Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

“And,” said Ricky, “one other thing. The Dedham girls said he screamed something else—but it was so mixed up with his other screams that they weren’t sure about it. ‘Bee-orchid.’ ‘Bee-orchid,’ just that. He had been raving, obviously. Out of his head with shock and pain. Well, he died on that table, and got a good burial a few days later. Eva Galli didn’t come to the funeral. Half the town was on Pleasant Hill, but not the dead man’s fiancée. That fueled their tongues.”

  “The old women, the women she had ignored,” Sears said. “They laid into her. Said she’d ruined Stringer. Of course half of them had unmarried daughters and they’d had their eyes on Stringer long before Eva Galli showed up. They said he made some discovery—an abandoned husband or an illegitimate child, something like that. They made her out to be a real Jezebel.”

  “We didn’t know what to do,” Ricky said. “We were afraid to visit her, after Stringer died. She might be grieving as much as a widow, you see, but she was unattached. It was our parents’ place to console her, not ours. If we had called on her, the female malice would have gone into high gear. So we stewed—just stewed. Everybody assumed that she’d pack up and move back to New York. But we couldn’t forget those afternoons.”

  “If anything, they became more magical, more poignant,” Sears said. “Now we knew what we had lost. An ideal—and a romantic friendship conducted in the light of an ideal.”

  “Sears is right,” Ricky said. “But in the end, we idealized her even more. She became an emblem of grief—of a fractured heart. All we wanted to do was to visit her. We sent her a note of condolence, and we would have gone through fire to see her. What we couldn’t go through was the iron-bound social convention that set her apart. There weren’t any cracks to slip through.”

  “Instead she visited us,” Sears said. “At the apartment your uncle lived in then. Edward was the only one who had his own place. We got together to talk and drink applejack. To talk about all the things we were going to do.”

  “And to talk about her,” Ricky said. “Do you know that Ernest Dowson poem: ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion’? Lewis found it and read it to us. That poem went through us like a knife. ‘Thy pale lost lilies.’ It certainly called for more applejack. ‘Madder music and stronger wine.’ What idiots we were. Anyhow, she turned up one night at Edward’s apartment.”

  “And she was wild,” Sears said. “She was frightening. She came in like a typhoon.”

  “She said she was lonely,” Ricky said. “Said she was sick of this damned town and all the hypocrites in it. She wanted to drink and she wanted to dance, and she didn’t care who was shocked. Said this dead little town and all its dead little people could go to hell as far as she was concerned. And if we were men and not little boys, we’d damn the town too.”

  “We were speechless,” Sears said. “There was our unattainable goddess, cursing like a sailor and raging . . . acting like a whore. ‘Madder music and stronger wine.’ That’s what we got, all right. Edward had a little gramophone and some records, and she made us crank it up and put on the loudest jazz he had. She was so vehement! It was crazy—we’d never seen any woman act that way, and for us she was, you know, sort of a cross between the Statue of Liberty and Mary Pickford. ‘Dance with me, you little toad,’ she said to John, and he was so frightened by her that he scarcely dared touch her. Her eyes were just blazing.”

  “I think what she felt was hate,” Ricky said. “For us, for the town, for Stringer. But it was hatred, and it was boiling. A cyclone of hate. She kissed Lewis while they were dancing, and he jumped back like she burned him. He dropped his arms, and she spun off to Edward and grabbed him and made him dance. Her face was terrible—rigid. Edward was always more worldly than the rest of us, but he too was shaken by Eva’s wildness—our paradise was crumbling all around us, and she kicked it into powder with every step. With every glance. She did seem like a devil; like something possessed. You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces—how all that feeling comes out and hits you like a truck? It was like that. ‘Aren’t you little sissies going to drink?’ she said. So we drank.”

  “It was unspeakable,” Sears said. “She seemed twice our size. I think I knew what was coming. There was only one thing that could be coming. We were simply too immature to know how to handle it.”

  “I don’t know if I saw it coming, but it came anyhow,” Ricky said. “She tried to seduce Lewis.”

  “He was the worst possible choice,” Sears said. “Lewis was only a boy. He may have kissed a gal before that night, but he certainly had done no more than that. We all loved Eva, but Lewis probably loved her most—he was the one who found that Dowson poem, remember. And because he loved her most, her performance that evening and her hatred stunned him.”

  “And she knew it,” Ricky said. “She was delighted. It pleased her, that Lewis was so shocked he could scarcely utter a word. And when she pushed Edward away and went after Lewis, Lewis was frozen stiff with horror. As if he had seen his mother begin to act that way.”

  “His mother?” Sears asked. “Well, I suppose. At least it tells you the depth of his fantasy about her—our fantasy, to be honest. And he was dumbstruck. Eva snaked her arms around him and kissed him. It looked like she was eating half his face. Imagine that—those hate-filled kisses pouring over you, all that fury biting into your mouth. It must have been like kissing a razor. When she drew back her head, Lewis’s face was smeared with lipstick. Normally it would have been a funny sight, but it was somehow horrifying. As if he was smeared with blood.”

  “Edward went up to her and said, ‘Cool down, Miss Galli,’ or something of the sort. She whirled on him, and we felt that enormous pressure of hatred again. ‘You want yours, do you, Edward?’ she said. ‘You can wait your turn. I want Lewis first. Because my little Lewis is so pretty.”

  “And then,” Ricky said, “she turned to me. ‘You’ll get some too, Ricky. And you too, Sears. You all will. But I want Lewis first. I want to show him what that insufferable Stringer Dedham saw when he peeked through my windows.’ And she started to take off her blouse.”

  “‘Please, Miss Galli,’ Edward said,” Sears remembered, “but she told him to shut up and finished taking off her blouse. She wore no bra. Her breasts were in period. Small and tight, like little apples. She looked incredibly lascivious. ‘Now, pretty little Lewis, why don’t we see what you can do?’ She began eating his face again.”

  Ricky said, “So we all thought we knew what Stringer had seen through her window. Eva Galli making love with another man. That, as much as her nakedness and what she was doing to Lewis, was a moral shock. We were hideously embarrassed. Finally Sears and I took a shoulder apiece and pulled her away from Lewis. Then she really swore. It was incredibly ugly. ‘Can’t you wait for it, you little so and sos and et ceteras and et ceteras?’ She began unbuttoning her skirt while she swore at us. Edward was nearly in tears. ‘Eva,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ She dropped her skirt and stepped out of it. ‘What’s wrong, you pansy, afraid to see what I look like?”

  “We were miles out of our depth,” Sears continued. “She pulled off her slip. She went dancing up to your uncle. ‘I think I’ll take a bite out of you, little Edward,’ she said and leaned toward him—toward his neck. And he slapped her.”

  “Hard,” Ricky said. “And she slapped him back even harder. She put all her weight behind it. It sounded as loud as a gun going off. John and Sears and I practically fainted. We were helpless. We couldn’t move.”

  “If we could have, we might have stopped Lewis,” Sears said. “But we stood like tin soldiers and watched him. He took off like an airplane—he just flew across the room and tackled her. He was sobbing and slobbering and wailing—he had snapped. He gave her a real football tackle. They went down like a bombed building. And they made a noise as loud as Black Monday’s crash. E
va never got up.”

  “Her head hit the edge of the fireplace,” Ricky said. “Lewis crawled up on her back and kneeled over her and raised his fists, but even he saw the blood coming out of her mouth.”

  Both old men were panting.

  * * *

  “So that was that,” Sears said. “She was dead. Naked and dead, with the five of us standing around like zombies. Lewis vomited on the floor, and the rest of us were close to it. We could not believe what had happened—what we had done. It’s no excuse, but we really were in shock. I think we just vibrated in the silence for a while.”

  “Because the silence seemed immense,” Ricky said. “It closed in on us like—like the snow out there. Finally Lewis said, ‘We’ll have to get the police.’ ‘No,’ Edward said. ‘We’ll all go to jail. For murder.’

  “Sears and I tried to tell him that no one had committed murder, but Edward said ‘How will you like being disbarred then? Because that’ll happen.’ John checked her for pulse and respiration, but of course there was none. ‘I think it’s murder,’ he said. ‘We’re sunk.’”

  “Ricky asked what we were supposed to do,” Sears said, “and John said, ‘There’s only one thing we can do. Hide her body. Hide it away where it won’t be found.’ We all looked at her body, and at her bloody face, and we all felt defeated by her—she had won. That’s how it felt. Her hatred had provoked us to something very like murder, if not murder under the law. And now we were talking about concealing our act—both legally and morally, a damning step. And we agreed to it.”

  Don asked, “Where did you decide to hide her body?”

  “There was an old pond five or six miles out of town. A deep pond. It’s not there anymore. It was filled in and they built a shopping center on the land. Must have been twenty feet deep.”

  “Lewis’s car had a flat tire,” Sears said, “so we wrapped the body in a sheet and left him there with her and went off into town to find Warren Scales. He had come in to shop with his wife, we knew. He was a good soul, and he liked us. We were going to tell him that we ruined his car, and then buy him a better one—Ricky and I paying the lion’s share.”

  “Warren Scales was the father of the farmer who talks about shooting Martians?” Don asked.

  “Elmer was Warren’s fourth child and first son. He wasn’t even thought of then. We went along downtown and found Warren and promised to bring his car back in an hour or so. Then we went back to Edward’s and carried the girl down the stairs and put her in the car. Tried to put her in the car.”

  Ricky said, “We were so nervous and afraid and numb and we still couldn’t believe what had happened or what we were doing. And we had great difficulty in fitting her into the car. ‘Put her feet in first,’ someone said, and we slid the body along the back seat, and the sheet got all tangled up, and Lewis started to swear about her head being caught and we pulled her halfway out again and John screamed that she moved. Edward called him a damned fool and said he knew she couldn’t move—wasn’t he a doctor?”

  “Yet finally we got her in—Ricky and John had to sit in back with the body. We had a nightmarish trip through town.” Sears paused and looked into the fire. “My God. I was driving. I just remembered that. I was so rattled that I couldn’t remember how to get to the pond. I just backtracked and drove around and went four or five miles out of our way. Finally someone told me how to get there. And we got onto that little dirt road which led down to the pond.”

  “Everything seemed so sharp,” Ricky said. “Every leaf, every pebble—flat and sharp as a drawing in a book. We got out of that car and the world just hit us between the eyes. ‘Do we have to do this?’ Lewis asked. He was crying. Edward said, ‘I wish to God we didn’t.’”

  “Then Edward got back behind the wheel,” Sears said. “The car was ten-fifteen yards from the pond, which fell off almost immediately to its full depth. He switched on the ignition. I cranked it up. Edward retarded the spark, put it in first, popped the clutch and jumped out. The car crawled forward.”

  Both men fell silent again, and looked at each other. “Then—” Ricky said, and Sears nodded. “I don’t know how to say this . . .”

  “Then we saw something,” Sears said. “We hallucinated. Or something.”

  “You saw her alive again,” Don said. “I know.”

  Ricky looked at him with a tired astonishment. “I guess you do. We saw her face through the rear window. She was staring at us—grinning at us. Jeering at us. We damn near dropped dead. The next second the car splashed into the pond and started to sink. We all ran forward and tried to look into the side windows. I was scared silly. I knew she was dead, back in the apartment—I knew it. John jumped into the water just as the car started to go down. When he came back up he said he had looked through the side window and . . .”

  “And he didn’t see anything on the back seat,” Sears told Don. “He said.”

  “The car went down and never came back up. It must be still down there, under thirty thousand tons of fill,” Ricky said.

  “Did anything else happen?” Don asked. “Please try to remember. It’s important.”

  “Two things did happen,” Ricky said. “But I need another drink, after all that.” He poured some of the whiskey into his glass and drank before resuming. “John Jaffrey saw a lynx on the other side of the pond. Then we all saw it. We jumped about a mile—it made us even guiltier, being seen. By even an animal. It switched its tail and disappeared back into the woods.”

  “Fifty years ago, were lynxes common around here?”

  “Not at all. Maybe farther north. Well, that was one. The other was that Eva’s house burned, caught on fire. When we walked back to town we saw the neighbors all standing around, watching the volunteers try to put it out.”

  “Did any of them see how it started?”

  Sears shook his head, and Ricky continued the story. “Apparently it just started by itself. Seeing it made us feel worse, as if we had caused that too.”

  “One of the volunteers said something odd,” Sears remembered. “All of us must have looked so haggard, standing around looking at the fire, and the firemen assumed we were worried about the other houses on the street. He said the other buildings were safe because the fire was getting smaller. He said from what he had seen, it looked like part of the house exploded inward—he couldn’t explain it, but that’s the way it looked to him. And the fire was only in that part of the house, up on the second floor. I saw what he was talking about. You could see some of the beams, and they were buckled in toward the fire.”

  “And the windows!” Ricky said. “The windows were broken, but there was no glass on the ground—they burst inward.”

  “Imploded,” Don said.

  Ricky nodded. “Yes. I couldn’t remember the word. I saw a light bulb do it once. Anyhow, the fire ruined the second floor, but the first floor wasn’t touched by it. A year or two later a family bought the place and had it rebuilt. We were all back at work, and people had stopped wondering what had happened to Eva Galli.”

  “Except for us,” Sears said. “And we didn’t talk about it. We had a few nasty moments when the developers started filling in that pond fifteen-twenty years ago, but they never found the car. They just buried it. And whatever was inside it.”

  “Nothing was inside it,” Don said. “Eva Galli is here now. She’s back. For the second time.”

  “Back?” Ricky said, jerking his head up.

  “She is back as Anna Mostyn. And before, she came here as Ann-Veronica Moore. As Alma Mobley, she met me in California and killed my brother in Amsterdam.”

  “Miss Mostyn?” Sears asked incredulously.

  “Is that what killed Edward?” Ricky asked.

  “I’m sure it is. He probably saw whatever Stringer saw—she let him see it.”

  “I will not believe that Miss Mostyn has anything to do with Eva Galli, Edward or St
ringer Dedham,” Sears said. “The idea is ridiculous.”

  “What is ‘it’?” Ricky asked. “What did she let him see?”

  “Herself changing shape,” Don said. “And I think she planned for him to see it, knowing it would literally scare him to death.” He looked at the two old men. “Here’s another. I think that in all probability she knows we are here tonight. Because we are unfinished business.”

  Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

  14

  “Changing shape,” Ricky said.

  “Changing shape indeed,” Sears said, less charitably. “You’re saying that Eva Galli and Edward’s little actress and our secretary are all the same person?”

  “Not a person. The same being. The lynx you saw on the other side of the pond was probably her too. Not a person at all, Sears. When you felt Eva Galli’s hate that day she came to my uncle’s apartment, I think you perceived the truest part of her. I think she came to provoke the five of you into some kind of destruction—to ruin your innocence. I think it backfired, and you injured her. At least that proves it can be done. Now she has come back to make you pay for it. Me, too. She took a detour from me to get my brother, but she knew that eventually I’d turn up here. And then she would be able to get us one by one.”

  “Was this the idea you said you’d tell us about?” Ricky asked.

  Don nodded.

  “What in the world makes you imagine that it is anything but a particularly bad idea?” Sears asked.

  “Peter Barnes, for one,” Don answered. “I think this will convince you too, Sears. And if it fails, I’ll read you something from a book that should work. But Peter first. He went to Lewis’s house today, as I told you before.” He recounted everything that had happened to Peter Barnes—the trip to the abandoned station, the death of Freddy Robinson, the death of Jim Hardie in Anna Mostyn’s house and the final, terrible events of the morning. “So I think it’s inescapable that Anna Mostyn is the ‘benefactor’ Gregory Bate mentioned. She animates Gregory and Fenny—Peter says he knew intuitively that Gregory was owned by something, that he was like a savage dog obeying an evil master. Together, they want to destroy the whole town. Just like Dr. Rabbitfoot in the novel I was planning.”