Ghost Story (49 page)

Don went back to the tape recorder: Alma Mobley lay within it, trapped on a few spools of coated amber stuff.

Frowning, he pushed the "play" button. Silky at first, sunny, her voice resumed.

"—and Alan McKechnie and all the other stories I used to hide the truth from you. It's true, I did want you to see: your intuition was better than anyone else's. Even Florence de Peyser became curious about you. But what good would it have done? Like your 'Rachel Varney,' I have lived since the times when your continent was lighted only by small fires in the forest, since Americans dressed in hides and feathers, and even then our kinds have abhorred each other. Your kind is so bland and smug and confident on the surface: and so neurotic and fearful and campfire-hugging within. In truth, we abhor you because we find you boring. We could have poisoned your civilization ages ago, but voluntarily lived on its edges, causing eruptions and feuds and local panics. We chose to live in your dreams and imaginations because only there are you interesting.

"Don, you make a grave mistake if you underestimate us. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination. In the places of your dreams. But despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real, as real as bullets and knives—for aren't they too tools of the imagination?—and if we want to frighten you it is to frighten you to death. For you are going to die, Donald. First your uncle, then the doctor, then Lewis. Then Sears, and after Sears, Ricky. And then you and whomever you have enlisted to help you. In fact, Donald, you are dead already. You are finished. And Milburn is finished with you." Now the Louisiana accent had vanished; even femininity had gone from the voice. It was a voice with no human resonance at all. "I am going to shatter Milburn, Donald. My friends and I will tear the soul from this pathetic town and crush its bare bones between our teeth."

A hissing silence followed: Don yanked the tape from the machine and tossed it into a cardboard box. In twenty minutes he had all his uncle's tapes in boxes. He carried the cartons into the living room and methodically fed all of the tapes into the wood fire, where they smoked and curled and stank and finally melted down to black bubbles on the burning logs. If Alma could see him, he knew, she'd be laughing.

You're dead already, Donald.

"Like hell I am," he said out loud. He remembered the haggard face of Eleanor Hardie, into which age had so suddenly burrowed; Alma had been laughing at him and the Chowder Society for decades, belittling their achievements and engineering their tragedies, hiding in the dark behind a false face, waiting for the moment to jump out and say boo.

And Milburn is finished with you.

"Not if we can get to you first," he said into the fire. "Not if this time we shoot the lynx."

"And what is innocence?" Narcissus enquired of his friend.

"Was it your nightmare again, baby?" Stella whispered hoarsely.

"No. No, not that. "I'll be okay, Stella." He patted her shoulder and left the bed. The urgency clung. Ricky slid his feet into his slippers, pulled a robe over his pajamas, and padded to the window.

"Honey, you're upset, come back to bed."

"I can't" He rubbed his face: still that wild feeling, trapped in his chest like a bird, that someone he knew was in mortal danger. Snow transformed Ricky's back yard into a range of shifting and dimpled hills.

It was the snow which reminded him: the snow blowing through a mirror in Eva Galli's house, and a glimpse of Elmer Scales, his face distorted by an obligation to a commanding and cruel beauty, running raggedly through the drifts. Raising a shotgun: turning a small form into a spray of blood. Ricky's stomach savagely bent in on itself, shooting pain down into his bowels. He pressed a hand into the soft flesh below his navel and groaned again. Elmer Scales's farm. Where the last stage of the Chowder Society's agony had begun.

"Ricky, what's wrong?"

"Something I saw in a mirror," he said, straightening up now that the pain had dissolved, aware that his statement would be nonsense to Stella. "I mean, something about Elmer Scales. I have to get out to his farm."

"Ricky, it's seven o'clock on Christmas morning."

"Makes no difference."

"You can't. Call him up first."

"Yes," he said, already on his way out of the bedroom, going past Stella's white, startled face. "I'll try that."

He was on the landing outside the bedroom, still with that wakening emergency sounding along his veins
(doom, doom)
and was torn for a second between rushing into the wardrobe closet and throwing on some clothes so he'd be ready to leave and running downstairs to the telephone.

A noise from downstairs decided him. Ricky put his hand on the banister and descended.

"You, too," Sears said. "I'm sorry."

"I just woke up," Ricky said. "I know what you're feeling—I want to go with you."

"Don't interfere," Sears said. "All I'm going to do is get out there, have a look around and make sure everything's all right. I feel like a cat on a griddle."

"Stella had a good idea. Let's try to call him first. Then the two of us will go together."

Sears shook his head. "You'll slow me down, Ricky. I'll be safer alone."

"Come on." Ricky put a hand on Sears's elbow and steered him back to the couch. "Nobody's going anywhere until we try the telephone. After that we can talk about what to do."

"There's nothing to talk about," Sears said, but sat down anyhow. He twisted his body to watch Ricky lift the phone off its stand and place it on the coffee table. "You know his number?"

"Of course," Ricky said, and dialed. Elmer Scales's telephone, rang; and rang again; and again. "I'll give him more time," Ricky said, and let it go for ten rings, then twelve. He heard it again:
doom, doom,
that frantic pulse.

"It's no good," Sears said, "I'd better go. Probably won't make it anyhow, on these roads."

"Sears, it's still early morning," Ricky said, putting down the phone. "Maybe nobody heard it ringing."

"At seven—" Sears looked at his watch. "At seven-ten on Christmas morning? In a house with five children? Does that sound likely to you? I know something is wrong out there, and if I can get there at all, I might be able to stop it from getting worse. I don't intend to wait for you to get dressed." Sears stood up and began putting on his coat.

"At least call Hardesty and let him go out there instead. You know what I saw, back in that house."

"That is a feeble joke, Ricky. Hardesty? Don't be foolish. Elmer won't shoot at me. We both know that."

"I know he won't," Ricky said miserably. "But I'm worried, Sears. This is something Eva's doing—like what she did to John. We should not let her split us up. If we go running in all directions she can get to us— destroy us. We ought to call Don and get him to come with us. Oh, I know something terrible is happening out there, I'm convinced of it, but you'll court something even worse if you try to go there by yourself."

Sears looked down at pleading Ricky Hawthorne, and the impatience on his face melted. "Stella would never forgive me if I let you take that wretched cold outside again. And it would take Don half an hour or more to get there. You can't make me wait, Ricky."

"I could never make you do anything you didn't want to do."

"Correct," Sears said, and buttoned his coat.

"You're not expendable, Sears."

"Who is? Can you name one person you think is expendable, Ricky? I've lost too much time already, so don't make me hang around while you try to justify naming Hitler or Albert de Salvo or Richard Speck or—"

"What in the world are you two talking about?" Stella was in the entrance of the living room, smoothing down her hair with the palms of her hands.

"Nail your husband to the couch and pour hot whiskey into him until I get back," Sears said.

"Don't let him go, Stella," Ricky said. "He can't go alone."

"Is it urgent?" she asked.

"For heaven's sake," Sears muttered, and Ricky nodded.

"Then he'd better go. I hope he can get the car started."

Sears moved toward the hallway, and Stella stepped aside to let him pass. But before he went into the hall, he turned back to look once more at Ricky and Stella. "I'll be back. Don't fret about me, Ricky."

"You realize it's probably too late already."

"It's probably been too late for fifty years," Sears said. Then he turned and was gone.

The key stuck halfway into the lock: cursing with impatience, Sears yanked it out and removed a glove to search his pockets for his cigar lighter. The cold bit and tore at his fingers, but the lighter snapped out its flame; Sears played it back and forth over the key, and just when his fingers felt as though they were about to drop off, slotted the key neatly into the lock. He opened the door and slid himself onto the leather seat.

Then the interminable business of starting the engine: Sears ground his teeth and tried to get the engine to turn over by willing it. He saw Elmer Scales's face as he had when coming awake, staring at him with dazed unfocused eyes and saying
You gotta get out here, Mr. James, I don't know what I been doin', just get here for Chrissake ...
the engine gnashed and sputtered, then mercifully caught. Sears fluttered the gas pedal, making the engine roar and then rocked the car back and forth to roll it out of its depression and through the snow which had built up around it.

After he got the car pointed out onto the street, Sears took the ice tool from the dashboard and pushed the powder off the windshield: the big harmless fluffs of snow swirled about him in a soundless dawn. He reversed the tool and used the bladed end to clear an eight-inch hole in the ice directly in front of the steering wheel. He'd let the heater do the rest.

"Things you're better off not knowing, Ricky," he said to himself, thinking of the childish footprints he'd seen in the drifts outside his window three mornings running. The first morning he'd pulled his drapes shut in case Stella came into the guest room to clean; a day later he had realized that Stella had an extremely haphazard approach to housekeeping, and that not even bribery would induce her to enter the guest room—she was waiting until the cleaning woman would be able to come from the Hollow. For two mornings, those prints of bare feet dotted the snow which relentlessly climbed up to the window, even on Sears's protected side of the house. This morning, after Elmer's drugged face had pulled him unceremoniously from sleep, he had seen the prints on the windowsill. How long would it be before Fenny appeared inside the Hawthorne house, trotting gleefully up and down the stairs? One more night? If Sears could lead him away, perhaps he could win more time for Ricky and Stella.

In the meantime he had to see to Elmer Scales and
just get here for Chrissake ...
Ricky too had been tuned into whatever kind of signal that was, but fortunately Stella had appeared to keep him at home.

The Lincoln rolled out onto the street and began bulling through the snow. There's one comfort, Sears thought: at this time of the morning on Christmas day the only other person on the road will be Omar Norris.

Sears pushed Elmer Scales's face and voice out of his consciousness and concentrated on driving. Omar had worked most of the night again, it seemed, because nearly all the streets in the center of Milburn were scraped down to the last four or five inches of hard-packed frozen snow. On these streets, the only danger was of skidding on the glassy cake beneath the wheels and going off into a spin to collide with a buried car ... he thought of Fenny Bate on his windowsill, levering up the window, gliding into the house, snuffling for the scent of living things ... but no, those windows had storms on them and he had made sure the inner windows were locked.

Maybe he was doing the wrong thing; maybe he ought to turn around and go back to Ricky's house.

But he couldn't do that, he realized. He swung the car through the red light at the top of the square and lifted his foot from the accelerator, letting the car coast into its own angle past the front of the hotel. He could not go back: Elmer's voice seemed almost to get stronger, sounding deep tones of pain, of confusion
(Jesus Sears, I can't get my head around what's happening out here).
He twitched the wheel and straightened out the car: the only rough spot now would be the highway, those few miles of treacherous hills, cars stacked up in the ditches on both sides ... he might be forced to walk.

Jesus Sears I can't figure out all this blood ... seems like those trespassers got in finally and now I'm scared bad, Sears, scared real bad ...

Sears nudged the accelerator down a fraction of an inch.