by Peter Straub
“Do you hate me so much because of Alison Greening?” I ask. “Pay for what?”
“For being you.” He says this flatly, as if it is self-explanatory. “It’s all over for you, Miles. Hovre is gonna put you away. I just talked to him. Twenty-four hours at the most. If you try to run, they’ll get you.”
“You talked to Hovre? He’s going to arrest me?” I feel the beginnings of relief.
“You bet your ass.”
“Good,” I say, startling Duane. “That’s what I want.”
“Jesus man,” Duane utters softly.
“Alison Greening is coming back tonight. She’s not what she used to be—she’s something horrible. Rinn tried to warn me.” I look into Duane’s incredulous face. “And she’s the one who has been killing those girls. I thought it was Zack, but now I know it was Alison Greening.”
“Stop-saying-that-name,” Duane says.
I turn around and begin to sprint toward the house. Duane shouts behind me, and I yell back to him, “I’m going inside to call Hovre.”
He follows me inside and glares at me suspiciously as I dial the number of the police station. “Ain’t gonna do you no good,” he mutters, stumping around the kitchen. “Only thing you can do now is wait for it. Or get in that heap of yours and try to run. According to Hank you can’t do more than forty in her, though. You wouldn’t get to Blundell before Hovre caught you.” He is talking as much to himself as to me; his bowed back faces me.
I am listening to the ringing of the telephone, expecting Dave Lokken to answer; but Polar Bears’ voice comes to me instead. “Chief Hovre.”
“This is Miles.”
Duane: “Who you talkin’ to? Is that Hovre?”
“This is Miles, Polar Bears. Why aren’t you on your way out here?”
There is a baffling pause. Then he says: “Why, Miles. I just been hearing about you. Seems you couldn’t stop. I reckon your cousin Du-ane is there with you.”
“Yes. He is.”
“Fuckin’-A I am,” says Duane.
“Good. Say, we got results on that blood. It’s AB, all right. It’ll take another day to break it down further to see if it’s male or female, the lab boys say.”
“I don’t have another day.”
“Miles old friend, I’d be surprised if you had another five minutes. Isn’t Duane carrying a twelve-gauge? I told him to bring one when he went down to see you. The law can overlook some things a man might do, if he’s been pushed too far.”
“I’m asking you to save my life, Polar Bears.”
“Some might say that you’d be a whole lot safer dead, Miles.”
“Does Lokken know what you’re doing?”
I hear the wheeze of his coughing. “Dave had to go all the way to the other end of the county today. Funny thing.”
“Tell him to get out here now,” Duane says. “I can’t stand having you in the house anymore.”
“Duane says you should come now.”
“Why don’t you and Duane keep up your conversation? Sounds real fruitful to me.” He hung up.
I turn around, still holding the receiver, and see Duane looking at me with dull eyes in a flushed face. “He’s not coming, Duane. He thinks you’re going to shoot me. He wants you to do it. He sent Lokken off on a wild-goose chase so nobody will know how he arranged things.”
“You’re talking guff.”
“Did he tell you to bring a shotgun?”
“Sure. He thinks you killed those girls.”
“He’s more devious than that. He told me about Alison Greening. He told me what happened. He’d rather have me dead than in jail. If I’m dead, I’m still guilty of the killings, but I can’t talk to anybody.”
“You shut up about that,” he says, his arms swinging at his sides. “Don’t say one word about that.”
“Because you hate thinking about it. You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t rape her.”
“Huh,” Duane snorts, his face red and strained. “I didn’t come here to talk about this. I just wanted to hear you admit you put the dirtiest part of yourself into my girl. Do you think I liked beating it out of her?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes. I think you did enjoy it.”
Duane whirls and presses the palms of his hands against a kitchen cupboard, supporting his weight on his arms, as I had seen him do against the engine block of a tractor. When he turns around again he is doing his best to smile. “Now I know you’re crazy. Boy, that just says it all. Maybe I oughta kill you, like you say Hovre wants.”
“Maybe you should.” I am transfixed by his ghastly attempt at relaxation. His face is colorless now; it looks as though you could pluck gobbets off it, like clay. His personality, which I had thought as stolid and bull-like as his body, appears to be breaking up, shaking apart into its facets.
“Why did you let me come here at all?” I ask. “Why didn’t you write back to say that someone else was staying in the house? And why did you pretend to be friendly when I first came?”
He says nothing; he simply looks at me, dull and sullen anger expressed by every inch and angle of his body.
“I’m as innocent of the deaths of those girls as I was of the death of Alison Greening,” I say to him.
“Maybe that was the first warning you had,” Duane says. “I’m gonna be listening for the sound of that junker of yours, so you’d best sit tight until Hovre comes to get you.” Then a smile which appears almost genuine. “I’m gonna enjoy that.” His gray face breaks, alters, as a perception hits him. “By God, if I’d of had my shotgun here, I would have cut you in two.”
“Then Alison Greening would come for you tonight.”
“It don’t make any difference how crazy you pretend to be,” Duane says. “Not now it don’t.”
“No. Not now.”
—
When Duane left the farmhouse he said, “You know, my wife was as dumb as the others. That cow actually wanted it. She couldn’t even pretend she was better than that. She used to yammer about how dirty I got out in the fields, and I used to say the dirt on me is nothing compared to what’s in your mind. I just hoped she would give me a son.”
—
When dusk began to devour the landscape, I knew that I had approximately three hours to get where I had to go. I would have to walk. Duane would hear the car, and telephone Hovre. They did not belong where I was going. The alternative was to wait in the farmhouse and take every creak of the boards for the sign of her coming. No. If she were going to appear and spring the trap of our old vow, the Pohlson quarry, where it started, would be where it would end. I had to go back, alone, to where it had begun, to see it as it was on that night, without the Woodsman and Zack, to stand in darkness on those flat slabs of stone and breathe that air. I felt almost that if I stood on that spot again, I might go back to the beginning and reverse things: might find an echo of the living girl, and reclaim myself and her in that salvation. Duane and his furious repressions, Polar Bears and his schemes, were tiny in the light of this immense possibility. I forgot them both five minutes after Duane left the farmhouse. Starving Paul Kant had worked through the fields; so would I.
—
It took me a little more than a quarter of the time it had Paul. I simply walked along the soft verge of the highway, going in dying light where I had to go; once a rattling slat-sided truck passed me, and I veered off into a cornfield until its red taillights disappeared around a bend. I had a pervasive sense of invisibility. No clumsy hothead in a truck could stop me; no more than I could stop my cousin from asserting her claim. Fear sparkled beneath my skin; I walked quickly, scarcely aware of the gravel over which I moved; at the top of the long winding hill I touched the wood of the Community Chest sign and felt the dampness of woodrot. Lights burned in a farmhouse just visible in a black valley. For a second I had the sensation that I was about to leap from the hill’s sheer side and fly—a dream of the inhuman, a dream of escape. Cold hands brushed my sides and urg
ed me forward.
At the base of the drive leading up the smaller hill to the quarry I paused for breath. It was just past nine o’clock. In the darkening sky hung the white lifeless stone of the moon. I took a step up the drive: I was a magnet’s negative pole, the lunar pole. My feet throbbed in their city shoes. A random branch of an oak stood out with supernatural, almost vocal clarity; a huge muscle rolled beneath its crust of bark. I sat on the edge of a pebbly granite shelf and slid off my shoes. Then I dropped them beside the rock and, finding what I had to find to move, moved. The air breathed me.
On tiptoe, with wincing feet, I went up the drive. Gravel gave way to dry grass. At the top of the drive I eased down onto my heels. The flat brown area was before me, the line of dying bushes at the far end. The sky was darkening fast. I realized that I was carrying my jacket in one hand, and I pulled it up over my shoulders. Air caught in my throat. Alison Greening seemed profoundly in the landscape, a part of all of it. She was printed deeply into every scrabble of rock, every tick of leaf. I went forward, the bravest act of my life, and felt invisibility stir about me.
By the time I reached the other side of the flat brown space, it had become dark. The translation from dusk to night was instantaneous, a subdivision of a second. My stockinged feet found a smooth rock slab. A blister burned at my heel. Its redness mounted up my leg, I could see that color rising and staining me, and I went forward again over brown grass to the line of bushes. My mind fluttered, and I snapped my head to the right, and saw a pair of finches shooting off into the bowl of the sky. Moonlight touched them for an instant, then lay upon and silvered the threads and bones of the sparse bushes. I took another step, and was on the first rock, looking down at the cup of black water which was the quarry. It was the center of an intense, packed silence.
And of a great brightness. The moon, as medallion-like as Alison’s face, shimmered and glowed from the water’s center. My leg was shaking. My mind was no more than a flat plate of images. It would have taken me a minute to remember my name, that leap from slippery Miles to froggy Teagarden. The stone beneath me ground at my feet; I went down onto the next step, and felt myself pulled toward the brightness. That flat pane of water with its glowing center drew me on, brought me down toward it. Another step. The entire silent pool edged with smooth rock was as if humming—no, was humming, wedged in the divide between the bottomless dark of the water and the flat shining head of the moon. The world tipped to slide me down, and I tipped with it.
Then I was there, on the bottom of the bottom of the world. Cool rock pushed upward on the soles of my feet. Heat burned at my temples and crisped small hairs in my nose. Water slid across my wrists. My fingers touched my sleeves, and they were dry. At the bottom of the bottom of the world, my face turned to the moon’s cold effigy, I sat in a hard unreal brightness.
When my body began to tremble I planted my hands on the shelf of cool rock and closed my eyes. The signs of her coming were unimaginable: it seemed to me that she might step out from the center of that gleaming disc on the water. Rock flowed under my hands; with my eyes clamped shut I was moving, part of a moving element, the rock which fitted itself beneath my hands and body like a negative, mirrored image. This sensation was very strong. My fingerprints folded into minute grooves in the stone, hand shapes met my hands, and when I snapped open my eyes again I thought I would see before them a sheer rise of rock.
I centered myself in my body, centered my body on the slab of rock. I felt the rock lift with my breathing, the veins in my hands connect to veins in the stone, and I ceased to move. I thought: I am a human mind in a human body. I saw white unreal brightness on my knees and my stockinged feet. High walls circled me, the water lay still, the only thing in the world beneath me. I knew that I had very little time left. The jacket lay across my shoulder like leaves. I had all the rest of my life to think; to wait.
—
But waiting itself is thinking, anticipation is an idea in the body, and for a long time even my pulse was charged with the energy of my waiting. I thought of hurtling through time; I was no longer trembling. My fingers slid into grooves in the stone. In the bowl of the quarry, the night was terrifically still. Once I opened my eyes and looked at my watch where dots by the numerals and slivers along the hands glowed green: it was ten forty-five.
I tried to remember when we had started to swim. It had to be sometime between eleven and twelve. Alison had probably died near to midnight. I looked up at the stars and then back down at the water where the moon floated. I could remember every word spoken on that night, every gesture. They had been crowded into my mind for the past twenty years. Twice, while lecturing to my sophomores, I had spun backward to those busy minutes and seen them all again while my disembodied voice droned on, being witty at the expense of literature. It was true to say that I had been trapped here, in that section of time, ever since, and that what had frightened me in my classroom was no more than an image of my life.
It was all still happening, in a space behind my eyes that belonged to it, and I could look inward to see it and us. The way she looked, grinning at me as cool air settled on my shoulders. Do you want to do what we do in California? Her hands on her hips. I could see my own hands working at my buttons, my legs, the legs of a thirteen-year-old boy, hanging pale and slim to the rock slab. I looked up and she was a white arc just entering the water, a vision of a leaping fish.
That would be printed on two other minds as well as mine. They had seen us: our bodies cutting the water, our arms white, her hair a sleek mass against my face. From their angle we would be pale faces beneath water-darkened hair, two faces so close as to be flowing together.
I shook all over. I raised my arm and looked at my wrist: eleven o’clock. A patch of skin on the back of my neck began to jump.
I closed my eyes again and the energy of the stone again rushed up to meet my hands, heels, outstretched legs. My breathing seemed overloud, amplified by the complicated passages within my body. The whole area of the quarry was breathing with me, taking in and releasing air. I counted to one hundred, making each inhalation and exhalation last eight beats.
Very soon.
I saw myself as I had been a month earlier, when I had only half dared to admit that I had returned to the farm to keep an appointment with a ghost. And brought a string of deaths dragging like a tail behind me. Despite the pretense of the boxes of books and notes, I had not done even three good days’ work on my dissertation: I had given it up on the feeblest of pretexts, that Zack’s foolish ideas were too much like Lawrence’s. Instead I had almost willfully turned the valley against me. And I saw myself: a large man with thinning hair, a man whose face immediately expresses whatever emotion has hold of him, a man rampaging through a small town. I had insulted more people in four weeks than I had in the past four years. I witnessed all of this as from the outside, saw myself bursting into stores and giving crazy messages from barstools, miming shoplifting, my face registering disgust. Even Duane had done a better job of disguising his feelings. From the morning of my arrival, I had felt Alison Greening’s approach, and that fact—the vision of her hovering at the edge of the fields—had sent me sliding as irrationally as a pinball.
I said her name, and a leaf rustled. The moonlight made my body look two-dimensional, a figure from a cartoon.
It had to be nearly the time. Eleven thirty. Pressure suddenly happened in my bladder; I felt my face grow hot. I crossed my legs and waited for the pressure to ebb. I began to rock forward on my stiff arms. Nerves in the stone responded to my movement, and echoed it so that at first the stone rocked with me, and then took all the motion and rocked me itself. The need to urinate built into an ache. I was rocked more intensely, and it vanished. I lay back and let the stone fit a hollow for my skull. My hands, stretched by my sides, found their true places.
Very soon.
A cloud covered half the stars and slowly scudded past the dead circle of the moon. My body seemed already to have given up its life, an
d the stone to have taken it into itself. The cold quarry water was breathing through me, using me as its bellows; I thought I heard her walking toward me, but a breeze skimmed past, and still the complications of life, the complications of feeling streamed from my body into everything around. I thought: it cannot last, it is too much, death is necessary, necessary. Suddenly it seemed to me, at the bottom of my fear like a flash of gold, that I had returned to the valley knowing that I would die there.
I heard music and knew it came from the electric point of contact between my head and the rock above the water. Soon, soon, soon. My death came speeding toward me, and I felt my body lighten. The tremendous forces about me seemed to lift me an inch or two above the rock, the music sounded in my head, I felt my soul contract into a humming capsule just below my breastbone. So I remained for a long time, gathered to split apart at her touch.
I witnessed my heavy profane sarcastic death-bound naive person hurtling through Arden, hiding within the body of my grandmother’s house, quailing on the floor of a forest, half-raping a coiling girl; I gasped because the sensation of levitating, all my cells linked by moonlight in a contract to ignore gravity, had endured so long.
All my being told me when midnight approached. I could not a second time will away the quick pain in my bladder, a leaf rattled in a twist of wind, and warm fluid rushed over my legs in a delicious letting go. I reached out for her, every second of her time ticked along my body. I caught only bright empty air.