Ghost Story (30 page)

"Shut your trap. I work in a hotel, remember?" Hardie produced a bundle of keys on a ring from beneath his jacket. The other hand held the telescope and the bottle. "Go over there and take a piss or something while I try the keys." He set the bottle down on the step and bent toward the lock.

Peter walked away down the long gray side of the church. From this side, it looked like a prison. He unzipped, steamingly pissed, staggered and splashed on his boots. Then he leaned against the church with one arm, stood as if deep in reflection, and quietly vomited between his feet. That too steamed. He was thinking about walking home when Jim Hardie called, "Come on, Clarabelle." He turned around and there was Hardie grinning at him, waving the keys and the bottle at him beside an open door. He resembled one of the gargoyles on the cathedral's facade.

"No," he said.

"Come
on.
Or don't you have hair on your balls?"

Peter trudged forward, and Hardie reached out and yanked him through the door.

Inside, the cathedral was cold, and dark with an undersea darkness. Peter stopped still, his feet on brick, feeling an immense space around him. He reached out his hands and touched chill air. Behind him, he heard Jim Hardie getting all of his things together. "Hey, where's your goddamned hand? Here, take this." The telescope slapped against his palm. Hardie's footsteps went away off to the side, clicking on the brick floor.

He turned and saw Hardie's hair flickering in the dark. "Move it. There are some stairs around here someplace ..."

Peter took a step forward and crashed into some sort of bench.

"Quiet."

"I can't see you!"

"Shit. Over here." There was a movement in the darkness: he understood that Jim was waving, and cautiously moved toward him.

"You see the stairs? We go up there. To a sort of balcony."

"You did this before," Peter said, amazed.

"Sure I did it before. Don't be a dope. Sometimes I used to take Penny here and screw around in the pews. What the hell? She's not Catholic either."

Peter's eyes were adjusting, and diffused light from a high circular window helped him to see the interior of the church. He had never been inside St. Michael's before. It was much larger than the white suburban box in which his parents spent an hour on Easter and Christmas day. Enormous pillars divided the vast space; an altar cloth shone like a ghost. He burped and tasted vomit. The staircase Jim was pointing to was wide, of brick, and curved against the inner skin of the cathedral.

"We go up there, and we wind up right in the front, facing the square. Her room is on the square, see? With a good telescope we can look right in."

"It's dumb."

"I'll explain later, shithead. Let's go up." He began to go quickly up the stairs. Peter stayed behind. "Wait," Hardie said, turning around and descending a couple of the steps. "You need a cigarette." He grinned at Peter, pulled out his cigarettes and gave one to Peter.

"Here?"

"Shit, yes. Nobody's going to see you." He lit his cigarette and Peter's. The flame of the lighter reddened the walls, made everything else disappear. The smoke helped the taste in Peter's mouth, somehow making the vomit taste more like beer again. "Take a drag or two. See? It's okay." He blew out smoke, but with the flame extinguished, Peter could only hear him exhale. He drew on his own cigarette again. Hardie was right; it calmed him. "Just come on up now." He started again, and Peter followed.

At the top, far up inside the church, they followed a narrow gallery around to the front of the church. There a window with a broad stone sill looked across the square. Jim was sitting with his legs up on the sill when Peter reached him. "Would you believe it," he said. "I once had a beautiful moment with Penny right on this spot." He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out. Peter saw him wink in the gray illumination from the window. "Drives 'em crazy. They can't figure out who was smoking. Here. Have a drink." He held the bottle out.

Peter shook his head and gave him the telescope. "Okay, we're here. Now explain." He sat on the cold sill and jammed his hands into the windbreaker's pockets.

Hardie looked at his watch. "First, some magic. Look out the window." Peter looked: the square, the dark buildings, bare trees. The Archer Hotel across the square had no lighted windows. "One, two, three." On
three
the lights in the square switched off. "It's two o'clock."

"Some magic."

"Well, if you're so hot, turn them back on." Hardie swung around, kneeling on the stone, and put the telescope to his eyes. "Too bad her light's not on. But if she gets near the window I'll be able to see her. You want a look?"

Peter took the telescope and trained it on the hotel.

"She's in the room above the front door. Straight across and a little bit down."

"I got the window. There's nothing there." Then he saw a red flash in the blackness of the room. "Wait. She's smoking."

Hardie grabbed the telescope from him. "Right. Sitting there smoking."

"So explain why we broke into a church to watch her smoke."

"Well, the first day she comes to the hotel I tried to come on with her, right? She puts me down. Then a little bit later
she
asks
me
if I'll take her out. She says she wants to see Humphrey's Place. So I take her there, but she's barely paying attention to me. Really pissed me off, man. I mean, why waste my time if she's not interested, right? Well, you know why? She wanted to meet Lewis Benedikt. You know him, right? The guy who was supposed to of offed his wife over in France."

"Spain," said Peter, who had very complicated ideas about Lewis Benedikt.

"Who cares? Anyhow, I'm sure that's why she asked me to take her there. So she's hot for wife-killers."

"I don't think he did it" Peter said. "He's a good guy. I mean, I think he's a good guy. I think that women sometimes sort of—you know—"

"Shit, I don't care if he did it or not. Hey, she's moving. He was silent; Peter was startled a moment later to have the telescope thrust into his hands. "Take a look. Fast."

Peter lifted the telescope, searched for the window, scanned past the top of the A in the hotel's sign. Back to the A; then straight up. He involuntarily moved several inches back on the sill. The woman stood at the window, smiling, holding a cigarette, looking right into his eyes. He thought he might have to vomit again. "She's looking at us!"

"Get serious. We're way across the square. It's dark out. But you see what I mean."

Peter gave the telescope back to Jim, who resumed looking at the woman's window. "See what you mean about what?"

"Well, she's weird. Two o'clock, and she's in her room in the dark with all her clothes on, smoking?"

"So what?"

"Look, I lived in that hotel all my life, right? So I know how people act in hotels. Even the old farts who stay with us. They watch television, they want room service, they leave their clothes all over the room, you get bottles on cabinets and rings on the tables, they have little parties in their rooms and you have to scrub the carpet afterward. At night you can hear them talking to themselves, snoring, spitting—well, you can hear everything they do. You can hear them pissing in the sink. The walls are thick but the
doors
aren't, see? If you're out in the hall you can practically hear them brush their teeth."

"So what?" Peter asked again.

"So she doesn't do any of that. She never makes any noise at all. She doesn't watch TV. Her room hardly ever needs to be cleaned. Even the bed is always made up. Strange, huh? So what does she do, sleep on top of the covers? Stay up all night?"

"Is she still there?"

"Yeah."

"Let me see." Peter took the telescope. The woman was still standing at her window, smiling faintly as if she knew they were talking about her. Peter shivered. He gave back the telescope.

"I'll tell you some more. I carried her suitcase up when she checked in. Now I've toted about a million suitcases, believe me, and that one was empty. She might have had a few newspapers in it, nothing more. Once when she was at work I looked in her closets— nothing. No clothes. But
she didn't always wear the same thing,
man. So what the hell did she do, wear them in layers? Two days later I checked again, and this time the closet was full of clothes—just like she knew someone came in to look. That was the night she asked me to take her to Humphrey's, and I figured she was going to chew me out. But no, she hardly talked to me at all. About the only thing she said was, 'I want you to introduce me to that man.' 'Lewis Benedikt?' I said, and she nodded, like she already knew his name. I took her up to him, and he ran away like a rabbit."

"Benedikt did? What for?"

"I thought he was afraid of her." Jim put the telescope down and lit another cigarette, looking at Peter all the time. "And you know something? I was too.

There's just something in the way she looks at you sometimes."

"Like if she thinks you were poking around in her room."

"Maybe. But it's a heavy look, man. It really gets you. There's one other thing too. If you walk along the halls at night, you can tell if people have their lights on, right? The light comes through the bottom of the door. Well, she never has her lights on.
Never.
But one night —well, this is crazy."

"Tell me."

"One night I saw some flickering underneath her door. Flickering light—like radium or something, you know? A kind of greenish light. Cold light. It wasn't a fire or anything, and it wasn't from our lamps."

"That's stupid."

"I saw it."

"But it doesn't mean anything. Green light."

"Not just green—sort of glowing. Sort of silvery. Anyhow, that's why I wanted us to take a look at her."

"Well, you did, so let's go home. My father'll be angry if I'm late!"

"Hold on." He looked through the telescope again. "I think something's happening. She's not at the window any more. Holy shit." He lowered the telescope. "She opened the door and went out. I saw her go into the hall."

"She's coming over here!" Peter scuttled off the sill and moved down the gallery toward the stairs.

"Don't wet your pants, Priscilla. She isn't coming here. She couldn't see us, remember? But if she's going somewhere, I want to see where. You coming or not?" He was already gathering up his cigarettes, the bottle, his bundle of keys. "Come on. We gotta hurry. She'll be out of the door in two minutes."

"I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying!"

They pounded along the gallery and down the stairs. Hardie ran through the side aisles of the cathedral and pushed the door open, which gave stumbling Peter enough light to avoid the pillars and the edges of the pews. Out in the night, Jim clipped the padlock back on the door and ran to the car. Peter's heart beat rapidly, in part from relief at being out of the church. Yet he was still tense. He pictured the woman he had seen in the window coming across the snowy square toward them, the wicked queen from
Snow White,
a woman who never turned on a light or slept in a bed and who could see him on a black night through a church window.

He realized that his head was clear. As he got into the car beside Jim, he said, "Fear sobers you up."

"She wasn't coming here, idiot," Hardie said, but pulled away from the side of the cathedral out to the south side of the square so rapidly that his tires squealed. Peter looked anxiously into the long expanse of the square—white ground broken by bare trees and the dim statue—but saw no evil queen drifting toward them. The picture had been so clear in his mind that, disbelieving, he continued to scan the town square after Jim had turned into Wheat Row.

"She's on the steps," Jim whispered when they were nearly to the corner. Looking toward the hotel through the bare trees, Peter saw the woman calmly descending to the sidewalk. She wore the long coat, a fluttering scarf, a hat. She looked so absurdly normal in this clothing, turning out into the deserted street past two in the morning, that Peter laughed and shuddered at once.

Jim switched off the headlights and rolled quietly up to the stoplight. Off to their left and across the street, the woman moved quickly into darkness.

"Hey, let's just go home," Peter said.

"Screw that. I want to see where she's going."

"What if she sees us?"

"She won't." He turned left and went slowly down the top of the square past the hotel, his lights still off. Though the lights in the square were not on, the street lamps would remain lighted until dawn, and both boys saw her entering a pool of light at the end of the first block across Main Street. Jim drove slowly across, and then waited until she had walked another block before going further.

"She's just taking a walk." Peter said. "She has insomnia, and she takes walks at night."

"Like hell."

"I don't like doing this."

"Okay. Okay. Get out of the car and walk home," Jim whispered fiercely at him. He reached across Peter and opened the passenger door. "Get out and run home."