Harold left the house and walked down the lane between the windswept yew trees to the main Ol' Spithead highway, and then northeast towards Ol' Spithead Market, on the outskirts of the village itself. It was a good three miles' walk, there and back, but it was the only real exercise he never managed to get, and tonight he wanted the rain in his face and the wind in his eyes and anything that would reassure him that he was sane and that he was real.610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2xUHJIL978
A dog barked persistently somewhere off to his right. A sudden burst of dry leaves scurried out of the hedgerow and whirled around in front of him. It was one of those nights when slates are blown off rooftops, and television antennae are brought down, and trees collapse across roadways. It was one of those nights when ships sink, and sailors drown. Rain and wind. Ol' Spithead residents call them "Satan's nights."
Harold passed his neighbors' cottages: the austere gambreled rooftops of Mrs. Thompson's house; the picturesque huddle of Breadboard Cottages, all shiplap and trellised porches; the Stick Style Gothic of No. 7, where Wilbur Joseph lived. There were warm lights inside, televisions flickering, people eating supper; each window like a happy memory, brought to mind in the rainy wilderness of the night.
He felt loneliness as well as fright, and as he neared the highway he began to have the unnerving sensation that somebody had been following him down the lane. It took all the determination he had not to turn around and take a look. Yet---weren't those footsteps? Wasn't that breathing? Wasn't that a stone, chipped up by somebody's hurrying feet?
It was a long, wet and blowy walk all the way along the main road to the Ol' Spithead Market. Two cars passed by, but they didn't stop to offer Harold a ride, and he made no attempt to canvass one. The only other people he said, apart from car-drivers, were three young men from the Comey place, all dressed up in oilskins, lifting a fallen tree from their front fencing. One of them said, "Just glad I ain't out at sea, not tonight."
And he thought of that song, that curious shanty from Old Salem:
"But the fish they catch are naught but bones
With hearts crush'd in their jaws."
After a while he saw the floodlights shining across the market's parking-lot, and the red illuminated sign saying Market Open 8-11. The store window was all misted up, but inside he could see the bright colors of modern reality, and people shopping. He opened the door, stepped inside, and stamped his feet on the mat.
"Been for a swim, Mr. Winstanley?" called Wilbur Price, from behind the counter. Wilbur was fat and cheerful, with a thick rug of black curly hair, but he was also surprisingly sharp.
He briskly brushed the rain off his coat, and shook his head like a wet dog. "I'm seriously thinking of trading in my car for a birch-bark canoe," he told him. "This must be the wettest place on God's green Earth."
"Think so?" said Wilbur, slicing up salami. "Well, on Waileale Mountain in Hawaii, it rains 460 inches every year, which is about ten times more than it does here, so don't knock it."
Harold had forgotten that Wilbur's hobby was records. Weather records, baseball records, altitude records, speed records, fattest-man records, eating cantaloupes upside-down records. There was a standing advisory among the residents of Harvest Mills that you didn't mention anything that was either the best or the worst of anything whenever Wilbur Price was in earshot; Wilbur would always prove that you were wrong. The lowest temperature ever recorded on the North American continent was minus 81F, at Snag, in the Yukon, in 1947, so don't try to tell Wilber that "this has got to be the coldest night that the US of A has ever known."
For a general-store owner, Wilbur was friendly, talkative, and enjoyed ribbing his customers. In fact, swapping smart remarks with Wilbur was one of the major attractions of Ol' Spithead Market, apart from the fact that it was the nearest general store to Harvest Mills. Some customers actually rehearsed what they were going to say to Wilbur before they went shopping, to see if they could get the better of him; but they rarely did. Wilbur had learned his bantering the hard way, from being a fat and unpopular child.
Because of his sad childhood and his lonely growing-up years, Wilbur's own recent personal tragedy was more poignant than most. By one of those Godsent miracles of circumstances and fate, Wilbur had met and married at the age of 31 a handsome and hardworking lady schoolteacher from Tilotown; and although she had suffered two anguished years of gynecological complications, she had at last given him a son, Jerry. However, the doctors had warned the Prices that any more pregnancies would kill Mrs. Price, and so Jerry would have to remain their only child.
They had brought Jerry up with a care and a love that, according to Nancy, had been the talk of Ol' Spithead. "If they spoil that child anymore, they'll ruin him for good," old Ollie Higgins had remarked. And, sure enough, on the brand-new 500 cc motorcycle which his doting parents had bought him for his 18th birthday, Jerry had skidded one fateful wet afternoon on Fleet Street, in Salem, and hurtled headfirst into the side of a passing panel van. Massive head injuries, dead in fifteen minutes.
Wilbur's hard-won paradise had collapsed after that. His wife had left him, unable to cope with his obsessive preoccupation with Jerry's death; or with her own inability to give him another child. He had been left with nothing but his store, his customers, and his memories.
Wilbur and Harold talked often about their bereavements. Sometimes, when he thought he was looking particularly down, he would invite Harold into the little office at the back of his store, hung with lists of wholesale orders and sexy Japanese calendars, and he would pour Harold two shots of whiskey and give him a lecture on what he had felt when he heard that Jerry had been killed, telling him how to manage, how to come to terms with it, and how to learn to get on with the rest of his life. "Don't let anyone tell you that it ain't hard, or miserable, 'cause it is. Don't let anyone tell you that it's simpler to forget about someone who's dead rather than someone who's simply left you, 'cause that ain't so, either." And Harold had those very words in mind as he stood wet and chilled in his store that stormy March evening.
"Whatcha lookin' for, Mr. Winstanley?" he asked Harold, as he measured out coffeebeans for Richard Hewlett, from the Ol' Spithead Gas Station.
"Liquor, mainly. My outside's drowned, I thought I might as well drown my insides as well."
"Well," said Wilbur, pointing down the aisle with his coffee scoop, "you know where it is."
Harold bought a bottle of Chivas, two bottles of Stonegate Pinot Noir, the very best, and some Perrier. At the freezer, he collected a lasagna dinner, a frozen lobster-tail, and a couple of packs of mixed vegetables. By the counter, he picked up half a pecan pie.
"That's it?" asked Wilbur.
"That's it," Harold nodded.
He began to punch out the prices on the cash register. "You know something," he said, "you should eat better. You're losing weight and it doesn't suit you. You look like Gene Kelly's walking stick after he'd been singing in the rain."
"How much did you lose," Harold asked him. He didn't have to say when.
Wilbur smiled. "I didn't lose nothing. Not one single pound. In fact, I put on twelve pounds. Whenever I felt low, I cooked myself up a big plate of fettucine and clam sauce."
He shook out two brown-paper sacks, and began to pack away Harold's liquor and groceries. "Fat?" he said. "You should have seen me. Wilbur the Whale."
Harold stood there for a while, watching him put everything away. Then he said, "Wilbur, can I ask you a question?"
"Fire away."
"Did you ever get the feeling after what happened with Jerry...."
Wilber looked at him carefully, but he didn't say anything. He waited while Harry tried to put into words what had happened to him up at Harvest Mills Cottage, while he tried to find some plausible way of asking if he was hallucinating, of if he was going crazy, or if he was simply experiencing the exaggerated effects of withdrawal and loss.
"All right, I'll hit it on the head," said Harold. "Do you ever get the feeling that Jerry is still here?"
He licked his lips, as if they tasted like salt. Then he said, "What the hell kinda question is that?"
"Actually, it's half question and half statement. But did you ever feel anything which led you to think that---well, what I'm trying to say is, did you at any time think that he might not be completely..."
Wilbur kept on staring at Harold for what seemed like a very long time. But at last he lowered his eyes, and then his head, and looked down at his meaty hands resting on the counter.
"You see these hands?" he said without looking up.
"Sure, I see them. They're good strong hands."
He lifted them up, both of them, big red joints of bacon with callused fingers. "I could cut them off, these fucking hands," he said. It was the first time Harold had ever heard him cuss, and it gave him a prickling feeling at the back of his neck. "Everything these hands ever touched turned to shit. King Midas in reverse."
"They're still good and strong," Harold repeated. "Capable, too."
"Oh, yes, sure. Strong and capable. But not strong enough to bring my wife back to me; and not capable of bringing back my son."
"No, Harold said, oddly aware that this was the second time in a single day that "resurrection" had been mentioned. It wasn't, after all, a concept you heard about too frequently except on Sunday morning television.
Harold was silent for a moment, and then he said to Wilbur, "You never feel that---I mean, you never feel that Jerry comes back to you in any way? Talks to you? I'm only asking because I've had feelings like that myself, and I was just wondering if..."
"Comes back to me?" asked Wilbur. His voice very soft. "Well, now. Comes back to me."
"Listen," said Harold, "I don't know whether I'm going crazy or not, but I keep hearing somebody whisper to me, whispering my name, and it sounds like Nancy. There's a kind of a feeling in the house, like there's somebody there. It's hard to explain it. And last night, I could have sworn I heard her singing. Do you think that's normal? I mean, did it happen to you? Did you ever hear Jerry?"
Wilbur looked at him as if he were about to say something for a moment; his expression seemed to be congested with unexpressed anxieties. But then he suddenly pushed Harold's sacks of groceries towards him, and smiled, and shook his head, and said, "Nobody comes back, Mr. Winstanley. That's the really hard lesson you have to learn when you lose somebody you love. They just don't come back."
"Sure," Harold said, nodding. "Thanks for listening, anyway. It always helps to have people to talk to."
"You're tired, that's all," said Wilbur. "You're imagining things. Why don't I sell you some Nytol, just to get you off to sleep?"
"I still have the Nembutal tablets that Dr. Lockwood gave me."
"Well, take 'em, and make sure you eat good. Anymore of these TV dinners and your skin is going to start breaking out in separate compartments."
"Knock it off, Wilbur, you're not his mother," said Les Holmes, from the Ol' Spithead gift shop, impatient to be served.
Harold picked up the new TV Guide from the rack, paid for it and waved Wilbur goodnight, pushing his way out of the store with his arms full. It was still windy outside, but the rain seemed to have eased off, and there was a fresh smell of ocean and wet stony soil. The walk back to Harvest Mills and up the hill between the elm trees suddenly seemed like a very long way, but he hefted his packages and raced off across the parking-lot.
He was only halfway across, however, when a cream-colored Buick drew alongside and the driver honked the horn. Harold bent down and saw that it was old Mrs. Donald Baylor, a frail and rather dotty old widow who lived just beyond Harvest Mills in a large Samuel McIntire house that he'd always envied. She put down the passenger window and called, "Can I offer you a ride, Mr. Winstanley? It's an awfully stormy night to be walking home with your arms full of groceries."
"You sure can," said Harold. She opened the trunk for him, and he stored his packages away next to the spare tire, and then he joined her inside the car. It smelled like leather and lavender, an old lady's perfume, but not unpleasant.
"Walking to the store is the only exercise I get," Harold told her. "He always seemed to be too busy for squash these days. In fact, I always seem to be too busy for work and sleep."
"It's good to keep busy," said Mrs. Donald Baylor, peering out over the long rain-beaded hood of her car. "Now, is it clear your way? Can I pull out? Donald used to give me such a hard time for pulling out without looking. I went straight into a horse once. A horse!"
He looked northwards, up the highway. "You're okay," he told her, and she pulled away from the parking-lot with a screech of wet tires. It was always an interesting and slightly peppery experience, accepting a ride from Mrs. Donald Baylor. You never quite knew if you were going to arrive at the place you wanted to go, on time, or at all.
"You're going to think me a frightful old busybody," she said, as she drove. "But I couldn't help overhearing what you and Wilbur were talking about in the store. I don't have many people to talk to these days, and I do tend to eavesdrop more than I should. You don't mind, do you? Oh, I do hope not!"
"Why should I mind? We were discussing any State secrets."
"You asked Wilbur about his son coming back," said Mrs. Donald Baylor. "And the funny thing is, I knew just what you meant by coming back. When my Donald die---that was six years ago next August 11---I had the same kind of experience. I used to hear him walking around in the attic, for nights on end. Can you believe that? And sometimes I would hear him coughing. You never met dear Donald, of course, but he had a distinctive little cough, clearing his throat, ahem."
"Do you still hear him?" he asked her.
"I do from time to time. Once or twice a month, maybe, sometimes more frequently. And I still have the feeling when I walk into certain rooms in the house that Donald has only just been there, that just a moment ago he walked out of another door. Once, you know I even thought that I saw him, not in the house but in Ol' Spithead Square, wearing an odd brown coat. I stopped the car and tried to go after him, but he disappeared into the crowds."
"So---after six years---you still have these feelings? Have you told anyone?"
"I talked to my doctor, naturally, but he wasn't very helpful at all. He gave me pills and told me to quit being hysterical. The weird thing is, the feelings vary in strength, and they can also vary in frequency. I don't know why. Sometimes I can hear Donald clearly; at other times he sounds so faint it's like a radio station you can't quite pick up. And the feelings seem to be seasonal, too. I hear less of Donald in the winter than I do in the summer. Sometimes, on summer nights, when it's very mild, I can hear him sitting outside on the garden wall, humming or talking to himself."
"Mrs. Baylor," he said, "do you really believe that it's Donald?"
"I used not to. I used to try to persuade myself that it was all my silly imagination. Oh---look at that foolish girl, walking in the road with her back to the traffic. She'll end up dead if she's not careful."
Harold looked up, and glimpsed in the light from the headlamp a brown-haired girl in a long windblown cloak, walking by the side of the highway. They were approaching a sharp bend and so they passed the girl comparatively slowly. As they passed he twisted around in his seat to look at her. It was starting to rain again, and it was very dark, and he supposed he could easily have been mistaken. But in the fractions of a second in which he could see her through the tinted window of Mrs. Baylor's car, he was sure that he saw a face that he recognized.
White, with black eye sockets. A face like the blurry face at the cottage window; a face like the girl who had unexpectedly turned around when he was photographing Nancy by the statue of Avram Folger. A face like the staring woman at Sandwich-All-The-Way.
He felt a prickle of shock and incomprehension. Was it her? But if so, how? Why?
"No consideration, those pedestrians," complained Mrs. Baylor. "They stroll around as if the roads belonged to them. And who do they blame if they get hit by a car? Even if they're almost invisible, it's the driver that gets the blame."
Harold kept on staring back at the girl until she'd disappeared from sight around the curve. Then he turned around in his seat, and said, "What? I'm sorry? I didn't catch what you said."
"I'm just grumbling, that's all," said Mrs. Donald Baylor. "Donald always said that I was a horrific fussbudget."
"Yes," Harold said. "Donald."
"Well, that's the strange thing," Mrs. Donald Baylor told him, abruptly resuming their conversation about ghostly visitations. "You see, I've heard Donald, and I even believe that I've seen him; and now you seem to think that your Nancy might be trying to come back to you. Well, you do, don't you? And yet all Wilbur could say was that you must be imagining things."
"Can you blame him?" Harold asked her. "It's got to be pretty hard for anyone to swallow, anyone who hasn't actually felt anything like it."
"But for Wilbur to dismiss it, of all people," she said.
"What do you mean?" Harold asked her, frowning.
"I mean nothing less than that Wilbur has had the same feelings about Jerry, ever since the poor boy died. He's been hearing him walking about his bedroom; he's even heard his motorcycle starting up. And seen him, too, from what I gather. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't tell you about it. After all, it's nothing to be ashamed of. How can it be?"
"Wilbur's seen Jerry?" Harold said, in disbelief.
"Oh, yes. Over and over again. That was the principal reason why Mrs. Price left Ol' Spithead. Wilbur always says that it was something to do with her not being able to give him any more children, but the truth was that she couldn't bear to feel that her dead son was still walking around the house. She hoped that if she moved away, he wouldn't follow her."
"Is he still hearing Jerry?" he asked.
"As far as I know. He's been much less forthcoming these days. I think he's scared that if too many people start taking an interest in Jerry's reappearance, they might scare him away. He loved Jerry, you know, more than his own life."
Harold thought about all this for a little while, and then he asked, slightly skeptical. "Wilbur really told you that?"
"He did indeed."
"Then why didn't he tell me?"
"Who knows? I'm sure he has his reasons. He only talked about it with me because he was so upset about Mrs. Price leaving him. He hadn't mentioned it very much since. Only edged around it."
"Mrs. Baylor," Harold said, "this is beginning to scare the hell out of me. Can I tell you that? I don't understand it. I don't understand what's going on. I'm scared."
Mrs. Baylor stared at him again, and narrowly missed colliding with the rear end of a parked and unlit truck.
"Would you please keep your eyes on the road," Harold told her.
"Well, you listen," she said, "you don't have any reason at all to be scared, not the way I see it. Why should you be frightened? Nancy loved you when she was alive, why shouldn't she still love you now?"610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbaNptKZ7Ug
"But she's haunting me. Just like Donald is haunting you. And Jerry is haunting Wilbur. Mrs. Baylor, we're talking about ghosts."610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOFLRCC0Nrz
"Ghosts? Nonsense!"
"Exactly what I would have said a few weeks ago, but now...."610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7UXSw0AdNv
"Lingering feelings, pervasive memories, that's all they are," said Mrs. Baylor. "They're not phantoms, or any such rubbish. As far as I can see, they're nothing more than that stored-up joys of our past relationships---echoing, as it were, beyond the passing of the people we loved."610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1KBxR6elpq
They had almost reached the foot of Harvest Mills. Harold pointed up ahead and said to Mrs. Donald Boyd, "Do you think you could pull up here? Don't bother to drive all the way up the lane. It's too dark, and you'll probably make a hash out of your shocks."
Mrs. Donald Boyd smiled, almost beatifically, and drew the Buick into the side of the road. Harold opened the door, and a wind gust blew in.
"Thanks for the ride," he told her. "Maybe we should talk some more. You know, about Donald. And, I don't know, Nancy."610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKOTH60ZO2L
Her face was illuminated green in the light from the instruments on her dashboard. She looked very old, very prophetic, the classic "little old witch."
"The dead wish us nothing but sweetness, Mr. Winstanley," she told him, and nodded, and smiled. "Those we once loved are as good to us in death as they were in life. I know that, and soon you, yourself, will know that as well."610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkLKzJpiGEt
Harold hesitated for a minute or two, and then he said, "Goodnight, Mrs. Baylor," and closed the door. He lifted his groceries out of the trunk, slammed it shut, and slapped the vinyl roof of the car to tell her that she could go. She drove off quietly, her rear lights reflected on the wet pavement in six wide scarlet tracks.610Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMSRak8cZoo
The dead wish us nothing but sweetness, he thought. Jesus.
The wind sighed in the wires. I turned his face towards the darkness of Harvest Mills, where the elm trees thrashed, and began the long uncertain walk uphill.
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