Ghost Story

And he was walking along a Pacific beach with David, both of them barefoot, a seagull gliding overhead, and he didn't want to look at David, who wore the dreadful moldering gravesuit, so he looked at the water and saw shimmering, iridescent layers of oil sliding through the pools around them. 'They just got it all,' David was saying, 'they watched us so long they know us right down to the ground, you know? That's why we can't win-that's why I look this way. You can get a few lucky breaks like you did back in Milburn, but believe me, they won't let you get away now. And it's not so bad.'

'No?' Don whispered, almost ready to believe it, and looked past David's terrible head and saw behind them, up on a bluff, the 'cottage' he and Alma had stayed in, several thousand years before.

'It's like when I first went into practice,' David explained, 'I thought I was such hot stuff, Don-Jesus, I thought I'd turn the place upside down. But the old guys in that firm, Sears and Ricky, they knew so many tricks, they were smooth as grease, man. And I was the only thing that got turned upside down. So I just settled down to learn, brother, I apprenticed myself to them, and I decided that if I was ever going to go anywhere I had to learn to be just like they were. That's how I got ahead.'

'Sears and Ricky?' Don asked.

'Sure. Hawthorne, James and Wanderley. Isn't that what it was?'

'In a way it was,' Don said, blinking into a red sun.

'In a big way. And that's what you have to do now, Don. You have to learn to honor your betters. Humility. Respect, if you like. See, these guys, they live forever, and they know us inside out, when you think you got them pinned down they wiggle out and come up fresh as flowers-just like the old lawyers in my first firm. But I learned, see, and I got all this.' David gestured encompassingly around, taking in the house, the ocean, the sun.

'All this,' Alma said, beside him now in her white dress, 'and me too. Like your saxophone player says, it's a complicated business.'

The patterns of oil in the water deepened, and the sliding colors wrapped around his shins.

'What you need, boy,' Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, 'is a way out. You got an icicle in your belly and a spike through your head, and you're as tired as three weeks of a Georgia summer. You gotta get to the final bar. You need a door, son.'

'A door,' Don repeated, ready to drop, and found himself looking at a tall wooden door upended in the sand. A sheet of paper was pinned to it at eye level; Don trudged forward and saw the typed letters on the sheet.

Gulf View Motor Lodge

1. The Management requests that all guests depart by noon, or pay another night's cabin rental.

2. We respect your property, please respect ours.

3. No frying, grilling or boiling in the cabins.

4. The Management wishes you a hearty welcome, a happy stay and a purposeful departure.

The Management.

'See?' David said behind him. 'A purposeful departure. You have to do what the Management tells you to do. That's what I was talking about-open it, Don.'

Don opened the door and walked through. Broiling Florida sun fell on him, lay across the shining asphalt of the parking lot. Angie was standing before him, holding open the door of his car. Don staggered and leaned on the baking red flank of a Chevrolet van; the man who resembled Adolf Eichmann, immured in his concrete booth, turned his head to stare at him. Light gleamed from his thin gold spectacles.

Don got in the car.

'Now just drive on out,' Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, leaning back into the car seat. 'You found that door you needed, didn't you? It's all gonna work out fine.'

Don pulled out into the exit lane. 'Which way?'

'Which way, son?' The black man giggled, and then gave his breathy, explosive laugh. 'Why, our way. That's the only way you got. We're just gonna get off by ourselves somewhere in the countryside, you see that?'

And of course, he did see it: turning out onto the highway in the direction away from Panama City, he saw not the road but a broad field, a checkered tablecloth on grass, a windmill turning in a scented breeze. 'Don't,' he said. 'Don't do that.'

'Fine, son. You just drive.'

Don peered ahead, saw the yellow line dividing the highway, gasped for air. He was tired enough to fall asleep driving.

'Boy, you stink like a goat. You need a shower.'

As soon as the musical voice had ceased, a shattering rain hit the windshield. He switched on the wipers, and when the windows cleared for a moment, saw sheets of rain bouncing off the highway, slicing down through suddenly darkened air.

He screamed and, not knowing he was going to do it, stamped on the accelerator.

The car squealed forward, rain pouring in through the open window, and they shot over the edge of the highway and plummeted down the bank.

His head struck the wheel and he knew the car was rolling over, flipping once and bouncing him up on the seat, then flipping again and righting itself, pointed downward, rolling free toward the railroad tracks and the Gulf.

Alma Mobley stood on the tracks, holding up her hands as if that would stop them: she flickered out like a light bulb as the car jounced over the tracks and went on gathering speed toward the access road.

'You damned cracker,' Dr. Rabbitfoot shouted, violently rocked into him and then rocked back against the door.

Don felt a sudden pain in his shirt, clasped his hand over it, and found the knife. He ripped open his shirt, shouting something that was not words, and when the black man lunged at him, met him with the blade.

'Damn… cracker,' Dr. Rabbitfoot managed to gasp. The knife bumped against a rib, the musician's eyes widened and his hand closed around Don's wrist, and Don pushed, willing it: the long blade scraped past the rib and found the heart.

Alma Mobley's face appeared across the windshield, wild and raddled as a hag's, screeching at him. Don's head was jammed into Dr. Rabbitfoot's neck; he felt blood pouring out over his hand.

The car lifted six inches off the ground, hoisted by an internal blast of wind that battered Don against the door and tore his shirt up into his face. They bounded off the access road and rode on the nightwatcher's death down into the Gulf.

The car mired itself in water and Don watched the man's body shriveling and shrinking as Anna Mostyn's had done. He felt warmth on his neck and knew that the rain had stopped before he saw the sunlight streaming across the whipping, tortured form blown back and forth on the car seat. Water poured in through the bottom of the doors; spouts of it whirled up to join Dr. Rabbitfoot's last dance. Pencils and maps on the dashboard lifted off and whirled too.

A thousand screaming voices surrounded him.

'Now, you bastard,' he whispered, waiting for the moan from the spirit inhabiting that disappearing form.

A whirling pencil winked into invisibility: vibrant greenish light colored everything like a flash of green lightning. Cracker, hissed a voice from nowhere, and the car pitched violently, and shafts of color as violent as that, as if the car were a prism, burst out from the center of the pinwheeling water.

Don aimed at a spot inches above the vortex and shot out his hands, throwing himself forward just as his ear recorded that the last hissing of the voice had become an angry, enduring buzz.

His hands closed around a form so small that at first he thought he had missed it. His motion carried him forward, and his joined hands struck the edge of the window and he tumbled off the seat into the water.

The thing in his hands stung him.

LET ME GO!

It stung him again, and his hand felt the size of footballs. He scraped his palms together and rolled it into his left hand.

RELEASE ME!