by Peter Straub
“Murder!” he yelled, but no one heard.
Just before the twentieth blow to his temples, Pumo’s eyes cleared and he saw Dracula peering impersonally down at him, her mouth pursed and her lipstick smeared.
2
Pumo came to in darkness, he knew not how much later. His lips throbbed and felt the size of steaks. He tasted blood. His whole body ached, the pain radiating out from the twin centers of his head and groin. In sudden panic, he put his hand on his penis, and found it intact. His eyes opened. He held up his hands before his face—they were dark with blood.
Pumo lifted his head to look down his body, and a white-hot band of pain jumped from temple to temple. He fell back on the wet pillow and breathed heavily. Then he lifted his head more cautiously. He was very cold. He saw his naked body sprawled on dark wet sheets. Working its way from ache to ache, a thin hot wire of agony snaked through the middle of his head. Now his lips felt like rough red bricks. He touched his face with wet fingers.
He considered getting out of bed. Then he wondered what time it was. Pumo raised his right arm and looked at his wrist, which no longer wore a watch.
He turned his head sideways. The radio with its digital clock was gone from the bedside table.
He slid himself off the side of the bed, finding the floor first with one foot, then with both his knees. His chest slid across the sheets, and he swallowed a bitter mouthful of vomit. When he stood up, his head swam and his vision darkened. He propped himself up on the headboard with aching arms. A cut on the side of his head beat and beat.
Clutching his head, Pumo slowly made his way into the bathroom. Without turning on the light, he bathed his face in cold water before daring to look at himself in the mirror. A grotesque purple mask, the face of the Elephant Man, stared back at him. His stomach flipped over, and he threw up into the sink and passed out again before he hit the floor.
1
“Yes, I’ve been lying low, and no, I haven’t changed my mind about going,” Pumo said. He was talking on the telephone to Michael Poole. “You should see me, or rather you shouldn’t. I’m hideous. I stay inside most of the time, because when I go out I frighten children.”
“Is that some new kind of joke?”
“Don’t I wish. I got beat up by a psychopath. I also got robbed.”
“You mean you got mugged?”
Pumo hesitated. “In a way. I’d explain the circumstances, Mike, but frankly, they’re too embarrassing.”
“Can’t you even give me a hint?”
“Well, never pick up anybody who calls herself Dracula.” After Michael had laughed dutifully, Pumo said, “I lost my watch, a clock radio, a brand new pair of lizard-skin boots from McCreedy and Shreiber, my Walkman, my Watchman, a Dunhill lighter that didn’t work anymore, a Giorgio Armani jacket, and all my credit cards and about three hundred in cash. And when the asshole took off, he or she left the downstairs door open and some goddamned bum came in and pissed all over the hallway.”
“How do you feel about that?” Michael groaned. “Jesus, what a stupid question. I mean, in general how do you feel? I wish you’d called me right away.”
“In general I feel like committing murder, that’s how I feel in general. This thing shook me up, Mike. The world is full of hurt. I understand that there’s no real safety, not anywhere. Terrible things can happen in an instant, to anyone. That asshole just about made me afraid to go outside. But if you’re smart, you should be afraid to go outside. Listen—I want you guys to be careful when you get over there. Don’t take any risks.”
“Okay,” Michael said.
“The reason I didn’t call you or anybody else is the only good thing that came out of this whole thing. Maggie showed up. I guess I just missed her at the place where I encountered Dracula. The bartender told her he saw me leaving with someone else, so the next day she came around to check up. And found me with my face about twice its normal size. So she moved back in.”
“As Conor said, there’s a flaw in every ointment. Or something like that.”
“But I did talk to Underhill’s agent. His former agent, I should say.”
“Don’t make me beg.”
“Basically the word is that our boy did go to Singapore, all right, just like he always said he would. Throng—the agent’s name is Fenwick Throng, believe it or not—didn’t know if he was still there. They have a funny history. Underhill always had his checks deposited in a branch bank down in Chinatown. Throng never even knew his address. He wrote to him in care of a post office box. Every now and then Underhill called up to rant at him, and a couple of times he fired him. I guess over a period of five or six years the calls got more and more abusive, more violent. Throng thought that Tim was usually drunk or stoned or high on something, or all three at once. Then he’d call back in tears a couple of days later and beg Throng to work for him again. Eventually it just got too crazy for Throng, and he told Tim he couldn’t work for him anymore. He thinks that Tim has been agenting his own books ever since.”
“So he’s probably still out there, but we’ll have to find him for ourselves.”
“And he’s nuts. He sounds scary as shit to me, Michael. If I were you, I’d stay home too.”
“So the agent convinced you that Tim Underhill is probably Koko.”
“I wish I could say he didn’t.”
“I wish you could too.”
“So consider this—is he really worth risking your neck for?” Tina asked.
“I’d sure as hell rather risk my neck for Underhill than for Lyndon Baines Johnson.”
“Well, hang on, because here comes the good part,” Tina said.
2
“I don’t think adult men actually exist anymore—if they ever did,” Judy said. “They really are just grown up little boys. It’s demeaning. Michael is a caring, intelligent person and he works hard and all that, but what he believes in is ridiculous. After you reach a certain level, his values are completely childish.”
“At least they’re that mature,” said Pat Caldwell. This conversation too was conducted over the telephone. “Sometimes I’m afraid that Harry’s are just infantile.”
“Michael still believes in the army. He’d deny that, but it’s the truth. He takes that boy’s game as the real thing. He loved being part of a group.”
“Harry had the time of his life in Vietnam,” Pat said.
“The point is that Michael is going back. He wants to be in the army again. He wants to be part of a unit.”
“I think Harry just wants something to do.”
“Something to do? He could get a job! He could start acting like a lawyer again!”
“Hmm, well, perhaps.”
“Are you aware that Michael wants to sell his share of the practice? That he wants to move out of Westerholm and work in a slum? He thinks he isn’t doing enough. I mean, he has a little tiny point, you have to be a doctor in a place like this to find out how really political it is, you wouldn’t believe how much infighting goes on, but that’s life, that’s all it is.”
“So he’s using the trip to give himself time to think about it,” Pat suggested.
“He’s using the trip to play army,” Judy said. “Let’s not even mention how he’s guilt-tripping himself about Ia Thuc.”
“Oh, I think Harry was always proud of Ia Thuc,” Pat said. “Some day, I ought to show you the letters he wrote me.”
3
The night before he flew to Singapore, Michael dreamed that he was walking at night along a mountain trail toward a group of uniformed men sitting around a small fire. When he gets nearer, he sees that they are ghosts, not men—flames show dimly through the bodies in front of the fire. The ghosts turn to watch him approach. Their uniforms are ragged and stiff with dirt. In his dream Michael simply assumes that he had served with these men. Then one of the ghosts, Melvin O. Elvan, stands and steps forward. Don’t mess with Underhill, Elvan says. The world is full of hurt.
On the same night, Tina Pumo dreams that he is lying on
his bed while Maggie Lah paces around the bedroom. (In real life, Maggie disappeared again as soon as his face had begun to heal.) You can’t win a catastrophe, Maggie says. You just have to try to keep your head above water. Consider the elephant, his grace and gravity, his innate nobility. Burn down the restaurant and start over.
The shutters of the bungalow were closed against the heat. A film of condensation lay over the pink stucco walls, and the air in the room was warm, moist, and pink dark. There was a strong, dark brown smell of excrement. The man in the first of the two heavy chairs now and then grunted and stirred, or pushed his arms against the ropes. The woman did not move, because the woman was dead. Koko was invisible, but the man followed him with his eyes. When you knew you were going to die, you could see the invisible.
If you were in a village, say—
If the smoke from the cookfire wavered and rose straight into the air again. If the chicken lifted one foot and froze. If the sow cocked her head. If you saw these things. If you saw a leaf shaking, if you saw dust hovering—
Then you might see the vein jumping in Koko’s neck. You might see Koko leaning against a hootch, the vein jumping in his neck.
This is one thing Koko knew: there are always empty places. In cities where people sleep on the pavement, in cities so crowded people take shifts in bed, cities so crowded no one single person is ever truly quiet. In these cities especially there are always hollow realms, eternal places, places forgotten. Rich people leave the empty places behind, or the city itself leaves them behind.
The rich people move everything out and forget, and at night eternity quietly breaks in with Koko.
His father had been sitting in one of the two heavy chairs the rich people had left behind. We use everything, his father said. We waste no part of the animal.
We do not waste the chairs.
There was one memory he had seen in the cave, and in memory no part of the animal is wasted.
This is one thing Koko knew: they thought the chairs weren’t good enough for them. Wherever they went had better chairs.
The woman didn’t count, Roberto Ortiz had just brought her along. There weren’t even enough cards for the ones that counted, much less the ones they brought along. When they answered the letters they were supposed to come alone, but the ones like Roberto Ortiz thought where they were going was nothing, who they were going to see was nobody, and it would all be over in ten minutes.… They never thought about the cards, no one had leaned over them at night and said: We waste no part of the animal. The woman was half-Indian, half-Chinese, something like that, maybe just a Eurasian, someone Roberto Ortiz had picked up, someone Roberto Ortiz was planning to fuck the way Pumo the Puma fucked the whore Dawn Cucchio in Sydney, Australia, just someone dead in a chair, just someone who wouldn’t even get a card.
In his right jacket pocket he had all five Rearing Elephant cards, all the regimental cards he had left, with the names written lightly, penciled lightly, on four of them. Beevers, Poole, Pumo, Linklater. These were for when he went to America.
In his left jacket pocket he had an ordinary pack of Orchid Boy playing cards, made in Taiwan.
When he had opened the door wearing the big Tim Underhill smile, the hey baby how’s it shakin’ smile, and seen the woman standing next to Roberto Ortiz wearing her own hello don’t mind me! smile, he had understood why there were two chairs.
In the cave there had been no chairs, no chairs for the lords of the earth. The cave made Koko shake, his father and the devil made him shake.
“Of course it’s okay,” he had said. “There’s not much here, but you have a chair apiece, so come in and sit you down, sit you down, don’t mind that the place is so bare, we’re making changes all the time, I don’t actually work here.…”
Oh, I pray here.
But they took the chairs anyhow. Yes, Mr. Roberto Ortiz had brought all his documentation, he brought it out, smiling, just beginning to look curious, beginning to notice the dust. The emptiness.
When Koko took the documents from the man’s hand, he switched on the invisibility switch.
It was the same letter for all of them.
Dear (name),
I have decided that it is no longer possible for me to remain silent about the truth of the events which occurred in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc in 1968. Justice must finally be done. You will understand that I myself cannot be the one to bring the truth of these events to the world’s eyes and ears. I was a participant in them, and have besides turned my horror at these events to account in works of fiction. As a representative, past or present, of the world press, as one who visited the scene of a great unknown crime and saw it at first-hand, would you care to discuss this matter further? I myself have no interest whatever in the profits that might be made from publishing the true story of Ia Thuc. You may write to me at (address) if you are interested in coming East to pursue this matter. I ask only, for reasons of my own security, that you refrain from discussing this matter with, or even mentioning it to, anyone until we have had an initial meeting, that you make no notes or diary entries pertaining to myself or Ia Thuc until we meet, and that you come to our first meeting with the following proofs of identity: a) passport, and b) copies of all stories and articles you wrote or to which you contributed, concerning the American action in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc. In my opinion, you will find our meeting more than worthwhile.
Yours sincerely,
Timothy Underhill,
Koko liked Roberto Ortiz. He liked him very much. I thought I could just show you my passports and drop off my material, he said, Miss Balandran and I had planned to see Lola, it’s getting late for a meeting now, Miss Balandran particularly wanted me to see Lola, it’s a form of entertainment well known in this city, could you come around to my hotel tomorrow for lunch, you’ll have time to look over the material in the file.…
Do you know Lola?
No.
Koko liked his smooth olive skin, his glossy hair, and his confident smile. He had the whitest shirt, the glossiest tie, the bluest blazer. He had Miss Balandran, who had long golden legs and dimples and knew about the local culture. He had been going to drop something off and arrange a meeting on his own ground, as the Frenchmen had done.
But the Frenchmen only had each other, they did not have Miss Balandran smiling so prettily, urging him so quietly, so sexily, to agree.
“Of course,” Koko said, “you must do as your beautiful escort says, you must see all the sights, just stop in for a second, have a drink and let me take an initial look at what you’ve brought …”
Roberto Ortiz never noticed that Miss Balandran flushed when Koko said “escort.”
Two passports?
They were sitting in the chairs, smiling up at him with such confidence, such assurance, their clothes so beautiful and their manners so good, knowing that in minutes they would be on their way to the nightclub, to their dinner and their drinks, their pleasures.
“Dual citizenship,” Ortiz said, glancing slyly at Miss Balandran. “I am Honduran as well as American. You’ll see all the Spanish-language publications in the file, besides the ones you’re familiar with.”
“Very interesting,” Koko said. “Very interesting, indeed. I’ll just be back in a moment with your drinks, and we can toast the success of our venture as well as your night out on the town.”
He went behind the chairs into the kitchen and turned the cold tap on and off, banged a cabinet closed.
“I wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed your books,” Roberto Ortiz called from the living room.
On the counter beside the sink were a hammer, a cleaver, an automatic pistol, a new roll of strapping tape, and a small brown paper bag. Koko picked up the hammer and the pistol.
“I think The Divided Man is my favorite,” Roberto Ortiz called out.
Koko put the pistol in his coat pocket and hefted the hammer. “Thank you,” he said.
They were just sitting in the chairs, looking forward. He cam
e gliding out of the kitchen and he was invisible, he made no noise. They were just waiting for their drinks. He came up behind Roberto Ortiz and he raised his arm and Miss Balandran didn’t even know he was there until she heard the squashy sound of the hammer hitting Roberto Ortiz’s head.
“Quiet,” he said. Roberto Ortiz collapsed into himself, unconscious but not dead. A snail trail of blood crawled out of his nose.
Koko dropped the hammer and quickly moved between the chairs.
Miss Balandran gripped the arms of her chair and stared at him with dinner plate eyes.
“You’re pretty,” Koko said, and took the pistol from his pocket and shot her in the stomach.
Pain and fear took people in different directions. Anything having to do with eternity made them show you their real selves. No part of the animal was wasted. Remembrance, the whole thing they had been, just sort of took over. Koko figured the girl would get up and come for him, move a couple of steps before she realized half her guts were still back in the chair. She looked like one hell of a fighter, like a scrapper. But she couldn’t even get out of the chair—it never even crossed her mind to get out of the chair. It took her a long time even to move her hands off the arms of the chair, and then she didn’t want to look down. She shit herself, like Lieutenant Beans Beevers, down in Dragon Valley. Her feet went out, and she started shaking her head. She looked about five years old all of a sudden.
“Jesus Christ,” Koko said, and shot her in the chest. The noise hurt his ears—it really bounced off those stucco walls. The girl had sort of melted back into the chair, and Koko had the feeling that the sound killed her before the second bullet did.
“All I got is one rope,” Koko said. “See?”
He got down on his knees and put his arms between Roberto Ortiz’s twisted-up feet to pull the rope out from under the chair.
Roberto Ortiz didn’t as much as groan the whole time Koko was tying him up. When the rope tightened over his chest and clamped his arms, he pushed out a little air that smelled like mouthwash. A red knot the size of a baseball had flowered on the side of his head, and a trickle of blood matted the hair behind the knot in a way that reminded Koko of a road on a map.