by Peter Straub
Poole excused himself and went back to the telephone. By now the bar was full of people, and he could barely hear the mechanical voice instructing him in the use of his credit card.
A man answered, asked for his name, and said that he would bring Maggie to the telephone. He sounded very paternal.
In a moment Maggie was on the line. “Well, well, Dr. Poole. How did you know I wanted to talk to you?”
“I have an idea that might be interesting to you.”
“Sounds interesting already,” she said.
“Has Tim Underhill mentioned our trip to Milwaukee to you?”
He had not.
“It hasn’t been too definite yet. We’re going to look up Victor Spitalny’s parents and spend a little time seeing if we can pick up some new information on him. He might have sent a postcard, there might be someone who’s heard something—it’s a long shot, but it’s worth trying.”
“And?”
“And I thought that maybe you should come along. You might be able to identify Spitalny from a photograph. And you’re a part of what’s going on. You’re already involved.”
“When will you be going?”
Michael said that he would book tickets that night for Sunday, and that he expected to be gone only a couple of days.
“We’re opening the restaurant in a week.”
“It might only take a day or two. We might find out that it’s just a cold trail.”
“So why should I come along?”
“I’d like you to,” Michael said.
“Then I will. Call me back with the flight times, and I’ll meet you at the airport. I’ll give you a check for my ticket.”
Michael hung up smiling.
He turned to face the bar and saw Conor standing face to face with a woman who was perhaps an inch taller than he. She had long, unruly brown hair and wore a plaid shirt, a tan sleeveless down jacket, and tight faded jeans. Conor nodded in his direction, and the woman turned to watch him approach them. She had a high, deeply lined forehead, firm eyebrows, and a strong intelligent face. She was not at all what Michael had expected.
“This is the guy I was telling you about,” Conor said. “Dr. Michael Poole, known as Mike. This is Ellen.”
“Hello, Dr. Poole.” She gripped his hand in hers.
“I hope you’ll call me Michael,” he said. “I’ve been hearing about you too, and I’m glad to meet you.”
“I had to get away for a little while so I could check up on my sweetie,” Ellen said.
“If you guys ever have babies, you’d better ask me to be their doctor,” Poole said, and for a time they all stood in the noisy bar grinning at each other.
3
When Michael slid into the last pew at St. Robert’s on the village square the service had already begun. Two pews near the front had been filled with children who must have been Stacy’s classmates. All of them looked taller, older, and at once more worldly and more innocent than she. Stacy’s parents, William and Mary, “like the college,” they said to those who met them for the first time, sat with a small group of relatives on the other side of the church. William turned around and gave Michael a grateful glance as he sat down. Light streamed in through the stained glass windows on both sides of the church. Michael felt like a ghost—he felt as if bit by bit he were becoming invisible, sitting in the bright optimistic church as an Episcopalian priest uttered heartfelt commonplaces about death.
He and the Talbots met at the church door at the end of the service. William Talbot was a beefy good-hearted man who had made a fortune with various investment banking firms. “I’m happy you came, Michael.”
“We heard you’re leaving your practice.” There was a question in Mary Talbot’s statement, and Michael thought he heard a criticism too. In the world of Westerholm, doctors were not supposed to leave their posts until they retired or dropped dead.
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Are you coming out to Memorial Park?”
Mary Talbot had begun to look oddly worried and doubtful.
“Of course,” Michael said.
There were two cemeteries in Westerholm, located at opposite ends of the town. The older of the two, Burr Grove, had filled up shortly before World War II, and was a leafy, hilly, shady place with rows of pitted old eighteenth-century tombstones. Burr Grove was known locally as “the graveyard.” Memorial Park, a straightforward modern cemetery, occupied a long level field bordered by woods near the expressway on the north end of town. It was neat, very well tended, and without charm or character of any kind. In Memorial Park there were no tilting tombstones, no statuary of angels or dogs or wailing women with dripping hair, no stone bungalows testifying to the fortunes of merchant families—only straight rows of small white headstones and long, level stretches of unbroken ground.
Stacy Talbot’s grave lay at the far end of the occupied section. The mounds of excavated earth had been covered with strips of imitation grass of an unearthly, chemical green. The young priest from St. Robert’s stood beneath a canopy and performed with what looked to Poole like fussy satisfaction in his own elegance. The schoolchildren, presumably considered too young for an actual burial, were not present. William and Mary Talbot stood with bowed heads among their relatives and neighbors. Poole knew better than half of the crowd of neighbors, who appeared more numerous outside in the cemetery than inside St. Robert’s. They were parents of his patients, some of them his own neighbors. Poole stood a little distance away from these people. He had really only been a doctor here: none of these people were his friends. Judy had been too busy and too anxious to invite people to their house; she had been secretly scornful of their lives and their ambitions. During the service Poole saw a few of them notice him—a little outburst of whispers, a few glances and smiles.
Because this was a child’s burial, Poole found himself remembering Robbie’s. He felt drained by too much recent grief: an era, in many ways the calmest and most productive of his life, seemed to be sliding into the ground with Stacy Talbot’s coffin. His heart ached for William and Mary Talbot, who had no other children and whose daughter had been so bright and brave. For an instant this grief pierced him like an arrow, and Stacy Talbot’s death was an abyss—a monster had taken her, whittled at her body, killed her inch by inch. Poole wished he had someone to hold, someone with whom he could cry, but he stood at the edge of the mourners and cried by himself.
It was over soon, and the people who had known Stacy turned away toward their cars. William Talbot came up to Michael and put his arms around him and then backed away, too moved to speak. Mary Talbot put her patrician face beside his and embraced him. “Oh, I miss her,” Michael said. “Thank you,” Mary Talbot whispered.
Into the darkness, Poole thought, for the moment forgetting where he had seen or heard the phrase.
Poole said good-bye to the Talbots and turned away to walk deeper into the cemetery on one of the narrow paths that ran between the neat rows of stones.
In other years he had come here every week. Judy had come with him twice, then ceased to come—she said the visits were morbid. Maybe it was morbid: Poole did not care, because they were necessary. Eventually they had ceased to be so necessary. His last visit had been the day before he had gone to Washington to meet Beevers, Conor, and Tina.
Behind him he heard the slamming of car doors as Stacy Talbot’s mourners began to leave.
Poole wished that Tim Underhill was beside him—his was the company he most wanted now. Underhill could make sense of what was happening, he could do justice to sorrow. Poole felt that he had gone through the funeral in an unfeeling daze from which he had awakened at only the last possible minute. Poole left the path and began to walk a narrow invisible line between individual graves in the direction of the woods that bordered the cemetery.
Into the darkness, Poole thought again, and then remembered the dream of the boy, the rabbit, and the cold grey rushing river.
A wave of dizziness went through him, a
nd the air went very dark, then very light before the dizziness left him.
The scent of strong sunlight and massed flowers had suddenly filled the cooling air, a scent so powerful and beautiful that it nearly lifted Poole off the ground, and in another quick white dazzle of light Poole saw a man who must have been six and a half feet tall standing between himself and Robbie’s grave. The man was smiling at him. He had curly light brown hair and was a slim muscular man who looked as though he could move very quickly. Poole felt an instantaneous love for this man, and then realized that this was not a man at all. Time had stopped. Poole and the being were encased in a bubble of silence, and the being moved gracefully to one side to allow Poole the sight of Robbie’s headstone …
… and a car door slammed, and a few quiet voices murmured back at Stacy’s gravesite, and a tribe of sparrows wheeled over his head and settled onto the ground for an instant only before shooting off again toward the woods. Poole still felt light-headed, and his eyes hurt. He stepped forward again and found himself wrapped in the last traces of a strong clear scent of sunshine and flowers. The being was gone.
There was Robbie’s white stone before him: Robbie’s full name, which now seemed so formal, Robbie’s dates.
The unearthly odor was gone, but it seemed to Poole that as if in compensation all the natural earthly odors around him had doubled or tripled in intensity. He was inundated with the odors of the grass, the life and freshness of the soil, the fragrance of roses in one of the cemetery’s vases beside the next headstone, ALICE ALISON LEAF 1952–1978, even the clean strong slightly dusty smell of the gravel on the cemetery paths, the colors of all things about him boomed and snapped and sizzled. For a moment the world had split open like a peach to reveal an overpowering sweetness and goodness.
Who had appeared before him? What? A god?
The charged radiance was slipping away. Poole felt the priest’s eyes on him, and he turned around and found himself looking at an indifferent landscape. The last cars had nearly reached the cemetery gates, and only his Audi and the hearse were still drawn up on the narrow drive. The funeral director and one of his assistants busily dismantled the electronic scaffold that had lowered Stacy’s coffin. Two men in green pants and donkey jackets, cemetery employees, lifted the grassy carpet off the mounds of raw earth and made ready to fill the grave. A yellow earth-moving machine had appeared from behind a screen of bushes. Poole felt as if he had just passed through some kind of extraordinary psychic bubble that still had the power to invest these homely activities with its ebbing power, as if what Poole saw before him were only the visible traces of a great glory.
Certain that he was still being watched, Poole turned around again and sensed more than saw a quick, surprised movement at the edge of the woods. He looked up toward it just in time to see a shadowy figure melting back between the trees. Poole’s whole body felt a jolt. He was about thirty yards from the edge of the woods. The extraordinary feeling of well-being that had surrounded him until a few seconds ago completely vanished into its own afterglow. Whatever had withdrawn into the trees seemed to vanish back even further, flickering between the trunks of trees. Poole stepped forward between his son’s grave and Alice Alison Leaf’s.
This time Michael knew that he had seen Koko. Koko had somehow followed him to the cemetery, which meant that he had followed him to Conor’s apartment.
Poole walked between the graves until he reached the empty part of the graveyard and then walked over brown winter grass toward the trees. Far back in the darkness of the woods he thought he could see a still pale figure watching him from beside a tree. “Come on out!” Poole yelled. The figure far back in the woods did not move.
“Come on out and talk to me!” Poole shouted.
He heard the funeral director and the cemetery workmen stop whatever they were doing to look at him.
The figure in the woods wavered like a match flame. Poole moved closer to the first bare trees, and the figure disappeared backward to flicker out behind a massive trunk deep in the woods. “Come out here!” Poole yelled.
“You okay?” a voice called out, and Poole turned around to see a man as heavy as a professional wrestler standing on the bulldozer, his hands cupped around his mouth.
Poole waved him off and began to trot toward the woods. The figure had disappeared. The woods, of heavily overgrown birch, oak, and maple, home to several families of foxes and raccoons, ran for another fifty yards down into a ravine and up over a crest, and down to the expressway.
A dim shape, dark now instead of pale, moved like a deer between two oaks.
Poole yelled for him to stop and passed between the first of the trees. Ahead of him was a low bristling tangle of brush, the grey diagonal line of a dead toppled ash tree, the rough accidental suggestion of a path that led around the tangle of brush, beneath the toppled ash, and on between the trees until it split apart into a hundred narrow byways of fallen leaves and spangles of light. The little shadow was inching almost provocatively backward toward the ravine, coaxing him forward.
Poole glanced again over his shoulder and saw all four men around Stacy’s grave, including the beefy gravedigger on the bulldozer, staring at him.
He ran around the dry tangle of brush, thinking that a god standing by his son’s grave had beckoned him forward, ducked to pass beneath the slanting line of the fallen ash, and saw a silver wire thin as a strand from a spiderweb gleaming up at him above the pulpy leaves and twigs on the floor of the forest. If he had been running normally he would never have seen it. Instincts he did not know he still had almost literally kicked into place, and as his right ankle moved forward to trip the wire, Poole sprang forward, lifting both feet off the ground, and sailed over the wire without touching it. For a moment that lasted long enough for him to feel proud of himself his whole body stretched out in the air parallel to the ground; then he thudded into the ground with a jolt that rattled all his bones. He pulled up his knees and kneaded his shoulder, greasy with leaf mold.
Poole got up, rubbing his shoulder, and trotted a few steps deeper into the woods. Spitalny appeared briefly in a vertical mesh of birch trunks, then vanished again. Michael knew he could not catch him. By the time he got halfway down into the ravine, Spitalny could be in a car and a couple of miles south.
Michael took another step forward, scanning the ground for indications of work. Tripwire usually meant mines or homemade explosives. Even a madman like Victor Spitalny could probably buy explosives in New York, once he had learned where to look. He wouldn’t be able to find any bouncing bettys or cluster bombs any more than he could find a LAW anti-tank rocket, but probably all sorts of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, plastic explosives, and grenades were for sale in underground weapons markets. Maybe crates of old M-14 plastic mines went up on the block.
Poole moved cautiously through the leaf mold, placing feet carefully, examining every inch of the ground before him. He moved forward another step, then another, feeling the earth yield beneath the soles of his shoes.
The flat, cynical laughter of a raven jeered at him from overhead. Poole looked up into the thick dark weave of branches. Sunlight penetrated about halfway down, then split and fractured to pick out a squirrel’s nest and a huge hairy black bole like a tumor. He continued to walk slowly toward the ravine. Wherever they were, Koko would rig his booby traps well, and they would stay in place, still armed, until they were tripped. Spitalny had been soldier enough for that. Poole wanted to find what he had set up and disarm it before some child went running through the woods.
Some little boy.
Poole shook his head, then made himself move forward, one step at a time, mapping every inch of territory in his head. Ahead of him something gleamed on the trunk of a slender maple: it caught his eye, and he heard voices calling out. He turned to see five men—the gravediggers, the undertaker and his assistant, and one other man in a grey coat and dark tie—standing in the sunlight at the edge of the woods on the dead grass of the unused sectio
n of the cemetery.
“Keep out!” he yelled, and motioned them back.
The man in the grey coat raised his hands to his mouth, and Poole heard him shout something that included the word trespassing.
“… police!” the man yelled.
Poole waved, and looked ahead of him again. He had nearly reached the ravine. If Spitalny had planted more booby traps, he thought he would have seen them.
“I’m coming,” he shouted back to the men, who huddled closer to one another, having probably heard him no better than he had heard them. The man in the grey coat was pointing at Poole, yelling again.
“… out now … police …”
“Don’t move!” Poole shouted. “I’ll be out in a second. Stay there!” He waved and tried to find what he had seen a moment before. It had been something incongruous: a flash of color? He scanned a rank of trees and saw nothing but a squirrel circling around the trunk of an oak. Beyond the squirrel’s head, grey brush reared up in the ravine. Spitalny had cut through that impenetrable-looking stuff in something like forty seconds—he was a better jungle fighter now than he had been in Vietnam. Michael shifted his eyes and saw it at last, a white rectangle on a maple’s thin dark trunk.
For a moment it looked like a scrap of white fur pinned to the bark; then he saw that what was pinned to the tree was a playing card.
He gave a flapping wave of his hand to the men at the edge of the woods and yelled, “Don’t come in! Danger!”
He hoped they heard him. “Danger!” he yelled one more time, waving his arms over his head in and out of an X, and walked backwards, still semaphoring, until he sensed he was near the maple tree with the playing card attached to its trunk.
The tree stood perhaps a yard behind him, slightly off to his right.