by Peter Straub
The footsteps thudded toward my door and went past it without even hesitating. A second later, another door opened and closed.
And then I remembered where I was. I heard John Ransom groan as he fell onto his bed. I unpeeled myself from the wall.
It was a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning.
I knocked on Ransom’s bedroom door. A barely audible voice told me to come in.
I pushed open the door and stepped inside the dark room. It was more than three times the size of the guest room. Beyond the bed, on the opposite side of the room, a wall of mirrors on closet doors dimly reflected the opening door and my shadowy face. His suit jacket lay crumpled on the floor next to the bed. Ransom lay face-down across the mattress. Garish suspenders made a bright Y across his back.
“How is she doing?” I asked. “Is she out of the coma?”
Ransom rolled onto his side and blinked at me as if he were not quite sure who I was. He pursed his lips and exhaled, then pushed himself upright. “God, what a night.” He bent forward and pulled off his soft brown wingtips. He tossed them toward the closet, and they thudded onto the carpet. “April’s doing a lot better, but she’s not out of the woods yet.” He shrugged his shoulders from beneath his suspenders and let them droop to his sides.
Ransom smiled up at me, and I realized how tired he looked when he was not smiling. “But things look good, according to the doctor.” He untied his tie and threw it toward a sofa. The tie fell short and fluttered onto the rose-colored carpet. “I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep and then go back to Shady Mount.” He grunted and pushed himself to the bottom end of the bed.
Two enormous paintings hung on facing walls, a male nude lying on lush grass, a female nude leaning forward against a tree on outstretched arms, both figures outlined in the Nabis manner. They were the most sensual Nabis paintings I had ever seen. John Ransom saw me looking back and forth from one to the other, and he cleared his throat as he unbuttoned his shirt.
“You like those?”
I nodded.
“April bought them from a local kid last year. I thought he was kind of a hustler.” He threw his shirt onto the floor, dropped his keys, change, and bills onto an end table, unbuckled his belt, undid his trousers and pushed them down. He pulled his legs out of them, yanked off his socks, and half-scooted, half-crawled up the bed. A sour, sweaty odor came from his body. “I’m sorry, but I’m really out.”
He began to scoot under the light blanket and the top sheet. Then he stopped moving, kneeling on the bed and holding up the covers. His belly bulged over the top of his boxer shorts. “You want to use the car? You could look around in Pigtown, see if it looks any—”
He flopped onto his sheets and smacked his hand on his forehead. “I’m sorry, Tim. I’m even more tired than I thought.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Even the people who live there call it Pigtown.”
This was not strictly true—the people who lived in my old neighborhood had always resented the name—but it seemed to help him. “Good for them,” he said. He groped for the pulled-back sheet and tugged it up. Then he rolled his head on the pillow and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “White Pontiac.”
“I guess I will take a look around,” I said.
Ransom closed his eyes, shuddered, and fell asleep.
PART
FOUR
WALTER DRAGONETTE
1
ON THE WAY to my old neighborhood, I realized that I wanted to go somewhere else first and turned Ransom’s white Pontiac onto Redwing Avenue and drove past traces of the old Millhaven—neighborhood bars in places that were not real neighborhoods anymore. Blistering morning sun seemed to wish to push the low wood and stone buildings down into the baking sidewalks. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was thinning out all around me, disappearing into a generic midwestern cityscape.
I would have been less convinced of the disappearance of the old Millhaven if I had turned on the radio and heard Paul Fontaine and Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan announcing the arrest of the soon-to-be-notorious serial killer Walter Dragonette, the Meat Man, but I left the radio off and remained ignorant of his name for another few hours.
Two or three miles went by in a blur of traffic and concrete on the east-west expressway. Ahead of me, the enormous wedding cake of the baseball stadium grew larger and larger, and I turned off on the exit just before it. This early in the morning, only the groundskeepers’ cars stood in the vast parking lot. Two blocks past the stadium, I turned in through the open gates of Pine Knoll Cemetery and parked near the gray stone guardhouse. When I got out, the heat struck me like a lion’s breath. Rows of differently sized headstones stretched off behind the guard’s office like a messy Arlington. Furry hemlock trees ranged along the far end. White gravel paths divided the perfect grass. Sprinklers whirled glittering sprays of water in the distance. Thirty feet away, an angular old man in a white shirt, black tie, black trousers, and black military hat puttered through the rows of headstones, picking up beer cans and candy wrappers left behind by teenagers who had climbed into the cemetery after the baseball game last night.
The graves I wanted lay in the older section of Pine Knoll, near the high stone wall that borders the left side of the cemetery. The three headstones stood in a row: Albert Hoover Underhill, Louise Shade Underhill, April Shade Underhill. The first two headstones, newer than April’s, still looked new, bone-dry in the drenching sun. All three would have been warm to the touch. The grass was kept very short, and individual green blades glistened in the sun.
If I had anything to say to these graves, or they to me, now was the time to say it. I waited, standing in the sun, holding my hands before me. A few bright moments came forward from a swirling darkness: sitting safe and warm on the davenport with my mother, watching drivers wading through waist-high snow after abandoning their cars; April skipping rope on the sidewalk; lying in bed with a fever on St. Patrick’s Day while my mother cleaned the house, singing along with the Irish songs on the radio. Even these were tinged with regret, pain, sorrow.
It was as if some terrible secret lay buried beneath the headstones, in the way a more vibrant, more real Millhaven burned and glowed beneath the surface of everything I saw.
2
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I turned south off the expressway at Goethals Street and continued south in the shadows of the cloverleaf overpasses. The seedy photography studios and failing dress shops gave way to the high blank walls of the tanneries and breweries. I caught the odor of hops and the other, darker odor that came from whatever the tanners did in the tanneries. Dented, hard-worked vans lined the street, and men on their breaks leaned against the dingy walls, smoking. In the partial light, their faces were the color of metal shavings.
Goethals Street reverted to the jarring old cobblestones, and I turned right at a corner where a topless bar was selling shots of brandy and beer chasers to a boisterous night-shift crowd. A block south I turned onto Livermore Avenue. The great concrete shadow of the viaduct floated away overhead, and the big corporate prisons vanished behind me. I was back in Pigtown.
The places where the big interlocking elms once stood had been filled with cement slabs. The sun fell flat and hard on the few people, most of them in their sixties and seventies, who toiled past the empty barber shops and barred liquor stores. My breath caught in my throat, and I slowed down to twenty-five, the speed limit. The avenue was almost as empty as the sidewalks, and so few cars had parked at the curb that the meter stands cast straight parallel shadows.
Everything seemed familiar and unfamiliar at once, as if I had often dreamed of but never seen this section of Livermore Avenue. Little frame houses like those on the side streets stood alongside tarpaper taverns and gas stations and diners. Once every couple of blocks, a big new grocery store or a bank with a drive-through window had replaced the old structures, but most of the buildings I had seen as a child wandering far from home still stood. For a moment, I felt like that child again, and
each half-remembered building that I passed shone out at me. These buildings seemed uncomplicatedly beautiful, with their chipped paint and dirty brick, the unlighted neon signs in their streaky windows. I felt stripped of layers of skin. My hands began to tremble. I pulled over to the empty curb and waited for it to pass.
The sight of my family’s graves had cracked my shell. The world trembled around me, about to blaze. The archaic story preserved in fragments about Orpheus and Lot’s wife says—look back, lose everything.
3
THE YELLOW CRIME SCENE RIBBONS closing off the end of the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn drooped as though melted by the sun. I leaned as far inside the little tunnel as I could without touching the tape. The place where my sister had been murdered was larger than I remembered it, about ten feet long and nine feet high at the top of the rounded arch. Wind, humidity, or the feet of policemen had gradually erased the chalked outline from the gritty concrete floor of the passage.
Then I looked up and saw the words. I stopped breathing. They had been printed across a row of bricks five feet above the ground in letters about a foot high. The words slanted slightly upward, as if the man writing them had been tilting to one side. The letters were black and thin, inky, and imperfections in the bricks made them look chewed, BLUE ROSE, another time capsule.
I backed away from the crime scene tape and turned around to face Livermore Avenue. Imaginary pain began to sing in my right leg. Fire traveled lightly through my bones, concentrating on all the little cracks and welds.
Then the child I had been, who lived within me and saw through my eyes, spoke the truth with wordless eloquence, as he always does.
A madman from my own childhood, a creature of darkness I had once glimpsed in the narrow alley at my back, had returned to take more lives. The man with the ponytail might have assaulted April Ransom and imitated his method, but the real Blue Rose was walking through the streets of Millhaven like a man inhabited by an awakened demon. John Ransom was right. The man who called himself Blue Rose was sitting over a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee in his kitchen, he was switching on his television to see if we were in for cooler weather, he was closing his front door to take a stroll through the sunlight.
Tom Pasmore had said something about place being the factor that linked the victims. Like his mentor, Tom Pasmore never told you everything he knew; he waited for you to catch up. I went up to the corner and crossed when the light changed, thinking about the places where Blue Rose had killed people forty years ago.
One outside the St. Alwyn, one inside. One across the street, outside the Idle Hour, the small white frame building directly in front of me. One, the butcher, two blocks away outside his shop. These four were the genuine Blue Rose murders. Standing at the side of the Idle Hour, I turned around to look across the street.
Three of the four original murders had happened on the doorstep of the St. Alwyn Hotel, if not inside.
I looked across the street at the old hotel, trying to put myself in the past. The St. Alwyn had been built at the beginning of the century, when the south side had thrived, and it still had traces of its original elegance. At the entrance on Widow Street, around the corner, broad marble steps led up to a huge dark wooden door with brass fittings. The name of the hotel was carved into a stone arch over the front door. From where I stood, I could see only the side of the hotel. Over the years it had darkened to a dirty gray. Nine rows of windows, most of them covered on the inside by brown shades, punctuated the stone. The St. Alwyn looked defeated, worn out by time. It had not looked very different forty years ago.
4
OUR OLD HOUSE stood four doors up the block, a foursquare rectangular wooden building with two concrete steps up to the front door, windows on both sides of the door, two windows in line with these on the second floor, and a small patchy front lawn. It looked like a child’s drawing. During my childhood, the top floor had been painted brown and the bottom one yellow. Later, my father had painted the entire house a sad, terrible shade of green, but the new owners had restored it to the original colors.
The old house hardly affected me. It was like a shell I had grown out of and left behind. I’d been more moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery—just driving into Pigtown on Livermore Avenue had affected me more deeply. I tried to let the deep currents, the currents that connect you to the rest of life, run through me, but I felt like a stone. What I remembered about the old house had to do with an old Underwood upright on a pine desk in a bedroom where blue roses climbed up the wallpaper, with onionskin paper and typewriter ribbons, and with telling stories to charm the darkness: a memory of frustration and concentration, and of time disappearing into a bright elastic eternity.
Then there was one more place I had to see, and I walked back down South Sixth, crossed Livermore, and turned south.
From two blocks away I saw the marquee sagging toward the sidewalk, and my heart moved in my chest. The Beldame Oriental had not survived the last three decades as well as the Royal. Sliding glass panels crusty with stains had once protected the letters that spelled out the titles of the films. Nothing remained of the ornate detail I thought I remembered.
Two narrow glass doors opened off the sidewalk. Behind them, before a set of black lacquered doors, the glass cubicle of the ticket booth was only dimly visible through the smudgy glass. Jagged pieces of cement and smoke-colored grit littered the black-and-white tile floor between the two sets of doors. The paltriness, the meanness of this distance—the stingy littleness of the entire theater—gave me a shock so deep that at the moment I was scarcely aware of it.
I stepped back and looked down the street for the real Beldame Oriental. Then I went up to the two narrow glass doors and tried either to push myself inside the old theater or simply to see better—I didn’t know which. My reflection moved forward to meet me, and we touched.
An enormous block of feeling loosed itself from its secret moorings and moved up into my chest. My throat tightened and my breathing stopped. My eyes sparkled. I drew in a ragged breath, for a moment uncertain if I were going to stay on my feet. I could not even tell if it were joy or anguish. It was just naked feeling, straight from the heart of my childhood. It even tasted like childhood. I pushed myself away from the old theater and wobbled over the sidewalk to lean on a parking meter.
Warmth on my head and shoulders brought me a little way back to myself, and I blew my nose into my handkerchief and straightened up. I stuffed the handkerchief back into my pocket. I moved away from the parking meter and pressed my hands over my eyes.
Across the street, a little old man in a baggy double-breasted suit and a white T-shirt was staring at me. He turned to look at some friends inside a diner and made a circular motion at his temple with his forefinger.
I uttered some noise halfway between a sigh and a groan. It was no wonder that I had been afraid to come back to Millhaven, if things like this were going to happen to me. All that saved me from another spell was the sudden memory of what I’d read in the gnostic gospel while I waited for John to come back from the hospital: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
I was trying to bring it forth—had been trying to bring it forth since I stood in front of the graves in Pine Knoll cemetery—but what in the world was it?
5
INEARLY WENT STRAIGHT BACK to the Pontiac and returned to John Ransom’s house. At the back of my mind was the idea of booking a seat back to New York on the evening flight. I was no longer so sure I cared about what had happened more than forty years ago in, near, or because of the St. Alwyn Hotel. I had already written that book.
Either in spite of or because of the experience I’d just had, I suddenly felt hungry. Whatever I was going to do would have to wait until I ate some sort of breakfast. The neon scimitar in the restaurant window had not been turned on yet, but an OPEN sign hung from the inside doorknob. I went into the hot
el for a morning paper at the desk.
What I saw when I came into the lobby must have been almost exactly what Glenroy Breakstone and his piano player, the murdered James Treadwell, had known forty years ago; and what my father had seen, walking across the lobby to his elevator. Worn leather furniture and squat brass spittoons stood on an enormous, threadbare oriental rug. One low-wattage bulb burned behind a green glass shade next to a couch.
A small stack of the morning’s Ledger lay on the desk. I picked one up and slid thirty-five cents toward the clerk. He was sitting down behind the desk with his chin in his hand, concentrating on the newspaper folded over his knees. He heard the sound of the coins and looked up at me. The whites of his eyes flared. “Oh! Sorry!” He glanced at the three copies that remained on the desk. “Got to get up early to get a paper today,” he said, and reached for the coins. I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty: the St. Alwyn got up late.
I carried the paper into Sinbad’s Cavern. A few silent men ate their breakfasts at the bar, and two couples had taken the tables at the front of the room. A waitress in a dark blue dress that looked too sophisticated for early morning was standing at the end of the bar, talking with the young woman in a white shirt and black bow tie working behind it. The place was quiet as a library. I sat down in an empty booth and waved at the waitress until she grabbed a menu off the bar and hurried over. She was wearing high heels, and she looked a little flushed, but it might have been her makeup.
She put the menu before me. “I’m sorry, but it’s so hard to concentrate today. I’ll get you some coffee and be right back.”