by Peter Straub
“Take it easy, now,” he said, and let the door close behind us.
All the cops standing around in the parking lot stared at us as we walked toward Ransom’s car. The sides of the buildings around us, red brick and gray stone, leaned inward, and the watching policemen looked like caged animals. Everything was grimy with age and suppressed violence.
Ransom collapsed into the passenger seat. A few cops with cement faces started moving toward our car. I got in and started the engine. Before I could put it in gear, one of the cops appeared beside me and leaned in the open window. His face was very close to mine. Whiskey blotches burned on his fleshy cheeks, and his eyes were pale and dead. Damrosch, I thought. Two others stood in back of the car.
“You had business here?” he said.
“We were with Paul Fontaine,” I said.
“Were you.” It was not a question.
“This is John Ransom. The husband of April Ransom.”
The terrible face recoiled. “Get out, get going.” He stood up and stepped back and waved me away. The cops behind the car melted away.
I drove through the jolting, pitted passage between the high municipal buildings and turned back out onto the street. Somewhere in the distance people were chanting. John Ransom sighed. I looked at him, and he leaned forward to switch on the radio. A bland radio voice said, “… accounts still coming in, and some of these are conflicting, but there seems to be little doubt that Walter Dragonette was responsible for at least twenty-five deaths. Cannibalism and torture have been widely rumored. A spontaneous demonstration is now in progress in front of police head—”
Ransom punched a button, and trumpet music filled the car—Clifford Brown playing “Joy Spring.” I looked at Ransom in surprise, and he said, “The Arkham College radio station programs four hours of jazz every day.” He slumped back into his seat. He had just wanted to stop hearing about Walter Dragonette.
I turned the corner and drove past the entrance to Armory Place. Clifford Brown, dead for more than thirty years, uttered a phrase that obliterated death and time with a confident, offhand eloquence. The music nearly lifted me out of the depression Walter Dragonette had evoked. I remembered hearing the same phrase all those years ago in Camp Crandall.
Ransom turned his head to look at the big crowd filling half of Armory Place. Three times as many people as had been there earlier covered the steps of police headquarters and the plaza. Signs punched up and down. One of them read VASS MUST GO. An amplified voice bawled that it was sick of living in fear.
I asked John Ransom who Vass was.
“Police chief,” he mumbled.
“Mind if we take a little detour?” I asked.
Ransom shook his head.
I left the yelling crowd behind me and continued on to Horatio Street, on the far side of the Ledger building and the Center for the Performing Arts. Horatio Street led us through a district given over to two-story brick warehouses, gas stations, liquor stores, and two brave little art galleries that seemed to be trying to turn the area into another Soho.
Clifford Brown played on, and the sunlight dazzled off the glass windows and the tops of cars. Ransom sat back in his seat without speaking, his right hand curled over his mouth, his eyes open but unseeing. At the entrance to the bridge, a sign announced that vehicles weighing over one ton were barred. I rolled across the rumbling old bridge and stopped on its far side. John Ransom looked as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. I got out and looked down at the river and its banks. Between high straight concrete walls, the black river moved sluggishly toward Lake Michigan. It was about fifteen or twenty feet deep and so dark that it could have been bottomless. Muddy banks littered with tires and rotting wooden crates extended from the concrete walls to the water.
Sixty years ago, this had been an Irish neighborhood, filled with the rowdy, violent men who had built roads and installed trolley tracks; for a brief time, the tenements had housed the men who worked in the warehouses across the river; for an even briefer time, students from Arkham and the local university campus had taken them over for their cheap rents. The crime they attracted had driven all the students away, and now these blocks were inhabited by people who threw their garbage and old furniture out onto the streets. The Green Woman Taproom had been affected by the same blight.
The tavern was a small two-story building with a slanting roof built on a concrete slab that jutted out over the river’s east bank. Asymmetrical additions had been built onto its back end. Before the construction of Armory Place, the bar had been a hangout for civil servants and off-duty cops. During summers, hopeful versions of Irish food had been served at round white tables overlooking the river—“Mrs. O’Reilly’s lamb shanks” and “Paddy Murphy’s Irish Stew.” Now the tables were gone, and spray-painted graffiti drooled across the empty concrete, SKUZ sux. ROMI 22. KILL MEE DEATH. A Pforzheimer beer sign hung crookedly in a window zigzagged with strips of tape. On a bitter winter night, people had laughed and drunk and argued in there while twenty feet away, someone murdered a woman holding an infant.
“Wasn’t it a crazy story?” said a voice at my shoulder. Startled, I jumped and looked around to see John Ransom standing just behind me. The car gaped open at the side of the road. The two of us were alone in the sunny desolation. Ransom looked ghostly, insubstantial, his face bleached by the light and his pale clothing. For a second I thought he meant that William Damrosch’s story was crazy, and I nodded.
“That lunatic,” he said, looking at the garbage strewn along the baked riverbank. “He saw my wife in his broker’s office.” He moved forward and stared down at the river. The black water was moving so slowly it seemed to be still. A shine coated it like a skin of ice.
I looked at Ransom. Some faint color had come back to his face, but he still looked on the verge of disappearing. “To tell you the truth, I’m still bothered that he heard about April’s murder before he confessed. And he didn’t know that Mangelotti had been hit on the head with something instead of being stabbed.”
“He forgot. Besides, Fontaine didn’t seem to mind.”
“That bothers me, too,” I said. “Fontaine and Hogan want to get a lot of black marker on that board in the lounge.”
Ransom’s face went white again. He moved back toward the car and sat down on the passenger seat. His hands were shaking. His whole face worked as he tried to swallow. He glanced up at me sidelong, as if he were checking to see if I were really taking all of this in. “Could we get back to my house, please?”
He said nothing at all during the rest of the drive to Ely Place.
13
INSIDE, JOHN PUSHED THE PLAYBACK BUTTON on his answering machine. Out of the harsh, dissolving sunlight, he looked more substantial, less on the verge of disappearance.
He straightened up when the tape had finished rewinding, and his eyes swam up to meet mine. The true lines of his face—the leaner, more masculine face I had seen years ago—rose through the cushion of flesh that had disguised them.
“One of those messages is from me,” I said. “I called you here before going over to the hospital.”
He nodded.
I went through the arch into the living room and sat down on the couch facing the Vuillard painting. The first caller, I remembered, had left a message yesterday—Ransom had not been able to check his machine since we had left the house together yesterday afternoon. A tinny but clearly audible voice said, “John? Mister Ransom? Are you home?” I leaned over the table and picked up one of the Vietnam books and opened it at random. “I guess not,” the voice said. “Ah, this is Byron Dorian, and I apologize for calling, but I really want to find out how April, how Mrs. Ransom is doing. Shady Mount won’t even confirm that she’s there. I know how hard this must be for you, but could you call me when you get back? It’s important to me. Or I’ll call you. I just want to hear something—not knowing is so hard. Okay. Bye.”
Another voice. “Hello John, this is Dick Mueller. Everybody down at Barnett is wonderi
ng about April and hoping that there’s been some improvement. We all sympathize completely with what you’re going through, John.” Ransom let go of an enormous sigh. “Please give me a ring here at the office or at home to let me know the state of play. My home number is 474-0653. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye now.”
I bet the Meat Man’s broker had gone through a queasy morning, once he sat down to his scrambled eggs with his copy of the Ledger.
The next call was mine from the St. Alwyn, and I tried to block out that thicker, deeper, wheezier imitation of my real voice by focusing on the paintings in front of me.
Then a voice much deeper and wheezier than mine erupted through the little speakers. “John? John? What’s going on? I’m supposed to be going on a trip. I don’t understand—I don’t understand where my daughter is. Can’t you tell me something? Call me back or get over here soon, will you. Where the hell is April?” Loud breathing blasted through the tape hiss as the caller seemed to wait for an answer. “Goddamn it anyhow,” he said, and breathed for another ten seconds. The caller banged the receiver on the body of the telephone a few times before he succeeded in hanging up.
“Oh, God,” Ransom said. “Just what I need. April’s father. I told you about him—Alan Brookner? Can you believe this? He’s supposed to be teaching his course on Eastern Religions next year, as well as the course on the Concept of the Sacred that we do together.” He put his hands on top of his head, as if he were trying to keep it from exploding upward like a gusher, and wandered back through the arch.
I put the book back on the coffee table.
Still holding down the top of his head, Ransom released an enormous sigh. “I guess I’d better call him back. We might have to go over there.”
I said that was okay with me.
“In fact, maybe I’ll let you call back these other people, too, after we’re done with Alan.”
“Anything, fine,” I said.
“I’d better get back to Alan,” John said. He lowered his hands and returned to the telephone.
He dialed and then fidgeted impatiently during a long series of rings. Finally he said, “Okay,” to me and turned to face the wall, tilting his head back. “Alan, this is John. I just got your call … Yes, I can hear that … No, April isn’t here, Alan, she had to go away. Look, do you want me to come over?… Sure, no problem, I’ll be right there. Calm down, Alan, I’ll be coming up the walk in a minute or two.”
He hung up and came back into the living room, looking so harassed that I wanted to order him to have a drink and go to bed. He had not even had breakfast, and now it was nearly two o’clock. “I’m sorry about this, but let’s get it over with,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to drive?” I asked him when he went past the Pontiac and continued walking east on Ely Place.
“Alan only lives two blocks away, and even though we got lucky just now, you can never get a parking place around here. People are ready to kill each other for parking places.” He glanced back at me, and I sped up and joined him so that we were striding along together.
“A guy across from the hospital came out and yelled at me this morning for parking in front of his house,” I said. “I guess I’m lucky he didn’t shoot.”
Ransom grunted and jerked his thumb rightward as we got near the next corner. The collar of his white shirt was dark with moisture, and the front of his shirt stuck to his chest in amoeba-shaped damp patches.
“He was especially indignant because someone sat down on his lawn and then got up and headed for the hospital.”
Ransom gave me a startled look, like a deer spotting a hunter in the forest. “Well.” He looked forward again and plunged along. “I’m sorry to put you through all this aggravation.”
“I thought Alan Brookner was a hero of yours.”
“He’s been having a certain amount of trouble.”
“He doesn’t even know that April was injured?”
He nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I’d appreciate it if you’d sort of go along with me on this one. I can’t tell him that April is dead.”
“Isn’t he going to read it in the newspapers?”
“Not likely,” John said. “This is it.”
The first house on the east side of the block was a substantial three-story red brick Georgian building with a fanlight over the door and symmetrical windows in decorative embrasures. Tall oak trees grew on the lawn, and the grass was wild and long, overgrown with knee-high weeds. “I keep forgetting to have something done about the grass,” John said, sounding as if he wanted to asphalt the lawn. Rolls of yellowing newspaper in rubber bands peeked out of the weeds, some of them so weathered they looked like the artificial logs in gas fireplaces.
“It won’t be too clean in there,” he told me. “We hired a maid for him last year, but she quit just before April went into the hospital, and I haven’t been …” He shrugged.
“Doesn’t he ever go outside?” I asked.
Ransom shook his head and pounded on the door again, then flattened his hands over his face. “He’s having one of his days. I should have known.” He brought a heavy bunch of keys out of his pocket and searched through them before finding the one he inserted into the lock. He opened the door. “Alan? Alan, I’m here, and I brought a friend.”
He stepped inside and motioned for me to follow him.
I waded through the unopened envelopes that littered the blue elephant-foot Persian rug in the entry. Untidy heaps of books and magazines covered all but a narrow footpath going up the bottom steps of a curving staircase. John stooped to pick up a handful of letters and carried them into the next room. “Alan?” He shook his head in frustration and tossed the letters onto a brown leather chesterfield.
Large oil paintings of families arranged before English country houses hung on the long wall opposite me. Rows of books filled the other three walls, and unjacketed books lay over the larger rose-colored Indian carpet that rolled across the room. Splayed books, torn pages of typing paper, and plates of congealed fried eggs, curling slices of bread, and charred hot dogs covered the broad mantel and a wide leather-topped table in front of the chesterfield. All the lights burned. Something in the room made my eyes sting as if I’d been swimming in an overchlorinated pool.
“What a mess,” John said. “Everything would be fine if the maid hadn’t quit—look, he’s been ripping up a manuscript.”
Big fluffy balls of gray dust fluttered away from his shoes. He pushed open a window set into the bookshelves on the side of the room.
I caught a faint but definite smell of excrement.
A big wheezy old man’s baritone boomed out, “John? Is that you, John?”
Ransom turned wearily to me and raised his voice. “I’m downstairs!”
“Downstairs?” The old man sounded like he had a built-in megaphone. “Did I call you?”
Ransom’s face sagged. “Yes. You called me.”
“You bring April with you? We’re supposed to go on a trip.”
Footsteps came down the staircase.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” Ransom said.
“Who are you talking to? Grant? Is Grant Hoffman here?”
The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. John said, “No, it’s a friend of mine, not Grant Hoffman.”
An old man with streaming white hair and long, skinny arms and legs padded into the room wearing only a pair of underpants stained with successive layers of yellow. His knees and elbows looked too large for the rest of him, as big as boles on trees. White hair foamed from his skinny chest, and loose, gossamer hairs drifted around his neck and the underside of his chin. If he had not been hunched over, he would have been my height. A ripe, sour odor came in with him. His eyes were simian and very bright.
“Where’s Grant?” he bellowed. “I heard you talking to him.” The incandescent eyes focused on me, and his face closed like a clamshell. “Who’s this? Did he come for April?”
“No, Alan, this is my friend
, Tim Underhill. April is out of town.”
“That’s ridiculous.” The angry chimpanzee face swung back to scowl at Ransom. “April would tell me if she went out of town. Did you tell me that she went out of town?”
“Several times.”
The old man walked up to us on his knotted stork’s legs. His hair floated around his head. “Well, I don’t remember everything, I suppose. Friend of John’s, are ye? You know my daughter?”
The odor increased as he got closer, and the stinging in my eyes got worse.
“I don’t, no,” I said.
“Too bad. She’d knock your bobby sox off. You want a drink? A drink’s what you need, if you’re gonna tangle with April.”
“He doesn’t drink,” John said. “And you shouldn’t have any more.”
“Come on in the kitchen with me, everything you need’s in there.”
“Alan, I have to get you upstairs,” John said. “You need to get cleaned up.”
“I had a shower this morning.” He jerked his head toward a door on the right-hand side of the room, grinning at me to let me know that we could cut loose in the kitchen if we got rid of this turkey. Then his face closed up again, and he gave John an unfriendly look. “You can come in the kitchen too, if you tell me where April is. If you know. Which I doubt.”
He crunched my elbow in his bony claw and pulled at my arm.
“Okay, let’s see what the kitchen is like,” John said.
“I don’t drink to excess,” said Alan Brookner. “I drink exactly the amount I want to drink. That’s different. Drunks drink to excess.”
He tugged me across the room. Brown streaks and spatters had dried onto his legs.
“Ever meet my daughter?”
“No.”
“She’s a pistol. Man like you would appreciate her.” He banged his forearm against the door in the wall of books, and it flew open as if on springs.