Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

I felt, months ago, that our stories were bringing something about—and I fear, I very much fear, that more people are going to die.

what I think is that Don’s arrival here was like the fitting of the last piece into a puzzle—that when all of us were joined by Don, the forces, whatever you want to call them, were increased. That we invoked them. We by our stories, Don in his book and in his imagination. We see things, but we don’t believe them; we feel things—people watching us, sinister things following us—but we dismiss them as fantasies. We dream horrors, but try to forget them. And in the meantime, three people have died.”

“Yes. I think you’ll hear the ultimate Chowder Society story.” “And may the Lord protect us until then,” Lewis said. “May He protect us afterward,”

This is a hard enough world to get through without asking for trouble.”

The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.

He shook their hands and wondered, taking Stella Hawthorne’s hand, as he always did seeing her, how a woman that old managed to be as good-looking as anyone you saw in the movies.

The sun went down earlier each evening, and at night Milburn contracted and froze. The houses seemed to draw together; the streets which were spangled by day darkened, seemed to narrow to ox-cart width; the black sky clamped down.

Two spacious houses stood ominously dark; the house on Montgomery Street contained horrors, which flickered and shifted from room to room, from floor to floor; in Edward Wanderley’s old house on Haven Lane, all that walked was mystery:

Outside, warmth surprised him; and more than that, the warm, almost laundered-feeling air seemed a protection, a cocoon of safety. The menacing suggestiveness of his woods had been rinsed away—shining with their beautiful muted colors of tree bark and lichen, with the mushy snow beneath like a swipe of watercolor, Lewis’s woods had none of the hard-edged illustrationlike quality he had seen in them before. He took his path backward

He was surrounded by quiet trees and dripping water, by white sunshine.

Nobody saw him: school was already deep in its round of self-enclosed activity, marching to the sound of bells.

The liquor burned Lewis’s throat, but tasted like a distillation of massed flowers. “Delicious.”

“One night Linda and I went to a dinner in one of the suites of the hotel I owned. Linda didn’t live through the night. Otto, I think the same thing that got my wife is after me.”

“You’re dead,” Peter said. “It’s funny about that,” the Hardie-thing replied. “You don’t really feel that way after it happens. You don’t even feel pain, Pete. It feels almost good. No, it definitely feels pretty good. And of course there’s nothing left to worry about. That’s a big plus.”

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.

“I suppose you’re not even interested in what my problem is.” “Harold,” she said, “you’ve been telling me all about your problems for months now, and I have listened with every appearance of interest.” Abruptly, he exhaled loudly, put a hand over hers and said, “Will you leave with me?

“Oh, Harold, you are being insufferably banal,” she exploded. “Do you want to live in a trailer park? Eat tacoburgers?

“Well, if I disgust you so much why do you go on seeing me?” “You did not have much competition.

If I have had an experimental approach to men during my life, Ricky has accommodated himself to it, which I dare say is more than you would be capable of doing, and if I have made a fool of anyone it is myself. I think it is time I retired into respectability. And—if you cannot see that Ricky has four or five times your own significance, then you are deluding yourself.” “Jesus, you can really be a bitch,” Harold said, his little eyes as wide as they could get.

“God, when I think of the men you must have turned into dogshit.” “Few of them made the transformation so successfully.”

my good friend, everyone in your story is haunted. Even the credit card was haunted. Most of all the teller. And that, my friend, is echt Amerikanisch.”

“What are you?” Peter said. “I am you, Peter,” the man said.

He took off his glasses. They have yellow eyes. He let me see him. He was—he was nothing but hate and death. He was like a laser beam.”

“He said he was me,” Peter said, his face distorting. “He said he was me, I want to kill him.” “Then we’ll do it together,” Don said.

You want revenge and I do too, and we’ll get it.”

“Paradise died,” Sears echoed, “and we looked into the devil’s face.”

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.

“I mean, Walt,” Sears calmly said, “if you will stop insulting us for a moment, that we’ll tell you who killed Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes. And Lewis.”

“I wonder if anyone can lie like a hundred-year-old lawyer,” Hardesty said, and spat once more into the fire.

And we understand one thing more.” “Just what the hell is that?” “That you’re frightened, Sheriff. But you have a lot of company.”

“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.”

“He was an appalling man. He was in my car, and I just overwhelmingly realized how much better than he you were. So I made him get out.” Stella smiled. “He shouted at me. It seems I am a bitch.” “At times you certainly are.”

Hardesty coughed and rubbed his eyes, feeling a little like that bozo in the old story who went to sleep one day and woke up with white hair and a long beard, about a hundred years older. “Rip van Shitstorm,” he muttered,

“I will take you places where you have never been. “And I will see the life run out of you. “And I will see you die like insects. Insects.”

And like you I am morally offended to hear that creature’s voice, in any of her guises—I

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.

Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? You are at the mercy of your human imaginations,

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.

Ricky’s heartbeat sounded: doom, doom. Someone was in terrible danger;

“You’re not expendable, Sears.” “Who is? Can you name one person you think is expendable, Ricky?

“Nail your husband to the couch and pour hot whiskey into him until I get back,” Sears said.

“I’ll be back. Don’t fret about me, Ricky.” “You realize it’s probably too late already.” “It’s probably been too late for fifty years,” Sears said. Then he turned and was gone.

“So you can be hurt,” Sears said. “By God, you can.” Snarling, they flew at him.

You and your rich-bitch friends been sittin’ on something all along—all along—and whatever it is does things—meaner’n a stirred-up hog. Right?

“I’m pig-drunk, lawyer. Gonna stay that way.

when the county plows got in he’d start making more money than the mint—nothing brought people into bars like bad times. His wife said, “Don’t talk like a gravedigger,” and that killed the conversation

It seemed that if you listened to that snow hissing long enough, you wouldn’t just hear it telling you that it was waiting for you, you’d hear some terrible secret—a secret to turn your life black.

He put in long days, working sixteen or seventeen hours, and when his wife came in to make hamburgers, he said to her, “Okay. The roads finally get plowed enough so guys can get their cars moving again, and the first place they head to is a bar. Where they stay all day long. Does that make sense to you?” “You called it,” was all she’d say. “It’s good drinking weather, anyhow,” Humphrey said.

Good drinking weather? More than that: Don Wanderley, driving with Peter Barnes to the Hawthorne house, thought that this dark gray day, still punishingly cold, was like the weather inside a drunk’s mind.

good magic lay only in human effort, but bad magic could come from around any corner.