Her name was Pauline Siebel and she was a large, plainspoken woman whose motherly manner belied the stubbornness beneath it, like spring steel deceptively upholstered.

Through the glass door of the telephone booth he watched the patrons of the bar going about the serious business of the day’s drinking, Pauline’s voice a reassuring buzz in his ear, businesslike. Somewhere out there in the world folks were still doing things.

Look, she told him. If you can’t write the damned thing then you can’t write the damned thing. Put it aside, work on something else. Begin another novel.

Binder smiled into the phone but the smile felt strange on his face. Right now I don’t know another novel, he said.

All right. Then don’t write one. Did you save any of the money?

Very damned little.

Then you’ll either have to go back to work or write something saleable. You’re a writer, aren’t you? You said you were. A compulsive writer? If a compulsive carpenter couldn’t build a Moorish castle he could still build a chicken coop. Even with a chicken coop there are variations in quality.

What do you mean?

Write a genre novel. Write Shootout at Wild Horse Gulch or Trixie Finds Love in the Bahamas. Write something we can sell to the paperback house. Write a horror novel. The two books I’ve seen of yours have that mood, those overtones to them anyway. The softcover racks are full of horror novels.

I don’t know if I could do that or not.

Are you saving yourself for posterity or what?

I guess I don’t know if I can do it.

Well, Pauline said, a shrug in her voice, you’re a writer. It’s your decision to make.

I’ll write you in a day or two and let you know.

By the time he got back to his beer and the ballgame, his mind was already busy thinking of a ghost story. He couldn’t focus on the ballgame. He always enjoyed reading M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House was one of his favorite novels. Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.

Halfdazed from the heat and from the beer he’d drunk Binder went into a used bookstore on Clark and began to browse. He bought a halfdozen books from a shelf marked OCCULT ARTS AND SCIENCES, selecting volumes with no criteria save their titles, choosing those with ghost or haunting or poltergeist, passing over those on astrology and spiritualism and out-of-body contact. With the paper bag of books under his arm he turned into the first bar he saw and ordered a Hamm’s, took it and the books to a back booth under the air conditioner, and studied them critically.

Not much here. Ghosts in American Houses. Fifty Great Ghost Stories. He hesitated on an oversized paperback, for the title stirred some memory he had lost. The book was covered with thick red paper, typescript in black, no illustration.