If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  “I think it came out the first second I showed up in Arden.”

  Polar Bears shook his head, disgusted. “Okay. Let’s forget it. I told that Hank kid to forget about it. He’s probably too young to know about it anyhow.”

  “So why are you upset?”

  “Forget about my problems, Miles. Let’s see if we can get any work done. You learn anything talking with Paul Kant?”

  “He didn’t do anything. He certainly didn’t kill anybody. He’s a sad frightened man. He isn’t capable of anything like these killings. He’s too scared to do anything but shop for his groceries.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “He’s too frightened even to bury his dog. I saw it just when I was leaving. He couldn’t kill anybody.”

  Polar Bears tilted his hat back and hunched down further on the seat. He was too big to fit comfortably behind a steering wheel. By now we were well out in the country, and I could see the broad loops of the Blundell River between trees. “Is this where the fishermen found the body of the Olson girl?”

  He tilted his head and looked at me. “No. That was a couple miles back. We passed the spot about five-six minutes ago.”

  “On purpose?”

  “On purpose for what?”

  I shrugged: we both knew.

  “I think our friend Paul might not have told you all the truth,” Polar Bears said. “If he was going out grocery shopping, wouldn’t he manage to buy some dog food?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Did he offer you anything when you were visiting? Lunch? A sandwich? Coffee?”

  “No. Why?” Then I saw why. “You mean he doesn’t leave his house? You mean his dog starved to death?”

  “Well, it might of starved, or somebody might of helped put it out of its misery. I don’t know. But I do know Paul Kant hasn’t been out of his house in about a week. Unless he sneaks out at night.”

  “What does he eat?”

  “Damn little. I guess he must have some canned stuff in his kitchen. That’s why you didn’t get any lunch out of him. He’s screwed down pretty tight.”

  “Well, how the hell can you—”

  He held up one hand. “I can’t make a man go out and buy groceries. And as long as he doesn’t actually starve, it might be better this way. Keeps him away from trouble. You maybe saw one of our local vigilantes watching his house.”

  “Can’t you chase them away?”

  “Why should I? This way I know what the hotheads are doing. I think there are some things you ought to know about Paul, Miles. I doubt that he’d tell you everything himself.”

  “Everything he needed to.”

  Polar Bears swung the car into a crossroads and began to go back in the general direction of Arden. We had gone nearly as far as the little town of Blundell, and we had not seen another person yet. The police radio crackled, but Hovre ignored it. He drove still at the same unhurried pace, following the line of the river through the valleys. “I wonder about that. You see, Paul’s had a few problems. Not the sort of thing a man is proud of. He’s been in a little trouble. You know how he lived in that rundown old place with his mother for years—even dropped out of school to nurse her and work so he could pay her doctor bills. Well, when the old lady died, Paul hung around town for a little bit, sort of lost, I guess, but then he packed up and went to Minneapolis for a week. About a month later, he did the same thing. He sort of settled down into a pattern. The last time he went, I got a call from a police sergeant over there. It seems that they had Paul under arrest. It seems they’d even been looking for him.” He glanced over at me, savoring the denouement. He couldn’t keep from smiling. “Seems they had a character used to hang around Boy Scout meetings—in summer, you know, when they meet in school playgrounds. Never said anything, just watched through the fence. When some of the kids walked home, he’d sort of amble on behind ’em, not saying anything, just trolling after these kids. After a fair number of times, say half a dozen, one of the parents calls the police. And the guy ducks out of the way—police couldn’t find him. Not then. Not until he tried something in a park with lots of mommies and kiddies and cops around. He damn near exposed himself. When they came up on him, it was old Paul, with his hand on his fly. He was their boy. He’d been going over to Minnesota to release his urges, you could say, and then coming back here until he had to do it again. He confessed, of course, but he hadn’t actually done anything. But he was scared. He committed himself voluntarily to our state hospital and stayed put there seven months. Then he came back. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. Now I suppose he forgot to tell you about that little episode in his life.”

  I just nodded. Eventually I thought of something to say. “I’ll have to take your word that what you told me is correct.” Hovre snorted with amusement. “But even so, what Paul did—what he didn’t do, rather—is a million miles from rape. The same person wouldn’t commit both kinds of crime. Not if I understand people at all.”

  “Maybe so. But nobody around Arden is going to rule it out, you understand? And there are things about these killings that people generally don’t know. What we have here isn’t a straightforward rapist. Even a rapist who kills. We got something a little fancier. We got a really sick man. Could be impotent. Could even be a woman. Or a man and a woman. I go for the single man idea, but the others are possible.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  We were back on the fringes of Arden now, and Polar Bears was homing in toward the Nash as if he knew where it was.

  “I got a theory about this boy of ours, Miles. I think he wants to come to me, he wants to talk about what he’s been doing. He’s got all that pressure, all that guilt building up inside of him. He’s bursting a gut to tell me about it. Wouldn’t you say?”

  I didn’t know, and told him so.

  “Just consider it. Sick as he is, he’s a mighty lonely man. He probably doesn’t even enjoy what he’s doing to these girls. But he knows he’s going to do it again.” Polar Bears looked at me; he was smiling and confidential and helpful. “There’s a big head of steam in our boy. He’s got to blow it off, but he knows it’s wrong—sick. I’m the one he has to talk to, and he knows it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s someone I see now and then, someone who’s around here and there, ready to share a few words. I might have seen him two or three times this week alone.” He pulled up to a stop sign; across the road and down the block sat the Nash. I wouldn’t have known how to find it. “Well, speaking of luck, Miles, isn’t that Nash the loaner Hank gave you?”

  “Yes. What are you going to do about the men who wrecked my car?”

  “I’m looking into it, Miles. Looking into it.” He rolled across the street and pulled up beside the old Nash.

  “Are you going to explain what you said about the killer? About his not being a straightforward rapist?”

  “Sure. Why don’t you come over to my house for a bite to eat some night this week? I’ll tell you all about it.” He reached across me and opened the door. “My cooking won’t kill you, I guess. I’ll be in touch, Miles. Keep your eyes open. Remember, you can always call me.”

  —

  His flat ingratiating voice stayed in my ears all the way home. It was almost hypnotic, like having your will taken from you. When I got out of the car at the farmhouse I was still hearing it, and I could not shake it even while I was pushing furniture around. I felt slightly engulfed by Polar Bears, and I knew the furniture would not come right, lock into the correct position, until I was free of him. I went upstairs and sat at my desk and looked into the two photographs. Eventually everything else went away, and I was left with Alison. Dimly, far away, the phone was ringing.

  And the third time it happened like this:

  A girl walked out of her home in the late afternoon and stood in the humid motionless air for a moment, wondering if it were not too hot to go bowling with her friends. Perspiration seemed to leap from her scalp. She remembered that she had left her sunglasse
s in her room, but she could not waste the energy to go back in and get them. She could feel her body sagging in the heat: and the pollen count was up nearly to 200. She would be sneezing by the time she got to the Bowl-A-Rama.

  Maybe it would be better to simply stay in her bedroom and read. She was small for her age, and her pretty face had a piquant, passive cast which looked utterly at home in front of a book. She wanted to be a teacher, an English teacher. The girl looked back across the brown lawn to her house, and sunlight bounced off the plateglass window. There was not a shadow in sight. She sneezed. Her white blouse already adhered to her skin.

  She turned away from the glare of the sun off the picture window and went toward town. She was following the direction she had seen Chief Hovre’s car travel, two or three hours earlier. Girls in Arden did not like going anywhere alone since the death of Jenny Strand: friends waited at the bowling alley. But surely in the daytime one was safe. Galen Hovre, she thought, was not intelligent enough to catch the killer of Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand: unless the big man she had seen sitting beside the sheriff was the murderer.

  She idled along looking at the ground, her thin arms swinging. She admitted to herself that she disliked bowling, and did it only because everyone else did.

  She never saw what grabbed her—there was only an awareness of a shape coming swiftly out of an alley, and then she was slammed against a wall and the fear was too bright in her mind for her to speak or cry out. The force with which she had been lifted and moved seemed scarcely human: what had touched her, what was bearing down on her, scarcely seemed the flesh of a fellow creature. Surrounding her was the pungent smell of earth, as if she were already in her grave.

  SEVEN

  My arms and legs could not move. Yet in another dimension, they were moving, not lying still on the floor of my workroom but taking me toward the woods. I witnessed both processes impartially, both the internal (walking into the woods) and the external (lying on the workroom floor), thinking that the only previous time such an experience had been given to me was when I had burst open the sea chest and looked at the photograph she had directed to be put on my desk. The air was sweet, perfumy, both in and out. The lights had all gone out and the fields were dark. At some point in the immeasurable, unreckonable amount of time since I had stood up to see why the mare was terrified, night had come. I was walking across the dark field toward the cottonwood trees; I parted thick weeds, I walked out onto a grassy root-hump and jumped easily across the creek. My body was light, a dream-body. There was no need to run. I could hear the telephone, owls, crickets. The night air was soft, so sweet it seemed liable to catch in the trees, like fog.

  I passed easily beyond the next area of fields and entered the woods. Birches gleamed like girls. Who had turned the lights out? My right index finger registered the sensation of polished boards, but it was touching a ghostly maple. Leaving it behind, I walked on a mulch of leaves. The gradient began to change. A deer plunged deeper into the woods somewhere to my right, and I turned in that direction. Uphill. Through trees closer and closer, high life-breathing oaks with bark like rivers. I touched the flank of a dead maple, down across my path like the corpse of a soldier, and lifted myself with my arms so that I sat on it and then swung my legs over and let myself fall onto the springy floor again. My knees absorbed the shock. There was still the light problem, but I knew where I was going.

  It was a clearing. A clearing perhaps sixteen feet across, ringed with giant oaks, the ashes of a fire at its center. She was there, waiting for me.

  Magically, I knew how to get there: all I had to do was drift and I would be taken, my feet would guide me.

  When the trees approached too near, I shoved them aside with my hand. Twigs caught in my jacket and hair, pulling at me as a thorny weed had captured my foot outside the Dream House. Leaves stirred in the thick perfumy air. Where my feet had been were sucking black holes. On the perpendicular sides of trees hung glistening mushrooms, white and red. I waded through ferns as high as my waist, holding my arms as if they cradled a rifle.

  There was a darkening of the spirit. Going closer to where I had to go, I saw the edges of starlight on the bark rills and began to be afraid. When I passed through a gap, it seemed to close behind me. The breathing life of the forest expressed an immensity of force. Even the air grew tight. I climbed over a lightning-blasted trunk. Living stuff coiled around my boots, golden roots proliferated over them. I stepped on a mushroom the size of a sheep’s head and felt it become jelly beneath my weight.

  The rough hand of a tree brushed my face. I felt my skin tear along my jaw, and crack like a porcelain cup. Branches closed over my head. The only light leading me was from leaves and ferns themselves, the light plants produce like oxygen. Another tree clicked into place behind me, blocking the way back. I went to my knees. By scraping along the soft damp forest floor, I got beneath the lowest branch of the sentinel tree. My fingers touched grass and stones; I pulled myself into the clearing.

  When I stood, my shirt was green with moss. The bandage was gone from my left hand. I could feel snapped twigs and dried, crumbling leaves in my hair. I tried to brush them away, off, but my hands could not move, my arms could not lift.

  The trees jostled and whispered behind me. The blackness was edged and pierced by a thousand sharp silvery lights on leaf edge and the curve of tendrils. The clearing was a dark circle with a darker circle at its center. I could move, and went forward. I touched the ashes. They were warm. I smelled woodsmoke, and it was heavy and sweet. The dense forest behind and before me seemed to grow taut. I froze beside the warm ashes, bent forward over my knees and in total silence.

  What will happen after she comes back? Rinn had asked me, and I felt a terror deeper than that of the first time in the woods. A high rustling whistling noise was coming toward me from where the leaf light was strongest, a whispery sound of movement. My skin felt icy. The sound dragged toward me.

  Then I saw her.

  She was across the clearing, framed between two black birches. She was unchanged. If anything had touched my thin layer of cold skin, I would have cracked open, I would have shattered into a heap of white cold fragments. She began to move forward, her motion slow, unstoppable.

  I called her name.

  As she drew nearer the noise increased—that high whispery whistling scratched in my ears. Her mouth was open. I saw that her teeth were water-polished stones. Her face was an intricate pattern of leaves; her hands were rilled wood, tipped with thorns. She was made of bark and leaves.

  I threw my hands back and felt smooth wood. Air lay in my lungs like water. I realized I was screaming only when I heard it.

  —

  “His eyes are open,” a voice said. I was looking at the open window above my desk, the curtains blowing and small papers lifting in the warm breeze. It was day. The air was its normal weight, unperfumed. “His eyes are wide open.”

  Another voice said, “Are you awake, Miles? Can you hear?”

  I tried to speak, and a rush of sour fluid poured from my mouth.

  The woman said, “He’ll live. Thanks to you.”

  —

  I sat up suddenly. I was in bed. It was still daytime. The telephone was ringing downstairs. “Don’t worry about it,” someone said. I turned to look; beside the door, her pale eyes reflectively on mine, the Tin Woodsman was closing a book. It was one I had given Zack. “That phone’s been going all night and morning, I guess. It’s Chief Hovre. He wants to talk to you about something. Was it an accident?” On the last sentence her tone changed, and her head tilted up. In her eyes I saw the fear of a complex betrayal.

  “What happened?”

  “You’re lucky you weren’t smoking. Pieces of you would probably be on top of Korte’s barn by now.”

  “What happened?”

  “Did you leave the gas on? On purpose?”

  “What? What gas?”

  “The gas in the kitchen, dummy. It was on most of the night. Mrs. Sunderson says y
ou’re alive because you’re up here. I had to break a window in the kitchen.”

  “How was it turned on?”

  “That’s the big question, all right. Mrs. Sunderson says you were trying to kill yourself. She says she should have known.”

  I rubbed my face. It was unscratched. The bandage was still on my left hand. “Pilot light,” I said.

  “Blown out. Or gone out. Both of them. Boy. You should have smelled that kitchen. So sweet.”

  “I think I smelled it up here,” I said. “I was sitting at my desk, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor. It was almost as though I left my body.”

  “Well, if you didn’t do it, it must have happened by itself.” She seemed relieved. “There’s something wrong with this house. Just when you got home two nights ago, all the lights went on, all over the house.”

  “You saw that too?”

  “Sure, I was in my bedroom. And last night, they all went off at once. My dad says the wiring never was any good in this old house.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping away from me?”

  “I said I’d leave as soon as you were all right. See, I was the one who found you. Old man Hovre phoned our house. He said you weren’t answering your phone. He said he had important news for you. My dad was asleep, so I came over myself. It was all locked up, except for the porch. So I pushed up the window in the front bedroom downstairs, and that’s when I smelled the gas. I went around to the kitchen and broke a window. To let air in. Then I held my breath and climbed in and ran into the living room and pushed up the window. A little later I came up here. You were on the floor in the other room. I pushed open the window in there too. I thought I was going to be sick.”