Ghost Story

"Where did you go?"

"Hotel bars. Places like that. Around the Loop. I think it was the first time he'd ever done anything like that with a student, and it made him nervous. I don't think he'd had much fun in his life. Eventually I became too much for him. I realized that I didn't want him in the way he wanted me. I know what you're going to ask next, so I'll answer it. Yes, we slept together. For a while. It wasn't much good. Alan was not very -physical. I began to think that what he really wanted to do was go to bed with a boy, but of course he was too whatever to do that. He couldn't."

"How long did it last?"

"A year." She finished her meal and dropped her napkin beside the plate. "I don't know why we're talking about this."

"What do you really like?"

She pretended to consider it seriously. "Let's see. Really like. Summer. Movies. English novels. Waking up at six and seeing very early morning out of the window-everything is so empty and pure. Lemon tea. What else? Paris. And Nice. I really do like Nice. When I was a little girl, we went there four or five summers in a row. And I like very good meals, like this one."

"It doesn't sound like the academic life is the one for you," I said. It was as though she had told me everything and nothing.

"It doesn't, does it?" She laughed, as at something of no importance. "I suppose what I need is a Great Love."

And there she was again, the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard. "Let's go to a movie tomorrow night," I said, and she agreed.

The next day I persuaded Rex Leslie, whose office was down the hall from mine, to exchange desks with me.

The art cinema was showing Renoir's La Grande Illusion, which Alma had never seen. Afterward we went to a coffee shop, a place packed with students, and bits of conversation from adjoining tables filtered through into our own. For a moment after we sat down, I experienced a flash of guilty fear, and recognized a second later that I was afraid of seeing Helen Kayon. But it was not her sort of place; and anyhow at this hour Helen usually was still at the library. I felt a moment of intense gratitude that I was not there too, grinding away at a discipline that was not only my own but merely a condition of employment.

"What a beautiful movie," she said. "I still feel like I'm in it."

"You feel movies very deeply, then."

"Of course." She looked at me, puzzled.

"And literature?"

"Of course." She looked at me again. "Well. I don't know. I enjoy it."

A bearded boy in a lumberjack shirt near us said in a carrying voice, "Wenner is naive and so is his magazine. I'll start buying it again when I see a picture of Jerry Brown on the cover."

His friend said, "Wenner is Jerry Brown."

"Berkeley," I said.

"Who is Wenner?"

"I'm surprised you don't know. Jann Wenner?"

"Who is he?"

"He was the Berkeley student who founded Rolling Stone."

"Is that a magazine?"

"You're full of surprises," I said. "You mean you've never heard of it?"

"I'm not interested in most magazines. I never look at them. What kind of magazine is it? Is it named after that band?"

I nodded. At least she had heard of them. "What kind of music do you like?"

"I'm not very interested in music."

"Let's try some other names. Do you know who Tom Seaveris?"

"No."

"Have you ever heard of Willie Mays?"

"Didn't he used to be an athlete? I'm also not very interested in sports."

"It shows." She giggled. "You're getting even more intriguing. How about Barbra Streisand?"

She pouted charmingly, self-parodyingly. "Of course."

"John Ford?" No. "Arthur Fonzarelli?" No. "Grace Bumbry?" No. "Desi Arnaz?" No. "Johnny Carson?" No. "Andre Previn?" No. "John Dean?" No.

"Don't ask me any more or I'll start saying yes to everything," she said.

"What do you do?" I asked. "Are you sure you live in this country?"

"Let me try you. Have you heard of Anthony Powell or Jean Rhys or Ivy Compton-Burnett or Elizabeth Jane Howard or Paul Scott or Margaret Drabble or-"

"They're English novelists and I've heard of all of them," I said. "But I take your point. You're really not interested in the things you're not really interested in."

"Exactly."

"You never even read newspapers," I said.

"No. And I never watch television." She smiled. "Do you think I should be stood against a wall and shot?"

"I'm just interested in who your friends are."

"Do you? Well, you are a friend of mine, aren't you?" Over it, as over our entire conversation, was that veneer of disinterested irony. I wondered for a moment if she were actually entirely human: her nearly complete ignorance of popular culture demonstrated more than any assertion how little she cared what people thought of her. What I had thought of as her integrity was more complete than I could have imagined. Maybe a sixth of the graduate students in California had never heard of an athlete like Seaver; but who in America could have avoided hearing of the Fonz?

"But you do have other friends. You just met me."

"I do, yes."

"In the English Department?" It was not impossible: for all I knew of my temporary colleagues, there might have been an extensive cell of Virginia Woolf fanciers who never looked at the newspapers. In them however this remoteness from their surroundings would have been an affectation; of Alma the reverse would have been true.

"No. I don't know many people there. I know some people who are interested in the occult."

"The occult?" I could not imagine what she meant. "Seances? Ouija boards? Madame Blavatsky? Planchettes?"

"No. They're more serious than that. They belong to an order."

I was stunned; I had fallen into an abyss. I envisioned Satanism, covens; California lunacy at its worst.

She read my face and said, "I'm not in it myself. I just know them."

"What is the name of the order?"

"X.X.X."

"But-" I leaned forward, scarcely believing that I had heard correctly. "It can't be X.X.X.? Xala…"

"Xala Xalior Xlati."

I felt disbelief, shock; I felt a surprised fear, looking at her beautiful face. X.X.X was more than a group of California screwballs dressing themselves in robes; they were frightening. They were known to be cruel, even savage; they'd had some minor connection with the Manson family, and that was the only reason I had read about them. After the Manson affair they were supposed to have gone elsewhere-to Mexico, I thought. Were they still in California? From what I had read, Alma would have been better off knowing button men in the Mafia: from the Mafia you would expect the motives, rational or not, of our phase of capitalism. The X.X.X. was raw material for nightmares.

"And those people are your friends?" I asked.

"You asked."

I shook my head, still astonished.

"Don't worry about it. Or about them. You'll never see them."

It gave me an entirely different picture of her life; sitting across from me, faintly smiling, she was for a moment sinister. It was as though I had stepped off a sunlit path into jungle; and I thought of Helen Kayon working on Scots Chaucerians in the library.

"Even I don't see them all that much," she said.

"But you've been to their meetings? You go to their houses?"

She nodded. "I said. They're my friends. But don't worry about it."

It could have been a lie-another lie, for I thought she had not always been truthful with me. But her entire manner, even her concern for my feelings, demonstrated that she was being truthful. She raised her cup of coffee to her lips, smiling at me with a trace of concern, and I saw her standing before a fire, holding a bleeding something in her hands…

"You are worrying about it. I'm not a member. I know people in it. You asked me. And I thought you should know."

"Have you been to meetings? What goes on?"

"I can't tell you. That is just another part of my life. A small part. It won't touch you."

"Let's get out of here," I said.

Was I thinking even then that she would give me material for a novel? I do not think so. I thought that her contact with the group was probably much slighter than she had suggested; I had only one hint, much later, that it may not have been. She was romancing, exaggerating, I told myself. The X.X.X. and Virginia Woolf? And La Grande Illusion? It was very far-fetched.

Sweetly, almost teasingly, she invited me back to her apartment. It was a short walk from the coffeehouse. As we left the busy street and turned into a darker area of tall houses, she began to talk inconsequentially of Chicago and her life there. For once I did not have to question her to get information about her past. I thought I could detect a glancing relief in her voice: because she had "confessed" her acquaintance with the X.X.X? Or was it because I had not quizzed her about it? The latter, I thought. It was a typical late summer Berkeley evening, somehow warm and chilly at once- cold enough for a jacket but with a sense of hidden warmth in the texture of the air. Despite the unpleasant surprise she had given me, the young woman beside me -her unconscious grace, her equally natural wit which lay embedded in her talk, her rather unearthly beauty- enlivened me, made me happier for life than I had been in months. Being with her was like coming out of hibernation.

We reached her building. "Ground floor," she said, and went up the steps to the door. For the pleasure of looking at her, I hung back. A sparrow lighted on the railing and cocked its head; I could smell leaves burning; she turned around and her face was washed into a pale blur by the shadows of the porch. Somewhere in the neighborhood a dog barked. Miraculously, I could still see her eyes, as if they shone like a cat's. "Are you as circumspect as your novel, or are you going to come in with me?"

I simultaneously recorded the fact that she had read my book and the featherlight criticism of it, and went up the steps to the door.

I had not imagined what her apartment would be like, but I should have known that it would be nothing like Helen Kayon's untidy menage. Alma lived alone- but that I had suspected. Everything in the large room into which she brought me was unified by a single taste, a single point of view: it was, though not obviously, one of the most luxurious private rooms I have ever seen. A long thick Bokhara rug lay over the floor; a painted firescreen was flanked by tables which looked to my untrained eye to be Chippendale. A vast desk was placed before the bay window. Striped Regency chairs; big cushions; a Tiffany lamp on the desk. I saw that I had been right to think that her parents were moneyed. I said, "You're not the typical grad student, are you?"

"I decided it was more sensible to live with these things than to put them in storage. More coffee?"

I nodded. So much about her now made sense, fit a pattern I hadn't seen before. If Alma was remote, it was because she was genuinely different; she had been raised in a manner that ninety per cent of America never sees and in which it only provisionally believes, the manner of the bohemian ultra-rich. And if she was essentially passive, it was because she had never had to make a decision for herself. On the spot I invented a childhood of nursemaids and nannies, schooling in Switzerland; holidays on yachts. That, I thought, explained her air of timelessness; it was why I had imagined her flying past the Plaza Hotel in the Fitzgerald twenties: that kind of wealth seemed to belong to another age.

When she came back in with the coffee I said, "How would you like to take a trip with me in a week or two? We could stay in a house in Still Valley."

Alma raised her eyebrows and cocked her head. It struck me that there was an androgynous quality to her passivity; just as there is, perhaps, an androgynous quality to a prostitute.

"You're an interesting girl," I said.

"A Reader's Digest character."

"Hardly."

She sat, her knees drawn up, on a fat cushion before me; she was strongly sexual and ethereal at once, and I dismissed the notion of her being somehow androgynous. It seemed impossible that I had just thought it. I knew that I had to sleep with her; I knew I would, and the knowledge made the act even more imperative.

Jus' put yo money on the table, boy…

By morning my infatuation was total. Going to bed had taken place in the most understated manner possible; after we had spent an hour or two talking, she had said, "You don't want to go home, do you?" "No." "Well then, you'd better stay here tonight." What followed was not just the ordinary limping round of the body, lust's three-legged race; in fact she was as passive in bed as in all else. Yet she had effortless orgasms, first during the minuet stage and then later during the hell-for-leather period; she clung to my neck like a child while her hips bucked and her legs strained against my back; but even during this surrendering she was separate. "Oh, I love you," she said after the second time, gripping my hair in her fists, but the pressure of her hands was as light as her voice. Reaching one mystery in her, I found another mystery behind it. Alma's passion seemed to come from the same section of her being as her table manners. I had made love with a dozen girls who were "better in bed" than Alma Mobley, but with none of them had I experienced that delicacy of feeling, Alma's ease with shades and colors of feeling. It was like being perpetually on the edge of some other sort of experience; like being before an unopened door.

I understood for the first time why girls fell in love with Don Juans, why they humiliated themselves pursuing them.

And I knew that she had given me a highly selective version of her past. I was certain that she had been nearly as promiscuous as a woman could be. That fit in with the X.X.X., with a sudden departure from Chicago; promiscuity seemed the unspoken element of Alma's mode of being.

What I wanted, of course, was to supplant all the others; to open the door and witness all of her mysteries; to have the grace and subtlety directed entirely toward me. In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.

3

Which is to say no more than that love cut me off at the knees. My notions of getting back to novel-writing vanished. I could not invent feelings when I was so taken over by them myself; with Alma's enigma before me, the different enigma of fictional characters seemed artificial. I would do that, but I had to do this first.

Thinking of Alma Mobley incessantly, I had to see her whenever I could: for ten days, I was with her almost every minute I was not teaching. Unread student stories piled up on my couch, matching the piles of essays about The Scarlet Letter on my desk. During this time our sexual bravado was outrageous. I made love to Alma in temporarily deserted classrooms, in the unlocked office I shared with a dozen others; once I followed her into a woman's lavatory in Sproul Hall and went into her as she balanced on a sink. A student in the creative writing class, after I had been very rhetorical, asked, "How do you define man, anyhow?" "Sexual and imperfect," I answered.

I said that I spent "almost" every moment with her that I did not spend in class. The exceptions were two evenings when she said that she had to visit an aunt in San Francisco. She gave me the aunt's name, Florence de Peyser, but while she was gone I still sweated with doubt. The next day, however, she was back unaltered -I could see no traces of another lover. Nor of the X.X.X., which was the greater worry. And she surrounded Mrs. de Peyser with so much circumstantial detail (a Yorkshire terrier named Chookie, a closetful of Halston dresses, a maid named Rosita) that my suspicions died. You could not return from an evening with the sinister zombies of the X.X.X. full of stories about a dog named Chookie. If there were other lovers, if the promiscuity I had sensed that first night still clung to her, I saw no sign of it.

In fact, if one thing bothered me it was not the hypothetical rivalry of another man but a remark she had made during our first morning together. It might have been no more than an oddly phrased statement of affection: "You have been approved," she said. For a lunatic moment, I thought she meant by our surroundings-the Chinese vase on the bedside table and the framed drawing by Pissarro and the shag carpet. (All of this made me more insecure than I recognized.)

"So you approve," I said.

"Not by me. Well of course by me, but not only by me." Then she put a finger to my lips.

Within a day or two I had forgotten this irritatingly unnecessary mystery.

Of course I had forgotten my work too, most of it. Even after the first frantically sensual weeks, I spent much less time on teaching than I had before. I was in love as I had never been: it was as though all my life I had skirted joy, looked at it askance, misunderstood it; only Alma brought me face to face with it.

Whatever I had suspected or doubted in her was burned away by feeling. If there were things I didn't know about her, I didn't give a damn; what I did know was enough.

I am sure it was she who first brought up the question of marriage. It was in a sentence like "When we're married, we ought to do a lot of traveling" or "What kind of house do you want after we're married?" Our conversation slipped into these discussions with no strain-I felt no coercion, only an increase in happiness.

"Oh, you really have been approved," she said.

"May I meet your aunt someday?"

"Let me spare you," she said, which did not answer the implied question. "If we get married next year, let's spend the summer on the Greek islands. I have some friends we can stay with-friends of my father's who live on Poros."

"Would they approve of me too?"

"I don't care if they do or not," she said, taking my hand and making my heart speed.

Several days later she mentioned that after we had visited Poros, she would like to spend a month in Spain.

"What about Virginia Woolf? Your degree?"

"I'm not really much of a student."

Of course I did not really imagine that we would spend months and months traveling, but it was a fantasy which seemed at least an image of our shared future; like the fantasy of my continued unspecified approval.

As the day of my Stephen Crane lecture for Lieberman drew nearer, I realized that I had done virtually no preparation, and I told Alma that I'd have to spend at least a couple of evenings at the library: "It'll be an awful lecture anyhow, I don't care if Lieberman tries to get me another year here because I think that we both want to get out of Berkeley, but I have to get some ideas together." She said that was fine, that she was planning to visit Mrs. de Peyser anyhow for the next two or three nights.

When we parted the next day, we gave each other a long embrace. Then she drove off. I walked back to my apartment, in which I had spent very little time during the previous month and a half, straightened things up and went off to the library.

On the library's ground floor I saw Helen Kayon for the first time since she had left the lecture theater with Meredith Polk. She did not see me; she was waiting for an elevator with Rex Leslie, the instructor with whom I had swapped desks. They were deep in conversation, and while I glanced at them Helen placed the flat of her hand on Rex Leslie's back. I smiled, silently wished her well and went up the stairs.

That night and the next I worked on the lecture. I had nothing to say about Stephen Crane; I was not interested in Stephen Crane; whenever I looked up from the pages, I saw Alma Mobley, her eyes glimmering and her mouth widening.

On the second night of Alma's absence I left my apartment to go out for a pizza and a beer and saw her standing in the shadows beside a bar called The Last Reef; it was a place I would have hesitated to enter, since by repute it was a haunt for bikers and homosexuals looking for rough trade. I froze: for a second what I felt was not betrayal but fear. She was not alone, and the man with her had obviously been in the bar- he carried a glass of beer-but was not apparently a biker or a gay in search of company. He was tall and his head was shaven and he wore dark glasses. He was very pale. And though he was dressed nondescriptly, in tan trousers and a golf jacket (over a bare chest? I thought I saw chains of some sort flattened against skin), the man looked animal, a hungry wolf in human skin. A small boy, exhausted and barefooted, sat on the pavement by his feet. The three of them were strikingly odd, grouped together in the shadows by the side of the bar. Alma seemed comfortable with the man; she spoke desultorily, he answered, they seemed closer than Helen Kayon and Rex Leslie though there were no gestures of familiar warmth between them. The child slumped at the man's feet, shaking himself at times as though he feared to be kicked. The three of them looked like a perverse, nighttime family-a family by Charles Addams: Alma's characteristic grace, her way of holding herself, seemed, beside the werewolflike man and the pathetic child, unreal, somehow wicked. I backed away, thinking that if the man saw me he would turn savage in an instant.

For that is what a werewolf looks like, I thought, and then thought: the X.X.X.

The man jerked the twitching boy off the pavement, nodded to Alma, and got into a car by the curbside, still holding his glass of beer. The boy crept into the back seat. In a moment the car had roared off.

Later that night, not knowing if I were making a mistake but unable to wait until the next day, I telephoned her. "I saw you a couple of hours ago," I said. "I didn't want to disturb you. Anyhow, I thought you were in San Francisco."

"It was too boring and I came back early. I didn't call because I wanted you to get your work done. Oh, Don, you poor soul. You must have imagined something awful."

"Who was the man you were talking to? Shaven head, dark glasses, a little boy with him-alongside a biker's bar."

"Oh, him. Is that who you saw me with? His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans. He came here to go to school and then dropped out. The boy is his little brother-their parents are dead, and Greg takes care of him. Though I must say not very well. The boy is retarded."

"He's from New Orleans?"

"Of course."

"What's his last name?"

"Why, are you suspicious? His last name is Benton. The Bentons lived on the same street as we did."

It sounded plausible, if I didn't think about the appearance of the man she was calling Greg Benton. "Is he in the X.X.X.?" I asked.

She laughed. "My poor darling is all worked up, isn't he? No, of course he isn't. Don't think about that, Don. I don't know why I told you."

"Do you really know people in the X.X.X.?" I demanded.

She hesitated. "Well, just a few." I was relieved: I thought she was glamorizing herself. Maybe my "werewolf" really was just an old neighbor from New Orleans; in fact, the sight of him in the bar's shadows had reminded me of my first sight of Alma herself, standing colorless as a ghost on a shadowy campus staircase.

"What does this… Benton do?"

"Well, I think he has an informal trade in pharmaceuticals," she said.

Now that made sense. It suited his appearance, his hanging around a bar like The Last Reef. Alma sounded as close to embarrassment as I had ever heard her.

"If you're through with your work, please come over and give your fiancée a kiss," she said. I was out the door in less than a minute.

Two peculiar things happened that night. We were in Alma's bed, watched over by the objects I have already enumerated. I had been dozing more than sleeping for most of the night, and I reached over lightly to touch Alma's bare rounded arm; I did not want to wake her. But it was as if her arm gave my fingers a shock: not an electrical shock, but a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsion-as though I had touched a slug. I snatched back my hand, she turned over and mumbled, "All right, darling?" and I mumbled something back. Alma patted my hand and went back to sleep. Sometime later I dreamed of her. I saw merely her face; but it was not the face I knew, and the strangeness of it made me groan with anxiety; and for the second time I came wholly awake, not sure where I was or by whose side I lay.

4

So that may be when the change began, but our relationship remained superficially as it had been, at least until the long weekend in Still Valley. We still made love often and happily, Alma continued to speak enchantingly of the way we would live after we married. And I continued to love her even while I doubted the absolute veracity of some of her statements. After all, as a novelist wasn't I too a kind of liar? My profession consisted of inventing things, and of surrounding them with enough detail to make them believable; a few inventions on someone else's part did not upset me unduly. We had decided to get married in Berkeley at the end of the spring semester, and marriage seemed a ceremonious seal to our happiness. But I think the change had already begun, and that my recoiling from the touch of her skin in the middle of the night was the sign that it had started weeks before without my seeing it.

Yet a factor in the change was certainly the "approval" I had so mysteriously earned. I finally asked her about it outright on the morning of the Crane lecture; it was a tense morning for me since I knew I was to do a bad job, and I said, "Look. If this approval you keep mentioning isn't yours and if it isn't Mrs. de Peyser's, then whose is it? I can't help but wonder. It's not your friend in the drug trade, I suppose. Or is it his idiot brother?"

She looked up, a bit startled. Then she smiled. "I ought to tell you. We're close enough."

"We ought to be."

She was still smiling. "It's going to sound a little funny."

"I don't care. I'm just tired of not knowing."

"The person who has been approving of you is an old lover of mine. Wait, Don, don't look like that. I don't see him anymore. I can't see him anymore. He's dead."

"Dead?" I sat down. I sounded surprised, and I am sure I looked surprised, but I think that I had expected something of this order of weirdness.

She nodded; her face serious and playful at once- the "doubling" effect. "That's right. His name is Tasker Martin. I'm in touch with him."

"You're in touch with him."

"Constantly."

"Constantly."

"Yes. I talk with him. Tasker likes you, Don. He likes you very much."

"He's okayed me, as it were."

"That's right. I talk to him about everything. And he's told me over and over that we're right for each other. Besides that, he just likes you, Don. He'd be a good friend of yours if he were alive."

I just stared at her.

"I told you it would sound a little funny."

"It does."

She lifted her hands. "So?"

"Um. How long ago did-Tasker die?"

"Years ago. Five or six years ago."

"Another old New Orleans friend?"

"That's right."

"And you were close to him?"

"We were lovers. He was older-a lot older. He died of a heart attack. Two nights after that he started to talk to me."

"It took him two days to get change for the phones." She did not reply to this. "Is he talking to you now?"

"He's listening. He's glad you know about him now."

"I'm not so sure I'm glad I do."

"Just get used to the idea. He really likes you, Don. It'll be all right-it'll be just the same as it was before."

"Does Tasker pick up his phone when we're in bed?"

"I don't know. I suppose he does. He always liked that side of things."

"And does Tasker give you some of your ideas about what we'll do after we get married?"

"Sometimes. It was Tasker that reminded me about my father's friends on Poros. He thinks you'll love the island."

"And what does Tasker think I'm going to do now that you've told me about him?"

"He says you'll be upset for a little while and that you'll think I'm crazy for a while, but that you'll just get used to the idea. After all he's here and he isn't going anywhere, and you're here and we're going to be married. Don, just think about Tasker as though he were a part of me."

"I suppose he must be," I said. "I certainly can't believe that you're actually in communication with a man who died five years ago."

In part, I was fascinated by all this. A nineteenth-century habit like talking with departed spirits suited Alma down to the ground-it harmonized even with her passivity. But also it was creepy. The talkative ghost of Tasker Martin was obviously a delusion: in the case of anybody but Alma, it would have been the symptom of mental illness. Creepy too was the concept of being okayed by former lovers. I looked across the table at Alma, who was regarding me with a kindly expression of expectancy, and thought: she does look androgynous. She could have been a pretty nineteen-year-old freckled boy. She smiled at me, still with expectation kindling in her face. I wanted to make love to her, and I also felt a separation from her. Her long beautifully shaped fingers lay on the polished wood of her table, attached to hands and wrists equally beautiful. These too both attracted and repelled.

"We'll have a beautiful marriage," Alma said.

"You and me and Tasker."

"See? He said you'd be like that at first."

On the way to the lecture I remembered the man I had seen her with, the Louisianian Greg Benton with his dead ferocious face, and I shuddered.

For one sign of Alma's abnormality, one indication that she was no one else I had ever known, was that she suggested a world in which advisory ghosts and men who were disguised wolves could exist. I know of no other way to put this. I do not mean that she made me believe in the paraphernalia of the supernatural; but she suggested that such things might be fluttering invisibly about us. You step on a solid-looking piece of ground and it falls away under your shoe; you look down and instead of seeing grass, earth, the solidity you had expected, you are looking at a deep cavern where crawling things scurry to get out of the light. Well, so here is a cavern, a chasm of sorts, you say; how far does it go? Does it underlie everything, and is the solid earth merely a bridge over it? No; of course it is not; it very likely is not. I do love Alma, I told myself. We will be married next summer. I thought of her extraordinary legs, of her fine lovely face; of the sense I had with her that I was deep in a half-understood game.

My second lecture was a disaster. I brought out secondhand ideas, unsuccessfully tried to relate them and got lost in my notes; I contradicted myself. My mind on other things, I said that The Red Badge of Courage was "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." It was impossible to disguise my lack of preparation and interest in what I was saying. There were a few ironic handclaps when I left the podium. I was grateful that Lieberman was far away in Iowa.

After the lecture I went to a bar and ordered a double Johnny Walker Black. Before I left I went to the telephones at the back and took out the San Francisco directory. I looked under P first and found nothing and started to sweat, but when I looked under D I found de Peyser, F. The address was in the right section of town. Maybe the earth was solid ground after all; of course it was.

The next day I rang David at his office and told him that I'd like to go to his place in Still Valley. "Fantastic," he said, "and about time, too. I've got some people looking in to see that nobody steals anything, but I wanted you to use the place all along, Don."

"I've been pretty busy," I said.

"How are the women out there?"

"Strange and new," I said. "In fact I think I'm engaged."

"You don't sound so sure about it."

"I'm engaged. I'm getting married next summer."

"What the hell's her name? Have you told anybody? Wow. I've heard about being understated, but…"

I told him her name. "David, I haven't told anybody else in the family. If you're in touch with them, say I'll be writing soon. Being engaged takes up most of my time."

He told me how to get to his place, gave me the name of the neighbors who had the key and said, "Hey, little brother, I'm happy for you." We made the usual promises to write.

David had bought the Still Valley property when he had a job in a California law firm; with his usual sagacity, he had chosen the place carefully, making sure that the house he would have as a vacation home had plenty of land around it-eight acres-and was close to the ocean, and then had spent all of his spare cash having the building completely renewed and redecorated. When he left for New York he kept the place, knowing that property values in Still Valley were going to take off. The house had probably quadrupled in value since then, proving once again that David was no fool. After Alma and I had picked up the keys from the painter and his pottery-making wife several miles down the valley road, we turned off onto a dirt road in the direction of the ocean. We could hear and smell the Pacific before we saw the house. And when Alma saw it she said, "Don, this is where we should come for our honeymoon."

I had been misled by David's constant description of the place as a "cottage." What I expected was a two-or three-room frame building, probably with outdoor plumbing-a beer and poker shack. Instead it looked just like what it was, the expensive toy of a rich young lawyer.

"Your brother just lets this place stay empty?" Alma asked.

"I think he comes here two or three weeks every year."

"Well."

I had never before seen her impressed. "What does Tasker think?"

"He thinks it's incredible. He says it looks like New Orleans."

I should have known better.

Yet the description was not inaccurate: David's "cottage" was a tall two-story wooden structure, dazzling white and Spanish in conception, with black wrought-iron balconies outside the upper windows. Thick columns flanked the massive front door. Behind the house we could see the endless blue ocean, a long way down. I took our suitcases from the trunk of the car and went up the steps and opened the door. Alma followed.

After going through a small tiled vestibule, we were in a vast room where various areas were raised and others sunken. A thick white carpet rolled over it all. Massive couches and glass-topped tables stood in the different areas of the room. Exposed beams had been polished and varnished across the width of the ceiling.

I knew what I would find even before we inspected the house, I knew there would be a sauna and a Jacuzzi and a hot tub, an expensive stereo system, a Cuisinart in the kitchen, a bookshelf filled with educational porn in the bedroom-and all this we found as we went through the house. Also a Betamax, a French bread rack serving as shelf space for Art Deco gewgaws, a bed the size of a swimming pool, a bidet in every bathroom… almost immediately I felt trapped inside someone else's fantasy. I'd had no idea David had made so much money during his years in California; neither had I known that his taste stayed on the level of a hustling young Jaycee.

"You don't like it, do you?" asked Alma.

"I'm surprised by it."

"What's your brother's name?"

I told her.

"And where does he work?"

She nodded when I named the firm, not as "Rachel Varney" would have done, with a detached irony, but as though she were checking the name against a list.

Yet of course she was correct: I did not like David's Xanadu.

Still, there we were: we had to spend three nights in the house. And Alma accepted it as if it were hers. But as she cooked in the gadget-laden kitchen, as she reveled in David's collection of expensive toys, I grew increasingly sour. I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip dip at the supermarket.

Once again I am compressing ideas about Alma into a single paragraph, but in this case I am condensing the impressions of two days, not of three times that many months; and the change in her was merely a matter of degree. Yet I had the uneasy feeling that, just as in her apartment she was perfectly the embodiment of the Bohemian rich girl, in David's house she threw off hints of a personality suited to Jacuzzi baths and home saunas. She became more garrulous. The sentences about how we would live after our marriage became essays: I found out where we would make our base while we traveled (Vermont), how many children we would have (three)-on and on.

And worse, she began to talk endlessly about Tasker Martin.

"Tasker was a big man, Don, and he had beautiful white hair and a strong face with the most piercing blue eyes. What Tasker used to like was… Did I ever tell you about Tasker's… One day Tasker and I…"

This more than anything marked the end of my infatuation.

But even then I found it difficult to accept that my feelings had changed. While she described the characters of our children, I would find myself mentally crossing my fingers-almost shuddering. Realizing what I was doing, I would say to myself: "But you're in love, aren't you? You can even put up with the fantasy of Tasker Martin, can't you? For her sake?"

The weather made everything worse. Though we had had warm sunshine on the day we arrived, our first night in Still Valley was submerged in dark dense fog that endured for the next three days. When I looked out the rear windows toward the ocean, it was as though the ocean were all around us, gray and deadening. (Of course, this is what "Saul Malkin" imagines in his Paris hotel room with "Rachel Varney.") At times you could see halfway down to the valley road, but at other times you saw about as far ahead as you could extend your arms. A flashlight in that damp grayness simply lost heart.

Thus, there we are, mornings and afternoons in David's house while gray fog slides past the windows and the noise of waves slapping the beach far down suggests that any minute water will begin to come in through the bottom of the door. Alma is elegantly curled on one of the sofas, holding a cup of tea or a plate with an orange divided into equal sections. "Tasker used to say that I'd be the most beautiful woman in America when I was thirty. Well, "I'm twenty-five now, and I think I'll disappoint him. Tasker used to…"

What I felt was dread.

On the second night she rolled out of bed naked, waking me. I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes in the gloom. Alma walked across the cold gray bedroom to the window. We had not closed the drapes, and Alma stood with her back to me, staring at-at nothing at all. The bedroom windows faced the ocean, but though we could hear the cold noises of water all through the night, the window revealed nothing but surging gray.

I expected her to speak. Her back looked very long and pale in the murky room.

"What is it, Alma?" I asked.

She did not move or speak.

"Is anything wrong?" Her skin seemed lifeless, white cold marble. "What happened?"

She turned very slightly toward me and said, "I saw a ghost." (That, at any rate, is what "Rachael Varney" tells "Saul Malkin"; but did Alma actually say, "I am a ghost?" I could not be sure; she spoke very softly. I'd had more than enough of Tasker Martin, and my first response was a groan. But if she had said I am a ghost, would I have responded differently?)

"Oh, Alma," I said, not as fed up as I would have been in the daytime. The chill in the room, the dark window and the girl's long white body, these made Tasker a more real presence than he had been. I was a little frightened. "Tell him to go away," I said. "Come back to bed."

But it was no good. She picked her robe off the bed, put it around her and sat down, turning her chair toward the window. "Alma?" She would not answer or turn around. I lay down again and finally went back to sleep.

After the long weekend in Still Valley things moved to their inevitable conclusion. I often thought that Alma was half-mad. She never explained her behavior of that night, and after what happened to David, I wondered if all her actions comprised what I had once called a game: if she had been playfully, consciously manipulating my mind and feelings. Passive rich girl, terrorist of the occult, student of Virginia Woolf, semilunatic- she did not cohere.

She continued to project us into our future, but after Still Valley I began to invent excuses for avoiding her. I thought that I loved her, but the love was overshadowed by dread. Tasker, Greg Benton, the zombies of the X.X.X.-how could I marry all that?

And then I felt a physical as well as a moral revulsion. Over the two months following Still Valley, we had generally ceased making love, though I sometimes spent the night in her bed. When I kissed her, when I held or touched her, I overheard my own thinking: not much longer.

My teaching, except for rare flashes in the writing classes, had become remote and dull; I had stopped my own writing altogether. One day Lieberman asked me to see him in his office and when I arrived he said, "One of your colleagues described your Stephen Crane lecture to me. Did you actually say that The Red Badge was a ghost story without a ghost?" When I nodded, he asked, "Would you mind telling me what that means?"

"I don't know what it means. My mind was wandering. My rhetoric got out of hand."

He looked at me in disgust. "I thought you made a good start," he said, and I knew there was no longer any question of my staying on another year.

5

Then Alma disappeared. She had forced me, as dependent people can force others to do as they wish, to meet her for lunch at a restaurant near the campus. I went, got a table, waited half an hour and at last realized that she was not coming. I had been braced for more stories of what we were going to do in Vermont, and I was not hungry, but ate a salad out of general relief and went home.

She did not call that night. I dreamed of her sitting in the prow of a small boat, drifting away down a canal and smiling enigmatically, as if giving me a day and a night of freedom was the last act of the charade.

By morning I had begun to worry. I telephoned her several times during the day, but either she was out or not answering the phone. (This evoked a clear picture. A dozen times while I had been in her apartment, she had let the phone ring until it stopped.) By evening, I had begun to imagine that I was really free of her, and I knew that I would do anything to avoid seeing her again. I telephoned twice more during the night, and was happy to get no answer. Finally I stayed up until two writing a letter breaking it off.

Before my first class I went over to her building. My heart was beating fast: I was afraid I'd see her by accident and have to mouth the phrases which were so much more convincing on paper. I went up the steps of her building and saw that the drapes were drawn over her windows. I pushed at the locked door. I almost pushed the bell. Instead I slid the letter between the window and the frame, where she would see it and the inscription Alma as soon as she came up the stairs. Then I-no other word for it-fled.

Of course she knew my teaching schedule, and I half-expected to see her loitering outside a classroom or lecture theater, my smug letter in her hand and a provoking expression on her face. But I went through my teaching day without seeing her.

The following day was a repetition of the last. I worried that she might have killed herself; I dismissed the worry; I went off to my classes; in the afternoon I rang and got no reply. Dinner at a bar; then I walked to her street and saw the white oblong of my treachery still in her window. At home I debated taking my phone off the hook but left it on, by now almost ready to admit that I was hoping she would call.

The next day I had a section of the American literature class at two o'clock. To get to the building where it met I had to cross a wide brick plaza. This plaza was always crowded. Students set up desks where you could sign petitions for legalizing marijuana or declare yourself in favor of homosexuality and the protection of whales; students thronged by. In their midst I saw Helen Kayon, for the first time since the evening in the library. Rex Leslie was walking beside her, holding her hand. They looked very happy-animal contentment encased them as in a bubble. I turned away from that sight, feeling like a Skid Row derelict. I realized that I had not shaved in two days, had not looked at myself in the mirror nor changed my clothes.

And when I turned away from Helen and Rex, I saw a tall pale man with a shaven head and dark glasses staring at me from beside a fountain. The vacant-faced boy, barefoot and in ragged dungarees, sat at his feet Greg Benton seemed even more frightening than he had outside The Last Reef; standing in the sun beside a fountain, he and his brother were extraordinary apparitions-a pair of tarantulas. Even the Berkeley students, who had seen a great deal in the way of human oddity, visibly skirted them. Now that he knew I had noticed him, Benton did not speak or gesture to me, but his whole attitude, the tilt of the shaven head, the way he held his body, was a gesture. It all expressed anger-as though I'd enraged him by getting away with something. He was like an angry blot of darkness on the sunny plaza: like cancer.

Then I realized that for some reason he was helpless. He was glaring at me because that was all he could do. I immediately blessed the protection of the thousands of students: and then I thought that Alma was in trouble. In danger. Or dead.

I turned away from Benton and his brother and sprinted toward the gate at the bottom of the plaza. When I had crossed the street I turned around to look back at Benton: I'd felt him watching me run-felt his cold satisfaction. But he and his brother had vanished. The fountain splashed, students milled. I even had a glimpse of Helen and Rex Leslie going into Sproul Hall, but the cancer had melted away.

By the time I reached Alma's street my fear seemed absurd. I knew that I was reacting to my own guilt. But had she not marked our final separation by standing me up at the restaurant? That I should have been in a sweat for her safety seemed a final manipulation. I caught my breath. Then I noticed that the drapes in Alma's windows were parted and the envelope was gone.

I ran down the block and up the stairs. Leaning sideways, I could see in her windows. Everything was gone. The room had been stripped bare. On the floorboards which had been covered by Alma's rugs I saw my envelope. It was unopened.

6

I went home dazed and stayed that way for weeks. I could not understand what had happened. I felt enormous relief and enormous loss. She must have left her rooms on the day we were to meet at the restaurant: but what had been in her mind? A last joke? Or had she known that everything was over, had been since Still Valley? Was she in despair? That was difficult to believe.

And if I had been so eager to be rid of her, why did I now feel that I was shuffling through a less significant world? Alma gone, I was left with the bare world of cause and effect, the arithmetic world-if without the odd dread she had aroused in me, without the mystery too. The only mystery I had left was that of where she had gone; and the larger mystery of who she had been.

I drank a good deal and cut my classes: I slept most of the day. It was as though I had some generalized disease that took my energy and left me with no occupation but sleeping and thinking about Alma. When after a week I began to feel healthier, I remembered seeing Benton in the plaza and imagined that he'd been angry because he had known that what I had gotten away with was my life.

After I started to meet my classes again I saw Leiberman in the halls after a lecture and at first he ducked his head and intended to snub me, but he thought better of it and flicked his eyes at mine and said, "Step into my office for a second, will you, Wanderley?" He too was angry, but it was anger I could deal with; I want to say it was only human anger: but what anger is not? A werewolf's?

"I know I've disappointed you," I said. "But my life got out of hand. I got sick. I'll finish out the term as honorably as I can."

"Disappointed? That's a mild word for it." He leaned back in his leather chair, his eyes blazing. "I don't think we've ever been let down so much by one of our temporary appointments. After I entrusted you with an important lecture, you apparently threw together the worst mishmash-the worst garbage-" He collected himself. "And you've missed more classes than anyone in our history since we had an alcoholic poet who tried to burn down the recruitments office. In short, you've been lax, slipshod, lazy-you've been disgraceful. I just wanted you to know what I thought of you. Single-handedly, you've endangered our entire program of bringing in writers. This program is supervised, you know. We have a board to answer to. I'll have to defend you to them, as much as I detest the thought."

"I can't blame you for feeling as you do," I said. "I just got into an odd situation-I think I've sort of been cracking up."

"I wonder when you so-called creative people are going to realize that you can't get away with murder." The outburst made him feel better. He steepled his fingers and looked at me over them. "I hope you don't expect me to give you a glowing recommendation."

"Of course not," I said. Then I thought of something. "I wonder if I can ask you a question."

He nodded.

"Have you ever heard of an English professor at the University of Chicago named Alan McKechnie?" His eyes widened; he folded his hands. "I don't really know what I'm asking. I wondered if you knew anything about him?"

"What the hell are you saying?"

"I'm curious about him. That's all."

"Well, for what it's worth," he said, and stood up. He marched over to his window, which gave a splendid view of the plaza. "I dislike gossip, you know."

What I knew was that he loved gossip, like most academics. "I knew Alan slightly. We were on a Robert Frost symposium five years ago-sound man. A bit too much the Thomist, but that's Chicago, isn't it? Still, a good mind. Had a lovely family too, I gather."

"He had children? A wife?"

Lieberman looked at me suspiciously. "Of course. That's what made it so tragic. Apart from the loss of his contributions to the field, of course."

"Of course. I forgot."

"Look? What do you know? I'm not going to slander a colleague for the sake of-the sake of-"

"There was a girl," I said.

He nodded, satisfied. "Yes. Apparently. I heard about it at the last MLA convention. One of the fellows from his department told me about it He was vamped. This girl simply pursued him. Dogged him. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in a word-I gather he finally did become enchanted by her. She was a graduate student of his. These things happen of course, they happen all the time. A girl falls for her professor, manages to seduce him, sometimes she makes him leave his wife, most times not. Most of us have more sense." He coughed. I thought: you really are a turd. "Well. He did not. Instead he went to pieces. The girl ruined him. In the end he killed himself. The girl, I gather, did a midnight flit-as our English friends have it though what this has to do with you, I can't imagine."

She had falsified nearly everything in the McKechnie story. I wondered what else might have been a lie. When I got home, I rang de Peyser, F. A woman answered the phone.

"Mrs. de Peyser?"

It was.

"Please excuse me for calling you on what may be a case of mistaken identity, Mrs. de Peyser, but this is Richard Williams at the First National of California. We have a loan application from a Miss Mobley who lists you as a reference. I'm just running the usual routine information check. You're named as her aunt.

"As her what? What's her name?"

"Alma Mobley. The problem is that she forgot to give your address and phone number, and there are several other Mrs. de Peysers in the Bay area, and I need the correct information for our files."

"Well it's not me! I've never heard of anybody named Alma Mobley, I can assure you of that."

"You do not have a niece named Alma Mobley who is a graduate student at Berkeley?"

"Certainly not. I suggest you get back to this Miss Mobley and ask her for her aunt's address so you don't go wasting your time."

"I'll do that right now, Mrs. de Peyser."

The second semester was a rainy blur. I pushed at a new book, but it would not budge. I never knew what to make of the Alma character: was she a La Belle Dame Sans Merci, as Lieberman had said; or was she a girl on the far borders of sanity? I didn't know how to treat her, and the first draft took so many misdirections it could have been an exercise in the use of the unreliable narrator. And I felt that the book needed another element, one I couldn't yet see, before it would work.

David telephoned me in April. He sounded excited, happy, more youthful than he'd been in years. "I have amazing news," he said. "Astounding news. I don't know how to tell you."

"Robert Redford bought your life story for the movies."

"What? Oh, come off it. No, really, this is hard for me to tell you."

"Why don't you just start at the beginning?"

"Okay. Okay, that's what I'll do, wiseass. Two months ago, on February third" -this was really the lawyer at work-"I was up on Columbus Circle, seeing a client. The weather was terrible, and I had to share a cab back to Wall Street Bad news, right? But I found myself sitting next to the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, she was so good-looking my mouth went dry. I don't know where I got the guts, but by the time we got to the Park, I asked her out to dinner. I don't usually do things like that!"

"No, you don't." David was too lawyerly to ask strange girls for dates. He'd never been in a singles bar in his life.

"Well, this girl and I really hit it off. I saw her every night that week. And I've gone on seeing her ever since. In fact, we're going to get married. That's half of the news."

"Congratulations," I said. "I wish you better luck than I had."

"Now we come to the difficult part. The name of this astounding girl is Alma Mobley."

"It can't be," I said.

"Wait. Just wait. Don, I know this is a shock. But she told me all about what happened between you, and I think it's essential that you know how sorry she is for everything that happened. We've talked about this a long time. She knows she hurt your feelings, but she knew that she just wasn't the right girl for you. And you weren't right for her. Also, she was in a bad patch in California. She wasn't herself, she says. She's afraid you have absolutely the wrong idea of her."

"That's just what I do have," I said. "Everything about her is wrong. She's some kind of witch. She's destructive."

"Hold on. I am going to marry this girl, Don. She's not the person you think she is. God, how we've talked about this. Obviously you and I have to talk about it a hell of a lot ourselves. In fact I was hoping you could hop a plane to New York this weekend so we could have a good long talk and really work through it. I'd be glad to pay your fare."

"That's ridiculous. Ask her about Alan McKechnie. See what she tells you. Then I'll tell you the truth."

"No, wait, buddy, we've already been through all that I know she gave you a garbled version of the McKechnie affair. Can't you imagine how shattered she was? Please come out here, Don. All three of us have to have a long session."

"Not on your life," I said. "Alma's a kind of Circe."

"Look, I'm at the office, but I'll call you later in the week, okay? We have to get things straight. I don't want my brother having bad feelings about my wife."

Bad feelings? I felt horror.

That night David rang again. I asked him if he'd met Tasker yet. Or if he knew about Alma and the Xala Xalior Xlati.

"See, that's where you got the wrong idea. She just made all that stuff up, Don. She was a little unsteady out there on the Coast. Besides who can take all that stuff seriously anyhow? Nobody here in New York ever heard of the XXX. In California, people get all cranked up about trivia."

And Mrs. de Peyser? She had told him that I was terribly possessive; Mrs. de Peyser was a tool to get time by herself.

"Let me ask you this, David," I said. "Sometimes, maybe only once, haven't you looked at her or touched her and just felt-something funny? Like that, no matter how strongly attracted you are to her, you're squeamish about touching her?"

"You've got to be kidding."

David would not permit me to creep away from the whole issue of Alma Mobley, as I wanted to do. He would not let it go. He telephoned me from New York two or three times a week, increasingly disturbed by my refusal to see reason.

"Don, we have to talk this thing out I feel terrible about you."

"Don't."

"I mean, I just don't understand your attitude about this thing. I know you must feel terrible resentment. Jesus, if things had worked out the other way around and Alma had walked out of my life and decided to marry you, I'd be tied in knots. But unless you admit your resentment, we can never get to the point of doing something about it."

"I don't resent anything, David."

"Come off it, kid brother. We have to talk about it sometime. Alma and I both feel that way."

One of my problems was that I didn't know to what extent David's assumptions were correct. It was true that I resented both David and Alma: but was it merely resentment that made me recoil from the thought of them marrying?

A month or so after that, many seesawing conversations later, David called to say that I was "going to have a break from being hounded by your brother. I've got a little business in Amsterdam, so I'm flying there tomorrow for five days. Alma hasn't seen Amsterdam since she was a child, and she'll be coming with me. I'll send you a postcard. But do me a favor and really think about our situation, will you?"

"I'll do my best," I said. "But you care too much about what I think."

"What you think is important to me."

"All right," I said. "Be careful."

Now what did I mean by that?

At times I thought that both David and myself had underestimated her calculation. Suppose, I thought, that Alma had engineered her meeting with David. Suppose that she had deliberately sought him out. When I thought about this, Gregory Benton and the stories of Tasker Martin seemed more sinister-as if they, like Alma, were stalking David.

Four days later I got a call from New York telling me that David was dead. It was one of David's partners, Bruce Putnam; the Dutch police had wired the office. "Do you want to go out there, Mr. Wanderley?" Putnam asked. "We'd like to leave it to you to take it from here. Just keep us informed, will you? Your brother was greatly liked and respected here. None of us can figure out what happened. It sounds like he fell out of a window."

"Have you heard from his fiancée?"

"Oh, did he have a fiancée? Imagine that-he never let on. Was she with him?"

"Of course she was," I said. "She must have seen everything. She must know what happened. I'll get on the first plane going."

There was a plane the next day to Schiphol Airport, and I took a cab to the police station which had cabled David's office. What I learned can be set down very barely: David had gone through a window and over a chest-high balcony. The hotel owner had heard a scream, but nothing more-no voices, no arguments. Alma was thought to have left him; when the police entered their room, none of her clothing was still in the closets.

I went to the hotel, looked at the high iron balcony, and turned away to the open wardrobe closet. Three of David's Brooks Brothers suits hung on the rail, two pairs of shoes beneath them. Counting what he must have been wearing at the time of his death, he had brought four suits and three pairs of shoes for a five-day visit. Poor David.

7

I arranged for the cremation and, two days later, stood in a cold crematorium while David's coffin slid along rails toward a fringed green curtain.

Two days after that I was back in Berkeley. My little apartment seemed cell-like and foreign. It was as though I had grown irretrievably apart from the person I had been in the days when I hunted down references to James Fenimore Cooper in PMLA. I began to sketch out The Nightwatcher, having only the most nebulous ideas for it, and to prepare for my classes again. One night I telephoned Helen Kayon's apartment, thinking that I would ask her out for a drink so that I could talk about Alma and my brother, and Meredith Polk told me that Helen had married Rex Leslie the week before. I found myself falling asleep at intervals all during the day and going to bed before ten at night; I drank too much but could not get drunk. If I survived the year, I thought, I would go to Mexico and lie in the sun and work on my book.

And escape my hallucinations. Once I had come awake near midnight and heard someone moving around in my kitchen; when I got out of bed and went in to check, I had seen my brother David standing near the stove, holding the coffeepot in one hand. "You sleep too much, kid," he said. "Why not let me give you a cup?" And another time, teaching a Henry James novel to my section of the survey class, I had seen on one of the chairs not the red-haired girl I knew was there, but-again-David, his face covered in blood and his suit torn, nodding happily at how bright I could be about Portrait of a Lady.

But I had one more discovery to make before I could go to Mexico. One day I went to the library and instead of going to the stack of critical magazines, went to the reference library and found a copy of Who's Who for the year 1960. It was nearly an arbitrary year; but if Alma was twenty-five when I met her, then in 1960 she should have been nine or ten.

Robert Mobley was in the book. As nearly as I can remember it, this was his entry-I read it over and over and finally had it photocopied.

MOBLEY, ROBERT OSGOOD, painter and watercolorist. b. New Orleans, La, Feb 23. 1909; s. Felix Morton and Jessica (Osgood); A.B. Yale U. 1927; m. Alice Whitney Aug 27, 1936; children-Shelby Adam, Whitney Osgood. Shown at: Flagler Gallery, New York; Winson Galleries, New York; Galerie Flam, Paris; SchlegeL Zurich; Galeria Esperance, Rome. Recipient Golden Palette 1946; Southern Regional Painters Award 1952, 1955, 1958. Collected in: Adda May Lebow Museum, New Orleans; Louisiana Fine Arts Museum; Chicago Institute of the Arts; Santa Fe Fine Arts; Rochester Arts Center; many others. Served as Lt Cmdr. USNR, 1941-1945. Member Golden Palette Society; Southern Regional Arts League; American Water Color Society; American League of Artists; American Academy of Oil Painting. Clubs: Links Golf; Deepdale Golf; Meadowbrook; Century (New York); Lyford Cay (Nassau); Garrick (London). Author: I Came This Way. Homes: 38957 Canal Blvd New Orleans, La; 18 Church Row, London NW3 UK; "Dans Le Vigne," Route de la Belle Isnard, St Tropez 83 France.

This wealthy clubman and artist had two sons, but no daughter. Everything Alma had told me-and David, presumably-had been invention. She had a false name and no history: she might as well have been a ghost. Then I thought of "Rachel Varney," a brunette with dark eyes, the trappings of wealth and an obscure past, and I saw that David had been the missing element in the book I'd tried to write.

8

I've spent nearly three weeks writing all this out, and all I've done is remember-I'm no closer to understanding it than I was before.

But I've come to one perhaps foolish conclusion. I'm no longer so ready to reject the notion that there might be some factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to David and myself. I find myself in the same position as the Chowder Society, no longer sure of what to believe. If I am ever invited to tell a story to the Chowder Society, I'll tell them what I've written out here. This account of my history with Alma-not The Nightwatcher-is my Chowder Society story. So perhaps I have not wasted my time after all; I've given myself a base for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel, and I'm prepared to change my mind on an important question-right now, maybe the important question. When I started this, the night after Dr. Jaffrey's funeral, I thought it would be destructive to imagine myself in the landscape and atmosphere of one of my own books. Yet-was I not in that landscape, back at Berkeley? My imagination may have been more literal than I thought.

Various odd things have been happening in Milburn. Apparently a group of farm animals, cows and horses, were killed by some kind of beast-I heard a man in the drugstore say that creatures from a flying saucer killed them! And far more seriously, a man either died or was killed. His body was found down near a disused railway siding. He was an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson. Lewis Benedikt in particular seemed to take this death hard, though it appears to have been accidental. In fact, something very peculiar seems to be happening to Lewis: he's become absentminded and fretful, almost as if he were blaming himself for Robinson's death.

I too have an unusual feeling which I'll record here at the risk of feeling idiotic whenever I see it in later years. This feeling is absolutely unfounded: more a hunch than a feeling. It's that if I start to look more closely into Milburn and do what the Chowder Society asks, I'll find what sent David over that railing in Amsterdam.

But the oddest feeling, the feeling that makes the adrenalin go, is that I am about to go inside my own mind: to travel the territory of my own writing, but this time without the comfortable make-believe of fiction. No "Saul Malkin" this time; just me.

III - The Town

Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept.

A friend passing by saw him and asked,

"Narcissus, why do you weep?"

"Because my face has changed," Narcissus said.

"Do you cry because you grow older?"

"No. I see that I am no longer innocent. I have been gazing at myself long and long, and so doing have worn out my innocence."

1

As Don has noted in his journal, while he sat in room 17 of the Archer Hotel and relived his months with Alma Mobley, Freddy Robinson lost his life. And as Don has noted, three cows belonging to a dairy farmer named Norbert Clyde had been killed-Mr. Clyde, walking over to his barn on the night of this occurrence, had seen something which scared him so badly that he felt as though the wind were knocked out of him.

He ran back to his house and did not dare to come out again until he could see dawn, when at any rate it was again time for chores and he had to go out. His description of the figure he had seen inspired, among a very few of the most excitable souls of Milburn, the story of a creature from a flying saucer which Don had heard in the drugstore. Both Walt Hardesty and the County Farm Agent, who inspected the dead cows, had heard the story, but neither was gullible enough to accept it. Walt Hardesty, as we know, had his own ideas; he had what he considered good reason for assuming that a few more animals would be bled white and then that would be that. His experience with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne made him keep his theory to himself and not share it with the County Farm Agent, who chose to overlook certain obvious facts and form the conclusion that somewhere in the area an oversize dog had turned killer. He filed a report to this effect and went back to the county seat, having completed his business. Elmer Scales, who had heard about Norbert Clyde's cows and was constitutionally half inclined to believe in flying saucers anyhow, sat up three nights in a row by his living-room window, holding a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun across his knees (… come from Mars boy maybe you do but we'll see how you glow when you got a load of shot in you). He could not possibly have foreseen or understood what he would be doing with that shotgun in two months' time. Walt Hardesty, who would have to clean up Elmer's mess, was content to take things easy until the next weirdo happening and think about how he could get the two old lawyers to open up to him-them and their friend Mr. Lewis Snob Benedikt. They knew something they weren't telling, and they knew something too about their other old buddy, Dr. John Dope Fiend Jaffrey. They just didn't take that normal, Hardesty told himself as he bedded down in the spare room behind his office. He put a bottle of County Fair on the floor beside his cot. No sir. Mr. Ricky Snob Hawthorne-With-Horns and Mr. Sears and Roebuck Snob James just didn't act normal at all.

But Don does not know, so he cannot put in his journal, that after Milly Sheehan leaves the Hawthorne house to return to the house on Montgomery Street where she lived with John Jaffrey, she remembers one morning that the doctor never did get around to putting up the storm windows and yanks on a coat and goes outside to see if she can do it herself and while she looks up despairingly at the windows (knowing that she'll never be able to lift the big storms that high), Dr. Jaffrey walks around the side of the house and smiles at her. He is wearing the suit Ricky Hawthorne picked out for his funeral but no shoes or socks, and at first the shock of seeing him outside barefoot is worse than the other shock. "Milly," he says, "tell them all to leave-tell them all to get out. I've seen the other side Milly, and it's horrible." His mouth moves, but the words sound like a badly dubbed film. "Horrible. Be sure to tell them now," he says, and Milly faints. She is out only a few seconds, and comes to whimpering, her hip aching from the fall, but even through her fear she can see no footprints in the snow beside her and knows that she was just seeing things-she'll never tell anyone. They put you away for things like that. "Too many of those darned stories, and a little too much of Mr. Sears James," she mutters to herself before picking herself up and limping back inside.

Don, sitting alone in room 17, of course does not know most of the things that happen in Milburn while he takes a three-week tour of his past. He barely sees the snow, which continues to fall heavily; Eleanor Hardie does not skimp on heating any more than she allows the lobby carpet to go unvacuumed, so he is warm, up in his room. But one night Milly Sheehan hears the wind shift to the north and west and getting out of bed to put on another blanket, sees stars between the rags of clouds. Back in bed, she lies listening to the wind blow more strongly-and then even more strongly than that, shaking the sash of the window, forcing itself in. The curtain billows, the shade rattles. When she wakes in the morning, she finds a drift of snow covering the sill.

And here are some other events from two weeks in Milburn, all of which happened while Don Wanderley consciously, willfully and at length evoked the spirit of Alma Mobley:

Walter Barnes sat in his car at Len Shaw's Exxon station and thought about his wife while Len filled the tank. Christina had been moping around the house for months now, staring at the telephone and burning dinners and at last he had begun to think that she was having an affair. Disturbingly, he still carried in his mind a clear picture of a drunken Lewis Benedikt fondling Christina's knees at Jaffrey's tragic party: and of a drunken Christina letting him do it. It was true that she was still an attractive woman, and he had become an overweight small-town banker, not the financial power he had once envisaged: most of the men of their class in Milburn would have been happy to go to bed with Christina, but it had been fifteen years since a woman had looked at him in a challenging way. Misery settled over him. His son would be leaving home in a year, and then it would be just he and Christina, pretending that they were happy. Len coughed and said, "How's your friend Mrs. Hawthorne? Thought she looked a little peaked last time she was in here- thought maybe she had a touch of the flu." "No, she's fine," Walter Barnes replied, thinking that Len, like ninety per cent of the men in town, coveted Stella: as he did himself. What he ought to do, he thought, was run away with Stella Hawthorne; go someplace like Pago Pago and forget about being lonely and married in Milburn; not knowing that the loneliness which would in fact visit him would be worse than anything he could imagine; and Peter Barnes, the banker's son, sat in another car with Jim Hardie while they drove at twenty miles over the limit to a rundown tavern, listening to Jim, who was six-two and muscular and the kind of boy described forty years earlier as "born to hang," and who had set fire to the old Pugh barn because he'd heard the Dedham girls kept their horses in it, tell stories of his sexual relations with the new woman at the hotel, this Anna woman, stories which would never be true, not in the way Jim meant them; and Clark Mulligan sat in the projection booth of his theater, watching Carrie for the sixtieth time and worried about what all this snow would do to his business and if Leota would have something besides hamburger casserole for dinner and if anything exciting would ever happen to him again; and Lewis Benedikt paced the rooms in his enormous house tormented by an impossible thought: that the woman who had appeared before him on the highway and whom he had nearly killed was his dead wife. The set of the shoulders, the swing of the hair… the more he thought back to those seconds, the more agonizingly quick and vague they were; and Stella Hawthorne lay on a motel bed with Milly Sheehan's nephew, Harold Sims, wondering if Harold would ever stop talking: "And then, Stel, some of the guys in my department are looking into myth survival among the Amerinds because they say the whole group dynamic thing is a dead letter, can you believe it? Hell, I only finished my thesis four years ago, and now the whole thing's out of style, Johnson and Leadbeater don't even mention Lionel Tiger anymore, they're getting into field work, and the other day, for Chrissake, a guy stopped me in the corridor and asked me if I've ever read any of the stuff on the Manitou-the Manitou, for Chrissake. Myth survival, for Chrissake."

"What's a Manitou?" she asked him, but didn't pay any attention to his answer-some story about an Indian who chased a deer for days up a mountain, but when he got to the top the deer turned on him and wasn't a deer anymore…

and bundled-up Ricky Hawthorne, driving to Wheat Row one morning (he now had his snow tires) saw a man wearing a pea jacket and a blue watch cap beating a child on the north side of the square. He slowed, and just had time to see the boy's bare feet kicking in the snow. For a moment he was so shocked that he could not think what to do; but he stopped, pulling the car over to the curb, and got out. "That's enough," he shouted, "that's quite enough," but the man and the child both turned to stare at him with such peculiar force that he put down his arm and got back in the car;

and the next night, sipping chamomile tea, looked out of an upstairs window and nearly dropped the cup, seeing a forlorn face staring in at him-gone in an instant when he jerked to one side. In the next instant, he realized that it was his own face;

and Peter Barnes and Jim Hardie come out of a country bar, and Jim, who is only half as drunk as Peter, says hey, shithead, I got a great idea, and laughs most of the way back to Milburn;

and a dark-haired woman sits facing the window in a dark room in the Archer Hotel and watches the snow fall and smiles to herself;

and at six-thirty in the evening an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson locks himself in his den and telephones a receptionist named Florence Quast and says, "No, I don't think I need to bother either of them, I think that new girl of theirs could answer my questions. Could you give me her name? And just where is she staying again?"

and the woman in the hotel sits and smiles, and several more animals, part of the fun, are butchered: two heifers in Elmer Scales's barn (Elmer having fallen asleep with the shotgun across his lap) and one of the Dedham girls' horses.

2

That was how Freddy Robinson came in. He had written the policy for the two Dedham girls, the daughters of the late Colonel and the sisters of long-deceased Stringer Dedham. Nobody bothered about the Dedham girls much anymore: they lived out in their old house on Willow Mile Road, they had their horses but rarely sold one, they kept to themselves. The same age as most of the men in the Chowder Society, they had not aged as well. For years they had talked obsessionally about Stringer, who had not died immediately when the threshing machine pulled off his arms but had lain on the kitchen table, wrapped in three blankets during a sweltering August, babbling and passing out and then babbling again until the life ran out of him. People in Milburn got tired of hearing about what Stringer was trying to say while he died, especially since it didn't make much sense; even the Dedham girls couldn't properly explain it-what they wanted you to know was that Stringer had seen something, he was upset, he wasn't fool enough to get caught in the thresher if he was really himself, was he? And the girls seemed to blame Stringer's fiancée, Miss Galli, and for a little while eyebrows were raised at her; but then Miss Galli just upped and left town, and after that people lost interest in whatever the Dedham girls thought of her. Thirty years later not many people in town even remembered Stringer Dedham, who had been handsome and a gentleman and would have turned the horses into a business and not just a half-hearted hobby for a couple of aging women, and the Dedham girls got tired of their own obsession-after so many years, they weren't so sure what Stringer had been trying to say about Miss Galli-and decided that their horses were better friends than Milburn people. Twenty years after that they were still alive, but Nettie was paralyzed with a stroke and most young people in Milburn had never seen either of them.

Freddy Robinson had driven past their farm one day not long after he had moved to Milburn and what made him reverse and go up the drive was the name on the mailbox, Col. T. Dedham-he didn't know that Rea Dedham repainted her father's name on the box every two years. Even though Colonel Thomas Dedham had died of malaria in 1910, she was too superstitious to take it off. Rea explained it to him; and she was so pleased to have a spruce young man across the table from her that she bought three thousand dollars' worth of insurance. What she insured were her horses. She was thinking of Jim Hardie, but she didn't tell that to Freddy Robinson. Jim Hardie was a bad 'un, and he'd had a grudge against the girls ever since Rea shooed him away from the horse barn when he was a little boy: the way young Robinson explained it to her, a little insurance was just what she needed, in case Jim Hardie ever came back with a can of gasoline and a match.

At that time, Freddy was a new agent and his ambition was to become a member of the Million Dollar Roundtable; eight years later he was close to making it, but it no longer mattered to him-he knew that if he'd been in a bigger town he'd have had it long before. He had been to enough conferences and conventions and sales meetings to think that he knew most that there was to know about the insurance business; he knew how the business worked, and he knew just how to sell life and property insurance to a scared young farmer whose soul belonged to the bank and whose nest egg had just vanished into a new milking system- now a fellow like that really needed insurance. But eight years of living in Milburn had changed Freddy Robinson. He no longer took pride in his ability to sell, since he had learned that it was based on an ability to exploit fear and greed; and he had learned half-consciously to despise most of his fellow salesmen-in the company's phrase, the "Humdingers."

It was not his marriage or children which had changed Freddy, but living across the street from John Jaffrey's house. At first, he had thought that the old boys he saw trooping in once a month or so were comic, unbelievably stuffy-looking. Dinner jackets! They had looked unprecedentedly grave-five Methuselahs padding out their time.

Then he began to notice that after sales meetings in New York he returned home with relief; his marriage was going badly (he was finding himself attracted to the high school girls his wife, two children ago, had rather resembled), but home was more than Montgomery Street-it was all of Milburn, and most of Milburn was quieter and prettier than anywhere he'd ever lived. Gradually he felt that he had a secret relationship to Milburn; his wife and children were eternal, but Milburn was a temporary restful oasis, not the provincial backwater he had first thought it. And once at a conference, a new agent sitting next to him unpinned his Humdinger badge and dropped it under the table, saying, "I can stand most of it, but this Mickey Mouse crap drives me up the wall."

Two further events, as unremarkable as these, assisted Freddy's conversion. One night, aimlessly walking about an ordinary section of Milburn, he went past Edward Wanderley's house on Haven Lane and saw the Chowder Society through a window. There they sat, his Methuselahs, talking among themselves; one raised a hand, one smiled. Freddy was lonely, and they seemed very close. He stopped to stare in at them. Since moving to Milburn, he had gone from twenty-six to thirty-one, and the men no longer seemed so old; while they had stayed the same, he had aged toward them. They were not grotesque, but dignified. Also, something he had never considered, they were enjoying themselves. He wondered what they were talking about, and was assailed by the sense that it was something secret-something not business, not sport, not sex, not politics. It simply washed through him that their conversation would be of a sort he had never heard. Two weeks later he took one of the high school girls to a restaurant in Binghamton, and saw Lewis Benedikt across the room with one of the waitresses from Humphrey Stalladge's bar. (Both had sweetly rejected Freddy's advances.) He had begun to envy the Chowder Society; before long he would begin to love what he considered they represented, a way of combining civilization with a quiet good time.

Lewis was the focus of Freddy's feelings. Closer to Freddy's age than the others, he showed what Freddy might become.

He watched his idol at Humphrey's Place, noticing how he raised his eyebrows before answering a question and how he tilted his head to one side, often, when smiling; how he used his eyes. Freddy began to copy these mannerisms. He copied too what he thought was Lewis's sexual pattern, but scaling down the ages of the girls from Lewis's twenty-five or twenty-six to seventeen or eighteen, which was the age of the girls who interested him anyhow. He bought jackets like those he saw Lewis wearing.

When Dr. Jaffrey invited him to his party for Ann-Veronica Moore, Freddy thought the doors of heaven had opened. He pictured a quiet evening, the Chowder Society and himself and the actress, and told his wife to stay home; when he saw the crowd, he began behaving like a fool. He stayed downstairs, too shy and disappointed to approach the older men he wanted to befriend; he made eyes at Stella Hawthorne; when he finally gathered the nerve to approach Sears James- who had always terrified him-he found himself talking about insurance as if under a curse. After Edward Wanderley's body was discovered, Freddy crawled away with the other guests.

After Dr. Jaffrey's suicide, Freddy was desperate. The Chowder Society was disintegrating before he had even had a chance to prove his worthiness for it. On that night, he saw Lewis's Morgan pull up to the doctor's house, and ran out to comfort Lewis-to make his impression. But again it had not worked. He was too nervous, he had been fighting with his wife, and he had been unable to keep from mentioning insurance; he had lost Lewis again.

Therefore, knowing nothing of what Stringer Dedham may have tried to describe to his sisters as he lay bleeding to death into a blanket on his kitchen table, Freddy Robinson, whose children were already noisy strangers and whose wife wanted a divorce, had no idea of what lay before him when Rea Dedham called him one morning and said that he had to come out to the farm. But he thought that what he saw there, a bit of silk scarf fluttering on a wire fence, gave him a way into the gracious company of friends he needed.

At first it seemed like another morning's work-another tiresome claim to be settled. Rea Dedham made him wait ten minutes on her frozen porch. From time to time he heard a horse neighing in the stables. Finally she appeared, wrinkled and hunched in a plaid shawl over her dress, saying that she knew who did it, yessir, she knew, but she'd looked at her policy and it didn't say anywhere that you didn't get your money if you knew, did it? And would he like any coffee?

"Yes, thank you," Freddy said, and pulled some papers from his briefcase. "Now if we could get into some of these claim forms, the company can start processing them as soon as possible. I'll have to look at the damage, of course, Miss Dedham. I guess you had some kind of accident?"

"I told you," she said. "I know who did it. It wasn't any accident. Mr. Hardesty is coming out too, so you'll just have to wait for him."

"So this is a case of criminal loss," Freddy said, checking off a box on one of his papers. "Could you just tell me about it in your own words?"

"They're the only words I have, Mr. Robinson, but you'll wait until Mr. Hardesty is here. I'm too old to say it all twice. And I'm not going out in that cold twice, not even for money. Brr!" She hugged herself with her bony arms and shivered theatrically. "Now you sit still and get some coffee into yourself."

Freddy, who had been awkwardly holding all his papers, his pen and his briefcase, looking around for a vacant chair. The Dedham girls' kitchen was a dirty cave filled with junk. One chair supported a couple of table lamps, another a stack of Urbanites so old they were yellow. A tall mirror in an oakleaf frame on one wall dully gave him back his reflection, a figure of bureaucratic incompetence engulfed by disorderly papers. He backed up to one dark wall, bent down and knocked a cardboard box off a chair with his bottom. It fell to the floor with a loud crash. The only sunlight in the room streamed over him. "Heavens," Rea Dedham said, shrugging. "Noise!" Freddy cautiously extended his legs and arranged his papers on his lap. "Dead horse, is that it?"

"That's it. You people owe me some money-a lot of money, the way I see it."

Freddy heard something heavy rolling toward the kitchen through the house, and soundlessly groaned. "I'll just get started on the preliminary details," he said, and bent over so that he would not have to look at Nettie Dedham.

"Nettie wants to say hello," Rea said. So he had to look up anyhow.

A moment later the door creaked inward, admitting a heap of blankets in a wheelchair. "Hello, Miss Dedham," Freddy said, half-standing and clutching the briefcase with one hand, the papers with the other. He gave her a quick glance, then fled back into his papers.

Nettie uttered a noise. Her head seemed to Freddy to be chiefly gaping mouth. Nettie was covered up to the chin in blankets, and her head was pulled back by some terrible constriction of the muscles so that her mouth was permanently open.

"You remember nice Mr. Robinson," Rea said to her sister, putting down cups of coffee on the table. Rea apparently ate all her meals standing up, for she made no move to sit now. "He's going to get our money for poor dear Chocolate. He's filling out the forms now, isn't he? He's filling out the forms."

"Ruar," Nettie uttered, waggling her head as she spoke. "Glr ror."

"Get us our money, that's right," Rea said. "There's nothing wrong with Nettie, Mr. Robinson."

"I should say not," he said, and looked away again. His eye fell on a stuffed robin under a glass bell, surrounded by dark brown leaves. "Let's get down to business, shall we? I gather the animal was named-"

"Here's Mr. Hardesty," Rea said. Freddy could hear another car coming up the drive, and lay the pen across the papers in his lap. He glanced uneasily at Nettie who was working her mouth and staring dreamily at the mottled ceiling. Rea set down her cup and began to struggle toward the door. Lewis would open it for her, he thought, still clutching his awkward pile of papers.

"Sit down, for heaven's sake," the old woman snapped.

Hardesty's boots crunched across the snow, mounted the porch. He had knocked twice before Rea got to the door.

Freddy had seen Walt Hardesty in Humphrey's place too often, sneaking into the back room at eight and lurching out at twelve, to think much of him as a sheriff. He looked like a bad-tempered failure, the sort of cop who'd enjoy using his gunbutt on someone's head. When Rea got the door open, Hardesty stood on the porch with his hands in his pockets, his sunglasses like armor over his eyes, and made no move to come in. " 'Lo, Miss Dedham," he said. "Well, where's your problem?"

Rea pulled the shawl more tightly around herself and went through the door. Freddy hesitated a moment and then realized that she was not coming back in; he dumped his papers on the chair and followed. Nettie waggled her head at him as he passed.

"I know who did it," he heard her saying to Hardesty as he went toward them. The old lady's voice was high and indignant. "It was that Jim Hardie, that's who."

"Oh, yeah?" Hardesty said. Freddy joined them, and the sheriff nodded at him over Rea's head. "Didn't take you long to get here, Mr. Robinson."

"Company paperwork," Freddy mumbled. "Official paperwork."

"Guys like you always got papers up the old kazoo," Hardesty said, and gave him a taut smile.

"It was Jim Hardie for sure," Rea insisted. "That boy's crazy."

"Well, we'll see about that," Hardesty said. They were nearly at the stables. "You find the dead animal?"

"We have a boy these days," Rea said. "He comes out to feed and water and change the straw. He's a nancy-boy," she added, and Freddy jerked his head up in surprise. Now he could smell the stables. "He found Chocolate in his stall. That's six hundred dollars' worth of horsemeat, Mr. Robinson, no matter who did it."

"Uh, how did you reach that figure?" Freddy asked. Hardesty was opening the stable doors. One horse whinnied, another kicked at its stall door. All the horses, to Freddy's untrained eye, looked dangerous. Their enormous lips and eyes flared at him.

"Because his sire was General Hershey and his dam was Sweet Tooth and they were two fine horses, that's because why. We could have sold General Hershey for stud anywhere-he looked just like Seabiscuit, Nettie used to say."

"Seabiscuit," Hardesty said under his breath.

"You're too young to remember any of the good horses," Rea said. "You write that down in your papers. Six hundred dollars." She was leading them into the stables, and the horses in the stalls shied back or swung their heads, according to their nature.

"These animals ain't too damn clean," Hardesty said. Freddy looked more closely and saw a huge patch of dried mud on the side of a gray.

"Skittish," Freddy said.

"He says they're skittish, the other one says they're dirty. I'm too old, that's the problem. Well, here's poor old Chocolate." The statement was unnecessary; the two men were staring over the stall door at the body of a big reddish animal on the straw-littered floor. To Freddy it looked like the body of a huge rat.

"Hell," Hardesty said, and opened the stall door. He stepped over the stiff legs and began to straddle the neck. The horse in the next stall whinnied, and Hardesty nearly fell down. "Hell." He steadied himself by propping an arm against the wooden side of the stall. "Hell, I can see it from here." He reached down to the horse's nose and tugged the entire head back toward him.

Rea Dedham screamed.

The two men half-carried, half-lifted her out of the stables past two rows of terrified horses. "Settle down now, settle down," Hardesty kept repeating, as if the old lady were herself a horse.

"Who the hell would do a thing like that?" Freddy asked, still shocked by the sight of the long wound in the horse's neck.

"Norbert Clyde claims it's Martians. Says he saw one. Didn't you hear about that?"

"I heard something," Freddy admitted. "Are you going to check into where Jim Hardie was last night?"

"Mister, I'd be a damn sight happier if people didn't tell me how to do my job." He bent over the old woman. "Miss Dedham, you settled down now? You like to sit?" She nodded, and Hardesty said to Freddy, "I'll hold her up, you open the door of my car."

They propped her up on the car seat, her legs dangling out. "Poor Chocolate, poor Chocolate," she moaned. "Horrible… poor Chocolate."

"All right, Miss Dedham. Now, I want to tell you something." Hardesty leaned forward and propped a foot up on the car. "Jim Hardie didn't do this, you hear me? Jim Hardie was out drinking beer with Pete Barnes last night. They drove up to a beer joint outside Glen Aubrey, and we got them checked in there till damn near two o'clock. I know about your little feud with Jim, so I asked around."

"He could have done it after two," Freddy said.

"He was playing cards with Peter Barnes in the Barnes's basement until daylight. That's what Pete says anyhow. Jim's been spending a lot of time with Pete Barnes, but I don't think the Barnes kid would do a thing like this or cover up for someone who did, do you?"

Freddy shook his head.

"And when Jim hasn't been with the Barnes kid, he's been with that new dame, you know who I mean. The good-looker-looks like a model."

"I know who you mean. That is, I've seen her."

"Yeah. So he didn't kill this horse, and he didn't kill Elmer Scales's heifers either. The State Farm Agent says it was a dog turned killer. So if you see a big flying dog with teeth like razors, I guess you got it." He looked at Freddy hard, and turned back to Rea Dedham. "You about ready to go inside now? Too cold out here for a old lady like you. I'll get you inside, and go back and get someone to get rid of that horse for you."

Freddy stepped back, rebuffed by Hardesty. "You know it wasn't a dog."

"Yep."

"So what do you think it was? What's going on?" He looked around, knowing that he was missing something. Then he had it, and opened his mouth just as he saw a bright bit of cloth fluttering on the barbed-wire fence near the stables.

"You want to say?"

"There wasn't any blood," Freddy said, looking at the cloth.

"Good for you. Farm Agent decided not to notice that. You gonna help me with this old lady?"

"I dropped something back there," Freddy told him, and walked back toward the stables. He heard Hardesty grunt, picking up Miss Dedham, and when he got to the stables, turned around to see him carrying her in the door. Freddy went over to the barbed wire and pulled the long bit of cloth from it-silk. It was torn from a scarf, and he knew where he had seen it.

Freddy began-it was not the word he would have chosen-to scheme.

Back home, after he had typed up his report and mailed it and the signed forms off to the head office, he dialed Lewis Benedikt's telephone number. He did not really know what he would say to Lewis; but he thought he had the key he'd been looking for.

"Hey, Lewis," he said. "Hey, how are you? This is Freddy."

"Freddy?"

"Freddy Robinson. You know."

"Oh yes."

"Ah, are you busy right now? I've got something I want to talk to you about."

"Go ahead," Lewis said, not very promisingly.

"Yeah. If I'm not taking up your time?… Okay. You know about those animals that were killed? Did you know there was another one? One of those old horses the Dedham sisters own, I wrote the policy on it, well I don't think any Martian killed it. I mean, do you?" He paused, but Lewis said nothing. "I mean, that's screwball. Uh, look, isn't that woman who just moved into town, the one who sometimes hangs around with Jim Hardie, isn't she working for Sears and Ricky?"

"I've heard something to that effect." Lewis said, and Freddy heard in his voice that he should have said Hawthorne, James instead of Sears and Ricky.

"Do you know her at all?"

"Not at all. Do you mind if I ask what the point is?"

"Well, I think there's more going on than Sheriff Hardesty knows about."

"Could you explain yourself, Freddy?"

"Not on the phone. Could we meet somewhere to talk about it? See, I found something out at the Dedham place, and I didn't want to show it to Hardesty until I had talked with you and maybe with, ah, Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. James."

"Freddy, I don't have a clue what you're talking about."

"Well, to tell you the truth I'm not so sure myself, but I wanted to get together with you, have a few beers maybe and bat a few ideas around. Sort of see what we can come up with on this."

"On what, for God's sake?"

"On a few ideas I have. I think all you guys are just terrific, you know, and I want you to know if there's any kind of trouble coming your way…"

"Freddy, I've got all the insurance I need," Lewis said. I'm not in the mood to go out. Sorry."

"Well, maybe I'll see you in Humphrey's Place anyhow? We could talk there."

"It's a possibility," Lewis said, and hungup.

Freddy put his receiver down, satisfied that he had planted enough hooks in Lewis for now. Lewis was bound to call him back once he'd thought about everything Freddy had told him. Of course if everything he was thinking was true, then it was his duty to go to Hardesty, but there was plenty of time for that-he wanted to think out the implications before he spoke to Hardesty. He wanted to make sure that the Chowder Society was protected. His thoughts went more or less in this order: he had seen the scarf from which the piece had been torn around the neck of the girl Hardesty called "the new dame." She had worn the scarf at Humphrey's Place on a date with Jim Hardie. Rea Dedham suspected Jim Hardie of killing the horse; Hardesty had said something about a "feud" between the Hardie boy and the Dedham sisters. The scarf proved that the girl had been there, so why not Hardie too? And if these two had for whatever reason killed the horse, why not the other animals? Norbert Clyde had seen a big form, something peculiar about the eyes: it could have been Jim Hardie caught in a ray of moonlight. Freddy had read about modern witches, crazy women who organized men into covens. Maybe this new girl was one of them. Jim Hardie was fodder for any lunatic who came down the pike, even if his mother would never see it. But the reputation of the Chowder Society would be damaged if all this were true, and if it got out. Hardie could be shut up, but the girl would have to be paid off and forced to leave.

He waited two days, anxiously waiting for Lewis to return his call.

When Lewis did not, he decided that the time for aggression had come and once again dialed Lewis's number.

"It's me again, Freddy Robinson."

"Oh, yes." Lewis said, already distant.

"I really think we ought to get together. Hey? Honestly, Lewis, I think we should. I've got your best interests at heart." Then, searching for an unanswerable appeal, "What if the next body is human, Lewis? Think about that."

"Are you threatening me? What the hell are you saying?"

" 'Course not." He was flattened. Lewis had taken it the wrong way. "Listen, how about tomorrow evening some time?"

"I'm going coon hunting," Lewis immediately said.

"Gosh," Freddy said, startled by this new facet of his idol. "I didn't know you did that. You hunt raccoon? That's really great, Lewis."

"It's relaxing. I go out with an old boy who has a few dogs. We just go off and waste time in the woods. Great if you like that sort of thing." Freddy heard the unhappiness in Lewis's voice, and for a moment was too disturbed by it to reply. "Well good-bye," Lewis said, and hung up.

Freddy stared at the phone, opened the drawer where he had put the section of scarf, looked at it. If Lewis could go hunting, so could he. Not really knowing why he felt it was necessary, he went to the door of his study and locked it. He searched his memory for the name of the old woman who worked as receptionist for the law firm: Florence Quast. Then he got her number from the book and mystified the old lady with a long story about a nonexistent policy. When she suggested that he call either Mr. James or Mr. Hawthorne, he said, "No, I don't think I need bother either of them, I think that new girl of theirs could answer my questions. Could you give me her name? And just where is she staying again?"

(Are you thinking, Freddy, that somehow she will be living in your house very soon? And is that why you locked the door of your study? Did you want to keep her out?)

Hours later, he rubbed his forehead, buttoned his jacket, wiped his palms on his trousers and dialed the Archer Hotel.

"Yes, I'd be happy to see you, Mr. Robinson," the girl said, sounding very calm.

(Freddy, you're not really afraid of meeting a pretty girl for a late-night conversation, are you? What's the matter with you, anyhow? And why did you think she knew exactly what you were going to say?)

3

Do you get the point? Harold Sims asked Stella Hawthorne, absently stroking her right breast. Do you see? It's just a story. That's the kind of thing my colleagues are into now. Stories! The point about this thing the Indian was chasing is that it has to show itself-it can't resist identifying itself-it's not just evil, it's vain. And I'm supposed to tell dumb horror stories like that, dumb stories like some stupid hack…

"All right, Jim, what's the story?" Peter Barnes asked. "What's this big idea of yours?" The cold air rushing into Jim Hardie's car had sobered Peter considerably: now when he concentrated he could make the four yellow beams of their headlights slide together into two. Jim Hardie was still laughing-a mean, determined laughter, and Peter knew that Jim was going to do something to somebody whether he was with him or not.

"Aw, this is great," Hardie said, and banged the horn. Even in the dark his face was a red mask in which the eyes were slits: that was the way Jim Hardie always looked while he was doing his most outrageous stunts, and whenever Peter Barnes ever took the time really to think about it, he was grateful that in a year he was going off to college and getting away from a friend who could look as crazy as that. Jim Hardie, drunk or otherwise stimulated, was capable of frightening wildness. What was either almost admirable or even more frightening was that he never lost his physical or verbal efficiency, no matter how drunk he was. Half-drunk, like now, he never slurred his words or staggered; wholly drunk, he was a figure of pure anarchy. "We're gonna tear things up," he said.

"Great," Peter said. He knew better than to protest; besides, Jim always got away with everything he did. Ever since they had met in grade school, Jim Hardie had talked his way out of trouble-he was wild, but not stupid. Even Walt Hardesty had never gotten anything on him-not even burning down the old Pugh barn because dumb Penny Draeger had told him that the Dedham girls, whom he hated, were using it as a stable.

"Might as well catch a few grins before you go to Cornell, hey?" Jim said. "Might as well catch all the grins you can get, because I hear that place is the pits." Jim had always said that he saw no point in going to college, but he occasionally showed that he resented Peter's acceptance, by early admission, to Cornell. Peter knew that all Jim Hardie wanted was for them to go on raising hell, a perpetual eighteen, forever.

"So is Milburn," Peter said.

"Good point, my son. It sure as shit is. But let's at least liven the place up, huh? So that's what we're going to do tonight, Priscilla. And just in case you thought you were going to dry up in the course of our adventures, your old friend James took care of that." Hardie unzipped his coat and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. "Golden hands, you turd, golden hands." He unscrewed the cap with one hand and drank while he drove, and his face grew red and taut. "You want a shluck?"

Peter shook his head; the smell nauseated him.

"Stupid bartender turned his back, right? Zoom. Asshole knew it was gone, too, but he was too much of a dipshit to say anything to me. You know something, Peter? It's depressing, having competition no better than that." He laughed, and Peter Barnes laughed too.

"Well, what are we going to do?"

Hardie passed him the bottle again, and this time he drank. The headlights swam apart and became four, and he shook his head, forcing them back to two.

"Hah! We are gonna peep, my boy, we are gonna take a look at a lady." Hardie palled at the bottle, chuckled, dribbled bourbon down his chin.

"Peep? Like a peeping Tom?" He let his head roll toward Hardie, who could obviously steam on to morning and through the next day, getting less predictable all the time.

"Peep. Look. Shoot a beaver. If you don't like it, jump out of the car."

"On a lady?"

"Well, not on a man, shitface."

"What, hide in a bush and look through…"

"Not exactly. Not exactly. Someplace much better."

"Who is it?"

"That bitch at the hotel."

Peter was now more confused than ever. "The one you were talking about? The one from New York?"

"Yeah." Jim swung the car around the square, passing the hotel without even bothering to look at it.

"I thought you were balling her."

"Well, I lied, man. So what? So I exaggerate a little. Truth is, she never let me put a hand on her. Look, I'm sorry I made up a little adventure about her, okay? She made me feel like a jerk. Taking her out to Humphrey's, giving her all my best lines-well, I want to take a look at her when she doesn't know I'm there." Jim bent forward and, disregarding the road altogether for a reckless amount of time, groped under his seat. When he straightened up again, he was grinning widely and holding a long brass-trimmed telescope. "With this. Hell of a good scope, Junior-cost me sixty bucks in the Apple."

"Mmn." Peter lolled back against the seat. "This is the grungiest thing I ever heard of."

A moment later, he became aware that Jim was stopping the car. He pushed himself forward and peered through the window. "Oh no. Not here."

"This is it babe. Move your ass."

Hardie shoved his shoulder, and Peter opened the door and half-rolled out of the car. St Michael's cathedral loomed before them, huge and forbidding in the darkness.

Both boys stood shivering in their windbreakers by a side door of the cathedral. "Now what are you going to do, kick the door in? There's a padlock on it, if you haven't noticed."

"Shut your trap. I work in a hotel, remember?" Hardie produced a bundle of keys on a ring from beneath his jacket. The other hand held the telescope and the bottle. "Go over there and take a piss or something while I try the keys." He set the bottle down on the step and bent toward the lock.

Peter walked away down the long gray side of the church. From this side, it looked like a prison. He unzipped, steamingly pissed, staggered and splashed on his boots. Then he leaned against the church with one arm, stood as if deep in reflection, and quietly vomited between his feet. That too steamed. He was thinking about walking home when Jim Hardie called, "Come on, Clarabelle." He turned around and there was Hardie grinning at him, waving the keys and the bottle at him beside an open door. He resembled one of the gargoyles on the cathedral's facade.

"No," he said.

"Come on. Or don't you have hair on your balls?"

Peter trudged forward, and Hardie reached out and yanked him through the door.

Inside, the cathedral was cold, and dark with an undersea darkness. Peter stopped still, his feet on brick, feeling an immense space around him. He reached out his hands and touched chill air. Behind him, he heard Jim Hardie getting all of his things together. "Hey, where's your goddamned hand? Here, take this." The telescope slapped against his palm. Hardie's footsteps went away off to the side, clicking on the brick floor.

He turned and saw Hardie's hair flickering in the dark. "Move it. There are some stairs around here someplace…"

Peter took a step forward and crashed into some sort of bench.

"Quiet."

"I can't see you!"

"Shit. Over here." There was a movement in the darkness: he understood that Jim was waving, and cautiously moved toward him.

"You see the stairs? We go up there. To a sort of balcony."

"You did this before," Peter said, amazed.

"Sure I did it before. Don't be a dope. Sometimes I used to take Penny here and screw around in the pews. What the hell? She's not Catholic either."

Peter's eyes were adjusting, and diffused light from a high circular window helped him to see the interior of the church. He had never been inside St. Michael's before. It was much larger than the white suburban box in which his parents spent an hour on Easter and Christmas day. Enormous pillars divided the vast space; an altar cloth shone like a ghost. He burped and tasted vomit. The staircase Jim was pointing to was wide, of brick, and curved against the inner skin of the cathedral.

"We go up there, and we wind up right in the front, facing the square. Her room is on the square, see? With a good telescope we can look right in."

"It's dumb."

"I'll explain later, shithead. Let's go up." He began to go quickly up the stairs. Peter stayed behind. "Wait," Hardie said, turning around and descending a couple of the steps. "You need a cigarette." He grinned at Peter, pulled out his cigarettes and gave one to Peter.

"Here?"

"Shit, yes. Nobody's going to see you." He lit his cigarette and Peter's. The flame of the lighter reddened the walls, made everything else disappear. The smoke helped the taste in Peter's mouth, somehow making the vomit taste more like beer again. "Take a drag or two. See? It's okay." He blew out smoke, but with the flame extinguished, Peter could only hear him exhale. He drew on his own cigarette again. Hardie was right; it calmed him. "Just come on up now." He started again, and Peter followed.

At the top, far up inside the church, they followed a narrow gallery around to the front of the church. There a window with a broad stone sill looked across the square. Jim was sitting with his legs up on the sill when Peter reached him. "Would you believe it," he said. "I once had a beautiful moment with Penny right on this spot." He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out. Peter saw him wink in the gray illumination from the window. "Drives 'em crazy. They can't figure out who was smoking. Here. Have a drink." He held the bottle out.

Peter shook his head and gave him the telescope. "Okay, we're here. Now explain." He sat on the cold sill and jammed his hands into the windbreaker's pockets.

Hardie looked at his watch. "First, some magic. Look out the window." Peter looked: the square, the dark buildings, bare trees. The Archer Hotel across the square had no lighted windows. "One, two, three." On three the lights in the square switched off. "It's two o'clock."

"Some magic."

"Well, if you're so hot, turn them back on." Hardie swung around, kneeling on the stone, and put the telescope to his eyes. "Too bad her light's not on. But if she gets near the window I'll be able to see her. You want a look?"

Peter took the telescope and trained it on the hotel.

"She's in the room above the front door. Straight across and a little bit down."

"I got the window. There's nothing there." Then he saw a red flash in the blackness of the room. "Wait. She's smoking."

Hardie grabbed the telescope from him. "Right. Sitting there smoking."

"So explain why we broke into a church to watch her smoke."

"Well, the first day she comes to the hotel I tried to come on with her, right? She puts me down. Then a little bit later she asks me if I'll take her out. She says she wants to see Humphrey's Place. So I take her there, but she's barely paying attention to me. Really pissed me off, man. I mean, why waste my time if she's not interested, right? Well, you know why? She wanted to meet Lewis Benedikt. You know him, right? The guy who was supposed to of offed his wife over in France."

"Spain," said Peter, who had very complicated ideas about Lewis Benedikt.

"Who cares? Anyhow, I'm sure that's why she asked me to take her there. So she's hot for wife-killers."

"I don't think he did it" Peter said. "He's a good guy. I mean, I think he's a good guy. I think that women sometimes sort of-you know-"

"Shit, I don't care if he did it or not. Hey, she's moving. He was silent; Peter was startled a moment later to have the telescope thrust into his hands. "Take a look. Fast."

Peter lifted the telescope, searched for the window, scanned past the top of the A in the hotel's sign. Back to the A; then straight up. He involuntarily moved several inches back on the sill. The woman stood at the window, smiling, holding a cigarette, looking right into his eyes. He thought he might have to vomit again. "She's looking at us!"

"Get serious. We're way across the square. It's dark out. But you see what I mean."

Peter gave the telescope back to Jim, who resumed looking at the woman's window. "See what you mean about what?"

"Well, she's weird. Two o'clock, and she's in her room in the dark with all her clothes on, smoking?"

"So what?"

"Look, I lived in that hotel all my life, right? So I know how people act in hotels. Even the old farts who stay with us. They watch television, they want room service, they leave their clothes all over the room, you get bottles on cabinets and rings on the tables, they have little parties in their rooms and you have to scrub the carpet afterward. At night you can hear them talking to themselves, snoring, spitting-well, you can hear everything they do. You can hear them pissing in the sink. The walls are thick but the doors aren't, see? If you're out in the hall you can practically hear them brush their teeth."

"So what?" Peter asked again.

"So she doesn't do any of that. She never makes any noise at all. She doesn't watch TV. Her room hardly ever needs to be cleaned. Even the bed is always made up. Strange, huh? So what does she do, sleep on top of the covers? Stay up all night?"

"Is she still there?"

"Yeah."

"Let me see." Peter took the telescope. The woman was still standing at her window, smiling faintly as if she knew they were talking about her. Peter shivered. He gave back the telescope.

"I'll tell you some more. I carried her suitcase up when she checked in. Now I've toted about a million suitcases, believe me, and that one was empty. She might have had a few newspapers in it, nothing more. Once when she was at work I looked in her closets- nothing. No clothes. But she didn't always wear the same thing, man. So what the hell did she do, wear them in layers? Two days later I checked again, and this time the closet was full of clothes-just like she knew someone came in to look. That was the night she asked me to take her to Humphrey's, and I figured she was going to chew me out. But no, she hardly talked to me at all. About the only thing she said was, 'I want you to introduce me to that man.' 'Lewis Benedikt?' I said, and she nodded, like she already knew his name. I took her up to him, and he ran away like a rabbit."

"Benedikt did? What for?"

"I thought he was afraid of her." Jim put the telescope down and lit another cigarette, looking at Peter all the time. "And you know something? I was too.

There's just something in the way she looks at you sometimes."

"Like if she thinks you were poking around in her room."

"Maybe. But it's a heavy look, man. It really gets you. There's one other thing too. If you walk along the halls at night, you can tell if people have their lights on, right? The light comes through the bottom of the door. Well, she never has her lights on. Never. But one night -well, this is crazy."

"Tell me."

"One night I saw some flickering underneath her door. Flickering light-like radium or something, you know? A kind of greenish light. Cold light. It wasn't a fire or anything, and it wasn't from our lamps."

"That's stupid."

"I saw it."

"But it doesn't mean anything. Green light."

"Not just green-sort of glowing. Sort of silvery. Anyhow, that's why I wanted us to take a look at her."

"Well, you did, so let's go home. My father'll be angry if I'm late!"

"Hold on." He looked through the telescope again. "I think something's happening. She's not at the window any more. Holy shit." He lowered the telescope. "She opened the door and went out. I saw her go into the hall."

"She's coming over here!" Peter scuttled off the sill and moved down the gallery toward the stairs.

"Don't wet your pants, Priscilla. She isn't coming here. She couldn't see us, remember? But if she's going somewhere, I want to see where. You coming or not?" He was already gathering up his cigarettes, the bottle, his bundle of keys. "Come on. We gotta hurry. She'll be out of the door in two minutes."

"I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying!"

They pounded along the gallery and down the stairs. Hardie ran through the side aisles of the cathedral and pushed the door open, which gave stumbling Peter enough light to avoid the pillars and the edges of the pews. Out in the night, Jim clipped the padlock back on the door and ran to the car. Peter's heart beat rapidly, in part from relief at being out of the church. Yet he was still tense. He pictured the woman he had seen in the window coming across the snowy square toward them, the wicked queen from Snow White, a woman who never turned on a light or slept in a bed and who could see him on a black night through a church window.

He realized that his head was clear. As he got into the car beside Jim, he said, "Fear sobers you up."

"She wasn't coming here, idiot," Hardie said, but pulled away from the side of the cathedral out to the south side of the square so rapidly that his tires squealed. Peter looked anxiously into the long expanse of the square-white ground broken by bare trees and the dim statue-but saw no evil queen drifting toward them. The picture had been so clear in his mind that, disbelieving, he continued to scan the town square after Jim had turned into Wheat Row.

"She's on the steps," Jim whispered when they were nearly to the corner. Looking toward the hotel through the bare trees, Peter saw the woman calmly descending to the sidewalk. She wore the long coat, a fluttering scarf, a hat. She looked so absurdly normal in this clothing, turning out into the deserted street past two in the morning, that Peter laughed and shuddered at once.

Jim switched off the headlights and rolled quietly up to the stoplight. Off to their left and across the street, the woman moved quickly into darkness.

"Hey, let's just go home," Peter said.

"Screw that. I want to see where she's going."

"What if she sees us?"

"She won't." He turned left and went slowly down the top of the square past the hotel, his lights still off. Though the lights in the square were not on, the street lamps would remain lighted until dawn, and both boys saw her entering a pool of light at the end of the first block across Main Street. Jim drove slowly across, and then waited until she had walked another block before going further.

"She's just taking a walk." Peter said. "She has insomnia, and she takes walks at night."

"Like hell."

"I don't like doing this."

"Okay. Okay. Get out of the car and walk home," Jim whispered fiercely at him. He reached across Peter and opened the passenger door. "Get out and run home."

Peter sat in the blast of cold from the door, almost ready to get out. "You should too."

"Jesus. God damn you! Get out or close the door," Jim hissed. "Hey! Wait a second!" Both boys watched as another car swung onto the street ahead of them and paused under a street lamp two blocks ahead. The woman went unconcernedly up to the car, the door swung open, and she got in.

"I know that car," Peter said. "I've seen it around."

"Of course you have, you dodo. Seventy-five blue Camaro-it belongs to that turkey, Freddy Robinson." He picked up speed as Robinson's car drove away.

"Well, now you know where she goes at nights."

"Maybe."

"Maybe? What else? Robinson's married. In fact, my mother heard from Mrs. Venuti that his wife wants to divorce him."

"That's because he sucks around high school girls, right? You know that Freddy Robinson likes 'em young. Haven't you ever seen him out with a girl?"

"Yeah."

"Who was it?"

"A girl from school," Peter said, not wanting to say that it was Penny Draeger.

"Okay. So whatever that jerk is doing, he's not just out on a date. Now, where the hell's he going?"

Robinson was leading them through northwest Milburn, making turns that seemed random, going further from the center of town. These houses under a black sky, snow drifted on their front lawns, looked sinister to Peter Barnes: the scale of the night diminished them to something larger than dollhouses, smaller than themselves. Freddy Robinson's taillights moved ahead of them like the eyes of a cat.

"All right. Let's see, he's going to turn right up ahead, and go west on Bridge Road."

"How do you-?" Peter stopped talking and watched Robinson's car do as Jim had predicted. "Where is he going?"

"To the only thing out this way that doesn't have a set of swings in the back yard."

"The old railroad station."

"You win a cigar. Or better yet, a cigarette." Both boys lit Marlboros; in the next minute, Robinson's car swung into the parking lot of Milburn's disused station. The railway had tried for years to sell the building; it was an empty shell with a board floor and a ticket window. Two old boxcars had stood on the overgrown tracks for as long as the boys could remember.

As they watched from an unlighted car down Bridge Road, first the woman, then Robinson, left the Camaro. Peter looked at Jim, afraid that he knew what Hardie was going to do. Hardie waited until Robinson and the woman had gone around the side of the station and then opened his door.

"No," Peter said.

"Fine. Stay here."

"What's the point? Catch them with their pants down?"

"That's not what they're going to do, idiot. Out here? Or in that freezing old station, with the rats? He's got enough money to hit a motel."

"Then what?" Peter pleaded.

"I want to know what she says. She brought him here, didn't she?"

And he closed the door and began to move quietly up Bridge Road.

Peter touched the door handle, pushed it down and heard the lock disengage. Jim Hardie was crazy: why should he follow him any further into pointless trouble?

Already they had invaded a church and smoked cigarettes and drunk whiskey there, and here was Jim Hardie, not satisfied, creeping along after cradle-robbing Freddy Robinson and that spooky woman.

What? The ground vibrated and from nowhere a freezing wind slammed into him. More than two voices seemed to lift beyond the station, screeching into the sudden wind. It felt as though a hand were banging inside Peter's skull.

The night deepened about him, and he thought he was fainting; he dimly heard Jim Hardie falling into the snow up ahead, and then they and the old station seemed surrounded by a moment of pure brightness.

He was out of the car, standing up on earth that seemed to bounce, looking toward Jim: his friend sat up in the snow, his body covered with white; Jim's eyebrows gleamed, greenish, like the dial of a watch- snow did that sometimes, caught by angled moonlight- Jim ran toward the station and Peter was able to think: That's how he gets in trouble, he's not just crazy, he never gives up- and they both heard Freddy Robinson scream.

Peter squatted down beside the car as if he expected gunshots. He could hear Jim's footsteps receding in the direction of the station. The footsteps paused; terrified, Peter looked cautiously around the fender of the car. Back and legs dusted with gleaming snow, Jim was unknowingly miming his own posture, and peering around the side of the station.

He wished he were two hundred yards off, watching through a telescope.

Jim crawled a few yards farther: Peter knew that now he would be able to see the entire rear of the station. Beyond the platform, stone steps led down into the railbed. The two abandoned boxcars sat, mired in weeds, at either end of the station.

He shook his head, and saw Jim running, bent over, back to the car. Jim did not speak to him or even look at him, but opened the door and scrambled in. Peter got in-his knees stiff from kneeling-just as Jim started the car.

"Well, what happened?"

"Shut up."

"What did you see?"

Hardie hit the accelerator and popped the clutch; the car shot widely forward. A film of snow covered Hardie's jacket and jeans.

"Did you see anything?"

"No."

"Did you feel the ground shake? Why did Robinson yell?"

"I don't know. He was lying down on the tracks."

"You didn't see that woman?"

"No. She must have been around the side."

"Well, you saw something. You ran like hell."

"At least I went!"

The rebuke quieted Peter, but more was to come. "You damn chickenshit, you just hid behind the car like a little girl-you got the balls of a pigeon-now listen, if anybody asks where you were tonight, you were playing poker with me, we were playing poker in your basement just like last night, right? Nothing happened, you get it? We had a few beers and then we picked up the game from last night. Okay?"

"Okay, but…"

"Okay." Hardie turned to glare at Peter. "Okay. You want to know what I saw? Well, something saw me. You know what? There was a little kid sitting on the top of the station, and he must have been watching me all the time."

This was totally unexpected. "A little kid? That's crazy. It's almost three in the morning. And it's cold, and there's no way to get up to the roof of the station anyhow. We used to try it often enough, back in grade school."

"Well, he was there and he was watching me. And here's another little tidbit." Hardie savagely cramped the car around a corner, and nearly went sideways into a row of mailboxes. "He was barefoot. And I don't think he had a shirt on either."

Peter was silenced.

"Man, he gave me the flying shits. So I got out. And I think Freddy Robinson is dead, man. So if anybody asks, we played poker all night."

"Whatever you say."

"Whatever I say."

Omar Norris had an unpleasant awakening. After his wife had thrown him out of his house, he had spent the night in what he considered his last refuge, one of the boxcars near the abandoned station, and if he had heard any noises during his sodden sleep, he no longer remembered them. Therefore, he was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant.

4

Over the next few nights and days several events of varying immediate importance took place in Milburn. Some of these events seemed trivial to the people involved, some were confusing or annoying, yet others were commanding and significant: but all were part of the pattern which would eventually bring so many changes to Milburn, and as a part of the pattern, all were important.

Freddy Robinson's wife learned that her husband had carried only the skimpiest life insurance coverage on himself, and that Humdinger Fred, the prospective member of the Million Dollar Roundtable, was worth only fifteen thousand dollars dead. She made a tearful long-distance call to her unmarried sister in Aspen, Colorado, who said, "I always told you he was a cheap so and so. Why not sell your house and come out here where it's healthy? And what kind of accident was that anyhow, honey?"

Which was the question that Broome County deputy coroner was asking himself, faced with the corpse of a thirty-four-year-old man from which most of the internal organs and all the blood had been removed. For a moment he considered writing under CAUSE OF DEATH the word "Exsanguination," but instead wrote "Massive internal insult," with a long appended note ending with the speculation that the "insult" had been caused by a marauding animal.

And Elmer Scales sat up every night with the shotgun across his lap, not knowing that the last cow had been killed and that the figure he had tauntingly half-seen was looking for bigger game;

and Walt Hardesty bought Omar Norris a drink in the back room at Humphrey's Place and heard Omar say that now that he had time to think about it, maybe he did hear a car or two that night, and it seemed to him that wasn't all, it seemed to him there was some kind of noise and some kind of light. "Noise? Light? Get the hell out of here, Omar," Hardesty said, but stayed nursing his beer after Omar left, wondering just what the hell was going on;

and the excellent young woman Hawthorne, James had hired told her employers that she wanted to leave the Archer Hotel and had heard in town that Mrs. Robinson was putting her house up for sale, and could they talk to their friend at the bank and set up the financing? She had, it turned out, a healthy account at a savings and loan in San Francisco;

and Sears and Ricky looked at one another with something surprisingly close to relief, as if they hadn't liked the thought of that house sitting empty, and said they could probably arrange something with Mr. Barnes;

and Lewis Benedikt promised himself he'd call his friend Otto Gruebe to make a date to go out with the dogs for a day's coon hunting;

and Larry Mulligan, laying out Freddy Robinson's body for burial, looked at the corpse's face and thought he must have seen the devil coming to carry him off;

and Nettie Dedham, penned in her wheelchair as she was penned within her paralyzed body, sat looking out of the dining-room window as she liked to do while Rea busied herself with the horses' evening feed and tilted her head so that she could see the evening light on the field. Then she saw a figure moving around out there and Nettie, who understood more than even her sister credited, fearfully watched it approach the house and barn. She uttered a few choked sounds, but knew that Rea would never hear them. The figure came nearer, hauntingly familiar. Nettie was afraid it was the boy from town Rea talked about-that wild boy in a rage that Rea had named him to the police. She trembled, watching the figure come nearer across the field, imagining what life would be like if the boy did anything to Rea; and then squawked in terror and nearly tipped over the wheelchair. The man walking toward the barn was her brother Stringer, wearing the brown shirt he'd had on the day he died: it was covered with blood, just as it had been when they'd put him on the table and wrapped him in blankets, but his arms were whole. Stringer looked across the small yard to her window, then held the strands of barbed wire with his hands, stepped through the fence and came toward the window. He smiled in at her, Nettie with her head rolling back on her shoulders, and then turned again toward the stable.

And Peter Barnes came down to the kitchen for his usual rushed breakfast, even more rushed these days when his mother had turned so introspective, and found his father, who should have left the house fifteen minutes earlier, sitting at the table before a cold cup of coffee. "Hey, dad," he said, "you're late for the bank."

"I know," his father said. "I wanted to talk to you about something. We haven't talked much lately, Pete."

"Yeah, I guess. But can't it wait? I have to get to school."

"You'll get there, but no, I don't think it can wait. I've been thinking about this for a couple of days."

"Oh?" Peter poured milk into a glass, knowing that it was likely to be serious. His father never came out with the serious things right away: he brooded about them as if they were bank loans, and then hit you with them when he had a plan all worked out.

"I think you've been seeing too much of Jim Hardie," his father said. "He's no good, and he's teaching you bad habits."

"I don't think that's true," Peter said, stung. "I'm old enough to have my own habits. Besides, Jim's not half as bad as people say-he just gets wild sometimes."

"Did he get wild Saturday night?"

Peter set down the glass and looked with feigned calm at his father. "No, weren't we quiet enough?"

Walter Barnes took off his glasses and polished them on his vest. "You're still trying to tell me you were here that night?"

Peter knew better than to stick to the lie. He shook his head.

"I don't know where you were, and I'm not going to ask. You're eighteen, and you have a right to your privacy. But I want you to know that at three o'clock your mother thought she heard a noise and I got up and walked all through the house. You weren't downstairs in the family room with Jim Hardie. In fact you weren't anywhere in the house." Walter put his glasses back on and looked seriously at his son, and Peter knew that now he was going to produce whatever plan he'd thought up.

"I haven't told your mother because I didn't want her to worry about you. She's been tense lately."

"Yeah, what's she so angry about, anyhow?"

"I don't know," said his father, who had an approximate idea. "I think she's lonely."

"But she's got a lot of friends, there's Mrs. Venuti, she sees her every day almost-"

"Don't try to get me off the track. I'm going to ask you a few questions, Pete. You didn't have anything to do with the Dedham girls' horse being killed, did you?"

"No," Peter uttered, shocked.

"And I don't really suppose you know anything about Rea Dedham being murdered."

To Peter, the Dedham girls were illustrations from a history book. "Murdered? God, I-" He looked wildly around the kitchen. "I didn't even know."

"I thought so. I just heard about it myself yesterday. The boy who cleans their stables found her yesterday afternoon. It'll be on the news today. And in tonight's paper."

"But why ask me?"

"Because people are going to think that Jim Hardie might possibly be involved."

"That's crazy!"

"I hope for Eleanor Hardie's sake that it is. And to tell you the truth, I can't see her son doing anything like that."

"No, he couldn't, he's just sort of wild, he doesn't stop when the ordinary guy would…" Peter shut up, hearing his own words.

His father sighed. "I was worried… people knew that Jim has something against those poor old women. Well. I'm sure that he had nothing to do with it, but Hardesty will undoubtedly be asking him questions." He put a cigarette in his mouth, but did not light it. "Okay. Scout, I think we have to be closer. You're going to college next year, and this is probably our last year together as a family. We're going to give a party weekend after next, and I'd like you to loosen up and come and be a part of it. Will you do that?"

So that was the plan. "Sure," he said, relieved.

"And you'll stay for the entire party? I'd like it if you could really get in the swing of things."

"Sure." Looking at his father, Peter saw him for a moment as already surprisingly old. His face was lined and pouchy, marked by a lifetime of worry.

"And we'll have more talks in the mornings?"

"Yes. Whatever you say. Sure."

"And there'll be less hanging around in beer joints with Jim Hardie." This was a command, not a question, and Peter nodded. "He could get you in real trouble."

"He's not as bad as everyone thinks," Peter said. "He just won't stop, you know, he keeps on going and-"

"That's enough. Better get to school. Can I give you a lift?"

"I'd like to walk. I get there too early otherwise."

"Okay, scout."

Five minutes later, books under his arm, Peter left the house; his viscera still retained the imprint of the fear he had felt when he thought his father would ask about Saturday night-that was an episode he planned to put out of his mind as completely as possible-but the fear was only a trembling area surrounded by a sea of relief. His father was far more concerned about being closer to him than about whatever he got up to with Jim Hardie: Saturday night would slip backward into time and become as remote as the Dedham girls.

He rounded the corner. His father's tact lay between him and whatever mysterious thing had happened out there two nights ago. In some way, his father was a protection against it; the terrible things would not happen; he was protected even by his immaturity. If he did not do anything bad, the terrors wouldn't get him.

By the time he reached the top of the square, the fear had almost entirely vanished. His normal route to school would have taken him past the hotel, but he did not want to take the slightest chance of seeing that woman again, and he turned off into Wheat Row. The cool air clipped against his face; sparrows thronged and cheeped across the snowy square, moving in quick zigs and zags. A long black Buick passed him, and he looked in the windows to see the two older lawyers, his father's friends, in the car's front seat. They both looked gray and tired. He waved, and Ricky Hawthorne lifted a hand in a returned greeting.

He was nearly at the bottom of Wheat Row and walking past the parked Buick when a commotion in the square took his attention. A muscular man in sunglasses, a stranger, wandered over the snow. He wore a pea jacket and a knit watch cap, but Peter saw from the white skin around his ears that his head was shaven. The stranger was clapping his hands together, making the sparrows scatter like spray from a shotgun: he looked irrational as a beast. Nobody else, neither the businessmen going up the pretty eighteenth-century steps of Wheat Row nor the secretaries following in short coats and long legs, saw him. The man clapped his hands again, and Peter realized that the man was looking directly at him. He was grinning like a hungry leopard. He started to lope toward Peter: Peter, frozen, sensed that the man was moving more rapidly than his steps could explain. He turned to run and saw, seated on one of the tilting tombstones before St. Michael's, a little boy with ragged hair and a slack grinning face. The boy, less fierce, was of the same substance as the man. He too was staring at Peter, who remembered what Jim Hardie had seen at the abandoned station. The stupid face twisted into a giggle. Peter nearly dropped his books, ran, kept running without looking back.

Our Miss Dedham Will Now Say a Few

Words

5

The three men sat in the corridor on the third floor of University Hospital, Binghamton. None of them liked being there: Hardesty because he suspected he looked like a fool in the larger city, where no one immediately knew of his authority, and suspected also that he was on a useless mission; Ned Rowles because he disliked being away from The Urbanite's offices at most times of the day, and especially disliked leaving layout entirely to the staff; and Don Wanderley because he had been out of the East too long to drive instinctively well on icy roads. Yet he thought that seeing the old woman whose sister had died so bizarrely might help the Chowder Society.

The suggestion had been Ricky Hawthorne's. "I haven't seen her in an age, and I understand she had a stroke some time back, but we might learn something from her. If you're willing to make the journey on a day like this." It was a day when noon was as dark as evening; storms hung over the town, waiting to happen.

"You think there might be some connection between her sister's death and your own problem?"

"There might be," Ricky admitted. "I don't really think so, of course, but it wouldn't do to overlook even these peripheral things. Trust me that there is some relevance, anyhow. We'll have it all out later. Now that you're here, we shouldn't keep you in the dark about anything. Sears might not agree with me, but Lewis probably would." Then Ricky had added wryly, "Besides, it might do you good to get out of Milburn, however briefly."

And that had been true at first. Binghamton, four or five times the size of Milburn, even on a dark, lowering day was another, brighter world: full of traffic, new buildings, young people, the sound of urban life, it was of its decade; it pushed little Milburn back into some novelettish period of Gothic romance. The larger city had made him recognize how enclosed Milburn was, how much an appropriate field for speculation like the Chowder Society's-it was the aspect of the town which had initially reminded him of Dr. Rabbitfoot. It seemed he had become accustomed to this. In Binghamton there was no drone of the macabre, no lurking abnormality to be sniffed out in stories over whiskey and in nightmares by old men.

But on the third floor of the hospital, Milburn held sway. Milburn was in Walt Hardesty's suspicion and nervousness, his rude "What the hell are you doing here? You're from town. I've seen you around-I saw you in Humphrey's." Milburn was even in Ned Rowles's lank hair and rumpled suit: at home, Rowles looked conventional and even well dressed; outside, he looked almost rubelike. You noticed that his jacket was too short, his trousers webbed with wrinkles. And Rowles's manner, in Milburn low-key and friendly, here seemed tinged with shyness.

"Just struck me as funny, old Rea going so soon after that Freddy Robinson being found dead. He was out at their place, you know, not more than a week before Rea died."

"How did she die?" Don asked. "And when can we see her sister? Aren't there evening visiting hours?"

"Waiting for a doctor to come out," Rowles said. "As to how she died, I decided not to put that in the paper. You don't need sensationalism to sell papers. But I thought anyone might have heard, around town."

"I've been working most of the time," Don said.

"Ah, a new book. Splendid."

"Is that what this guy is?" Hardesty asked. "That's just what we need, a writer. Sweet jumping Jesus. Great I'm gonna be talking to a witness in front of the fearless editor and some writer. And this old dame, how the hell is she going to know who I am, anyhow? How is she gonna know I'm sheriff?"

That's what is worrying him, Don thought: he looks like Wyatt Earp because he's so insecure that he wants everybody to know that he wears a badge and carries a gun.

Some of this must have shown on his face, because Hardesty became more aggressive. "Okay, let's have your story. Who sent you here? Why are you in town?"

"He's Edward Wanderley's nephew," Rowles said in a tired voice. "He's doing some work for Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne."

"Jesus, those two," Hardesty moaned. "Did they ask you to come here to see the old lady?"

"Mr. Hawthorne did," Don answered.

"Well I suppose I ought to fall down and pretend I'm a red carpet." Hardesty lit a cigarette, ignoring the no smoking sign at the end of the corridor. "Those two old birds have something up their sleeves. Up their sleeves. Hah! That's rich."

Rowles looked away, obviously embarrassed; Don glanced at him for an explanation.

"Go on, tell him, Fearless. He asked you how she died."

"It's not very appetizing." Rowles, wincing, caught Don's eye.

"He's a big boy. He's built like a running back, ain't he?"

That was another thing about the sheriff: he would always be measuring the size of another man against his own.

"Go on. It's not a goddamned state secret."

"Well." Rowles leaned wearily back against the wall. "She bled to death. Her arms were severed."

"My God," Don said, sickened and sorry that he had come. "Who would…"

"You got me, you know?" Hardesty said. "Maybe your rich friends could give us a hint. But tell me this- who would go around doing operations on livestock, like happened out at Miss Dedham's? And before that, at Norbert Clyde's. And before that, at Elmer Scales's?"

"You think there's one explanation for all of that?" This was, he assumed, what his uncle's friends had asked him to discover.

A nurse went by and scowled at Hardesty, who was shamed into stamping out his cigarette.

"You can go in now," the doctor said, leaving the room.

Don's first shocked thought, seeing the old woman, was she's dead too: but he noticed her bright panicked eye, which was darting from one of them to another. Then he saw her mouth working and knew that Nettie Dedham was beyond communication.

Hardesty, thrusting forward, was bustlingly untroubled by the patient's gaping mouth and signs of agitation. "I'm the sheriff, Miss Dedham," he said, "Walt Hardesty, the sheriff from over in Milburn?"

Don looked into the flat panic in Nettie Dedham's eye and wished him luck. He turned to the editor.

"I knew she had a stroke," the editor said, "but I didn't know she was as bad as this."

"We didn't meet the other day," Hardesty was saying, "but I talked to your sister. Do you remember? When the horse was killed?"

Nettie Dedham made a rattling sound.

"Is that yes?"

She repeated the sound.

"Good. So you remember, and you know who I am." He sat down and began speaking in a low voice.

"I suppose Rea Dedham could understand her," Rowles said. "Those two were supposed to be beauties, once. I remember my father talking about the Dedham girls. Sears and Ricky would remember."

"I guess they would."

"Now I want to ask you about your sister's death," Hardesty was saying. "It's important that you tell me anything you saw. You say it, and I'll try to understand it. Okay?"

"Gl."

"Do you remember that day?"

"Gl."

"This is impossible," Don whispered to Rowles, who twitched his face and went around to the other side of the bed to look out of the window. The sky was black and neon purple.

"Were you sitting in a position where you could see the stables where your sister's body was found?"

"Gl."

"That's affirmative?"

"Gl!"

"Did you see anybody approach the barn or stables prior to your sister's death?"

"GL!"

"Could you identify that person?" Hardesty was sitting forward at an exaggerated angle. "Say if we brought him here, could you make a noise to say he was the one?"

The old woman made a sound Don eventually recognized as crying. He felt debased by his presence in the room.

"Was that person a young man?"

Another series of strangled noises. Hardesty's excitement was turning into an iron impatience.

"Let's say it was a young man, then. Was it the Hardie boy?"

"Rules of evidence," Rowles muttered to the window.

"Screw the rules of evidence. Was that who it was, Miss Dedham?"

"Glooorgh," moaned the old woman.

"Shit. Do you mean to say no? It wasn't?"

"Glooorgh."

"Could you try to name the person you saw?"

Nettie Dedham was trembling. "Glngr. Ginger." She made an effort which Don could feel in his own muscles.

"Glngr."

"Ah, let's let that go for now. I got a couple more things." He rotated his head to look angrily at Don, who thought he saw embarrassment too on the sheriff's face. Hardesty turned back to the old woman and pitched his voice lower, but Don could still hear.

"I don't suppose you heard any funny noises? Or saw any funny lights or anything?"

The old woman's head wobbled; her eyes darted.

"Any funny noises or lights, Miss Dedham?" Hardesty hated having to ask her this. Ned Rowles and Don shared a glance of puzzled interest.

Hardesty wiped his forehead, giving up. "That's it. It's no good. She thinks she saw something, but who the hell can figure out what it was? I'm getting out of here. You stay or not, do what the hell you like."

Don followed the sheriff out of the room, and paused in the corridor as Hardesty spoke to a doctor. When Rowles emerged, his aging boy's face was pensive and considering.

Hardesty turned from the doctor and glanced at Rowles. "You make any sense out of that?"

"No, Walt. No sense that makes sense."

"You?"

''Nothing," Don said.

"Well, I'll be damned if I'm not going to start believing in spacemen or vampires or something pretty soon myself," Hardesty said, and went off down the corridor.

Ned Rowles and Don Wanderley followed. When they reached the elevators, Hardesty was standing inside one, stabbing a button. Before Don could reach the elevator, the door had whooshed shut unimpeded by the sheriff, who obviously wanted to escape the other two.

A moment later another elevator appeared, and the two men stepped inside it. "I've been thinking about what Nettie might have been trying to say," Rowles told him. The doors closed and the elevator smoothly descended. "I promise you, this is crazy."

"I haven't heard anything lately that isn't."

"And you're the man who wrote The Nightwatcher."

Here we go, Don thought.

Don buttoned up his coat and followed Rowles outside into the parking lot. Though he wore only his suit, Rowles did not appear to notice the cold. "Here, get in my car for a second," the editor said.

Don got into the passenger seat and looked over at Rowles, who was rubbing his forehead with one hand. The editor looked much older in the interior of the car: shadows poured into his wrinkles. " 'Glngr?' Isn't that what she said, that last time? You agree? It was a lot like that anyhow, wasn't it? Now. I never knew him myself, but a long time ago the Dedham girls had a brother, and I guess they talked about him for quite a while after he died…"

Don drove back toward Milburn on the field-bordered highway under the lurid sky purpled with glowing strips. Back, back to Milburn, with part of the story of Stringer Dedham riding with him; back to Milburn, where people were beginning to close themselves up as the snows grew worse and the houses seemed to melt closer together; where his uncle had died and his uncle's friends dreamed of horrors; away from the century and back to the confinement of Milburn, more and more like that of his own mind.

Housebreaking, Part One

6

"My father says I'm not supposed to see you so much anymore."

"So what? Do you care? How old are you anyhow, five?"

"Well, he's worried about something. He doesn't look very happy."

"He doesn't look happy," Jim mimicked. "He's old. I mean, what is he, fifty-five? He's got a boring job and an old car and he's too fat and his favorite little boy is going to fly out of the nest in nine or ten months. Just take a look around this town, friend. How many folks do you see with big smiles on their wrinkly old faces? This town is loaded with miserable old suckers. Are you gonna let them run your life?" Jim leaned back on his barstool and smiled at Peter, clearly assuming that the old argument was still persuasive.

Peter felt himself sinking back into uncertainty and ambiguity-these arguments were persuasive. His father's worries were not his: and the issue had never been that he did not love his father, for he did, but merely whether he should always obey his father's infrequent orders-or as Jim put it, "let him run your life."

For had he, after all, done anything truly bad with Jim? Because of Jim's keys, they had not even broken into the church; then they had followed a woman. That was all. Freddy Robinson had died, and that was a shame even if they had not liked him, but nobody was saying that his death had not been natural; he'd had a heart attack, or had fallen down and hurt his head…

And there had been no little boy on top of the station.

And there had been no little boy sitting on the gravestone.

"I suppose I should be grateful your old man let you come out tonight."

"No, it's not that bad. He just thinks we ought to spend less time together, not that we shouldn't spend any time at all together. I guess he doesn't like me sitting in places like this."

"This? What's wrong with this?" Hardie gestured comically around at the seedy tavern. "Hey, you- Sunshine!" Jim shouted. "This is a hell of a great place, isn't it?" The bartender looked back over his shoulder and grimaced stupidly. "Civilized as shit, Lady Jane. The Duke down there agrees with me. I know what your old man is afraid of. He doesn't want you to get in with the wrong crowd. Well, I am the wrong crowd, that's true. But if I am, then so are you. So the worst has already happened, and as long as you're here, you might as well relax and enjoy it."

If you wrote down the things Hardie said and looked at them afterward, you'd find the errors, but just listening to him talk, you'd be convinced of anything.

"See, what the old boys all think is craziness is just another way of stayin' sane-you live in this town long enough you're in danger of woodworm in the headboard, and you have to keep reminding yourself that the whole world isn't just one big Milburn." He looked over at Peter, sipped his beer and grinned, and Peter saw the fractured light in his eyes and knew, as he had all along, that underneath the "stayin' sane" kind of craziness there was another, real craziness. "Now admit it, Pete." He said, "Aren't there times when you'd like to see the whole damn town go up in flames? The whole thing knocked down and plowed over? It's a ghost town, man. The whole place is full of Rip Van Winkles, it's just one Rip Van Winkle after another, a bunch of weird Rip Van Winkles with vacuums for brains, with a knothead drunk for a sheriff and crummy bars for a social life-"

"What happened to Penny Draeger?" Peter interrupted. "You haven't gone out with her for three weeks."

Jim hunched over the bar and wrapped his hand around his beerglass. "One. She heard I took that Mostyn dame out, so she got pissed off at me. Two. Her parents, old Rollie and Irmengard, heard that she went out a couple of times with the late F. Robinson. So they grounded her. She never told me about that, you know? Good thing she didn't. I would have grounded her, all right."

"Do you think she went out with him because you took that woman to Humphrey's?"

"How the hell do I know why she does things, man? Do you see a sequence there, my boy?"

"Don't you?" It was sometimes safer to give Jim's questions back to him.

"Hell." He bent all the way forward and lay his shaggy head on the wet wood of the bar. "All these women are mysteries to me." He was speaking softly, as if regretfully, but Peter saw his eyes gleaming between his lashes and knew it was an act. "Yeah. Well you might have a point. There might be a sequence there after all, Clarabelle. There just might be. And if there is, then that Anna dame besides not giving me any herself after teasing me along, also screwed up the sex life I had. In fact, if you look at it that way, you could definitely say that she owes me a few." He rolled his head a quarter turn up on the bar, and his eyes gleamed at Peter. "Which had occurred to me, to tell you the truth." He sat there, bent over, his head like a separate object on the bar, grinning maniacally up at Peter. "Yes, it had, old pal."

Peter swallowed.

Jim straightened up and knocked on the bar. "Two more flagons here, Sunshine."

"What do you want to do?" Peter asked, knowing that he would inevitably be carried along with it, and looked through the tavern's greasy windows at a pane of darkness flecked with white.

"Let's see. What do I want to do?" Jim mused, and Peter realized sickeningly that Jim had known all along what he wanted to do, and that inviting him out for a beer was only the first moment of the plan; he'd been steered into this conversation as surely as he'd been driven out into the country, and all of it, "another way of stayin' sane" and the ghost town business, was enumerated on a list somewhere in Hardie's mind. "What do I want to do?" He cocked his head. "Even this palace gets a little boring after a flagon or six, so I guess going back to dear little Milburn would be pleasant. Yes, I think we'll definitely be going back to dear little Milburn."

"Let's stay away from her," Peter said.

Jim ignored this. "You know, our dear lovely sexy friend moved out of the hotel two weeks ago. Oh, she is missed. She is missed, Pete. I miss seeing that great ass going up the stairs. I miss those eyes flashing in the corridors. I miss her empty suitcase. I miss her amazing body. And I'm sure you know where she went."

"My father arranged the mortgage. His house." Peter nodded more vigorously than he needed to, and realized he was getting drunk again.

"Your old man's a useful old gnome, isn't he?" Jim asked, smiling pleasantly. "Innkeeper!" He banged on the bar. "Give my friend and myself a couple of shots of your best bourbon." The bartender resentfully poured out shots of the same brand that Jim had stolen. "Now, back to the point. Our friend who is so sincerely missed moves out of our excellent hotel and into Robinson's house. Now isn't that a curious sort of coincidence? I suppose that you and I, Clarabelle, are the only two people in the world who know that it is a coincidence. Because we're the only people who knew she was out at the station when old Freddy passed."

"His heart," Peter muttered.

"Oh, she does get you in the heart. She gets you by the heart and the balls. But funny though, isn't it? Freddy falls down onto the tracks-did I say falls? No: floats. I saw it, remember. He floats down onto the tracks like he's made out of tissue paper. Then she gets all hot to own his house. Is that also one, old buddy? Do you see a sequence there too, Clarabelle?"

"No," he whispered.

"Now, Pete, that's not how you got early admission to Cornhole U. Use those powerful brain cells, baby." He put his hand on Peter's back and leaned toward him, breathing the clear odor of alcohol into Peter's face. "Our sexy friend wants something in that house. Just think of her in there. Man, I'm curious, aren't you? That sexy lady moving around in Freddy's old house- what's she looking for? Money? Jewelry? Dope? Well, who knows? But she's looking for something. Moving that sexy frame of hers around those rooms, checking everything out… that'd be a sight to see, wouldn't it?"

"I can't," Peter said. The bourbon moved in his guts like oil.

"I think," said Jim, "that we will begin to move toward our transportation."

Peter found himself standing outside in the cold by Jim's car: he could not remember why he was alone. He stamped his feet, rotated his head on his shoulders; said, "Hey, Jim."

Hardie emerged a moment later, grinning like a shark. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Just had to tell our friend in there how much I enjoyed his company. He didn't seem to believe me, so I had to repeat my message several times. He demonstrated what you could call a lack of interest. Fortunately, I managed also to take care of our liquid requirements for the remainder of this pleasant evening." He partially unzipped his jacket and let the neck of a bottle protrude.

"You're a madman."

"I'm crazy like a fox, you mean." Jim opened the car and leaned across the seat to unlock Peter's door. "Now to return to the subject of our previous discussion."

"You really ought to go to college," Peter said as

Jim started the car. "With your talent for bull, you'd be Phi Beta Kappa."

"Well, I used to think I'd be a pretty good lawyer," Jim said surprisingly. "Here, have a jolt." He passed Peter the bottle. "What's a good lawyer besides a superior bullshitter? Look at that old Sears James, man. If I ever saw a guy who looks like he could shit you from here to Key West…"

Peter remembered his last sight of Sears James, seated massively in a car, his face pale behind the bleary window. Then he remembered the face of the boy sitting on the headstone in front of St. Michael's. "Let's stay away from that woman," he said.

"Now that's just the point I want to discuss." He gave Peter a bright look. "Didn't we reach the point where this mysterious lady is wandering around the house looking for something? As I recall, Clarabelle, I invited you to picture that."

Peter nodded miserably.

"And give me back that bottle if you're not going to do anything with it. Now. There's something in that house, isn't there? Aren't you a little curious about what it is? There's something going on, anyhow, and you and me, old buddy, are the only people who know about it. Am I right so far?"

"You might be."

"CHRIST!" Hardie yelled, making Peter jump. "You dumb SHIT! What else can I be? There's some reason she wanted that house-that's the only thing that makes sense. There's something in there she wants."

"You think she got rid of Robinson?"

"I don't know about that. I didn't see anything but him sort of floating down onto the tracks. What the hell? But I can tell you one thing, I want to get a look at that house."

"Oh no," Peter moaned.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," Jim protested. "She's just a broad, after all. She's got strange habits, but she's just a woman, Clarabelle. And for shit's sake, I'm not really stupid enough to go in there when she's there.

And if you're too chickenshit to go in with me, you can walk from here."

Down, down the dark country road; down the dark road to Milburn.

"How will you know if she's out? She sits in the dark every night, you said."

"You ring the bell, dummy."

On the crest of the last low hill before the turnoff, Peter, already sick with worry, looked down the highway and saw the lights of Milburn-gathered in a little depression in the land, they looked as though one hand could gather them up. It looked arbitrary, Milburn, like a nomad city of tents, and though Peter Barnes had known it all his life-though it was, in effect, all he had known-it looked unfamiliar.

Then he saw why. "Jim. Look. All the lights on the west side of town are out."

"Snow pulled down the wires."

"But it's not snowing."

"It snowed when we were in the bar."

"Did you really see a little kid sitting on top of the station that night?"

"Nah. Just thought I did. It must have been snow, or some newspaper or something-shit, Clarabelle, can a kid get up there? You know he can't. Let's be straight, Clarabelle, it was a little spooky out there that night."

They continued on to Milburn through the growing dark.

7

There, in town, Don Wanderley sat at his desk on the west side of the Archer Hotel, and saw darkness suddenly spread over the street below his window while his desk lamp still burned; and Ricky Hawthorne gasped as dark surged through his living room, and Stella said to get the candles, it was only that spot on the highway where the lines always blew down at least twice every winter; and Milly Sheehan, going for her own candles, heard a slow knocking at the front door which she would never, ever, not in a thousand years, answer; and Sears James, locked in his suddenly dark library, heard a rattle of happy footsteps on his stairs and told himself he was dozing; and Clark Mulligan, who had been showing two weeks of science fiction and horror pictures and had a head full of lurid images-you can show it, man, but nobody makes you watch it-walked out of the Rialto for the fresh air in the middle of a reel and thought he saw in the sudden blackout a man who was a wolf lope across the street, on a fierce errand, in an evil hurry to get somewhere (nobody makes you watch the stuff, man).

Housebreaking, Part Two

8

Jim stopped the car half a block away from the house. "If only the goddamned lights didn't go off." They were both looking at the building's blank facade, the curtainless windows behind which no figure moved, no candle shone.

Peter Barnes thought of what Jim Hardie had seen, Freddy Robinson's body floating down onto the overgrown railway tracks, and of the-little-boy-who-wasn't-there but perched on the tops of stations and headstones. And then he thought: I was right the last time. Fear sobers you up. When he looked at Jim, he saw him tense with excitement.

"I thought she never turned them on anyhow."

"Man, I still wish they didn't go off," Jim said, and shivered, his face a grinning mask. "In a place like this"-gesturing out at the respectable neighborhood of three-story houses-"you know, in a Rotarian pig heaven like this, our lady friend might sort of want to blend in. She might keep her lights on just so nobody thinks there's nothing funny about her." He tilted his head. "Like, you know, that old house on Haven Lane where that writer guy lived-Wanderley? You ever go past there at night? All these houses around are all lit up and there's old Wanderley's place as dark as a tomb, man. Gives you the frights."

"This gives me the frights," Peter admitted. "Besides that, it's illegal."

"You really are the pits, you know that?" Hardie turned on his seat and stared at Peter, who saw his barely controlled urge to get moving, to do, to flail out again at whatever obstacle the world had put in his way. "Do you get the feeling that our lady friend worries about what's legal and what isn't? Do you think she got that house because she was worried about the damned law-about Walt Hardesty, for Chrissake?" Hardie shook his head, either disgusted or pretending to be disgusted. Peter suspected that he was working himself up for an action even he thought might be reckless.

Jim turned away from him and started the car moving; Peter hoped for a moment that Hardie was going to circle around the block and go back to the hotel, but his friend kept the car in first gear and merely crept up the block until they were directly in front of the house.

"You're either with me or you're a jerk, you jerk," he said.

"What are you going to do?"

"First off, take a look in a downstairs window. Do you have balls enough for that, Clarabelle?"

"You won't be able to see anything."

"Jesus," Hardie said, and got out of the car.

Peter hesitated only a second. Then he too got out and followed Hardie up across the snowy lawn and around the side of the building. Both boys moved quickly, hunching over to avoid being seen by the neighbors.

In a moment they were sitting on their haunches in drifted snow beneath one of the side windows. "Well, at least you have guts enough to look in a window, Clarabelle."

"Don't call me that," Peter whispered. "I'm sick of that."

"Great time you picked to tell me." Hardie grinned at him, then lifted his head to peer over the sill. "Hey, look at this."

Peter slowly raised his head above the sill. He was looking into a small side room just visible in the moonlight falling in over their shoulders. The room had neither furniture nor carpet.

"Weird lady," Hardy said, and Peter heard laughter hidden in his voice. "Let's go around the back." He scuttled away, still hunching over. Peter followed.

"I'll tell you what, I don't think she's here," Hardie said when Peter reached the back of the building. He was standing up and leaning against the wall between a small window and the back door. "I just get the feeling this house is empty." Here in the back where no one could see them, both boys felt more comfortable.

The long back yard ended in a white hillock of snow which was a buried hedge; a plaster birdbath, the basin covered with snow like frosting on a cake, sat between them and the hedge. Even by moonlight this was a reassuringly commonplace object. You couldn't be frightened with a birdbath looking at you, Peter thought, and managed a smile.

"Don't you believe me?" Hardie challenged.

"It's not that" Both were speaking in their normal voices.

"Okay, you look in there first."

"Okay." Peter turned and stepped boldly in front of the small window. He saw a sink gleaming palely, a hardwood floor, a stove Mrs. Robinson must have left behind. A single water glass, left on the breakfast bar, caught an edge of moonlight. If the birdbath had looked homely, this looked forlorn-one glass gathering dust on the counter-and Peter at once began to agree with Jim that the house was empty. "Nothing," he said.

Hardie nodded beside him. Then he jumped up to the small concrete step before the back door. "Man, if you hear anything, run like hell." He pushed the bell.

The sound of the doorbell trilled through the house.

Both boys braced themselves; held their breath. But no steps came, no voices called.

"Hey?" Jim said, smiling seraphically at Peter. "How about that?"

"We're doing this all wrong," Peter said. "What we ought to do is walk around in front and act like we just came. If anybody sees us, we'll just be two guys looking for her. If she doesn't answer the front doorbell, we'll do what people always do and look in the front windows. If someone sees us crawling around like we did before, they'll call the cops."

"Not bad," Jim said after a moment. "Okay, we'll try it. But if nobody answers, I'm coming around back here and going in. That was the point, remember?"

Peter nodded; he remembered.

As if he too were relieved at having found a way to stop skulking, Jim walked freely and naturally to the front of the house. Peter coming more slowly behind him, Jim went across the lawn to the front door. "Okay, sport," he said.

Peter stood beside him and thought: I can't go in there. Empty, but filled with bare rooms and the atmosphere of whatever kind of person chose to live in them, the house seemed to be feigning stillness.

Jim rang the front bell. "We're wasting time," he said, and betrayed his own unease.

"Just wait. Just act normal."

Jim stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket and fidgeted on the doorstep. "Long enough?"

"A few more seconds."

Jim exhaled a billowing cloud of steam. "Okay. A few more seconds. One-two-three. Now what?"

"Ring it again. Just like you would if you thought she was at home."

Jim stabbed the bell a second time: the trilling flared and died inside the house.

Peter looked up and down the block of houses across the street. No cars. No lights. The dim glow of a candle shone in a window four houses away, but no curious faces looked out at the two boys standing on the steps of the new neighbor's house. Old Dr. Jaffrey's house directly across the street looked mournful.

From nowhere at all, utterly inexplicably, distant music floated in the air. A buzzing trombone, an insinuating saxophone: jazz, played a long way off.

"Huh?" Jim Hardie lifted his head and turned from the door. "Sounds like-what?"

Peter had an image of flatbed trucks, black musicians playing freely into the night. "Sounds like a carnival."

"Sure. We get a lot of those in Milburn. In November."

"Must be a record."

"Somebody's got his window open."

"Has to be."

And yet-as if the idea of carnival musicians suddenly appearing to play in Milburn was frightening- neither boy wanted to admit that these lilting sounds were too true to come from a record.

"Now we look in the window," Jim said. "Finally."

He jumped off the steps and went to the large front window. Peter stayed on the porch, softly clapping his hands together, listening to the fading music: the flatbed was going into the center of town, toward the square, he thought. But what sense did that make? The sound died away.

"You'll never guess what I'm looking at," Jim said.

Startled, Peter looked at his friend. Jim's face was determinedly bland. "An empty room."

"Not quite."

He knew that Jim would not tell him: he would have to look for himself. Peter jumped off the step and walked up to the window.

At first he saw what he had expected: a bare room where the carpet had been taken up and invisible dust lay everywhere. On the other side, the black arch of a doorway; on his side, the reflection of his own face, looking out from the glass.

He felt for a second the terror of being trapped in there like his reflection, of being forced to go through that doorway, to walk the bare floorboards: the terror made no more sense than the band music, but like it, it was there.

Then he saw what Jim had meant. On one side, up against the baseboards, a brown suitcase lay on the floor.

"That's hers!" Jim said in his ear. "You know what that means?"

"She still there. She's in there."

"No. Whatever she wanted is still in there."

Peter backed away from the window and looked at Jim's set, red face. "That's enough screwing around," Jim said. "I'm going inside. You coming-Clarabelle?"

Peter could not answer; Jim simply stepped around him and set off around the side of the house.

Seconds later he heard the pop and tinkle of breaking glass. He groaned; turned around and saw his features reproduced in the window; they were pulled by fear and indecision.

Get out. No. You have to help him. Get out. No, you have to-

He went around the side of the house as quickly as he could without running.

Jim was up on the back steps, reaching in through the little pane of glass he had broken. In the dim light, bent over, he was the image of a burglar: Jim's words came back to him. So the worst has already happened, and you might as well relax and enjoy it.

"Oh, it's you," Jim said. "Thought you'd be home under the bed by now."

"What happens if she comes home?"

"We run out the back, idiot. Two doors in this house, remember? Or don't you think you can run as fast as a woman?" His face stilled with concentration for a moment; then the lock clicked open. "Coming?"

"Maybe. But I'm not going to steal anything. And you aren't either."

Jim snorted derisively and went through the door.

Peter went up the steps and peered in. Hardie was moving across the kitchen floor, going deeper into the house, not bothering to look back.

Might as well relax and enjoy it. He stepped over the doorframe. Ahead of him, Hardie was thumping around in the hallway, opening doors and cabinets.

"Quiet," Peter hissed.

"Quiet yourself," Jim called back, but the noises immediately ceased, and Peter understood that whether or not he admitted it, Jim also was afraid.

"Where do you want to look?" Peter asked. "What are we looking for, anyway?"

"How should I know? We'll know when we see it."

"It's too dark in here to see anything. You could see better from the outside."

Jim pulled his matches out of his jacket and lit one. "How is that?" In truth, it was worse: where they previously had a dim vision of the entire hallway, now they could see only within a small circle of light.

"Okay, but we stick together," Peter said.

"We could cover the house faster if we split up."

"No way."

Jim shrugged. "Whatever you want." He led Peter down the hall into the living room. This was even bleaker than they had been able to see from the outside. The walls, dotted here and there by children's crayons, also showed the pale rectangles where pictures had hung. Paint flaked off in chips and patches. Jim was going around the room, knocking on the walls, lighting one match after another.

"Look at the suitcase."

"Oh yeah, the suitcase."

Jim knelt down and opened the case. "Nothing." Peter watched over his shoulder as Jim turned the suitcase over, shook it, and replaced it on the bare floor.

He whispered, "We're not going to find anything."

"Christ, we look in two rooms and you're ready to give up." Jim stood up abruptly, and his match went out.

For a moment pure blackness enveloped them. "Light another one," Peter whispered.

"Better this way. No one outside can see a light. Your eyes'll adjust."

They stood in silence and darkness for five or six seconds, letting the image of flame fade from their eyes, become a pinpoint in sheer black; then waited longer seconds while the features of the house took shape around them.

Peter heard a noise from somewhere in the house and jumped.

"For God's sake, calm down."

"What was that?" Peter whispered, and heard the hysteria rising in his voice.

"A stair creaked. The back door clicked shut. Nothing."

Peter touched his forehead with his fingers and felt them trembling against his skin.

"Listen. We've been talking, pounding walls, we broke a window-don't you think she'd come out if she was here?"

"I guess so."

"Okay, let's try the next floor."

Jim grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him out of the living room back into the hall. Then he let go and led Peter down the hall to the foot of the stairs.

Up there it was dark-up there it was new territory. Peter felt more profoundly uneasy, looking at the stairs, then he had since entering the house.

"You go up and I'll stay here."

"You want to hang around in the dark by yourself?"

Peter tried to swallow, but could not. He shook his head.

"All right. It's got to be up there, whatever it is."

Jim put his foot on the second of the unpainted steps. Here too the carpet had been removed. He lifted himself up; looked back. "Coming?" Then he began to mount the stairs, taking them by twos. Peter watched: when Jim was halfway up, he willed himself to follow.

The lights snapped on again when Jim was at the top and Peter was two-thirds of the way up.

"Hello, boys," said a deep unruffled voice from the bottom of the stairs.

Jim Hardie shrieked.

Peter fell backward on the stairs and, half-paralyzed with fright, thought he'd slide right down into the grasp of the man looking up at them.

"Let me take you to your hostess," he said, giving them a dead smile. He was the strangest-looking man Peter had ever seen-a blue knit cap was shoved down over blond curly hair like Harpo Marx's, sunglasses rode on his nose; he wore overalls but no shirt, and his face was white as ivory. It was the man from the square. "She will be delighted to see you again," the man said. "As her first visitors, you can count on an especially warm welcome." The man's smile broadened as he began to come up the stairs after them.

When he had come up only a few of the steps he lifted a hand and pulled the blue cap off his head. The Harpo curls, a wig, came off with it.

When he took off the dark glasses his eyes shone a uniform golden yellow.

9

Standing at his window in the hotel and looking out over the darkened section of Milburn, Don heard the far off convolutions of saxophones and trombones blaring on the cold air and thought: Dr. Rabbitfoot's come to town. His telephone rang behind him.

Sears was facing his library door, listening for footsteps padding on his stairs, when his telephone rang.

Ignoring it, he unlocked his door; opened it. The staircase was empty.

He went to answer his phone.

Lewis Benedikt, whose mansion was on the furthest periphery of the area affected by the power failure, heard neither music nor childish footsteps. What he heard, blown on the wind or from inside his own mind or drifting on a draft through his dining room and winding around a newel post on its way toward him, was the most despairing sound he knew: the languishing, nearly inaudible voice of his dead wife, calling over and over again, "Lewis. Lewis." He had been hearing it, on and off, for days. When his telephone rang he turned to it with relief.

And with relief too heard Ricky Hawthorne's voice: "I'm going batty sitting here in the dark. I've spoken to Sears and Edward's nephew and Sears graciously said that we can get together at this short notice at his house. I'd say we need to. Do you agree? We'll break a rule and just come as we are, shall we?"

Ricky thought that the young man was getting to look like a true member of the Chowder Society. Beneath the mask of sociability anyone would expect from a nephew of Edward's, he had the jim-jams. He leaned back in one of Sears's wonderful leather chairs, he sipped his whiskey and looked (with his uncle's reflex amusement) around the cherished interior of the library (did it look as old-fashioned to him as Edward had said it was?), he spoke at intervals, but there was an undercurrent of tension in all of it.

Maybe that makes him one of us, Ricky thought: and he saw that Don was the sort of person they would have befriended, years and years back; if he had been born forty years earlier, he would have been one of them as if by birthright.

Still, there was a streak of secrecy in him. Ricky could not imagine what he had meant by asking if any of them had heard music during the early evening.

Pressed about this, he had evaded explanations; pressed further, he had said, "I was just getting the feeling that everything happening has a direct relationship to my writing."

This remark, which would have seemed egotistical at any other time, was given density by the candlelight; each of the men stirred in his chair.

"Isn't that why we asked you here?" Sears said.

And then he had explained: Ricky listened puzzled to Don's account of his idea for a new book and the description of the Dr. Rabbitfoot character, and how he had heard the showman's music just before Ricky's call.

"Are you saying that events in this town are occurrences from an unwritten book?" Sears asked incredulously. "That's sheer poppycock."

"Unless," Ricky said, thinking, "unless… well, I'm not really sure how to put this. Unless things here in Milburn have focused lately-have come to a focus they did not have before."

"You mean that I'm the focus," Don said.

"I don't know."

"This is nonsense," Sears interjected. "Focused, unfocused-all that's happened is that we are managing to frighten ourselves even more. That's your focus. The daydreams of a novelist can't have anything to do with it."

Lewis sat apart from all this, wrapped in some private misery. Ricky asked him what he thought, and Lewis replied, "Sorry. I was thinking about something else. Can I get myself another drink, Sears?"

Sears nodded grimly; Lewis was drinking at twice his normal rate, as if his appearance at a meeting in an old shirt and a tweed jacket gave him license to break another of their old rules.

"What's supposed to indicate this mysterious focus?" Sears asked belligerently.

"You know as well as I do. John's death, first of all."

"Coincidence," Sears said.

"Elmer's sheep-all the animals that have died."

"Now you believe in Hardesty's Martians."

"Don't you remember what Hardesty told us? That it was sort of a game-an amusement some sort of creature gave itself. What I'm suggesting is that the stakes have been raised. Freddy Robinson. Poor old Rea Dedham. I felt, months ago, that our stories were bringing something about-and I fear, I very much fear, that more people are going to die. I'm saying that our lives and the lives of many people in this town may be endangered."

"Well, what I said stands. You have certainly managed to frighten yourself," Sears said.

"We're all frightened," Ricky pointed out. His cold made his voice raw and his throat throbbed, but he forced himself to go on. "We are. But what I think is that Don's arrival here was like the fitting of the last piece into a puzzle-that when all of us were joined by Don, the forces, whatever you want to call them, were increased. That we invoked them. We by our stories, Don in his book and in his imagination. We see things, but we don't believe them; we feel things-people watching us, sinister things following us-but we dismiss them as fantasies. We dream horrors, but try to forget them. And in the meantime, three people have died."

Lewis stared at the rug, then nervously spun an ashtray on the table before his chair. "I just remembered something I said to Freddy Robinson on the night he cornered me outside John's house. I said that someone was picking us off like flies."

"But why should this young man, whom none of us had seen until a short time ago, be the last element?" Sears asked.

"Because he was Edward's nephew?" Ricky asked. It came to him straight from the blue sky of inspiration; a moment later he felt a painful spasm of relief that his children were not coming to Milburn for Christmas. "Yes. Because he is Edward's nephew."

All three of the older men almost palpably felt the gravity of what Ricky had called "the forces" about them. Three frightened men, they sat in the molten light of the candles and looked back into their past.

"Maybe," Lewis at last said. He drained his whiskey. "But I don't understand about Freddy Robinson. He wanted to meet with me-he called me twice. I just put him off. Made a vague promise to see him in a bar sometime."

Sears asked, "He had something to tell you before he died?"

"I didn't give him the chance to tell it. I thought he wanted to sell me insurance."

"Why did you think that?"

"Because he said something about trouble coming your way."

They were silent again. "Maybe," Lewis said, "if I met him, he'd still be alive."

Ricky said, "Lewis, that sounded just like John Jaffrey. He blamed himself for Edward's death."

For a moment all three men glanced at Don Wanderley.

"Maybe I'm not here just because of my uncle," Don said. "I want to buy my way into the Chowder Society."

"What?" Sears exploded. "Buy?"

"With a story. Isn't that the admission fee?" He smiled tentatively around the circle. "It's very clear in my mind because I just spent some time writing it all in a journal. And," he said, breaking another of their rules, "this isn't fiction. This happened just in the way I'll tell it-you couldn't use it as fiction because it didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened. But if Mr. Hawthorne" ("Ricky," the lawyer breathed) "is right, then five people, not four, have died. And my brother was the first of them."

"You were both engaged to the same girl," Ricky said, remembering one of the last things Edward had said to him.

"We were both engaged to Alma Mobley, a girl I met at Berkeley," Don began, and the four of them settled into their chairs. "I think this is a ghost story," he said, pulling, in Dr. Rabbitfoot's image, the dollar from his jeans.

He held them with the story, speaking into the flame of the candles as if into an unquiet place in his mind; he did not tell it as he had in his journal, deliberately invoking all the detail he could remember, but he told most of it. The story took him half an hour.

"So the Who's Who entry proved that everything she had said was false," Don concluded. "David was dead, and I never saw her again. She had simply disappeared." He wiped his face; exhaled loudly. "That's it. Is it a ghost story or not? You tell me."

None of the men spoke for a moment. Tell him, Sears, Ricky silently prayed. He looked over at his old friend, who had steepled his fingers before his face. Say it, Sears. Tell him.

Sears eyes met his. He knows what I'm thinking.

"Well," Sears said, and Ricky closed his eyes. "As much as any of our stories is, I guess. Is that the series of events on which you based your book?"

"Yes."

"They make a better story than the book," Sears said.

"But they don't have an ending."

"Not yet, perhaps," Sears said. He scowled at the candles, which had burned down into the silver holders. Now, Ricky prayed, his eyes still closed. "This young man you imagined to look like a werewolf was named- ah, Greg? Greg Benton?" Ricky opened his eyes again, and if anyone had been looking at him they would have seen gratitude written on his every feature.

Don nodded, clearly not understanding why this was important.

"I knew him under a different name," Sears said. "A long time ago, he was called Gregory Bate. And his half-witted brother was called Fenny. I was present when Fenny died." He smiled with the bitterness of a man compelled to eat a meal he hates. "That would have been quite some time before your-Benton- decided to affect a shaven head."

"If he can make two appearances, then he can make three," Ricky said. "I saw him on the square not two weeks ago."

The lights, violently bright after so long a time of candlelight, came suddenly on. The four men in Sears's library, their distinction and whatever of ease the candlelight had given them erased by the harsher light, looked fearful: we look half-dead already, Ricky thought. It was as though the candles had drawn them into a warm circle, the warmth of a candle and a group and a story; now they were blown apart, scattered on a wintry plain.

"Looks like he heard you," Lewis, drunk, said. "Maybe that's what Freddy Robinson saw. Maybe he saw Gregory turning into a wolf. Hah!"

Housebreaking, Part Three

10

Peter picked himself up on the stairs and, with no awareness of willing himself to move, went backward up the stairs to stand beside Jim on the landing.

The werewolf came slowly, unstoppably toward them, in no hurry at all. "You want to meet her, don't you?" His grin was ferocious. "She will be so pleased. You will have quite a welcome, I promise you."

Peter looked wildly around; saw phosphorescent light leaking from beneath a door.

"She is not perhaps quite in shape to see you yet, but that makes it all the more interesting, don't you think? We all like to see our friends with their masks off."

He's talking to keep us still, Peter thought. It's like hypnotism.

"Aren't you the two boys interested in scientific exploration? In telescopes? How nice it is to meet two fine young fellows with inquiring minds, two fellows who want to extend their knowledge. So many young people merely coast along, don't they, so many are afraid to take risks. Well we certainly can't say that about you now, can we?"