Ghost Story

Ghost Story

By

Peter Straub

Ghosts are always hungry.

-R. D. Jameson

Prologue - Driving South

The chasm was merely one of the

orifices of that pit of blackness

that lies beneath us, everywhere.

The Marble Faun,

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

1

What was the worst thing you've ever done?

I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me… the most dreadful thing…

2

Because he thought that he would have problems taking the child over the border into Canada, he drove south, skirting the cities whenever they came and taking the anonymous freeways which were like a separate country, as travel was itself like a separate country. The sameness both comforted and stimulated him, so that on the first day he was able to drive for twenty hours straight through. They ate at McDonald's and at root-beer stands: when he was hungry, he left the freeway and took a state highway parallel to it, knowing that a drive-in was never more than ten or twenty miles away. Then he woke up the child and they both gnawed at their hamburgers or chili dogs, the child never speaking more than to tell him what she wanted. Most of the time she slept. That first night, the man remembered the light bulbs illuminating his license plates, and though this would later prove to be unnecessary swung off the freeway onto a dark country road long enough to unscrew the light bulbs and toss them into a field. Then he took handfuls of mud from beside the road and smeared them over the plates. Wiping his hands on his trousers, he went back around to the driver's side and opened the door. The child was sleeping with her back straight against the seat, her mouth closed. She appeared to be perfectly composed. He still did not know what he was going to have to do to her.

In West Virginia, he came awake with a jerk and realized that for some seconds he had been driving in his sleep. "We're going to pull up and take a nap." He left the freeway outside of Clarksburg and drove on a state road until he saw against the sky a red revolving sign with the words PIONEER VILLAGE on it in white. He was keeping his eyes open only by will power. His mind did not feel right: it seemed that tears were hanging just behind his eyes and that very soon he would involuntarily begin to weep. Once in the parking lot of the shopping center, he drove to the row farthest from the entrance and backed the car up against a wire fence. Behind him was a square brick factory which manufactured plastic animal replicas for display-for Golden Chicken trucks. The factory's asphalt yard was half-filled with giant plastic chickens and cows. In their midst stood a giant blue ox. The chickens were unfinished, larger than the cows and dully white.

Before him lay this nearly empty section of the lot, then a thick cluster of cars in rows, and then the series of low sandstone-colored buildings which was the shopping center.

"Can we look at the big chickens?" the girl asked.

He shook his head. "We're not getting out of the car, we're just going to sleep." He locked the doors and rolled up the windows. Under the child's steady unexpectant gaze he bent over, felt under the seat and drew out a length of rope. "Hold your hands out," he said.

Almost smiling, she held out her small hands, balled into fists. He pulled them together and wound the rope twice about her wrists, knotted it, and then tied her ankles together. When he saw how much rope was left, he held out the surplus with one arm and roughly pulled the child to him with the other. Then he wound the rope about them both, looping them together, and made the final knot after he had stretched out across the front seat.

She was lying on top of him, her hands bunched in the middle of his stomach and her head on his chest. She breathed easily and regularly, as if she had expected no more than what he had done. The clock on the dashboard said that it was five-thirty, and the air was just beginning to turn cooler. He hitched his legs forward and leaned his head back against the headrest. To the noises of traffic, he fell asleep.

And awakened it seemed immediately, his face filmed with sweat, the faintly acrid, greasy odor of the child's hair in his nostrils. It was dark now; he must actually have slept for hours. They had gone undiscovered- imagine being found in a shopping center parking lot in Clarksburg, West Virginia, with a little girl tied to your sleeping body! He groaned, shifted himself to one side and woke the girl. Like him, she came immediately into wakefulness. She bent back her head and regarded him. There was no fear, only intensity in her gaze. He hurriedly untied the knots, dragged the rope from around them; his neck complained when he sat upright. "You want to go to the bathroom?" he asked.

She nodded. "Where?"

"Beside the car."

"Right here? In the parking lot?"

"You heard me."

He thought again that she nearly smiled. He looked at the girl's intense small face, framed in black hair. "You'll let me?"

"I'm going to be holding onto your hand."

"But you won't look?" For the first time, she showed concern.

He shook his head.

She moved her hand to the lock on her door, but he shook his head again and took her wrist and held it tightly. "Out on my side," he said and pulled up his own lock and got out, still clutching the girl's bony wrist. She began to edge sideways toward the door, a girl of seven or eight with short black hair, wearing a little dress of some thin pink material. On her otherwise bare feet were faded blue canvas sneakers, fraying at the tops of the heels. Childishly, she put one bare leg down first and then wiggled around to swing the other out of the car.

He pulled her around to the factory fence. The girl bent her head back and looked up. "You promised. You won't watch."

"I won't watch," he said.

And for a moment he did not watch, but let his head roll back as she stooped, forcing him to lean sideways. His eyes drifted over the grotesque plastic animals behind the fence. Then he heard some fabric-cotton- moving over skin, and looked down. Her left arm was extended so that she was as far from him as she could get. The cheap pink dress was pulled up over her waist. She too was looking at the plastic animals. When the girl was finished, he took his eyes from her, knowing that she would glance at him. She stood up and waited for him to tell her what to do next. He pulled her back toward the car.

"What do you do for a living?" she asked.

He laughed out loud with surprise: this cocktail-party question! "Nothing."

"Where are we going? Are you taking me someplace?"

He opened the door and stood aside as she climbed back into the car. "Someplace," he said. "Sure, I'm taking you someplace." He got in beside her, and she moved across the seat to the door.

"Where?"

"We'll see when we get there."

Again he drove all night, and again the girl slept most of the time, coming awake to stare out the windshield (she always slept sitting up, like a doll in her tennis shoes and pink dress) and to ask him odd questions. "Are you a policeman?" she asked him once, and then after seeing an exit sign, "What's Columbia?"

"It's a city."

"Like New York?"

"Yes."

"Like Clarksburg?"

He nodded.

"Are we always going to sleep in the car?"

"Not always."

"Can I play the radio?"

He said yes, and she leaned forward and twisted the knob. The car was invaded by static, two or three voices speaking at the same time. She punched another button and the same crowded hiss erupted from the speaker. "Twist the dial," he said. Frowning, her face concentrated, she began slowly to turn the selector. In a moment she had locked onto a clear signal, Dolly Parton. "I love this," she told him.

So for hours they drove south through the songs and rhythms of country music, the stations weakening and changing, the disk jockeys swapping names and accents, the sponsors succeeding each other in a revolving list of insurance companies, toothpaste, soap, Dr Pepper and Pepsi-Cola, acne preparations, funeral parlors, petroleum jelly, bargain wristwatches, aluminum siding, dandruff shampoos: but the music remained the same, a vast and self-conscious story, a sort of seamless repetitious epic in which women married truckers and no-good gamblers but stood by them until they got a divorce and the men sat in bars plotting seductions and how to get back home, and they came together hot as two-dollar pistols and parted in disgust and worried about the babies. Sometimes the car wouldn't start, sometimes the TV was busted; sometimes the bars closed down and threw you out onto the street, your pockets turned inside out. There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliché, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America's bottom dogs.

Once he asked her, "Have you ever heard of a man named Edward Wanderley?"

She did not reply but regarded him levelly.

"Have you?"

"Who's he?"

"He was my uncle," he said, and the girl smiled at him.

"How about a man named Sears James?"

She shook her head, still smiling.

"A man named Ricky Hawthorne?"

Again she shook her head. There was no point in continuing. He did not know why he had bothered to ask in the first place. It was even possible that she had never heard those names. Of course she had never heard them.

Still in South Carolina, he thought that a highway patrolman was following him: the police car was twenty yards behind, keeping the same distance whatever the man did. He thought he could see the state cop speaking into his radio; immediately he cut his speed by five miles an hour and changed lanes, but the police car would not pass. He felt a deep trembling in his chest and abdomen: he visualized the police car gaining on him, turning on its siren, forcing him to the side of the road. Then the questions would begin. It was about six in the afternoon, and the freeway was crowded: he felt himself being drawn helplessly along with the traffic, at the mercy of whoever was in the police car-helpless, trapped. He had to think. He was simply being drawn on toward Charleston, pulled by the traffic through miles of flat scrubby country: suburbs were always visible in the distance, miserable collections of little houses with frame garages. He could not remember the number of the freeway he was on. In the rear-view mirror, behind the long row of cars, behind the police car, an old truck sent out a tall column of black smoke through a chimneylike pipe beside the engine. He feared the patrolman cruising up beside him and shouting: "Get over!" And he could imagine the girl shouting, her high tinny voice shouting, "He made me come with him, he ties me onto him when he sleeps!" The southern sun seemed to assault his face, to grind at his pores. The state patrolman swung out into the next lane and began to draw up toward him.

-Asshole, that's not your girl, who is that girl?

Then they would put him in a cell and begin to beat him, working on him methodically with nightsticks, turning his skin purple…

But none of that happened.

3

Shortly after eight o'clock he pulled over to the side of the road. It was a narrow country road, loose red dirt piled on the shoulders, as if it had been only recently dug out of the earth. He was no longer sure of what state he was in, South Carolina or Georgia: it was as though these states were fluid, as if they-and all the rest of them-could leak over into one another, pushing forward like the highways. It all looked wrong. He was in the wrong place: no one could live here, no one could think here, in this brutal landscape. Unfamiliar vines, green and ropelike, struggled up the low bank beside his car. The fuel gauge had been on E for the past half hour. All of it was wrong, all of it. He looked at the girl, this girl he had kidnapped. She was sleeping in that doll-like way, her back straight against the seat and her feet in the ripped sneakers dangling above the floor. She slept too much. Suppose she was sick; suppose she was dying.

She woke as he was watching her. "I have to go to the bathroom again," she said.

"Are you okay? You're not sick, are you?"

"I have to go to the bathroom."

"Okay," he grunted and moved to open his door.

"Let me go by myself. I won't run away. I won't do anything. I promise."

He looked at her serious face, her black eyes set in olive skin.

"Where could I go, anyhow? I don't even know where I am."

"I don't either."

"So?"

It had to happen sometime: he couldn't hold on to her at every moment. "You promise?" he asked, knowing the question was foolish.

She nodded. He said, "All right."

"And you promise you won't drive away?"

"Yes."

She opened the door and left the car. It was all he could do not to watch her, but it was a test, not to watch her. A Test. He wished overwhelmingly that he had her hand trapped in his fist. She could be scrambling up the bank, running off, screaming… but no, she was not screaming. It often happened that the terrible things he imagined, the worst things, did not occur; the world gave a hitch and things went back to the way they had always been. When the girl climbed back into the car he was flooded with relief-it had happened again, no black hole had opened up for him.

He closed his eyes and saw an empty freeway, divided by white lines, unreeling before him.

"I have to find a motel," he said.

She leaned back into the seat, waiting for him to do whatever he wanted. The radio was turned low, and sounds from a station in Augusta, Georgia-a silky, lilting guitar-drifted out. For a moment, an image leaped to his mind-the girl dead, her tongue protruding, her eyes bulging. She gave him no resistance! Then for a moment he was standing-it was as if he were standing-on a street in New York, some street in the East Fifties, one of those streets where well-dressed women walk sheepdogs. Because there was one of those women, walking along. Tall, wearing beautifully faded jeans and an expensive shirt and a deep tan, walking along toward him with her sunglasses pushed to the top of her head. A huge sheepdog padded beside her, wagging its rump. He was nearly close enough to see the freckles exposed by the undone top buttons of the woman's shirt.

Ah.

But then he was right again, he heard the low guitar music, and before he switched on the ignition he patted the top of the girl's head. "Have to get us a motel," he said.

For an hour he just continued, protected by the cocoon of numbness, by the mechanics of driving: he was almost alone on the dark road.

"Are you going to hurt me?" the girl asked.

"How should I know?"

"You won't, I think. You're my friend."

Then it was not "as if' he were on the street in New York, he was on that street, watching the woman with the dog and the suntan come toward him. Again he saw the little random scattering of freckles below her collarbone-he knew how it would taste if he put his tongue there. As often in New York, he could not see the sun, but he could feel it-a heavy, aggressive sun. The woman was a stranger, unimportant… he was not supposed to know her, she was just a type… a taxi went by, he was aware of iron railings on his right side, the lettering on the windows of a French restaurant on the other side of the street. Through the soles of his boots, the pavement sent up heat. Somewhere above, a man was shouting one word over and over. He was there, he was: a portion of his emotion must have shown in his face, for the woman with the dog looked at him curiously and then hardened her face and moved to the outer edge of the sidewalk.

Could she speak? Could someone in whatever sort of experience this was utter sentences, audible ordinary human sentences? Could you talk to the people you met in hallucinations, and would they answer back?

He opened his mouth. "I have to"-to get out, he was going to say, but he was already back in the stalled car. A soggy lump that had once been two potato chips lay on his tongue.

What was the worst thing you've ever done?

The maps seemed to show that he was only a few miles from Valdosta. He drove unthinkingly on, not daring to look at the child and therefore not knowing if she were awake or sleeping, but feeling her eyes on him nonetheless. Eventually he passed a sign which informed him that he was ten miles from the Friendliest City in the South.

It looked like any southern town: a little industry on the way in, machine shops and die-stampers, surreal groups of corrugated metal huts under arc lights, yards littered with cannibalized trucks; further in, wooden houses in need of paint, groups of black men standing on corners, their faces alike in the dark; new roads went scarring through the land, then ended abruptly, weeds already encroaching; in the town proper, the teenagers patrolling endlessly, vacantly in their old cars.

He passed a low building, incongruously new, a sign of the New South, with a sign reading PALMETTO MOTOR-IN; he reversed down the street back to the building.

A girl with upswept lacquered hair and candy-pink lipstick gave him a meaningless, dead smile and a room with twin beds "for myself and my daughter." In the register he wrote: Lamar Burgess, 155 Ridge Road, Stonington, Conn. After he handed her a night's payment in cash, she gave him a key.

Their cubicle contained two single beds, an iron-textured brown carpet and lime-green walls, two pictures-a kitten tilting its head, an Indian looking into a leafy gorge from a clifftop-a television set, a door into a blue-tiled bathroom. He sat on the toilet seat while the girl undressed and got into bed.

When he peeked out to check on her, she was lying beneath a sheet with her face to the wall. Her clothes were scattered on the floor, a nearly empty bag of potato chips lay beside her. He ducked back into the bathroom, stripped and got into the shower. Which blessed him. For a moment he felt almost as though he were back in his old life, not "Lamar Burgess" but Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley. And there it was. It was no good, he could not get away from it. The mind was a trap-it was a cage that slammed down over you. However he had got to where he was, he was there. Stuck there in the Palmetto Motor-In. He turned off the shower, all traces of the blessing departed.

In the little room, only the weak light over his bed to illuminate those ghostly surroundings, he pulled on his jeans and opened his suitcase. The hunting knife was wrapped in a shirt, and he unrolled it so the knife fell out on the bed.

Carrying it by the chunky bone handle, he crossed to the girl's bed. She slept with her mouth open; perspiration gleamed on her forehead.

For a long time he sat beside her, holding the knife in his right hand, ready to use it.

But this night he could not. Giving up, giving in, he shook her arm until her eyelids fluttered.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I want to sleep."

"Who are you?"

"Go away. Please."

"Who are you? I'm asking, who are you?"

"You know."

"I know?"

"You know. I told you."

"What's your name?"

"Angie."

"Angie what?"

"Angie Maule. I told you before."

He held the knife behind his back so that she could not see it.

"I want to sleep," she said. "You woke me up." She turned her back to him again. Fascinated, he watched sleep settle over her: her fingertips twitched, her eyelids contracted, her breathing changed. It was as if, to exclude him, she had willed herself to sleep. Angie- Angela? Angela Maule. It did not sound like the name she had given him when he had first taken her into the car. Minoso? Minnorsi? Some name like that, an Italian name-not Maule.

He held the knife in both hands, the black bone handle jammed into his naked belly, his elbows out: all he had to do was thrust it forward and jerk it up, using all his strength…

In the end, sometime around three in the morning, he crossed over to his bed.

4

The next morning, before they checked out, she spoke to him while he was looking at the maps. "You shouldn't ask me those questions."

"What questions?" He had been keeping his back turned, at her request, as she got into the pink dress, and he suddenly had the feeling that he had to turn around, right now, to see her. He could see his knife in her hands (though it was back inside the rolled-up shirt), could feel it just beginning to prick his skin. "Can I turn around now?"

"Yeah, sure."

Slowly, still feeling the knife, his uncle's knife, beginning to enter his skin, he turned sideways on the chair. The girl was sitting on her unmade bed, watching him. Her intense unbeautiful face.

"What questions?"

"You know."

"Tell me."

She shook her head and would not say any more.

"Do you want to see where we're going?"

The girl came toward him, not slowly but measuredly, as if not wishing to display suspicion. "Here," he said, pointing to a spot on the map. "Panama City, in Florida."

"Will we be able to see the water?"

"Maybe."

"And we won't sleep in the car?"

"No."

"Is it far away?"

"We can get there tonight. We'll take this road-this one-see?"

"Uh huh." She was not interested: she hung a little to one side, bored and wary.

She said: "Do you think I'm pretty?"

What's the worst thing that ever happened to you? That you took off your clothes at night beside the bed of a nine-year-old girl? That you were holding a knife? That the knife wanted to kill her?

No. Other things were worse.

Not far over the state line and not on the highway he had shown Angie on the map but on a two-lane country road, they drew up before a white board building. Buddy's Supplies.

"You want to come in with me, Angie?"

She opened the door on her side and got out in that childish way, as if she were climbing down a ladder; he held the screen door open for her. A fat man in a white shirt sat like Humpty Dumpty on a counter. "You cheat on your income tax," he said. "And you're the first customer of the day. You believe that? Twelve-thirty and you're the first guy through the door. No," he said, bending forward and scrutinizing them. "Hell no. You don't cheat Uncle Sam, you do worse than that. You're the guy killed four-five people up in Tallahassee the other day."

"What-?" he said. "I just came in here for some food-my daughter-"

"Gotcha," the man said. "I used to be a cop. Allentown, Pennsylvania. Twenty years. Bought this place because the man told me I could turn over a hundred dollars' profit a week. There's a lot of crooks in this world. Anybody comes in, I can tell what kind of crook they are. And now I got you straight. You're not a killer. You're a kidnapper."

"No, I-" he felt sweat pouring down his sides. "My girl-"

"You can't shit me. Twenty years a cop."

He began to look frantically around the store for the girl. Finally he saw her staring gravely at a shelf stocked with jars of peanut butter. "Angie," he said. "Angie-come on-"

"Aw, hold on," the fat man said. "I was just tryin' to get a rise out of you. Don't flip out or nothin'. You want some of that peanut butter, little girl?"

Angie looked at him and nodded.

"Well, take one off the shelf and bring it up here. Anything else, mister? 'Course if you're Bruno Hauptmann, I'll have to bring you in. I still got my service revolver around somewhere. Knock you flat, I'll tell you that for free."

It was, he saw, all a weary mockery. Yet he could scarcely conceal his trembling. Wasn't that something an ex-cop would notice? He turned away toward the aisles and shelves.

"Hey, listen to this," the man said to his back. "If you're in that much trouble, you can just get the hell out of here right now."

"No, no," he said. "I need some things-"

"You don't look much like that girl."

Blindly, he began taking things off the shelves, anything. A jar of pickles, a box of apple turnovers, a canned ham, two or three other cans he didn't bother to look at. These he took to the counter.

The fat man, Buddy, was staring at him suspiciously. "You just shook me up a little bit," he said to him. "I haven't had much sleep, I've been driving for a couple of days…" Invention blessedly descended. "I have to take my little girl to her grandmother, she's in Tampa-" Angie swiveled around, clutching two jars of crunchy peanut butter, and gaped at him as he said this-"uh, Tampa, on account of her mother and me split up and I have to get a job, get things put together again, right, Angie?" The girl's mouth hung open.

"Your name Angie?" the fat man asked her.

She nodded.

"This man your daddy?"

He thought he would fall down.

"Now he is," she said.

The fat man laughed. " 'Now he is!' Just like a kid. Goddam, you figure out the brain of a kid, you got to be some kind of genius. All right, nervous, I guess I'll take your money." Still sitting on the counter, he rang up the purchases by bending to one side and punching the buttons of the register. "You better get some rest. You remind me of about a million guys I took into my old station."

Outside, Wanderley said to her, "Thanks for saying that."

"Saying what?": pertly, self-assuredly. Then again, almost mechanically, eerily, ticking her head from side to side: "Saying what? Saying what? Saying what?"

5

In Panama City he pulled into the Gulf Glimpse Motor Lodge, a series of shabby brick bungalows around a parking lot. The manager's lodge sat at the entrance, a separate square building like the others, with the exception of a large pane of plate glass behind which, in what must have been ovenlike heat, a stringy old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a mesh T-shirt was visible. He looked like Adolf Eichmann. The severe inflexible cast of the man's face made Wanderley remember what the ex-policeman had said about himself and the girl: he did not, with his blond hair and fair skin, look anything like the girl's father. He pulled up before the manager's lodge and left the car, his palms sweaty.

But inside, when he said that he wanted a room for himself and his daughter, the old man merely glanced incuriously at the dark-haired child in the car, and said, "Ten-fifty a day. Sign the register. You want food, try the Eat-Mor down the road apiece. There's no cooking in the bungalows. You planning on staying more than one night, Mr.-" He swung the register toward him. "Boswell?"

"Maybe as long as a week."

"Then you'll pay the first two nights in advance."

He counted out twenty-one dollars, and the manager gave him a key. "Number eleven, lucky eleven. Across the parking lot."

The room had whitewashed walls and smelled of lavatory cleaner. He gave it a perfunctory look around: the same iron carpet, two small beds with clean but worn sheets, a television with a twelve-inch screen, two awful pictures of flowers. The room appeared to have more shadows in it than could be accounted for. The girl was inspecting the bed against the side wall. "What's Magic Fingers? I want to try it. Can I? Please?"

"It probably won't work."

"Can I? I want to try it. Please?"

"All right. Lie down on it. I have to go out to do some things. Don't leave until I come back. I have to put a quarter in this slot, see? Like this? When I get back we can eat." The girl was lying on the bed, nodding with impatience, looking not at him but at the coin in his hand. "We'll eat when I get back. I'll try to get you some new clothes, too. You can't wear the same things all the time."

"Put in the quarter!"

He shrugged, pushed the quarter into the slot and immediately heard a humming noise. The child settled down onto the bed, her arms fully extended, her face tense. "Oh. It's nice."

"I'll be back pretty soon," he said, and went back out into the harsh sunlight and for the first time smelled water.

The Gulf was a long way off, but it was visible. On the other side of the road he had taken into town the land abruptly fell off into a wasteland of weeds and rubble at its bottom bisected by a series of railroad tracks. After the tracks another disused weedy patch of land ended at a second road which veered off toward a group of warehouses and loading sheds. Beyond this second road was the Gulf of Mexico-gray lathery water.

He walked down the road in the direction of town.

On the edge of Panama City he went into a Treasure Island discount store and bought jeans and two T-shirts for the girl, fresh underwear, socks, two shirts, a pair of khaki trousers and Hush Puppies for himself.

Carrying two large shopping bags, he emerged from Treasure Island and turned in the direction that was downtown. Diesel fumes drifted toward him, cars with Keep the Southland Great bumper stickers rolled by. Men in short-sleeved shirts and short gray crewcuts moved along the sidewalks. When he saw a uniformed cop trying to eat an icecream cone while writing out a parking ticket, he dodged between a pickup truck and a Trailways van and crossed the street. A rivulet of sweat issued from his left eyebrow and ran into his eye; he was calm. Once again, disaster had not happened.

He discovered the bus station by accident. It took up half a block, a vast new-looking building with black glass slits for windows. He thought: Alma Mobley, her mark. Once through the revolving door, he saw a few aimless people on benches in a large empty space-the people always seen in bus stations, a few young-old men with lined faces and complex hairdos, some children racketing around, a sleeping bum, three or four teenage boys in cowboy boots and shoulder-length hair. Another cop was leaning against the wall by the magazine counter. Looking for him? Panic started in him again, but the cop barely glanced at him. He pretended to check the arrivals-and-departures board before moving, with exaggerated carelessness, to the men's room.

He locked himself into a toilet and stripped. After dressing up to the waist in the new clothes, he left the toilet and washed at one of the sinks. So much grime came off that he washed himself again, splashing water onto the floor and working the green liquid soap deep into his armpits and around the back of his neck. Then he dried himself on the roller and put on one of the new short-sleeved shirts-a light blue shirt with thin red stripes. All of his old clothes went into the Treasure Island bag.

Outside, he noticed the odd grainy grayish blue of the sky. It was the sort of sky he imagined as hanging forever over the keys and swamps much further south in Florida, a sky that would hold the heat, doubling and redoubling it, forcing the weeds and plants into fantastic growth, making them send out grotesque and swollen tendrils… the sort of sky and hot disk of sun which should always, now that he thought of it, have hung over Alma Mobley. He stuffed the bag of old clothes in a trash barrel outside a gun shop.

In the new clothes his body felt young and capable, healthier than it had all through that terrible winter. Wanderley moved down the shabby southern street, a tall well-built man in his thirties, no longer quite aware of what he was doing. He rubbed his cheek and felt that blond man's feathery stubble-he could go two or three days without looking as though he needed a shave. A pickup driven by a sailor, five or six sailors in summer whites standing up in the rear of the truck, drove past him, and the sailors yelled something-something cheerful and private and derisory.

"They don't mean no harm," said a man who had appeared beside Wanderley. His head, with an enormous hair-sprouting wart dividing one eyebrow, came no higher than Wanderley's breastbone. "They's all good boys."

He smiled and uttered a meaningless agreement and moved away-he could not go back to the motel, could not deal with the girl; he felt as though he might faint. His feet seemed unreal in the Hush Puppies-too far down, too far from his eyes. He found that he was walking rapidly down a descending street, going toward an area of neon signs and movie theaters. In the grainy sky the sun hung high and motionless. Shadows of parking meters stood out, purely black, on the sidewalk: for a moment he was certain there were more shadows than parking meters. All the shadows hovering over the street were intensely black. He passed the entrance to a hotel and was aware of a vast brown empty space, a brown cool cave, beyond its glass doors.

Almost unwillingly, recognizing a dread familiar set of sensations, he went on in the terrific heat: consciously he kept himself from stepping over the shadows of the parking meters. Two years before the world had gathered itself in this ominous way, had been slick and full of intent-after the episode of Alma Mobley, after his brother had died. In some fashion, literally or not, she had killed David Wanderley: he knew that he had been lucky to escape whatever it was that took David through the Amsterdam hotel window. Only writing had brought him back up into the world; only writing about it, the horrid complicated mess of himself and Alma and David, writing about it as a ghost story, had released him from it. He had thought.

Panama City? Panama City, Florida? What was he doing there? And with that strange passive girl he had taken with him? Whom he had spirited down through the South?

He had always been the "erratic one," the "troubled one," the foil to David's strength, in the economy of family life his poverty the foil to David's success; his ambitions and pretensions ("You actually think you can support yourself as a novelist? Even your uncle wasn't that dumb": his father) the contrast to David's hard-working good sense, to David's steady progress through law school and into a good law firm. And when David had bumped into the daily stuff of his life, it had killed him.

That was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Until last winter: until Milburn.

The shabby street seemed to open like a grave. He felt as if one more step toward the bottom of the hill and the sleazy movie theaters would take him down, down, as if it would never stop but turn into an endless falling. Something which had not been there before appeared before him, and he squinted to see it more clearly.

Breathlessly he turned around in the piercing sunlight. His elbow caught someone's chest, and he heard himself murmuring sorry, sorry to an irritated woman in a white sunhat. He unconsciously began to move quickly back up the street. Back there, looking down to the intersection at the bottom of the hill, he had momentarily seen his brother's tombstone: it had been small, of purple marble, the words David Webster Wanderley, 1939-1975 carved into it, sitting in the middle of the intersection. He fled.

Yes, he had seen David's tombstone, but David had none. He had been cremated in Holland, and his ashes flown back to their mother. David's tombstone, yes, with David's name, but what sent him rushing back up the hill was the feeling that it was for him. And that if he were to kneel in the middle of the intersection and dig up the coffin, within it he would find his own putrefying body.

He turned into the only cool, welcoming place he had seen, the hotel lobby. He had to sit down, to calm himself; beneath the disinterested regard of a desk clerk and a girl behind a magazine counter, he sank down onto a sofa. His face was clammy. The fabric of the sofa's upholstery rubbed uncomfortably into his back; he leaned forward, ran his fingers through his hair, looked at his watch. He had to appear normal, as if he were just waiting for someone; he had to stop trembling. Potted palm trees had been placed here and there about the lobby. A fan whirled overhead. A thin old man in a purple uniform stood by an open elevator and stared at him: caught, he looked away.

When noises came to him he realized that since seeing the tombstone in the middle of the intersection he had heard nothing. His own pulse had drowned all other sound. Now the efficient noises of hotel life floated in the humid air. A vacuum cleaner hummed on an invisible staircase, telephones dimly rang, the elevator doors closed with a soft whoosh. Around the lobby, small groups of people sat in conversation. He began to feel that he could face the street again.

6

"I'm hungry," she said.

"I got you some new clothes."

"I don't want new clothes, I want food."

He crossed the room to sit in the empty chair. "I thought you'd get tired of wearing the same dress all the time."

"I don't care what I wear."

"Okay." He tossed the bag onto her bed. "I just thought you might like them."

She did not respond.

"I'll feed you if you answer some questions."

She turned away from him and began picking at the sheets, wrinkling them and smoothing them out.

"What's your name?"

"I told you. Angie."

"Angie Maule?"

"No. Angie Mitchell."

He let it go. "Why haven't your parents sent the police out to find you? Why haven't we been found yet?"

"I don't have any parents."

"Everybody has parents."

"Everybody except orphans."

"Who takes cares of you?"

"You do."

"Before me."

"Shut up. Shut up." Her face became glossy and self-contained.

"Are you really an orphan?"

"Shut up shut up shut up!"

To stop her screaming he lifted the canned ham out of the box of groceries. "All right," he said. "I'll get you some food. We'll have some of this."

"Okay." It was as if she had never screamed. "I want the peanut butter too."

While he was slicing the ham she said, "Do you have enough money to take care of us?"

She ate in her dedicated way: first she bit off a mouthful of ham, then dipped her fingers in the peanut butter and brought a wad of it home and chewed the two together. "Delicious," she managed to utter around the food.

"If I go to sleep, you won't leave, will you?"

She shook her head. "But I can take a walk, can't I?"

"I guess so."

He was drinking a can of beer from a six-pack he had picked up at the little store on his way back; the beer and the food together made him drowsy, and he knew that if he did not get to bed, he would fall asleep in the chair.

She said, "You don't have to tie me onto you. I'll come back. You believe me, don't you?"

He nodded.

"Because where could I go? I don't have anywhere to go."

"Okay!" he said. Once again, he could not talk to her as he wished: she was in control. "You can go out, but don't be gone too long." He was acting like a parent: he knew that she had put him in this role. It was ludicrous.

He watched her go out of the mean little room. Later, rolling over in bed, he dimly heard the door clicking shut and knew that she had, after all, come back. So she was his.

And that night he lay on his bed, fully dressed, watching her sleep. When his muscles began to ache from being held so long in the same position, he shifted his body on the bed; in this way, over a period of two hours, he went from lying on his side and supporting his head on his hand to sitting up with his knees raised and his hands crossed behind his head to leaning forward, elbows on knees, and finally back to lying on his side, cocked up on one elbow: as if all these postures were elements of a formal round. His eyes scarcely ever left the girl. She lay absolutely still-sleep had taken her somewhere else and left only her body behind. Simply lying there, both of them lying there, she had escaped him.

He rose, went to his suitcase and took out the rolled-up shirt and went back to stand beside his bed. He held the shirt by the collar and let gravity carry the hunting knife to the bed, unrolling the shirt as it fell. When it hit the bed it was too heavy to bounce. Wanderley picked it up and hefted it.

Holding the knife once again behind his back, he shook the girl's shoulder. Her features seemed to blur before she turned over and dug her face into the pillow. He grasped her shoulder again and felt the long thin bone, the prominent wing jutting out from her back. "Go 'way," she muttered into the pillow.

"No. We're going to talk."

"It's too late."

He shook her, and when she did not respond, tried to roll her over by force. Thin and small as she was, she was strong enough to resist. He could not make her face him.

Then she turned over by herself, as if in contempt. Lack of sleep showed in her face, but beneath the puffiness she looked adult.

"What's your name?"

"Angie." She smiled carelessly. "Angie Maule."

"Where do you come from?"

"You know."

He nodded.

"What were your parents' names?"

"I don't know."

"Who took care of you before I picked you up?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Why not?"

"They aren't important. They were just people."

"Was their name Maule?"

Her smile became more insolent. "Does it matter? You think you know everything anyhow."

"What do you mean, 'They were just people'?"

"They were just people named Mitchell. That's all."

"And you changed your name yourself?"

"So what?"

"I don't know." That was true.

So they looked at one another, he sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the knife behind him and knowing that whatever was going to happen, he would be unable to use it. He supposed that David too had been unable to take life-any life but his own, if he had done that. The girl probably knew he was holding the knife, he thought, and simply dismissed it as a threat. It was not a threat. He too was probably not a threat, she had never been even apprehensive of him.

"Okay, let's try again," he said. "What are you?"

For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled. It was a transformation, but not of a kind to make him feel easier: she did not look any less adult. "You know," she said.

He insisted. "What are you?"

She smiled all through her amazing response. "I am you."

"No. I am me. You are you."

"I am you."

"What are you?" It came out in despair, and it did not mean what he had meant the first time he asked it.

Then just for a second he was back on the street in New York, and the person before him was not the stylish suntanned anonymous woman, but his brother David, his face crumbled and his body dressed in the torn and rotting clothing of the grave.

… the most dreadful thing…

Part One: After Jaffrey's Party

Don't the moon look lonesome,

shinin' through the trees?

Don't the moon look lonesome,

shinin' through the trees?

-Blues

I - The Chowder Society: The

October Stories

America's first fictional heroes were old men.

-Robert Ferguson

Milburn Observed Through Nostalgia

1

One day early in October Frederick Hawthorne, a seventy-year-old lawyer who had lost very little to the years, left his house on Melrose Avenue in Milburn, New York, to walk across town to his offices on Wheat Row, just beside the square. The temperature was a little colder than Milburn expected so early in its autumn, but Ricky wore his winter uniform of tweed topcoat, cashmere muffler and gray, no-nonsense hat. He walked a little briskly down Melrose Avenue to warm up his blood, moving beneath huge oaks and smaller maples already colored heart-wrenching shades of orange and red-another unseasonal touch. He was susceptible to colds, and if the temperature dropped another five degrees, he'd have to drive.

But in the meantime, as long as he could keep the wind from his neck, he enjoyed the walk. After he had turned out of Melrose Avenue toward the square, he was warm enough to go at a more leisurely pace. Ricky had little reason to rush to his office: clients rarely appeared before noon. His partner and friend, Sears James, probably would not appear for another forty-five minutes, and that gave Ricky enough time to amble through Milburn, saying hello to people and observing the things he liked to observe.

What he chiefly liked to observe was Milburn itself- Milburn, the town in which all of his life except for his time in university, law school and the army had been spent. He had never wanted to live anywhere else, though in the early days of his marriage, his lovely and restless wife had often claimed that the town was boring. Stella had wanted New York-had wanted it resolutely. That had been one of the battles he had won. It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work. Ricky imagined that if you watched New York for the same period, what you saw would be mainly New York at work. Buildings went up and down too fast there for Ricky's taste, everything moved too quickly, wrapped in a self-absorbed cocoon of energy, whirling too fast to notice anything west of the Hudson but the Jersey lights. Also, New York had a couple of hundred thousand lawyers; Milburn had only five or six that counted, and he and Sears had been for forty years the most prominent of these. (Not that Stella had ever cared a whit about Milburn's notions of prominence.)

He entered the business district which lay along two blocks west of the square and continued for two blocks along the other side, passed Clark Mulligan's Rialto theater, and paused to look at the marquee. What he saw there made him wrinkle his nose. The posters on the front of the Rialto showed the blood-streaked face of a girl. The kind of movies Ricky liked could now be seen only on television: for Ricky, the film industry had lost its bearings about the time William Powell had retired. (He thought that Clark Mulligan probably agreed with him.) Too many modern films were like his dreams, which had become particularly vivid during the last year.

Ricky turned dismissively away from the theater and faced a prospect far more pleasing. The original high frame houses of Milburn had endured, even if nearly all of them were now office buildings: even the trees were younger than the buildings. He walked, his polished black shoes kicking through crisp leaves, past buildings much like those on Wheat Row and accompanied memories of his boyhood self down these same streets. He was smiling, and if any of the people he greeted had asked him what he was thinking about, he might (if he allowed himself to be so pompous) have said: "Why, sidewalks. I've been thinking about sidewalks. One of my earliest memories is of the time they put in the sidewalks along the whole stretch of Candlemaker Street here, right down to the square. Hauling those big blocks up with horses. You know, sidewalks made a greater contribution to civilization than the piston engine. Spring and winter in the old days you had to wade through mud, and you couldn't enter a drawing room without tracking some of it in. Summers, the dust was everywhere!" Of course, he reflected, drawingrooms had gone out just about the time the sidewalks had come in.

When he reached the square he found another unhappy surprise. Some of the trees lining the big grassy space were already completely bare, and most of the others had at least a few bare limbs-there was still plenty of the color he'd been anticipating, but during the night the balance had turned and now black skeletal arms and fingers, the bones of the trees, hung against the leaves like signposts to winter. Dead leaves carpeted the square.

"Hi, Mr. Hawthorne," someone beside him said.

He turned and saw Peter Barnes, a high school senior whose father, twenty years younger than Ricky, was in the second periphery of his friends. The first circle consisted of four men his own age-there had been five, but Edward Wanderley had died almost a year earlier. More somberness, when he was determined not to be somber. "Hello, Peter," he said, "you must be on your way to school."

"It starts an hour late today-the heaters broke again."

Peter Barnes stood beside him, a tall amiable-looking boy in a ski sweater and jeans. His black hair seemed almost girlishly long to Ricky, but the width of his shoulders promised that when he started to fill out, he would be a much bigger man than his father. Presumably his hair didn't look girlish to girls. "Just walking around?"

"That's right," Peter said. "Sometimes it's fun just to walk around town and look at things."

Ricky nearly beamed. "Why that's right! I feel exactly the same thing myself. I always enjoy my walks across town. The strangest things pop into my head. I was just thinking that sidewalks changed the world. They made everything much more civilized."

"Oh?" said Peter, looking at him curiously.

"I know, I know-I told you strange things occur to me. Heavens. How is Walter these days?"

"He's fine. He's at the bank now."

"And Christina, she's fine too?"

"Sure," Peter said, and there was a touch of coolness in his response to the question about his mother. A problem there? He remembered that Walter had complained to him some months before that Christina had become a little moody. But for Ricky, who could remember Peter's parents' generation as teenagers, their problems were always a little, fictional-how could people with the world still in front of them have truly serious problems?

"You know," he said, "we haven't talked like this in ages. Is your father reconciled to your going to Cornell yet?"

Peter smiled wryly. "I guess so. I don't think he knows how tough it is to get into Yale. It was a lot easier when he went."

"No doubt it was," said Ricky, who had just remembered the circumstances under which he had last had a conversation with Peter Barnes. John Jaffrey's party: the evening on which Edward Wanderley had died.

"Well, I guess I'll poke around in the department store for a while," Peter said.

"Yes," Ricky said, remembering against his will all the details of that evening. It seemed to him at times that life had darkened since that night: that a wheel had turned.

"I guess I'll go now," Peter said, and stepped backward.

"Oh, don't let me hold you up," Ricky said. "I was just thinking."

"About sidewalks?"

"No, you scamp." Peter turned away, smiling and saying goodbye, and strode easily up the side of the square.

Ricky spotted Sears James's Lincoln cruising past the Archer Hotel at the top of the square, going as usual ten miles an hour slower than anyone else, and hurried on his way to Wheat Row. Somberness had not been evaded: he saw again the skeletal branches thrusting through the brilliant leaves, the implacable bloodied face of the girl on the film poster, and remembered that it was his turn to tell the story at the Chowder Society meeting that night. He hastened on, wondering what had become of his high spirits. But he knew: Edward Wanderley. Even Sears had followed them, the other three members of the Chowder Society, into that gloom. He had twelve hours to think of something to talk about.

"Oh, Sears," he said on the steps of their building. His partner was just pushing himself out of the Lincoln. "Good morning. It's at your house tonight, isn't it?"

"Ricky," said Sears, "at this hour of the morning it is positively forbidden to chirp."

Sears lumbered forward, and Ricky followed him through the door leaving Milburn behind.

Frederick Hawthorne

1

Of all the rooms in which they habitually met, this was Ricky's favorite-the library in Sears James's house, with its worn leather chairs, tall indistinct glass-fronted bookcases, drinks on the little round tables, prints on the walls, the muted old Shiraz carpet beneath their feet and the rich memory of old cigars in the atmosphere. Having never committed himself to marriage, Sears James had never had to compromise his luxurious ideas of comfort. After so many years of meeting together, the other men were by now unconscious of the automatic pleasure and relaxation and envy they experienced in Sears's library, just as they were nearly unconscious of the equally automatic discomfort they felt in John Jaffrey's house, where the housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, forever bustled in, rearranging things. But they felt it: each of them, Ricky Hawthorne perhaps more so than the others, had wished to possess such a place for himself. But Sears had always had more money than the others, just as his father had had more money than theirs. It went back that way for five generations, until you reached the country grocer who had cold-bloodedly put together a fortune and turned the James family into gentry: by the time of Sears's grandfather, the women were thin, palpitating, decorative and useless, the men hunted and went to Harvard and they all went to Saratoga Springs in the summers. Sears's father had been a professor of ancient languages at Harvard, where he kept a third family house; Sears himself had become a lawyer because as a young man he had thought it immoral for a man not to have a profession. His year or so of schoolmastering had shown him that it could not be teaching. Of the rest, the cousins and brothers, most had succumbed to good living, hunting accidents, cirrhosis or breakdowns; but Sears, Ricky's old friend, had bluffed his way through until, if he was not the handsomest old man in Milburn-that was surely Lewis Benedikt-he was the most distinguished. But for the beard, he was his father's double, tall and bald and massive, with a round subtle face above his vested suits. His blue eyes were still very young.

Ricky supposed that he had to envy that too, the magisterial appearance. He himself had never been particularly prepossessing. He was too small and too trim for that. Only his mustache had improved with age, growing somehow more luxuriant as it turned gray. When he had developed little jowls, they had not made him more impressive: they had only made him look clever. He did not think that he was particularly clever. If he had been, he might have avoided a business arrangement in which he was unofficially to become a sort of permanent junior partner. But it had been his father, Harold Hawthorne, who had taken Sears into the firm. All those years ago, he had been pleased-even excited-that he would be joined by his old friend. Now, settled into an undeniably comfortable armchair, he supposed that he was still pleased; the years had married them as securely as he was married to Stella, and the business marriage had been far more peaceful than the domestic, even if clients in the same room with both partners invariably looked at Sears and not himself when they spoke. That was an arrangement which Stella would never have tolerated. (Not that anyone in his right mind, all through the years of their marriage, would have looked at Ricky when he could have looked at Stella.)

Yes, he admitted to himself for the thousandth time, he did like it here. It went against his principles and his politics and probably the puritanism of his long-vanished religion too, but Sears's library-Sears's whole splendid house-was a place where a man felt at ease.

Stella had no compunctions about demonstrating that it was also the sort of place where a woman too could feel at ease. She didn't mind now and then treating Sears's house as though it were her own. Thankfully, Sears tolerated it. It had been Stella, on one of those occasions (twelve years ago, coming into the library as if she led a platoon of architects), who had given them their name. "Well, there they are, by God," she had said, "The Chowder Society. Are you going to keep my husband away from me all night, Sears? Or aren't you boys through telling your lies yet?" Still, he supposed it was Stella's perpetual energy and constant needling which had kept him from succumbing to age as old John Jaffrey had. For their friend Jaffrey was "old" despite his being six months younger than Hawthorne himself and a year younger than Sears, and in fact only five years older than Lewis, their youngest member.

Lewis Benedikt, the one who was supposed to have killed his wife, was seated directly across from Ricky, an image of expansive good health. As time rolled through them all, subtracting things, it seemed only to add to Lewis. It hadn't been true when he was younger, but these days he bore a definite resemblance to Cary Grant. His chin would not sag, his hair would not fall. He had become almost absurdly handsome. This evening, Lewis's big placid humorous features wore-like all their faces-an expression of expectancy. It was generally true that the best stories were told here, in Sears's house.

"Who's on the griddle tonight?" asked Lewis. But it was only courtesy. They all knew. The group called the Chowder Society had only a few rules: they wore evening clothes (because thirty years ago, Sears had rather liked the idea), they never drank too much (and now they were too old for that anyhow), they never asked if any of the stories were true (since even the outright whoppers were in some sense true), and though the stories went around the group in rotation, they never pressured anyone who had temporarily dried up.

Hawthorne was about to confess when John Jaffrey interrupted. "I've been thinking," he said, and then responded to the others' inquisitive glances, "no, I know it's not me, and a good thing too. But I was just thinking that in two weeks it will be a year to the day since Edward died. He'd be here tonight if I hadn't insisted on that damned party."

"Please, John," said Ricky. He didn't like to look directly at Jaffrey's face when it showed his emotions so clearly. His skin looked like you could push a pencil straight through it and draw no blood. "All of us know that you were not to blame yourself."

"But it happened in my house," insisted Jaffrey.

"Calm down, doc," Lewis said. "You're not doing yourself any good."

"I'll decide that."

"Then you're not doing the rest of us any good," Lewis said with the same bland good humor. "We all remember the date. How could we forget?"

"Then what are you doing about it? Do you think you're acting as though it never happened-as though it was normal? Just some old poop kicking the bucket? Because if so, let me inform you that you're not."

He had shocked them into silence; even Ricky could think of nothing to say. Jaffrey's face was gray. "No," he said. "You're damned well not. You all know what's been happening to us. We sit around here and talk like a bunch of ghouls. Milly can hardly stand having us in my house anymore. We weren't always like this-we used to talk about all sorts of things. We used to have fun-there used to be fun. Now there isn't. We're all scared. But I don't know if some of you are admitting it. Well, it's been a year, and I don't mind saying that I am."

"I'm not so sure I'm scared," said Lewis. He took a sip of his whiskey and smiled at Jaffrey.

"You're not so sure you're not, either," snapped the doctor.

Sears James coughed into his fist, and everybody immediately looked at him. My God, thought Ricky: he can do that whenever he wants, just effortlessly capture our attention. I wonder why he ever thought he couldn't be a good teacher. And I wonder why I ever thought I could hold my own with him. "John," Sears said gently, "we're all familiar with the facts. All of you were kind enough to go through the cold to come here tonight, and none of us are young men anymore. Let's continue."

"But Edward didn't die at your house. And that Moore woman, that so-called actress, didn't-"

"Enough of that," Sears commanded.

"Well, I suppose you remember how we got on this kick," said Jaffrey.

Sears nodded, and so did Ricky Hawthorne. It had been at the first meeting after Edward Wanderley's odd death. The remaining four had been hesitant-they could not have been more conscious of Edward's absence had an empty chair been placed among them. Their conversation had stuttered and stalled through half a dozen false beginnings. All of them, Ricky had seen, were wondering if they could bear to continue to meet. Ricky knew that none of them could bear not to. And then he had had his inspiration: he had turned to John Jaffrey and said, "What's the worst thing you've ever done?"

Dr. Jaffrey had surprised him by going pink; and then had set the tone of all their subsequent meetings by saying, "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me-the most dreadful thing…" and following it by telling what was in effect a ghost story. It was riveting, surprising, frightening… it took their minds off Edward. They had gone on like that ever since.

"Do you really think it's just coincidence?" asked Jaffrey.

"Don't follow," Sears grumped.

"You're dissembling, and it's beneath you. I mean that we started on this tack, me first, after Edward…"

His voice trailed off, and Ricky knew that he was caught between died and was killed.

"Went west," he put in, hoping for lightness of touch. Jaffrey's stony lizardlike eye, darting at him, told him he'd failed. Ricky leaned back in the opulent chair, hoping to vanish into the luxurious background and be no more conspicuous than a water stain on one of Sears's old maps.

"Where did you get that from?" Sears asked, and Ricky remembered. It was what his father had used to say when a client died. "Old Toby Pfaff went west last night… Mrs. Wintergreen went west this morning. There'll be the devil to pay in probate court." He shook his head. "Yes, that's right," Sears said. "But I don't know…"

"Exactly," said Jaffrey. "I think something pretty damn funny is going on."

"What do you advise? I take it that you're not just talking for the sake of interrupting the proceedings."

Ricky smiled over the tops of his joined fingers to show that he took no offense.

"Well, I do have a suggestion." He was doing his best, Ricky saw, to handle Sears carefully. "I think we should invite Edward's nephew to come here."

"And what would be the point of that?"

"Isn't he by way of being an expert in… in this sort of thing?"

"What is 'this sort of thing'?"

Pushed, Jaffrey did not back down. "Maybe just what's mysterious. I think he could-well, I think he could help us." Sears was looking impatient, but the doctor did not let him interrupt. "I think we need help. Or am I the only man here who has trouble getting a decent night's sleep? Am I the only one who has nightmares every night?" He scanned them all with his sunken face. "Ricky? You're an honest man."

"You're not the only one, John," Ricky said.

"No, I suppose not," said Sears, and Ricky looked at him in surprise. Sears had never indicated before that he too might have awful nights-certainly it never showed on that big smooth reflective face. "You have his book in mind, I imagine."

"Well, yes, of course. He must have done research- he must have had some experience."

"I thought his experience was of mental instability."

"Like us," Jaffrey said bravely. "Edward must have had some reason for willing his nephew his house. I think it was that he wanted Donald to come here, if anything should happen to him. I think he knew that something would happen. And I'll tell you what else I think. I think we ought to tell him about Eva Galli."

"Tell him an inconclusive story fifty years old? Ridiculous."

"The reason it's not ridiculous is that it is inconclusive," the doctor said.

Ricky saw that Lewis was as surprised, even shaken, as he that Jaffrey had brought up the story of Eva Galli. That episode lay, as Sears had said, fifty years in their past; none of them had mentioned it since.

"Do you think you know what happened to her?" the doctor challenged.

"Hey, come on," Lewis put in. "Do we really need that? What the hell is the point?"

"The point is trying to find out what really happened to Edward. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear."

Sears nodded, and Ricky thought he could detect in his longtime partner's face a sign of-what? Relief? Of course he would not admit to it; but that it could be seen at all was a revelation to Ricky. "I'm in a little doubt about the reasoning," Sears said, "but if it would make you happy I suppose we could write to Edward's nephew. We have his address in our files, don't we, Ricky?" Hawthorne nodded. "But to be democratic, I'd like to put it to a vote first. Shall we just verbally agree or disagree and vote like that? What do you say?" He sipped from his glass and looked them over. They all agreed. "We'll start with you, John."

"Of course I say yes. Send for him."

"Lewis?"

Lewis shrugged. "I don't care one way or the other. Send for him if you want."

"That's a yes?"

"Okay, it's a yes. But I say don't drag up the Eva Galli business."

"Ricky?"

Ricky looked at his partner and saw that Sears knew how he was going to vote. "No. Definitely no. I think it's a mistake."

"You'd rather have us go on as we have been going on for a year?"

"Change is always change for the worse."

Sears was amused. "Spoken like a true lawyer, though I think the sentiment ill becomes a former member of YPSL. But I say yes, and that makes it three to one. It's carried. We'll write to him. Since mine was the deciding vote, I'll handle it."

"I've just thought of something," Ricky said. "It's been a year now. Suppose he wants to sell the house? It's been sitting empty since Edward died."

"Faw. You're inventing problems. We'll get him here faster if he wants to sell."

"How can you be sure things won't get worse? Can you be sure?" Sitting as he had at least once a month for more than twenty years in a coveted chair in the best room he knew, Ricky fervently wished that nothing would change-that they would be allowed to continue, and that they would simply tease out their anxieties in bad dreams and stories. Looking at them all in the lowered light as a cold wind battered the trees outside Sears's windows, he wished for nothing more than that: to continue. They were his friends, he was in a way as married to them as a moment ago he had considered he was to Sears, and he gradually became aware that he feared for them. They seemed so terribly vulnerable, sitting there and regarding him quizzically, as if each of the others imagined that nothing could be worse than a few bad dreams and a bi-weekly spook story. They believed in the efficacy of knowledge. But he saw a plane of darkness, cast by a lampshade, cross John Jaffrey's forehead and thought: John is dying already. There is a kind of knowledge they have never confronted, despite the stories they tell; and when that thought came into his well-groomed little head, it was as though whatever was implied in the knowledge he meant was out there somewhere, out in the first signs of winter, out there and gaining on them.

Sears said, "We've decided, Ricky. It's for the best. We can't just stew in our own juices. Now." He looked around the circle they made, metaphorically rubbing his hands, and said, "Now that's settled, who, as Lewis put it, is on the griddle tonight?"

Within Ricky Hawthorne the past suddenly shifted and delivered a moment so fresh and complete that he knew he had his story, although he'd had nothing planned and had thought he would have to pass; but eighteen hours from the year 1945 shone clearly in his mind, and he said, "Well, I guess it's me."

2

After the other two had left, Ricky stayed behind, telling them that he was in no hurry to get out into that cold. Lewis had said, "It'll put blood in your cheeks, Ricky," but Dr. Jaffrey had merely nodded-it really was unseasonably cold for October, cold enough for snow. Sitting alone in the library while Sears went off to freshen up their drinks, Ricky could hear the ignition of Lewis's car grinding away in the street. Lewis had a Morgan which he'd imported from England five years before, and it was the only sports car Ricky had really liked the looks of. But the canvas top wouldn't be much protection on a night like this; and Lewis seemed to be having a lot of trouble getting the car to start. There. He'd nearly got it. In these New York winters, you really needed something bigger than Lewis's little Morgan. Poor John would be frozen by the time Lewis got him home to Milly Sheehan and the big house on Montgomery Street, around the corner and seven blocks up. Milly'd be sitting in the semi-dark of the doctor's waiting rooms, keeping herself awake so that she could jump up as soon as she heard his key in the door, help him off with his coat and pour a little hot chocolate into him. As Ricky sat listening, the Morgan's engine coughed into life-he heard them drive away and pictured Lewis clapping a hat on his head, grinning at John and saying, "Didn't I tell you this little beauty would perform?" After he'd dropped John off, he'd leave town altogether, zipping along Route 17 until he was out in the woods, and go back to the place he'd bought when he had returned. Whatever else Lewis had done in Spain, he had earned a lot of money.

Ricky's own home was literally just around the corner, not a five-minute walk away; in the old days he and Sears had walked to their office in town every day. In warm weather they sometimes still did: "Mutt and Jeff," as Stella said. This was directed more at Sears than himself-Stella had never actually liked Sears. Of course she had never let this submerged dislike interfere with her attempts to dominate him a little. There was no question that Stella would be waiting up with hot chocolate: she'd have gone to sleep hours ago, leaving only a hall light burning upstairs. It was Stella's conviction that if he was going to indulge himself at his friends' houses and leave her behind, he could knock around in the dark when he got home, bumping his knees on the glass and chrome modern furniture she had made him buy.

Sears came back into the room with two drinks in his hands and a freshly fired-up cigar in his mouth. Ricky said, "Sears, you're probably the only person I know to whom I could admit that sometimes I wish I'd never got married."

"Don't waste your envy on me," Sears said. "I'm too old, too fat and too tired."

"You're none of those things," he answered, accepting the drink Sears gave him, "you just have the luxury of being able to pretend you are."

"Oh, but you pulled out the prize plum," Sears said. "The reason you wouldn't say what you've just said to anyone else is that they'd be stupefied. Stella is a famous beauty. And if you said it to her, she'd brain you." He sat back in the chair he'd occupied earlier, stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. "She'd slap a box together, dump you in it, bury you in five seconds flat and then run off with an athletic forty-year-old smelling of salt water and bay rum. The reason you can tell me is that-" Sears paused, and Ricky feared that he'd say, I sometimes wish you'd never married too. "Is it that I am hors de combat, or is it hors commerce?"

Listening to his partner's voice, holding his drink, Ricky thought of John Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt speeding away to their houses, of his own redecorated house waiting, and was aware of how settled their lives were; of how much they had found a comfortable routine. "Well, which is it?" Sears asked, and he replied, "Oh, in your case hors de combat, I'm sure," and smiled, stingingly aware of their closeness. He remembered what he had said before, all change is change for the worse, and thought: that's true, God help us. Ricky suddenly saw all of them, his old friends and himself, as on a fragile invisible plane suspended high up in dark air.

"Does Stella know you have nightmares?" Sears asked.

"Well, I didn't know that you did," Ricky answered, as though it were a joke.

"I saw no reason to discuss it."

"And you've been having them for-?"

Sears leaned further into his chair. "You've had yours for-?"

"A year."

"And I. For a year. So have the other two, apparently."

"Lewis doesn't seem ruffled."

"Nothing ruffles Lewis. When the Creator made Lewis, he said, 'I am going to give you a handsome face, a good constitution and an equable temperament, but because this is an imperfect world, I'll hold back a little on brains.' He got rich because he liked Spanish fishing villages, not because he knew what was going to happen to them."

Ricky ignored this-it was all part of the way Sears liked to characterize Lewis. "They started after Edward's death?"

Sears nodded his massive head.

"What do you think happened to Edward?"

Sears shrugged. They had all asked the question too many times. "As you are surely aware, I know no more than you."

"Do you think we'll be any happier if we find out?"

"Goodness, what a question! I can't answer that one either, Ricky."

"Well, I don't. I think something terrible will happen to us. I think you'll bring down disaster on us if you invite that young Wanderley."

"Superstition," Sears grumbled. "Nonsense. I think something terrible has already happened to us, and this young Wanderley might be the man who can clear it up."

"Did you read his book?"

"The second one? I looked at it."

This was an admission that he had read it.

"What did you think?"

"A nice exercise in genre writing. More literary than most. A few nice phrases, a reasonably well-constructed plot."

"But about his insights…"

"I think he won't immediately dismiss us as a bunch of old fools. That's the main thing."

"Oh, I wish he would," Ricky wailed. "I don't want anybody poking around in our lives. I want things just to keep on going."

"But it's possible that he will 'poke around,' as you say, and end by convincing us that we are just spooking ourselves. Then maybe Jaffrey will stop scourging himself for that blasted party. He only insisted on it because he wanted to meet that worthless little actress. That Moore girl."

"I think about that party a lot," Ricky said. "I've been trying to remember when I saw her that night."

"I saw her," said Sears. "She was talking to Stella."

"That's what everybody says. Everybody saw her talking to my wife. But where did she go afterward?"

"You're getting as bad as John. Let's wait for young Wanderley. We need a fresh eye."

"I think we'll be sorry," said Ricky, trying for one last time. "I think we'll be ruined. We'll be like some animal eating its own tail. We have to put it behind us."

"It's decided. Don't be melodramatic."

So that was that. Sears could not be swayed. Ricky asked him about another of the things on his mind. "On our evenings, do you always know what you're going to say in advance, when it's your turn?"

Sears's eyes met his, marvelously, cloudlessly blue. "Why?"

"Because I don't. Not most of the time. I just sit and wait, and then it comes to me, like tonight. Is it that way with you?"

"Often. Not that it proves anything."

"Is it like that for the others too?"

"I see no reason why it shouldn't be. Now, Ricky, I want to get some rest and you should go home. Stella must be waiting for you."

He couldn't tell if Sears were being ironic or not. He touched his bow tie. Bow ties were a part of his life, like the Chowder Society, that Stella barely tolerated. "Where do these stories come from?"

"From our memories," Sears said. "Or, if you prefer, from our doubtless Freudian unconsciouses. Come on. I want to be left alone. I have to wash all the glasses before I get to bed."

"May I ask you one more time-"

"What now?"

"-not to write to Edward's nephew." Ricky stood up, audacity making his heart speed.

"You can be persistent, can't you? Certainly you may ask, but by the time we get together again, he will already have my letter. I think it's for the best."

Ricky made a wry face, and Sears said, "Persistent without being aggressive." It was very much like something Stella would have said. Then Sears startled him by adding, "It's a nice quality, Ricky."

At the door Sears held his coat while he slipped his arms into the sleeves. "I thought John looked worse than ever tonight," Ricky said. Sears opened the front door onto dark night illuminated by the street lamp before the house. Orange light fell on the short dead lawn and narrow sidewalk, both littered with fallen leaves. Massive dark clouds moved across the black sky; it felt like winter. "John is dying," Sears said unemotionally, giving back to Ricky his own thought. "See you at Wheat Row. Give my regards to Stella."

Then the door closed behind him, a spruce little man already beginning to shiver in the cold night air.

Sears James

1

They spent most days together at their office, but Ricky honored tradition by waiting until the meeting at Dr. Jaffrey's house to ask Sears the question that had been on his mind for two weeks. "Did you send the letter?"

"Of course. I told you I would."

"What did you say to him?"

"What was agreed. I also mentioned the house, and said that we hoped he would not decide to sell it without inspecting it first. All of Edward's things are still there, of course, including his tapes. If we haven't had the heart to go through them, perhaps he will."

They were standing apart from the other two, just inside the doorway to John Jaffrey's living rooms. John and Lewis were seated in Victorian chairs in a corner of the nearest room, talking to the doctor's housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, who sat on a stool before them, dangling a flowered tray which had held their drinks. Like Ricky's wife, Milly resented being excluded from the meetings of the Chowder Society, unlike Stella Hawthorne, she perpetually hovered at the edges, popping in with bowls of ice cubes and sandwiches and cups of coffee. She irritated Sears to almost exactly the same extent as a summer fly bumping against the window. In many ways Milly was preferable to Stella Hawthorne-less demanding, less driven. And she certainly took care of John: Sears approved of the women who helped his friends. For Sears, it was an open question whether or not Stella had taken care of Ricky.

Now Sears looked down at the person fate had put closer to him than anyone else in the world, and knew that Ricky was thinking that he had weasel-worded his way out of the last question. Ricky's sagacious little jowls were taut with impatience. "All right," he said. "I told him that we weren't satisfied with what we knew of his uncle's death. I did not mention Miss Galli."

"Well, thank God for that," Ricky said, and walked across the room to join the others. Milly stood up, but Ricky smiled and waved her back to the stool. A born gentleman, Ricky had always been charming to women. An armchair stood not four feet away, but he would not sit until Milly asked him to.

Sears took his eyes off Ricky and looked around at the familiar upstairs sitting room. John Jaffrey had turned the whole ground floor of his house into his office-waiting rooms, consulting rooms, a drug cabinet. The other two small rooms on the ground floor were Milly's apartment. John lived the rest of his life up here, where there had been only bedrooms in the old days. Sears had known the interior of John Jaffrey's home for at least sixty years: during his childhood, he had lived two houses down, on the other side of the street. That is, the building he had always thought of as "the family house" was there, to be returned to from boarding school, to be returned to from Cambridge. In those days, Jaffrey's house had been owned by a family named Frederickson, who had two children much younger than Sears. Mr. Frederickson had been a grain merchant, a crafty beer-swilling mountainous man with red hair and a redder face, sometimes mysteriously tinged blue; his wife had been the most desirable woman young Sears had ever seen. She was tall, with coiled long hair some color between brown and auburn, and had a kittenish exotic face and prominent breasts. It was with these that young Sears had been fascinated. Speaking to Viola Frederickson, he'd had to struggle to keep his eyes on her face.

In the summers, home from boarding school and between trips to the country, he was their babysitter. The Fredericksons could not afford a full-time nanny, though a girl from the Hollow lived in their house as cook and maid. Possibly it amused Frederickson to have Professor James's son babysit for his boys. Sears had his own amusements. He liked the boys and enjoyed their hero worship, which was so much like that of the younger boys at the Hill School; and once the boys were asleep, he enjoyed prowling through the house and seeing what he could find. He saw his first French letter in Abel Frederickson's dresser drawer. He had known he was doing wrong, entering the bedrooms where he now freely stood, but he could not keep himself from doing it. One night he had opened Viola Frederickson's desk and found a photograph of her-she looked impossibly inviting, exotic and warm, an icon of the other, unknowable half of the species. He looked at the way her breasts pushed out the fabric of her blouse, and his mind filled with sensations of their weight, their density. He was so hard that his penis felt like the trunk of a tree: it was the first time that his sexuality had hit him with such force. Groaning, clutching his trousers, he had turned away from the photograph and seen one of her blouses folded on top of the dresser. He could not help himself; he caressed it. He could see where the blouse would bulge, carrying her within it, her flesh seemed to be present beneath his hands, and he unbuttoned his trousers and took out his member. He placed it on the blouse, thinking with the part of his mind that could still think that it was making him do it; it was making him push its distended tip down where her breasts would cushion it. He groaned, bent double over the blouse, a convulsion went through him, and he exploded. His balls felt as if they'd been caught in a vise. Immediately after, shame struck him like a fist. He rolled the blouse up into his satchel of books and, going a roundabout way home, wrapped the once-flawless thing around a stone and tossed it into the river. Nobody had ever mentioned the stolen blouse to him, but it was the last time he'd been invited to babysit.

Through the windows behind Ricky Hawthorne's head, Sears could see a street lamp shining on the second floor of the house Eva Galli had bought when, on whatever whim or impulse, she had come to Milburn. Most of the time he could forget about Eva Galli and where she had lived: he supposed that he was conscious of it now-of her house shining at them through the window-because of some connection his mind made between her and the ridiculous scene he had just remembered.

Maybe I should have cleared out of Milburn when I could, he thought: the bedroom where Edward Wanderley had died exactly a year ago was just overhead. By unspoken common agreement, none of them had alluded to the coincidence of their meeting here again on the anniversary of their friend's death. A fraction of Ricky Hawthorne's sense of doom flickered in his mind, and then he thought: you old fool, you still feel guilty about that blouse. Hah!

2

"It's my turn tonight," Sears said, relaxing as well as he could into Jaffrey's largest armchair and making sure he was facing away from the old Galli house, "and I want to tell you about certain events that happened to me when I was a young man experimenting with the profession of teaching in the country around Elmira. I say experimenting because even then, at the beginning of my first year, I had no certainty that I was destined for that profession. I'd signed a two-year contract, but I didn't think they could hold me to it if I wanted to leave. Well, one of the most dreadful things in my life happened to me there, or it didn't happen and I imagined it all, but anyhow it scared the pants off me and eventually made it impossible for me to stay on. This is the worst story I know, and I've kept it locked up in my mind for fifty years.

You know what a schoolmaster's duties were in those days. This was no urban school, and it was no Hill School either-God knows that was where I should have applied, but I had a number of elaborate ideas in those days. I fancied myself as a real country Socrates, bringing the light of reason into the wilderness. Wilderness! In those days, the country around Elmira was nearly that, as I remember, but now there isn't even a suburb where the little town was. A freeway cloverleaf was put up right over the site of the school. The whole thing's under concrete. It used to be called Four Forks, and it's gone. But back then, during my sabbatical from Milburn, it was a typical little village, ten or twelve houses, a general store, a post office, a blacksmith, the schoolhouse. All of these buildings looked alike, in a general sort of way-they were all wooden, they hadn't been painted in years so they all looked a bit gray and dismal. The schoolhouse was one room, of course, one room for all eight grades. When I came up for my interview I was told that I'd be boarding with the Mathers-they'd put in the lowest bid, and I soon found out why-and that my day would start at six. I had to chop the wood for the schoolhouse stove, get a good fire going, sweep the place out and get the books in place, pump up the water, clean the boards-wash the windows, too, when they needed it.

Then at seven-thirty the students would come. And my job was to teach all eight grades, reading, writing, arithmetic, music, geography, penmanship, history… the "works." Now I'd run a mile from any such prospect, but then I was full of Abraham Lincoln on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other, and I was bursting to start. The whole idea simply enraptured me. I was besotted. I suppose even then the town was dying, but I couldn't see it. What I saw was splendor- freedom and splendor. A little tarnished perhaps, but splendor all the same.

You see, I didn't know. I couldn't guess what most of my pupils would be like. I didn't know that most country schoolteachers in these little hamlets were boys of about nineteen, with no more education than they'd be giving. I didn't know how muddy and unpleasant a place like Four Forks would be most of the year. I didn't know I'd be half-starved most of the time. Nor that it would be a condition of my job that I report for church every Sunday off in the next village, an eight-mile hike. I didn't know how rough it would be.

I began to find out when I went over to the Mathers with my suitcase that first night. Charlie Mather used to be the postmaster in town, but when the Republicans got into office they made Howard Hummell the postmaster, and Charlie Mather never got over his resentment. He was permanently sour. When he took me up to the room I was to use, I saw that it was unfinished- the floor was plain unsanded wood, and the ceiling consisted of just the roofing joists and tiles. "Was makin' this for our daughter," Mather told me. "She died. One less mouth to feed." The bed was a tired old mattress on the floor, with one old army blanket over it. In the winter, there wasn't enough warmth for an Eskimo in that room. But I saw that it had a desk and a kerosene lamp, and I was still seeing stars, and I said fine, I'll love it here, something to that effect. Mather grunted in disbelief, as well he might.

Supper that night was potatoes and creamed corn. "You'll eat no meat here," Mather said, "unless you save up and buy it yourself. I'm getting the allowance to keep you alive, not to fatten you up." I don't suppose I ate meat more than six times at the Mather table, and that was all at once, when somebody gave him a goose and we had goose every day until there was nothing left of it. Eventually some of my pupils began bringing me ham and beef sandwiches-their parents knew Mather was a mean-fisted man. Mather himself ate his big meal at noon, but he made it clear that it was my duty to spend the lunch hour in the schoolhouse- "offering extra help and giving punishments."

Because up there they believed in the birch. I'd taught my first day when I found out about that. I say, taught, but really all I'd managed to do was keep them quiet for a few hours and write down their names and ask a few questions. It was astonishing. Only two of the older girls could read, simple addition and subtraction was as far as their math went, and not only had a few of them not heard of foreign countries, one of them didn't even believe they existed. "Aw, there's nothin' like that," one scrawny ten-year-old told me. "A place where people ain't even American? Where they don't even talk American?" But he couldn't go further, he was laughing too hard at the absurdity of the idea, and I saw a mouthful of appalling, blackened teeth. "So what about the war, dopey?" another boy said. "Never heard tell of the Germans?" Before I could react, the first boy flew over the desk and started beating the second boy. It looked as though he was literally set on murdering him. I tried to separate the two boys-the girls were all shrieking-and I grabbed the assailant's arm. "He's right," I said. "He shouldn't have called you a name, but he is right. Germans are the people who live in Germany, and the world war…" I stopped short because the boy was growling at me. He was like a savage dog, and for the first time I realized that he was mentally disturbed, perhaps retarded. He was ready to bite me. "Now apologize to your friend," I said.

"Ain't no friend of mine."

"Apologize."

"He's queer, sir," the other boy said. His face was pale, and his eyes were frightened, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. "I shouldn't never of said that to him."

I asked the first boy what his name was. "Fenny Bate," he managed to drool out. He was calming down. I sent the second boy back to his desk. "Fenny," I said, "the trouble is that you were wrong. America isn't the whole world, just as New York isn't the whole United States." This was too complicated, and I had lost him. So I brought him up to the front and made him sit down while I drew maps on the board. "Now this is the United States of America, and this is Mexico, and this is the Atlantic Ocean…"

Fenny was shaking his head darkly. "Lies," he said. "All that's lies. That stuff ain't there. It AIN'T!" When he shouted he pushed at his desk and it went crashing over.

I asked him to pick up his desk, and when he just shook his head, starting to slobber again, I picked it up myself. Some of the children gasped. "So you've seen or heard of maps and other countries?" I asked.

He nodded. "But they're lies."

"Who told you that?"

He shook his head and refused to say. If he had shown any signs of embarrassment, I would have thought that he'd learned this misinformation from his parents; but he did not-he was just angry and sullen.

At noon all the children took their paper bags outside and ate their sandwiches in the lot around the school. It would be window-dressing to call it a playground, though there was a rickety set of swings in back of the school. I kept my eye on Fenny Bate. He was left alone by most of the other children. When he roused himself from his stupor and tried to join a group, the others pointedly walked away and left him standing alone, his hands in his pockets. From time to time a skinny girl with lank blond hair came up and spoke to him-she rather resembled him, and I imagined that she must have been his sister. I checked my lists: Constance Bate, in the fifth grade. She had been one of the quiet ones.

Then, when I looked back at Fenny, I saw an odd-looking man standing on the road outside the building, looking across the school grounds at him, just as I was doing. Fenny Bate was sitting unaware between us. For some reason, this man gave me a shock. It was not just that he was odd in appearance, though he was that, dressed in old disreputable working clothes, with wild black hair, ivory cheeks, a handsome face and extremely powerful looking arms and shoulders. It was the way he was looking at Fenny Bate. He looked feral. And with the wildness, there was a striking sort of freedom in the way he stood there, a freedom that went deeper than mere self-assurance. To me he seemed extremely dangerous; and it seemed that I had been transported into a region where men and boys were wild beasts in disguise. I looked away, almost frightened by the savagery in the man's face, and when I looked back he was gone.

My notions of the place were confirmed that evening, when I had forgotten all about the man outside on the road. I had gone upstairs to my drafty room to try to work out my lessons for the second day. I would have to introduce the multiplication tables to the upper grades, they all could use some extremely elementary geography… things of this sort were going through my mind when Sophronia Mather entered my room. The first thing she did was to turn down the kerosene lamp I had been using. "That's for full dark, not evening," she said. "We can't afford to have you using up all the kerosene. You'll learn to read your books by the light God gives you."

I was startled to see her in my room. During supper the previous evening she had been silent, and judging by her face, which was pinched and sallow and tight as a drumhead, you would say that silence was her natural mode. She made it very expressive, I can tell you. But I was to learn that apart from her husband, she had no fear of speech.

"I've come to quiz you, schoolteacher," she said. "There's been talk."

"Already?" I asked.

"You make your ending in your manner of beginning, and how you begin is how you'll go on. I've heard from Mariana Birdwood that you tolerate misbehavior in your classes."

"I don't believe I did," I said.

"Her Ethel claims you did."

I could not put a face to the name Ethel Birdwood, but I remembered calling it out-she was one of the older girls, the fifteen-year-olds, I thought. "And what does Ethel Birdwood claim I tolerated?"

"It's that Fenny Bate. Didn't he use fists on another boy? Right in front of your nose?"

"I spoke to him."

"Spoke? Speakin's no good. Why didn't you use your ferule?"

"I don't possess one," I said.

Now she really was shocked. "But you must beat them," she finally got out. "It's the only way. You must ferule one or two every day. And Fenny Bate more than the rest."

"Why particularly him?"

"Because he is bad."

"I saw that he is troubled, slow, disturbed," I said, "but I don't think that I saw that he was bad."

"He is. He is bad. And the other children expect him to be beaten. If your ideas are too uppity for us, then you'll have to leave the school. It's not only the children who expect you to use the ferule." She turned as if to go out. "I thought I would do you the kindness of speaking to you before my husband hears that you have been neglecting your duties. Mind you, you'll take my advice. There's no teaching without beating."

"But what makes Fenny Bate so notorious?" I asked, ignoring that horrific last remark. "It would be unjust to persecute a boy who needs help."

"The ferule's all the help he needs. He's not bad, he's badness itself. You should make him bleed and keep him quiet-keep him down. I'm only trying to help you, schoolmaster. We have use of the little extra money your allowance brings us." With that she left me. I did not even have time to ask her about the peculiar man I had seen that afternoon.

Well, I had no intention of doing further damage to the town scapegoat.

(Milly Sheehan, her face puckered with distaste, set down the ashtray she had been pretending to polish, glanced at the window to make sure the drapes were closed and edged around the door. Sears, pausing in his story, saw that she had left it open a crack.)

3

Sears James, pausing in his story and thinking with annoyance that Milly's eavesdropping was becoming less subtle every month, was unaware of an event which had occurred that afternoon in town and would affect all of their lives. This was unremarkable in itself, the arrival of a striking young woman on a Trailways bus- a young woman who stepped out of the bus on the corner of the bank and the library and looked around with an expression of confident satisfaction like that of a successful woman returning for a nostalgic look at her home town. That was what she suggested, holding a small suitcase in her hand and smiling slightly in a sudden fall of brilliant leaves, and you would have said, watching her, that her success was the measure of her revenge. She looked, with her long handsome coat and her abundance of dark hair, as if she had come back to rejoice discreetly over how far she had come-as if that were half the pleasure she felt. Milly Sheehan, out shopping for the doctor's groceries, saw her standing by the stop as the bus rolled away toward Binghamton and thought for a moment that she knew her; as did Stella Hawthorne, who was having a cup of coffee beside the window of the Village Pump restaurant. Still smiling, the dark-haired girl strode past the window, and Stella turned her head to watch her cross the town square and go up the steps of the Archer Hotel. Her companion, an associate professor of anthropology at the nearby SUNY college, named Harold Sims, said, "The scrutiny one beautiful woman gives another! But I've never seen you do it before, Stel."

She, who detested being called "Stel" said, "Did you think she was beautiful?"

"I'd be a liar if I said I didn't."

"Well, if you think I'm beautiful too, I guess it's all right." She smiled rather automatically at Sims, who was twenty years younger than herself and infatuated, and looked back at the Archer Hotel, where the tall young woman was just negotiating the door and disappearing within.

"If it's all right, why are you staring?"

"Oh, it's just-" Stella closed her mouth. "It's just nothing at all. That's the sort of woman you ought to be taking to lunch, not a battered old monument like me."

"Jesus, if you think that," Sims said and tried to take her hand beneath the table. She brushed his hand aside with a touch of her fingers. Stella Hawthorne had never appreciated being fondled in restaurants. She would have liked to have given his paw a good hard slap.

"Stella, give me a break."

She looked straight into his mild brown eyes and said, "Hadn't you better get back to all your nice little students?"

In the meantime the young woman was checking into the hotel. Mrs. Hardie, who had been running the Archer Hotel with her son since the death of her husband, emerged from her office and came up to the lovely young person on the other side of the desk. "May I help you?" she asked, and thought how am I going to keep Jim from this one?

"I'll need a room with a bath," the girl said. "I'd like to stay here until I can find a place to rent somewhere in town."

"Oh, how nice," said Mrs. Hardie. "You're moving to Milburn? Well, I think that's real sweet. Most all the young people here nowadays just can't wait to get out. Like my Jim, he'll take your bags up, he thinks every day here is another day in jail. New York is where he wants to go. Would that be where you're from?"

"I've lived there. But some of my family lived here once."

"Well, here are our rates, and here's the register," said Mrs. Hardie, sliding a mimeographed sheet of paper and the big leather-bound register across the counter to her. "You'll find this a real nice quiet hotel, most of the folks here are residential, just like a boardinghouse really, but with the service of a hotel, and no loud parties at night." The young woman had nodded at the rates and was signing the register. "No discos, not on your life, and I have to tell you straight off, no men in your room past eleven."

"Fine," the girl said, turning the register back to Mrs. Hardie, who read the name written in a clear elegant handwriting: Anna Mostyn, with an address given in the West Eighties in New York.

"Oh, that's good," said Mrs. Hardie, "you never know how girls will take that these days, but"-she looked up at the new guest's face, and was stopped short by the indifference in the long blue eyes. Her first, almost unconscious thought was she's a cold one, and this was followed by the perfectly conscious reflection that this girl would have no trouble handling Jim. "Anna's such a nice old-fashioned name."

"Yes."

Mrs. Hardie, a little disconcerted, rang the bell for her son.

"I'm really a very old-fashioned sort of person," the girl said.

"Didn't you say you had family here in town?"

"I did, but it was a long time ago."

"It's just that I didn't recognize the name."

"No, you wouldn't. An aunt of mine lived here once.

Her name was Eva Galli. But you probably wouldn't have known her."

(Ricky's wife, sitting alone in the restaurant, suddenly snapped her fingers and exclaimed, "I'm getting old." She had remembered of whom the girl had reminded her. The waiter, a high-school dropout by the look of him, bent over the table, not quite sure how to give her the bill after the gentleman had stormed off, and uttered "Huh?" "Oh get away, you fool," she said, wondering why it was that while one half of high-school dropouts looked like thugs, the other half resembled physicists. "Oh, here, better give me the bill before you faint.")

Jim Hardie kept sneaking looks at her all the way up the stairs, and once he had opened her room and put her suitcase down offered, "I hope you're going to stick around a good long time."

"I thought your mother said you hated Milburn."

"I don't hate it so much anymore," he said, giving her the look which had melted Penny Draeger in the back seat of his car the previous night.

"Why?"

"Ah," he said, not knowing how to continue in the face of her total refusal to be melted. "Ah, you know."

"I do?"

"Look. I just mean you're a goddamn great-lookin' lady, that's all. You know what I mean. You got a lot of style." He decided to be bolder than he felt "Ladies with style turn me on."

"Do they?"

"Yeah." He nodded. He couldn't figure her out. If she was a nonstarter, she would have told him to leave at the beginning. But though she let him hang around, she wasn't looking interested or flattered-she wasn't even looking amused. Then she surprised him by doing what he had been half hoping she would do, and took off her coat. She wasn't much in the chest department, but she had good legs. Then, entirely without warning, a total awareness of her body assaulted him-a blast of pure sensuality, nothing like the steamy posturing of Penny Draeger or the other high-school girls he had bedded, a wave of pure and cold sensuality which dwindled him.

"Ah," he said, desperately hoping she would not send him away, "I bet you had some kind of great job in the city. What are you, in television or something?"

"No."

He fidgeted. "Well, it's not like I don't know your address or anything. Maybe I could drop in sometime, have a talk?"

"Maybe. Do you talk?"

"Hah. Yeah, well, guess I better get back downstairs. I mean, I gotta lot of storm windows to put up, this cold weather we got…"

She sat on the bed and held her hand out. Half reluctantly, he went toward her. When he touched her hand, she placed a neatly folded dollar bill in his palm. "I'll tell you what I think," she said. "I think bellboys shouldn't wear jeans. They look sloppy."

He accepted the dollar, too confused to thank her, and fled.

(It was Ann-Veronica Moore, thought Stella, that actress at John's house the night Edward died. Stella allowed the intimidated boy to hold her fur coat. Ann-Veronica Moore, why should I think of her? I only saw her for a few minutes, and that girl really didn't resemble her at all.)

4

No, Sears continued, I was resolved to help that poor creature, Fenny Bate. I didn't think there was such a thing as a bad boy, unless misunderstanding and cruelty were to make him bad. And that you could redress. So I began a little reclamation program. When Fenny tipped over his desk the next day, I righted it myself, much to the disgust of the older children; and at lunchtime I asked him to stay inside with me.

The other children filed out, buzzing with speculation-I'm sure they thought I was going to cane him once they were out of sight-and then I noticed that his sister was lurking in the dark rear corner. "I won't hurt him, Constance," I said. "You can stay behind too if you wish." Those poor children! I can still see both of them, with their bad teeth and tattered clothing, he full of suspicion and resentment and fear and she simply fearful-for him. She crept into a chair and I went to work to try to straighten out some of Fenny's misconceptions. I told him all the stories of explorers I knew, about Lewis and Clarke and Cortez and Nansen and Ponce de Leon, stuff I was going to use later in class, but it had no effect on Fenny. He knew that the world went only about forty or fifty miles out from Four Forks, and that the people within this radius were the world's population. He clung to this notion with the dogged stubbornness of the stupid. "Who in the world told you this, Fenny?" I asked. He shook his head. "Did you make it up yourself?" He shook his head again. "Was it your parents?"

Back in the dark corner, Constance giggled-giggled without any humor. That laugh of hers sent chills through me-it conjured up pictures of a nearly bestial life. Of course, that was what they had; and all the other children knew it and as I found out later, it was much worse, much more unnatural, than anything I could have imagined.

Anyhow, I raised my hands in despair or impatience, and the wretched girl must have thought I was going to strike him, because she called out, "It was Gregory!"

Fenny looked back at her, and I swear that I've never seen anyone look so frightened. In the next instant he was off his chair and out of the schoolroom. I tried to call him back, but it was no good. He was running as if for life, off into the woods, sprinting in the jack-rabbit country way. The girl hung in the doorway, watching him go. And now she looked frightened and dismayed-her whole being had turned pale. "Who is Gregory, Constance?" I asked her, and her face twisted. "Does he sometimes walk by the schoolhouse? Is his hair like this?" And I stuck my hands up over my head, my fingers spread wide-and then she was off too, running as fast as he had.

Well, that afternoon I was accepted by the other students. They'd assumed that I had beaten both of the Bate children, and so taken part in the natural order of things. And that night at dinner I got, if not an extra potato, at least a sort of congealed smile from Sophronia Mather. Evidently Ethel Birdwood had reported to her mother that the new schoolmaster had seen reason.

Fenny and Constance didn't come to school the next two days. I stewed about that, and thought that I'd acted so clumsily that they might never return. On the second day I was so restless that I paced around the schoolyard during lunchtime. The children regarded me as they would a dangerous lunatic;-it was clear that teacher was supposed to stay indoors, preferably administering the ferule. Then I heard something that stopped me dead and made me whirl around toward a group of girls, who were sitting rather primly on the grass. They were the biggest girls and one of them was Ethel Birdwood. I was sure that I'd heard her mention the name Gregory. "Tell me about Gregory, Ethel," I said.

"What's Gregory?" she asked, simpering. "There's no one with that name here." She gave me a great cow-eyed look, and I was certain she was thinking of that rural tradition of the schoolmaster marrying his eldest female pupil. She was a confident girl, this Ethel Birdwood, and her father had the reputation of being prosperous.

I wasn't having it "I just heard you mention his name."

"You must be mistaken, Mr. James," she said, dripping honey.

"I do not feel charitable to liars," I said. "Tell me about this Gregory person."

Of course they all assumed that I was threatening her with a caning. Another girl came to her rescue. "We were saying that Gregory fixed that gutter," she said, and pointed to the side of the school. One of the rain gutters was obviously new.

"Well, he'll never come around this school again if I can help it," I said, and left them to their infuriating giggling.

After school that day I thought I'd visit the lion's den, as it were, and walk up to the Bate home. I knew it was about as far out of town as Lewis's house is from Milburn. I set off on the most likely road, and walked quite a way, three or four miles, when I realized I'd probably gone too far. I hadn't passed any houses, so the Bate home had to be actually in the woods themselves, instead of on their edge as I had imagined. I took a likely-looking trail, and thought I would simply tack back and forth toward town until I found them.

Unfortunately, I got lost. I went into ravines and up hills and through scrub until I couldn't have told you where even the road was anymore. It all looked appallingly alike. Then, just at dusk, I was aware of being watched. It was a remarkably uncanny feeling-it was like knowing a tiger was behind me, about to pounce. I turned around and put my back against a big elm. And then I saw something. A man stepped into a clearing about thirty yards from me-the man I had seen before. Gregory, or so I thought. He said nothing, and neither did I. He just gazed at me, absolutely silent, with that wild hair and that ivory face. I felt hatred, absolute hatred, streaming from him. An air of utter unreasonable violence hung about him, along with that peculiar freedom I had sensed earlier-he was like a madman. He could have killed me off in those woods, and no one would have known. And trust me, what I saw in his face was murder, nothing else. Just as I expected him to come forward and attack me, he stepped behind a tree.

I went forward very slowly. "What do you want?" I called, simulating bravery. There was no answer. I went forward a bit more. Finally I got to the tree where I had seen him, and there wasn't a trace of him-he had just melted away.

I was still lost, and I still felt threatened. For that was the meaning of his appearance, I knew-it was a threat. I took a few steps off in a random direction, passed through another thick stand of trees, and stopped short. For a moment I was scared. Right before me, closer than that apparition had been, was a thin shabbily dressed girl with stringy blond hair: Constance Bate.

"Where's Fenny?" I asked.

She raised one bony arm and pointed off to the side. Then he too rose up like a-"like a snake from a basket," I must admit, is the metaphor that comes to mind. On his face, when he stood up in the tall weeds, was that characteristic Fenny Bate expression of sullen guilt.

"I was looking for your home," I said, and they both pointed at once in the same direction, again without speaking. Looking through a chink in the woods, I saw a tarpaper shack with one greasepaper window and a stingy little pipe of a chimney. You used to see a lot of tarpaper shacks here and there, though thank goodness they have disappeared now, but that one was the most sordid I ever did see. I know I have the reputation of being a conservative, but I've never equated virtue with money, nor poverty with vice, yet that mean stinking little shack-looking at it, you knew it stank-somehow for me appeared to breathe foulness. No, it was worse than that. It wasn't merely that the lives within would be brutalized by poverty, but that they would be twisted, malformed… my heart fell, I looked away and saw an emaciated black dog nosing at a dead cushion of feathers that must have been a chicken once. This surely, I thought, must be how Fenny got the reputation for being "bad"-the prim folks of Four Forks had taken one look at his home and condemned him for life.

Yet I didn't want to go in there. I didn't believe in evil, but evil was what I felt.

I turned back to the children, who had the oddest frozen look in their eyes. "I want to see you in school tomorrow," I said.

Fenny shook his head.

"But I want to help you," I said. I was on the verge of making a speech: what I wanted to say to him was that it was my plan to change his life, to rescue him, in a sense I suppose to make him human… that obstinate, frozen look on his mug stopped me. There was something else in it too, and I realized with a shock that something about Fenny was reminding me of my last glimpse of the mysterious Gregory. "You must come back to school tomorrow," I said.

Constance said, "Gregory doesn't want us to. Gregory said we have to stay here."

"Well, what I say is he comes, and you come too."

"I'll ask Gregory."

"Oh, to hell with Gregory," I shouted, "you'll come," and walked away from the two of them. That queer sensation stayed with me until I found the road again -it was like walking away from damnation.

You can guess what the result was. They did not return. Things ticked on in their normal way for several days, Ethel Birdwood and some of the other girls giving me liquid glances whenever I called on them for an answer, me toiling over the next day's lessons in that frigid box of a room and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse. Eventually Ethel began bringing me sandwiches for lunch, and soon my other admirers among the girls were bringing sandwiches too. I used to save one in my pocket to eat in my room after supper with the Mathers.

On Sundays I made the long hike to Footville for my required visit to the Lutheran church there. It was not as deadly as I had feared. The minister was an old German, Franz Gruber, who called himself Dr. Gruber. The doctorate was genuine-he was a much subtler man than his gross body or residence in Footville, New York, suggested. I thought his sermons were interesting, and I decided to speak to him.

When the Bate children finally appeared, they seemed worn and tired, like drinkers after a strenuous night this became a pattern. They'd miss two days, come in, miss three, come in for two: and each time I saw them, they looked worse. Fenny in particular seemed in decline. It was as though he were aging prematurely: he grew even thinner, his skin seemed to crease on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. And when I saw him, I could swear that he looked as though he were smirking at me-Fenny Bate smirking, though I would have sworn that he didn't possess the mental equipment for it. For him, it seemed corrupt-it frightened me.

Therefore, one Sunday after the service I spoke to Dr. Gruber at the church door. I waited to be last to shake his hand, and when everybody else had filed away down the road, I told him that I wanted his advice on a problem.

He must have thought that I was going to confess to an adultery, or some such. But he was very kind, and invited me into his home, across the street from the church.

Very graciously, he escorted me into his library. This was a large room, entirely book-lined-I hadn't seen a room like it since I'd left Harvard. It was obviously the room of a scholar: it was a room where a man comfortable with ideas worked with them. Most of the books were in German, but many were in Latin and Greek. He had the patristic writings in big soft leather folios, Bible commentaries, works of theology and the great aid to sermon-writers, a Bible concordance. On a shelf behind his desk I was surprised to see a little collection of Lully, Fludd, Bruno, what you could call the occult studies of the Renaissance. Also, even more surprisingly, a few antiquarian books about witchcraft and Satanism.

Dr. Gruber had been out of the room fetching beer, and when he came in he saw me looking at these books.

"What you see," he said in his guttural accent "is the reason you find me in Footville, Mr. James. I hope you will not think me a cracked old fool on the evidence of those books." Without my prompting him, he told me the story, and it's as you'd expect-he'd been brilliant, approved of by his elders, he had written books himself, but when he had shown too much interest in what he called "hermetic matters," he was ordered to stop that line of study. He'd published one further paper, and been banished to the most out-of-the-way congregation the Lutheran establishment could find. "Now," he said, "my cards are on the table, as my new countrymen say. I never speak of these hermetic matters in my sermons, but I continue my studies in them. You are free to go or to speak, as you please." This sounded a little pompous to me, and I was a little taken aback, but I saw no reason not to continue.

I told him the whole story, not stinting on the detail. He listened with great attentiveness, and it was clear that he had heard of Gregory and the Bate children.

More than that, he seemed to be very excited by the story.

When I finished he said, "And all of this happened just as you have explained?"

"Of course."

"You have spoken of it to no one else?"

"No."

"I am very happy you have come to me," he said, and instead of saying anything further, pulled a gigantic pipe out of a desk drawer, filled it and began to smoke, all the while fixing me with his protuberant eyes. I began to feel uneasy, and half-regretted that I had taken his earlier comments so lightly. "Your landlady never gave you any idea of why she thought Fenny Bate was 'badness itself'?"

I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the negative impression I'd just had of him. "Do you know why she would?"

"It is a well-known story," he answered. "In these two little towns, actually it is quite a famous story."

"Is Fenny bad?" I asked.

"He is not bad, but he is corrupt," said Dr. Gruber. "But from what you say-"

"It could be worse? I confess," I said, "it's entirely a mystery."

"More so than you imagine," he said calmly. "If I try to explain it to you, you will be tempted, on the basis of what you know about me, to think me insane." His eyes bulged even more.

"If Fenny is corrupt," I asked, "who corrupted him?"

"Oh, Gregory," he replied. "Gregory, without doubt Gregory is in back of it all."

"But who is Gregory?" I had to ask.

"The man you saw. I'm positive of that. You have described him perfectly." He held his pudgy fingers up behind his head, imitating my own gesture to Constance Bate. "Perfectly, I assure you. Yet when you hear more, you will doubt my word."

"For the sake of heaven, why?"

He shook his head, and I saw that his free hand was trembling. For a second I wondered if I really had stumbled into intimate conversation with a madman.

"Fenny's parents had three children," he said, puffing out smoke. "Gregory Bate was the first"

"He is their brother!" I exclaimed. "One day I thought I saw a resemblance… yes, I see. But there's nothing unnatural in that."

"That depends, I think, on what passed between them."

I tried to take it in. "You mean something unnatural passed between them."

"And with the sister as well."

A feeling of horror went through me. I could see that cold handsome face, and that hateful careless manner -Gregory's air of being free of all restraint. "Between Gregory and the sister."

"And, as I said, between Gregory and Fenny."

"He corrupted both of them, then. Why isn't Constance as condemned by Four Forks as Fenny?"

"Remember, schoolteacher, that this is the hinterland. A touch of-unnaturalness-between brother and sister among those wretched families in shacks is perhaps not so unnatural after all."

"But between brother and brother-" I might have been back at Harvard, discussing a savage tribe with a professor of anthropology.

"It is."

"By God, it is!" I exclaimed, seeing that crafty, prematurely aged expression on Penny's face. "And now he is trying to send me off-he sees me as an interference."

"Apparently he does. I hope you see why."

"Because I won't stand for it," I said. "He wants to get rid of me."

"Ah," he said. "Gregory wants everything."

"You mean he wants them forever."

"Both of them forever-but from your story, perhaps Fenny most of all."

"Can't their parents stop this?"

"The mother is dead. The father left when Gregory grew old enough to beat him."

"They live alone in that appalling place?"

He nodded.

It was terrible: it meant the miasma, the sense of the place as somehow damned, came from the children themselves: from what happened between them and Gregory.

"Well," I protested, "can't the children themselves do something to protect themselves?"

"They did," he said.

"But what?" I had prayer in mind, I suppose, since I was talking with a preacher, or boarding with another family-but as to that, my own experience had shown me how far charity went in Four Forks.

"You won't take my word for it," he said, "so I must show you." He abruptly stood up, and gestured for me to stand as well. "Outside," he ordered. Beneath his excitement, he seemed very disturbed, and just for a moment I thought that he found me as unpleasant as I did him, with his showers of pipe tobacco and his bulging eyes.

I left the room and on the way out of the house, passed a room with a table set for one. I smelled a roast cooking, and an open bottle of beer sat on the table, so it could be that all he disliked was being kept from his lunch.

He slammed the door behind us and set off back toward the church. This was mystifying indeed. When he had crossed the road, he called to me without turning his head. "You know that Gregory was the school handyman? That he used to do odd jobs around the school?"

"One of the girls said something about it," I replied, watching him continue on around the side of the church. What next, I wondered, a trip into the fields? And what would I have to be shown before I would believe it?

A little graveyard lay behind the church, and I had time, following waddling Dr. Gruber, to idly look at the names on the massive nineteenth-century tombstones-Josiah Foote, Sarah Foote, all of that clan which had founded the village, and other names which meant nothing to me. Dr. Gruber was now standing, with a decided air of impatience, by a little gate at the back of the graveyard.

"Here," he said.

Well, I thought, if you're too lazy to open it yourself, and bent down to lift the latch.

"Not that," he said sharply. "Look down. Look at the cross."

I looked where he was pointing. It was a crude hand-painted wooden cross, standing where a tombstone would, at the head of a grave. Someone had lettered the name Gregory Bate on the horizontal piece of the cross. I looked back up at Dr. Gruber, and there was no doubt this time, he was looking at me with distaste.

"It can't be," I said. "It's preposterous. I saw him."

"Believe me, schoolteacher, this is where your rival is buried," he said, and not for a long time after did I notice his peculiar choice of words. "The mortal portion of him, at any rate."

I was numb; I repeated what I had said. "It can't be."

He ignored my remark. "One night a year ago, Gregory Bate was doing some work in the schoolyard. While doing it, he looked up and noticed-I imagine this is what happened-that the rain gutter required some attention, and he went around to the back of the school and got the ladder and went up. Fenny and Constance saw their chance to escape his tyranny, and knocked the ladder out from under him. He fell, struck his head on the corner of the building, and died."

"What were they doing there at night?"

He shrugged. "He always took them with him. They had been sitting in the playground."

"I don't believe that they killed him on purpose," I said.

"Howard Hummell, the postmaster, saw them running off. It was he who found Gregory's body."

"So nobody actually saw it happen."

"Nobody had to actually see it, Mr. James. What happened was clear to all."

"It's not clear to me," I said, and he shrugged again. "What did they do afterward?"

"They ran. It must have been obvious that they had succeeded. The back of his head was crushed. Fenny and his sister disappeared for three weeks-they hid out in the woods. By the time they realized they had nowhere to go and returned home, we had buried Gregory. Howard Hummell had told what he had seen, and people assumed what they assumed. Hence, you see, Fenny's 'badness.' "

"But now-" I said, looking down at the crudely lettered grave. The children must have made and lettered the cross, I realized, and suddenly that seemed the most gruesome detail of all.

"Oh yes, now. Now Gregory wants him back. From what you tell me, he has him back-he has both of them back. But I imagine that he will wish to remove Fenny from your-influence." He pronounced this last word with a meticulous Germanic precision.

It chilled me. "To take him."

"To take him."

"Can't I save him?" I said, almost pleading.

"I suspect at least no one else can," he said, looking at me as from a great distance.

"Can't you help, for God's sake!"

"Not even for His. From what you say, it has gone too far. We do not believe in exorcisms, in my church."

"You just believe-" I was furious and scornful.

"In evil, yes. We do believe in that."

I turned away from him. He must have imagined that I was going to return and beg him for help, but when I kept on walking, he called out, "Take care, schoolteacher."

Walking home I was in a sort of daze-I could scarcely believe or accept what had seemed irrefutable while I talked with the preacher. Yet he had shown me the grave; and I had seen with my own eyes the transformation in Fenny-I had seen Gregory: it is not too much to say that I had felt him, the impression he made on me was that strong.

And then I stopped walking, about a mile from Four Forks, faced with proof that Gregory Bate knew exactly what I had discovered, and knew exactly what I had intended. One of the farmers' fields there formed a large wide bare hill visible from the road, and he was up on the hill staring down at me. He didn't move a muscle when I saw him, but his intensity quivered out of him, and I must have jumped a foot He was looking at me as though he could read every thought in my head. Far up in the clouds above him, a hawk was circling aimlessly. Any trace of doubt left me. I knew that everything Gruber had told me was true.

It was all I could do not to run. But I would not show cowardice before him, no matter how cowardly I felt. He was waiting for me to run, I imagine, standing up there with his arms hanging straight and his pale face visible as only a white smudge and all that feeling arrowing toward me. I forced myself to continue home at a walk.

Dinner I could scarcely force myself to swallow-I had no more than a bite or two. Mather said, "If you'll starve yourself there's more for the rest of us. It's no matter to me."

I faced him directly. "Did Fenny Bate have a brother as well as a sister?"

He looked at me with as much curiosity as he possessed.

"Well did he?"

"He did."

"What was the brother's name?"

"It was Gregory, but I'll thank you to refrain from speaking about him."

"Were you afraid of him?" I asked, because I saw fear on both his face and his wife's.

"Please, Mr. James," said Sophronia Mather. "This will do no good."

"Nobody speaks of that Gregory Bate," her husband said.

"What happened to him?" I asked.

He stopped chewing and put down his fork. "I don't know what you heard or who you heard it from, but I'll tell you this. If any man was damned, it was that Gregory Bate, and whatever happened to him was deserved. That's an end to talk of Gregory Bate." Then he pushed more food into his mouth, and the discussion was over. Mrs. Mather kept her eyes religiously on her plate for the rest of the meal.

I was in a stew. Neither of the two Bate children appeared in school for two or three days, and it was almost as though I had dreamed the whole affair. I went through the motions of teaching, but my mind was with them, especially poor Fenny, and the danger he was in.

What above all kept the horror before me was that I saw Gregory in town one day.

Because it was a Saturday, Four Forks was filled with farmers and their wives who came in for their shopping. Every Saturday, the little town had almost a fairground look, at least in contrast to the way it looked normally. The sidewalks were crowded and the stores were busy. Dozens of horses stamped in the street, and everywhere you saw the eager faces of kids, all piled into the backs of wagons, their eyes wide open with being in town. I recognized many of my pupils and waved to some of them.

Then a big farmer I'd never met before tapped my shoulder and said that he knew I was his son's teacher and that he wanted to shake my hand. I thanked him and listened to him talk for a bit. Then I saw Gregory over his shoulder. Gregory was leaning against the side of the post office, indifferent to everything about him and staring at me-just intently staring, as he must have been doing from the hilltop. My mouth dried up, and something obviously showed in my face, because my pupil's father stopped talking and asked me if I felt all right.

"Oh yes," I said, but it must have looked as if I were being deliberately rude, because I kept looking over his shoulder. No one else could see Gregory: they just walked by him, carrying on in the normal way, looking right through him.

Now where I had seen that abandoned freedom I could see only depravity.

I made some excuse to the farmer-a headache, an abscessed tooth-and turned back to Gregory. He was gone. He had vanished during the few seconds I was saying good-bye to the farmer.

So I knew that the showdown was coming, and that he would pick the time and place.

The next time Fenny and Constance came to school I was determined that I would protect them. They were both pale and quiet, and enough of an aura of strangeness enveloped them for the other children to leave them alone. It was perhaps four days since my seeing their brother leaning against the Four Forks post office. I could not imagine what had been happening to them since I had last seen them, but it was as though a wasting disease had hold of them. They seemed so lost and apart, those ragged backward children. I was determined to keep them under my protection.

When the lessons for the day were over, I kept them back as the others raced for home. They sat uncomplaining at their desks, stricken and dumb.

"Why did he let you come to school?" I asked.

Fenny looked at me blankly and said, "Who?"

I was dumbfounded. "Gregory, of course."

Fenny shook his head as if to blow away fog. "Gregory? We ain't seen Gregory for a long time. No, not for a long time now."

Now I was shocked-they were wan from his absence!

"Then what do you do with yourselves?"

"We go over."

"Go over?"

Constance nodded, agreeing with Fenny. "We go over."

"Go over where? Go over what?"

Now they were both looking at me with their mouths open, as if I were very dense.

"Go over to meet Gregory?" It was horrible, but I could think of nothing else.

Fenny shook his head. "We don't never see Gregory."

"No," said Constance, and I was horrified to hear regret in her voice. "We just go over."

Fenny seemed to come to life for a moment. He said, "But I heard him once. He said this is all there is, and there ain't no more. There ain't nothin' but this. There ain't nothin' like you said-like on maps. It ain't there."

"Then what's out there instead?" I asked.

"It's like what we see," Fenny said.

"See?"

"When we go," he answered.

"What do you see?" I asked.

"It's nice," Constance said, and put her head on the desk. "It's real nice."

I didn't have the faintest idea of what they were talking about, but I didn't like the sound of it much, and I thought I'd have time later to talk about it further. "Well, nobody's going anywhere tonight," I said. "I want both of you to stay here with me tonight. I want to keep you safe."

Fenny nodded, but stupidly and halfheartedly, as if he didn't care much where he spent his nights, and when I looked to Constance for agreement I saw that she had fallen asleep.

"All right then," I said. "We can fix up places to sleep later, and tomorrow I'll try to find beds for you in the village. You two children can't stay out in the woods on your own anymore."

Fenny nodded slackly again, and I saw that he too was on the verge of falling asleep. "You can put your head down," I said.

In seconds both of them were sleeping with their heads on their desks. I could almost have agreed with Gregory's dreadful statement at that moment-it was really as though this was all there was, all there was anywhere, just myself and the two exhausted children in a cold barn of a schoolhouse-my sense of reality had had too many knocks. As we three sat in the schoolhouse, the day began to end and the whole area of the room, dim at the best of times, became dark and shadowy. I did not have the heart to turn on the lights, so we sat there as at the bottom of a well. I had promised them that I would find beds in the village, but that miserable little hamlet not fifty paces down the road seemed miles off. And even if I'd had the energy and confidence to leave them alone, I couldn't imagine who'd take them in. If it were a well, it was really a well of hopelessness, and I seemed to myself as lost as the children.

Finally I could stand it no longer, and I went over to Fenny and shook his arm. He came awake like a frightened animal, and I held him on his chair only by using all of my strength. I said, "I have to know the truth, Fenny. What happened to Gregory?"

"He went over," he said, sullen again.

"Do you mean he died?"

Fenny nodded, and his mouth dropped open, and again I saw those terrible rotting teeth.

"But he comes back?"

He nodded again.

"And you see him?"

"He sees us," Fenny said, very firmly. "He looks and looks. He wants to touch."

"To touch?"

"Like before."

I put my hand on my forehead-it was burning. Every word that Fenny spoke opened a new abyss. "But did you shake the ladder?"

Fenny just looked stupidly at his desk, and I repeated my question. "Did you shake the ladder, Fenny?"

"He looks and he looks," Fenny said, as if it were the largest fact in his consciousness.

I put my hands on his head to make him look up at me, and at that moment the face of his tormentor appeared in the window. That white terrible face-as if he wanted to stop Fenny answering my questions. I felt sick, dumped back into the pit, but I also felt as if the battle had come at last, and I pulled Fenny toward me, trying to protect him physically.

"Is he here?" Fenny shrieked, and at the sound of his voice Constance dropped to the floor and began to wail.

"What does that matter?" I yelled. "He won't get you-I have you! He knows he's lost you forever!"

"Where is he?" Fenny shrieked again, pushing at me. "Where is Gregory?"

"There," I said, and turned him around to face the window.

He was already jerking himself around, and we both stared then at an empty window-there was nothing out there but an empty dark sky. I felt triumphant-I had won. I gripped Fenny's arm with all the strength of my victory, and he gave a shout of pure despair. He toppled forward, and I caught him as if he were jumping into the pit of hell itself. Only a few seconds later did I realize what I had caught: his heart had stopped, and I was holding a dispossessed body. He had gone over for good.

"And that was it," Sears said, looking at the circle of his friends. "Gregory too was gone for good. I came down with a nearly fatal fever-that was what I'd felt on my forehead-and spent three weeks in the Mathers' attic room. When I had recovered and could move around again, Fenny was buried. He really had gone over for good. I wanted to quit my job and leave the village, but they held me to my contract and I went back to teaching. I was shattered, but I could go through the motions. By the end of it, I was even using the ferule. I'd lost all my liberal notions, and when I left I was regarded as a fine and satisfactory teacher.

"There is one other thing, though. On the day I left Four Forks I went for the first time to look at Penny's grave. It was behind the church, next to his brother's. I looked at the two graves, and do you know what I felt? I felt nothing. I felt empty. As though I'd had nothing at all to do with it."

"What happened to the sister?" asked Lewis.

"Oh, she was no problem. She was a quiet girl, and people felt sorry for her. I'd overestimated the stinginess of the village. One of the families took her in. As far as I know, they treated her as their own daughter. It's my impression that she got pregnant, married the boy and left town. But that would have been years later."

Frederick Hawthorne

1

Ricky walked home, surprised to see snow in the air. It's going to be a hell of a winter, he thought, all the seasons are going funny. In the glow surrounding the street lamp at the end of Montgomery Street, snowflakes whirled and fell and adhered to the ground for a time before melting. Cold air licked in beneath his tweed topcoat. He had a half hour walk before him, and he was sorry that he hadn't taken his car, the old Buick Stella happily refused to touch-on cold nights, he usually drove. But tonight he'd wanted time to think: he had been going to grill Sears on the contents of his letter to Donald Wanderley, and he had to work out a technique. This, he knew, he'd failed to do. Sears had told him just what he wanted to, and no more. Still, the damage, from Ricky's point of view, was done; what point was there in knowing how the letter was worded? He startled himself by sighing aloud, and saw his breath send a few big lazy flakes spinning off in a complicated pattern as they melted.

Lately, all the stories, his own included, had made him tense for hours afterward; but tonight he felt more than that. Tonight he felt especially anxious. Ricky's nights were now uniformly dreadful, the dreams of which he had spoken to Sears pursued him straight through until dawn, and he had no doubt that the stories he and his friends told gave them substance; still he thought that the anxiety was not due to his dreams. Nor was it due to the stories, though Sears's had been worse than most-all of their stories were getting worse. They frightened themselves each time they met, but they continued to meet because not to meet would have been more frightening yet. It was comforting to get together, to see that they were each bearing up. Even Lewis was frightened, or why would he have voted in favor of writing to Donald Wanderley? It was this, knowing that the letter was on its way, ticking away in a mailbag somewhere, that made Ricky more than usually anxious.

Maybe I really should have left this town ages ago, he considered, looking at the houses he passed. There was scarcely one he had not been inside at least once, on business or pleasure, to see a client or to eat a dinner. Maybe I should have gone to New York, back when I got married, as Stella wanted to do: it was, for Ricky, a thought of striking disloyalty. Only gradually, only imperfectly had he convinced Stella that his life was in Milburn, with Sears James and the law practice. Cold wind cut into his neck and pulled at his hat. Around the corner, ahead of him, he saw Sears's long black Lincoln parked at the curb; a light burned in Sears's library. Sears would not be able to sleep, not after telling a story like that. By now, they all knew the effects of reliving these past events.

But it's not just the stories, he thought; no, and it's not just the letter either. Something is going to happen. That was why they told the stories. Ricky was not given to premonitions, but the dread of the future he'd felt two weeks earlier while talking to Sears came thudding back into him again. That was why he had thought of moving out of town. He turned into Melrose Avenue: "avenue," presumably, because of the thick trees which lined either side. Their branches stood out gesturally, tinted orange by the lamps. During the day the last of the leaves had fallen. Something's going to happen to the whole town. A branch groaned above Ricky's head. A truck changed gears far behind him, off on Route 17: sound traveled a long way on these cold nights in Milburn. When he went forward, he could see the lighted windows of his own bedroom, up on the third floor of his house. His ears and nose ached with the cold. After such a long and reasonable life, he said to himself, you can't go mystic on me now, old friend. We'll need all the rationality we can muster up.

At that moment, near where he felt safest and with this self-given reassurance in his mind, it seemed to Ricky that someone was following him: that someone was standing back on the corner, glaring at him. He could feel cold eyes staring at him, and in his mind it seemed that they floated alone-just eyes following him. He knew how they would look, clear pale luminous and floating at the level of his own eyes. Their lack of feeling would be dreadful-they would be like eyes in a mask. He turned around, fully expecting to see them, so great was his sense of them. Abashed, he realized that he was trembling. Of course the street was empty. It was simply an empty street, even on a dark night as ordinary as a mongrel pup.

This time you really did it to yourself, he thought, you and that gruesome story Sears told. Eyes! It was something out of an old Peter Lorre film. The Eyes of… of Gregory Bate? Hell. The Hands of Dr. Orlac. It's very clear, Ricky told himself, nothing at all is going to happen, we're just four old coots going out of our minds. To imagine that I thought…

But he had not thought the eyes were behind him, he had known it. It had been knowledge.

Nonsense, he almost said aloud, but let himself in his front door a little more quickly than usual.

His house was dark, as it always was on Chowder Society nights. By running his fingers along the edge of the couch, Ricky skirted the coffee table which on other nights had given him a half dozen bruises; having successfully navigated past that obstacle, he groped around a corner into the dining room and went through into the kitchen. Here he could turn on a light without any possibility of disturbing Stella's sleep; the next time he could do that was at the top of the house, in the dressing room which along with the horrid sleek Italian coffee table had been his wife's latest brainstorm. As she had pointed out, their closets were too crowded, there was no place to store their unseasonal clothes, and the small bedroom next to theirs wasn't likely to be used ever again, now that Robert and Jane were gone; so for a cost of eight hundred dollars, they'd had it converted into a dressing room, with clothes rails and mirrors and a thick new carpet. The dressing room had proved one thing to Ricky: as Stella had always said, he actually did own as many clothes as she did. That had been rather a surprise to Ricky, who was so without vanity that he was unconscious of his own occasional dandyism.

A more immediate surprise was that his hands were shaking. He had been going to make a cup of chamomile tea, but when he saw how his hands trembled, he took a bottle out of a cabinet and poured a small amount of whiskey into a glass. Skittish old idiot. But calling himself names did not help, and when he brought the glass to his lips his hand still shook. It was this damned anniversary. The whiskey, when he took it into his mouth, tasted like diesel oil, and he spat it out into the sink. Poor Edward. Ricky rinsed out his glass, turned off the light and went up the stairs in the dark.

In his pajamas, he left the dressing room and crossed the hall to his bedroom. Quietly he opened the door. Stella lay, breathing softly and rhythmically, on her side of the bed. If he could make it around to his side without knocking into the chair or kicking over her boots or brushing against the mirror and making it rattle he could get into bed without disturbing her.

He gained his side of the bed without waking her and quietly slipped under the blankets. Very gently, he stroked his wife's bare shoulder. It was quite likely that she was having another affair, or at least one of her serious flirtations, and Ricky thought that she had probably taken up again with the professor she'd met a year ago-there was a breathy silence on the phone that was peculiarly his; long ago Ricky had decided that many things were worse than having your wife occasionally go to bed with someone else. She had her life, and he was a large part of it. Despite what he sometimes felt and had said to Sears two weeks before, not being married would have been an impoverishment.

He stretched out, waiting for what he knew would happen. He remembered the sensation of having the eyes boring into his back; he wished that Stella could help, could comfort him in some way; but not wishing to alarm or distress her, thinking that they would end with every new day and thinking also that they were uniquely, privately his, he had never told her of his nightmares. This is Ricky Hawthorne preparing for sleep: lying on his back, his clever face showing no sign of the emotions behind it, his hands behind his head, his eyes open; tired, uneasy, jealous; fearful.

2

In her room at the Archer Hotel, Anna Mostyn stood at a window and watched individual snowflakes drift down toward the street. Though the overhead light was off and it was past twelve, she was fully dressed. The long coat was thrown over the bed, as if she had just come in or was just going out.

She stood at the window and smoked, a tall attractive woman with dark hair and long blue eyes. She could see down nearly the entire length of Main Street the deserted square to one side with its empty benches and bare trees, the black fronts of shops and the Village Pump restaurant and a department store; two blocks on, a traffic light turned green over an empty street. Main Street continued for eight blocks, but the buildings were visible only as dark shopfronts or office buildings. On the opposite side of the square she could see the dark facades of two churches looming above the tops of the bare trees. In the square a bronze Revolutionary War general made a grandiose gesture with a musket.

Tonight or tomorrow? she wondered, smoking her cigarette and surveying the little town.

Tonight.

3

When sleep finally came to Ricky Hawthorne, it was as if he were not merely dreaming, but had in fact been lifted bodily and still awake into another room in another building. He was lying in bed in a strange room, waiting for something to happen. The room seemed deserted, part of an abandoned house. Its walls and floor were bare planks; the window was only an empty frame, sunlight leaked in through a dozen cracks. Dust particles swirled in these stark rays of light. He did not know how he knew it, but he knew that something was going to happen, and that he was afraid of it. He was unable to leave the bed; but even if his muscles were working, he knew with the same knowledge that he would not be able to escape whatever was coming. The room was on an upper floor of the building: through the window he saw only gray clouds and a pale blue sky. But whatever was coming was going to come from inside, not out there.

His body was covered with an old quilt so faded that some of its squares were white. Beneath it, his legs lay paralyzed, two raised lines of fabric. When Ricky looked up, he realized that he could see every detail of the wooden planks on the wall with a more than usual clarity: he saw how the grain flowed down each board, how the knotholes were formed, the way the nailheads stood out at the tops of certain, boards. Breezes filled the room flicking the dust here and there.

From down at the bottom of the house, he heard a crash-it was the noise of a door being thrown open, a heavy cellar door banging against a wall. Even his upstairs room shook with it. As he listened, he heard some complex form dragging itself out of the cellar: it was a heavy form, animal-like, and it had to squeeze through the doorframe. Wood splintered, and Ricky heard the creature thud against a wall. Whatever it was began to investigate the ground floor, moving slowly and heavily. Ricky could picture what it saw-a series of bare rooms exactly like his. On the ground floor, tall grass and weeds would be growing up through the cracks in the floorboards. The sunlight would be touching the sides and back of whatever was moving heavily, purposefully through these deserted rooms. The thing downstairs made a sucking noise, then a high-pitched squeal. It was looking for him. It was snuffling through the house, knowing he was there.

Ricky tried again to force his legs to move, but the two lumps of fabric did not even twitch. The thing downstairs was brushing against walls as it passed through the rooms, making a scratchy noise; the wood creaked. He thought he heard it break through a rotten floorboard.

Then he heard the noise he had been dreading: it shouldered through another doorway. The noises from downstairs were suddenly louder-he could hear the thing breathing. It was at the bottom of the staircase.

He heard it hurl itself at the stairs.

It thumped up what sounded like a half dozen stairs, and then slipped back down. Then it went more slowly, whining with impatience, taking the stairs two or three at a time.

Ricky's face was wet with perspiration. What most frightened him was that he couldn't be sure if he were dreaming or not: if he could be certain that this was only a dream, then he had only to suffer through it, to wait until whatever it was down there got up to the top of the stairs and burst into the room-the scare would wake him up. But it did not feel at all like a dream. His senses were alert, his mind was clear, the entire experience lacked the rather disembodied, disconnected atmosphere of a dream. In no dream had he ever sweated. And if he was wide awake, then the thing banging and thundering on the stairs was going to get him, because he couldn't move.

The noises changed, and then Ricky realized that he was indeed on the third floor of the abandoned building, because the thing looking for him was on the second. Its noises were much louder: the whining, the slithery sound as its body rubbed through doors and against walls. It was moving faster, as if it smelled him.

The dust still circled in the random beams of sun; the few clouds still drifted through a sky that looked like early spring. The floor rattled as the creature thrust impatiently back onto the landing.

Now he could hear its breathing very clearly. It threw itself at the last staircase, making a noise like a wrecking ball hitting the side of a building. Ricky's stomach seemed packed with ice; he was afraid he would vomit-vomit ice cubes. His throat tightened. He would have screamed, but he thought, even while knowing it was not true, that if he did not make any noise maybe the thing would not find him. It squealed and whined, banging its way up the staircase. A stair rod snapped.

When it reached the landing outside his bedroom door, he knew what it was. A spider: it was a giant spider. It thudded against the door of his room. He heard it begin to whine again. If spiders could whine, that was how they would do it. A multitude of legs scrabbled at the door as the whining grew louder. Ricky felt pure terror, a white elemental fear worse than he'd ever experienced.

But the door did not splinter. It quietly opened. A tall black form stood just beyond the doorframe. It was no spider, whatever it was, and Ricky's terror decreased by an unconscious fraction. The black thing in the doorway did not move for a moment, but stood as if looking at him. Ricky tried to swallow; he managed to use his arms to push himself upright. The rough planks rubbed against his back and he thought again: this isn't a dream.

The black form came through the door.

Ricky saw that it was not an animal at all, but a man. Then another plane of blackness separated off, then another, and he saw that it was three men. Beneath the cowls draped over their lifeless faces, he saw the familiar features. Sears James and John Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt stood before him, and he knew that they were dead.

He woke up screaming. His eyes opened to the normal sights of morning on Melrose Avenue, the cream colored bedroom with the graphics Stella had bought on their last trip to London, the window looking out on the big back yard, a shirt draped over a chair. Stella's firm hand gripped his shoulder. The room seemed mysteriously absent of light. On a strong impulse he could not name, Ricky jumped out of bed-came as close to jumping out of bed as his seventy-year-old knees would permit-and went across to the window. Stella, behind him, said, "What?" He didn't know what he was looking for, but what he saw was unexpected: the entire back yard, all the roofs of the neighboring houses, were dusted with snow. The sky too was oddly without light. He didn't know what he was going to say, but when he opened his mouth he uttered: "It snowed all night, Stella. John Jaffrey should never have had that dadblasted party."

4

Stella sat up in bed and talked to him as if he had said something reasonable. "Wasn't John's party over a year ago, Ricky? I don't see what that has to do with last night's snow."

He rubbed his eyes and his dry cheekbones; he smoothed down his mustache. "It was a year ago last night." Then he heard what he had been saying. "No, of course not. There's no connection, I mean."

"Come back to bed and tell me what's wrong, baby."

"Oh, I'm okay," he said, but returned to the bed. When he was lifting the blankets to get back in, Stella said, "You're not okay, baby. You must have had a terrible dream. Do you want to tell me about it?"

"It doesn't make much sense."

"Tell me anyhow." She began to caress his back and shoulders, and he twisted to look down at her head on the dark blue pillow. As Sears had said, Stella was a beauty: she had been a beauty when he met her, and apparently she would be a beauty when she died. It was not a plump chocolate-box prettiness, but a matter of strong cheekbones, straight facial planes and definite black eyebrows. Stella's hair had gone an uncompromising gray when she was in her early thirties, and she had refused to dye it, seeing long before anyone else what a sexual asset an abundant head of gray hair would be when combined with a youthful face: now she still had the abundant gray hair, and her face was not much less youthful. It would be more truthful to say that her face had never been precisely youthful, nor would it ever truly be old: in fact with every year, up nearly to fifty, she had come more completely into her beauty, and then had pitched camp there. She was ten years younger than Ricky, but on good days she still looked only a blink over forty.

"Tell me, Ricky," she said. "What the hell is going on?"

So he began to tell her his dream, and he saw concern, horror, love and fear cross her elegant face. She continued to rub his back, and then moved her hand to his chest. "Baby," she said when he was through, "do you really have dreams like that every night?"

"No," he said, looking at her face and seeing beneath the superficial emotions of the moment the self-absorption and amusement which were always present in Stella and which were always joined, "that was the worst one." Then, smiling a little because he saw where she was going with all this rubbing, he said, "That was the champ."

"You've been very tense lately." She lifted his hand and touched it to her lips.

"I know."

"Do all of you have these bad dreams?"

"All who?"

"The Chowder Society." She placed his hand on her cheek.

"I think so."

"Well," she said, and sat up and, crossing her arms elbows-out before her, began to work her nightdress over her head, "don't you old fools think you ought to do something about it?" The nightdress went off, and she tossed her head to flip her hair back into place. Their two children had left her breasts sagging and her nipples large and brown, but Stella's body had aged only a little more than her face.

"We don't know what to do," he confessed.

"Well, I know what to do," she said and went back down on the bed and opened her arms. If Ricky had ever wished that he had remained a bachelor like Sears, he did not wish it this morning.

"You old sexpot," Stella said when they were done, "you would have given this up a long time ago if it hadn't been for me. What a loss that would have been. If it weren't for me you'd be too dignified to ever take your clothes off."

"That's not true."

"Oh? What would you do, then? Chase after little girls like Lewis Benedikt?"

"Lewis doesn't chase after little girls."

"Girls in their twenties, then."

"No. I wouldn't."

"There. I'm right. You wouldn't have any sex life at all, like your precious partner Sears." She folded back the sheets and blankets on her side of the bed, and got out. "I'll shower first," she said. Stella demanded a long time by herself in the bathroom every morning. She put on her long white-gray robe and looked as if she were about to tell someone to sack Troy. "But I'll tell you what you should do. You should call Sears right now and tell him about that awful dream. You won't get anywhere if you won't at least talk about it. If I know you and Sears, you two can go for weeks at a time without saying anything personal to each other. That's dreadful. What in the world do you talk about, anyhow?"

"Talk about?" Ricky asked, a little taken aback. "We talk about law."

"Oh, law," Stella said, and marched off toward the bathroom.

When she returned nearly thirty minutes later he was sitting up in bed looking confused. The pouches beneath his eyes were larger than usual. "The paper isn't here yet," he said. "I went downstairs and looked."

"Of course it isn't here," Stella said, dropping a towel and a box of tissues on the bed, and turned away again to go into the dressing room. "What time do you think it is?"

"What time? Why, what time is it? My watch is on the table."

"It's just past seven."

"Seven?" They normally did not get up until eight, and Ricky usually dawdled around the house until nine-thirty before leaving for the office on Wheat Row. Though neither he nor Sears admitted it, there was no longer much work for them; old clients dropped in from time to time, there were a few complicated lawsuits which looked to drag on through the next decade, there was always a will or two or a tax problem to clarify, but they could have stayed home two days of every week without anybody noticing. Alone in his part of the office suite, Ricky lately had been rereading Donald Wanderley's second book, trying unsuccessfully to persuade himself that he wanted its author in Milburn. "What are we doing up?"

"You woke us up with your screaming, if I have to remind you," Stella called from the dressing room. "You were having problems with a monster that was trying to eat you, remember?"

"Um," Ricky said. "I thought it looked dark outside."

"Don't be evasive," Stella called, and in another minute or two was back beside the bed, fully dressed. "When you start to scream in your sleep, it's time to start taking whatever is happening to you seriously. I know you won't go to a doctor-"

"I won't go to a head doctor, anyhow," Ricky said. "My mind is in good working order."

"So I said. But since you won't consider that, you should at least talk to Sears about it. I don't like to see you eating yourself up." With that, she left for the downstairs.

Ricky lay back, considering. It had been, as he said to Stella, the worst of the nightmares. Simply thinking about it now was unsettling-simply having Stella go down the stairs was, at some level, unsettling. The dream had been extraordinarily vivid, with the detail and texture of wakefulness. He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life. That had been horrid: it had been somehow immoral, and the shock to his morality even more than the horror had made him open his mouth and scream. Maybe Stella was right. Without knowing how he would bring up the subject with Sears, he nevertheless picked up the receiver of the bedside phone. After Sears's phone had rung once, Ricky realized that he was acting very much out of character and that he didn't have the faintest idea why Stella thought Sears James would have anything worthwhile to say. But by then it was too late, and Sears had picked up the phone and said hello.

"It's Ricky, Sears."

Evidently it was the morning for demonstrating inconsistency of character; nothing less like Sears than his response could be imagined. "Ricky, thank God," he said. "You must have ESP. I was just going to call you. Can you come by and pick me up in five minutes?"

"Give me fifteen minutes," Ricky said. "What happened?" And then, thinking of his dream, "Did anybody die?"

"Why do you ask that?" Sears said in a different, sharper voice.

"No reason. I'll tell you later. I take it we're not going to Wheat Row."

"No. I just had a call from our Vergil. He wants us out there-he wants to sue everybody in sight. Step on it, will you?"

"Elmer wants us both at his farm? What happened?"

Sears was impatient. "Something earthshaking, apparently. Pull the plug out, Ricky."

5

While Ricky hurried into a scalding shower, Lewis Benedikt was jogging on a path through the woods. He did this every morning, jogging a regular two miles before making breakfast for himself and whatever young lady might have spent the night at his house. Today, as always after Chowder Society nights and far oftener than his friends imagined, there was no young lady, and Lewis was pushing himself harder than usual. The night before he'd had the worst nightmare of his life; its effects still clung to him, and he thought that a good run would blow them away-where another man would write in a diary or confide in his mistress or have a drink, Lewis exercised. So now, in a blue running suit and Adidas shoes, he puffed his way along the path through his woods.

Lewis's property had included both woods and pasture along with the stone farmhouse he had cherished from the moment he had seen it. It was like a fortress with shutters, a huge building constructed at the start of the century by a rich gentleman farmer who liked the look of the castles in the illustrated novels by Sir Walter Scott admired by his wife. Lewis neither knew nor cared about Sir Walter, but years of living in a hotel had left him with a need for the sense of a multitude of rooms about him. He would have had claustrophobia in a cottage. When he had decided to sell his hotel to the chain which had been offering increasing amounts of money for it over the six preceding years, he had enough money left after taxes to buy the only house in or near Milburn which would truly have satisfied him, and enough to furnish it as he wished. The paneling, guns and pikestaffs did not always please his female guests. (Stella Hawthorne, who had spent three adventurous afternoons at Lewis's farm shortly after his return, had said she'd never been had in an officers' mess before.) He'd sold the pasture land as soon as he could, but kept the woods because he liked the idea of owning them.

Jogging through them, he always saw something new which quickened his sense of life: one day a pocket of snowdrops and monkshoods in a hollow beside the stream, the next a red-winged blackbird as big as a cat peering wild-eyed at him from the branches of a maple. But today he was not looking, he was simply running along the snowy path, wishing that whatever was going on would stop. Maybe this young Wanderley could set things right again: judging by his book, he had been to a few dark places himself. Maybe John was right, and Edward's nephew would at least be able to figure out what was happening to the four of them. It could not just be guilt, after all this time. The Eva Galli business had happened so long ago that it had concerned five different men in a different country: if you looked at the land and compared it to what it was in the twenties, you'd never think it was the same place. Even his woods were second growth, though he liked to pretend that they were not.

Lewis, running, liked to think of the huge climax forest that had once blanketed nearly all of North America: a vast belt of trees and vegetation, silent wealth through which moved only himself and Indians. And a few spirits. Yes, in an endless vault of forest you could believe in spirits. Indian mythology was full of them-they suited the landscape. But now, in a world of Burger Kings and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets and Pitch 'n Putt golf courses, all the old tyrannical ghosts must have been crowded out.

They aren't crowded out yet, Lewis. Not yet.

It was like another voice speaking in his mind. Like hell they aren't, he said to himself, passing one hand over his face.

Not here. Not yet.

Shit. He was spooking himself. He was still affected by that damned dream. Maybe it was time they really talked about these dreams to one another-described them. Now suppose they all had the same dream. What would that mean? Lewis's mind could not go so far. Well, it would mean something: and at least talking about it would help. He thought he had scared himself awake, this morning. His foot came down into slush, and he clearly saw the final image of his dream: the two men withdrawing their hoods to show their wasted faces.

Not yet.

God damn. He came to a halt, exactly halfway on his run, and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of the running jacket. He wished he had already completed the run and were back inside his kitchen, brewing up coffee or smelling bacon frying in the pan. You're tougher than this, you old buzzard, he counseled himself, you've had to be, ever since Linda killed herself. He leaned for a moment on the fence at the end of the path, where it circled back into the trees, and looked aimlessly out over the field he had sold. Now it was lightly covered with snow, a bumpy expanse from which hard light momentarily bounced and sang. All that too would have been forest. Where the dark things hid.

Oh hell. Well, if they old, they weren't anywhere in sight now. The air was leaden and empty, and you could see nearly all the way across the dip in the valley to where the trucks on Route 17 steamed on toward Binghamton and Elmira, or the other way toward Newburgh or Poughkeepsie. Only for a moment, the woods at his back made him feel uneasy. He turned around; saw only the path twisting back into the trees; heard only an angry squirrel complain that he was going to have a hungry winter.

Pal, we've all had hungry winters. He was thinking of the season after Linda had died. Nothing puts off guests like a public suicide. And is there a Mrs. Benedikt? Oh yes, that's her bleeding all over the patio- you know, the one with the funny bend in her neck. They had cleared off one by one, leaving him with a deteriorating two-million-dollar asset and no cash inflow. He'd had to let three-fourths of the staff go, and paid the rest out of his own pocket. It had been three years before business had returned, and six years before he had paid his debts.

Suddenly, what he wanted was not coffee and bacon, but a bottle of O'Keefe's beer. A gallon of it. His throat was dry and his chest ached.

Yes, we've all had hungry winters, pal. A gallon of O'Keefe's? He could have swallowed a barrel. Remembering Linda's senseless, inexplicable death made him yearn for drunkenness.

It was time to get back. Shaken by memory-Linda's face had come back to him with utter clarity, claiming him through the nine years since that moment-he turned from the fence and inhaled deeply. Running, not a gallon of ale, was his therapy now. The path through the mile and a half of woods seemed narrower, darker.

Your problem, Lewis, is that you're yellow.

It was the nightmare that had brought back the memories. Sears and John, in those cerements of the grave, with those lifeless faces. Why not Ricky? If the other two living members of the Chowder Society, why not the third?

He was sweating even before he started the run back.

The return path took a long angle off to the left before turning back in the direction of the farmhouse: normally this loafing misdirection was Lewis's favorite part of his morning run. The woods closed in almost immediately, and by the time you had gone fifteen paces you forgot all about the open field at your back. More than any other part of the path, it looked here like the original climax forest: thick oaks and girlish birches fought for root space, tall ferns crowded toward the path. Today he ran it with as little pleasure in it as it was possible for him to feel. All those trees, their number and thickness, were obscurely threatening: running away from the house was like running away from safety. Going over the powdery snow in white air, he pushed himself hard toward the cut back home.

When the sensation first hit him, he ignored it, vowing not to allow himself to be whammied any more than he was already. What had come into his mind was that someone was standing back at the beginning of the return path, just where the first trees stood. He knew that no one could be there: it was impossible that anyone had walked across the field without his noticing. But the sensation persisted; it would not be argued away. His watcher's eyes seemed to follow him, going deeper into the crowded trees. A squadron of crows left the branches of an oak just ahead of him. Normally this would have delighted Lewis, but this time he jumped at their racket and almost fell.

Then the sensation shifted, and became more intense. The person back there was coming after him, staring at him with huge eyes. Frantic, despising himself, Lewis pelted for home without daring to look back. He could feel the eyes watching him until he reached the walkway leading across his back garden from the edge of the woods to his kitchen door.

He ran down the path, his chest raggedly hauling in air, twisted the doorknob, and jumped inside. He slammed the door behind him and went immediately to the window beside it. The path was empty and the only footprints were his. Still Lewis was frightened, looking out to the near edge of his woods. For a moment a traitorous synapse in his brain told him: maybe you should sell out and move into town. But there were no footprints. Nobody could possibly be out there, keeping out of sight in the shelter of the trees-he wouldn't be scared out of the house he needed, forced by his own weakness to trade his splendid comfortable isolation for a crowded discomfort. To this decision, made in a cold kitchen on the first day of snowfall, he would hold.

Lewis put a kettle on the stove, got his coffee pitcher off a shelf, filled the grinder with Blue Mountain beans and held the switch down until they were powder. Oh hell. He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of O'Keefe's and after snapping off the cap drank most of it without tasting or swallowing. As the beer hit his stomach, a two-sided thought surprised him. I wish Edward was still alive: I wish John hadn't pushed so hard for his godawful party.

6

"Well, speak up," said Ricky. "What is it, trespassers again? We explained our position on that. He must know even if he won that he couldn't make enough on a trespassing suit to pay expenses."

They were just entering the foothills of the Cayuga Valley, and Ricky was handling the old Buick with great care. The roads were slippery, and though ordinarily he would have had his snow tires put on before making even the eight-mile drive to Elmer Scales's farm, this morning Sears had not given him time. Sears himself, huge in his black hat and black fur-collared winter coat, seemed as conscious of this as Ricky. "Keep your mind on your driving," he said. "There's supposed to be ice on the roads up around Damascus."

"We're not going to Damascus," Ricky pointed out.

"Even so."

"Why didn't you want to use your car?"

"I'm having the snow tires put on this morning."

Ricky grunted, amused. Sears was in one of his refractory moods, a frequent consequence of a conversation with Elmer Scales. He was one of their oldest and most difficult clients. (Elmer had come to them first at fifteen years of age, with a long and complex list of people he wished to sue. They had never managed to get rid of him, nor had he ever altered his perception of conflict as a situation best addressed by an immediate lawsuit.) A skinny, excitable man with jutting ears and a high-pitched voice, Scales was called "Our Vergil" by Sears because of his poetry, which he ritually sent off to Catholic magazines and local papers. Ricky understood that the magazines just as ritually sent them back-once Elmer had shown him a file stuffed with rejection slips-but the local newspapers had printed two or three. They were inspirational poems, their imagery drawn from Elmer's life as a farmer: The cows do moo, the lambs do bleat. God's Glory walks in on thundering feet. So did Elmer Scales. He had eight children and an undimmed passion for litigation.

Once or twice a year either partner was summoned out to the Scales farm and Elmer would direct him to a hole in a fence where a hunter or a teenager had cut through his fields: Elmer had often identified these trespassers with his binoculars, and he wanted to sue. They usually managed to talk him out of this, but he always had two or three litigations of other sorts under way. But this time, Ricky suspected, it was more serious than Scales's upsets were normally; he had never before asked-commanded-both partners to come out.

"As you know, Sears," he said, "I can drive and think at the same time. I'm doing a very sedate thirty miles an hour. I think you can trust me with whatever has Elmer worked up."

"Some of his animals died." Sears said this tight-lipped, implying that his speaking would be likely to result in their going off the road at any minute.

"So why are we going out there? We can't bring them back."

"He wants us to see them. He called Walter Hardesty too."

"They didn't just die, then."

"With Elmer, who knows? Now please concentrate on getting us there safely, Ricky. This experience will be grisly enough as it is."

Ricky glanced at his partner and for the first time that morning saw how pale Sears's face was. Beneath the smooth skin prominent blue veins swam at intervals into visibility; beneath the young eyes hung gray patches of webbed skin. "Keep your eyes on the road," said Sears.

"You look terrible."

"I don't think Elmer will notice."

Ricky's eyes were now safely on the narrow country road; this gave him license to speak. "Did you have a bad night?"

Sears said, "I think it's beginning to melt."

As this was a blatant lie, Ricky ignored it. "Did you?"

"Observant Ricky. Yes, I did."

"So did I. Stella thinks we should talk about it."

"Why? Does she have bad nights too?"

"She thinks that talking about it would help."

"That sounds like a woman. Talking just opens the wounds. Not talking helps to heal them."

"In that case, it was a mistake to invite Donald Wanderley here."

Sears grunted in exasperation.

"That was unfair of me," Ricky said, "and I'm sorry I said it. But I think we should talk about it for the same reason you think we should invite that boy."

"He's not a boy. He must be thirty-five. He might be forty."

"You know what I mean." Ricky took a deep breath. "Now I want your forgiveness in advance, because I am going to tell you the dream I had last night. Stella said I woke up screaming. In any case, it was the worst dream yet." By a shift in the car's inner weather, Ricky knew that Sears was immediately more interested. "I was in a vacant house, on an upper floor, and some mysterious beast was trying to find me. I'll skip the development, but the feeling of danger was overwhelming. At the end of the dream it came into the room where I was, but it wasn't a monster anymore. It was you and Lewis and John. All of you were dead." Glancing sideways toward his passenger, he saw the curve of Sears's mottled cheek, the curve of the hatbrim.

"You saw the three of us?"

Ricky nodded.

Sears cleared his throat, and then cranked the window down a quarter of the way. Freezing air rushed into the car. Sears's chest expanded beneath the black coat: individual spiky hairs of the furry collar flattened in the rush of air. "Extraordinary. You say there were the three of us?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Extraordinary. Because I had an identical dream. But when that dreadful thing burst into my room, I saw only two men. Lewis and John. You weren't there."

Ricky heard a tone in the other's voice it took him a moment to identify, and when he had named it, the recognition carried enough surprise to silence him until they turned into Elmer Scales's long driveway. It was envy.

"Our Vergil," Sears pronounced, to himself Ricky thought. As they went slowly up the drive toward the isolated two-story farmhouse, Ricky saw an obviously impatient Scales, dressed in a cap and a plaid jacket, waiting for them on the porch and saw also that the farmhouse resembled a building in an Andrew Wyeth painting. Scales himself looked like a Wyeth portrait; or, more accurately perhaps, a Norman Rockwell subject. His ears stuck redly out beneath the tied-up flaps of his cap. A gray Dodge sedan was pulled up in the cleared space beside the porch, and when Ricky parked next to it he saw the sheriff's seal on the door. "Walt's here," he said, and Sears nodded.

The two men got out of the car, pulling their coats in tightly around their necks. Scales, now flanked by two shivering children, did not move from the porch. He had the high hard look of excitement which accompanied his most passionate litigations. His reedy voice called to them. " 'Bout time you two lawyers got here. Walt Hardesty's been here ten minutes."

"He didn't have as far to come," Sears grumbled. The brim of his hat curled in the unobstructed breeze cutting across the fields.

"Sears James, I don't suppose any man alive ever got in the last word with you. Hey, you kids! Get back in the house, you'll freeze your butts off." He swatted one with each hand, and the two boys scuttled back inside the door. Scales stood above the two old men, smiling grimly.

"What is it, Elmer?" Ricky asked, holding his coat closed at his neck. His feet in his well-shined black shoes were already chilled.

"You'll just have to see. You two town boys aren't really dressed for a walk across the fields. Guess that's your hard luck. Hang on a second, I'll get Hardesty." He disappeared for a moment into the house and emerged again with the sheriff, Walt Hardesty, who was wearing a loose sheepskin-lined denim coat and a Stetson. Alerted by Scales's remark, Ricky looked at the sheriff's feet: he wore heavy leather hiking boots. "Mr. James, Mr. Hawthorne." He nodded to them, steam pluming out over his mustache, which was larger and more ragged than Ricky's. In this cattleman's outfit, Hardesty looked fifteen years younger than his true age. "Now that you're here, maybe Elmer will show us what this mystery's all about."

"Damn right I will," said the farmer, and clumped down the porch steps and began leading them away from the house, walking on the path toward the snow-dusted barn. "Just you come this way, gentlemen, and see what I'm gonna show you."

Hardesty fell in beside Ricky. Sears was walking alone, with immense dignity, behind them. "Colder 'n a bitch," the sheriff said. "Looks like being a damn long winter."

Ricky said, "I hope not I'm too old for one of those."

With exaggerated gestures and an expression like glee on his skinny face, Elmer Scales was unhooking a long rail fence which led into a side pasture. "Now you pay attention, Walt" he called back. "You see if you can spot any tracks." He pointed to a line of splayed footprints. "Them's mine from this morning, goin' and comin'." The prints returning were widely spaced, as if Scales had been running. "Where's your notebook? Ain't you gonna take notes?"

"Calm down, Elmer," the sheriff said. "I want to see what the problem is first."

"You took notes fast enough when my oldest boy racked up his car."

"Come on, Elmer. Show us what you want us to see."

"You town boys gonna ruin your shoes," Elmer said. "Can't be helped. Follow me."

Hardesty did as commanded and set off beside Elmer; his broad back in the bulky coat made the farmer look like a capering boy. Ricky glanced back at Sears, just now approaching the gate and regarding the snowy field with disgust "He might have told us we'd need snowshoes."

"He's enjoying himself," Ricky said wonderingly.

"He'll enjoy himself when I get walking pneumonia and fire a lawsuit at him," Sears muttered. "Since there's no alternative, let's go."

Gamely Sears put a well-shod foot down into the pasture, where it immediately sank into snow up to the laces. "Ugh." He retracted it; shook it. The others were already halfway across the field. "I'm not going," Sears said, jamming his hands into the pockets of his opulent coat. "Damn it, he can come to the office."

Ricky said, "Well then, I'd better go at least," and started after the other two. Walt Hardesty had turned around to look at them, stroking his ragged mustache, a frontier lawman translated to a snowy field in New York state. He appeared to be smiling. Elmer Scales plodded on oblivious. Ricky picked his way from one footprint to another. Behind him, he heard Sears emit enough air to fill a balloon and begin to follow.

Single file now, Elmer talking and gesticulating in front they went across the field. With an odd air of triumphant glee, Elmer stopped at the top of a ridge. Beside him, half-covered by snow, were piles of dirty washing. When Hardesty reached the low gray piles, he knelt and prodded; then he grunted, pushing, and Ricky saw four neat black feet roll stiffly into the air.

His shoes soaked and his feet wet, Ricky came up to them. Sears, holding his arms out for balance, was still threading toward them, his hat brim flattened by the wind.

"I didn't know you still kept any sheep," he heard Hardesty say.

"I don't, now!" Scales yelled. "I just had those four, and now they're all gone. Somebody killed 'em. Just kept 'em around for the sake of the old days. My daddy had a couple hundred, but there's no money in the stupid dang things anymore. The kids liked 'em, that's all."

Ricky looked down at the four dead animals: flat on their sides, eyes glazed, snow in the matted wool. Innocent, he asked, "What killed them?"

"Yeah! That's it, ain't it!" Elmer was working himself up into a tantrum. "What! Well, you're the law around here, you tell me!"

Hardesty, kneeling beside the dirty-gray body of the sheep he had rolled over, looked up at Scales with distaste. "You mean you don't even know if these animals died naturally, Elmer?"

"I know! I know!" Scales lifted his arms dramatically: a bat in flight.

"How do you know?"

"Because nothing can kill a damn sheep, that's how I know! And what the hell would kill four at once? Heart attacks? Boy!"

Sears now joined them, his frame making the kneeling Hardesty look small. "Four dead sheep," he said, looking down. "I suppose you want to sue them."

"What? You find the lunatic who did this and sue his ass off!"

"And who would that be?"

"Dunno. But…"

"Yeah?" Hardesty looked up again from the sheep huddled at his knees.

"I'll tell you inside. Meantime, Mr. Sheriff, you look 'em over good and take notes and find out what he did to 'em."

"He?"

"Inside."

Hardesty, scowling, was probing the carcass. "You want the vet for this, Elmer, not me." His hands moved to the animal's neck. "Uh oh."

"What?" said Scales, almost leaping with anticipation.

Instead of answering, Hardesty crab-walked to the next nearest sheep and thrust his hands deep into the wool at its neck.

"You might have seen this for yourself," he said, and gripping its nose and mouth pulled back the sheep's head.

"Jesus," said Scales; the two lawyers were silent. Ricky looked down at the exposed wound: like a wide mouth, the long slash in the animal's neck.

"A neat job," Hardesty said. "A very neat job of work. Okay, Elmer. You proved your point. Let's get back inside." He wiped his fingers in the snow.

"Jesus," Elmer repeated. "Their throats are cut? All of 'em?"

Wearily Hardesty yanked back the heads of each remaining animal. "All of them."

Old voices spoke clearly in Ricky's mind. He and Sears looked at each other, looked away.

"I'll sue the heart out of whoever did this!" Elmer screeched. "Shit! I knew something was funny! I knew it! Shit!"

Hardesty was now looking around at the empty field. "You sure you went up here once, and then went straight back?"

"Uh huh."

"How did you know something was wrong?"

"Because I saw 'em up here this morning from the window. Normally when I'm washin' my face at my window them stupid animals is the first thing I see. See?" He pointed across the fields to his house. The shining pane of the kitchen window faced them. "There's grass under here. They just walk around all day, stuffin' themselves. When the snow gets real bad I pen 'em up in the barn. I just looked out an' I saw 'em, like they are now. Something sure was wrong, so I put on my coat and my boots and came up. Then I called you and my lawyers. I want to sue, and I want you to arrest whoever done this."

"There aren't any tracks besides ours," Hardesty said, smoothing his mustache.

"I know," said Scales. "He brushed 'em out."

"Could be. But you can usually tell, on unbroken snow."

Jesus she moved she can't she's dead.

"And there's another thing," said Ricky, breaking into the suspicious silence which had developed between the two men and interrupting the lunatic voice in his mind. "There's no blood."

For a moment all four men stared down at the sheep and the fresh snow. It was true.

"Can we get off this steppe now?" Sears said.

Elmer was still staring down at the snow, swallowing. Sears began to move across the field, and soon they were all following.

"All right kids, out of the kitchen. Get upstairs," Scales shouted as they came into the house and removed their coats. "We gotta talk in private. Go on, git." He shooed his hands at some of the children who were clustered in the hallway, staring at Walter Hardesty's pistol. "Sarah! Mitchell! Upstairs, now." He led them into the kitchen and a woman as thin as Elmer shot up out of a chair, clasping her hands. "Mr. James, Mr. Hawthorne," she said. "Could you use some coffee?"

"Kitchen toweling, if you please, Mrs. Scales," Sears said. "Then coffee."

"Kitchen…"

"To wipe my shoes. Mr. Hawthorne undoubtedly requires the same service."

The woman looked down in dismay at the lawyer's shoes. "Oh, good heavens. Here, let me help you…" She took a roll of paper toweling from a cupboard, tore off a long section, and made as if to kneel at Sears's feet. "That won't be necessary," Sears said, taking the wadded paper from her hands. Only Ricky knew that Sears was disturbed, not merely rude.

"Mr. Hawthorne…?" A bit rattled by Sears's coldness, the woman turned to Ricky.

"Yes, thank you, Mrs. Scales," he said. "That's very kind of you." He too accepted several sections of the toweling.

"Their throats were cut," Elmer said to his wife. "What did I tell you? Some crazyman's been out here. And-" his voice rose "-a crazyman who can fly, because he didn't leave no prints."

"Tell them," his wife said. Elmer looked at her sharply, and she hurried off to put the coffee together.

Hardesty asked, "Tell us what?" No longer in the Wyatt Earp costume, the sheriff was restored to his proper age of fifty. He's hitting the bottle worse than ever, Ricky thought, seeing the broken veins in Hardesty's face, the deepening irresolution. For the truth was that, despite his Texas Ranger appearance, the hawk nose, lined cheeks and gunslinger blue eyes, Walt Hardesty was too lazy to be a good sheriff. It was typical of him that he had had to be told to look at the second pair of sheep. And Elmer Scales was right; he should have taken notes.

Now the farmer was preening himself, about to deliver his bombshell. Stringy cords stood out in his neck; his bat ears went a deeper shade of red. "Well hell, I saw him, didn't I?" His mouth dropped comically, and he surveyed each of them in turn.

"Him," his wife said in ironic counterpoint behind him.

"Shit, woman, what else?" Scales thumped the table. "Get that coffee ready and stop interrupting." He turned back to the three men. "As big as me! Bigger! Starin' at me! Damnedest thing you ever saw!" Enjoying his moment, he spread his arms. "Right outside!

Just a little further than that away from me. How's them apples?"

"Did you recognize him?" Hardesty asked.

"Didn't see him that well. Now I'll tell you how it was." He was moving around the kitchen, unable to contain himself, and Ricky was reminded of an old perception, that "Our Vergil" wrote poetry because he was too volatile to believe he was not capable of it. "I was in here last night, late. Couldn't sleep, never could."

"Never could," echoed his wife.

Screeches, thumps came from overhead. "Forget the coffee and get on upstairs, straighten 'em out," Scales said. He paused while she left the room. Soon another voice joined the cacophony above; then the noises ceased.

"Like I said. I was in here, readin' through a couple-two-three equipment and seed catalogues. Then! I hears something from out near the barn. Prowler! Damn! I jumps up and looks out the window. Seen it was snowin'. Uh oh, work to do tomorrow, I says to myself. Then I seen him. By the barn. Well, between the barn and the house."

"What did he look like?" Hardesty said, still not taking notes.

"Couldn't tell! Too dark!" Now his voice had soared from alto to soprano. "Just saw him there, starin'!"