A Dark Matter

by Peter Straub

  From nowhere in particular, the phrase serial killer seemed to enter his mind. With it came memories of headlines and TV news stories about the Milwaukee maniac called “the Ladykiller.” How many women had he murdered and, according to the police chief in Milwaukee, turned to bloody rags? Five? Six? This is a man who murders women and turns their corpses into bloody rags, the detective had said, whatever his name was, Hooper, Cooper, something like that. Do you imagine that we would ever allow a monster like that to run free? Unfortunately, they had allowed him to do exactly that, so run free he had, the monster, piling up more corpses until he died of old age or retired to Florida.

  Up ahead, a figure turned the corner onto Gorham Street and became a half-seen silhouette in the glare of the sunlight.

  Terror thrust its roots into Howard’s guts. Keith Hayward had just walked into the dazzle at the top of Gorham Street and now, quick as a ferret, begun to move toward him. Too frightened to step back, Howard awaited the fiend’s attack. He opened his mouth to scream.

  A second later, the downpouring light revealed that the man advancing upon him was not Hayward, but someone far more frightening, one of the “dogs” Mallon had warned them about. In terror so great he could not so much as moan, Howard shuffled backward, stumbled over his own feet, and dropped to the sidewalk, hard. Pain flared in his left hip, and his buttock felt as though it had been struck with a sledgehammer. Gasping with pain and fear, he propped himself up on an elbow and realized that no one stood in front of him.

  On the sunlit sidewalk, a footstep sounded. Gray trouser legs and two polished black wingtips. The knees bent as their owner leaned over. Howard looked up into the face of an unremarkable man in his mid-thirties with a cap of thick but very short dark hair. Flinty amusement shone in his pale blue eyes.

  Howard held out his right arm, half expecting the man to pull him to his feet. The man bent closer and mouthed the words Sorry, kid. Howard dropped his arm and tried to scoot backwards, but his feet were still tangled, and his right ankle throbbed. The man stooped down and settled his hands on his knees.

  “Did something frighten you?” His voice was low, soft, and not quite human.

  Howard nodded.

  “You should probably pay attention to that,” the man said. The reedy metallic quality at the center of his voice made it sound as though it were projected from somewhere inside him rather than created in his throat.

  “Were you in the girls’ bathroom at Madison West?” Howard asked.

  “I go where I like,” the man said, again sounding as though some other smaller man within him was talking through a megaphone. “Close your eyes now, son.”

  Terrified, he obeyed. For a second the air directly before Howard Bly became as hot as the wind from his dream desert. The sound of footfalls mutated into something softer that padded away, clicking.

  No, he thought at the time; in the hospital, pretending to look at the first page of an old paperback of L. Shelby Austin’s The Moondreamers found in the Game Room, the old Howard shook his head at his stupidity.

  Ant-Ant Antonio glanced up from one of the jigsaw tables, and old Howard Bly gave him an empty-headed look and said, “Portmanteau redivivus.” If Hayward had cut Meredith up according to plan, he could have stashed her body in a portmanteau, but he would have to be redivivus to do it now.

  “Mr. Bly, you da m-m-man,” Ant-Ant told him.

  Because Ant-Ant expected him to nod, Howard nodded.

  Although he had imagined he was going to tell Mallon everything, that afternoon young Howard failed to describe either his nightmare or the sudden appearance on the sidewalk of the “agent.” His hero’s customary lordliness could not quite conceal the heightened flutter in his nerves and bloodstream. Howard remained convinced that only he and Eel had observed their hero’s anxiety. Did that mean they had to protect him?

  At the same time, he’d had to protect himself, too, from Keith Hayward. Okay, Hayward hadn’t murdered Meredith Bright. All the same, Howard thought, something inside him had so darkened and shriveled that he could easily become one of those guys who traveled around the country murdering strangers. Or one of those demons who lurk like spiders in the webs of their terrible apartments, and dart out to pick off their victims. Back when they were all in fifth or sixth grade, they had paid as much attention as the grown-ups would allow to the Ladykiller.

  Young Howard wanted to control the mixture of fear and revulsion Keith aroused in him. The idea that his suspicions might put Hayward on alert made him feel as though hot tar was being pumped into his stomach.

  When everyone who wanted to take part in the rehearsal had met, as instructed, at the busy corner of University Avenue and North Francis, on the edge of the campus but not on it, Howard had placed himself as far as possible from Hayward, who began their march by sticking close to Mallon and jabbering away like a monkey.

  Brett Milstrap hung in there on his other side, now and then tossing in a comment. Milstrap looked amused. In fact, Milstrap always seemed to be amused around his roommate. Basically, the guy was using Hayward to prop up his own ego. The Eel had once told Hootie that Milstrap looked like a student who had just cheated on a test, which was pretty brilliant, Hootie thought. Even the yellow polo shirt and khaki pants he was wearing, classics of the preppy wardrobe, could not disguise the falsity at the center of his being. And he loved being creepy in his own special way, you couldn’t miss it. No wonder he was Hayward’s best friend.

  On the other hand, Spencer’s willingness to tolerate Keith Hayward’s company just baffled Hootie. The frat boy’s inner illness seemed so obvious that Howard wondered if Mallon simply wished to keep an eye on him. Maybe he was trying to neutralize this horrible killer-in-the-making. In that case, what was supposed to happen to the rest of them when Mallon took off?

  The thought of Mallon’s desertion made Howard want to reel across the sidewalk.

  After a couple of blocks Hayward must have tired of trying to impress Mallon, because he turned to Milstrap and pretended to say something in confidence while Mallon continued on ahead. Carrying shopping bags filled with stolen materials, Dilly-O and Boats strolled along behind. The Eel, who trusted Hayward no more than Howard did, sent him a half smile, half grimace that told him he was not alone in his loathing of their mutual enemy. He sped up, patted the Eel on the shoulder as he went by, and slipped in next to Mallon, who turned from intense conversation with Meredith Bright and looked down at him.

  “Do you have a question?”

  “Why didn’t you take Meredith’s car?”

  “I guess all of us couldn’t fit in,” Meredith said.

  Mallon ignored her. “We have to stick together now. I think that’s part of the whole deal.”

  “Is this meadow far away?”

  Mallon smiled. “Maybe a mile and a half.”

  “All right,” Howard said, aware that Meredith Bright was taking in this conversation with a look of impatience on her face.

  “I sense you have something else in mind,” Mallon said.

  Meredith Bright turned her head from him.

  “Do you want to talk about it in private?”

  Hootie nodded.

  Mallon whispered something to Meredith, who, looking annoyed, slipped back behind them, but not far enough to join the Eel.

  “So what’s your problem?” Mallon asked him.

  He snapped back into focus. “I had a nightmare about Keith,” he said, and abruptly realized that he did not want to tell Mallon the whole of his dream.

  “Aha,” Mallon said.

  “I know you can’t really tell anything from dreams,” he began.

  “Hootie my boy, you have a lot to learn.”

  This, Howard thought, was going to be like swimming upstream. “Okay. I dreamed that he murdered people. I know that doesn’t mean he really does, but I had the dream in the first place because I think something’s wrong with him.”

  “I guess so,” Mallon said. “You and the Eel keep bringing
it up.”

  “There is something wrong with him,” Howard insisted.

  In the Crafts Room, pretending now to be interested in the second page of The Moondreamers, the older, fatter, gray-haired Howard nodded.

  “S-Sure lovin’ that book, aren’t we, Howard?” said nosy Ant-Ant, cruising by.

  “Quacksalver,” Howard shot back, informing ignorant Ant-Ant Anthony that he was a charlatan.

  “I know,” Mallon told the angelic boy-Howard who had relished the nickname Hootie. “And you know I know, Hootie.”

  “He’s sick inside,” Howard said. “I think he likes to hurt people.” He decided not to amplify this remark with references to dismembered bodies and the trunks of cars. If he ever got around to Maverick McCool, Mallon would laugh him right back to State Street, and he would be too embarrassed ever to talk to his hero again.

  “Sometimes, Hootie, you amaze me.”

  “So you know, too,” he said, fighting not to show how deeply his hero’s condescension had wounded him. “Why do you let him stay with us?”

  “We need warm bodies. With Keith, we get a two-for-one deal, because Milstrap goes wherever he does. Oh, the guy’s different, I know that. Don’t you remember what I said to him at our gathering?”

  “He’s worse than you think,” Howard said, miserable that Mallon refused to take him seriously. “I can’t stand being in the same room with him. I can’t stand looking at him.”

  Mallon gripped Hootie’s upper arm, walked him across the sidewalk, and pushed his shoulder up against a plate-glass window. For a half second of sudden panic, maybe less, Howard imagined that he had seen Brett Milstrap inside the shop gazing at them through the big windows. It was impossible—side by side with Hayward, Milstrap came sailing by at just that moment, deliberately ignoring them.

  Mallon bent down and spoke directly into his ear. His voice was soft and rapid. “I have taken Hayward’s problems into consideration and will do my absolute damnedest to use them tomorrow evening.”

  “Use them?”

  “For us. Don’t you think what is inside that wretched kid exists also in the hidden world?”

  Young Howard could not speak. Old Howard felt his eyes prickle.

  “We want to let it give us the privilege of seeing what it’s all about. It’ll be contained, it’ll be held—I have spells for binding and unbinding, they’re ancient, they’re well tested, they do what they’re supposed to do, these spells. I think there’s a good chance that exposure to this force could reach out to Keith and fix him.”

  Young Howard shook his head; the old Howard pressed his hands to his eyes, like Mallon on Gorham Street. “He can’t—”

  “For the first time in his life, he’ll get a good look at this crazy force whipping around inside him. Don’t you think that would change a man?”

  “Have you ever seen anything like that happen?”

  Mallon straightened up and looked ahead. Some thirty feet away the group had come to a halt. Meredith and the little band were looking back at them. Hayward, whispering to Brett Milstrap, had turned his back.

  “We’re holding things up,” Mallon said. Howard thought he meant Let’s not leave Meredith alone up there. They began moving forward again.

  Mallon’s voice had returned to its usual register, and it was filled with all his old authority. “Not exactly, no, but I’ve seen things like that.”

  “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Mallon’s eye cut toward him again, and Howard said, “Don’t tell me that stuff about seeing a man’s hand cut off in a bar.”

  Spencer Mallon placed a hand on the side of his face and squinted ahead. Keith Hayward stopped whispering to his roommate and turned a dark glance upon them.

  “The weirdest thing,” Mallon said. He smiled. “Usually, the closest you get is the feeling that something almost happened—that the veil trembled for a second, and you came close to seeing what was on the other side. Or that some extraordinary force was hovering just out of sight, almost close enough to touch, but you weren’t good enough to hold it there, or strong enough, or concentrated enough, or that something else in the room screwed things up. That’s what happens most of the time.”

  Mallon looked up the block to the others, most of whom were now looking back with undisguised curiosity. Dill seemed almost on the verge of anger. Mallon swept his fingers through the air, telling them to keep moving forward.

  “But four, five years ago, when I was in Austin, this strange thing happened. And that was absolutely the weirdest place my investigations ever took me. It was around the time the agent left a note for me on the garbage can, remember? I said that something extraordinary happened there, but I didn’t get specific.”

  “I remember,” Howard said, offended that Mallon might think it possible he had forgotten.

  “Also, I didn’t mention that I was living with this girl, Antonia. Looked a little like Alexandra, remember her from La Bella Capri? Antonia was the first woman I ever knew who considered herself a witch, a Wiccan. So one day Antonia and I are lying around on her bed. It’s about five o’clock in the afternoon, and we’re supposed to get up and meet some people, only she says, Why don’t you and I try to do something here?

  “We went into the living room and stood side by side on her rug, naked. She’s burning some laurel and myrtle and cypress in a bowl, and she dipped a little oil of something or other into another bowl, a big one, with some other dried herbs crushed up into it. She lit seven candles. Then she sang something, I have no idea what, but it sounded exactly right. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘what do we do now?’

  “‘Just give it your best shot,’ Antonia said.

  “Because I didn’t expect anything to happen, I began to quote the first thing that came to mind, a passage I had memorized a couple of days before from Campanella’s Universalis Philosophiae. I do know Latin, you know. And Greek. Anyhow, I’m rattling away in the Roman Empire’s good old mother tongue, something about inhaling the Spirit of the World and hearing planetary music, and I notice that this dense, powerful odor is coming from the burning herbs—actually, it smells like sex plus death, if that makes any sense! Eros and Thanatos, the old Greeks called it. I’m getting turned on all over again, very turned on. Words are still pouring out of my mouth, and all of a sudden it is clear to me that what I’m doing is another form of sex, sort of a whole body sex. Antonia is moaning away beside me, and I’m right at the point when I don’t think I can hold out a second longer, and then it’s like the floor drops away beneath me, and I’m not in that room anymore.

  “I’m on a dark plain. Fires are burning on the horizon. The sky is red. It all happens so fast, I don’t have time to be scared. Then I understand that something is there with me, only I don’t know what is. I can’t see it, I just know it’s close. This huge, monstrous being is big, it’s invisible, and it is really, really interested in me. I can hear it turning around to get a look at me, and all of a sudden I’m so scared I practically faint … before I can blink, I’m back in Antonia’s living room. She’s kneeling on the floor, bent over. It looks like she’s praying to Allah. Which wouldn’t have been a bad idea, come to think of it. There’s a strong, strange smell in the room, like old blankets and cold ashes.

  “I asked her if she was all right, but she didn’t answer. I bent down and rubbed her back. She lifted her head, and it’s covered with blood, her whole face is bloody. Turns out, she just had a bloody nose, but it looked like she’d been knifed, or beaten up. I asked if she was all right all over again. She shook her head. ‘What happened?’ I asked. I even asked, ‘Did you see it?’”

  Spencer laughed, apparently at his own foolishness.

  “What did she say?” Howard asked.

  “She said, ‘Get the hell out of my house, and never come back,’ that’s what she said. You have to admit, Hootie, it was a truly weird experience.”

  “You don’t know what happened to her?”

  “She had her own trip,
that’s what happened to her, and she couldn’t handle it. Right now, you’re thinking, ‘Why would he want to do that again? Wasn’t it terrible enough for him?’ Right?”

  “Well …” Hootie said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “It came from me, don’t you get it? I produced what I saw—an image of pure sexual force. Okay, it looked pretty dark, but the woman with me was a witch, for God’s sake! Don’t you think she added in some kind of potion to keep me under her spell? It didn’t work, and it bounced back on her, that’s all. In our case, right now, I think something a lot more comprehensive is going to happen.” Mallon settled his hands on Howard’s shoulders, and lowered the handsome shield of his face to within inches of the boy’s.

  In the Crafts Room, the fat old Howard Bly turned to the wall to keep the attendant from seeing him weep.

  “Hey, everybody,” said sadistic Ant-Ant Anthony. “Check out Mr. Vocabulary B-Boy. He’s having q-quite a d-day. Aren’t you, Mr. B-Bly?”

  Decades back in time, Spencer Mallon was saying, “And let’s face it, Hootie. Although you may not know it, I’m finished here—it’s all over, more or less.” His breath smelled like freshly cut hay. “They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, in case you’ve ever read Thomas Wyatt. That’s all she wrote, apart from the fun all of us are going to have over the next day and a half.”

  “Fun?” Howard asked.

  “Just you wait. I have a little surprise arranged for all of you. I’m going to make your dreams come true.” He grinned and ruffled Hootie’s dead-straight hair.