by Peter Straub
When we were about forty miles from Milwaukee, Ruddler dialed his voice way down and said, “We just got some grim news here, friends, and I want to take the liberty of sharing it with you. I’m jumping the gun on the official announcement, but to an old broadcaster like myself the news is news, and ought to be reported straight and true in a timely fashion, not sifted and filleted and spun this way and that until black turns into white and vicey-versy.”
“No,” I said. “It can’t be.”
“Can’t be what?”
“So pardon me for shaking up your day, my friends, forgive me if you can for bringing Mr. Death into our conversation here. We’d prefer to keep him out, I know, but when Mr. Death walks into the room, people tend to give him all their attention, because our Mr. Death is ONE GOSH-DARNED SERIOUS FELLOW. Well, prepare to pay attention, folks.
“About twenty minutes ago, a plane fell out of the sky and crash-landed on a farmer’s field near the little hamlet of Wales, not far from highway I-94. There were no survivors, at least no OBVIOUS ones.”
“No, no,” Don said, shaking his head. “This is …”
I shushed him.
“EZ Flite Air Flight 202, on its regular journey between Madison and our fair city, BIT THE DUST, you could say, AUGURED IN, as the fly boys once had it, killing everyone on board, passengers and crew alike. They add up, ladies and gentlemen, to seventeen souls.”
Don moaned and put his face in his hands.
“There have been BIGGER air crashes, killing MORE souls, but that’s not relevant. Here we have a genuine opportunity for thought, for philosophy, and I think we ought to SEIZE it. Now think of this—seventeen people, turned into crispy critters, bones broken, bodies all smashed up—why THEM? Huh? Right? Are you HEARING me? These people DIED TOGETHER. My question to you is, did anything unite them BEFORE they met their fates? Did they have ANYTHING IN COMMON? Because they sure do now! If you were to look back into those seventeen fragile human lives, really look, turn a magnifying glass on them, a MICROSCOPE, do you think you’d see some common threads? You bet you would! Jenny knew Jackie in grade school, Jackie used to babysit for Johnnie, Johnnie owed a lot of money to Joe. There’d be a TON of that. But go deeper.
“There is another side to this question. Fourteen passengers died, and three crew members. But SIXTEEN tickets were booked for that flight, and TWO of them were never paid for. TWO PEOPLE decided no thanks, I’m not gonna GET on good old Flight 202 from Dane County Regional Airport to Mitchell Field, thanks anyhow, but no. They were GOING to take that flight, but they CHANGED THEIR MINDS, both of em. Why? I wanna know, I really do. WHY? Huh, right?”
I gave Olson an uneasy, unhappy look and found the same thing coming back at me.
“The question is, what does this MEAN? We’re allowed to think about MEANING, aren’t we?”
“I’m pulling over,” I said. “I can’t take this anymore. My hands are shaking, and it feels like my guts are, too.” I drove the car into the breakdown lane, turned it off, and slumped down in my seat.
Joe Ruddler roared on. “Because let me tell you this, the truth as I see it is THE TRUTH, period. Full stop. Take my word for it, heck, you can take that to the bank. JOE RUDDLER DOES NOT LIE TO YOU, folks. He CAN’T. Joe Ruddler happens to be too darn simple-minded to do anything but speak the TRUTH, and he’s been that cotton-pickin’ way his whole durn LIFE! That’s what he DOES, he tells THE COTTON-PICKIN’ TRUTH! Yowza!
“And this is what I’m here to tell you, my friends. Those two folks that backed away from EZ Flite Air 202 have a DESTINY. Yes, they DO! They were SAVED FOR A PURPOSE. In all LIKELIHOOD, they just suppose they got lucky. Yes, they DID, they SURE did, and do you know why? The reason they got LUCKY is because—”
“Is that,” I whispered.
“—they have a DESTINY! Only one thing in the world is more POWERFUL than the possession of a DESTINY. That one thing is MEANING. There is MEANING in their lives, they are wrapped in a MEANING!”
Unable to bear this stuff a moment longer, I struck a button, and the radio went dead.
“Am I in possession of a destiny?” Olson twitched on his seat, as if he had been prodded or poked. “Oh, Christ, look at that.”
He jabbed his index finger at the right-hand edge of the windshield, and when I shifted my gaze to look out, I saw for the first time what should have been apparent for at least a couple of minutes, and would have been, had we not been so claimed by loudmouthed Joe Ruddler. Miles away in a distant field, a narrow column of dense black smoke coiled up into the air, widening out as it rose.
“OmyGod,” Olson said.
“Oh, my God,” I said, a moment behind him. “Oh, Jesus.”
“How many people did he say?”
“Seventeen, I think. Which includes three crew.”
“Oh. Oh. This is terrible. Did we see any of them, do you think?”
“Not at the ticket counter. Though some of those people way ahead of me must have been … I wonder if those two girls … And that guy who was going bald …”
“Lee, I can’t look at that smoke anymore. All right?”
“I feel sick.”
“Drive away. Let’s get out of here.”
I followed orders, and we fled.
Fifteen minutes later, Olson asked, “Feeling better now?”
“Yeah. I am. Weird, but better.”
“Same here. Weird but better.”
“Relieved.”
“Really relieved.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You too, huh?”
“It’s like the reverse of survivor guilt.”
“Survivor euphoria.”
“Survivor bliss.”
“Hah!”
“Jesus, man, we could be lying dead back there. Or smashed up, or burned up into, what did he say, crispy critters?”
“We almost were. So close.”
“Missed us by fuckin’ inches.”
“By millimeters.”
Don punched the dashboard, then planted his hands on the roof and pushed up. “Whoa. Is it okay to feel like this?”
“Sure! We’re not dead!”
“Those seventeen poor sons a bitches are all dead, and we’re still alive!”
“Exactly. Yep. That’s it, exactly.”
“Being alive feels pretty fuckin’ good, doesn’t it?”
“Being alive is great,” I said, with the feeling of uttering a profound but little-known truth. “Just … great. And we owe it all to that guy. If he was a guy. Maybe he was some kind of angel.”
“Your angel, anyhow.”
I gave him a questioning look.
“What do we know about him? Two things. He knew who you were, and he didn’t want you to die in an airplane crash.”
“So he was my guardian angel?”
“One way or another, yeah! For sure! Hey—remember what you were saying about a woman Hayward never got to kill because he was killed? Or her child, or her grandchild? A ripple effect?”
I nodded.
“That talk-show guy, Joe Ruddler, was yelling about destiny. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“Did that guy ask if you were on Flight 202?”
“I think so. Sure, he did. Hold on. No, he just came up and told me he had a precognition that if I took Flight 202, the consequences would be terrible.”
“So he already knew what flight you were on.”
I slumped a bit. Perhaps after all I would be required to be in possession of a destiny.
“One way or another, it’s about you, Harwell. Face it.”
I wished Olson had not mentioned my speculations. Most of my joyousness at still being alive had evaporated, though I had a vivid memory of its taste.
“I’m going to read my copy of Vanity Fair right now,” Olson said.
He leaned over the back of the seat, fished around in his bag until he had dug out the magazine he had purchased in the airport, and thumped himself down again while he r
iffled through its pages. “Beautiful ads in this thing,” he said, and spoke no more until we reached the exit for downtown Milwaukee, where he told me to get off the highway and drive to the Pfister.
“I should have known,” I said. “You guys think there’s only one hotel in Milwaukee.”
“My surprise isn’t a guy,” Olson said. “When you get to the hotel, go into the lot.”
After Don had made a call from one of the phones behind the concierge desk, we took adjacent armchairs in the Pfister’s lobby and watched clusters of people come down the hallway from the elevators to the newer, Tower part of the hotel complex, descend the lobby steps, and gather before the long front desk. They were usually in families. Sometimes small groups of men bunched up as they registered, punching their friends’ shoulders and laughing open-mouthed at jokes.
“They’re all doing something together,” Don said. “And they came here to do it. Are they in some association, some club? Or do they all work for the same company?”
“There sure are a lot of them,” I said. “Are we waiting for this surprise of yours to come down here? Why don’t you tell me who it is?”
“Because that would spoil the surprise. We’re waiting for someone to leave.”
“So we can follow this person. This woman.”
“Nope. Completely, hopelessly wrong. Why don’t you just wait?”
I crossed my legs, canted sideways, and leaned on the chair’s armrest. If I had to, I could have waited there forever. Whenever we got hungry or thirsty, we could order sandwiches and drinks from wandering waiters. The Pfister was a gracious old grande dame. The studly concierge wore a cavalier’s pointed mustache, and the composed and deferential registration clerks would have looked at home behind the desk at the Savoy. Only the sport shirts, khakis, and boat shoes of the guests located the lobby in its time and place.
“I can’t believe what’s happening with Hootie,” I said.
“Neither can Dr. Greengrass and that steamy little Pargeeta.”
“You think Pargeeta’s ‘steamy’? She strikes me as cold and haughty.”
“Don’t know much about women, do you? Pargeeta’s a freak. She’s so freaky, Hootie turns her on!”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I remembered seeing an odd conflict of emotions surfacing in the young woman’s face when Howard lay on the floor. After Greengrass asked him to speak in his own words, Pargeeta almost smiled. Whatever her feelings had been, they looked nothing like arousal.
“The girls always loved Hootie, man.”
“When he looked like the blond kid in Shane.”
“It’s a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.”
“Face it, Don, you couldn’t tell a story straight if somebody put a gun to your head. Mallon was the same way.”
“Aww,” Don said. “We’re having our first argument.”
I realized that I was more irritated than I had thought. These Mallon people made up the rules everywhere they went, arrogant, conceited, grasshoppers who depended on everyone else to feed them and clothe them and given them drugs and alcohol and listen to their ridiculous lies and open their legs whenever the Mallons and Mallon-ites wanted …
I had a sudden visual flash of the silver-haired man in the airport, and with it occurred a certain dread possibility. Instantly, I thrust it away.
“Calm down,” Don said. “I see by your face that you’re getting all cranked up. Remember that I’m doing you a favor here. And looky looky looky, I believe our question has been answered.”
I followed the direction of his gaze and saw, just now flowing down the lobby steps and earning a smile from the Cavalier, a cluster of people of every age, all of them stuffed into blue jeans that strained over their swollen bellies and ample hams. At their center moved a round-faced young woman encumbered with what appeared to be a loose gauze bandage floating about the top of her head. They were a family, mother and father, uncles and aunts, sons, daughters, cousins, wives and husbands, and even a couple of roly-poly children who darted in and out of the general confusion.
“Is that a melee, or what?” asked Olson. “God, look at her. She’s the Queen Bee, all right.”
The lively familial scuffle bustled toward the front desk, where it broke apart into singles and couples, allowing Don’s Queen Bee to throw out her arms and move at a slow, stately trot toward the desk. Two beefy males of approximately her age moved into position to receive extravagant hugs. The gauze on the young woman’s sturdy head was a wedding veil, swept back over an elaborate and lacquered hairdo. Apart from the veil, she wore a gray Eau Claire sweatshirt, the same kind of jeans as the rest of her family, and—a wonderful touch, I thought—well-worn, nearly knee-high cowboy boots with stacked heels and much ridging and stitching. She had come down with her family to greet the arrival of the groom and the best man, his brother.
“Going to be noisy in here tonight,” I said.
For a moment, I switched my gaze to a group of four men in crisp dark suits and gleaming shirtfronts who emerged from the nearer, non-Tower elevators and strode past the wedding party, moving toward the Jefferson Street exit at the back of the lobby. These men moved with the quick, gliding pace of dogs intent on their goal, entirely indifferent to the spectacle around them. The curls of white wire running from the ears of the two tall, athletic-looking men in the rear disappeared beneath the smooth collars of their jackets. Pacing just ahead of a thin, watchful-looking man with black-framed glasses who had tucked a black leather folder beneath his elbow, the obvious leader of this pack had perfect CEO hair graying at the temples and a broad, suntanned face with deep smile lines around the eyes. He looked as if he had just purchased the hotel and was heading out to buy two or three more.
Open-mouthed, Don Olson tracked the progress of these men toward the exit. They swept out in a fluid unit, flowing through the self-opened glass door like sharks prowling the sea.
Olson turned to me and tapped my bicep. “Time for the big surprise, bud.”
He stood up. I did the same. “So that’s who we were waiting to leave.”
“Gee, d’ya think?” Olson wove through the lobby furniture, going to the same elevator the four men had just left. I followed a few steps behind.
“The man who owns the world, his lawyer, and his security team.”
“You didn’t recognize him.”
“I don’t read the business section,” I said.
“That’s not the one he’s usually in.” Olson came up to the single lobby elevator and punched the button with a knuckle. Immediately, the door retracted.
“Okay, I give up,” I said. I went into the elevator and watched Olson use his knuckle to punch the button for the fifth floor.
“What’s the business with the knuckle? A sanitation issue?”
“You really didn’t recognize that guy? He might be our president one day, if our luck runs really bad.”
I snapped my fingers. “You don’t want to leave fingerprints. It’s a trick you learned from Boats.”
“Why leave your prints all over everywhere? Use your elbow, not your hand. Use your knuckle, not your finger. Wear gloves. A world like this, privacy disappearing in a hundred little ways, you might as well do what you can to cover yourself. Just ask the senator what he thinks about individual privacy. Fine for him, is what he thinks. That guy, him and those like him need so much privacy they want to take most of what we got.”
“He’s a senator?”
“First term, but give him time. They’ve got big plans, huge plans.”
“They? Him and that skinny lawyer guy next to him?”
“Him and his wife.”
The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. I followed Olson out as I had followed him in, and when we turned to go down the corridor, something awakened in my memory.
“Is this senator’s name Walsh?”
“Senator Rinehart Walker Walsh, of Walker Farms, Walker Ridge, Tennessee
.”
“Currently the husband of …”
“The former Meredith Bright. The one remaining survivor of Spencer Mallon’s ceremony-slash-experiment-slash-breakthrough in the agronomy meadow that you still haven’t met.”
“Apart from Hayward’s roommate, Brett Milstrap.”
“Well, good luck with that. And you forgot Mallon.”
“You mean he isn’t dead?” This information shocked me: it was like hearing that the Minotaur still lived at the heart of his labyrinth. A sudden foul taste and a scalding sensation rose from the back of my throat into my mouth.
“Of course he’s not dead. He lives on the Upper West Side of New York and he makes his living as a psychic. He’s a great psychic. Want to meet him? I’ll give you his address.”
I tried to picture myself ringing Mallon’s doorbell, and a shiver of revulsion ran through me. “All this time, that bastard has been alive.” I still could only barely believe it. “Jesus. You know, back in the airport, this terrible idea came to me, and I …”
Don said, “Pull yourself together, Lee. This isn’t exactly going to be a day at the beach, either.”
At the end of the hallway he knocked on a door marked “The Marquette Suite.”
The door swung open. A tall, cadaverous, black-clad man in his mid-thirties stood before us, already backing away. He had a pronounced stoop, dark hair that dripped over his pale forehead, dark, shiny eyes, and a long, slippery mouth.
“Yes,” he said, making a sketchy bow of his slouch. “Donald, of course, here you are, yes.” Briefly, he offered Don his limp hand, which Don took, briefly, and dropped without shaking. The man turned his entire upper body to me, and swung his hand with it. His eyes glittered. It was like meeting an undertaker from an old black-and-white movie. “And this must be Mr. Harwell, our famous aut’or. What a pleasure this iz.”
I met the man’s dangling fingers with his own. They felt cold and lifeless. After a moment of contact, I pulled back my hand.
“I am Vardis Fleck, Mr. Harwell, Mrs. Walsh’s assistant. Please come with me into the drawing room.”