by Peter Straub
“I wonder if anyone can lie like a hundred-year-old lawyer,” Hardesty said, and spat once more into the fire. “Okay. Now let me tell you something. I’m going to put out a bulletin on this Anna Mostyn, and that’s all she wrote. That’s all I’m gonna do. You two old buzzards and this kid here can spend the rest of the winter ghost-hunting, for all I’m concerned. You’re screwball—as far as I’m concerned, you’re plumb outa your heads. And if I get some goddamned killer who drinks beer and eats hamburgers and takes his kid out for a drive on Sundays, then I’m gonna call you up and laugh in your faces. And I’ll see that people around here never stop laughing when they hear your names. You understand me?”
“Don’t shout at us, Walt,” Sears said. “I’m sure we all understand what you said. And we understand one thing more.”
“Just what the hell is that?”
“That you’re frightened, Sheriff. But you have a lot of company.”
Conversation with G
7
“Are you really a sailor, G?”
“Um.”
“Did you go lots of places?”
“Yes.”
“How come you can hang around Milburn so long? Don’t you have a ship to get back to?”
“Shore leave.”
“Why don’t you ever want to do anything but go to the movies?”
“No reason.”
“Well, I just like being with you.”
“Um.”
“But why don’t you ever take off your shades?”
“No reason.”
“Someday I’ll take them off.”
“Later.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Conversation with Stella
8
“Ricky, what’s happening to us? What’s happening to Milburn?”
“A terrible thing. I don’t want to tell you now. There’ll be time when it’s all over.”
“You’re frightening me.”
“I’m frightened too.”
“Well, I’m frightened because you’re frightened.” For a time, the Hawthornes simply held each other.
“You know what killed Lewis, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“Well, I discovered an astonishing thing about myself. I can be a coward. So please don’t tell me. I know I asked, but don’t. I just want to know it’ll end.”
“Sears and I will make it end. With young Wanderley’s help.”
“He can help you?”
“He can. He has already.”
“If only this terrible snow would stop.”
“Yes. But it won’t.”
“Ricky, have I given you an awful time?” Stella propped herself up on an elbow to look into his eyes.
“A worse time than most women would,” he said. “But I rarely wanted any other women.”
“I am sorry that I ever had to cause you pain. Ricky, I’ve never cared for any man as much as I have cared for you. Despite my adventures. You know that’s all over, don’t you?”
“I guessed.”
“He was an appalling man. He was in my car, and I just overwhelmingly realized how much better than he you were. So I made him get out.” Stella smiled. “He shouted at me. It seems I am a bitch.”
“At times you certainly are.”
“At times. You know, he must have found Lewis’s body right after that.”
“Ah. I wondered what he was doing up there.”
Silence: Ricky held his wife’s shoulder, aware of her timeless profile beside him. If she had not looked like that, could he have endured it so long? Yet if she had not looked like that, she would not have been Stella—it was an impossible speculation.
“Tell me something, baby,” she breathed. “Who was this other woman you used to want?”
Ricky laughed; then both of them, at least for a time, were laughing.
9
Motionless days: Milburn lay frozen under the accumulating snow. Garage owners took their telephones off their hooks, knowing they already had too much snowplow business with their regular customers; Omar Norris carried a bottle in each of his coat’s deep pockets, and rammed the city’s plow into twice his usual quota of parked cars—he was on triple time, often plowing the same streets two or three times a day, and sometimes when he got back to the municipal garage, Omar was so drunk that he simply rolled onto a cot in the foreman’s office instead of going home. Copies of The Urbanite stood in wrapped bundles at the back of the print room—the newsboys couldn’t get to their collection points. Finally Ned Rowles shut the paper down for a week and sent everybody home with a Christmas bonus. “In this weather,” he told his staff, “nothing’s going to happen except more of this weather. Have yourselves a merry little Christmas.”
But even in an immobilized town, things happen. Dozens of cars went off the roads and stayed nose down for days, buried under fresh drifts. Walter Barnes sat in his television room nursing a succession of drinks and watched an endless round of giveaway shows with the sound turned off. Peter cooked their meals. “I could understand a lot of things,” Barnes told his son, “but I sure as hell can’t understand that.” And went back to his quiet, nonstop drinking. One Friday night, Clark Mulligan put the first reel of Night of the Living Dead back in the projector for the Saturday-noon showing, turned off all the lights, flipped the broken lock on the fire door and decided once again not to bother with it and went back out into the blizzard to find Penny Draeger’s body lying half-covered with snow beside an abandoned car. He slapped her face and rubbed her wrists, but nothing he could do would put breath back in her throat or change the expression on her face—G had finally allowed her to take off his dark glasses.
And Elmer Scales finally met the man from Mars.
10
It happened on the day before Christmas. The date meant nothing to Elmer. For weeks he had done his chores in a blind rage of impatience, cuffing his children if they came too close and leaving the Christmas arrangements to his wife—she had bought the presents and put up the tree, having given up on Elmer until he realized that what he was waiting up for every night didn’t exist and never would wait around to get shot. On Christmas Eve Mrs. Scales and the children went to bed early, leaving Elmer sitting with the shotgun across his lap and his paper and pencil on the table to his right.
Elmer’s chair faced his picture window, and with the lights off, he could see about as far as the barn—a big shape in the darkness. Except for where he had shoveled, the snow was waist-high: enough to slow down any sort of creature who was after more of his animals. Elmer did not need light to scribble down the random lines he thought of: by now he did not even have to look at the paper. He could write while staring out the window.
summers them old trees was high enough to glide from
and
Lord Lord farmings a ballbreaking business
and
somethings not a squirrel scratching under the eaves—
lines he knew would come to nothing, were not poetry, were nonsense, but which he had to write down anyhow because they came into his mind. At times they were joined by other lines, part of a conversation someone was having with his father, and these fragments too he wrote down: Warren, can we borrow your automobile? We promise to bring it back real soon. Real soon. Got urgent business.
Sometimes it seemed his father was there in the dark room with him, trying to explain something about the old plow horses he’d finally replaced with a John Deere, trying to say that those were good horses, you got to care for them boy, they done good by us, those five kids you got could get a lot of pleasure outa nice old horses like that—horses dead for twenty-five years!—trying to tell him something about the car. Watch them two lawyer boys, sonny, banged up my car and lost it, drove it into a swamp or something, gave me cash dollars but nobody can trust boys like that, n
o matter how rich they daddies are—creaky old voice getting at him just like when the old man was alive. Elmer wrote it all down, getting it mixed up with the poetry that wasn’t poetry.
Then he saw a shape gliding toward the window, coming toward him through the snow and night with shining eyes. Elmer dropped the pencil and jerked up the shotgun, nearly firing both barrels through the picture window before he realized that the creature was not running away—that it knew he was there and was coming for him.
Elmer kicked away the chair and stood up. He patted his pockets to make sure he was carrying the extra shells, and then lifted the shotgun and sighted down the barrel, waiting for the thing to get close enough for him to see what it really was.
As it advanced, he began to doubt. If it knew he was there, waiting to blast it all the way back to the barn, why wasn’t it running away? He cocked the hammers. The thing was coming up his walk, going between the two big drifts, and Elmer finally saw that it was much shorter than what he had seen before.
Then it left the walk and came over the snow to press its face against the window and he saw that it was a child.
Elmer lowered the gun, numb with confusion. He could not shoot a child. The face at the window peered in at him with a frantic, lost appeal—it was the face of misery, of every human wretchedness. With those yellow eyes, it begged him to come out, to give it rescue.
Elmer moved to the door, hearing his father’s voice behind him. He paused with his hand on the doorknob, the shotgun dangling from his other hand, and then opened the door.
Freezing air, powdery snow blew in his face. The child was standing on the walk with its head averted. Someone said, “Thank you, Mr. Scales.” Elmer jerked his head back and saw the tall man standing on the snowdrift to his left. Way up there, balancing on the snow like a feather, he was smiling gently down at the farmer. His face was ivory, and his eyes were vibrant accumulations of—it seemed to Elmer—a hundred shades of gold.
He was the most beautiful man Elmer had ever seen, and Elmer knew that he could not shoot him if he stood in front of him for a decade with a loaded and cocked shotgun.
“You—why—uh,” Elmer managed to say.
“Precisely, Mr. Scales,” the beautiful man said, and effortlessly stepped down from the snowbank onto the path. When he was facing Elmer, the golden eyes seemed to shimmer with wisdom.
“You’re no Martian,” Elmer said. He did not even feel the cold anymore.
“Why, of course not. I’m part of you, Elmer. You can see that, can’t you?”
Elmer nodded dumbly.
The beautiful thing put a hand on Elmer’s shoulder. “I’m here to talk to you about your family. You’d like to come with us, wouldn’t you, Elmer?”
Elmer nodded again.
“Then there are a few details you have to take care of. At the moment you’re slightly—encumbered? You cannot imagine the harm done to you by the people around you, Elmer. I am afraid there are things about them you have to know.”
“Tell me,” Elmer said.
“With pleasure. And then you will know what to do?”
Elmer blinked.
11
Some hours later on Christmas Eve, Walt Hardesty woke up in his office and noticed that the brim of his Stetson bore a new stain—he had knocked over a glass while sleeping at his desk, and the small amount of bourbon remaining in the glass had soaked into his hat. “Assholes,” he pronounced, meaning the deputies, then remembered that the deputies had gone home hours before and would not return for two days. He uprighted the glass and blinked around him. The light in his untidy office hurt his eyes but seemed oddly pale—dim and somehow pinkish, as if on some early morning of a Kansas spring forty years before. Hardesty coughed and rubbed his eyes, feeling a little like that bozo in the old story who went to sleep one day and woke up with white hair and a long beard, about a hundred years older. “Rip van Shitstorm,” he muttered, and worked for a while at clearing the phlegm from his throat. After that he tried to blot the hatbrim on his shirtsleeve, but the stain, though still damp, had set. He lifted the hat to his nose: County Fair. Well, what the hell, he thought, and sucked at the coffee-colored stain. Lint, dust, a faint trace of bourbon came into his mouth along with the disagreeable flavor of wet felt.
Hardesty went to the sink in his office, rinsed out his mouth, and bent down to look into the mirror. There was Rip van Shitstorm indeed, the famous hat-sucker, a sight which gave him no pleasure, and he was about to turn away when he finally recorded that behind him and to his left, just visible over his shoulder, the door to the utility cells was open wide.
And that was impossible. He unlocked that door only when Leon Churchill or some other deputy brought in another body waiting to be shipped up to the county morgue—the last time it had been Penny Draeger, her long silky black hair fouled and matted with dirt and snow. Hardesty had lost track of time since the discovery of Jim Hardie’s and Mrs. Barnes’s bodies and the beginning of the heavy snow, but he thought that Penny Draeger must have come in at least two days ago—that door had stayed locked ever since. But now it was open—open to its fullest extent—as if one of the bodies back there had strolled out, seen him sleeping with his head on his cheek, and turned around to go back to its cell and its sheet.
He walked past the file cabinets and his battered desk to the door, swung it back and forth reflectively for a moment, and then went through to the corridor which led to the cells. Here stood a tall metal door which he had not touched since leaving the Draeger girl’s body; and it too was unlocked.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Hardesty said, for while the deputies had keys to the first door, only he had the key to this, and he had not even looked at the metal door for two days. He took the big key from the ring which hung beside his holster, fit it into the slot, and heard the mechanism clicking shut, driving the bolt. He looked at the key for a second, as if trying to see if it would open the door by itself, and then experimented by unlocking it: difficult as ever, the key taking a lot of pressure before it would move. He began to pull the door open, almost afraid to look behind it to the cells.
He remembered the screwball story Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne had tried to tell him: something out of Clark Mulligan’s horror movies. A smokescreen for whatever they really knew, a thing you’d have to be crazy to believe. If they had been younger, he would have swung on both of them. They were ridiculing him, hiding something. If they weren’t lawyers . . .
He heard a noise from the cells.
Hardesty yanked at the door and stepped through onto the narrow concrete walkway between the utility cells. Even in the darkness, the air seemed full of some dirty pink light, hazy and very faint. The bodies lay beneath their sheets, mummies in a museum. He could not have heard a noise, not possibly; unless he had heard the jail itself creaking.
He realized that he was frightened, and detested himself for it. He couldn’t even tell who most of them were any more, there were so many of them, so many sheet-covered bodies . . . but the corpses in the first cell on his right, he knew, were Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes, and those two were never going to make any more noise again ever.
He looked into their cell through the bars. Their bodies were on the hard floor beneath the cot against the far wall, two still white forms. Nothing wrong there. Wait a second, he thought, trying to remember the day he had put them in the cell. Didn’t he put Mrs. Barnes on top of the bunk? He was almost certain . . . he peered in at them. Now wait, now just hold it up a minute here, he thought, and even in the cold of the unheated cells, began to sweat. A white-covered little parcel that could only be the Griffen baby—frozen to death in his own bed—lay on the cot. “Now just wait a goddamned second,” he said, “that can’t be.” He’d put the Griffen baby with de Souza, in a cell on the other side of the corridor.
What he wanted to do was lock the doors behind him again and open a fresh bottle—get out of th
is place right away—but he pushed open the cell door and stepped in. There had to be some explanation: one of the deputies had come back here and rearranged the bodies, made a little more room . . . but that too couldn’t be, they never came back here without him . . . he saw Christina Barnes’s blond hair leaking out from beneath the edge of her sheet. Just a second before the sheet had been tucked securely around her head.
He backed away toward the cell door, now absolutely unable to stand so near the body of Christina Barnes, and when he had reached the threshold of the cell looked wildly around at the other bodies. They all seemed subtly different, as if they’d moved an inch or so, rolled over and crossed their legs while his back had been turned. He stood in the entrance to the cell, now unpleasantly conscious that his back was turned to all those other bodies, but unable to stop looking at Christina Barnes. He thought that even more of her hair was frothing out from beneath the sheet.
When he glanced at the little form on the cot, Hardesty’s stomach slammed up into his throat. As if the dead child had wriggled forward in its sheet, the top of its bald round head protruded through an opening in the sheet—a grotesque parody of birth.
Hardesty jumped backward out of the cell into the dark corridor. Though he could not see them moving, he had a wild, panicky sense that all of the bodies in the cells were in motion—that if he stayed back here in the dark a second longer, they would point toward him like the needles of a dozen magnets.
From an end cell, one he knew was empty, came a dry rasping voiceless sound. A chuckle. This empty sound of mirth unfolded in his mind, more a thought than a sound. Hardesty backed nervelessly down the corridor until he thumped into the edge of the metal door, then whirled around it and slammed it shut.
Edward’s Tapes
12
Don leaned against the window, looking anxiously toward Haven Lane—they should have arrived fifteen or twenty minutes earlier. Unless Sears was in charge. If Sears had insisted on driving, Don had no idea how long the journey from Ricky’s house would take. Crawling at five or ten miles an hour through the streets, risking collision at every intersection and stoplight: at least they could not be killed, going at Sears’s speed. But they could be isolated, away from what they assumed was the safety of Ricky’s and his uncle’s houses. If they were out there alone in the snow, on foot, their car off the road, Gregory could close in, talking amiably, waiting until they moved or ran.