Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  The werewolf came slowly, unstoppably toward them, in no hurry at all. “You want to meet her, don’t you?” His grin was ferocious. “She will be so pleased. You will have quite a welcome, I promise you.”

  Peter looked wildly around; saw phosphorescent light leaking from beneath a door.

  “She is not perhaps quite in shape to see you yet, but that makes it all the more interesting, don’t you think? We all like to see our friends with their masks off.”

  He’s talking to keep us still, Peter thought. It’s like hypnotism.

  “Aren’t you the two boys interested in scientific exploration? In telescopes? How nice it is to meet two fine young fellows with inquiring minds, two fellows who want to extend their knowledge. So many young people merely coast along, don’t they, so many are afraid to take risks. Well, we certainly can’t say that about you now, can we?”

  Peter glanced at Jim Hardie’s face: Jim’s mouth hung open.

  “No, you have been extremely brave. Now I will be with you in a moment, and I want you to relax and wait for me . . . just relax and wait.”

  Peter slammed the back of his hand into Jim’s ribs, but Jim did not move. He glanced back at the terrible figure coming toward him, and made the mistake of looking directly into the blank golden eyes. Immediately he heard a voice like music coming not from the man but speaking directly inside his head: Relax, Peter, relax, you will meet her . . .

  “Jim!” he screamed.

  Hardie gave a convulsive shudder, and Peter knew that he was lost already.

  Settle down, boy, no need for all that noise . . .

  The golden-eyed man was nearly to them, reaching out his left hand. Peter stepped backward, too frightened for coherent thought.

  The man’s white hand glided nearer and nearer Jim’s own left hand.

  Peter turned his back and pounded halfway up the next flight of stairs. When he looked around the light beneath the door on the landing was spilling out with such intensity that the walls were tinted faintly green: green too was Jim, in that light.

  “Just take my hand,” the man said. He was two steps below Jim, and their hands nearly touched.

  Jim brushed his fingers against the palm of the man’s hand.

  Peter looked up the stairs, but could not leave Jim.

  The man beneath was chuckling. Peter’s heart froze, and he looked down again. The man was grasping Jim’s wrist with his left hand. The wolfish eyes glowed wide.

  Jim screeched.

  The man holding him moved his hands to Jim’s throat and twisted his body with immense force, slamming the boy’s head against the wall. He planted his feet on the boards of the landing and again smashed Jim’s head into the wall.

  Your turn.

  Jim fell onto the boards and the man kicked him aside as if he were as weightless as a paper bag. A bright smear of blood like a child’s finger-painting lay on the wall.

  Peter ran down a long corridor lined with doors; opened one at random and slipped in.

  Just inside the door, he froze. The outline of a man’s head showed against a window. “Welcome home,” the man’s toneless voice said. “Have you met her yet?” He stood up from the bed. “You haven’t? Once you do, you’ll never forget it. An incredible woman.”

  The man, still only a black outline against a window, began to shuffle toward Peter, who remained stock-still just inside the door. As the man drew nearer, he saw that it was Freddy Robinson.

  “Welcome home,” Robinson said.

  Found you.

  Footsteps in the corridor paused outside the bedroom door. Time. Time. Time. Time.

  “You know, I don’t exactly remember—”

  Panicked, Peter rushed at Robinson with his arms extended, intending to shove him out of the way: the moment his fingers touched his shirt, Robinson broke up into a shapeless pattern of glowing points of light; his fingers tingled. It was gone utterly in an instant, and Peter rushed through the air where it had been.

  “Come out, Peter,” said the voice outside the door. “We all want you to come out”; and the other voice in his mind repeated Time.

  Standing in front of the bed, Peter heard the doorknob moving. He scrambled onto the bed and banged the heels of his hands against the top of the window frames.

  The window slid up as if on grease. Cold air streamed over him. He felt the other mind reaching for him, telling him to come to the door, not to be silly, didn’t he want to see that Jim was all right?

  Jim!

  He crawled out of the window as the door opened. Something rushed toward him, but he was already across the upper roof and jumping down onto the next level. From there he let himself drop onto the roof of the garage; and from the garage he jumped onto a snowdrift.

  As he ran past Jim’s car he looked sideways at the house; but it was as solidly ordinary as it had looked at first: only the lights in the stairwell and front hall burned, casting an inviting rectangle of yellow onto the walk. That too seemed to speak to Peter Barnes, to say imagine the peace of lying down with your hands crossed on your chest, imagine sleeping under ice . . .

  He ran all the way home.

  11

  “Lewis, you’re already drunk,” Sears said gruffly. “Don’t make more of an ass of yourself.”

  “Sears,” Lewis said, “it’s a funny thing, but it’s hard not to make an ass of yourself when you talk about stuff like this.”

  “That’s a point. But for God’s sake, stop drinking.”

  “You know, Sears,” Lewis said. “I get the feeling our little decorums aren’t going to be much good anymore.”

  Ricky asked him, “Do you want to stop meeting?”

  “Well, what the hell are we? The Three Musketeers?”

  “In a way. We’re what’s left. Plus Don, of course.”

  “Oh, Ricky.” Lewis smiled. “The sweetest thing about you is that you’re so damned loyal.”

  “Only to the things worth being loyal to,” Ricky said, and sneezed loudly twice. “Excuse me. I ought to be home. Do you really want to give up the meetings?”

  Lewis shoved his glass toward the middle of the table and slumped down in his chair. “I don’t know. I suppose not. I’d never get any of Sears’s good cigars if we didn’t meet twice a month. And now that we have a new member, well . . .” Just as Sears was about to burst out, Lewis looked up at them and was as handsome as he’d ever been in his life. “And maybe I’d be scared not to meet. Maybe I believe everything you said, Ricky. I’ve had a couple of funny experiences since October—since the night Sears talked about Gregory Bate.”

  “So have I,” Sears said.

  “So have I,” echoed Ricky. “Isn’t that what we’ve been saying?”

  “So I guess we should tough it out,” Lewis said. “You guys are in another league intellectually from me, maybe this kid here is too, but I guess it’s a hang together or hang separately kind of situation. Sometimes, out at my place, I get really spooked—like something is out there just counting the seconds until it can nail me. Like it nailed John.”

  “Do we believe in werewolves?” Ricky asked.

  “No,” Sears said, and Lewis shook his head.

  “I don’t either,” said Don. “But there’s something . . .” He paused, thinking, and looked up to see all three of the older men looking expectantly at him. “I don’t have it worked out yet. It’s just an idea. I’ll think about it some more before I try to explain it.”

  “Well, the lights have been on for some time now,” Sears said pointedly. “And we had a good story. Perhaps we’ve made some progress, but I don’t see how. If the Bate brothers are in Milburn, I’d like to assume that they’ll do as the ineffable Hardesty suggests, and move on when they’re tired of us.”

  Don read the expression in Ricky’s eyes and nodded.

  “Wait,” Ricky said. “
Excuse me, Sears, but I sent Don out to see Nettie Dedham at the hospital.”

  “Oh, yes?” Sears was already magisterially bored.

  “I went, yes,” Don said. “I met the sheriff and Mr. Rowles there. We all had the same idea.”

  “To see if she’d say anything,” Ricky said.

  “She couldn’t. She isn’t able to.” Don looked at Ricky. “You must have called the hospital.”

  “I did,” Ricky said.

  “But when the sheriff asked her if she had seen anyone on the day her sister died, she tried to say a name. It was obvious that that’s what she was doing.”

  “And the name?” Sears demanded.

  “What she said was just a garble of consonants—like Glngr. Glngr. She said it two or three times. Hardesty gave up—couldn’t make any sense out of it.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone could,” Lewis said, glancing at Sears.

  “Mr. Rowles took me aside out in the parking lot and said that he thought she was trying to say her brother’s name. Stringer? Isn’t that right?”

  “Stringer?” Ricky said. He covered his eyes with the palm of a hand.

  “I’m missing something,” Don said. “Would somebody explain to me why that’s so important?”

  “I knew this was going to happen,” Lewis said. “I knew it.”

  “Get a hold of yourself, Lewis,” Sears ordered. “Don, we will have to discuss this among ourselves first. But I think that we owe you a story to match the one you told us. You will not hear it tonight, but after we’ve discussed it, I imagine that you will get the ultimate Chowder Society story.”

  “Then I want to ask another favor,” Don said. “If you decide to tell it to me, could we have it at my uncle’s house?”

  He saw the reluctance pass through the three men; they looked suddenly older—even Lewis seemed frail.

  “That may not be a bad idea,” Ricky Hawthorne said. He looked like one vast cold wrapped in mustache and spotted bow tie. “A house of your uncle’s was where it started for us.” He managed to smile at Don. “Yes. I think you’ll hear the ultimate Chowder Society story.”

  “And may the Lord protect us until then,” Lewis said.

  “May He protect us afterward,” Sears added.

  12

  Peter Barnes entered his parents’ bedroom and sat on the bed, watching his mother brush her hair. She was in her distant, abstracted mood: for months now, she had alternated between this glacial coldness—cooking TV dinners and taking long walks by herself—and an intrusive maternalism. In that mood she gave him new sweaters, cooed over him at dinner and pestered him about his homework. In her maternal periods he often sensed that she was almost on the verge of crying: the weight of unshed tears hung in her voice and charged her gestures.

  “What’s for dinner tonight, mom?”

  She tilted her head and looked at his reflection in the mirror for approximately a second. “Hot dogs and sauerkraut.”

  “Oh.” Hot dogs were fine with Peter, but his father detested them.

  “Is that what you wanted to ask, Peter?” She did not look at him this time, but kept her eyes on the reflection of her hand pulling the brush through her hair.

  Peter had always been conscious that his mother was an exceptionally attractive woman—maybe not a fabulous beauty like Stella Hawthorne, but more than merely pretty all the same. She had a high, youthful blond attractiveness; she had always had an unencumbered look, like a sailboat one sees far out in a bay, nipping into the breeze. Men desired her, he knew, though he did not wish to think about that; on the night of the party for the actress, he had seen Lewis Benedikt caress his mother’s knees. Until then he had blindly (he now thought) imagined that adulthood and marriage meant release from the passionate confusions of youth. But his mother and Lewis Benedikt could have been Jim Hardie and Penny Draeger; they looked a more natural couple than she and his father. And not long after the party he had felt his parents’ marriage begin to unravel.

  “No, not really,” he said. “I like to watch you brushing your hair.”

  Christina Barnes froze, her hand lifted to the crown of her head; then brought it down in a smooth heavy stroke. She found his eyes again, then looked quickly, almost guiltily away.

  “Who’s going to come to your party tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “Oh, just the usual people. Your father’s friends. Ed and Sonny Venuti. A few other people. Ricky Hawthorne and his wife. Sears James.”

  “Will Mr. Benedikt be here?”

  This time she deliberately met his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe. Why? Don’t you like Lewis?”

  “Sometimes I guess I do. I don’t see him all that much.”

  “Nobody sees him all that much, darling,” she said, lifting his mood a little. “Lewis is a recluse, unless you’re a twenty-five-year-old girl.”

  “Wasn’t he married once?”

  She looked at him again, this time more sharply. “What’s the point of all this, Peter? I’m trying to brush my hair.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Peter nervously smoothed the counterpane with his hand.

  “Well?”

  “I guess I was just wondering if you were happy.”

  She laid down the brush on her dressing table, making its ivory back click against the wood. “Happy? Of course I am, sweetie. Now go downstairs and tell your father to get ready for dinner.”

  Peter left the bedroom and went downstairs to the small side room where his father was undoubtedly watching television. That was another sign that things were going wrong: Peter could not remember his father ever choosing to watch television at night before, but for months he had taken his briefcase into the television room, saying that he wanted to work on a few papers; minutes later the theme music of “Starsky and Hutch” or “Charlie’s Angels” would come faintly through the closed door.

  He peeked into the room, saw the Eames chair pulled up in front of the flickering screen—“The Brady Bunch”—the salted nuts on the bowl on the table, a pack of cigarettes and lighter beside them, but his father was not there. His briefcase, unopened, lay on the floor beside the Eames chair.

  Out of the television room, then, with its images of lonely comfort, and down the hall to the kitchen. When Peter walked in, Walter Barnes, dressed in a brown suit and worn brown wingtip shoes, was just dropping two olives into a martini. “Peter, old scout,” he said.

  “Hi, dad. Mom says dinner’s going to be ready soon.”

  “I wonder what that means. An hour—an hour and a half? What did she make anyhow, do you know?”

  “It’s going to be hot dogs.”

  “Whoof. Ugh. Christ. I guess I’ll need a few of these, hey, Pete?” He raised his glass, smiled at Peter, and sipped.

  “Oh, dad . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Peter stepped sideways, shoved his hands in his pockets, suddenly inarticulate. “Are you looking forward to your party?”

  “Sure,” his father said. “It’ll be a good time, Pete, you’ll see. Everything’s going to work out fine.”

  Walter Barnes began to walk out of the kitchen toward the television room, but some instinct made him look back at his son, who was spinning from side to side, hands still in his pockets, his face snagged with emotion. “Hey there, scout. Having trouble at school?”

  “No,” Peter said, shifting miserably: side to side, side to side.

  “Come on with me.”

  They went down the hall, Peter hanging back. At the door to the television room, his father said, “Your friend Jim Hardie still hasn’t come back, I hear.”

  “No.” Peter started to sweat.

  His father placed the martini on a mat and put himself heavily into the Eames chair. They both glanced at the screen. Most of the Brady children and their father were crawling around the furniture of their living room—a living
room much like the Barnes’s own—looking for a lost pet, a turtle or a kitten (or perhaps, since those Brady kids were cute little rascals, a rodent).

  “His mother’s worried sick,” his father said, and popped a handful of macadamia nuts into his mouth. When those had gone down his throat, he said, “Eleanor’s a nice woman. But she never understood that boy. You have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “No,” Peter said, looking to the rodent hunt as if for clues to the conduct of family life.

  “Just took off in his car.”

  Peter nodded. He had walked over toward Montgomery Street on his way to school the day after his escape from the house and from halfway down the block had seen that the car was gone.

  “Rollie Draeger’s a bit relieved, is my guess,” said his father. “Probably just good luck his daughter’s not pregnant.”

  “Um hum.”

  “You wouldn’t have any idea where Jim went?” His father glanced at him.

  “No,” Peter said, and risked a look in return.

  “He didn’t confide in you during one of your beer-drinking sessions?”

  “No,” Peter said unhappily.

  “You must miss him,” his father said. “Maybe you’re even worried about him. Are you?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said, by now as close to tears as he sometimes thought his mother was.

  “Well, don’t be. A kid like that will always cause more trouble than he’ll ever be in himself. And I’ll tell you something—I know where he is.”

  Peter looked up at his father.

  “He’s in New York. Sure he is. He’s on the run for some reason or other. And I wonder if he might not have had something to do with what happened to old Rea Dedham after all. Looks funny that he ran out, don’t you think?”

  “He didn’t,” Peter said. “He just didn’t. He couldn’t.”

  “Still, you’re better off with a couple of old farts like us than with him, don’t you think?” When Peter did not give him the agreement he expected, Walter Barnes reached out toward his son and touched his arm. “One thing you have to learn in this world, Pete. The trouble-makers might look glamorous as hell, but you’re better off steering clear of them. You stay with people like our friends, like the ones you’ll be talking to at our party, and you’ll be on your way. This is a hard enough world to get through without asking for trouble.” He released Peter’s arm. “Say, why don’t you pull up a chair and watch TV a little while with me? Let’s spend a little time together.”