“Something like that.”

“You’re asking the wrong person if you want to be reassured. Don’t forget, I’m the kid who opened the door to an upstairs bedroom and saw him hanging from a beam.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No, it’s not. Let me tell you one other thing before I tell you exactly what I think. Something Minella Corey said. She said there are evil men in the world, truly evil men. Sometimes we hear of them, but more often they work in absolute darkness. She said she had been cursed with a knowledge of two such men in her lifetime. One was Adolf Hitler. The other was her brother-in-law, Hubert Marsten.” He paused. “She said that on the day Hubie shot her sister she was three hundred miles away in Cape Cod. She had taken a job as housekeeper for a rich family that summer. She was making a tossed salad in a large wooden bowl. It was quarter after two in the afternoon. A bolt of pain, ‘like lightning,’ she said, went through her head and she heard a shotgun blast. She fell on the floor, she claims. When she picked herself up—she was alone in the house—twenty minutes had passed. She looked in the wooden bowl and screamed. It appeared to her that it was full of blood.”

“God,” Susan murmured.

“A moment later, everything was normal again. No headache, nothing in the salad bowl but salad. But she said she knew—she knew—that her sister was dead, murdered with a shotgun.”

“That’s her unsubstantiated story?”

“Unsubstantiated, yes. But she’s not some oily trickster; she’s an old woman without enough brains left to lie. That part doesn’t bother me, anyway. Not very much, at least. There’s a large enough body of ESP data now so that a rational man laughs it off at his own expense. The idea that Birdie transmitted the facts of her death three hundred miles over a kind of psychic telegraph isn’t half so hard for me to believe as the face of evil—the really monstrous face—that I sometimes think I can see buried in the outlines of that house.

“You asked me what I think. I’ll tell you. I think it’s relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn’t cost them anything. It doesn’t keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is more unsettling.”

He looked up at the Marsten House and spoke slowly.

“I think that house might be Hubert Marsten’s monument to evil, a kind of psychic sounding board. A supernatural beacon, if you like. Sitting there all these years, maybe holding the essence of Hubie’s evil in its old, moldering bones.

“And now it’s occupied again.

“And there’s been another disappearance.” He turned to her and cradled her upturned face in his hands. “You see, that’s something I never counted on when I came back here. I thought the house might have been torn down, but never in my wildest dreams that it had been bought. I saw myself renting it and…oh, I don’t know. Confronting my own terrors and evils, maybe. Playing ghost-breaker, maybe—be gone in the name of all the saints, Hubie. Or maybe just tapping into the atmosphere of the place to write a book scary enough to make me a million dollars. But no matter what, I felt that I was in control of the situation, and that would make all the difference. I wasn’t any nine-year-old kid anymore, ready to run screaming from a magic-lantern show that maybe came out of my own mind and no place else. But now…”

“Now what, Ben?”

“Now it’s occupied!” he burst out, and beat a fist into his palm. “I’m notin control of the situation. A little boy has disappeared and I don’t know what to make of it. It could have nothing to do with that house, but…I don’t believe it.” The last four words came out in measured lengths.

“Ghosts? Spirits?”

“Not necessarily. Maybe just some harmless guy who admired the house when he was a kid and bought it and became…possessed.”

“Do you know something about—” she began, alarmed.

“The new tenant? No. I’m just guessing. But if it is the house, I’d almost rather it was possession than something else.”

“What?”

He said simply, “Perhaps it’s called another evil man.”

FOUR

Ann Norton watched them from the window. She had called the drugstore earlier. No, Miss Coogan said, with something like glee. Not here. Haven’t been in.

Where have you been, Susan? Oh, where have you been?

Her mouth twisted down into a helpless ugly grimace.

Go away, Ben Mears. Go away and leave her alone.

FIVE

When she left his arms, she said, “Do something important for me, Ben.”

“Whatever I can.”

“Don’t mention those things to anyone else in town. Anyone.”

He smiled humorlessly. “Don’t worry. I’m not anxious to have people thinking I’ve been struck nuts.”

“Do you lock your room at Eva’s?”

“No.”

“I’d start locking it.” She looked at him levelly. “You have to think of yourself as under suspicion.”

“With you, too?”

“You would be, if I didn’t love you.”

And then she was gone, hastening up the driveway, leaving him to look after her, stunned by all he had said and more stunned by the four or five words she had said at the end.

SIX

He found when he got back to Eva’s that he could neither write nor sleep. He was too excited to do either. So he warmed up the Citroën, and after a moment of indecision, he drove out toward Dell’s place.

It was crowded, and the place was smoky and loud. The band, a country-and-western group on trial called the Rangers, was playing a version of “You’ve Never Been This Far Before,” which made up in volume for whatever it lost in quality. Perhaps forty couples were gyrating on the floor, most of them wearing blue jeans. Ben, a little amused, thought of Edward Albee’s line about monkey nipples.

The stools in front of the bar were held down by construction and mill workers, each drinking identical glasses of beer and all wearing nearly identical crepe-soled work boots, laced with rawhide.

Two or three barmaids with bouffant hairdos and their names written in gold thread on their white blouses (Jackie, Toni, Shirley) circulated to the tables and booths. Behind the bar, Dell was drawing beers, and at the far end, a hawklike man with his hair greased back was making mixed drinks. His face remained utterly blank as he measured liquor into shot glasses, dumped it into his silver shaker, and added whatever went with it.

Ben started toward the bar, skirting the dance floor, and someone called out, “Ben! Say, fella! How are you, buddy?”

Ben looked around and saw Weasel Craig sitting at a table close to the bar, a half-empty beer in front of him.

“Hello, Weasel,” Ben said, sitting down. He was relieved to see a familiar face, and he liked Weasel.

“Decided to get some night life, did you, buddy?” Weasel smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. Ben thought that his check must have come in; his breath alone could have made Milwaukee famous.

“Yeah,” Ben said. He got out a dollar and laid it on the table, which was covered with the circular ghosts of the many beer glasses that had stood there. “How you doing?”

“Just fine. What do you think of that new band? Great, ain’t they?”

“They’re okay,” Ben said. “Finish that thing up before it goes flat. I’m buying.”

“I been waitin’ to hear somebody say that all night. Jackie!” he bawled. “Bring my buddy here a pitcher! Budweiser!”

Jackie brought the pitcher on a tray littered with beer-soaked change and lifted it onto the table, her right arm bulging like a prizefighter’s. She looked at the dollar as if it were a new species of cockroach. “That’s a buck fawty,” she said.

Ben put another bill down. She picked them both up, fished sixty cents out of the assorted puddles on her tray, banged them down on the table, and said, “Weasel Craig, when you yell like that you sound like a rooster gettin’ its neck wrung.”