A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  Hootie let go of me, wiped his hands over his shiny face and, eyes glowing, spoke directly to me. “Skylark, have you anything to say to me?”

  I glanced at Dr. Greengrass, who raised his hands in a shrug.

  Don Olson said, “I guess you didn’t know. One day, Mallon told the Eel she was his skylark.”

  The moment he said the word, I was pierced by the bright, sudden memory of a skylark my wife and I had seen soaring above the garden of a pub in North London.

  meredith bright walsh

  Don Olson and I occupied a side table in the Governor’s Lounge on the twelfth floor of the Concourse. A delicate-looking young man and an athletic young woman, both blond and uniformed in white shirts and bow ties, were settling trays of hors d’oeuvres into pans on a long table against the wall. Bored as a goldfish in a goldfish bowl, a bartender in a brocade vest drifted to the far side of his circular domain. A fresh margarita sat on a white square of napkin before Olson, a glass of sauvignon blanc before me. At a few minutes before 6:00 p.m., the hotel’s shadow fell across the half-empty streets that lay between it and Lake Monona. A shadow had fallen on us, too. We had a lot to think about.

  The decision to accompany Howard Bly on a stroll through the hospital’s grounds had not resulted in the conversation I had hoped would unfold along the curving paths. Instead, our excursion had ended in a messy scramble back to the ward—a disaster that would have resulted in the immediate expulsion and permanent removal of Mr. Bly’s two old friends from the hospital, but for his startling last-minute intercession. It had been an awkward couple of minutes or so. Hootie began shouting from the moment he burst into the hospital’s rear entrance and felt safe.

  Dr. Greengrass exploded from his office yelling for the attendants, who promptly smothered the patient with their bodies, as if his clothing had combusted in the sunlight. “What triggered this?” Greengrass bellowed. “What did you do to him?”

  Thrashing on the cold floor, Hootie bawled nuggets from Captain Fountain’s treasure chest. “Recumbentibus! Recusant! Regardution! Reddition! Redibition!”

  “The two of you have undone twenty years of progress!” Greengrass’s voice blared over Howard’s outcries. “I want you out of here! Visitor privileges are revoked. Permanently and irrevocably.”

  Olson and I stepped back toward the rear entrance, glancing at each other in mutual shock.

  Greengrass leveled a forefinger the size of a cigar. “You will leave this instant! I mean, off the grounds. Don’t even think about coming back, you hear me?”

  The surprising turnaround began with a sudden, shocking silence from the tiled floor. All attention focused upon the fat little man lying spread-eagled between his keepers. Antonio Argudin and Max Byway relaxed their grip and straightened up, breathing a little hard.

  Hootie Bly, the focus of everyone’s gaze, including that of Pargeeta Parmendera, who had appeared from some nowhere close at hand, lay perfectly still, hands palms up, the tips of his shoes aimed at the ceiling. His eyes found Greengrass.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “Take it back.”

  “What?” Dr. Greengrass moved toward his patient, and Argudin and Byway, still on their knees, inched away. “What was that, Howard?”

  “I said, take it back,” Howard told him.

  “He’s not quoting,” said Pargeeta. “This is major.”

  Before anyone else thought to move, she darted up to Howard and knelt beside him. His lips moved. She shook her head, not in denial but to tell him she did not understand.

  The doctor said, “There’s no need to hold you down, is there, Howard?”

  Howard shook his head. Pargeeta stood up and backed away, giving Howard an eloquent glance I could not decode.

  “Did you use your own words, Howard? Wasn’t that normal speech?”

  Howard took his eyes from the doctor’s and contemplated the ceiling. “Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for other human souls.”

  Dr. Greengrass hunkered down. The hem of his white jacket drooped against the floor. He reached out to pat Howard’s hand. “Very nice, Howard. Was that from The Scarlet Letter? It sounded as though it was.”

  Howard nodded. “‘Hester,’ said the clergyman, ‘Farewell.’”

  “We’ve all learned to appreciate The Scarlet Letter around here. It’s quite a novel. You can find almost everything in that book, if you know where to look. Would you like to get up now?”

  “Um,” Howard said. “Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell!”

  “Are you saying good-bye to someone, Howard?”

  “Um,” he said again. “Nay, I think not so.”

  “You’re not so frightened anymore, are you?”

  “Nay, I think not so,” he repeated.

  “Well, let’s start with sitting up. Can you do that?”

  “How can it be otherwise?” He held his arms out straight before him and waited, like a child, to be assisted.

  Irritated, Dr. Greengrass glared at the slow-moving attendants. Antonio and Max jumped forward, and each took an arm and together pulled Bly into an upright sitting position. Greengrass waved them away and leaned in closer.

  “Howard, can you tell me in your own words, or in Hawthorne’s, it doesn’t matter, but I’d really prefer you to speak for yourself, can you tell me what frightened you out there?”

  Howard glanced over at us. For a moment, I thought I saw the hint of a smile move across Hootie’s face. Pargeeta drew in her breath and gripped her elbows—I had a vague impression of conflicting emotions, but could not imagine what might be troubling her, nor could I be certain that she was in fact troubled. It was an emotional shimmer, a faint, unwilling release of feeling.

  “Can you try to tell me, Howard?” asked the doctor.

  Howard nodded, slowly. He kept his eyes fixed on us. “It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she knew full well.”

  “Fiend-like,” Greengrass said.

  “The arch-fiend,” Hootie quoted, “standing there with a smile and a scowl, to claim his own.”

  “I see. Let’s stand up together now, shall we?”

  Antonio and Max got on either side of Howard and pulled him up onto his feet. Dr. Greengrass stood up, a little more slowly, and smiled at him. “Are you all right now?”

  “‘Now that I am back in these comforting surroundings, my distress has almost completely left me,’ said Millicent. ‘But I do hope to have another outing one day soon.’”

  “And now we hear from Mr. Austin’s Moondreamers,” the doctor said. “Another useful text. But before that, we heard from Howard Bly himself, didn’t we?”

  Howard looked over Greengrass’s head and, in an instant, became expressionless, numb, almost flat enough to reflect the light.

  “You asked me to rescind my order that these men leave our premises and never return. Don’t do that. Take it back. That was Howard Bly talking, wasn’t it?”

  Howard stood before him, disappearing inch by inch.

  “I’ll let them stay on one condition, that you confirm what I’m saying. Say ‘Yes,’ Howard, meaning ‘Yes, I spoke for myself, yes, I found my own words,’ and your old friends can come here as often as you and they desire. But you have to say it, Howard. You have to say Yes.’”

  Hootie began to blush. He seemed once again to be fully present, though in considerable disagreement with himself. His eyes met the doctor’s, and the flush spread across his cheeks, darkening as it moved.

  “Take it back.”

  “You’re quoting yourself. Well, that’s good enough, Howard. Thank you.”

  In a little while, all had returned to the version of normality familiar to the Lamont Hospital. Antonio Argudin patrolled the wards and the common rooms in search of a patient to terrorize; the jigsaw-puzzle obsessives dwelt upon clouds and sailing vessels; propped on his pillows Howard Bly lay reading L. Shelby Austin’s masterwork. Dr. Greengrass sat installed behind his des
k, discussing hospital policy with Pargeeta Parmendera and the two visitors responsible for patient Bly’s recent breakthrough. Prodded only slightly by his former babysitter, the doctor soon agreed that we should feel free to visit our friend whenever we wished to do so, provided of course that we did not interfere with his hours of rest.

  Don said, “He’s not completely sane, is he? This is an awful thing to say, but I think you have to start there.”

  “So Hootie did see, or thought he saw, a demon, or the devil, or something like that, and that makes him crazy?”

  “You heard him as well as I did. ‘The arch-fiend,’ he said. And something about the devil with a smile on his face. That would terrify anybody. But people who see the devil popping up on garden paths are not sane, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s funny, but for some reason devils popping up on garden paths sounds a little like Hawthorne to me.” It was a little like The Scarlet Letter, in fact, but I let that slide. “So you and Greengrass both think Hootie was scared.”

  “Well, he was! You heard him. He was scared out of his mind. Come on.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. He was making a lot of noise, that’s right, but he wasn’t screaming, remember?”

  “It sounded like screaming to me. What do you think he was doing?”

  “You thought he was really frightened, so what you heard was screaming. What I heard was shouting. Hootie wasn’t screaming, he was yelling. It looked to me as though …” I stopped, really unsure of how to put it.

  “As though what?” Don asked.

  “As though he wasn’t able to handle all the feelings boiling up inside him. I agree, he did see something. But he kept saying ‘Farewell,’ remember? I think he was really moved, I think his own emotions tipped him over. And I don’t think Pargeeta saw him as terrified, either. They had some kind of conversation, something passed between them. And there’s something else you should consider.”

  “Namely?”

  “He was disturbed, he was angry. You know what I think? You’re not going to like this very much, Don. It’s possible that he was talking about Spencer Mallon. Because we were there, he may suddenly have realized that Mallon had put him in the mental ward.”

  “It wasn’t Mallon. He would never call Mallon the arch-fiend.”

  “How can you be sure of that? You haven’t seen Hootie since 1966.”

  “Hootie loved that man,” Don said. “You would have, too, if you’d had the balls to come with us.”

  “If I thought my guru had ruined my life, I don’t believe I would still love him.”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Don said. “Maybe ruin isn’t ruin, maybe it isn’t ruinous. And don’t call him my guru. We weren’t Buddhists or Hindus. He was my teacher, my mentor. My master.”

  “The thought of a master gives me the creeps.”

  “Then you have a problem, sorry. But I understand. When I was seventeen I thought the same way you do.”

  “This is a good argument,” I said. “We could probably keep it up for hours, but I don’t want to keep defending spiritual arrogance. There is another possibility, that it’s linked to this Ladykiller business I was looking into. Actually, we should talk about this.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe what stirred Hootie up, what he saw out in that garden, was Keith Hayward. Everything seems so connected to me.”

  Attracted by free food and drink, guests from the concierge floors had been crowding into the lounge, claiming most of the chairs, couches, and tables. A stout couple wearing crimson UW sweatshirts now occupied the sofa beside our table. The noise level had gone up, most of it centered on the bar, where few empty stools remained. Bored no longer, the bartender grinned and poured, grinned and poured.

  Don canted back his chair until his shoulders met the wall. “What’s up with this Ladykiller business? Why do you care about it, anyhow?”

  I took a good-sized swig of my wine. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Just guessing here, but does the reason have something to do with the Eel?”

  “No!” (Though it did, in a weird way I did not want to think about. This, however, was why I had suggested Hayward.)

  My shout did not cause every head to swivel in our direction. All conversation did not freeze. Some heads turned our way, and the noise level did drop off for a moment. Then everyone swung back into their conversations and their drinks. I took another, smaller, swallow of mediocre wine.

  “Sorry. No, it’s not about Lee, although she’s involved, like all the rest of you. What it is, is—just before you showed up—I realized I wasn’t going anywhere with my novel—and I saw a guy in my local breakfast place that reminded me of Hootie—and I was thinking about this cop named Cooper, and I realized I had to, had to finally figure out what happened to all of you out in that meadow.”

  “You mean … you think you should be trying to write another novel? Because, I gotta say, that’s just what I was—”

  “NO!”

  Heads, more of them, turned our way once again, and the room fell more nearly silent than previously. The bartender leaned forward to peer through the crowd and give me a look divided between concern and interrogation. I made hush-hush movements with my hands. “That thing out there in the meadow is mysterious, it’s violent, it’s life-changing, it’s about a huge, astonishing breakthrough … isn’t it?”

  “Not according to Mallon.”

  “Because he wanted even more! Mallon was a creature of the sixties. He had a kind of spiritual greediness. He actually wanted to change the world, and in a way, Don, can’t you see, he actually did! Only no one noticed, and it lasted no more than a couple of seconds. He did it, though. At least it looks like that to me.”

  Olson looked away, and his eyes went out of focus. He grinned. “I like your point of view, though. Mallon changed the world, but only for a couple of seconds. That’s cute. But don’t forget that the only people Mallon managed to persuade were four high-school students, two assholes, and one girl who fell in love with him.”

  “Afterwards, all of you were different. And one of the assholes was dead.”

  “Brett Milstrap was worse than dead.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll try to explain it to you later. If I can, which I doubt. Anyhow, what’s this business about Hayward? And who’s Cooper?”

  “With Hayward, you guys had no idea what you were dealing with. Even my wife and Hootie didn’t really know what he was like.”

  “Is this connected in any way with what I was telling you about—that shed? I didn’t say this at the time, it seemed too crazy, but when I was standing there, I had this strong, strong feeling … that he had strapped some naked kid to a chair. And the kid was why he brought out his knife.”

  “Amazing,” I said.

  I had shocked Don more than he wished to reveal. “You’re not saying I was right, are you?”

  “You were absolutely right,” I said. “The boy’s name was Tomek Miller. Only he wasn’t in the little room on Henry Street, because by then he was dead. His corpse, what was left of it, was discovered in the ruins of a burned building in Milwaukee. December 1961. Miller was probably Keith Hayward’s first victim.”

  Olson blinked several times and tilted a portion of the margarita into his mouth. After swallowing, he appeared to track the progress of the alcohol down his throat. His body relaxed into his chair, and one arm dropped straight to his side. When he turned back to me, he seemed almost to be smiling. “No kidding.”

  “I said it was amazing.”

  He shook his head, as if at a particularly satisfying magic trick. “Man, I wanted to make myself invisible and slip right inside that awful place—because it was awful. That’s what I wanted to get across to Mallon, how twisted Hayward actually was. I heard him singing to his knife!”

  “That knife, I guess from what you told me, was a present from his uncle. Tillman Hayward. Once you know a few things about Tillman, it makes a lot of sense.”


  “So what do you know about Hayward?”

  “During dinner,” I said.

  “Maybe there’s a gene for what we call evil,” I said. “Some variation on the normal pattern that pops up a lot less frequently than the marker for cystic fibrosis, say, or Tay-Sachs, and most other diseases. Hitler could have been born with it, and Stalin and Pol Pot, and every other dictatorial ruler who set about imprisoning and killing his own subjects, but so would plenty of everyday citizens. Every big city would have about three of these guys, every small city maybe one, and every fourth or fifth little town would have one—people who think other people are lesser beings and like to kill, hurt, injure, at the very least dominate and humiliate them. A bunch of other people would have been twisted into similar shapes by their lousy, abusive childhoods, but we’re talking about people who are born that way. They carry that gene, and unluckily for everyone around them, it gets activated. It wakes up. Whatever. That’s what you ran into when you met Keith Hayward.”

  “The Bad Seed,” Don said.

  “Exactly. The other point of view, which lots of religious people believe, is that from birth every single human being is corrupt and sinful, but that true evil, the real sulfurous Satanic thing, is timeless, comes from outside, and exists independently from human beings. To me, this always seemed a primitive way to think. It absolves you from responsibility for your actions. A devout Christian would say that I had it all wrong.”

  We were sitting at a corner table in Muramoto, just off Capital Square on King Street. The bartender at the Governor’s Club had recommended the place. He had also suggested that we try the Asian slaw salad, which resembled a haystack. It had been delicious, and so had everything else. Although by this time we had both drunk a good deal of first-class sake, I had taken in more than had my companion.

  “Are you a little drunk?”

  “Um. Hootie’s freakout kind of threw me. Anyhow, I wanted these options to be clear. Is evil innate, and a human quality, or is it an external entity, and inhuman in nature?”