Ghost Story (38 page)

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 despoilation. 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."

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.

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.