Ghost Story (36 page)

The doorbell rang.

She loosened her grip on his neck. "Poor darling, with a crummy runaway friend and a psycho mother like me." She kissed the back of his head. "And I cried all over your clean shirt."

The bell rang again.

"Oh, there's one more," Christina Barnes said. "Your father will make the drinks. Let's get back to normal before we're seen in public again, okay?"

"It's someone you invited?"

"Why sure it is, Pete, who else could it be?"

"I don't know," he said, and looked at the window again. No one was there: only his mother's averted face and his own, glowing like pale candles in the glass. "Nobody."

She straightened up and wiped her eyes. "I'll get the food out of the oven. You better get in and say hello."

"Who is it?"

"Some friend of Sears and Ricky's."

He walked to the door and looked back, but she was already opening the oven door and reaching in, an ordinary woman getting the dinner ready for a party.

I don't know what's real and what isn't,
he thought, and turning his back on her went out into the hall. The stranger, Mr. Wanderley's nephew, was talking near the living-room arch. "Well, what I'm interested in now, to tell the truth, is the difference between invention and reality. For example, did you happen to hear music a few days ago? A band, playing outside somewhere in town?"

"Why no," breathed Sonny Venuti. "Did you?"

Peter stopped dead just inside the arch and gaped at the writer.

"Hey, Pete," his father said. "I want you to meet your dinner partner."

"Oh,
I
wanted to sit next to this handsome young man," Sonny Venuti crooned, smiling at him popeyed.

"You're stuck with me," said Lou Price.

"Come on over here, scout," his father called.

He pulled himself away from Don Wanderley, who was looking at him curiously, and turned to his father. His mouth dried. His father was standing with his arm around a tall woman with a lovely fox-sharp face.

It was the face which had looked the wrong way through a telescope across a dark square and found him.

"Anna, this is my son Pete. Pete, Miss Mostyn."

Her eyes licked at him. He was conscious for a moment of standing halfway between the woman and Don Wanderley, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne looking on like spectators at a tennis match; but himself and the woman and Don Wanderley forming the points of a long narrow triangle like a burning-glass, and then her eyes moved over him again, and he was conscious only of the danger he was in.

"Oh, I think Peter and I will have lots to talk about," said Anna Mostyn.

Peter Barnes, a tall black-haired boy who looks both capable and sensitive, was the dropped bomb. He seemed merely uncommunicative at first—understandable in a seventeen-year-old playing servant at his parents' party. Flashes of warmth for the Hawthornes. He too responds to Stella. But underneath the distance was something else—something I gradually imagined was— panic? Despair? Apparently a friend of his disappeared under a cloud, and his parents evidently assumed that to be the cause of his moroseness. Yet it was more than that, and what I thought I saw in him was fear—the Chowder Society had either tuned me to this, or caused me mistakenly to project it. When I was making my pompous remarks to Sonny Venuti, Peter stopped in his tracks and stared at me; he really searched me with his eyes, and I had the idea that he wanted badly to talk to me—not about books. The startling thing was that I thought that he too had heard the Dr. Rabbitfoot music.

And if that's true— if that's true— then we are in the middle of Dr. Rabbitfoot's revenge. And all Milburn is about to blow up.

Oddly, it was something Anna Mostyn said that caused Peter to faint. He trembled when he first saw her: I am sure of that. He was afraid of her. Now Anna Mostyn is a woman not far short of beauty, even the awesome Stella Hawthorne sort; her eyes seem to go all the way back to Norfolk and Florence, where she says her ancestors came from. She has apparently made herself indispensable to Sears and Ricky, but her greatest gift is for merely being politely there, helpful when that is needed, as on the day of the funeral. She suggests kindness and sympathy and intelligence but does not overwhelm you with her excellence. She is discreet, quiet on the surface of things a supremely self-contained, self-possessed young woman. She really is remarkably unobtrusive. Yet she is sensual in an inexplicably unsettling way. She seems
cold,
sensually cold: it is a self-referring, self-pleasing sensuality.

I saw her fix Peter Barnes with this challenge for a moment during dinner. He had been staring at his plate, forcing his father into yet more bluster and bonhomie, and annoying his mother; he never looked at Anna Mostyn, though he was sitting next to her. The other guests ignored him and chattered away about the weather. Peter was burning to get away from the table. Anna took his chin in her hand, and I knew the sort of look he was getting. Then she said to him very quietly that she wanted some of the rooms of her new house repainted, and she thought that he and one or two of his school friends might like to come to her house to do it. He swooned. That old-fashioned word fits perfectly. He fainted, passed out, pitched forward— swooned. I thought at first that he'd had a fit; so did most other people present. Stella Hawthorne calmed us down, helped Peter off his chair, and his father took him upstairs. Dinner ended shortly afterward.

And I know how. It is their air of timelessness: but where Alma would have flown past the Plaza Hotel in the twenties, Anna Mostyn would have been inside, smiling at the antics of men with flasks in their pockets, men cavorting, talking about new cars and the stock market, doing their best to knock her dead.

Tonight I am going to take the pages of the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel down to the hotel's incinerator and burn them.

Metaphorically, Milburn people in general took off their shirts. Omar Norris happily went back on the bottle full time, and when his wife kicked him out of the house, returned to his boxcar without a qualm and prayed into the neck of a half-empty fifth that the heavy snow was gone for good. The town relaxed during these days of temporary, warming relief. Walter Barnes wore a gaudy pink-and-blue-striped shirt to the bank, and for eight hours felt deliciously unbankerlike; Sears and Ricky made timeworn jokes about Elmer Scales suing the weatherman for inconstancy. For two days lunchtimes at the Village Pump were crowded with strangers out for drives. Clark Mulligan's business doubled during the final two days of his Vincent Price double feature, and he held the pictures over for another week. The gutters ran with black water; if you weren't careful, cars dodging too close to the curbs could drench you from the neck down. Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie's former girlfriend, found a new man, a stranger with a shaven head and dark glasses who said to call him G and was exciting and mysterious and came from nowhere and said he was a sailor—heady stuff for Penny. In the sunlight, with the sound of water everywhere, Milburn was a spacious town. People pulled on rubber boots to keep their shoes dry and went for walks. Milly Sheehan hired a boy from down the block to hang her storm windows and the boy said, "Gee, Mrs. Sheehan, maybe you won't even need these until Christmas!" Stella Hawthorne, lying in a scented tub, decided that it was time to send Harold Sims back to the spinster librarians who would be impressed by him: she'd rather have her hair done. Thus for two days resolutions were made, long hikes were taken; men did not resent getting out onto the highway in the morning and driving to their offices; in this false spring, spirits lifted.

But Eleanor Hardie grew exhausted with worry and polished the hotel's banisters and counters twice in one day, and John Jaffrey and Edward Wanderley and the others lay underground, and Nettie Dedham was taken off to an institution still mouthing the only two syllables she would ever wish to say; and Elmer Scales's gaunt body thinned down even further as he sat up with the shotgun across his lap. The sun went down earlier each evening, and at night Milburn contracted and froze. The houses seemed to draw together; the streets which were spangled by day darkened, seemed to narrow to oxcart width; the black sky clamped down. The three old men of the Chowder Society forgot their feeble jokes and trekked through bad dreams. Two spacious houses stood ominously dark; the house on Montgomery Street contained horrors, which flickered and shifted from room to room, from floor to floor; in Edward Wanderley's old house on Haven Lane, all that walked was mystery: and for Don Wanderley, when he would see it, the mystery would lead to Panama City, Florida, and a little girl who said "I am you."

He was never sure whether this was a dream: in the night he heard a dreadful noise, the sound of the wind blowing all that snow back over his drive. It seemed like wakefulness; and it seemed too that he heard another sound—a sound like music blown on the wind. He thought:
I'm dreaming this.
But his muscles ached and wobbled as he got out of bed, and his head spun. He went to his window, which looked down the side of the house onto the roof of the old stables and the first third of his drive. He saw a three-quarter moon hanging above desolate trees. The next thing he saw was so much like a scene from one of Ricky's odder movies that afterward he knew that he could not actually have witnessed it. The wind blew, as he had feared, and gauzy sheets of snow drifted onto his drive; everything was starkly black and white. A man dressed in minstrel's clothing stood on top of the snow-mountain going down to the road. A saxophone white as his eyes hung from his mouth. As Lewis looked, not even trying to force his foggy mind to make sense of this vision, the musician blew a few half-audible bars, lowered the saxophone and winked. His skin seemingly as black as the sky, he stood weightlessly on snow into which he should have sunk up to his waist. Not one of your old spirits, Lewis, jealous of your tenancy, come for your blackbirds and snowdrops; go back to bed and dream in peace. But still stupid with exhaustion, he watched on and the figure changed—it was John Jaffrey grinning at him from the impossible perch, shoe-blacking spread on his face and hands: white eyes, white teeth. Lewis stumbled back into bed.

He went to the entry hall, kicked off his loafers and put on his boots.

Pulling his khaki jacket over his shoulders, he went back through the house to the kitchen. Lewis put a kettle full of cold water on a burner and looked through the kitchen window. Like the trees in front of the house, his woods shone and glistened; snow lay damp and squashy on the lawn, whiter and deeper beneath the wet trees further away. He would take his walk while the kettle boiled, and then come back and have breakfast.

Outside, warmth surprised him; and more than that, the warm, almost laundered-feeling air seemed a protection, a cocoon of safety. The menacing suggestiveness of his woods had been rinsed away—shining with their beautiful muted colors of tree bark and lichen, with the mushy snow beneath like a swipe of watercolor, Lewis's woods had none of the hard-edged illustrationlike quality he had seen in them before.

He took his path backward again, loafing along and breathing deeply; he smelled the mulch of wet leaves beneath the snow. Feeling youthful and healthy, his chest full of delicate air, he regretted drinking too much at Sears's house. It was foolish to blame himself for Freddy Robinson's death; as for whispers of his name, hadn't he heard those all his life? It was snow falling from a branch—meaningless noise to which his guilty soul gave meaning.

He needed a woman's company, a woman's conversation. Now that it was finally over with Christina Barnes, he could invite Annie, the blond waitress from Humphrey's, out to his house for a good dinner and let her talk to him about painters and books. Her intelligent conversation would be an exorcism of the past month's worries; maybe he would invite Anni too, and they both would talk about painters and books. He'd stumble a bit, trying to keep up, but he would learn something.

And then he thought that maybe he'd get Stella Hawthorne away from Ricky for an hour or two and just luxuriate in the fact of that astonishing face and bristling personality sitting across the table from him.

Blissful, Lewis turned around and realized why he had always run his path in the opposite direction: on this long return stretch with its two angled sections, you were nearly at the house before you could see it. Going the other way preserved for as long as possible his illusion that he was the only white man on a densely wooded continent. He was surrounded by quiet trees and dripping water, by white sunshine.

There were two points that destroyed Lewis's illusion of being Daniel Boone striking out through alien wilderness, and he reached the first of these after ten minutes of walking. Midpoint on his walk: he saw the tubular top half of a yellow oil truck, its lower section cut off by the curve of the long field, steaming toward Binghamton. So much for Daniel Boone. He turned down the straight path to the kitchen door.

By now he was hungry, and glad that he had remembered to buy bacon and eggs the last time he was in Milburn. He had coffee beans to grind, stoneground bread to toast, tomatoes to grill. After breakfast he'd call the girls and invite them out for dinner and let them tell him what books to read: Stella would wait.

He was halfway home when he began to smell food. Puzzled, he cocked his head. Unmistakably, it was the smell of breakfast—the breakfast he had just imagined. Coffee, bacon, eggs.
Uh oh,
he thought,
Christina.
After Walter had left for work and Peter for school, she had climbed into the station wagon and come out for a scene. She still had a key to the back door.

Soon he was close enough to see the house through the last of the trees, and the breakfast smells were stronger. His boots heavy, he trudged forward, thinking of what he could say to Christina. It would be difficult, especially if she were affecting a meek repentant mood, as the breakfast odors seemed to prove she was ... then, still in the last section of the woods, he realized that her car was not drawn up before the garage.

And that was where she always put her car: the parking area was out of sight of the road, near the back door: in fact it was where everyone parked. But not only was Christina's station wagon not drawn up on the puddly brick court, no car at all was there.

He stopped walking and looked carefully at the gray stone height of the house. Only a few trees stood in his way, and the size of the house made them insignificant —thin stalks. For a moment the house looked even larger than he knew it was.

As a drift of breeze brought the odors of coffee and bacon to him, Lewis looked at his house as if for the first time: an architect's copy of an illustrator's idea of a Scottish castle, a folly of a kind, the building too appeared to glisten, as the wet trees had. It was the end of a quest in a story. Lewis with his soaking boots and hungry belly looked at the house with a frozen heart. The windows glittered in their casements.

It was the castle of a dead, not a captive, princess.

Slowly Lewis approached the house and left the temporary safety of the woods. He crossed the brick court where the car should have been. The odors of breakfast were maddeningly strong. Lewis cautiously opened the kitchen door; he entered.

The kitchen was empty, but not undisturbed. Signs of occupation and activity lay everywhere. Two plates were laid out on the kitchen table—his best china. Polished silver had been set beside the plates. Two candles, not lighted, stood in silver holders near the plates. A can of frozen orange juice had been set out before his blender. Lewis turned to the stove: empty pans sat atop unlighted burners. The smell of cooking was overwhelming. His kettle whistled, and he turned it off.

Two slices of bread had been placed beside the toaster.

"Christina?" he called, thinking—not very rationally —that it still might be a practical joke. There was no answer.

He turned back to the stove and sniffed the air over the pans. Bacon. Eggs in butter. Superstitiously he touched the cold iron.

The dining room was just as he had left it; and when he went into the living room, that too was undisturbed. He picked up a book on the arm of a chair and looked at it quizzically, though he had put it there the night before. He stood in the living room for a moment, here where no one had come, smelling a breakfast no one had cooked, as if the room were a refuge. "Christina?" he called. "Anybody?"

Upstairs a familiar door clicked shut.

"Hello?"

Lewis moved to the base of the stairs and looked up. "Who's there?" Sunlight drifted in from a window on the landing; he saw dust motes spinning lazily above the stairs. The house was noiseless; for the first time its vast size seemed a threat. Lewis cleared his throat.

"Who's there?"

After a long moment he began to climb the stairs. When he reached the landing he looked out of the little window set in its casement—sunlight, dripping trees— and continued on to the top.

Here the hallway was light, silent, empty. Lewis's bedroom was on the right, two old rooms with the adjoining wall removed. One of the old doors had been sealed off, the other replaced with an elaborately grained slab of monkeywood hand-fashioned into a door. With its heavy brass knob, Lewis's bedroom door closed with a distinctively chunky sound, and that was the sound he had heard.

Lewis stood before the door, unable to make himself open it. He cleared his throat again. He could see the double expanse of his bedroom, the carpet, his slippers beside the bed, his pajamas over a chair, the windows from which he had looked that morning. And he could see the bed. What made him afraid to open the door was that on the bed he envisioned the fourteen years' dead body of his wife. He raised his hand to knock; he held his fist an inch from the door; lowered it again. Lewis touched the doorknob.

He forced himself to turn the heavy knob. The lock disengaged. Lewis closed his eyes and pushed.

He opened them to hazy sunlight from the long windows opposite the door; an edge of a chair, hung with blue-striped pajamas; the reek of rotting flesh.

Welcome, Lewis.

Lewis bravely stepped around the door and into the pool of early light that was his bedroom. He looked at the empty bed. The foul odor dissipated as quickly as it had come. Now he could smell only the cut flowers on the table before the window. He went to the bed and hesitantly touched the bottom sheet, which was warm.