by Peter Straub
Peter Barnes got out of bed that night, having heard the music and imagining that this time the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn and Don’s Dr. Rabbitfoot were making a special trip to get him. (But there was another cause, he knew.) He locked his door and climbed back into bed and pushed his hands down on his ears; but the wild music got louder, coming down his street, and louder still.
It stopped directly in front of his house: sliced off in the middle of a bar, as if a button on a tape recorder had been pushed. The silence was more charged with possibilities than the music had been. Finally Peter could stand the tension no longer, and softly left his bed and looked out of his window onto the street.
Down there, down where he had once seen his father marching off to work looking dumpy and Russian, stood a line of people in bright moonlight. Nothing could stop him from recognizing the figures standing on the fresh snow where the road should have been. They stood gazing up at him with shadowed eyes and open mouths, the town’s dead, and he would never know if they stood there only in his mind or if Gregory Bate and his benefactor had stirred these facsimiles and made them move: or if Hardesty’s jail and a half-dozen graves had opened to let their inhabitants walk. He saw Jim Hardie staring up at his window, and the insurance salesman Freddy Robinson, and old Dr. Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt, and Harlan Bautz—he had died while shoveling snow. Omar Norris and Sears James were beside the dentist. Peter’s heart moved to see Sears—he’d known that was why the music had sounded again. A girl stepped out from behind Sears, and Peter blinked to see Penny Draeger, her once-exciting face as blank and dead as all the others. A small group of children stood mutely beside a tall scarecrow with a shotgun, and Peter nodded, mouthing the word “Scales” to himself: he had not known. Then the crowd divided to let his mother come forward.
She was not the lifelike ghost he had seen in the Bay Tree Market’s parking lot: like the others, his mother was washed of life, too empty even for despair. She seemed animated only by need—need at a level beneath all feeling. Foreshortened by his angle of vision, Christina came forward over the snow to the boundary of their property; she extended her arms up to him and her mouth moved. He knew that no human words could have issued from that mouth, from that driven body—it must have been only a moan or a cry. She, they, all were asking him to come out: or were they pleading for surcease, for sleep? Peter began to cry. They were eerie, not frightening. Standing out there below his window, so pitiably drained, they were as if merely dreamed. The Bates and their benefactor had sent them, but it was him they needed. The tears cold on his cheeks, Peter turned away from the window; so many, so many, so many.
Face up, he lay back on his bed; stared with open eyes at the ceiling. He knew they would go: or would he look out in the morning to see them all still there, frozen into place like snowmen? But the music blared into life again, suddenly as present as a bright slash of red, and yes, they would be drifting away, following Dr. Rabbitfoot’s bright tempo.
* * *
When the music had faded, Peter got up from his bed and checked the window. Yes. Gone. They had not even left marks on the snow.
He went downstairs in the dark; at the foot of the stairs saw a line of light beneath the television room door. Peter gently pushed it open.
The television showed a pattern of moving dots divided by a slowly upward-drifting black bar. The strong brown smell of whiskey filled the room. His father lay back in the chair with his mouth open, tie undone, the skin on his face and neck gray and parchmentlike: breathing with the soft rattling inhalations of an infant. A nearly empty bottle, a full glass in which the ice had melted, sat beside him on the table. Peter went to the television set and switched it off. Then he tenderly shook his father’s arm.
“Mnn.” His father’s eyes opened cloudy and dazed. “Pete. Heard music.”
“You were dreaming.”
“What time?”
“Near one.”
“I was thinking about your mother. You look like her, Pete. My hair, her face. Lucky—could’ve looked like me.”
“I was thinking about her too.”
His father got out of the chair, rubbed his cheeks, and gave Peter a look of unexpected clarity. “You’re grown up, Pete. Funny. I saw it just now—you’re a grown man.”
Peter, embarrassed, said nothing.
“Didn’t want to tell you earlier. Ed Venuti called me up this afternoon—heard it from the state cops. Elmer Scales, farmer a little way out of town? Had his mortgage with us. All those kids? Ed says he killed them all. Shot all the kids and then shot his wife and then killed himself. Pete, this town is going crazy. Just plain sick and crazy.”
“Let’s get upstairs,” Peter said.
6
For some days Milburn stood as still as Humphrey Stalladge’s card game after his wife had uttered a word which seemed obscene to both of them: gravediggers and graves were a taboo subject, when everybody in town knew well or was related to one of the sheet-covered bodies in the jail. People settled down in front of the television and ate pizzas from the freezer and prayed that the power lines would stay up; they avoided one another. If you looked outside and saw your next-door neighbor fighting up his lawn to get to his front door, he looked unearthly, transformed by stress into a wild ragged frontier version of himself: you knew he’d damage anyone who threatened to touch his dwindling store of food. He’d been touched by that savage music you had tried to escape, and if he looked through your Thermopane picture window and saw you his eyes were barely human.
And if good old Sam (assistant manager down at Horn’s Tire Recapping Service and a shark at poker) or good old Ace (retired foreman from a shoe factory in Endicott and a terrible bore, but sent his son through medical school) were not outside, catching your eye with a starved glance which meant take your eyes off me, you bastard, then it was even worse: because what you saw looked not murderous but dead. The streets impassable except on foot, nine-foot, twelve-foot drifts, a constant swirl of white in the air, a glooming sky. The houses on Haven Lane and Melrose Avenue looked vacant, drapes drawn against the desolation outside. In town, snow drifted up to the roofs and sheeted across the streets; windows reflected chill emptiness. Milburn looked as though everyone in town were lying still under a sheet in one of Hardesty’s cells; and when someone like Clark Mulligan or Rollo Draeger, who had lived all his life in Milburn, looked at it now a cold whisper of wind brushed across his heart.
That was in the daytime. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, ordinary people in Milburn, those who had never heard of Eva Galli or Stringer Dedham and thought of the Chowder Society (if they thought of it at all) as a collection of museum pieces, wound up going to bed earlier and earlier—at ten, then at nine-thirty—because the thought of all that black weather out there made them want to close their eyes and not open them again until dawn. If the days were threatening, the nights were ferocious. The wind tore around the corners of the houses, rattling shutters and storm windows, and two or three times a night a big gust flattened itself against the wall like an enormous wave—hard enough to make the lights sway. And it often seemed to ordinary people in Milburn that mixed up with all that banging and hissing outside were voices—voices that couldn’t contain their glee. The Pegram boys heard something tapping at their bedroom window, and in the morning saw the prints of bare feet outside on a drift. Grieving Walter Barnes was not the only person in Milburn who thought the whole town was going crazy.
On the last day of the year the mayor finally got through to all three of the deputies and told them that they had to get Hardesty out of the office and into a hospital—the mayor was afraid that looting would begin soon if they couldn’t get the streets plowed. He appointed Leon Churchill acting sheriff—the biggest and dumbest of the deputies, the one most likely to follow orders—and told Leon that if he didn’t patch up Omar Norris’s plow himself and start clearing the streets, he’d be out of a job permanently. So on
New Year’s Day Leon walked to the municipal garage and found that the plow wasn’t as bad as it had looked. Sears James’s big car had bent some of the plates, but everything still worked. He took the plow out that morning, and in the first hour developed more respect for Omar Norris than he’d ever had for the mayor.
But when the deputies got to the sheriff’s office all they found was an empty room and a smelly cot. Walt Hardesty had disappeared sometime during the previous four days. He had left behind six empty bourbon bottles but no note or forwarding address—certainly nothing to tell of the gut-panic he’d felt one night when he lifted his head from his desk to pour himself another drink and heard more noises from back in the utility cells. At first it had sounded to Hardesty like conversation, and then like the sound a butcher makes when he slaps raw steak on the counter. He hadn’t waited for whoever it was back there to start coming down the corridor, but had put on his hat and his jacket and slipped out into the blizzard. He made it as far as the high school before a hand closed over his elbow and a calm voice said in his ear, “Isn’t it time we met, sheriff?” When Leon’s plow uncovered him, Walt Hardesty looked like a piece of carved ivory: a life-size ivory statue of a ninety-year-old man.
7
Though the weather station predicted more snow all during the first week of January, it held off for two days. Humphrey Stalladge opened up again, working the entire long bar by himself—Annie and Anni, off in the country, were still snowed in—and found business as lively as he had predicted. He put in long days, working sixteen or seventeen hours, and when his wife came in to make hamburgers, he said to her, “Okay. The roads finally get plowed enough so guys can get their cars moving again, and the first place they head to is a bar. Where they stay all day long. Does that make sense to you?”
“You called it,” was all she’d say.
“It’s good drinking weather, anyhow,” Humphrey said.
* * *
Good drinking weather? More than that: Don Wanderley, driving with Peter Barnes to the Hawthorne house, thought that this dark gray day, still punishingly cold, was like the weather inside a drunk’s mind. It had none of the uncanny flashes of brightness he had seen in Milburn earlier in the winter: no doorposts or chimneys gleamed, no sudden colors jumped forward. There were none of these magician’s tricks. Everything that was not white was blurry in the gray clinging weather; with no true shadows and a hidden sun, everything looked heavily shadowed.
He glanced over his shoulder at the rolled-up parcel on the back seat. His poor weapons, found in Edward’s house. They were almost childishly crude. Now that he had a plan and the three of them were going to fight, even the depressive weather seemed to imply their defeat. He and a tense seventeen-year-old boy and an old man with a bad cold: for a moment it seemed comically hopeless. But without them, hope did not exist.
“The deputy doesn’t plow as good as Omar,” Peter said beside him. It was merely to interrupt the silence, but Don nodded: the boy was right. The deputy had trouble holding the plow at a steady level, and when he was through with a street it had an oddly terraced look. The three-and four-inch variations in the road made the car jounce like a fairground trolley. On either side of the street they could see mailboxes tilted crazily into the snowbanks—Churchill had skittled them with the edge of the plow.
“This time we’re going to do something,” the boy said, making it half a question.
“We’re going to try,” Don said, glancing at the boy. Peter looked like a young soldier who’d seen a dozen firefights in two weeks—looking at him, you could taste the bitterness of spent adrenalin.
“I’m ready,” he said, and while Don heard the firmness in it he also heard ragged nerves and wondered if the boy, who had done so much more than he and Ricky Hawthorne, could endure any more.
“Wait until you hear what I have in mind,” Don said. “You might not want to go through with it. And that would be okay, Peter. I’d understand.”
“I’m ready,” the boy repeated, and Don could feel him shivering. “What are we going to do?”
“Go back into Anna Mostyn’s house,” he answered. “I’ll explain it at Ricky’s.”
Peter slowly exhaled. “I’m still ready.”
8
“It was part of the message on the Alma Mobley tape,” Don said. Ricky Hawthorne was leaning forward on his couch, looking not at Don but at the box of Kleenex before him. Peter Barnes glanced at him momentarily, and then turned sideways again, resting his head against the back of the couch. Stella Hawthorne had disappeared upstairs, but not before giving Don a look of the clearest warning.
“It was a message for me, and I didn’t want to subject anyone else to it,” he explained. “Especially not you, Peter. You can both imagine the kind of thing it was.”
“Psychological warfare,” Ricky said.
“Yes. But I’ve been thinking about one thing she said. It . . . call it. It could explain where she is. I think she meant it as a clue, or a hint, or whatever you want to call it.”
“Go on,” said Ricky.
“She said that we—human beings—are at the mercy of our imaginations, and if we want to look for her, or for any of them, we should look in the places of our dreams. In the places of our imaginations.”
“‘In the places of our dreams,’” Ricky repeated. “I see. She means Montgomery Street. Well. I should have known we weren’t through with that house.” Peter extended one arm along the top of the couch and rolled deeper into it: rejection. “We deliberately didn’t bring you the first time we went there,” Ricky said to the boy. “Of course now you have even more reason for not wanting to go. How do you feel about it?”
“I have to go,” Peter said.
“It almost has to be what she means,” Ricky continued, still gently probing the boy with his eyes. “Sears and Lewis and John and I all had dreams about that house. We dreamed about it almost every night for a year. And when Sears and Don and I went there, when we found your mother and Jim, she didn’t attack us physically, but she attacked our imaginations. If it’s any consolation, the thought of going back there scares the hell out of me too.”
Peter nodded. “Sure it does.” Finally, as if another’s admission of fear gave him courage, he leaned forward. “What’s in the package, Don?”
Don reached down and picked up the rolled blanket beside his chair. “Just two things I found in the house. We might be able to use them.” He lay the bundle on the table and unrolled it. All three of them looked at the long-handled axe and the hunting knife which now lay uncovered on the blanket.
“I spent the morning sharpening and oiling them. The axe was rusty—Edward used it for his firewood. The knife was a gift from an actor—he used it in a film and gave it to my uncle when his book was published. It’s a beautiful knife.”
Peter leaned over and picked up the knife. “It’s heavy.” He turned it over in his hands: an eight-inch blade with a cruel dip along the top end and a groove from tip to base, fitted with a hand-carved handle, the knife was obviously designed for one purpose only. It was a machine for killing. But no, Don remembered; that was how it looked; not what it was. It had been made to fit an actor’s hand: to photograph well. But beside it the axe was brutal and graceless. “Ricky has his own knife,” Don said. “Peter, you can take the Bowie knife. I’ll carry the axe.”
“Are we going there right away?”
“Is there any point in waiting?”
Ricky said, “Hang on. I’ll go upstairs and tell Stella that we’re going out. I’ll say that if we don’t come back in an hour, she should call whoever is at the sheriff’s office these days and have a car sent to the Robinson house.” He left them and began going up the staircase.
Peter reached forward and touched the knife. “It won’t take an hour,” he said.
9
“We’ll go in the back again,” Don said to Ricky, bending forward to
speak into his ear. They were just outside the house. Ricky nodded. “We’ll have to be as quiet as we can.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Ricky. He sounded older and weaker than Don had ever heard him. “You know, I saw the movie that knife came from. Big scene—a long scene about it being forged. Man making it melted down a piece of asteroid or meteor he had—used it in the knife. Supposed to have—” Ricky stopped and breathed heavily for a moment, making sure that Peter Barnes was listening to him. “Supposed to have special properties. Hardest substance anyone ever saw. Like magic. From space.” Ricky smiled. “Typical movie foolishness. Looks like a dandy knife, though.”
Peter pulled it from the pocket of his duffel coat and for a second each of them—almost embarrassed to be caught in such childishness—looked at it again. “Outer space worked wonders for Colonel Bowie,” Ricky said. “In the movie.”
“Bowie—” Peter started to say, remembering something from a grade-school history class, and then clamped his mouth shut on the rest of the sentence. Bowie died at the Alamo. He swallowed, shook his head, and turned toward the Galli house. It was what he should have learned from Jim Hardie: good magic lay only in human effort, but bad magic could come from around any corner.