“ ‘Ghosts!’ the docker roared at him.
“ ‘Yeah, ghosts,’ he said. ‘You can laugh at me if you want, but that was Silver Spectre, with Ike McCann on his back.’
“We did laugh at him, but not for long. Because nobody ever found that grey horse or his rider. The only other interval on the track is on the front side where the horses come out in the afternoon, and there was a maintenance man working there who said no horse went through that interval all morning. So, as far as anybody could tell, that horse and rider didn’t ever exist at all except along the backstretch rail from out of the soup and back into it.
“And it was that same morning that Stuart Gallon’s little girl was drowned.”
“Somebody drowned his daughter?” I asked.
“No, no, it was an accident,” said Charley. “Hell — nobody, no matter how much they hated Stu, could have wanted a terrible thing like that to happen. It happened in the swimming pool at Gallon’s hotel. It was a sad thing. The death of a child always is. And Stu Gallon was really devoted to her too. Nobody’s all rotten, I guess. Gallon was only mostly rotten.”
“Did you ever see the ghost again, Fred?” I asked.
“No, not me.”
“He was seen again though,” Charley said. “Several times. Always on foggy mornings. People I know have seen him — people who used to come in here.”
I looked around at the gathered regulars. Again, no witnesses.
I think Charley sensed I was losing interest. He leaned across the bar and looked me in the eye. “And every time that grey phantom made his appearance something else terrible happened to Stu Gallon, as if Ike and the Spectre were getting their revenge from beyond the grave. The second time the ghost horse ran Stu Gallon’s wife died. The very same day. Then his house burned down. Then he lost his job with Lakehills Stable and really went on the skids.”
“I was surprised to see him in here tonight,” said Fred.
“Yeah. He hasn’t been in here in years.”
I had a feeling I’d had enough for the evening, enough to drink and enough ghost story. Not that they’d scared me — I wondered if they were making it all up. As I swayed to my feet I asked Fred, “After all the terrible things that happened to him, did most people come to forgive him for the things he did in his earlier days?”
“Well, I never heard that his misfortunes made Stu Gallon any nicer. And some of the things he did back when I knew him are the kind of things you just don’t forgive.”
I said good night to the assembly, paid my bill, and made my way carefully through the fog back to Blakemore Village’s last remaining excuse for a hotel. There I saw the former trainer, Stu Gallon, sitting in the lobby, just staring into space. He did seem to have an oddly haunted look in his eyes.
I have to confess, though, I slept well that night. No nightmares. And if I had had one, it probably would have been about confronting my editor without a good story.
I slept late into the morning, as is my custom. When I was out on the street at eleven, the fog had cleared and it was a bright, sunny day. I was debating whether to try to gather more material for my article or just go back to the city and do my best with what little I had. As I passed the tavern, Charley was just opening up. “You keep long hours,” I said.
“It’s my place and there’s not enough business to hire anybody to help pour. You heard what happened at Blakemore Downs this morning?”
“No. Something happened and I missed it?”
“The town cop came by a few minutes ago and told me. Stu Gallon is dead. They found him out at the Downs. In the infield.”
“What was he doing there?”
“The guys that found him are from the wrecking company that’s going to tear the place down next week. They said he was lying on the grave of Silver Spectre. They say he had a shovel. It seems he was digging.”
I must say that gave me more of a shiver, there in the bright sunlight, than anything I’d heard in the foggy, theatrical gloom of the night before.
“You know what I think?” said Charley. “I think Silver Spectre and Ike McCann made one last appearance this morning.”
And as I’ve thought about it over the years I think that’s what happened too — in a manner of speaking.
Stuart Gallon died of a heart attack, they found. And it could have been brought on by the strain of his crazy digging. Or he could have been frightened to death by something he saw.
A ghost horse and rider coming at him out of the fog? Maybe.
But I thought of that old ex-jockey, Billy Duff, who took care of the place. And I thought of his old grey gelding, the only horse on the grounds. And I thought of that jockey room with the silks still hanging there ready to wear, surely including the silks worn by Ike McCann when he rode Silver Spectre. And I wondered if what scared Stu Gallon to death might not have been a flesh-and-blood man streaking out of the fog on a flesh-and-blood horse, participating in a quite deliberately deadly masquerade. It could have been an act of durable, burning hatred. Or it could have been an act of mercy.
Or it could have been a ghost.
How Do I Kill Thee?
by Ernest Savage
It was the third time that day Phil Perkins had killed his wife...
Phil Perkins was driving down Main Street ten minutes from home when his wife stepped off the curb in front of his car. He hit her square and hard and her fat body sloshed off the upper edge of his windshield, soaring high in the air and coming down into the grille-work of the monstrous truck he could see in his rearview mirror, ricocheting like a rag doll and disappearing into the stream of opposing traffic — poof!
He drove steadily on, making the light at Seventeenth Street, proceeding six more blocks to Emerald, his street, and turning left as always. There she was again, in the guise of a boy standing in the gutter, and again she stepped in front of his car and was punched high into the thick greenery of the trees that arched over the street and made it one of the prettiest lower-middle-class streets in town.
It was the third time today he’d killed her, one of his more productive days. He’d been having a lot of productive days lately.
He turned into the drive of his home, parked in front of the garage out back, and walked into the house through the kitchen door with two heavy ledger books under his arm. Phil Perkins was a bookkeeper and a good one, one of the last of a dying breed in this computerized age. But he loved his work and still had as much of it as he could handle. He regarded a ledger sheet as one of the most beautiful printed pages man had yet devised, with its intricate and utterly logical network of intersecting lines. He loved the column headings: Salaries — Taxes — Rent — Utilities — Insurance — Maintenance — Phone. So sensible and concise. He loved the act of entering figures between the colorful vertical lines, felt an artist’s need to make them full, round, and important, lusted for the balance that was there to be found, that could elude him only for a while.
He put the books on the kitchen table and washed his hands at the sink, careful not to touch the dirty dishes heaped there. On the counter to his left two frozen Mexican dinners were slowly thawing, and Phil, a neat and orderly man — his tie was always firmly knotted and centered in his collar — lifted them and wiped the puddled water from beneath before drying his hands.
A car glides quietly down the street outside carrying two hell-born kids, one at the wheel, one in the rear seat with a rifle at the ready, its ugly snout drawing beads on windows as they pass — there is a tongue of flame, a pop, the sound of shattering glass, and Thelma is stretched out on the living-room floor, a bullethole between her eyes — poof!