Ghost Story (57 page)

Don shook his head.

David put down his knife and fork. "Let's try an experiment. I can prove to you that you want to live. Okay?"

"I know I want to live." He looked across the indisputably real street and saw the indisputably real woman walking up the other side, still tugged along by the sheepdog. No: not walking up the other side, he realized, but coming down it, as she had just come down his side. It was like a film in which the same extra is shown in different scenes, in different roles, jarring you with his presence, reminding you that this is only invention. Still, there she was, moving briskly behind the handsome dog, not an invention but part of the street.

"I'll prove it. I'm going to put my hands around your throat and choke you. When you want me to stop, just say stop."

"That's ridiculous."

David reached quickly across the table and gripped his throat. "Stop," he said. David tightened his muscles, and went up off his chair, knocking the table aside. The carafe toppled and bubbled wine over the tablecloth. None of the other diners appeared to notice, but went on eating and talking in their indisputably real way, indisputably forking food into their indisputably real mouths. "Stop," he tried to say, but now David's hands were bearing down too hard, and he could not form the word. David's face was that of a man writing a report or casting a fly: he knocked the table over with his hip.

Then David's face was not his, but the head of an antlered stag or the huge head of an owl or both of those.

Shockingly near, a man explosively sneezed.

Peter opened his mouth, closed it again. "I—"

"You could thank him, Peter," his mother said dryly.

"That movie probably shook him up," Mulligan said. "It has that effect on people. I've seen it hundreds of times by now, but it still gets me. That's all it was, Pete. A movie."

"A movie?" Peter said. "No—we were coming up the stairs ..." He held out his hand and saw the Bowie knife.

"That's where the reel ended. Your mother said you were interested in seeing how it all looks from up here. Since you're the only people in the theater, there's no harm in that, is there?"

"Peter, what in the world are you doing with that knife?" his mother asked. "Give it to me
immediately."

"No, I have to—ah. I have to—" Peter stepped away from his mother and looked confusedly around at the little projection booth. A corduroy coat draped from a hook; a calendar, a mimeographed piece of paper had been tacked to the rear wall. It was as cold as if Mulligan were showing the movie in the street.

"You'd better settle down, Pete," Mulligan said. "Now here you can see our projectors, the last reel is all ready to go in this one, see, I get them all set up beforehand and when a little mark shows up in a couple of the frames I know I have so many seconds to start up the—"

"What happens at the end?" Peter asked. "I can't get straight in my head just what's—"

"Oh, they all die, of course," Mulligan said. "There's no other way for it to end, is there? When you compare them with what they're fighting, they really do seem sort of pathetic, don't they? They're just accidental little people, after all, and what they're fighting is—well, splendid, after all. You can watch the ending up here with me, if you'd like. Is that okay with you, Mrs. Barnes?"

"He'd better," Christina said, sidling toward him.

"He went into some kind of trance down there. Give me that knife, Peter."

Peter put the knife behind his back.

"Oh, he'll see it soon enough, Mrs. Barnes," Mulligan said, and flicked up a switch on the second projector.

"See what?" Peter asked. "I'm freezing to death."

"The heaters are broken. I'm liable to get chilblains up here. See what? Well, the two men are killed first, of course, and then ... but watch it for yourself."

Peter bent forward to look through the slot in the wall, and there was the empty interior of the Rialto, there the hollow beam of light widening toward the screen ...

Beside him, an unseen Ricky Hawthorne loudly sneezed, and he was aware of everything shifting again, the walls of the projection booth seemed to waver, he saw something recoil in disgust, something with the huge head of an animal recoiling as if Ricky had spat on it, and then Clark Mulligan locked back into place again, saying, "Film has a rough spot there, I guess, it's okay now," but his voice was trembling, and his mother was saying, "Give me the knife, Peter."

"It's all a trick," he said. "It's another slimy
trick."

"Peter, don't be rude," his mother said.

Clark Mulligan looked toward him with concern and puzzlement on his face, and Peter, remembering the advice from some old adventure story, brought the Bowie knife up into Mulligan's bulging stomach. His mother screamed, already beginning to melt like everything around him, and Peter locked both hands on the bone handle and levered the knife up. He cried out in sorrow and misery, and Mulligan fell back into the projectors, knocking them off their stands.

"Look, Ricky," he heard Don saying, and the voice was compelling enough to make him turn his head. When he saw what was happening on the floor of the apartment, he sat up. "Peter did it," he heard Don say beside him.

The boy was standing six feet away from them, his eyes intent on the body of the woman lying some little way from them. Don was on his knees, rubbing his neck. Ricky met Don's eyes, saw both horror and pain there, and then both of them looked back down at Anna Mostyn.

For a moment she looked as she had when he had first seen her in the reception room at Wheat Row: a young woman with a lovely fox face and dark hair: even now the old man saw the real intelligence and false humanity in her oval face. Her hand clutched the bone handle protruding out just below her breastbone; dark blood already poured from the long wound. The woman thrashed on the floor, contorting her face; her eyes fluttered. Random flakes of snow whirled in through the open window and settled down on each of them.

Anna Mostyn's eyes flew open, and Ricky braced himself, thinking she would say something; but the lovely eyes drifted out of focus, not seeming to recognize any of the men. A wave of blood gushed from her wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across her body and touching the knees of the two men; she half-smiled, and a third wave rushed across her body and pooled on the floor.

For an instant only, as if the corpse of Anna Mostyn were a film, a photographic transparency over another substance, the three of them saw a writhing life through the dead woman's skin—no simple stag or owl, no human or animal body, but a mouth opened beneath Anna Mostyn's mouth and a body constrained within Anna Mostyn's bloody clothing moved with ferocious life: it was as swirling and varied as an oil slick, and it angrily flashed out at them for the moment it was visible; then it blackened and faded, and only the dead woman lay on the floor.

In the next second, the color of her face died to chalky white and her limbs curled inward, forced by a wind the others could not feel. The dead woman drew up like a sheet of paper tossed on a fire, drawing in, her entire body curling inward like her arms and legs. She fluttered and shrank before them, becoming half her size, then a quarter of her size, no longer anything human, merely a piece of tortured flesh curling and shrinking before them, hurtled and buffeted by an unfelt wind.

The tenement room itself seemed to exhale, releasing a surprisingly human sigh through whatever was left of her throat. A green light flashed about them, flaring like a thousand matches: and the remainder of Anna Mostyn's body fluttered once more and disappeared into itself. Ricky, by now leaning forward on his hands and knees, saw how the particles of snow falling where the body had been spun around in a vortex and followed it into oblivion.

Thirteen blocks away, the house across the street from John Jaffrey's on Montgomery Street exploded into itself. Milly Sheehan heard the crack of the explosion, and when she rushed to her front window she was in time to see the facade of Eva Galli's house fold inward like cardboard, and then break up into separate bricks flying inward to the fire already roaring up through the center of the house.

"That's it, isn't it?" Peter asked. "It's all over now. We did it all."

"Yes, Peter," Ricky said. "It's all over."

And for a moment the two men exchanged glances of agreement. Don stood up and walked as if idly to the window and saw only a slackening storm. He turned to the boy and embraced him.

"He asks how I feel," Ricky said, supported by pillows on his bed in the Binghamton hospital. "Pneumonia is no fun. It affects the system adversely. I advise you to refrain from getting it."

"I'll try," Don said. "You almost died. They just got the highway open in time for the ambulance to bring you up here. If you hadn't pulled through, I'd have had to take your wife to France this spring."

"Don't tell that to Stella. She'll run in here and pull my tubes out." He smiled wryly. "She's so eager to get to France she'd even go with a pup like you."

"How long will you have to stay in here?"

"Two more weeks. Apart from the way I feel, it's not too bad. Stella has managed to terrify all the nurses, so they take excellent care of me. Thank you for the flowers, by the way."

"I missed you," Don said. "Peter misses you too."

"Yes," Ricky said simply.

"It's a funny thing about this whole affair. I feel closer to you and Peter—and Sears, I guess I have to say—than anyone since Alma Mobley."

"Well, you know my thoughts about that. I blurted them all out when that young doctor doped me to the gills. The Chowder Society is dead, long live the Chowder Society. Sears once said to me that he wished he wasn't so old. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I agree with him now. I wish I could see Peter Barnes grow up—I wish I could help him. You'll have to do that for me. We owe him our lives, you know."

"I know. Whatever we don't owe to your cold."

"I was completely befuddled, back in that room."

"So was I."

"Well, thank God for Peter. I'm glad you didn't tell him."

"Agreed. He's been through enough. But there is still a lynx to be shot."

Don nodded.

"Because," Ricky continued, "otherwise she'll just come back again. And keep on coming back until all of us and most of our relatives are dead. I've supported my children for too long to want to see them go that way. And as much as I hate to say it, it looks like it's your job."

"In every way," Don said. "It was really you who destroyed both Gregory and Fenny. And Peter killed their boss. I have to take care of the remaining business."

"I don't envy you the job. But I do have confidence in you. You have the knife?"

"I picked it up off the floor."

"Good. I'd hate to think of it being lost. You know, back in that terrible room I think I saw the answer to one of the puzzles Sears and I and the others used to talk about. I think we saw the reason for your uncle's heart attack."

"I think so too," Don said. "Just for a second. I didn't know that you saw it too."

"Poor Edward. He must have walked into John's spare bedroom, expecting at the worst to find his actress in bed with Freddy Robinson. And instead she— what? Threw off the mask."

Ricky was now very tired, and Don stood up to go. He put a stack of paperback books and a bag of oranges on the table beside Ricky's bed.

"Don?" Even the old man's voice was grainy with exhaustion.

"Yes?"

"Forget about pampering me. Just shoot me a lynx."