Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  And if I had been so eager to be rid of her, why did I now feel that I was shuffling through a less significant world? Alma gone, I was left with the bare world of cause and effect, the arithmetic world—if without the odd dread she had aroused in me, without the mystery too. The only mystery I had left was that of where she had gone; and the larger mystery of who she had been.

  I drank a good deal and cut my classes: I slept most of the day. It was as though I had some generalized disease that took my energy and left me with no occupation but sleeping and thinking about Alma. When after a week I began to feel healthier, I remembered seeing Benton in the plaza and imagined that he’d been angry because he had known that what I had gotten away with was my life.

  After I started to meet my classes again I saw Lieberman in the halls after a lecture and at first he ducked his head and intended to snub me, but he thought better of it and flicked his eyes at mine and said, “Step into my office for a second, will you, Wanderley?” He too was angry, but it was anger I could deal with; I want to say it was only human anger: but what anger is not? A werewolf’s?

  “I know I’ve disappointed you,” I said. “But my life got out of hand. I got sick. I’ll finish out the term as honorably as I can.”

  “Disappointed? That’s a mild word for it.” He leaned back in his leather chair, his eyes blazing. “I don’t think we’ve ever been let down so much by one of our temporary appointments. After I entrusted you with an important lecture, you apparently threw together the worst mishmash—the worst garbage—” He collected himself. “And you’ve missed more classes than anyone in our history since we had an alcoholic poet who tried to burn down the recruitments office. In short, you’ve been lax, slipshod, lazy—you’ve been disgraceful. I just wanted you to know what I thought of you. Single-handedly, you’ve endangered our entire program of bringing in writers. This program is supervised, you know. We have a board to answer to. I’ll have to defend you to them, as much as I detest the thought.”

  “I can’t blame you for feeling as you do,” I said. “I just got into an odd situation—I think I’ve sort of been cracking up.”

  “I wonder when you so-called creative people are going to realize that you can’t get away with murder.” The outburst made him feel better. He steepled his fingers and looked at me over them. “I hope you don’t expect me to give you a glowing recommendation.”

  “Of course not,” I said. Then I thought of something. “I wonder if I can ask you a question.”

  He nodded.

  “Have you ever heard of an English professor at the University of Chicago named Alan McKechnie?” His eyes widened; he folded his hands. “I don’t really know what I’m asking. I wondered if you knew anything about him?”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m curious about him. That’s all.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth,” he said, and stood up. He marched over to his window, which gave a splendid view of the plaza. “I dislike gossip, you know.”

  What I knew was that he loved gossip, like most academics. “I knew Alan slightly. We were on a Robert Frost symposium five years ago—sound man. A bit too much the Thomist, but that’s Chicago, isn’t it? Still, a good mind. Had a lovely family too, I gather.”

  “He had children? A wife?”

  Lieberman looked at me suspiciously. “Of course. That’s what made it so tragic. Apart from the loss of his contributions to the field, of course.”

  “Of course. I forgot.”

  “Look? What do you know? I’m not going to slander a colleague for the sake of—the sake of—”

  “There was a girl,” I said.

  He nodded, satisfied. “Yes. Apparently. I heard about it at the last MLA convention. One of the fellows from his department told me about it. He was vamped. This girl simply pursued him. Dogged him. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in a word—I gather he finally did become enchanted by her. She was a graduate student of his. These things happen of course, they happen all the time. A girl falls for her professor, manages to seduce him, sometimes she makes him leave his wife, most times not. Most of us have more sense.” He coughed. I thought: you really are a turd. “Well. He did not. Instead he went to pieces. The girl ruined him. In the end he killed himself. The girl, I gather, did a midnight flit—as our English friends have it. Though what this has to do with you, I can’t imagine.”

  She had falsified nearly everything in the McKechnie story. I wondered what else might have been a lie. When I got home, I rang de Peyser, F. A woman answered the phone.

  “Mrs. de Peyser?”

  It was.

  “Please excuse me for calling you on what may be a case of mistaken identity, Mrs. de Peyser, but this is Richard Williams at the First National of California. We have a loan application from a Miss Mobley who lists you as a reference. I’m just running the usual routine information check. You’re named as her aunt.

  “As her what? What’s her name?”

  “Alma Mobley. The problem is that she forgot to give your address and phone number, and there are several other Mrs. de Peysers in the Bay area, and I need the correct information for our files.”

  “Well it’s not me! I’ve never heard of anybody named Alma Mobley, I can assure you of that.”

  “You do not have a niece named Alma Mobley who is a graduate student at Berkeley?”

  “Certainly not. I suggest you get back to this Miss Mobley and ask her for her aunt’s address so you don’t go wasting your time.”

  “I’ll do that right now, Mrs. de Peyser.”

  * * *

  The second semester was a rainy blur. I pushed at a new book, but it would not budge. I never knew what to make of the Alma character: was she a La Belle Dame Sans Merci, as Lieberman had said; or was she a girl on the far borders of sanity? I didn’t know how to treat her, and the first draft took so many misdirections it could have been an exercise in the use of the unreliable narrator. And I felt that the book needed another element, one I couldn’t yet see, before it would work.

  David telephoned me in April. He sounded excited, happy, more youthful than he’d been in years. “I have amazing news,” he said. “Astounding news. I don’t know how to tell you.”

  “Robert Redford bought your life story for the movies.”

  “What? Oh, come off it. No, really, this is hard for me to tell you.”

  “Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

  “Okay. Okay, that’s what I’ll do, wiseass. Two months ago, on February third”—this was really the lawyer at work—“I was up on Columbus Circle, seeing a client. The weather was terrible, and I had to share a cab back to Wall Street. Bad news, right? But I found myself sitting next to the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. I mean, she was so good-looking my mouth went dry. I don’t know where I got the guts, but by the time we got to the Park, I asked her out to dinner. I don’t usually do things like that!”

  “No, you don’t.” David was too lawyerly to ask strange girls for dates. He’d never been in a singles bar in his life.

  “Well, this girl and I really hit it off. I saw her every night that week. And I’ve gone on seeing her ever since. In fact, we’re going to get married. That’s half of the news.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “I wish you better luck than I had.”

  “Now we come to the difficult part. The name of this astounding girl is Alma Mobley.”

  “It can’t be,” I said.

  “Wait. Just wait. Don, I know this is a shock. But she told me all about what happened between you, and I think it’s essential that you know how sorry she is for everything that happened. We’ve talked about this a long time. She knows she hurt your feelings, but she knew that she just wasn’t the right girl for you. And you weren’t right for her. Also, she was in a bad patch in California. She wasn’t herself, she says. She’s afraid y
ou have absolutely the wrong idea of her.”

  “That’s just what I do have,” I said. “Everything about her is wrong. She’s some kind of witch. She’s destructive.”

  “Hold on. I am going to marry this girl, Don. She’s not the person you think she is. God, how we’ve talked about this. Obviously you and I have to talk about it a hell of a lot ourselves. In fact I was hoping you could hop a plane to New York this weekend so we could have a good long talk and really work through it. I’d be glad to pay your fare.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Ask her about Alan McKechnie. See what she tells you. Then I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “No, wait, buddy, we’ve already been through all that. I know she gave you a garbled version of the McKechnie affair. Can’t you imagine how shattered she was? Please come out here, Don. All three of us have to have a long session.”

  “Not on your life,” I said. “Alma’s a kind of Circe.”

  “Look, I’m at the office, but I’ll call you later in the week, okay? We have to get things straight. I don’t want my brother having bad feelings about my wife.”

  Bad feelings? I felt horror.

  That night David rang again. I asked him if he’d met Tasker yet. Or if he knew about Alma and the Xala Xalior Xlati.

  “See, that’s where you got the wrong idea. She just made all that stuff up, Don. She was a little unsteady out there on the Coast. Besides who can take all that stuff seriously anyhow? Nobody here in New York ever heard of the X.X.X. In California, people get all cranked up about trivia.”

  And Mrs. de Peyser? She had told him that I was terribly possessive; Mrs. de Peyser was a tool to get time by herself.

  “Let me ask you this, David,” I said. “Sometimes, maybe only once, haven’t you looked at her or touched her and just felt—something funny? Like that, no matter how strongly attracted you are to her, you’re squeamish about touching her?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  David would not permit me to creep away from the whole issue of Alma Mobley, as I wanted to do. He would not let it go. He telephoned me from New York two or three times a week, increasingly disturbed by my refusal to see reason.

  “Don, we have to talk this thing out. I feel terrible about you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I mean, I just don’t understand your attitude about this thing. I know you must feel terrible resentment. Jesus, if things had worked out the other way around and Alma had walked out of my life and decided to marry you, I’d be tied in knots. But unless you admit your resentment, we can never get to the point of doing something about it.”

  “I don’t resent anything, David.”

  “Come off it, kid brother. We have to talk about it sometime. Alma and I both feel that way.”

  One of my problems was that I didn’t know to what extent David’s assumptions were correct. It was true that I resented both David and Alma: but was it merely resentment that made me recoil from the thought of them marrying?

  A month or so after that, many seesawing conversations later, David called to say that I was “going to have a break from being hounded by your brother. I’ve got a little business in Amsterdam, so I’m flying there tomorrow for five days. Alma hasn’t seen Amsterdam since she was a child, and she’ll be coming with me. I’ll send you a postcard. But do me a favor and really think about our situation, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “But you care too much about what I think.”

  “What you think is important to me.”

  “All right,” I said. “Be careful.”

  Now what did I mean by that?

  At times I thought that both David and myself had underestimated her calculation. Suppose, I thought, that Alma had engineered her meeting with David. Suppose that she had deliberately sought him out. When I thought about this, Gregory Benton and the stories of Tasker Martin seemed more sinister—as if they, like Alma, were stalking David.

  * * *

  Four days later I got a call from New York telling me that David was dead. It was one of David’s partners, Bruce Putnam; the Dutch police had wired the office. “Do you want to go out there, Mr. Wanderley?” Putnam asked. “We’d like to leave it to you to take it from here. Just keep us informed, will you? Your brother was greatly liked and respected here. None of us can figure out what happened. It sounds like he fell out of a window.”

  “Have you heard from his fiancée?”

  “Oh, did he have a fiancée? Imagine that—he never let on. Was she with him?”

  “Of course she was,” I said. “She must have seen everything. She must know what happened. I’ll get on the first plane going.”

  There was a plane the next day to Schiphol Airport, and I took a cab to the police station which had cabled David’s office. What I learned can be set down very barely: David had gone through a window and over a chest-high balcony. The hotel owner had heard a scream, but nothing more—no voices, no arguments. Alma was thought to have left him; when the police entered their room, none of her clothing was still in the closets.

  I went to the hotel, looked at the high iron balcony, and turned away to the open wardrobe closet. Three of David’s Brooks Brothers suits hung on the rail, two pairs of shoes beneath them. Counting what he must have been wearing at the time of his death, he had brought four suits and three pairs of shoes for a five-day visit. Poor David.

  7

  I arranged for the cremation and, two days later, stood in a cold crematorium while David’s coffin slid along rails toward a fringed green curtain.

  Two days after that I was back in Berkeley. My little apartment seemed cell-like and foreign. It was as though I had grown irretrievably apart from the person I had been in the days when I hunted down references to James Fenimore Cooper in PMLA. I began to sketch out The Nightwatcher, having only the most nebulous ideas for it, and to prepare for my classes again. One night I telephoned Helen Kayon’s apartment, thinking that I would ask her out for a drink so that I could talk about Alma and my brother, and Meredith Polk told me that Helen had married Rex Leslie the week before. I found myself falling asleep at intervals all during the day and going to bed before ten at night; I drank too much but could not get drunk. If I survived the year, I thought, I would go to Mexico and lie in the sun and work on my book.

  And escape my hallucinations. Once I had come awake near midnight and heard someone moving around in my kitchen; when I got out of bed and went in to check, I had seen my brother David standing near the stove, holding the coffeepot in one hand. “You sleep too much, kid,” he said. “Why not let me give you a cup?” And another time, teaching a Henry James novel to my section of the survey class, I had seen on one of the chairs not the red-haired girl I knew was there, but—again—David, his face covered in blood and his suit torn, nodding happily at how bright I could be about Portrait of a Lady.

  But I had one more discovery to make before I could go to Mexico. One day I went to the library and instead of going to the stack of critical magazines, went to the reference library and found a copy of Who’s Who for the year 1960. It was nearly an arbitrary year; but if Alma was twenty-five when I met her, then in 1960 she should have been nine or ten.

  Robert Mobley was in the book. As nearly as I can remember it, this was his entry—I read it over and over and finally had it photocopied.

  MOBLEY, ROBERT OSGOOD, painter and watercolorist. b. New Orleans, La, Feb 23. 1909; s. Felix Morton and Jessica (Osgood); A.B. Yale U. 1927; m. Alice Whitney Aug 27, 1936; children—Shelby Adam, Whitney Osgood. Shown at: Flagler Gallery, New York; Winson Galleries, New York; Galerie Flam, Paris; Schlegel, Zurich; Galeria Esperance, Rome. Recipient Golden Palette 1946; Southern Regional Painters Award 1952, 1955, 1958. Collected in: Adda May Lebow Museum, New Orleans; Louisiana Fine Arts Museum; Chicago Institute of the Arts; Santa Fe Fine Arts; Rochester Arts Center; many others. Served as Lt Cmdr. USNR
, 1941–1945. Member Golden Palette Society; Southern Regional Arts League; American Water Color Society; American League of Artists; American Academy of Oil Painting. Clubs: Links Golf; Deepdale Golf; Meadowbrook; Century (New York); Lyford Cay (Nassau); Garrick (London). Author: I Came This Way. Homes: 38957 Canal Blvd New Orleans, La; 18 Church Row, London NW3 UK; “Dans Le Vigne,” Route de la Belle Isnard, St Tropez 83 France.

  This wealthy clubman and artist had two sons, but no daughter. Everything Alma had told me—and David, presumably—had been invention. She had a false name and no history: she might as well have been a ghost. Then I thought of “Rachel Varney,” a brunette with dark eyes, the trappings of wealth and an obscure past, and I saw that David had been the missing element in the book I’d tried to write.

  8

  I’ve spent nearly three weeks writing all this out, and all I’ve done is remember—I’m no closer to understanding it than I was before.

  But I’ve come to one perhaps foolish conclusion. I’m no longer so ready to reject the notion that there might be some factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to David and myself. I find myself in the same position as the Chowder Society, no longer sure of what to believe. If I am ever invited to tell a story to the Chowder Society, I’ll tell them what I’ve written out here. This account of my history with Alma—not The Nightwatcher—is my Chowder Society story. So perhaps I have not wasted my time after all; I’ve given myself a base for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel, and I’m prepared to change my mind on an important question—right now, maybe the important question. When I started this, the night after Dr. Jaffrey’s funeral, I thought it would be destructive to imagine myself in the landscape and atmosphere of one of my own books. Yet—was I not in that landscape, back at Berkeley? My imagination may have been more literal than I thought.

  * * *

  Various odd things have been happening in Milburn. Apparently a group of farm animals, cows and horses, were killed by some kind of beast—I heard a man in the drugstore say that creatures from a flying saucer killed them! And far more seriously, a man either died or was killed. His body was found down near a disused railway siding. He was an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson. Lewis Benedikt in particular seemed to take this death hard, though it appears to have been accidental. In fact, something very peculiar seems to be happening to Lewis: he’s become absentminded and fretful, almost as if he were blaming himself for Robinson’s death.