by Peter Straub
He could do no more tonight; his arms and shoulders still ached from gluing bottles onto the wall; he would just tip a little more vodka into the Ama—another inch, for an hour’s reading—and get into bed. He had to go to work tomorrow.
As he folded and hung up the day’s clothes, Bunting looked over his row of books, wondering if the Buffalo Hunter experience would ever be given to him again, afraid that reading might just be reading again.
On the other hand, he was also afraid that it might not be. Did he want to jump down the rabbit hole every time he opened a book?
Bunting had been groping toward the clothes rail with the suit hanger in hand while looking down at his row of books, and finally he leaned into his closet and put the hook on the rail so that he could really inspect the books. There were thirty or forty, all of them dated to his first days in New York. All the paperbacks had curling covers, cracked spines, and pulpy pages that looked as if they had been dunked in a bathtub. Slightly more than half of these were Westerns, many of these taken from Battle Creek. Most of the others were mysteries. He finally selected one of these, The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler.
It would be a relatively safe book to see from the inside—it wasn’t one of the books where Philip Marlowe got beaten up, shot full of drugs, or locked away in a mental hospital. As importantly, he had read it last year and remembered it fairly well. He would be able to see if any important details changed once he got inside the book.
Bunting carefully brushed his teeth and washed his face. He peered through his blinds and looked out at the dingy brownstones, wondering if any of the people who lived behind those lighted windows had ever felt anything like his fearful and impatient expectancy.
Bunting checked the level in his bottle and turned off his other lamp. Then he switched it on again and ducked into his closet to set an alarm clock that he had brought with him from Michigan but never needed. Bunting extracted the clock from a bag behind his shoes, set it to the proper time, shoved various things off the bedside chair to make room for it, and wound it up. After he set the alarm for seven-thirty he switched off the light near the sink. Now the only light burning in his room was the reading lamp at the head of his bed. He folded his pillow in half and wedged it behind his head. He licked his lips and opened The Lady in the Lake to the first chapter. Blood pounded in his temples, his fingertips, and at the back of his head. The first sentence swam up at him, and he was gone.
6
Nearly everything was different, the cloudy air, the loud ringing sounds, the sense of a wide heartbreak, his taller, more detached self, and one of the greatest differences was that this time he had a vast historical memory, comprehensive and investigatory—he knew that the city around him was changing, that its air was far more poisoned than the beautiful clean air of the meadow where the buffalo grazed but much cleaner than the air of New York City forty-five years hence: some aspect of himself was familiar with a future in which violence, ignorance, and greed had finally won the battle. He was walking through downtown Los Angeles, and men were tearing up a rubber sidewalk at Sixth and Olive. The world beat in on him, its sharp particulars urged him toward knowledge, and as he entered a building and was instantly in a seventh-floor office his eye both acknowledged and deflected that knowledge by assessing the constant stream of details—double-plate glass doors bound in platinum, Chinese rugs, a glass display case with tiers of creams and soaps and perfumes in fancy boxes. A man named Kingsley wanted him to find his mother. Kingsley was a troubled man of six-two, elegant in a chalk-striped gray flannel suit, and he moved around his office a lot as he talked. His mother and his stepfather had been in their cabin up in the mountains at Puma Point for most of the summer, and then had suddenly stopped communicating.
“Do you think they left the cabin?” Bunting asked.
Kingsley nodded.
“What have you done about it?”
“Nothing. Not a thing. I haven’t even been up there.” Kingsley waited for Bunting to ask why, and Bunting could smell the man’s anger and impatience. He was like a cocked and loaded gun.
“Why?” he asked.
Kingsley opened a desk drawer and took out a telegraph form. He passed it over, and Bunting unfolded it under Kingsley’s smoldering gaze. The wire had been sent to Derace Kingsley at a Beverly Hills address and said: I AM DIVORCING CHRIS STOP MUST GET AWAY FROM HIM AND THIS AWFUL LIFE STOP PROBABLY FOR GOOD STOP GOOD LUCK MOTHER.
When Bunting looked up, Kingsley was handing him an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of a couple in bathing suits sitting on a bench beneath a sun umbrella. The woman was a slim blonde in her sixties, smiling and still attractive. She looked like a good-looking widow on a cruise. The man was a handsome brainless animal with a dark tan, sleek black hair, and strong shoulders and legs.
“My mother,” Kingsley said. “Crystal. And Chris Lavery. Former playmate. He’s my stepfather.”
“Playmate?” Bunting asked.
“To a lot of rich women. My mother was just the one who married him. He’s a no-good son of a bitch, and there’s never been any love lost between us.”
Bunting asked if Lavery were at the cabin.
“He wouldn’t stay a minute if my mother went away. There isn’t even a telephone. He and my mother have a house in Bay City. Let me give you the address.” He scribbled on a stiff sheet of stationery from the top of his desk—Derace Kingsley, Gillerlain Company—and folded the card in half and handed it to Bunting like a state secret.
“Were you surprised that your mother wanted out of the marriage?”
Kingsley considered the question while he took a panatela out of a copper-and-mahogany box and beheaded it with a silver guillotine. He took his time about lighting it. “I was surprised when she wanted in, but I wasn’t surprised when she wanted to dump him. My mother has her own money, a lot of it, from her family’s oil leases, and she always did as she pleased. I never thought her marriage to Chris Lavery would last. But I got that wire three weeks ago, and I thought I’d hear from her long before now. Two days ago a hotel in San Bernardino called me to say that my mother’s Packard Clipper was unclaimed in their garage. It’s been there for better than two weeks. I figured she was out of state, and sent them a check to hold the car. Yesterday I ran into Chris Lavery in front of the Athletic Club and he acted as if nothing had happened—when I confronted him with what I knew, he denied everything and said that as far as he knew, she was enjoying herself up at the cabin.”
“So that’s where she is,” Bunting said.
“That bastard would lie just for the fun of it. But there’s another angle here. My mother has had trouble with the police occasionally.”
He looked genuinely uncomfortable now, and Bunting helped him out. “The police?”
“She helps herself to things from stores. Especially when she’s had too many martinis at lunch. We’ve had some pretty nasty scenes in managers’ offices. So far nobody’s filed charges, but if something happened in a strange city where nobody knew her—” He lifted his hands and let them fall back onto the desk.
“Wouldn’t she call you, if she got into trouble?”
“She might call Chris first,” Kingsley admitted. “Or she might be too embarrassed to call anybody.”
“Well, I think we can almost throw the shoplifting angle out of this,” Bunting said. “If she’d left her husband and gotten into trouble, the police would be likely to get in touch with you.”
Kingsley poured himself a drink to help himself with this worrying. “You’re making me feel better.”
“But a lot of other things could have happened. Maybe she ran away with some other man. Maybe she had a sudden loss of memory—maybe she fell down and hurt herself somewhere, and she can’t remember her name or where she lives. Maybe she got into some jam we haven’t thought of. Maybe she met foul play.”
“Good God, don’t say that,” Kingsley said.
“You’ve got to consider it,” Bunting told him. “All of it. You nev
er know what’s going to happen to a woman your mother’s age. Plenty of them go off the rails, believe me—I’ve seen it again and again. They start washing dishcloths in the middle of the night. They fall down in parking lots and mess up their faces. They forget their own names.”
Kingsley stared at him, horrified. He took another slug of his drink.
“I get a hundred dollars a day, and a hundred right now,” Bunting said.
—
Bunting drove to an address in Bay City that Kingsley’s secretary gave him. The bungalow where Kingsley’s mother had lived with Chris Lavery lay on the edge of the V forming the inner end of a deep canyon. It was built downward, and the front door was slightly below street level. Patio furniture stood on the roof. The bedrooms would be in the basement, and lowest of all, like the corner pocket on a pool table, was the garage. Korean moss edged the flat stones of the front walk. An iron knocker hung on the narrow door below a metal grille.
Bunting pounded the knocker against the door. When nothing happened, he pushed the bell. Then he hammered on the knocker again. No one came to the door. He walked around the side of the house and lifted the garage door to eye level. A car with white sidewalls was inside the garage. He went back to the front door.
Bunting pushed the bell and banged on the door, thinking that Chris Lavery might have been sleeping off a hangover. When there was still no response, Bunting twisted back and forth in front of the door, uncertain of his next step. He would have to drive all day and get nowhere—at Puma Point there would be another empty building, and he would stand at another door, knocking and ringing, and nobody would ever let him in. He would stand outside in the dark, banging on a locked door.
How had he become a detective? What had made him do it? That was the mystery, it seemed to him, not the whereabouts of some rich idiot who had married a playboy. He touched the little pink Ama bottle in his shoulder holster, for comfort.
Bunting stepped off the porch and walked back around the side of the house to the garage. He swung up the door, went inside, and pulled the door down behind him. The car with whitewalls was a big roadster convertible that would gulp down gasoline like it was vodka and looked as if it could hit a hundred and twenty on the highway. Bunting realized that if he had the key, he could turn on the ignition, lean back in the car, stick his good old bottle in his mouth, and take the long, long ride. He could make the long good-bye, the one you never came back from.
But he did not have the key to the roadster, and even if he did, he had a business card with a tommy gun in the corner; he had to detect. At the back of the garage was a plywood door leading into the house. The door was locked with something the builder had bought at a five-and-dime, and Bunting kicked at the door until it broke open. Wooden splinters and tinny pieces of metal sprayed into the hallway.
Bunting stepped inside. His heart was beating fast, and he thought, with sudden clarity: This is why I’m a detective. It was not just the excitement, it was the sense of imminent discovery. The whole house lay above him like a beating heart, and he was in a passage inside that heart.
The hushed warm smell of late morning in a closed house came to him, along with the odor of Vat 69. Bunting began moving down the hall. He glanced into a guest bedroom with drawn blinds. At the end of the hall he stepped into an elaborately furnished bedroom where a crystal greyhound stood on a smeary mirror-top table. Two pillows lay side by side on the unmade bed, and a pink towel with lipstick smears hung over the side of the wastebasket. Red lipstick smears lay like slashes across one of the pillows. Some foul, emphatic perfume hung in the air.
Bunting turned to the bathroom door and put his hand on the knob.
No, he did not want to look in the bathroom—he suddenly realized that he wanted to be anyplace at all, a Sumatran jungle, a polar ice cap, rather than where he was. The lipstick stain on the towel dripped steadily on the carpet, turning into a squashy red mush. He looked at the bed, and saw that the second pillow glistened with red that had leaked onto the sheet.
No, he said inside himself, please no, not again. One of them is in there, or both of them are in there, and it’ll look like a butcher shop, you don’t want, you can’t, it’s too much…
He turned the knob and opened the door. His eyes were nearly closed. Drools and sprays of blood covered the floor. A fine spattering of blood misted the shower curtain.
It’s only Bunting, finding another body. Body-a-day Bunting, they call him.
He walked through the blood and pushed back the shower curtain.
The tub was empty—only a thick layer of blood lay on the bottom of the tub, slowly oozing down the drain.
The hideous clanging of a bell came to him through the bathroom windows. A white space in the air filled with the sound of the bell. Bunting clapped his hands to his ears. His neck hurt, and his back ached. He turned to flee the bathroom, but the bathroom had disappeared into empty white space. His legs could not move. Pain encased his body like St. Elmo’s fire, and he groaned aloud and closed his eyes and opened them to the unbearable enclosure of his room and the shrieking clock.
For a moment he knew that the walls of this room were splashed with someone’s blood, and he dropped the book and scuttled off the bed, gasping in pain and terror. His legs cried out, his entire body cried out. He could not move. He began writhing toward the door, moaning, and stopped only when he realized that he was back in his room. He lay on his carpet, panting, until the blood had returned to his legs enough for him to stand up and go into the bathroom. He had a difficult moment when he had to pull back the shower curtain, but none of the numerous stains on the porcelain and the wall tiles were red, and hot water soon brought him back into his daily life.
7
The next significant event in Bunting’s life followed the strange experience just described as if it had been rooted in or inspired by it, and began shortly after he left his building to go to work. He had a slight headache, and his hands trembled: it seemed to him while tying his necktie that his face had subtly altered in a way that the discolored bags under his eyes did not entirely account for. His cheeks looked sunken, and his skin was an almost unnatural white. He supposed that he had not slept at all. He looked as if he were still staring at the bloody bathtub.
A layer of skin had been peeled away from him. All the colors and noises on the street seemed brighter and louder, everything seemed several notches more alive—the cars streaming down the avenue, the men and women rushing along the sidewalk, the ragged bums holding their paper bags. Even the little pieces of grit and paper whirled by the wind seemed like messages. Although he was never truly conscious of this, Bunting usually tried to take in as little as possible on his way to work. He thought of himself as in a transparent bubble which protected him from unnecessary pain and distraction. That was how you lived in New York City—you moved around inside an envelope of tough resistant varnish. A crew of men in orange hard hats and jackets were taking up the concrete sidewalk down the block from his building, and the sound of a jackhammer pounded in Bunting’s ears. For a second the world wobbled around him, and he was back in the Los Angeles of forty years before, on his way to see a man named Derace Kingsley. He shuddered, then remembered: in the first paragraph of The Lady in the Lake, he had seen workmen taking up a rubber sidewalk.
For a second the clouds parted, and bright sunlight fell upon Bunting and everything before him. Then the air went dark.
The sound of the jackhammers abruptly ceased, and the workmen behind Bunting began shouting indistinct, urgent words. They had found something under the sidewalk, and because Bunting had to get away from what they found, he took one quick step toward his bus stop. Then a thick wall of water smashed against his head—without any warning, a thick drenching rainfall had soaked his clothes, his hair, and everything and everybody around him. The air turned black in an instant, and a loud roll of thunder, followed immediately by a crack of lightning that illuminated the frozen street, obliterated the shouts of the workmen
. The lightning turned the world white for a brief electric moment: Bunting could not move. His suit was a wet rag, his hair streamed down the sides of his face. The sudden rainfall and the lightning that illuminated the water bouncing crazily off the roof of the bus shelter threw Bunting right out of his frame. What had been promised for days had finally arrived. His eyes had been washed clean of habit, and he saw.
People thrust past him to get into doorways and beneath the roof of the bus shelter, but he neither could, nor wanted to, move. If he could have moved, he would have fallen to his knees with thanks. For long, long seconds after the lightning faded, everything blazed and burned with life. Being streamed from every particle of the world—wood, metal, glass, or flesh. Cars, fire hydrants, the concrete and crushed stones of the road, each individual raindrop, all contained the same living substance that Bunting himself contained—and this was what was significant about himself and them. If Bunting had been religious, he would have felt that he had been given a direct, unmediated vision of God; since he was not, his experience was of the sacredness of the world itself.
All of this took place in a few seconds, but those seconds were out of time altogether. When the experience began to fade, and Bunting began to slip out of eternity back into time, he wiped the mixture of rain and tears from his face and started to move toward the bus shelter. It seemed that he too had overflowed. He moved beneath the roof of the bus shelter. Several people were looking at him oddly. He wondered what his face looked like—it seemed to him that he might be glowing. The bus appeared in the rainy darkness up the avenue, lurching and rolling through the potholes like an ocean liner. What had happened to him—what he was already beginning to think of as his “experience”—was similar, he realized, to what he felt when he tumbled into The Buffalo Hunter.
He sighed loudly and wiped his eyes. The people nearest him moved away.