Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  “You’ll never guess what I’m looking at,” Jim said.

  Startled, Peter looked at his friend. Jim’s face was determinedly bland. “An empty room.”

  “Not quite.”

  He knew that Jim would not tell him: he would have to look for himself. Peter jumped off the step and walked up to the window.

  At first he saw what he had expected: a bare room where the carpet had been taken up and invisible dust lay everywhere. On the other side, the black arch of a doorway; on his side, the reflection of his own face, looking out from the glass.

  He felt for a second the terror of being trapped in there like his reflection, of being forced to go through that doorway, to walk the bare floorboards: the terror made no more sense than the band music, but like it, it was there.

  Then he saw what Jim had meant. On one side, up against the baseboards, a brown suitcase lay on the floor.

  “That’s hers!” Jim said in his ear. “You know what that means?”

  “She still there. She’s in there.”

  “No. Whatever she wanted is still in there.”

  Peter backed away from the window and looked at Jim’s set, red face. “That’s enough screwing around,” Jim said. “I’m going inside. You coming—Clarabelle?”

  Peter could not answer; Jim simply stepped around him and set off around the side of the house.

  Seconds later he heard the pop and tinkle of breaking glass. He groaned; turned around and saw his features reproduced in the window; they were pulled by fear and indecision.

  Get out. No. You have to help him. Get out. No, you have to—

  He went around the side of the house as quickly as he could without running.

  Jim was up on the back steps, reaching in through the little pane of glass he had broken. In the dim light, bent over, he was the image of a burglar: Jim’s words came back to him. So the worst has already happened, and you might as well relax and enjoy it.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Jim said. “Thought you’d be home under the bed by now.”

  “What happens if she comes home?”

  “We run out the back, idiot. Two doors in this house, remember? Or don’t you think you can run as fast as a woman?” His face stilled with concentration for a moment; then the lock clicked open. “Coming?”

  “Maybe. But I’m not going to steal anything. And you aren’t either.”

  Jim snorted derisively and went through the door.

  Peter went up the steps and peered in. Hardie was moving across the kitchen floor, going deeper into the house, not bothering to look back.

  Might as well relax and enjoy it. He stepped over the doorframe. Ahead of him, Hardie was thumping around in the hallway, opening doors and cabinets.

  “Quiet,” Peter hissed.

  “Quiet yourself,” Jim called back, but the noises immediately ceased, and Peter understood that whether or not he admitted it, Jim also was afraid.

  “Where do you want to look?” Peter asked. “What are we looking for, anyway?”

  “How should I know? We’ll know when we see it.”

  “It’s too dark in here to see anything. You could see better from the outside.”

  Jim pulled his matches out of his jacket and lit one. “How is that?” In truth, it was worse: where they previously had a dim vision of the entire hallway, now they could see only within a small circle of light.

  “Okay, but we stick together,” Peter said.

  “We could cover the house faster if we split up.”

  “No way.”

  Jim shrugged. “Whatever you want.” He led Peter down the hall into the living room. This was even bleaker than they had been able to see from the outside. The walls, dotted here and there by children’s crayons, also showed the pale rectangles where pictures had hung. Paint flaked off in chips and patches. Jim was going around the room, knocking on the walls, lighting one match after another.

  “Look at the suitcase.”

  “Oh yeah, the suitcase.”

  Jim knelt down and opened the case. “Nothing.” Peter watched over his shoulder as Jim turned the suitcase over, shook it, and replaced it on the bare floor.

  He whispered, “We’re not going to find anything.”

  “Christ, we look in two rooms and you’re ready to give up.” Jim stood up abruptly, and his match went out.

  For a moment pure blackness enveloped them. “Light another one,” Peter whispered.

  “Better this way. No one outside can see a light Your eyes’ll adjust.”

  They stood in silence and darkness for five or six seconds, letting the image of flame fade from their eyes, become a pinpoint in sheer black; then waited longer seconds while the features of the house took shape around them.

  Peter heard a noise from somewhere in the house and jumped.

  “For God’s sake, calm down.”

  “What was that?” Peter whispered, and heard the hysteria rising in his voice.

  “A stair creaked. The back door clicked shut. Nothing.”

  Peter touched his forehead with his fingers and felt them trembling against his skin.

  “Listen. We’ve been talking, pounding walls, we broke a window—don’t you think she’d come out if she was here?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay, let’s try the next floor.”

  Jim grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him out of the living room back into the hall. Then he let go and led Peter down the hall to the foot of the stairs.

  Up there it was dark—up there it was new territory. Peter felt more profoundly uneasy, looking at the stairs, then he had since entering the house.

  “You go up and I’ll stay here.”

  “You want to hang around in the dark by yourself?”

  Peter tried to swallow, but could not. He shook his head.

  “All right. It’s got to be up there, whatever it is.”

  Jim put his foot on the second of the unpainted steps. Here too the carpet had been removed. He lifted himself up; looked back. “Coming?” Then he began to mount the stairs, taking them by twos. Peter watched: when Jim was halfway up, he willed himself to follow.

  The lights snapped on again when Jim was at the top and Peter was two-thirds of the way up.

  “Hello, boys,” said a deep unruffled voice from the bottom of the stairs.

  Jim Hardie shrieked.

  Peter fell backward on the stairs and, half-paralyzed with fright, thought he’d slide right down into the grasp of the man looking up at them.

  “Let me take you to your hostess,” he said, giving them a dead smile. He was the strangest-looking man Peter had ever seen—a blue knit cap was shoved down over blond curly hair like Harpo Marx’s, sunglasses rode on his nose; he wore overalls but no shirt, and his face was white as ivory. It was the man from the square. “She will be delighted to see you again,” the man said. “As her first visitors, you can count on an especially warm welcome.” The man’s smile broadened as he began to come up the stairs after them.

  When he had come up only a few of the steps he lifted a hand and pulled the blue cap off his head. The Harpo curls, a wig, came off with it.

  When he took off the dark glasses his eyes shone a uniform golden yellow.

  9

  Standing at his window in the hotel and looking out over the darkened section of Milburn, Don heard the far off convolutions of saxophones and trombones blaring on the cold air and thought: Dr. Rabbitfoot’s come to town.

  His telephone rang behind him.

  * * *

  Sears was facing his library door, listening for footsteps padding on his stairs, when his telephone rang. Ignoring it, he unlocked his door; opened it. The staircase was empty.

  He went to answer his phone.

  * * *

  Lewis Benedikt, whose mansion was on
the furthest periphery of the area affected by the power failure, heard neither music nor childish footsteps. What he heard, blown on the wind or from inside his own mind or drifting on a draft through his dining room and winding around a newel post on its way toward him, was the most despairing sound he knew: the languishing, nearly inaudible voice of his dead wife, calling over and over again, “Lewis. Lewis.” He had been hearing it, on and off, for days. When his telephone rang he turned to it with relief.

  And with relief too heard Ricky Hawthorne’s voice: “I’m going batty sitting here in the dark. I’ve spoken to Sears and Edward’s nephew and Sears graciously said that we can get together at this short notice at his house. I’d say we need to. Do you agree? We’ll break a rule and just come as we are, shall we?”

  * * *

  Ricky thought that the young man was getting to look like a true member of the Chowder Society. Beneath the mask of sociability anyone would expect from a nephew of Edward’s, he had the jim-jams. He leaned back in one of Sears’s wonderful leather chairs, he sipped his whiskey and looked (with his uncle’s reflex amusement) around the cherished interior of the library (did it look as old-fashioned to him as Edward had said it was?), he spoke at intervals, but there was an under-current of tension in all of it.

  Maybe that makes him one of us, Ricky thought: and he saw that Don was the sort of person they would have befriended, years and years back; if he had been born forty years earlier, he would have been one of them as if by birthright.

  Still, there was a streak of secrecy in him. Ricky could not imagine what he had meant by asking if any of them had heard music during the early evening. Pressed about this, he had evaded explanations; pressed further, he had said, “I was just getting the feeling that everything happening has a direct relationship to my writing.”

  This remark, which would have seemed egotistical at any other time, was given density by the candlelight; each of the men stirred in his chair.

  “Isn’t that why we asked you here?” Sears said.

  And then he had explained: Ricky listened puzzled to Don’s account of his idea for a new book and the description of the Dr. Rabbitfoot character, and how he had heard the showman’s music just before Ricky’s call.

  “Are you saying that events in this town are occurrences from an unwritten book?” Sears asked incredulously. “That’s sheer poppycock.”

  “Unless,” Ricky said, thinking, “unless . . . well, I’m not really sure how to put this. Unless things here in Milburn have focused lately—have come to a focus they did not have before.”

  “You mean that I’m the focus,” Don said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is nonsense,” Sears interjected. “Focused, unfocused—all that’s happened is that we are managing to frighten ourselves even more. That’s your focus. The daydreams of a novelist can’t have anything to do with it.”

  Lewis sat apart from all this, wrapped in some private misery. Ricky asked him what he thought, and Lewis replied, “Sorry. I was thinking about something else. Can I get myself another drink, Sears?”

  Sears nodded grimly; Lewis was drinking at twice his normal rate, as if his appearance at a meeting in an old shirt and a tweed jacket gave him license to break another of their old rules.

  “What’s supposed to indicate this mysterious focus?” Sears asked belligerently.

  “You know as well as I do. John’s death, first of all.”

  “Coincidence,” Sears said.

  “Elmer’s sheep—all the animals that have died.”

  “Now you believe in Hardesty’s Martians.”

  “Don’t you remember what Hardesty told us? That it was sort of a game—an amusement some sort of creature gave itself. What I’m suggesting is that the stakes have been raised. Freddy Robinson. Poor old Rea Dedham. I felt, months ago, that our stories were bringing something about—and I fear, I very much fear, that more people are going to die. I’m saying that our lives and the lives of many people in this town may be endangered.”

  “Well, what I said stands. You have certainly managed to frighten yourself,” Sears said.

  “We’re all frightened,” Ricky pointed out. His cold made his voice raw and his throat throbbed, but he forced himself to go on. “We are. But what I think is that Don’s arrival here was like the fitting of the last piece into a puzzle—that when all of us were joined by Don, the forces, whatever you want to call them, were increased. That we invoked them. We by our stories, Don in his book and in his imagination. We see things, but we don’t believe them; we feel things—people watching us, sinister things following us—but we dismiss them as fantasies. We dream horrors, but try to forget them. And in the meantime, three people have died.”

  Lewis stared at the rug, then nervously spun an ashtray on the table before his chair. “I just remembered something I said to Freddy Robinson on the night he cornered me outside John’s house. I said that someone was picking us off like flies.”

  “But why should this young man, whom none of us had seen until a short time ago, be the last element?” Sears asked.

  “Because he was Edward’s nephew?” Ricky asked. It came to him straight from the blue sky of inspiration; a moment later he felt a painful spasm of relief that his children were not coming to Milburn for Christmas. “Yes. Because he is Edward’s nephew.”

  All three of the older men almost palpably felt the gravity of what Ricky had called “the forces” about them. Three frightened men, they sat in the molten light of the candles and looked back into their past.

  “Maybe,” Lewis at last said. He drained his whiskey. “But I don’t understand about Freddy Robinson. He wanted to meet with me—he called me twice. I just put him off. Made a vague promise to see him in a bar sometime.”

  Sears asked, “He had something to tell you before he died?”

  “I didn’t give him the chance to tell it. I thought he wanted to sell me insurance.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because he said something about trouble coming your way.”

  They were silent again. “Maybe,” Lewis said, “if I met him, he’d still be alive.”

  Ricky said, “Lewis, that sounded just like John Jaffrey. He blamed himself for Edward’s death.”

  For a moment all three men glanced at Don Wanderley.

  “Maybe I’m not here just because of my uncle,” Don said. “I want to buy my way into the Chowder Society.”

  “What?” Sears exploded. “Buy?”

  “With a story. Isn’t that the admission fee?” He smiled tentatively around the circle. “It’s very clear in my mind because I just spent some time writing it all in a journal. And,” he said, breaking another of their rules, “this isn’t fiction. This happened just in the way I’ll tell it—you couldn’t use it as fiction because it didn’t have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened. But if Mr. Hawthorne” (“Ricky,” the lawyer breathed) “is right, then five people, not four, have died. And my brother was the first of them.”

  “You were both engaged to the same girl,” Ricky said, remembering one of the last things Edward had said to him.

  “We were both engaged to Alma Mobley, a girl I met at Berkeley,” Don began, and the four of them settled into their chairs. “I think this is a ghost story,” he said, pulling, in Dr. Rabbitfoot’s image, the dollar from his jeans.

  * * *

  He held them with the story, speaking into the flame of the candles as if into an unquiet place in his mind; he did not tell it as he had in his journal, deliberately invoking all the detail he could remember, but he told most of it. The story took him half an hour.

  “So the Who’s Who entry proved that everything she had said was false,” Don concluded. “David was dead, and I never saw her again. She had simply disappeared.” He wiped his face; exhaled loudly. “That’s it. Is it a ghost
story or not? You tell me.”

  None of the men spoke for a moment. Tell him, Sears, Ricky silently prayed. He looked over at his old friend, who had steepled his fingers before his face. Say it, Sears. Tell him.

  Sears eyes met his. He knows what I’m thinking.

  “Well,” Sears said, and Ricky closed his eyes. “As much as any of our stories is, I guess. Is that the series of events on which you based your book?”

  “Yes.”

  “They make a better story than the book,” Sears said.

  “But they don’t have an ending.”

  “Not yet, perhaps,” Sears said. He scowled at the candles, which had burned down into the silver holders. Now, Ricky prayed, his eyes still closed. “This young man you imagined to look like a werewolf was named—ah, Greg? Greg Benton?” Ricky opened his eyes again, and if anyone had been looking at him they would have seen gratitude written on his every feature.

  Don nodded, clearly not understanding why this was important.

  “I knew him under a different name,” Sears said. “A long time ago, he was called Gregory Bate. And his half-witted brother was called Fenny. I was present when Fenny died.” He smiled with the bitterness of a man compelled to eat a meal he hates. “That would have been quite some time before your—Benton—decided to affect a shaven head.”

  “If he can make two appearances, then he can make three,” Ricky said. “I saw him on the square not two weeks ago.”

  The lights, violently bright after so long a time of candlelight, came suddenly on. The four men in Sears’s library, their distinction and whatever of ease the candlelight had given them erased by the harsher light, looked fearful: we look half-dead already, Ricky thought. It was as though the candles had drawn them into a warm circle, the warmth of a candle and a group and a story; now they were blown apart, scattered on a wintry plain.

  “Looks like he heard you,” Lewis, drunk, said. “Maybe that’s what Freddy Robinson saw. Maybe he saw Gregory turning into a wolf. Hah!”

  Housebreaking, Part Three

  10

  Peter picked himself up on the stairs and, with no awareness of willing himself to move, went backward up the stairs to stand beside Jim on the landing.