Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  “I know who you are,” Don said. “Your name is Robert Mobley.”

  “Why, of course. And you read my memoir. Though I wish you could have been more complimentary about the writing. No matter, my boy, no matter. No apologies necessary.”

  Don was looking around the room, which had a long, slightly pitched floor ending at a small stage. There were no doors he could see, and the pale walls rose almost to cathedral height: way up, tiny lights flashed and winked. Under this false sky, fifty or sixty people milled about, as if at a party. At the top end of the room, where a small bar had been set up, Don saw Lewis Benedikt, wearing a khaki jacket and carrying a bottle of beer. He was talking to a gray-suited old man with sunken cheeks and bright, tragic eyes who must have been Dr. John Jaffrey.

  “Your son must be here,” Don guessed.

  “Shelby? Indeed he is. That’s Shelby over there.” He nodded in the direction of a boy in his late teens, who smiled back at them. “We’re all here for the entertainment, which promises to be very exciting.”

  “And you were waiting for me.”

  “Well, Donald, without you none of this could have been arranged.”

  “I’m getting out of here.”

  “Leave? Why, my boy, you can’t! You’ll have to let the show roll on, I’m afraid—you’ve already noticed there are no doors here. And there’s nothing to fear—nothing here can harm you. It’s all entertainment, you see—mere shadows and pictures. Only that.”

  “Go to hell,” Don said. “This is some kind of charade she set up.”

  “Amy Monckton, you mean? Why, she’s only a child. You can’t imagine—”

  But Don was already walking away toward the side of the theater. “It’s no good, dear boy,” Mobley called after him. “You’re going to have to stay with us until it’s over.” Don pressed his hands against the wall, aware that everybody in the room was looking at him. The wall was covered in a pale felt-like material, but beneath the fabric was something cold and hard as iron. He looked up to the winking dots of light. Then he pounded the wall with the flat of his hand—no depression, no hidden door, nothing but a flat sealed surface.

  The invisible lights dimmed, as did the imitation stars. Two men took him, one holding an arm, the other a shoulder. They forcibly turned him to face the stage, on which a single spotlight shone. In the middle of the spot stood a placard board. The first placard read:

  RABBITFOOT DE PEYSER PRODUCTIONS TAKES PRIDE IN PRESENTING

  A hand dipped into the light and removed the sign.

  A SHORT WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

  The curtain went up to reveal a television set. Don thought it was blank until he noticed details on the white screen—the red brick of a chimney, the “snow” which was real snow. Then the picture jumped into life for him.

  It was a high-angled shot of Montgomery Street, taken from over the roof of Anna Mostyn’s house. Immediately after he recognized the setting, the characters appeared. He, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne struggled up the middle of Montgomery Street: he and Ricky looking at the house for as long as they were in frame, Sears looking down as if consciously to give contrast to the shot. There was no sound, and Don could not remember what they had said to each other before marching toward the house. Three faces in fast-cut closeups: their eyebrows crusted with white, they looked like soldiers conducting a mopping-up operation in some Arctic war. Ricky’s tired face was obviously that of a man with a bad cold. He was suffering: it was much clearer to Don now than it had been outside the house.

  Then a shot of his reaching in through the broken window. An exterior camera followed the three men into the house, tracking them through the kitchen and into the dark hallway. More unheard conversation; a third camera picked up Don and Ricky climbing the stairs, Ricky pointing to the bloodstain. On Ricky’s civilized face was the expression of pain he had seen. They parted, and the camera left Don just as he pushed at the door to Anna Mostyn’s bedroom.

  Don uneasily watched the camera following Ricky up the stairs. A jump-cut to the end of an empty corridor: Ricky seen in silhouette pausing on a landing, then going up to the top floor. Another jump cut: Ricky entering the top floor, trying the first door and entering a room.

  Inside the room now: Ricky came through the door with the camera watching him like a hidden assailant. Ricky breathing heavily, looking at the room with open mouth and widening eyes—the room of the nightmare, then, as he had guessed. The camera began to creep toward him. Then it, or the creature it represented, sprang.

  Two hands gripped Ricky’s neck, choking him. Ricky fought, pushing at his murderer’s wrists, but was too weak to break his grip. The hands tightened, and Ricky began to die: not cleanly, as on the television programs this “commercial” imitated, but messily, with streaming eyes and bleeding tongue. His back arched helplessly, fluids streamed from his eyes and nose, his face began to turn black.

  Peter Barnes said they can make you see things, Don thought, that’s all they’re doing now . . .

  Ricky Hawthorne died in front of him, in color on a twenty-six inch screen.

  4

  Ricky forced himself to open the door of the first bedroom on the top floor of the house. He wished he were home with Stella. She had been very shaken by Lewis’s death, though she knew nothing of Peter Barnes’s story.

  Maybe this is where it ends, he thought, and went through into the bedroom.

  And forced himself to stand still: even the breath in his body wanted to flee. It was the room of the dream, and every atom of it seemed pervaded with the Chowder Society’s misery. Here they had each sweated and gone cold with fear; on this bed—now with a single gray blanket thrown over the bare mattress—each had struggled helplessly to move. In the prison of that wretched bed they had waited for life to end. The room stood only for death: it was an emblem of death, and its bare cold bleakness was its image.

  He remembered that Sears was, or soon would be, in the cellar. But there was no cellar-beast: just as there was no sweating Ricky Hawthorne pinned to the bed. He turned around slowly, taking in all of the room.

  On a side wall hung the only anomaly, a small mirror.

  (Mirror, mirror on the wall . . . who’s the scaredest of them all?)

  (Not I, said the little hed hen.)

  Ricky went around the bed to approach the mirror. Set opposite the window, it reflected a white section of sky. Tiny flakes of snow drifted across its surface and disappeared at the bottom of the frame.

  When Ricky got closer to the mirror a whisper of breeze slid against his face. He bent forward and a sparse handful of snowflakes spun out to touch his cheek.

  He made the mistake of looking directly into what he now confusedly thought must be a small window open directly to the weather.

  A face appeared before him, a face he knew, wild and lost; then he glimpsed Elmer Scales moving clumsily through the snow; carrying a shotgun. Like the first apparition, the farmer was splashed with blood; the jug-eared face had starved down to skin-covered bone, but in Scales’s fierce gauntness was something which forced Ricky to think he saw something beautiful—Elmer always wanted to look at something beautiful: this bubbled to the surface of Ricky’s mind and broke. Elmer was screaming into the blaring storm, lifting his gun and shooting at a small form, flipping it over in a spray of blood . . .

  Then Elmer and his target blew away and he was looking at Lewis’s back. A naked woman stood in front of Lewis, soundlessly mouthing words. Scripture, he read, then see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? The woman was not living, nor was she beautiful, but Ricky saw the lineaments of returned desire in the dead face and knew he was looking at Lewis’s wife. He tried to back away and escape the vision, but found he could not move.

  Just when the woman closed on Lewis, both she and he melting into unrecognizable forms, Ricky saw Peter Barnes crouching in a corner of the storm. No—in a building, some buildi
ng he knew but could not recognize. Some long-familiar corner, a worn carpet, a curved tan wall with a dim light in a sconce . . . a man like a wolf was bending over terrified Peter Barnes, grinning at him with white prominent teeth. This time there was no melting, merciful snowfall to hide the dreadful thing from Ricky Hawthorne: the creature leaned over cowering Peter Barnes, picked him up and like a lion killing a gazelle, broke his back. Lionlike, it bit into the boy’s skin and began to eat.

  5

  Sears James had inspected the front rooms of the house and found nothing; and nothing, he thought, was what they were most likely to find in all the rest of the house. One empty suitcase scarcely justified going even a foot beyond one’s door, in weather like this. He came back into the hall, heard Don walking aimlessly about in a bedroom at the top of the stairs, and made a quick check through the kitchen. Wet footprints, their own, dirtied the floor. A single bleary water glass sat on a dusty counter. An empty sink, empty shelves. Sears chafed his cold hands together and came back out into the dark hallway.

  Now Don was banging the walls upstairs—looking for a secret panel, Sears imagined, and shook his head. That all three of them were still alive and prowling through the house proved to Sears that Eva had moved on and left nothing behind.

  He opened the door to the cellar. Wooden steps led down into complete blackness. Sears flicked the switch, and a bulb at the top of the steps went on. Its light revealed the steps and concrete floor at their bottom, but seemed to extend only seven or eight feet from the bottom of the steps. Apparently it was the only light; which meant, Sears realized, that the cellar was unused. The Robinsons had never turned the basement into a den or family room.

  He went down a few steps and peered into the murk. What he could see looked like any Milburn cellar: extending under the whole of the house, about seven feet high, with walls of painted concrete block. The old furnace sat near the wall at the far end, casting a deep many-armed shadow which met and melted smoothly into the gloom; on one side stood the tall tubular cylinder for hot water and two disconnected iron sinks.

  Sears heard a thump from upstairs, and his heart leaped: he was vastly more nervous than he wished to acknowledge. Tilting his head back toward the top of the stairs, he listened for further noises or sounds of distress, but heard none: probably no more than a slamming door.

  Come down and play in the dark, Sears.

  Sears took a step further down and saw his gigantic shadow advance along the concrete floor. Come on, Sears.

  He did not hear the words spoken in his mind, he saw no images or pictures: but he had been commanded, and he followed his bloated shadow down onto the concrete floor.

  Come and see the toys I left for you.

  He reached the concrete floor and experienced a sick thrill of pleasure that was not his own.

  Sears spun around, afraid that something was coming for him from under the wooden staircase. Light banded the concrete in stripes, streaming between the wood: nothing was there. He would have to leave the protection of the light and look into the corners of the cellar.

  He moved forward, wishing wholeheartedly that he too had brought a knife, and his shadow melted away into dark. Then all doubt left him. “Oh, my God,” he said.

  John Jaffrey was stepping out into the shadowy light beside the furnace. “Sears, old friend,” he said. His voice was toneless. “Thank heavens you’re here. They told me you would be, but I didn’t know—I mean I—” He shook his head. “It’s all been so confused.”

  “Stay away from me,” Sears said.

  “I saw Milly,” John said. “And do you know, Milly just won’t let me in the house. But I warned her . . . I mean, I told her to warn you—and the others. About something. Can’t remember now.” He lifted his sunken face and twisted his mouth into a ghastly smile. “I went over. Isn’t that what Fenny said to you? In your story? That’s right. I went over, and now Milly won’t—won’t open—ah—” He raised his hand to his forehead. “Oh, it’s just awful, Sears. Can’t you help me?”

  Sears was backing away from him, unable to speak.

  “Please. Funny. Here in this place again. They made me come here—wait for you. Please help me, Sears. Thank heavens you’re here.”

  Jaffrey lurched into the light, and Sears saw fine gray dust covering his face and outstretched hands, his bare feet. Jaffrey was moving in a painful, senile circle, his eyes too seemingly covered by a mixture of dust and drying tears—this spoke of more pain than his addled words and shuffling walk, and Sears, who remembered Peter Barnes’s story about Lewis, at last felt more pity than fear.

  “Yes, John,” he said, and Dr. Jaffrey, apparently unable to see in the light from the naked bulb, turned toward his voice.

  Sears went forward to touch Dr. Jaffrey’s extended hand. At the last minute he closed his eyes. A tingling sensation passed through his fingers and traveled halfway up his arm. When he opened his eyes, John was no longer there.

  He stumbled into the staircase, painfully bumping his ribs. Toys. Sears began mechanically to rub his hand against his coat: would he have to find more creatures shambling and dazed like John?

  But no, that was not what he would have to do. Sears soon discovered the reason for the plural noun. He walked out of the light toward the furnace and saw a heap of clothing dumped by the far wall. A pile of discarded boots and rags: it was eerily like the scrubby bodies of the sheep on Elmer Scales’s farm. He wanted to turn away: all the truly bad things had begun back there, with him and Ricky freezing on a cold white hill. Sears saw a flaccid hand, a swirl of blond hair. Then he recognized one of the rags as Christina Barnes’ s coat; it lay flat, nearly empty, flung over a second flattened and emptied body, and it enveloped a gray deflated thing ending in blond hair which was Christina’s body.

  Instinctively, the shout escaping him, he called for the other two; then Sears forced control on himself and went to the bottom of the stairs and began methodically, loudly, shamelessly to repeat their names.

  6

  “So you three found them,” Hardesty said. “You look pretty shook up, too.” Sears and Ricky were seated on a couch in John Jaffrey’s house, Don in a chair immediately beside them. The sheriff, still wearing his coat and hat, was leaning against the mantel, trying to disguise the fact that he was very angry. The wet traces of his footprints on the carpet, a source of evident irritation to Milly Sheehan until Hardesty had sent her out of the room, showed a circling path of firm heelprints and squared-off toes.

  “So do you,” Sears said.

  “Yeah. Suppose I do. I never saw bodies like those two, exactly. Even Freddy Robinson wasn’t that bad. You ever seen bodies like that, Sears James? Hey?”

  Sears shook his head.

  “No. You’re damn right. Nobody ever did. And I’m gonna have to store ’em up in the jail until the meat wagon can get in here. And I’m the poor son of a bitch who has to take Mrs. Hardie and Mr. Barnes along to see those goddamned things to identify them. Unless you’d like to do that for me, Mr. James?”

  “It’s your job, Walt,” Sears said.

  “Shit. My job, is it? My job is finding out who did what to those people—and you two old buzzards just sit there, don’t you? You found ’em by accident, I suppose. Just happened to break into that particular house, just happened to be taking a walk on a goddamned day like this, I suppose, and just thought you’d try a little house-breaking—Jesus, I oughta lock all three of you in the same cell with them. Along with torn-up Lewis Benedikt and that nigger de Souza and the Griffen boy who froze to death because his hippy mommy and daddy were too cheap to put a heater in his room. God damn. That’s what I ought to do, all right.” Hardesty, now entirely unable to hide his anger, spat into the fireplace and kicked at the fender. “Jesus, I live in that fucking jail, I really oughta haul you three assholes along and see how you like it.”

  “Walt,” Sears said. “Cool down.”r />
  “Sure. By God, if you two weren’t nothin’ but a couple of hundred-year-old lawyers with teeth in the palms of your hands, I’d do it.”

  “I mean, Walt,” Sears calmly said, “if you will stop insulting us for a moment, that we’ll tell you who killed Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes. And Lewis.”

  “You will. Hot damn. Guess I don’t have to get out the rubber hoses after all.”

  Silence for a moment: then Hardesty said, “Well? I’m still here.”

  “It was the woman who calls herself Anna Mostyn.”

  “Swell. Just dandy. Okay. Anna Mostyn. Okay. It was her house, so she’s the one. Good work. Now. What did she do, suck ’em dry, like a hound’ll do to an egg? And who held ’em down, because I know no woman could have taken that crazy Hardie kid by herself. Huh?”

  “She did have help,” Sears said. “It was a man who calls himself Gregory Bate or Benton. Now hold on to yourself, Walt, because here comes the difficult part. Bate has been dead for almost fifty years. And Anna Mostyn—”

  He stopped. Hardesty had clamped both eyes shut.

  Ricky took it up. “Sheriff, in a way you were right about all this from the beginning. Remember when we looked at Elmer Scales’s sheep? And you told us about other incidents, lots of them, that happened in the sixties?”

  Hardesty’s bloodshot eyes flew open.

  “It’s the same thing,” Ricky said. “That is, we think it’s probably the same thing. But here, they’re out to kill people.”

  “So what’s this Anna Mostyn?” Hardesty asked, his body rigid. “A ghost? A vampire?”

  “Something like that,” Sears said. “A shapeshifter, but those words will do.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “That’s why we went to her house. To see if we could find anything.”

  “And that’s what you’re gonna tell me. Nothing more.”

  “There is no more,” Sears said.