Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  “Then the child called me from her room. I could hear her voice saying ‘Mr. Benedikt, Mr. Benedikt,’ over and over again, very softly. Mrs. de Peyser said ‘Would you mind? She likes you very much.’ Sure, I said, I’d be happy to say good night to the girl, but Linda stood up before I could and said, ‘Darling, you’re too tired to move. Let me go.’ ‘No,’ said Mrs. de Peyser. ‘The child wants him.’ But it was too late. Linda was already going toward the girl’s bedroom.

  “And then it was too late for everything. Linda went into the bedroom and a second later I knew something was horribly wrong. Because there wasn’t any noise. I had heard the child half-whispering when she called to me, and I should have heard Linda speaking to her. It was the loudest silence of my life. I was aware, fuzzy as I was, of Mrs. de Peyser staring at me. That silence ticked on. I stood up and began to go toward the bedroom.

  “Linda began to shriek before I got halfway. They were terrible shrieks . . . so piercing . . .” Lewis shook his head. “I banged open the door and burst in just as I heard the noise of breaking glass. Linda was frozen in the window, glass showering all over. Then she was gone. I was too shocked and terrified even to call out. For a second I couldn’t move. I looked at the girl, Alice. She was standing on her bed with her back flattened against the wall. For a second—for less than a second—I thought she was smirking at me.

  “I ran to the window. Alice started sobbing behind me. It was much too late to help Linda, of course. She was lying dead, way down on the patio. A little crowd of people who had come out of the dining room for the evening air stood around her body. Some of them looked up and saw me leaning out of the broken window. A woman from Yorkshire screamed when she saw me.”

  “She thought you had pushed her,” Otto said.

  “Yes. She made a lot of trouble for me with the police. I could have spent the rest of my life in a Spanish jail.”

  “Lew-iss, couldn’t this Mrs. de Peyser and the liddle girl explain what really happened?”

  “They checked out. They were booked for another week, but while I was making statements to the police, they packed up and left.”

  “But didn’t the police try to find them?”

  “I don’t know. I never found them again. And I’ll tell you a funny thing, Otto. The story has a joke ending. When she checked out, Mrs. de Peyser paid with an American Express card. She made a little speech to the desk clerk too—said she was sorry to go, that she wished she could do something to help me, but that it was impossible, after the shock she and Alice had had, for them to stay on. A month later we heard from American Express that the card was invalid. The real Mrs. de Peyser was dead, and the company could not honor any debts on her account.” Lewis actually laughed. One of the sticks in the fire tumbled down onto the coals, showering sparks out over the snow. “She stiffed me,” he said, and laughed again. “Well, what do you think of that story?”

  “I think it is a very American sort of story,” Otto said, “You must have asked the child what happened—at least what made her stand up on the bed.”

  “Did I! I grabbed her and shook her. But she just cried. Then I carried her over to her aunt and got downstairs as fast as I could. I never had another chance to talk to her. Otto, why did you say it was an American sort of story?”

  “Because, my good friend, everyone in your story is haunted. Even the credit card was haunted. Most of all the teller. And that, my friend, is echt Amerikanisch.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Lewis. “Look, Otto, I sort of feel like going off by myself for a little while. I’ll just wander around for a few minutes. Do you mind?”

  “Are you going to take your fancy rifle?”

  “No. I’m not going to kill anything.”

  “Take poor Flossie along.”

  “Fine. Come on, Flossie.”

  The dog jumped up, all alertness again, and Lewis, who was now really unable to sit still or to pretend in any way that he was unaffected by the feelings which had sprung out at him from his memories, walked off into the woods.

  Witness

  7

  Peter Barnes dropped the vase, half-nauseated by the foul smell which had swept over him. He heard a high-pitched giggling; his wrist was already cold where the unseen boy gripped him. Already knowing what he would see, he turned around to see it. The boy who had been sitting on the gravestone was holding onto his wrist with both hands, looking up at Peter’s face with the same idiot mirth. His eyes were blank gold.

  Peter chopped at him with his free hand, expecting that the scrawny reeking child would blow apart like the Jim Hardie-thing downstairs. Instead the boy ducked the blow and kicked at his ankles with a bony foot which hit him like a sledgehammer. The kick dumped Peter on the ground.

  “Make him look, brat,” the man said.

  The boy nipped behind Peter, clamped his head between two ice-hard hands and turned him around by force. The terrible foulness intensified. Peter realized that the boy’s head was just behind his own and screamed “Get away from me!” but the hands on his head increased their pressure. It felt as though the sides of his skull were being pushed together. “Let me go!” he yelled, and this time he did fear that the boy would crush his skull.

  His mother’s eyes were closed. Her tongue stuck out further.

  “You killed her,” he said.

  “Oh, she is not dead yet,” the man said. “She is merely unconscious. We need her to be alive, don’t we, Fenny?”

  Peter heard horrible squeals from behind him. “You strangled her,” he said. The pressure of the boy’s hands lessened to its original level: enough to hold him as if in a clamp.

  “But not to death,” the man said, giving a mock-pedantic inflection to the words. “I may have crushed her poor little windpipe a little, and the poor darling probably has a very sore throat. But she does have a pretty neck, doesn’t she, Peter?”

  He dropped one hand, and held Christina Barnes up with the other as if she weighed no more than a cat. The exposed portion of her neck wore large purple bruises.

  “You hurt her,” Peter said.

  “I am afraid that I did. I only wish that I could perform the same service to you. But our benefactor, the charming woman whose house you broke into with your friend, has decided that she wants you for herself. At the moment, she is occupied with more urgent business. But great treats are in store for you, Master Barnes, and for your older friends. By that time, neither you nor they will know up from down. You will not know if you’re reaping or sowing, isn’t that right, idiot brother?”

  The boy gripped Peter’s head painfully tightly and made a whinnying noise.

  “What are you?” Peter said.

  “I am you, Peter,” the man said. He was still holding his mother up with one hand. “Isn’t that a nice simple answer? Of course it is not the only answer. A man named Harold Sims who knows your older friends would undoubtedly say that I am a Manitou. Mr. Donald Wanderley has been told that my name is Gregory Benton, and that I am a resident of the city of New Orleans. Of course I once spent several entertaining months in New Orleans, but I can’t be said to be from there. I was born with the name Gregory Bate, and that was how I was known until my death in the year 1929. Fortunately, I had entered into an agreement with a charming woman known as Florence de Peyser which spared me the usual indignities attendant upon death, which I am afraid I rather feared. And what do you fear, Peter? Do you believe in vampires? In werewolves?”

  The resonant voice had been unreeling in Peter’s mind, lulling and soothing him, and it was a moment before he realized that he had been asked a direct question. “No,” he whispered, and then:

  (Liar went through his mind)

  and the man holding his mother by the throat altered and Peter knew in every cell that what he was looking at was not merely a wolf, but a supernatural being in wolf form whose only purpose was to kill, to create te
rror and chaos and to take life as savagely as possible: saw that pain and death were the only poles of its being. He saw that this being had nothing in it that was human, and that it only dressed in the body it had once owned. He saw too, now that it was letting him see deeply into it, that this pure destructiveness was not its own master any more than a dog is: another mind owned and directed it as surely as the creature owned the dreadful purity of its evil. All of this Peter saw in a second. And the next second brought an even worse recognition: that in all of this blackness lived a morally fatal glamour.

  “I don’t . . .” he uttered, trembling.

  “Oh, but you do,” the werewolf said, and put his dark glasses back on. “I saw perfectly well that you do. I could have been a vampire just as easily. That is even more beautiful. And perhaps even closer to the truth.”

  “What are you?” Peter asked again.

  “Well, you could call me Dr. Rabbitfoot,” the creature said. “Or you could call me a nightwatcher.”

  Peter blinked.

  “Now I am afraid we must leave you. Our benefactor will arrange another meeting with you and your friends in due time. But before we take our leave, we must satisfy our hunger.” It smiled. Its teeth were gleamingly white. “Hold him very still,” it commanded, and the hands pushed with terrible force on the sides of Peter’s head. He began to cry.

  Still smiling, the creature pulled Christina Barnes closer to him and, dipping its head to her neck, slid its mouth over her skin. Peter tried to leap forward, but the frozen hands held him back. The creature began to eat.

  Peter tried to scream, and the dead child holding him moved its hands to cover his mouth. It pressed Peter’s head against its chest. The smell of putrefaction, his terror and despair, the horror of being clasped against the revolting body and the greater horror of what was happening to his mother—he blacked out.

  * * *

  When he awakened he was alone. The stench of corruption still hung in the room. Peter moaned and pushed himself up into a kneeling position. The vase he had dropped lay on its side near him. Flowers, still brilliant, were strewn out across a puddle on the carpet. He raised his hands to his face and caught on them the reek of the dead boy who had held him. He gagged. The awful smell must have covered his mouth too, rubbed off the boy’s hand: it was as though his mouth and cheek were covered with decay.

  Peter ran out of the bedroom and down the hall until he found a bathroom. Then he turned on the hot water and scrubbed his face and hands over and over, working up the lather and rinsing it off, then taking the soap again and working it between his palms. He was sobbing. His mother was dead: she had come to see Lewis, and they had killed her. They had done to her what they did to animals: they were dead creatures that lived like vampires on blood. But they were not vampires. Nor were they werewolves; they could just make you think they were. They had sold themselves long ago to whatever owned them. Peter remembered green light leaking from beneath a door, and nearly vomited into the sink. She owned them. They were nightwatchers—night-things. He smeared Lewis’s soap over his mouth, rubbing and rubbing to rid himself of the smell of Fenny’s hands.

  Peter remembered Jim Hardie seated at the bar in a seedy country tavern, asking him if he would like to see all of Milburn go up in flames, and knew that unless he could be stronger, braver and smarter than Jim, that what would happen to Milburn would be worse than that. The nightwatchers would systematically ruin the town—make it a ghost town—and leave behind only the stench of death.

  Because that’s all they want, he said to himself, remembering Gregory Bate’s naked face, all they want is to destroy. He saw Jim Hardie’s taut face, the face of Jim drunk and hurling himself into a wild scheme; the face of Sonny Venuti leaning toward him with her pop eyes; of his mother as she left the station wagon on the brick court; and chillingly, of the actress at the party last year, looking at him with a smiling mouth and expressionless eyes.

  He dropped Lewis’s towel on the bathroom floor.

  They’ve been here before.

  There was only one person who could help him—who might not think he was lying or crazy. He had to get back to town and see the writer who was staying in the hotel.

  The loss of his mother went through him once again, shaking tears from him; but he did not have time to cry now. He went out into the hall and past the heavy door. “Oh, mom,” he said. “I’ll stop them. I’ll get them. I’ll—” But the words were hollow, just a boy’s defiance. They want you to think that.

  Peter did not look back at the house as he ran down the drive, but he felt it back there, watching him and mocking his puny intentions—as if it knew that his freedom was only that of a dog on a leash. At any second he could be pulled back, his neck bruised, his wind cut off . . .

  He saw why when he reached the end of Lewis’s drive. A car was parked on the verge of the highway, and the Jehovah’s Witness who had given him a lift was inside it, looking at him. He blinked his lights at Peter: glowing eyes. “Come along,” the man called. “Just come along, son.”

  Peter ran out into the traffic. An oncoming car squealed around him, another car skidded to a stop. Half a dozen horns cried out. He reached the median and ran across the empty other half of the highway. He could still hear the Witness calling to him. “Come back. It’s no good.”

  Peter disappeared into the underbrush on the far side of the highway. Among the noises and confusions of traffic, he clearly heard the Witness starting up his car to track him back to town.

  8

  Five minutes after Lewis left Otto’s fire, he began to feel tired. His back ached from all the shoveling he had done the day before; his legs threatened to give out. The hound trotted before him, forcing him to go on when he’d rather just go down the hill back to his car. Even that was at least a half hour walk away. Better to go on after the dog and settle down and then return to the fire.

  Flossie sniffed at the base of a tree, checked that he was still there, and trotted on.

  The worst part of the story was that he had allowed Linda to go into the child’s room alone. Sitting at the de Peyser table, woozy, even more exhausted than he was now, he had sensed that the entire situation was somehow false, that he was unknowingly playing a part in a game. That was what he had not told Otto: that sense of wrongness which had come over him during dinner. Beneath the food’s absence of taste had lain the faint taste of garbage, and in the same way beneath the superficial chatter of Florence de Peyser had lain something which had made him see himself as a marionette forced into dance. Feeling that, why had he continued to sit, to struggle to appear normal—why hadn’t he taken Linda by the arm and hurried out?

  Don too had said something about feeling like a player in a game.

  Because they know you well enough to know what you will do. That is why you stayed. Because they knew you would.

  The slight wind shifted; turned colder. The hound lifted its nose, sniffed and turned into the direction of the wind. She began to move more quickly.

  “Flossie!” he yelled. The hound, already thirty yards ahead of him and visible only when he saw it coursing between the trees, emerged into an opening and glanced back at Lewis over its shoulder. Then she amazed Lewis by lowering her head and growling. The next second she flashed away.

  Looking ahead, he saw only the bushy shapes of fir trees, interspersed with the bare skeletons of other trees, standing on ground mottled white. Melting snow moved sluggishly downhill. His feet were cold. Finally he heard the dog barking, and went toward the sound.

  When he finally saw the dog, she began to whine. She was standing in a small glacial hollow, and Lewis was at the hollow’s upper edge. Boulders like Easter Island statues, crusted with quartz, littered the bottom of the hollow. The dog glanced up at him, whined again, wriggled her body, and then flattened out alongside one of the boulders. “Come back, Flossie,” he said. The dog pressed herself onto the
ground, switching her tail.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  He stepped into the hollow and slipped two yards down on cold mud. The dog barked once sharply, then turned in a tight circle and flattened herself out again on the ground. She was looking at a stand of fir trees growing up on the far side of the hollow. As Lewis slogged through the mud, Flossie crept forward toward the trees.

  “Don’t go in there,” he said. The dog crept up to the first of the trees, whining; then it disappeared under the branches.

  He tried to call it out. The hound would not return. No sound came from within the thick cluster of firs. Frustrated, Lewis looked up at the sky and saw heavy clouds scudding on the north wind. The two days’ respite from snow was over.

  “Flossie.”

  The dog did not reappear, but as he looked at the dense curtain of fir needles he saw an astonishing thing. Stitched into the pattern of needles and branches was the outline of a door. A clump of dark needles formed the handle. It was the most perfect optical illusion he had ever seen: even the hinges were represented.

  Lewis took a step forward. He was at the spot where Flossie had flattened herself out on the ground. The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.

  It was the door to his bedroom.

  * * *

  Lewis slowly went up the other side of the hollow toward the door. He went close enough to touch the smooth wood.

  It wanted him to open it. Lewis stood in his wet boots in a cold, lifting breeze and knew that all the inexplicable occurrences of his life since that day in 1929 had led him to this: they put him in front of an impossible door to an unforseeable experience. If he had just been thinking that the story of Linda’s death was—as Don said of the story of Alma Mobley—without point or ending, then there behind the door was its meaning. Even then Lewis knew that the door led not to one room but many.