"You said you didn't read," she cut in, pouting.
He stared dumbly at her a moment. She seemed very disappointed, suddenly, even annoyed. "Yes, yes," he stamiered. "Not since last week. Only timetables and stock iarket reports since then. No time to read purely for ..." he cast about in his brain for the word she had used. “Amusement. No time. Too much work, dammit. Too much making money." He grinned nervously. "I hate it, really. This need to make money. You can make only so such and then it becomes ... redundant." He smiled; that surely had been a remark to remember. He chattered on, as if accustomed to making memorable remarks, "So, I haven't actually read anything for amusement since last week. It amuses me to read. Mysteries, science fiction, romances, the whole . . . gamut, everything. I once read Collier's Encyclopedia—"
"Would you like to come home with me?" the brunette cut in.
Guy Squires' mouth dropped open. "You mean it?" he asked breathlessly.
"Obviously, you're a real reader," said the brunette.
"I am, I am."
~ * ~
Ryerson stood in his office doorway, finger poised on the light switch, and looked at the man seated in his desk chair. The man's back was turned.
"Can we leave the light off?" the man asked.
"Of course," Ryerson answered. He could see only the back of the man's head, a wild mop of dark hair—it might have been red, he thought.
"Do you know me?" the man said.
"I don't know the back of your head. Especially in the dark."
"Do you know my voice?"
"I've never heard it, no," Ryerson answered. The man's voice was deep, but not baritone. It had a strained quality which suggested, strangely, that the man wasn't accustomed to speaking.
"Do any names come to you?" the man asked. "Listen," Ryerson answered, "I could ask you these same questions—"
"You're Ryerson Biergarten," the man cut in. "I know that much, anyway." He seemed to be pleading.
Ryerson turned on the light.
There was no reaction from the man. Ryerson could see that his guess about the man's hair color had been correct; it was red.
Ryerson turned the light off.
"Thank you," the man said.
"For what?"
"For leaving the light off."
Ryerson took a couple of steps into the room. He stopped. He smelled the ocean. He had also smelled the ocean at Jack Lutz's cabin, he remembered. He asked, "Why are you here?"
The man answered at once, "I thought you'd know."
Ryerson was uncertain how to interpret this, whether the man was, indeed, asking why he was here, or whether the man knew why he was here and was being coy.
"I don't understand what you're saying," Ryerson told him.
"I'm not sure," the man said.
"What aren't you sure of?"
"Do you know?"
Ryerson sighed. "If you're playing a game—"
"I don't believe so," the man said. "I don't know. What do I know?"
Ryerson got the uneasy feeling that the man's question was genuine and that he—the man—actually felt that Ryerson could answer it.
"Where have you come from?" Ryerson asked.
"Did you turn on the light a moment ago?" the man asked.
"Yes."
"I only remember it now. Is that odd?"
"I don't understand," Ryerson said.
"I believe that my name is Sam Goodlow," the man said. "Do you know that name?"
Ryerson didn't answer. He was suddenly afraid. Creosote came into the room and stood next to Ryerson, gaze upturned.
"Sam Goodlow," the man said. "I would face you, I would swivel around in your chair here, but I can't, and I wish I could."
Creosote wheezed.
Ryerson's mouth went dry.
"Mr. Biergarten?" the man said.
"Yes?" Ryerson managed.
"But what is the question?" the man said. "Who knows?"
Creosote turned his flat face toward the voice of the man and cocked his head.
Ryerson came forward quickly and leaned over the front of his desk.
The man in the chair turned around at once and faced him.
Ryerson screamed and ran from the room.
Creosote followed.
Sam Goodlow stared at the empty doorway and wondered what in the hell he had done.
ELEVEN
Guy Squires and the beguiling dark-eyed brunette got off the train together and took a taxi to 114 Troy Street, on Boston's lower east side.
"You live here?" Guy Squires asked, flabbergasted.
The brunette, who was clutching her bad paperback book in her right hand and had her left arm around Guy Squires' waist, answered, "I do. Yes. Up there, on the top floor."
The building they were looking at was a narrow, gray, late-Victorian town house which had—many years earlier, Guy Squires imagined—seen better days. It was sandwiched between two squat brown brick buildings. Both buildings bore NO TRESPASSING and FOR SALE signs.
The brunette's building also bore a FOR SALE sign. The sign was yellowed from age and weathering and the real-estate broker's name was barely readable.
Troy Street was short and narrow, and Guy Squires noticed that he and the brunette were the only people on it.
"Well, let's go up," chirped the brunette, took her arm from around Guy Squires' waist, and grabbed hold of his land.
Guy Squires resisted. He felt uneasy. The street and the building, the decay and the abandonment made him uneasy. And the brunette made him uneasy, too, though he wasn't sure why. Perhaps because she simply didn't look like she belonged here. She looked like she belonged on the upper west side.
"I'm not sure about this," he said.
The brunette laughed. It was an easy laugh, quick and believable, and Guy Squires smiled in response. "This is where I come when I want to be alone," the brunette told him. "I have a place on the upper west side, too, of course. But it's so stuffy there, wouldn't you agree?"
Guy Squires nodded and began to speak, but the brunette went on, "I know this doesn't look like much. But at least there's no one around. We won't want for privacy." She gave him a coy look.
Guy Squires nodded again, with enthusiasm, and said, "Yeah, privacy." He realized that he needed to use a bathroom.
And they went, hand in hand, up the moldering steps of the Victorian town house, through the front doors, inside, and up three flights of lousy stairs to the third floor.
The brunette pushed open a door marked 3c.
Guy Squires said, as the door opened, "You don't lock it?"
"I don't need to," the brunette cooed. "No one bothers me. No one's ever bothered me. They don't dare." She gave him another coy look. "Go on in. Please." And she held her arm out to indicate the apartment.
Again, Guy Squires became uneasy. He could see only darkness inside the apartment. There weren't even any grayish lumps where chairs or couches would be. "It's too dark," he said.
"Silly me," said the brunette, reached around him, and flicked on a light switch, bathing the apartment in bright light from an overhead fixture. "Is that better?" she said.
But it wasn't.
The apartment was bare. There were dust-covered floors and tall, grimy windows and hideous velvet wallpaper sporting plump, pink cherubs. But no furniture.
Guy Squires asked, "You live here?" He noticed an odd smell from her. It was subtle and unmistakable—the tangy smell of the earth.
"Not exactly," she answered. "Please. Go in. I'll read to you. I'd love to read to you. I've been reading for a very long time."
He glanced at her. He thought that her looks had changed. Her dark eyes had lost some of their color. And her luxurious shoulder-length hair looked longer, wilder.
"Go on in," she said once more, and she attempted another coy look. But it worked badly. The line of her mouth was too hard and thin, and her eyes were too narrow.
Guy Squires said, "I'm afraid this was a mistake."
"Mistake," echoed t
he brunette. "Mistake," she said again. "No mistake, Jack." And she put her hand in the small of his back and pushed him into the room.
He stumbled, went face down on the bare floor, turned his head, looked openmouthed at her as she came in through the doorway.
She was holding the bad paperback book in front of her as she glided toward him. Her hair had grown and was the length of her body; it caressed her—it was alive. And as she approached, as she held the bad paperback book in front of her like a weapon, she leaned over and he saw that her eyes were blank, that they bore no color at all, and that her mouth was lipless and impossibly wide—it terminated at the sides of her head, like the mouth of a toad.
And she said, as she bent over him and he stared wide-eyed at her, as his full bladder let go because of his fear, "I'm going to read to you. And you're going to listen, dammit!"
~ * ~
Ryerson Biergarten could not clearly remember what had sent him screaming from his office on the second floor of his town house. He remembered a face, but indistinctly, as if it were covered by a stocking.
He remembered little else. He remembered nothing of the conversation he had had with the man who owned that face, though he remembered that there had been a conversation. Oblique and cryptic.
He knew well enough why he couldn't remember what had happened only moments earlier. He was protecting himself from something fearful and odd and unexplainable. If his clocks suddenly began moving counterclockwise, he would have the same reaction. He would tell himself that his clocks were moving clockwise, although his inner self would know better. His inner self, after all, was much better equipped to handle such things. It was connected to the real, unpredictable, anarchic universe in a way that his outer self wasn't. It was that way with everyone, he knew. He wasn't special.
With the eye of his memory, he sought to peel away the stocking that covered the face. He thought that it was a male face, and that surely it had been hideous; otherwise he wouldn't have run screaming from it.
Creosote stood beside him. He glanced down at the dog but said nothing. The dog's flat, gummy face could have been easier to look at, he thought, than the one behind the stocking.
Creosote whimpered.
Ryerson looked away.
He was in his kitchen. He didn't remember coming here. He didn't even particularly like it here. He knew that people congregated in kitchens because they were places that were often filled with warmth and with friendly smells. But his kitchen was bare and utilitarian, and he didn't eat in it often because there was no one to eat in it with.
He couldn't peel away the stocking that covered the face in his memory. He saw Creosote's face beneath it—round, dark eyes, tiny fangs, and triangular patterns of black and white fur. He grinned.
The face in his memory cleared and grinned back. He gasped. But he did not scream. That, he thought, was a beginning, at least. The next step would be communication.
The prospect made him weak in the knees.
~ * ~
Sam Goodlow thought, I am in another man's chair, in another man's house, and I've just scared the hell out of him. He wondered how he had done it. He wondered what there could be about him that would make a grown man scream and run away.
And he wondered why he was here, in that man's chair, in that man's house.
Why was he anywhere?
He was dead, for God's sake. Wasn't he?
Maybe not.
But of course he was. He remembered the mammoth Lincoln Town Car coming at him, the beefy driver grinning at him, remembered the sky coming down, the road coming up.
Then nothing.
Clear enough. He was dead. (Unless he had survived, somehow.)
And he was sitting in another man's chair, in another man's house.
Why? Because the man knew him? Because he knew the man? Because they were friends?
Who knows? he wondered.
And answered himself that the man knew, of course.
He rose from the desk chair, crossed the room, and went out into the hallway. "Hello?" he called. "Who's here? Is someone here?"
This was stupid, he thought. The man who owned this house had to be here, unless he'd run screaming out into the street.
A tall mirror stood at the end of the hallway, not far off, and Sam looked at himself in it.
What he saw there made him shudder.
~ * ~
The phone rang, and Ryerson turned his head quickly toward it. The phone was in the foyer, down a short hallway from the kitchen. He thought briefly about ignoring it, but went down the hallway and answered it anyway because he had never been able to ignore a ringing telephone.
Jack Lutz, clearly upset, said, "It's my wife, Mr. Biergarten. It's Stevie. She's come back."
Ryerson knew from the man's tone that She's come back did not mean what it seemed to mean. "Go on," he said.
"Mr. Biergarten, she's here, now. I can see her, for God's sake."
"You're at home, Mr. Lutz?"
"She's looking at me! But I don't think she can see me. I'm sure she can't see me. I know she can't see me!"
"Do you smell anything unusual, Mr. Lutz?"
"For Christ's sake, she's looking right at me and she can't see me—"
"Mr. Lutz, do you smell anything unusual?"
"Yes. Salt air. Fish." A pause. "Wet clay."
~ * ~
"Yes, Ms. Erb," said the woman who called herself Violet McCartle. "I'm fully aware of what dumping my stock portfolio might do to the market, but it is, after all, my portfolio, and I can do with it what I wish. And I wish to unload it."
Janice Erb sighed and poured herself another cup of coffee.
"You may pour me a cup, too," said the woman who called herself Violet McCartle.
Janice looked confusedly at her. "When did you start drinking coffee again?"
A moment's silence. Janice noticed that the woman looked suddenly bewildered. She said, "Didn't you say your doctors recommended against it?"
The woman nodded. "Yes, but, as you can see, Ms. Erb, I'm doing much better. Once again, I'm ambulatory. My blood pressure has returned to normal, and so I have resumed some old and very pleasurable habits." She withdrew a pack of cigarettes from her cavernous black leather purse. "Do you mind?" She lit up at once and glanced about for an ashtray. There was none. She flicked her ash on the floor, nodded at the coffeepot and said, "Light, no sugar."
TWELVE
Sam Goodlow shuddered at his reflection because he saw it with such numbing clarity that it scared him.
He could not remember seeing his reflection so dearly before, and he stared at it now for a long time without moving and thought, So this is what other people see then they see me.
He remembered looking at his reflection before, but it had never been the same as it was now. Prior to this moment, looking at his reflection had been like trying to hear is own voice when he spoke. He had always heard it through the passageways, bone, and muscle of his own head, and it was not what other people heard. Looking at is reflection had been the same sort of thing. He had always seen what he wanted to see, what he had hoped to see. He had been kind to himself, for his own sake.
But there he was, now. Big and oafish and vulnerable looking. No macho man. Barely more than an infant in a double-X suit. It was what other people saw, and he had ever known it.
He looked away.
He turned around.
There was a stairway close by and he could hear someone talking from below.
He listened for a while, uncertain that he recognized the voice, and started down the stairway.
~ * ~
"But now she's gone," Jack Lutz said. "I can't see her anymore. She vanished, like that, my God, like that, pff, Mr. Biergarten ..."
"It may not have been her you were seeing," Ryerson said.
"But it was. I saw her. It was Stevie."
Ryerson hesitated. He wasn't sure what he was suggesting. Ideas often came to him that way—not fully formed. Often, the
y stayed that way. Often, they went nowhere. He said, "I'm coming over there, Mr. Lutz. I'll arrive within the hour. Promise me you won't go near the place where your wife disappeared."
"Of course," Lutz said. "I won't go anywhere near it. I haven't been able to go anywhere near it."
"Yes, good," Ryerson said, and hung up.
Moments later, with Creosote in his arms, he was leaving the house.
~ * ~
Sam Goodlow stood in front of the door, watched Ryerson go, and became very confused. Man and dog had passed through him as if he were no more substantial than air. Good Lord, he and the man had been talking together only minutes earlier, and now the man could walk through him and apparently think nothing of it.
What was the protocol here? Who was supposed to acknowledge whom? Would there be times when he—Samwould be unable to see him—Ryerson? Or did it work only one way? Were the living usually unable to see the dead? Did the dead have perfect vision and ultimate wisdom? But clearly they didn't. At least he didn't or he wouldn't be asking these questions of himself.
Maybe there were people in the house even now and he couldn't see or hear them. Maybe they were looking at him and wondering what sort of creature he was.
The idea made his skin crawl.
And then he was in the third seat of Ryerson's 1948 “Woody" station wagon.
~ * ~
It was the twin of a car that Ryerson had owned two years earlier. He had totalled that car and replaced it with this one, because his parents had owned a Woody, and going places in it had been among the happiest and most secure times of his life.
This new Woody was gray, it sported real wood siding, its motor hummed as well as any forty-five-year-old motor could hum, and Ryerson drove the car badly because it was all but impossible for him to ignore the barrage of psychic input that came his way from other drivers.
Creosote sat beside him, buckled into a toddler's seat. It had taken a while for Ryerson to teach the dog to stay put, but he sat well in it, now, and Ryerson thought the dog might even be aware that it -was for his own good.
Ryerson was not aware of his other passenger.
Goodlow's Ghosts Page 6