by Peter Straub
He clamped his eyes shut and pressed his lips together in a tight line. I waited for him to get back in control of himself.
“There had to be two of them, because—”
“Because one drove her car here before they took her to the St. Alwyn.”
Sudden anger made me shout. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth when I first got here? All this subterfuge! Didn’t you realize how it would look if the police found the car?”
Ransom stayed calm. “Well, they didn’t find it, did they?” He drank again and swished the vodka around in his mouth. “After you left town, I was going to drive it to Chicago and leave it on the street with the keys in it. A present for the hoodlums. Then it wouldn’t matter if the police found it.”
He registered my impatience. “Look, I know it was a dumb scheme. I was scared, and I panicked. But forget about me for a second. Writzmann had to be one of the men in the car. That’s why he hung around the hospital. He was waiting to see if April was going to wake up.”
“All right, but that makes twice you lied to me,” I said.
“Tim, I didn’t think I could ever tell anyone what really happened. I was wrong. I’m apologizing. Just listen to me. There was another guy in that car, the cop you were talking about. And he must be the one who killed Writzmann.”
“Yes,” I said. “He met him in the Green Woman.” John nodded slowly, as if this was utterly new and fascinating.
“Go on,” he said.
“Writzmann probably asked for the meeting. His father called him up and said, Billy, I want you to keep your thugs away from me.”
“Didn’t I tell you we’d get something moving?” John said. “It worked like a charm.”
“Is this really the kind of thing you had in mind?”
“I don’t mind the bad guys bumping each other off. That’s fine by me. Go on.”
“Writzmann said that two people had come to his father’s house asking about Elvee Holdings. That was all he had to say. The cop had to cut his connections to everything that would lead us to him. I don’t know what he did. Probably he waited for Writzmann to turn his back and clubbed him with the butt of his gun. He dragged him to that chair, tied him up, and cut him to pieces. That’s what he likes.”
“Then he left him there overnight,” John said. “He knew we were in for a hell of a storm, so yesterday morning he put him in the trunk of his car, waited until it started to really come down, and dumped him in front of the Idle Hour. Nobody’d be on the streets, and it was dark anyhow. It’s beautiful. He’s got his third Blue Rose victim, and nobody can tie him to Writzmann. He killed Grant Hoffman and my wife and his own stooge, and he’s completely in the clear.”
“Except that we know he’s a cop. And we know he’s the son of Bob Bandolier.”
“How do we know the part about his being a cop?”
“The names given for the other two directors of Elvee Holdings were Leon Casement and Andrew Belinski. Casement was Bob Bandolier’s middle name, and about ten years ago, the head of the homicide division in Millhaven was a guy named Andy Belin. Belin’s mother was Polish, and the other detectives called him Belinski.” I tried to smile at him, but the smile didn’t turn out right. “I suppose that’s station house humor.”
“Wow,” John said. He looked at me admiringly. “You’re good.”
“Fontaine told me,” I said. “I’m not so sure I should have asked.”
“Goddamn,” John said. He sat up straight and leveled his entire arm at me. “Fontaine took his father’s statements out of the Blue Rose file before he gave them to you. He ordered you to stay away from the Sunchanas, and when that didn’t work, he hauled you all the way out to his father’s grave. See? he said. Bob Bandolier is dead and buried. Forget this crap and go home. Right?”
“Basically. But he couldn’t have taken Writzmann’s body to the Idle Hour. I was with him when it started to rain.”
“Think of how the man works,” John said. “He had one stooge, right? Now he’s got another one. He paid somebody to dump the body. It’s perfect. You’re his alibi.”
It wouldn’t even have to be money, I thought. Information would be better than money.
“So what do we do?” John asked. “We can hardly go to the police. They love Fontaine down there at Armory Place. He’s Millhaven’s favorite detective—he’s Dick Tracy, for God’s sake!”
“Maybe we can get him out in the open,” I said. “Maybe we can even get him to put himself out in the open.”
“How do we do that?”
“I told you that Fee Bandolier has been slipping into his father’s old house in the middle of the night about once every two weeks. The woman who lives next door catches glimpses of him. She promised to call me the next time she saw him.”
“To hell with that. Let’s break into the place.”
I groaned. “I’m too tired and sore to play cowboy.”
“Think about it. If it isn’t Fontaine, it’s some other guy at Armory Place. Maybe there are family pictures in the house. Maybe there’s, I don’t know, something with his name on it. Why did he keep the house? He’s keeping something in there.”
“Something was always in there,” I said. “His childhood. I’m going to bed, John.” My muscles complained when I stood up.
He put his empty glass on the table and touched the bandage on the side of his head. Then he leaned back into the chair. For a second, we both listened to the rain beat against the windows.
I turned away to go toward the stairs. Gravity pulled at every cell in my body. All I wanted in the world was to get into bed.
“Tim,” he said.
I turned around slowly. He was getting up, and he fixed me with his eyes. “You’re a real friend.”
“I must be,” I said.
“We’ll see this thing through together, won’t we?”
“Sure,” I said.
He came toward me. “From now on, I promise, there’ll be nothing but the truth. I should have—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just don’t try to kill me anymore.”
He moved up close and put his arms around me. His head pressed against mine. He hugged me tight into his padded chest—it was like being hugged by a mattress. “I love you, man. Side by side, all right?”
“De Opresso Libri,” I said, and patted him on the back.
“There it is.” He slammed his fist into my shoulder and gripped me tighter. “Tomorrow we start fresh.”
“Yeah,” I said, and went upstairs.
I undressed and got into bed with The Nag Hammadi Library. John Ransom was moving around in his bedroom, now and then bumping against the furniture. The hard, steady rain pounded the window and rattled against the side of the house. By the light of the bedside lamp, I opened the book to “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” and read:
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you,
you see inside of you; it is visible and is your garment.
Before long, the words swam together and became different words altogether, and I managed to close the book and turn off the light before I dropped into sleep.
3
AT FOUR O’CLOCK, I came irretrievably awake from a dream in which a hideous monster searched for me in a dark basement, and lay in bed listening to my heart thud against my chest. After a moment I realized that the rain had stopped. Laszlo Nagy was a better meteorologist than most weathermen.
For a while I followed the advice I always give myself on sleepless nights, that rest is the next best thing, and stayed in bed with my eyes closed. My heart slowed down, and I breathed easily and regularly while my body relaxed. An hour passed. Every time I turned the pillow over, I caught the traces of some florid scent and finally realized that it must have been whatever perfume or cologne Marjorie Ransom put on before she went to bed. I threw back the shee
t and went to the window. Black, oily-looking fog pressed against the glass. The street lamp out on the sidewalk was only a dim, barely visible yellow haze, like the sun in a Turner painting. I turned on the overhead light, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and went downstairs in my pajamas to work on my book.
For another hour and a half I inhabited the body of a small boy whose bedroom walls were papered with climbing blue roses, a boy whose father said he struck him out of a great, demanding love, and whose mother lay dying in a stink of feces and decaying flesh. We’re taking good care of this woman here, his father said, our love is better for her than any hospital. Beneath Charlie Carpenter’s skin, Fee Bandolier watched his mother drifting out into blackness. I was in the air around him, Fee and not-Fee, Charlie and not-Charlie, watching and recording. When the sorrow became too great to continue, I put down the pencil and went back upstairs on trembling legs.
It was about six. I had this odd sense—that I was lost. John’s house seemed no more or less real than the smaller house I had imagined around me. If I had still been drinking, I would have had two inches of John’s hyacinth vodka and tried to get to sleep again. Instead, I checked the window—the fog had turned to a thick, impenetrable silver—took a quick shower, dressed in jeans and Glenroy’s black sweatshirt, put my notebook in my pocket, and went back down to go outside.
4
THE WORLD WAS GONE. Before me hung a weightless gauze of light grayish silver which parted as I passed through and into it, reforming itself at a constant distance of four or five feet before and behind me. I could see the steps going down to the walk, and the tall hedges on either side of the lawn tinged the silver dark green. The moist, chill air settled like mist against my face and hands. I moved toward the haze of the street lamp.
Out on the sidewalk, I could see the dim, progressively feebler and smaller points of light cast by the row of street lamps marching down Ely Place toward Berlin Avenue. If I counted them as I went along, as the child-me had counted the rows in the movie theater to be able to return to my seat, the lamps would be my landmarks. I wanted to get out of John’s house for a little while; I wanted to replace Marjorie Ransom’s tropical perfume with fresh air, to do what I did in New York, let the blank page fill itself with words while I moved thoughtlessly along.
I went three blocks and passed six lamps without seeing a house, a car, or another person. I turned around and looked back, and all of Ely Place except the few feet of sidewalk beneath my feet was a shimmering silver void. Seeming a long way away, much more distant than I knew it was, a circular yellow haze burned feebly through the bright emptiness. I put my back to it again and tried to look across what had to be Berlin Avenue.
But it didn’t look like Berlin Avenue—it looked exactly like the other three intersections I had come to, with a low rounded curb and a flat white roadbed partially and intermittently revealed through gaps in the stationary fog. The gleam of the next streetlight cut through the fog ahead of me. Ely Place ended at Berlin Avenue, and there should have been no streetlight ahead of me. Maybe, I thought, one stood directly opposite Ely Place, on the other side of the avenue. But in that case, shouldn’t it have been farther away?
Of course I could not really tell the distance between me and the next lamp. The fog made that impossible, distancing objects where it was thickest, bringing them nearer where it was less dense. I almost certainly had to be standing on the corner of Ely Place and Berlin Avenue. Starting at John’s house, I had walked three blocks west. Therefore, I had reached Berlin Avenue.
I’ll walk across the avenue, I thought, and then go back to John’s. Maybe I could even get some sleep before the day really began.
I stepped down onto the roadbed, looking both ways for the circular yellow shine of headlights. There was no noise at all, as if the fog had muffled everything around in cotton. I took six slow steps forward into a gently yielding silver blankness that sifted through me as I walked. Then my foot struck a curb I could only barely see. I stepped up onto the next section of sidewalk. Some unguessable distance ahead of me, the next street lamp burned a circle of dim yellow the size of a tennis ball through the silver. Whatever I had crossed, it wasn’t Berlin Avenue.
Three feet away, the green metal stalk of a street sign shone out of the fog. I went toward the sign and looked up. The green pole ascended straight up into thick cloud, like a skyscraper. I couldn’t even see the signs, much less read the names stamped on them. I got right beside the pole and tilted back my head. Far up in a silver mass that seemed to shift sideways as I looked into it, a darker section of fog vaguely suggested a rectangle. Above that the shining silver fog appeared to coalesce and solidify, like a roof.
There must have been four blocks, not three, between John’s house and Berlin Avenue. All I had to do was follow the lamps and keep counting. I began walking toward the glow of the lamp, and when I drew level with it, I said five to myself. As soon as I walked past the lamp, the world disappeared again into soft bright silvery emptiness. Berlin Avenue had to be directly ahead of me, and I moved along confidently until the dime-sized glow of yet another street lamp reached me through the fog from somewhere far ahead. Then I reached another intersection with a rounded curb down into a gray-white roadbed. Ely Place had stretched itself off into a dimensionless infinity.
But as long as I kept counting the street lamps, I was secure—the street lamps were my version of Ariadne’s thread; they would lead me back to John’s house. I stepped down into the narrow road and walked across.
Mystified, I walked another two blocks and passed three more lamps without hearing a car or seeing another human being. At the beginning of the next block, the ninth street lamp glowing just ahead of me, I realized what must have happened—I had turned the wrong way when I left John’s house and was now far east of Berlin Avenue, nearing the Sevens and Eastern Shore Drive. The invisible houses around me had grown larger and grander, the lawns had become longer and more immaculate. In a few blocks, I would be across the street from the big bluffs falling away to the lakeshore.
Another block went by in a chilly silver emptiness, and then another. I had counted eleven lamps. If I had turned east instead of west on Ely Place, I was very nearly at Eastern Shore Road. Ahead of me lay another block and another dim circle of yellow light.
Two thoughts came to me virtually simultaneously: this street was never going to lead me either to Berlin Avenue or to Eastern Shore Road, and if John Ransom and I were going to break into Bob Bandolier’s old house, this was the day to do it. I even thought there was an excellent reason for taking a look inside the Bandolier house. I’d dismissed John’s statement that Fee was keeping something in the house by telling him yes, he kept his childhood there: now I thought that probably his adulthood—the records of his secret life—would be in the house, too. Where else could he have taken the boxes from the Green Woman? Elvee Holdings couldn’t own property all over town. It was so obvious that I didn’t see why I hadn’t thought of it before.
Now all I had to do was to count off eleven street lamps and wait for John to get out of bed. I turned around and started moving back through the bright vacancy.
The sequence of lamps burned toward me, increasing in size from dull yellow pinpoints to glowing pumpkins and illuminating nothing but the reflective haze surrounding them. Once I heard a car moving down the street, so slowly that I could almost hear the tread of the tires flattening against the road. It crept up behind me and then finally inched past. The engine hissed. All I could see of the car were two ineffectual lines of light slanting abruptly toward the street, as if they were trying to read the concrete. It was like watching some huge invisible animal slide past me. Then the animal was gone. For a long moment I still heard it hissing, and then the sound was gone, too.
At the eleventh lamp I moved toward the edge of the sidewalk, trying to locate one of the hedges that marked the boundaries of John’s lot. No tinge of dark green shone through the fog, and I held out my hands and groped
back and forth without finding the hedge. I took another step toward the edge of the sidewalk and stumbled off the curb into the street. For a second I stood looking right and left, seeing nothing, half-stupefied with confusion. I could not be in the street—the car had gone past me on the other side. I took another step into the street, leaving the lamp behind me, and thrust my hands out in front of me, blindly reaching for anything I could actually touch.
I turned around and saw the reassuring yellow light reflecting itself off smoky particles that reflected onto other particles, then onto others, so that the lamp had become a smoky yellow ball of haze without edges or boundaries, continuing on beyond itself into the illusion of a reflection, like a fiction of itself.
I went back over the empty invisible street and came up onto the sidewalk again. When I got close enough to the pole so that it stood out shining and green against the silver, I brushed my fingers against it. The metal was cold and damp with tiny invisible droplets, solid as a house. I moved to the other side of the sidewalk, the side where the huge hissing animal had swept past me, and felt my way forward until I felt the sidewalk give way to short coarse grass.
I both understood and imagined that somehow I had walked all the way across the city to my old neighborhood, where snow fell in the middle of summer and angels blotted out half the sky. I came fearfully up the lawn, hoping to see John’s sturdy, deceptive building come into being in front of me, but knowing that I was back in Pigtown and would see some other house altogether.
A dwelling with wide steps leading up to a porch gradually drifted toward me out of the silver mist. Beyond the porch, flaking boards dotted with sparkling silver drops led up to a broad black window. I stood a few feet from the edge of the porch, waiting. My heart went into overdrive. A small boy came forward out of the darkness behind the window and stopped moving as soon as he saw me looking in. Don’t fear me, I thought, I have a thing to tell you, but the thing I wished to say instantly fractured into incoherence. The world is made of fire. You will grow up. Bunny is Good Bread. We can, we can come through. The boy blinked, and his eyes went out of focus. He would not hear me—he couldn’t hear me. A huge white curl of fog swam out of the void like a giant paw, cutting me off from the boy, and when I stepped forward to see him again, the window was empty.