Free The Moonlight by Nicholas Guild

if he went over there he would tell her everything.  He wouldn’t be able to help himself.  And then it would be over between them—she would think he was a nut.
    So he couldn’t go, because he couldn’t bear the thought of surrendering her.
    He started to walk back to the Moonlight.
    When he reached the entrance to the driveway he saw his mail still strewn over the ground, so he bent down and picked it up.  The mailbox door was still hanging open, so he closed it.  There was a circular from Grand Union; he decided he would go through it very carefully and make a shopping list.  He wished he had bought a newspaper in town, because then he could have looked over the classified adds.  It was time he found himself a car.
    Oddly enough, his panic had left him—or, perhaps more accurately, it had simply grown familiar enough that he could examine it, as if it were something entirely separate from himself, a curious little object he had picked up somewhere.  Or he could put it aside for a while and live his life just as if it didn’t exist.
    He looked up at the roadhouse, and it felt almost as if he were looking into a living face.  “You and I belong to one another,” it seemed to say.  “All this time, I have been waiting just for you.”
    When he walked in through the kitchen door, he had the eerie sense of being eaten alive.
    Sitting at the table, he took the postcard out again and looked it over, front and back.  “Welcom.”  The voice on the phone belonged either to a living man, in which case this whole business was merely a nuisance, or it belonged to some spectral presence, The Ghost of the Moonlight Roadhouse, who was annoyed at being disturbed.  If that was so, then they would just have to get used to each other.  After all, how seriously could you take a ghost that didn’t even know how to spell?
    The writing was all block letters, copybook stuff.  A ghost who stole cigarettes and had dropped out of school in the third grade.  Jesus.
    He picked up the phone and this time was rewarded with a dial tone—no more tricks.  He dialed Beth’s number, murmuring each digit as he punched the button.  6-6-5-4-7-5-9.  There was a ring at the other end, then another ring, then the click of a receiver being lifted.
    “Hello?”  It was Beth’s voice.
    “Hi.  It’s just me.  I got my phone installed.”
    “Oh—well, good.”  She made it sound like the nicest thing he could have done for her.  “Will I see you tonight?”
    “Sure.  I’ll come for a late dinner, around nine thirty.”
    “You’ll have bad dreams if you eat that late.”
    “No I won’t.”
    The sound of her laughter was so beautiful it made him hurt inside.  God but he loved her.  With someone like Beth, there were no bad dreams.
    “I’ll see you tonight,” he said, wanting to say more but not quite able to trust himself.  “Bye bye.”
    “Bye bye.”
    He waited for a moment, hoping she would speak again—perhaps she was waiting too—and then there was another click and the dial tone again.  He put the receiver down.
    The manila envelope from Welcome Wagon was on top of the pile of junk mail.  He opened it up and let the contents spill out onto the kitchen table.  Coupons from a car wash, two dry cleaning places, a pizzeria—one entitling him to a free drink at the Lobster Pot.  A free potted plant from a garden supply place, two dollars off a gallon of exterior house paint, a free pineapple with any ten-dollar purchase at the Greenley Produce Company, twenty per cent off the cost of having your carpet steam cleaned . . .
    “Well, I know one carpet that needs it,” he said out loud.
    He was answered, almost at once, by a burst of cruel, mocking laughter.  It sounded as if it was right there in the room with him.

     
Chapter 7
    Beth Saunders had been having it on with Phil in her apartment almost every night for two weeks before her roommate said anything.
    “So who’s the new guy?”
    It was early