditch. He fought the door, opened it and got out. His legs were trembling too. He saw at once that the Morgan was stuck: its rear tires were bolted
to the field. He’d need a towtruck. “Hey!” he shouted. “Are you okay?” He forced his legs to move. “Are you all right?”

  Lewis went unsteadily toward the road. He saw the crazy streaks his car had made. His hips ached. He felt very old. “Hey! Lady!” He couldn’t see the girl anywhere. Heart pounding, he waddled across the road, afraid of what he might see lying in the ditch, limbs splayed out, head thrown back . . . but the ditch cradled only a mound of unblemished snow. He looked up and down the road: no woman anywhere in sight.

  Lewis eventually gave up. Somehow the woman had gone away as suddenly as she’d come; or he had just imagined that he’d seen her. He rubbed his eyes. His hips still ached; bones seemed to be rubbing together. He went creakily down the road, hoping to see a farmhouse from which he could call the AAA. When he finally found one, a man with a thick black mattress of a beard and animal eyes let him use his telephone but made him wait outside on an open porch until the truck came.

  * * *

  He did not get home until after seven. Hungry, Lewis was still irritable. The girl had been there only a moment, like a deer jumping out before him, and when he had gone into the skid he had lost sight of her. But on that long straight road, where could she have run to, after he had landed in the field? So maybe she actually was lying dead in a ditch; but even a dog would leave a huge dent in the Morgan’s body, and the car was undamaged.

  “Hell,” he said out loud. The car was still in the drive; he had been in the house only long enough to get warm. The midday restlessness, the feeling that if he did not move some bad thing would happen—that something worse than the accident was aimed at him like a gun—was back. Lewis went up to his bedroom, removed the sweater and parka and put on a clean shirt, a rep tie and double-breasted blazer. He’d go to Humphrey’s Place and have a hamburger and a few beers. That was the ticket.

  * * *

  The lot was nearly full, and Lewis had to park in a space close to the road. The light snow had ceased during the early evening, but the air was cold and so sharp it felt as if you could break pieces off it with your bare hands. Beer signs flashed from the windows of the long gray building; country music from the four-piece band came to Lewis across the spaces of the lot. Wabash Cannonball.

  A keening note on the fiddle stitched into his brain as soon as he was inside, and Lewis frowned at the musician sawing away on the bandstand, hair down to his shoulders, left hip and right foot jigging in time, but the boy’s eyes were closed and he never noticed. Then an instant later the music was just music again, but his headache remained. The bar was crowded and so warm that Lewis began to perspire almost immediately. Big shapeless Humphrey Stalladge, an apron over his white shirt, moved back and forth behind the bar. All the tables nearest the band seemed to be filled with kids drinking beer from pitchers. When he looked at the backs of their heads, Lewis honestly couldn’t tell the boys from the girls.

  What if you saw yourself running toward you, running toward the headlights of your car, your hair flying and your face twisted with fear . . .

  “Get you anything, Lewis?” Humphrey asked.

  “Two aspirin and a beer. I’ve got a rotten headache. And a hamburger, Humphrey. Thanks.”

  Down at the other end of the bar, as far from the bandstand as he could get, looking both damp and filthy, Omar Norris was entertaining a group of men. As he talked his eyes bulged, his hands made swooping motions, and Lewis knew that if you were close enough to him you’d eventually see Omar’s spittle shining on your lapels. When he had been younger, Omar’s stories of getting out from under his wife’s heel and of W. C. Fields-like stratagems for avoiding all work but running the town snowplow and working as the department store Santa had been amusing enough, but Lewis was mildly surprised that he could get anyone to listen to him now. People were even buying him drinks. Stalladge came back with his aspirin tablets and set a glass of beer beside them. “Burger’s on the way,” he said.

  Lewis put the aspirins on his tongue and washed them down. The band had stopped playing Wabash Cannonball and was doing something else, a song he didn’t recognize. One of the young women at the tables in front of the band had turned around and was staring at him. Lewis nodded to her.

  He finished his beer and looked over the rest of the crowd. There were only a few empty booths by the front wall, so he caught Humphrey’s eye and pointed to his glass, and when it was filled he started to go across the room to one of them. If he didn’t get one early enough, he’d be pinned to the bar all night. Halfway across the room he nodded to Rollo Draeger, the druggist—come out to get away from Irmengard’s endless complaints—and belatedly recognized the boy seated beside the girl who had stared at him: Jim Hardie, Eleanor’s son, usually seen these days with Draeger’s daughter. He glanced back at the couple, and found them both staring at him now. Jim Hardie was a suspect kid, Lewis thought: he was broad and blond and strong, but he looked like he had a streak of wildness as wide as the county. He was always grinning: Lewis had heard from Walt Hardesty that Jim Hardie was probably the one who had burned down the deserted old Pugh barn and set a field on fire. He could see the boy grinning as he did that. The girl with him tonight was older than Penny Draeger; better-looking, too.

  Lewis remembered a time, years ago, when everything had been simple, and it would have been he sitting beside a girl listening to a band, Noble Sissle or Benny Goodman—Lewis with his heart on fire. The memory made him automatically look around the room for Stella Hawthorne’s commanding face, but he knew that the moment he’d entered he had half-consciously recorded that she was not in the room.

  Humphrey appeared with his hamburger, looked at his glass and said, “If you’re gonna drink that fast, maybe you want a pitcher?”

  Lewis had not even noticed that his second beer was finished. “Good idea.”

  “You don’t look so hot,” Humphrey said.

  The band, which had been discussing something, noisily went back to work and spared Lewis the necessity of replying. Humphrey’s two relief barmaids, Anni and Annie, came in, releasing a wave of cold into the room. They were just enough reason to stick around. Anni was gypsyish, with curly black hair fluffing out around a sensual face; Annie looked like a Viking and had strong well-shaped legs and beautiful teeth. Both of them were in their mid-thirties and talked like college professors. They lived with men off in the country and were childless. Lewis liked both of them enormously, and sometimes took one or the other out for a meal. Anni saw him and waved, he waved back, and the guitarist, backed by a seesawing fiddle, yelled

  You lost your hot, I lost mine

  so (feedback) we find

  a spare garden to seed our dreams?

  Humphrey moved away to give the women instructions. Lewis bit into his hamburger.

  When he looked up Ned Rowles was standing beside him. Lewis raised his eyebrows and, still chewing, half-stood and motioned for Rowles to enter the booth. He liked Ned Rowles too; Ned had made The Urbanite an interesting newspaper, not just the usual smalltown list of firemen’s picnics and advertisements for sales at the grocery stores. “Help me drink this,” he said, and poured beer from the pitcher into Ned’s nearly empty glass.

  “How about me?” said a deeper, dryer voice over his shoulder, and, startled, Lewis turned his head to see Walt Hardesty glinting down at him. That explained why Lewis had not seen Ned at first; he and Hardesty had been back in the room where Humphrey stacked his surplus beer. Lewis knew that Hardesty, who was year by year surrendering himself to the bottle as surely as Omar Norris, sometimes spent all afternoon in the back room—he would not drink in front of his deputies.

  “Of course, Walt,” he said, “I didn’t see you before. Please join me.” Ned Rowles was looking at him oddly. Lewis was sure that the editor found Hardesty as tiresome as he did himself and had no desire for more of his company, but did he expect him to send the sheriff away? Whatever the look meant, Rowles slid over on
his side of the booth to make room for Hardesty. The sheriff was still wearing his outer jacket; that back room was probably cold. Like the college student he resembled, Ned went as long as possible with only a tweed jacket for protection against winter.

  Then Lewis saw that both men were looking at him oddly, and his heart jumped—had he hit the girl after all? Had someone written down his license number? He’d be guilty of hit and run! “Well, Walt,” he said, “is this about anything special, or do you just want a beer?” He filled Hardesty’s glass as he spoke.

  “Right now, I’ll settle for the beer, Mr. Benedikt,” Hardesty said, “Quite a day, right?”

  “Yes,” Lewis said simply.

  “A terrible day,” said Ned Rowles, and he passed a hand through the hair falling over his forehead. He grimaced at Lewis. “You don’t look so good, pal. Maybe you ought to go home and get some rest.”

  Lewis was even more puzzled than before by this remark. If he had struck the girl and if they knew about it, the sheriff would not just let him go home. “Oh,” he said, “I get restless at home. I’d feel a lot better if people stopped telling me I looked terrible.”

  “Well, it’s a miserable business,” Rowles said. “I guess we’d all agree to that.”

  “Hell, yes,” Hardesty said, finishing off his beer and pouring another. Ned’s face was set in a painful expression of—what? It looked like sympathy. Lewis splashed more beer into his glass. The fiddler had switched to guitar, and now the music had become so loud that the three men had to bend over to be heard. Lewis could hear fragments of lyrics, phrases bawled into the microphones.

  wrong way out, baby . . . wrong way out

  “I was just thinking of the times when I was a kid and used to go see Benny Goodman,” he said. Ned Rowles snapped his head back, looking confused.