"I didn't get your name," McLain said to Vickery.
"Art Vickery. Look, why do you keep staring at me?"
McLain ignored that. "You a friend of Mr. Hannigan's?"
"No," Hannigan said from the bar. "I just met him tonight, a few minutes ago. He wanted to use my phone."
McLain's eyes glittered. "Is that right?" he said. "Then you don't live around here, Mr. Vickery?"
"No, I don't live around here."
"Your car happened to break down too, is that it?"
"Not exactly."
"What then—exactly?"
"I was with a woman, a married woman, and her husband showed up unexpectedly." There was sweat on Vickery's face now. "You know how that is."
"No," McLain said, "I don't. Who is this woman?"
"Listen, if you're with the Highway Patrol as you say, I don't want to give you a name."
"What do you mean, if I'm with the Highway Patrol as I say? I told you I was, didn't I? I showed you my identification, didn't I?"
"Just because you're carrying it doesn't make it yours."
McLain's lips thinned and his eyes did not blink at all now. "You trying to get at something, mister? If so, maybe you'd better just spit it out."
"I'm not trying to get at anything," Vickery said. "There's an unidentified lunatic running around loose in this damned fog."
"So you're not even trustful of a law officer."
"I'm just being careful."
"That's a good way to be," McLain said. "I'm that way myself. Where do you live, Vickery?"
"In San Francisco."
"How were you planning to get home tonight?"
"I'm going to call a friend to come pick me up."
"Another lady friend?"
"No."
"All right. Tell you what. You come with me up to where my car is, and when the tow truck shows up with a new fan belt I'll drive you down to Bodega. You can make your call from the patrol station there?"
A muscle throbbed in Vickery's temple. He tried to match McLain's stare, but it was only seconds before he averted his eyes.
"What's the matter?" McLain said. "Something you don't like about my suggestion?"
"I can make my call from right here."
"Sure, but then you'd be inconveniencing Mr. Hannigan. You wouldn't want to do that to a total stranger, would you?"
"You're a total stranger," Vickery said. "I'm not going out in that fog with you, not alone and on foot."
"I think maybe you are."
"No. I don't like those eyes of yours, the way you keep staring at me."
"And I don't like the way you're acting, or your story, or the way you look," McLain said. His voice had got very soft, but there was a hardness underneath that made Hannigan—standing immobile now at the bar—feel ripples of cold along his back. "We'll just be going, Vickery. Right now."
Vickery took a step toward him, and Hannigan could not tell if it was involuntary or menacing. Immediately McLain swept the tail of his suit jacket back and slid a gun out of a holster on his hip, centered it on Vickery's chest. The coldness on Hannigan's back deepened; he found himself holding his breath.
"Outside, mister," McLain said.
Vickery had gone pale and the sweat had begun to run on his face. He shook his head and kept on shaking it as McLain advanced on him, as he himself started to back away. "Don't let him do it," Vickery said desperately. He was talking to Hannigan but looking at the gun. "Don't let him take me out of here!"
Hannigan spread his hands. "There's nothing I can do."
"That's right, Mr. Hannigan," McLain said, "you just let me handle things. Either way it goes with this one, I'll be in touch."
A little dazedly, Hannigan watched McLain prod Vickery into the hall, to the door; heard Vickery shout something. Then they were gone and the door slammed shut behind them.
Hannigan got a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his forehead. He poured himself a drink, swallowed it, poured and drank a second. Then he went to the door.
Outside, the night was silent except for the rhythmic hammering of the breakers in the distance. There was no sign of Vickery or McLain. Hannigan picked up the shovel and the lantern from where he had put them at the house wall and made his way down the steps to the patio, down the fogbound path toward the tule marsh.
He thought about the two men as he went. Was Vickery the lunatic? Or could it be McLain? Well, it didn't really matter; all that mattered now was that Vickery might say something to somebody about the grave. Which meant that Hannigan had to dig up the body and bury it again in some other place.
He hadn't intended the marsh to be a permanent burial spot anyway; he would find a better means of disposal later on. Once that task was taken care of, he could relax and make a few definite plans for the future. Money was made to be spent, particularly if you had a lot of it. It was too bad he had never been able to convince Karen of that.
At the gravesite Hannigan set the lantern down and began to unearth the strangled body of his wife.
And that was when the third man, a stranger carrying a long sharp kitchen knife, crept stealthily out of the fog. . . .
Probably my best-known horror story, "Peekaboo" was written for a Charles Grant–edited anthology called Nightmares. Written backward, in a sense, because the plot evolved from the last line, which magically appeared one morning in my overheated brain, rather than devolved to it as is usually the case. It's one of those exercises in cauld grue that depends for its effects not so much on the author's imagination as on the reader's. The real horror here lies in what happens after the last line—and I'll bet that in nine out of ten cases, the reader's version is nastier and more terrifying than my own would be.
Peekaboo
Roper came awake with the feeling that he wasn't alone in the house.
He sat up in bed, tense and wary, a crawling sensation on the back of his scalp. The night was dark, moonless; warm clotted black surrounded him. He rubbed sleep mucus from his eyes, blinking, until he could make out the vague grayish outlines of the open window in one wall, the curtains fluttering in the hot summer breeze.
Ears straining, he listened. But there wasn't anything to hear. The house seemed almost graveyard-still, void of even the faintest of night sounds.
What was it that had woken him up? A noise of some kind? An intuition of danger? It might only have been a bad dream, except that he couldn't remember dreaming. And it might only have been imagination, except that the feeling of not being alone was strong, urgent.
There's somebody in the house, he thought.
Or some thing in the house?
In spite of himself Roper remembered the story the nervous real estate agent in Whitehall had told him about this place. It had been built in the early 1900s by a local family, and when the last of them died off a generation later it was sold to a man named Lavolle who had lived in it for forty years. Lavolle had been a recluse whom the locals considered strange and probably evil; they hadn't had anything to do with him. But then he'd died five years ago, of natural causes, and evidence had been found by county officials that he'd been "some kind of devil worshiper" who had "practiced all sorts of dark rites." That was all the real estate agent would say about it.