Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

His mind did not feel right: it seemed that tears were hanging just behind his eyes and that very soon he would involuntarily begin to weep.

He was susceptible to colds, and if the temperature dropped another five degrees, he’d have to drive.

When he reached the square he found another unhappy surprise. Some of the trees lining the big grassy space were already completely bare, and most of the others had at least a few bare limbs—there was still plenty of the color he’d been anticipating, but during the night the balance had turned and now black skeletal arms and fingers, the bones of the trees, hung against the leaves like signposts to winter. Dead leaves carpeted the square.

Still, he supposed it was Stella’s perpetual energy and constant needling which had kept him from succumbing to age as old John Jaffrey had.

As time rolled through them all, subtracting things, it seemed only to add to Lewis.

None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that it was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, a sufficiency of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement.

When I fictionalized them in the book I inevitably sensationalized them, and doing so falsified my own memories.

But as she cooked in the gadget-laden kitchen, as she reveled in David’s collection of expensive toys, I grew increasingly sour. I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip dip at the supermarket.

Peter stepped backward, too frightened for coherent thought.

She suggests kindness and sympathy and intelligence but does not overwhelm you with her excellence.

He said, “You don’t want me to come to your house,” and for a moment looked so stupid that Stella knew she was an enigma to him. Men to whom you were an enigma were thoroughly useless.

You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces—how all that feeling comes out and hits you like a truck? It was like that.

“Ricky, have I given you an awful time?” Stella propped herself up on an elbow to look into his eyes. “A worse time than most women would,” he said. “But I rarely wanted any other women.”

Your kind is so bland and smug and confident on the surface: and so neurotic and fearful and campfire-hugging within.