by Peter Straub
Don’t be afraid, I wanted to say, but I was afraid, too.
I went blindly across the lawn, holding my hands out before me, and fifteen paces brushed me against a thick green hedge. I moved down the side of the tough, springy border until it fell away in a square corner at the edge of the sidewalk. Then I groped my way around it and went diagonally up across the next lawn until I saw familiar granite steps and a familiar door flanked by narrow windows.
Pigtown—either the real Pigtown or the one I carried within me—had melted away, and I was back on Ely Place.
5
PINK FROM THE SHOWER and dressed in gray slacks, a charcoal gray cotton turtleneck, and a dark blue silk jacket, John came downstairs a couple of hours later. A smaller, flesh-colored bandage was taped to his head. He smiled at me when he came into the living room, and said, “What a day! We don’t usually get fogs like this, in the middle of summer.” He clapped his hands together and regarded me for a moment, shaking his head as if I were a tremendous curiosity. “You get up early to do some work?” Before I could answer, he asked, “What’s that mighty tome? I thought the gnostic gospels were my territory, not yours.”
I closed the book. “How many blocks is it from here to Berlin Avenue?”
“Three,” he said. “Can’t you find the answer in the Gospel of Thomas? I like the verse where Jesus says, If you understand the world, you have found a corpse, but if you have found a corpse, you’re superior to the world. That has the real gnostic thing, don’t you think?”
“How many blocks is it to Eastern Shore Drive?”
He looked up and counted on his fingers. “Seven, I think. I might have left one out. Why?”
“I went out this morning and got lost. I went about nine blocks in the fog, and then I realized that I wasn’t even sure what direction I was going.”
“It must have been up,” he said. “Or sideways. You can’t go nine blocks in either of the usual directions. Look, I’m starved. Did you eat anything yet?”
I shook my head.
“Let’s get something in the kitchen.”
He turned around, and I followed him into the kitchen.
“What do you want? I’m going to have some fried eggs.”
“Just toast,” I said.
“Suit yourself.” Ransom put bread into the toaster, greased a pan with margarine, and broke two eggs into the sizzling grease.
“Who lives in the house next door?” I asked him. “The one to the right?”
“Them? Bruce and Jennifer Adams. They’re in their late sixties. Bruce used to own a travel agency, I guess. The one time we went to their house, it was full of these folk art sculptures from Bali and Indonesia. The stuff looked like it would walk around the house at night after all the lights were out.”
“Have you ever seen any children over there?”
He laughed. “I don’t think they’d let a kid within twenty feet of the place.”
“What about the neighbors on the other side?”
“That’s an old guy named Reynolds. April liked him enough to invite him over for dinner now and then. Used to teach French literature at the university. Reynolds is okay, I guess, but a little bit swishy.” He was working a spatula under one of the eggs and stopped moving before he swung his head to glance at me. “I mean, you know what I mean. I don’t have anything against the guy.”
“I understand,” I said. “But I guess there wouldn’t be any children in that house, either.”
Four slices of toast popped up in the toaster, and I put them on a plate and began spreading margarine on them.
“Tim,” John said.
I looked up at him. He slid the eggs onto a plate, met my eyes, looked away, and then met my eyes again. “I’m really glad we had that conversation last night. And I’m grateful to you. I respect you, you know that.”
“How long do you think this fog is going to last?”
He looked at the window. “Hard to say. Might even last until the afternoon, it’s so thick. Why? You want to do something?”
“I think we might see if we can get into that house,” I said.
“In this?” He was carrying his plate to the table, and he flapped a hand at the window. “Let’s give it another half hour or so, and see what happens.” He gave me a curious half-smile. “What made you change your mind?”
I spread a spoonful of jam on top of my toast. “I was thinking about what you said last night—that there had to be something in that house. Do you remember that little piece of paper I found in the Green Woman?”
He stopped shaking his head after I spoke a couple of sentences and began getting interested after I reminded him of Walter Dragonette’s notebook.
“Okay,” he said. “So if this guy kept detailed notes about every murder he committed, then we can really nail him. All we have to do is trace him back to the town where he was working.”
“Tom Pasmore would probably be able to help us with that.”
“I’m not putting any faith in that guy,” he said. “This is our baby.”
“We’ll think about that after we get the notes,” I said.
For the rest of the morning, we listened to weather reports on the radio and kept checking the windows. The fog was as thick at ten as it had been at eight, and the radio advised everybody to stay home. There had been half a dozen accidents on the freeways, as well as another five or six minor crashes at intersections. No planes had left Millhaven airport since before midnight, and all incoming flights were being diverted to Milwaukee or Chicago.
John kept jumping up from the couch to take a few steps outside the front door, coming back in to razz me about getting lost.
I was glad he was in a good mood. While he ran in and out, checking to see if we could see far enough to drive, I leafed through “The Paraphrase of Shem” and “The Second Treatise of Great Seth.”
“Why are you bothering with that drivel?” John asked.
“I’m hoping to find out,” I said. “What do you have against it?”
“Gnosticism is a dead end. When people allude to it now, they make it mean anything they want it to mean by turning it into a system of analogies. And the whole point of gnosticism in the first place was that any kind of nonsense you could make up was true because you made it up.”
“I guess that’s why I like it,” I said.
He shook his head in cheerful derision.
At twelve-thirty we ate lunch. The planes were still sitting on the runways and the announcers hadn’t stopped telling people to stay home, but from the kitchen window, we could see nearly halfway to the hemlocks at the back of John’s property. “You won’t lose your mind again if I bring that pistol, will you?” John asked me.
“Just don’t shoot the old lady next door,” I said.
6
ITURNED ON THE FOG LIGHTS and pulled out into the street. The stop sign at the end of the block swam up out of the fog in time for me to brake to a halt.
“You can do this, right?” John asked.
Experimentally, I flicked on the headlights, and both the stop sign and the street ahead disappeared into a shimmering gray fog pierced by two useless yellow tunnels. Ransom grunted, and I punched the lights to low beam. At least other people would be able to see us coming.
“Let’s hire a leper to walk in front of us, ringing a bell,” Ransom said.
On a normal day, the drive to South Seventh Street took about twenty minutes; John and I got there in a little more than two and a half hours. We made it without accident, though we had two close calls and one miraculous intervention, when a boy on a bicycle suddenly loomed up directly in front of me, no more than two or three feet away. I veered around him and kept driving, my mouth dry and my bowels full of water.
We got out of the car a block away from the house. The fog obscured even the buildings across the sidewalk. “It’s this way,” I said, and led him across the street and down toward Bob Bandolier’s old house.
7
IHEARD LOW VOI
CES. Hannah and Frank Belknap were sitting on their porch, looking out at nothing. From the sidewalk, I could just make out the porch of the Bandolier place. The Belknaps’ voices came through the fog as clearly as voices on a radio that had been dialed low. They were talking about going to northern Wisconsin later in the summer, and Hannah was complaining about having to spend all day in a boat.
“You always catch more fish than I do, you know you do,” Frank said.
“That doesn’t mean it’s all I want to do,” said Hannah’s disembodied voice.
John and I began walking slowly and softly across the lawn, making as little noise as possible.
The side of the house cut off Frank’s reply. John and I walked over wet brown grass, keeping close to the building. At the corner we turned into the backyard. At the far end, barely visible in the fog, a low wooden fence with a gate stood along a narrow alley. We came up to the back door, set on a concrete slab a little larger than a welcome mat.
John bent down to look at the lock, whispered, “No problem,” and hauled the big ball of keys out of his pants pocket. He riffled through them, singled out one, and tried it in the lock. It went a little way in and stopped. He pulled it out, flicked through the keys again, and tried another one that looked identical to the first. That didn’t work, either. He turned to me, shrugged and smiled, and singled out another. This one slid into the lock as if it had been made for it. The lock mechanism clicked, and the door opened. John made an after you, Alfonse gesture, and I slid inside behind his back while he turned to close the door behind us.
I knew where everything was. It was the kitchen of the house where I had grown up, a little dusty and battered, but entirely familiar. A rectangular table with a scarred top stood a few feet from the door. In the dim light, I could make out the names BETHY JANEY BILLY scratched into the wood, along with a lot of random squiggles. Ransom took a couple of steps forward on the cracked yellow linoleum. “What are you waiting for?” he said.
“Decompression,” I said. A section of wallpaper with images of shepherds and shepherdesses holding crooks drooped away from the wall. Someone, probably Bethy, Janey, and Billy, had scribbled over the images, and ancient yellow grease spots spattered the wall behind the little electric stove. An enormous cock and balls, imperfectly covered with a palimpsest of scrawled lines, sprouted from one of the shepherds near the loose seam of wallpaper. The Dumkys had left plenty of signs of their brief residence.
John said, “You should be used to a life of crime by now,” and walked through the kitchen into the hallway. “What are there, three or four rooms?”
“Three, not counting the kitchen,” I said. I came into the dark little hallway and put my hand on a doorknob. “The boy’s bedroom would have been here,” I said, and opened the door.
The narrow rectangle of Fee’s old bedroom matched mine exactly. There was a narrow bed with a dark green army surplus blanket and a single wooden chair. A small chest of drawers, stained so dark it was almost black, stood against the wall. At the far end, a narrow window exposed a moving layer of fog. I stepped inside, and my heart shrank. John knelt to look under the bed. “Cooties.” A frieze of stick figures, round suns with rays, and cartoon houses all interconnected by a road map of scribbled lines, covered the walls to the level of my waist. The light blue paint above the graffiti had turned dingy and mottled.
“This Fee kid got away with a lot of crap,” John said.
“The tenants did this,” I said. I went to the bed and pulled down the blanket. There were no sheets, just an ancient buttoned mattress covered in dirty stripes. John gave me a curious look and began opening the drawers. “Nothing,” he said. “Where would he stash the boxes?”
I shook my head and escaped the bedroom.
The three windows at the front of the living room were identical to those in my old house, and the whole long rectangular room brought me back to childhood as surely as the bedroom. An air of leftover misery and rage seemed to intensify the musty air. I knew this room—I had written it.
I had placed two tables in front of the windows—the place where our davenport had stood—and there they were, more ornate than I had imagined, but the same height, and of the same dark wood. A telephone sat on the table to the left, beside a worn overstuffed chair—Bob Bandolier’s throne. The long couch I had described stood against the far wall, green, not yellow, but with the same curved arms I had described.
And yet, I thought, it was more unlike than like the room I had imagined. I had thought that Bob Bandolier would provide his family with devotional pictures, the Sermon on the Mount or the Feeding of the Multitude, but there were no reproductions or chromographs on the walls, only wallpaper. I had imagined a small shelf of books with the Bible and paperback Westerns and mysteries, but the only shelves in the living room were shallow, glass, and rimmed with black metal piping—once they had held china figurines. A high-backed brocade chair with rolled arms stood beside the telephone table, and another matching chair without arms faced into the room from beside the other, empty table. His and hers.
“It’s like a—like a museum of 1945,” John said, turning to me with an incredulous smile.
“That’s what it is,” I said.
I sat down on the chaise and looked sideways. Through a window in the unadorned wall, I could just about make out the side of the Belknap house. Through a matching window in her own living room, Hannah had seen the adult Fee sitting just where I was now. John was looking behind the chairs and beneath the couch. Fee came at night and used only a flashlight, so he had never noticed the grease spots on the brocade chairs or the rim of grime along the edges of the couch cushions.
John opened the door opposite that into the common entry. I stood up and followed him into the bedroom where Anna Bandolier had died of starvation and neglect.
A rusty black stain wavered down the middle of the bare mattress on the double bed. John looked under the bed, and I opened Bob Bandolier’s walnut clothing press. Two wire hangers hung from a metal rail, and a third lay deep in forty-year-old dust on the bottom of the press. “The drawers,” John said, and we both opened one of the big drawers on either side of the little mirrored vanity table against the wall. Mine was empty. John pushed his drawer closed and looked at me with both impatience and exasperation.
“Okay,” he said. “Where are they?”
“After Bob Bandolier got rid of the Sunchanas, there were no more upstairs tenants. So he might have put the boxes there.” Then I remembered something else. “And there’s a basement, where they used to do the washing.”
“I’ll look upstairs.” He brushed the dust off his knees and gave me another tight-mouthed look. “Let’s get out of here as soon as we can. I don’t trust this fog.”
I could almost see little Fee Bandolier standing on the side of the bed on a cold night in November of 1950, holding onto his dying mother’s arm while his father lay unconscious on the floor, surrounded by empty beer bottles.
“All right?” John asked.
I nodded, and he left the bedroom. I turned my back on the boy and walked out through the mists and vapors that emanated from everything I thought about him and went back through the living room toward the kitchen.
As in my old house, the basement door was next to the stove. I went down the wooden steps in the dark, letting my eyes adjust.
A long wooden workbench stood across the gray concrete floor from the bottom of the stairs. Against the wall above the back of the bench hung a row of coffee cans and jam jars filled with nails and screws. Soon I made out the shapes of boxes beneath the bench, and I exhaled with mingled relief and triumph and went to the bench and bent down and pulled the nearest box toward me.
It was about the size of a case of whiskey, and the top of the box had been folded, not taped, shut. I wrestled with the interlocking cardboard panels before all four of them sprang free at once, revealing a layer of dark fabric. Fee had wrapped his notes in cloth after seeing what the rats had done to them in th
e Green Woman. I grabbed a loose handful of cloth and pulled up. The cloth came out of the box without resistance. Sleeves flopped out of the bundle. It was a suit jacket. I dropped it on the floor and put my hands back into the box. This time I pulled out the trousers to the suit. Beneath the trousers, carelessly folded, were two more suits, one dark blue, the other dark gray. I stuffed the first suit back into the box, pushed it back under the workbench, and pulled another carton toward me. When I got the top open, I found a pile of white shirts with Arrow labels. They were grimy from the dust sifting down from the workbench and stiff with starch.
The next box held three more suits folded onto a layer of wrinkled boxer shorts and balled-up undershirts, the next a jumble of black shoes, and the final one at least a hundred wide, late-forties neckties tangled together like snakes. My knees creaked when I stood up.
Fee Bandolier had expelled the Dumkys, cleaned up what was important to him, and turned the lock on the door, sealing the past inside a bell jar.
A wide gray spiderweb hung between the wringer of the old washing machine and the slanting ledge of the small rectangular basement window in the wall behind it. I walked slowly down the length of the basement. A black bicycle the size of a Shetland pony leaned against the wall. I turned toward the bulky furnace in the center of the basement, seeing another row of boxes in the darkness. I moved forward, and the row of boxes mutated into the long rectangular dish of a coaster wagon. I pushed it with my foot, and it rolled backward on squeaking wheels, dragging its wooden handle with it. When it moved, I saw another box hidden between the coaster and the furnace.
“There,” I said, and bent down to get my hands on it. Wisps and tatters of old spiderwebs hung from the box. It had been moved recently. I braced my muscles and jerked the box off the ground. It was nearly weightless. Whatever it contained was not hundreds of handwritten pages. I carried the box around the furnace toward the foot of the stairs and heard John walking across the kitchen floor.