Ghost Story (42 page)

He found Don's door and knocked.

"Mr. Wanderley," he said when the writer opened the door.

For Don, the appearance of the shaken teenager outside his room meant the arrival of certainty. The period when the consequences of the final Chowder Society story—whatever that would turn out to be— were limited to its members and a few outlyers was over. The expression of shock and loss on Peter Barnes's face told Don that what he had been brooding about in his room was no longer the property of himself and four elderly men.

"Come in, Peter," he said. "I thought we'd be meeting again soon."

The boy moved like a zombie into the room and sat blindly in a chair. "I'm sorry," he began, and then closed his mouth. "I want—I have to—" He blinked, and was obviously unable to continue.

"Hang on," Don said, and went to his dresser and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured an inch into a water glass and gave it to Peter. "Drink some of this and settle down. Then just tell me everything that happened. Don't waste time thinking that I might not believe you, because I will. And so will Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. James, when I tell them."

" 'My older friends,' " Peter said. He swallowed some of the whiskey. "That's what he called them. He said you thought his name was Greg Benton."

Peter twitched, uttering the name, and Don felt the shock of a conviction hitting his nerves: whatever the danger to himself, he would destroy Greg Benton.

"You met him," he said.

"He killed my mother," Peter said flatly. "His brother held me and made me watch. I think—I think they drank her blood. Like they did to those animals. And he killed Jim Hardie. I saw him do it, but I got away."

"Go on," Don said.

"And he said someone—I can't remember his name —would call him a Manitou. Do you know what that is?"

"I've heard of it."

Peter nodded, as if this satisfied him. "And he turned into a wolf. I saw him. I saw him do it." Peter set the glass down on the floor, then looked at it again and picked it up and took another sip. His hands trembled badly enough nearly to splash the whiskey over the lip of the glass. "They
stink
—they're like rotten dead things—I had to scrub and scrub. Where Fenny touched me."

"You saw Benton turn into a wolf?"

"Yes. Well, no. Not exactly. He took off his glasses. They have yellow eyes. He let me
see
him. He was— he was nothing but hate and death. He was like a laser beam."

"I understand," Don said. "I've seen him. But I never saw him without his glasses."

"When he takes them off, he can make you do things. He can talk inside your head. Like ESP. And they can make you see dead people, ghosts, but when you touch them, they sort of blow up. But
they
don't blow up. They grab you and they kill you. But they're dead too. Somebody else owns them—their benefactor. They do what she wants."

"She?" Don asked, and remembered a lovely woman holding this handsome boy's chin at a dinner party.

"That Anna Mostyn," Peter said. "But she was here before."

"Yes, she was," Don said. "As an actress."

Peter looked at him with grateful surprise.

"I just figured out some of the story, Peter," Don said. "Just in the past few days." He looked at the shivering boy in the chair. "It looks like you figured out a lot more than I did and in a shorter time."

"He said he was
me,"
Peter said, his face distorting.
"He said he was me,
I want to
kill
him."

"Then we'll do it together," Don said.

Peter interrupted him. "Anything
she
wants them to do."

"That's right. But we're not helpless. We can fight back. And we'll do it. We'll get rid of them however we can. That's a promise."

"But they're already dead," Peter said. "How can we kill them? I
know
they're dead—they have that smell—"

He was beginning to slide into panic again, and Don reached over and took his hand. "I know because of the stories. These things aren't new. They've probably been around for centuries—for longer than that. They've certainly been talked about and written about for hundreds of years. I think they are what people used to call vampires and werewolves—they're probably behind a thousand ghost stories. Well, in the stories, and I think that means in the past, people found ways to make them die again. Stakes through the heart or silver bullets —remember? The point is that they can be destroyed. And if it takes silver bullets, that's what we'll use. But I don't think we'll need them. You want revenge and I do too, and we'll get it."

"But that's just them," Peter said, looking straight at Don. "What do we do about
her?"

"That'll be harder. She's the general. But history is full of dead generals." It was a facile answer, but the boy seemed calmer. "Now I think you'd better tell me everything, Peter. Begin with how Jim died, if that's the beginning. The more you remember, the more you'll help us. So try to tell it all."

"Because I knew no one would believe me but you. You heard the music."

Don nodded.

"And nobody will, will they? They'll think it's like Mr. Scales and the Martians."

"Not quite. The Chowder Society will. I hope."

"You mean Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne and ..."

"Yes." He and the boy looked at each other, knowing that Lewis was dead. "We'll be enough, Peter. It's the four of us against her."

"When do we start? What do we do?"

"I'll meet with the others tonight. I think you ought to go home. You have to see your father."

"He won't believe me. I know he won't. Nobody would, unless they ..." The boy's voice trailed off.

"Do you want me to come with you?"

Peter shook his head.

"I will if you want me to."

"No. I won't tell him. It wouldn't do any good. I'll have to tell him later."

"Maybe that's better. And if you want help when the times comes, I'll give it to you. Peter, I think you've been brave as hell. Most adults would have folded up like tissue paper. But you're going to have to be even braver from now on. You might have to protect your father as well as yourself. Don't open your door to anybody unless you know who they are."

Peter nodded. "I wont. You bet I won't. But why are they here, anyhow? Why is
she
here?"

"That's what I'm going to find out tonight."

Peter stood up and began to leave, but when he put his hands in his pockets, he touched a folded pamphlet. "I forgot. The man in the blue car gave me this after he took me to Mr. Benedict's house." He brought out
The Watchtower
and smoothed it out on Don's desk. Beneath the name, in large black letters on the cheap pulpy paper, were the words DR. RABBITFOOT LED ME TO SIN.

Don ripped the pamphlet in half.

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."

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?"