Ghost Story by Peter Straub Page A

reliving these past events.

    But it's not just the stories, he thought; no, and it's not just the letter either. Something is going to happen. That was why they told the stories. Ricky was not given to premonitions, but the dread of the future he'd felt two weeks earlier while talking to Sears came thudding back into him again. That was why he had thought of moving out of town. He turned into Melrose Avenue: "avenue," presumably, because of the thick trees which lined either side. Their branches stood out gesturally, tinted orange by the lamps. During the day the last of the leaves had fallen. Something's going to happen to the whole town. A branch groaned above Ricky's head. A truck changed gears far behind him, off on Route 17: sound traveled a long way on these cold nights in Milburn. When he went forward, he could see the lighted windows of his own bedroom, up on the third floor of his house. His ears and nose ached with the cold. After such a long and reasonable life, he said to himself, you can't go mystic on me now, old friend. We'll need all the rationality we can muster up.

    At that moment, near where he felt safest and with this self-given reassurance in his mind, it seemed to Ricky that someone was following him: that someone was standing back on the corner, glaring at him. He could feel cold eyes staring at him, and in his mind it seemed that they floated alone—just eyes following him. He knew how they would look, clear pale luminous and floating at the level of his own eyes. Their lack of feeling would be dreadful—they would be like eyes in a mask. He turned around, fully expecting to see them, so great was his sense of them. Abashed, he realized that he was trembling. Of course the street was empty. It was simply an empty street, even on a dark night as ordinary as a mongrel pup.

    This time you really did it to yourself, he thought, you and that gruesome story Sears told. Eyes! It was something out of an old Peter Lorre film. The Eyes of ... of Gregory Bate? Hell. The Hands of Dr. Orlac. It's very clear, Ricky told himself, nothing at all is going to happen, we're just four old coots going out of our minds. To imagine that I thought ...

    But he had not thought the eyes were behind him, he had known it. It had been knowledge.

    Nonsense, he almost said aloud, but let himself in his front door a little more quickly than usual.
    * * * * *
    His house was dark, as it always was on Chowder Society nights. By running his fingers along the edge of the couch, Ricky skirted the coffee table which on other nights had given him a half dozen bruises; having successfully navigated past that obstacle, he groped around a corner into the dining room and went through into the kitchen. Here he could turn on a light without any possibility of disturbing Stella's sleep; the next time he could do that was at the top of the house, in the dressing room which along with the horrid sleek Italian coffee table had been his wife's latest brainstorm. As she had pointed out, their closets were too crowded, there was no place to store their unseasonal clothes, and the small bedroom next to theirs wasn't likely to be used ever again, now that Robert and Jane were gone; so for a cost of eight hundred dollars, they'd had it converted into a dressing room, with clothes rails and mirrors and a thick new carpet. The dressing room had proved one thing to Ricky: as Stella had always said, he actually did own as many clothes as she did. That had been rather a surprise to Ricky, who was so without vanity that he was unconscious of his own occasional dandyism.
    A more immediate surprise was that his hands were shaking. He had been going to make a cup of chamomile tea, but when he saw how his hands trembled, he took a bottle out of a cabinet and poured a small amount of whiskey into a glass. Skittish old idiot. But calling himself names did not help, and when he brought the glass to his lips his hand still shook. It was this damned anniversary.