Ghost Story (54 page)

Screams, moans, the sound of rushing wind filled the theater.

—live forever

—live forever

Don stretched out his legs, dazedly looking at the pile of bodies lying beneath the risers to the stage. The old man's white face twisted toward him, lying across the body of a barefoot child. Peter Barnes was at the bottom of the heap, feebly moving his hands.

"We should have concluded matters two years ago," Bate purred. "So much trouble would have been saved if we had. You remember two years back, don't you?"

Don heard Alma Mobley saying
His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans,
and remembered a moment so vividly that it was as if he were there again: he standing on a corner in Berkeley and looking in shock at a woman in the shadows beside a bar named The Last Reef. A leaden sense of betrayal made it impossible to move.

"So much trouble," Bate repeated. "But it makes this moment all the sweeter, don't you think?"

Peter Barnes, bleeding from a cheek, pushed himself halfway out of the tangle.

"Alma," Don managed to say.

Bate's ivory face flickered. "Yes. Your Alma. And your brother's Alma. Mustn't forget David. Not nearly as entertaining as you."

"Entertaining."

"Oh, yes. We enjoy entertainment. Only proper, since we have provided so much of it. Now look at me again, Donald." He reached down to pull Don up from the floor, smiling coldly.

Peter groaned: pulled himself clear. Don looked confusedly across at him and saw that Fenny also was moving, rolling over, his smudgy face a soundless screaming grimace.

"They hurt Fenny," Don said, blinking, and saw Bate's hand slowly reaching toward him. He shot his legs out and squirmed away from Bate, moving faster than he ever had in his life. Don rolled to his feet, halfway between Gregory and Peter, who was—

—live forever—

blinking at the squirming, grimacing form of Fenny Bate. "They
hurt
Fenny," Don said, the meaning of Fenny's agony going through him like an electric current. The giant sounds of the film opened up again in his ears.

"You don't," he said to Bate, and looked under the seats. His axe lay out of reach.

"Don't?"

"You don't live forever."

"We live much longer than you," Bate said, and the civilized veneer of his voice cracked open to reveal the violence beneath it. Don backed toward Peter, looking not at Bate's eyes but at his mouth.

"You won't live another minute," Bate said, and took a step forward.

"Peter—" Don said, and looked over his shoulder at the boy.

Peter was holding the Bowie knife above Fenny's writhing body.

"Do
it," Don shouted, and Peter brought the knife down into Fenny's chest. Something white and foul exploded upward, a reeking geyser, from Fenny's ribcage.

Gregory Bate launched himself toward Peter, howling, and knocked Don savagely over the first row of seats.

Ricky Hawthorne at first thought he was dead, the pain in his back was so bad that he thought only death or dying could account for it, and then he saw the worn carpet under his face, the loops of thread seeming inches high and heard Don shouting: so he was alive. He moved his head: the last thing he could remember was cutting open the back of Fenny Bate's neck. Then a locomotive had run into him.

Something beside him moved. When he lifted his head to see what it was, Fenny's bare streaming chest leaped—seeming six feet long—a yard into the air. Small white worms swam across the white skin. Ricky recoiled, and though his back felt as though it were broken, forced himself to sit up.

To his side, Gregory Bate was lifting Peter Barnes off the floor, howling as if his chest were a cave of winds. A section of the beam from the projector caught Gregory's arms and Peter's body, and swarming blotches of black and white moved over them for a second. Still howling, Bate threw Peter into the screen.

Ricky could not see his knife, and went on his knees to scrabble for it. His fingers closed around a bone handle, and a long blade reflected a line of gray light. Fenny thrashed beside him, rolling over onto his hand, and uttered a thin
eee,
dead air rushing out. Ricky snatched the knife from under Fenny's back, feeling his hand come away wet, and made himself stand.

Gregory Bate was just scrambling up onto the stage to leap through the rip in the screen after Peter, and Ricky threw out his free hand and grasped the thick collar of his pea jacket. Bate suddenly went rigid, his reflexes as good as a cat's, and Ricky knew in terror that he would kill him, spinning around with pulverizing hands and slashing teeth, if he did not do the only possible thing.

Before Bate could move, Ricky slammed the Bowie knife into his back.

Now he could hear nothing, not the noises on the soundtrack, not the cry that must have come from Bate: he stood still gripping the bone handle, deafened by the enormity of what he had done. Bate fell back down and turned around and showed Ricky Hawthorne a face to carry with him all his life: eyes full of tearing wind and blizzard and a black mouth open as wide as a cavern.

"Filth," Ricky said, almost sobbing.

Bate fell toward him.

"Get away, Ricky," Don said, but the old lawyer was unable to move. Bate began to crawl toward him.

He stepped beside Ricky and Bate tilted back his head and looked straight into his eyes.

—live forever

Don hurriedly raised the axe over his head and brought the sharpened blade down into Bate's neck, cutting down deeply into the chest. With the next blow he severed the head.

"Let me," he said, and both Ricky and Don stared up at him with white faces.

When Peter was down on the floor of the theater beside them, he took the axe from Don and brought it weakly, glancingly down, his hysteria and loathing spoiling the blow; then he felt suddenly stronger, as strong as a logger, felt as if he were glowing, filled with light, and raised it effortlessly, all the pain leaving him, and brought the axe down again; and again; and again; and then moved to Fenny.

When they were only shreds of skin and smashed bones a zero breeze lifted off their ruined bodies and swirled up into the beam from the projector, passing Peter with such force that it knocked him aside.

Peter bent down into the mess and picked up the Bowie knife.

"By God," Ricky said, and tottered into one of the seats.

When they left the theater, limping, their minds numb, they felt an impatient, hurrying wind even in the lobby—a wind that seemed to swirl through the empty space, rattling posters and the bag of potato chips on the candy counter, searching the way out— and when they broke open the doors, it streamed over them to join the worst blizzard of the season.

"There'll be a lot of accidents on the roads this afternoon," his father said.

"And we finally got a doctor to come give her a sedative, and Mr. Hawthorne has a terrible cold the doctor said could turn into pneumonia if he doesn't rest, so Don Wanderley and I are taking care of them both."

"Let me get this straight, Pete. You were
with
this Wanderley and Mr. Hawthorne?"

"That's right," Peter said.

"Well, I wish you'd thought of calling before this. I was worried half to death. You're all I have, you know."

"I'm sorry, Dad."

"Well, at least you're with good people. Try to get home when you can, but don't take any chances in the storm."

"Okay, Dad," Peter said and hung up, grateful that his father had sounded sober, and even more grateful that he had asked no more questions.

He and Don made soup for Ricky, and brought it up to the guest-room where the old man was resting while his wife slept undisturbed in their bedroom.

"Don't know what happened to me," Ricky said. "I just couldn't move another step. If I'd been alone, I would have frozen to death out there."

"If any of us had been alone," Don said, and did not have to finish the sentence.

"Or if there had been only two of us," Peter said. "We'd be dead. He could have killed us easily."

"Yes, well he didn't," Ricky said briskly. "Don was right about them. And now two-thirds of what we have to do is accomplished."

"You mean we have to find her," Peter said. "Do you think we can do it?"

"We'll do it," Don said. "Stella might be able to tell us something. She might have learned something— heard something. I don't think there's any doubt that the man in the blue car was the same man who was after you. We should be able to talk to her tonight."

"Will it do any good?" Peter asked. "We're snowed in again. We'll never be able to drive anywhere, even if Mrs. Hawthorne does know something."

"Then we'll walk," Don said.

"Yes," Ricky said. "If that's what it takes, we'll walk." And lay back against the pillows. "You know,
we're
the Chowder Society now. The three of us. After Sears was found dead I thought—I said I was the only one left. I felt terribly bereft. Sears was my best friend; he was like my brother. And I'll miss him as long as I live. But I know that when Gregory Bate cornered Sears, Sears put up a hell of a good scrap. He did his best to save Fenny once a long time ago, and I know he did his best against them when his time came. No, there's no need to feel bad about Sears—he probably did better than any of us could have done alone."

Ricky put his empty soup bowl down on the bedside table. "But now there's a new Chowder Society, and here we all are. And there's no whiskey and no cigars, and we're not dressed right—and good heavens, look at me! I'm not even wearing a bow tie." He plucked at the open collar of his pajama shirt and smiled at them. "And I'll tell you one other thing. No more awful stories and no nightmares either. Thank God."

"I'm not so sure about the nightmares," Peter said.

"A huge dose of vitamins."

"Well, I feel much better. All revved up. I still have that terrific cold, of course, but I've had that so long that it feels like a friend. But listen here, Don. After what we've been through, I couldn't feel closer to you. If Sears felt like my brother, you feel like my son. Closer than my son, in fact. My boy Robert can't talk to me—I can't talk to him. That's been true since he was about fourteen. So I think I'm going to adopt you spiritually, if you don't object."

"It makes me too proud of myself to object," Don said, and took Ricky's hand.

"You sure there were just vitamins in that shot?"

"Well."

"If this is how dope makes you feel, I can understand how John became an addict." He lay back and closed his eyes. "When all this is over, assuming we're still alive, let's stay in touch. I'll take Stella on a trip to Europe. I'll send you a barrage of postcards."

"Of course," Don said, and started to say something, but Ricky was already asleep.

Stella Hawthorne, her hair in a scarf, looked up at Don from beside her husband on the guest-room bed. "I woke up an hour or so ago," she said, "and I got lonely, so I came down here to Ricky. Is that food? Oh, you're lovely, both of you." She smiled at Peter, who was standing shyly in the door.

"While the two of you were eating us out of house and home I had a little talk with Stella," Ricky said. He took the tray and put it on Stella's lap, and then removed one of the plates. "What luxury this is! Stella, we should have had maids years ago."

"I think I mentioned that once," Stella said. Though still obviously shaken and exhausted by shock, Stella had improved enormously during the evening; she did not look like a woman in her forties now, and perhaps she never would again, but her eyes were clear.

Ricky poured wine for himself and Stella and cut off a piece of steak. "There's no doubt that the man who picked up Stella was the same one who followed you, Peter. He even told Stella that he was a Jehovah's Witness."

"But he was
dead,"
Stella said, and for a moment the shock swept wholly back into her face. She snatched at Ricky's hand and held it. "He was."

"I know," Ricky said, and turned to the other two again. "But after she came back with help, the body was gone."

"Will you please tell me what is going on?" Stella said, now almost in tears.

"I will," said Ricky, "but not now. We're not finished yet. I'll explain everything to you this summer. When we get out of Milburn."

"Out of Milburn?"

"I'm going to take you to France. We'll go to Antibes and St. Tropez and Aries and anywhere else that looks good. We'll be a pair of funny-looking old tourists together. But first you have to help us. Is that all right with you?"

Stella's practicality saw her through. "It is if you're really promising, and not just bribing me."

"Did you see anything else around the car when you came back with Leon Churchill?" Don asked.

"No one else was there," Stella replied, calmer again.

"I don't mean another person. Any animals?"

"I don't remember. I felt so—sort of unreal. No, nothing."

"You're sure? Try to remember how it looked. The car, the open door, the snowbank you hit—"

"Oh," she said, and Ricky paused with the fork halfway to his mouth. "You're right. I saw a dog. Why is that important? It jumped on top of the snowbank from someone's yard, and then jumped down onto the street. I noticed it because it was so beautiful. White."

"That's it," Don said.

Peter Barnes looked back and forth from Don to Ricky, his mouth open.

"Wouldn't you like some wine, Peter? And you, Don?" Ricky asked.

Don shook his head, but Peter said, "Sure," and Ricky passed him his glass.

"Can you remember anything the man said?"

"It was all so horrible ... I thought he was crazy. And then I thought he knew me because he called me by name, and he said I shouldn't go to Montgomery Street because you weren't there anymore—where were you?"

"I'll tell you all about it over a Pernod. This spring."

"Anything else you remember?" Don asked. "Did he say where he was taking you?"

"To a friend," Stella said, and shuddered. "He said I'd see a mystery. And he talked about Lewis."

"Nothing more about where his friend was?"

"No. Wait. No." She looked down at her plate, and pushed the tray down toward the foot of the bed. "Poor Lewis. That's enough questions. Please."

"You'd better leave us," Ricky said.

Peter and Don were at the door when Stella said, "I

remember. He said he was taking me to the Hollow. I'm sure he said that."

"That's enough for now," Ricky said. "See you in the morning, gentlemen."