Frank Kaylor was the chief of police of the village of Merridale, charged with keeping “lawn order,” as he self-deprecatingly put it, among the 8,000 inhabitants. It was fairly dull work, and he liked it that way. Anything else would have meant that he wasn’t doing his job. There were four men on the force beside himself, and together they were more than enough to handle things. Merridale was a tame place. The last murder had been eight years before, when the Kline boy had strangled little Ginny Fuller. It had been ugly—the high school whiz kid … seven-year-old retarded girl … sex-crime-then-stuffed-in-a-garbage-bag school. Kaylor had had nightmares about it for months. And two years from now Peter Kline would be up for parole. It was a shitty system, Kaylor thought. And very early this morning it looked like he might be going to get involved in it again. The phone had just woke him up, making both him and Lettie curse, and Dotty Sanders was on the other end, telling him that Marty had murdered Sheila Sommers, had just confessed it to her, and had begged her to call him. Kaylor thought they were both drunk at first, especially after what Dotty told him was in their bedroom, but she didn’t really sound drunk, only upset to the point of hysteria. He told her to take it easy, he’d be right over, hung up, and began to dress.
“What is it?” his wife asked from the bed.
He shrugged. “A D and D. I hope.” In the den he tried to get Bob Rankin, who was on graveyard shift, on the radio, but Rankin didn’t reply for a moment. Just as he came on, sirens started to wail outside.
Rankin, his voice rising to a near-falsetto at times, told his chief what was happening and what had appeared in the town. “I’m not lying,” he stressed over and over. “I really see them, Chief. Honest to God.”
Kaylor made plans to meet Rankin at the Sanders house. By the time he got there he had seen hundreds of the shapes lining streets and sidewalks, palely visible inside houses with undrawn curtains. “You see them? You see them?” Rankin pressed when Kaylor joined him outside the Sanders house on Glenview Terrace.
“I see ’em,” Kaylor replied grimly. “Jesus, Bob, what have we got here?”
“I don’t know, Chief, but I hope to shit they go away soon.”
Inside the house they found Martin and Dotty Sanders sitting at the kitchen table, their eyes averted from each other. Marty had come to himself enough to protest that it was all an accident, that he’d been scared Sheila would tell Dotty. Dotty was silent, her eyes wide in near-shock. While Marty babbled on, she gestured for Kaylor and Rankin to follow her, leading them into the bedroom, where they both gasped at the sight of Sheila Sommers (or her ghost, they both thought) lying naked on the bed.
“It’s not her,” said Rankin in awe. “She’s buried.”
Kaylor leaned down and tried to touch the glowing flesh. The way his hand passed through it terrified him for a moment, but he regained his composure and nodded. “You’re right. It’s not her. But it’s something.”
While Marty Sanders moaned, “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to,” Kaylor had Rankin get the Polaroid from the car and take some shots while he contacted the state troopers. It took a while, but he got through, reported the incident, and asked for assistance.
“Chief,” the voice on the other end crackled, “you’re gonna get more assistance than you know what to do with. We’ve been getting calls for the last fifteen minutes, and trying to get you for the last ten. What in hell’s going on over there?”
“Damned if I know, but if it’s some kind of hallucination, then I’m seeing it too.” After learning where the staters would arrive, Kaylor radioed the Merridale Fire Hall “Kaylor here. Where the hell’s the fire?” he asked whoever answered.
“No fire.” The voice shook. “We just didn’t know what else to do. You seen ’em?”
“I’ve seen ’em. Folks are probably upset enough as it is without the damned sirens. Shut ’em off.” Within a minute the sirens fell into silence.
The Polaroids that Rankin gave him showed the bed, the bedside table, the lamp, but no sign of Sheila Sommers, or whatever psychic residue remained of her. “What is it, Chief?” Rankin asked. “What are any of them?”
“Let’s not worry about that now. We got a man to take in.” When Kaylor told Dotty that they’d have to take Marty to the station, she clutched at his arm.
“I can come with you, can’t I? I mean, I can’t stay here.”
“Dotty, there’s no place to stay down at the station. We only have the one cell. We could drop you off at a friend’s if you like, or you could stay here, just not go in the bedroom.”
“Could you”—her voice sounded very small—”could you take it away?” Kaylor didn’t answer and Dotty shook her head. “No. No, I guess not.” She looked up at him. “Shut the bedroom door. Just shut the door and I’ll stay here.”
She didn’t say goodbye to her husband when they took him to the car, nor did he speak to her. Soon the three men were nearing the small downtown section of Merridale, and the blue forms were everywhere, like silent sentinels. There were several in both standing and sprawled positions across the roads, and once, when there was no room to go around, Kaylor told Rankin to drive slowly through one of the shapes.
There was no sense of contact, but for a moment the top of the figure’s head and part of his back were visible on the floor of the police car. They all jumped, and Rankin turned the wheel spasmodically, but kept the car on the road. “Steady, Bob, steady,” Kaylor said. Martin Sanders giggled.
Rankin pulled the car into one of the spaces in the town square. There were four or five cars parked nearby with their headlights on. While Rankin took Martin Sanders into the police station, Kaylor walked over to them. The cars of Tom Markley and Pastor Craven were parked side by side, so close they nearly touched. Markley’s right-hand window and Craven’s left were rolled down all the way, and Kaylor could hear them talking through the gap as he approached. He rapped lightly on the mayor’s windshield and Markley jumped like a rabbit.
“Jesus!” he said in disgust when he saw Kaylor’s face peering through the glass in the coming light of dawn. “You scared the life outta me, Frank.” Then his eyes narrowed and he looked around suspiciously, as if something were creeping up on them. “You wanta come in here?”
“Why don’t you come out here?” Kaylor answered. “You think it’s safe?”
“You see them moving? Besides, I have a gun.”
“Don’t know what good that’ll do,” the mayor grumbled, but he slid back over to the driver’s side and opened the door quietly, as though he didn’t want to be heard. A haze of cigarette smoke followed him as he left the car and he lit another immediately. He fixed Frank Kaylor with a bulldog stare, although he had to look up to do it, and coughed as the smoke leaked out of him. Have a stroke in another year, Kaylor thought as he stared into the lumpy, florid face. Mayor Tom Markley smoked two packs a day and was only five pounds short of being fat. Not, Kaylor had decided, a good prognosis for longevity. “Well?” Markley said.
“Well what?”
“C’mon, Pastor,” Markley called softly to Craven, who was just getting out through his passenger door, and turned back to Kaylor. “Well, what have you done about all this?”
“What’s to do?” He shrugged. “Staters are on their way.”
“Staters!” Markley barked. “We got a town full of spooks and people scared shitless about ’em—including me. And you tell me the staters are coming. Frank, there are people leaving town—actually packing up and going.”
Kaylor looked at Markley’s eyes and read the near-panic in them. “You want me to calm folks down?” he asked.
“Yes. Damn right I do!”
Kaylor walked back to the police car, opened the trunk, and took out a bullhorn. Flicking it on, he aimed it down South Market Street and spoke into it. “Attention. May I have your attention, please. This is Police Chief Kaylor speaking. There is nothing to fear from the”—he paused—”the things that we are all seeing on the streets and perhaps in your homes. The
y can’t harm you. There’s no need for panic or to leave town. The mayor and Pastor Craven are here with me now and we assure you that these creatures are harmless. We don’t know as yet what they are, but an investigation is under way. Please remain calm and continue with what you would normally be doing.” Kaylor switched off the bullhorn and looked at Markley. “Happy?”
“What did you tell them that for?”
“You wanted me to calm them down.”
“We don’t know these things are harmless!”
In answer Kaylor walked over to the figure of an old woman ten yards away and swung his arm through the space she occupied. “She’s not hitting back,” he said grimly, returning to Markley’s side.
“I think Frank is right,” said Pastor Craven in his deep baritone. “They seem too ethereal to do us any harm.”
“Well, what about this investigation then?” Markley went on.
“I’m investigating,” Kaylor replied, “right now.”
Craven smiled. “Aren’t we all?”
“What do you think, Pastor?” Kaylor asked. “This is more in your line than in mine.”
“Tom and I have been discussing it, and from what I can make out, as crazy as it sounds, we’ve got a town full of ghosts here. I don’t recognize them all, but I do a lot of them. And they’re all dead. With some it looks like they’re positioned right where they died—at the moment of death. With others it seems they show up where they lived, or where they spent much of their time.”
“Jesus Christ,” moaned Markley. “Excuse me, Pastor;” he added, “but I feel like I’m still sleeping, like this can’t really be happening.”
“It does feel like a dream,” Craven agreed, “but I’m fairly certain I’m awake.”
“What about hallucinations?” Kaylor suggested. “Mass hallucinations.”
Craven pointed to a blue shape visible through the window of the Bar-Kay Dress Shop. “You see that woman?” Kaylor nodded. “Describe her to me.”
Kaylor did, noting the woman’s bobbed, antiquated hairstyle, her thin lips, heavy frame, large pendulous breasts to which her stubby fingers were pressed.
“You’ve just described Grace Moyer,” Craven said when Kaylor had finished. “She died of a heart attack when I was ten, years before you were born, Frank. My mother used to take me in her shop. So how could you hallucinate something that’s in my memory?”
Kaylor shook his head, thinking that it did seem like a dream, and feeling grateful for that. If he could just keep that idea in his mind until he could accept what had happened as reality, he thought he’d be all right.
“They’re really here then,” said Markley. “Holy shit …” He gave a half-laugh. “I wonder …”
“What?” Kaylor asked.
“I can’t help but wonder if … if Eddie Karl’s been telling the truth all along.”
Neither the minister nor the police chief made any comment, but they wondered too.
The state troopers arrived with the sun twenty minutes later. As always, they seemed cool, withdrawn, dryly professional, at least at first. Once they learned exactly what they were dealing with, many of them seemed as jumpy as Tom Markley. The mere act of filling them in did wonders for Kaylor, and he felt almost in control once more.
People were starting to come out on the street at last, most in pairs, hurrying to the comforting-looking group of living men gathered in the square. Most people, however, stayed in their houses, closing the doors of rooms where the figures, glowing softer in the light of day, were stationed.
Some were not frightened, but were touched in other ways by the reappearance of those dear to them. Joe Longsdorff sat all morning on the couch next to the apparition of his wife, Judy, who had died very quickly of leukemia three years before. Though her face was expressionless, her eyes were open, and her naked body still looked firm, youthful, appealing. As Joe told her what had happened in the years she was gone, he gradually put an arm around the space she occupied, and ultimately piled up pillows that he rested his head upon, positioned so that his cheek seemed to be lying on her breast.
On Locust Street, Thorne and Evelyn Beech sat in their cold backyard under the willow tree, where the swing set had been thirty years before. “Can I get you anything?” Thorne said. “Coffee?”
“Coffee would be nice.”
“You can’t stay here forever, Evelyn,” he said gently.
“She has,” the woman replied, never taking her eyes off the little girl who lay arms akimbo, neck cocked at an angle several degrees past awkward.
Throughout the town grown men and women became children once more in the presence of their returned parents, and trembled at the impossibility of it all. They had gone to sleep alone and had awakened in the presence of their ancestors. Mothers saw sons returned from the battlefields, snatched from flaming accidents, just as they had been at the second when death had claimed them. Widows and widowers, most finally used to their lot, now found themselves married once again.
In nearly every house with a living occupant, both radio and television were turned on. However, KMRA, Merridale’s local radio station, was the only media source that as of 8:00 A.M. had mentioned what had occurred in the town. The morning DJ, Hal Drake, was playing his usual “Mellow Morning Music,” but between each record he cut the commercials and instead said what Chief Kaylor had requested: “Okay, this is Hal Drake for the Drake Wake on KMRA Merridale, and if you’re a Merridale resident and a bit upset by what’s happening in the town, Police Chief Frank Kaylor has asked me to say that we should all stay cool, and that whatever this phenomenon is, it seems to be completely harmless. We got state police in here now, and other government agencies have been contacted, so go easy on the panic button, all right? Stay in your houses if you like, or go to work, or if you’re really bugged and want to leave town and visit the folks for a bit, hey, feel free. But drive carefully, okay? And remember, there’s nothing to worry about.” Drake hoped to hell there wasn’t—he didn’t like the way the station’s former owner was staring at him from where he hovered, gauntly thin, three feet above the tile floor. “Now let’s get back to some music—Mr. Vic Damone singing ‘Come Back to Me.’ ”
Fifteen miles away the news manager for WLMA, Lansford’s CBS affiliate, hooted in laughter and turned off the radio. “ ‘Come Back to Me!’ Jesus H., what a choice.”
WLMA’s morning news anchor grinned and puffed on a cigarette that sprinkled ash over his blue uniform blazer. “We go with it or not?”
The news manager scratched his head. “It is so fucking wacky I can’t believe it. But something’s doing up there. You got the story?”
“Right here.” The anchor held up a typed sheet.
“Okay, let’s do this. Don’t lead with it. Rhoda started up there twenty minutes ago and we ought to hear from her any second. We’ll get the dope by the first commercial, guaranteed. Then we’ll know.”
Twelve minutes into the show, Rhoda, called and verified the story in a trembling voice. The manager gave the anchor the high sign, and WLMA became the first TV station to report on what would become known as the Ghost Town. Before the half hour was up, the news manager had sent a two-man camera crew to join Rhoda in Merridale, and also called the CBS regional office, who said they would send their own crew as soon as possible.
By noon, when the crew arrived, Merridale was in no mood to welcome them. The square was filled with people, and Kaylor had ordered detour signs put up directing traffic up Park, across Spruce, and down Lincoln to bypass it. The square had become the kraal of the town, the place of safety from which the natives would face the dangers of their particular jungle. Although it was a Friday, most of the husbands had remained home from work in order to be with their families, and now a good majority of those families occupied the several thousand square feet that were formed by the meeting of High and Market streets. At first glance it looked almost festive, as though a town fair or Oktoberfest were in progress. The sun was shining, and although the
day had started off chilly, it had become quite warm for late October. People sat in clusters on lawn chairs, mothers and fathers with children on their laps. But there was no trace of festivity in the faces. They were solemn, concerned, filled with a dark fear. There had been over two dozen bodies visible in the square itself, but once people started gathering there early that morning, Henry Zeller and his son Buck set cardboard partitions around the grisly figures, concocting them from the refrigerator and washer/dryer boxes in the basement of their hardware and appliance store. There were still visible apparitions up and down the streets, but the square at least was secured as well as possible. Too, daylight weakened the effect of the things. The sun seemed friendly, and although it did not diminish the forms completely, it was enough for people to feel perplexity rather than sheer terror, as they had in the dark.
So they sat and stood and crouched, heads together, some whispering, an occasional out-of-place laugh breaking the silence along with the cries of babies and the whining of children. Photographers took pictures, reporters scribbled on pads, a few looking nervously over their shoulders as if expecting the makeshift boxes to split apart or the hollow-eyed living people to suddenly erupt into madness. The CBS crew moved into the square warily for all their experience. They had seen the ethereal shapes on their way in, and so were prepared for the expressions on the faces of the townspeople. “They look like refugees,” muttered a cameraman as they walked in front of Zeller’s Hardware. “Look dead themselves.” None of his colleagues disagreed.
While one reporter talked to the mayor, another walked through the crowd, which looked at him sullenly, until he spotted a face with just the right combination of tension, fear, and aggression. “Sir?” he said. “Would you mind if we talked to you for a while and taped it?”
The man was overweight, somewhat shabby, and in his early sixties. His crew-cut head was hatless, and a black-gray beard ran from ear to chin to ear without detouring for a moustache, as though it had been hurriedly painted on rather than grown. He gestured at the cameraman with a stubby finger. “We on TV now?”
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