Ghost Story (44 page)

"Because the silence seemed immense," Ricky said. "It closed in on us like—like the snow out there. Finally Lewis said, 'We'll have to get the police.' 'No,' Edward said. 'We'll all go to jail. For murder.'

"Sears and I tried to tell him that no one had committed murder, but Edward said 'How will you like being disbarred then? Because that'll happen.' John checked her for pulse and respiration, but of course there was none.
'I
think it's murder,' he said. 'We're sunk.' "

"Ricky asked what we were supposed to do," Sears said, "and John said, 'There's only one thing we can do. Hide her body. Hide it away where it won't be found.' We all looked at her body, and at her bloody face, and we all felt defeated by her—she had won. That's how it felt. Her hatred had provoked us to something very like murder, if not murder under the law. And now we were talking about concealing our act— both legally and morally, a damning step. And we agreed to it."

Don asked, "Where did you decide to hide her body?"

"There was an old pond five or six miles out of town. A deep pond. It's not there anymore. It was filled in and they built a shopping center on the land. Must have been twenty feet deep."

"Lewis's car had a flat tire," Sears said, "so we wrapped the body in a sheet and left him there with her and went off into town to find Warren Scales. He had come in to shop with his wife, we knew. He was a good soul, and he liked us. We were going to tell him that we ruined his car, and then buy him a better one— Ricky and I paying the lion's share."

"Warren Scales was the father of the farmer who talks about shooting Martians?" Don asked.

"Elmer was Warren's fourth child and first son. He wasn't even thought of then. We went along downtown and found Warren and promised to bring his car back in an hour or so. Then we went back to Edward's and carried the girl down the stairs and put her in the car. Tried to put her in the car."

Ricky said, "We were so nervous and afraid and numb and we still couldn't believe what had happened or what we were doing. And we had great difficulty in fitting her into the car. 'Put her feet in first,' someone said, and we slid the body along the back seat, and the sheet got all tangled up, and Lewis started to swear about her head being caught and we pulled her halfway out again and John screamed that she moved. Edward called him a damned fool and said he knew she couldn't move—wasn't he a doctor?"

"Yet finally we got her in—Ricky and John had to sit in back with the body. We had a nightmarish trip through town." Sears paused and looked into the fire. "My God. I was driving. I just remembered that. I was so rattled that I couldn't remember how to get to the pond. I just backtracked and drove around and went four or five miles out of our way. Finally someone told me how to get there. And we got onto that little dirt road which led down to the pond."

"Everything seemed so
sharp,"
Ricky said. "Every
leaf,
every
pebble
—flat and sharp as a drawing in a book. We got out of that car and the world just hit us between the eyes. 'Do we have to do this?' Lewis asked. He was crying. Edward said, 'I wish to God we didn't.' "

"Then Edward got back behind the wheel," Sears said. "The car was ten-fifteen yards from the pond, which fell off almost immediately to its full depth. He switched on the ignition. I cranked it up. Edward retarded the spark, put it in first, popped the clutch and jumped out. The car crawled forward."

Both men fell silent again, and looked at each other. "Then—" Ricky said, and Sears nodded. "I don't know how to say this ..."

"Then we saw something," Sears said. "We hallucinated. Or something."

"You saw her alive again," Don said. "I know."

Ricky looked at him with a tired astonishment. "I guess you do. We saw her face through the rear window. She was staring at us—grinning at us. Jeering at us. We damn near dropped dead. The next second the car splashed into the pond and started to sink. We all ran forward and tried to look into the side windows. I was scared silly. I knew she was dead, back in the apartment—I
knew
it. John jumped into the water just as the car started to go down. When he came back up he said he had looked through the side window and ..."

"And he didn't see anything on the back seat," Sears told Don. "He said."

"The car went down and never came back up. It must be still down there, under thirty thousand tons of fill," Ricky said.

"Did anything else happen?" Don asked. "Please try to remember. It's important."

"Two things did happen," Ricky said. "But I need another drink, after all that." He poured some of the whiskey into his glass and drank before resuming. "John Jaffrey saw a lynx on the other side of the pond. Then we all saw it. We jumped about a mile—it made us even guiltier, being seen. By even an animal. It switched its tail and disappeared back into the woods."

"Fifty years ago, were lynxes common around here?"

"Not at all. Maybe farther north. Well, that was one. The other was that Eva's house burned, caught on fire. When we walked back to town we saw the neighbors all standing around, watching the volunteers try to put it out."

"Did any of them see how it started?"

Sears shook his head, and Ricky continued the story. "Apparently it just started by itself. Seeing it made us feel worse, as if we had caused that too."

"One of the volunteers said something odd," Sears remembered. "All of us must have looked so haggard, standing around looking at the fire, and the firemen assumed we were worried about the other houses on the street. He said the other buildings were safe because the fire was getting smaller. He said from what he had seen, it looked like part of the house exploded
inward
— he couldn't explain it, but that's the way it looked to him. And the fire was only in that part of the house, up on the second floor. I saw what he was talking about. You could see some of the beams, and they were buckled in toward the fire."

"And the windows!" Ricky said. "The windows were broken, but there was no glass on the ground—they burst inward."

"Imploded," Don said.

Ricky nodded. "Yes. I couldn't remember the word. I saw a light bulb do it once. Anyhow, the fire ruined the second floor, but the first floor wasn't touched by it. A year or two later a family bought the place and had it rebuilt. We were all back at work, and people had stopped wondering what had happened to Eva Galli."

"Except for us," Sears said. "And we didn't talk about it. We had a few nasty moments when the developers started filling in that pond fifteen-twenty years ago, but they never found the car. They just buried it. And whatever was inside it."

"Nothing was inside it," Don said. "Eva Galli is here now. She's back. For the second time."

"Back?" Ricky said, jerking his head up.

"She is back as Anna Mostyn. And before, she came here as Ann-Veronica Moore. As Alma Mobley, she met me in California and killed my brother in Amsterdam."

"Miss
Mostyn?"
Sears asked incredulously.

"Is that what killed Edward?" Ricky asked.

"I'm sure it is. He probably saw whatever Stringer saw—she let him see it."

"I will not believe that Miss Mostyn has anything to do with Eva Galli, Edward or Stringer Dedham," Sears said. "The idea is ridiculous."

"What is 'it'?" Ricky asked. "What did she let him see?"

"Herself changing shape," Don said. "And I think she planned for him to see it, knowing it would literally scare him to death." He looked at the two old men. "Here's another. I think that in all probability she knows we are here tonight. Because we are unfinished business."

"Changing shape indeed," Sears said, less charitably. "You're saying that Eva Galli and Edward's little actress and our secretary are all the same person?"

"Not a person. The same being. The lynx you saw on the other side of the pond was probably her too. Not a person at all, Sears. When you felt Eva Galli's hate that day she came to my uncle's apartment, I think you perceived the truest part of her. I think she came to provoke the five of you into some kind of destruction— to ruin your innocence. I think it backfired, and you injured her. At least that proves it can be done. Now she has come back to make you pay for it. Me, too. She took a detour from me to get my brother, but she knew that eventually I'd turn up here. And then she would be able to get us one by one."

"Was this the idea you said you'd tell us about?" Ricky asked.

Don nodded.

"What in the world makes you imagine that it is anything but a particularly bad idea?" Sears asked.

"Peter Barnes, for one," Don answered. "I think this will convince you too, Sears. And if it fails, I'll read you something from a book that should work. But Peter first. He went to Lewis's house today, as I told you before." He recounted everything that had happened to Peter Barnes—the trip to the abandoned station, the death of Freddy Robinson, the death of Jim Hardie in Anna Mostyn's house and the final, terrible events of the morning. "So I think it's inescapable that Anna Mostyn is the 'benefactor' Gregory Bate mentioned. She animates Gregory and Fenny—Peter says he knew intuitively that Gregory was owned by something, that he was like a savage dog obeying an evil master. Together, they want to destroy the whole town. Just like Dr. Rabbitfoot in the novel I was planning."

"They're trying to make that novel come true?" Ricky asked.

"I think so. They also called themselves nightwatchers. They're playful. Think of those initials. Anna Mostyn, Alma Mobley, Ann-Veronica Moore. That was playfulness—she wanted us to notice the similarity. I'm sure she sent Gregory and Fenny because Sears had seen them before. Or years ago, they appeared to him because she knew she'd be able to use them now. And it's no accident that when I saw Gregory in California, I thought of him being like a werewolf."

"Why no accident, if that's what you're claiming he is?" Sears asked.

"I'm not claiming that. But creatures like Anna Mostyn or Eva Galli are behind every ghost story and supernatural tale ever written," Don said. "They are the originals of everything that frightens us in the supernatural. I think in stories we make them manageable. But the stories at least show that we can destroy them. Gregory Bate isn't a werewolf any more than Anna Mostyn is. He is what people have described as a werewolf. Or as a vampire. He feeds on living bodies. He sold himself to his benefactor for immortality."

Don took up one of the books he had brought with him. "This is a reference book, the
Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend.
There's a long entry under 'Shapeshifting,' written by a professor named R. D. Jameson. Listen to this: 'Although no census of shapeshifters has been taken, the number of them found in all parts of the world is astronomical.' He says they appear in the folklore of all peoples. He goes on for three columns—it's one of the longest entries in the book. I'm afraid it isn't actually of much help to us, apart from showing that these beings have been talked about in folk history for thousands of years, because Jameson doesn't recount ways, if any, in which the legends say these creatures can be destroyed. But listen to the way he ends the entry: 'The studies made of shapeshifting foxes, otters, etc., are sound but miss the central problem of shapeshifting itself. Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology. Until the phenomena in both areas have been scrutinized with care, we are not able to go beyond the general observation that nothing is, in fact, what it seems to be.' "

"Amen," said Ricky.

"Precisely. Nothing is what it seems to be. These beings can convince you that you are losing your mind. That's happened to each of us—we've seen and felt things we argued ourselves out of later. It can't be true, we tell ourselves; such things do not happen. But they do happen, and we did see them. You did see them. You did see Eva Galli sit up on the car seat, and you saw her appear as a lynx a moment later."

"Just suppose," Sears said, "that one of us had a rifle along that day, and had shot the lynx. What would have happened?"

"I think you would have seen something extraordinary, but I can't imagine what it would have been. Maybe it would have died. Maybe it would have shifted to some preferred form—maybe, if it had been in great pain, it would have gone through a series of changes. And maybe it would have been helpless."

"A lot of maybes," Ricky said.

"That's all we have."

"If we accept your theory."

"If you have a better one I'll listen to it. But through Peter Barnes we know what happened to Freddy Robinson and Jim Hardie. Also, I checked with her agent and found out some things about Ann-Veronica Moore. She came literally from nowhere. There is no record at all of her in the town she said she was born in. Because there couldn't be—there never was an Ann-Veronica Moore until the day she enrolled in acting class. She just arrived, plausible and well documented, at the door of a theater, knowing it was a way to get to Edward Wanderley."

"Then these—these things you think exist—are even more dangerous. They have wit," Sears said.

"Yes, they do have wit. They love jokes, and they make longterm plans, and like the Indians' Manitou, they love to flaunt themselves. This second book gives a good example of that." He picked it up and showed the spine to the two men.
"I Came This Way,
by Robert Mobley. He was the painter Alma claimed was her father. I made the mistake of never looking at his autobiography until today. Now I think that she wanted me to read it and discover that in calling herself Mobley she was making a pun on an earlier appearance. The fourth chapter is called 'Dark Clouds'—it's not a very well-written autobiography, but I want to read you a few paragraphs from that chapter."

Don opened the book to a marked page, and neither of the two old men stirred.

" 'Even in a life so apparently fortunate as mine has been, dark and troubling periods have intruded and marked months and years with indelible grief. The year 1958 was one such; only by hurling myself with the utmost concentration into my work, I believe, did I maintain my sanity during that year. Knowing the sunny watercolors and rigid formal experimentation in oils which had been characteristic of my work during the five years previous, people have often questioned me about the stylistic transformation which led to my so-called Supernatural Period. I can say now only that my mind was very likely unbalanced, and the violent disorder of my emotions found expression in the work I forced myself to do.

" 'The first painful event of the year was the death of my mother, Jessica Osgood Mobley, whose affection and wise advice had ...' I'll skip a page or two here." Don scanned the page, and turned it over. "Here we are. 'The second, even more shattering loss was the death by his own hand in his eighteenth year of my elder son, Shelby. I shall mention here only the circumstances surrounding Shelby's death which led directly to my work of the so-called Supernatural Period, for this book is chiefly an account of my life in painting: yet I must assert that my son's was a gay, innocent and vibrant spirit, and I am certain that only a great moral shock, the apprehension of a hitherto unsuspected evil, could have led him to take his life.

" 'Shortly after the death of my mother, a spacious house near our own was sold to an evidently prosperous, attractive woman in her mid-forties whose sole family consisted of a niece of fourteen who had become her ward after the death of the girl's parents. Mrs. Florence de Peyser was friendly and reserved, a woman with charming manners who wintered in Europe as my own parents had: in fact she seemed altogether more representative of another age than our own, and for a time I speculated about doing her portrait in watercolor. She collected paintings, as I saw when invited to her house, and was even knowledgeable about my own work— though my abstractions of the period would have fitted oddly with her French Symbolists! But for all Mrs. de Peyser's charm, the principle attraction of her household soon became her niece. Amy Monckton's beauty was almost ethereal, and I believe that she was the most feminine being I have ever seen. Every action she undertook, be it merely entering a room or pouring a cup of tea, spoke a volume of quiet grace. The child was an enchantment, entirely self-possessed and modest— as delicate as (but perhaps more intelligent than) Pansy Osmond, for whose sake Henry James's Isobel Archer sacrificed herself so willingly. Amy was a welcome guest in our home: both of my sons were drawn to her.'

"And there she is," Don said. "A fourteen-year-old Alma Mobley, under the guidance of Mrs. de Peyser.

Poor Mobley didn't know what he was letting into his house. He goes on: 'Though Amy was the same age as Whitney, my younger son, it was Shelby—sensitive Shelby—who became closer to her. At the time, I thought it was proof of Shelby's
politesse,
that he gave so much time to a girl four years younger than himself. And even when I picked up clear signs of affection (poor Shelby blushed when the girl's name was mentioned), I could never have imagined that they indulged in any behavior of a morbid, degrading or precocious kind. In truth, it was one of the delights of my life to observe my tall, handsome son walking through our garden with the pretty child. And I was not surprised, though perhaps a bit amused, when Shelby confided to me that when she was eighteen and he twenty-two, he would marry Amy Monckton.

" 'After several months I noticed that Shelby had become increasingly withdrawn. He was no longer interested in his friends, and in the last months of his life, he concentrated exclusively on the de Peyser household and Miss Monckton. They had lately been joined by a servant of sinister and Latin appearance named Gregorio. I distrusted Gregorio on sight, and attempted to warn Mrs. de Peyser about him, but was informed that she had known him and his family for many years, and that he was an excellent chauffeur. I felt I could say no more.

" 'In this short account I can say only that my son became haggard in appearance and secretive in manner during the last two weeks of his life. I played the heavy parent for the first time in my life and forbade him to communicate with the de Peyser household. His attitude led me to believe that under Gregorio's influence, he and the child were experimenting with drugs—perhaps also with illicit sensuality. That noxious and debasing weed, marijuana, was even then to be found in the lower sections of New Orleans. And I feared also that they experimented too with some gimcrack form of Creole mysticism. That sort of thing suits the drug milieu.

" 'Whatever Shelby had been drawn into, its results were tragic. He disobeyed my orders and continued clandestinely to frequent the de Peyser house; and on the last day of August he returned home, took the service revolver I kept in a drawer in my bedroom, and shot himself. It was I, painting in my studio, who heard the shot and discovered his body.

" 'What occurred next must have been the result of shock. I did not think to call the police or an ambulance: I wandered outside, imagining somehow that help would already have arrived. I found myself on the road outside our house. I was looking at Mrs. de Peyser's residence. What I saw there nearly made me lose consciousness.

" 'I imagined I saw the chauffeur Gregorio standing at an upper window, sneering down at me. Malevolence seemed to flow from him. He was exultant I tried to scream and could not. I looked down and saw something worse. Amy Monckton stood by the side of the house, similarly staring at me, but with a calm, expressionless gaze and a grave face.
Her feet were not touching the ground!
Amy appeared to be floating nine or ten inches above the grass. Exposed to them, I felt an utter terror, and pressed my hands to my face. When I removed them and could see again, they were gone.

" 'Mrs. de Peyser and Amy sent flowers to Shelby's funeral, but by then had gone to California. Though I was and am now convinced that I had imagined my last sight of the child and the chauffeur, I burned the flowers rather than let them adorn Shelby's coffin. The paintings of my so-called Supernatural Period, which I propose now to discuss, flowed from this experience.' "

Don looked at the two old men. "I read that for the first time today. You see what I mean by flaunting themselves? They want their victims to know, or at least to suspect, what sort of things happened to them. Robert Mobley got a shock that nearly unhinged him, and he did the best paintings of his life; Alma wanted me to read about it and know that she had lived in New Orleans with Florence de Peyser under another name and killed a boy as surely as she killed my brother."

"Why hasn't Anna Mostyn killed us already?" Sears asked. "She's had every opportunity. I can't even pretend not to be convinced by what you've told us, but why has she waited? Why aren't the three of us as dead as the others?"

Ricky cleared his throat. "Edward's actress told Stella that I'd be a good enemy. I think what she was waiting for was the moment when we knew exactly what we were up against."

"You mean now," Sears said.

"Do you have a plan?" Ricky asked.

"No, just a few ideas. I'm going to go back to the hotel and pick up my things and move back here. Maybe in the tapes she made with my uncle there'll be some information we can use. And I want to break into Anna Mostyn's home. I hope you will come with me. We might find something there."