A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  My eye! thought the Eel. Then, in the odd, harrowing rush that followed, she managed to forget this event until the darkening vision of her early thirties returned it to her.

  In front of Mallon a naked woman who looked nearly green posed listlessly before a dead landscape with a slow-moving camel, a floating dress, a white dove …

  An extraordinary hubbub came from these scenes: hooting and yelling from the mad queen’s blank world, loud groans from the territory behind the green woman. In a crackling thunderstorm, a red-haired giant with a raised sword screamed at Boats. In the scene before the Eel, an ancient couple, he with a long Don Quixote beard, both of them with streaming white hair, leaned into a fierce wind and twisted their necks around, viciously, to expose the ugly faces with enormous, pointed noses on the backs of their heads.

  They were nothing to these figures. Insofar as human beings entered into their notice, they existed to be tormented and dispatched. These things had the transparent, empty viewpoint of gods. (The actual deity is another matter.) Mallon had called them up, but now that they were here, he barely saw them, and had no idea what to do with them.

  At that point, the Eel saw Brett Milstrap bend down and tug at something, an edge, a seam with a break in the thread. She had the feeling that this idea was so terrible that he should forget about it immediately. On the other hand, Brett Milstrap seemed to have been created to invent terrible ideas.

  The biggest problem with the world over there on the other side of the tough air-membrane gliding around her, Eel gathered, was that it was both lunatic and poisonous. Being crazy and toxic, according to some sources it had frightened Mallon’s beloved Cornelius Agrippa right back into Christianity. If it hadn’t, it should have. These faceless kings and queens, wilting girls, floating shirts, giant ranting warriors, and the rest, these camels and dragons and curious pigs, failed to make sense because they were utterly incapable of logic or coherence. Rationality had no place in their world. They could not make sense; sense wasn’t in them. Meaning had come late to the world, and they had no use for it.

  In the meadow, Brett Milstrap was standing in front of the seam he had opened, revealing a single, inhumanly bright light surrounded by darkness. The Eel saw him bend toward the opening, probably in hopes of getting a better view of that strange, blank realm.

  Alongside him, Hayward seemed to have forgotten all about his frat brother, nor did he demonstrate much care for the spirit world. From the fixity of his glance, evidently he had been staring at the Meredith-Hootie-Eel trio for some time. Eel could not tell if the object of his gaze was Meredith or herself. All she knew for sure was that he was not staring at Hootie. According to everything she had intuited about the sorry Keith Hayward, he had some kind of punitive crush on Meredith. Yet his eye seemed to flick back and forth between them, a matter that disturbed her, profoundly. The Eel did not desire the attentions of Keith Hayward.

  Sweat shone on his face, and his eyes looked hot, almost poached. Distracted by the thoughts jittering across his brain, he took a hesitating forward step, then another, more decisive step. On the other side of Hootie Bly, Meredith subtly rearranged her stance, a shift in the angle of one hip and one shoulder, in a way that claimed Hayward for herself alone. She was welcome to him, that idiot. With his third step Hayward burst into a run, and maybe Meredith couldn’t or didn’t want to see it, but he was looking straight at the Eel. He was the Unappeasable itself—she didn’t know how she had failed to see it before, that Hayward out-Boatsed Boats—and he wanted her.

  Because he knew, too! He had seen something. Hayward had taken in some portion of Eel’s journey, and what he had taken in had unhinged him. The Eel wished she could transform herself into a real skylark and take off into the night sky, because her terrified body refused to move. She had become an inert, passive thing, a statue.

  And she really did think she was going to die. So do you know what she learned? She learned that she would be all right when her time came. The Eel would not surrender her hold on life sweating and trembling with fear. Standing in the meadow at that extraordinary moment, she thought, if that asshole psycho is actually going to murder me, at least I have seen what I have seen today, and at least I have had love, and at least I didn’t let my father ruin my life. A life is a life, and this one was mine.

  Now, she wasn’t claiming that at the age of seventeen or eighteen, whatever she was that night, she said these exact things to herself in this exact way, but she was going in that direction. She thought she had been a tremendously brave, savvy girl, and she wished that she could be more like that now. Over time, she thought, the Eel had softened up. She thought it was too bad it didn’t work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years.

  But obviously, she didn’t die, did she?

  Now she’s getting close to the part that is going to be really difficult to talk about.

  Well, before they got to the really hard part, they had to deal with Keith Hayward. From inside Keith Hayward.

  All this time, however, two other things were happening. Behind Hayward, the Eel was vaguely aware that Brett Milstrap was leaning closer to the opening he had forced in the fabric between this world and theirs—like a cat that could not keep from poking its head into an inviting bag. Brett moved even closer by a crucial half inch, and then he was gone, sucked right in. It happened so quickly that all Eel saw was only a pair of brown Bass Weejun loafers flying through the entry point, which instantly zipped itself shut—then, just before his roommate blocked her view, Milstrap appeared far back in the cold world of the lunatic spirits, running hard toward the foreground, his face a mask of panic.

  Determined to sink his claws into the Eel, Hayward clattered forward, all knees and elbows. If it had not been for the second process then taking place before her, the Eel would have been snatched up and carried off, soon to be a goner. However, the demonic being Mallon had awakened was whirling in their direction, and it fixed her and Hootie Bly in its sights. Of Mallon’s band, only they had seen it! Hayward wanted Eel, but the thing wanted both of them. As it launched itself—and it was a lot faster than Hayward—it helplessly moved into partial visibility. What very briefly had appeared to be a bristly pig with a faintly manlike head and an air of aggrieved entitlement was stretching out and putting on bulk as it raced toward them. As if in strobelike flashes, the Eel saw dark gloves that had burst their seams, and a dusty, stained, black swallowtail jacket. A few lazy-seeming flies continued to describe circles around its upper reaches.

  When this industrious being had nearly drawn parallel to Hayward, and was in fact only a single stride from overtaking him, Keith glanced to his side and—the Eel supposed—took in what was gaining on him. Without losing a beat or slackening pace, Hayward went through what was evidently a complex mental process. Then, with a strange, questioning glance at the petrified Eel (in the few seconds since last we checked in, her serenity had shredded), he threw himself into the path of the demonic creature that was the primary result of Mallon’s work.

  So what did Keith Hayward do? Attack the thing beside him? Sacrifice himself so that Eel, or Hootie, or both (but not Meredith, though like them she came in for the benefits) could live through the night? Hayward died, and if Eel and Hootie hadn’t survived, they wouldn’t be in Chicago this night, but what actually happened in the moment? And what happened in the moment just before?

  Well, here’s one thing that happened, or might have happened.

  In the sliver of time between Hayward’s puzzling glance at Eel and his leap into the creature’s trajectory, the Eel traveled again, skylark or not, at incredible speed into HaywardWorld, you might say. She said she “traveled,” but there was no sense of flight or transition—she was skimming over what appeared to be small backyards in a city like Milwaukee, but the light was a strange blue-purple, and the air was of no temperature at all, and nothing moved or grew or breathed. She understood that she had come to an interior world, a world held in m
emory. This time around, she had not been released, and she had not chosen to embark. She had been plucked from her space and thrown here. This was another thing Mallon had done unaware: he had given her access to Keith Hayward, the last person to whom she would have desired any such thing.

  But here she was, and there he was, the same sallow-faced child with the head that looked subtly misshapen whom she had seen as a playground outcast, now a few years on, lying on his back on the worn-out grass, clearly turning something over in his mind. The musing boy looked up and seemed to notice her in the same second that she saw he was holding a long kitchen knife in one hand. This was merely a memory, she reminded herself, but the idea of being seen sent sparkles of alarm through her chest and stomach.

  Of course she was not seen. His eyes moved across the sky, tracing some odd Haywardian thought—or, she wondered, tracking a skylark?—and he sat up and sprang to his feet. The boy was out of his yard and into the alley before she could move, and she floated over the fence and saw him already down at the end of the block, turning the corner.

  Then she was at the end of the block following close upon him as he trotted up the street and ducked into an overgrown empty lot, where he slid in behind a brick wall and hunkered down in a thriving stand of Queen Ann’s lace. Keith tilted left to dig into his right pocket, from which he tugged a small plastic bag containing eraser-sized nibs of cooked brown meat that looked as though they had been worried off a couple of hamburgers. He reached in, withdrew about half of the nibs and gobbets, and deep within the flowering weeds arranged them into a miniature ziggurat. With a final pat to the heaped-up hamburger pellets, Keith scooted backward and leaned against the wall. With both hands, he anchored the base of the knife on his groin and held the blade upright.

  Sweat poured out of his hairline and bloomed on his cheeks. His eyes twitched. He tightened his mouth into a single downturned line.

  Long minutes later, a scrawny cat padded into the nest beneath the white canopy of Queen Ann’s lace. Hayward said, “Nice kitty, kitty, kitty. Don’t you want this nice new lunch I made for you, kitty kitty?”

  Purring, the cat flattened lower to the ground and slid creeping up to the mound of hamburger meat. Its nose fluttered. The cat dipped its head toward the food and licked.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Keith said, “you skinny, funny-looking little creep.” He slowly extended a hand and began to stroke the animal’s spine. When the cat opened its jaws and took a real bite, Keith’s hand tightened around the cat’s neck and jerked it upright. He slammed the spitting, clawing animal against the brick wall and thrust the knife into the middle of its back. A thin stream of blood spurted out and soon dwindled. The cat’s paws curled inward; its tail curled up. The boy drew the knife down the cat’s midsection, slicing it like a melon, and the whole thin body went limp.

  The expression on the boy’s face was that of a ten-year-old barrister listening to the Crown’s arguments.

  When Keith lowered his victim to the ground and bent over it, the Eel flicked away. No more of this, she thought, but there was much more. She was present for the lurid memory of Uncle Tilly’s crucial slow drip of a small number of words that poured a world of depravity into his young disciple’s willing ear. In Keith’s mind, above the impossibly handsome head and Roman nose of Tillman Hayward the sky blazed blood-red, purple, bruise-blue, gorgeous as an orchid. A dozen dogs and cats fell before Keith, and after the acquisition in high school of a friend/slave named Miller, a dozen more. Miller, two years younger than his friend/master, looked like Pinocchio, and had a good mind and an ingrained despairing passivity that made him, another starving skinny, funny-looking little being, perfect for his role as Keith’s sidekick. The Eel visited Hayward’s memories of his private room, one grotesque animal mutilation after another, and saw that a variety of tenderness and connection, a sick love, did bloom in that awful place.

  At last she was obliged to watch, as though on a private screen, Hayward’s memory of the Christmas of his junior year and the wicked exchange of gifts between uncle and nephew. Around Uncle Till wavering lights always played, a cold but brilliant sun always hung in the daytime sky, and nights were always the deepest, richest, most breathing blacks. His smallest gestures threw out immense shadows. Till gifted his nephew with a Sabatier chef’s knife, and informed him that it was going to be his centerpiece, his show pony. Uncle Till accepted his nephew’s gift, that of Miller, with a smile like the glint of steel razors, and his nephew grew faint with loving admiration.

  Even before the three of them entered the abandoned building on Sherman Boulevard, Miller clearly felt alarmed and fearful about having been given to Keith’s dangerous uncle. His knees jigged in his blue jeans, and his pores seemed to exhale an odd, metallic smell. After they had gone downstairs into Keith’s secret place, he announced that he would prefer to live through the experience, and Keith’s uncle informed him that he could rest easy, as he had never killed, nor ever would kill, anyone with a dick. (“Unless maybe by accident,” he added.) Then he ordered trembling Miller to undress and asked if he was hung pretty good. When Miller replied that he didn’t know, Uncle Till said that they would find out soon enough. There were a lot of things they were about to learn, he said, all kinds of things. And nephew, he added, if he were to enjoy himself in the deepest possible way, he feared he would have to be left alone with his Christmas present.

  Through Keith Hayward seemed to move the wayward spirits of resistance, defiance, regret, and reluctance, a surprising matter given his love for his uncle, but he acted in the spirit of Christmas and remembered aloud the existence down the Boulevard of a certain diner. Try their cherry pie, said Uncle Till. Fit for a king, it was.

  Keith’s memory of his hour’s penance in the diner was a nightmare of huge, grotesque faces, the company of men and women enduring a horrible death-in-life, a monumental struggle with a cardboard pie smothered under an excess of poisonous cherries. The world about him had grown seedy and poisoned. Down the counter, a repulsive giant named Antonio with a disfiguring stutter let the waitress know that he had just landed a good job at a mental hospital in Madison. Hayward did not understand why he saw things as he did.

  He had given one of the two people he loved permission to kill the other.

  Of Miller’s last moments, the Eel knew she could bear to watch none, and dreaded what was to come, only to discover that neither did Hayward wish to keep these moments clear, and had buried them beneath layers of smoke and chiaroscuro, where they existed only as hints of movement polluted throughout by guilt. Reluctantly catching sight of a twitching foot here, a flopping hand there, eventually she glimpsed Hayward squatting behind his carved, beaten, bleeding friend and guiding, under Uncle Till’s instruction, his Sabatier show pony to the side of Miller’s neck. Words came garbled through the visual static: … use your arm muscles and sink it in … a good hard pull all across then … On the instant Eel tasted a dark, bitter venom flowing into her, staining her tongue, her palate, and the inside of her throat. Teenaged girl, bird, or a dot of consciousness swimming through another’s mind, she could not bear what was happening to her, and twisted around, eyes clamped shut, and coughed and spat, hoping to retch.

  Then her feet met some solid surface, and the unspeakable taste rinsed itself from her mouth and throat. The nature of the space about her had undergone a great change. Eel risked opening one eye halfway and peering out through the slit. From other forms of sensory evidence—primarily the absence of a choked, overheated underlying emotional atmosphere—it was clear that she had been translated out of Keith’s dreamscapes. What was reported by the half-opened eye reassured her: a tufted red-leather sofa against a wall hung with a row of graphics, a tall reading lamp, a neatly crowded bookcase, a Persian rug on a polished hardwood floor.

  These impressions and reflections required no more than a second and a half.

  Eel opened both eyes fully and observed that the graphics above the handsome sofa depicted the tortures
of hell.

  In what she did not recognize as an old-time, grade-A New York accent, a voice behind her said, “Hiya, kiddo, how ya doon?”

  She whirled around to see a man with a neatly trimmed red-brown beard and a cap of short curly dark hair smiling at her from behind a desk. His cheeks had sunken, and his eyes hid far back beneath hedgerow eyebrows. The man was standing up. Suspended between his hands he held a row of books.

  “You still okay?” he asked, and lowered the books into a cardboard box, where they fit exactly, as if measured for the space. The bookcase at his back was half-empty. Stacks of cardboard boxes with folded tops covered the rug beside the desk.

  The Eel said that she was okay, yes. She thought.

  He smiled, showing teeth as white as dentures. “No prollem, no prollem. Hey, yawanna know ya few-cha?”

  She shook her head.

  “Smawt. That’s pretty smawt.”

  His sunken eyes turned color as he spoke. When she first saw him, they had been as brown as a cigar wrapper, but when he asked if she wanted to learn about her future, they had become an innocent and playful blue. His eyes had turned a glowing golden yellow while he admired her intelligence.

  “Most pee-pul wanna know dere few-chas, but dey don’ like it much when dey heah abouddit. You got nuttin ta worry abaht, lemme say dat. Maybe a liddle trubble heah and deah, you’ll get troo it. An in style, ya know? First class, dat’s you.”

  From here on out, the Eel was going to stop trying to imitate this pungent accent and just use her own voice. It could have used any accent it wanted to, anyhow. The accent wasn’t important.

  She asked where they were, and what sort of being her kindly new companion might happen to be. Eel thought she knew the answers, but she asked anyhow.

  “Oh, you’re still inside my boy Hayward,” answered her new friend. “And you know exactly what I am.”