Ghost Story

have found somewhere else already.'

Don looked at Sears and Ricky. 'There is just one thing left to say. As Sears asked, what would have happened if you'd shot the lynx? That's what we'll have to find out. This time we'll have to shoot the lynx, whatever that will mean.'

He smiled at them. 'It's going to be a hell of a winter.'

Sears James rumbled something affirmative. Ricky asked, 'What do you suppose the odds are that we three and Peter Barnes will ever see the end of it?'

'Rotten,' Sears answered. 'But you've certainly done what we asked you here to do.'

'Do we tell anybody?' Ricky asked. 'Should we try to convince Hardesty?'

That's absurd,' Sears snorted. 'We'd end up in the booby hatch.'

'Let them think they're fighting Martians,' Don said. 'Sears is right. But I'll give you a much better bet than the one you gave me.'

'What's that?'

'I bet your perfect secretary won't come to work tomorrow.'

When the old men left him in his uncle's house, Don built up the fire and sat in Ricky's warm place on the couch. While snow piled up on the roof and tried to wind its way around doors and window frames, he remembered a warm-chilly night, the smell of burning leaves, a sparrow lighting on a rail and a pale already loved face shining at him with luminous eyes from a doorway. And a naked girl looking out of a black window and pronouncing words he only now understood: 'You are a ghost.' You Donald. You. It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.

II - The Town Besieged

Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept.

When his friend; passing by, enquired the reason,

Narcissus replied, 'I weep that I have lost my innocence.'

His friend answered, 'You would wiser weep that you ever had it.'

1

December in Milburn; Milburn moving toward Christmas. The town's memory is long, and this month has always meant certain things, maple sugar candy and skating on the river and lights and trees in the stores and skiing on the hills just outside of town. In December, under several inches of snow, Milburn always took on a festive, almost magically pretty look. A tall tree always went up in the square, and Eleanor Hardie matched its lights by decorating the front of the Archer Hotel. Children lined up before Santa Claus in Young Brothers' department store and put in their non-negotiable demands for Christmas-only the older ones noticed that Santa looked and smelled a little bit like Omar Norris. (December always reconciled Omar not only with his wife, but also with himself-he cut his drinking in half, and talked to the few cronies he had about 'moonlighting down at the store.') As his father had done, Norbert Clyde always drove his old horse-drawn sleigh through town and gave the kids rides so they would know what real sleighbells sounded like- and would know the feeling of skimming along through pine- smelling air behind two good horses. And as his father had done, Elmer Scales pulled open a gate in one of his pasture fences and let the town people come out to sled down a hill at the edge of his property: you always saw half a dozen station wagons pulled up alongside the fence, and half a dozen young fathers pulling Flexible Flyers laden with excited children up Elmer's hill. Some families pulled taffy in their kitchens; some families roasted chestnuts in their fireplaces. Humphrey Stalladge put up red and green lights over the bar, and started making Tom and Jerries. Milburn wives swapped recipes for Christmas cookies; the butchers took orders for twenty-pound turkeys and gave away recipes for turkey gravy. Eight-year-olds in the grade school cut out trees from colored paper and pasted them to classroom windows. High school kids concentrated more on hockey than English and history, and thought about the records they'd buy with the holiday checks from aunts and uncles. The Kiwanis and Rotary and the Kaycees held a huge party in the ballroom of the Archer Hotel, with three bartenders imported from Binghamton, and cleared several thousand dollars for the Golden Agers fund; from this evening, and from all the cocktail parties the younger, newer residents of Milburn held-the people who still did not look quite familiar to Sears and Ricky, though they might have lived in Milburn for years-people came to work with headaches and queasy stomachs.

This year there still were a few cocktail parties and women still made Christmas cookies, but December in Milburn was different. People who met in Young Brother's department store didn't say 'Isn't it nice to have a white Christmas?' but 'I hope this snow doesn't keep up'; Omar Norris had to stay on the municipal snowplow all day long, and junior clerks said they'd get into his Santa suit only if someone fumigated it first; the mayor and Hardesty's deputies set up an enormous tree, but Eleanor Hardie didn't have the heart to decorate the front of the hotel-indeed she began to look so harried and lost that a tourist couple from New York City took one glance at her and decided on the spot to keep on going until they found a motel. And Norbert Clyde, the first time ever, didn't take his sleigh out of his barn and grease up the runners: ever since seeing that 'thing' on his land, he had gone into a funny decline. You could hear him at Humphrey's or other bars on the outskirts of town, saying that the County Farm Agent didn't know his ass from his elbow, and that if people had any sense they'd start paying a little more attention to Elmer Scales, who didn't open up his gate to let the sledders onto his hill, but skipped dinners and scribbled crazy poetry and waited up nights with his loaded twelve-gauge over his knees. His tribe of children sledded on the hill by themselves, feeling ostracized. Snow fell all day, all night; the drifts at first covered fences, and then reached the eaves of the houses. In the second two weeks of December, the schools were closed for eight days: the high school's heating system failed, and the board shut it down until mid-January, when a heating engineer from Binghamton was finally able to get into town. The grade school closed a few days later: the roads were treacherous, and after the school bus went into a ditch twice in one morning, the parents would have kept their kids home anyway. People of the age of Ricky and Sears-those who were the town's memory-looked back to the winters of 1947 and 1926, when no traffic had come in or out of Milburn for weeks, and fuel had run out and old folks (who were no older than the present ages of Sears and Ricky) had, along with Viola Frederickson of the auburn hair and exotic face, frozen to death.

This December Milburn looked less like a village on a Christmas card than a village under siege. The Dedham girls' horses, forgotten even by Nettie, starved and died in their stables. This December, people stayed in their houses more than they were used to, and tempers wore thin-some broke. Philip Kneighler, one of the new Milburnites, went inside and beat up his wife after his snow blower broke down on his driveway. Ronnie Byrum, a nephew of Harlan Bautz's home on leave from the Marines, objected to the harmless remarks of a man standing beside him in a bar and broke his nose: he would have broken his jaw if two of Ronnie's old high school buddies had not pinned his arms back. Two sixteen-year-old boys named Billy Byrum (Ronnie's brother) and Anthony 'Spacemaker' Ortega concussed a younger boy who insisted on talking through the eight-twenty-five showing of Night of the Living Dead at Clark Mulligan's Rialto Theater. All over Milburn couples locked together in their houses quarreled about their babies, their money, their television programs. A deacon of the Holy Ghost Presbyterian Church-the same church of which Lewis's father had once been pastor-locked himself in the unheated building one night two weeks before Christmas and wept and cursed and prayed all night because he thought he was going crazy: he thought he had seen the naked boy Jesus standing on a snowdrift outside the church windows, begging him to come out.

At the Bay Tree Market, Rhoda Flagler pulled a clump of blond hair out of the scalp of Bitsy Underwood because Bitsy had challenged her right to the last three cans of pureed pumpkin: with the trucks unable to make deliveries, all the stocks were getting low. In the Hollow, an unemployed bartender named Jim Blazek knifed and killed a mulatto short-order cook named Washington de Souza because a tall man with a shaven head who dressed like a sailor had told Blazek that de Souza was messing around with his wife.

During the sixty-two days from the first of December to the thirty-first of January, these ten citizens of Milburn died of natural causes: George Fleischner (62), heart attack; Whitey Rudd (70), malnutrition; Gabriel Fish (58), exposure; Omar Norris (61), exposure following concussion; Marion Le Sage (73), stroke; Ethel Bin (76), Hodgkin's Disease; Dylan Griffen (5 months), hypothermia; Harlan Bautz (55), heart attack; Nettie Dedham (81),