Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  Lewis could not refuse it. Otto, rubbing his hands before a twigfire, was only a part of an existence too trivial to insist on its worth—too trivial to hold to. For Lewis, who had already made his decision, his past, especially the latest years in Milburn, was dull lead, a long ache of boredom and uselessness from which he had been shown the way out.

  Thus Lewis turned the brass knob and fell into his place in the puzzle.

  He stepped, as he knew he would, into a bedroom. He recognized it immediately: the sunny bedroom, filled with Spanish flowers, of the ground-floor apartment he and Linda had kept in the hotel. A silky Chinese rug stretched beneath his feet to each of the room’s corners; flowers in vases, still hungry for the sun, picked up the golds, reds and blues of the rug and shone them back. He turned around, saw the closing door, and smiled. Sun streamed through the twin windows. Looking out, he saw a green lawn, a railed precipice and the top of the steps down to the sea which glimmered below. Lewis went to the canopied bed. A dark blue velvet dressing gown lay folded across its foot. At peace, Lewis surveyed the entire lovely room.

  Then the door to the lounge opened, and Lewis turned smiling to his wife. In the haze of his utter happiness, he moved forward, extending his arms. He stopped when he saw that she was crying.

  “Darling, what’s wrong? What happened?”

  She raised her hands: across them lay the body of a short-haired dog. “One of the guests found her lying on the patio. Everybody was just coming out from lunch, and when I got there they were all standing around staring at the poor little thing. It was horrible, Lewis.”

  Lewis leaned over the body of the dog and kissed Linda’s cheek. “I’ll take care of it, Linda. But how the devil did it get there?”

  “They said someone threw it out of a window . . . oh, Lewis, who in the world would do a thing like that?”

  “I’ll take care of it. Poor sweetie. Just sit down for a minute.” He took the corpse of the dog from his wife’s hands. “I’ll straighten it out. Don’t worry about it anymore.”

  “But what are you going to do with it?” she wailed.

  “Bury it in the rose garden next to John, I guess.”

  “That’s good. That’s lovely.”

  Carrying the dog, he went toward the lounge door, then paused. “Lunch went all right otherwise?”

  “Yes, fine. Florence de Peyser invited us to join her in the suite for dinner tonight. Will you feel like it after all that tennis? You’re sixty-five, remember.”

  “No, I’m not.” Lewis faced her with a puzzled expression. “I’m married to you, so I’m fifty. You’re making me old before my time!”

  “Absentminded me,” Linda said. “Really, I could just kick myself.”

  “I’ll be right back with a much better idea,” Lewis said, and went through the door to the lounge.

  The dog’s weight slipped off his hands, and everything changed. His father was walking toward him across the floor of the parsonage living room. “Two more points, Lewis. Your mother deserves a little consideration, you know. You treat this house as though it were a hotel. You come in at all hours of the night.” His father reached the armchair behind which Lewis stood, swerved off in the direction of the fireplace, and then marched back to the other side of the room, still talking. “Sometimes, I am told, you drink spirits. Now I am not a prudish man, but I will not tolerate that. I know you are sixty-five—”

  “Seventeen,” Lewis said.

  “Seventeen, then. Don’t interrupt. No doubt you think that is very grown up. But you will not drink spirits while you live under this roof, is that understood? And I want you to begin showing your age by helping your mother with the cleaning. This room is henceforth your responsibility. You must dust and clean it once a week. And see to the grate in the mornings. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Good. That is point one. Point two concerns your friends. Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne are both fine men, and I would say I have an excellent relationship with both of them. But age and circumstance divide us. I would not call them friends, nor would they call me their friend. For one thing, they are Episcopalians, just one step from popery. For another, they possess a good deal of money. Mr. James must be one of the richest men in all of New York. Do you know what that means, in 1928?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It means that you cannot afford to keep up with his son. Nor can you keep up with Mr. Hawthorne’s son. We lead respectable and godly lives, but we are not wealthy. If you continue to associate with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I foresee the direst consequences. They have the habits of the sons of wealthy men. As you know, it is my plan to send you to the university in the autumn, but you will be one of the poorest students at Cornell, and you must not learn such habits, Lewis, they will lead only to ruin. I will forever regret your mother’s generosity in using her own funds to provide the wherewithal to purchase you a motorcar.” He was on another circuit of the room. “And people are already gossiping about the three of you and that Italian woman on Montgomery Street. I know clergymen’s sons are supposed to be wild, but . . . well, words fail me.” He paused midpoint on the track from the corner of the room and looked seriously into Lewis’s eyes. “I assume that I am understood.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand. Is that all?”

  “No. I am at a loss to account for this.” His father was holding out to him the corpse of a short-haired hound. “It was lying dead on the walk to the church door. What if one of the congregation had seen it there? I want you to dispose of it immediately.”

  “Leave it to me,” Lewis said. “I’ll bury it in the rose garden.”

  “Please do so immediately.”

  Lewis took the dog out of the living room, and at the last minute turned to ask, “Do you have Sunday’s sermon prepared, father?”

  No one answered. He was in an unused bedroom at the top of the house on Montgomery Street. The room’s only furniture was a bed. The floorboards were bare, and greasepaper had been nailed over the only window. Because Lewis’s car had a flat tire, Sears and Ricky were off borrowing Warren Scales’s old flivver while Warren and his pregnant wife shopped. A woman lay on the bed, but she would not answer him because she was dead. A sheet covered her body.

  Lewis moved back and forth on the floorboards, willing his friends to return with the farmer’s car. He did not want to look at the covered shape on the bed; he went to the window. Through the greasepaper he could see only vague orange light. He glanced back at the sheet. “Linda,” he said miserably.

  He stood in a metal room, with gray metal walls. One light bulb hung from the ceiling. His wife lay under a sheet on a metal table. Lewis leaned over her body and sobbed. “I won’t bury you in the pond,” he said. “I’ll take you into the rose garden.” He touched his wife’s lifeless fingers under the sheet and felt them twitch. He recoiled.

  As he watched horrified, Linda’s hands crept up beneath the sheet. Her white hands folded the sheet down over her face. She sat up, and her eyes opened.

  Lewis cowered at the far end of the little room. When his wife swung her legs off the morgue table, he screamed. She was naked, and the left side of her face was broken and scraped. He held his hands out in front of him in a childish gesture of protection. Linda smiled at him, and said, “What about that poor dog?” She was pointing to the uncovered slab of table, where a short-haired hound lay on its side in a puddle of blood.

  He looked back in horror at his wife, but Stringer Dedham, his hair parted in the middle, a brown shirt concealing his stumps, stood beside him. “What did you see, Stringer?” he asked.

  Stringer smiled at him bloodily. “I saw you. That’s why I jumped out of the window. Don’t be a puddin’ head.”

  “You saw me?”

  “Did I say I saw you? Guess I’m the puddin’ head. I didn’t see you. Your wife’s the one saw you. What I saw w
as my girl. Saw her right through her window, morning of the day I helped out on the thresher. Gosh, I must be a real moron.”

  “But what did you see her doing? What did you try to tell your sisters?”

  Stringer bent back his head and laughed, and blood gushed out of his mouth. He coughed. “Golly gee, I couldn’t hardly believe it, it was just amazin’, friend. You ever see a snake with its head cut off? You ever see that tongue dartin’ out—and that head just a stump of a thing no bigger than your thumb? You ever see that body workin’ away, beatin’ itself in the dust?” Stringer laughed loudly through the red foam in his mouth. “Holy Moses, Lewis, what a godforsaken thing. Honestly, ever since it’s been like I can’t hardly think straight, like my brain’s all mixed up and leakin’ outa my ears. It’s like that time I had the stroke, in 1940, remember? When one side of me froze up? And you gave me baby food on a spoon? Grrr, what a godawful taste!”

  “That wasn’t you,” Lewis said, “That was my father.”

  “Well, what did I tell you? It’s all mixed up—like someone cut my head off, and my tongue keeps moving.” Stringer gave an abashed red smile. “Say, wasn’t you goin’ to take that poor old dog and drop it in the pond?”

  “Oh, yes, when they get back,” Lewis said. “We need Warren Scales’s car. His wife is pregnant.”

  “The wife of a Roman Catholic farmer is of no concern to me at the moment,” his father said. “One year at college has coarsened you, Lewis.” From his temporary mooring beside the mantel, he looked long and sadly at his son. “And I know too that this is a coarsening era. Pitch defileth, Lewis. Our age is pitch. We are born into damnation, and for our children all is darkness. I wish that I could have reared you in more stable times—Lewis, once this country was a paradise! A paradise! Fields as far as you could see! Filled with the bounty of the Lord! Son, when I was a boy I saw Scripture in the spider webs. The Lord was watching us then, Lewis, you could feel His presence in the sunlight and the rain. But now we are like spiders dancing in a fire.” He looked down at the literal fire, which was warming his knees. “It all started with the railway. That I’m sure of, son. The railroad brought money to men who’d never had the smell of two dollars together in all their lives. The iron horse spoiled the land, and now financial collapse is going to spread like a stain over this whole country.” And looked at Lewis with the clear shrewd eyes of Sears James.

  “I promised her I’d bury her in the rose garden,” Lewis said. “They’ll be back with the car soon.”

  “The car.” His father turned away in disgust. “You never listened to the important things I had to tell you. You have forsaken me, Lewis.”

  “You excite yourself too much,” Lewis said. “You’ll give yourself a stroke.”

  “His will be done.”

  Lewis looked at his father’s rigid back. “I’ll see to it now.” His father made no answer. “Good-bye.”

  His father spoke without turning around. “You never listened. But mark me, son, it will come back to haunt you. You were seduced by yourself, Lewis. Nothing sadder can be said of any man. A handsome face and feathers for brains. You got your looks from your mother’s Uncle Leo, and when he was twenty-five he stuck his hand into the woodstove and held it there until it was charred like a hickory log.”

  Lewis went through the dining-room door. Linda was peeling the sheet off her naked body in the vacant upper room. She smiled at him with bloody teeth. “After that,” she said, “your mother’s Uncle Leo was a godly man all his life long.” Her eyes glowed, and she swung her legs down off the bed. Lewis backed away toward the bare wooden wall. “After that he saw Scripture in spider webs, Lewis.” She moved slowly toward him, twisting on a broken hip. “You were going to put me in the pond. Did you see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? Or were you distracted by your pretty face?”

  “Now it’s over, isn’t it?” Lewis asked.

  “Yes.” She was close enough for him to catch the dark brown smell of death.

  Lewis straightened his body against the rough wall. “What did you see in that girl’s bedroom?”

  “I saw you, Lewis. What you were supposed to see. Like this.”

  9

  As long as Peter was concealed by the underbrush he was safe. A wiry network of branches hid him from the road. On the other side, beginning ten or fifteen yards back, were trees like those before Lewis’s house. Peter worked his way back into them to be further screened from the man in the car. The Jehovah’s Witness had not moved off the shoulder of the highway: Peter could see the top of his car, a bright acrylic blue shield, over the top of the dry brambles. Peter ducked from the safety of one tree to another; then to another. The car inched forward. They continued in this way for some time, Peter moving slowly over the damp ground and the car clinging to his side like a shark to which he was the pilot fish. At times the Witness’s car moved slightly ahead, at times it hung back, but never was it more than five or ten yards off in either direction—the only comfort available for Peter was that the driver’s errors proved that he could not see him. He was just idling down the shoulder of the road waiting for a section of cleared ground.

  Peter tried to visualize the landscape on his side of the highway, and remembered that only for a mile or so in the vicinity of Lewis’s house was there heavy ground cover—most of the rest of the land, until an eruption of gas stations and drive-ins marked the edges of Milburn, was field. Unless he crawled in ditches for seven miles, the man in the car would be able to see him as soon as he left the stretch of woods.

  Come out, son.

  The Witness was aimlessly sending out messages, trying to coax him into the car. Peter shut his mind to the whispers as well as he could and plunged on through the woods. Maybe if he kept on running, the Witness would drive down the road far enough to let him think.

  Come on, boy. Come out of there. Let me take you to her.

  Still protected by the high brambles and the trees, Peter ran until he could see, strung between the massive trunks of oaks, double strands of silvery wire. Beyond the wire was a long curved vacancy of field—empty white ground. The Witness’s car was nowhere in sight. Peter looked sideways, but here the trees were too thick and the brambles too high for him to see the section of highway nearest him. Peter reached the last of the trees and the wire and looked over the field, wondering if he could get across unseen. If the man saw him on the field, Peter knew he would be helpless. He could run, but eventually the man would get him as the thing back in the Montgomery Street house got Jim.

  She’s interested in you, Peter.

  It was another aimless, haphazard dart with no real urgency in it.

  She’ll give you everything you want.

  She’ll give you anything you want.

  She’ll give you back your mother.

  The blue car edged forward into his vision and stopped just past the point where the field began. Peter shuddered back a few feet deeper into the wood. The man in the car turned sideways, resting his arm along the top of the seat, and in this posture of patient waiting looked out at the field Peter would have to cross. Come on out and we’ll give you your mother.

  Yes. That was what they would do. They’d give him back his mother. She would be like Jim Hardie and Freddy Robinson, with empty eyes and amnesiac conversation and no more substance than a ray of moonlight.

  Peter sat down on wet ground, trying to remember if any other roads were near. He would have to go through the woods or the man would find him when he crossed the field; was there another road, running parallel to the highway, going back to Milburn?

  He remembered nights of driving around the countryside with Jim, all of the footloose journeying of high school weekends and summers: he would have said that he knew Broome County as well as he knew his own bedroom.

  But the patient man in the blue car made it difficult to think. He could not remember what happened on the other side of
this wood—a developer’s suburb, a factory? For a moment his mind would not give him the information he knew it had, and instead offered images of vacant buildings where dark things moved behind drawn blinds. But whatever lay on the other side of the woods, the other side was where he had to go.

  Peter stood up quietly and retreated a few yards farther into the woods before turning his back on the highway and running away from the car. Seconds later he remembered what he was running toward. There was an old two-lane macadam highway in this direction, in Milburn, called “the old Binghamton road” because once it had been the only highway between the two towns: pitted, obsolete and unsafe, it was avoided by nearly all traffic now. Once there had been small businesses dotted along it, fruit markets, a motel, a drugstore. Now most of these were empty, and some of them had been razed. The Bay Tree Market alone flourished: it was heavily patronized by the better-off people of Milburn. His mother had always bought fruit and vegetables there.

  If he remembered the distance between the old and new highways correctly, it would take him less than twenty minutes to get to the Market. From there he could get a lift into town and make it safely to the hotel.

  * * *

  In fifteen minutes he had wet feet, a stitch in his side and a rip in his jacket from a snagged branch, but he knew he was getting near the old road. The trees had thinned out and the ground sloped gently down.

  Now, seeing in the blank gray air ahead of him that the woods were ending, he went nearer the fence and crept slowly along it for the final thirty yards. He still was not sure if the fruit market was to the left or the right, or how far off it was. All he hoped was that it would be in sight, and show a busy parking lot.