by Peter Straub
Bill Wilk started to stay something, but Pohlhaus shushed him and went around the table to the door. He leaned out and said, “Stafford, we’re ready in here.”
When he turned around, he was holding a small stack of papers. He handed two of them to Philip Underhill, then went to the other side of the table to give papers to the Auslanders, Bill Wilk, and Jennie Dell. He still had two or three pages in his hand when he returned to the head of the table.
“So we are assuming that this is a fairly accurate portrait of Ronnie.” Like the rest of them, Pohlhaus stared down at the picture. “We think Ronnie is a bad, bad man. We also think that he’s been at work here at least five years.”
The man whose face had been drawn by the sketch artist might have been one of those actors like Murray Hamilton or Tim Matheson, actors who appear in one film or television program after another, and whose names you can never remember and probably never knew. His almost-handsome features suggested a salesman’s instantaneous affability. That his eyes may have been a fraction of an inch too close together and his nose a millimeter too short only added to his approachability. His minor flaws made him look friendlier. He probably had some kind of job that put him in contact with people. He was the guy standing next to you at the bar who says, “So a rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar.” This man would have little trouble talking gullible teenage boys into his car.
“What do you mean, at least five years?” said Bill Wilk.
“Yes, what makes you say that?” asked Philip.
“When Professor Bellinger pushed our time frame backward, I started to look at other jurisdictions, just to see what turned up. Here’s what I found.”
He pulled out the sheet at the bottom of his little stack of papers. It was a typed list.
“August 1998. James Thorn, a sixteen-year-old boy reported missing in Auburn.” Auburn was a little town just south of Millhaven. “Thorn was a good student who until his disappearance had never so much as stayed out all night.”
He moved his finger down the list. “Another sixteen-year-old boy, Luther Hardcastle, living with his grandparents in Footeville.” This was an old farming community, now a small town surrounded by suburbs, located about five minutes west of Millhaven. “He goes missing in July of 1999 and is never seen again. According to his grandmother, Luther was mildly retarded and very obedient.” He looked up. “Here’s the interesting part. The last person reported to have seen Luther Hardcastle was a friend of his, Robert Whittle, who told an officer in Footeville that he ran into Luther on Main Street that afternoon and invited him to listen to some CDs at his house. Luther was a big Billy Joel fan. He told Whittle he’d come by later, but first he was going to Ronnie’s house because Ronnie was going to give him a lot of Billy Joel CDs. From the way he said it, Whittle assumed that Ronnie was a friend of Luther’s grandparents, or at least someone known to them.”
“Oh, my God,” said Jennie Dell.
“That happened in 1999, and you didn’t know about it until today?” Flip Auslander seemed torn between rage and incredulity.
“You’d be amazed by how little communication goes on between departments in different jurisdictions. Anyhow, Luther Hardcastle’s story put a lot of things in a different light. Joseph Lilly, for example. He was a seventeen-year-old Laurel Heights boy who disappeared in June of 2000. Then there is Barry Amato, fourteen, disappeared from South Millhaven in July 2001. So we have this pattern of one a year, always in the summer months, when the boys are on vacation and more likely to be outside at night. In 2002, the ante is upped a little. Last year, we had two teenage boys disappear from the Lake Park region, Scott Lebow and Justin Brothers, seventeen years old. Their parents thought that they ran away together, since the Lebow boy had just come out to his mother, and Justin’s parents had known he was gay since he went through puberty. Both sets of parents tried to break up the friendship. We thought the boys ran off together, too, but now I believe we must reconsider.”
“The creep got ’em,” said Bill Wilk.
“Here’s the situation as I see it,” Pohlhaus said. “Ronnie has been living in or around this city for years. He has a decent job, and he owns his own house. He is single. He likes to consider himself heterosexual. This man is neat, orderly, and a considerate neighbor. Mainly, he keeps to himself. His neighbors have never been inside his house. Five years ago, something in him snapped, and he could no longer resist the very, very powerful temptation to act on his fantasies. James Thorn fell for his CDs story and wound up buried in a secret location, probably somewhere on Ronnie’s property.
“Killing Thorn kept him satisfied for a year, after which time Luther Hardcastle fell into his lap. Luther’s probably buried next to or on top of the Thorn boy. I want you to observe that Ronnie went to different parts of the Millhaven area to select his victims, and that he continued to do so until this summer. He keeps to the pattern of one murder a year. In the summer of 2000, he goes hunting again and captures Joseph Lilly. Another body in the backyard, or under his basement floor. In 2001, another body. In 2002, he strikes it rich and gets two victims. His appetite is getting stronger. This year, he bides his time until school gets out, but then loses control completely. He kills four boys in the space of about ten days. My point is, he’s getting more and more reckless. Three weeks ago, he approached a boy in broad daylight, and the only thing that stopped him was that our professor scared him off. He laid low for a little while. Then he went into this frenzy.”
Sergeant Pohlhaus’s words would have been unbearable but for the almost violently impassive authority with which he delivered them. No one at the table moved.
“This city needs a curfew,” Philip said. His voice sounded as if it were leaking through from the other side of a heavy internal door.
“A curfew is going to be set in place within the next couple of days. Persons sixteen years of age and younger will be required by law to be off the streets by ten P.M. We’ll see how effective it is.”
“But what are you going to do?” asked Marty Auslander. “Wait around hoping you’ll catch him before he murders another boy?”
The remainder of the meeting degenerated into a contest of name-calling against stonewalling. As the Underhills left the building, Philip looked so drained and weary that Tim asked if he could drive him home.
“You got it,” Philip said, and tossed him the keys.
Bill Wilk, Jennie Dell, and the Auslanders separated from the brothers and from one another before they reached the sidewalk. All parties went toward their cars without a parting word or a gesture of farewell.
From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 25 June 2003
Six o’clock. Without anything to do (maybe without the energy to think of something to do), I sit here on the ugly green sofa of my childhood, scribbling in this journal while pretending not to hear the sounds coming from upstairs. Philip is weeping. Ten minutes ago, he was sobbing, but now he has settled into a soft, steady weep, and I hear sighs instead of groans. I should probably be glad he can cry. Haven’t I been waiting for him to show some genuine emotion?
Now the two of us, along with everyone else in that room, have a name and a face to go with our fears and our grief. Ronnie, what an innocuous-looking fiend. I wonder what Joseph Kalendar looked like. I could Google him on my nephew’s computer, but for some reason I feel reluctant to break into Mark’s privacy like that. Of course the police felt no such compunction, and they searched his hard disk and his e-mail for clues to what might have happened to him. Since Philip says they returned it without comment, I assume they found nothing relevant.
Which means they ignored the e-mails Mark sent me. If this adventure of his made him feel as though he were inside one of my books, it couldn’t be a conventional mystery about a murderer and an empty house. It had to be something about the house itself, and something that was happening to him there. Something he was undergoing. This “something” both frightened and excited him in a way mere sleuthing could never do. What J
imbo tells me confirms this. Mark’s paper bag traveled from the second floor of Kalendar’s house to the ground floor through a series of secret corridors between the walls. Earlier, the photo album had traveled from the kitchen to a space hidden behind a panel in an upstairs closet. I don’t see how you can avoid the conclusion that someone else was in the house with him.
Gardens at
Impossible
Distances
PART FIVE
20
In the heat beneath the stairs, sweat drizzled from his hairline to his eyebrows. For a moment his vision blurred. Through a blanket of humidity, an indistinct hand groped forward in shadows toward a fuzzy shape that two seconds before had been a paper bag. Mark wiped his eyes. The fuzzy shape once again became that of a bag. Even before his fingers closed around its top, he knew it was the bag he had left in the closet upstairs.
He lifted it, and the hammer and the crowbar clunked together. Mark thumped the bag onto the floor. His stomach felt taut, and his eyes hurt. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t be here.” He unrolled the top and thrust his hand deep inside. The crowbar fell against his wrist, and the hammer tilted into the side of the bag. Here was the album’s quilted plastic binding, taking up most of the interior. Behind the album, his sandwich wilted in its smooth container.
Mark’s mouth was dry. The little space behind the closet had shrunk around him, crushing him down. Awkwardly, he slid open the panel leading into the closet, trained the light on the inner side of the door, worked the latch, and pushed his way outside. He was sweating furiously.
At the bottom of the staircase, Mark took everything out of the bag and arranged its contents in front of him. The air was a mild gray, brightened by ambient window light to a dusty glow that illuminated the grime on his hands and the dark, embedded layer of grit on the cover of the album.
“How did you . . .”
Mark glanced to both sides, then up the length of the staircase.
Smoky, insubstantial walls: he felt all at once that altogether another world lay on the other side of these vaguenesses, and if he but pushed through the veils of gauze, he could reach that new and infinitely more desirable realm.
“Hello!”
Only silence answered.
“Is anyone here?”
No voice, no footfalls responded.
“I know you’re here,” he called in a carrying voice. “Show yourself!”
His heart thudded. While he was in the basement, someone had slipped out of hiding—this house offered a great many hiding places—gone to the master bedroom, picked up the laden bag, and with it moved through the house on either the visible staircase or a hidden one to the ground floor, where this someone worked the catch on the wooden safe, deposited in it the paper bag, closed the box back up, and thereafter disappeared back into the secret parts of the house. Yesterday, the same person had taken the photo album back to the upstairs closet.
It came to him that everything about the house had changed—changed without transition—and he had only just now registered the difference, which was enormous.
The monstrous snout-being that wished to frighten him away was not interested in playing games. That creature wanted to scare him off, so that it could rejoice in the poisoned atmosphere that it had created. Someone else, someone quick and stealthy as a panther, had shifted the bag from one closet to another. During every moment of Mark’s progress through the house’s hidden passages, this being had been aware of his exact location. Mark might as well have been blowing a bugle as he worked his way through the house.
Because most of what he knew about this silent someone else was simply that it was present in the house, he thought of it as “the Presence.” Of course, Mark reminded himself, that the bag and its contents had been moved was all the proof he had of the Presence’s existence. That seemed proof enough. The Presence had shifted Mark’s things, believing that he would find them in their new hiding place, which meant oho o me-o my-o that it wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.
The chill that had moved across his skin receded, and he became aware of the heat of his T-shirt sticking to his skin. Dust swirled in the dim light from the window. The sheets draped over the chairs and the sofa seemed to stir. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again, they hung still as shrouds. A white blur moved across the periphery of his vision. When he turned to look at it, it was gone.
Not long before dusk, the boys sat huddled together on the bench nearest the Sherman Park fountain, conversing intently under the eye of a police officer named Quentin Jester. Patrolman Jester strained to overhear the boys’ conversation. The few words he caught were not helpful, nor did they alleviate his boredom, which had returned to him after banishment by a brief and unsettling incident. Along with four strategically placed policemen, plus a homeless man pushing a grocery cart full of empty bottles down a path, the boys were alone in the park.
What Patrolman Jester failed to mention in his report, or at any other opportunity (except for that presented by his fellow officer and academy classmate Louis Easley at the House of Ko-Reck-Shun), was that shortly before the homeless man entered the scene from the east, and first one boy, the red-haired one, then the other, Mark Underhill, entered from the north, a fourth stranger had excited his professional attention not only by his great size and unusual clothing but for another matter as well, one more difficult to put into words. “He looked like back in the day, he could have played some college ball,” Jester said. “One thing about this dude, he had some serious size on him. But he never played no ball. He never played anything. This guy never played, period, unless it was with a couple of cut-off heads. I got this feeling, like ‘We got trouble here,’ okay?”
Patrolman Jester explained that he had at no point seen the man’s face. And although he had spent the previous hour and a half monitoring the movements of the few people who entered and left his assigned area of Sherman Park, Jester had failed to observe this gigantic man’s appearance until, without any of the usual signals of arrival, the dude had simply come into being in front of him, straight out of nowhere, his back turned to the startled officer. Jester had been following the progress across the grass of a particularly fat and lively squirrel, a squirrel undaunted by the heat that had enervated most of his kind, and upon swinging his gaze back to the broad path and its empty benches, he’d discovered the presence of this massive character, decked out in a long black coat that dropped well past his knees. Huge legs, planted far apart; heavy black boots; massive head held high; and arms folded in front of him. He might have been carved out of half a ton of black marble.
“How could a water buffalo like that sneak up on you?” asked Patrolman Easley.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Jester told his friend. “All I knew was, this man is there, and he is my problem. Because you know he is a problem.”
“You and me, we haven’t been out of the academy long enough to be able to smell the bad guys.”
“You’d know what I’m talking about if you were there. He’s one bad mother, is what I’m saying, and there he is in front of me, and I have to deal with him.”
Louis Easley raised both his eyebrows and his beer glass, but he did not drink. “So this is our man? Mr. Sherman Park himself, in person?”
“That’s what was going through my mind. I move up on him so I can at least get a look at his face. This rumbling noise is coming toward me from the boulevard entrance, and I look that way, and this red-haired kid is pumping along on a skateboard. When I look back, the big dude is gone. Gone, man. Like he fell straight down through a trap door.”
“You, you’re some kind of police officer,” Easley told him.
“You wouldn’t be laughing, you saw him, too,” Jester said.
A few seconds after Jimbo rolled to the bench and jumped off his board, the policeman who’d been standing on the other side of the walkway gave him a funny look and said, “Buddy, while you were coming up this path, did you happen to notice a man stand
ing right over here in this position?”
“I didn’t see anyone but you,” Jimbo said.
“You had a good view of this area.”
“I guess.”
“Where was I standing when you first saw me?”
“Over there.” Jimbo pointed to a spot on the edge of the walkway four feet south of the fountain. It was just about where another officer had shown him and Mark the photograph of Shane Auslander.
“And when I was over there, no one was over here?”
“Not until you got here.”
“Thank you,” said Officer Jester, retreating.
These guys are losing their minds, Jimbo said to himself.
When he first caught sight of Mark moving empty-handed from the bright sun of Sherman Boulevard into the wavering shade cast by tall lindens on the wide flags of the walkway, he felt a twinge of loss. This time, he had brought his skateboard and Mark had not, which was, he found, worse than the recognition that both of them had left their boards at home. It made him for a moment feel as though Mark had set off on a journey that left him waving from the dock. Mark drew closer, and the urgent expression on his face reminded Jimbo that he, too, had something incredible to announce, although he was not so sure he actually wanted to tell Mark what Mr. Hillyard had revealed to him.
Mark suffered from no such scruple. His eyes blazing, he could barely restrain himself from running. Jimbo saw him take in the skateboard and on the spot dismiss it as an irrelevance. The swift, deepening ache this brought Jimbo almost immediately dwindled in the intensity of Mark’s eager slide down onto the bench and the swooping tilt of his shieldlike face toward Jimbo’s. He was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, and his face had a scrubbed, gleaming look. He smelled faintly of soap.