Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  Jim hunched over the bar and wrapped his hand around his beer-glass. “One. She heard I took that Mostyn dame out, so she got pissed off at me. Two. Her parents, old Rollie and Irmengard, heard that she went out a couple of times with the late F. Robinson. So they grounded her. She never told me about that, you know? Good thing she didn’t. I would have grounded her, all right.”

  “Do you think she went out with him because you took that woman to Humphrey’s?”

  “How the hell do I know why she does things, man? Do you see a sequence there, my boy?”

  “Don’t you?” It was sometimes safer to give Jim’s questions back to him.

  “Hell.” He bent all the way forward and lay his shaggy head on the wet wood of the bar. “All these women are mysteries to me.” He was speaking softly, as if regretfully, but Peter saw his eyes gleaming between his lashes and knew it was an act. “Yeah. Well you might have a point. There might be a sequence there after all, Clarabelle. There just might be. And if there is, then that Anna dame besides not giving me any herself after teasing me along, also screwed up the sex life I had. In fact, if you look at it that way, you could definitely say that she owes me a few.” He rolled his head a quarter turn up on the bar, and his eyes gleamed at Peter. “Which had occurred to me, to tell you the truth.” He sat there, bent over, his head like a separate object on the bar, grinning maniacally up at Peter. “Yes, it had, old pal.”

  Peter swallowed.

  Jim straightened up and knocked on the bar. “Two more flagons here, Sunshine.”

  “What do you want to do?” Peter asked, knowing that he would inevitably be carried along with it, and looked through the tavern’s greasy windows at a pane of darkness flecked with white.

  “Let’s see. What do I want to do?” Jim mused, and Peter realized sickeningly that Jim had known all along what he wanted to do, and that inviting him out for a beer was only the first moment of the plan; he’d been steered into this conversation as surely as he’d been driven out into the country, and all of it, “another way of stayin’ sane” and the ghost town business, was enumerated on a list somewhere in Hardie’s mind. “What do I want to do?” He cocked his head. “Even this palace gets a little boring after a flagon or six, so I guess going back to dear little Milburn would be pleasant. Yes, I think we’ll definitely be going back to dear little Milburn.”

  “Let’s stay away from her,” Peter said.

  Jim ignored this. “You know, our dear lovely sexy friend moved out of the hotel two weeks ago. Oh, she is missed. She is missed, Pete. I miss seeing that great ass going up the stairs. I miss those eyes flashing in the corridors. I miss her empty suitcase. I miss her amazing body. And I’m sure you know where she went.”

  “My father arranged the mortgage. His house.” Peter nodded more vigorously than he needed to, and realized he was getting drunk again.

  “Your old man’s a useful old gnome, isn’t he?” Jim asked, smiling pleasantly. “Innkeeper!” He banged on the bar. “Give my friend and myself a couple of shots of your best bourbon.” The bartender resentfully poured out shots of the same brand that Jim had stolen. “Now, back to the point. Our friend who is so sincerely missed moves out of our excellent hotel and into Robinson’s house. Now isn’t that a curious sort of coincidence? I suppose that you and I, Clarabelle, are the only two people in the world who know that it is a coincidence. Because we’re the only people who knew she was out at the station when old Freddy passed.”

  “His heart,” Peter muttered.

  “Oh, she does get you in the heart. She gets you by the heart and the balls. But funny though, isn’t it? Freddy falls down onto the tracks—did I say falls? No: floats. I saw it, remember. He floats down onto the tracks like he’s made out of tissue paper. Then she gets all hot to own his house. Is that also one, old buddy? Do you see a sequence there too, Clarabelle?”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “Now, Pete, that’s not how you got early admission to Cornhole U. Use those powerful brain cells, baby.” He put his hand on Peter’s back and leaned toward him, breathing the clear odor of alcohol into Peter’s face. “Our sexy friend wants something in that house. Just think of her in there. Man, I’m curious, aren’t you? That sexy lady moving around in Freddy’s old house—what’s she looking for? Money? Jewelry? Dope? Well, who knows? But she’s looking for something. Moving that sexy frame of hers around those rooms, checking everything out . . . that’d be a sight to see, wouldn’t it?”

  “I can’t,” Peter said. The bourbon moved in his guts like oil.

  “I think,” said Jim, “that we will begin to move toward our transportation.”

  * * *

  Peter found himself standing outside in the cold by Jim’s car: he could not remember why he was alone. He stamped his feet, rotated his head on his shoulders; said, “Hey, Jim.”

  Hardie emerged a moment later, grinning like a shark. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Just had to tell our friend in there how much I enjoyed his company. He didn’t seem to believe me, so I had to repeat my message several times. He demonstrated what you could call a lack of interest. Fortunately, I managed also to take care of our liquid requirements for the remainder of this pleasant evening.” He partially unzipped his jacket and let the neck of a bottle protrude.

  “You’re a madman.”

  “I’m crazy like a fox, you mean.” Jim opened the car and leaned across the seat to unlock Peter’s door. “Now to return to the subject of our previous discussion.”

  “You really ought to go to college,” Peter said as Jim started the car. “With your talent for bull, you’d be Phi Beta Kappa.”

  “Well, I used to think I’d be a pretty good lawyer,” Jim said surprisingly. “Here, have a jolt.” He passed Peter the bottle. “What’s a good lawyer besides a superior bullshitter? Look at that old Sears James, man. If I ever saw a guy who looks like he could shit you from here to Key West . . .”

  Peter remembered his last sight of Sears James, seated massively in a car, his face pale behind the bleary window. Then he remembered the face of the boy sitting on the headstone in front of St. Michael’s. “Let’s stay away from that woman,” he said.

  “Now that’s just the point I want to discuss.” He gave Peter a bright look. “Didn’t we reach the point where this mysterious lady is wandering around the house looking for something? As I recall, Clarabelle, I invited you to picture that.”

  Peter nodded miserably.

  “And give me back that bottle if you’re not going to do anything with it. Now. There’s something in that house, isn’t there? Aren’t you a little curious about what it is? There’s something going on, anyhow, and you and me, old buddy, are the only people who know about it. Am I right so far?”

  “You might be.”

  “CHRIST!” Hardie yelled, making Peter jump. “You dumb SHIT! What else can I be? There’s some reason she wanted that house—that’s the only thing that makes sense. There’s something in there she wants.”

  “You think she got rid of Robinson?”

  “I don’t know about that. I didn’t see anything but him sort of floating down onto the tracks. What the hell? But I can tell you one thing, I want to get a look at that house.”

  “Oh no,” Peter moaned.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Jim protested. “She’s just a broad, after all. She’s got strange habits, but she’s just a woman, Clarabelle. And for shit’s sake, I’m not really stupid enough to go in there when she’s there. And if you’re too chicken-shit to go in with me, you can walk from here.”

  Down, down the dark country road; down the dark road to Milburn.

  “How will you know if she’s out? She sits in the dark every night, you said.”

  “You ring the bell, dummy.”

  * * *

  On the crest of the last low hill before the turnoff, Peter, already sick with worry, lo
oked down the highway and saw the lights of Milburn—gathered in a little depression in the land, they looked as though one hand could gather them up. It looked arbitrary, Milburn, like a nomad city of tents, and though Peter Barnes had known it all his life—though it was, in effect, all he had known—it looked unfamiliar.

  Then he saw why. “Jim. Look. All the lights on the west side of town are out.”

  “Snow pulled down the wires.”

  “But it’s not snowing.”

  “It snowed when we were in the bar.”

  “Did you really see a little kid sitting on top of the station that night?”

  “Nah. Just thought I did. It must have been snow, or some newspaper or something—shit, Clarabelle, can a kid get up there? You know he can’t. Let’s be straight, Clarabelle, it was a little spooky out there that night.”

  They continued on to Milburn through the growing dark.

  7

  There, in town, Don Wanderley sat at his desk on the west side of the Archer Hotel, and saw darkness suddenly spread over the street below his window while his desk lamp still burned;

  and Ricky Hawthorne gasped as dark surged through his living room, and Stella said to get the candles, it was only that spot on the highway where the lines always blew down at least twice every winter;

  and Milly Sheehan, going for her own candles, heard a slow knocking at the front door which she would never, ever, not in a thousand years, answer;

  and Sears James, locked in his suddenly dark library, heard a rattle of happy footsteps on his stairs and told himself he was dozing;

  and Clark Mulligan, who had been showing two weeks of science fiction and horror pictures and had a head full of lurid images—you can show it, man, but nobody makes you watch it—walked out of the Rialto for the fresh air in the middle of a reel and thought he saw in the sudden blackout a man who was a wolf lope across the street, on a fierce errand, in an evil hurry to get somewhere (nobody makes you watch the stuff, man).

  Housebreaking, Part Two

  8

  Jim stopped the car half a block away from the house. “If only the goddamned lights didn’t go off.” They were both looking at the building’s blank fačade, the curtainless windows behind which no figure moved, no candle shone.

  Peter Barnes thought of what Jim Hardie had seen, Freddy Robinson’s body floating down onto the overgrown railway tracks, and of the-little-boy-who-wasn’t-there but perched on the tops of stations and headstones. And then he thought: I was right the last time. Fear sobers you up. When he looked at Jim, he saw him tense with excitement.

  “I thought she never turned them on anyhow.”

  “Man, I still wish they didn’t go off,” Jim said, and shivered, his face a grinning mask. “In a place like this”—gesturing out at the respectable neighborhood of three-story houses—“you know, in a Rotarian pig heaven like this, our lady friend might sort of want to blend in. She might keep her lights on just so nobody thinks there’s nothing funny about her.” He tilted his head. “Like, you know, that old house on Haven Lane where that writer guy lived—Wanderley? You ever go past there at night? All these houses around are all lit up and there’s old Wanderley’s place as dark as a tomb, man. Gives you the frights.”

  “This gives me the frights,” Peter admitted. “Besides that, it’s illegal.”

  “You really are the pits, you know that?” Hardie turned on his seat and stared at Peter, who saw his barely controlled urge to get moving, to do, to flail out again at whatever obstacle the world had put in his way. “Do you get the feeling that our lady friend worries about what’s legal and what isn’t? Do you think she got that house because she was worried about the damned law—about Walt Hardesty, for Chrissake?” Hardie shook his head, either disgusted or pretending to be disgusted. Peter suspected that he was working himself up for an action even he thought might be reckless.

  Jim turned away from him and started the car moving; Peter hoped for a moment that Hardie was going to circle around the block and go back to the hotel, but his friend kept the car in first gear and merely crept up the block until they were directly in front of the house.

  “You’re either with me or you’re a jerk, you jerk,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “First off, take a look in a downstairs window. Do you have balls enough for that, Clarabelle?”

  “You won’t be able to see anything.”

  “Jesus,” Hardie said, and got out of the car.

  Peter hesitated only a second. Then he too got out and followed Hardie up across the snowy lawn and around the side of the building. Both boys moved quickly, hunching over to avoid being seen by the neighbors.

  In a moment they were sitting on their haunches in drifted snow beneath one of the side windows. “Well, at least you have guts enough to look in a window, Clarabelle.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Peter whispered. “I’m sick of that.”

  “Great time you picked to tell me.” Hardie grinned at him, then lifted his head to peer over the sill. “Hey, look at this.”

  Peter slowly raised his head above the sill. He was looking into a small side room just visible in the moonlight falling in over their shoulders. The room had neither furniture nor carpet.

  “Weird lady,” Hardy said, and Peter heard laughter hidden in his voice. “Let’s go around the back.” He scuttled away, still hunching over. Peter followed.

  “I’ll tell you what, I don’t think she’s here,” Hardie said when Peter reached the back of the building. He was standing up and leaning against the wall between a small window and the back door. “I just get the feeling this house is empty.” Here in the back where no one could see them, both boys felt more comfortable.

  The long back yard ended in a white hillock of snow which was a buried hedge; a plaster birdbath, the basin covered with snow like frosting on a cake, sat between them and the hedge. Even by moonlight this was a reassuringly commonplace object. You couldn’t be frightened with a birdbath looking at you, Peter thought, and managed a smile.

  “Don’t you believe me?” Hardie challenged.

  “It’s not that.” Both were speaking in their normal voices.

  “Okay, you look in there first.”

  “Okay.” Peter turned and stepped boldly in front of the small window. He saw a sink gleaming palely, a hardwood floor, a stove Mrs. Robinson must have left behind. A single water glass, left on the breakfast bar, caught an edge of moonlight. If the birdbath had looked homely, this looked forlorn—one glass gathering dust on the counter—and Peter at once began to agree with Jim that the house was empty. “Nothing,” he said.

  Hardie nodded beside him. Then he jumped up to the small concrete step before the back door. “Man, if you hear anything, run like hell.” He pushed the bell.

  The sound of the doorbell trilled through the house.

  Both boys braced themselves; held their breath. But no steps came, no voices called.

  “Hey?” Jim said, smiling seraphically at Peter. “How about that?”

  “We’re doing this all wrong,” Peter said. “What we ought to do is walk around in front and act like we just came. If anybody sees us, we’ll just be two guys looking for her. If she doesn’t answer the front doorbell, we’ll do what people always do and look in the front windows. If someone sees us crawling around like we did before, they’ll call the cops.”

  “Not bad,” Jim said after a moment. “Okay, we’ll try it. But if nobody answers, I’m coming around back here and going in. That was the point, remember?”

  Peter nodded; he remembered.

  As if he too were relieved at having found a way to stop skulking, Jim walked freely and naturally to the front of the house. Peter coming more slowly behind him, Jim went across the lawn to the front door. “Okay, sport,” he said.

  Peter stood beside him and thought: I
can’t go in there. Empty, but filled with bare rooms and the atmosphere of whatever kind of person chose to live in them, the house seemed to be feigning stillness.

  Jim rang the front bell. “We’re wasting time,” he said, and betrayed his own unease.

  “Just wait. Just act normal.”

  Jim stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket and fidgeted on the doorstep. “Long enough?”

  “A few more seconds.”

  Jim exhaled a billowing cloud of steam. “Okay. A few more seconds. One—two—three. Now what?”

  “Ring it again. Just like you would if you thought she was at home.”

  Jim stabbed the bell a second time: the trilling flared and died inside the house.

  Peter looked up and down the block of houses across the street. No cars. No lights. The dim glow of a candle shone in a window four houses away, but no curious faces looked out at the two boys standing on the steps of the new neighbor’s house. Old Dr. Jaffrey’s house directly across the street looked mournful.

  From nowhere at all, utterly inexplicably, distant music floated in the air. A buzzing trombone, an insinuating saxophone: jazz, played a long way off.

  “Huh?” Jim Hardie lifted his head and turned from the door. “Sounds like—what?”

  Peter had an image of flatbed trucks, black musicians playing freely into the night. “Sounds like a carnival.”

  “Sure. We get a lot of those in Milburn. In November.”

  “Must be a record.”

  “Somebody’s got his window open.”

  “Has to be.”

  And yet—as if the idea of carnival musicians suddenly appearing to play in Milburn was frightening—neither boy wanted to admit that these lilting sounds were too true to come from a record.

  “Now we look in the window,” Jim said. “Finally.”

  He jumped off the steps and went to the large front window. Peter stayed on the porch, softly clapping his hands together, listening to the fading music: the flatbed was going into the center of town, toward the square, he thought. But what sense did that make? The sound died away.