Ash Wednesday (23 page)

"No. No, like ghosts."

"Like ghosts."

"That's what they said. The whole town is full of ghosts.”

“Great. Can I finish the dishes now?"

"I'm not kidding."

"You sure that wasn't a commercial? For a horror movie?”

“Nah, it was a bulletin, hell, you heard it. It's gonna be on the evening news."

"Yeah. Sure."

"Look, I
gotta
leave for the game now. You watch it and tell me when I come home, okay?"

"Let me finish the dishes first."

~*~

Doris in Boston didn't watch the
CBS Evening News
. Walter
Peschke
in Manhattan didn't either, but he watched it later that evening on his VCR when he got home from his job at Mr. Steak. After he saw the Merridale story, heard the interviews, watched Dan Rather disappear immediately afterward, and cursed his timer once more, he called Alice Meadows, hoping she would be home. She was.

"Alice, Walter," he said when she answered. "Didn't know if you'd be home so soon."

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Ever since Freeland's been conducting, the tempos are faster by a good twenty percent. Show wraps at ten-fifteen now." Alice Meadows had been performing in an Equity Library Theatre production of
Anyone Can Whistle
for the past two weeks. Walter still hadn't seen it. Walter didn't like musicals.

"Friday night—I thought you might be out," Walter said.

"No. Not tonight." It was a noncommittal answer. Typical of Alice, Walter thought. Always noncommittal. "What's up?"

"I just heard something on the news about your old hometown."

"Merridale?" The name came slowly, as though she were hesitant to speak it aloud.

"Yeah. Listen. I'll play it. But it's pretty strange." He held the receiver to the speaker and pushed the play button.

Alice Meadows listened to Dan Rather, listened to reporters interviewing Tom Markley, Frank
Kaylor
, Pastor Craven, even Fred
Hibbs
, whom she did not remember. As she listened, she slowly grew chilled, in spite of the steam radiator that had driven the apartment to a cloying seventy-eight degrees, and by the time the voices had stopped and Walter was back on the line, she had already realized the possibilities.

"You hear it okay? Alice?"

She tried to answer, but had to clear her throat first. "Yes. Fine, Walter."

"Bizarre, huh? Your folks aren't there now, are they?"

"No. No, they're not." Alice's father had worked in a civilian function for the Air Force. He had been stationed at the now defunct Fort Harris base, twenty miles from Merridale, where he had had his longest span of service—six years, from the time Alice was fourteen through her twentieth birthday. They were in Colorado now.

"You still keep in touch with anyone back there?"

"Not really. Walter, listen, I'm kind of busy right now. I'll talk to you later, all right?"

"Yeah, sure. But listen, what about that Vivaldi concert next week? You said you'd let me know this weekend."

"Thanks, but I don't think so. I’ll be out of town next week."

"Out of town? What about your show?"

"I'll work something out."

"But where are you going? What's—"

"Talk to you later, Walter. Thanks for giving me the news." And she hung up.

"Shit," Walter mumbled into the dead receiver, trying to remember what he'd ever done to piss her off. Their first dates had been great, even if his taste in shows had been a little heavier than hers. Sex had logically followed, and it had been very good for both of them. What's more, they related well—even Alice had admitted that. She'd gotten under his skin all right, and he was damned if he could get her out. But when he had suggested living together, he was suddenly talking to a different person. She seemed offended, as though he'd asked her to go down on him in the Plymouth lobby at intermission. "I can't commit to a relationship like that," was all she said, and when he pressed her for a reason, she withdrew, not only from the conversation, but from him as well. A week ago they'd created a small monsoon on his waterbed, and now he couldn't get a luncheon date. Walter
Peschke
cursed the perversity of women and shuddered at the thought of hauling his VCR down to Crazy Eddie's in the morning.

In her apartment, Alice Meadows shuddered too. I wonder if he's there, she thought. Oh, Jesus, is he there?

She opened a kitchen cabinet and looked in at half-empty bottles of Irish Mist,
Sabra
, and a nearly full fifth of Smirnoff Vodka. The sweetness of the first two at that moment repelled her, and the thought of the flavorless raw vodka was equally odious. She needed something that would hit her directly, that she could taste.

In the desk drawer she found the small stash of grass that Walter had left there a few weeks before. She had intended to return it to him, but now she rolled a joint with unpracticed fingers, lit it, and sucked in the harsh smoke. She didn't like grass, but tonight its immediacy of effect seemed more appealing than the slow-working alcohol in the kitchen. I hope it doesn't wreck my throat, she thought, and then realized it didn't matter, that
Sharlaine
would be more than anxious to do the role, and that Cal, the director, wouldn't mind either. He and
Sharlaine
had been getting it on since the second week of rehearsals, and it would be a good chance for each of them to score points with the other. The show had opened, the reviews had been good, and it was damned near sold out already. She didn't feel guilty.

When she called Penn Station she was put on hold for five minutes, but finally heard a well-modulated voice say, "Hello, thank you for calling Amtrak. May I help you?"

"Yes. I'd like to know when trains leave for Merridale, Pennsylvania."

"Oh, my God, miss." The voice slipped, and she heard the unmistakable tones of street black. "You don't really want to go there now, do you?"

Alice was surprised at first, and she almost laughed before annoyance took her. "Yes, I do. Now when do the trains leave?"

"Honey, I seen the news tonight. You really don't—"

"Listen! I want a ticket, all right? Not a lecture."

"I'm sorry, miss." There was an indecisive pause and when the woman spoke again, the voice had returned to its buttery flow, telling Alice that she would have to go to Philadelphia first, "but there will be no trains out of Philadelphia after eleven-thirty P.M. for Merridale."

The morning then, Alice thought, and jotted down the time of the New York train and the connection on the Philadelphia-Harrisburg run. Then she hung up and began to pack, planning to call Cal in the morning.

~*~

By late Friday evening, when Alice Meadows was hearing the news, the population of Merridale had increased by over 200. The majority were newsmen, but others had begun to arrive as well—out-of-town relatives, several close friends of residents, and even the first few curiosity seekers, as well as a group of four spiritualists from Philadelphia who had come to investigate for their psychic research society, which consisted of the four of them plus one other who had to work the next day. Unknown to Alice Meadows, ABC and CBS each did a half-hour special at 10:30 that evening about the situation in Merridale, one of which nearly every Merridale resident watched.

Seeing their town, their people, themselves, on prime-time television filled them with a strange mixture of dismay and delight, and most of them agreed that the treatment was fair, that the town looked good, if a bit upset, but that was only natural under the circumstances, wasn't it?

The figures themselves did not photograph well at all, and at best only faint outlines showed up on videotape and film. The townspeople were relieved by that. It was bad enough that the on-the-spot strangers could view their naked dead, let alone the whole world. ABC used artists' sketches to depict several of the less grisly specimens. CBS stuck with the unsatisfactory live footage. In
Merridale's
two motels, filled before dinnertime, cameramen worked late into the night trying to figure out ways to push their film into capturing the evanescent images, but even at night the best any of them got was a man-shaped blue blur, without any details or further evidences of humanity.

By that evening more residents had made up their minds to leave the town, intimidated by the media attention, but most of all by the ghosts that hovered unsmiling near them. The majority, however, decided to remain, the stubbornness of their German forebears (now clearly visible) keeping some in their homes. Others were held by something less easily defined. Had they been able to phrase it dramatically, they might have termed it a sense of destiny, of a grim and unaccountable certainty that their town, their particular spot on earth, had been chosen above all others as a great question mark at the end of life's most baffling riddle.

But instead of this motive, which would have struck them as wearily pretentious, they might have responded instead as
Sim
Dupes had when asked by a reporter why he was staying. "It's my home. Don't know what they are, but they ain't hurt me yet. And it's my home."

And because it was home, people remained. They put up curtains, shut up rooms, moved high bookcases and china cupboards in front of their dead. They slept in the guest rooms or on the living room sofas if their bedrooms were already occupied. Frightened children slept with frightened parents; frightened widows and widowers moved in with others of their kind so that few were alone in that dismal blueness of night. Even Evelyn Beech left her daughter's side to finally go inside with her husband. "She'll be here in the morning," Thorne told her, and she knew he was right. A few blocks away, Joe
Longsdorff
slept peacefully with his head cushioned on pillows in his wife's lap, dreaming that they were really together once more. And Mrs. Viola Stauffer had long since stopped walking in awe from room to room of her giant house. She sat asleep in the wing chair next to her father, her mother, and her sister,
Buddie
, who was as young and lovely as on that sad day more than sixty years before when the influenza struck.

In his apartment, Brad Meyers sat drinking a beer. His chair was pushed back against the wall so that he could face the television set and the apparition of the old man, both of which emanated a glow that made the room bright enough to read in. A kung fu movie was on the late show, and Brad grinned at the overdone grunts and groans that accompanied each motion of the fighters.

"Brad?" Christine called from the bedroom.

"
Heh
?" Brad replied gutturally, giving his voice the brash, husky quality of the film's
overdubbers
. "What you want, eh woman?" he mimicked.

"Will you
please
turn that down?"

"
Heh
? Why for?"

"It's keeping me awake. And Wally." The two of them were sleeping together, both scared as much by Brad's disregard for the ghosts as by the ghosts themselves.

"Shit," Brad mumbled, and then called, "So turn it down yourself!" She did not answer. "What's the matter? You want it turned down, come turn it down." Still there was no sound. "You scared?" he said. "Scared of Old Black Joe here? He won't bite. C'mon." Then he heard the bedroom door close. He shrugged, watched for another minute, then stood up and turned the volume to half of what it had been. On his way back to the chair he stopped in front of the dead man. "Joe," he said. "Your name Joe? You like that name? Okay, Joe. Joe you are."

He sat down, watched the end of the movie with Joe, then went to sleep on Wally's single bed.

At 8:30 the next morning,
boing
,
spwang
,
thwack
,
thrubba-dubba-dubba
, and clang were the first sounds to pierce his consciousness. He staggered into the hall in his underwear, but instead of the noise coming from the TV in the living room, its source was his and Christine's room right across the hall from Wally's. He kicked the door open.