Ghost Story

Peter glanced at Jim Hardie's face: Jim's mouth hung open.

"No, you have been extremely brave. Now I will be with you in a moment, and I want you to relax and wait for me… just relax and wait."

Peter slammed the back of his hand into Jim's ribs, but Jim did not move. He glanced back at the terrible figure coming toward him, and made the mistake of looking directly into the blank golden eyes. Immediately he heard a voice like music coming not from the man but speaking directly inside his head: Relax, Peter, relax, you will meet her…

"Jim!" he screamed.

Hardie gave a convulsive shudder, and Peter knew that he was lost already.

Settle down, boy, no need for all that noise…

The golden-eyed man was nearly to them, reaching out his left hand. Peter stepped backward, too frightened for coherent thought.

The man's white hand glided nearer and nearer Jim's own left hand.

Peter turned his back and pounded halfway up the next flight of stairs. When he looked around the light beneath the door on the landing was spilling out with such intensity that the walls were tinted faintly green: green too was Jim, in that light.

"Just take my hand," the man said. He was two steps below Jim, and their hands nearly touched.

Jim brushed his fingers against the palm of the man's hand.

Peter looked up the stairs, but could not leave Jim.

The man beneath was chuckling. Peter's heart froze, and he looked down again. The man was grasping Jim's wrist with his left hand. The wolfish eyes glowed wide.

Jim screeched.

The man holding him moved his hands to Jim's throat and twisted his body with immense force, slamming the boy's head against the wall. He planted his feet on the boards of the landing and again smashed Jim's head into the wall.

Your turn.

Jim fell onto the boards and the man kicked him aside as if he were as weightless as a paper bag. A bright smear of blood like a child's fingerpainting lay on the wall.

Peter ran down a long corridor lined with doors; opened one at random and slipped in.

Just inside the door, he froze. The outline of a man's head showed against a window. "Welcome home," the man's toneless voice said. "Have you met her yet?" He stood up from the bed. "You haven't? Once you do, you'll never forget it. An incredible woman."

The man, still only a black outline against a window, began to shuffle toward Peter, who remained stock-still just inside the door. As the man drew nearer, he saw that it was Freddy Robinson.

"Welcome home," Robinson said.

Found you.

Footsteps in the corridor paused outside the bedroom door. Time. Time. Time. Time.

"You know, I don't exactly remember-"

Panicked, Peter rushed at Robinson with his arms extended, intending to shove him out of the way: the moment his fingers touched his shirt, Robinson broke up into a shapeless pattern of glowing points of light; his fingers tingled. It was gone utterly in an instant, and Peter rushed through the air where it had been.

"Come out, Peter," said the voice outside the door. "We all want you to come out"; and the other voice in his mind repeated Time.

Standing in front of the bed, Peter heard the doorknob moving. He scrambled onto the bed and banged the heels of his hands against the top of the window frames.

The window slid up as if on grease. Cold air streamed over him. He felt the other mind reaching for him, telling him to come to the door, not to be silly, didn't he want to see that Jim was all right?

Jim!

He crawled out of the window as the door opened. Something rushed toward him, but he was already across the upper roof and jumping down onto the next level. From there he let himself drop onto the roof of the garage; and from the garage he jumped onto a snowdrift.

As he ran past Jim's car he looked sideways at the house; but it was as solidly ordinary as it had looked at first: only the lights in the stairwell and front hall burned, casting an inviting rectangle of yellow onto the walk. That too seemed to speak to Peter Barnes, to say imagine the peace of lying down with your hands crossed on your chest, imagine sleeping under ice…

He ran all the way home.

11

"Lewis, you're already drunk," Sears said gruffly. "Don't make more of an ass of yourself."

"Sears," Lewis said, "it's a funny thing, but it's hard not to make an ass of yourself when you talk about stuff like this."

"That's a point. But for God's sake, stop drinking."

"You know, Sears," Lewis said. "I get the feeling our little decorums aren't going to be much good anymore."

Ricky asked him, "Do you want to stop meeting?"

"Well, what the hell are we? The Three Musketeers?"

"In a way. We're what's left. Plus Don, of course."

"Oh, Ricky." Lewis smiled. "The sweetest thing about you is that you're so damned loyal."

"Only to the things worth being loyal to," Ricky said, and sneezed loudly twice. "Excuse me. I ought to be home. Do you really want to give up the meetings?"

Lewis shoved his glass toward the middle of the table and slumped down in his chair. "I don't know. I suppose not I'd never get any of Sears's good cigars if we didn't meet twice a month. And now that we have a new member, well…" Just as Sears was about to burst out Lewis looked up at them and was as handsome as he'd ever been in his life. "And maybe I'd be scared not to meet. Maybe I believe everything you said, Ricky. I've had a couple of funny experiences since October-since the night Sears talked about Gregory Bate."

"So have I," Sears said.

"So have I," echoed Ricky. "Isn't that what we've been saying?"

"So I guess we should tough it out," Lewis said. "You guys are in another league intellectually from me, maybe this kid here is too, but I guess it's a hang together or hang separately kind of situation. Sometimes, out at my place, I get really spooked-like something is out there just counting the seconds until it can nail me. Like it nailed John."

"Do we believe in werewolves?" Ricky asked.

"No," Sears said, and Lewis shook his head.

"I don't either," said Don. "But there's something…" He paused, thinking, and looked up to see all three of the older men looking expectantly at him. "I don't have it worked out yet. It's just an idea. I'll think about it some more before I try to explain it."

"Well, the lights have been on for some time now," Sears said pointedly. "And we had a good story. Perhaps we've made some progress, but I don't see how. If the Bate brothers are in Milburn, I'd like to assume that they'll do as the ineffable Hardesty suggests, and move on when they're tired of us."

Don read the expression in Ricky's eyes and nodded.

"Wait" Ricky said. "Excuse me, Sears, but I sent Don out to see Nettie Dedham at the hospital."

"Oh, yes?" Sears was already magisterially bored.

"I went, yes," Don said. "I met the sheriff and Mr. Rowles there. We all had the same idea."

"To see if she'd say anything," Ricky said.

"She couldn't. She isn't able to." Don looked at Ricky. "You must have called the hospital."

"I did," Ricky said.

"But when the sheriff asked her if she had seen anyone on the day her sister died, she tried to say a name. It was obvious that that's what she was doing."

"And the name?" Sears demanded.

"What she said was just a garble of consonants-like Glngr. Glngr. She said it two or three times. Hardesty gave up-couldn't make any sense out of it."

"I don't suppose anyone could," Lewis said, glancing at Sears.

"Mr. Rowles took me aside out in the parking lot and said that he thought she was trying to say her brother's name. Stringer? Isn't that right?"

"Stringer?" Ricky said. He covered his eyes with the palm of a hand.

"I'm missing something," Don said. "Would somebody explain to me why that's so important?"

"I knew this was going to happen," Lewis said. "I knew it."

"Get a hold of yourself, Lewis," Sears ordered. "Don, we will have to discuss this among ourselves first. But I think that we owe you a story to match the one you told us. You will not hear it tonight, but after we've discussed it, I imagine that you will get the ultimate Chowder Society story."

"Then I want to ask another favor," Don said. "If you decide to tell it to me, could we have it at my uncle's house?"

He saw the reluctance pass through the three men; they looked suddenly older-even Lewis seemed frail.

"That may not be a bad idea," Ricky Hawthorne said. He looked like one vast cold wrapped in mustache and spotted bow tie. "A house of your uncle's was where it started for us." He managed to smile at Don.

"Yes. I think you'll hear the ultimate Chowder Society story."

"And may the Lord protect us until then," Lewis said.

"May He protect us afterward," Sears added.

12

Peter Barnes entered his parents' bedroom and sat on the bed, watching his mother brush her hair. She was in her distant, abstracted mood: for months now, she had alternated between this glacial coldness-cooking TV dinners and taking long walks by herself-and an intrusive maternalism. In that mood she gave him new sweaters, cooed over him at dinner and pestered him about his homework. In her maternal periods he often sensed that she was almost on the verge of crying: the weight of unshed tears hung in her voice and charged her gestures.

"What's for dinner tonight, mom?"

She tilted her head and looked at his reflection in the mirror for approximately a second. "Hot dogs and sauerkraut."

"Oh." Hot dogs were fine with Peter, but his father detested them.

"Is that what you wanted to ask, Peter?" She did not look at him this time, but kept her eyes on the reflection of her hand pulling the brush through her hair.

Peter had always been conscious that his mother was an exceptionally attractive woman-maybe not a fabulous beauty like Stella Hawthorne, but more than merely pretty all the same. She had a high, youthful blond attractiveness; she had always had an unencumbered look, like a sailboat one sees far out in a bay, nipping into the breeze. Men desired her, he knew, though he did not wish to think about that; on the night of the party for the actress, he had seen Lewis Benedikt caress his mother's knees. Until then he had blindly (he now thought) imagined that adulthood and marriage meant release from the passionate confusions of youth. But his mother and Lewis Benedikt could have been Jim Hardie and Penny Draeger; they looked a more natural couple than she and his father. And not long after the party he had felt his parents' marriage begin to unravel.

"No, not really," he said. "I like to watch you brushing your hair."

Christina Barnes froze, her hand lifted to the crown of her head; then brought it down in a smooth heavy stroke. She found his eyes again, then looked quickly, almost guiltily away.

"Who's going to come to your party tomorrow night?" he asked.

"Oh, just the usual people. Your father's friends. Ed and Sonny Venuti. A few other people. Ricky Hawthorne and his wife. Sears James."

"Will Mr. Benedikt be here?"

This time she deliberately met his eyes. "I don't know. Maybe. Why? Don't you like Lewis?"

"Sometimes I guess I do. I don't see him all that much."

"Nobody sees him all that much, darling," she said, lifting his mood a little. "Lewis is a recluse, unless you're a twenty-five-year-old girl."

"Wasn't he married once?"

She looked at him again, this time more sharply. "What's the point of all this, Peter? I'm trying to brush my hair."

"I know. I'm sorry." Peter nervously smoothed the counterpane with his hand.

"Well?"

"I guess I was just wondering if you were happy."

She laid down the brush on her dressing table, making its ivory back click against the wood. "Happy? Of course I am, sweetie. Now go downstairs and tell your father to get ready for dinner."

Peter left the bedroom and went downstairs to the small side room where his father was undoubtedly watching television. That was another sign that things were going wrong: Peter could not remember his father ever choosing to watch television at night before, but for months he had taken his briefcase into the television room, saying that he wanted to work on a few papers; minutes later the theme music of "Starsky and Hutch" or "Charlie's Angels" would come faintly through the closed door.

He peeked into the room, saw the Eames chair pulled up in front of the flickering screen-"The Brady Bunch"-the salted nuts on the bowl on the table, a pack of cigarettes and lighter beside them, but his father was not there. His briefcase, unopened, lay on the floor beside the Eames chair.

Out of the television room, then, with its images of lonely comfort, and down the hall to the kitchen. When Peter walked in, Walter Barnes, dressed in a brown suit and worn brown wingtip shoes, was just dropping two olives into a martini. "Peter, old scout," he said.

"Hi, dad. Mom says dinner's going to be ready soon."

"I wonder what that means. An hour-an hour and a half? What did she make anyhow, do you know?"

"It's going to be hot dogs."

"Whoof. Ugh. Christ. I guess I'll need a few of these, hey, Pete?" He raised his glass, smiled at Peter, and sipped.

"Oh, dad…"

"Yes?"

Peter stepped sideways, shoved his hands in his pockets, suddenly inarticulate. "Are you looking forward to your parry?"

"Sure," his father said. "It'll be a good time, Pete, you'll see. Everything's going to work out fine."

Walter Barnes began to walk out of the kitchen toward the television room, but some instinct made him look back at his son, who was spinning from side to side, hands still in his pockets, his face snagged with emotion. "Hey there, scout. Having trouble at school?"

"No," Peter said, shifting miserably: side to side, side to side.

"Come on with me."

They went down the hall, Peter hanging back. At the door to the television room, his father said, "Your friend Jim Hardie still hasn't come back, I hear."

"No." Peter started to sweat.

His father placed the martini on a mat and put himself heavily into the Eames chair. They both glanced at the screen. Most of the Brady children and their father were crawling around the furniture of their living room-a living room much like the Barnes's own-looking for a lost pet, a turtle or a kitten (or perhaps, since those Brady kids were cute little rascals, a rodent).

"His mother's worried sick," his father said, and popped a handful of macadamia nuts into his mouth. When those had gone down his throat, he said, "Eleanor's a nice woman. But she never understood that boy. You have any idea where he might have gone?"

"No," Peter said, looking to the rodent hunt as if for clues to the conduct of family life.

"Just took off in his car."

Peter nodded. He had walked over toward Montgomery Street on his way to school the day after his escape from the house and from halfway down the block had seen that the car was gone.

"Rollie Draeger's a bit relieved, is my guess," said his father. "Probably just good luck his daughter's not pregnant."

"Um hum."

"You wouldn't have any idea where Jim went?" His father glanced at him.

"No," Peter said, and risked a look in return.

"He didn't confide in you during one of your beer-drinking sessions?"

"No," Peter said unhappily.

"You must miss him," his father said. "Maybe you're even worried about him. Are you?"

"Yeah," Peter said, by now as close to tears as he sometimes thought his mother was.

"Well, don't be. A kid like that will always cause more trouble than he'll ever be in himself. And I'll tell you something-I know where he is."

Peter looked up at his father.

"He's in New York. Sure he is. He's on the run for some reason or other. And I wonder if he might not have had something to do with what happened to old Rea Dedham after all. Looks funny that he ran out, don't you think?"

"He didn't," Peter said. "He just didn't. He couldn't."

"Still, you're better off with a couple of old farts like us than with him, don't you think?" When Peter did not give him the agreement he expected, Walter Barnes reached out toward his son and touched his arm. "One thing you have to learn in this world, Pete. The troublemakers might look glamorous as hell, but you're better off steering clear of them. You stay with people like our friends, like the ones you'll be talking to at our party, and you'll be on your way. This is a hard enough world to get through without asking for trouble." He released Peter's arm. "Say, why don't you pull up a chair and watch TV a little while with me? Let's spend a little time together."

Peter sat down and pretended to watch the television. From time to time he heard the grinding of the snowplow, gradually working past their house and then continuing on in the direction of the square.

13

By the next day both atmospheres-internal and external-had changed. His mother was in neither of her moods, but moved happily through the house, vacuuming and dusting, talking on the telephone, listening to the radio. Peter, up in his room, listened to music interspersed with snow reports. The roads were so bad that school had been called off. His father had walked to the bank: from his bedroom window, Peter had seen his father setting off in hat, topcoat and rubber boots, looking small and Russian. Several other Russians, their neighbors, had joined him by the time he reached the end of the block. The snow reports repeated a monotonous theme: break out the snowmobiles, kids, eight inches last night and more predicted for the weekend, accident on Route 17 has stalled traffic between Damascus and Windsor… accident on Route 79 has stopped traffic between Oughuoga and Center Village… overturned camper van on Route 11 four miles north of Castle Creek… Omar Norris came by on the snowplow just before noon, burying two cars under an immense drift. After lunch his mother made him beat egg whites to a stiff froth. The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.

Alone again in his room he looked up Robinson, F, in the directory and dialed the number, his heart trying to bump the roof of his mouth. After two rings, someone picked up the receiver and immediately replaced it.

The radio brought disasters. A fifty-two-year-old man in Lester died of a heart attack while shoveling out his driveway; two children were killed when their mother's car struck a bridge abutment near Hillcrest. An old man in Stamford died of hypothermia-no money for the heating.

At six the snowplow again rattled past the house. By then Peter was in the television room, waiting for the news. His mother looked in, a blond head in a swirl of cooking orders: "Remember to change for dinner, Pete. Why don't you go all out and wear a tie?"

"Is anybody coming in this weather?" He pointed to the screen-a blur of falling snow, blocked traffic. Men with a stretcher carried the body of the hypothermia victim, seventy-six-year-old Elmore Vesey, out of a rotting snowbound shack.

"Sure. They don't live far away." Inexplicably happy, she sailed off.

His father came home gray-faced half an hour later, looked in and said, "Hiya, Pete. Okay?" and went upstairs to roll into a hot tub.

At seven his father joined him in the television room, martini in hand, cashews in the bowl. "Your mother says she'd like to see you in a tie. Since she's in a good mood, why not oblige her this once?"

"Okay," he said.

"Still no word from Jim Hardie?"

"No."

"Eleanor must be losing her mind with worry."

"I guess."

He went back up to his room and lay on his bed. Being in attendance at a party, answering all the familiar questions ("Looking forward to Cornell?"), walking around with a tray and pitchers of drinks, were what he felt least in the world like doing. He felt most like curling up in a blanket and staying in bed for as long as they'd let him. Then nothing could happen to him. The snow would build up around the house, the thermostats would click on and off, he would fall into great arcs of sleep…

At seven-thirty the bell rang, and he got up from bed. He heard his father opening the door, voices, drinks being offered: the arrivals were the Hawthornes and another man whose voice he did not recognize. Peter slid his shirt up over his head and replaced it with a clean one. Then he pulled a tie under the collar, knotted it, combed his hair with his fingers and left the bedroom.

When he reached the landing and was able to see the door, his father was hanging up coats in the guest closet. The stranger was a tall man in his thirties-thick blond hair, squarish friendly face, tweed jacket and blue shirt without a tie. No lawyer, Peter thought, "A writer," his mother said at that instant, her voice way up out of its normal register. "How interesting," and Peter winced.

"Here's our boy Pete," his father said, and all three guests looked up at him, the Hawthornes with smiles, the stranger merely with an appraising glance of interest. He shook their hands and wondered, taking Stella Hawthorne's hand, as he always did seeing her, how a woman that old managed to be as good-looking as anyone you saw in the movies. "Nice to see you, Peter," Ricky Hawthorne said, and gave him a brisk dry handshake. "You look a little beat."

"I'm okay," he said.

"And this is Don Wanderley, he's a writer, and he was the nephew of Mr. Wanderley," his mother said. The writer's handshake was firm and warm. "Oh, we must talk about your books. Peter, would you please go in the kitchen and get the ice ready?"

"You look sort of like your uncle," Peter said.

"Thank you."

"Pete, the ice."

Stella Hawthorne said, "On a night like this I think I want my drinks steamed, like clams."

His mother cut off his laugh-"Pete, the ice, please" -and then turned to Stella Hawthorne with a fast nervous grin. "No, the streets seem all right for the moment," he heard Ricky Hawthorne say to his father; he went down the hall into the kitchen and began cracking ice into a bowl. His mother's voice, too loud, carried all the way.

A moment later she was beside him, taking things from under the grill and peering into the oven. "Are the olives and rice crackers out?" He nodded. "Then get these on a tray and hand them around, please, Peter." They were egg rolls and chicken livers wrapped in bacon. He burned his fingers transferring them to a tray, and his mother crept up behind him and kissed the nape of his neck. "Peter, you're so sweet." Without having had a drink, she acted drunk. "Now, what do we have to do? Are the martinis ready? Then when you come back with the tray, come back in for the pitcher and put it on another tray with the glasses, will you? Your father'll help. Now. What do I have to do? Oh-mash up capers and anchovies to put in the pot. You look just lovely, Peter, I'm so glad you put on a tie."

The bell rang again: more familiar voices. Harlan Bautz, the dentist, and Lou Price, who looked like the villain of a gangster movie. Their wives, brassy and meek respectively.

He was passing the first tray around when the Venutis arrived. Sonny Venuti popped an egg roll in her mouth, said "Warmth!" and kissed him on the cheek. She looked pop-eyed and haggard. Ed Venuti, his father's partner, said, "Looking forward to Cornell, son?" and breathed gin in his face.

"Yes, sir."

But he was not listening. "God bless the Martoonerville Trolley," he said as his father put a filled glass in his hand.

When he offered the tray to Harlan Bautz, the dentist slapped his back and said, "Bet you can't wait to get to Cornell, hey, boy?"

"Yes, sir." He fled back into the kitchen.

His mother was spooning a greenish mixture into a steaming casserole. "Who just came?"

He told her.

"Just finish adding this goop and then put it back in the oven," she said, handing him the bowl. "I have to get out and say hello. Oh, I feel so festive tonight."

She left, and he was alone in the kitchen. He dropped the rest of the thick green substance into the casserole and twirled a spoon around in it. When he was putting it back into the oven, his father appeared and said, "Where's the drinks tray? I shouldn't have made so many martinis, we got a crowd of whiskey drinkers. Oh, I'll just take out the pitcher and use the other glasses in the dining room. Hey, the joint's jumping already, Pete. You ought to talk to that writer, he's an interesting fella, guess he writes chillers-I remember Edward telling me something about it. Interesting, no? I knew you'd have a good time if you spent some time with our friends. You are, aren't you?"

"What?" Peter closed the oven door.

"Having a good time."

"Sure."

"Okay. Get out there and talk to people." He shook his head as if in wonderment. "Boy. Your mother's all wound up. She's having a great time. Nice to see her like this again."

"Yes," Peter said, and drifted out to the living room, carrying a tray of canapes his mother had left behind.

There she was, "all wound up," as his father had said: almost as if literally wound up, talking rapidly through a cloud of exhaled smoke, darting from Sonny Venuti to pick up a bowl of black olives and offer them to Harlan Bautz.

"They say if this keeps up Milburn could be cut off entirely," Stella Hawthorne said, her voice lower and more listenable to than his mother's and Mrs. Venuti's. Perhaps for that reason, it stopped all conversation. "We only have that one snowplow, and the county's plow will be kept busy on the highway."

Lou Price, on the couch beside Sonny Venuti, said, "And look who's driving our plow. The council should never have let Omar Norris's wife talk them into it. Most of the time Omar's too boiled to see where he's going."

"Now, oh, Lou, now, that's the only work Omar Norris does all year round-and he came by here twice today!" His mother defended Omar Norris overbrightly: Peter saw her looking at the door, and knew that her febrile high spirits were caused by someone who had not arrived yet.

"He must be sleeping out in the boxcars these days," Lou Price said. "In boxcars or in his garage, if his wife lets him get that close. You want a guy like that running a two-ton snowplow past your car? He could run the damn thing on his breath."

The doorbell rang, and his mother nearly dropped her drink.

"I'll get it," Peter said, and went to the door.

It was Sears James. Beneath the wide brim of his hat, his face was worn and so white his cheeks looked almost blue. Then he said, "Hello, Peter," and looked normal again, taking off his hat and apologizing for being late.

For twenty minutes Peter took canapes around on trays, refilled drinks and evaded conversation. (Sonny Venuti, grabbing his cheek with two fingers: "I bet you can't wait to get away from this awful town and start chasing college girls, right, Pete?") Whenever he looked at his mother, she was in the middle of a sentence, her eyes darting to the front door. Lou Price was loudly explaining something about soybean futures to Harlan Bautz; Mrs. Bautz was boring Stella Hawthorne with advice about redecoration. ("I'd say, go rosewood.") Ed Venuti, Ricky Hawthorne and his father were talking off in a corner about the disappearance of Jim Hardie. Peter returned to the sterile peacefulness of the kitchen, loosened his tie and cradled his head on a counter spattered with green. Five minutes later the telephone rang. "No, don't bother, Walt, I'll get it," he heard his mother cry in the living room.

The kitchen extension stopped ringing a few seconds' later. She was on the phone in the television room. Peter looked at the white telephone on the kitchen wall. Maybe it was not what he thought; maybe it was Jim Hardie to say hey don't worry, man, I'm in the Apple… he had to know. Even if it was what he thought. He picked up the receiver: he would listen only for a second.

The voice was Lewis Benedikt's, and his heart folded.

"… can't come, no, Christina," Lewis was saying. "I just can't. My drive is six feet deep in snow."

"Someone's on the line," his mother said.

"Don't be paranoid," Lewis said. "Besides, Christina, it would be a waste of time for me to come out. You know."

"Pete? Is that you? Are you listening?"

Peter held his breath; did not hang up.

"Oh, Peter's not listening. Why would he?"

"Damn you, are you there?" His mother's voice: sharp as the buzz of a hornet.

"Christina, I'm sorry. We're still friends. Go back to your party and have a great time."

"You can be such a shallow creep," his mother said, and slammed down the phone. A second later, in shock, Peter also put down his receiver.

He stood on wobbly legs, almost certain of the meaning of what he had overheard. He blindly turned to the kitchen window. Footsteps. The door behind him opened and closed. Behind his own blank reflection-as drained as when he had looked into an empty room on Montgomery Street-was his mother's, her face an angry blur. "Did you get an earful, spy?" Then there was another reflection between them-it was like that for a moment, another pale blur sliding between his face and his mother's. It shifted closer, and Peter was looking at a small face not in reflection, but directly outside the window: an imploring, twisted childish face. The boy was begging him to come out. "Tell me, you little spy," his mother ordered.

Peter screamed; and jammed his fist in his mouth to stop the noise. He closed his eyes.

Then his mother's arms were around him and her voice was going, muttering apologies, the tears now not latent but warm on his neck. He could hear, above the noise his mother was making, the voice of Sears James declaiming: "Yes, Don came here to take possession of his house, but also to help us out with a little problem-a research problem." Then a muffled voice that might have been Sonny Venuti's. Sears replied, "We want him to look into the background of that Moore girl, the actress who disappeared." More muffled voices: mild surprise, mild doubt, mild curiosity. He took his fist out of his mouth.

"It's okay, mom," he said.

"Peter, I'm so sorry."

"I won't tell."

"It's not-Peter, it wasn't what you think. You can't let it upset you."

"I thought maybe it was Jim Hardie calling," he said.

The doorbell rang.

She loosened her grip on his neck. "Poor darling, with a crummy runaway friend and a psycho mother like me." She kissed the back of his head. "And I cried all over your clean shirt."

The bell rang again.

"Oh, there's one more," Christina Barnes said. "Your father will make the drinks. Let's get back to normal before we're seen in public again, okay?"

"It's someone you invited?"

"Why sure it is, Pete, who else could it be?"

"I don't know," he said, and looked at the window again. No one was there: only his mother's averted face and his own, glowing like pale candles in the glass. "Nobody."

She straightened up and wiped her eyes. "I'll get the food out of the oven. You better get in and say hello."

"Who is it?"

"Some friend of Sears and Ricky's."

He walked to the door and looked back, but she was already opening the oven door and reaching in, an ordinary woman getting the dinner ready for a party.

I don't know what's real and what isn't, he thought, and turning his back on her went out into the hall. The stranger, Mr. Wanderley's nephew, was talking near the living-room arch. "Well, what I'm interested in now, to tell the truth, is the difference between invention and reality. For example, did you happen to hear music a few days ago? A band, playing outside somewhere in town?"

"Why no," breathed Sonny Venuti. "Did you?"

Peter stopped dead just inside the arch and gaped at the writer.

"Hey, Pete," his father said. "I want you to meet your dinner partner."

"Oh, I wanted to sit next to this handsome young man," Sonny Venuti crooned, smiling at him popeyed.

"You're stuck with me," said Lou Price.

"Come on over here, scout," his father called.

He pulled himself away from Don Wanderley, who was looking at him curiously, and turned to his father. His mouth dried. His father was standing with his arm around a tall woman with a lovely fox-sharp face.

It was the face which had looked the wrong way through a telescope across a dark square and found him.

"Anna, this is my son Pete. Pete, Miss Mostyn."

Her eyes licked at him. He was conscious for a moment of standing halfway between the woman and Don Wanderley, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne looking on like spectators at a tennis match; but himself and the woman and Don Wanderley forming the points of a long narrow triangle like a burning-glass, and then her eyes moved over him again, and he was conscious only of the danger he was in.

"Oh, I think Peter and I will have lots to talk about," said Anna Mostyn.

From the journals of Don Wanderley

14

What was to have been my introduction to a wider Milburn community ended in a disastrous shambles.

Peter Barnes, a tall black-haired boy who looks both capable and sensitive, was the dropped bomb. He seemed merely uncommunicative at first-understandable in a seventeen-year-old playing servant at his parents' party. Flashes of warmth for the Hawthornes. He too responds to Stella. But underneath the distance was something else-something I gradually imagined was- panic? Despair? Apparently a friend of his disappeared under a cloud, and his parents evidently assumed that to be the cause of his moroseness. Yet it was more than that, and what I thought I saw in him was fear-the Chowder Society had either tuned me to this, or caused me mistakenly to project it. When I was making my pompous remarks to Sonny Venuti, Peter stopped in his tracks and stared at me; he really searched me with his eyes, and I had the idea that he wanted badly to talk to me-not about books. The startling thing was that I thought that he too had heard the Dr. Rabbitfoot music.

And if that's true- if that's true- then we are in the middle of Dr. Rabbitfoot's revenge. And all Milburn is about to blow up.

Oddly, it was something Anna Mostyn said that caused Peter to faint. He trembled when he first saw her: I am sure of that. He was afraid of her. Now Anna Mostyn is a woman not far short of beauty, even the awesome Stella Hawthorne sort; her eyes seem to go all the way back to Norfolk and Florence, where she says her ancestors came from. She has apparently made herself indispensable to Sears and Ricky, but her greatest gift is for merely being politely there, helpful when that is needed, as on the day of the funeral. She suggests kindness and sympathy and intelligence but does not overwhelm you with her excellence. She is discreet, quiet on the surface of things a supremely self-contained, self-possessed young woman. She really is remarkably unobtrusive. Yet she is sensual in an inexplicably unsettling way. She seems cold, sensually cold: it is a self-referring, self-pleasing sensuality.

I saw her fix Peter Barnes with this challenge for a moment during dinner. He had been staring at his plate, forcing his father into yet more bluster and bonhomie, and annoying his mother; he never looked at Anna Mostyn, though he was sitting next to her. The other guests ignored him and chattered away about the weather. Peter was burning to get away from the table. Anna took his chin in her hand, and I knew the sort of look he was getting. Then she said to him very quietly that she wanted some of the rooms of her new house repainted, and she thought that he and one or two of his school friends might like to come to her house to do it. He swooned. That old-fashioned word fits perfectly. He fainted, passed out, pitched forward- swooned. I thought at first that he'd had a fit; so did most other people present. Stella Hawthorne calmed us down, helped Peter off his chair, and his father took him upstairs. Dinner ended shortly afterward.

And now I notice this for the first time: Alma Mobley. Anna Mostyn. The initials, the great similarity of the names. Am I at a point where I can afford to call anything coincidental "a mere coincidence"? She is not like Alma Mobley in any way; yet she is like her.

And I know how. It is their air of timelessness: but where Alma would have flown past the Plaza Hotel in the twenties, Anna Mostyn would have been inside, smiling at the antics of men with flasks in their pockets, men cavorting, talking about new cars and the stock market, doing their best to knock her dead.

Tonight I am going to take the pages of the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel down to the hotel's incinerator and burn them.

Part Three: The Coon Hunt

But the civilized human spirit, whether one calls

it bourgeois or merely leaves it at civilized,

cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny.

-Dr Faustus, Thomas Mann

I - Eva Galli and the Manitou

It was surely October

On this very night of last year

That I journeyed-I journeyed down here-

That I brought a dread burden down here-

Ah, what demon has tempted me here?

***

"Ulalume,"

-Edgar Allen Poe

Lewis Benedikt

1

Two days of a shift in the weather: the snow ceased, and the sun returned. It was like two days of a wayward Indian summer. The temperature rose above freezing for the first time in a month and a half; the town square turned into a soupy marsh even the pigeons avoided; and as the snows melted, the river-grayer and faster than on the day John Jaffrey stepped off the bridge-came nearly up to its banks. For the first time in five years Walt Hardesty and his deputies, aided by the fire volunteers, piled sandbags along the banks to prevent a flood. Hardesty kept on his Wild West costume all during the heavy hard work of carrying the sandbags from the truck, but a deputy named Leon Churchill stripped to his waist and thought maybe the worst of it was over until the bitter days of February and March.

Metaphorically, Milburn people in general took off their shirts. Omar Norris happily went back on the bottle full time, and when his wife kicked him out of the house, returned to his boxcar without a qualm and prayed into the neck of a half-empty fifth that the heavy snow was gone for good. The town relaxed during these days of temporary, warming relief. Walter Barnes wore a gaudy pink-and-blue-striped shirt to the bank, and for eight hours felt deliciously unbankerlike; Sears and Ricky made timeworn jokes about Elmer Scales suing the weatherman for inconstancy. For two days lunchtimes at the Village Pump were crowded with strangers out for drives. Clark Mulligan's business doubled during the final two days of his Vincent Price double feature, and he held the pictures over for another week. The gutters ran with black water; if you weren't careful, cars dodging too close to the curbs could drench you from the neck down. Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie's former girlfriend, found a new man, a stranger with a shaven head and dark glasses who said to call him G and was exciting and mysterious and came from nowhere and said he was a sailor-heady stuff for Penny. In the sunlight, with the sound of water everywhere, Milburn was a spacious town. People pulled on rubber boots to keep their shoes dry and went for walks. Milly Sheehan hired a boy from down the block to hang her storm windows and the boy said, "Gee, Mrs. Sheehan, maybe you won't even need these until Christmas!" Stella Hawthorne, lying in a scented tub, decided that it was time to send Harold Sims back to the spinster librarians who would be impressed by him: she'd rather have her hair done. Thus for two days resolutions were made, long hikes were taken; men did not resent getting out onto the highway in the morning and driving to their offices; in this false spring, spirits lifted.

But Eleanor Hardie grew exhausted with worry and polished the hotel's banisters and counters twice in one day, and John Jaffrey and Edward Wanderley and the others lay underground, and Nettie Dedham was taken off to an institution still mouthing the only two syllables she would ever wish to say; and Elmer Scales's gaunt body thinned down even further as he sat up with the shotgun across his lap. The sun went down earlier each evening, and at night Milburn contracted and froze. The houses seemed to draw together; the streets which were spangled by day darkened, seemed to narrow to oxcart width; the black sky clamped down. The three old men of the Chowder Society forgot their feeble jokes and trekked through bad dreams. Two spacious houses stood ominously dark; the house on Montgomery Street contained horrors, which flickered and shifted from room to room, from floor to floor; in Edward Wanderley's old house on Haven Lane, all that walked was mystery: and for Don Wanderley, when he would see it, the mystery would lead to Panama City, Florida, and a little girl who said "I am you."

Lewis spent the first of these days shoveling out his drive, deliberately overexerting himself and working so hard that he sweated through the running suit and khaki jacket he wore; by noon his arms and back were aching as if he'd never worked in his life. After lunch he napped for half an hour, showered, and forced himself to finish the job. He shoveled the last of it out of his drive-by then the snow was damp and much heavier than when he'd started-at six-thirty. Lewis went in, having created what looked like a mountain range down the side of his drive, showered again, took his telephone off the hook and consumed four bottles of beer and two hamburgers. He did not think he would be able to get up the stairs to bed. When he made it into his bedroom, he painfully removed his clothes, dropped them on the floor, and fell onto his blankets, instantly asleep.

He was never sure whether this was a dream: in the night he heard a dreadful noise, the sound of the wind blowing all that snow back over his drive. It seemed like wakefulness; and it seemed too that he heard another sound-a sound like music blown on the wind. He thought: I'm dreaming this. But his muscles ached and wobbled as he got out of bed, and his head spun. He went to his window, which looked down the side of the house onto the roof of the old stables and the first third of his drive. He saw a three-quarter moon hanging above desolate trees. The next thing he saw was so much like a scene from one of Ricky's odder movies that afterward he knew that he could not actually have witnessed it. The wind blew, as he had feared, and gauzy sheets of snow drifted onto his drive; everything was starkly black and white. A man dressed in minstrel's clothing stood on top of the snow-mountain going down to the road. A saxophone white as his eyes hung from his mouth. As Lewis looked, not even trying to force his foggy mind to make sense of this vision, the musician blew a few half-audible bars, lowered the saxophone and winked. His skin seemingly as black as the sky, he stood weightlessly on snow into which he should have sunk up to his waist. Not one of your old spirits, Lewis, jealous of your tenancy, come for your blackbirds and snowdrops; go back to bed and dream in peace. But still stupid with exhaustion, he watched on and the figure changed-it was John Jaffrey grinning at him from the impossible perch, shoe-blacking spread on his face and hands: white eyes, white teeth. Lewis stumbled back into bed.

After he had steamed most of the soreness out of his muscles in a long hot shower Lewis went downstairs and looked out of his dining-room windows with astonishment. Most of the snow had already disappeared from the trees in front of his house, leaving them wet and shiny. Black pools of water lay over the brick court which extended from his house to the old stables. The range of snow down the drive was only half its height of yesterday. The shift in weather had held. The sky was cloudless and blue. Lewis looked a second time at the diminished range of snow beside his drive and shook his head: another dream. Edward's nephew had planted that picture in his mind, with his account of the leading character in his unwritten book, the black carnival-bandleader with the funny name. He has us dreaming his books for him, he thought, and smiled.

He went to the entry hall, kicked off his loafers and put on his boots.

Pulling his khaki jacket over his shoulders, he went back through the house to the kitchen. Lewis put a kettle full of cold water on a burner and looked through the kitchen window. Like the trees in front of the house, his woods shone and glistened; snow lay damp and squashy on the lawn, whiter and deeper beneath the wet trees further away. He would take his walk while the kettle boiled, and then come back and have breakfast.

Outside, warmth surprised him; and more than that, the warm, almost laundered-feeling air seemed a protection, a cocoon of safety. The menacing suggestiveness of his woods had been rinsed away-shining with their beautiful muted colors of tree bark and lichen, with the mushy snow beneath like a swipe of watercolor, Lewis's woods had none of the hard-edged illustrationlike quality he had seen in them before.

He took his path backward again, loafing along and breathing deeply; he smelled the mulch of wet leaves beneath the snow. Feeling youthful and healthy, his chest full of delicate air, he regretted drinking too much at Sears's house. It was foolish to blame himself for Freddy Robinson's death; as for whispers of his name, hadn't he heard those all his life? It was snow falling from a branch-meaningless noise to which his guilty soul gave meaning.

He needed a woman's company, a woman's conversation. Now that it was finally over with Christina Barnes, he could invite Annie, the blond waitress from Humphrey's, out to his house for a good dinner and let her talk to him about painters and books. Her intelligent conversation would be an exorcism of the past month's worries; maybe he would invite Anni too, and they both would talk about painters and books. He'd stumble a bit, trying to keep up, but he would learn something.

And then he thought that maybe he'd get Stella Hawthorne away from Ricky for an hour or two and just luxuriate in the fact of that astonishing face and bristling personality sitting across the table from him.

Blissful, Lewis turned around and realized why he had always run his path in the opposite direction: on this long return stretch with its two angled sections, you were nearly at the house before you could see it. Going the other way preserved for as long as possible his illusion that he was the only white man on a densely wooded continent. He was surrounded by quiet trees and dripping water, by white sunshine.

There were two points that destroyed Lewis's illusion of being Daniel Boone striking out through alien wilderness, and he reached the first of these after ten minutes of walking. Midpoint on his walk: he saw the tubular top half of a yellow oil truck, its lower section cut off by the curve of the long field, steaming toward Binghamton. So much for Daniel Boone. He turned down the straight path to the kitchen door.

By now he was hungry, and glad that he had remembered to buy bacon and eggs the last time he was in Milburn. He had coffee beans to grind, stoneground bread to toast, tomatoes to grill. After breakfast he'd call the girls and invite them out for dinner and let them tell him what books to read: Stella would wait.

He was halfway home when he began to smell food. Puzzled, he cocked his head. Unmistakably, it was the smell of breakfast-the breakfast he had just imagined. Coffee, bacon, eggs. Uh oh, he thought, Christina. After Walter had left for work and Peter for school, she had climbed into the station wagon and come out for a scene. She still had a key to the back door.

Soon he was close enough to see the house through the last of the trees, and the breakfast smells were stronger. His boots heavy, he trudged forward, thinking of what he could say to Christina. It would be difficult, especially if she were affecting a meek repentant mood, as the breakfast odors seemed to prove she was… then, still in the last section of the woods, he realized that her car was not drawn up before the garage.

And that was where she always put her car: the parking area was out of sight of the road, near the back door: in fact it was where everyone parked. But not only was Christina's station wagon not drawn up on the puddly brick court, no car at all was there.

He stopped walking and looked carefully at the gray stone height of the house. Only a few trees stood in his way, and the size of the house made them insignificant -thin stalks. For a moment the house looked even larger than he knew it was.

As a drift of breeze brought the odors of coffee and bacon to him, Lewis looked at his house as if for the first time: an architect's copy of an illustrator's idea of a Scottish castle, a folly of a kind, the building too appeared to glisten, as the wet trees had. It was the end of a quest in a story. Lewis with his soaking boots and hungry belly looked at the house with a frozen heart. The windows glittered in their casements.

It was the castle of a dead, not a captive, princess.

Slowly Lewis approached the house and left the temporary safety of the woods. He crossed the brick court where the car should have been. The odors of breakfast were maddeningly strong. Lewis cautiously opened the kitchen door; he entered.

The kitchen was empty, but not undisturbed. Signs of occupation and activity lay everywhere. Two plates were laid out on the kitchen table-his best china. Polished silver had been set beside the plates. Two candles, not lighted, stood in silver holders near the plates. A can of frozen orange juice had been set out before his blender. Lewis turned to the stove: empty pans sat atop unlighted burners. The smell of cooking was overwhelming. His kettle whistled, and he turned it off.

Two slices of bread had been placed beside the toaster.

"Christina?" he called, thinking-not very rationally -that it still might be a practical joke. There was no answer.

He turned back to the stove and sniffed the air over the pans. Bacon. Eggs in butter. Superstitiously he touched the cold iron.

The dining room was just as he had left it; and when he went into the living room, that too was undisturbed. He picked up a book on the arm of a chair and looked at it quizzically, though he had put it there the night before. He stood in the living room for a moment, here where no one had come, smelling a breakfast no one had cooked, as if the room were a refuge. "Christina?" he called. "Anybody?"

Upstairs a familiar door clicked shut.

"Hello?"

Lewis moved to the base of the stairs and looked up. "Who's there?" Sunlight drifted in from a window on the landing; he saw dust motes spinning lazily above the stairs. The house was noiseless; for the first time its vast size seemed a threat. Lewis cleared his throat.

"Who's there?"

After a long moment he began to climb the stairs. When he reached the landing he looked out of the little window set in its casement-sunlight, dripping trees- and continued on to the top.

Here the hallway was light, silent, empty. Lewis's bedroom was on the right, two old rooms with the adjoining wall removed. One of the old doors had been sealed off, the other replaced with an elaborately grained slab of monkeywood hand-fashioned into a door. With its heavy brass knob, Lewis's bedroom door closed with a distinctively chunky sound, and that was the sound he had heard.

Lewis stood before the door, unable to make himself open it. He cleared his throat again. He could see the double expanse of his bedroom, the carpet, his slippers beside the bed, his pajamas over a chair, the windows from which he had looked that morning. And he could see the bed. What made him afraid to open the door was that on the bed he envisioned the fourteen years' dead body of his wife. He raised his hand to knock; he held his fist an inch from the door; lowered it again. Lewis touched the doorknob.

He forced himself to turn the heavy knob. The lock disengaged. Lewis closed his eyes and pushed.

He opened them to hazy sunlight from the long windows opposite the door; an edge of a chair, hung with blue-striped pajamas; the reek of rotting flesh.

Welcome, Lewis.

Lewis bravely stepped around the door and into the pool of early light that was his bedroom. He looked at the empty bed. The foul odor dissipated as quickly as it had come. Now he could smell only the cut flowers on the table before the window. He went to the bed and hesitantly touched the bottom sheet, which was warm.

A minute later he was downstairs holding the telephone. "Otto. Are you afraid of the game wardens?"

"Ach, Lewis. They run when they see me. On a day like this you want to go out with the dogs? Come for schnapps instead."

"Then we go out," Lewis said. "Please."

2

Peter walked out of his homeroom when the bell rang and went down the corridor to his locker. While the rest of the school pushed past to various parts of the building and most of his class filed into Miller's room for history, he pretended to search for a book. Tony Drexler, a friend of his, loitered beside him for unbearable seconds and finally asked, "Heard from Jim Hardie yet?"

"No," Peter said, burying himself deeper in his locker.

"I bet he's in Greenwich Village already."

"Yeah."

"Time to get to History. You read the chapter?"

"No."

"Bullshit," Drexler laughed. "See you there."

Peter nodded. Not long after he was alone. Leaving his books in his locker but taking his coat, he slammed the metal panel shut and ran down the hall to the bathroom. He shut himself in a toilet and waited for the first period bell to ring.

Ten minutes later he peeked out of the bathroom door. The hallway was empty, and he raced down the corridor. Then he continued unseen down the stairs and out the door.

A hundred yards off to the side, a first-period gym class sweated over calisthenics on the muddy field; two girls were already doing punishment laps around the track. Nobody saw him: school was already deep in its round of self-enclosed activity, marching to the sound of bells.

A block away on School Road, Peter turned off into a sidestreet and from there zigzagged through town, avoiding the square and the shopping district, until he reached Underhill Road, which led to Route 17. He jogged down Underhill Road for half a mile, by now well out of town and in sight only of bare fields ending in stands of trees.

When the highway came in sight, he walked across a squelchy knoll and climbed over a double strip of thick aluminum nailed to a series of white posts. Peter ran across the lanes to the median, climbed another aluminum fence, waited for a break in the traffic and then ran across to the other side of the highway. Then he held out his arm, thumb extended, and began to walk backward down the highway.

He had to see Lewis: he had to talk to Lewis about his mother.

From the bottom of his mind floated the image of himself leaping on Lewis, swinging at him with his fists, battering at the handsome face…

But then came the opposite image of Lewis laughing, Lewis telling him not to worry about anything, that he had not come back from Spain to have affairs with people's mothers.

If Lewis said that, he could tell him about Jim Hardie.

Peter had been hitchhiking for fifteen minutes when a blue car finally pulled over to the side of the road. The middle-aged man behind the wheel leaned sideways and opened the passenger door. "Where you going, son?" He was a tubby man in a wrinkled gray suit with a green necktie knotted too tightly. Advertising leaflets of some kind littered the back seat. "Just down the road six or seven miles," Peter said. "I'll tell you when we get close." He got in.

"This is against my principles," the man said, rolling away.

"Pardon?"

"Against my principles. Hitchhiking is pretty dangerous, especially for good-looking kids like you. I don't think you should do it."

Peter laughed out loud, startling both the driver and himself.

The man stopped at the end of Lewis's drive, but would not leave without giving him more advice. "Listen, son. You never know who you're going to meet out on these roads. Could be any kind of pervert." He grabbed Peter's arm just as the boy was opening the door.

"Promise me you won't do it again. Promise me, son."

"Okay, I promise," Peter said.

"The Lord knows you made that promise." The man released Peter's arm, and the boy scrambled out of the car. "Hold on, son, wait up. Just a sec." Peter fidgeted by the side of the car, shifting on his feet, while the man leaned over and picked up one of the leaflets on the back seat. "This will help you, son. Read it and keep it. It's got an answer in it."

"An answer?"

"That's right. Show it to your friends." He handed Peter a cheaply printed pamphlet: The Watchtower.

The driver picked up speed on the highway; Peter shoved the little magazine in his pocket and turned around to go up Lewis's drive.

The drive had been pointed out to him, but he had never seen Lewis's house-never seen more of it than the gray peaks which could be glimpsed from the highway. As he began to walk up the drive, these peaks disappeared. The drifted snow had melted, and the drive shone, catching the sun at a hundred mirrorlike points. Seeing the top of the house from the road, Peter had never recognized how far the house sat from the highway, how enclosed it was by trees. When he reached the first curve of the drive, he was able partially to see the house between their trunks, and for the first time he began to question what he was doing.

He came closer. A smaller extension of the drive curved off to the front of the house, which looked as long as a city block. Faceted windows threw back the light. The major section of the drive trailed around the side of the house and ended at a brick courtyard flanked by what looked to Peter like stables-he saw only a corner of these. He could not imagine himself entering such an imposing place: it looked like you could wander a week in it without finding your way out. This evidence of Lewis's separateness, his otherness, put all of Peter's plans in doubt.

Going in there seemed ominously like going into the silent house on Montgomery Street.

Peter walked around to the rear of the building, trying to relate this massive grandeur to what he thought of Lewis. For Peter, who knew nothing of the house's history, it seemed regal: it demanded a different conception of its owner. Still, the rear of the house was better: a door on a brick court, the homely wooden fronts of the stables, this was at a level with which he was more comfortable. He had just noticed the paths leading into the woods when he heard a voice speaking in his mind.

Imagine Lewis in bed with your mother, Peter. Imagine him lying on top of her.

"No," he whispered.

Imagine how she looks moving under him naked, Peter. Imagine-

Peter froze and the voice ceased simultaneously. A car had turned into the drive from the highway. Lewis had come home. Peter thought for a second if he should wait exposed in the courtyard for Lewis to see him as he drove in, and then the car shifted up and was too near the house and he could not bear to see Lewis while the echo of the voice still hung in his mind, and he ran to the side of the stables and crouched down. His mother's station wagon rolled into the courtyard behind the house.

Peter groaned softly, and heard laughter whispering along the painted boards of the old stables.

He flattened himself out on the snow and looked through the gnarled stalks of a rosebush as his mother got out of the station wagon. Her face was drawn, pale with concentrated feeling-a taut angry expression he had never seen. As he watched from beside the stables, she leaned back into the car and tapped the horn twice. Then she straightened up, walked around the front of the car, skirted the puddles on the flat red bricks and went up to the little door in the rear of the house. He thought she would knock, but she dug in her bag for a moment, took out a key and let herself in. He heard her call Lewis's name.

3

Lewis steered the Morgan around a black pool on the rutted drive which led to the back of the cheese factory. This was a bungalow-sized square wooden building Otto had built himself in a valley outside Afton, below a range of wooded hills. Dogs yapped in the kennels to the side of the factory. Lewis parked his car just outside the platform that served as Otto's loading bay, jumped up onto the platform, swung open the metal doors and went into the factory. He inhaled the pervasive odor of curdled milk.

"Lew-iss!" Otto stood in diffuse light on the other side of the little factory surrounded by white machinery, supervising while cheese was poured into round flat wooden molds. As each mold was filled, Otto's son, Karl, took it to the weighing machine, recorded its weight and the mold number, and then stacked it in a corner. Otto said something to Karl and then came across the wooden floor to grasp Lewis's hand. "How good to see you, my friend. But Lew-iss, you look so got-awful tired! You need some of my homemade schnapps."

"And you look busy," Lewis said. "But I'd be grateful for the schnapps."

"Busy, don't worry about busy. Karl is handling everything now, I should worry about Karl? He is a good cheesemaker. Almost as good as me."

Lewis smiled and Otto slapped him on the back and lumbered off to his office, a small enclosure near the loading bay. Otto sank down in his ancient chair behind the desk, making the springs creak; Lewis across the desk from him. "Now, my friend." Otto bent over and removed a decanter and two thimble glasses from a drawer. "Now we have a good drink. To make your cheeks red again." He tipped liquid from the decanter into the glasses.

The liquor burned Lewis's throat, but tasted like a distillation of massed flowers. "Delicious."

"Of course it is delicious. I make it myself. I suppose you brought your gun, Lew-iss?"

Lewis nodded.

"So. I thought you were the kind of friend who comes into my office and drinks my schnapps and eats my beautiful new cheese"-Otto pushed himself out of his chair and went the short distance to a low refrigerator -"but all the time thinks only about going out and shooting something." He placed a block of cheese veined with wine down before Lewis and cut off sections with his knife. This was one of the specialty cheeses Otto made to sell under his own name; the wheels of cheddar went to a combine. "Now tell me. Am I right?"

"You're right."

"I thought so. But it is fine, Lew-iss. I bought a new dog. Very good dog. This dog can see two-three miles- can smell for ten! Pretty soon I think I give this dog Karl's job."

The winy cheese was as good as Otto's schnapps. "Do you think it might be too wet to take a dog out?"

"No, no. Under those big trees it won't be so wet. You and me, we'll find some animal. Maybe even a fox, huh?"

"And you're not afraid of the game warden?"

"No! They run when they see me. They say, uh uh, here is that crazy old German-with a gun yet!"

Listening to Otto Gruebe's buffoonery, sitting in his office with a fresh glass of the powerful brandy and his mouth full of intricate tastes, Lewis thought that Otto represented a kind of alternative Chowder Society- a less complicated, but equally valuable friendship.

"Let's go out and see that dog," he said.

"Let's see the dog, hey? Lew-iss, when you see my new dog, you will go down on your knees and propose marriage to her."

Both men put on their coats and left the office. Outside, Lewis noticed a tall skinny boy of roughly Peter Barnes's age up on the loading bay. He wore a purple shirt and tight jeans, and he was piling up the heavy molds for pickup. He stared at Lewis for a moment, then ducked his head and smiled.

As they walked toward the kennels Lewis said, "You hired a new boy?"

"Yes. You saw him? He was the poor boy who found the body of the old lady who kept the horses. She lived near you."

"Rea Dedham," Lewis said. When he glanced over his shoulder, the boy was still looking at him, half-smiling; Lewis swallowed and turned away.

"Ya. He was very disturbed, and he could not stand to live near there anymore, he is a very sensitive boy, Lew-iss, and so he asked me for a job and got a room in Afton. So I gave him a broom and let him clean the machinery and stack the cheese. It is good until after Christmas, then we cannot afford him so much anymore."

Rea Dedham; Edward and John; it pursued him even here.

Otto let the new dog out of its kennel, and was hunkering down beside it, rubbing his hands up and down its coat. It was a hound, lean and gray with muscular shoulders and haunches; the bitch did not yip like the other dogs or leap around with joy to be out of the kennel, but stood attentively beside Otto, looking about with alert blue eyes. Lewis too bent to pet it, and the hound accepted his hand and sniffed his boots. "This is Flossie," Otto said. "What a dog, hey? What a beauty you are, my Flossie. Shall we take you out now for a liddle while, my Flossie?"

For the first time the bitch showed animation, tilting its head and swishing its tail. The well-schooled animal, Otto jug-eared and happy beside it, the nearness of the trees and the pervasive odors of cheesemaking, all of this seemed to swing Lewis in an arc away from the blue-jeaned boy behind him and the Chowder Society which lurked behind the boy, and he said, "Otto, I want to tell you a story."

"Ya? Good. Tell me, Lew-iss."

"I want to tell you about how my wife died."

Otto cocked his head and for a moment absurdly resembled the hound kneeling before him. "Ya. Good." He nodded, and reflectively ran a finger around the base of the hound's ears. "You can tell me when we go up in the woods for an hour or two, hey? I'm glad, Lew-iss. I'm glad."

Lewis and Otto called what they did when they went out with rifles and a dog coon-hunting, and Otto chortled about the possibility of seeing a fox, but it had been at least a year since they had shot anything. The rifles and the dog were chiefly an excuse to go rambling through the long wood which lay above the cheese factory-for Lewis, it was a sportier version of his morning runs. Sometimes they shot off their guns, sometimes one of the dogs treed something: Lewis might have tried to shoot it, but at least half the time Otto looked at the banded, angry animal up on the branch of a tree and laughed. "Come on, Lew-iss, this one is too pretty. Let's find an ugly one."

Lewis suspected that if they tried anything like that this time, they'd have to clear it with Flossie first. The sleek little animal was wholly businesslike. She did not go after birds or squirrels like half the other dogs, but padded along in front of them, tilting her head from side to side, her tail switching. "Flossie is going to make us work," he said.

"Ya. I paid two hundred dollars to look like a fool in front of a dog, hey?"

Once they were up the valley and into the trees Lewis felt his tension begin to leave him. Otto was showing off the dog, whistling to make it go out on a wide tangent, whistling again to call it back.

Now they were moving through thick woods. As Otto had predicted, it was colder and dryer up here than in the valley. In exposed territory melting snow made rivulets, and marshy ground beneath the remaining snow sucked at their boots, but under a curtain of conifers it was as if the thaw had never come. Lewis lost sight of Otto for ten minutes at a time, then caught flashes of his red jacket between green fir needles and heard him communicating with the dog. Lewis lifted his Remington to his shoulder and sighted down on a pine cone; the dog switched and skirmished up ahead, looking for a scent.

Half an hour later, when she found one, Otto was too tired to follow it. The dog began baying, and streaked off to their right. Otto lowered his blunderbuss and said, "Ach, let it go, Flossie." The dog whimpered, turned around to stare disbelievingly at the two men: What are you clowns doing, anyhow? Then it lowered its tail and walked back. Ten yards off, it sat down and began licking its hindquarters.

"Flossie has given up on us," Otto said. "We are not in her class. Have a liddle drink." He offered Lewis a flask. "I think we need to be warm, hey, Lewis?"

"Can you build a fire around here?"

"Sure I can. I saw a liddle deadfall back a teeny bit -lots of dry wood in there. You just scoop a hole in the snow, get your tinder and presto. Fire."

Seeing that the hill came to its rise only twenty yards above them, Lewis climbed up while Otto went back to the deadfall to collect dry wood and tinder. Flossie, no longer interested, watched him stumble upward toward the ridge.

He did not expect what he found: they had come farther than he had thought and below him, down a long forested slope, was a streak of highway. On the other side of the highway the woods resumed again, but the few cars traveling the highway were a despoliation. They ruined his fragile mood of well-being.

And then it was as if Milburn had reached out even here, to point at him on the crest of a wooded hill: one of the cars moving rapidly down the highway was Stella Hawthorne's. "Oh, God," Lewis muttered, watching Stella's Volvo cross through the space directly before him. It, and the woman driving it, brought the night and the morning back to him. He might as well have pitched a tent on the square; even out in the woods, Milburn whispered behind him. Stella's car traveled up the road; her turn indicator flashed, and she pulled onto the shoulder. A moment later another car pulled in beside her. A man got out and went around to Stella's window and rapped until she opened her door.

Lewis turned away and went back down the slippery hill to Otto.

He had already started a little fire. At the bottom of a hole scooped in the snow, on a bed of stones, a flame licked at tinder. Otto fed it a larger twig, then another, then a handful, and the single flame grew into a dozen. Above this Otto built a foot-high tepee of sticks. "Now, Lew-iss," he said, "warm your hands."

"Any schnapps left?" Lewis took the flask and joined Otto on a fallen log dusted of its snow. Otto dug in his pockets and withdrew a homemade sausage sliced neatly in half. He gave half to Lewis, and bit into his own half. The fire leaped up into the tepee and warmed Lewis's ankles through his boots. He extended his hands and feet and around a bit of sausage said, "One night Linda and I went to a dinner in one of the suites of the hotel I owned. Linda didn't live through the night. Otto, I think the same thing that got my wife is after me."

4

Peter stood up beside the stables, crossed the court and peeked in the kitchen window. Pans on the stove, a round table laid for two: his mother had come for breakfast. He heard her footsteps as she went further into the house, obviously looking for Lewis Benedikt. What would she do when she found out he wasn't there?

Of course she isn't in danger, he told himself: this isn't her house. She can't be in danger. She'll find out Lewis isn't here and then she'll go back home. But it was too much like the other time, he looking in a window and waiting at a door while another person prowled within an empty house. She'll just go home.

He touched the door, expecting it to be locked; but it swung open an inch.

This time he would not go in. He was afraid of too much-only part of it was the possibility of meeting his mother in the house and having to invent an explanation for his being there.

But he could do that. He could say that he wanted to talk to Lewis about-about anything. Cornell University. Fraternities.

He saw Jim Hardie's crushed head sliding down a mottled wall.

Peter took his hand off the door and stepped down into the brick court. He took several steps backward, looking up at the rear of the house. It was a fantasy anyhow: his mother's angry face had made it clear that she would not accept any fairytales about advice on fraternities.

He backed up further, the fortresslike back of Lewis's house seeming for a moment almost to lean over and follow him. A curtain twitched, and Peter was unable to move further. Someone was behind the curtain, someone not his mother. He could see only white fingers holding back the fabric. Peter wanted to run, but his legs would not move.

The figure with white hands was lowering its face to the glass and grinning down at him. It was Jim Hardie.

Inside the house, his mother screamed.

Peter's legs unlocked, and he ran across the court and through the back door.

He went rapidly through the kitchen and found himself in a dining room. Through a wide doorway he could see living-room furniture, light coming in through the front windows. "Mom!" He ran into the living room. Two leather couches flanked a fireplace, antique weapons hung on one wall. "Mom!"

Jim Hardie walked into the room, smiling. He showed the palms of his hands, demonstrating to Peter that his intentions were not violent. "Hi," he said, but the voice was not Jim's. It was not the voice of any human being.

"You're dead," Peter said.

"It's funny about that," the Hardie-thing replied. "You don't really feel that way after it happens. You don't even feel pain, Pete. It feels almost good. No, it definitely feels pretty good. And of course there's nothing left to worry about. That's a big plus."

"What did you do to my mother?"

"Oh, she's fine. He's upstairs with her now. You can't go up there. I'm supposed to talk to you. Hi!"

Peter looked wildly at the wall of spears and pikes, but it was too far away. "You don't even exist," he shouted, almost crying. "They killed you." He pulled a lamp from a table beside one of the couches.

"It's hard to say," Jim said. "You can't say I don't exist, because here I am. Did I say Hi yet? I'm supposed to say that. Let's-"

Peter threw the lamp at the Hardie-thing's chest as hard as he could.

It went on talking for the seconds the lamp was in the air."-sit down and-"

The lamp exploded it into a shower of lights like sparks and crashed into the wall.

Peter ran down the length of the living room, almost sobbing with impatience. At the room's other end he passed through an arch, and his feet skidded on black and white tiles. To his right was the massive front door, to his left a carpeted staircase. Peter ran up the stairs.

When he reached the first landing he stopped, seeing that the staircase continued. Down at the other end of the gallerylike hall, he could see the foot of another staircase, which evidently led to another area of the house. "Mom!"

Then he heard a whimpering noise, very near. He moved to Lewis's monkeywood door and opened it- his mother made another strangled whimpering noise. Peter ran into the room.

And stopped. The man from Anna Mostyn's house stood near a large bed that Peter knew must have been Lewis's. Striped pajamas hung from a chair. The man wore the dark glasses and knit cap. His hands were around Christina Barnes's neck. "Master Barnes," he said. "How you young people get around. And how you poke your charming noses into other people's business. You'll be needing the ferule, I'm thinking."

"Mom, they're not real," he said. "You can make them disappear." His mother's eyes protruded and her body moved convulsively. "You just can't listen to what they say, they get inside your head and make you hypnotized."

"Oh, we had no need to do that," the man said.

Peter moved to the broad shelf beneath the windows and picked up a vase of flowers.

"Boy," the man said.

Peter cocked his arm. His mother's face was turning blue, and her tongue protruded. He made a frantic mewing sound in his throat and took aim at the man. Two cold small hands closed around his wrist. A wave of rotten air, the odor of an animal left dead for days in the sun, went over him.

"That's a good boy," the man said.

Hatpin

5

Harold Sims got angrily into the car, forcing Stella to move sideways on the seat. "What's the big idea? What the hell do you mean, acting like this?"

Stella took a pack of cigarettes from her bag, lit one and then silently offered the pack to Harold.

"I said, what's the big idea? I had to drive twenty-five miles to get here." He pushed the cigarettes away.

"It was your idea to meet, I believe. At least that is what you said on the telephone."

"I meant at your house, goddamnit. You knew that."

"And then I specified here. You did not have to come."

"But I wanted to see you!"

"Then what is the difference to you whether we meet here or in Milburn? You can say what you want to say here."

Sims punched the dashboard. "Damn you. I'm under stress. A great deal of stress. I don't need problems from you. What's the point of meeting out here on this godforsaken part of the highway?"

Stella looked around them, "Oh, I think it's really a rather pretty spot. Don't you? It's quite a beautiful spot. But to answer your question, the point of course is that I did not want you to come to my house."

He said, "You don't want me to come to your house," and for a moment looked so stupid that Stella knew she was an enigma to him. Men to whom you were an enigma were thoroughly useless.

"No," she said gently. "I did not."

"Well, Jesus, we could have met in a bar somewhere, or in a restaurant, or you could have come to Binghamton-"

"I wanted to see you alone."

"Okay, I give up." And he lifted his hands as if literally giving something away. "I suppose you're not even interested in what my problem is."

"Harold," she said, "you've been telling me all about your problems for months now, and I have listened with every appearance of interest."

Abruptly, he exhaled loudly, put a hand over hers and said, "Will you leave with me? I want you to go away with me."

"That's not possible." She patted his hand, then lifted the hand off hers. "Nothing like that is going to happen, Harold."

"Come away with me next year. That gives us plenty of time to break the news to Ricky." He squeezed her hand again.

"Besides being impertinent, you are being foolish. You are forty-six. I am sixty. And you have a job." Stella felt almost as though she were speaking to one of her children. This time she very firmly removed his hand and placed it on the steering wheel.

"Oh hell," he moaned. "Oh hell. Oh goddam it. I only have a job until the end of the year. The department isn't recommending me for promotion, and that means I have to go. Holz broke the news to me today. He said he was sorry to do it, but that he was trying to move the department in a new direction, and I wasn't cooperating. Also, I haven't published enough. Well, I haven't published anything in two years, but that isn't my fault, you know I did three articles and every other anthropologist in the country got published-"

"I have heard all this before," Stella interrupted. She stubbed out her cigarette.

"Yeah. But now it's really important. The new guys in the department have just aced me out. Leadbeater got a grant to live on an Indian reservation next term and a contract with Princeton University Press and Johnson's got a book coming out next fall… and I get the axe."

What he was saying finally reached Stella through her impatience with the sound of his voice. "Do you mean to say, Harold, that you invited me to run away with you when you don't even have a job?"

"I want you with me."

"Where did you plan to go?"

"I dunno. Maybe California."

"Oh, Harold, you are being insufferably banal," she exploded. "Do you want to live in a trailer park? Eat tacoburgers? Instead of moaning to me you ought to be writing letters and trying to find a new job. And why should you think that I would enjoy sharing your poverty? I was your mistress, not your wife." At the last second she restrained herself from adding, "Thank God."

In a muffled voice, Harold said, "I need you."

"This is ridiculous."

"I do. I do need you."

She saw that he was working himself up to the point of tears. "Now you are being not only banal, but self-pitying. You really are a very self-pitying man, Harold. It took me a long time to see it, but lately when I have thought of you, I have seen you with a big placard around your neck which reads 'Deserving Case.' Admit it, Harold, things have not been very satisfactory between us lately."

"Well, if I disgust you so much why do you go on seeing me?"

"You did not have much competition. And in fact, I do not intend to go on seeing you. In any case you will be far too busy applying for jobs to cater to my whims. And I will be too busy looking after my husband to listen to your complaints."

"Your husband?" Sims said, now really stunned.

"Yes. He is far more important to me than you, and at this moment he needs me much more. So I am afraid this is it. I will not see you anymore."

"That dried up little… that old clothes horse…? He can't be."

"Watch out," Stella warned.

"He's so insignificant," Sims wailed. "You've been making a fool of him for years!"

"All right. He is anything but dried up, and I will not listen to you insult him. If I have had an experimental approach to men during my life, Ricky has accommodated himself to it, which I dare say is more than you would be capable of doing, and if I have made a fool of anyone it is myself. I think it is time I retired into respectability. And-if you cannot see that Ricky has four or five times your own significance, then you are deluding yourself."

"Jesus, you can really be a bitch," Harold said, his little eyes as wide as they could get.

She smiled. " 'You're the most terrifying, ruthless creature I've ever known,' as Melvyn Douglas said to Joan Crawford. I cannot remember the name of the movie, but Ricky is very fond of the line. Why don't you call him up and ask him the name of the picture?"

"God, when I think of the men you must have turned into dogshit."

"Few of them made the transformation so successfully."

"You bitch." Harold's mouth was thinning dangerously.

"You know, like all intensely self-pitying men, you really are very crude, Harold. Would you please get out of my car?"

"You're angry," he said in disbelief. "I lose my job and you just dumped on me, and you're angry."

"Yes, I am. Please get out, Harold. Go back to your little heaven of self-regard."

"I could. I could get out right now." He leaned forward. "Or I could force you to see reason by making you do what you enjoy so much."

"I see. You're threatening to rape me, are you, Harold?"

"It's more than a threat."

"It's a promise, is it?" she asked, seeing real brutishness in him for the first time. "Well, before you start slobbering over me, I'll make you a promise too." Stella lifted a hand to the underside of her lapel and pulled out a long hatpin: she had carried it with her for years now, ever since a man in Schenectady had followed her all day through shops. She held the hatpin out before her. "If you make one move toward me, I promise you I'll plant this thing in your neck." Then she smiled: and it was the smile that did it.

He scrambled out of the seat as if given an electric shock and slammed the door behind him. Stella reversed the car to the restraining fence, changed gears and shot out across the oncoming traffic.

"GOD DAMN IT!" He pounded a fist into the palm of the other hand. "I HOPE YOU HAVE AN ACCIDENT!"

Sims picked up a stone from the gravelly shoulder and threw it across the highway. Then he stood for a moment breathing heavily. "Jesus, what a bitch." He ran his fingers through his cropped hair; he was far too angry to drive all the way back to the university. Sims looked at the forest which began down the slope, saw the puddles of icy water between the trees, and then looked across the four lanes of road to the dry higher ground.

Story

6

"We'd just had a fight," Lewis said. "We didn't have many, and when we had one I was usually wrong. This time it was because I fired one of the maids. She was just a girl from the country around Malaga. I can't even remember her name anymore, but she was a crank, or so I thought." He cleared his throat and leaned toward the fire. "The reason was that she was all caught up in the occult. She believed in magic, evil spirits-Spanish peasant spiritualism. That didn't bother me enough to fire her, even though she spooked some of the help by seeing omens in everything. Birds on the lawn, unexpected rain, a broken glass-all omens. The reason I fired her was that she refused to clean one of the rooms."

"It is a pretty damn good reason," Otto said.

"I thought so too. But Linda thought I was being hard on the girl. She'd never refused to clean the room before. The girl was upset by the guests, said they were bad or something. It was crazy."

Lewis took another slug of the brandy, and Otto added a branch to the fire. Flossie came nearer and lay with her hindquarters close to the flames.

"Were these guests Spanish, Lew-iss?"

"Americans. A woman from San Francisco named Florence de Peyser and a little girl, her niece. Alice Montgomery. A cute little girl about ten. And Mrs. de Peyser had a maid who traveled with her, a Mexican-American woman named Rosita. They stayed in a big suite at the top of the hotel. Really, Otto, you couldn't imagine people less spooky than those three. Of course, Rosita could have kept the suite clean and probably did, but it was our girl's job to go in there once a day and she refused, so I fired her. Linda wanted me to change the schedule around and let one of the other girls do it."

Lewis stared into the fire. "People heard us fighting about it and that was rare too. We were out in the rose garden, and I guess I yelled. I thought it was a matter of principle. So did Linda. Of course. I was stupid. I should have switched the schedule like Linda wanted. But I was too stubborn-in a day or two, she would have swung me around to her point of view, but she didn't live long enough." Lewis bit off a piece of the sausage and for a time chewed silently without tasting. "Mrs. de Peyser invited us to dinner in the suite that same night. Most nights we ate by ourselves and stayed out of people's way, but now and then a guest would invite us to join them for lunch or dinner. I thought Mrs. de Peyser was extending herself to be gracious, and I accepted for us.

"I should not have gone. I was very tired-exhausted. I'd been working hard all day. Besides arguing with Linda, I had helped load two hundred cases of wine into the storeroom in the morning, and then I played obligation games in a tennis tournament all afternoon. Two doubles matches. What I really needed was a quick snack and then bed, but we went up to the suite around nine. Mrs. de Peyser gave us drinks, and then we had arranged with the waiter that the meal was to be brought up around a quarter to ten. Rosita would serve it, and the waiter could go back to the dining room.

"Well, I had one drink and felt woozy. Florence de Peyser gave me another, and all I was fit for was trying to make conversation with Alice. She was a lovely little girl, but she never spoke unless you asked her a question. She was suffocated by good manners, and so passive that you thought she was simple-minded. I gathered that her parents had shunted her off onto her aunt for the summer.

"Later I wondered if my drink had been drugged. I began to feel odd, not sick or drunk exactly, but dissociated. Like I was floating above myself. But Florence de Peyser, who had given us a jaunt on her yacht-well, it was just impossible. Linda noticed that I wasn't feeling well, but Mrs. de Peyser pooh-poohed her. And of course I said I felt fine.

"We sat down to eat. I managed to get down a few bites, but I did feel very light-headed. Alice said nothing during the meal, but looked at me shyly from time to time, smiling as if I were an unusual treat. That was not how I felt. In fact, it may have been only alcohol on top of weariness. My senses were screwy-my fingers felt numb, and my jaw, and the colors in the room seemed paler than I knew they were-I couldn't taste the food at all.

"After dinner, her aunt sent Alice to bed. Rosita served cognac, which I didn't touch. I was able to talk, I know, and I may have seemed normal to anyone but Linda, but all I wanted to do was get to bed. The suite, large as it was, seemed to tighten down over me-over the three of us at the table. Mrs. de Peyser kept us there, talking. Rosita melted away.

"Then the child called me from her room. I could hear her voice saying 'Mr. Benedikt, Mr. Benedikt,' over and over again, very softly. Mrs. de Peyser said 'Would you mind? She likes you very much.' Sure, I said, I'd be happy to say good night to the girl, but Linda stood up before I could and said, 'Darling, you're too tired to move. Let me go.' 'No,' said Mrs. de Peyser. The child wants him.' But it was too late. Linda was already going toward the girl's bedroom.

"And then it was too late for everything. Linda went into the bedroom and a second later I knew something was horribly wrong. Because there wasn't any noise. I had heard the child half-whispering when she called to me, and I should have heard Linda speaking to her.

It was the loudest silence of my life. I was aware, fuzzy as I was, of Mrs. de Peyser staring at me. That silence ticked on. I stood up and began to go toward the bedroom.

"Linda began to shriek before I got halfway. They were terrible shrieks… so piercing…" Lewis shook his head. "I banged open the door and burst in just as I heard the noise of breaking glass. Linda was frozen in the window, glass showering all over. Then she was gone. I was too shocked and terrified even to call out. For a second I couldn't move. I looked at the girl, Alice. She was standing on her bed with her back flattened against the wall. For a second-for less than a second-I thought she was smirking at me.

"I ran to the window. Alice started sobbing behind me. It was much too late to help Linda, of course. She was lying dead, way down on the patio. A little crowd of people who had come out of the dining room for the evening air stood around her body. Some of them looked up and saw me leaning out of the broken window. A woman from Yorkshire screamed when she saw me."

"She thought you had pushed her," Otto said.

"Yes. She made a lot of trouble for me with the police. I could have spent the rest of my life in a Spanish jail."

"Lew-iss, couldn't this Mrs. de Peyser and the liddle girl explain what really happened?"

"They checked out. They were booked for another week, but while I was making statements to the police, they packed up and left."

"But didn't the police try to find them?"

"I don't know. I never found them again. And I'll tell you a funny thing, Otto. The story has a joke ending. When she checked out, Mrs. de Peyser paid with an American Express card. She made a little speech to the desk clerk too-said she was sorry to go, that she wished she could do something to help me, but that it was impossible, after the shock she and Alice had had, for them to stay on. A month later we heard from American Express that the card was invalid. The real Mrs. de Peyser was dead, and the company could not honor any debts on her account." Lewis actually laughed. One of the sticks in the fire tumbled down onto the coals, showering sparks out over the snow. "She stiffed me," he said, and laughed again. "Well, what do you think of that story?"

"I think it is a very American sort of story," Otto said, "You must have asked the child what happened- at least what made her stand up on the bed."

"Did I! I grabbed her and shook her. But she just cried. Then I carried her over to her aunt and got downstairs as fast as I could. I never had another chance to talk to her. Otto, why did you say it was an American sort of story?"

"Because, my good friend, everyone in your story is haunted. Even the credit card was haunted. Most of all the teller. And that, my friend, is echt Amerikanisch."

"Well, I don't know," said Lewis. "Look, Otto, I sort of feel like going off by myself for a little while. I'll just wander around for a few minutes. Do you mind?"

"Are you going to take your fancy rifle?"

"No. I'm not going to kill anything."

"Take poor Flossie along."

"Fine. Come on, Flossie."

The dog jumped up, all alertness again, and Lewis, who was now really unable to sit still or to pretend in any way that he was unaffected by the feelings which had sprung out at him from his memories, walked off into the woods.

Witness

7

Peter Barnes dropped the vase, half-nauseated by the foul smell which had swept over him. He heard a high-pitched giggling; his wrist was already cold where the unseen boy gripped him. Already knowing what he would see, he turned around to see it. The boy who had been sitting on the gravestone was holding onto his wrist with both hands, looking up at Peter's face with the same idiot mirth. His eyes were blank gold.

Peter chopped at him with his free hand, expecting that the scrawny reeking child would blow apart like the Jim Hardie-thing downstairs. Instead the boy ducked the blow and kicked at his ankles with a bony foot which hit him like a sledgehammer. The kick dumped Peter on the ground.

"Make him look, brat," the man said.

The boy nipped behind Peter, clamped his head between two ice-hard hands and turned him around by force. The terrible foulness intensified. Peter realized that the boy's head was just behind his own and screamed "Get away from me!" but the hands on his head increased their pressure. It felt as though the sides of his skull were being pushed together. "Let me go!" he yelled, and this time he did fear that the boy would crush his skull.

His mother's eyes were closed. Her tongue stuck out further.

"You killed her," he said.

"Oh, she is not dead yet," the man said. "She is merely unconscious. We need her to be alive, don't we, Fenny?"

Peter heard horrible squeals from behind him. "You strangled her," he said. The pressure of the boy's hands lessened to its original level: enough to hold him as if in a clamp.

"But not to death," the man said, giving a mock-pedantic inflection to the words. "I may have crushed her poor little windpipe a little, and the poor darling probably has a very sore throat. But she does have a pretty neck, doesn't she, Peter?"

He dropped one hand, and held Christina Barnes up with the other as if she weighed no more than a cat. The exposed portion of her neck wore large purple bruises.

"You hurt her," Peter said.

"I am afraid that I did. I only wish that I could perform the same service to you. But our benefactor, the charming woman whose house you broke into with your friend, has decided that she wants you for herself. At the moment, she is occupied with more urgent business. But great treats are in store for you, Master Barnes, and for your older friends. By that time, neither you nor they will know up from down. You will not know if you're reaping or sowing, isn't that right, idiot brother?"

The boy gripped Peter's head painfully tightly and made a whinnying noise.

"What are you?" Peter said.

"I am you, Peter," the man said. He was still holding his mother up with one hand. "Isn't that a nice simple answer? Of course it is not the only answer. A man named Harold Sims who knows your older friends would undoubtedly say that I am a Manitou. Mr. Donald Wanderley has been told that my name is Gregory Benton, and that I am a resident of the city of New Orleans. Of course I once spent several entertaining months in New Orleans, but I can't be said to be from there. I was born with the name Gregory Bate, and that was how I was known until my death in the year 1929. Fortunately, I had entered into an agreement with a charming woman known as Florence de Peyser which spared me the usual indignities attendant upon death, which I am afraid I rather feared. And what do you fear, Peter? Do you believe in vampires? In werewolves?"

The resonant voice had been unreeling in Peter's mind, lulling and soothing him, and it was a moment before he realized that he had been asked a direct question. "No," he whispered, and then:

(Liar went through his mind)

and the man holding his mother by the throat altered and Peter knew in every cell that what he was looking at was not merely a wolf, but a supernatural being in wolf form whose only purpose was to kill, to create terror and chaos and to take life as savagely as possible: saw that pain and death were the only poles of its being. He saw that this being had nothing in it that was human, and that it only dressed in the body it had once owned. He saw too, now that it was letting him see deeply into it, that this pure destructiveness was not its own master any more than a dog is: another mind owned and directed it as surely as the creature owned the dreadful purity of its evil. All of this Peter saw in a second. And the next second brought an even worse recognition: that in all of this blackness lived a morally fatal glamour.

"I don't…" he uttered, trembling.

"Oh, but you do," the werewolf said, and put his dark glasses back on. "I saw perfectly well that you do. I could have been a vampire just as easily. That is even more beautiful. And perhaps even closer to the truth."

"What are you?" Peter asked again.

"Well, you could call me Dr. Rabbitfoot," the creature said. "Or you could call me a nightwatcher."

Peter blinked.

"Now I am afraid we must leave you. Our benefactor will arrange another meeting with you and your friends in due time. But before we take our leave, we must satisfy our hunger." It smiled. Its teeth were gleamingly white. "Hold him very still," it commanded, and the hands pushed with terrible force on the sides of Peter's head. He began to cry.

Still smiling, the creature pulled Christina Barnes closer to him and, dipping its head to her neck, slid its mouth over her skin. Peter tried to leap forward, but the frozen hands held him back. The creature began to eat.

Peter tried to scream, and the dead child holding him moved its hands to cover his mouth. It pressed Peter's head against its chest. The smell of putrefaction, his terror and despair, the horror of being clasped against the revolting body and the greater horror of what was happening to his mother-he blacked out.

When he awakened he was alone. The stench of corruption still hung in the room. Peter moaned and pushed himself up into a kneeling position. The vase he had dropped lay on its side near him. Flowers, still brilliant, were strewn out across a puddle on the carpet. He raised his hands to his face and caught on them the reek of the dead boy who had held him. He gagged. The awful smell must have covered his mouth too, rubbed off the boy's hand: it was as though his mouth and cheek were covered with decay.

Peter ran out of the bedroom and down the hall until he found a bathroom. Then he turned on the hot water and scrubbed his face and hands over and over, working up the lather and rinsing it off, then taking the soap again and working it between his palms. He was sobbing. His mother was dead: she had come to see Lewis, and they had killed her. They had done to her what they did to animals: they were dead creatures that lived like vampires on blood. But they were not vampires. Nor were they werewolves; they could just make you think they were. They had sold themselves long ago to whatever owned them. Peter remembered green light leaking from beneath a door, and nearly vomited into the sink. She owned them. They were nightwatchers- night-things. He smeared Lewis's soap over his mouth, rubbing and rubbing to rid himself of the smell of Fenny's hands.

Peter remembered Jim Hardie seated at the bar in a seedy country tavern, asking him if he would like to see all of Milburn go up in flames, and knew that unless he could be stronger, braver and smarter than Jim, that what would happen to Milburn would be worse than that. The nightwatchers would systematically ruin the town-make it a ghost town-and leave behind only the stench of death.

Because that's all they want, he said to himself, remembering Gregory Bate's naked face, all they want is to destroy. He saw Jim Hardie's taut face, the face of Jim drunk and hurling himself into a wild scheme; the face of Sonny Venuti leaning toward him with her pop eyes; of his mother as she left the station wagon on the brick court; and chillingly, of the actress at the party last year, looking at him with a smiling mouth and expressionless eyes.

He dropped Lewis's towel on the bathroom floor.

They've been here before.

There was only one person who could help him- who might not think he was lying or crazy. He had to get back to town and see the writer who was staying in the hotel.

The loss of his mother went through him once again, shaking tears from him; but he did not have time to cry now. He went out into the hall and past the heavy door. "Oh, mom," he said. "I'll stop them. I'll get them. I'll-" But the words were hollow, just a boy's defiance. They want you to think that.

Peter did not look back at the house as he ran down the drive, but he felt it back there, watching him and mocking his puny intentions-as if it knew that his freedom was only that of a dog on a leash. At any second he could be pulled back, his neck bruised, his wind cut off…

He saw why when he reached the end of Lewis's drive. A car was parked on the verge of the highway, and the Jehovah's Witness who had given him a lift was inside it, looking at him. He blinked his lights at Peter: glowing eyes. "Come along," the man called. "Just come along, son."

Peter ran out into the traffic. An oncoming car squealed around him, another car skidded to a stop. Half a dozen horns cried out. He reached the median and ran across the empty other half of the highway. He could still hear the Witness calling to him. "Come back. It's no good."

Peter disappeared into the underbrush on the far side of the highway. Among the noises and confusions of traffic, he clearly heard the Witness starting up his car to track him back to town.

8

Five minutes after Lewis left Otto's fire, he began to feel tired. His back ached from all the shoveling he had done the day before; his legs threatened to give out. The hound trotted before him, forcing him to go on when he'd rather just go down the hill back to his car. Even that was at least a half hour walk away. Better to go on after the dog and settle down and then return to the fire.

Flossie sniffed at the base of a tree, checked that he was still there, and trotted on.

The worst part of the story was that he had allowed Linda to go into the child's room alone. Sitting at the de Peyser table, woozy, even more exhausted than he was now, he had sensed that the entire situation was somehow false, that he was unknowingly playing a part in a game. That was what he had not told Otto: that sense of wrongness which had come over him during dinner. Beneath the food's absence of taste had lain the faint taste of garbage, and in the same way beneath the superficial chatter of Florence de Peyser had lain something which had made him see himself as a marionette forced into dance. Feeling that, why had he continued to sit, to struggle to appear normal-why hadn't he taken Linda by the arm and hurried out?

Don too had said something about feeling like a player in a game.

Because they know you well enough to know what you will do. That is why you stayed. Because they knew you would.

The slight wind shifted; turned colder. The hound lifted its nose, sniffed and turned into the direction of the wind. She began to move more quickly.

"Flossie!" he yelled. The hound, already thirty yards ahead of him and visible only when he saw it coursing between the trees, emerged into an opening and glanced back at Lewis over its shoulder. Then she amazed Lewis by lowering her head and growling. The next second she flashed away.

Looking ahead, he saw only the bushy shapes of fir trees, interspersed with the bare skeletons of other trees, standing on ground mottled white. Melting snow moved sluggishly downhill. His feet were cold. Finally he heard the dog barking, and went toward the sound.

When he finally saw the dog, she began to whine. She was standing in a small glacial hollow, and Lewis was at the hollow's upper edge. Boulders like Easter Island statues, crusted with quartz, littered the bottom of the hollow. The dog glanced up at him, whined again, wriggled her body, and then flattened out alongside one of the boulders. "Come back, Flossie," he said. The dog pressed herself onto the ground, switching her tail.

"What is it?" he asked her.

He stepped into the hollow and slipped two yards down on cold mud. The dog barked once sharply, then turned in a tight circle and flattened herself out again on the ground. She was looking at a stand of fir trees growing up on the far side of the hollow. As Lewis slogged through the mud, Flossie crept forward toward the trees.

"Don't go in there," he said. The dog crept up to the first of the trees, whining; then it disappeared under the branches.

He tried to call it out. The hound would not return. No sound came from within the thick cluster of firs. Frustrated, Lewis looked up at the sky and saw heavy clouds scudding on the north wind. The two days' respite from snow was over.

"Flossie."

The dog did not reappear, but as he looked at the dense curtain of fir needles he saw an astonishing thing. Stitched into the pattern of needles and branches was the outline of a door. A dump of dark needles formed the handle. It was the most perfect optical illusion he had ever seen: even the hinges were represented.

Lewis took a step forward. He was at the spot where Flossie had flattened herself out on the ground. The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.

It was the door to his bedroom.

Lewis slowly went up the other side of the hollow toward the door. He went close enough to touch the smooth wood.

It wanted him to open it. Lewis stood in his wet boots in a cold, lifting breeze and knew that all the inexplicable occurrences of his life since that day in 1929 had led him to this: they put him in front of an impossible door to an unforseeable experience. If he had just been thinking that the story of Linda's death was-as Don said of the story of Alma Mobley-without point or ending, then there behind the door was its meaning. Even then Lewis knew that the door led not to one room but many.

Lewis could not refuse it. Otto, rubbing his hands before a twigfire, was only a part of an existence too trivial to insist on its worth-too trivial to hold to. For Lewis, who had already made his decision, his past, especially the latest years in Milburn, was dull lead, a long ache of boredom and uselessness from which he had been shown the way out.

Thus Lewis turned the brass knob and fell into his place in the puzzle.

He stepped, as he knew he would, into a bedroom. He recognized it immediately: the sunny bedroom, filled with Spanish flowers, of the ground-floor apartment he and Linda had kept in the hotel. A silky Chinese rug stretched beneath his feet to each of the room's corners; flowers in vases, still hungry for the sun, picked up the golds, reds and blues of the rug and shone them back. He turned around, saw the closing door, and smiled. Sun streamed through the twin windows. Looking out, he saw a green lawn, a railed precipice and the top of the steps down to the sea which glimmered below. Lewis went to the canopied bed. A dark blue velvet dressing gown lay folded across its foot. At peace, Lewis surveyed the entire lovely room.

Then the door to the lounge opened, and Lewis turned smiling to his wife. In the haze of his utter happiness, he moved forward, extending his arms. He stopped when he saw that she was crying.

"Darling, what's wrong? What happened?"

She raised her hands: across them lay the body of a short-haired dog. "One of the guests found her lying on the patio. Everybody was just coming out from lunch, and when I got there they were all standing around staring at the poor little thing. It was horrible, Lewis."

Lewis leaned over the body of the dog and kissed Linda's cheek. "I'll take care of it, Linda. But how the devil did it get there?"

"They said someone threw it out of a window… oh, Lewis, who in the world would do a thing like that?"

"I'll take care of it. Poor sweetie. Just sit down for a minute." He took the corpse of the dog from his wife's hands. "I'll straighten it out. Don't worry about it anymore."

"But what are you going to do with it?" she wailed.

"Bury it in the rose garden next to John, I guess."

"That's good. That's lovely."

Carrying the dog, he went toward the lounge door, then paused. "Lunch went all right otherwise?"

"Yes, fine. Florence de Peyser invited us to join her in the suite for dinner tonight. Will you feel like it after all that tennis? You're sixty-five, remember."

"No, I'm not." Lewis faced her with a puzzled expression. "I'm married to you, so I'm fifty. You're making me old before my time!"

"Absentminded me," Linda said. "Really, I could just kick myself."

"I'll be right back with a much better idea," Lewis said, and went through the door to the lounge.

The dog's weight slipped off his hands, and everything changed. His father was walking toward him across the floor of the parsonage living room. "Two more points, Lewis. Your mother deserves a little consideration, you know. You treat this house as though it were a hotel. You come in at all hours of the night." His father reached the armchair behind which Lewis stood, swerved off in the direction of the fireplace, and then marched back to the other side of the room, still talking. "Sometimes, I am told, you drink spirits. Now I am not a prudish man, but I will not tolerate that. I know you are sixty-five-"

"Seventeen," Lewis said.

"Seventeen, then. Don't interrupt. No doubt you think that is very grown up. But you will not drink spirits while you live under this roof, is that understood? And I want you to begin showing your age by helping your mother with the cleaning. This room is henceforth your responsibility. You must dust and clean it once a week. And see to the grate in the mornings. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," he said.

"Good. That is point one. Point two concerns your friends. Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne are both fine men, and I would say I have an excellent relationship with both of them. But age and circumstance divide us. I would not call them friends, nor would they call me their friend. For one thing, they are Episcopalians, just one step from popery. For another, they possess a good deal of money. Mr. James must be one of the richest men in all of New York, Do you know what that means, in 1928?"

"Yes, sir."

"It means that you cannot afford to keep up with his son. Nor can you keep up with Mr. Hawthorne's son. We lead respectable and godly lives, but we are not wealthy. If you continue to associate with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I foresee the direst consequences. They have the habits of the sons of wealthy men. As you know, it is my plan to send you to the university in the autumn, but you will be one of the poorest students at Cornell, and you must not learn such habits, Lewis, they will lead only to ruin. I will forever regret your mother's generosity in using her own funds to provide the wherewithal to purchase you a motorcar." He was on another circuit of the room. "And people are already gossiping about the three of you and that Italian woman on Montgomery Street I know clergymen's sons are supposed to be wild, but… well, words fail me." He paused midpoint on the track from the corner of the room and looked seriously into Lewis's eyes. "I assume that I am understood."

"Yes, sir. I understand. Is that all?"

"No. I am at a loss to account for this." His father was holding out to him the corpse of a short-haired hound. "It was lying dead on the walk to the church door. What if one of the congregation had seen it there? I want you to dispose of it immediately."

"Leave it to me," Lewis said. "I'll bury it in the rose garden."

"Please do so immediately."

Lewis took the dog out of the living room, and at the last minute turned to ask, "Do you have Sunday's sermon prepared, father?"

No one answered. He was in an unused bedroom at the top of the house on Montgomery Street. The room's only furniture was a bed. The floorboards were bare, and greasepaper had been nailed over the only window. Because Lewis's car had a flat tire, Sears and Ricky were off borrowing Warren Scales's old flivver while Warren and his pregnant wife shopped. A woman lay on the bed, but she would not answer him because she was dead. A sheet covered her body.

Lewis moved back and forth on the floorboards, willing his friends to return with the farmer's car. He did not want to look at the covered shape on the bed; he went to the window. Through the greasepaper he could see only vague orange light. He glanced back at the sheet. "Linda," he said miserably.

He stood in a metal room, with gray metal walls. One light bulb hung from the ceiling. His wife lay under a sheet on a metal table. Lewis leaned over her body and sobbed. "I won't bury you in the pond," he said. "I'll take you into the rose garden." He touched his wife's lifeless fingers under the sheet and felt them twitch. He recoiled.

As he watched horrified, Linda's hands crept up beneath the sheet. Her white hands folded the sheet down over her face. She sat up, and her eyes opened.

Lewis cowered at the far end of the little room. When his wife swung her legs off the morgue table, he screamed. She was naked, and the left side of her face was broken and scraped. He held his hands out in front of him in a childish gesture of protection. Linda smiled at him, and said, "What about that poor dog?" She was pointing to the uncovered slab of table, where a short-haired hound lay on its side in a puddle of blood.

He looked back in horror at his wife, but Stringer Dedham, his hair parted in the middle, a brown shirt concealing his stumps, stood beside him. "What did you see, Stringer?" he asked.

Stringer smiled at him bloodily. "I saw you. That's why I jumped out of the window. Don't be a puddin' head."

"You saw me?"

"Did I say I saw you? Guess I'm the puddin' head. I didn't see you. Your wife's the one saw you. What I saw was my girl. Saw her right through her window, morning of the day I helped out on the thresher. Gosh, I must be a real moron."

"But what did you see her doing? What did you try to tell your sisters?"

Stringer bent back his head and laughed, and blood gushed out of his mouth. He coughed. "Golly gee, I couldn't hardly believe it, it was just amazin', friend. You ever see a snake with its head cut off? You ever see that tongue dartin' out-and that head just a stump of a thing no bigger than your thumb? You ever see that body workin' away, beatin' itself in the dust?" Stringer laughed loudly through the red foam in his mouth. "Holy Moses, Lewis, what a godforsaken thing. Honestly, ever since it's been like I can't hardly think straight, like my brain's all mixed up and leakin' outta my ears. It's like that time I had the stroke, in 1940, remember? When one side of me froze up? And you gave me baby food on a spoon? Grrr, what a godawful taste!"

"That wasn't you," Lewis said, "That was my father."

"Well, what did I tell you? It's all mixed up-like someone cut my head off, and my tongue keeps moving." Stringer gave an abashed red smile. "Say, wasn't you goin' to take that poor old dog and drop it in the pond?"

"Oh, yes, when they get back," Lewis said. "We need Warren Scales's car. His wife is pregnant."

"The wife of a Roman Catholic farmer is of no concern to me at the moment," his father said. "One year at college has coarsened you, Lewis." From his temporary mooring beside the mantel, he looked long and sadly at his son. "And I know too that this is a coarsening era. Pitch defileth, Lewis. Our age is pitch. We are born into damnation, and for our children all is darkness. I wish that I could have reared you in more stable times-Lewis, once this country was a paradise! A paradise! Fields as far as you could see! Filled with the bounty of the Lord! Son, when I was a boy I saw Scripture in the spider webs. The Lord was watching us then, Lewis, you could feel His presence in the sunlight and the rain. But now we are like spiders dancing in a fire." He looked down at the literal fire, which was warming his knees. "It all started with the railway. That I'm sure of, son. The railroad brought money to men who'd never had the smell of two dollars together in all their lives. The iron horse spoiled the land, and now financial collapse is going to spread like a stain over this whole country." And looked at Lewis with the clear shrewd eyes of Sears James.

"I promised her I'd bury her in the rose garden," Lewis said. "They'll be back with the car soon."

"The car." His father turned away in disgust. "You never listened to the important things I had to tell you. You have forsaken me, Lewis."

"You excite yourself too much," Lewis said. "You'll give yourself a stroke."

"His will be done."

Lewis looked at his father's rigid back. "I'll see to it now." His father made no answer. "Good-bye."

His father spoke without turning around. "You never listened. But mark me, son, it will come back to haunt you. You were seduced by yourself, Lewis. Nothing sadder can be said of any man. A handsome face and feathers for brains. You got your looks from your mother's Uncle Leo, and when he was twenty-five he stuck his hand into the woodstove and held it there until it was charred like a hickory log."

Lewis went through the dining-room door. Linda was peeling the sheet off her naked body in the vacant upper room. She smiled at him with bloody teeth. "After that," she said, "your mother's Uncle Leo was a godly man all his life long." Her eyes glowed, and she swung her legs down off the bed. Lewis backed away toward the bare wooden wall. "After that he saw Scripture in spider webs, Lewis." She moved slowly toward him, twisting on a broken hip. "You were going to put me in the pond. Did you see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? Or were you distracted by your pretty face?"

"Now it's over, isn't it?" Lewis asked.

"Yes." She was close enough for him to catch the dark brown smell of death.

Lewis straightened his body against the rough wall. "What did you see in that girl's bedroom?"

"I saw you, Lewis. What you were supposed to see. Like this."

9

As long as Peter was concealed by the underbrush he was safe. A wiry network of branches hid him from the road. On the other side, beginning ten or fifteen yards back, were trees like those before Lewis's house. Peter worked his way back into them to be further screened from the man in the car. The Jehovah's Witness had not moved off the shoulder of the highway: Peter could see the top of his car, a bright acrylic blue shield, over the top of the dry brambles. Peter ducked from the safety of one tree to another; then to another. The car inched forward. They continued in this way for some time, Peter moving slowly over the damp ground and the car clinging to his side like a shark to which he was the pilot fish. At times the Witness's car moved slightly ahead, at times it hung back, but never was it more than five or ten yards off in either direction-the only comfort available for Peter was that the driver's errors proved that he could not see him. He was just idling down the shoulder of the road waiting for a section of cleared ground.

Peter tried to visualize the landscape on his side of the highway, and remembered that only for a mile or so in the vicinity of Lewis's house was there heavy ground cover-most of the rest of the land, until an eruption of gas stations and drive-ins marked the edges of Milburn, was field. Unless he crawled in ditches for seven miles, the man in the car would be able to see him as soon as he left the stretch of woods.

Come out, son.

The Witness was aimlessly sending out messages, trying to coax him into the car. Peter shut his mind to the whispers as well as he could and plunged on through the woods. Maybe if he kept on running, the Witness would drive down the road far enough to let him think.

Come on, boy. Come out of there. Let me take you to her.

Still protected by the high brambles and the trees, Peter ran until he could see, strung between the massive trunks of oaks, double strands of silvery wire. Beyond the wire was a long curved vacancy of field- empty white ground. The Witness's car was nowhere in sight. Peter looked sideways, but here the trees were too thick and the brambles too high for him to see the section of highway nearest him. Peter reached the last of the trees and the wire and looked over the field, wondering if he could get across unseen. If the man saw him on the field, Peter knew he would be helpless. He could run, but eventually the man would get him as the thing back in the Montgomery Street house got Jim.

She's interested in you, Peter.

It was another aimless, haphazard dart with no real urgency in it.

She'll give you everything you want.

She'll give you anything you want.

She'll give you back your mother.

The blue car edged forward into his vision and stopped just past the point where the field began. Peter shuddered back a few feet deeper into the wood. The man in the car turned sideways, resting his arm along the top of the seat, and in this posture of patient waiting looked out at the field Peter would have to cross.

Come on out and we'll give you your mother.

Yes. That was what they would do. They'd give him back his mother. She would be like Jim Hardie and Freddy Robinson, with empty eyes and amnesiac conversation and no more substance than a ray of moonlight.

Peter sat down on wet ground, trying to remember if any other roads were near. He would have to go through the woods or the man would find him when he crossed the field; was there another road, running parallel to the highway, going back to Milburn?

He remembered nights of driving around the countryside with Jim, all of the footloose journeying of high school weekends and summers: he would have said that he knew Broome County as well as he knew his own bedroom.

But the patient man in the blue car made it difficult to think. He could not remember what happened on the other side of this wood-a developer's suburb, a factory? For a moment his mind would not give him the information he knew it had, and instead offered images of vacant buildings where dark things moved behind drawn blinds. But whatever lay on the other side of the woods, the other side was where he had to go.

Peter stood up quietly and retreated a few yards farther into the woods before turning his back on the highway and running away from the car. Seconds later he remembered what he was running toward. There was an old two-lane macadam highway in this direction, in Milburn, called "the old Binghamton road" because once it had been the only highway between the two towns: pitted, obsolete and unsafe, it was avoided by nearly all traffic now. Once there had been small businesses dotted along it, fruit markets, a motel, a drugstore. Now most of these were empty, and some of them had been razed. The Bay Tree Market alone flourished: it was heavily patronized by the better-off people of Milburn. His mother had always bought fruit and vegetables there.

If he remembered the distance between the old and new highways correctly, it would take him less than twenty minutes to get to the Market. From there he could get a lift into town and make it safely to the hotel.

In fifteen minutes he had wet feet, a stitch in his side and a rip in his jacket from a snagged branch, but he knew he was getting near the old road. The trees had thinned out and the ground sloped gently down.

Now, seeing in the blank gray air ahead of him that the woods were ending, he went nearer the fence and crept slowly along it for the final thirty yards. He still was not sure if the fruit market was to the left or the right, or how far off it was. All he hoped was that it would be in sight, and show a busy parking lot.

He squelched forward, peering around the few remaining trees.

You're wasting your time, Peter. Don't you want to see your mother again?

He groaned, feeling the feathery touch of the Witness's mind. His stomach went cold. The blue car was parked on the road before him. On the front seat Peter saw a bulky shape he knew was the Witness, leaning back, waiting for him to show himself.

The Bay Tree Market was in sight about a quarter mile down the old highway to Peter's left-the car faced the other way. If he made a run for it, the man would have to turn his car around on the narrow old road.

That still would not give him enough time.

Peter looked again at the market: there were plenty of cars in the lot. At least one of them would belong to someone he knew. All he had to do was to get there.

For a moment he felt no more than five years old, a shivering boy helpless and with no weapons and with no hope of defeating the murderous creature waiting for him in the car. If he tore his windbreaker into pieces and then tied them together and then put one end in the gas tank-but that was just a bad idea from worse movies. He could never get to the car before the man saw him.

In fact, the only thing he could do, apart from rushing the man, was to go openly across the field to the market and see what happened. The man was looking the other way, and at least he would have some time before he was seen.

Peter separated the strands of wire clipped to the trees and climbed through. A quarter of a mile away, in a straight line, was the rear parking lot of the Bay Tree Market. He held his breath and started walking across the field.

The car did a three-point turn behind him and drew up alongside him, just visible in the periphery of his vision. Nice brave boy. Nice boys shouldn't go hitchhiking, should they? Peter closed his eyes and went stumbling over the field.

Stupid brave boy. He wondered what the man would do to stop him.

He did not have to wait long to find out.

"Peter, I have to talk to you. Open your eyes, Peter." The voice was Lewis Benedikt's. Peter opened his eyes and saw Lewis standing twenty yards before him, dressed in baggy trousers, boots, an unfastened khaki army jacket.

"You're not here," Peter said.

"Talk sense, Peter," Lewis said, and began to come toward him. "You can see me, can't you? You can hear me? I'm here. Please listen to me. I want to tell you about your mother."

"She's dead." Peter stopped walking, unwilling to get closer to the Lewis-creature.

"No, she is not." Lewis stopped too, as if not wishing to frighten Peter. Off on the road to their side, the car also halted. "Nothing's that black or white. She wasn't dead when you saw her in my house, was she?"

"She was."

"You can't be sure, Pete. She passed out, just like you." Lewis opened his hands and smiled at Peter.

"No. They cut-they cut open her throat. They killed her. Just like those animals were killed." He closed his eyes again.

"Pete, you're wrong and I can prove it. That man in the car doesn't want to hurt you. Let's go to him. Let's go there now."

Peter opened his eyes. "Did you really sleep with my mother?"

"People our age sometimes make mistakes. They do things they're sorry about later. But it didn't mean anything, Pete. You'll see when you get home. All you have to do is come home with us, and she'll be there, just like she always is." Lewis was smiling toward him with intelligent concern. "Don't judge her badly because she made one mistake." He started coming forward again. "Trust me. I always hoped we'd be friends."

"I did too, but you can't be my friend because you're dead," Peter said. He bent over and picked up a double handful of wet snow. He squeezed it together in his hands.

"You're going to throw a snowball at me? Isn't that a little juvenile?"

"I feel sorry for you," Peter said, and threw the snowball and blew the thing that looked like Lewis into a shower of falling light.

As if shell-shocked, he trudged ahead, walking straight through the space where Lewis had stood. The air tingled on his face. He felt another feathery tickling in his mind, and braced himself.

But no words followed. Instead came a wave of bitterness and anger which nearly knocked him down with its force. It was the same blackness of feeling he had seen when the creature holding his mother had taken off its dark glasses, and the violence of the emotion made him stagger; but there was a wide current of defeat in it.

Peter snapped his head sideways in surprise; the blue car accelerated down the macadam road.

Relief buckled his knees. He did not know why, but he had won. Peter sat heavily, clumsily down in the snow and tried not to cry. After a while he stood up again and continued on toward the parking lot. He was too numb for feeling; he made himself concentrate on getting his legs to move. First one step, then another. His feet were very cold. Another step. Now he was not far from the lot.

Then an even greater sweetness flooded through him. His mother was flying through the parking lot running toward him. "Pete!" she shouted, half-sobbing. "Thank God!"

She reached the cars at the edge of the lot and ran past them onto the field. He stood watching her run toward him, too crowded with feeling to speak, and then trudged forward. She had a large bruise on one cheek and her hair was as tangled as a gypsy's. A scarf tied around her neck showed a line of red at its center.

"You got away," he said, stupefied with relief.

"They took me out of the house-that man-" She stood a few yards away from him, and her hands went to her throat. "He cut my neck-I fainted-I thought they were going to kill you."

"I thought you were dead," he told her. "Oh, mom."

"Poor Pete." She hugged her arms around herself. "Let's get out of here. We'll have to get a ride back to town. I guess both of us can just about move that far."

That she could joke, however feebly, moved him again to the point of tears. He put a hand over his eyes.

"Cry later," she said. "I think I'll cry for a week after I sit down. Let's find a ride."

"How did you get away from them?" He walked beside her, about to hug her, but she stepped backward, leading him toward the lot. He fell into step with her.

"I guess they thought I was too frightened to move. And when they got me outside, the fresh air sort of revived me. That man relaxed his hold on my arm, and I swung around and belted him with my bag. Then I ran away into the woods. I heard them looking for me. I've never never been so scared in my life. After a while they just gave up. Were they looking for you?"

"No," he said. "No." And the tension melted in him. "There was someone else, but he left-he didn't get me."

"They'll leave us alone now," she said. "Now that we're away from there."

He looked into her face, and she glanced down. "I owe you a lot of explanations, Peter. But this isn't the time. I just want to get home and put a real bandage on my throat. We'll have to think of something to tell your father."

"You won't tell him what happened?"

"We'll just let it die, can't we?" she asked, and looked pleadingly at him. "I'll explain everything to you -in time. Let's just be thankful now that we're alive."

They stepped onto the surface of the parking lot.

"Okay," Peter said. "Mom, I'm so-" He struggled with his emotions, but they were too dense to be expressed. "We have to talk to someone, though. The same man that hurt you killed Jim Hardie."

She looked back at him, having walked forward toward the crowded middle of the lot "I know."

"You know?"

"I mean I guessed. Hurry up, Pete. My neck hurts. I want to get home."

"You said you knew."

She made a gesture of exasperation. "Don't cross-examine me, Peter."

Peter looked wildly around the parking lot and saw the blue car just nosing past the side of the market. "Oh, mom," he said. "They did. They did. You didn't get away from them."

"Peter. Snap out of it. I see someone we can get a ride with."

As the blue car swung up the lane behind her, Peter walked toward his mother, staring at her. "Okay, I'm coming."

"Good. Peter, everything will be the way it was again, you will see. We both had a terrible fright, but a hot bath and a good sleep will work wonders."

"You'll need stitches in your neck," Peter said, coming closer.

"No, of course not." She smiled at him. "A bandage is all I need. It was just a scratch. Peter. What are you doing, Peter? Don't touch it, it hurts. You'll start the bleeding again."

The blue car was now at the top of their row. Peter reached out toward his mother.

"Don't, Pete, well get our ride in a minute…"

He clamped his eyes shut and swung his arm toward his mother's head. A second later his fingers were tingling. He yelled: a horn sounded, terrifyingly loud.

When he opened his eyes his mother was gone and the blue car was speeding toward him. Peter scrambled toward the protection of two parked cars and slipped between them just as the blue car raced by, scraping its side against them and making them rock.

He watched it squeeze down to the end of the aisle, and when it cut across to drive up the next aisle, he saw Irmengard Draeger, Penny's mother, walk out of the back door of the market carrying a sack of groceries. He ran toward her, cutting through the rows of parked cars.

Stories

10

Inside the hotel, Mrs. Hardie looked at him curiously but told him Don Wanderley's room number and then watched him as he climbed the steps at the end of the lobby. He knew that he should have turned around to say something, but he could not trust himself, after the strain of riding back to town with Mrs. Draeger, to make even the most perfunctory conversation with Jim's mother.

He found Don's door and knocked.

"Mr. Wanderley," he said when the writer opened the door.

For Don, the appearance of the shaken teenager outside his room meant the arrival of certainty. The period when the consequences of the final Chowder Society story-whatever that would turn out to be- were limited to its members and a few outlyers was over. The expression of shock and loss on Peter Barnes's face told Don that what he had been brooding about in his room was no longer the property of himself and four elderly men.

"Come in, Peter," he said. "I thought we'd be meeting again soon."

The boy moved like a zombie into the room and sat blindly in a chair. "I'm sorry," he began, and then closed his mouth. "I want-I have to-" He blinked, and was obviously unable to continue.

"Hang on," Don said, and went to his dresser and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured an inch into a water glass and gave it to Peter. "Drink some of this and settle down. Then just tell me everything that happened. Don't waste time thinking that I might not believe you, because I will. And so will Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. James, when I tell them."

" 'My older friends,' " Peter said. He swallowed some of the whiskey. "That's what he called them. He said you thought his name was Greg Benton."

Peter twitched, uttering the name, and Don felt the shock of a conviction hitting his nerves: whatever the danger to himself, he would destroy Greg Benton.

"You met him," he said.

"He killed my mother," Peter said flatly. "His brother held me and made me watch. I think-I think they drank her blood. Like they did to those animals. And he killed Jim Hardie. I saw him do it, but I got away."

"Go on," Don said.

"And he said someone-I can't remember his name -would call him a Manitou. Do you know what that is?"

"I've heard of it."

Peter nodded, as if this satisfied him. "And he turned into a wolf. I saw him. I saw him do it." Peter set the glass down on the floor, then looked at it again and picked it up and took another sip. His hands trembled badly enough nearly to splash the whiskey over the lip of the glass. "They stink-they're like rotten dead things-I had to scrub and scrub. Where Fenny touched me."

"You saw Benton turn into a wolf?"

"Yes. Well, no. Not exactly. He took off his glasses. They have yellow eyes. He let me see him. He was- he was nothing but hate and death. He was like a laser beam."

"I understand," Don said. "I've seen him. But I never saw him without his glasses."

"When he takes them off, he can make you do things. He can talk inside your head. Like ESP. And they can make you see dead people, ghosts, but when you touch them, they sort of blow up. But they don't blow up. They grab you and they kill you. But they're dead too. Somebody else owns them-their benefactor. They do what she wants."

"She?" Don asked, and remembered a lovely woman holding this handsome boy's chin at a dinner party.

"That Anna Mostyn," Peter said. "But she was here before."

"Yes, she was," Don said. "As an actress."

Peter looked at him with grateful surprise.

"I just figured out some of the story, Peter," Don said. "Just in the past few days." He looked at the shivering boy in the chair. "It looks like you figured out a lot more than I did and in a shorter time."

"He said he was me," Peter said, his face distorting. "He said he was me, I want to kill him."

"Then we'll do it together," Don said.

"They're here because I'm here," Don told him. "Ricky Hawthorne said that when I joined him and Sears and Lewis Benedikt, that we brought these things -these beings-into focus. That we gathered them here. Maybe if I had stayed away, there'd just be a few dead sheep or cows or something, and that would be that. But that was never a possibility, Peter. I couldn't stay away-and they knew I would have to come. And now they can do anything they want."

Peter interrupted him. "Anything she wants them to do."

"That's right. But we're not helpless. We can fight back. And we'll do it. We'll get rid of them however we can. That's a promise."

"But they're already dead," Peter said. "How can we kill them? I know they're dead-they have that smell-"

He was beginning to slide into panic again, and Don reached over and took his hand. "I know because of the stories. These things aren't new. They've probably been around for centuries-for longer than that. They've certainly been talked about and written about for hundreds of years. I think they are what people used to call vampires and werewolves-they're probably behind a thousand ghost stories. Well, in the stories, and I think that means in the past, people found ways to make them die again. Stakes through the heart or silver bullets -remember? The point is that they can be destroyed. And if it takes silver bullets, that's what we'll use. But I don't think we'll need them. You want revenge and I do too, and we'll get it."

"But that's just them," Peter said, looking straight at Don. "What do we do about her?"

"That'll be harder. She's the general. But history is full of dead generals." It was a facile answer, but the boy seemed calmer. "Now I think you'd better tell me everything, Peter. Begin with how Jim died, if that's the beginning. The more you remember, the more you'll help us. So try to tell it all."

"Why didn't you tell anyone else about this?" he asked when Peter was done.

"Because I knew no one would believe me but you. You heard the music."

Don nodded.

"And nobody will, will they? They'll think it's like Mr. Scales and the Martians."

"Not quite. The Chowder Society will. I hope."

"You mean Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne and…"

"Yes." He and the boy looked at each other, knowing that Lewis was dead. "We'll be enough, Peter. It's the four of us against her."

"When do we start? What do we do?"

"I'll meet with the others tonight. I think you ought to go home. You have to see your father."

"He won't believe me. I know he won't. Nobody would, unless they…" The boy's voice trailed off.

"Do you want me to come with you?"

Peter shook his head.

"I will if you want me to."

"No. I won't tell him. It wouldn't do any good. I'll have to tell him later."

"Maybe that's better. And if you want help when the times comes, I'll give it to you. Peter, I think you've been brave as hell. Most adults would have folded up like tissue paper. But you're going to have to be even braver from now on. You might have to protect your father as well as yourself. Don't open your door to anybody unless you know who they are."

Peter nodded. "I wont. You bet I won't. But why are they here, anyhow? Why is she here?"

"That's what I'm going to find out tonight."

Peter stood up and began to leave, but when he put his hands in his pockets, he touched a folded pamphlet. "I forgot. The man in the blue car gave me this after he took me to Mr. Benedict's house." He brought out The Watchtower and smoothed it out on Don's desk. Beneath the name, in large black letters on the cheap pulpy paper, were the words DR. RABBITFOOT LED ME TO SIN.

Don ripped the pamphlet in half.

11

Harold Sims tramped into the upper woods, disgusted with both himself and Stella Hawthorne. His shoes and the bottoms of his trousers were soaked, the shoes probably ruined. But what was not? He had lost his job, and when he had finally asked Stella to leave with him, after weeks of thinking about it, he had lost her too. Damn it, did she think that he had just asked her on the spur of the moment? Didn't she know him better than that? He ground his teeth.

It's not like I forgot she was sixty, he told himself: I worried about that plenty. "I came to that bitch with clean hands," he said out loud, and saw the words vaporize before him. She had betrayed him. She had insulted him. She had never-he could see it now-really taken him seriously.

And what was she, anyhow? An old bag with no morals and a freakish bone structure. Intellectually, she hardly counted.

And she wasn't really adaptable. Look at her view of California-trailer parks and tacoburgers! She was shallow-Milburn was where she belonged. With that stuffy little husband, talking about old movies.

"Yes?" he said. He had heard a quick, gasping noise, very near.

"Do you need help?" No one answered, and he put his hands on his hips and looked around.

It had been a human noise, a sound of pain. "I'll help if you tell me where you are," he said. Then he shrugged, and walked toward the area where he thought the sound had come from.

He stopped as soon as he saw the body lying at the base of the fir trees.

It was a man-what was left of a man. Sims forced himself to look at him. That was a mistake, for he nearly vomited. Then he realized that he would have to look again. His ears were roaring. Sims bent over the battered head. It was, as he had feared, Lewis Benedikt. Near his head was the body of a dog. At first Sims had thought that the dog was a severed piece of Lewis.

Trembling, Sims straightened up. He wanted to run. Whatever kind of animal had done that to Lewis Benedikt was still nearby-it couldn't be more than a minute away.

Then he heard crashing in the bushes, and was too scared to move. He visualized some huge animal leaping out at him from behind the firs-a grizzly. Sims opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

A man with a face like a Halloween pumpkin emerged from around the fir trees. He was breathing hard, and he held a huge blunderbuss of a shotgun pointed at Sim's belly. "Hold it there," the man said. Sims was certain that the frightening-looking creature was going to blow him in half, and his bowels voided.

"I ought to kill you stone dead right now," the man said.

"Please…"

"But this is your lucky day, killer. I'm taking you to a telephone and gedding the police to come. Hey? Why did you do this to Lewis, hey?"

When Sims could not answer, understanding only that this horrible peasant would not kill him after all, Otto inched around behind him and prodded him in the back with the barrels of the shotgun. "So. Play soldier, scheisskopf. March. Mach schnell."

Ancient History

12

Don waited in his car outside Edward Wanderley's house for Sears and Ricky to arrive. Waiting, he found in himself all the emotions he had seen in Peter Barnes that evening-but the boy was a rebuke to his fear. Over a few days, Peter Barnes had done and understood more than he and his uncle's friends had in more than a month.

Don lifted the two books he had taken from the Milburn library just before Peter had come. They supported the notion he'd had while talking to the three men in Sears's library: he thought he knew what they were fighting. Sears and Ricky would tell him why. Then, if their story fit his theory, he would do what they had asked him to Milburn for: he would give them their explanation. And if the explanation seemed lunatic, perhaps it was-perhaps it was even wrong; but Peter's story and the copy of The Watchtower proved that they had long since lurched into a time when madness offered a truer picture of events than sanity. If his mind and Peter Barnes's had shattered, Milburn had shattered to their pattern. And out of the cracks had crawled Gregory and Fenny and their benefactor, all of whom they must destroy.

Even if it kills us, Don thought. Because we are the only ones who have a chance of doing it.

The headlights of a car appeared in a swirl of falling snow. After a moment, Don saw the outline of a high dark car behind them, and the car swung to the curb on the other side of Haven Lane. The lights died. First Ricky, then Sears got out of the old black Buick. Don left his own car and trotted across the street to join them.

"And now Lewis," Ricky said to him. "Did you know?"

"Not definitely. But I thought so."

Sears, who had been listening to this, nodded impatiently. "You thought so. Ricky, give him the keys." As Don opened the door, Sears grumbled behind him, "I hope you'll tell us how you got your information. If Hardesty fancies himself as the town crier, I'll arrange to have him spitted."

The three men went into a black entryway; Sears found the light switch. "Peter Barnes came to me this afternoon," Don said. "He saw Gregory Bate kill his mother. And he saw what must have been Lewis's ghost."

"Oh, God," Ricky breathed. "Oh, my God. Oh poor Christina."

"Let's get the heat going before we say any more," Sears requested. "If everything's blowing up in our faces, I for one at least want to be warm." The three of them began wandering through the ground floor of the house, lifting dust sheets off the furniture. "I will miss Lewis very much," Sears said. "I used to malign him terribly, but I did love him. He gave us spirit. As your uncle did." He dropped a dust sheet on the floor. "And now he is in the Chenango County morgue, apparently the victim of a savage attack by some sort of animal. A friend of Lewis's accused Harold Sims of the crime.

Under different circumstances, that would be comic." Sears's face sagged. "Let's take a look at your uncle's office, and then take care of the heating. I don't know if I can bear this anymore."

Sears led him into a large room at the rear of the house while Ricky switched on the central heating boiler. "This was the office." He flicked a switch, and track lights on the ceiling shone on an old leather couch, a desk with an electric typewriter, a file cabinet and a Xerox machine; on a broad shelf jutting out below narrower shelves filled with white boxes sat a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a cassette recorder.

"The boxes are the tapes he made for his books?"

"I guess so."

"And you and Ricky and the others never came here after he died?"

"No," Sears said, gazing at the well-ordered office. It evoked Don's uncle more wholly than any photograph -it radiated the contentment of a man happy in what he did. This impression helped to explain Sears's next words. "I suppose that Stella told you we were afraid to come in here. There might be some truth in that. But I think that what really kept us away was guilt."

"And that was part of the reason you invited me to Milburn."

"Yes. I think all of us except Ricky thought you would-" He made a shooing-away gesture with his hands. "Somehow magically dispel our guilt. John Jaffrey most of all. That is the wisdom of hindsight."

"Because it was Jaffrey's party."

Sears nodded curtly, and turned out of the office. "There still must be most of a cord of wood out in back. Why don't you bring some of it in so we can have a fire?"

"This is the story we never thought we'd tell," Ricky said ten minutes later. A bottle of Old Parr and their glasses stood on the dusty table before Ricky's couch. "That fire was a good idea. It'll give Sears and me something to look at. Did I ever tell you that I started everything by asking John about the worst thing he'd ever done? He said he wouldn't tell me, and he told me a ghost story instead. Well, I should have known better. I knew what the worst thing was. We all knew."

"Then why did you ask?"

Ricky sneezed violently, and Sears said, "It happened in 1929-October of 1929. That was a long time ago. When Ricky asked John about the worst thing he'd ever done, all that we could think about was your Uncle Edward-it was only a week after his death. Eva Galli was the last thing on our minds."

"Well, now we have truly crossed the Rubicon," said Ricky. "Up until you said the name, I still wasn't sure that we'd tell it. But now that we're here we'd better go on without stopping. Whatever Peter Barnes told you had better wait until we're done-if after that you still want to stay in the same room with us. And I suppose that somehow what happened to him must be related to the Eva Galli affair. Now; I've said it too."

"Ricky never wanted you to know about Eva Galli," said Sears. "Way back when I wrote to you, he thought it would be a mistake to rake it all up again. I guess we agreed with him. I certainly did."

"Thought it would muddy the waters," Ricky said through his cold. "Thought it couldn't possibly have anything to do with our problem. Spook stories. Nightmares. Premonitions. Just four old fools losing their marbles. Thought it was irrelevant. It was all so mixed up anyhow. Should have known better when that girl came looking for a job. And now with Lewis gone…"

"You know something?" Sears said. "We never even gave Lewis John's cufflinks."

"Slipped our minds," Ricky said, and drank some of his Old Parr. He and Sears were already deep in the well of their story, concentrated on it so wholly that Don, seated near them, felt invisible.

"Well, what happened to Eva Galli?" he asked.

Sears and Ricky glanced at each other; then Ricky's eyes went to his glass and Sears's to the fire. "Surely that's obvious," Sears said. "We killed her."

"The two of you?" Don asked, thrown off balance it was not the answer he had expected.

"All of us," Ricky answered. "The Chowder Society. Your uncle, John Jaffrey, Lewis, and Sears and myself. In October, 1929. Three weeks after Black Monday, when the stock market collapsed. Even here in Milburn, you could see the beginnings of the panic. Lou Price's father, who was also a broker, shot himself in his office. And we killed a girl named Eva Galli. Not murder- not outright murder. We'd never have been convicted of anything-maybe not even of manslaughter. But there would have been a scandal."

"And we couldn't face that," Sears said. "Ricky and I had just started out as lawyers, working in his father's firm. John had qualified as a doctor only the year before. Lewis was the son of a clergyman. We were all in the same fix. We would have been ruined. Slowly, if not immediately."

"That was why we decided on what we tried to do," said Ricky.

"Yes," said Sears. "We did an obscene thing. If we'd been thirty-three instead of twenty-three, we would probably have gone to the police and taken our chances. But we were so young-Lewis wasn't even out of his teens. So we tried to conceal it. And then at the end-"

"At the end," Ricky said, "we were like characters in one of our stories. Or in your novel. I've been reliving the last ten minutes for two months now. I even hear our voices, the things we said when we put her in Warren Scales's car…"

"Let's start at the beginning," Sears said.

"Let's start at the beginning. Yes."

"All right," Ricky said. "It begins with Stringer Dedham. He was going to marry her. Eva Galli hadn't been in town two weeks when Stringer set his cap for her. He was older than Sears and myself, thirty-one or two, I imagine, and he was in a position to marry. He ran the Colonel's old farm and stables with the girls' help, and Stringer worked hard and had good ideas. In short, he was a prosperous, well-thought-of fellow, and made a good catch for any of the local girls. Good-looking fellow too. My wife says he was the handsomest man she'd ever seen. All the girls above school age were after him. But when Eva Galli came to town with all her money and her metropolitan manners and her good looks, Stringer was sandbagged. She knocked him off his pins. She bought that house on Montgomery Street-"

"Which house on Montgomery Street?" Don asked. "The one Freddy Robinson lived in?"

"Why yes. The one across the street from John's house. Miss Mostyn's house. She bought that house, and set it up with new furniture and a piano and a gramophone. And she smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails, and she wore her hair short-a real John Held girl."

"Not entirely," Sears said. "She was no bubble-headed flapper. The time for those had passed, anyhow. And she was educated. She read quite widely. She could speak intelligently. Eva Galli was an enchanting woman. How would you describe the way she looked, Ricky?"

"Like a nineteen-twenties Claire Bloom," Ricky said immediately.

"Typical Ricky Hawthorne. Ask him to describe someone, and he names a movie star. I guess you can take it as an accurate description. Eva Galli had all this exciting modernity about her, what was modernity for Milburn at any rate, but there was also a refinement about her-an air of grace."

"That's true," said Ricky. "And a certain mysteriousness we found terribly attractive. Like your Anna Mobley. We knew nothing about her but what she hinted-she had lived in New York, she had apparently spent some time in Hollywood as an actress in silents. She did a small part in a romance called China Pearl. A Richard Barthelmess movie."

Don took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote down the name of the film.

"And she was obviously partly of Italian ancestry, but she told Stringer at one point that her maternal grandparents were English. Her father had been a man of considerable substance, one gathered, but she had been orphaned when just a child and was raised by relatives in California. That was all we knew about her. She said that she had come here for peace and seclusion."

"The women tried to take her under their wing," Sears said. "She was a catch for them too, remember. A wealthy girl who had turned her back on Hollywood, sophisticated and refined-every woman of position in Milburn sent her an invitation. The little societies women here had in those days all wanted her. I think that what they wanted was to tame her."

"To make her identifiable," Ricky said. "Yes. To tame her. Because with all her qualities, there was something else. Something fey. Lewis had a romantic imagination then, and he told me that Eva Galli was like an aristocrat, a princess or some such, who had turned her back on the court and gone off to the country to die."

"Yes, she affected us too," said Sears. "Of course, for us she was out of reach. We idealized her. We saw her from time to time-"

"We paid court," Ricky said.

"Absolutely. We paid court to her. She had politely refused all the ladies' invitations, but she had no objections to five gangling young men showing up on her doorstep on a Saturday or Sunday. Your uncle Edward was the first of us. He had more daring than we other four. By this time, everybody knew that Stringer Dedham had lost his head over her, so in a sense she was seen as under Stringer's patronage-as if she always had a ghostly duenna by her side. Edward slipped between the cracks of convention. He paid a call on her, she was dazzlingly charming to him, and soon we all got into the habit of calling on her. Stringer didn't seem to mind. He liked us, though he was in a different world."

"The adult world," Ricky said. "As Eva was. Even though she could only have been two or three years older than us, she might have been twenty. Nothing could have been more proper than our visits. Of course some of the elderly women thought they were scandalous. Lewis's father thought so too. But we had just enough social leeway to get away with it. We paid our visits in a group, after Edward had broken the ground, about once every two weeks. We were far too jealous to allow any one of us to go alone. Our visits were extraordinary. It was like slipping out of time altogether. Nothing exceptional happened, even the conversation was ordinary, but for those few hours we spent with her, we were in the realm of magic. She swept us off our feet. And that she was known to be Stringer's fiancée made it safe."

"People didn't grow up so fast in those days," Sears said. "All of this-young men in their early twenties mooning about a woman of twenty-five or -six as if she were an unattainable priestess-must seem risible to you. But it was the way we thought of her-beyond our reach. She was Stringer's, and we all thought that after they married we'd be as welcome at his house as at hers."

The two older men fell silent for a moment. They looked into the fire on Edward Wanderley's hearth and drank whiskey. Don did not prod them to speak, knowing that a crucial turn in the story had come and that they would finish telling it when they were able.

"We were in a sort of sexless, pre-Freudian paradise," Ricky finally said. "In an enchantment. Sometimes we even danced with her, but even holding her, watching her move, we never thought about sex. Not consciously. Not to admit. Well, paradise died in October, 1929, shortly after the stock market and Stringer Dedham."

"Paradise died," Sears echoed, "and we looked into the devil's face." He turned his head toward the window.

13

Sears said, "Look at the snow."

The other two followed his gaze and saw white flakes blizzarding against the window. "If his wife can find him, Omar Norris will have to be out plowing before morning."

Ricky drank more of his whiskey. "It was tropically hot," he said, melting the present storm in the unseasonal October of nearly fifty years before. "The threshing got done late that year. It seemed folks couldn't get down to work. People said money worries made Stringer absentminded. The Dedham girls said no, that wasn't it, he'd gone by Miss Galli's house that morning. He'd seen something."

"Stringer put his arms in the thresher," Sears said, "and his sisters blamed Eva. He said things while he was dying, wrapped up in blankets on their table. But you couldn't make head or tail of what they thought they heard him say. 'Bury her,' that was one thing, and 'cut her up,' as though he'd seen what was going to happen to himself."

"And," said Ricky, "one other thing. The Dedham girls said he screamed something else-but it was so mixed up with his other screams that they weren't sure about it. 'Bee-orchid.' 'Bee-orchid,' just that. He had been raving, obviously. Out of his head with shock and pain. Well, he died on that table, and got a good burial a few days later. Eva Galli didn't come to the funeral. Half the town was on Pleasant Hill, but not the dead man's fiancée. That fueled their tongues."

"The old women, the women she had ignored," Sears said. "They laid into her. Said she'd ruined Stringer. Of course half of them had unmarried daughters and they'd had their eyes on Stringer long before Eva Galli showed up. They said he made some discovery-an abandoned husband or an illegitimate child, something like that. They made her out to be a real Jezebel."

"We didn't know what to do," Ricky said. "We were afraid to visit her, after Stringer died. She might be grieving as much as a widow, you see, but she was unattached. It was our parents' place to console her, not ours. If we had called on her, the female malice would have gone into high gear. So we stewed-just stewed. Everybody assumed that she'd pack up and move back to New York. But we couldn't forget those afternoons."

"If anything, they became more magical, more poignant," Sears said. "Now we knew what we had lost. An ideal-and a romantic friendship conducted in the light of an ideal."

"Sears is right," Ricky said. "But in the end, we idealized her even more. She became an emblem of grief-of a fractured heart. All we wanted to do was to visit her. We sent her a note of condolence, and we would have gone through fire to see her. What we couldn't go through was the iron-bound social convention that set her apart. There weren't any cracks to slip through."

"Instead she visited us," Sears said. "At the apartment your uncle lived in then. Edward was the only one who had his own place. We got together to talk and drink applejack. To talk about all the things we were going to do."

"And to talk about her," Ricky said. "Do you know that Ernest Dowson poem: 'I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion'? Lewis found it and read it to us. That poem went through us like a knife. 'Thy pale lost lilies.' It certainly called for more applejack. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' What idiots we were. Anyhow, she turned up one night at Edward's apartment"

"And she was wild," Sears said. "She was frightening. She came in like a typhoon."

"She said she was lonely," Ricky said. "Said she was sick of this damned town and all the hypocrites in it. She wanted to drink and she wanted to dance, and she didn't care who was shocked. Said this dead little town and all its dead little people could go to hell as far as she was concerned. And if we were men and not little boys, we'd damn the town too."

"We were speechless," Sears said. "There was our unattainable goddess, cursing like a sailor and raging… acting like a whore. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' That's what we got, all right. Edward had a little gramophone and some records, and she made us crank it up and put on the loudest jazz he had. She was so vehement! It was crazy-we'd never seen any woman act that way, and for us she was, you know, sort of a cross between the Statue of Liberty and Mary Pickford. 'Dance with me, you little toad,' she said to John, and he was so frightened by her that he scarcely dared touch her. Her eyes were just blazing."

"I think what she felt was hate," Ricky said. "For us, for the town, for Stringer. But it was hatred, and it was boiling. A cyclone of hate. She kissed Lewis while they were dancing, and he jumped back like she burned him. He dropped his arms, and she spun off to Edward and grabbed him and made him dance. Her face was terrible-rigid. Edward was always more worldly than the rest of us, but he too was shaken by Eva's wildness- our paradise was crumbling all around us, and she kicked it into powder with every step. With every glance. She did seem like a devil; like something possessed. You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces-how all that feeling comes out and hits you like a truck? It was like that. 'Aren't you little sissies going to drink?' she said. So we drank."

"It was unspeakable," Sears said. "She seemed twice our size. I think I knew what was coming. There was only one thing that could be coming. We were simply too immature to know how to handle it."

"I don't know if I saw it coming, but it came anyhow," Ricky said. "She tried to seduce Lewis."

"He was the worst possible choice," Sears said. "Lewis was only a boy. He may have kissed a gal before that night, but he certainly had done no more than that. We all loved Eva, but Lewis probably loved her most-he was the one who found that Dowson poem, remember. And because he loved her most, her performance that evening and her hatred stunned him."

"And she knew it," Ricky said. "She was delighted. It pleased her, that Lewis was so shocked he could scarcely utter a word. And when she pushed Edward away and went after Lewis, Lewis was frozen stiff with horror. As if he had seen his mother begin to act that way."

"His mother?" Sears asked. "Well, I suppose. At least it tells you the depth of his fantasy about her- our fantasy, to be honest. And he was dumbstruck. Eva snaked her arms around him and kissed him. It looked like she was eating half his face. Imagine that-those hate-filled kisses pouring over you, all that fury biting into your month. It must have been like kissing a razor. When she drew back her head, Lewis's face was smeared with lipstick. Normally it would have been a funny sight but it was somehow horrifying. As if he was smeared with blood."

"Edward went up to her and said, 'Cool down, Miss Galli,' or something of the sort. She whirled on him, and we felt that enormous pressure of hatred again. 'You want yours, do you, Edward?' she said. 'You can wait your turn. I want Lewis first. Because my little Lewis is so pretty."

"And then," Ricky said, "she turned to me. 'You'll get some too, Ricky. And you too, Sears. You all will. But I want Lewis first. I want to show him what that insufferable Stringer Dedham saw when he peeked through my windows.' And she started to take off her blouse."

" 'Please, Miss Galli,' Edward said," Sears remembered, "but she told him to shut up and finished taking off her blouse. She wore no bra. Her breasts were in period. Small and tight, like little apples. She looked incredibly lascivious. 'Now, pretty little Lewis, why don't we see what you can do?' She began eating his face again."

Ricky said, "So we all thought we knew what Stringer had seen through her window. Eva Galli making love with another man. That, as much as her nakedness and what she was doing to Lewis, was a moral shock. We were hideously embarrassed. Finally Sears and I took a shoulder apiece and pulled her away from Lewis. Then she really swore. It was incredibly ugly. 'Can't you wait for it, you little so and sos and et ceteras and et ceteras?' She began unbuttoning her skirt while she swore at us. Edward was nearly in tears. 'Eva,' he said, 'please don't.' She dropped her skirt and stepped out of it. 'What's wrong, you pansy, afraid to see what I look like?"

"We were miles out of our depth," Sears continued. "She pulled off her slip. She went dancing up to your uncle. 'I think I'll take a bite out of you, little Edward,' she said and leaned toward him-toward his neck. And he slapped her."

"Hard," Ricky said. "And she slapped him back even harder. She put all her weight behind it. It sounded as loud as a gun going off. John and Sears and I practically fainted. We were helpless. We couldn't move."

"If we could have, we might have stopped Lewis," Sears said. "But we stood like tin soldiers and watched him. He took off like an airplane-he just flew across the room and tackled her. He was sobbing and slobbering and wailing-he had snapped. He gave her a real football tackle. They went down like a bombed building. And they made a noise as loud as Black Monday's crash. Eva never got up."

"Her head hit the edge of the fireplace," Ricky said. "Lewis crawled up on her back and kneeled over her and raised his fists, but even he saw the blood coming out of her mouth."

Both old men were panting.

"So that was that," Sears said. "She was dead. Naked and dead, with the five of us standing around like zombies. Lewis vomited on the floor, and the rest of us were close to it. We could not believe what had happened-what we had done. It's no excuse, but we really were in shock. I think we just vibrated in the silence for a while."

"Because the silence seemed immense," Ricky said. "It closed in on us like-like the snow out there. Finally Lewis said, 'We'll have to get the police.' 'No,' Edward said. 'We'll all go to jail. For murder.'

"Sears and I tried to tell him that no one had committed murder, but Edward said 'How will you like being disbarred then? Because that'll happen.' John checked her for pulse and respiration, but of course there was none. 'I think it's murder,' he said. 'We're sunk.' "

"Ricky asked what we were supposed to do," Sears said, "and John said, 'There's only one thing we can do. Hide her body. Hide it away where it won't be found.' We all looked at her body, and at her bloody face, and we all felt defeated by her-she had won. That's how it felt. Her hatred had provoked us to something very like murder, if not murder under the law. And now we were talking about concealing our act- both legally and morally, a damning step. And we agreed to it."

Don asked, "Where did you decide to hide her body?"

"There was an old pond five or six miles out of town. A deep pond. It's not there anymore. It was filled in and they built a shopping center on the land. Must have been twenty feet deep."

"Lewis's car had a flat tire," Sears said, "so we wrapped the body in a sheet and left him there with her and went off into town to find Warren Scales. He had come in to shop with his wife, we knew. He was a good soul, and he liked us. We were going to tell him that we ruined his car, and then buy him a better one- Ricky and I paying the lion's share."

"Warren Scales was the father of the farmer who talks about shooting Martians?" Don asked.

"Elmer was Warren's fourth child and first son. He wasn't even thought of then. We went along downtown and found Warren and promised to bring his car back in an hour or so. Then we went back to Edward's and carried the girl down the stairs and put her in the car. Tried to put her in the car."

Ricky said, "We were so nervous and afraid and numb and we still couldn't believe what had happened or what we were doing. And we had great difficulty in fitting her into the car. 'Put her feet in first,' someone said, and we slid the body along the back seat, and the sheet got all tangled up, and Lewis started to swear about her head being caught and we pulled her halfway out again and John screamed that she moved. Edward called him a damned fool and said he knew she couldn't move-wasn't he a doctor?"

"Yet finally we got her in-Ricky and John had to sit in back with the body. We had a nightmarish trip through town." Sears paused and looked into the fire. "My God. I was driving. I just remembered that. I was so rattled that I couldn't remember how to get to the pond. I just backtracked and drove around and went four or five miles out of our way. Finally someone told me how to get there. And we got onto that little dirt road which led down to the pond."

"Everything seemed so sharp," Ricky said. "Every leaf, every pebble-flat and sharp as a drawing in a book. We got out of that car and the world just hit us between the eyes. 'Do we have to do this?' Lewis asked. He was crying. Edward said, 'I wish to God we didn't.' "

"Then Edward got back behind the wheel," Sears said. "The car was ten-fifteen yards from the pond, which fell off almost immediately to its full depth. He switched on the ignition. I cranked it up. Edward retarded the spark, put it in first, popped the clutch and jumped out. The car crawled forward."

Both men fell silent again, and looked at each other. "Then-" Ricky said, and Sears nodded. "I don't know how to say this…"

"Then we saw something," Sears said. "We hallucinated. Or something."

"You saw her alive again," Don said. "I know."

Ricky looked at him with a tired astonishment. "I guess you do. We saw her face through the rear window. She was staring at us-grinning at us. Jeering at us. We damn near dropped dead. The next second the car splashed into the pond and started to sink. We all ran forward and tried to look into the side windows. I was scared silly. I knew she was dead, back in the apartment-I knew it. John jumped into the water just as the car started to go down. When he came back up he said he had looked through the side window and…"

"And he didn't see anything on the back seat," Sears told Don. "He said."

"The car went down and never came back up. It must be still down there, under thirty thousand tons of fill," Ricky said.

"Did anything else happen?" Don asked. "Please try to remember. It's important."

"Two things did happen," Ricky said. "But I need another drink, after all that." He poured some of the whiskey into his glass and drank before resuming. "John Jaffrey saw a lynx on the other side of the pond. Then we all saw it. We jumped about a mile-it made us even guiltier, being seen. By even an animal. It switched its tail and disappeared back into the woods."

"Fifty years ago, were lynxes common around here?"

"Not at all. Maybe farther north. Well, that was one. The other was that Eva's house burned, caught on fire. When we walked back to town we saw the neighbors all standing around, watching the volunteers try to put it out."

"Did any of them see how it started?"

Sears shook his head, and Ricky continued the story. "Apparently it just started by itself. Seeing it made us feel worse, as if we had caused that too."

"One of the volunteers said something odd," Sears remembered. "All of us must have looked so haggard, standing around looking at the fire, and the firemen assumed we were worried about the other houses on the street. He said the other buildings were safe because the fire was getting smaller. He said from what he had seen, it looked like part of the house exploded inward- he couldn't explain it, but that's the way it looked to him. And the fire was only in that part of the house, up on the second floor. I saw what he was talking about. You could see some of the beams, and they were buckled in toward the fire."

"And the windows!" Ricky said. "The windows were broken, but there was no glass on the ground-they burst inward."

"Imploded," Don said.

Ricky nodded. "Yes. I couldn't remember the word. I saw a light bulb do it once. Anyhow, the fire ruined the second floor, but the first floor wasn't touched by it. A year or two later a family bought the place and had it rebuilt. We were all back at work, and people had stopped wondering what had happened to Eva Galli."

"Except for us," Sears said. "And we didn't talk about it. We had a few nasty moments when the developers started filling in that pond fifteen-twenty years ago, but they never found the car. They just buried it. And whatever was inside it."

"Nothing was inside it," Don said. "Eva Galli is here now. She's back. For the second time."

"Back?" Ricky said, jerking his head up.

"She is back as Anna Mostyn. And before, she came here as Ann-Veronica Moore. As Alma Mobley, she met me in California and killed my brother in Amsterdam."

"Miss Mostyn?" Sears asked incredulously.

"Is that what killed Edward?" Ricky asked.

"I'm sure it is. He probably saw whatever Stringer saw-she let him see it."

"I will not believe that Miss Mostyn has anything to do with Eva Galli, Edward or Stringer Dedham," Sears said. "The idea is ridiculous."

"What is 'it'?" Ricky asked. "What did she let him see?"

"Herself changing shape," Don said. "And I think she planned for him to see it, knowing it would literally scare him to death." He looked at the two old men. "Here's another. I think that in all probability she knows we are here tonight. Because we are unfinished business."

Do You Know What It Means To Miss

New Orleans?

14

"Changing shape," Ricky said.

"Changing shape indeed," Sears said, less charitably. "You're saying that Eva Galli and Edward's little actress and our secretary are all the same person?"

"Not a person. The same being. The lynx you saw on the other side of the pond was probably her too. Not a person at all, Sears. When you felt Eva Galli's hate that day she came to my uncle's apartment, I think you perceived the truest part of her. I think she came to provoke the five of you into some kind of destruction- to ruin your innocence. I think it backfired, and you injured her. At least that proves it can be done. Now she has come back to make you pay for it. Me, too. She took a detour from me to get my brother, but she knew that eventually I'd turn up here. And then she would be able to get us one by one."

"Was this the idea you said you'd tell us about?" Ricky asked.

Don nodded.

"What in the world makes you imagine that it is anything but a particularly bad idea?" Sears asked.

"Peter Barnes, for one," Don answered. "I think this will convince you too, Sears. And if it fails, I'll read you something from a book that should work. But Peter first. He went to Lewis's house today, as I told you before." He recounted everything that had happened to Peter Barnes-the trip to the abandoned station, the death of Freddy Robinson, the death of Jim Hardie in Anna Mostyn's house and the final, terrible events of the morning. "So I think it's inescapable that Anna Mostyn is the 'benefactor' Gregory Bate mentioned. She animates Gregory and Fenny-Peter says he knew intuitively that Gregory was owned by something, that he was like a savage dog obeying an evil master. Together, they want to destroy the whole town. Just like Dr. Rabbitfoot in the novel I was planning."

"They're trying to make that novel come true?" Ricky asked.

"I think so. They also called themselves nightwatchers. They're playful. Think of those initials. Anna Mostyn, Alma Mobley, Ann-Veronica Moore. That was playfulness-she wanted us to notice the similarity. I'm sure she sent Gregory and Fenny because Sears had seen them before. Or years ago, they appeared to him because she knew she'd be able to use them now. And it's no accident that when I saw Gregory in California, I thought of him being like a werewolf."

"Why no accident, if that's what you're claiming he is?" Sears asked.

"I'm not claiming that. But creatures like Anna Mostyn or Eva Galli are behind every ghost story and supernatural tale ever written," Don said. "They are the originals of everything that frightens us in the supernatural. I think in stories we make them manageable. But the stories at least show that we can destroy them. Gregory Bate isn't a werewolf any more than Anna Mostyn is. He is what people have described as a werewolf. Or as a vampire. He feeds on living bodies. He sold himself to his benefactor for immortality."

Don took up one of the books he had brought with him. "This is a reference book, the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. There's a long entry under 'Shapeshifting,' written by a professor named R. D. Jameson. Listen to this: 'Although no census of shapeshifters has been taken, the number of them found in all parts of the world is astronomical.' He says they appear in the folklore of all peoples. He goes on for three columns-it's one of the longest entries in the book. I'm afraid it isn't actually of much help to us, apart from showing that these beings have been talked about in folk history for thousands of years, because Jameson doesn't recount ways, if any, in which the legends say these creatures can be destroyed. But listen to the way he ends the entry: 'The studies made of shapeshifting foxes, otters, etc., are sound but miss the central problem of shapeshifting itself. Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology. Until the phenomena in both areas have been scrutinized with care, we are not able to go beyond the general observation that nothing is, in fact, what it seems to be.' "

"Amen," said Ricky.

"Precisely. Nothing is what it seems to be. These beings can convince you that you are losing your mind. That's happened to each of us-we've seen and felt things we argued ourselves out of later. It can't be true, we tell ourselves; such things do not happen. But they do happen, and we did see them. You did see them. You did see Eva Galli sit up on the car seat, and you saw her appear as a lynx a moment later."

"Just suppose," Sears said, "that one of us had a rifle along that day, and had shot the lynx. What would have happened?"

"I think you would have seen something extraordinary, but I can't imagine what it would have been. Maybe it would have died. Maybe it would have shifted to some preferred form-maybe, if it had been in great pain, it would have gone through a series of changes. And maybe it would have been helpless."

"A lot of maybes," Ricky said.

"That's all we have."

"If we accept your theory."

"If you have a better one I'll listen to it. But through Peter Barnes we know what happened to Freddy Robinson and Jim Hardie. Also, I checked with her agent and found out some things about Ann-Veronica Moore. She came literally from nowhere. There is no record at all of her in the town she said she was born in. Because there couldn't be-there never was an Ann-Veronica Moore until the day she enrolled in acting class. She just arrived, plausible and well documented, at the door of a theater, knowing it was a way to get to Edward Wanderley."

"Then these-these things you think exist-are even more dangerous. They have wit," Sears said.

"Yes, they do have wit. They love jokes, and they make longterm plans, and like the Indians' Manitou, they love to flaunt themselves. This second book gives a good example of that." He picked it up and showed the spine to the two men. "I Came This Way, by Robert Mobley. He was the painter Alma claimed was her father. I made the mistake of never looking at his autobiography until today. Now I think that she wanted me to read it and discover that in calling herself Mobley she was making a pun on an earlier appearance. The fourth chapter is called 'Dark Clouds'-it's not a very well-written autobiography, but I want to read you a few paragraphs from that chapter."

Don opened the book to a marked page, and neither of the two old men stirred.

" 'Even in a life so apparently fortunate as mine has been, dark and troubling periods have intruded and marked months and years with indelible grief. The year 1958 was one such; only by hurling myself with the utmost concentration into my work, I believe, did I maintain my sanity during that year. Knowing the sunny watercolors and rigid formal experimentation in oils which had been characteristic of my work during the five years previous, people have often questioned me about the stylistic transformation which led to my so-called Supernatural Period. I can say now only that my mind was very likely unbalanced, and the violent disorder of my emotions found expression in the work I forced myself to do.

" 'The first painful event of the year was the death of my mother, Jessica Osgood Mobley, whose affection and wise advice had…' I'll skip a page or two here." Don scanned the page, and turned it over. "Here we are. 'The second, even more shattering loss was the death by his own hand in his eighteenth year of my elder son, Shelby. I shall mention here only the circumstances surrounding Shelby's death which led directly to my work of the so-called Supernatural Period, for this book is chiefly an account of my life in painting: yet I must assert that my son's was a gay, innocent and vibrant spirit, and I am certain that only a great moral shock, the apprehension of a hitherto unsuspected evil, could have led him to take his life.

" 'Shortly after the death of my mother, a spacious house near our own was sold to an evidently prosperous, attractive woman in her mid-forties whose sole family consisted of a niece of fourteen who had become her ward after the death of the girl's parents. Mrs. Florence de Peyser was friendly and reserved, a woman with charming manners who wintered in Europe as my own parents had: in fact she seemed altogether more representative of another age than our own, and for a time I speculated about doing her portrait in watercolor. She collected paintings, as I saw when invited to her house, and was even knowledgeable about my own work- though my abstractions of the period would have fitted oddly with her French Symbolists! But for all Mrs. de Peyser's charm, the principle attraction of her household soon became her niece. Amy Monckton's beauty was almost ethereal, and I believe that she was the most feminine being I have ever seen. Every action she undertook, be it merely entering a room or pouring a cup of tea, spoke a volume of quiet grace. The child was an enchantment, entirely self-possessed and modest- as delicate as (but perhaps more intelligent than) Pansy Osmond, for whose sake Henry James's Isobel Archer sacrificed herself so willingly. Amy was a welcome guest in our home: both of my sons were drawn to her.'

"And there she is," Don said. "A fourteen-year-old Alma Mobley, under the guidance of Mrs. de Peyser.

Poor Mobley didn't know what he was letting into his house. He goes on: 'Though Amy was the same age as Whitney, my younger son, it was Shelby-sensitive Shelby-who became closer to her. At the time, I thought it was proof of Shelby's politesse, that he gave so much time to a girl four years younger than himself. And even when I picked up clear signs of affection (poor Shelby blushed when the girl's name was mentioned), I could never have imagined that they indulged in any behavior of a morbid, degrading or precocious kind. In truth, it was one of the delights of my life to observe my tall, handsome son walking through our garden with the pretty child. And I was not surprised, though perhaps a bit amused, when Shelby confided to me that when she was eighteen and he twenty-two, he would marry Amy Monckton.

" 'After several months I noticed that Shelby had become increasingly withdrawn. He was no longer interested in his friends, and in the last months of his life, he concentrated exclusively on the de Peyser household and Miss Monckton. They had lately been joined by a servant of sinister and Latin appearance named Gregorio. I distrusted Gregorio on sight, and attempted to warn Mrs. de Peyser about him, but was informed that she had known him and his family for many years, and that he was an excellent chauffeur. I felt I could say no more.

" 'In this short account I can say only that my son became haggard in appearance and secretive in manner during the last two weeks of his life. I played the heavy parent for the first time in my life and forbade him to communicate with the de Peyser household. His attitude led me to believe that under Gregorio's influence, he and the child were experimenting with drugs-perhaps also with illicit sensuality. That noxious and debasing weed, marijuana, was even then to be found in the lower sections of New Orleans. And I feared also that they experimented too with some gimcrack form of Creole mysticism. That sort of thing suits the drug milieu.

" 'Whatever Shelby had been drawn into, its results were tragic. He disobeyed my orders and continued clandestinely to frequent the de Peyser house; and on the last day of August he returned home, took the service revolver I kept in a drawer in my bedroom, and shot himself. It was I, painting in my studio, who heard the shot and discovered his body.

" 'What occurred next must have been the result of shock. I did not think to call the police or an ambulance: I wandered outside, imagining somehow that help would already have arrived. I found myself on the road outside our house. I was looking at Mrs. de Peyser's residence. What I saw there nearly made me lose consciousness.

" 'I imagined I saw the chauffeur Gregorio standing at an upper window, sneering down at me. Malevolence seemed to flow from him. He was exultant I tried to scream and could not. I looked down and saw something worse. Amy Monckton stood by the side of the house, similarly staring at me, but with a calm, expressionless gaze and a grave face. Her feet were not touching the ground! Amy appeared to be floating nine or ten inches above the grass. Exposed to them, I felt an utter terror, and pressed my hands to my face. When I removed them and could see again, they were gone.

" 'Mrs. de Peyser and Amy sent flowers to Shelby's funeral, but by then had gone to California. Though I was and am now convinced that I had imagined my last sight of the child and the chauffeur, I burned the flowers rather than let them adorn Shelby's coffin. The paintings of my so-called Supernatural Period, which I propose now to discuss, flowed from this experience.' "

Don looked at the two old men. "I read that for the first time today. You see what I mean by flaunting themselves? They want their victims to know, or at least to suspect, what sort of things happened to them. Robert Mobley got a shock that nearly unhinged him, and he did the best paintings of his life; Alma wanted me to read about it and know that she had lived in New Orleans with Florence de Peyser under another name and killed a boy as surely as she killed my brother."

"Why hasn't Anna Mostyn killed us already?" Sears asked. "She's had every opportunity. I can't even pretend not to be convinced by what you've told us, but why has she waited? Why aren't the three of us as dead as the others?"

Ricky cleared his throat. "Edward's actress told Stella that I'd be a good enemy. I think what she was waiting for was the moment when we knew exactly what we were up against."

"You mean now," Sears said.

"Do you have a plan?" Ricky asked.

"No, just a few ideas. I'm going to go back to the hotel and pick up my things and move back here. Maybe in the tapes she made with my uncle there'll be some information we can use. And I want to break into Anna Mostyn's home. I hope you will come with me. We might find something there."

"What you'll find in there is a long walk on a short pier," Sears said.

"No, I don't think they'll be there anymore. The three of them will know that we'll try the house first. They'll have found somewhere else already."

Don looked at Sears and Ricky. "There is just one thing left to say. As Sears asked, what would have happened if you'd shot the lynx? That's what we'll have to find out. This time we'll have to shoot the lynx, whatever that will mean."