Ghost Story

Adda May Lebow Museum, New Orleans; Louisiana Fine Arts Museum; Chicago Institute of the Arts; Santa Fe Fine Arts; Rochester Arts Center; many others. Served as Lt Cmdr. USNR, 1941-1945. Member Golden Palette Society; Southern Regional Arts League; American Water Color Society; American League of Artists; American Academy of Oil Painting. Clubs: Links Golf; Deepdale Golf; Meadowbrook; Century (New York); Lyford Cay (Nassau); Garrick (London). Author: I Came This Way. Homes: 38957 Canal Blvd New Orleans, La; 18 Church Row, London NW3 UK; 'Dans Le Vigne,' Route de la Belle Isnard, St Tropez 83 France.

This wealthy clubman and artist had two sons, but no daughter. Everything Alma had told me-and David, presumably-had been invention. She had a false name and no history: she might as well have been a ghost. Then I thought of 'Rachel Varney,' a brunette with dark eyes, the trappings of wealth and an obscure past, and I saw that David had been the missing element in the book I'd tried to write.

8

I've spent nearly three weeks writing all this out, and all I've done is remember-I'm no closer to understanding it than I was before.

But I've come to one perhaps foolish conclusion. I'm no longer so ready to reject the notion that there might be some factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to David and myself. I find myself in the same position as the Chowder Society, no longer sure of what to believe. If I am ever invited to tell a story to the Chowder Society, I'll tell them what I've written out here. This account of my history with Alma-not The Nightwatcher-is my Chowder Society story. So perhaps I have not wasted my time after all; I've given myself a base for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel, and I'm prepared to change my mind on an important question-right now, maybe the important question. When I started this, the night after Dr. Jaffrey's funeral, I thought it would be destructive to imagine myself in the landscape and atmosphere of one of my own books. Yet-was I not in that landscape, back at Berkeley? My imagination may have been more literal than I thought.

Various odd things have been happening in Milburn. Apparently a group of farm animals, cows and horses, were killed by some kind of beast-I heard a man in the drugstore say that creatures from a flying saucer killed them! And far more seriously, a man either died or was killed. His body was found down near a disused railway siding. He was an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson. Lewis Benedikt in particular seemed to take this death hard, though it appears to have been accidental. In fact, something very peculiar seems to be happening to Lewis: he's become absentminded and fretful, almost as if he were blaming himself for Robinson's death.

I too have an unusual feeling which I'll record here at the risk of feeling idiotic whenever I see it in later years. This feeling is absolutely unfounded: more a hunch than a feeling. It's that if I start to look more closely into Milburn and do what the Chowder Society asks, I'll find what sent David over that railing in Amsterdam.

But the oddest feeling, the feeling that makes the adrenalin go, is that I am about to go inside my own mind: to travel the territory of my own writing, but this time without the comfortable make-believe of fiction. No 'Saul Malkin' this time; just me.

III - The Town

Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept.

A friend passing by saw him and asked,

'Narcissus, why do you weep?'

'Because my face has changed,' Narcissus said.

'Do you cry because you grow older?'

'No. I see that I am no longer innocent. I have been gazing at myself long and long, and so doing have worn out my innocence.'

1

As Don has noted in his journal, while he sat in room 17 of the Archer Hotel and relived his months with Alma Mobley, Freddy Robinson lost his life. And as Don has noted, three cows belonging to a dairy farmer named Norbert Clyde had been killed-Mr. Clyde, walking over to his barn on the night of this occurrence, had seen something which scared him so badly that he felt as though the wind were knocked out of him.

He ran back to his house and did not dare to come out again until he could see dawn, when at any rate it was again time for chores and he had to go out. His description of the figure he had seen inspired, among a very few of the most excitable souls of Milburn, the story of a creature from a flying saucer which Don had heard in the drugstore. Both Walt Hardesty and the County Farm Agent, who inspected the dead cows, had heard the story, but neither was gullible enough to accept it. Walt Hardesty, as we know, had his own ideas; he had what he considered good reason for assuming that a few more animals would be bled white and then that would be that. His experience with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne made him keep his theory to himself and not share it with the County Farm Agent, who chose to overlook certain obvious facts and form the conclusion that somewhere in the area an oversize dog had turned killer. He filed a report to this effect and went back to the county seat, having completed his business. Elmer Scales, who had heard about Norbert Clyde's cows and was constitutionally half inclined to believe in flying saucers anyhow, sat up three nights in a row by his living-room window, holding a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun across his knees (… come from Mars boy maybe you do but we'll see how you glow when you got a load of shot in you). He could not possibly have foreseen or understood what he would be doing with that shotgun in two months' time. Walt Hardesty, who would have to clean up Elmer's mess, was content to take things easy until the next weirdo happening and think about how he could get the two old lawyers to open up to him-them and their friend Mr. Lewis Snob Benedikt. They knew something they weren't telling, and they knew something too about their other old buddy, Dr. John Dope Fiend Jaffrey. They just didn't take that normal, Hardesty told himself as he bedded down in the spare room behind his office. He put a bottle of County Fair on the floor beside his cot. No sir. Mr. Ricky Snob Hawthorne-With-Horns and Mr. Sears and Roebuck Snob James just didn't act normal at all.

But Don does not know, so he cannot put in his journal, that after Milly Sheehan leaves the Hawthorne house to return to the house on Montgomery Street where she lived with John Jaffrey, she remembers one morning that the doctor never did get around to putting up the storm windows and yanks on a coat and goes outside to see if she can do it herself and while she looks up despairingly at the windows (knowing that she'll never be able to lift the big storms that high), Dr. Jaffrey walks around the side of the house and smiles at her. He is wearing the suit Ricky Hawthorne picked out for his funeral but no shoes or socks, and at first the shock of seeing him outside barefoot is worse than the other shock. 'Milly,' he says, 'tell them all to leave-tell them all to get out. I've seen the other side Milly, and it's horrible.' His mouth moves, but the words sound like a badly dubbed film. 'Horrible. Be sure to tell them now,' he says, and Milly faints. She is out only a few seconds, and comes to whimpering, her hip aching from the fall, but even through her fear she can see no footprints in the snow beside her and knows that she was just seeing things-she'll never tell anyone. They put you away for things like that. 'Too many of those darned stories, and a little too much of Mr. Sears James,' she mutters to herself before picking herself up and limping back inside.

Don, sitting alone in room 17, of course does not know most of the things that happen in Milburn while he takes a three-week tour of his past. He barely sees the snow, which continues to fall heavily; Eleanor Hardie does