Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. —The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne Ghosts are always hungry. —R. D. Jameson

There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliché, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.

straub needs to chill and get into country goddamn

Yet there were things they had not seen, and which they would see in time. It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age’s defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living. If none in the Chowder Society but Ricky Hawthorne truly appreciated this, in time they would all know it.

“I know who killed him. It was you. You—you Chowder Society. You killed him with your terrible stories. You made him sick—you and your Fenny Bates!” Her face twisted; Stella rushed in too late to stop Milly’s final words. “They ought to call you the Murder Society! They ought to call you Murder Incorporated!”

the inscrutable yet simultaneously unconscious burden of those who are right for the wrong reasons, amirite

So there they stood, Murder Incorporated, beneath a bright sky in late October. They felt grief, anger, despair, guilt—they had been talking of graves and corpses compulsively for a year, and now they were burying one of their own.

They saw me as some sort of steel-plated professional, an expert in the supernatural—they saw me as a Van Helsing! My original impressions were correct; they all do feel a distinct foreboding—I suppose you could say they’re on the verge of being scared of their own shadows. My role is to investigate, of all things.

Only after Stella rather abruptly left the house for what she called an “appointment”—after the strange scene in the kitchen, I had a passing notion of its character, and the momentary expression of utter misery which crossed Ricky Hawthorne’s face confirmed it—did the three men open up to me. Bad choice of words: they did not “open up” at all, at least not until much later, but after Stella Hawthorne had driven off, the three old men began to show me why they had asked me to come to Milburn.

What am I involved in here? A ghost story? Or something worse, something not just a story? The three old men have only the sketchiest knowledge of the events of two years ago—and they can’t possibly know that they’ve asked me to enter the strangest part of my life again, to roll myself back through the calendar to the worst, most destructive days: or to roll myself up again in the pages of a book which was my attempt to reconcile myself with them. But can there really be any connection, even if it is just the connection of one ghost story leading to another, as it did with the Chowder Society? And can there truly be any factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to my brother?

Everything that has beauty has a body, and is a body; everything that has being has being in the flesh: and dreams are only drawn from the bodies that are. —“Bodiless God,” D. H. Lawrence

he’s no more than Alma in blackface, Alma with horns, tail and a soundtrack.

pete my guy wyd you posted (perhaps unintentional) racist cringe you're gonna lose followers

I know some people who are interested in the occult.” “The occult?” I could not imagine what she meant. “Séances? Ouija boards? Madame Blavatsky? Planchettes?” “No. They’re more serious than that. They belong to an order.” I was stunned; I had fallen into an abyss. I envisioned Satanism, covens; California lunacy at its worst. She read my face and said, “I’m not in it myself. I just know them.” “What is the name of the order?” “X.X.X.” “But—” I leaned forward, scarcely believing that I had heard correctly. “It can’t be X.X.X.? Xala . . .” “Xala Xalior Xlati.” I felt disbelief, shock; I felt a surprised fear, looking at her beautiful face. X.X.X. was more than a group of California screwballs dressing themselves in robes; they were frightening. They were known to be cruel, even savage; they’d had some minor connection with the Manson family, and that was the only reason I had read about them. After the Manson affair they were supposed to have gone elsewhere—to Mexico, I thought. Were they still in California? From what I had read, Alma would have been better off knowing button men in the Mafia: from the Mafia you would expect the motives, rational or not, of our phase of capitalism. The X.X.X. was raw material for nightmares.

What I wanted, of course, was to supplant all the others; to open the door and witness all of her mysteries; to have the grace and subtlety directed entirely toward me. In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.

You step on a solid-looking piece of ground and it falls away under your shoe; you look down and instead of seeing grass, earth, the solidity you had expected, you are looking at a deep cavern where crawling things scurry to get out of the light. Well, so here is a cavern, a chasm of sorts, you say; how far does it go? Does it underlie everything, and is the solid earth merely a bridge over it? No; of course it is not; it very likely is not. I do love Alma, I told myself. We will be married next summer. I thought of her extraordinary legs, of her fine lovely face; of the sense I had with her that I was deep in a half-understood game.

Omar Norris had an unpleasant awakening. After his wife had thrown him out of his house, he had spent the night in what he considered his last refuge, one of the boxcars near the abandoned station, and if he had heard any noises during his sodden sleep, he no longer remembered them. Therefore, he was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say “Not again” (what he said was “Shit on this”), but “Not again” was what he meant.

But the civilized human spirit, whether one calls it bourgeois or merely leaves it at civilized, cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny. —Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann

I have lived since the times when your continent was lighted only by small fires in the forest, since Americans dressed in hides and feathers, and even then our kinds have abhorred each other. Your kind is so bland and smug and confident on the surface: and so neurotic and fearful and campfire-hugging within. In truth, we abhor you because we find you boring. We could have poisoned your civilization ages ago, but voluntarily lived on its edges, causing eruptions and feuds and local panics. We chose to live in your dreams and imaginations because only there are you interesting. “Don, you make a grave mistake if you underestimate us. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination. In the places of your dreams. But despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real, as real as bullets and knives—for aren’t they too tools of the imagination?—and if we want to frighten you it is to frighten you to death. For you are going to die, Donald. First your uncle, then the doctor, then Lewis. Then Sears, and after Sears, Ricky. And then you and whomever you have enlisted to help you. In fact, Donald, you are dead already. You are finished. And Milburn is finished with you.” Now the Louisiana accent had vanished; even femininity had gone from the voice. It was a voice with no human resonance at all. “I am going to shatter Milburn, Donald. My friends...

Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? —Alma Mobley

“Bowie—” Peter started to say, remembering something from a grade-school history class, and then clamped his mouth shut on the rest of the sentence. Bowie died at the Alamo. He swallowed, shook his head, and turned toward the Galli house. It was what he should have learned from Jim Hardie: good magic lay only in human effort, but bad magic could come from around any corner.

Don said, “I once knew a girl who spent all day in a library and said she had a friend who protected her from vileness. I don’t know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.” “I know that’s true,” Peter said, “but it just seems so hard to do.”