Ghost Story by Peter Straub

came down with a nearly fatal fever—that was what I'd felt on my forehead—and spent three weeks in the Mathers' attic room. When I had recovered and could move around again, Fenny was buried. He really had gone over for good. I wanted to quit my job and leave the village, but they held me to my contract and I went back to teaching. I was shattered, but I could go through the motions. By the end of it, I was even using the ferule. I'd lost all my liberal notions, and when I left I was regarded as a fine and satisfactory teacher.

    "There is one other thing, though. On the day I left Four Forks I went for the first time to look at Penny's grave. It was behind the church, next to his brother's. I looked at the two graves, and do you know what I felt? I felt nothing. I felt empty. As though I'd had nothing at all to do with it."

    "What happened to the sister?" asked Lewis.

    "Oh, she was no problem. She was a quiet girl, and people felt sorry for her. I'd overestimated the stinginess of the village. One of the families took her in. As far as I know, they treated her as their own daughter. It's my impression that she got pregnant, married the boy and left town. But that would have been years later."
    Frederick Hawthorne
    1
    Ricky walked home, surprised to see snow in the air. It's going to be a hell of a winter, he thought, all the seasons are going funny. In the glow surrounding the street lamp at the end of Montgomery Street, snowflakes whirled and fell and adhered to the ground for a time before melting. Cold air licked in beneath his tweed topcoat. He had a half hour walk before him, and he was sorry that he hadn't taken his car, the old Buick Stella happily refused to touch—on cold nights, he usually drove. But tonight he'd wanted time to think: he had been going to grill Sears on the contents of his letter to Donald Wanderley, and he had to work out a technique. This, he knew, he'd failed to do. Sears had told him just what he wanted to, and no more. Still, the damage, from Ricky's point of view, was done; what point was there in knowing how the letter was worded? He startled himself by sighing aloud, and saw his breath send a few big lazy flakes spinning off in a complicated pattern as they melted.
    Lately, all the stories, his own included, had made him tense for hours afterward; but tonight he felt more than that. Tonight he felt especially anxious. Ricky's nights were now uniformly dreadful, the dreams of which he had spoken to Sears pursued him straight through until dawn, and he had no doubt that the stories he and his friends told gave them substance; still he thought that the anxiety was not due to his dreams. Nor was it due to the stories, though Sears's had been worse than most—all of their stories were getting worse. They frightened themselves each time they met, but they continued to meet because not to meet would have been more frightening yet. It was comforting to get together, to see that they were each bearing up. Even Lewis was frightened, or why would he have voted in favor of writing to Donald Wanderley? It was this, knowing that the letter was on its way, ticking away in a mailbag somewhere, that made Ricky more than usually anxious.

    Maybe I really should have left this town ages ago, he considered, looking at the houses he passed. There was scarcely one he had not been inside at least once, on business or pleasure, to see a client or to eat a dinner. Maybe I should have gone to New York, back when I got married, as Stella wanted to do: it was, for Ricky, a thought of striking disloyalty. Only gradually, only imperfectly had he convinced Stella that his life was in Milburn, with Sears James and the law practice. Cold wind cut into his neck and pulled at his hat. Around the corner, ahead of him, he saw Sears's long black Lincoln parked at the curb; a light burned in Sears's library. Sears would not be able to sleep, not after telling a story like that. By now, they all knew the effects of