by Peter Straub
This December Milburn looked less like a village on a Christmas card than a village under siege. The Dedham girls’ horses, forgotten even by Nettie, starved and died in their stables. This December, people stayed in their houses more than they were used to, and tempers wore thin—some broke. Philip Kneighler, one of the new Milburnites, went inside and beat up his wife after his snow blower broke down on his driveway. Ronnie Byrum, a nephew of Harlan Bautz’s home on leave from the Marines, objected to the harmless remarks of a man standing beside him in a bar and broke his nose: he would have broken his jaw if two of Ronnie’s old high school buddies had not pinned his arms back. Two sixteen-year-old boys named Billy Byrum (Ronnie’s brother) and Anthony “Spacemaker” Ortega concussed a younger boy who insisted on talking through the eight-twenty-five showing of Night of the Living Dead at Clark Mulligan’s Rialto Theater. All over Milburn couples locked together in their houses quarreled about their babies, their money, their television programs. A deacon of the Holy Ghost Presbyterian Church—the same church of which Lewis’s father had once been pastor—locked himself in the unheated building one night two weeks before Christmas and wept and cursed and prayed all night because he thought he was going crazy: he thought he had seen the naked boy Jesus standing on a snowdrift outside the church windows, begging him to come out.
At the Bay Tree Market, Rhoda Flagler pulled a clump of blond hair out of the scalp of Bitsy Underwood because Bitsy had challenged her right to the last three cans of puréed pumpkin: with the trucks unable to make deliveries, all the stocks were getting low. In the Hollow, an unemployed bartender named Jim Blazek knifed and killed a mulatto short-order cook named Washington de Souza because a tall man with a shaven head who dressed like a sailor had told Blazek that de Souza was messing around with his wife.
During the sixty-two days from the first of December to the thirty-first of January, these ten citizens of Milburn died of natural causes: George Fleischner (62), heart attack; Whitey Rudd (70), malnutrition; Gabriel Fish (58), exposure; Omar Norris (61), exposure following concussion; Marion Le Sage (73), stroke; Ethel Birt (76), Hodgkin’s Disease; Dylan Griffen (5 months), hypothermia; Harlan Bautz (55), heart attack; Nettie Dedham (81), stroke; Penny Draeger (18), shock. Most of these died during the worst of the snows, and their bodies, along with those of Washington de Souza and several others, had to be kept, stacked and covered with sheets in one of the unused utility cells in Walter Hardesty’s tiny jail—the wagon from the morgue in the county seat couldn’t make it into Milburn.
The town closed in on itself, and even the ice skating on the river died out. At first, the skating went as it always had: every hour of daylight saw twenty or thirty high school students, mixed in with kids from elementary school, dashing back and forth, playing crack the whip and skating backward: a print by Currier and Ives. But if the high school juniors and seniors who swept off the ice never noticed the death of three old women and four old men and did not much mourn the passing of their dentist, another loss hit them like a slap in the face as soon as they glided out onto the frozen river. Jim Hardie had been the best skater Milburn had ever seen, and he and Penny Draeger had worked out tandem routines which looked to their contemporaries as good as anything you saw in the Olympics. Peter Barnes had been nearly as good, but he refused to come skating this year; even when the weather paused, Peter stayed at home. But Jim was the one they missed: even when he showed up in the morning with bloodshot eyes and a stubble on his cheeks, he had enlivened them all—you couldn’t watch him without trying to skate a little better yourself. Now even Penny did not show up. Like Peter Barnes, she had drifted away into privacy. Soon, most of the other skaters did the same: every day more snow had to be shoveled off the river, and some of the boys doing the shoveling thought that Jim Hardie was not in New York after all; they had a feeling that something had happened to Jim—something they didn’t want to think about too much. Days before it was proven, they knew that Jim Hardie was dead.
One day during his afternoon break Bill Webb picked up his battered old hockey skates from his locker behind the restaurant and walked over to the river and looked dully at the two untouched feet of fresh snow blanketing it. For this winter, the skating was dead too.
Clark Mulligan never bothered to book the new Disney film he always brought in at Christmas, but ran horror movies all through the season. Some nights he had seven or eight customers, some nights only two or three; other nights he started up the first reel of Night of the Living Dead and knew he was showing it only to himself. Saturday’s matinee usually brought out ten or fifteen kids who had already seen the movie but couldn’t think of anything else to do. He began letting them in for free. Every day he lost a little more money, but at least the Rialto got him away from home; as long as the power lines stayed up, he could keep warm and busy, and that was all he wanted. One night he walked down from the booth to see if anybody had bothered to sneak in through the fire door, and saw Penny Draeger sitting beside a wolf-faced man wearing sunglasses: Clark hurried back up to his projection booth, but he was sure the man had grinned at him before he could turn away. He didn’t know why, but that frightened him—badly.
For the first time in most of their lives, Milburn people saw the weather as malevolent, a hostile force that would kill them if they let it. Unless you got up on your roof and knocked off the snow, the rafter beams would crack and buckle under its weight, and in ten minutes your house would be a frigid ruined shell, uninhabitable until spring; the wind chill factor sometimes brought the temperature down to sixty below, and if you stayed outside for much longer than it took to run from your car to your house, you could hear the wind chuckling in your inner ear, knowing that it had you where it wanted you. That was one enemy, the worst they knew. But after Walt Hardesty and one of his deputies identified the bodies of Jim Hardie and Christina Barnes, and word got around about the condition of their bodies, Milburn people drew their drapes and switched on their television instead of going out to their neighbor’s party and wondered if it was a bear after all that killed handsome Lewis Benedikt. And when, like Milly Sheehan, they saw that a line of snow had worked in around the storm window and lay like a taunt on the sill, they began to think about what else might get in. So they, like the town, closed in; shut down; thought about survival. A few remembered Elmer Scales standing in front of the statue, waving his shotgun and ranting about Martians. Only four people knew the identity of an enemy more hostile than the murderous weather.
Sentimental Journey
2
“I see on the news that it’s worse in Buffalo,” Ricky said, talking more for its own sake than because he thought the other two would be interested. Sears was driving his Lincoln in extremely Sears-like style: all the way to Edward’s house where they had picked up Don, and now back to the west side of town, he had hunched over the wheel and proceeded at fifteen miles an hour. He blew his horn at every intersection, warning all comers that he did not intend to stop.
“Stop babbling, Ricky,” he said, and blasted his horn and rolled across Wheat Row to the north end of the square.
“You didn’t have to blow the horn, that was a green light,” Ricky pointed out.
“Humpf. Everybody else is going too fast to stop.”
Don, in the back seat, held his breath and prayed that the traffic lights on the other end of the square would turn green before Sears reached them. When they passed the steps to the hotel, he saw the lights facing Main Street flash to amber; the lights switched to green just as Sears put the entire palm of his hand down on the button and floated the long car like a galleon onto Main Street.
Even with the headlights on, the only objects truly visible were traffic lights and the red and green pinpoints of illumination on the Christmas tree. All else dissolved in swirling white. The few approaching cars appeared first as streamers of yellow light, then as shapeless forms like large animals: Don could see their colors only when they were immediately a
longside, a proximity Sears acknowledged with another imperious blast of the Lincoln’s horn.
“What do we do when we get there, if we ever do?” Sears asked.
“Just have a look around. It might help.” Ricky looked at him in a way that was as good as speaking, and Don added, “No. I don’t think she’ll be there. Or Gregory.”
“Did you bring a weapon?”
“I don’t own a weapon. Did you?”
Ricky nodded; held up a kitchen knife. “Foolish, I know, but . . .”
Don did not think it was foolish; for a moment he wished that he too had a knife, if not a flamethrower and a grenade.
“Just out of curiosity, what are you thinking about at this moment?” Sears asked.
“Me?” Don asked. The car began to drift slowly sideways, and Sears turned the wheel very slightly to correct it.
“Yes.”
“I was just remembering something that used to happen back when I was a prep school student in the Midwest. When we had to choose our colleges, the staff would give us talks about ‘the East.’ ‘The East’ was where they wanted us to go—it was simple snobbery, and my school was very old-fashioned in that way, but the school would look better if a big proportion of its seniors went on to Harvard or Princeton or Cornell—or even a state university on the East Coast. Everybody pronounced the word the way a Muslim must pronounce the word Mecca. And that’s where we are now.”
“Did you go East?” Ricky asked. “I don’t know if Edward ever mentioned it.”
“No. I went to California, where they believed in mysticism. They didn’t drown witches, they gave them talk shows.”
“Omar never got around to plowing Montgomery Street,” Sears said; Don, surprised, turned to his window and saw that while he had talked they had reached the end of Anna Mostyn’s street. Sears was right. On Maple, where they were, hard-packed snow about two inches deep showed the treads and deep grooves of Omar Norris’s plow; it was like a white riverbed cut through high white banks. On Montgomery, the snow lay four feet deep. Already filling up with fresh snowfall, deep indentations down the middle of the road indicated where two or three people had fought through to Maple.
Sears turned off the ignition, leaving the parking lights on. “If we’re going through with this, I see no point in waiting.”
The three men stepped out onto the glassy surface of Maple Street. Sears turned up the fur collar of his coat and sighed. “To think I once balked at stepping into the two or three inches of snow on Our Vergil’s field.”
“I hate the thought of going into that house again,” Ricky said.
All three could see the house through the swirls of falling snow. “I’ve never actually broken into a house before,” Sears said. “How do you propose to do it?”
“Peter said that Jim Hardie broke a pane of glass in the back door. All we have to do is reach in and turn the knob.
“And if we see them? If they are waiting for us?”
“Then we try to put up a better fight than Sergeant York,” Ricky said. “I suppose. Do you remember Sergeant York, Don?”
“No,” Don said. “I don’t even remember Audie Murphy. Let’s go.” He stepped into the drift left by the plow. His forehead was already so cold it felt like a metal plate grafted onto his skin. When he and Ricky were both on top of the drift they reached down to Sears, who stood with his arms extended like a small boy, and pulled him forward. Sears lumbered forward and up like a whale taking a reef, and then all three men stepped from the top of the drift into the deep snow on Montgomery Street.
The snow came up past their knees. Don realized that the two old men were waiting for him to begin, so he turned around and began to move up the street toward Anna Mostyn’s house, doing his best to step in the deep depressions made by an earlier walker. Ricky followed, using the same prints. Sears, off to the side and stumping through unbroken snow, came last. The bottom of his black coat swept along after him like a train.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the house. When all three were standing in front of the building, Don again saw the two older men looking at him and knew that they would not move until he made them do it. “At least it’ll be warmer inside,” he said.
“I just hate the thought of going in there again,” Ricky said, not very loudly.
“So you said,” Sears reminded him. “Around the back, Don?”
“Around the back.”
Once again he led the way. He could hear Ricky sneezing behind him as each of them plowed on through snow nearly waist-high. Like Jim Hardie and Peter Barnes, they stopped at the side window and looked in; saw only a dark empty chamber. “Deserted,” Don said, and continued around to the rear of the house.
He found the window Jim Hardie had broken, and just as Ricky joined him on the back step, reached in and turned the handle of the kitchen door. Breathing heavily, Sears joined them.
“Let’s get in out of the snow,” Sears said. “I’m freezing.” It was one of the bravest statements Don had ever heard, and he had to answer it with a similar courage. He pushed the door and stepped into the kitchen of Anna Mostyn’s house. Sears and Ricky came in close behind him.
“Well, here we are,” Ricky said. “To think it’s been fifty years, or near enough. Should we split up?”
“Afraid to, Ricky?” Sears said, impatiently brushing snow off his coat. “I’ll believe in these ghouls when I see them. You and Don can look at the rooms upstairs and on the landings. I’ll do this floor and the basement.”
And if the earlier statement had been an act of courage, this, Don knew, was a demonstration of friendship: none of them wanted to be alone in the house. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be surprised if we find anything too. We might as well start.”
Sears led as they left the kitchen and went into the hall. “Go on,” he said—commanded. “I’ll be fine. This way will save time, and the sooner we get it over with, the better.” Don was already on the stairs, but Ricky had turned questioningly back to Sears. “If you see anything, give a shout.”
3
Don and Ricky Hawthorne were alone on the staircase. “It didn’t used to be like this,” Ricky said. “Not at all, you know. This place used to be so beautiful, then. The rooms downstairs—and her room, up there on the landing. Just beautiful.”
“So were Alma’s rooms,” Don said. He and Ricky could hear Sears’s footsteps on the boards of the lower room. The sound brought a new awareness flooding across Ricky’s features. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me. Your whole face changed.”
Ricky blushed. “This is the house we dream about. Our nightmares are set here. Bare boards, empty rooms—the sound of something moving around, like Sears just now, down below. That’s how the nightmare begins. When we dream it, we’re in a bedroom—up there.” He pointed up the staircase. “On the top floor.” He went up a few steps. “I have to go up there. I have to see the room. It might help to—to stop the nightmare.”
“I’ll go with you,” Don said.
When they reached the landing, Ricky stopped short. “Didn’t Peter tell you this was where—?” He pointed to a dark smear down the side of the wall.
“Where Bate killed Jim Hardie.” Don swallowed involuntarily. “Let’s not stay here any longer than we have to.”
“I don’t mind splitting up,” Ricky hastily said. “Why don’t you take Eva’s old bedroom and the rooms on the next landing, and I’ll prowl around on the top floor? It’ll go faster that way. If I find anything, I’ll call for you. I want to get out of here too—I can’t stand being here.”
Don nodded, agreeing with him wholeheartedly. Ricky continued up the stairs, and Don climbed to a half-landing and swung open the door to Eva Galli’s bedroom.
* * *
Bare, desolate; then the noises of an invisible crowd: hushing feet and whispers, ratt
ling papers. Don hesitantly took a step deeper into the empty room, and the door crashed shut behind him.
“Ricky?” he said, and knew that his voice was no louder than the whispers behind him. The dim light guttered; and from the moment he could no longer see the walls, Don felt that he was in a much larger room—the walls and ceiling had flown out, expanded, leaving him in a psychic space he did not know how to leave. A cold mouth pressed against his ear and said or thought the word “Welcome.” He swung around to the source of the sound, thinking belatedly that the mouth, like the greeting, had been only a thought. His fist met air.
As if playfully to punish him, someone tripped him, and he landed painfully on hands and knees. A carpet met his hands. This gradually took on color—dark blue—and he realized that he could see again. Don lifted his head and saw a white-haired man in a blazer the color of the carpet and gray slacks above mirror-polished black loafers standing before him: the blazer covered a prosperous little paunch. The man smiled down in a rueful fashion and offered him a hand; behind him other men moved. Don knew immediately who he was.
“Have a little accident, Don?” he asked. “Here. Take my hand.” He pulled him upright. “Glad you could make it. We were waiting for you.”