by Peter Straub
The instant the door closed behind Magritte, another opened and a tall soldier in green fatigues emerged. It was like a farce: a clockwork village where one door opened as soon as another closed. The tall soldier glanced at me, seemed to hesitate, and began moving toward me.
Fuck you, I thought, I have a right to be here, I do the dirty work for you assholes.
He kicked up dust as he walked. He was carrying a .45 in a black leather holster hung from his web belt, and two ballpoint pens jutted out of the slanted, blousy pocket of his shirt. There were two crossed rifles on his collar, and a captain’s star on his epaulets. He carried something soft in one hand, and a wristwatch with a steel band hung upside down from a slot in his collar.
Too late, I remembered to salute. When my hand was still at my forehead, I saw that the man coming toward me had the face I had just seen in a body bag. It was Captain Havens. My eyes dropped to the name tag stitched to his shirt. The steel watch covered the first two or three letters, and all I could read was SOM.
Good trick, I thought. First I see him being scalped, then I see him coming at me.
I thought of wet elm leaves in a gutter.
The ghost of Captain Havens smiled at me. The ghost called me by name and asked, “How’d you find out I was here?” When he came closer I saw that the ghost was John Ransom.
5
JUST A GUESS,” I said, and when his smile turned quizzical, “I was just following the road to see where it went.”
“That’s pretty much how I got here, too,” Ransom said. He was close enough to shake my hand, and as he reached out he must have caught the stench of the shed, and maybe the smells of whiskey and the one hundreds too. His eyebrows moved together. “What have you been doing?”
“I’m on the body squad. Over there.” I nodded toward the road. “What do you do? What is this place?”
He had grasped my hand, but instead of shaking it, he spun me around and marched me away from the empty-looking camp and into the spindly trees. “You better stay out of sight until you straighten up,” he said.
“You should see what the rest of them are doing,” I said, but sat down at the base of one of the trees and leaned against the slick, spongy bark. The man in the gray suit and sunglasses came out of the building he had entered earlier and strode back across the grass to the building he had left. He jumped up onto the stoop and touched his breast pocket before he went in.
“Johnny got his gun,” I said.
“That’s Francis Pinkel, Senator Burrman’s aide. Pinkel thinks he’s James Bond. That’s a Walther PPK in his shoulder holster. We’re giving the senator a briefing, and then we’ll take him up in a helicopter and show him one of our projects.”
“You in some kind of private army?”
He showed me the soft green cap in his hand.
“You’re one of those guys in Harry Truman shirts who carry briefcases and live out in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhades.” I laughed.
“Sometimes we’re asked to fly in wearing civvies,” he said. He placed the beret on his head. It was a dark forest green with a leather roll around its bottom seam, and it had a patch with two arrows crossing a sword above the words De Oppresso Liber. It looked good on him. “How’d a lousy grunt like you learn so much?”
“You learn a lot, working on the body squad. What is this place, here?”
“Special Operations Group. We ride piggyback on White Star when we’re not in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhade.”
“You really do that?”
John Ransom explained that the CIDG program in Darlac Province had been going since the early sixties, but that he had been assigned to border surveillance in the highlands near the Laotian border, in Khan Duc. Last year, they had parachuted in a bulldozer and carved a landing strip out of a jungle ridge line. While they looked for the Khatu tribesmen he was supposed to be working with, his actual troops were press-ganged teenagers from Danang and Hue. The teenagers were a little hairy, Ransom said. They weren’t much like the Rhade Montagnards. He sounded frustrated when he told me about his troops, and angry with himself for letting me see his frustration—the teenagers played transistors on patrol, he said. “But they kill everything that moves. Including monkeys.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Five months, but I’ve been in the service three years. Did the Special Forces training at Bragg, got here just in time to help set up Khan Duc. It’s not like the regular army.” He had begun to sound oddly defensive to me. “We actually get out and do things. We get into parts of the country the army never sees, and our A teams do a lot of damage to the VC.”
“I wondered who was doing all that damage,” I said.
“These days people don’t believe in an elite, even the army has problems with that, but that’s what we are. You ever hear of Sully Fontaine? Ever hear of Franklin Bachelor?”
I shook my head. “We’re a pretty elite group in the body squad, too. Ever hear of di Maestro? Picklock? Scoot?”
He nearly shuddered. “I’m talking about heroes. We have guys who fought the Russians with Germany—we have guys who fought the Russians in Czechoslovakia.”
“I didn’t know we were fighting the Russkies yet,” I said.
“We’re fighting communism,” he said simply. “That’s what it’s all about. Stopping the spread of communism.”
He had maintained his faith even during five months of shepherding teenage hoodlums through the highlands, and I thought I could see how he had done it. He was staring forward to see something like pure experience.
I wished that he could meet Scoot and Ratman. I thought Senator Burrman should meet them, too. They could have an exchange of views.
“How did you get on the body squad?” Ransom asked me.
Francis Pinkel popped out of a building and scouted the ghost town for marauding VC. A burly gray-haired man who must have been the senator came out after him, followed by a Special Forces colonel. The colonel was short and solid and walked as if he were trying to drive his feet into the ground by the sheer force of his personality.
“Captain McCue thought I’d enjoy the work.”
I saw Ransom memorizing the name. He asked me where I was supposed to join my unit, and I told him.
He flipped up the watch hanging from his collar. “About time for my dog and pony show. Can’t you get a shower and drink a lot of coffee or something?”
“You don’t understand the body squad,” I said. “We work better this way.”
“I’m going to take care of you,” he said, and began to trot out of the woods toward the senator’s building. Then he turned around and waved. “Maybe we’ll run into each other at Camp Crandall.” It was clear he thought that we never would.
I met John Ransom twice at Camp Crandall. Everything about him had changed by the first time we met again, and by the second time he had changed even more. He’d had a narrow scrape at a fortified Montagnard village called Lang Vei. Most of his Bru tribesmen had been killed, and so had most of the Green Berets there. After a week, Ransom escaped from an underground bunker filled with the bodies of his friends. When the surviving Bru finally made it to Khe Sanh, the marines took away their rifles and ordered them back into the jungle. By this time a prominent marine officer had publicly ridiculed what he called the Green Berets’ “anthropological” warfare.
6
IHAVE USED THE PHRASE “the bottom of the world” twice, and that is two times too often. Neither I, nor John Ransom, nor any other person who returned ever saw the real bottom of the world. Those who did can never speak. Elie Wiesel uses the expression “children of the night” to describe Holocaust survivors: some children came out of that night and others did not, but the ones who did were changed forever. Against a background of night and darkness stands a child. The child, whose hand is extended toward you, who is smiling enigmatically, has come straight out of that dark background. The child can speak or must be silent forever, as the case ma
y be.
7
MY SISTER APRIL’S DEATH—her murder—happened like this. She was nine, I was seven. She had gone out after school to play with her friend Margaret Rasmussen. Dad was where he always was around six o’clock in the evening, at the end of South Sixth Street, our street, in the Idle Hour. Mom was taking a nap. Margaret Rasmussen’s house was five blocks away, on the other side of Livermore Avenue. It was only two blocks away if you crossed Livermore and went straight through the arched tunnel like a viaduct that connected the St. Alwyn Hotel to its annex. Bums and winos, of which our neighborhood had a share, sometimes gathered in this tunnel. My sister, April, knew she was supposed to go the three blocks around the front of the St. Alwyn and then back down Pulaski Street, but she was always impatient to get to Margaret Rasmussen’s house, and I knew that she usually went straight through the tunnel.
This was a secret. It was one of our secrets.
I was listening to the radio alone in our living room. I want to remember, I sometimes think I really do remember, a sense of dread directly related to the St. Alwyn’s tunnel. If this memory is correct, I knew that April was going to have crossed Livermore Street in no more than a minute, that she was going to ignore the safety of the detour and walk into that tunnel, and that something bad waited for her in there.
I was listening to “The Shadow,” the only radio program that actually scared me. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. After this came a sinister, even a frightening, laugh. Not long before, Dad had shown me a Ledger article claiming that the real Shadow, the one the radio series was based on, was an old man who lived in Millhaven. His name was Lamont von Heilitz, and a long time ago he called himself “an amateur of crime.”
I turned off the radio and then, sneakily, switched it back on again in case Mom woke up and wondered what I was doing. I walked out of the front door and jogged down the path to the sidewalk, where I began to run toward Livermore Street. April was not waiting on the corner for the light to change, which meant that she had already crossed Livermore and would be in the tunnel. All I wanted was to get past the Idle Hour unnoticed and to see April’s slight blond figure emerging into the sunlight on the far side of the tunnel. Then I could turn around and go home.
I don’t believe in premonitions, not personally. I believe that other people have them, not me.
A stalled truck kept me from seeing across Livermore Avenue. The truck was long and shiny, with some big name painted on its side, ALLERTON maybe, or ALLINGHAM. Elms still lined Millhaven’s streets, and their leaves were strewn thickly in the gutter, where clear water from a broken hydrant gurgled over and through them and carried a few, like toast-colored rafts, to the drain down the street. A folded newspaper lay half in, half out of the water; I remember a photograph of one boxer hitting another in a spray of sweat and saliva.
At last the truck began to move forward, ALLERTON or ALLINGHAM with it.
The truck moved past the front of the arched little bridge to the St. Alwyn annex, and I leaned forward to see through the traffic. Cars slid by and interrupted my view. April’s pale blue dress was moving safely through the tunnel. She was about half of the way down its length, and had perhaps four feet to go before coming out into the disappearing daylight. The flow of cars cut her off from me again, then allowed me another flash of blue.
An adult-sized shadow moved away from the darkness of the wall and moved toward April. The traffic blocked my view again.
It was just someone coming home through the tunnel—someone on his way to the Idle Hour. But the big shadow had been moving toward April, not past her. I imagined that I had seen something in the big shadow’s hand.
Through the sound of horns and engines, I thought I heard a voice rising to a scream, but another blast of horns cut it off. Or something else cut it off. The horns stopped blaring when the traffic moved—homeward traffic at six-fifteen on an autumn night, moving beneath the elms that arched over Livermore and South Sixth Street. I peered through the cars, nearly hopping with anxiety, and saw April’s oddly limp back. Her hair fell back past her shoulders, and the whole streak of blond and pale blue that was her back went up. The man’s arm moved. Dread froze me to the sidewalk.
For a moment it seemed that everything on the street, maybe everything in Millhaven, had stopped, including me. The thought of what was happening across the street pushed me forward over the leaves packed into the gutter and down into the roadbed. There was no traffic anymore, only an opening between cars through which I saw April’s dress floating in midair. I moved into the opening, and only then became aware that cars were flowing past on both sides of me and that most of them were blowing their horns. For a moment, nearly my last moment, I knew that all movement had ceased in the tunnel. The man stopped moving. He turned toward the noise in the street, and I saw the shape of his head, the set of his shoulders.
At that point, though I was unaware of it, my father came out of the Idle Hour. Several other men came with him, but Dad was the first one through the door.
A car horn blasted in my ear, and I turned my head. The grille of an automobile was coming toward me with what seemed terrific slowness. I was absolutely unable to move. I knew that the car was going to hit me. This certainty existed entirely apart from my terror. It was like knowing the answer to the most important question on a test. The car was going to hit me, and I was going to die.
Writing about this in the third person, in Mystery, was easier.
My vision of things ceases with the car coming toward me with terrific unstoppable slowness, frame by frame, as a car would advance through a series of photographs. Dad and his friends saw the car hit me; they saw me adhere to the grille, then slip down to be caught on a bumper ornament and dragged thirty feet before the car jolted to a halt and threw me off.
At that moment I died—the boy named Timothy Underhill, the seven-year-old me, died of shock and injury. He had a fractured skull, his pelvis and his right leg were shattered, and he died. Such a moment is not visible from a sidewalk. I have the memory of sensation, of being torn from my body by a giant, irresistible force and being accelerated into another, utterly different dimension. Of blazing light. What remains is the sense of leaving the self behind, all personality and character, everything merely personal. All of that was gone, and something else was left. I want to think that I was aware of April far ahead of me, sailing like a leaf through some vast dark cloudgate. There was an enormous, annihilating light, a bliss, an ecstasy you have to die to earn. Unreasoning terror surrounds and engulfs this memory, if that’s what it is. I dream about it two or three times a week, a little more frequently than I dream about the man I killed face-to-face. The experience was entirely nonverbal and, in some basic way, profoundly inhuman. One of my clearest and strongest impressions is that living people are not supposed to know.
I woke up encased in plaster, a rag, a scrap, in a hospital room. There followed a year of wretchedness, of wheelchairs and useless anger—all this is in Mystery. Not in that book is my parents’ endless and tongue-tied misery. My own problems were eclipsed, put utterly into shadow by April’s death. And because I see her benevolent ghost from time to time, particularly on airplanes, I guess that I have never really recovered either.
On October fifteenth, while I was still in the hospital, the first of the Blue Rose murders took place on almost exactly the same place where April died. The victim was a prostitute named Arlette Monaghan, street name Fancy. She was twenty-six. Above her body on the brick wall of the St. Alwyn, the murderer had written the words BLUE ROSE.
Early in the morning of October twentieth, James Treadwell’s corpse was found in bed in room 218 of the St. Alwyn. He too had been murdered by someone who had written the words BLUE ROSE on the wall above the body.
On the twenty-fifth of October, another young man, Monty Leland, was murdered late at night on the corner of South Sixth and Livermore, the act sheltered from the sparse traffic down Livermore at that hour by t
he corner of the Idle Hour. The usual words, left behind by the tavern’s front door, were painted over as soon as the police allowed by the Idle Hour’s owner, Roman Majestyk.
On November third, a young doctor named Charles “Buzz” Laing managed to survive wounds given him by an unseen assailant who had left him for dead in his house on Millhaven’s east side. His throat had been slashed from behind, and his attacker had written BLUE ROSE on his bedroom wall.
The final Blue Rose murder, or what seemed for forty-one years to be the final Blue Rose murder, was that of Heinz Stenmitz, a butcher who lived on Muffin Street with his wife and a succession of foster children, all boys. Four days after the attack on the doctor, Stenmitz was killed outside his shop, next door to his house. I have no difficulty remembering Mr. Stenmitz. He was an unsettling man, and when I saw his name in the Ledger’s subhead (the headline was BLUE ROSE KILLER CLAIMS FOURTH VICTIM), I experienced an ungenerous satisfaction that would have shocked my parents.
I knew, as my parents did not—as they refused to believe, despite a considerable scandal the year before—that there were two Mr. Stenmitzes. One was the humorless, Teutonic, but efficient butcher who sold them their chops and sausages. Tall, blond, bearded, blue-eyed, he carried himself with an aggressive rectitude deeply admired by both my parents. His attitude was military, in the sense that the character played over and over by C. Aubrey Smith in Hollywood films of the thirties and forties was military.
The other Mr. Stenmitz was the one I saw when my parents put two dollars in my hand and sent me to the butcher shop for hamburger. My parents did not believe in the existence of this other man within Mr. Stenmitz. If I had insisted on his presence, their disbelief would have turned into anger.
The Mr. Stenmitz I saw when I was alone always came out from behind the counter. He would stoop down and rub my head, my arms, my chest. His huge blond bearded head was far too close. The smells of raw meat and blood, always prominent in the shop, seemed to intensify, as if they were what the butcher ate and drank. “You came to see your friend Heinz?” A pat on the cheek. “You can’t stay away from your friend Heinz, can you?” A sharp, almost painful pat on the buttocks. His thick red fingers found my pockets and began to insinuate themselves. His eyes were the lightest, palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen, the eyes of a Finnish sled dog. “You have two dollars? What are these two dollars for? So your friend Heinz will show you a nice surprise, maybe?”