Ghost Story

that the level of the roadbed dropped seven inches. When the front end slammed down onto the packed snow, Stella floored the accelerator, still trying to think of the roads that could take her to Montgomery once she got off Candlemaker Street.

The rear end of the car spun out sideways, struck a metal fence and a mailbox, and then continued to revolve around so that Stella was traveling astraddle the road: in a cold panic, she wrenched at the wheel just as the car dropped into another of Churchill's terraces. The car rolled up on its side, wheels spinning, and then dropped down, still traveling, onto the metal fence.

'Damn,' she said, and clenched her hands on the wheel and breathed deeply, forcing herself to stop trembling. She swung the door open and looked down. If she edged off the seat and let her legs dangle, she would be only three or four feet from the ground. The car could stay where it was-in any case, it had to. She'd need a tow-truck to pull it off the fence. Stella let her legs hang out of the open door, took another deep breath and pushed herself off the seat.

She landed hard, but stayed on her feet and began walking down School Road without once looking back at her car. Door open, key in the ignition, leaning against the fence like a stuffed toy-she had to get to Ricky. Ahead of her a quarter of a mile down the road, the high school was a fuzzy dark-brown cloud.

Stella had just realized that she would have to hitchhike when a blue car appeared out of the gray blur behind her. For the first time in her life, Stella Hawthorne turned to face an oncoming car and stuck out her thumb.

The blue car rolled toward her and began to brake. Stella lowered her arm as the car drew up beside her. When she bent down and looked in she saw a pudgy man bending sideways and giving her a shy welcoming look. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for her. 'It's against my principles,' he said, 'but you look like you need a ride.'

Stella got in and leaned back against the seat forgetting for the moment that this helpful little man would not be able to read her mind. Then she and the car started forward and she said, 'Oh, please excuse me, I just had an accident and I'm not thinking right. I must-'

'Please, Mrs. Hawthorne,' the man said, turning his head to smile at her. 'Don't waste your breath. I assume you were going to Montgomery Street. You needn't bother. That was all a mistake.'

'You know me?' Stella asked. 'But how did you know-'

The man silenced her by reaching out with a boxer's quickness and tightening his hand around her hair. 'Soft,' he said, and his voice, formerly as shyly ingratiating as the man's appearance, was the quietest she'd ever heard.

12

Don was the first of them to see Clark Mulligan's body. The theater owner lay huddled on the carpet behind the candy counter-another corpse bearing the signs of the Bate brothers' appetites. 'Yes, Peter,' he said, turning away from the body, 'you're right. They're inside.'

'Mr. Mulligan?' Peter asked quietly.

Ricky came up to the counter and looked over. 'Oh, no.' He drew his knife from his coat pocket. 'We still don't know that what we're trying to do is possible, do we? For all we know, we need wooden stakes or silver bullets or a fire or…'

'No,' Peter said. 'We don't need any of those things. We have everything we need right here.' The boy was very pale, and he avoided looking over the counter at Mulligan's body, but the determination set deeply in his face was unlike anything Don had ever seen: it was fear's negation. 'That was just how they killed vampires and werewolves-what they thought were vampires and werewolves. They could have used anything.' He challenged Don directly. 'Isn't that what you think?'

'Yes,' Don said, not adding that it was one thing to offer a theory in comfortable rooms, another to stake your life on it.

'I do too,' Peter said. He held his knife, blade up, so rigidly that Don could sense the tautness of his muscles all the way up his arm. 'I know they're inside. Let's go.'

Then Ricky spoke and simply said what was obvious. 'We don't have a choice.'

Don lifted his axe and held the head pressed flat against his chest; went quietly to the doors to the stalls; slipped inside. The other two followed him.

He flattened himself out against the wall in the dark theater, realizing that he had never considered that the movie might be running. Giant forms moved across the screen, bellowing, rampaging. The Bates must have killed Clark Mulligan less than an hour before the three of them had arrived. Clark had set up the film, started it as he had done every day during the storms, and come down to find Gregory and Fenny waiting for him in the lobby. Don inched sideways along the back wall, looking for a movement in the seats ahead of him.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw only the rounded backs of the seats stretching away. The heavy blade of the axe pressed against his chest. The movie's soundtrack filled his head with shouts and cries. It played to an empty theater. And of all the spectacles to which their enemy had treated him, Don thought that this was surely the strangest-the horror on the screen, the turmoil of voices and music washing out in darkness over all those empty seats. He looked sideways toward Peter Barnes and even in the dark saw the set of his face. He pointed to the far aisle; then bent forward to see Ricky, who was only a shadow against the wall, and motioned toward the wide middle aisle. Peter immediately moved away toward the other side of the theater. Ricky went more slowly to the center, and checked Peter and Don's position before bending down to make sure Gregory or Fenny was not hiding in the row. Then they advanced forward, checking each row in turn.

And what if Ricky finds them? Don thought. Could we get to him in time to save him? He's exposed, way out there in the open.

But Ricky, holding his knife out to one side, moved down the wide center aisle, looking calmly on either side of him as if he were looking for a lost ticket-he was being as thorough as he had been in Anna Mostyn's house.

Don moved in tandem with the others, straining to see into the darkness between the rows. Candy wrappers, torn paper, what looked like a winter's worth of dust, rows of seats, some torn, some taped together, a few in every row with broken arms-and in the middle of each row, a well of darkness that wanted to suck him toward it. Above him, ahead of him, the film paraded a succession of images Don caught as disconnected frames whenever he looked up from the floor of the theater. Corpses pushing themselves up from their graves, cars rolling dangerously fast around corners, a girl's stricken face… Don glanced up at the screen and thought for a moment he was seeing a film of himself in Anna Mostyn's cellar.

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