Ghost Story

Florence de Peyser which spared me the usual indignities attendant upon death, which I am afraid I rather feared. And what do you fear, Peter? Do you believe in vampires? In werewolves?'

The resonant voice had been unreeling in Peter's mind, lulling and soothing him, and it was a moment before he realized that he had been asked a direct question. 'No,' he whispered, and then:

(Liar went through his mind)

and the man holding his mother by the throat altered and Peter knew in every cell that what he was looking at was not merely a wolf, but a supernatural being in wolf form whose only purpose was to kill, to create terror and chaos and to take life as savagely as possible: saw that pain and death were the only poles of its being. He saw that this being had nothing in it that was human, and that it only dressed in the body it had once owned. He saw too, now that it was letting him see deeply into it, that this pure destructiveness was not its own master any more than a dog is: another mind owned and directed it as surely as the creature owned the dreadful purity of its evil. All of this Peter saw in a second. And the next second brought an even worse recognition: that in all of this blackness lived a morally fatal glamour.

'I don't…' he uttered, trembling.

'Oh, but you do,' the werewolf said, and put his dark glasses back on. 'I saw perfectly well that you do. I could have been a vampire just as easily. That is even more beautiful. And perhaps even closer to the truth.'

'What are you?' Peter asked again.

'Well, you could call me Dr. Rabbitfoot,' the creature said. 'Or you could call me a nightwatcher.'

Peter blinked.

'Now I am afraid we must leave you. Our benefactor will arrange another meeting with you and your friends in due time. But before we take our leave, we must satisfy our hunger.' It smiled. Its teeth were gleamingly white. 'Hold him very still,' it commanded, and the hands pushed with terrible force on the sides of Peter's head. He began to cry.

Still smiling, the creature pulled Christina Barnes closer to him and, dipping its head to her neck, slid its mouth over her skin. Peter tried to leap forward, but the frozen hands held him back. The creature began to eat.

Peter tried to scream, and the dead child holding him moved its hands to cover his mouth. It pressed Peter's head against its chest. The smell of putrefaction, his terror and despair, the horror of being clasped against the revolting body and the greater horror of what was happening to his mother-he blacked out.

When he awakened he was alone. The stench of corruption still hung in the room. Peter moaned and pushed himself up into a kneeling position. The vase he had dropped lay on its side near him. Flowers, still brilliant, were strewn out across a puddle on the carpet. He raised his hands to his face and caught on them the reek of the dead boy who had held him. He gagged. The awful smell must have covered his mouth too, rubbed off the boy's hand: it was as though his mouth and cheek were covered with decay.

Peter ran out of the bedroom and down the hall until he found a bathroom. Then he turned on the hot water and scrubbed his face and hands over and over, working up the lather and rinsing it off, then taking the soap again and working it between his palms. He was sobbing. His mother was dead: she had come to see Lewis, and they had killed her. They had done to her what they did to animals: they were dead creatures that lived like vampires on blood. But they were not vampires. Nor were they werewolves; they could just make you think they were. They had sold themselves long ago to whatever owned them. Peter remembered green light leaking from beneath a door, and nearly vomited into the sink. She owned them. They were nightwatchers- night-things. He smeared Lewis's soap over his mouth, rubbing and rubbing to rid himself of the smell of Fenny's hands.

Peter remembered Jim Hardie seated at the bar in a seedy country tavern, asking him if he would like to see all of Milburn go up in flames, and knew that unless he could be stronger, braver and smarter than Jim, that what would happen to Milburn would be worse than that. The nightwatchers would systematically ruin the town-make it a ghost town-and leave behind only the stench of death.

Because that's all they want, he said to himself, remembering Gregory Bate's naked face, all they want is to destroy. He saw Jim Hardie's taut face, the face of Jim drunk and hurling himself into a wild scheme; the face of Sonny Venuti leaning toward him with her pop eyes; of his mother as she left the station wagon on the brick court; and chillingly, of the actress at the party last year, looking at him with a smiling mouth and expressionless eyes.

He dropped Lewis's towel on the bathroom floor.

They've been here before.

There was only one person who could help him- who might not think he was lying or crazy. He had to get back to town and see the writer who was staying in the hotel.

The loss of his mother went through him once again, shaking tears from him; but he did not have time to cry now. He went out into the hall and past the heavy door. 'Oh, mom,' he said. 'I'll stop them. I'll get them. I'll-' But the words were hollow, just a boy's defiance. They want you to think that.

Peter did not look back at the house as he ran down the drive, but he felt it back there, watching him and mocking his puny intentions-as if it knew that his freedom was only that of a dog on a leash. At any second he could be pulled back, his neck bruised, his wind cut off…

He saw why when he reached the end of Lewis's drive. A car was parked on the verge of the highway, and the Jehovah's Witness who had given him a lift was inside it, looking at him. He blinked his lights at Peter: glowing eyes. 'Come along,' the man called. 'Just come along, son.'

Peter ran out into the traffic. An oncoming car squealed around him, another car skidded to a stop. Half a dozen horns cried out. He reached the median and ran across the empty other half of the highway. He could still hear the Witness calling to him. 'Come back. It's no good.'

Peter disappeared into the underbrush on the far side of the highway. Among the noises and confusions of traffic, he clearly heard the Witness starting up his car to track him back to town.

8

Five minutes after Lewis left Otto's fire, he began to feel tired. His back ached from all the shoveling he had done the day before; his legs threatened to give out. The hound trotted before him, forcing him to go on when he'd rather just go down the hill back to his car. Even that was at least a half hour walk away. Better to go on after the dog and settle down and then return to the fire.

Flossie sniffed at the base of a tree, checked that he was still there, and trotted on.

The worst part of the story was that he had allowed Linda to go into the child's room alone. Sitting at the de Peyser table, woozy, even more exhausted than he was now, he had sensed that the entire situation was somehow false, that he was unknowingly playing a part in a game. That was what he had not told Otto: that sense of wrongness which had come over him during dinner. Beneath the food's absence of taste had lain the faint taste of garbage, and in the same way beneath the superficial chatter of Florence de Peyser had lain something which had made him see himself as a marionette forced into dance. Feeling that, why had he continued to sit, to struggle to appear normal-why hadn't he taken Linda by the arm and hurried out?

Don too had said something about feeling like a player in a game.

Because they know you well enough to know what you will do. That is why you stayed. Because they knew you would.

The slight wind shifted; turned colder. The hound lifted its nose, sniffed and turned into the direction of the wind. She began to move more quickly.

'Flossie!' he yelled. The hound, already thirty yards ahead of him and visible only when he saw it coursing between the trees, emerged into an opening and glanced back at Lewis over its shoulder. Then she amazed Lewis by lowering her head and growling. The next second she flashed away.

Looking ahead, he saw only the bushy shapes of fir trees, interspersed with the bare skeletons of other trees, standing on ground mottled white. Melting snow moved sluggishly downhill. His feet were cold. Finally he heard the dog barking, and went toward the sound.

When he finally saw the dog, she began to whine. She was standing in a small glacial hollow, and Lewis was at the hollow's upper edge. Boulders like Easter Island statues, crusted with quartz, littered the bottom of the hollow. The dog glanced up at him, whined again, wriggled her body, and then flattened out alongside one of the boulders. 'Come back, Flossie,' he said. The dog pressed herself onto the ground, switching her tail.