Ghost Story

carried him into the room as if an invisible cord pulled him along.

He took in the bedroom in a series of snapshotlike tableaux: Don beside him, crouching, axe held up to one side; an empty bed; dusty floor; a bare wall; the window he had forced open centuries ago; Ricky Hawthorne planted beside him open-mouthed, holding out his knife as if he were trying to give it away; a wall with a small mirror. An empty bedroom.

Don lowered his axe, the tension cautiously leaving his face; Ricky Hawthorne began to prowl around the room as if he'd have to see every inch of it before he could believe that Anna Mostyn and the Bates weren't hiding there. Peter realized that he was holding the knife slackly at his side; he realized that he was relaxed. The room was safe. And if this room was safe, then the house was too. He looked at Don, who lifted the edges of his mouth in a closed smile.

Then he felt idiotic, standing inside the door smiling at Don, and he went forward, double-checking all the places Ricky Hawthorne had already examined. Nothing under the bed. An empty closet. He went up to the far wall; a muscle jumped in the small of his back, loosening with a snap like a rubber band. Peter brushed his fingers against the wall: cold. And dirty. Gray stuff came away on his fingers. He glanced into the mirror.

Shockingly loud, Ricky Hawthorne's voice shouted at him from across the room: 'Not the mirror, Peter!'

But it was already too late. He'd been caught by a breeze from the depth of the mirror, and turned unthinkingly to look deeply into it. His own face was fading to a pale outline and beneath the outline, on the other side of it swimming up, was the face of a woman. He did not know her, but he took her in as if he were in love: light freckles, softly brown-blond hair, soft shining eyes, the mouth bracketed by the most tender lines he'd ever seen. She touched all the tension in him, all the feeling he had, and he saw things in her face that he knew were beyond his understanding, promises and songs and betrayals he would not know for years. He felt all the shallowness and insularity of his relationships with the girls he had known and kissed and strained against, and saw that the areas in him which had gone out to women had never been enough, had never been complete. And, in a rush of tenderness, an enveloping nimbus of emotion, she was speaking to him. Beautiful Peter. You want to be one of us. You already are one of us. He did not move or speak, but he nodded and said yes. And so are your friends, Peter. You can live through all time, singing the one song which is my song-you can be with me and them forever, moving like a song. Just use the knife, Peter, use your knife, you know how, do it beautifully, raise your knife, lift your knife, raise your knife and turn-

He was bringing the knife up when the mirror went falling, still musically speaking, though he couldn't hear it so well for the sound of a blow and a voice near his head: the mirror hit the floor and split.

'It was a trick, Peter,' Ricky Hawthorne was saying. 'I should have warned you before, but I was afraid to speak,' his face and experienced eyes so near to Peter's own face that Peter, looking down in shock, saw in surreal close-up the tight loops in the knot of Ricky's bow tie. 'Just a trick.' Peter trembled and embraced him.

When they separated, Peter bent down to the two halves of the mirror and held his palm over one of the pieces. A delicious wind (the one song which is my song) lilted up from it. He felt or sensed Ricky stiffening beside him: half of a tender mouth glimmered beneath his hand, just visible. He drove his heel into the broken mirror, then brought it down again and again, splitting the silvery glass into a scattered jigsaw puzzle.

10

Fifteen minutes later they were back in the car, traveling slowly toward the center of town, following the random, looping trail of plowed streets. 'She wants to make us like Gregory and Fenny,' Peter said. 'That's what she meant. 'Live through all time.' She wants to turn us into those things.'

'We don't have to let it happen,' Don said.

'You talk so brave sometimes.' Peter shook his head. 'She said I already was one of them. Because when I saw Gregory turn into-you know-he said he was me. It was like Jim. Just keeping going. Never stopping. Never doubting.'

'And you liked that in Jim Hardie,' Don said, and Peter nodded, his face marked with tears. 'I would too,' Don said. 'Energy is always likeable.'

'But she knows I'm the weak link,' Peter said, and put his hand to his face. 'She tried to use me, and it almost worked. She could use me to get you and Ricky.'

'The difference between you-between all of us- and Gregory Bate,' Don said, 'is that Gregory wanted to be used. He chose it. He sought it.'

'But she almost made me choose it too,' Peter said. 'God, I hate them.'

Ricky spoke from the back seat. 'They've taken your mother, most of my friends and Don's brother, Peter. We all hate them. She could do to any of us what she did to you back there.'

As Ricky continued to speak comfortingly from the back, Don drove on, no longer bothering to notice the desolation caused by the snow: there would be more of it in an hour, in a day or two at the most, and then Milburn would not only be sealed off from outside but a sprung trap. One more heavy snow would see a wave of death to take half the town.

'Stop the car,' Peter said. 'Stop.' He laughed. 'I know where they are. The place of dreams.' His laughter was high-pitched and tremulous, spiraled out of the boy's hysteria. 'The place of dreams, didn't she say? And what's the only place in town that stayed open all during the storms?'

'What in the world are you talking about?' Don asked, turning around on the seat to look at Peter's face, suddenly open and sure.

'There,' Peter said, and Don followed the line of his pointing finger.

Across the street from them, in giant red neon letters:

RIALTO

And beneath that, in smaller black letters, one last proof of Anna Mostyn's wit:

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

11

Stella checked her watch for the sixtieth time, and then stood up to compare what it said with the clock on the mantel. The mantel clock was three minutes ahead, as it always was. Ricky and the other two had been gone somewhere between thirty and thirty-three minutes. She thought she knew how Ricky had felt on Christmas morning-that if he didn't get out of the house and start moving, something terrible would happen. And now Stella knew that if she did not get over to the Robinson house in one hell of a hurry that Ricky would be in awful danger. He had said to give them an hour, but that was surely too long. Whatever had frightened Ricky and the rest of the Chowder Society was in that house, waiting to strike again. Stella would never have described herself as a feminist, but she had long ago seen how men mistakenly assumed that they had to do everything themselves. The Milly Sheehans locked their doors and hallucinated-or whatever-when their men died or left them. If some inexplicable catastrophe took their men, they cowered behind female passivity and waited for the reading of the will.

Ricky had simply assumed that she was not fit to join them. Even a boy was of more use than she. She looked again at her watch. Another minute had gone by.

Stella went to the downstairs closet and put on her coat: then she took it off, thinking that, after all, maybe she would not be able to help Ricky. 'Nuts,' she said out loud, and pulled the coat on again and went out the door.

At least it was not snowing now: and Leon Churchill, who had gaped at her since he was a boy of twelve, had cleared some of the streets. Len Shaw from the service station, another remote-control conquest, had cleared their driveway as soon as his plow could make it to the Hawthorne house;-in an unfair world, Stella had no compunctions about taking unfair advantage of her looks. She started her car easily (Len, denied Stella, had given almost erotic attention to the Volvo's engine) and rolled down the drive out into the street.

By now Stella, having decided to go there, was in an almost frantic hurry to get to Montgomery Street. Direct access was blocked by the unplowed roads, and she put her foot down on the accelerator and followed the maze of streets Leon had opened-she groaned when she realized that she was being taken all the way over to the high school. From there she'd have to cut down School Road to Harding Lane, and then over on Lone Pine Road back the way she had started and then on Candlemaker Street past the Rialto. Working out this circuitous map in her head, Stella let the car get nearly to her normal driving speed. The drops and elevations left by Churchill's handling of the plow jolted her against the wheel, but she took the corner into School Road quickly, not seeing in the woolly light