If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  They were both there. Alison sat with her feet in the water, looking up at me with expectant curiosity. Zack, a bisected white exclamation point in his black bathing suit, was grinning, snapping his fingers. “It’s the man,” he said. “It’s my main man.”

  “Did you shout?”

  Zack giggled. “Wowee.” Snap-snap of his fingers.

  “Did I shout? I screamed my head off!”

  “How long?”

  “A couple of minutes. Couldn’t you hear?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “You screamed as loud as you could?”

  “I’m practically hoarse,” she answered. “If I yelled any longer, I would have ripped something.”

  Zack bent his legs and sat down on the black pile of his clothing. “It’s the truth, man. She really hollered. What’s it about, anyhow? What’s your stunt?”

  “No stunt,” I said. “Just finding out about an old lie.”

  “You’re too hung up on the past, Miles.” His grin grew more intense. “Jesus, man, look at those clothes. What kind of clothes are those for a swim?”

  “I didn’t know I was going swimming.”

  “What else do you do at a quarry?”

  I sat down with my legs before me on the smooth hot lip of rock. I looked up at the bushes overhead. They would have been hidden up there, waiting to jump down. That was where they had been. I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. I could smell the water; it was Alison’s smell.

  “I haven’t been here for twenty years,” I said. “I don’t know what you do here.”

  “It’s a great place to groove on ideas,” Zack said, stretched out whitely in the sun. His ribs showed under the skin like sticks and his arms and legs were skinny and covered with thin black hair. His body looked obscene, spidery. Beneath the black strip of bathing suit lay a prominent sexual bulge. “I thought it was time we saw each other again.” He spoke like a general summoning his adjutant. “I had to thank you for the books.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. I removed my tie and dropped it and the jacket I had been carrying by my side. Then I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and unbuttoned it halfway down to let air enter.

  “Miles went to church,” Alison said from the quarry’s edge. “Old Bertilsson preached about him again.”

  “Hah hah hah!” Zack exploded with laughter. “That old fart. He oughta be making shitty little doilies, hey? He’s a feeb. I hate that sucker, man. So he thinks you’re the Masked Marauder, huh?”

  Alison asked, “Did you bring towels?”

  “Hey? Sure I brought towels. Can’t go swimming without towels. Brought three of them.” Zack rolled over on his belly and examined me. “Is that right? Am I right about him, my main man?”

  “More or less.” It was too hot for my heavy shoes, and I unlaced them and pulled them off.

  The Woodsman said, “Well, if you brought towels, I’m sure going to swim. My throat hurts from all that yelling.” She looked over her shoulder at Zack, who indulgently flipped his hand in a do-what-you-want gesture.

  “I’m gonna go skinny,” she said, and glanced at me. She still had not got over her desire to shock.

  “You can’t scare him, he’s the Masked Marauder,” said Zack.

  She stood up, displeased, leaving dark high-arched footprints on the stone, and pulled the blue shirt over her head. Her breasts lolled large and pink against her chest. She pushed her jeans down unceremoniously, revealing all of her stocky well-shaped little body.

  “If you’re the Masked Marauder, haven’t you been busy lately?” asked Zack.

  I watched Alison go padding to the edge of the quarry and stand, judging the water for a moment. She wanted to get away from us.

  “That’s not actually funny,” I said.

  She raised her arms and then used her leg muscles to spring out into the water in a clean dive. When her head broke water, she began to breaststroke across the quarry.

  “Well, what about that guy, anyhow?”

  “What guy?” For a moment my mind blurred and I thought he meant Alison Updahl.

  “The killer.” He was lying on his side, gleeful. He seemed to be supercharged with sly, flinty enthusiasm, as if secrets were bubbling inside him. His eyes, very large now, appeared to be chiefly pupil. “He kinda turns me on. He’s done something else, you know, something most people don’t know about yet.”

  “Oh?” If that were widely known, Polar Bears’ strategy was a failure.

  “Don’t you see the beauty of that? Man, that D. H. Lawrence would have. The guy who wrote those books. I been reading those books. There’s a lot in them.”

  “I don’t think Lawrence ever sympathized with sex killers.”

  “Are you sure? Are you really sure? What if a killer was on the side of life? Hey? See, I looked at that Women in Love book—I didn’t read all of it, I just read the parts you underlined. I wanted to get inside you, man.”

  “Oh, yes.” It was an appalling notion.

  “Doesn’t he talk about beetles? That some people are beetles? Who should be killed? You gotta live according to your ideas, don’t you? Take the idea of pain. Pain is a tool. Pain is a tool for release.”

  “Why don’t you stop talking and come in and swim?” Alison called from the center of the quarry. Sweat poured down my face.

  Zack’s intense black eyes focused unblinkingly on me. “Take your shirt off,” he said.

  “I guess I will,” I said, and unbuttoned it the rest of the way and dropped it on top of my jacket.

  “Don’t you think the people who are just stupid beetles should be killed? That’s why I dig this guy. He just goes out and does it.”

  We had left Lawrence a long way behind, but I wanted only to let him rant, so that he would be done earlier. “Has there been another one? Another murder?”

  “I don’t know, man, but answer me this. Why would he fuckin’ stop?”

  I nodded. Suddenly all I wanted was to be in the water, to feel the quarry’s cold water about me again.

  “Maybe my favorite part of the book was about blood brotherhood,” Zack said. “I dug that nude wrestling part between two men. You underlined almost all of that.”

  “I suppose I might have,” I said, but he had switched gears again.

  “He’s free, you see, whoever this guy is, he’s free as hell. Nobody’s gonna stop him. He’s thrown out all of the old shit holding him back. And if he thought anybody was gonna stand in his way, bang, he’d get rid of him.”

  This conversation was reminding me uneasily of my afternoon with Paul Kant; it was even worse. Where Paul Kant had been low-voiced and depressed, this skinny boy was simply shivering with conviction.

  “Like Hitler did to Roehm. Roehm was in his way, and he just smashed him with his foot. The Night of the Long Knives. Bang. Another beetle dead. You see the beauty in that?”

  “No,” I said. “There isn’t any.” I had to get away from him, and when Alison shouted to us again, I said, “It’s too hot for this. I think I’ll swim a little.”

  “You gonna skinny-dip?” His mad eyes were taunting me.

  “Why not?” I said, irritated, and shucked the rest of my clothing. Infuriatingly, Zack stood when I did, and slithered out of his skimpy black bathing suit. We dove into the water together. I felt more than saw the Woodsman watching us from the center of the pool.

  The water hit me like an electric jolt. The memories of the last time I had been in the quarry hit me too, with an even greater force, and I could see her as I had seen her then, her hands and feet flashing. Then I recognized that I was seeing not my Alison, but my cousin’s daughter, an altogether more adult female form. Underwater, I frog-kicked away, wanting to experience the rush of emotion away from the other two. It was like a clamp around my chest, and for a moment, fleeing the legs dangling in the water, I thought I would be killed by my own emotion. My heart fluttered, and I kicked away for another second and then surfaced, breathing noisily.

  Zack’s grinning fa
ce was four feet away, looking absurdly young beneath his streaming black hair. His eyes seemed to have no white at all. He said something inaudible, choked by his own pleasure.

  Then he repeated it. “This is where it happened, isn’t it, Miles?” He was exuding crazy glee.

  “What?” I said, my stomach frozen.

  “You and Alison’s aunt. Hey?” His mouth was lifted in a loose insane smile.

  I turned away and began to swim as strongly as I could toward the lip of the quarry. His voice was calling, but not to me.

  Water was thrashing behind me. Now he was calling to me. “You don’t talk, do you? You don’t talk, do you?” His voice was loud and brutal.

  Eight feet from safety I felt a hand catch my ankle. When I kicked out with my free leg, another hand grasped my calf, and then I was yanked backward and down. While two hands held my legs, other hands pushed my shoulders, and I felt a heavy body riding my back, beginning to squeeze my chest. The one on top leaned forward to wrap arms around my neck, and cushiony breasts pressed against me. I bucked underwater, but she clamped me with greater force, expelling the rest of the air from my lungs. Games, I thought, and breaststroked, thinking that my breath would outlast hers. Zack still clung to my ankles. I kicked idly, resolved not to give them the satisfaction of a struggle. Then I realized that she was close enough to the surface to raise her head and breathe, and a spurt of fear made me fight.

  I shook violently, but she forced me deeper into the tunnel of water. The hands on my legs let go, and I knew that Zack too was going up to breathe. My chest fought for air. In moments, Zack appeared before me under the water and raised his arms to my shoulders. I swung at him, but the blow was ridiculously slowed by the water. He dug his fingers into my shoulders and held me helpless, prone in the water. Astride me, the Woodsman squeezed and squeezed.

  If I had been alone with the Woodsman, I could have thrown or pulled her off, but while Zack held me and pinned my arms, I could do nothing but struggle, making my air problem worse. As I grew weaker, Zack moved in nearer and put his hands on the small of my back, pulling me down even further. I realized with shock and horror that he was erect when a fleshy club bumped my hip.

  In the next instant I breathed in a gulp of burning water, and I knew that they were going to kill me.

  Then their hands and arms fell away, the weight of Alison rolled off my back, and I was helped to the surface.

  I held to the rock edge of the quarry, coughing painfully. Water came up like vomit. Getting out of the quarry was impossible; I clung with my weak arms and my head lolled against my shoulder. After a moment I could lever myself up far enough so that my forearms were flat on the hot stone, and I bent my head to rest on them. Through half-opened eyes, not really recognizing what I saw, I noticed Zack sliding out of the water and up onto rock as easily as an eel. Then he bent down and braced himself to take the arm of the naked girl. That bastard nearly killed me and it turned him on, I thought, and an emotion half fear and half anger gave me the energy to struggle up onto the edge of stone. I lay in the sun, shivering, my skin burning where it touched the hot smooth rock.

  He sat down beside me. I saw only a spidery flank with thin black hairs streaming across white skin. “Hey, Miles. Hey, man. You okay?”

  I rolled away, onto my back. The hot stone seared me. I closed my eyes, still coughing. When I opened my eyes, they were blocking the sun, standing above me. They were black against the flat blue sky. Alison knelt to cradle my head. “Let me alone,” I said. I wriggled away. “Did you plan that?”

  “It was just fun, Miles,” he said. “We were playing.”

  “Poor old Miles, he ’most drowned,” crooned Alison, and came toward me again and pushed herself against me. I was engulfed in cool wet skin. Involuntarily, I looked at Zack. “I’m sorry, man,” he said, unself-consciously manipulating his testicles. I turned my eyes away and found myself staring at Alison’s soft heavy breasts and firm belly. “Give me a towel,” I ordered. Zack stepped away toward the pile of clothing.

  Alison brought her face closer to mine. “This is where it happened, isn’t it? You can tell Zack. You could tell him anything. That’s why he wanted to meet you here. He heard about it at Freebo’s. That’s why he knows you understand him. He wants you to be brothers. Didn’t you hear what he was saying before?”

  I fought to stand up, and after a moment she released me. Zack was coming toward me, a pink towel in one hand. The other hand held an open switchblade. I stepped backward.

  When Zack saw what must have been in my face, he tossed me the towel and said, “Hey, man. I want to help you take off the bandage. It’s not doing you any good anymore.”

  After knotting the towel around my waist, I looked at my left hand. It was caught in a soggy limp mass of gauze, a webby useless thing already half off my palm. Zack took my hand in his and before I had time to push him away, neatly sliced the mess of gauze away from my palm. Then he ripped away the tape in one quick motion.

  Above the base of my thumb was a reddish triangle of new skin, defined by a thin red line on all three sides. I gingerly touched the spot with incurling fingers. It was delicate, but it had healed. Zack threw the drowned package of tape and gauze up into the bushes. I looked at him and his eyes were crazy and gleeful. His face was very young, framed by long smooth Indian’s hair.

  “You’re my best friend,” he said. He held out his left palm, and the image of him as a thin dead-white Indian lurched into stronger focus in my mind. He stood there, skinny, his ribs thrusting beneath his skin, dripping, dangling, armored in loony radiance. His dog’s eyes filled with shining light. “I’ll prove it to you, Miles. We can be brothers.” He raised the switchblade like a scalpel and deliberately sliced his left palm. Then he dropped the blade and continued to hold his palm out toward me, inviting me to press mine against it. Alison screamed when she looked up at the sound of the knife clattering and saw blood dripping onto the flat rock.

  “Miles!” she screeched. “Go to the truck! Get the bandages! Go!”

  Zack’s face did not alter by a millimeter: he was still encased in the armor of crazy light. “You did it,” I said, still grasping the dimensions of what I had seen. “It’s you.”

  “Miles,” Alison sobbed, “run, run, please run.”

  Zack stood shining at me with dog’s eyes and loose smile. To escape the light of the smile I ran around him, around the Tin Woodsman who was rushing toward Zack, and sprinted in bare feet and flapping towel up to the black van.

  When I yanked down on the handle of the rear doors and pushed them open, something that had been wedged against one of them fell out into the dust. I looked down and saw a familiar shape just ceasing to roll. It was one of the old wide-hipped eight-ounce Coke bottles.

  —

  “What did you do that for?” she asked, still naked, the water dried by the sun from all but her darkened hair, as the paperback of She began to sink into the water of the quarry. I was conscious of Zack behind us, standing near his dropped knife on the hot stone, and I was aware of having too many reasons to be able to roll them up into a single answer. I was sending a chip of Alison into the place where she had died; I was furious with them both and with myself for not knowing how to reckon with what I suspected, the sight of the Coke bottle having brought back clearly what Polar Bears Hovre had told me; I was simply overcome with anger and disgust and throwing away something I valued was the simplest way to express that I had looked into the face of damnation. When I had crawled into the back of the van, I had seen, glittering amid the rubble of spare parts, one of the thousand-faceted doorknobs I had removed from my desk.

  “Get away from him,” Zack said. “Ally, get your ass over here.”

  “Why?”

  “Alison,” I said softly, “Zack is in trouble. I think you should keep away from him.”

  “You don’t understand him. Nobody does.”

  “Just take my advice,” I said, “please,” very aware in spite of everything of
the Maillol-like body of the naked girl I was bending toward.

  —

  That night and the next I dreamed of being back in the drifting blue horror, suspended, dead, guilty beyond the possibility of help or forgiveness. It was the quarry, the deep pitiless water of the quarry, and it was where I had let her die, the greatest sin of my life, the one before which I had been most helpless, and the greatest crime I knew. The crime for which she could not forgive me. Even in sleep I believe I wept and ground my teeth. They had been up there, and I had not been able to send them away, those murderers of both her life and mine. It was a bottomless guilt. I would be freed of it only by her return. I had twice immersed myself in the cold water of the quarry, twice I had breathed it in, and both times I had emerged alive: that too was a crime, when she had not.

  Sunday night I came miserably awake near two o’clock, smelled the air like a forest animal, and got downstairs in time to turn off the gas cocks on the stove. The recurrence seemed to prove that the cause was a simple mechanical failure, if one that could have had fatal results. What had awakened me, and therefore saved me, was the ringing of the telephone. I had once told Alison that if I got one of “those” calls at night, I would not answer it. But after twisting the handles on the stove and shoving open a window to admit the cool meadow air, I was in the perfect mood for handling Onion Breath. “Stinking skulking creeping weasel,” I pronounced into the phone, “crawling cowardly weak crippled ugly snake.” Incapable of syntax but with a good stock of adjectives, I went on until he (she) hung up. I could not then return to bed and that dominating nightmare. The kitchen was very cold; I waved newspapers to dispel the gas, and closed the window. After wrapping a blanket from the downstairs bedroom around my shoulders, I returned to the kitchen, lit a kerosene lamp and a cigarette, and combined some further elements of the Alison-environment, gin, vermouth, twist of lemon peel, ice. Her drink, with which I had been dosing myself nightly. Wrapped in the blanket, I sipped the martini and sat in one of the kitchen chairs near the telephone. I wanted another call.