Ghost Story

'Cry later,' she said. 'I think I'll cry for a week after I sit down. Let's find a ride.'

'How did you get away from them?' He walked beside her, about to hug her, but she stepped backward, leading him toward the lot. He fell into step with her.

'I guess they thought I was too frightened to move. And when they got me outside, the fresh air sort of revived me. That man relaxed his hold on my arm, and I swung around and belted him with my bag. Then I ran away into the woods. I heard them looking for me. I've never never been so scared in my life. After a while they just gave up. Were they looking for you?'

'No,' he said. 'No.' And the tension melted in him. 'There was someone else, but he left-he didn't get me.'

'They'll leave us alone now,' she said. 'Now that we're away from there.'

He looked into her face, and she glanced down. 'I owe you a lot of explanations, Peter. But this isn't the time. I just want to get home and put a real bandage on my throat. We'll have to think of something to tell your father.'

'You won't tell him what happened?'

'We'll just let it die, can't we?' she asked, and looked pleadingly at him. 'I'll explain everything to you -in time. Let's just be thankful now that we're alive.'

They stepped onto the surface of the parking lot.

'Okay,' Peter said. 'Mom, I'm so-' He struggled with his emotions, but they were too dense to be expressed. 'We have to talk to someone, though. The same man that hurt you killed Jim Hardie.'

She looked back at him, having walked forward toward the crowded middle of the lot 'I know.'

'You know?'

'I mean I guessed. Hurry up, Pete. My neck hurts. I want to get home.'

'You said you knew.'

She made a gesture of exasperation. 'Don't cross-examine me, Peter.'

Peter looked wildly around the parking lot and saw the blue car just nosing past the side of the market. 'Oh, mom,' he said. 'They did. They did. You didn't get away from them.'

'Peter. Snap out of it. I see someone we can get a ride with.'

As the blue car swung up the lane behind her, Peter walked toward his mother, staring at her. 'Okay, I'm coming.'

'Good. Peter, everything will be the way it was again, you will see. We both had a terrible fright, but a hot bath and a good sleep will work wonders.'

'You'll need stitches in your neck,' Peter said, coming closer.

'No, of course not.' She smiled at him. 'A bandage is all I need. It was just a scratch. Peter. What are you doing, Peter? Don't touch it, it hurts. You'll start the bleeding again.'

The blue car was now at the top of their row. Peter reached out toward his mother.

'Don't, Pete, well get our ride in a minute…'

He clamped his eyes shut and swung his arm toward his mother's head. A second later his fingers were tingling. He yelled: a horn sounded, terrifyingly loud.

When he opened his eyes his mother was gone and the blue car was speeding toward him. Peter scrambled toward the protection of two parked cars and slipped between them just as the blue car raced by, scraping its side against them and making them rock.

He watched it squeeze down to the end of the aisle, and when it cut across to drive up the next aisle, he saw Irmengard Draeger, Penny's mother, walk out of the back door of the market carrying a sack of groceries. He ran toward her, cutting through the rows of parked cars.

Stories

10

Inside the hotel, Mrs. Hardie looked at him curiously but told him Don Wanderley's room number and then watched him as he climbed the steps at the end of the lobby. He knew that he should have turned around to say something, but he could not trust himself, after the strain of riding back to town with Mrs. Draeger, to make even the most perfunctory conversation with Jim's mother.

He found Don's door and knocked.

'Mr. Wanderley,' he said when the writer opened the door.

For Don, the appearance of the shaken teenager outside his room meant the arrival of certainty. The period when the consequences of the final Chowder Society story-whatever that would turn out to be- were limited to its members and a few outlyers was over. The expression of shock and loss on Peter Barnes's face told Don that what he had been brooding about in his room was no longer the property of himself and four elderly men.

'Come in, Peter,' he said. 'I thought we'd be meeting again soon.'

The boy moved like a zombie into the room and sat blindly in a chair. 'I'm sorry,' he began, and then closed his mouth. 'I want-I have to-' He blinked, and was obviously unable to continue.

'Hang on,' Don said, and went to his dresser and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured an inch into a water glass and gave it to Peter. 'Drink some of this and settle down. Then just tell me everything that happened. Don't waste time thinking that I might not believe you, because I will. And so will Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. James, when I tell them.'

' 'My older friends,' ' Peter said. He swallowed some of the whiskey. 'That's what he called them. He said you thought his name was Greg Benton.'

Peter twitched, uttering the name, and Don felt the shock of a conviction hitting his nerves: whatever the danger to himself, he would destroy Greg Benton.

'You met him,' he said.

'He killed my mother,' Peter said flatly. 'His brother held me and made me watch. I think-I think they drank her blood. Like they did to those animals. And he killed Jim Hardie. I saw him do it, but I got away.'

'Go on,' Don said.

'And he said someone-I can't remember his name -would call him a Manitou. Do you know what that is?'

'I've heard of it.'

Peter nodded, as if this satisfied him. 'And he turned into a wolf. I saw him. I saw him do it.' Peter set the glass down on the floor, then looked at it again and picked it up and took another sip. His hands trembled badly enough nearly to splash the whiskey over the lip of the glass. 'They stink-they're like rotten dead things-I had to scrub and scrub. Where Fenny touched me.'

'You saw Benton turn into a wolf?'

'Yes. Well, no. Not exactly. He took off his glasses. They have yellow eyes. He let me see him. He was- he was nothing but hate and death. He was like a laser beam.'

'I understand,' Don said. 'I've seen him. But I never saw him without his glasses.'

'When he takes them off, he can make you do things. He can talk inside your head. Like ESP. And they can make you see dead people, ghosts, but when you touch them, they sort of blow up. But they don't blow up. They grab you and they kill you. But they're dead too. Somebody else owns them-their benefactor. They do what she wants.'

'She?' Don asked, and remembered a lovely woman holding this handsome boy's chin at a dinner party.

'That Anna Mostyn,' Peter said. 'But she was here before.'

'Yes, she was,' Don said. 'As an actress.'

Peter looked at him with grateful surprise.

'I just figured out some of the story, Peter,' Don said. 'Just in the past few days.' He looked at the shivering boy in the chair. 'It looks like you figured out a lot more than I did and in a shorter time.'

'He said he was me,' Peter said, his face distorting. 'He said he was me, I want to kill him.'

'Then we'll do it together,' Don said.

'They're here because I'm here,' Don told him. 'Ricky Hawthorne said that when I joined him and Sears and Lewis Benedikt, that we brought these things -these beings-into focus. That we gathered them here. Maybe if I had stayed away, there'd just be a few dead sheep or cows or something, and that would be that. But that was never a