by Peter Straub
“How’s Lucy Cleveland?” Jimbo asked, unable to keep from sounding sarcastic. But even as he registered his lack of belief in that invisible young woman, he felt jealousy moving through his system. Jimbo would have done anything to know that bliss, to have earned that spectacular exhaustion.
“Lucy Cleveland is extraordinary. Are you going to let me in?”
Jimbo backed away, and Mark entered. Margo Monaghan was out shopping for groceries, so the boys went into the living room, where Mark fell onto the sofa. He drew up his knees and curled around them as comfortably as a cat.
“Was this the last time you saw him?” I asked Jimbo.
He nodded.
“What kind of mood did he seem to be in? Besides happy, I mean. Was there anything more?”
“Yeah. I thought he looked kind of . . . I don’t know what the word is. Like he couldn’t make up his mind about what he was going to do next. ‘So how do you feel?’ I asked him.
“‘Tired, but happy.’ He uncurled and stretched out. He said, ‘You’d think I’d be able to sleep at night, but when I get on the bed all I can do is think about her, and I get so excited it’s impossible to fall asleep.’ Then he stared up at the ceiling for a little while. Then he said, ‘I have to think about something. I came here to think, but I can’t really talk about it.’
“I said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and he said that Lucy Cleveland had asked him to do something.”
Mark refused to tell Jimbo what Lucy wanted him to do but he had—as do I—the feeling that it would have been on her behalf. According to Jimbo, he refused to say any more, except that he was thinking about the choice she had given him. Jimbo wondered if he was deliberating whether or not to tell him the truth, that he had invented Lucy Cleveland to impress his friend. But when Mark spoke, it was to another purpose entirely.
He chuckled, and Jimbo said, “Yo, is something funny?”
“I was just remembering something,” Mark said.
“This better be good.”
“When I was sitting in the living room over there, waiting for her to show herself—and I didn’t know anything about her then, I didn’t even know her name. Back then, she was just the Presence. All I knew was, she was in the house with me, and I knew she was getting closer. I’m sitting on the bottom of the staircase, and all my stupid shit is laid out in front of me. The hammer, the flashlight, that stuff. And I began to smell something really good.”
Mark sensed, knew, understood that the sudden arrival of this delicious odor meant that the presence in the house was on the verge of showing herself to him.
Mark went on: “I just couldn’t believe that I didn’t recognize the smell. It was completely familiar, like almost an everyday smell, but really, really good. I heard a footstep behind the closet door, so she had come down those hidden stairs and was about to walk out through the closet. The next thing I heard was the panel opening up and her taking two steps to the closet door.
“And that’s when I remembered what that smell was—when she opened the closet door and came out. You won’t believe what it was. Chocolate-chip cookies! When they’re still in the oven, but almost done. Bubbling up and already that nice brown color.”
To Jimbo, this was a sure sign that Mark had lost his mind. A beautiful woman who smelled like chocolate-chip cookies? How ridiculous could you get?
No, Mark told him, Lucy Cleveland didn’t smell like chocolate-chip cookies. Lucy Cleveland smelled sort of like sunlight and fresh grass and fresh bread, things like that, if she smelled like anything. The odor was an announcement, it was like a trumpet fanfare. It meant she was here, she was ready to enter.
Jimbo could only goggle at him.
Mark pushed himself off the sofa and said his father never noticed he wasn’t coming home at night. Philip had stopped attending to his curfew. Actually, he had stopped attending to Mark, and the two of them moved around the house like distant planets, connected by only the vestiges of gravity.
Jimbo asked him where he was going now, and if he wanted company.
No, Mark told him. He was just going out, so he would be able to think a little more. Being able to walk around might help.
Sometime between 7:15 and 7:30 Patrolman Jester observed my nephew seated on one of the benches lining the pathway to the fountain. He appeared to be working out some problem or decision; his lips were moving, though Patrolman Jester had no particular interest in what Mark was saying to himself. In any case, he could not hear it.
By the time Jimbo Monaghan had reached the point in his story where Mark was moving down the walk and waving good-bye, he looked barely capable of going on. He slumped into the back of the sofa like a leaky sack of grain.
“What do you think happened to him after that?” Tim asked.
The boy’s eyes found his, flicked away. “Everybody knows what happened to Mark. He walked into Sherman Park, and the Sherman Park Killer, or the Dark Man, or whatever you call him, grabbed him. Mark wasn’t even thinking about his own safety. But don’t ask me what he was thinking about, because I couldn’t tell you. He was in his own little world.” Again the watery red eyes met Tim’s. “I think that terrible house screwed him up, if you care about what I think. It got to him, right from the start. It changed him.”
“What about Lucy Cleveland?”
“There was no Lucy Cleveland,” Jimbo said. He seemed amazingly weary. “A gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl hides out in an empty house and lets a fifteen-year-old boy have sex with her all day long? A gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl that nobody else can see? Yeah, that happens all the time. In books, maybe.”
“Exactly,” Tim said.
Skip poised at the top of the front steps, gazing at Tim while trembling with what looked like the desire to attack. Then it occurred to Tim that the dog was not baring its teeth or snarling, standard behavior for dogs in attack mode. It was trembling with old age, not aggression. The dog was probably cold all the time. Probably Skip spent the whole day on the same few feet of porch because that was where the sunlight fell. Tim extended a hand, and Skip permitted his head to be scratched.
“That poor old animal’s so arthritic he doesn’t move much anymore. Spends all day sacked out in that one spot of sunlight.”
Tim had not heard the front door open. He looked up to see Omar Hillyard gazing at him through the screen door.
“Sort of like me,” Hillyard said. “You decided to come back, I see.”
“Yes,” Tim said. “I hope you don’t mind.” He stepped up beside the dog. Leaning on his cane, Mr. Hillyard opened the screen door, awkwardly. “Just walk around Skip and come on in. He’ll move back to his spot, but it’ll take him a little while.”
Tim took another step, and Skip either moaned or sighed. Tim looked down at the old dog. When Skip got his front end pointed toward his favorite place, his stiff legs began to carry him toward it.
“He makes a splendid noise when he collapses into the sunlight,” Hillyard said.
Together, they watched Skip hobble across the porch. The old dog moved like a clumsy piece of machinery that had been assembled by someone who had failed to read the manual. He reached the little square of sunlight and fell into it, all at once, and landed with an audible thump. He made a sound of pure contentment, like humming, deep in his chest.
“Know just how he feels,” Hillyard said.
He moved back, and Tim walked through the front door into the living room, which bore a generic resemblance to Philip’s, except that the furniture was cleaner and not so old. Stumping in behind him, Hillyard waved toward a brown love seat covered in threadbare corduroy. “That one’s still pretty comfortable. Me, if I sit over here, I can lean my crutch on the footstool, makes it easier to get up.”
He parked himself in a high-backed armchair and propped the cane beside him.
On both sides of the room, framed photographs and drawings of young men, most of them nude, looked out from the walls. Two facing drawings depicted young men in a state of arousal.
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“I don’t believe I told you this, but the boy on the left is me,” Hillyard said. “Back in 1946, right after I got out of the army. The other one is my lover, George Olander. He was the artist. George and I bought this house in 1955, when people still used the term ‘bachelor.’ We said we were roomies, and nobody bothered us. George died in 1983, exactly twenty years ago. At first your friend Sancho was thrown off course by these pictures, but he decided not to think about it, and pretty soon he was all right.”
“He came over to ask about Joseph Kalendar.”
“Like you. Actually, he came about the house, but pretty soon that brought us to Joseph Kalendar. I’ve got some iced tea in the kitchen, if you’d care for any.”
“No, thanks.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m inhospitable. Truth is, I’m out of practice. For obvious reasons, George and I never had the neighbors in, and I have continued the tradition. Fact is, I went out of my way to discourage visitors. Then I fell down and hurt myself. But am I supposed to take down all my pictures just because the Monaghan boy comes over here?”
“How are you now?”
“Improving. Nothing broke, thank God. Just busted off a few chips, that’s all.”
Tim’s love seat gave him a perfect view across the street to the Kalendar house. “I didn’t ask you earlier if you ever saw the boys going to that house. It seems they were obsessed with it, my nephew especially.”
“I saw it all,” Hillyard said. “Either from exactly where you are now, or through my kitchen window. I saw your nephew and his friend stare at that place hour after hour. You could always hear them coming, because of their skateboards. I saw them come over here one night and shine a light on the window. Sancho saw something that knocked him flat on his rear end.”
“He told me about that,” Tim said.
“I always wondered if maybe what he saw was the other fellow.”
“Ah,” Tim said, feeling something hitherto unknown slide into a place exactly its size and shape. “The other fellow. They called him the Dark Man. My nephew told Jimbo he was something like a ghost.”
“Not unless ghosts are flesh and blood. Man looked kind of like Joseph Kalendar, except he wasn’t quite so huge. He dressed like Kalendar, too. Long black coat.”
“You saw this man? What did he do?”
“He came around at night. Just like the boys, he went to the back of the house and let himself in. I only saw him a couple of times. Even then, I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t just dreaming.”
“Did you tell Jimbo about this man?”
Hillyard shook his head, looking both fussy and bloated with self-importance. “Didn’t think it was any of his business. Besides, I couldn’t be certain I really did see that guy. It was pretty dark out there, and the shadows have a habit of moving around. Anyhow, the boy only wanted to hear about Mr. Kalendar, and I gave him an earful, but there’s as much of what I didn’t tell him as of what I did.”
“Because you didn’t think it was any of his business.”
“And one more thing.” He smirked at Tim. “He didn’t ask me the right questions.”
“Are you willing to tell me what you didn’t say to Jimbo?”
“If you ask the right questions.”
Tim looked at him in exasperation. “I’ll try. To start with, why don’t you fill me in on what you did tell Jimbo?”
“It was pretty much what I told you, the first time you came here. The man was a psycho killer of the first water,” Hillyard said. “Joseph Kalendar did away with his whole family, and God knows how many women besides. Turned his house into a kind of torture chamber. Brought his own son along with him when he went out raping and murdering, and later on he even murdered the boy! A lunatic, pure and simple. Not that we should have been surprised, mind you. Wouldn’t you say there was something wrong with a man that never wants to show his face?”
Tim thought of the snapshots Jimbo had described to him. “Never? Not just in photographs?”
“The man was extremely uncomfortable showing his face. That’s why he eventually grew that big, thick beard. When he lived around here, Kalendar wore a hat, and he turned up the collar of that coat he was always wearing. Sometimes, he went so far as to hold his hands in front of his face. He was always turning his back on you.”
“Did you have much contact with him?”
“Oh, now you’re asking better questions. Yes, I did, a bit. The man was a good carpenter, after all. When George and I needed some new shelves, we called Mr. Kalendar, and he did a beautiful job. So a few years later, when we found dry rot in some of the timbers and floorboards, we went back to him. Kalendar gave us a good price and replaced all the wood in short order.”
“From what I’ve been hearing,” Tim said, “he must have been a great carpenter. I guess you must have liked him, since you hired him twice.”
“Liked him?” Omar Hillyard scowled. “No one can say I liked Mr. Joseph Kalendar.”
“But he spent a lot of time in your house.”
“His prices were low, and the man lived across the street. Otherwise, we would never have spoken to him, much less had him in our house.”
“Ah.” Tim gestured toward the drawings and paintings on the walls. “He objected to your situation.”
“He hated our situation. The man had religious objections to homosexuality, and no doubt other objections as well. But after he let us know what he thought, and said he was going to pray for us, it wasn’t much of a problem anymore. The problem was him. The problem was what he did.”
“Like what?”
“Joseph Kalendar made rooms feel smaller and darker than they were. He had that power. Just by being there. He removed all the extra air from wherever he was. When you were with him, you felt like you were carrying a tremendous weight. Of what, I can hardly say. Hostility. It was like a black cloud surrounded him. When you were with him, it surrounded you, too. You felt all that stifled anger and hostility and depression even when he was telling you that he would pray for you. I’ve often thought that’s what evil feels like. That the evil in him poisoned the atmosphere and made it awful to be around him.”
“I’ve heard of people like that,” Tim said. “But only in psychoanalytic case histories.”
“Of course you don’t feel it right away. At first, Kalendar seemed like an ordinary, taciturn sort of working man. You had to let him get entangled a bit with you before you got the full effect.”
“Imagine being in the family of a person like that,” Tim said.
“That’s why his wife’s disappearance never aroused much suspicion. We all thought she ran off to get away from him. And the boy wouldn’t have gone with her. He was Kalendar’s assistant in the carpentry business ever since he was old enough to pick up a hammer. Dropped out of school. Completely loyal to his father. That’s why Kalendar wound up taking him along on his excursions. Naturally, after Myra took off they could bring the bodies home, dispose of them in the furnace. That’s where they found what was left of the boy—in the furnace.”
“And here you were,” Tim said. “Living right across the street from him. Didn’t anything ever strike you as funny? Were you even suspicious? Even if you wouldn’t have gone to the police with your suspicions, didn’t you have some?”
“Kalendar struck me as funny,” Hillyard said. “Are you kid-ding? After I knew he was crazy, everything he did seemed wrong to me.”
“You must have been here when he saved the two children from next door.”
“You did some homework, didn’t you? But it wasn’t next door to here, it was 3325, the house just up the street from him. A black family named Watkins lived in that house.”
“Did you see any of what happened?”
“Saw it all, more or less.”
“Just out of curiosity, did this happen before or after he added the strange extra room to his house and built that wall to hide it?”
“That’s a very good question,” Hillyard said. “He rescued th
e Watkins family only two days before he started working on that big wall at the back of his property. He must have added the room after he finished the wall.”
“How did you know about the extra room if you’ve never been in the house?”
Hillyard bristled.
“I mow the lawn over there once every couple of months, don’t I? Well, I used to, before I got laid up like this, and I’ll be doing it again, I can tell you that.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”
“What could you have implied?”
“Nothing,” Tim said, taken aback. “I don’t know. I just meant, I seemed to have annoyed you with an innocent question.” It occurred to him that Hillyard might have been one of the people who tried to burn down Kalendar’s house.
“George used to tell me I sometimes got touchy for no good reason, and I’m probably worse now than I was then. We were talking about Kalendar and the fire. Tell me, Mr. Underhill. You’re a writer. Doesn’t that episode strike you as a little out of character for the man I just described?”
“Wouldn’t a very religious man feel it his duty to rescue people from a burning building?”
“Kalendar hated the blacks,” Hillyard said. “He didn’t even think they were people. I had the feeling he’d have been just as happy if the whole Watkins family had burned to a crisp.”
“My brother told me he kept running back in, he was so determined to save them.”
Hillyard gazed at him, looking superior and self-satisfied, like a cat with a bird in its mouth. “Suppose I tell you what happened, and then see what you think.”
“All right,” Tim said.
“Kalendar was in his backyard when the fire broke out. The flames were mainly at the back of the house, and he had to run around and break down the front door. The whole thing fell down flat. In he charged. Even from my porch, I could hear him yelling, but I couldn’t make out the words. In two or three minutes, a long time in a burning house, he came out, carrying one of the Watkins children and holding the other one by the hand. The kids were screaming and wailing. He sure looked like a hero to me, and I couldn’t stand the sight of the man.