Ghost Story

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