Ghost Story

  But no, of course not, the scene was just part of the film, a man unlike him in a cellar unlike Anna’s. The movie family had barricaded themselves in a basement, and the soundtrack boomed with the sounds of doors closing: maybe that’s how you fight them, you just hole up until they go away . . . you bite down and close your eyes and hope they get your brother, your friend, anybody, before they get you . . . and that, he realized, was what the nightwatchers had done. He looked over the rows of seats, seeing them filled with Gregory’s victims, and then saw Ricky and Peter looking curiously back at him. He was two rows behind. Don bent forward again, found himself staring stiffly with embarrassment at a flattened popcorn box, and moved hurriedly down the broad steps to catch up with the others.

  * * *

  When they reached the bottom row without finding anything, Don and Peter went toward the center aisle to join Ricky. “Nothing,” Don said.

  “They’re here, though,” Peter whispered. “They have to be.”

  “There’s the projection booth,” Don said.” The toilets. And Mulligan must have had some sort of office.”

  On the screen a door slammed: noise of life walled in, and of death walled in with it.

  “Maybe the balcony,” Peter said, and glanced up at the screen. “And what’s behind there? How do you get there?”

  Again, a door slammed. Inhuman voices matching the scale of the people on the screen, inflated with assumed emotions, fell toward them from the speakers.

  The door clicked open with a flat, ticking noise—the sound made when a metal bar, depressed, lifts a catch; then it slammed shut again.

  “Of course,” Ricky said, “that’s where they’d”—but the other two were not paying attention. They had recognized the sound, and were staring at the entrance to a lighted cavernous tunnel to the right of the screen. Above the tunnel a white sign read EXIT.

  The soundtrack blared down on them, to their side giant forms enacted a pantomime romantic enough for the music, but what they listened to was a light, dry noise coming down the exit corridor toward the light: a noise like clapping hands. It was the sound of bare feet.

  A child appeared at the end of the corridor and paused at the edge of the light. He looked toward them—an apparition from a thirties’ study of rural poverty, a small boy with shivering sides and prominent ribs and a smudgy, shadowy face that would never be invaded by thought. He stood in the last traces of the corridor’s light, drool forming on his lower lip. The boy raised his arms, holding his bunched hands level before him, and made the gesture of pumping up and down on an iron bar. Then he tilted back his head and giggled; and again made the gesture of closing a heavy door.

  “My brother is telling you that the doors are locked,” said a voice from above them. They whirled around, Don hefting the axe in his arms, and saw Gregory Bate standing on the stage beside the red curtains flanking the screen. “But three such brave adventurers wouldn’t have it otherwise, would they? You have come for this, haven’t you? Especially you, Mr. Wanderley—all the way from California. Fenny and I were sorry not to have been properly introduced there.” He moved easily to the center of the stage, and the movie broke and flowed over the surface of his body. “And you really think that you can harm us with those medieval objects you carry? Why, gentlemen . . .” He flung out his arms, his eyes glowing. Every part of him was printed with gigantic forms—an open hand, a falling lamp, a splintering door.

  And beneath all that, Don saw what Bate had demonstrated to Peter Barnes—that the gentlemanly diction and theatrical manner were insubstantial clothing over a terrible concentration, a purpose as implacable as a machine’s. Bate was standing on the stage, smiling down at them. “Now,” he said, his tone like a god’s summoning light.

  Don jumped sideways, hearing something rush past him, and saw Fenny’s mad little body crashing into Peter Barnes. None of them had seen the child move; now he was already on top of Peter, forcing his arms to the floor of the theater, snarling, holding Peter’s knife harmlessly away while he wriggled on top of him, making a squealing noise that got lost in the screams from the speakers.

  Don raised his axe and felt a strong hand close over his wrist. (Immortal whispered up his arm, don’t you want to be?)

  “Wouldn’t you like to live forever?” Gregory Bate said in his ear, blowing foulness toward his face. “Even if you must die first? It’s a good Christian bargain, after all.”

  The hand spun him easily around, and Don felt his own strength draining out as if Bate’s hand on his wrist drew it out of him like a magnet. Bate’s other hand took his chin and tilted it up, forcing Don to look into his eyes. He remembered Peter telling him how Jim Hardie had died, how Bate had sucked him down into his eyes, but it was impossible not to look: and his feet seemed to be floating, his legs were water, at the bottom of the shining gold was a comprehensive wisdom and beneath that was total mindlessness, a rushing violence, pure cold, a killing winter wind through a forest.

  “Watch this, you scum,” he dimly heard Ricky saying. Then Bate’s attention snapped away from him, and his legs seemed to be filled with sand, and the side of the werewolf’s head moved past his face as slowly as a dream. Something was making an appalling racket, and Bate’s profiled head slid past his own, marble skin and an ear as perfect as a statue’s—Bate flung him away.

  “Do you see this, you filth?” Ricky was shouting, and Don, lying all tumbled over his axe (now what was that for?), half-wedged beneath one of the front-row seats, looked dreamily up and saw Ricky Hawthorne sawing into the back of Fenny’s neck.

  “Bad,” he whispered, and “no,” and no longer sure that it was not really just a part of the giant shadowy action blazing on above them all, saw Gregory slap the old man down onto Peter Barnes’s motionless body.

  13

  “There’s no need to make trouble, is there, Mrs. Hawthorne?” said the man gripping her hair. “You hear me, don’t you?” He tugged at her hair, pulling it painfully.

  Stella nodded.

  “And you heard what I said? No need to go to Montgomery Street—no need at all. Your husband isn’t there anymore. He didn’t find what he was looking for, so he went elsewhere.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend of a friend. A good friend’s good friend.” Still holding her hair, the man reached across the wheel to move the automatic shift, and drove slowly off. “And my friend is very eager to meet you.”

  “Let me go,” Stella said.

  He yanked her toward him. “Enough, Mrs. Hawthorne. You have a very exciting time ahead of you. So—enough. No fighting. Or I’ll kill you here. And that would be a terrible waste. Now promise me you’ll be quiet. We are just going into the Hollow. Okay? You’ll be quiet?”

  Stella, terrified and fearful that the handful of hair was about to be ripped from her head, said, “Yes.”

  “Very intelligent.” He let her hair fall slack and pressed his hand against the side of her head. “You’re such a pretty woman, Stella.”

  She recoiled from his touch.

  “Quiet?”

  “Quiet,” she breathed, and the driver went on slowly toward the high school. She looked back through the rear window and saw no other cars: her own, tilted against the fence, grew smaller behind her.

  “You’re going to kill me,” she said.

  “Not unless you force me to do it, Mrs. Hawthorne. I am quite a religious person in my present life. I would hate to have to take a human life. We’re pacifists, you know.”

  “We?”

  He pursed his lips at her in an ironic little smile, and gestured toward the back seat. She looked down and saw dozens of copies of The Watchtower scattered there.

  “Then your friend is going to kill me. Like Sears and Lewis and the others.”

  “Not quite like that, Mrs. Hawthorne. Well, perhaps just a little bit like Mr. Benedikt. That was the only one our f
riend conducted by herself. But I can promise you that Mr. Benedikt saw many unusual and interesting things before he passed away.” They were going by the school now, and Stella heard a familiar grinding noise before recognizing it: she looked frantically out the window and saw the town snowplow chugging into a twelve-foot drift.

  “In fact,” the man continued, “you could say that he had the time of his life. And as for you, you will have an experience many would envy—you will see directly into a mystery, Mrs. Hawthorne, a mystery which has endured in your culture for centuries. Some would say that would be worth dying for. Especially since the alternative is dying quite messily right here.”

  Now even the snowplow was a block behind them. The next clear street, Harding Lane, was twenty feet ahead, and Stella saw herself being driven away from safety—from Leon on the plow—toward terrible danger, passive at the hands of this maniac Jehovah’s Witness.

  “In fact, Mrs. Hawthorne,” the man said, “since you are cooperating so nicely—”

  Stella kicked out as hard as she could and felt the toe of her boot connect solidly with his ankle. The man yelped with pain and twisted toward her. She threw herself at the wheel, getting her body between it and the man, who was clubbing her on the head, and forced the car toward the snowbank left by the plow.

  Now if Leon would only look, she prayed: but the car thudded almost noiselessly into the bank.

  The man tore her off the wheel and forced her back against the door, twisting her legs painfully beneath her. Stella raised her hands and struck his face, but the man put all his weight on her and batted her hands away. Be still! shouted in her mind, and Stella nearly lost consciousness. Stupid, stupid woman.

  She opened her eyes wide and looked at the face above hers—pouchy with excess flesh, black open pores on the thick nose, sweat on the forehead, meek bloodshot eyes; the face of a prim little man who would tell hitchhikers that it was against his principles to pick them up. He was hitting her on the side of the head, and every blow released a spray of saliva over her. Stupid woman!

  Grunting, he brought a knee up between her legs and leaned forward and put his hands on her throat.

  Stella flailed at his sides and then managed to hook a hand under his chin: it was not enough. He continued to crush her throat, the voice in her mind repeating stupid stupid stupid . . .

  She remembered.

  Stella dropped her hands, pulled at her lapel with her right hand, found the pearl base of the hatpin. She used all the strength in her right arm to drive the long pin into his temple.

  The meek eyes bulged and the monotonous word repeating in her mind became a babble of astonished voices. What what (she) no this (sword) woman what—the man’s hands went limp on her throat, and he dropped onto her like a boulder.

  Then she was able to scream.

  * * *

  Stella scrambled to open the door and fell backward out of the car. For a moment after she rolled over she lay panting on the ground, tasting the blood in her mouth mix with dirty snow and rock salt. She pushed herself up, saw his balding head lolling off the edge of the seat, whimpered and got to her feet.

  Stella turned away from the car and ran down School Road toward Leon Churchill, who was now standing by the side of the plow, gazing at something dark he had evidently uncovered. She shouted his first name, slowed to a walk, and the deputy swiveled to watch her come toward him.

  Leon glanced back at the dark thing in the snow and then trotted toward her: Stella was too distraught to see that the deputy was nearly as shocked as herself. When he caught her, he spun her halfway around and said, “Uh now Mrs. Hawthorne you don’t want to look at that what’s the matter anyhow you had an accident Mrs. Hawthorne?”

  “I just killed a man,” she said. “I hitchhiked in his car. He tried to hurt me. I stuck a hatpin in his head. I killed him.”

  “He tried to hurt you?” Leon asked. “Uh—” He glanced back at his plow, and then looked again at Stella Hawthorne’s face. “Come on, let’s have a look. It happened up there?” He pointed to the blue car. “You had an accident.”

  As he marched her along toward the car, she tried to explain. “I had an accident in my car, he stopped to give me a ride and then he tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. And I had a long hatpin . . .”

  “Well, you didn’t kill him, anyhow,” Leon said, and looked at her almost indulgently.

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “He ain’t in the car,” Leon said. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face the open door, the empty front seat.

  Stella nearly fainted.

  Leon held her up and tried to explain. “See, what probably happened is you got shook up after the accident, this guy who gave you a lift went away to get help, and you maybe even passed out a little bit. You banged yourself up when the car went off the road. Why don’t I take you home on the plow, Mrs. Hawthorne?”

  “He’s not there,” Stella said.

  A large white dog jumped on top of the snowbank from the front yard of one of the neighboring houses, walked along the top and jumped down to the road in a shower of snow.

  “Yes, please take me home, Leon,” Stella said.

  Leon looked anxiously toward the school. “Yeah, I gotta get to the office anyhow. You stay right here and I’ll come back with the plow in five seconds.”

  “Fine.”

  “Not much of a chariot,” Leon said, and smiled at her.

  14

  “Now, Mr. Wanderley,” Bate said, “back to the topic we were discussing.” He began to move across the aisle toward Don.

  Screams, moans, the sound of rushing wind filled the theater.

  —live forever

  —live forever

  Don stretched out his legs, dazedly looking at the pile of bodies lying beneath the risers to the stage. The old man’s white face twisted toward him, lying across the body of a barefoot child. Peter Barnes was at the bottom of the heap, feebly moving his hands.

  “We should have concluded matters two years ago,” Bate purred. “So much trouble would have been saved if we had. You remember two years back, don’t you?”

  Don heard Alma Mobley saying His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans, and remembered a moment so vividly that it was as if he were there again: he standing on a corner in Berkeley and looking in shock at a woman in the shadows beside a bar named The Last Reef. A leaden sense of betrayal made it impossible to move.

  “So much trouble,” Bate repeated. “But it makes this moment all the sweeter, don’t you think?”

  Peter Barnes, bleeding from a cheek, pushed himself halfway out of the tangle.

  “Alma,” Don managed to say.

  Bate’s ivory face flickered. “Yes. Your Alma. And your brother’s Alma. Mustn’t forget David. Not nearly as entertaining as you.”

  “Entertaining.”

  “Oh, yes. We enjoy entertainment. Only proper, since we have provided so much of it. Now look at me again, Donald.” He reached down to pull Don up from the floor, smiling coldly.

  Peter groaned: pulled himself clear. Don looked confusedly across at him and saw that Fenny also was moving, rolling over, his smudgy face a soundless screaming grimace.

  “They hurt Fenny,” Don said, blinking, and saw Bate’s hand slowly reaching toward him. He shot his legs out and squirmed away from Bate, moving faster than he ever had in his life. Don rolled to his feet, halfway between Gregory and Peter, who was—

  —live forever—

  blinking at the squirming, grimacing form of Fenny Bate. “They hurt Fenny,” Don said, the meaning of Fenny’s agony going through him like an electric current. The giant sounds of the film opened up again in his ears.

  “You don’t,” he said to Bate, and looked under the seats. His axe lay out of reach.

  “Don’t?”

  “You don’t live fo
rever.”

  “We live much longer than you,” Bate said, and the civilized veneer of his voice cracked open to reveal the violence beneath it. Don backed toward Peter, looking not at Bate’s eyes but at his mouth.

  “You won’t live another minute,” Bate said, and took a step forward.

  “Peter—” Don said, and looked over his shoulder at the boy.

  Peter was holding the Bowie knife above Fenny’s writhing body.

  “Do it,” Don shouted, and Peter brought the knife down into Fenny’s chest. Something white and foul exploded upward, a reeking geyser, from Fenny’s rib-cage.

  Gregory Bate launched himself toward Peter, howling, and knocked Don savagely over the first row of seats.

  * * *

  Ricky Hawthorne at first thought he was dead, the pain in his back was so bad that he thought only death or dying could account for it, and then he saw the worn carpet under his face, the loops of thread seeming inches high and heard Don shouting: so he was alive. He moved his head: the last thing he could remember was cutting open the back of Fenny Bate’s neck. Then a locomotive had run into him.

  Something beside him moved. When he lifted his head to see what it was, Fenny’s bare streaming chest leaped—seeming six feet long—a yard into the air. Small white worms swam across the white skin. Ricky recoiled, and though his back felt as though it were broken, forced himself to sit up.

  To his side, Gregory Bate was lifting Peter Barnes off the floor, howling as if his chest were a cave of winds. A section of the beam from the projector caught Gregory’s arms and Peter’s body, and swarming blotches of black and white moved over them for a second. Still howling, Bate threw Peter into the screen.