Ghost Story

"Age. No more or less. We're coming to the end of our span, Ricky. All of us. We've lived long enough, haven't we?"

Ricky shook his head.

"John's dying already. You can see it in his face, can't you?"

"Yes, I thought I saw…" Ricky said, thinking back to a time at the start of the meeting-a plane of darkness sliding across John Jaffrey's forehead-which now seemed to have happened years before.

"Death. That's what you thought you saw. It's true, my old friend." Sears smiled benignly at him. "I've been giving this a lot of thought, and you mentioning Eva Galli-well, it stirs it all up. I'll tell you what I've been thinking." Sears drew on the cigar and leaned massively forward. "I think Edward did not die of natural causes. I think he was given a vision of such terrible and unearthly beauty that the shock to his poor mortal system killed him. I think we have been skirting the edges of that beauty in our stories for a year."

"No, not beauty," Ricky said. "Something obscene- something terrible."

"Hold it. I want you to consider the possibility of another race of beings-powerful, all-knowing, beautiful beings. If they existed, they would detest us. We would be cattle compared to them. They'd live for centuries-for a century of centuries, so that you and I would look like children to them. They would not be bound by accident, coincidence or a blind combination of genes. They'd be right to detest us: beside them, we would be detestable." Sears stood up, put down his glass, and began to pace. "Eva Galli. That was where we missed our chance. Ricky, we could have seen things worth our pathetic lives to see."

"They're even vainer than we are, Sears," Ricky said. "Oh. Now I remember. The Bates. That's the story you can't tell."

"Oh, that's all finished now," Sears said. "Everything is finished now." He walked to Ricky, and leaned on his chair looking down at him. "I fear that from now on all of us are-is it hors commerce or de combat?"

"In your case, I am sure it is hors de combat," Ricky said, remembering his lines. He felt terribly ill, shivering, he felt the onslaught of the worst cold of his life: it lay like smoke in his lungs and weighted his arms like a winter's worth of snow.

Sears leaned toward him. "That's true for all of us, Ricky. But still, it was quite a journey, wasn't it?" Sears plugged the cigar in his mouth and reached out to palp Ricky's neck. "I thought I saw swollen glands. You'll be lucky not to die of pneumonia." Sears's massive hand circled Ricky's throat.

Helplessly, Ricky sneezed.

"Pay attention to me," David said. "Do you understand the importance of this? You put yourself in a position where the only logical end is your death. So although you consciously imagined these beings you invented as evil, unconsciously you saw that they were superior. That's why your 'story' was so dangerous. Unconsciously, according to your doctor, you saw that they were going to kill you. You invented something so superior to yourself that you wanted to give your life to them. That's dangerous stuff, kid."

Don shook his head.

David put down his knife and fork. "Let's try an experiment. I can prove to you that you want to live. Okay?"

"I know I want to live." He looked across the indisputably real street and saw the indisputably real woman walking up the other side, still tugged along by the sheepdog. No: not walking up the other side, he realized, but coming down it, as she had just come down his side. It was like a film in which the same extra is shown in different scenes, in different roles, jarring you with his presence, reminding you that this is only invention. Still, there she was, moving briskly behind the handsome dog, not an invention but part of the street.

"I'll prove it. I'm going to put my hands around your throat and choke you. When you want me to stop, just say stop."

"That's ridiculous."

David reached quickly across the table and gripped his throat. "Stop," he said. David tightened his muscles, and went up off his chair, knocking the table aside. The carafe toppled and bubbled wine over the tablecloth. None of the other diners appeared to notice, but went on eating and talking in their indisputably real way, indisputably forking food into their indisputably real mouths. "Stop," he tried to say, but now David's hands were bearing down too hard, and he could not form the word. David's face was that of a man writing a report or casting a fly: he knocked the table over with his hip.

Then David's face was not his, but the head of an antlered stag or the huge head of an owl or both of those.

Shockingly near, a man explosively sneezed.

"Hello, Peter. So you want to look behind the scenes." Clark Mulligan backed away from the door of the projection room, inviting him in. "Nice of you to bring him up, Mrs. Barnes. I don't get much company up here. What's the matter? You look sort of confused, Pete."

Peter opened his mouth, closed it again. "I-"

"You could thank him, Peter," his mother said dryly.

"That movie probably shook him up," Mulligan said. "It has that effect on people. I've seen it hundreds of times by now, but it still gets me. That's all it was, Pete. A movie."

"A movie?" Peter said. "No-we were coming up the stairs…" He held out his hand and saw the Bowie knife.

"That's where the reel ended. Your mother said you were interested in seeing how it all looks from up here. Since you're the only people in the theater, there's no harm in that, is there?"

"Peter, what in the world are you doing with that knife?" his mother asked. "Give it to me immediately."

"No, I have to-ah. I have to-" Peter stepped away from his mother and looked confusedly around at the little projection booth. A corduroy coat draped from a hook; a calendar, a mimeographed piece of paper had been tacked to the rear wall. It was as cold as if Mulligan were showing the movie in the street.

"You'd better settle down, Pete," Mulligan said. "Now here you can see our projectors, the last reel is all ready to go in this one, see, I get them all set up beforehand and when a little mark shows up in a couple of the frames I know I have so many seconds to start up the-"

"What happens at the end?" Peter asked. "I can't get straight in my head just what's-"

"Oh, they all die, of course," Mulligan said. "There's no other way for it to end, is there? When you compare them with what they're fighting, they really do seem sort of pathetic, don't they? They're just accidental little people, after all, and what they're fighting is-well, splendid, after all. You can watch the ending up here with me, if you'd like. Is that okay with you, Mrs. Barnes?"

"He'd better," Christina said, sidling toward him.

"He went into some kind of trance down there. Give me that knife, Peter."

Peter put the knife behind his back.

"Oh, he'll see it soon enough, Mrs. Barnes," Mulligan said, and flicked up a switch on the second projector.

"See what?" Peter asked. "I'm freezing to death."

"The heaters are broken. I'm liable to get chilblains up here. See what? Well, the two men are killed first, of course, and then… but watch it for yourself."

Peter bent forward to look through the slot in the wall, and there was the empty interior of the Rialto, there the hollow beam of light widening toward the screen…

Beside him, an unseen Ricky Hawthorne loudly sneezed, and he was aware of everything shifting again, the walls of the projection booth seemed to waver, he saw something recoil in disgust, something with the huge head of an animal recoiling as if Ricky had spat on it, and then Clark Mulligan locked back into place again, saying, "Film has a rough spot there, I guess, it's okay now," but his voice was trembling, and his mother was saying, "Give me the knife, Peter."

"It's all a trick," he said. "It's another slimy trick."

"Peter, don't be rude," his mother said.

Clark Mulligan looked toward him with concern and puzzlement on his face, and Peter, remembering the advice from some old adventure story, brought the Bowie knife up into Mulligan's bulging stomach. His mother screamed, already beginning to melt like everything around him, and Peter locked both hands on the bone handle and levered the knife up. He cried out in sorrow and misery, and Mulligan fell back into the projectors, knocking them off their stands.

19

"Oh, Sears," Ricky said-gasped. His throat blazed. "Oh, my poor friends." For a moment they had all been alive again, and their fragile world had been whole: the double loss of his friends and their comfortable world reverberated through the whole of his being, and tears burned in his eyes.

"Look, Ricky," he heard Don saying, and the voice was compelling enough to make him turn his head. When he saw what was happening on the floor of the apartment, he sat up. "Peter did it," he heard Don say beside him.

The boy was standing six feet away from them, his eyes intent on the body of the woman lying some little way from them. Don was on his knees, rubbing his neck. Ricky met Don's eyes, saw both horror and pain there, and then both of them looked back down at Anna Mostyn.

For a moment she looked as she had when he had first seen her in the reception room at Wheat Row: a young woman with a lovely fox face and dark hair: even now the old man saw the real intelligence and false humanity in her oval face. Her hand clutched the bone handle protruding out just below her breastbone; dark blood already poured from the long wound. The woman thrashed on the floor, contorting her face; her eyes fluttered. Random flakes of snow whirled in through the open window and settled down on each of them.

Anna Mostyn's eyes flew open, and Ricky braced himself, thinking she would say something; but the lovely eyes drifted out of focus, not seeming to recognize any of the men. A wave of blood gushed from her wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across her body and touching the knees of the two men; she half-smiled, and a third wave rushed across her body and pooled on the floor.

For an instant only, as if the corpse of Anna Mostyn were a film, a photographic transparency over another substance, the three of them saw a writhing life through the dead woman's skin-no simple stag or owl, no human or animal body, but a mouth opened beneath Anna Mostyn's mouth and a body constrained within Anna Mostyn's bloody clothing moved with ferocious life: it was as swirling and varied as an oil slick, and it angrily flashed out at them for the moment it was visible; then it blackened and faded, and only the dead woman lay on the floor.

In the next second, the color of her face died to chalky white and her limbs curled inward, forced by a wind the others could not feel. The dead woman drew up like a sheet of paper tossed on a fire, drawing in, her entire body curling inward like her arms and legs. She fluttered and shrank before them, becoming half her size, then a quarter of her size, no longer anything human, merely a piece of tortured flesh curling and shrinking before them, hurtled and buffeted by an unfelt wind.

The tenement room itself seemed to exhale, releasing a surprisingly human sigh through whatever was left of her throat. A green light flashed about them, flaring like a thousand matches: and the remainder of Anna Mostyn's body fluttered once more and disappeared into itself. Ricky, by now leaning forward on his hands and knees, saw how the particles of snow falling where the body had been spun around in a vortex and followed it into oblivion.

Thirteen blocks away, the house across the street from John Jaffrey's on Montgomery Street exploded into itself. Milly Sheehan heard the crack of the explosion, and when she rushed to her front window she was in time to see the facade of Eva Galli's house fold inward like cardboard, and then break up into separate bricks flying inward to the fire already roaring up through the center of the house.

"The lynx," Ricky breathed. Don took his eyes from the spot on the floor where Anna Mostyn had dwindled into vacant air, and saw a sparrow sitting on the sill of the open window. The little bird cocked its head at the three of them, Don and Ricky already beginning to move across the floor toward it, Peter still gazing at the empty floor, and then the sparrow lifted itself off the sill and flew out through the window.

"That's it, isn't it?" Peter asked. "It's all over now. We did it all."

"Yes, Peter," Ricky said. "It's all over."

And for a moment the two men exchanged glances of agreement. Don stood up and walked as if idly to the window and saw only a slackening storm. He turned to the boy and embraced him.

20

"How do you feel?" Don asked.

"He asks how I feel," Ricky said, supported by pillows on his bed in the Binghamton hospital. "Pneumonia is no fun. It affects the system adversely. I advise you to refrain from getting it."

"I'll try," Don said. "You almost died. They just got the highway open in time for the ambulance to bring you up here. If you hadn't pulled through, I'd have had to take your wife to France this spring."

"Don't tell that to Stella. She'll run in here and pull my tubes out." He smiled wryly. "She's so eager to get to France she'd even go with a pup like you."

"How long will you have to stay in here?"

"Two more weeks. Apart from the way I feel, it's not too bad. Stella has managed to terrify all the nurses, so they take excellent care of me. Thank you for the flowers, by the way."

"I missed you," Don said. "Peter misses you too."

"Yes," Ricky said simply.

"It's a funny thing about this whole affair. I feel closer to you and Peter-and Sears, I guess I have to say-than anyone since Alma Mobley."

"Well, you know my thoughts about that. I blurted them all out when that young doctor doped me to the gills. The Chowder Society is dead, long live the Chowder Society. Sears once said to me that he wished he wasn't so old. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I agree with him now. I wish I could see Peter Barnes grow up-I wish I could help him. You'll have to do that for me. We owe him our lives, you know."

"I know. Whatever we don't owe to your cold."

"I was completely befuddled, back in that room."

"So was I."

"Well, thank God for Peter. I'm glad you didn't tell him."

"Agreed. He's been through enough. But there is still a lynx to be shot."

Don nodded.

"Because," Ricky continued, "otherwise she'll just come back again. And keep on coming back until all of us and most of our relatives are dead. I've supported my children for too long to want to see them go that way. And as much as I hate to say it, it looks like it's your job."

"In every way," Don said. "It was really you who destroyed both Gregory and Fenny. And Peter killed their boss. I have to take care of the remaining business."

"I don't envy you the job. But I do have confidence in you. You have the knife?"

"I picked it up off the floor."

"Good. I'd hate to think of it being lost. You know, back in that terrible room I think I saw the answer to one of the puzzles Sears and I and the others used to talk about. I think we saw the reason for your uncle's heart attack."

"I think so too," Don said. "Just for a second. I didn't know that you saw it too."

"Poor Edward. He must have walked into John's spare bedroom, expecting at the worst to find his actress in bed with Freddy Robinson. And instead she- what? Threw off the mask."

Ricky was now very tired, and Don stood up to go. He put a stack of paperback books and a bag of oranges on the table beside Ricky's bed.

"Don?" Even the old man's voice was grainy with exhaustion.

"Yes?"

"Forget about pampering me. Just shoot me a lynx."

21

Three weeks later, when Ricky was at last released from the hospital, the storms had wholly vanished, and Milburn, no longer under siege, convalesced and healed as surely as the old lawyer. Supplies reached the grocery stores and supermarkets: Rhoda Flagler saw Bitsy Underwood at the Bay Tree Market, turned red as a radish and rushed over to apologize for pulling out her hair. "Oh, those were terrible days," Bitsy said. "I probably would have clobbered you if you'd got to that damned pumpkin first."

The schools reopened; businessmen and bankers went back to work, taking down their shutters and facing the mounds of paperwork that had accumulated on their desks; slowly, the joggers and walkers began to appear on Milburn's streets again. Annie and Anni, Humphrey Stalladge's two good-looking barmaids, grieved for Lewis Benedikt and married the men they were living with; they conceived within a week of one another. If they had boys, they'd name them Lewis.

Some businesses never did open up again: a few men had gone bankrupt-you have to pay rent and property taxes on a shop, even if it is buried under a snowdrift. Others closed for more somber reasons. Leota Mulligan thought about running the Rialto by herself, but sold the site to a franchise chain and married Clark's brother six months later: Larry was less a dreamer than Clark had been, but he was a dependable man and good company and he liked her cooking. Ricky Hawthorne quietly closed down the law office, but a young attorney in town persuaded him to sell him the firm's name and goodwill. The new man took back Florence Quast and had new nameplates made for the door and the front of the building. Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. "Pity his name isn't Poe," Ricky said, but Stella didn't think that was funny.

During all this time, Don waited. When he saw Ricky and Stella, they talked about the travel brochures that now covered the enormous coffee table; when he saw Peter Barnes, they talked about Cornell, about the writers the boy was reading, about how his father was adjusting to life without Christina. Twice Don and Ricky drove to Pleasant Hill and placed flowers on all the graves which had come into being since John Jaffrey's funeral. Buried together in a straight line were Lewis, Sears, Clark Mulligan, Freddy Robinson, Harlan Bautz, Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie-so many new graves, separate piles of earth, still lumpy. In time, when the earth had settled, they would have their headstones. Christina Barnes was buried farther off beneath another heap of raw earth, on half of the double plot Walter Barnes had bought. Elmer Scales's family had been buried closer to the top of the hill, in the Scales family plot first purchased by Elmer's grandfather: a weatherworn stone angel guarded over them. There too they put flowers.

"No sign of a lynx yet," Ricky said as they drove back to town.

"No lynx," Don answered. Both of them knew that when it came, it would not be a lynx; and that the waiting might take months, years.

Don read, looked forward to his dinners with Ricky and Stella, watched entire sequences of movies on television (Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dar Duryea in a gangster's nipped-in suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo), found he could not write; waited. Often he woke himself up in the middle of the night, weeping. He too had to heal.

In mid-March on a black wintry day just like those he and the Chowder Society had endured, a mail truck delivered a heavy package from a film rental company in New York. It had taken them two months to find a copy of China Pearl.

He threaded his uncle's projector and set up the screen and discovered that his hands were trembling so badly that it would have taken him three tries to light a cigarette. Just the sequence of setting up Eva Galli's only movie brought back the apparition of Gregory Bate in the Rialto, where all of them could have died. And he found that he feared that Eva Galli would have Alma Mobley's face.

He had attached the speakers in case someone had added a musical sound track: made in 1925, China Pearl was a silent film. When he switched the projector on and sat back to watch, holding a drink to help his nerves, he discovered that the print had been altered by the distribution company. It was not just China Pearl, it was number thirty-eight in a series called "Classics of the Silent Screen"; besides a soundtrack, a commentary had been added. That meant, Don knew, that the film had been heavily edited.

"One of the greatest stars of the silent era was Richard Barthelmess," said the announcer's colorless voice, and the screen showed the actor walking down a mock-up of a street in Singapore. He was surrounded by Hollywood Filipinos and Japanese dressed as Malays-they were supposed to be Chinese. The announcer went on to describe Barthelmess's career, and then summarized a story about a will, a stolen pearl, a false accusation of murder: the first third of the film had been cut. Barthelmess was in Singapore looking for the true murderer, who had stolen "the famous Pearl of the Orient." He was aided by Vilma Banky, who owned a bar "frequented by waterfront scum" but "as a Boston girl, has a heart the size of Cape Cod…"

Don turned the speakers off. For ten minutes he watched the lipsticked little actor gaze soulfully at Vilma Banky, topple villainous "waterfront scum," run about on boats: he hoped that if Eva Galli would appear in this butchered version, he would recognize her. Vilma Banky's bar housed a number of women who draped themselves over the customers and languorously sipped tall drinks. Some of these prostitutes were plain, some of them were stunning: any of them, he supposed, could have been Eva Galli.

But then a girl appeared framed in the doorway of the bar, studio fog boiling behind her, and pouted at the camera. Don looked at her sensual, large-eyed face, and felt his heart freeze. He hurriedly switched on the soundtrack.

"… the notorious Singapore Sal," crooned the announcer. "Will she get to our hero?" Of course she was not the notorious Singapore Sal, that was an invention of whoever had written the inane commentary; but he knew she was Eva Galli. She sauntered through the bar and approached Barthelmess; she stroked his cheek. When he brushed her hand away, she sat down on his lap and kicked one leg in the air. The actor dumped her on the floor. "So much for Singapore Sal," gloated the announcer.

Don yanked out the speaker leads, stopped the film and backed it up to Eva Galli's entrance, and watched the sequence again.

He had expected her to be beautiful, and she was not. Beneath the makeup, she was just a girl of ordinary good looks; she looked nothing like Alma Mobley. She had enjoyed the business of acting, he saw, playing the part of an ambitious girl playing a part had amused her-how she would have enjoyed stardom! As Ann-Veronica Moore, she had played at it again; even Alma Mobley had seemed fitted for the movies. She could have molded that passive beautiful face over a thousand characters. But in 1925, she had miscalculated, made a mistake: cameras exposed too much, and what you saw when you looked at Eva Galli on screen was a young woman who was not likable. Even Alma had not been likable; even Anna Mostyn, when truly seen-as at the Barnes's party-seemed coldly perverse, driven by willpower. They could for a time evoke human love, but nothing in them could return it. What you finally saw was their hollowness. They could disguise it for a time, but never finally, and that was their greatest mistake; a mistake in being. Don thought he could recognize it anywhere now, in any nightwatcher pretending to be man or woman.

22

At the beginning of April Peter Barnes came to visit him. The boy, who had seemed to be recovering from their terrible winter, slumped into a chair and ran his hands over his face. "I'm sorry to interrupt you. If you're busy I'll go away again."

"You can always come to see me," Don said. "You never have to think twice about it. I mean that, Peter. I'll never be anything but happy to see you. That's a guarantee."

"I was hoping you'd say something like that. Ricky's leaving in a week or two, isn't he?"

"Yes. I'm driving them to the airport next Friday. They're both very excited about their trip. But if you want to see Ricky now, all I have to do is call him up. He'll come."

"No, please don't," the boy said. "It's bad enough I'm bothering you…"

"For God's sake, Peter," Don said. "What's the matter?"

"Well, it's just that I've been having an awful time lately. That's why I wanted to see you."

"I'm glad you did. What's wrong?"

"I keep seeing my mother," Peter said. "I mean, I dream about her all the time. It's like I'm back in Lewis's house, and I'm seeing that Gregory Bate grab her again-and I keep dreaming about the way he looked on the floor of the Rialto. All those smashed-up pieces of him moving around. Refusing to die." He was close to tears.

"Have you talked to your father about it?"

Peter nodded. "I tried. I wanted to tell him everything, but he won't listen. Not really. He looks at me like I'm five years old and telling him some made-up nonsense. So I stopped before I really started."

"You can't blame him, Peter. Nobody who hadn't been with us could believe it. If he can listen to part of it and not tell you you're crazy, maybe that's enough. Part of him was listening. Maybe part of him believes it. You know, I think there's another problem too. I think you're afraid that if you give up the horror and fear, that you'll also be giving up your mother. Your mother loved you. And now she's dead, and she died in a terrible way, but she put her love into you for seventeen or eighteen years, and there's a lot of it left. The only thing you can do is carry on with it."

Peter nodded.

Don said, "I once knew a girl who spent all day in a library and said she had a friend who protected her from vileness. I don't know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side."

"I know that's true," Peter said, "but it just seems so hard to do."

"You're doing it right now. Coming here and talking to me is part of getting to the other side. Going to Cornell will be another big part of it. You'll have so much work to do that you won't be able to brood about Milburn."

"Can I see you again? After I'm in college?"

"You can come to see me anytime at all. And if I'm not in Milburn, I'll write to let you know where I am."

"Good," Peter said.

23

Ricky sent him postcards from France; Peter continued to visit, and gradually Don saw that the boy was beginning to let the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn fade into the background of his experience. In warm weather, with a new girlfriend who was also going to Cornell, Peter was beginning to relax.

But it was a false peace, and Don still waited. He never let Peter see his own tension, but it grew every week.

He had watched new arrivals to Milburn, had managed to look at all the tourists who checked into the Archer Hotel, but none of them had given him the thrill of fear Eva Galli had projected across fifty years. Several nights after drinking too much, Don dialed Florence de Peyser's telephone number and said, "This is Don Wanderley. Anna Mostyn is dead." The first time, the person at the other end simply replaced the phone in its cradle; the second time, a female voice said, "Isn't this Mr. Williams at the bank? I think your loan is about to be recalled, Mr. Williams." The third time, an operator's voice told him that the telephone had been switched to an unlisted number.

The other half of his anxiety was that he was running out of money. His bank account had no more than two or three hundred dollars in it-now that he was drinking again, enough for only a couple of months. After that he would have to find a job in Milburn, and any sort of job would keep him from patrolling the streets and shops, searching for the being whose arrival Florence de Peyser had promised.

He spent two or three hours every day, now that the weather was warm, sitting on a bench near the playground in Milburn's only park. You have to remember their time scale, he told himself: you have to remember that Eva Galli gave herself fifty years to catch up with the Chowder Society. A child growing up unobtrusively in Milburn could give Peter Barnes and himself fifteen or twenty years of apparent safety before beginning to play with them. And then it would be someone everybody knew; it would have a place in Milburn; it would not be as visible as a stranger. This time, the nightwatcher would be more careful. The only limit on its time would be that it would want to act before Ricky died of natural causes-so perhaps it had to be ready in ten years.

How old would that make it now? Eight or nine. Ten, perhaps.

If.

24

And that was how he found her. At first, he was doubtful, watching the girl who had appeared at the playground one afternoon. She was not beautiful, not even attractive-she was dark and intense, and her clothes never seemed to be clean. The other children avoided her, but children often did that; and her air of separation from them, swinging herself in lonely arcs or bouncing up and down on an otherwise empty teeter-totter, could have been a resilient child's defense against rejection.

But perhaps children were quicker at seeing real difference than adults.

He knew he would have to make up his mind quickly: his account had shrunk to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But if he took the girl away and he was wrong, what was he: a maniac?

He started wearing the Bowie knife strapped to his side beneath his shirt when he went to the playground.

Even if he was right and the girl Ricky's "lynx," she could stick to her role-if he took her away, she could damage him irreparably by not revealing anything and waiting for the police to find them. But the nightwatcher wanted them dead: if he was right, he did not think she would let the police and the legal system punish him for her. She liked gaudier conclusions than that.

She seemed to take no notice of him, but the child began to appear in his dreams, sitting off to one side, observing him expressionlessly, and he imagined that even when she was sitting on a swing, seemingly absorbed, she peeked at him.

Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic's desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.

He became a fixture in the park, a motionless man who never had his hair cut and seldom shaved, after some weeks as much to be expected at his place on the bench as the swings were in their places. Ned Rowles had done a short piece about him in The Urbanite in the early spring, so he was recognized, not molested or chased away by a deputy. He was a writer, presumably he was thinking about a book; he owned property in Milburn. If people thought he was odd, they liked having a well-known eccentric in their town; and he was known to be a friend of the Hawthornes.

Don closed out his account and took his remaining money away in cash; he could not sleep, even when he drank too much; he knew he was falling back into the patterns of his breakdown after David's death. Each morning, he taped the big knife to his side before walking to the park.

If he did not act, he knew, one day he would not be able to leave his bed: his indecision would spin back into every atom of his life. It would paralyze him. This time he would not be able to write his way out of it.

One morning he motioned to another of the children, and the little boy shyly came up to him.

"What's the name of that girl?" he asked, pointing.

The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said, "Angie."

"Angie what?"

"Don't know."

"Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?"

The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding that he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupping his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. "Because she's awful." He scampered away, and the girl swung back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, uncaring.

Angie. Sitting inside his sweaty clothes under a warm eleven o'clock sun, he froze.

That night, in the midst of some harried dream, Don fell out of bed and staggered to his feet, holding a head which felt as though it had fractured like a dropped plate. He went into the kitchen for a glass of water and aspirin, and saw-imagined he saw-Sears James sitting at the dining-room table playing solitaire. The hallucination looked at him disgustedly, said, "It's about time you straightened out, isn't it?" and went back to its game.

He returned to the bedroom and began throwing clothes into a suitcase, taking the Bowie knife from the top of the dresser and rolling it up in a shirt.

At seven o'clock, unable to wait any longer, he drove to the park, went to his bench and waited.

The girl appeared, walking across the damp grass, at nine. She wore a shabby pink dress he had seen many times before, and she moved swiftly, wrapped as ever in her private isolation. They were alone for the first time since Don had thought of watching the playground. He coughed, and she looked directly at him.

And he thought he understood that all of these weeks, he sitting rooted to his bench and fearing for his sanity, she obliviously, concentratedly playing by herself, had been part of her game. Even the doubt (which still would not leave him) was part of the game. She had tired him, weakened him, tortured him as she had surely tortured John Jaffrey before persuading him to jump from the bridge into a freezing river. If he was right.

"You," he said.

The girl sat on a swing and looked across the playground to him.

"You."

"What do you want?"

"Come here."

She stood up off the swing and began to march toward him. He couldn't help it-he was afraid of her. The girl paused two feet in front of him and looked into his face with unreadable black eyes.

"What's your name?"

"Angie. Nobody ever talks to me."

"Angie what?"

"Angie Messina."

"Where do you live?"

"Here. In town."

"Where?"

She pointed vaguely east-the direction of the Hollow.

"You live with your parents?"

"My parents are dead."

"Then who do you live with?"

"Just people."

"Have you ever heard of a woman named Florence de Peyser?"

She shook her head: and maybe it was true, maybe she had not.

He looked up toward the sun, sweating, unable to speak.

"What do you want?" the girl demanded to know.

"I want you to come with me."

"Where?"

"For a ride."

"Okay," she said.

Trembling, he left the bench. As simple as that. As simple as that. No one saw them go.

What's the worst thing you've ever done? Did you kidnap a friendless girl and drive without sleeping, hardly eating, stealing money when your own melted away… did you point a knife toward her bony chest?

What was the worst thing? Not the act, but the ideas about the act: the garish film unreeling through your head.

Epilogue - Moth in a Killing Jar

"Put the knife away," said his brother's voice. "You hear me, don't you, Don? Put it away. It won't do you any good anymore."

Don opened his eyes and saw the open-air restaurant about him, the gilt lettering across the street. David sat across the table, still handsome, still radiating concern, but dressed in a moldering sack which once had been a suit; the lapels were gray with fine dust, the seams sprouted white threads. Mold grew up the sleeves.

His steak and a half-full wineglass were before him; in his right hand he held a fork, in his left a bone-handled Bowie knife.

Don freed a button on his shirt and slid the knife between his shirt and his skin. "I'm sick of these tricks," he said. "You're not my brother, and I'm not in New York. We're in a motel room in Florida."

"And you haven't had nearly enough sleep," his brother said. "You really look like you're in terrible shape." David propped one elbow on the table and lifted the smoky aviator glasses off his eyes. "But maybe you're right. It doesn't unsettle you so much anymore, does it?"

Don shook his head. Even his brother's eyes were right; that seemed indecent, that she should have copied his eyes so exactly. "It proves I was right," he said.

"About the little girl in the park, you mean. Well, of course you were right about her. You were supposed to find her-haven't you worked that out yet?"

"Yes. I did."

"But in a few hours little Angie, the poor orphan girl, will be back in the park. In ten or twelve years, she'll be just about the age for Peter Barnes, wouldn't you say? Of course, poor Ricky will have killed himself long before that."

"Killed himself."

"Very easy to arrange, dear brother."

"Don't call me brother," Don said.

"Oh, we're brothers all right," David said, and smiled as he snapped his fingers.

In the motel room, a weary-looking black man settled back into the chair facing him and unclipped a tenor saxophone from the strap around his neck. "Now me, of course, you know," he said, putting the saxophone down on a bedside table.

"Dr. Rabbitfoot."

"The celebrated."

The musician had a heavy, authoritative face, but instead of the gaudy minstrel's getup Don had imagined him wearing, he dressed in a rumpled brown suit shot with iridescent threads of a paler, almost pinkish brown; and he too looked rumpled, tired from a life spent on the road. Dr. Rabbitfoot's eyes were as flat as the little girl's, but their whites had turned the yellow of old piano keys.

"I didn't imagine you very well."

"No matter. I don't take offense easy. You can't think of everything. In fact, there's a lot you didn't think of." The musician's breathy confidential voice had the timbre of his saxophone. "A few easy victories don't mean you won the war. Seems like I be reminding folks of that a lot. I mean, you got me here, but where did you get yourself? That's an example of the kind of thing you gotta keep in mind, Don."

"I got face to face with you," Don said.

Dr. Rabbitfoot lifted his chin and laughed: and in the middle of the laugh, which was hard and explosive, as regular as a stone skipping over water, Don was in Alma Mobley's apartment, all of the luxurious objects in their old places around him, and Alma was seated on a cushion before him.

"Well, that's hardly new, is it?" she asked, still laughing. "Face to face-that's a position we knew many times, as I remember it. Top to tail, too."

"You're despicable," he said. These transformations were starting to work: his stomach burned and his temples ached.

"I thought you got beyond that," she said in her glancing, sunshiny voice. "After all, you know more about us than nearly anyone on this planet. If you don't like our characters, at least you should respect our abilities."

"No more than I respect the sleazy tricks of a nightclub magician."

"Then I'll have to teach you to respect them," she said and leaned forward and was David, half his skull flattened and his jaw broken and his skin broken and bleeding in a dozen places.

"Don? For God's sake, Don… can't you help me? Jesus, Don." David pitched sideways on the Bokhara rug and groaned with pain. "Do something-for God's sake…"

Don could not bear it. He ran around his brother's body, knowing if he bent over to help David they would kill him, and opened the door of Alma's apartment, shouted "No!" and saw that he was in a crowded, sweaty room, a nightclub of some sort (It's only because I said nightclub, he thought, she picked up the word and yanked me into it) where black and white people sat together at small round tables facing a bandstand.

Dr. Rabbitfoot was sitting on the edge of the bandstand, nodding at him. The saxophone was back on its chain, and he fingered the keys as he spoke.

"You see, boy, you got to respect us. We can take your brain and turn it to cornmeal mush." He pushed himself off the stand and came toward Don. "Pretty soon"-and now, shockingly, Alma's voice came from his wide mouth-"you don't know where you are or what you're doing, everything inside you is all mixed up, you don't know what's a lie and what isn't." He smiled. Then in the doctor's voice again, and lifting the saxophone toward Don, he said, "You take this horn here. I can tell little girls I love them through this horn, and that's probably a lie. Or I can say I'm hungry, and that sure as hell ain't no lie. Or I can say something beautiful, and who knows if that's a lie or not? It's a complicated business, see?"

"It's too hot in here," Don said. His legs were trembling and his head seemed to be spinning in wide arcs. The other musicians on the stand were tuning up, some of them hitting the A the piano player fed them, others running scales: he was afraid that when they started to play, the music would blow him to pieces. "Can we leave?"

"You got it," said Dr. Rabbitfoot. The yellow around his pupils shone.

The drummer splashed a cymbal, and a throbbing note from a bass vibrated through the humid air like a bird, taking his stomach with it, and all the musicians came in together, the sound hitting him like an enormous breaker.

And he was walking along a Pacific beach with David, both of them barefoot, a seagull gliding overhead, and he didn't want to look at David, who wore the dreadful moldering gravesuit, so he looked at the water and saw shimmering, iridescent layers of oil sliding through the pools around them. "They just got it all," David was saying, "they watched us so long they know us right down to the ground, you know? That's why we can't win-that's why I look this way. You can get a few lucky breaks like you did back in Milburn, but believe me, they won't let you get away now. And it's not so bad."

"No?" Don whispered, almost ready to believe it, and looked past David's terrible head and saw behind them, up on a bluff, the "cottage" he and Alma had stayed in, several thousand years before.

"It's like when I first went into practice," David explained, "I thought I was such hot stuff, Don-Jesus, I thought I'd turn the place upside down. But the old guys in that firm, Sears and Ricky, they knew so many tricks, they were smooth as grease, man. And I was the only thing that got turned upside down. So I just settled down to learn, brother, I apprenticed myself to them, and I decided that if I was ever going to go anywhere I had to learn to be just like they were. That's how I got ahead."

"Sears and Ricky?" Don asked.

"Sure. Hawthorne, James and Wanderley. Isn't that what it was?"

"In a way it was," Don said, blinking into a red sun.

"In a big way. And that's what you have to do now, Don. You have to learn to honor your betters. Humility. Respect, if you like. See, these guys, they live forever, and they know us inside out, when you think you got them pinned down they wiggle out and come up fresh as flowers-just like the old lawyers in my first firm. But I learned, see, and I got all this." David gestured encompassingly around, taking in the house, the ocean, the sun.

"All this," Alma said, beside him now in her white dress, "and me too. Like your saxophone player says, it's a complicated business."

The patterns of oil in the water deepened, and the sliding colors wrapped around his shins.

"What you need, boy," Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, "is a way out. You got an icicle in your belly and a spike through your head, and you're as tired as three weeks of a Georgia summer. You gotta get to the final bar. You need a door, son."

"A door," Don repeated, ready to drop, and found himself looking at a tall wooden door upended in the sand. A sheet of paper was pinned to it at eye level; Don trudged forward and saw the typed letters on the sheet.

Gulf View Motor Lodge

1. The Management requests that all guests depart by noon, or pay another night's cabin rental.

2. We respect your property, please respect ours.

3. No frying, grilling or boiling in the cabins.

4. The Management wishes you a hearty welcome, a happy stay and a purposeful departure.

The Management.

"See?" David said behind him. "A purposeful departure. You have to do what the Management tells you to do. That's what I was talking about-open it, Don."

Don opened the door and walked through. Broiling Florida sun fell on him, lay across the shining asphalt of the parking lot. Angie was standing before him, holding open the door of his car. Don staggered and leaned on the baking red flank of a Chevrolet van; the man who resembled Adolf Eichmann, immured in his concrete booth, turned his head to stare at him. Light gleamed from his thin gold spectacles.

Don got in the car.

"Now just drive on out," Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, leaning back into the car seat. "You found that door you needed, didn't you? It's all gonna work out fine."

Don pulled out into the exit lane. "Which way?"

"Which way, son?" The black man giggled, and then gave his breathy, explosive laugh. "Why, our way. That's the only way you got. We're just gonna get off by ourselves somewhere in the countryside, you see that?"

And of course, he did see it: turning out onto the highway in the direction away from Panama City, he saw not the road but a broad field, a checkered tablecloth on grass, a windmill turning in a scented breeze. "Don't," he said. "Don't do that."

"Fine, son. You just drive."

Don peered ahead, saw the yellow line dividing the highway, gasped for air. He was tired enough to fall asleep driving.

"Boy, you stink like a goat. You need a shower."

As soon as the musical voice had ceased, a shattering rain hit the windshield. He switched on the wipers, and when the windows cleared for a moment, saw sheets of rain bouncing off the highway, slicing down through suddenly darkened air.

He screamed and, not knowing he was going to do it, stamped on the accelerator.

The car squealed forward, rain pouring in through the open window, and they shot over the edge of the highway and plummeted down the bank.

His head struck the wheel and he knew the car was rolling over, flipping once and bouncing him up on the seat, then flipping again and righting itself, pointed downward, rolling free toward the railroad tracks and the Gulf.

Alma Mobley stood on the tracks, holding up her hands as if that would stop them: she flickered out like a light bulb as the car jounced over the tracks and went on gathering speed toward the access road.

"You damned cracker," Dr. Rabbitfoot shouted, violently rocked into him and then rocked back against the door.

Don felt a sudden pain in his shirt, clasped his hand over it, and found the knife. He ripped open his shirt, shouting something that was not words, and when the black man lunged at him, met him with the blade.

"Damn… cracker," Dr. Rabbitfoot managed to gasp. The knife bumped against a rib, the musician's eyes widened and his hand closed around Don's wrist, and Don pushed, willing it: the long blade scraped past the rib and found the heart.

Alma Mobley's face appeared across the windshield, wild and raddled as a hag's, screeching at him. Don's head was jammed into Dr. Rabbitfoot's neck; he felt blood pouring out over his hand.

The car lifted six inches off the ground, hoisted by an internal blast of wind that battered Don against the door and tore his shirt up into his face. They bounded off the access road and rode on the nightwatcher's death down into the Gulf.

The car mired itself in water and Don watched the man's body shriveling and shrinking as Anna Mostyn's had done. He felt warmth on his neck and knew that the rain had stopped before he saw the sunlight streaming across the whipping, tortured form blown back and forth on the car seat. Water poured in through the bottom of the doors; spouts of it whirled up to join Dr. Rabbitfoot's last dance. Pencils and maps on the dashboard lifted off and whirled too.

A thousand screaming voices surrounded him.

"Now, you bastard," he whispered, waiting for the moan from the spirit inhabiting that disappearing form.

A whirling pencil winked into invisibility: vibrant greenish light colored everything like a flash of green lightning. Cracker, hissed a voice from nowhere, and the car pitched violently, and shafts of color as violent as that, as if the car were a prism, burst out from the center of the pinwheeling water.

Don aimed at a spot inches above the vortex and shot out his hands, throwing himself forward just as his ear recorded that the last hissing of the voice had become an angry, enduring buzz.

His hands closed around a form so small that at first he thought he had missed it. His motion carried him forward, and his joined hands struck the edge of the window and he tumbled off the seat into the water.

The thing in his hands stung him.

LET ME GO!

It stung him again, and his hand felt the size of footballs. He scraped his palms together and rolled it into his left hand.

RELEASE ME!

He squeezed his fingers down into his palm, and was stung again before the enormous voice in his head dampened into a thin, wriggling shriek.

Crying now, partly from pain but far more from a savage sense of triumph that made him feel he was shining like the sun, streaming light from every pore, he used his right hand to take the knife from the sodden car seat and push the passenger door open against the lapping water of the Gulf.

Then the voice in his mind widened out like a hunting horn. The wasp stung him twice rapidly, hitting the base of two fingers.

Don crawled sobbing across the seat and dropped out into the waist-high water. Time to see what happens when you shoot the lynx. He stood up and saw a row of men standing seventy yards off outside the sheds, staring at him in the sun. An overweight man in a security guard's uniform was running down to the edge of the water.

Time to see what happens. Time to see. He waved the security guard away with his right hand, and dropped the left into the water to stun the wasp.

The guard saw the knife in his hand, and put his own hand on his holster. "You okay?" he shouted.

"Get away!"

"Look, buddy-"

RELEASE ME!

The guard lowered his hand, backed a few inches up the beach, bewilderment chasing the belligerence from his face.

YOU HAVE TO LET ME GO!

"Like hell I do," Don said, and came up onto the sand and went to his knees, cramping his left hand down again. "Time to shoot the lynx."

He raised the knife over his swollen, flaming left hand and curled back the fingers a fraction of an inch at a time. When a part of the wasp's body, struggling legs and a bloated hindquarters, was uncovered, he slashed down with the knife, laying open his hand.

NO! YOU CANNOT DO THIS!

He tilted his palm and dropped the severed section of the wasp onto the sand. Then he slashed down again and cut the remainder of the wasp in half.

NO! NO! NO! NO! CANNOT!

"Hey, mister…" said the security guard, coming nearer across the sand. "You cut your hand all to hell."

"Had to," Don said, and dropped the knife beside the pieces of the wasp. The enormous flaring voice had become a shrill piping scream. The guard, still red-faced and fuddled, looked down at the pieces of the wasp, twitching and rolling feverishly over the sand. "Wasp," he said. "Thought maybe that freak storm took you off the… uh…" He rubbed his mouth. "It prob'ly stung you right then, huh? Jeeze, I never knew those things live when they're… uh…"

Don was winding his shirt around his wounded hand, and he dropped it back into salt water to help it heal.

"Guess you wanted revenge on the l'il sonofabitch, huh?" the guard said.

"I did," Don said, and met the man's baffled eyes and laughed. "That's right, I did."

"Yeah, you got it too," the guard said. Both of them watched the severed pieces of wasp rolling in the wet sand. "That thing ain't ever gonna give up the ghost."

"Doesn't look like it." Don used his shoe to scrape sand over the wriggling sections of the wasp. Even then dimples and depressions in the sand showed that the thing continued to struggle.

"Tide'll come in and take it," the guard said. He motioned toward the sheds, the rank of curious men. "Can we do anything for you? We could get a truck out here, call from the plant to get your car hauled out."

"Let's do that. Thank you."

"You got somewhere you got to go in a hurry?"

"Not in a hurry," Don said, knowing all at once what he had to do next. "But there's a woman I have to meet in San Francisco." They began to go toward the sheds and the quiet men. Don stopped to look back; saw only sand. Now he could not even find the spot where he had buried it.

"Tide'll take that l'il bastard halfway to Bolivia," the fat guard said. "You don't want to worry about that anymore, friend. It'll be fishfood by five o'clock."

Don tucked the knife into his belt and experienced a wave of love for everything mortal, for everything with a brief definite life span-a tenderness for all that could give birth and would die, everything that could live, like these men, in sunshine. He knew it was only relief and adrenalin, but it was all the same a mystical, perhaps a sacred emotion. Dear Sears. Dear Lewis. Dear David. Dear John, unknown. And dear Ricky and Stella, and dear Peter too. Dear brothers, dear humankind.

"For a guy whose car is turning into salt rust, you look awful happy," the guard said.

"Yes," Don answered. "Yes, I am. Don't ask me to explain it."

The End