The Moonlight (7 page)

All at once he was visited by the ghost of a memory—not a name or an association, only a feeling.  It was fear.

He hadn’t been afraid just because he thought the guy might come up with a gun.  That too, but not only that.  He had been afraid because the face. . .

And not just the face.  The voice too.  He could hear that voice coming from some dark corner of his mind—not any words, just the voice . . .  The mocking voice out of some terrifying, half-hidden memory.

Whoever he was, he was no joker.

The car slowed down and stopped, so maybe the guy really was lost.  Leo didn’t look back—somehow he didn’t dare look back—but he could hear the car turning around in someone’s driveway.

He wanted to run, but what was the point of running?  The car wasn’t more than a hundred feet behind him, and with his leg if he tried to run he would probably fall straight over on his face.

He wouldn’t even be able to climb over the fences that everybody had up to protect their god damned front lawns.

There was no time—no time.

Leo could hear the car’s engine revving behind him.  He knew exactly what they planned to do, and he was just too hobbled with age to get away.

God dammit, if they were going to do a number on him they should stop trying to spook him with their fucking motor noises and get it over with.  The fucking bastards, he wouldn’t even give them the satisfaction of turning around to look. 

And then he remembered.  That young guy’s face came back to him from his own youth—a million years ago, and more.  Still young, the way the dead are always young.  Still young because a memory does not age.

Leo turned around.  He saw the car hurtling toward him, in the shaded light a blood-red monster closing for the kill.

And his mind flashed through astonishment to fear to a terrible anger.  It was not right.  It was not to be borne.

“Charlie, you shit—you dead shit,” he shouted, his voice hoarse with rage, even as death swept toward him with gathering speed.  “Get out o’ the fuckin’ car.  I kill you, Brush.  You fuck.”

And all he could see was the face behind the windshield, laughing at him.

It was one of those days when you had to get up early to spend it waiting around the house.  The phone company had said that if he called after eight in the morning they could tell him when the installer was coming—morning or afternoon, that was their idea of “when”—but the girl he got in Customer Service couldn’t even find him on her list.  Maybe the installer had a different list.  Maybe he just wouldn’t show up.

It had been the same in California, every time.

But sometimes the gods are kind, and it was only eleven o’clock when he saw the phone truck pulling into his driveway.

“Where do you want it?” the installer asked.  He was in middle fifties, with the kind of build that suggested he didn’t spend a lot of time climbing up power poles, but he seemed an easy-going type.  Probably he had been doing this same job, day after day, since high school.

Where
did
he want the phone?  He hadn’t given the matter any thought.

“The bedroom or the kitchen,” the installer volunteered.  “Those are the usual places if you only want one.”  The checked his list.  “And that’s all you’re down for.  Of course, there’s always the TV room.”

“The kitchen,” Phil said quickly.  He hated the idea of a phone going off two feet from his ear in the small hours of the morning, and he didn’t even own a TV.

The installer nodded approvingly.  “Then it’s a cinch, ’cause there’s already a line in there.  I’ll be done in twenty minutes.”

That was fine.  The man had hardly been inside the door for two minutes and Phil could hardly wait to be rid of him—and not because he found anything distasteful about the installer, or because he wouldn’t enjoy a little company, but from the feeling which now constantly assailed him that he never was alone within these walls, that anyone else made an uncomfortable third.

For days the sense of some presence in the house had been accumulating in his mind.  A second pack of cigarettes had disappeared, after he had found the first one, crumpled and empty, on a table outside on the dance floor—twice now he thought he had seen someone out there in the dark.  And at night there was the noise from the room above, too soft for the tread of a living human being yet inexplicable as anything else.

Sometimes he felt almost as if he himself were the second occupant of the Moonlight.  Or as if this other only occupied some corner of his mind.  The thoughts that kept coming unbidden into his head—not his thoughts, not really his, for all that he was thinking them. . .

“I remember now!” the installer announced triumphantly as he leaned across the kitchen counter to unscrew the plate over the phone jack.  “I put the phone in here for the last customers.  A man and his wife—the guy was runnin’ a service station.  I should’ve remembered the minute I saw the gas pump outside.  Jeez!”

In the next moment he was lost in contemplation of the skein of colored wires that had popped out from behind the little metal plate.

“I hope you have better luck, though,” he went on at last, in a murmur that suggested he might be talking to himself.

“Pardon?”

For a long time there was no answer.

“The phone lines.”  The installer brushed his finger across the exposed ends of the wires, making them dance like a child’s toy.  “I was back here about half a dozen times—they kept hearing strange voices, like they got connected to the wrong party.  The last time I was here the guy’s wife had already moved out, but I don’t suppose it was over the phone service.”

He laughed good-naturedly at the recollection of this domestic calamity, too distant in time to have any meaning except as the set-up for a joke.

“There—so much for that!”  With the triumph of a man who has solved a knotty technical problem, he fitted the plate back on and inserted the screw into the center hole.  “You got your own phone, or you want me to get you one out of the truck?”

When Phil shook his head, the man nodded sagely and started for the door.  Then he stopped and turned around.

“What color?”

“Color?”

“The phone—what color?”

Phil looked around at the kitchen, which looked just as it must have looked in George Patchmore’s time.

“Black,” he said.

“Black?”  The installer sounded as if he could hardly believe his ears.  “I ain’t even sure I got a black one with me.  I’ll have to check.”

Five minutes later the truck had pulled out of the driveway, and Phil was left alone with two new phone books and his shiny black phone.

Whom should he call?  It seemed a shame to just leave the thing sitting there.  He had to call somebody.  Beth?  Would her roommate be asleep?  He decided he didn’t care whether she was or not—it was not a case in which roommates had any rights worth considering.  He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and started looking for the phone number he had been carrying around for a week and had never had occasion to use.  He hoped he hadn’t lost it.

No, there it was.  In his hand was a ragged slip of paper with Beth’s writing on it:  “Beth Saunders 665-4759.”  In spite of himself, he was impressed by its odd formality.  How many Beths did she think he knew?

He picked up the receiver and cradled it against his ear.  The index finger of his left hand wavered uncertainly over the “6” button.

“Put down the phone, Phil,” the voice said.  For a second or two he wasn’t sure where it had come from.  He actually began to look around the room.  “Put it
down
, Phil.”

He put it down.  His heart was beating painfully in his chest, and he was frightened.  Strange voices over the phone lines—sure.  Except that this voice was oddly, terrifyingly familiar.  He was sure he had never heard it before in his life, but that didn’t make any difference.  He knew it.

The phone man was having him on.  That was it.  His truck was probably parked a quarter of a mile down the road, and he had tapped into the main line.  Waiting, knowing nobody leaves a new phone alone.  The story about the man and his wife and the voices had all been set-up.

The guy was probably laughing his ass off, right that minute.

He would complain to the company—right now.  He would fix the son-of-a-bitch.  He would get him fired.

He opened the phone book do find the number.  He picked up the receiver again.

“Go look in your mailbox, Phil.”

This time he dropped the receiver, so that it bounced against the kitchen counter, and he had to use both hands to put it back on its cradle.

“Oh shit,” he whispered, his hands trembling as they held the receiver down, as if by main force.  Who the fuck did he think he was kidding.  That wasn’t the installer’s voice.

The voice went with the dark shape out on the dance floor, with the footsteps over his head at night, with the missing packs of cigarettes.  When he heard it again, he would know who he was talking to.

“Oh goddam fucking Jesus.”

“Go look in your mailbox, Phil.”

The property was bounded along Old River Road by a stone fence—never in his life had Phil seen so many miles and miles of piled-up stone as he had since coming to Greenley; he pitied the poor bastards, dead these three hundred years and more, who had first had to clear this land for farming—and on top of the fence, right next to the driveway entrance, was the oversize mailbox, its white paint almost all flaked off, looking like a tin Quonset hut in the snow.  In a week he had never even opened it.  Why should he?  Who would be sending him mail?

Well, maybe he should have, because inside there was a little pile of circulars and a manila envelope claiming to be full of valuable coupons from the Welcome Wagon people.  There was also a postcard.

Phil held the postcard in both hands, as if afraid of losing it, and just let everything else slip to the ground.  Still clutching the postcard, he walked back to the house, stumbling like a blindman.

The front of the card was a black-and-white photograph of a girl sitting with her elbows against her knees on an expanse of beach.  She was smiling ecstatically and wore big sunglasses and a striped bathing suit that went about halfway down her thighs.  Her hair in the back was caught in a net bag, the sort of thing he believed used to be called a “snood”.

Above the girl, printed in big red letters, was the message:  WELCOME TO GREENLEY.  It was the standard sort of postcard that people bought on vacations to send home to their friends.

Except that it was obviously about fifty years old.

He turned it over.  The back was divided by a black line running down the middle into two blank squares.  The stamp in the upper right corner was a rosy pink and valued at two cents.  It displayed a picture of James A. McNeill Whistler.  There was no address.  In the left square, printed in a hand that looked like it belonged to a psychotic child, were the words, “And welcom to the Moonlight Roadhouse.”  Nothing else, just that.

He sat at the kitchen table and laid the postcard down flat.  He tried to focus his mind on the details—the missing “e” in “welcom,” the fact that the stamp had come loose and was curling up at the bottom left corner, the way the girl’s toes seemed to cluster together, as if from a lifetime of wearing narrow, pointed shoes—but after a while he had to put the card in a drawer.  He couldn’t bear to look at it.

He went to the refrigerator and got himself a beer, only to discover that his  throat was so constricted he could hardly drink it.

At one point he felt an almost irresistible urge to weep.  Yet he didn’t dare.  If he broke down he was finished.

Why was he being persecuted like this?  Some extremely clever maniac must be trying to drive him crazy.  Except he didn’t believe that.  He didn’t believe there was any maniac.

Phil took the postcard out again and put it in his pocket.  He would see about this.

The post office is in a little corner of Brookville, where Dancer Street branches off from the Old River Road.  There is an immense parking lot and, at the very back, the Grand Union.  On one side you can look over a six-foot-high wooden fence and see the back of the Lobster Pot, and on the other side is the post office.  Phil had never been inside, but he passed it every time he went to get groceries.

The walk into town had calmed him down and cleared his mind.  As long as he kept his legs moving he could almost believe that the whole thing was just some sort of elaborate practical joke.  In the bright sunshine it was impossible to believe in the boogie man.

It was a few minutes after noon, but the post office was not crowded.  There was only one person ahead of him at the window and that was a lady who wanted to send a large package to the Netherlands and was debating with the clerk whether she should have it insured.  She finally settled for “return receipt requested,” collected her slip and went away looking as if she thought somehow she had been cheated.  Phil went up to the window and slid the postcard across the counter toward the clerk.

“Would you know anything about this?” he asked.

The clerk, who was a rather dapper looking black man of about thirty who wore a gold plug in his right earlobe, picked up the card and examined both sides, first the front and then the back and then the front again.