Ghost Story (47 page)

"So do you," Sears said.

"Yeah. Suppose I do. I never saw bodies like those two, exactly. Even Freddy Robinson wasn't that bad. You ever seen bodies like that, Sears James? Hey?"

Sears shook his head.

"No. You're damn right Nobody ever did. And I'm gonna have to store 'em up in the jail until the meat wagon can get in here.
And
I'm the poor son of a bitch who has to take Mrs. Hardie and Mr. Barnes along to see those goddamned things to identify them. Unless you'd like to do that for me, Mr. James?"

"It's your job, Walt," Sears said.

"Shit. My job, is it? My job is finding out who did what to those people—and you two old buzzards just sit there, don't you? You found 'em by accident I suppose. Just happened to break into that particular house, just happened to be taking a walk on a goddamned day like this, I suppose, and just thought you'd try a little housebreaking—Jesus, I oughta lock all three of you in the same cell with them. Along with torn-up Lewis Benedikt and that nigger de Souza and the Griffen boy who froze to death because his hippy mommy and daddy were too cheap to put a heater in his room. God damn. That's what I ought to do, all right." Hardesty, now entirely unable to hide his anger, spat into the fireplace and kicked at the fender. "Jesus, I live in that fucking jail, I really oughta haul you three assholes along and see how you like it."

"Walt," Sears said. "Cool down."

"Sure. By God, if you two weren't nothin' but a couple of hundred-year-old lawyers with teeth in the palms of your hands, I'd do it."

"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."

"You will. Hot damn. Guess I don't have to get out the rubber hoses after all."

Silence for a moment: then Hardesty said, "Well? I'm still here."

"It was the woman who calls herself Anna Mostyn."

"Swell. Just dandy. Okay. Anna Mostyn. Okay. It was her house, so she's the one. Good work. Now. What did she do, suck 'em dry, like a hound'll do to an egg? And who held 'em down, because I know no woman could have taken that crazy Hardie kid by herself. Huh?"

"She did have help," Sears said. "It was a man who calls himself Gregory Bate or Benton. Now hold on to yourself, Walt, because here comes the difficult part. Bate has been dead for almost fifty years. And Anna Mostyn—"

He stopped. Hardesty had clamped both eyes shut.

Ricky took it up. "Sheriff, in a way you were right about all this from the beginning. Remember when we looked at Elmer Scales's sheep? And you told us about other incidents, lots of them, that happened in the sixties?"

Hardesty's bloodshot eyes flew open.

"It's the same thing," Ricky said. "That is, we think it's probably the same thing. But here, they're out to kill people."

"So what's this Anna Mostyn?" Hardesty asked, his body rigid. "A ghost? A vampire?"

"Something like that," Sears said. "A shapeshifter, but those words will do."

"Where is she now?"

"That's why we went to her house. To see if we could find anything."

"And that's what you're gonna tell me. Nothing more."

"There is no more," Sears said.

"I wonder if anyone can lie like a hundred-year-old lawyer," Hardesty said, and spat once more into the fire. "Okay. Now let me tell you something. I'm going to put out a bulletin on this Anna Mostyn, and that's all she wrote. That's all I'm gonna do. You two old buzzards and this kid here can spend the rest of the winter ghost-hunting, for all I'm concerned. You're screwball—as far as I'm concerned, you're plumb outa your heads. And if I get some goddamned
killer
who drinks beer and eats hamburgers and takes his kid out for a drive on Sundays, then I'm gonna call you up and laugh in your faces. And I'll see that people around here never stop laughing when they hear your names. You understand me?"

"Don't shout at us, Walt," Sears said. "I'm sure we all understand what you said. And we understand one thing more."

"Just what the hell is that?"

"That you're frightened, Sheriff. But you have a lot of company."

"Um."

"Did you go lots of places?"

"Yes."

"How come you can hang around Milburn so long? Don't you have a ship to get back to?"

"Shore leave."

"Why don't you ever want to do anything but go to the movies?"

"No reason."

"Well, I just like being with you."

"Um."

"But why don't you ever take off your shades?"

"No reason."

"Someday I'll take them off."

"Later."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"A terrible thing. I don't want to tell you now. There'll be time when it's all over."

"You're frightening me."

"I'm frightened too."

"Well, I'm frightened because you're frightened." For a time, the Hawthornes simply held each other.

"You know what killed Lewis, don't you?"

"I think so."

"Well, I discovered an astonishing thing about myself. I can be a coward. So please don't tell me. I know I asked, but don't. I just want to know it'll end."

"Sears and I will make it end. With young Wanderley's help."

"He
can
help you?"

"He can. He has already."

"If only this terrible snow would stop."

"Yes. But it won't."

"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."

"I am sorry that I ever had to cause you pain. Ricky, I've never cared for any man as much as I have cared for you. Despite my adventures. You know that's all over, don't you?"

"I guessed."

"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."

"At times. You know, he must have found Lewis's body right after that."

"Ah. I wondered what he was doing up there."

Silence: Ricky held his wife's shoulder, aware of her timeless profile beside him. If she had not looked like that could he have endured it so long? Yet if she had not looked like that, she would not have been Stella— it was an impossible speculation.

"Tell me something, baby," she breathed. "Who was this other woman you used to want?"

Ricky laughed; then both of them, at least for a time, were laughing.

But even in an immobilized town, things happen. Dozens of cars went off the roads and stayed nose down for days, buried under fresh drifts. Walter Barnes sat in his television room nursing a succession of drinks and watched an endless round of giveaway shows with the sound turned off. Peter cooked their meals. "I could understand a lot of things," Barnes told his son, "but I sure as hell can't understand
that."
And went back to his quiet, nonstop drinking. One Friday night, Clark Mulligan put the first reel of
Night of the Living Dead
back in the projector for the Saturday-noon showing, turned off all the lights, flipped the broken lock on the fire door and decided once again not to bother with it and went back out into the blizzard to find Penny Draeger's body lying half-covered with snow beside an abandoned car. He slapped her face and rubbed her wrists, but nothing he could do would put breath back in her throat or change the expression on her face—G had finally allowed her to take off his dark glasses.

And Elmer Scales finally met the man from Mars.

Elmer's chair faced his picture window, and with the lights off, he could see about as far as the barn— a big shape in the darkness. Except for where he had shoveled, the snow was waist-high: enough to slow down any sort of creature who was after more of his animals. Elmer did not need light to scribble down the random lines he thought of: by now he did not even have to look at the paper. He could write while staring out the window.

Sometimes it seemed his father was there in the dark room with him, trying to explain something about the old plow horses he'd finally replaced with a John Deere, trying to say that those were good horses, you got to care for them boy, they done good by us, those five kids you got could get a lot of pleasure outa nice old horses like that—horses dead for twenty-five years! —trying to tell him something about the car.
Watch them two lawyer boys, sonny, banged up my car and lost it, drove it into a swamp or something, gave me cash dollars but nobody can trust boys like that, no matter how rich they daddies are
—creaky old voice getting at him just like when the old man was alive. Elmer wrote it all down, getting it mixed up with the poetry that wasn't poetry.

Then he saw a shape gliding toward the window, coming toward him through the snow and night with shining eyes. Elmer dropped the pencil and jerked up the shotgun, nearly firing both barrels through the picture window before he realized that the creature was not running away—that it knew he was there and was coming for him.

Elmer kicked away the chair and stood up. He patted his pockets to make sure he was carrying the extra shells, and then lifted the shotgun and sighted down the barrel, waiting for the thing to get close enough for him to see what it really was.

As it advanced, he began to doubt. If it knew he was there, waiting to blast it all the way back to the barn, why wasn't it running away? He cocked the hammers. The thing was coming up his walk, going between the two big drifts, and Elmer finally saw that it was much shorter than what he had seen before.

Then it left the walk and came over the snow to press its face against the window and he saw that it was a child.

Elmer lowered the gun, numb with confusion. He could not shoot a child. The face at the window peered in at him with a frantic, lost appeal—it was the face of misery, of every human wretchedness. With those yellow eyes, it begged him to come out, to give it rescue.

Elmer moved to the door, hearing his father's voice behind him. He paused with his hand on the doorknob, the shotgun dangling from his other hand, and then opened the door.

Freezing air, powdery snow blew in his face. The child was standing on the walk with its head averted. Someone said, "Thank you, Mr. Scales." Elmer jerked his head back and saw the tall man standing on the snowdrift to his left. Way up there, balancing on the snow like a feather, he was smiling gently down at the farmer. His face was ivory, and his eyes were vibrant accumulations of—it seemed to Elmer—a hundred shades of gold.

He was the most beautiful man Elmer had ever seen, and Elmer knew that he could not shoot him if he stood in front of him for a decade with a loaded and cocked shotgun.

"You—why—uh," Elmer managed to say.

"Precisely, Mr. Scales," the beautiful man said, and effortlessly stepped down from the snowbank onto the path. When he was facing Elmer, the golden eyes seemed to shimmer with wisdom.

"You're no Martian," Elmer said. He did not even feel the cold anymore.

"Why, of course not. I'm part of
you,
Elmer. You can see that, can't you?"

Elmer nodded dumbly.

The beautiful thing put a hand on Elmer's shoulder. "I'm here to talk to you about your family. You'd like to come with us, wouldn't you, Elmer?"

Elmer nodded again.

"Then there are a few details you have to take care of. At the moment you're slightly—encumbered? You cannot imagine the harm done to you by the people around you, Elmer. I am afraid there are things about them you have to know."

"Tell me," Elmer said.

"With pleasure. And then you will know what to do?"

Elmer blinked.