Ghost Story

The bell rang again.

'Oh, there's one more,' Christina Barnes said. 'Your father will make the drinks. Let's get back to normal before we're seen in public again, okay?'

'It's someone you invited?'

'Why sure it is, Pete, who else could it be?'

'I don't know,' he said, and looked at the window again. No one was there: only his mother's averted face and his own, glowing like pale candles in the glass. 'Nobody.'

She straightened up and wiped her eyes. 'I'll get the food out of the oven. You better get in and say hello.'

'Who is it?'

'Some friend of Sears and Ricky's.'

He walked to the door and looked back, but she was already opening the oven door and reaching in, an ordinary woman getting the dinner ready for a party.

I don't know what's real and what isn't, he thought, and turning his back on her went out into the hall. The stranger, Mr. Wanderley's nephew, was talking near the living-room arch. 'Well, what I'm interested in now, to tell the truth, is the difference between invention and reality. For example, did you happen to hear music a few days ago? A band, playing outside somewhere in town?'

'Why no,' breathed Sonny Venuti. 'Did you?'

Peter stopped dead just inside the arch and gaped at the writer.

'Hey, Pete,' his father said. 'I want you to meet your dinner partner.'

'Oh, I wanted to sit next to this handsome young man,' Sonny Venuti crooned, smiling at him popeyed.

'You're stuck with me,' said Lou Price.

'Come on over here, scout,' his father called.

He pulled himself away from Don Wanderley, who was looking at him curiously, and turned to his father. His mouth dried. His father was standing with his arm around a tall woman with a lovely fox-sharp face.

It was the face which had looked the wrong way through a telescope across a dark square and found him.

'Anna, this is my son Pete. Pete, Miss Mostyn.'

Her eyes licked at him. He was conscious for a moment of standing halfway between the woman and Don Wanderley, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne looking on like spectators at a tennis match; but himself and the woman and Don Wanderley forming the points of a long narrow triangle like a burning-glass, and then her eyes moved over him again, and he was conscious only of the danger he was in.

'Oh, I think Peter and I will have lots to talk about,' said Anna Mostyn.

From the journals of Don Wanderley

14

What was to have been my introduction to a wider Milburn community ended in a disastrous shambles.

Peter Barnes, a tall black-haired boy who looks both capable and sensitive, was the dropped bomb. He seemed merely uncommunicative at first-understandable in a seventeen-year-old playing servant at his parents' party. Flashes of warmth for the Hawthornes. He too responds to Stella. But underneath the distance was something else-something I gradually imagined was- panic? Despair? Apparently a friend of his disappeared under a cloud, and his parents evidently assumed that to be the cause of his moroseness. Yet it was more than that, and what I thought I saw in him was fear-the Chowder Society had either tuned me to this, or caused me mistakenly to project it. When I was making my pompous remarks to Sonny Venuti, Peter stopped in his tracks and stared at me; he really searched me with his eyes, and I had the idea that he wanted badly to talk to me-not about books. The startling thing was that I thought that he too had heard the Dr. Rabbitfoot music.

And if that's true- if that's true- then we are in the middle of Dr. Rabbitfoot's revenge. And all Milburn is about to blow up.

Oddly, it was something Anna Mostyn said that caused Peter to faint. He trembled when he first saw her: I am sure of that. He was afraid of her. Now Anna Mostyn is a woman not far short of beauty, even the awesome Stella Hawthorne sort; her eyes seem to go all the way back to Norfolk and Florence, where she says her ancestors came from. She has apparently made herself indispensable to Sears and Ricky, but her greatest gift is for merely being politely there, helpful when that is needed, as on the day of the funeral. She suggests kindness and sympathy and intelligence but does not overwhelm you with her excellence. She is discreet, quiet on the surface of things a supremely self-contained, self-possessed young woman. She really is remarkably unobtrusive. Yet she is sensual in an inexplicably unsettling way. She seems cold, sensually cold: it is a self-referring, self- pleasing sensuality.

I saw her fix Peter Barnes with this challenge for a moment during dinner. He had been staring at his plate, forcing his father into yet more bluster and bonhomie, and annoying his mother; he never looked at Anna Mostyn, though he was sitting next to her. The other guests ignored him and chattered away about the weather. Peter was burning to get away from the table. Anna took his chin in her hand, and I knew the sort of look he was getting. Then she said to him very quietly that she wanted some of the rooms of her new house repainted, and she thought that he and one or two of his school friends might like to come to her house to do it. He swooned. That old- fashioned word fits perfectly. He fainted, passed out, pitched forward- swooned. I thought at first that he'd had a fit; so did most other people present. Stella Hawthorne calmed us down, helped Peter off his chair, and his father took him upstairs. Dinner ended shortly afterward.

And now I notice this for the first time: Alma Mobley. Anna Mostyn. The initials, the great similarity of the names. Am I at a point where I can afford to call anything coincidental 'a mere coincidence'? She is not like Alma Mobley in any way; yet she is like her.

And I know how. It is their air of timelessness: but where Alma would have flown past the Plaza Hotel in the twenties, Anna Mostyn would have been inside, smiling at the antics of men with flasks in their pockets, men cavorting, talking about new cars and the stock market, doing their best to knock her dead.

Tonight I am going to take the pages of the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel down to the hotel's incinerator and burn them.

Part Three: The Coon Hunt

But the civilized human spirit, whether one calls

it bourgeois or merely leaves it at civilized,

cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny.

-Dr Faustus, Thomas Mann

I - Eva Galli and the Manitou

It was surely October

On this very night of last year

That I journeyed-I journeyed down here-

That I brought a dread burden down here-

Ah, what demon has tempted me here?

***