Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

Once he asked her, “Have you ever heard of a man named Edward Wanderley?” She did not reply but regarded him levelly. “Have you?” “Who’s he?” “He was my uncle,” he said, and the girl smiled at him. “How about a man named Sears James?” She shook her head, still smiling. “A man named Ricky Hawthorne?”

Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley.

“No doubt it was,” said Ricky, who had just remembered the circumstances under which he had last had a conversation with Peter Barnes. John Jaffrey’s party: the evening on which Edward Wanderley had died.

Lewis Benedikt, the one who was supposed to have killed his wife, was seated directly across from Ricky, an image of expansive good health.

And then he had had his inspiration: he had turned to John Jaffrey and said, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“You’d rather have us go on as we have been going on for a year?” “Change is always change for the worse.”

it was a room where a man comfortable with ideas worked with them.

He toppled forward, and I caught him as if he were jumping into the pit of hell itself. Only a few seconds later did I realize what I had caught: his heart had stopped, and I was holding a dispossessed body. He had gone over for good.

But he had not thought the eyes were behind him, he had known it. It had been knowledge.

This is Ricky Hawthorne preparing for sleep: lying on his back, his clever face showing no sign of the emotions behind it, his hands behind his head, his eyes open; tired, uneasy, jealous; fearful.

“She thinks that talking about it would help.” “That sounds like a woman. Talking just opens the wounds. Not talking helps to heal them.”

It’s starting and we don’t even know what it is.

Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead spoke in his mind again,

The following events occurred a year and a day earlier, in the evening of the last day of the golden age. 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.

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.

“Oh.” Stella’s voice rose. “She asked me if I was married. I said, ‘I’m Mrs. Hawthorne.’ And then she said, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve just seen your husband. He looks like he’d be a good enemy.’” “You couldn’t have heard her correctly.” “I did.” “It doesn’t make sense.” “That’s what she said.”

a sense that the woods around the town are stronger, deeper than the little grid of streets people put in their midst.

Funny how lost this country seems, though people have been walking back and forth over it for hundreds of years. It looks bruised and regretful, its soul gone or withdrawn, waiting for something to happen that will wake it up again.

What if you saw yourself running toward you, running toward the headlights of your car, your hair flying and your face twisted with fear . .

And the first thing she does is seduce him. And the first thing he does is to be seduced. And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand. Which is the myth of New England.

He no longer took pride in his ability to sell, since he had learned that it was based on an ability to exploit fear and greed;

For one thing, they are Episcopalians, just one step from popery.

“That’ll be harder. She’s the general. But history is full of dead generals.”

Eva Galli was like an aristocrat, a princess or some such, who had turned her back on the court and gone off to the country to die.”

“In an enchantment. Sometimes we even danced with her, but even holding her, watching her move, we never thought about sex. Not consciously. Not to admit. Well, paradise died in October, 1929, shortly after the stock market and Stringer Dedham.” “Paradise died,” Sears echoed, “and we looked into the devil’s face.”

“You are a ghost.” You Donald. You. It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.

“I am an old man, and I am accustomed to expressing myself in whatever manner I please. Sometimes I fear I am rude.” Sears smiled at the boy. “That too might be morally offensive. But I hope that you live long enough to enjoy the pleasure of it.”

Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. “Pity his name isn’t Poe,” Ricky said, but Stella didn’t think that was funny.

Your mother loved you. And now she’s dead, and she died in a terrible way, but she put her love into you for seventeen or eighteen years, and there’s a lot of it left. The only thing you can do is carry on with it.”

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Did you kidnap a friendless girl and drive without sleeping, hardly eating, stealing money when your own melted away . . . did you point a knife toward her bony chest? What was the worst thing? Not the act, but the ideas about the act: the garish film unreeling through your head.