Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  It’s not like I forgot she was sixty, he told himself: I worried about that plenty. “I came to that bitch with clean hands,” he said out loud, and saw the words vaporize before him. She had betrayed him. She had insulted him. She had never—he could see it now—really taken him seriously.

  And what was she, anyhow? An old bag with no morals and a freakish bone structure. Intellectually, she hardly counted.

  And she wasn’t really adaptable. Look at her view of California—trailer parks and tacoburgers! She was shallow—Milburn was where she belonged. With that stuffy little husband, talking about old movies.

  “Yes?” he said. He had heard a quick, gasping noise, very near.

  “Do you need help?” No one answered, and he put his hands on his hips and looked around.

  It had been a human noise, a sound of pain. “I’ll help if you tell me where you are,” he said. Then he shrugged, and walked toward the area where he thought the sound had come from.

  He stopped as soon as he saw the body lying at the base of the fir trees.

  It was a man—what was left of a man. Sims forced himself to look at him. That was a mistake, for he nearly vomited. Then he realized that he would have to look again. His ears were roaring. Sims bent over the battered head. It was, as he had feared, Lewis Benedikt. Near his head was the body of a dog. At first Sims had thought that the dog was a severed piece of Lewis.

  Trembling, Sims straightened up. He wanted to run. Whatever kind of animal had done that to Lewis Benedikt was still nearby—it couldn’t be more than a minute away.

  Then he heard crashing in the bushes, and was too scared to move. He visualized some huge animal leaping out at him from behind the firs—a grizzly. Sims opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  A man with a face like a Halloween pumpkin emerged from around the fir trees. He was breathing hard, and he held a huge blunderbuss of a shotgun pointed at Sim’s belly. “Hold it there,” the man said. Sims was certain that the frightening-looking creature was going to blow him in half, and his bowels voided.

  “I ought to kill you stone dead right now,” the man said.

  “Please . . .”

  “But this is your lucky day, killer. I’m taking you to a telephone and gedding the police to come. Hey? Why did you do this to Lewis, hey?”

  When Sims could not answer, understanding only that this horrible peasant would not kill him after all, Otto inched around behind him and prodded him in the back with the barrels of the shotgun. “So. Play soldier, scheisskopf. March. Mach schnell.”

  Ancient History

  12

  Don waited in his car outside Edward Wanderley’s house for Sears and Ricky to arrive. Waiting, he found in himself all the emotions he had seen in Peter Barnes that evening—but the boy was a rebuke to his fear. Over a few days, Peter Barnes had done and understood more than he and his uncle’s friends had in more than a month.

  Don lifted the two books he had taken from the Milburn library just before Peter had come. They supported the notion he’d had while talking to the three men in Sears’s library: he thought he knew what they were fighting. Sears and Ricky would tell him why. Then, if their story fit his theory, he would do what they had asked him to Milburn for: he would give them their explanation. And if the explanation seemed lunatic, perhaps it was—perhaps it was even wrong; but Peter’s story and the copy of The Watchtower proved that they had long since lurched into a time when madness offered a truer picture of events than sanity. If his mind and Peter Barnes’s had shattered, Milburn had shattered to their pattern. And out of the cracks had crawled Gregory and Fenny and their benefactor, all of whom they must destroy.

  Even if it kills us, Don thought. Because we are the only ones who have a chance of doing it.

  The headlights of a car appeared in a swirl of falling snow. After a moment, Don saw the outline of a high dark car behind them, and the car swung to the curb on the other side of Haven Lane. The lights died. First Ricky, then Sears got out of the old black Buick. Don left his own car and trotted across the street to join them.

  “And now Lewis,” Ricky said to him. “Did you know?”

  “Not definitely. But I thought so.”

  Sears, who had been listening to this, nodded impatiently. “You thought so. Ricky, give him the keys.” As Don opened the door, Sears grumbled behind him, “I hope you’ll tell us how you got your information. If Hardesty fancies himself as the town crier, I’ll arrange to have him spitted.”

  The three men went into a black entryway; Sears found the light switch. “Peter Barnes came to me this afternoon,” Don said. “He saw Gregory Bate kill his mother. And he saw what must have been Lewis’s ghost.”

  “Oh, God,” Ricky breathed. “Oh, my God. Oh poor Christina.”

  “Let’s get the heat going before we say any more,” Sears requested. “If everything’s blowing up in our faces, I for one at least want to be warm.” The three of them began wandering through the ground floor of the house, lifting dust sheets off the furniture. “I will miss Lewis very much,” Sears said. “I used to malign him terribly, but I did love him. He gave us spirit. As your uncle did.” He dropped a dust sheet on the floor. “And now he is in the Chenango County morgue, apparently the victim of a savage attack by some sort of animal. A friend of Lewis’s accused Harold Sims of the crime. Under different circumstances, that would be comic.” Sears’s face sagged. “Let’s take a look at your uncle’s office, and then take care of the heating. I don’t know if I can bear this anymore.”

  Sears led him into a large room at the rear of the house while Ricky switched on the central heating boiler. “This was the office.” He flicked a switch, and track lights on the ceiling shone on an old leather couch, a desk with an electric typewriter, a file cabinet and a Xerox machine; on a broad shelf jutting out below narrower shelves filled with white boxes sat a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a cassette recorder.

  “The boxes are the tapes he made for his books?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And you and Ricky and the others never came here after he died?”

  “No,” Sears said, gazing at the well-ordered office. It evoked Don’s uncle more wholly than any photograph—it radiated the contentment of a man happy in what he did. This impression helped to explain Sears’s next words. “I suppose that Stella told you we were afraid to come in here. There might be some truth in that. But I think that what really kept us away was guilt.”

  “And that was part of the reason you invited me to Milburn.”

  “Yes. I think all of us except Ricky thought you would—” He made a shooing-away gesture with his hands. “Somehow magically dispel our guilt. John Jaffrey most of all. That is the wisdom of hindsight.”

  “Because it was Jaffrey’s party.”

  Sears nodded curtly, and turned out of the office. “There still must be most of a cord of wood out in back. Why don’t you bring some of it in so we can have a fire?”

  * * *

  “This is the story we never thought we’d tell,” Ricky said ten minutes later. A bottle of Old Parr and their glasses stood on the dusty table before Ricky’s couch. “That fire was a good idea. It’ll give Sears and me something to look at. Did I ever tell you that I started everything by asking John about the worst thing he’d ever done? He said he wouldn’t tell me, and he told me a ghost story instead. Well, I should have known better. I knew what the worst thing was. We all knew.”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  Ricky sneezed violently, and Sears said, “It happened in 1929—October of 1929. That was a long time ago. When Ricky asked John about the worst thing he’d ever done, all that we could think about was your Uncle Edward—it was only a week after his death. Eva Galli was the last thing on our minds.”

  “Well, now we have truly crossed the Rubicon,” said Ricky. “Up until you said the name, I still wasn’t sure that
we’d tell it. But now that we’re here we’d better go on without stopping. Whatever Peter Barnes told you had better wait until we’re done—if after that you still want to stay in the same room with us. And I suppose that somehow what happened to him must be related to the Eva Galli affair. Now; I’ve said it too.”

  “Ricky never wanted you to know about Eva Galli,” said Sears. “Way back when I wrote to you, he thought it would be a mistake to rake it all up again. I guess we agreed with him. I certainly did.”

  “Thought it would muddy the waters,” Ricky said through his cold. “Thought it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with our problem. Spook stories. Nightmares. Premonitions. Just four old fools losing their marbles. Thought it was irrelevant. It was all so mixed up anyhow. Should have known better when that girl came looking for a job. And now with Lewis gone . . .”

  “You know something?” Sears said. “We never even gave Lewis John’s cufflinks.”

  “Slipped our minds,” Ricky said, and drank some of his Old Parr. He and Sears were already deep in the well of their story, concentrated on it so wholly that Don, seated near them, felt invisible.

  “Well, what happened to Eva Galli?” he asked.

  Sears and Ricky glanced at each other; then Ricky’s eyes went to his glass and Sears’s to the fire. “Surely that’s obvious,” Sears said. “We killed her.”

  “The two of you?” Don asked, thrown off balance. It was not the answer he had expected.

  “All of us,” Ricky answered. “The Chowder Society. Your uncle, John Jaffrey, Lewis, and Sears and myself. In October, 1929. Three weeks after Black Monday, when the stock market collapsed. Even here in Milburn, you could see the beginnings of the panic. Lou Price’s father, who was also a broker, shot himself in his office. And we killed a girl named Eva Galli. Not murder—not outright murder. We’d never have been convicted of anything—maybe not even of manslaughter. But there would have been a scandal.”

  “And we couldn’t face that,” Sears said. “Ricky and I had just started out as lawyers, working in his father’s firm. John had qualified as a doctor only the year before. Lewis was the son of a clergyman. We were all in the same fix. We would have been ruined. Slowly, if not immediately.”

  “That was why we decided on what we tried to do,” said Ricky.

  “Yes,” said Sears. “We did an obscene thing. If we’d been thirty-three instead of twenty-three, we would probably have gone to the police and taken our chances. But we were so young—Lewis wasn’t even out of his teens. So we tried to conceal it. And then at the end—”

  “At the end,” Ricky said, “we were like characters in one of our stories. Or in your novel. I’ve been reliving the last ten minutes for two months now. I even hear our voices, the things we said when we put her in Warren Scales’s car . . .”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” Sears said.

  “Let’s start at the beginning. Yes.”

  * * *

  “All right,” Ricky said. “It begins with Stringer Dedham. He was going to marry her. Eva Galli hadn’t been in town two weeks when Stringer set his cap for her. He was older than Sears and myself, thirty-one or two, I imagine, and he was in a position to marry. He ran the Colonel’s old farm and stables with the girls’ help, and Stringer worked hard and had good ideas. In short, he was a prosperous, well-thought-of fellow, and made a good catch for any of the local girls. Good-looking fellow too. My wife says he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen. All the girls above school age were after him. But when Eva Galli came to town with all her money and her metropolitan manners and her good looks, Stringer was sandbagged. She knocked him off his pins. She bought that house on Montgomery Street—”

  “Which house on Montgomery Street?” Don asked. “The one Freddy Robinson lived in?”

  “Why yes. The one across the street from John’s house. Miss Mostyn’s house. She bought that house, and set it up with new furniture and a piano and a gramophone. And she smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails, and she wore her hair short—a real John Held girl.”

  “Not entirely,” Sears said. “She was no bubbleheaded flapper. The time for those had passed, anyhow. And she was educated. She read quite widely. She could speak intelligently. Eva Galli was an enchanting woman. How would you describe the way she looked, Ricky?”

  “Like a nineteen-twenties Claire Bloom,” Ricky said immediately.

  “Typical Ricky Hawthorne. Ask him to describe someone, and he names a movie star. I guess you can take it as an accurate description. Eva Galli had all this exciting modernity about her, what was modernity for Milburn at any rate, but there was also a refinement about her—an air of grace.”

  “That’s true,” said Ricky. “And a certain mysteriousness we found terribly attractive. Like your Anna Mobley. We knew nothing about her but what she hinted—she had lived in New York, she had apparently spent some time in Hollywood as an actress in silents. She did a small part in a romance called China Pearl. A Richard Barthelmess movie.”

  Don took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote down the name of the film.

  “And she was obviously partly of Italian ancestry, but she told Stringer at one point that her maternal grandparents were English. Her father had been a man of considerable substance, one gathered, but she had been orphaned when just a child and was raised by relatives in California. That was all we knew about her. She said that she had come here for peace and seclusion.”

  “The women tried to take her under their wing,” Sears said. “She was a catch for them too, remember. A wealthy girl who had turned her back on Hollywood, sophisticated and refined—every woman of position in Milburn sent her an invitation. The little societies women here had in those days all wanted her. I think that what they wanted was to tame her.”

  “To make her identifiable,” Ricky said. “Yes. To tame her. Because with all her qualities, there was something else. Something fey. Lewis had a romantic imagination then, and he told me that Eva Galli was like an aristocrat, a princess or some such, who had turned her back on the court and gone off to the country to die.”

  “Yes, she affected us too,” said Sears. “Of course, for us she was out of reach. We idealized her. We saw her from time to time—”

  “We paid court,” Ricky said.

  “Absolutely. We paid court to her. She had politely refused all the ladies’ invitations, but she had no objections to five gangling young men showing up on her doorstep on a Saturday or Sunday. Your uncle Edward was the first of us. He had more daring than we other four. By this time, everybody knew that Stringer Dedham had lost his head over her, so in a sense she was seen as under Stringer’s patronage—as if she always had a ghostly duenna by her side. Edward slipped between the cracks of convention. He paid a call on her, she was dazzlingly charming to him, and soon we all got into the habit of calling on her. Stringer didn’t seem to mind. He liked us, though he was in a different world.”

  “The adult world,” Ricky said. “As Eva was. Even though she could only have been two or three years older than us, she might have been twenty. Nothing could have been more proper than our visits. Of course some of the elderly women thought they were scandalous. Lewis’s father thought so too. But we had just enough social leeway to get away with it. We paid our visits in a group, after Edward had broken the ground, about once every two weeks. We were far too jealous to allow any one of us to go alone. Our visits were extraordinary. It was like slipping out of time altogether. Nothing exceptional happened, even the conversation was ordinary, but for those few hours we spent with her, we were in the realm of magic. She swept us off our feet. And that she was known to be Stringer’s fiancée made it safe.”

  “People didn’t grow up so fast in those days,” Sears said. “All of this—young men in their early twenties mooning about a woman of twenty-five or -six as if she were an unattainable priestess—must seem risible to you. But it was the
way we thought of her—beyond our reach. She was Stringer’s, and we all thought that after they married we’d be as welcome at his house as at hers.”

  The two older men fell silent for a moment. They looked into the fire on Edward Wanderley’s hearth and drank whiskey. Don did not prod them to speak, knowing that a crucial turn in the story had come and that they would finish telling it when they were able.

  “We were in a sort of sexless, pre-Freudian paradise,” Ricky finally said. “In an enchantment. Sometimes we even danced with her, but even holding her, watching her move, we never thought about sex. Not consciously. Not to admit. Well, paradise died in October, 1929, shortly after the stock market and Stringer Dedham.”

  “Paradise died,” Sears echoed, “and we looked into the devil’s face.” He turned his head toward the window.

  13

  Sears said, “Look at the snow.”

  The other two followed his gaze and saw white flakes blizzarding against the window. “If his wife can find him, Omar Norris will have to be out plowing before morning.”

  Ricky drank more of his whiskey. “It was tropically hot,” he said, melting the present storm in the unseasonal October of nearly fifty years before. “The threshing got done late that year. It seemed folks couldn’t get down to work. People said money worries made Stringer absentminded. The Dedham girls said no, that wasn’t it, he’d gone by Miss Galli’s house that morning. He’d seen something.”

  “Stringer put his arms in the thresher,” Sears said, “and his sisters blamed Eva. He said things while he was dying, wrapped up in blankets on their table. But you couldn’t make head or tail of what they thought they heard him say. ‘Bury her,’ that was one thing, and ‘cut her up,’ as though he’d seen what was going to happen to himself.”