A Dark Matter

by Peter Straub

  For the rest of the walk to the agronomy meadow, Howard Bly had to deal with the questions Boats and Dill fired at him.

  He said: “It’s not important what we talked about.”

  He said: “What I wanted to know, I found out. He doesn’t trust Hayward either.”

  He said: “But yeah, I trust him. He’s really trying to learn new things, you know.”

  He said: “Yeah, it’s a little scary. He’s seen some really weird stuff.”

  He said: “No, I have no idea what the surprise is.”

  Looking back down the sidewalk in frustration, he caught sight of an outright impossibility. Ten yards back, Brett Milstrap stood in the middle of the sidewalk, trying to wave all of them back. He did not look like a student who had just cheated on a test, he looked weary and despairing in his bright yellow shirt and khaki pants. He seemed to be both the age he really was and decades older. The only problem was, Brett Milstrap was now walking up University Avenue side by side with his roommate and only friend, Jack the Ripper. Hootie swung around to check and found that along with the rest of their party, the roommates had turned the next corner and were no longer in view. The same was true of Boats and Dilly. Apparently, Milstrap had doubled back in one hell of a hurry to head off the expedition from the rear. It made no sense at all.

  The Eel leaned around the corner and urged him to pick up the pace, for God’s sake.

  “Hey,” Hootie said, and looked back over his shoulder to see that the imploring figure had disappeared. “Is Milstrap up there?”

  “Right up front with his best buddy.”

  The group embarked on a series of smaller roads new to Hootie and his friends. The houses grew farther and farther apart. Eventually they reached the slightly wider and more substantial Glasshouse Road, where residences disappeared altogether. Arrowing straight toward a long flat greensward that had to be their destination, it was Madison’s most disreputable street. All the businesses rejected by the city’s more conventional sectors seemed to have settled here. RUDY’S TATTOOS was flanked by two run-down rightward-tilting bars with rows of motorcycles propped outside. Continuing on both sides down to the end of the street stood Pedro’s Magic Emporium, Monster Comix, Capital Guns, Badger Pawnshop, Badger Guns, Scott Myers School of Martial Arts, Knife And Blade World, Hank Wagner’s Pistol Range, Scuzzy’s Midnight Lounge, Whips ’N Chains, Betty’s Boudoir, stores with signs proclaiming LEATHER: ALL LEATHER and WEAPONS SALE OR RENT, and an unnamed store with a streaky, unclean display window papered with magazine covers depicting naked men and women. These businesses occupied small, one-story buildings roughly the size of the Aluminum Room but shabbier. At the far end of Glasshouse, two bars, THE DOWNBEAT TAP ROOM and HOUSE OF KO-RECK-SHUN, faced each other on opposite sides of the street.

  Just past the street’s blunt end lay an enormous, shimmering swath of green that looked as though it had come from a world altogether more generous and expansive. When Howard looked at it, he thought for some reason of what Mallon had said about his high school and imagined him standing on the meadow’s green carpet with his arms wide, declaiming in ancient Greek.

  By common though unspoken agreement, the group moved to the middle of the street. For most of its length, the journey down Glasshouse Road felt like a trip through a ghost village. Low, dim music floated from the biker bars, along with a barely audible buzz of conversation. Although lights burned in the windows of the gun shops, customers neither entered or emerged. Hank Wagner appeared to have taken the day off from target shooting, and no one was stocking up on dirty magazines. In one of the biker bars behind them, a growling voice uttered a fragrant curse. With a sound like the snapping of wood, something broke. Several dogs, or things that sounded like dogs, began to mutter in dog language. The little group drew more tightly together, with Spencer Mallon and Dilly-O, watchful and listening hard, at their head. “Don’t look back,” Mallon said. “Don’t look back.”

  Hootie found himself bracketed between the Eel and Keith Hayward, who had drifted up out of nowhere. Hayward’s hand fell on his shoulder like a metal claw.

  “Does silence give you the runs, baby face?” Hayward whispered.

  Hootie jerked away, shuddering.

  Then voices filled the air, and the sound of booted feet striking pavement. A lot of motorcycles roared into life. The little group in the middle of the road froze, then quickly began drifting to the right, away from the uproar of the motorbikes.

  “Let’s step along here,” Mallon said, sounding more nervous than he probably wanted to appear. “We want to get up on the sidewalk.” He reached out for Meredith Bright and yanked her to his side.

  With Mallon in the lead, the little group scrambled onto the sidewalk. Hayward had rushed up behind Howard Bly, who was at first aware only of the thin, ravaged face lowering itself toward his right shoulder, exhaling breath so sour it seemed to have been twice recycled. A skinny arm encircled with stiff dark hair like bristles snagged his waist. Hootie’s mind went white with revulsion.

  “Widdle Hoo-dee scaiwed, widdle Hoo-dee aw fwightened of the big, bad motowcycohs,” Hayward hissed.

  In a panic of loathing, Hootie struggled against the bony arm pressing him into Hayward’s body, and felt it drop away of itself. Hayward had lost interest in him, and now he was thrusting himself past Meredith and toward the front of the group. Heading elsewhere, the roaring of the motorbikes faded behind them. Howard became aware of some kind of scuffle taking place up on the sidewalk outside the House of Ko-Reck-Shun. Mallon, Meredith, Dill, and now Keith Hayward kept him from seeing it. He gathered up his courage in both hands and moved toward Mallon’s free side, Hayward’s touch seeming to burn through his clothing. Howard could hear the Monster (the Eel’s name for him) braying his stupid laugh, haw haw haw, as he went around the side of the group, wondering what could be so terrible that it amused Keith Hayward, wondering also why the Eel was nowhere in sight. When Howard reached Mallon’s safe side, both questions were answered. The Eel stood rigid with shame and rage on the sidewalk outside the seedy House of Ko-Reck-Shun, being upbraided by a spectacularly drunken old man who had obviously just come out of the bar.

  It took Howard Bly a moment to realize that the ruined old man was Carl Truax, the Eel’s father. If his clothes were not yet in rags, they were shapeless and filthy with grime, and his whiskery cheeks folded in toward his wet mouth and flickering tongue. He was trying to shout, but his voice rose only to a squashy, wobbling stage whisper.

  “Lee, damn you, what you doin’ way the hell over here? You’re supposed to be in school!”

  In a voice as small and hard as a walnut, the Eel said, “It’s Saturday, you moron.”

  Howard Bly could nearly have fainted—such humiliation, such courage!

  “I’ll drag you home and slap you silly. I’m your father, father a the famous goddam Eel, and I’m goin’ show the Eel who’s boss. Leave you black an blue, make you bleed from the ear holes, thass right, you hitch your sorry ass over here and lemme—”

  “You’re too drunk to do anything to anybody, Mister, and you’re certainly not going to injure the Eel, now or ever again,” Mallon broke in. “Now shut up and either go home or back inside. The choice is up to you.”

  The old man skittered toward him, muttering, “Choice is up ta me, fuckin right, you fuckin asshole.” He aimed a wide, looping punch at Mallon’s head, and Mallon easily ducked away. His ruined clothes fluttering about his skinny body, Eel’s father shambled around in a circle, lowered his head, and tried a sloppy one-two combination that came nowhere near his moving target. Keith Hayward was still braying haw haw haw.

  Mallon dodged another weightless blow and gave the Eel a look of pure handsome perplexity. “I don’t want to hit the guy.”

  “Knock him out, I don’t give a shit,” the Eel said.

  “Fuck this,” Dilly-O said. He rushed into the fray, came up on the old man from behind, and caught him under the arms. Then he spun him across the sidewalk, shove
d him through the yawning door, and propelled him back into the bar.

  “First time anyone was ever thrown into that place,” said Brett Milstrap.

  “You know it? You been to the House of Ko-Reck-Shun?” asked Mallon, keeping an eye on the doorway. Lazy, drunken laughter sounded from the interior.

  “Well, once, yeah,” Milstrap said. “I was really drunk, and these guys took me there, and I think somebody maybe tied me up … ?” He closed his mouth and made blackboard-erasing motions with his right hand. “Whoa.”

  “Should have gone to Scuzzy’s instead,” said the Eel, demonstrating if not full recovery from the embarrassment at least the desire to tough it out.

  “Are you kidding? We came from Scuzzy’s.”

  “How do you feel, really?” Mallon asked. “If you like, we could take your father home, make sure nothing happens to him.”

  “He’ll get home fine by himself. He just won’t remember any of this.”

  “You have to be a little shook up,” Mallon said. “Come on.”

  “No, you come on,” the Eel said. “I want to see our meadow.”

  “Then take a look at it.” He swept one arm toward the concrete barriers and the end of the street, making a comedy of presenting all of them with the shimmering swath of grass on which Howard had imagined him reciting ancient Greek.

  By turning to look in the direction Mallon was pointing, this enlarged version of the little band was declaring itself, it occurred to Howard, ready for whatever expansions of consciousness might be in the offing. It was brave—brave all the way round. It was amazing, how Mallon managed to stack all these layers in his comedy, his gesture of giving them the meadow. In the Crafts Room, tears spilled from Howard’s eyes as he, too, regarded the dazzling meadow where their lives had submitted to such gorgeous ruin. He saw it whole, and he saw it pure, for in his imagination the meadow had been untouched by everything that had touched them.

  The meadow before them, that sun-struck meadow in the last moments when it was no more than an irregular field owned by the UW Department of Agriculture …

  The agronomy meadow, in effect an enormous and complex grassland, was bounded on two sides by state highways, on its distant far end by a dense wood owned by the forestry department. Near the highway that swooped by far off to their right, a long row of metal devices like sun reflectors had been slanted over little squares of variegated grasses. Immediately behind the shining reflectors stood a line of red wooden boxes with their lids propped open. The shimmering grassy space of the meadow, perhaps twenty square acres altogether, spread out over the ground like an enormous blanket, rising up here and there into little folds and peaks and corrugations, elsewhere disappearing into deeper folds or swales that might have been made by man but long ago had been absorbed into the meadow’s fabric.

  “I see why you picked it,” Meredith said.

  “Oh? Why did I do that?”

  “You tell him, Hootie,” Meredith said, and placed a cool white hand on the back of his sweaty neck. “You and Eel, you’re good at seeing things.”

  Hootie cast a sideways glance at the Eel, who was fidgeting with impatience. “Because we could hide in one of those valley things.” He thought about standing in one of the little valleys. “Then you’d have to look up at the hillside, except it’s too low to be a real hillside. You want us to be looking up. Spencer, did you really go to West Point?”

  Mallon laughed in surprise. “I did, yes, Hootie, I did. I’m proud to be able to say that.”

  “But didn’t you say that you went to the University of California at Santa Cruz?” asked the Eel, now looking indignant instead of impatient. “Where you met the guy who wrote Love’s Body?”

  “Is there some reason we are dicking around like this?” Hayward asked.

  “You doubt him?” asked Meredith, so pale that she seemed almost bloodless.

  “All these questions,” Mallon said. “Let’s save that spirit for when we can really use it. Don’t waste energy in the doubt game.”

  “Why does doubt have to be a game?”

  “Eel, don’t you see …” Meredith was unable to speak above a whisper.

  Mallon silenced her with a glance. “Doubt undermines good energy. Above all, Eel, you don’t want to doubt me. Right now—a moment from now—we are going to walk into this stupendous meadow together, and we must be united, one force, because none of this is going to work unless every element in our chain, down to the molecular level, is directed unswervingly at our common goal. We have to be like a laser beam, guys—to smash through the consensus perceptual level, that’s what it takes. Do you think you’re here by accident?”

  When he looked around at his circle of followers, fixing each one with his stare, Spencer Mallon appeared, if only to Howard Bly, to be a couple of feet taller than anyone else.

  “Keith, are you here by some kind of random selection? Brett, are you?”

  Hayward shook his head. “Uh uh, no way.”

  Milstrap said, “Whatever you say, boss.” Balanced on one leg, his hand on his hip, Milstrap was completely restored to his unpleasant self. Hootie wondered what had gone wrong with him, and how it had been set right so quickly.

  “You two, Meredith, and the kids here, you bring us into balance—get it, Eel?”

  The Eel swallowed.

  “Know what I studied at West Point? Among other things, chemistry. This may amaze you, Eel, but at heart I am a scientist. At Santa Cruz, besides philosophy I studied psychology. Also a science. Data, data, data—you spend thousands upon thousands of hours doing research with lab animals, and then you interpret your data. The second I heard about the four of you, I knew you’d be perfect for this experiment of ours.

  “And now, Eel, if you and your friends are ready, if all of us are ready, we will walk into our meadow and find our perfect valley. I’ll tell you what, prove I’m right—you show me where it is.”

  With considerably more mockery than the first time, he swept his arm toward the meadow, inviting Eel to demonstrate the perfection of his research methods. This was going to be as much an experiment as those involving the sun reflectors and wooden boxes that marched down the right side of the meadow.

  “Hell, I’ll do it,” said Dilly. He strode up to the nearly waist-high concrete barrier that marked the end of Glasshouse Road, swung his shopping bag over the barrier, then slipped over it one leg at a time. Following closely behind him, Boats vaulted over, bag and all.

  “Come on, Eel,” said Dill. “Let’s show him where it is.”

  Clumsily, the Eel swung over the concrete wall. Even more clumsily, Hootie came after, and while he was brushing concrete dust off his shirt, Mallon leaped atop the barrier, then jumped down, all in one graceful gesture. He extended a hand to Meredith, who settled her blue-jeaned rump on the top of the barrier and swung her legs over in tandem.

  Keith Hayward tried to imitate Mallon’s effortless agility. He nearly fell off the barrier, but caught himself in time to jump down. Brett Milstrap went over in the style of Dilly-O, one leg at a time, but less nimbly. He muttered, “Scraped the family jewels.” When Boats and Keith Hayward started to laugh, Hayward cut himself off in mid-bray and glared at the younger boy.

  “Let’s show him what we’re here for,” Dill said, ready to start.

  He gestured to his friends and led them toward the heart of the meadow. Grasses and wildflowers tangled at their feet. Various shades of green stretched out before them, folding into low berms covered with sprawling, untidy ranks of Queen Anne’s Lace and tiger lilies. The meadow seemed larger once they had entered it. Somewhere in the distance, bees hummed in the motionless air.

  Howard glanced at Mallon, following along behind them next to Meredith Bright. His earlier anxiety seemed to have disappeared. He was smiling to himself, and he looked both pleased to be in the meadow with them and genuinely curious to see if, unaided, his youngest followers could locate the site he had chosen. Keith Hayward and Brett Milstrap lounged along eigh
t or nine yards behind, muttering. Hayward caught Hootie’s eye and gave him a glance so smoky, threatening, and resentful that the boy at once whirled around, as if jabbed with a pointed stick.

  If he turned around again, Hayward would be staring at him still, and that would be too disturbing—like looking down into a dark body of water and seeing something large and ill defined shifting around in there. He and Dill were right at the front of the little column proceeding through the meadow, which was fine with him. Boats and the Eel came along a couple of feet behind. After a wider gap, Mallon and Meredith Bright walked along ahead of Hayward and Milstrap, who lagged and dallied like disaffected schoolchildren.

  Dilly hesitated, and Howard pointed to a clump of tiger lilies that covered the beginning of a fold in the landscape. As the fold continued across the meadow, the vegetation surrounding it grew thicker and more varied—black-eyed Susans, brambles, lupines, and wild roses like tough miniature baseballs.

  “Damn it, Hootie, Meredith was right,” Dilly-O told him. “You are really good at seeing things.”

  “That’s sort of brumous to me,” Howard replied, “but if you’re looking for someplace where you can be out of sight, this one’s better than the one you were thinking about. Right, Eel?”

  “Bingo,” said the Eel.

  “I wasn’t thinking about some other place, I was just thinking,” said Dill. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Spencer?”

  “Go in there and tell me if it’s right,” Spencer said, finessing the question. “Did you say ‘brumous’?”

  “Um, hazy,” said Howard Bly, beginning to blush.

  Weeds and wildflowers disguised the entire length and height of the swale. From the Glasshouse Road end of the meadow, it appeared to be merely an overgrown ripple in the land. Narrow and shallow where the group entered, it gradually deepened and widened out as they proceeded. When they had come to a point slightly past midway, the grassy wall to their left rose nearly to the top of Howard’s head, and the thick combination of grasses and weeds growing all along the soft ridge concealed them all. To their right, the opposite ridge had sunken into a low, concave rill of land where the grasses had burned brown. The cars speeding along the distant highway were moving dots of color.