Interior Darkness: Selected Stories

by Peter Straub

  8

  He arrived at DataComCorp soaked and irritable, not knowing why. He wanted to push people who got in his way, to yell at anyone who slowed him down. He blamed this feeling on having to arrive at the office in wet clothes. The truth was that discomfort caused only the smallest part of his anger. Bunting felt as if he had been forced into an enclosure too small for him; he had left a mansion and returned to a hovel. The glimpse of the mansion made the hovel unendurable.

  He came stamping out of the elevator and scowled at the receptionist. As soon as he was inside his cubicle, he ripped off his suit jacket and threw it at a chair. He yanked down his tie and rubbed his neck and forehead with his damp handkerchief. In a dull, ignorant fury he banged his fist against his computer’s On switch and began punching in data. If Bunting had been in a better mood, his natural caution would have protected him from the mistake he made after Frank Herko appeared in his cubicle. As it was, he didn’t have a chance—foolhardy anger spoke for him.

  “The Great Lover returns at last,” Herko said.

  “Leave me alone,” said Bunting.

  “Bunting the Infallible shows up still drunk after partying with his lovely bimbo, misses work for two days, doesn’t answer his phone, shows up half-drowned—”

  “Get out, Frank,” Bunting said.

  “—and madder than a stuck bull, probably suffering from the flu if not your actual pneumonia—”

  Bunting sneezed.

  “—and expects the only person who really understands him to shut up and leave him alone. God, you’re soaked. Don’t you have any sense? Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

  Bunting growled. Herko slipped out of the cubicle, and a minute later returned with both hands full of wadded brown paper napkins from the dispenser in the men’s room. “Dry yourself off, will you?”

  Bunting snarled and swabbed his face with some of the napkins. He scrubbed napkins in his hair, unbuttoned his shirt and rubbed napkins over his damp chest.

  “So what were you doing?” Herko asked. “Coming down with double pneumonia?”

  Herko was a hysterical fool. Also, he thought he owned Bunting. Bunting did not feel ownable. “Thanks for the napkins,” he said. “Now get out of here.”

  Herko threw up his hands. “I just wanted to tell you that I set up your date with Marty for tonight. I suppose that’s still all right, or do you want to kill me for that, too?”

  Around Bunting the world went white. His blood stopped moving in his veins. “You set up my date?”

  “Well, Marty was eager to meet you. Eight o’clock, at the bar at One Fifth Avenue. Then you’re in the Village, you can go to eat at a million places right around there.” Herko leaned forward to peer at Bunting’s face. “What’s the matter? You sick again? Maybe you should go home.”

  Bunting whirled to face his computer. “I’m okay. Will you get the hell out of here?”

  “Jesus,” Herko said. “How about some thanks?”

  “Don’t do me any more favors, okay?” Bunting did not take his eyes from the screen, and Herko retreated.

  Late in the afternoon, Bunting put his head around the door of his friend’s cubicle. Herko glanced up, frowning. “I’m sorry,” Bunting said. “I was in a bad mood this morning. I know I was rude, and I want to apologize.”

  “Okay,” Herko said. “That’s all right.” He was still a little stiff and wounded. “It’s okay about the date, right?”

  “Well,” Bunting said, and saw Herko’s face tighten. “No, it’s fine. Sure. That’s great. Thanks.”

  “You’ll love the bar,” Herko said. “And then you’re right down there in the Village. Million restaurants, all around you.”

  Bunting had never been in Greenwich Village, and knew only of the restaurants, many of them invented, to which he had taken Veronica. Then something else occurred to him.

  “You like Raymond Chandler, don’t you?” he asked, having remembered an earlier conversation.

  “Ray is my man, my main man.”

  “Do you remember that part in The Lady in the Lake where Marlowe first goes to Chris Lavery’s house?”

  Herko nodded, instantly in a better mood.

  “What does he find?”

  “Chris Lavery.”

  “Alive?”

  “Well, how else could he talk to him?”

  “He doesn’t find a lot of blood splashed all over the bathroom, does he?”

  “What’s happening to you?” Herko asked. “You starting to put the great literature of our time through a mental shredder, or what?”

  “Or what,” Bunting said, though it seemed that he had certainly shuffled, if not actually shredded, the pages he had read. He backed out of the cubicle and disappeared into his own.

  Herko sat quiet with surprise for a moment, then yelled, “Long fangs! Long, long fangs! Bunting’s gone a-hunting!” He howled like a wolf.

  Some of the ladies giggled, and one of them said that he shouldn’t tease. Herko started laughing big chesty barrelhouse laughs.

  Bunting sat behind his computer, trying to force himself to concentrate on his work. Herko gasped for breath, then went on rolling out laughter. The bubble of noise about him suddenly evoked the image of the workmen who had exclaimed, an instant before the sudden storm, over the hole they had made in the sidewalk: they had found a dead man in that hole.

  Bunting knew this with a sudden and absolute certainty. The men working on the sidewalk had looked down into that hole and seen a rotting corpse, or a heap of bones and a skull in a dusty suit, or a body in some stage between those two. Bunting saw the open mouth, the matted hair, the staring eyes and the writhing maggots. He tried to wrench himself back into the present, where his own living body sat in a damp shirt before a computer terminal filled with what for the moment looked alarmingly like gibberish.

  DATATRAX 30 CARTONS MONMOUTH NJ BLUE CODE RED CODE

  Jesus stepped past the rock at the mouth of the tomb, spread his arms wide, and sailed off in his dusty white robe into a flawless blue sky.

  That’s my body, he thought. My body.

  Something the size of a walnut rattled in his stomach, grew to the size of an apple, then developed a point that lengthened into a needle. Bunting held his hands to his stomach and rushed out of the Data Entry room into the corridor. He banged through the men’s room door and entered a toilet stall not much smaller than his cubicle. He pressed his necktie to his chest to avoid spatter, bent over, and vomited.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Bunting looked up from his screen and saw the flash of a green dress moving past the door of his cubicle. The color was a dark flat green that both stood out from the office’s pale walls and harmonized with them, and for an instant it seemed to float toward Bunting, who had been daydreaming about nothing in particular. The flat green jumped into sharp focus; then it was gone. The air the woman had filled hummed with her absence, and suddenly all the world Bunting could see promised to overflow with sacred and eternal being, as it had that morning. Bunting braced himself and fought the rising sense of expectancy—he did not know why, but he had to resist. The world instantly lost the feeling of trembling anticipation that had filled it a moment before: every detail fell back onto itself. Jesus went back into his cave and rolled the rock back across the entrance. The workmen standing in the rain looked down into an empty hole. Bunting was still alive, or still dead. He had been saved. The tree had fallen in the deep forest, and no one had heard it, so it still stood.

  ———

  That night Bunting again set his alarm and went back into The Lady in the Lake. He was driving into the mountains, and once he got to a place called Bubbling Springs, the air grew cool. Canoes and rowboats went back and forth on Puma Lake, and speedboats filled with squealing girls zipped past, leaving wide foamy wakes. Bunting drove through meadows dotted with white irises and purple lupines. He turned off at a sign for Little Fawn Lake and crawled past granite rocks. He drove past a waterfall and through a maze of black oak trees.
Now everything about him sang with meaning, and he was alive within this meaning, as alive as he was supposed to be, equal to the significance of every detail of the landscape. A woodpecker peered around a tree trunk, an oval lake curled at the bottom of a valley, a small bark-covered cabin stood against a stand of oaks. This information came toward and into him in a steady stream, every glowing feather and shining outcropping of rock and inch of wood overflowing with its portion of being, and Bunting, the eye around which this speaking world cohered, moved through this stream of information undeflected and undisturbed.

  He got out of his car and pounded on the cabin door, and a man named Bill Chess came limping into view. Bunting gave Bill Chess a drink from a pint of rye in his pocket and they sat on a flat rock and talked. Bill Chess’s wife had left him and his mother had died. He was lonely in the mountains. He didn’t know anything about Derace Kingsley’s mother. Eventually, they went up the heavy wooden steps to Kingsley’s cabin and Chess unlocked the door and they went inside to the hushed warmth. Bunting’s heart was breaking. Everything he saw looked like a postcard from a world without grief. The floors were plain and the beds were neat. Bill Chess sat down on one of the cream-colored bedspreads while Bunting opened the door to the bathroom. The air was hot, and the stink of blood stopped him as soon as he stepped inside. Bunting moved to the shower curtain, knowing that what was left of Crystal Kingsley’s body lay inside the tub. He held his breath and grasped the curtain. When he pushed it aside, Bill Chess cried out behind him. “Muriel, Sweet Christ, it’s Muriel!” But there was no body in the tub, only a bloodstain hardening as it oozed toward the drain.

  9

  At seven-thirty on Friday night, Bunting sat at a table facing the entrance of One Fifth Avenue, alternately checking his watch and looking at the door. He had arrived fifteen minutes before, dressed in one of his best suits, showered, freshly shaved, black wingtips and teeth brushed, his mouth tingling with Binaca. To get to the bar, which was already crowded, you had to walk past the tables, and Bunting planned to get a good look at this woman before she saw him. After that he would know what to do. The waitress came around, and he ordered another vodka martini. Bunting thought he felt comfortable. His heart was beating fast, and his hands were sweaty, but that was okay, Bunting thought—after all, this was his first date, his first real date, since he had broken up with Veronica. In another sense, one he did not wish to consider, this was his first date in twenty years. Every couple of minutes, he went to the men’s room and splashed water on his face. He fluffed up his hair and buffed his shoes with paper towels. Then he went back to his table and sipped his drink and watched the door.

  He wished that he had thought of secreting an Ama in one of his pockets. Even a loose nipple would work: he could tuck it into his mouth whenever he felt anxious. Or just keep it in his pocket!

  Bunting shot his cuffs, ran a hand over his hair, looked at his watch. He leaned on his elbows and stared at the people in the bar. Most of them were younger than himself, and all of them were talking and laughing. He checked the door again. A young woman with black hair and round glasses had just entered, but it was still only twenty minutes to eight—far too early for Marty. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, wondering if he ought to go back into the bathroom and splash more water on his face. He felt a little bit hot. Still okay, but just a tad hot. He advised himself to think about all those times he had gone to fancy places with Veronica, and shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to remember the exact feelings of walking into Quaglino’s beside his tall, executive girlfriend…

  “Bob? Bob Bunting?” someone said in his ear, and he jumped forward as if he had been jabbed with a fork. His chest struck the table, and his glass wobbled. He stabbed out a hand to grasp the drink and knocked it over. Clear liquid spilled out and darkened the tablecloth. Two large olives rolled across the table, and one of them fell to the floor. Bunting uttered a short, mortifying shriek. The woman who had spoken to him was laughing. She placed a hand on his arm. He whirled around on his chair, bumping his elbow on the table’s edge, and found the black-haired woman who had just entered the restaurant staring down at him with a quizzical alarm.

  “After all that, I hope you are Bob Bunting,” she said.

  Bunting nodded. “I hope I am, too,” he said. “I don’t seem to be too sure, do I? But who are you? Do we know each other?”

  “I’m Marty,” she said. “Weren’t you waiting for me?”

  “Oh,” he said, understanding everything at last. She was a short, round-faced woman with a restless, energetic quality that made Bunting feel tired. Her eyes were very blue and her lipstick was very red. At the moment she seemed to be inwardly laughing at him. “Excuse me, my goodness,” he said, “yes, of course, nice to meet you.” He got to his feet and held out his hand.

  She took it, not bothering to conceal her amusement. “You been here long?”

  She had a strong New York accent.

  “A little while,” he confessed.

  “You wanted to check me out, didn’t you?”

  “Well, no. Not really.” He thought with longing of his room, his bed, his wall of bottles, and The Lady in the Lake. “How did you know who I was?”

  “Frank described you, how else? He said you’d be dressed like a lawyer and that you looked a little shy. Do you want to have another drink here, now that I made you spill that one? I’ll have one, too.”

  He took her coat to the checkroom, and when he returned he found a fresh martini at his place, a glass of white wine in front of Marty, and a clean tablecloth on the table. She was smiling at him. He could not decide if she was unusually pretty or just disconcerting.

  “You did get here early to check me out, didn’t you?” she asked. “If you didn’t like the way I looked, you could duck out when I went into the bar.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  “Why not? I would. Why do you think I got here so early? I wanted to check you out. Blind dates make me feel funny. Anyhow, I knew who you were right away, and you didn’t look so bad. I was afraid you might be real gonzo, from what Frank said about you, but I knew that anybody as nervous as you couldn’t really be gonzo.”

  “I’m not nervous,” Bunting said.

  “Then why did you go off like a bomb when I said your name?”

  “You startled me.”

  “Well, I couldn’t have startled you if you weren’t nervous. It’s okay. You never saw me before either. So tell me the truth—if you saw me walk in the door, and if I didn’t notice you, would you have cut out? Or would you have gone through with it?”

  She raised her glass and sipped. Her eyes were so blue that the color had leaked into the whites, spreading a faint blue nimbus around the irises. He saw for the first time that she was wearing a black dress that fit her tightly, and that her eyebrows were firm black lines. She seemed exotic, almost mysterious, despite her forthright manner. She was, he realized, startlingly good-looking. Then he suddenly saw her naked, a vision of smooth white skin and large soft breasts.

  “Oh,” he said, “I would have gone through with it, of course.”

  “Why are you blushing? Your whole face just turned red.”

  He shrugged in an agony of embarrassment. He was certain that she knew what he had been thinking. He gulped at his drink.

  “You’re not exactly what I expected, Bob,” she said in a very dry voice.

  “Well, you’re not quite what I expected, either,” was all he could think to say. Unable to look at her, he was sitting straight upright on his chair and facing the happy crowd in the bar. How were those men able to be so casual? How did they think of things to say?

  “How well do you know Frank and Lindy?” she asked.

  “I work with Frank.” He glanced over at her, then looked back at the happy, untroubled people in the bar. “We’re in the same office.”

  “That’s all? You don’t see him after work?”

  He shook his head.

  �
�You made a big impression on Frank,” she said. “He seems to think…Bob, would you mind looking at me, Bob? When I’m talking to you?”

  Bunting cleared his throat and turned to face her. “Sorry.”

  “Is anything wrong? Anything I should know about? Do I look just like the person you hated most in the fourth grade?”

  “No, I like the way you look,” Bunting said.

  “Frank acted like you were this real swinger. This wild man. ‘Long fangs, Marty,’ he says to me, ‘this guy has got long, long fangs,’ you know how Frank talks. This means he likes you. So I figured if Frank Herko liked you so much, how bad could you be? Because Frank Herko acts like a real asshole, but underneath, he’s a sweetheart.” She sipped her wine and continued looking at him coolly. “So I got all dolled up and took the train into Manhattan, figuring at least I might get some fun out of the evening, go to some clubs, maybe a good restaurant, meet this wild man, if I have to fight him off when it’s all over, well, I can do that. But it’s not like that, is it? You don’t know any clubs—you don’t really go out much, do you, Bobby?”

  Bunting stood up and took a twenty out of his wallet. He was blushing so hard his ears felt twice their normal size. He put the money down on the table and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to waste your time.”

  Marty grinned. “Hold on, will you?” She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. “Don’t act that way, I’m just saying you’re different from what I expected. Sit down. Please. Don’t be so…”

  Bunting sat down, and she let go of his wrist. He could still feel her fingers around him. The sensation made him feel slightly dizzy. He was looking at her pale clever pretty face.

  “So scared,” she said. “There’s no reason for that. Let’s just sit here and talk. In a while, we can go out and eat somewhere. Or we could even eat here. Okay?”

  “Sure,” he said, recovering. “We can just sit here and talk.”

  “So say something,” Marty said. She frowned. “Do you always sweat this much? Or is it just me?”