Ghost Story

want to look at the covered shape on the bed; he went to the window. Through the greasepaper he could see only vague orange light. He glanced back at the sheet. 'Linda,' he said miserably.

He stood in a metal room, with gray metal walls. One light bulb hung from the ceiling. His wife lay under a sheet on a metal table. Lewis leaned over her body and sobbed. 'I won't bury you in the pond,' he said. 'I'll take you into the rose garden.' He touched his wife's lifeless fingers under the sheet and felt them twitch. He recoiled.

As he watched horrified, Linda's hands crept up beneath the sheet. Her white hands folded the sheet down over her face. She sat up, and her eyes opened.

Lewis cowered at the far end of the little room. When his wife swung her legs off the morgue table, he screamed. She was naked, and the left side of her face was broken and scraped. He held his hands out in front of him in a childish gesture of protection. Linda smiled at him, and said, 'What about that poor dog?' She was pointing to the uncovered slab of table, where a short-haired hound lay on its side in a puddle of blood.

He looked back in horror at his wife, but Stringer Dedham, his hair parted in the middle, a brown shirt concealing his stumps, stood beside him. 'What did you see, Stringer?' he asked.

Stringer smiled at him bloodily. 'I saw you. That's why I jumped out of the window. Don't be a puddin' head.'

'You saw me?'

'Did I say I saw you? Guess I'm the puddin' head. I didn't see you. Your wife's the one saw you. What I saw was my girl. Saw her right through her window, morning of the day I helped out on the thresher. Gosh, I must be a real moron.'

'But what did you see her doing? What did you try to tell your sisters?'

Stringer bent back his head and laughed, and blood gushed out of his mouth. He coughed. 'Golly gee, I couldn't hardly believe it, it was just amazin', friend. You ever see a snake with its head cut off? You ever see that tongue dartin' out-and that head just a stump of a thing no bigger than your thumb? You ever see that body workin' away, beatin' itself in the dust?' Stringer laughed loudly through the red foam in his mouth. 'Holy Moses, Lewis, what a godforsaken thing. Honestly, ever since it's been like I can't hardly think straight, like my brain's all mixed up and leakin' outta my ears. It's like that time I had the stroke, in 1940, remember? When one side of me froze up? And you gave me baby food on a spoon? Grrr, what a godawful taste!'

'That wasn't you,' Lewis said, 'That was my father.'

'Well, what did I tell you? It's all mixed up-like someone cut my head off, and my tongue keeps moving.' Stringer gave an abashed red smile. 'Say, wasn't you goin' to take that poor old dog and drop it in the pond?'

'Oh, yes, when they get back,' Lewis said. 'We need Warren Scales's car. His wife is pregnant.'

'The wife of a Roman Catholic farmer is of no concern to me at the moment,' his father said. 'One year at college has coarsened you, Lewis.' From his temporary mooring beside the mantel, he looked long and sadly at his son. 'And I know too that this is a coarsening era. Pitch defileth, Lewis. Our age is pitch. We are born into damnation, and for our children all is darkness. I wish that I could have reared you in more stable times-Lewis, once this country was a paradise! A paradise! Fields as far as you could see! Filled with the bounty of the Lord! Son, when I was a boy I saw Scripture in the spider webs. The Lord was watching us then, Lewis, you could feel His presence in the sunlight and the rain. But now we are like spiders dancing in a fire.' He looked down at the literal fire, which was warming his knees. 'It all started with the railway. That I'm sure of, son. The railroad brought money to men who'd never had the smell of two dollars together in all their lives. The iron horse spoiled the land, and now financial collapse is going to spread like a stain over this whole country.' And looked at Lewis with the clear shrewd eyes of Sears James.

'I promised her I'd bury her in the rose garden,' Lewis said. 'They'll be back with the car soon.'

'The car.' His father turned away in disgust. 'You never listened to the important things I had to tell you. You have forsaken me, Lewis.'

'You excite yourself too much,' Lewis said. 'You'll give yourself a stroke.'

'His will be done.'

Lewis looked at his father's rigid back. 'I'll see to it now.' His father made no answer. 'Good-bye.'

His father spoke without turning around. 'You never listened. But mark me, son, it will come back to haunt you. You were seduced by yourself, Lewis. Nothing sadder can be said of any man. A handsome face and feathers for brains. You got your looks from your mother's Uncle Leo, and when he was twenty-five he stuck his hand into the woodstove and held it there until it was charred like a hickory log.'

Lewis went through the dining-room door. Linda was peeling the sheet off her naked body in the vacant upper room. She smiled at him with bloody teeth. 'After that,' she said, 'your mother's Uncle Leo was a godly man all his life long.' Her eyes glowed, and she swung her legs down off the bed. Lewis backed away toward the bare wooden wall. 'After that he saw Scripture in spider webs, Lewis.' She moved slowly toward him, twisting on a broken hip. 'You were going to put me in the pond. Did you see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? Or were you distracted by your pretty face?'

'Now it's over, isn't it?' Lewis asked.

'Yes.' She was close enough for him to catch the dark brown smell of death.

Lewis straightened his body against the rough wall. 'What did you see in that girl's bedroom?'

'I saw you, Lewis. What you were supposed to see. Like this.'

9

As long as Peter was concealed by the underbrush he was safe. A wiry network of branches hid him from the road. On the other side, beginning ten or fifteen yards back, were trees like those before Lewis's house. Peter worked his way back into them to be further screened from the man in the car. The Jehovah's Witness had not moved off the shoulder of the highway: Peter could see the top of his car, a bright acrylic blue shield, over the top of the dry brambles. Peter ducked from the safety of one tree to another; then to another. The car inched forward. They continued in this way for some time, Peter moving slowly over the damp ground and the car clinging to his side like a shark to which he was the pilot fish. At times the Witness's car moved slightly ahead, at times it hung back, but never was it more than five or ten yards off in either direction-the only comfort available for Peter was that the driver's errors proved that he could not see him. He was just idling down the shoulder of the road waiting for a section of cleared ground.

Peter tried to visualize the landscape on his side of the highway, and remembered that only for a mile or so in the vicinity of Lewis's house was there heavy ground cover-most of the rest of the land, until an eruption of gas stations and drive-ins marked the edges of Milburn, was field. Unless he crawled in ditches for seven miles, the man in the car would be able to see him as soon as he left the stretch of woods.

Come out, son.

The Witness was aimlessly sending out messages, trying to coax him into the car. Peter shut his mind to the whispers as well as he could and plunged on through the woods. Maybe if he kept on running, the Witness would drive down the road far enough to let him think.

Come on, boy. Come out of there. Let me take you to her.

Still protected by the high brambles and the trees, Peter ran until he could see, strung between the massive trunks of oaks, double strands of silvery wire. Beyond the wire was a long curved vacancy of field- empty white ground. The Witness's car was nowhere in sight. Peter looked sideways, but here the trees were too thick and the brambles too high for him to see the section of highway nearest him. Peter reached the last of the trees and the wire and looked over the field, wondering if he could get across unseen. If the man saw him on the field, Peter knew he would be helpless. He could run, but eventually the man would get him as the thing back in the Montgomery Street house got Jim.

She's interested in you, Peter.

It was another aimless, haphazard dart with no real urgency in it.

She'll give you everything you want.

She'll give you anything you want.

She'll give you back your mother.

The blue car edged forward into his vision and stopped just past the point where the field began. Peter shuddered back a few feet deeper into the wood. The man in the car turned sideways, resting his arm along the top of the seat, and in this posture of patient waiting looked out at the field Peter would have to cross.

Come on out and we'll give you your mother.