Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  Jim switched off the headlights and rolled quietly up to the stoplight. Off to their left and across the street, the woman moved quickly into darkness.

  “Hey, let’s just go home,” Peter said.

  “Screw that. I want to see where she’s going.”

  “What if she sees us?”

  “She won’t.” He turned left and went slowly down the top of the square past the hotel, his lights still off. Though the lights in the square were not on, the street lamps would remain lighted until dawn, and both boys saw her entering a pool of light at the end of the first block across Main Street. Jim drove slowly across, and then waited until she had walked another block before going further.

  “She’s just taking a walk.” Peter said. “She has insomnia, and she takes walks at night.”

  “Like hell.”

  “I don’t like doing this.”

  “Okay. Okay. Get out of the car and walk home,” Jim whispered fiercely at him. He reached across Peter and opened the passenger door. “Get out and run home.”

  Peter sat in the blast of cold from the door, almost ready to get out. “You should too.”

  “Jesus. God damn you! Get out or close the door,” Jim hissed. “Hey! Wait a second!” Both boys watched as another car swung onto the street ahead of them and paused under a street lamp two blocks ahead. The woman went unconcernedly up to the car, the door swung open, and she got in.

  “I know that car,” Peter said. “I’ve seen it around.”

  “Of course you have, you dodo. Seventy-five blue Camaro—it belongs to that turkey, Freddy Robinson.” He picked up speed as Robinson’s car drove away.

  “Well, now you know where she goes at nights.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? What else? Robinson’s married. In fact, my mother heard from Mrs. Venuti that his wife wants to divorce him.”

  “That’s because he sucks around high school girls, right? You know that Freddy Robinson likes ’em young. Haven’t you ever seen him out with a girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A girl from school,” Peter said, not wanting to say that it was Penny Draeger.

  “Okay. So whatever that jerk is doing, he’s not just out on a date. Now, where the hell’s he going?”

  Robinson was leading them through northwest Milburn, making turns that seemed random, going further from the center of town. These houses under a black sky, snow drifted on their front lawns, looked sinister to Peter Barnes: the scale of the night diminished them to something larger than dollhouses, smaller than themselves. Freddy Robinson’s taillights moved ahead of them like the eyes of a cat.

  “All right. Let’s see, he’s going to turn right up ahead, and go west on Bridge Road.”

  “How do you—?” Peter stopped talking and watched Robinson’s car do as Jim had predicted. “Where is he going?”

  “To the only thing out this way that doesn’t have a set of swings in the back yard.”

  “The old railroad station.”

  “You win a cigar. Or better yet, a cigarette.” Both boys lit Marlboros; in the next minute, Robinson’s car swung into the parking lot of Milburn’s disused station. The railway had tried for years to sell the building; it was an empty shell with a board floor and a ticket window. Two old boxcars had stood on the overgrown tracks for as long as the boys could remember.

  As they watched from an unlighted car down Bridge Road, first the woman, then Robinson, left the Camaro. Peter looked at Jim, afraid that he knew what Hardie was going to do. Hardie waited until Robinson and the woman had gone around the side of the station and then opened his door.

  “No,” Peter said.

  “Fine. Stay here.”

  “What’s the point? Catch them with their pants down?”

  “That’s not what they’re going to do, idiot. Out here? Or in that freezing old station, with the rats? He’s got enough money to hit a motel.”

  “Then what?” Peter pleaded.

  “I want to know what she says. She brought him here, didn’t she?”

  And he closed the door and began to move quietly up Bridge Road.

  Peter touched the door handle, pushed it down and heard the lock disengage. Jim Hardie was crazy: why should he follow him any futher into pointless trouble? Already they had invaded a church and smoked cigarettes and drunk whiskey there, and here was Jim Hardie, not satisfied, creeping along after cradle-robbing Freddy Robinson and that spooky woman.

  What? The ground vibrated and from nowhere a freezing wind slammed into him. More than two voices seemed to lift beyond the station, screeching into the sudden wind. It felt as though a hand were banging inside Peter’s skull.

  The night deepened about him, and he thought he was fainting; he dimly heard Jim Hardie falling into the snow up ahead, and then they and the old station seemed surrounded by a moment of pure brightness.

  He was out of the car, standing up on earth that seemed to bounce, looking toward Jim: his friend sat up in the snow, his body covered with white; Jim’s eyebrows gleamed, greenish, like the dial of a watch—snow did that sometimes, caught by angled moonlight—

  Jim ran toward the station and Peter was able to think: That’s how he gets in trouble, he’s not just crazy, he never gives up—

  and they both heard Freddy Robinson scream.

  Peter squatted down beside the car as if he expected gunshots. He could hear Jim’s footsteps receding in the direction of the station. The footsteps paused; terrified, Peter looked cautiously around the fender of the car. Back and legs dusted with gleaming snow, Jim was unknowingly miming his own posture, and peering around the side of the station.

  He wished he were two hundred yards off, watching through a telescope.

  Jim crawled a few yards farther: Peter knew that now he would be able to see the entire rear of the station. Beyond the platform, stone steps led down into the railbed. The two abandoned boxcars sat, mired in weeds, at either end of the station.

  He shook his head, and saw Jim running, bent over, back to the car. Jim did not speak to him or even look at him, but opened the door and scrambled in. Peter got in—his knees stiff from kneeling—just as Jim started the car.

  “Well, what happened?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What did you see?”

  Hardie hit the accelerator and popped the clutch; the car shot widely forward. A film of snow covered Hardie’s jacket and jeans.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No.”

  “Did you feel the ground shake? Why did Robinson yell?”

  “I don’t know. He was lying down on the tracks.”

  “You didn’t see that woman?”

  “No. She must have been around the side.”

  “Well, you saw something. You ran like hell.”

  “At least I went!”

  The rebuke quieted Peter, but more was to come. “You damn chicken-shit, you just hid behind the car like a little girl—you got the balls of a pigeon—now listen, if anybody asks where you were tonight, you were playing poker with me, we were playing poker in your basement just like last night, right? Nothing happened, you get it? We had a few beers and then we picked up the game from last night. Okay?”

  “Okay, but . . .”

  “Okay.” Hardie turned to glare at Peter. “Okay. You want to know what I saw? Well, something saw me. You know what? There was a little kid sitting on the top of the station, and he must have been watching me all the time.”

  This was totally unexpected. “A little kid? That’s crazy. It’s almost three in the morning. And it’s cold, and there’s no way to get up to the roof of the station anyhow. We used to try it often enough, back in grade school.”

  “Well, he was there and he was watching me. And here’s another little tidbit.” Hardie savage
ly cramped the car around a corner, and nearly went sideways into a row of mailboxes. “He was barefoot. And I don’t think he had a shirt on either.”

  Peter was silenced.

  “Man, he gave me the flying shits. So I got out. And I think Freddy Robinson is dead, man. So if anybody asks, we played poker all night.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Whatever I say.”

  * * *

  Omar Norris had an unpleasant awakening. After his wife had thrown him out of his house, he had spent the night in what he considered his last refuge, one of the boxcars near the abandoned station, and if he had heard any noises during his sodden sleep, he no longer remembered them. Therefore, he was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say “Not again” (what he said was “Shit on this”), but “Not again” was what he meant.

  4

  Over the next few nights and days several events of varying immediate importance took place in Milburn. Some of these events seemed trivial to the people involved, some were confusing or annoying, yet others were commanding and significant: but all were part of the pattern which would eventually bring so many changes to Milburn, and as a part of the pattern, all were important.

  Freddy Robinson’s wife learned that her husband had carried only the skimpiest life insurance coverage on himself, and that Humdinger Fred, the prospective member of the Million Dollar Roundtable, was worth only fifteen thousand dollars dead. She made a tearful long-distance call to her unmarried sister in Aspen, Colorado, who said, “I always told you he was a cheap so and so. Why not sell your house and come out here where it’s healthy? And what kind of accident was that anyhow, honey?”

  Which was the question that Broome County deputy coroner was asking himself, faced with the corpse of a thirty-four-year-old man from which most of the internal organs and all the blood had been removed. For a moment he considered writing under CAUSE OF DEATH the word “Exsanguination,” but instead wrote “Massive internal insult,” with a long appended note ending with the speculation that the “insult” had been caused by a marauding animal.

  And Elmer Scales sat up every night with the shotgun across his lap, not knowing that the last cow had been killed and that the figure he had tauntingly half-seen was looking for bigger game;

  and Walt Hardesty bought Omar Norris a drink in the back room at Humphrey’s Place and heard Omar say that now that he had time to think about it, maybe he did hear a car or two that night, and it seemed to him that wasn’t all, it seemed to him there was some kind of noise and some kind of light. “Noise? Light? Get the hell out of here, Omar,” Hardesty said, but stayed nursing his beer after Omar left, wondering just what the hell was going on;

  and the excellent young woman Hawthorne, James had hired told her employers that she wanted to leave the Archer Hotel and had heard in town that Mrs. Robinson was putting her house up for sale, and could they talk to their friend at the bank and set up the financing? She had, it turned out, a healthy account at a savings and loan in San Francisco;

  and Sears and Ricky looked at one another with something surprisingly close to relief, as if they hadn’t liked the thought of that house sitting empty, and said they could probably arrange something with Mr. Barnes;

  and Lewis Benedikt promised himself he’d call his friend Otto Gruebe to make a date to go out with the dogs for a day’s coon hunting;

  and Larry Mulligan, laying out Freddy Robinson’ s body for burial, looked at the corpse’s face and thought he must have seen the devil coming to carry him off;

  and Nettie Dedham, penned in her wheelchair as she was penned within her paralyzed body, sat looking out of the dining-room window as she liked to do while Rea busied herself with the horses’ evening feed and tilted her head so that she could see the evening light on the field. Then she saw a figure moving around out there and Nettie, who understood more than even her sister credited, fearfully watched it approach the house and barn. She uttered a few choked sounds, but knew that Rea would never hear them. The figure came nearer, hauntingly familiar. Nettie was afraid it was the boy from town Rea talked about—that wild boy in a rage that Rea had named him to the police. She trembled, watching the figure come nearer across the field, imagining what life would be like if the boy did anything to Rea; and then squawked in terror and nearly tipped over the wheelchair. The man walking toward the barn was her brother Stringer, wearing the brown shirt he’d had on the day he died: it was covered with blood, just as it had been when they’d put him on the table and wrapped him in blankets, but his arms were whole. Stringer looked across the small yard to her window, then held the strands of barbed wire with his hands, stepped through the fence and came toward the window. He smiled in at her, Nettie with her head rolling back on her shoulders, and then turned again toward the stable.

  * * *

  And Peter Barnes came down to the kitchen for his usual rushed breakfast, even more rushed these days when his mother had turned so introspective, and found his father, who should have left the house fifteen minutes earlier, sitting at the table before a cold cup of coffee. “Hey, dad,” he said, “you’re late for the bank.”

  “I know,” his father said. “I wanted to talk to you about something. We haven’t talked much lately, Pete.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But can’t it wait? I have to get to school.”

  “You’ll get there, but no, I don’t think it can wait. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days.”

  “Oh?” Peter poured milk into a glass, knowing that it was likely to be serious. His father never came out with the serious things right away: he brooded about them as if they were bank loans, and then hit you with them when he had a plan all worked out.

  “I think you’ve been seeing too much of Jim Hardie,” his father said. “He’s no good, and he’s teaching you bad habits.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Peter said, stung. “I’m old enough to have my own habits. Besides, Jim’s not half as bad as people say—he just gets wild sometimes.”

  “Did he get wild Saturday night?”

  Peter set down the glass and looked with feigned calm at his father. “No, weren’t we quiet enough?”

  Walter Barnes took off his glasses and polished them on his vest. “You’re still trying to tell me you were here that night?”

  Peter knew better than to stick to the lie. He shook his head.

  “I don’t know where you were, and I’m not going to ask. You’re eighteen, and you have a right to your privacy. But I want you to know that at three o’clock your mother thought she heard a noise and I got up and walked all through the house. You weren’t downstairs in the family room with Jim Hardie. In fact you weren’t anywhere in the house.” Walter put his glasses back on and looked seriously at his son, and Peter knew that now he was going to produce whatever plan he’d thought up.

  “I haven’t told your mother because I didn’t want her to worry about you. She’s been tense lately.”

  “Yeah, what’s she so angry about, anyhow?”

  “I don’t know,” said his father, who had an approximate idea. “I think she’s lonely.”

  “But she’s got a lot of friends, there’s Mrs. Venuti, she sees her every day almost—”

  “Don’t try to get me off the track. I’m going to ask you a few questions, Pete. You didn’t have anything to do with the Dedham girls’ horse being killed, did you?”

  “No,” Peter uttered, shocked.

  “And I don’t really suppose you know anything about Rea Dedham being murdered.”

  To Peter, the Dedham girls were illustrations from a history book. “Murdered? God, I—” He looked wildly around the kitchen. “I didn’t even know.”

  “I thought so. I just heard about it myself yesterday. The boy who cleans their stables found her yesterday afternoon. It’ll be
on the news today. And in tonight’s paper.”

  “But why ask me?”

  “Because people are going to think that Jim Hardie might possibly be involved.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “I hope for Eleanor Hardie’s sake that it is. And to tell you the truth, I can’t see her son doing anything like that.”

  “No, he couldn’t, he’s just sort of wild, he doesn’t stop when the ordinary guy would . . .” Peter shut up, hearing his own words.

  His father sighed. “I was worried . . . people knew that Jim has something against those poor old women. Well. I’m sure that he had nothing to do with it, but Hardesty will undoubtedly be asking him questions.” He put a cigarette in his mouth, but did not light it. “Okay. Scout, I think we have to be closer. You’re going to college next year, and this is probably our last year together as a family. We’re going to give a party weekend after next, and I’d like you to loosen up and come and be a part of it. Will you do that?”

  So that was the plan. “Sure,” he said, relieved.

  “And you’ll stay for the entire party? I’d like it if you could really get in the swing of things.”

  “Sure.” Looking at his father, Peter saw him for a moment as already surprisingly old. His face was lined and pouchy, marked by a lifetime of worry.

  “And we’ll have more talks in the mornings?”

  “Yes. Whatever you say. Sure.”

  “And there’ll be less hanging around in beer joints with Jim Hardie.” This was a command, not a question, and Peter nodded. “He could get you in real trouble.”

  “He’s not as bad as everyone thinks,” Peter said. “He just won’t stop, you know, he keeps on going and—”

  “That’s enough. Better get to school. Can I give you a lift?”

  “I’d like to walk. I get there too early otherwise.”

  “Okay, scout.”

  Five minutes later, books under his arm, Peter left the house; his viscera still retained the imprint of the fear he had felt when he thought his father would ask about Saturday night—that was an episode he planned to put out of his mind as completely as possible—but the fear was only a trembling area surrounded by a sea of relief. His father was far more concerned about being closer to him than about whatever he got up to with Jim Hardie: Saturday night would slip backward into time and become as remote as the Dedham girls.