A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  (You were eaten by a tiger.)

  Long ago, Howard Bly had seen someone eaten by a tiger. He needed to see no more. One of them was to inhabit the country of the blind, Spencer had said, and it should have been him, Howard Bly. In the place he lived, there was nothing to look at anyway.

  Because of Spencer Mallon, Howard Bly had a special hatred of doors. For hours on end, the attendant named Ant-Ant Antonio Argudin crouched hidden behind a door marked PERSONNEL ONLY where he smoked his stinky cigarettes, only guess what, Howard never once knocked on it. And guess what again? Howard Bly had lived in the hospital for forty years, he knew what was behind the PERSONNEL door, and it didn’t scare him. A dull green room with broken-down furniture and an ashtray nobody was supposed to use … an ugly table with a coffeemaker, magazines lying on another old table. Men’s magazines. Magazines for men. Howard had seen them, but he hadn’t looked. That was where they went, the attendants—Ant-Ant, Robert C. (for Crushwell), Ferdinand Czardo, Robert G. (for Gurnee), and Max Byway—when they wanted to be by themselves.

  On the sixteenth of October in the year 1966, Mallon had succeeded in opening his door, and what happened after that was so terrible that Howard had encircled himself with the sacred stones of his words, and they had kept him safe in the midst of the reeking-storming-down-pink-orange light. Until a huge and fatal orb made of sentences had knocked everything out of Howard Bly’s head and sent him spinning cock-a-hoop through a hundred stories that comforted him, mocked him, tortured him, babied him, and showed him the only way he could continue.

  Now. Enter Spencer Mallon, seated on a carton in the store’s basement, swinging his legs beneath him and leaning forward on an arm so ropey the muscles cast shadows. Wiping a sleeve across his eyes as he muddled unseeing into the Game Room, fat old Howard Bly had no problem at all in seeing them as they had been on that day. Tall, athletic-looking Dilly-O on the floor, leaning against a low wall of boxed canned goods, his knees hugged to his chest, his head drooping over. Dill’s dark hair, longer than that of the others, swung forward over his ears to frame his young tough’s face. Between his lips, a cigarette from a pack of Viceroys lately stashed behind the cash register sent up a straight, unruffled column of white smoke.

  Dilly-O, you were like a god! You were!

  In a UW rowing team T-shirt, dirty white painters’ pants, and tennis shoes, Boats squatted on the floor, staring at Mallon, hoping for some indication of what they were to do that day. With his newly awakened senses, little Howard was painfully aware of how greatly Boats wished to become Spencer Mallon’s favorite disciple.

  Spencer Mallon leaning over, staring at his legs moving back and forth like pistons … He wiped a hand over his face, then ran it through his perfect hair.

  “Okay,” he said. “Things are getting intense. Meredith drew up a chart, and it tells us that the optimal time and date are only two days away. Seven-twenty p.m., Sunday, the sixteenth of October. We’ll still have the light, but no one else should be around.”

  “Around where?” asked Boats. “You found a place?”

  “The university agronomy meadow, on the far end of Glasshouse Road. Good site, excellent site. Tomorrow afternoon I want us to go out there for a rehearsal.”

  “Rehearsal?”

  “I want us to get it right. Some of you knuckleheads hardly know how to listen.”

  “When you said ‘chart,’” asked Boats, “did you mean some kind of navigational chart?”

  “Astrological,” Mallon said. “Based on our group. Time and date of birth are when we first got together at La Bella Capri.”

  “Meredith did an astrology chart?” asked the Eel. “About us?”

  “She’s an experienced astrologist.”

  He grinned at his followers. To Howard, the man’s inner desperation immediately shrank to a more tolerable level.

  “I still feel a little weird about relying on that thing, to tell you the truth, but Meredith was absolutely confident of her results, so we’re aiming for seven-twenty two nights from now. What about four o’clock for our rehearsal? Everybody cool with that?”

  They all nodded. Only Howard, it seemed, felt that Mallon was still uneasy about the use of astrology.

  “Will Meredith come to this rehearsal?” Howard asked.

  “She damn well better,” Mallon said.

  Laughter followed this remark.

  Mallon said, “I want you to partner up tomorrow. It could get wild out there.”

  “What do you mean?” Boats asked the question for all of them.

  Mallon shrugged. “Hey, on the other hand, these things usually go nowhere. And that could happen, too.”

  “You’ve done this a lot?”

  Momentarily, discomfort erased Mallon’s anxiety. “What do you think my life is about? But this time, okay, this time I think I’m closer than ever.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Boats, with a silent, stricken echo from Howard Bly.

  “I can read the signs, and the signs are all around us.” His discomfort arose again and affected his posture, his expression, even the angle of his legs.

  “What do you mean, signs?” asked Boats.

  “You got to keep your eyes open. Look for the little things that don’t belong.”

  With a shock of surprise, Old Howard, who had moved onto a chair in the Crafts Room, realized that if Boats and Dilly-O were ever to get together now, they would not, not ever, not really talk about what had happened in the meadow—because they would never be able to agree about it. He almost wished one of them, maybe Boats and Dill together as of old, would drive up to Madison to see him. After all this time, which yet had gone by in a moment, he would find a way to talk to them.

  “There’s something I should say to you. Something I should have realized a long time ago.” Mallon snapped his mouth shut, looked down at his dangling legs, then looked back up and gazed at each of them in turn. Howard’s stomach froze, and though he did not know it, so did the Eel’s.

  No, no, no, Howard thought.

  “When our ceremony is finished, I’ll have to leave. Whatever the results are. And remember, the whole thing might turn out to be a total bust. One of the things that could happen is … nothing at all.”

  “But if something does …” said Dill.

  “Then I’ll have to get out of town!” Mallon emitted a grade-A Mallon chuckle, rueful and charmingly self-amused. To two of his young disciples, it seemed contaminated by self-consciousness. He was looking at himself in a secret mirror.

  “Look,” Mallon said, “there are no instruction manuals for what we’re trying to do.”

  He tried to grin, and at least to Howard Bly succeeded only in making himself look sickly. “But you know that everything is everything, am I right? As long as we take care of each other, nothing bad is gonna happen.”

  It was getting worse with every word, Howard thought. Looking around, he saw that only the Eel seemed to be as stricken as himself. The other two were lapping up Mallon’s reassurances in the old way.

  “Everything is everything,” said Dill.

  What does that mean, exactly? Howard asked himself.

  Spencer Mallon was looking straight at the Eel, and the Eel was trying not to show discomfort.

  Oh, my Spencer, my darling my dearest, don’t be this person, be yourself.

  “Once in Kathmandu,” Mallon said, “I heard a gorgeous woman with an amazing, smoky voice sing a song called ‘Skylark.’”

  This part, really, this part was almost too much for Old Howard, it damn near cut him off at the knees.

  Mallon was still staring at the Eel. “We were in a funky little bar with a tiny bandstand. What she did with ‘Skylark’ made me break down and weep. And what a beautiful song that is anyhow. When the set was over, I went up to talk to her, and after a little while she went home with me. I made love to that woman until the sun came up the next day.”

  “How nice for you,” the Eel said, amazing Howard with this display of cool.


  He straightened his back and put his hand on his heart. “Eel, you’re my skylark. You’re going to rise up singing, you’ll sail up into the blue, singing one long, continuous song that’ll hypnotize everyone who hears it.”

  The Eel said, “Don’t talk to me that way.”

  The Eel was capable of producing tears, who would have thought?

  The previous afternoon, as he found himself remembering, Hootie Bly had bopped on over to the Tick-Tock Diner in the company of his darling friend Eel. But when they arrived within the State Street shoebox of their favorite campus hangout, Meredith Bright’s bright hair and face did not shine from the reflective walls. Neither did she occupy any booth or counter seat. Considering the reassuring possibility that Meredith might after all drop in at any second, they took two seats at the bottom of the counter, near the window.

  They ordered cherry Cokes, all they could afford. Moments later, a skinny guy with furze on his cheeks and a russet whisk broom sprouting from his chin slid out of the third booth along the wall and plunked himself down beside young Howard. A second and a half of memory search identified this being as one of the college students who had shown up for both the gathering at La Bella Capri and the meeting on Gorham Street.

  “Listen,” he said, leaning forward on his elbows and speaking in a conspiratorial manner intensified by the arm sliding over Howard’s shoulders, “I don’t know why I’m doing this, it’s not like you’re going to be grateful or anything, but I gotta tell you—be careful around your friend Mallon.”

  Howard said, “What do you mean?”

  “Mallon is not a guy you can trust.”

  Aggressively, the Eel asked, “Why not?”

  “Okay, if you’re going to make this difficult.” The bearded boy turned away.

  “Hold on,” said the Eel. “I just asked, that’s all.”

  The boy swiveled back. “I’m trying to do you some good, all right? Mallon is a con man. He comes over to our place, he takes a couple of records, a bunch of shirts, and when you tell him you don’t like it, he says, ‘Everything is everything,’ like that’s some kind of answer.”

  “So what does he get out of being here?” asked Eel.

  “Sex,” he said. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

  The Eel inhaled deeply and blinked a couple of times.

  The boy grinned. “Plus, the opportunity to spread his bullshit around and act like a hero. A guy cuts his hand off in Tibet, and that makes you a philosopher? Maybe, if you’re a lunatic. Besides, I doubt any of that stuff ever happened. Think about it, that’s all I’m saying. And keep him out of your room, or wherever you live. The guy’s a thief.”

  “We don’t have to worry about that,” Eel said. Her voice was hard and oddly brittle. “When he’s with us, Boats does all his thieving for him.”

  “Hey, if that makes you happy.” The boy shrugged. The way he held his mouth made the rufous broom on his chin jut straight out. Then he jumped off his seat and, with a hint of haste that suggested offense, returned to the booth.

  “I didn’t say it made me happy,” Eel confided to the Howard that had been.

  “Actually, what does he do when he isn’t with us?” asked little Howard.

  “He goes hither and yon,” said Eel, for some reason sounding a little bitter. “Last night, for example, he went to the Falls for dinner. I know, because he took me with him.”

  Unable to contain his dismay, Howard said, “Spencer took you to dinner at the Falls?”

  The Falls was one of Madison’s best restaurants, right up there in the top two or three. Until this moment, the young Howard had supposed that none of his band, like himself, had ever as much as seen the inside of the place.

  “I was going to tell you,” Eel said, shifting around on the stool. “It was all right, once I started to feel comfortable.”

  It was strange, Howard thought: he had never seen the Eel look less comfortable than right now.

  “What did you eat?”

  The Eel shrugged. “Some fish. He ordered a steak.”

  “Why did he take you out for dinner? How did that happen? He’s staying in my basement, for God’s sake.”

  “He had a fight with Meredith, or something, so he asked me. I said sure. What else would I say? I’m sorry you’re jealous, Hootie, but that’s what happened.”

  “I’m not jealous,” Howard said, staring down at the jaunty straw leaning against the side of his half-empty glass. “How did you get your dad to let you go?”

  “He didn’t even notice I was gone.”

  “All right.”

  “I mean, all our dads are screwed up, but yours is the best of the bunch.”

  “Obviously, you don’t have to live with him,” Howard said, remembering the morning’s outburst of rage and indignation over the absence of a single family-sized bag of Lay’s potato chips from a box supposed to contain a dozen. That Spencer Mallon had opened the box and pilfered the bag of chips made Howard feel sick to his stomach.

  A great part of Howard Bly yearned for the simplicity of the days before the arrival of Spencer Mallon, when nobody stole bags of potato chips from the basement, nobody came creeping into the building at all hours and padded downstairs half drunk to fall asleep on a mattress that had to be shoved out of sight every morning. It seemed now that Spencer Mallon had also managed to mess up his relationship with the Eel, a matter of grave importance.

  “So what did you talk about?”

  “He didn’t really want to talk. He said I made him feel better.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Howard said, horrified because he was beginning to suspect why it might not be.

  Eel startled him by bursting forth with a sequence of words and sentences that flew by so quickly he could barely make them out. “Do you get the feeling that Spencer isn’t really himself lately? I don’t know what to think about him anymore.” Something vital and submerged flicked across the Eel’s face. “I’m totally confused. I’m not very happy. What happened to Meredith, for example? But why am I asking you? You’re useless.” Then, as if the insult had been immediately forgotten, that blazing face turned to his. “If you ask me, he’s an asshole.”

  “I think he’s scared of something,” Hootie said. “Maybe he’s worried this whatever-it-is isn’t going to work.”

  “What if it doesn’t? He’s been messing around like this for years.” And there it was, coming into flower before him, the bitterness Howard had noticed earlier. “If you ask me, the only great upheavals that are happening in this country have to do with Vietnam and civil rights. Spencer Mallon didn’t have a thing to do with either one.”

  Hootie could say nothing to this.

  “And you know what? The guy isn’t even any good at what he does. He came here to get a bunch of smart college students around him, and who does he wind up with? Four dumb high-school students, plus two, only two, frat boys, and there’s something wrong with both of them, especially Keith Hayward.”

  “You forgot Meredith Bright,” Hootie said. “And you’re not dumb, Eel. Come on.”

  “Okay, he wound up with three dumb high-school students, two sickos, and a blond who completely bought all of his bullshit.”

  “Look, Eel,” said Howard, hoping above all to revive their old sense of conviction. “You and I believe in him, we really do. Okay, Dilly wants Mallon to adopt him, and Boats wants to be his bodyguard forever, or something like that, but we’re different, aren’t we? We’re the reason Meredith came back to the Aluminum Room—she wanted to talk to us! To us! And Dill and Boats, they’re super-impressed by Spencer, he’s like the answer to their prayers or something, but you and me, we just love him. We don’t even look at him the same way they do. I see you look at him, Eel, I know. You’d do anything he asked, isn’t that right? Anything.”

  The Eel nodded, suggesting emotions too complex for Hootie to read. For a second he even thought the Eel might cry, and utter terror filled him.

  “What happened, anyhow?
Was he mean to you in the restaurant?”

  Eel jumped down from the stool. The discussion had ended.

  And on the day after the tense gathering in the basement, Howard thought he saw one of the agent-creatures that had followed Mallon through the streets of Austin.

  As if emanating from his pores, the acrid stench of a bad dream had floated alongside him, darkening everything before him. Shadows deepened. Water seemed to gush from the tap, his toothpaste tube to swell in protest as he squeezed. His mouth tasted more of blood than Colgate. Back in his bedroom, the poison within him infected the view from his window, that of a barren street stretched like an eggshell over a roaring void.

  It was Saturday, thank goodness.

  Howard shoved his legs into a pair of jeans, thrust his head through the neck of a bright red Badger T-shirt, and slid his feet into moccasins. The rehearsal was to take place that afternoon, and a restlessness compounded of fear and impatience caused him to grab a cruller and a half pint of milk from their cabinets and sail through the side door before he had bitten into the pastry. Slanting down from State Street, Gorham Street offered the same spectacle of unopened shops and empty parking places in front of closed stores.

  Oozing through his pores, his terrible dream contaminated whatever struck his eye. Fat snakes lurked in the deep shadows of the gutters. The cruller, which should have been sweet, crispy on the outside and as yielding as cake within, crumbled in his mouth like plaster.

  For hours, it seemed, he had dreamed of Keith Hayward driving through a desert at night. Beside the road grew scrub punctuated by occasional tall cacti. Hot air devoid of moisture blew from the dream over the dreamer. A college boy as good-looking as the Swedish exchange students who sometimes dropped into the Aluminum Room lounged in the passenger seat of the red sports car. Improbably, his name was Maverick McCool. If you were named Maverick McCool, especially if you looked like a Swedish exchange student, girls, even girls like Meredith Bright, probably hung out on the sidewalk, praying for you to walk past your window.