Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

The room appeared to have more shadows in it than could be accounted for.

“Okay, let’s try again,” he said. “What are you?” For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled.

It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work. Ricky imagined that if you watched New York for the same period, what you saw would be mainly New York at work. Buildings went up and down too fast there for Ricky’s taste, everything moved too quickly,

The kind of movies Ricky liked could now be seen only on television: for Ricky, the film industry had lost its bearings about the time William Powell had retired.

You know, sidewalks made a greater contribution to civilization than the piston engine. Spring and winter in the old days you had to wade through mud, and you couldn’t enter a drawing room without tracking some of it in.

But for Ricky, who could remember Peter’s parents’ generation as teenagers, their problems were always a little fictional—how could people with the world still in front of them have truly serious problems?

“Ricky,” said Sears, “at this hour of the morning it is positively forbidden to chirp.”

Having never committed himself to marriage, Sears James had never had to compromise his luxurious ideas of comfort.

Lewis Benedikt, the one who was supposed to have killed his wife, was seated directly across from Ricky, an image of expansive good health. As time rolled through them all, subtracting things, it seemed only to add to Lewis.

Sears James coughed into his fist, and everybody immediately looked at him. My God, thought Ricky: he can do that whenever he wants, just effortlessly capture our attention.

“Change is always change for the worse.” Sears was amused. “Spoken like a true lawyer,

They believed in the efficacy of knowledge.

Stella had never actually liked Sears. Of course she had never let this submerged dislike interfere with her attempts to dominate him a little.

“I don’t want anybody poking around in our lives. I want things just to keep on going.”

“I think we’ll be sorry,” said Ricky, trying for one last time. “I think we’ll be ruined. We’ll be like some animal eating its own tail. We have to put it behind us.” “It’s decided. Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Believe me, schoolteacher, this is where your rival is buried,” he said,

We do not believe in exorcisms, in my church.” “You just believe—” I was furious and scornful. “In evil, yes. We do believe in that.”

After such a long and reasonable life, he said to himself, you can’t go mystic on me now, old friend. We’ll need all the rationality we can muster up.

It’s very clear, Ricky told himself, nothing at all is going to happen, we’re just four old coots going out of our minds.

years of living in a hotel had left him with a need for the sense of a multitude of rooms about him. He would have had claustrophobia in a cottage.

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

Ricky sat with his hands on the wheel, his alert face turned to Hardesty, but his mind held only one thought: It’s starting. It’s starting and we don’t even know what it is.

‘Confidential business.’ His only confidential business is with a bottle of Jim Beam.”

“Indeed. He blots up free liquor in Humphrey Stalladge’s back room. He’d be better off in a shoe factory in Endicott.”

Omar Norris, one of the town’s small population of full-time drinkers, was seated on a stool at the bar, looking at them in amazement;

Hardesty swung a leg over a chair as if it were a large dog he intended to ride,

Ricky’s children, the former darlings of his heart, were now like distant planets. Their letters were painful; seeing them was worse. “No,” he said, “I don’t think they’ll be able to make it this time.”

“So I’d watch myself,” Sonny Venuti was saying. “She might look like a little angel, but that kind of woman loves to turn men into hash.” “Pandora’s Box,” said Ricky, reminded of his first impression of the actress.

“That’s it,” Sears said. “I’m tired and I’m going home. Noisy music makes me want to bite someone.”

My uncle’s town, Milburn, is one of those places that seems to create its own limbo and then to nest down in it. Neither proper city nor proper country—too small for one, too cramped for the other, and too self-conscious about its status. (The local paper is called The Urbanite. Milburn even seems proud of its minuscule slum

the rest of the day loomed over him like an Alp.

The air felt delicious, crisp as a winesap apple;

The light snow had ceased during the early evening, but the air was cold and so sharp it felt as if you could break pieces off it with your bare hands.

I can feel reality slithering away from me,

Speaking of her parents, she used the past tense, and I gathered that they had died some time ago. That too fit her manner, her air of disconnection from all but herself.

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.

“Are you as circumspect as your novel, or are you going to come in with me?”

was in love as I had never been: it was as though all my life I had skirted joy, looked at it askance, misunderstood it; only Alma brought me face to face with it.

“What does this . . . Benton do?” “Well, I think he has an informal trade in pharmaceuticals,” she said.

At times you could see halfway down to the valley road, but at other times you saw about as far ahead as you could extend your arms. A flashlight in that damp grayness simply lost heart.

He was like an angry blot of darkness on the sunny plaza: like cancer.

“I wonder when you so-called creative people are going to realize that you can’t get away with murder.”

He was vamped. This girl simply pursued him. Dogged him.

These things happen of course, they happen all the time. A girl falls for her professor, manages to seduce him, sometimes she makes him leave his wife, most times not. Most of us have more sense.” He coughed. I thought: you really are a turd.

the first draft took so many misdirections it could have been an exercise in the use of the unreliable narrator.

“Did they ask you to come here to see the old lady?” “Mr. Hawthorne did,” Don answered. “Well, I suppose I ought to fall down and pretend I’m a red carpet.”

If you wrote down the things Hardie said and looked at them afterward, you’d find the errors, but just listening to him talk, you’d be convinced of anything.

you live in this town long enough you’re in danger of woodworm in the headboard, and you have to keep reminding yourself that the whole world isn’t just one big Milburn.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Jim protested. “She’s just a broad, after all. She’s got strange habits, but she’s just a woman, Clarabelle.

Peter stood beside him and thought: I can’t go in there. Empty, but filled with bare rooms and the atmosphere of whatever kind of person chose to live in them, the house seemed to be feigning stillness.