9

Standing at his window in the hotel and looking out over the darkened section of Milburn, Don heard the far off convolutions of saxophones and trombones blaring on the cold air and thought: Dr. Rabbitfoot's come to town. His telephone rang behind him.

Sears was facing his library door, listening for footsteps padding on his stairs, when his telephone rang.

Ignoring it, he unlocked his door; opened it. The staircase was empty.

He went to answer his phone.

Lewis Benedikt, whose mansion was on the furthest periphery of the area affected by the power failure, heard neither music nor childish footsteps. What he heard, blown on the wind or from inside his own mind or drifting on a draft through his dining room and winding around a newel post on its way toward him, was the most despairing sound he knew: the languishing, nearly inaudible voice of his dead wife, calling over and over again, "Lewis. Lewis." He had been hearing it, on and off, for days. When his telephone rang he turned to it with relief.

And with relief too heard Ricky Hawthorne's voice: "I'm going batty sitting here in the dark. I've spoken to Sears and Edward's nephew and Sears graciously said that we can get together at this short notice at his house. I'd say we need to. Do you agree? We'll break a rule and just come as we are, shall we?"

Ricky thought that the young man was getting to look like a true member of the Chowder Society. Beneath the mask of sociability anyone would expect from a nephew of Edward's, he had the jim-jams. He leaned back in one of Sears's wonderful leather chairs, he sipped his whiskey and looked (with his uncle's reflex amusement) around the cherished interior of the library (did it look as old-fashioned to him as Edward had said it was?), he spoke at intervals, but there was an undercurrent of tension in all of it.

Maybe that makes him one of us, Ricky thought: and he saw that Don was the sort of person they would have befriended, years and years back; if he had been born forty years earlier, he would have been one of them as if by birthright.

Still, there was a streak of secrecy in him. Ricky could not imagine what he had meant by asking if any of them had heard music during the early evening.

Pressed about this, he had evaded explanations; pressed further, he had said, "I was just getting the feeling that everything happening has a direct relationship to my writing."

This remark, which would have seemed egotistical at any other time, was given density by the candlelight; each of the men stirred in his chair.

"Isn't that why we asked you here?" Sears said.

And then he had explained: Ricky listened puzzled to Don's account of his idea for a new book and the description of the Dr. Rabbitfoot character, and how he had heard the showman's music just before Ricky's call.

"Are you saying that events in this town are occurrences from an unwritten book?" Sears asked incredulously. "That's sheer poppycock."

"Unless," Ricky said, thinking, "unless… well, I'm not really sure how to put this. Unless things here in Milburn have focused lately-have come to a focus they did not have before."

"You mean that I'm the focus," Don said.

"I don't know."

"This is nonsense," Sears interjected. "Focused, unfocused-all that's happened is that we are managing to frighten ourselves even more. That's your focus. The daydreams of a novelist can't have anything to do with it."

Lewis sat apart from all this, wrapped in some private misery. Ricky asked him what he thought, and Lewis replied, "Sorry. I was thinking about something else. Can I get myself another drink, Sears?"

Sears nodded grimly; Lewis was drinking at twice his normal rate, as if his appearance at a meeting in an old shirt and a tweed jacket gave him license to break another of their old rules.

"What's supposed to indicate this mysterious focus?" Sears asked belligerently.

"You know as well as I do. John's death, first of all."

"Coincidence," Sears said.

"Elmer's sheep-all the animals that have died."

"Now you believe in Hardesty's Martians."

"Don't you remember what Hardesty told us? That it was sort of a game-an amusement some sort of creature gave itself. What I'm suggesting is that the stakes have been raised. Freddy Robinson. Poor old Rea Dedham. I felt, months ago, that our stories were bringing something about-and I fear, I very much fear, that more people are going to die. I'm saying that our lives and the lives of many people in this town may be endangered."

"Well, what I said stands. You have certainly managed to frighten yourself," Sears said.

"We're all frightened," Ricky pointed out. His cold made his voice raw and his throat throbbed, but he forced himself to go on. "We are. But what I think is that Don's arrival here was like the fitting of the last piece into a puzzle-that when all of us were joined by Don, the forces, whatever you want to call them, were increased. That we invoked them. We by our stories, Don in his book and in his imagination. We see things, but we don't believe them; we feel things-people watching us, sinister things following us-but we dismiss them as fantasies. We dream horrors, but try to forget them. And in the meantime, three people have died."

Lewis stared at the rug, then nervously spun an ashtray on the table before his chair. "I just remembered something I said to Freddy Robinson on the night he cornered me outside John's house. I said that someone was picking us off like flies."

"But why should this young man, whom none of us had seen until a short time ago, be the last element?" Sears asked.

"Because he was Edward's nephew?" Ricky asked. It came to him straight from the blue sky of inspiration; a moment later he felt a painful spasm of relief that his children were not coming to Milburn for Christmas. "Yes. Because he is Edward's nephew."

All three of the older men almost palpably felt the gravity of what Ricky had called "the forces" about them. Three frightened men, they sat in the molten light of the candles and looked back into their past.

"Maybe," Lewis at last said. He drained his whiskey. "But I don't understand about Freddy Robinson. He wanted to meet with me-he called me twice. I just put him off. Made a vague promise to see him in a bar sometime."

Sears asked, "He had something to tell you before he died?"

"I didn't give him the chance to tell it. I thought he wanted to sell me insurance."

"Why did you think that?"

"Because he said something about trouble coming your way."

They were silent again. "Maybe," Lewis said, "if I met him, he'd still be alive."

Ricky said, "Lewis, that sounded just like John Jaffrey. He blamed himself for Edward's death."

For a moment all three men glanced at Don Wanderley.

"Maybe I'm not here just because of my uncle," Don said. "I want to buy my way into the Chowder Society."

"What?" Sears exploded. "Buy?"

"With a story. Isn't that the admission fee?" He smiled tentatively around the circle. "It's very clear in my mind because I just spent some time writing it all in a journal. And," he said, breaking another of their rules, "this isn't fiction. This happened just in the way I'll tell it-you couldn't use it as fiction because it didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened. But if Mr. Hawthorne" ("Ricky," the lawyer breathed) "is right, then five people, not four, have died. And my brother was the first of them."

"You were both engaged to the same girl," Ricky said, remembering one of the last things Edward had said to him.

"We were both engaged to Alma Mobley, a girl I met at Berkeley," Don began, and the four of them settled into their chairs. "I think this is a ghost story," he said, pulling, in Dr. Rabbitfoot's image, the dollar from his jeans.

He held them with the story, speaking into the flame of the candles as if into an unquiet place in his mind; he did not tell it as he had in his journal, deliberately invoking all the detail he could remember, but he told most of it. The story took him half an hour.

"So the Who's Who entry proved that everything she had said was false," Don concluded. "David was dead, and I never saw her again. She had simply disappeared." He wiped his face; exhaled loudly. "That's it. Is it a ghost story or not? You tell me."

None of the men spoke for a moment. Tell him, Sears, Ricky silently prayed. He looked over at his old friend, who had steepled his fingers before his face. Say it, Sears. Tell him.

Sears eyes met his. He knows what I'm thinking.

"Well," Sears said, and Ricky closed his eyes. "As much as any of our stories is, I guess. Is that the series of events on which you based your book?"

"Yes."

"They make a better story than the book," Sears said.

"But they don't have an ending."

"Not yet, perhaps," Sears said. He scowled at the candles, which had burned down into the silver holders. Now, Ricky prayed, his eyes still closed. "This young man you imagined to look like a werewolf was named- ah, Greg? Greg Benton?" Ricky opened his eyes again, and if anyone had been looking at him they would have seen gratitude written on his every feature.

Don nodded, clearly not understanding why this was important.

"I knew him under a different name," Sears said. "A long time ago, he was called Gregory Bate. And his half-witted brother was called Fenny. I was present when Fenny died." He smiled with the bitterness of a man compelled to eat a meal he hates. "That would have been quite some time before your-Benton- decided to affect a shaven head."

"If he can make two appearances, then he can make three," Ricky said. "I saw him on the square not two weeks ago."

The lights, violently bright after so long a time of candlelight, came suddenly on. The four men in Sears's library, their distinction and whatever of ease the candlelight had given them erased by the harsher light, looked fearful: we look half-dead already, Ricky thought. It was as though the candles had drawn them into a warm circle, the warmth of a candle and a group and a story; now they were blown apart, scattered on a wintry plain.

"Looks like he heard you," Lewis, drunk, said. "Maybe that's what Freddy Robinson saw. Maybe he saw Gregory turning into a wolf. Hah!"