Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  Lewis said, “If you feel that, I agree with you.”

  “Is that fair to John?” Ricky asked.

  “John’s past being fair to,” Sears said. He finished the cognac in his glass and leaned forward to pour more from the bottle.

  Sudden footsteps on the stairs made all three swivel their heads toward the entrance from the hall.

  Turned that way in his chair, Lewis could see Ricky’s front window, and he noticed with surprise that it had begun to snow again. Hundreds of big flakes hammered the black window.

  Milly Sheehan came in, her hair all flattened on one side and all frowsy on the other. She was sausaged into one of Stella’s old dressing gowns. “I heard that, Sears James,” she said in a voice like the wail of an ambulance. “You’ll bully John even when he’s dead.”

  “Milly, I meant no disrespect,” Sears said. “Shouldn’t you—”

  “No. You won’t get rid of me now. I won’t give you coffee now and bow and scrape. I have something to say to you. John didn’t commit suicide. Lewis Benedikt, you listen too. He didn’t. He wouldn’t have. John was murdered.”

  “Milly,” Ricky began.

  “Do you think I’m deaf? Do you think I don’t know what’s going on? John was killed, and do you know who killed him? Well, I do.” Footsteps, this time Stella’s, came hurrying down the stairs. “I know who killed him. It was you. You—you Chowder Society. You killed him with your terrible stories. You made him sick—you and your Fenny Bates!” Her face twisted; Stella rushed in too late to stop Milly’s final words. “They ought to call you the Murder Society! They ought to call you Murder Incorporated!”

  7

  So there they stood, Murder Incorporated, beneath a bright sky in late October. They felt grief, anger, despair, guilt—they had been talking of graves and corpses compulsively for a year, and now they were burying one of their own. The unexpected findings of the autopsy had puzzled and distressed them all; Sears had blown up, choosing to disbelieve. Ricky too had not at first believed that John could have been a dope addict. “Evidence of massive, habitual and longstanding introduction of narcotic substance . . .” then a lot of fancy medical language, but the point was that the coroner had publicly defamed John Jaffrey. Sears’s ranting had been of no use—the man would not change his story. Sears would not alter his opinion that in the course of one autopsy the man had changed from a skillful professional to an incompetent and dangerous fool. The coroner’s findings had circulated through Milburn, and some citizens said they sided with Sears and some accepted the autopsy’s conclusions, but none came to the funeral. Even the Reverend Neil Wilkinson seemed embarrassed. The funeral of a suicide and drug addict—well!

  The new girl, Anna, had been wonderful: she’d helped deal with Sears’s rage, cushioning Mrs. Quast from the worst effects of it, she’d been as marvelous with Milly Sheehan as Stella had, and she’d transformed the office. She had forced Ricky to realize that Hawthorne, James had plenty of work if Hawthorne and James wanted to do it. Even during the terrible period of arranging John’s funeral, even on the day he took a suit from John’s closet and bought a coffin, he and Sears found themselves responding to more letters and answering more phone calls than they had for weeks. They had been drifting toward retirement, sending clients elsewhere as if automatically, and Anna Mostyn seemed to have brought them back to life. She had mentioned her aunt only once, and in the most harmless way: she had asked them what she was like. Sears had come close to blushing and muttered, “Almost as pretty as you, but not as fierce.” And she had been staunchly on Sears’s side in the matter of the autopsy. Even coroners make mistakes, she had pointed out with placid, undeniable common sense.

  Ricky was not so sure; he was not even sure it mattered. John had functioned perfectly well as a doctor; his own body had weakened but he had remained competent at curing other bodies. Surely a “massive, habitual, etc.” drug habit would account for the physical decline John had exhibited. A daily insulin injection would have got John used to needles. He found that if John Jaffrey had been an addict, it did not much affect what he thought of him.

  And this: it made his suicide explicable. No empty-eyed barefooted Fenny Bate, no Murder Incorporated, no mere stories had killed him—the drug had eaten into his brain as it had eaten into his body. Or he could not take it anymore, the “shame” of addiction. Or something.

  Sometimes it was convincing.

  In the meantime his nose ran and his chest tickled. He wanted to sit down; he wanted to be warm. Milly Sheehan was gripping Stella as if the two of them were battered by a hurricane, now and then using one hand to pluck another tissue from the box, wipe her eyes, and drop the tissue on the ground.

  Ricky took a damp tissue from his own coat pocket, discreetly wiped his nose, and returned it to his pocket.

  All of them heard the car coming up the hill to the cemetery.

  From the Journals of Don Wanderley

  8

  It seems I am an honorary member of the Chowder Society. It’s all very odd—in fact, just the peculiarity of it all is a shade unsettling. Maybe the oddest part of my being here is that my uncle’s friends almost seem to fear that they are caught in some kind of real-life horror story, a story like The Nightwatcher. It was because of The Nightwatcher that they wrote me. They saw me as some sort of steel-plated professional, an expert in the supernatural—they saw me as a Van Helsing! My original impressions were correct; they all do feel a distinct foreboding—I suppose you could say they’re on the verge of being scared of their own shadows. My role is to investigate, of all things. And what they haven’t told me directly, but have implied, is that I am supposed to say, nothing to worry about, boys. There’s a rational, reasonable explanation for everything—but of that I have little doubt.

  They want me to be able to write, too—they’re very firm about that. Sears James said, “We didn’t ask you here so that we could interrupt your career!” So they want me to give about half of my day to Dr. Rabbitfoot, and the other half to them. There’s the feeling, definitely, that part of what they want is just someone to talk to. They’ve been talking to themselves for too long.

  * * *

  Not long after the secretary, Anna Mostyn, left, the dead man’s housekeeper said that she wanted to lie down, and Stella Hawthorne took her upstairs. When she came back down, Mrs. Hawthorne gave us all large glasses of whiskey. In Milburn high society, which I guess this is, you drink whiskey English style, neat.

  We had a painful, halting conversation. Stella Hawthorne said, “I hope you knock some sense into these characters’ heads,” which mystified me. They hadn’t yet explained the real reason why they asked me to come. I nodded, and Lewis said, “We have to talk about it.” That silenced them again. “We want to talk about your book, too,” Lewis said. “Fine,” I said. More silence.

  “I might as well feed you three owls,” Stella Hawthorne said. “Mr. Wanderley, will you please give me a hand?”

  I followed her into the kitchen, expecting to be handed plates or cutlery. What I did not expect was for the elegant Mrs. Hawthorne to whirl around, slam the door behind her and say, “Didn’t those three old idiots in there say why they wanted you to come here?”

  “I guess they fudged a little,” I said.

  “Well, you better be good, Mr. Wanderley,” she said, “because you’re going to have to be Freud to deal with those three. I want you to know that I don’t approve of your being here at all. I think people should solve their problems by themselves.”

  “They implied they just wanted to talk to me about my uncle,” I said. Even with her gray hair, I thought she could be no older than about forty-six or seven, and she looked as beautiful and stern as a ship’s figurehead.

  “Your uncle! Well, maybe they do. They’d never deign to tell me,” and I understood part of the reason for her fury. “How well did you know your uncle, Mr. Wanderley?”

 
; I asked her to use my first name. “Not very well. After I went to college and moved to California, I didn’t see him more than once every couple of years. I hadn’t seen him at all for several years before his death.”

  “But he left you his house. Doesn’t it strike you a little bit funny that those three characters out there didn’t suggest you stay there?”

  Before I could reply she went on. “Well, even if it doesn’t, it does me. And not only funny, but pathetic. They’re afraid to go into Edward’s house. They just all came to a kind of—a kind of silent agreement. They’ve never entered that house. They’re superstitious, that’s why.”

  “I thought I felt—well, when I came to the funeral I thought I saw—” I stammered, not sure of how far I could go with her.

  “Bully for you,” she said. “Maybe you’re not as big a blockhead as they are. But I tell you this, Don Wanderley, if you make them any worse than they are already, you’ll have me to answer to.” She put her hands on her hips, her eyes sizzling, and then she exhaled. Her eyes changed; she gave me a tight, pained smile and said, “We’d better get busy or I suppose they’ll start to gossip about you.”

  She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a platter holding a roast the size of a young pig. “Cold roast beef all right for you? The carving things are in the drawer to your right. Start cutting.”

  * * *

  Only after Stella rather abruptly left the house for what she called an “appointment”—after the strange scene in the kitchen, I had a passing notion of its character, and the momentary expression of utter misery which crossed Ricky Hawthorne’s face confirmed it—did the three men open up to me. Bad choice of words: they did not “open up” at all, at least not until much later, but after Stella Hawthorne had driven off, the three old men began to show me why they had asked me to come to Milburn.

  It began like a job interview.

  “Well, here you are at last, Mr. Wanderley,” said Sears James, pouring more cognac into his glass and removing a fat cigar case from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Cigar? I can vouch for their merit.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “And please call me Don.”

  “Very well. I have not welcomed you properly, Don, but I will do so now. We were all great friends of your uncle Edward’s. I am, and I speak for my two friends as well, very grateful that you have come across the country to join us. We think that you can help us.”

  “Does this have to do with my uncle’s death?”

  “In part. We want you to work for us.” Then he asked me if we could talk about The Nightwatcher.

  “Of course.”

  “It was a novel, therefore in large part an invention, but was this invention based on an actual case? We assume you did research for the book. But what we want to know is whether in the course of your research you discovered any corroborating evidence for the ideas in your book. Or perhaps your research was inspired by some inexplicable occurrence in your own life.”

  I could almost feel their tension on my fingertips, and perhaps they could feel mine on theirs. They knew nothing about David’s death, but they had asked me to expose the central mystery of both The Nightwatcher and my life.

  “The invention, as you put it, was based on an actual case,” I said, and the tension broke.

  “Could you describe that to us?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not clear enough to me. Also, it’s too personal. I’m sorry, but I can’t go into it.”

  “We can respect that,” Sears James said. “You seem nervous.”

  “I am,” I admitted, and laughed.

  “The situation in The Nightwatcher was based on a real situation that you knew about?” asked Ricky Hawthorne, as if he hadn’t been paying attention, or could not believe what he had just heard.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you know of other similar cases?”

  “No.”

  “But you do not reject the supernatural out of hand,” Sears said.

  “I don’t know if I do or not,” I said. “Like most people.”

  Lewis Benedikt sat up straight and stared at me. “But you just said . . .”

  “No, he didn’t,” Ricky Hawthorne put in. “He just said his book was based on a real event, not that it recounted the event exactly. Is that right, Don?”

  “More or less.”

  “But what about your research?” asked Lewis.

  “I didn’t actually do much,” I said.

  Hawthorne sighed, glanced at Sears with what looked like irony: I told you so.

  “I think you can help us anyway,” Sears said, as if he were contradicting a voiced opinion. “Your skepticism will do us good.”

  “Maybe,” Hawthorne muttered.

  I was still feeling that they had blundered into my most private space. “What does all this have to do with my uncle’s heart attack?” I asked. There was a lot of self-defense in the question, but it was the right question to ask.

  It all came out—James had decided to tell me everything.

  “And we’ve been having unthinkable nights. I know that John did too. It is not exaggerating to say that we fear for our reason. Would either of you dispute that?”

  Hawthorne and Lewis Benedikt looked as though they were remembering things they’d rather not, and shook their heads.

  “So we want your expert help, and as much time as you can reasonably give us,” Sears concluded. “John’s apparent suicide has shaken us all very deeply. Even if he was a drug addict, which I dispute, I do not think he was a potential suicide.”

  “What was he wearing?” I asked. It was just a stray thought.

  “Wearing? I don’t recall . . . Ricky, did you look at his clothing?”

  Hawthorne nodded. “I had to throw it out. It was the most astounding assortment of things—his evening jacket, a pajama shirt, the trousers to another suit. No socks.”

  “That’s what John put on when he got up the morning he died?” Lewis asked, astonished. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

  “At first I was shocked by it, and then I forgot. Too much was happening.”

  “But he was usually such a fastidious man,” Lewis said. “Damn it, if John jumbled his clothes up like that, his mind must have been jumbled too.”

  “Precisely,” Sears said, and smiled at me. “Don, that was a perceptive question. None of us thought of it.”

  I could see him beginning to snatch up all the available rationalizations. “It doesn’t simplify things to point out that his mind was jumbled,” I pointed out. “In the case I had in mind when I did my book, a man killed himself, and I’m damn sure his mind was shaken, but I never found out what really happened to him.”

  “You’re talking about your brother, aren’t you?” asked Ricky Hawthorne cleverly. Naturally. So they all knew, after all; my uncle had told them about David. “And that was the ‘case’ you alluded to?”

  I nodded.

  “Uh oh,” Lewis said.

  I said, “I just turned it into a ghost story. I don’t know what really happened.”

  For a moment all three of them looked embarrassed.

  “Well,” Sears James said, “even if you are not accustomed to doing research, I’m sure that you’re capable of it.”

  Ricky Hawthorne leaned back into his eccentric couch; his bow tie was still immaculate, but his nose was red and his eyes bleary. He looked small and lost, in the midst of his giant furniture. “It will obviously make my two friends happier if you stay with us for a while, Mr. Wanderley.”

  “Don.”

  “Don, then. Since you seem prepared to do that, and since I am exhausted, I suggest we all say good night. You’ll spend the night at Lewis’s?”

  Lewis Benedikt said, “That’s fine,” and stood up.

  “I have one question,” I said. “Are you asking me to th
ink about the supernatural—or whatever you want to call it—because that absolves you from thinking about it?”

  “Perceptive, but inaccurate,” Sears James said, looking at me with his rifle shot’s blue eyes. “We think about it all the time.”

  “That reminds me,” Lewis said. “Are you going to stop the Chowder Society meetings? Does anyone think we should?”

  “No,” Ricky said with an odd defiance. “For heaven’s sake let’s not. For our sakes, let’s continue to meet. Don will be included.”

  So here I am. Each of the three men, my uncle’s friends, seems admirable in his own way: but are they losing their minds? I can’t even be sure they have told me everything. They are frightened, and two of them have died; and I wrote earlier in this journal that Milburn feels like the sort of town where Dr. Rabbitfoot would go to work. I can feel reality slithering away from me, if I start to imagine that one of my own books is happening around me.

  The trouble is, I could almost start to imagine that. Those two suicides—David’s and Dr. Jaffrey’s—that’s the problem, that simple coincidence. (And the Chowder Society shows no signs of recognizing that this coincidence is the main reason I am interested in their problem.) What am I involved in here? A ghost story? Or something worse, something not just a story? The three old men have only the sketchiest knowledge of the events of two years ago—and they can’t possibly know that they’ve asked me to enter the strangest part of my life again, to roll myself back through the calendar to the worst, most destructive days: or to roll myself up again in the pages of a book which was my attempt to reconcile myself with them. But can there really be any connection, even if it is just the connection of one ghost story leading to another, as it did with the Chowder Society? And can there truly be any factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to my brother?

  II

  Alma

  Everything that has beauty has a body, and is a body; everything that has being has being in the flesh: and dreams are only drawn from the bodies that are.