“Hell, yes! Aren’t you?”

Tom discovered that he was, as a matter of fact. His interest had been piqued. He looked at Archer across the table— frowned and looked more closely. “Oh, shit, I know who you are! You’re the kid who used to pitch stones at cars down along the coast highway!”

“You were a grade behind me. Tony Winter’s little brother.”

“You cracked a windshield on a guy’s Buick. There were editorials in the paper. Juvenile delinquency on the march.”

Archer grinned. “It was an experiment in ballistics.”

“Now you sell haunted houses to unsuspecting city slickers.

“I think ‘haunted’ is kind of melodramatic. But I did hear another odd story about the house. George Bukowski told me this—George is a Highway Patrol cop, owns a double-wide mobile home down by the marina. He said he was up along the Post Road last year, cruising by, when he saw a light in the house—which he knew was unoccupied ’cause he’d been in on the search for Ben Collier. So he stopped for a look. Turned out a couple of teenagers had broken a basement window. They had a storm lantern up in the kitchen and a case of Kokanee and a ghetto blaster—just having a good old party. He took them in and confiscated maybe an eighth-ounce of dope from the oldest boy, Barry Lindell. Sent ’em all home to their parents. Next day George goes back to the house to check out the damage—the kicker is, it turns out there wasn’t any damage. It was like they’d never been there. No matches on the floor, no empties, everything spit-polished.”

Tom said, “The window where they broke in?”

“It wasn’t broken anymore.”

“Bullshit,” Tom said.

Archer held up his hands. “Sure. But George swears on it. Says the window wasn’t even reputtied, he would have recognized that. It wasn’t fixed—it just wasn’t broken.”

The waitress delivered the sandwich. Tom picked it up and took a thoughtful bite. “This is an obsessively tidy ghost we’re talking about.”

“The phantom handyman.”

“I can’t say I’m frightened.”

“I don’t guess you have any reason to be. Still—”

“I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“And let me know how it goes,” Archer said. “I mean, if that’s okay with you.” He slid his business card across the table. “My home number’s on the back.”

“You’re that curious?”

Archer checked out the next table to make sure nobody was listening. “I’m that fucking bored.”

“Yearning for the old days? A sunny afternoon, a rock in your hand, the smell of a wild convertible?”

Archer grinned. The grin said, Hell, yes, I am that kid, and I don’t much mind admitting it.

This man enjoys life, Tom thought.

Heartening to believe that was still possible.

Before he drove out to the house Tom stopped at the Harbor Mall to pick up supplies. At the A P he assembled a week’s worth of staples and a selection of what Barbara used to call bachelor food: frozen entrees, potato chips, cans of Coke in plastic saddles. At the Radio Shack he picked up a plug-in phone, and at Sears he paid $300 for a portable color TV.

Thus equipped for elementary survival, he drove to the house up along the Post Road.

The sun was setting when he arrived. Did the house look haunted? No, Tom thought. The house looked suburban. Cedar siding a little faded, the boxy structure a little lost in these piney woods, but not dangerous. Haunted, if at all, strictly by Mr. Clean. Or perhaps the Tidy Bowl Man.

The key turned smoothly in the lock.

Stepping over the threshold, he had the brief but disquieting sensation that this was after all somebody else’s house … that he had arrived, like Officer Bukowski’s juvenile delinquents, without credentials. Well, to hell with that. He flicked every light switch he could reach until the room was blisteringly bright. He plugged in the refrigerator—it began to hum at once—and dropped the Cokes inside. He plugged in the TV set and tuned the rabbit ears to a Tacoma station, a little fuzzy but watchable. He cranked the volume up. Noise and light.

He preheated the ancient white enamel stove, watching the elements for a time to make sure everything worked. (Everything did.) The black Bakelite knobs were as slick as ebony; his own fingerprints seemed like an insult to their polished surface. He slipped a TV dinner into the oven and closed the door. Welcome home.

A new life, he thought.

That was why he had come here—or at least that was what he’d told his friends. Looking around this clean, illuminated space, it was possible—almost possible—to believe that.

He took the TV dinner into the living room and poked at the tepid fried chicken with a plastic fork while MacNeil (or Lehrer, he had never quite sorted that out) conducted a round-table discussion of this year’s China crisis. When he was finished he tidied away the foil plate into a plastic bag— he wasn’t ready to offend the Hygiene Spirit just yet—and pulled the tab on a Coke. He watched two nature documentaries and a feature history of Mormonism. Then, suddenly, it was late, and when he switched off the set he heard the wind turning the branches of the pines; he was reminded how far he had come from town and what a large slice of loneliness he might have bought himself, here.

He turned up the heat. The weather was still cool, summer still a ways off. He stepped outside and watched the silhouettes of the tall pines against the sky. The sky was bright with stars. You have to come a long way out, Tom thought, to see a sky like this.

Inside, he locked the door behind him and slid home the security chain.

The bed in the big bedroom belonged to him now …

but he had never slept in it, and he felt the weight of its strangeness. The bed was made in the same Danish Modern style as the rest of the furniture: subdued, almost generic, as if it had been averaged out of a hundred similar designs; not distinctive but solidly made. He tested the mattress; the mattress was firm. The sheets smelled faintly of clean, crisp linen and not at all of dust.

He thought, I’m an intruder here …

But he frowned at himself for the idea. Surely not an intruder, not after the legal divinations and fiscal blessings of the realty office. He was that most hallowed institution now, a Homeowner. Misgivings, at this stage, were strictly beside the point.

He switched off the bedside lamp and closed his eyes in the foreign darkness.

He heard, or thought he heard, a distant humming … barely audible over the whisper of his own breath. The sound of faraway, buried machinery. Night work at a factory underground. Or, more likely, the sound of his imagination. When he tried to focus on it it vanished into the ear’s own night noises, tinnitus and the creaking of small bones. Like every house, Tom thought, this one must move and sigh with the pulse of its heat and the tension of its beams.

Surrounded by the dark and the buzzing of his own thoughts, he fell asleep at last.

The dream came to him after midnight but well before dawn —it was three a.m. when he woke and checked his watch.

The dream began conventionally. He was arguing with Barbara, or bearing the brunt of one of her arguments. She had accused him of complicity in some sweeping, global disaster: the warming of the earth, ocean pollution, nuclear war. He protested his innocence (at least, his ignorance); but her small face, snub-nosed, lips grimly compressed, radiated a disbelief so intense that he could smell the rising odor of his own guilt.

But this was only one more variation of what had become the standard Barbara dream. On another night it might have ended there. He would have come awake drenched in the effluvia of his own doubt; would have rinsed his face with cold tap water and staggered back to bed like a battle-fatigued foot soldier slogging to the trenches.