by Peter Straub
“And Nancy was upset.”
“Very. Very disturbed about the whole thing.”
“Did she seem guilty to you?”
“That’s one way to put it. Guilty and upset. Stay away from those people, I said. Don’t ever let them come out here again.”
“Did you ever meet Kalendar?”
Philip shuddered.
“Nancy must have known him, though, at least during her childhood.”
“Yeah, sure, she knew him. I guess he was sort of okay as a kid, but he started to get weird pretty soon. The trouble was, nobody knew how weird. Nancy said this thing about him once—after he got arrested. She said it was scary just being with him.”
“How?”
“Nancy said he made you feel like all the air was sucked out of the room. Nobody ever knew what happened to his wife. I bet he killed her, too, and got rid of the body. For sure, she disappeared.”
“How long was that after she came out to see Nancy?”
Philip looked at him in surprised speculation. “Four, five weeks. Nancy called them in the middle of the day, hoping he was out in this little workshop he rented on Sherman Boulevard. But Kalendar answered, said he had no idea where she was. Myra, that was her name! Dumb bitch, you have to feel sorry for her, hitching up with a guy like that.”
“Still, there was the heroism thing.”
Philip laughed. “The first time Joe Kalendar got famous. We’re getting close to Shady Mount Hospital. Turn left. Let’s drive north for a while.”
Tim thought that Philip wanted to wind up on Eastern Shore Drive, where the spectacle of mansions inhabited by people whose children were legacies at Brown and Wesleyan would further divert him from the reality of his situation. He was looking for distraction, not Mark. Philip had given up; now he was merely waiting for the police to find the body.
“Happened back when I was first getting to know Nancy. The summer I was nineteen, 1968. Of course, you wouldn’t know anything at all about this stuff, you were away killing Commies for Christ, weren’t you?”
Tim smiled. “Most of the guys in my platoon liked to call ’em gooks.”
“Slants,” Philip said. “Slopes.”
“You know, you could always tell people you were there.”
“Sometimes I do,” Philip said.
“I’m sure,” Tim said. “Anyhow, Kalendar saved the lives of two children?”
“The story was all over the local paper. The house next to his, a plug shorted out and bang, electrical fire. It was like six in the morning. It takes about ten minutes for the whole house to fill up with smoke. Joe Kalendar happened to be messing around in his backyard, and I guess he smelled the smoke or something.”
“He’s messing around in his backyard at six o’clock in the morning?”
“Maybe he was having a fresh-air pee. Who knows?”
“Who lived in the other house?”
“A black family—two little girls. Guy was a bus driver, something like that. Later on, he said Kalendar basically hadn’t given him the time of day since he moved onto the block, but what he did proved that blacks and whites could get along fine, at least in the city of Millhaven. That bilge was exactly what people wanted to hear. Especially then, one year after the big riots—Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. People lapped it up, turned Kalendar into a symbol.” He smiled. “Of course, Kalendar had no time at all for black people.”
“What did he do, rescue the children?”
“Both of them. The parents weren’t even out of bed when he hit the door. Wasn’t for Kalendar, everybody would have died of smoke inhalation. According to the bus driver, he smashed down the door and bulled straight in. He’s shouting, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ The kids more or less run into him, or he runs into them. He grabs them and hightails it out the door.”
“Were the parents still in bed?”
“Standing right in front of the door, trying to figure out what to do next. Dazed and groggy and all that, but I hardly think the bus driver was Mensa material anyhow. Kalendar ran back in and slammed into him and his wife and shoved everyone outside.”
“So he saved them all.”
“You could see it that way. Kalendar didn’t want to stop there, either.”
“He thought more people were still inside?”
“The bus driver told the reporter that Kalendar was fighting to go back in when the police and the firemen showed up and restrained him. All this came out all over again when he got arrested, that’s the reason I remember it.”
Tim turned left onto the pretty street called An Die Blumen, making his way toward the lake. Barely pretending to look for Mark, Philip let his eyes drift over a little knot of teenage boys and girls walking east, carrying tennis rackets and soft Adidas and Puma bags. They had the bland confident good looks produced by wealthy parents, private schools, and a sense of entitlement.
“I wish I could afford to live around here,” Philip said. “Instead of that dopey Jimbo Monaghan, Mark could have friends like those kids. Look at them—they’re completely safe. They’re going to go through life laughing and carrying tennis rackets. And do you know why? Because this is a long way from Pigtown.”
Tom Pasmore had grown up around the corner from where they were, and his childhood, Tim knew, had been neither safe nor stable. He turned onto Eastern Shore Drive, and Philip swiveled his head to look at the great mansions. In one of them, a man had murdered his wife’s lover; in another, a millionaire given to black suits and Cuban cigars had raped his two-year-old daughter; in another, two off-duty policemen acting as paid executioners had murdered a kind and brilliant man.
“Jimbo wasn’t good for Mark,” Philip continued.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Believe me, I know kids, and those two were not in the mainstream. To be honest, they were a couple of losers. And if you ask me, they were getting way too close. You could see it in the music they liked. They didn’t listen to normal people. All that airy-fairy stuff gave me the creeps.”
12
On the night Mark first broke into the abandoned house, the lost girl, who was the girl she had declined to rescue, came again to Nancy Underhill. Her son had left for the evening, and Philip had vanished into his “den,” where he would remain until 10:00 P.M., at which time he would emerge, announce that he was going to bed, and look at her as if any deviation from his schedule was an indication of questionable thought processes. At 10:30 on the dot, he would sit bolt upright in bed and listen for the sound of Mark either opening the front door or walking from the backyard into the kitchen. If he failed to hear Mark return before his curfew, he would instruct her to “work out” a suitable punishment for “your son,” then lie back, roll over, and, having fulfilled his duties as CEO of the Superior Street Underhills, return untroubled to sleep.
She had been seated on the davenport with her legs beneath her and a cold cup of coffee before her on the table, staring at, but not seeing, a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond. Everybody Loves Raymond was camouflage. Philip detested the program and was unlikely to investigate her state of mind if he found her watching it.
Instead of a scene in which an actor named Ray Romano was pretending to argue with his father, Nancy was looking at something else entirely, a scene that replayed itself across the screen of her inner eye. Nancy’s scene took place not in a fictional Long Island living room, but in the kitchen of a quick-and-dirty tract house constructed by a shady contractor named James Carrollton, then in the second year of a three-year stretch for tax evasion. Standing in for Ray Barone, sportswriter and father of three, was Nancy Underhill, a suburban housewife, still childless after two years of marriage; and before Nancy was Myra Kalendar, the wife of her terrible cousin Joseph, who in adolescence had spirited the neighbors’ dogs and cats away to distant lots, doused them with lighter fuel, and set them on fire. Joseph had referred to this activity as “making torches.”
Myra sat across the table in the tacky suburban kitchen and begge
d for help. Myra had no friends. She could talk to no one but Nancy. Joseph would kill her if she went to the police. She begged not for herself, but for the daughter who since birth had been Joseph Kalendar’s private project and plaything. In the year of the appeal, Lily Kalendar was six years old and a secret from both the state and the school board. Until this moment, she had been a secret from Nancy, too. Joseph took his daughter out of the house only at night, to conceal her from the neighbors. The one time Lily had managed to go outside during the day—to escape!—she had hidden in the alley, and her father had gone crazy with rage and worry. When he smelled smoke, he saw that it came from the house of a black neighbor with two daughters Lily had often seen playing in their yard; he assumed that his daughter had fled there. On his return, coughing and red-eyed and reeking of smoke, Lily had crawled weeping out of hiding, begging for mercy.
Instead, Myra said, she got the beating of her life. Her father loved her, she was the love of his life, and her disobedience would cost her dearly. And after that, Joseph had built a special room to hold his beloved daughter and a special wall to hide the room. But that was only two of many modifications Joseph had made to their house.
The worst was . . . she did not want to say it.
The scene played and replayed in Nancy’s mind and memory as she stared blindly at the television set. Myra sobbing, she herself trembling and lowering her head, thinking, Philip is right, she’s unbalanced. None of this is true, she’s making it up. Nancy knew what she had done; she had backed away. She had said to herself, Myra had a miscarriage, we all knew that. There isn’t any daughter, thank goodness. They’re both crazy. Fear of her dreadful cousin had led her to betray her niece. Eight years later, the headlines had shown the world what her cousin was capable of, but Nancy could not lie to herself: she had already known.
Mark surprised her by coming home early. After giving her one of those looks that had become familiar to her, Mark muttered something about being tired and disappeared into his room. At 10:00 P.M., as if summoned by one of Quincy’s timetable bells, Philip popped into the living room and announced that bedtime had come. Alone, then, she sat in the living room until the next program had chattered to a conclusion. Nancy turned off the television and in the abrupt silence understood that her worst fear had been realized. The world would no longer run along its old, safe tracks. There had been a rip in the fabric, and bleak, terrible miracles would result. That was how it came to her, a tear in the fabric of daily life, through which monstrosities could pour. And enter they had, drawn by Nancy’s old, old crime.
For she knew her son had not obeyed her. In one way or another, Mark had awakened the Kalendars. Now they all had to live with the consequences, which would be unbearable but otherwise impossible to predict. A giant worm was loose, devouring reality in great mouthfuls. Now the worm’s sensors had located Nancy, and its great, humid body oozed ever closer, so close she could feel the earth yield beneath it.
Nancy’s own sensors prickled with dread. Moments before she was able to raise her eyes and look at the arch into the little dining room, she knew her visitor had returned. There she stood, the child, a six-year-old girl in dirty overalls, her bare, filthy feet on the outermost edge of the faded rag rug, her small, slim, baleful back turned to Nancy. Her hair was matted with grease, possibly with blood. Anger boiled from her and hung in the dead air between them. There was a good measure of contempt in all that rage. Lily had come through the rip in the fabric to cast judgment on her weak traitorous aunt, that fearful and despairing wretch. Oh the fury oh the rage in a tortured child, oh the power in that fury. She had come also for Mark, his mother saw. Mark was half hers already, and had been from the moment Joseph Kalendar’s hellhouse had surged out of the mist and knocked him off his stupid skateboard.
13
It amazed Jimbo Monaghan how dumb smart people could be. If he understood the reason for most of what Mark had said and done over the past five days, it could not be all that difficult for anyone to grasp. Especially when the reason was so obvious. Mark had come home in the afternoon, strolled into the little downstairs bathroom to take a leak, and in a tub full of tepid, bloody water, discovered the naked corpse of his mother with a plastic bag over her head. The film of condensation on the inside of the bag kept him from making out her face. Mainly, he could see her nose and the black, open hole of her mouth. A second later, he noticed the paring knife dripping blood onto the tiles beside the tub. At first I thought it was some kind of horrible mistake, he told Jimbo. Then I thought if I went out into the kitchen and came back in, she wouldn’t be there anymore.
All that time, his heart seemed not to beat. He thought he had hung in the doorway for an incredibly long time, looking at his mother and trying to make sense of what he saw. Blood pounded in his ears. He moved a step forward, and the tops of her knees came into view, floating like little pale islands in the red water.
In the next moment, he found himself standing alone in the middle of the kitchen, as if blown backward by a great wind. Through the open bathroom door, he could see one of his mother’s arms propped on the side of the tub. He told Jimbo, “I went over to the wall phone. It felt like I was swimming underwater. I didn’t even know who I was going to call, but I guess I dialed my father’s number at Quincy. He told me to call 911 and wait for him outside.”
Mark did exactly that. He called 911, communicated the essential information, and went outside to wait. About five minutes later, his father and the paramedics arrived more or less simultaneously. While he stood on the porch, he felt a numb, suspended clarity that, he thought, must be similar to what ghosts and dead people experienced, watching the living go through their paces.
In Jimbo’s opinion, that was the last time Mark had been clear about his own emotions. The next day, he had turned up at Jimbo’s back door, his mind focused on an unalterable plan. It was as if he had been considering it for weeks. He wanted to break into the house on Michigan Street, and his friend Jimbo had to come with him. In fact, Jimbo was indispensable. He couldn’t do it without him.
He confessed that he had tried to do it by himself and run into some unexpected trouble. His body had gone bananas on him. He’d felt like he couldn’t breathe and it was hard to see. All those spider webs, yuck! But none of that would happen if Jimbo went with him, Mark said, he knew they would be able to pass untroubled into the house. And once they got inside, they would be able to check out the strangest part of that building, which Mark had not mentioned to his friend until this very moment, the pup-tent room. Wasn’t Jimbo curious about a room like that? Wouldn’t he like to get a look at it?
“Not if that guy is in there,” Jimbo said.
“Think back, Jimbo. Are you really sure you saw him? Or did I maybe put the idea in your head?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Mark said. “Because if it’s the two of us, we’ll be all right.”
“I don’t get you.”
“You watch my back, I watch yours,” Mark said. “I think that house doesn’t have anything in it but atmosphere, anyhow.”
“Atmosphere,” Jimbo said. “Now I really don’t get you.”
“Atmosphere makes you see stuff. It made you faint, and it made me feel sick—it felt like spider webs were all over me. But they weren’t real spider webs, they were atmosphere.”
“Okay,” Jimbo said. “Maybe I see that, a little bit. But why do you want to go in there again?”
“I have to go in there,” Mark said. “That house killed my mother.”
Silently, Jimbo uttered, Ooh-kayyy, startled by an understanding that had come to him as if by angelic messenger: Mark felt guilty, and he didn’t know it. Jimbo did not have a detailed grasp of his friend’s psyche, but he was absolutely certain that Mark would not be ranting in this way if, on the day after he broke his promise to his mother, he had not walked into a bathroom and found her lying dead in the tub. Of that, he would not speak. It was unspeakable by defi
nition. Instead, he could not stop himself from talking about this screwy plan. Jimbo resolved not to give in, to fight Mark on this issue for as long as it took.
Over the following days, Mark tested his resolution so often that Jimbo thought that he had been invited to accompany Mark into the house on Michigan Street on the order of something like once an hour. After the first dozen times, he adopted the approach that he would use on every occasion thereafter, to pretend that Mark’s obsessiveness was a joke. Mark might easily have been enraged by this tactic, but he barely noticed it.
One day during that hideous week, Jimbo heard from his father, who had learned of it from an off-duty police officer in a cop bar called the House of Ko-Reck-Shun, that a Los Angeles film crew would be on Jefferson Street early that afternoon, shooting a scene for a gangster movie. He called Mark, and the boys decided to take a bus downtown, an area they did not know as well as they imagined. They knew the number 14 bus would take them past the main library and the county museum, and they assumed that from there they would easily find Jefferson Street in or near the section of downtown located west of the Millhaven River, where theaters, bookstores, specialty shops, and department stores lined Grand Avenue all the way to Lafayette University, west of the library and museum.
They got off the bus too early and wasted twenty minutes wandering north and east before asking directions of a preppy-looking guy who appeared, Jimbo thought, more than a touch too interested in Mark, although as usual Mark failed to notice that he was being admired. Then they walked an extra block up Orson Street and reached the top of Cathedral Square before looking back to the corner and noticing that they had already gone past Jefferson. To cut off some extra distance, they took one of the paths angling through the square. With a pang, Jimbo realized that earlier in the summer they would never have made such a journey without their skateboards; this time, they had never considered bringing the boards along.