by Peter Straub
At Fourteenth Street I stopped for a cup of coffee. At Twenty-fourth Street Lily came out of her kitchen and found Charlie Carpenter standing inside her front door. Decided to stop off on your way to work, Charlie? She was wearing a long white cotton robe printed with little blue flowers, and her hair was shapeless. I saw that Lily had recently applied eggplant-colored polish to her toenails. You’re full of surprises.
Then it stopped moving, at least until it would start again. At Fifty-second Street, I went into the big B. Dalton to look for some books. In the religion section downstairs I bought Gnosticism, by Benjamin Walker, The Nag Hammadi Library, and The Gospel According to Thomas. I took the books outside and decided to walk to Central Park.
When I got past the zoo I sat on a bench, took out my notebook, and looked for Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan. They had not moved. Lily was still saying You’re full of surprises, and Charlie Carpenter was still standing inside her front door with his hands in his pockets, smiling at her like a little boy. They both looked very fine, but I was not thinking about them now. I was thinking about the body squad and Captain Havens. I remembered the strange, disordered men with whom I had spent that time and saw them before me, in our shed. I remembered my first body, and Ratman’s story about Bobby Swett, who had disappeared into a red mist. Mostly, I could see Ratman as he was telling the story, his eyes angry and sparkling, his finger jabbing, his whole being coming to life as he talked about the noise the earth made by itself. Ratman seemed astonishingly young now—skinny, with a boy’s unfinished skinniness.
Then, without wanting to, I remembered some of what happened later, as I occasionally do when a nightmare wakes me up. I had to get up off the bench, and I shoved my notebook in my pocket and started walking aimlessly through the park. I knew from experience that it would be hours before I could work or even speak normally to anyone. I felt as though I were walking over graves—as though a lot of people like Ratman and di Maestro, both of whom had only been boys too young to vote or drink, lay a few feet beneath the grass. I tensed up when I heard someone coming up behind me. It was time to go home. I turned around and went toward what I hoped was Fifth Avenue. A pigeon beat its wings and jumped into the air, and a circle of grass beneath it flattened out in the pattern made by an ascending helicopter.
It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.
I saw the face of the man I had killed on a Chinese man carrying his daughter on his shoulders. He jumped up on an almost invisible trail. His face looked frozen—it was almost funny, all that amazement. I watched the Chinese man carry his daughter toward a Sabrett’s hot dog cart. The girl’s round face filled like a glass with serious, gleeful concentration. Her father held a folded dollar in his hand. He was carrying a ridiculous old rifle that was probably less accurate than a BB gun. He got a hot dog wrapped in white tissue and handed it up to his daughter. No ketchup, no mustard, no sauerkraut. Just your basic hot dog experience. I raised my M-16 and I shot him in the throat and he fell straight down. It looked like a trick.
Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan had turned away from me, they were grinding their teeth and wailing.
I sat down on a bench in the sun. I was sweating. I was not sure if I had been going east toward Fifth Avenue, or west, deeper into the park. I slowly inhaled and exhaled, trying to control the sudden panic. It was just a bad one. It was just a little worse than normal. It was nothing too serious. I grabbed one of the books I had bought and opened it at random. It was The Gospel According to Thomas, and here is what I read:
The Kingdom of Heaven
Is like a woman carrying a jug
Full of meal on a long journey.
When the handle broke,
The meal streamed out behind her, so that
She never noticed anything was wrong, until
Arriving home, she set the jug down
And found that it was empty.
The Kingdom of Heaven
Is like a man who wished to assassinate a noble.
He drew his sword at home, and struck it
against the wall,
To test whether his hand were strong enough.
Then he went out, and killed the noble.
I thought of my father drinking in the alley behind the St. Alwyn Hotel. Hard Millhaven sunlight bounced and dazzled from the red bricks and the oil-stained concrete. Drenched in dazzling light, my father raised his pint and drank.
I stood up and found that my legs were still shaking. I sat down again before anyone could notice. Two young women on the next bench laughed at something, and I glanced over at them. One of them said, “You are sworn to secrecy. Let us begin at the beginning.”
Back on Grand Street I typed my notes into the computer and printed them out. I saw that I had mapped out the next few days’ work. I thought of going downstairs for lunch so I could show Maggie Lah those enigmatic, barbaric verses from the gnostic gospel, but remembered it was Friday, one of the days she worked on her philosophy M.A. at NYU. I went into my own kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Fastened to the door is a photograph I cut out of the New York Times the day after Ted Bundy was executed. It shows his mother holding a telephone receiver to her ear while she plugs her other ear with an index finger. She has bangs and big glasses and concentration has pulled her thick eyebrows together. The caption is Louise Bundy, of Tacoma, Wash., saying goodbye by telephone to her son, Theodore Bundy, the serial killer who was executed for murder yesterday morning in Florida.
Whenever I see this terrible photograph, I think about taking it down. I try to remember why I cut it out in the first place. Then I open the refrigerator door.
The telephone rang as soon as I pulled the handle, and I closed the door and went into the loft’s main room to answer it.
I said, “Hello,” and the voice on the other end said the same thing and then paused. “Am I speaking to Timothy Underhill? Timothy Underhill, the writer?”
When I admitted to my identity, my caller said, “Well, it’s been a long time since we’ve met. Tim, this is John Ransom.”
And then I felt an of course: as if I had known he would call, that predetermined events were about to unfold, and that I had been waiting for this for days.
“I was just thinking about you,” I said, because in Central Park I had remembered the last time I had seen him—he had been nothing like the friendly, self-justifying captain I had met on the edge of Camp White Star, parroting slogans about stopping communism. He had reminded me of Scoot. Around his neck had been a necklace of dried blackened little things I’d taken for ears before I saw that they were tongues. I had not seen him since, but I never forgot certain things he had said on that day.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about you, too,” he said. Now he sounded a long way from the man who had worn the necklace of tongues. “I’ve been reading The Divided Man.”
“Thanks,” I said, and wondered if that was what he was calling about. He sounded tired and slow.
“That’s not what I mean. I thought you’d like to know something. Maybe you’ll even want to come out here.”
“Out where?”
“Millhaven,” he said. Then he laughed, and I thought that he might be drunk. “I guess you don’t know I came back here. I’m a professor here, at Arkham College.”
That was a surprise. Arkham, a group of redbrick buildings around a trampled little common, was a gloomy institution just west of Millhaven’s downtown. The bricks had long ago turned sooty and brown, and the windows never looked clean. It had never been a particularly good school, and I knew of no reason wh
y it should have improved.
“I teach religion,” he said. “We have a small department.”
“It’s nice to hear from you again,” I said, beginning to disengage myself from the conversation and him.
“No, listen. You might be interested in something that happened. I want, I’d like to talk to you about it.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Someone attacked two people and wrote BLUE ROSE near their bodies. The first person died, but the second one is in a coma. She’s still alive.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t say any more. “Is that really true?”
“The second one was April,” he said.
My blood stopped moving.
“My wife, April. She’s still in a coma.”
“My God,” I said. “I’m sorry, John. What happened?”
He gave me a sketchy version of the attack on his wife. “I just wanted to ask you a question. If you have an answer, that’s great. And if you can’t answer, that’s okay too.”
I asked him what the question was, but I thought I already knew what he was going to ask.
“Do you still think that detective, Damrosch, the one you called Esterhaz in the book, killed those people?”
“No,” I said—almost sighed, because I half suspected what a truthful answer to that question would mean. “I learned some things since I wrote that book.”
“About the Blue Rose murderer?”
“You don’t think it’s the same person, do you?” I asked.
“Well, I do, yes.” John Ransom hesitated. “After all, if Damrosch wasn’t the murderer, then nobody ever caught the guy. He just walked away.”
“This must be very hard on you.”
He hesitated. “I just wanted to talk to you about it. I’m—I’m—I’m not in great shape, I guess, but I don’t want to intrude on you anymore. You told me more than enough already. I’m not even sure what I’m asking.”
“Yes, you are,” I said.
“I guess I was wondering if you might want to come out to talk about it. I guess I was thinking I could use some help.”
You are sworn to secrecy.
Let us begin at the beginning.
PART
TWO
FRANKLIN BACHELOR
1
MY SECOND ENCOUNTER with John Ransom in Vietnam took place while I was trying to readjust myself after an odd and unsettling four-day patrol. I did not understand what had happened—I didn’t understand something I’d seen. Actually, two inexplicable things had happened on the last day of the patrol, and when I came across John Ransom, he explained both of them to me.
We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. Damp gray twilight settled around us. We couldn’t smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. A black, six-six, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound grunt named Leonard Hamnet fingered a letter he had received months before out of his pocket and squinted at it, trying to read it for the thousandth time while spooning canned peaches into his mouth. By now, the precious letter was a rag held together with tape.
At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the lieutenant yelled, “Shit!” and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.
The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy, named Tyrell Budd, coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.
One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the solid ground on the other side of the paddy. A little group of thatched huts was visible through the sparse trees. Then the two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. I experienced that endless moment of pure helplessness in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to leave it. The shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us. A shell fragment whizzed overhead, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage’s helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground. A little smoke drifted up from it.
We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, but he was breathing. Leonard Hamnet picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder.
When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of the misery we were to encounter later in a place called Ia Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The huts were empty—something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again.
Michael Poole’s map said that the place was named Bong To.
Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.
Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. “I caught a head wound,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner,” Hamnet said.
Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. “I see double,” he said. “I’ll never get that helmet back on.”
The medic said, “Take it easy, we’ll get you out of here.”
“Out of here?” Spanky brightened up.
“Back to Crandall,” the medic said.
A nasty little wretch named Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. “There ain’t nobody here,” Spitalny said. “What the fuck is going on?” He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.
Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat.
“Spitalny, Tiano,” the lieutenant said. “Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now.”
Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was Spitalny’s only friend, said, “You do it this time, Lieutenant.”
Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.
“Hey, I’m gone, I’m already there,” Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes had found us.
Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots.
Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village.
“Maybe I better take a look,” the lieutenant said. He flicked his lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.
The lieutenant came hurrying back out of the hut.
“
Underhill, Poole,” he said, “I want you to see this.”
Poole and I glanced at each other. Poole seemed a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen’s eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same.
“What is it, Lieutenant?” he asked.
The lieutenant gestured for us to follow him into the hut and went back inside. Poole looked as if he felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.
The lieutenant was fingering his sidearm just inside the hut. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on his lighter.
“You tell me what it is, Poole.”
He marched into the hut, holding up the lighter like a torch.
Inside, he stooped down and tugged at the edges of a wooden panel in the floor. I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. “Now. Tell me what this is.”
“It’s where they hide the kids when people like us show up,” I said. “Did you take a look?”
I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn’t about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.
“Taking a look is your job, Underhill,” he said.
For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.
“Give me the lighter,” Poole said, and grabbed it away from the lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the lieutenant and me by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.