Ghost Story

'I don't care what I wear.'

'Okay.' He tossed the bag onto her bed. 'I just thought you might like them.'

She did not respond.

'I'll feed you if you answer some questions.'

She turned away from him and began picking at the sheets, wrinkling them and smoothing them out.

'What's your name?'

'I told you. Angie.'

'Angie Maule?'

'No. Angie Mitchell.'

He let it go. 'Why haven't your parents sent the police out to find you? Why haven't we been found yet?'

'I don't have any parents.'

'Everybody has parents.'

'Everybody except orphans.'

'Who takes cares of you?'

'You do.'

'Before me.'

'Shut up. Shut up.' Her face became glossy and self-contained.

'Are you really an orphan?'

'Shut up shut up shut up!'

To stop her screaming he lifted the canned ham out of the box of groceries. 'All right,' he said. 'I'll get you some food. We'll have some of this.'

'Okay.' It was as if she had never screamed. 'I want the peanut butter too.'

While he was slicing the ham she said, 'Do you have enough money to take care of us?'

She ate in her dedicated way: first she bit off a mouthful of ham, then dipped her fingers in the peanut butter and brought a wad of it home and chewed the two together. 'Delicious,' she managed to utter around the food.

'If I go to sleep, you won't leave, will you?'

She shook her head. 'But I can take a walk, can't I?'

'I guess so.'

He was drinking a can of beer from a six-pack he had picked up at the little store on his way back; the beer and the food together made him drowsy, and he knew that if he did not get to bed, he would fall asleep in the chair.

She said, 'You don't have to tie me onto you. I'll come back. You believe me, don't you?'

He nodded.

'Because where could I go? I don't have anywhere to go.'

'Okay!' he said. Once again, he could not talk to her as he wished: she was in control. 'You can go out, but don't be gone too long.' He was acting like a parent: he knew that she had put him in this role. It was ludicrous.

He watched her go out of the mean little room. Later, rolling over in bed, he dimly heard the door clicking shut and knew that she had, after all, come back. So she was his.

And that night he lay on his bed, fully dressed, watching her sleep. When his muscles began to ache from being held so long in the same position, he shifted his body on the bed; in this way, over a period of two hours, he went from lying on his side and supporting his head on his hand to sitting up with his knees raised and his hands crossed behind his head to leaning forward, elbows on knees, and finally back to lying on his side, cocked up on one elbow: as if all these postures were elements of a formal round. His eyes scarcely ever left the girl. She lay absolutely still-sleep had taken her somewhere else and left only her body behind. Simply lying there, both of them lying there, she had escaped him.

He rose, went to his suitcase and took out the rolled-up shirt and went back to stand beside his bed. He held the shirt by the collar and let gravity carry the hunting knife to the bed, unrolling the shirt as it fell. When it hit the bed it was too heavy to bounce. Wanderley picked it up and hefted it.

Holding the knife once again behind his back, he shook the girl's shoulder. Her features seemed to blur before she turned over and dug her face into the pillow. He grasped her shoulder again and felt the long thin bone, the prominent wing jutting out from her back. 'Go 'way,' she muttered into the pillow.

'No. We're going to talk.'

'It's too late.'

He shook her, and when she did not respond, tried to roll her over by force. Thin and small as she was, she was strong enough to resist. He could not make her face him.

Then she turned over by herself, as if in contempt. Lack of sleep showed in her face, but beneath the puffiness she looked adult.

'What's your name?'

'Angie.' She smiled carelessly. 'Angie Maule.'

'Where do you come from?'

'You know.'

He nodded.

'What were your parents' names?'

'I don't know.'

'Who took care of you before I picked you up?'

'It doesn't matter.'

'Why not?'

'They aren't important. They were just people.'

'Was their name Maule?'

Her smile became more insolent. 'Does it matter? You think you know everything anyhow.'

'What do you mean, 'They were just people'?'

'They were just people named Mitchell. That's all.'

'And you changed your name yourself?'

'So what?'

'I don't know.' That was true.

So they looked at one another, he sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the knife behind him and knowing that whatever was going to happen, he would be unable to use it. He supposed that David too had been unable to take life-any life but his own, if he had done that. The girl probably knew he was holding the knife, he thought, and simply dismissed it as a threat. It was not a threat. He too was probably not a threat, she had never been even apprehensive of him.

'Okay, let's try again,' he said. 'What are you?'

For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled. It was a transformation, but not of a kind to make him feel easier: she did not look any less adult. 'You know,' she said.

He insisted. 'What are you?'

She smiled all through her amazing response. 'I am you.'

'No. I am me. You are you.'

'I am you.'

'What are you?' It came out in despair, and it did not mean what he had meant the first time he asked it.

Then just for a second he was back on the street in New York, and the person before him was not the stylish suntanned anonymous woman, but his brother David, his face crumbled and his body dressed in the torn and rotting clothing of the grave.

… the most dreadful thing…

Part One: After Jaffrey's Party

Don't the moon look lonesome,