“About?” Sears waved toward their office building.

“Miracle of miracles. A parking space right in front of the door.”

“About what Elmer saw.”

“If it is obvious to Walt Hardesty, then it is obvious indeed. Yes.”

“Did you actually see anything?”

“I saw something not there. I hallucinated. I can only assume that I was overtired and somehow emotionally affected by the story I told.”

Ricky carefully backed the car into the space before the tall wooden facade of the office building.

Sears coughed, placed his hand on the door latch, did not move; to Ricky, he looked as though he already regretted what he was going to say. “I take it you saw more or less the same thing that Our Vergil did.”

“Yes, I did.” He paused. “No. I felt it, but I knew what it was.”

“Well.” He coughed again, and Ricky grew tense with waiting. “What I saw was Fenny Bate.”

“The boy in your story?” Ricky was astonished.

“The boy I tried to teach. The boy I suppose I killed —helped to kill.”

Sears took his hand from the door and let his weight fall back on the car seat. Now, at last, he wanted to talk.

Ricky tried to take it in. “I wasn’t sure that—” He stopped in midsentence, aware that he was breaking one of the Chowder Society’s rules.

“That it was a true story? Oh, it was true enough, Ricky. True enough. There was a real Fenny Bate, and he died.”

Ricky remembered the sight of Sears’s lighted window. “Were you looking out of the library windows when you saw him?”

Sears shook his head. “I was going upstairs. It was very late, probably about two o’clock. I had fallen asleep in a chair after doing the dishes. I didn’t feel very good, I’m afraid—I would have felt worse if I’d known that Elmer Scales was going to wake me up at seven o’clock this morning. Well, I turned off the lights in the library, closed the door, and began to go up the stairs. And then I saw him sitting there, sitting on the stairs. He appeared to be asleep. He was dressed in the rags I remembered him wearing, and his feet were bare.”

“What did you do?”

“I was too frightened to do anything at all. I’m no longer a strong young man of twenty. Ricky, I just stood there for—I don’t know how long. I thought I might collapse. I steadied myself by putting my hand on the banister, and then he woke up.” Sears was clasping his hands together before him, and Ricky could tell that he was gripping hard. “He didn’t have eyes. He just had holes. The rest of his face was smiling.” Sears’s hands went to his face and folded in beneath the wide hat-brim. “Christ, Ricky. He wanted to play.”

“He wanted to play?”

“That’s what went through my mind. I was in such shock I couldn’t think straight. When the—hallucination—stood up, I ran back down the stairs and locked myself in the library. I went to bed on the couch. I had the feeling that it was gone, but I couldn’t make myself go back out on the staircase. Eventually I fell asleep and had the dream we were discussing. In the morning of course I recognized what had happened. I was ‘seeing things,’ in the vulgar parlance. And I did not think, nor do I think now, that such things are exactly in the province of Walt Hardesty. Or Our Vergil, for that matter.”

“My God, Sears,” Ricky said.

“Forget about it, Ricky. Just forget I ever told you. At least until this young Wanderley arrives.”

Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead spoke in his mind again, and he turned his eyes from the dashboard where they had been resting while Sears told him to do the impossible, and looked straight into the pale face of his law partner.

“No more,” Sears said. “Whatever it is, no more. I’ve had enough.”

… no put her feet in first.

“Sears.”

“I can’t, Ricky,” Sears said, and levered himself out of the car.

Hawthorne got out on his side, and looked across the top of the car at Sears, an imposing man dressed in black, and for a moment he saw on the face of his old friend the waxy features his dream had given him. Behind him, around him, all of the town floated in wintry air, as if it too had secretly died. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” Sears said. “I wish Edward were still alive. I often wish that.”

“So do I,” Ricky whispered, but Sears had already turned from him and was beginning to go up the steps to the front door. A rising wind bit at Ricky’s face and hands, and he quickly followed, sneezing again.