Ghost Story

'But he comes back?'

He nodded again.

'And you see him?'

'He sees us,' Fenny said, very firmly. 'He looks and looks. He wants to touch.'

'To touch?'

'Like before.'

I put my hand on my forehead-it was burning. Every word that Fenny spoke opened a new abyss. 'But did you shake the ladder?'

Fenny just looked stupidly at his desk, and I repeated my question. 'Did you shake the ladder, Fenny?'

'He looks and he looks,' Fenny said, as if it were the largest fact in his consciousness.

I put my hands on his head to make him look up at me, and at that moment the face of his tormentor appeared in the window. That white terrible face-as if he wanted to stop Fenny answering my questions. I felt sick, dumped back into the pit, but I also felt as if the battle had come at last, and I pulled Fenny toward me, trying to protect him physically.

'Is he here?' Fenny shrieked, and at the sound of his voice Constance dropped to the floor and began to wail.

'What does that matter?' I yelled. 'He won't get you-I have you! He knows he's lost you forever!'

'Where is he?' Fenny shrieked again, pushing at me. 'Where is Gregory?'

'There,' I said, and turned him around to face the window.

He was already jerking himself around, and we both stared then at an empty window-there was nothing out there but an empty dark sky. I felt triumphant-I had won. I gripped Fenny's arm with all the strength of my victory, and he gave a shout of pure despair. He toppled forward, and I caught him as if he were jumping into the pit of hell itself. Only a few seconds later did I realize what I had caught: his heart had stopped, and I was holding a dispossessed body. He had gone over for good.

'And that was it,' Sears said, looking at the circle of his friends. 'Gregory too was gone for good. I came down with a nearly fatal fever-that was what I'd felt on my forehead-and spent three weeks in the Mathers' attic room. When I had recovered and could move around again, Fenny was buried. He really had gone over for good. I wanted to quit my job and leave the village, but they held me to my contract and I went back to teaching. I was shattered, but I could go through the motions. By the end of it, I was even using the ferule. I'd lost all my liberal notions, and when I left I was regarded as a fine and satisfactory teacher.

'There is one other thing, though. On the day I left Four Forks I went for the first time to look at Penny's grave. It was behind the church, next to his brother's. I looked at the two graves, and do you know what I felt? I felt nothing. I felt empty. As though I'd had nothing at all to do with it.'

'What happened to the sister?' asked Lewis.

'Oh, she was no problem. She was a quiet girl, and people felt sorry for her. I'd overestimated the stinginess of the village. One of the families took her in. As far as I know, they treated her as their own daughter. It's my impression that she got pregnant, married the boy and left town. But that would have been years later.'

Frederick Hawthorne

1

Ricky walked home, surprised to see snow in the air. It's going to be a hell of a winter, he thought, all the seasons are going funny. In the glow surrounding the street lamp at the end of Montgomery Street, snowflakes whirled and fell and adhered to the ground for a time before melting. Cold air licked in beneath his tweed topcoat. He had a half hour walk before him, and he was sorry that he hadn't taken his car, the old Buick Stella happily refused to touch-on cold nights, he usually drove. But tonight he'd wanted time to think: he had been going to grill Sears on the contents of his letter to Donald Wanderley, and he had to work out a technique. This, he knew, he'd failed to do. Sears had told him just what he wanted to, and no more. Still, the damage, from Ricky's point of view, was done; what point was there in knowing how the letter was worded? He startled himself by sighing aloud, and saw his breath send a few big lazy flakes spinning off in a complicated pattern as they melted.

Lately, all the stories, his own included, had made him tense for hours afterward; but tonight he felt more than that. Tonight he felt especially anxious. Ricky's nights were now uniformly dreadful, the dreams of which he had spoken to Sears pursued him straight through until dawn, and he had no doubt that the stories he and his friends told gave them substance; still he thought that the anxiety was not due to his dreams. Nor was it due to the stories, though Sears's had been worse than most-all of their stories were getting worse. They frightened themselves each time they met, but they continued to meet because not to meet would have been more frightening yet. It was comforting to get together, to see that they were each bearing up. Even Lewis was frightened, or why would he have voted in favor of writing to Donald Wanderley? It was this, knowing that the letter was on its way, ticking away in a mailbag somewhere, that made Ricky more than usually anxious.

Maybe I really should have left this town ages ago, he considered, looking at the houses he passed. There was scarcely one he had not been inside at least once, on business or pleasure, to see a client or to eat a dinner. Maybe I should have gone to New York, back when I got married, as Stella wanted to do: it was, for Ricky, a thought of striking disloyalty. Only gradually, only imperfectly had he convinced Stella that his life was in Milburn, with Sears James and the law practice. Cold wind cut into his neck and pulled at his hat. Around the corner, ahead of him, he saw Sears's long black Lincoln parked at the curb; a light burned in Sears's library. Sears would not be able to sleep, not after telling a story like that. By now, they all knew the effects of reliving these past events.

But it's not just the stories, he thought; no, and it's not just the letter either. Something is going to happen. That was why they told the stories. Ricky was not given to premonitions, but the dread of the future he'd felt two weeks earlier while talking to Sears came thudding back into him again. That was why he had thought of moving out of town. He turned into Melrose Avenue: 'avenue,' presumably, because of the thick trees which lined either side. Their branches stood out gesturally, tinted orange by the lamps. During the day the last of the leaves had fallen. Something's going to happen to the whole town. A branch groaned above Ricky's head. A truck changed gears far behind him, off on Route 17: sound traveled a long way on these cold nights in Milburn. When he went forward, he could see the lighted windows of his own bedroom, up on the third floor of his house. His ears and nose ached with the cold. After such a long and reasonable life, he said to himself, you can't go mystic on me now, old friend. We'll need all the rationality we can muster up.

At that moment, near where he felt safest and with this self-given reassurance in his mind, it seemed to Ricky that someone was following him: that someone was standing back on the corner, glaring at him. He could feel cold eyes staring at him, and in his mind it seemed that they floated alone-just eyes following him. He knew how they would look, clear pale luminous and floating at the level of his own eyes. Their lack of feeling would be dreadful-they would be like eyes in a mask. He turned around, fully expecting to see them, so great was his sense of them. Abashed, he realized that he was trembling. Of course the street was empty. It was simply an empty street, even on a dark night as ordinary as a mongrel pup.

This time you really did it to yourself, he thought, you and that gruesome story Sears told. Eyes! It was something out of an old Peter Lorre film. The Eyes of… of Gregory Bate? Hell. The Hands of Dr. Orlac. It's very clear, Ricky told himself, nothing at all is going to happen, we're just four old coots going out of our minds. To imagine that I thought…

But he had not thought the eyes were behind him, he had known it. It had been knowledge.

Nonsense, he almost said aloud, but let himself in his front door a little more quickly than usual.

His house was dark, as it always was on Chowder Society nights. By running his fingers along the edge of the couch, Ricky skirted the coffee table which on other nights had given him a half dozen bruises; having successfully