Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  He squelched forward, peering around the few remaining trees.

  You’re wasting your time, Peter. Don’t you want to see your mother again?

  He groaned, feeling the feathery touch of the Witness’s mind. His stomach went cold. The blue car was parked on the road before him. On the front seat Peter saw a bulky shape he knew was the Witness, leaning back, waiting for him to show himself.

  The Bay Tree Market was in sight about a quarter mile down the old highway to Peter’s left—the car faced the other way. If he made a run for it, the man would have to turn his car around on the narrow old road.

  That still would not give him enough time.

  Peter looked again at the market: there were plenty of cars in the lot. At least one of them would belong to someone he knew. All he had to do was to get there.

  * * *

  For a moment he felt no more than five years old, a shivering boy helpless and with no weapons and with no hope of defeating the murderous creature waiting for him in the car. If he tore his windbreaker into pieces and then tied them together and then put one end in the gas tank—but that was just a bad idea from worse movies. He could never get to the car before the man saw him.

  In fact, the only thing he could do, apart from rushing the man, was to go openly across the field to the market and see what happened. The man was looking the other way, and at least he would have some time before he was seen.

  Peter separated the strands of wire clipped to the trees and climbed through. A quarter of a mile away, in a straight line, was the rear parking lot of the Bay Tree Market. He held his breath and started walking across the field.

  The car did a three-point turn behind him and drew up alongside him, just visible in the periphery of his vision. Nice brave boy. Nice boys shouldn’t go hitchhiking, should they? Peter closed his eyes and went stumbling over the field.

  Stupid brave boy. He wondered what the man would do to stop him.

  He did not have to wait long to find out.

  “Peter, I have to talk to you. Open your eyes, Peter.” The voice was Lewis Benedikt’s. Peter opened his eyes and saw Lewis standing twenty yards before him, dressed in baggy trousers, boots, an unfastened khaki army jacket.

  “You’re not here,” Peter said.

  “Talk sense, Peter,” Lewis said, and began to come toward him. “You can see me, can’t you? You can hear me? I’m here. Please listen to me. I want to tell you about your mother.”

  “She’s dead.” Peter stopped walking, unwilling to get closer to the Lewis-creature.

  “No, she is not.” Lewis stopped too, as if not wishing to frighten Peter. Off on the road to their side, the car also halted. “Nothing’s that black or white. She wasn’t dead when you saw her in my house, was she?”

  “She was.”

  “You can’t be sure, Pete. She passed out, just like you.” Lewis opened his hands and smiled at Peter.

  “No. They cut—they cut open her throat. They killed her. Just like those animals were killed.” He closed his eyes again.

  “Pete, you’re wrong and I can prove it. That man in the car doesn’t want to hurt you. Let’s go to him. Let’s go there now.”

  Peter opened his eyes. “Did you really sleep with my mother?”

  “People our age sometimes make mistakes. They do things they’re sorry about later. But it didn’t mean anything, Pete. You’ll see when you get home. All you have to do is come home with us, and she’ll be there, just like she always is.” Lewis was smiling toward him with intelligent concern. “Don’t judge her badly because she made one mistake.” He started coming forward again. “Trust me. I always hoped we’d be friends.”

  “I did too, but you can’t be my friend because you’re dead,” Peter said. He bent over and picked up a double handful of wet snow. He squeezed it together in his hands.

  “You’re going to throw a snowball at me? Isn’t that a little juvenile?”

  “I feel sorry for you,” Peter said, and threw the snowball and blew the thing that looked like Lewis into a shower of falling light.

  As if shell-shocked, he trudged ahead, walking straight through the space where Lewis had stood. The air tingled on his face. He felt another feathery tickling in his mind, and braced himself.

  But no words followed. Instead came a wave of bitterness and anger which nearly knocked him down with its force. It was the same blackness of feeling he had seen when the creature holding his mother had taken off its dark glasses, and the violence of the emotion made him stagger; but there was a wide current of defeat in it.

  Peter snapped his head sideways in surprise; the blue car accelerated down the macadam road.

  Relief buckled his knees. He did not know why, but he had won. Peter sat heavily, clumsily down in the snow and tried not to cry. After a while he stood up again and continued on toward the parking lot. He was too numb for feeling; he made himself concentrate on getting his legs to move. First one step, then another. His feet were very cold. Another step. Now he was not far from the lot.

  Then an even greater sweetness flooded through him. His mother was flying through the parking lot, running toward him. “Pete!” she shouted, half-sobbing. “Thank God!”

  She reached the cars at the edge of the lot and ran past them onto the field. He stood watching her run toward him, too crowded with feeling to speak, and then trudged forward. She had a large bruise on one cheek and her hair was as tangled as a gypsy’s. A scarf tied around her neck showed a line of red at its center.

  “You got away,” he said, stupefied with relief.

  “They took me out of the house—that man—” She stood a few yards away from him, and her hands went to her throat. “He cut my neck—I fainted—I thought they were going to kill you.”

  “I thought you were dead,” he told her. “Oh, mom.”

  “Poor Pete.” She hugged her arms around herself. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll have to get a ride back to town. I guess both of us can just about move that far.”

  That she could joke, however feebly, moved him again to the point of tears. He put a hand over his eyes.

  “Cry later,” she said. “I think I’ll cry for a week after I sit down. Let’s find a ride.”

  “How did you get away from them?” He walked beside her, about to hug her, but she stepped backward, leading him toward the lot. He fell into step with her.

  “I guess they thought I was too frightened to move. And when they got me outside, the fresh air sort of revived me. That man relaxed his hold on my arm, and I swung around and belted him with my bag. Then I ran away into the woods. I heard them looking for me. I’ve never never been so scared in my life. After a while they just gave up. Were they looking for you?”

  “No,” he said. “No.” And the tension melted in him. “There was someone else, but he left—he didn’t get me.”

  “They’ll leave us alone now,” she said. “Now that we’re away from there.”

  He looked into her face, and she glanced down. “I owe you a lot of explanations, Peter. But this isn’t the time. I just want to get home and put a real bandage on my throat. We’ll have to think of something to tell your father.”

  “You won’t tell him what happened?”

  “We’ll just let it die, can’t we?” she asked, and looked pleadingly at him. “I’ll explain everything to you—in time. Let’s just be thankful now that we’re alive.”

  They stepped onto the surface of the parking lot.

  “Okay,” Peter said. “Mom, I’m so—” He struggled with his emotions, but they were too dense to be expressed. “We have to talk to someone, though. The same man that hurt you killed Jim Hardie.”

  She looked back at him, having walked forward toward the crowded middle of the lot. “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “I mean I guessed. Hurry up, Pete. My neck hurts.
I want to get home.”

  “You said you knew.”

  She made a gesture of exasperation. “Don’t cross-examine me, Peter.”

  Peter looked wildly around the parking lot and saw the blue car just nosing past the side of the market. “Oh, mom,” he said. “They did. They did. You didn’t get away from them.”

  “Peter. Snap out of it. I see someone we can get a ride with.”

  As the blue car swung up the lane behind her, Peter walked toward his mother, staring at her. “Okay, I’m coming.”

  “Good. Peter, everything will be the way it was again, you will see. We both had a terrible fright, but a hot bath and a good sleep will work wonders.”

  “You’ll need stitches in your neck,” Peter said, coming closer.

  “No, of course not.” She smiled at him. “A bandage is all I need. It was just a scratch. Peter. What are you doing, Peter? Don’t touch it, it hurts. You’ll start the bleeding again.”

  The blue car was now at the top of their row. Peter reached out toward his mother.

  “Don’t, Pete, we’ll get our ride in a minute . . .”

  He clamped his eyes shut and swung his arm toward his mother’s head. A second later his fingers were tingling. He yelled: a horn sounded, terrifyingly loud.

  When he opened his eyes his mother was gone and the blue car was speeding toward him. Peter scrambled toward the protection of two parked cars and slipped between them just as the blue car raced by, scraping its side against them and making them rock.

  He watched it squeeze down to the end of the aisle, and when it cut across to drive up the next aisle, he saw Irmengard Draeger, Penny’s mother, walk out of the back door of the market carrying a sack of groceries. He ran toward her, cutting through the rows of parked cars.

  Stories

  10

  Inside the hotel, Mrs. Hardie looked at him curiously but told him Don Wanderley’s room number and then watched him as he climbed the steps at the end of the lobby. He knew that he should have turned around to say something, but he could not trust himself, after the strain of riding back to town with Mrs. Draeger, to make even the most perfunctory conversation with Jim’s mother.

  He found Don’s door and knocked.

  “Mr. Wanderley,” he said when the writer opened the door.

  For Don, the appearance of the shaken teenager outside his room meant the arrival of certainty. The period when the consequences of the final Chowder Society story—whatever that would turn out to be—were limited to its members and a few outlyers was over. The expression of shock and loss on Peter Barnes’s face told Don that what he had been brooding about in his room was no longer the property of himself and four elderly men.

  “Come in, Peter,” he said. “I thought we’d be meeting again soon.”

  The boy moved like a zombie into the room and sat blindly in a chair. “I’m sorry,” he began, and then closed his mouth. “I want—I have to—” He blinked, and was obviously unable to continue.

  “Hang on,” Don said, and went to his dresser and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured an inch into a water glass and gave it to Peter. “Drink some of this and settle down. Then just tell me everything that happened. Don’t waste time thinking that I might not believe you, because I will. And so will Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. James, when I tell them.”

  “‘My older friends,’” Peter said. He swallowed some of the whiskey. “That’s what he called them. He said you thought his name was Greg Benton.”

  Peter twitched, uttering the name, and Don felt the shock of a conviction hitting his nerves: whatever the danger to himself, he would destroy Greg Benton.

  “You met him,” he said.

  “He killed my mother,” Peter said flatly. “His brother held me and made me watch. I think—I think they drank her blood. Like they did to those animals. And he killed Jim Hardie. I saw him do it, but I got away.”

  “Go on,” Don said.

  “And he said someone—I can’t remember his name—would call him a Manitou. Do you know what that is?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  Peter nodded, as if this satisfied him. “And he turned into a wolf. I saw him. I saw him do it.” Peter set the glass down on the floor, then looked at it again and picked it up and took another sip. His hands trembled badly enough nearly to splash the whiskey over the lip of the glass. “They stink—they’re like rotten dead things—I had to scrub and scrub. Where Fenny touched me.”

  “You saw Benton turn into a wolf?”

  “Yes. Well, no. Not exactly. He took off his glasses. They have yellow eyes. He let me see him. He was—he was nothing but hate and death. He was like a laser beam.”

  “I understand,” Don said. “I’ve seen him. But I never saw him without his glasses.”

  “When he takes them off, he can make you do things. He can talk inside your head. Like ESP. And they can make you see dead people, ghosts, but when you touch them, they sort of blow up. But they don’t blow up. They grab you and they kill you. But they’re dead too. Somebody else owns them—their benefactor. They do what she wants.”

  “She?” Don asked, and remembered a lovely woman holding this handsome boy’s chin at a dinner party.

  “That Anna Mostyn,” Peter said. “But she was here before.”

  “Yes, she was,” Don said. “As an actress.”

  Peter looked at him with grateful surprise.

  “I just figured out some of the story, Peter,” Don said. “Just in the past few days.” He looked at the shivering boy in the chair. “It looks like you figured out a lot more than I did and in a shorter time.”

  “He said he was me,” Peter said, his face distorting. “He said he was me, I want to kill him.”

  “Then we’ll do it together,” Don said.

  * * *

  “They’re here because I’m here,” Don told him. “Ricky Hawthorne said that when I joined him and Sears and Lewis Benedikt, that we brought these things—these beings—into focus. That we gathered them here. Maybe if I had stayed away, there’d just be a few dead sheep or cows or something, and that would be that. But that was never a possibility, Peter. I couldn’t stay away—and they knew I would have to come. And now they can do anything they want.”

  Peter interrupted him. “Anything she wants them to do.”

  “That’s right. But we’re not helpless. We can fight back. And we’ll do it. We’ll get rid of them however we can. That’s a promise.”

  “But they’re already dead,” Peter said. “How can we kill them? I know they’re dead—they have that smell—”

  He was beginning to slide into panic again, and Don reached over and took his hand. “I know because of the stories. These things aren’t new. They’ve probably been around for centuries—for longer than that. They’ve certainly been talked about and written about for hundreds of years. I think they are what people used to call vampires and werewolves—they’re probably behind a thousand ghost stories. Well, in the stories, and I think that means in the past, people found ways to make them die again. Stakes through the heart or silver bullets—remember? The point is that they can be destroyed. And if it takes silver bullets, that’s what we’ll use. But I don’t think we’ll need them. You want revenge and I do too, and we’ll get it.”

  “But that’s just them,” Peter said, looking straight at Don. “What do we do about her?”

  “That’ll be harder. She’s the general. But history is full of dead generals.” It was a facile answer, but the boy seemed calmer. “Now I think you’d better tell me everything, Peter. Begin with how Jim died, if that’s the beginning. The more you remember, the more you’ll help us. So try to tell it all.”

  * * *

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone else about this?” he asked when Peter was done.

  “Because I knew no one would believe me but you. You heard the musi
c.”

  Don nodded.

  “And nobody will, will they? They’ll think it’s like Mr. Scales and the Martians.”

  “Not quite. The Chowder Society will. I hope.”

  “You mean Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne and . . .”

  “Yes.” He and the boy looked at each other, knowing that Lewis was dead. “We’ll be enough, Peter. It’s the four of us against her.”

  “When do we start? What do we do?”

  “I’ll meet with the others tonight. I think you ought to go home. You have to see your father.”

  “He won’t believe me. I know he won’t. Nobody would, unless they . . .” The boy’s voice trailed off.

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “I will if you want me to.”

  “No. I won’t tell him. It wouldn’t do any good. I’ll have to tell him later.”

  “Maybe that’s better. And if you want help when the times comes, I’ll give it to you. Peter, I think you’ve been brave as hell. Most adults would have folded up like tissue paper. But you’re going to have to be even braver from now on. You might have to protect your father as well as yourself. Don’t open your door to anybody unless you know who they are.”

  Peter nodded. “I won’t. You bet I won’t. But why are they here, anyhow? Why is she here?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out tonight.”

  Peter stood up and began to leave, but when he put his hands in his pockets, he touched a folded pamphlet. “I forgot. The man in the blue car gave me this after he took me to Mr. Benedikt’s house.” He brought out The Watchtower and smoothed it out on Don’s desk. Beneath the name, in large black letters on the cheap pulpy paper, were the words DR. RABBITFOOT LED ME TO SIN.

  Don ripped the pamphlet in half.

  11

  Harold Sims tramped into the upper woods, disgusted with both himself and Stella Hawthorne. His shoes and the bottoms of his trousers were soaked, the shoes probably ruined. But what was not? He had lost his job, and when he had finally asked Stella to leave with him, after weeks of thinking about it, he had lost her too. Damn it, did she think that he had just asked her on the spur of the moment? Didn’t she know him better than that? He ground his teeth.