It's not like I forgot she was sixty, he told himself: I worried about that plenty. "I came to that bitch with clean hands," he said out loud, and saw the words vaporize before him. She had betrayed him. She had insulted him. She had never-he could see it now-really taken him seriously.
And what was she, anyhow? An old bag with no morals and a freakish bone structure. Intellectually, she hardly counted.
And she wasn't really adaptable. Look at her view of California-trailer parks and tacoburgers! She was shallow-Milburn was where she belonged. With that stuffy little husband, talking about old movies.
"Yes?" he said. He had heard a quick, gasping noise, very near.
"Do you need help?" No one answered, and he put his hands on his hips and looked around.
It had been a human noise, a sound of pain. "I'll help if you tell me where you are," he said. Then he shrugged, and walked toward the area where he thought the sound had come from.
He stopped as soon as he saw the body lying at the base of the fir trees.
It was a man-what was left of a man. Sims forced himself to look at him. That was a mistake, for he nearly vomited. Then he realized that he would have to look again. His ears were roaring. Sims bent over the battered head. It was, as he had feared, Lewis Benedikt. Near his head was the body of a dog. At first Sims had thought that the dog was a severed piece of Lewis.
Trembling, Sims straightened up. He wanted to run. Whatever kind of animal had done that to Lewis Benedikt was still nearby-it couldn't be more than a minute away.
Then he heard crashing in the bushes, and was too scared to move. He visualized some huge animal leaping out at him from behind the firs-a grizzly. Sims opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
A man with a face like a Halloween pumpkin emerged from around the fir trees. He was breathing hard, and he held a huge blunderbuss of a shotgun pointed at Sim's belly. "Hold it there," the man said. Sims was certain that the frightening-looking creature was going to blow him in half, and his bowels voided.
"I ought to kill you stone dead right now," the man said.
"Please…"
"But this is your lucky day, killer. I'm taking you to a telephone and gedding the police to come. Hey? Why did you do this to Lewis, hey?"
When Sims could not answer, understanding only that this horrible peasant would not kill him after all, Otto inched around behind him and prodded him in the back with the barrels of the shotgun. "So. Play soldier, scheisskopf. March. Mach schnell."
Ancient History
12
Don waited in his car outside Edward Wanderley's house for Sears and Ricky to arrive. Waiting, he found in himself all the emotions he had seen in Peter Barnes that evening-but the boy was a rebuke to his fear. Over a few days, Peter Barnes had done and understood more than he and his uncle's friends had in more than a month.
Don lifted the two books he had taken from the Milburn library just before Peter had come. They supported the notion he'd had while talking to the three men in Sears's library: he thought he knew what they were fighting. Sears and Ricky would tell him why. Then, if their story fit his theory, he would do what they had asked him to Milburn for: he would give them their explanation. And if the explanation seemed lunatic, perhaps it was-perhaps it was even wrong; but Peter's story and the copy of The Watchtower proved that they had long since lurched into a time when madness offered a truer picture of events than sanity. If his mind and Peter Barnes's had shattered, Milburn had shattered to their pattern. And out of the cracks had crawled Gregory and Fenny and their benefactor, all of whom they must destroy.
Even if it kills us, Don thought. Because we are the only ones who have a chance of doing it.
The headlights of a car appeared in a swirl of falling snow. After a moment, Don saw the outline of a high dark car behind them, and the car swung to the curb on the other side of Haven Lane. The lights died. First Ricky, then Sears got out of the old black Buick. Don left his own car and trotted across the street to join them.
"And now Lewis," Ricky said to him. "Did you know?"
"Not definitely. But I thought so."
Sears, who had been listening to this, nodded impatiently. "You thought so. Ricky, give him the keys." As Don opened the door, Sears grumbled behind him, "I hope you'll tell us how you got your information. If Hardesty fancies himself as the town crier, I'll arrange to have him spitted."
The three men went into a black entryway; Sears found the light switch. "Peter Barnes came to me this afternoon," Don said. "He saw Gregory Bate kill his mother. And he saw what must have been Lewis's ghost."
"Oh, God," Ricky breathed. "Oh, my God. Oh poor Christina."
"Let's get the heat going before we say any more," Sears requested. "If everything's blowing up in our faces, I for one at least want to be warm." The three of them began wandering through the ground floor of the house, lifting dust sheets off the furniture. "I will miss Lewis very much," Sears said. "I used to malign him terribly, but I did love him. He gave us spirit. As your uncle did." He dropped a dust sheet on the floor. "And now he is in the Chenango County morgue, apparently the victim of a savage attack by some sort of animal. A friend of Lewis's accused Harold Sims of the crime.
Under different circumstances, that would be comic." Sears's face sagged. "Let's take a look at your uncle's office, and then take care of the heating. I don't know if I can bear this anymore."
Sears led him into a large room at the rear of the house while Ricky switched on the central heating boiler. "This was the office." He flicked a switch, and track lights on the ceiling shone on an old leather couch, a desk with an electric typewriter, a file cabinet and a Xerox machine; on a broad shelf jutting out below narrower shelves filled with white boxes sat a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a cassette recorder.
"The boxes are the tapes he made for his books?"
"I guess so."
"And you and Ricky and the others never came here after he died?"
"No," Sears said, gazing at the well-ordered office. It evoked Don's uncle more wholly than any photograph -it radiated the contentment of a man happy in what he did. This impression helped to explain Sears's next words. "I suppose that Stella told you we were afraid to come in here. There might be some truth in that. But I think that what really kept us away was guilt."
"And that was part of the reason you invited me to Milburn."
"Yes. I think all of us except Ricky thought you would-" He made a shooing-away gesture with his hands. "Somehow magically dispel our guilt. John Jaffrey most of all. That is the wisdom of hindsight."
"Because it was Jaffrey's party."
Sears nodded curtly, and turned out of the office. "There still must be most of a cord of wood out in back. Why don't you bring some of it in so we can have a fire?"
"This is the story we never thought we'd tell," Ricky said ten minutes later. A bottle of Old Parr and their glasses stood on the dusty table before Ricky's couch. "That fire was a good idea. It'll give Sears and me something to look at. Did I ever tell you that I started everything by asking John about the worst thing he'd ever done? He said he wouldn't tell me, and he told me a ghost story instead. Well, I should have known better. I knew what the worst thing was. We all knew."
"Then why did you ask?"