by Peter Straub
—I was furious! My body acted before my mind could tell it what to do. I swung my arm around toward his voice, and Robert must have turned his head away, because he didn’t stop my arm or duck or anything, and before I realized that I was trying to hit him in the head with that rock, I felt the rock smash against something hard. I yelled in shock, but my body kept moving—I slid forward and swung that rock down again, and this time I felt something crack up like an eggshell, and my hands were all wet. I started making some kind of noise, not yelling, not crying, something messier and less articulate than those—I was down in that ravine, for God’s sake, and I’d just killed a man who had once been violently in love with me. And you know what? I was glad, violently glad, that he was dead.
(The disgusting figure clutching the Eel shivered in ecstasy, then disappeared, having obtained what it wanted.)
—Someone pounded down into the ravine, and I screamed and struggled to stand up. It had to be a cop, and I’d go to jail for a lot longer than that asshole ever had. A man was saying, My God, my God, over and over, and I realized he wasn’t a cop. It was Pete from the diner! He had come out to make sure nothing funny happened to me, and when he couldn’t see me on the street, he ran into that enormous lot. Pretty soon, he heard me making that noise, and here he was, my savior!
—Pete got me home unseen, and he got me into my apartment and let me clean up and change into fresh clothes. He put all the bloody stuff in a garbage bag and told me he was going to burn it all after he dragged the body deep into the ravine and covered it up, or put it in a cave, or hid it somehow, so nobody would find it for a long time. And I guess he did a good job, because Robert’s body is still down there. No policemen ever came around asking tough questions. I got away with murder. Is that secret enough for you, Ms. Truax?
The next lady said:
—This is funny, it makes me smile when I think about it. The strange stuff that happens in your life! So, anyhow. When I was a little girl, my mother used to take me into her favorite stores so I could shoplift things for her.
Eel had her thief.
“She got her to confess?” Don asked, next to the dark windows in the lounge.
“That she did,” I remembered saying, all the while feeling, far too near, the beating of enormous wings. “It took her twenty minutes. The woman broke down. She said she only stole a little at a time, and she hadn’t really noticed how the amount grew. By now it scared her, but she didn’t know how to stop. ‘You’ve already stopped,’ Lee told her. ‘It’s over.’ They worked out a repayment schedule, never brought in the police, solved the whole problem in one afternoon. The lady went away shaken but reformed. You know, she had kept on shoplifting through her whole life. Like Boats!”
“Yeah, like Boats,” Olson said. “But this lady got caught.”
He smiled, then looked upward, distracted by a thought. “What year was this, again?”
“Nineteen ninety-five. October, I think.”
“That’s interesting. I have the feeling that in October of 1995, Spencer and I were visiting this patron of his, an old lady named Grace Fallow. She was rich, and she liked Spencer to come to her and give consultations. This was way at the end of the time I was working with him.”
“Yes, and?”
—Yes, and? Meaning, what is this to me?
“Grace Fallow lived in Rehoboth Beach. She put us up in a hotel called the Boardwalk Plaza.”
—Grace Fallow lived in Rehoboth Beach … Boardwalk Plaza.
“We could have run into her! Wouldn’t that have been weird?”
“I guess it would have been, yes.”
He frowned at me. “Hey, it was a coincidence. We never saw her, and as far as I know, she never saw us. But maybe, you know, she glimpsed him and got caught up in nostalgia. It was a pretty exciting time in our lives. And I could be wrong about the date.” He paused and looked up and to the left. “Actually, I think I was wrong. I think Grace Fallow asked us to pay her a visit in October of 1996, not ‘95. Yes. I think that’s right. It was 1996.”
—Sure it was, I muttered, using a phrase I had not spoken to my friend in the lounge. In the lounge, I had said nothing; I had merely nodded.
A long time passed before I felt able to turn off the bedside lamp and invite the mind-stirring darkness.
The following morning, we went back to the Lamont Hospital and there a stupendous thing took place, but before I explain what it was, we are going to skip over the next four days, each of them packed with events that may have been a shade less stupefying but were pretty astonishing anyhow, at least to all who were present. But on the fifth day, the one to which we are skipping, another amazement, in fact several of them, occurred, all of which began with Don Olson’s announcement over toasted bagels and Danish pastry at our usual table in the lounge that Howard Bly, the source of the stupendousnesses and stupefactions noted above, had been told not to expect his friends this day. In response to my question, Olson told me that he had a surprise for me. The surprise involved a quick trip to Milwaukee.
“What’s your surprise?”
“You’ll find out when we get there. We have kind of a small window here. It takes an hour and a half to drive to Milwaukee, but on an airplane you get there in half an hour. Now, even though I really hate to fly, I booked us cheap tickets on this new no-frills airline, EZ Flite Air. All you have to do is get us to the airport in the next forty minutes or so and pay the money. In Milwaukee, we can rent a car. I figure you’d gain at least half an hour, and unless I’m all wrong you’re going to want it.”
“What’s all the rush?”
“The person we’re going to meet can’t spare a lot of time.”
“And you won’t tell me who this mystery person is.”
“You’re wasting precious minutes,” Olson said, wiping his lips with the napkin as he stood.
In five minutes, we were driving to Dane County Regional Airport, and in twenty-five I was standing eighth in line at the EZ Flite Air desk in the bright, wide lobby. I alone had no luggage. All I planned to bring with me, a notebook and a fountain pen, had been slipped into my jacket pockets.
Don Olson, who admitted to being one of those people who exist in a state of near-paralytic fear from the moment a plane’s wheels leave the ground to the moment they meet it again, had disappeared into the depths of the terminal to hunt down candy bars and magazines, or whatever else might dull his anxieties. Since it was still fairly early in the morning, I hoped that Olson would not feel compelled to gulp down a couple of whiskies. Or at least that he might hold it to two and no more.
The line crawled forward, moving at the rate of perhaps one foot every twenty minutes. The ticket clerks on the far side of the distant desk spent a great deal of time staring, befuddled, at a monitor visible only to them. They tapped keys and shook their heads and whispered. Eventually the key tapping, the whispering, and the head shaking ceased, and another group of passengers were handed their boarding passes and directed toward security and the gates. I settled in to wait my turn.
To kill time, I fieldstripped my pen to reassure myself that it was almost full. What do you know, it was. While I reassembled the pen, a fraught couple with three enormous bags was released from the desk, and I could move another foot and a half. I pushed my hands into my pockets and leaned forward to see if my shoes required shining. They did not, yet. I straightened up, inhaled deeply, and sighed. Both of the boys at the desk had flattened their hands over their crew cuts in a posture of amazement and confusion. This was not a good sign. One of the boys tapped a lot of keys and bent toward the invisible monitor. What he saw there caused him to shake his head.
I turned around and looked at the people on the other side of the wide, empty space behind me. College students and other civilians crossed my line of vision, going in and out of the doors, gabbing into cell phones, leaning against pillars and waste bins, standing or sitting on their luggage. Nearly everyone wore or carried a backpack, and almost everyone was und
er the age of forty. I hoped to see Olson, but the candy bars and magazines must have been on the other side of the terminal. My gaze drifted across a row of disheveled-looking young people arrayed on a line of stationary chairs and stopped to focus upon a slim older man in a black leather jacket, a lightweight black turtleneck, and jeans. This was no ordinary geezer. He looked a bit like an actor. The man’s hair, ample, silvery white, and just short enough to escape being a coiffure, swept back from his suntanned, slightly vulpine face to fall past the collar of the jacket. He had prominent, dead-level cheekbones and deeply set blue eyes and could have been any age between seventy and eighty-five. This imposing, undoubtedly self-invented character was looking directly at me. Evidently he had been staring at me for some time. That the object of his concentration had caught him at it did not at all embarrass him. He simply went on looking at me, calmly, as if I were an animal in a zoo.
I had no idea why this should be true, but the man’s gaze irritated and upset me. Being looked at in this way felt impudent, condescending, like a diminishment. It was uncomfortable to be singled out and watched. I wished the man would focus on some other victim. He looked completely self-sufficient. The man’s intensely blue eyes were shamelessly trying to lock with mine.
When I spun around to break contact, it felt as if I had dropped an electrified wire. The young men at the counter were now handing baggage tickets and boarding passes to two girls. The line diminished by one, a tall, long-haired man with an ill-concealed bald spot and a six-foot duffel bag that rolled behind him on its convenient wheels like a dog. I advanced another foot. A messy family of two heavyset parents and four even more heavyset kids, dragging a great many heaped-up bags, trudged across the empty space, gathered behind me, and immediately began to argue.
If you say that one more time, I’m going to. I was only trying to. Why don’t you ever LISTEN to. Molly, if you don’t stop flapping your mouth. I don’t have to if I don’t want. I don’t care if the kids are. Those brats are the whole reason for.
I tried to use the family as cover while checking to see if the silver-haired man was still staring at me. To my relief and surprise, the man was no longer standing in front of the big windows. Then a movement caught my eye and, heart already jumping in my chest, I turned my head and saw, about four feet off to my left, the silver-haired man approaching me. He stopped moving and held up his hands.
“Do you want something from me?” I asked. “What is it? Who are you, Rasputin?”
The family at my back sensed drama and fell silent.
The man smiled. His smile was beautiful. “Aren’t you Lee Harwell, the writer?”
Astonished, I nodded. “I am, yes.”
“I’ve read all your books. Please let me apologize. I must have seemed very rude.”
“It’s perfectly all right. Thank you for explaining.”
While this was going on, the young men dispensed another boarding pass and baggage ticket, and I moved into the gap left by the couple ahead of me. The silver-haired man sidled closer. The awful family shoved their bags forward, eyeing the man as if they expected him to perform some feat of magic.
He leaned sideways and rolled his expressive eyes at me. His lips pursed, and wrinkles divided his forehead into furrows. I thought: There’s more. I should have known. I looked through the terminal, but Olson was probably guzzling tequila in some distant corner.
“I must speak to you,” the man said, softly. “Could you please move away with me? This has to be private.”
“I’m not moving out of this line.”
“It concerns your safety.”
Before I could object, my admirer placed one hand on my elbow, another in the small of my back, and shifted me a foot and a half to the side as easily as if I were on wheels.
“Now, hold on there, mister,” I said, pulling away.
“I am holding on,” the man said, smiling once again, and with the same effortless authority used the slightest pressure in the small of my back to stop me from moving away. He leaned in and whispered, his eyes pinning mine.
“I was staring because I had a very strong premonition about you. You must not take this flight.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. Once more, it seemed that my hand had fastened onto an electric fence, and pure energy pulsed through me. I tried to break contact, but the pressure on my back, which felt like the pressure of a doll’s hand, held me fast.
“Please. If you go up to the counter and buy a ticket from those two fools and get on EZ Flite Air 202, the consequences will be drastic. Catastrophic.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I know. If you fly to Milwaukee you will lose everything.” He paused to be certain that this had hit its mark. “Don’t you have a car? Drive there, and all will be well.”
“All will be well?”
The man’s hands dropped away. The sense of release from some profound but invisible energy was as palpable as the sudden cessation of an uproar.
“Think about it, Lee.”
“What’s your name?”
The beautiful smile transformed the severity of his face. “Rasputin.”
The man stepped back. In seconds, he had disappeared.
Two couples and a man who looked like a retired soldier stood between me and the ticket counter.
I looked at the clerks, paralyzed as ever by their cluelessness, and wondered: What if the whole airline is like these guys? How many successful flights had EZ Flite Air managed to pull off, anyhow? And where was Don Olson?
As soon as the question had formed, Olson appeared at the edge of the crowded distance into which “Rasputin” had disappeared. Perhaps he had seen that odd and impressive character.
After Don came up to me, bearing copies of Vanity Fair and The New Republic, on his breath a faint perfume of bourbon, I asked if he had noticed a striking man in a black jacket, silvery hair to his shoulders, and the face of an Apache chief, if Apaches were WASPs. Don blinked and said, “What?”
I repeated myself.
“Maybe I missed him.”
“You couldn’t miss a guy like that. No one could. It’d be like missing a burning building.”
Don blinked again. “No then, I didn’t see him. Why? What did he do?”
“He told me not to take this flight.”
We were permitted to move another eighteen inches toward the head of the line, where we now stood third.
Olson asked why the man had advised against the flight, and listened to the answer with what looked like equanimity. “What do you want to do?” He seemed, at a level deep within, almost amused.
“I was waiting for you to come back, so I could ask you.”
“I’ll go along with whatever you say. As long as you say the right thing.”
I gave him a look of exasperation. “I hate to say it, but I want to take the car.”
“You said the right thing. Let’s get going.”
I said, “All right,” and realized that I could not simply walk off. The family behind me was wrangling again, so I asked the people ahead of me if they were getting on the flight to Milwaukee.
The man of the first couple said, “No, Green Bay.”
The woman of the second couple said, “Terre Haute. Why?”
The man who resembled a retired soldier smiled and said, “I’m going a lot farther than these other people.”
I asked if he were changing planes in Milwaukee.
“St. Louis.”
I turned around to face the couple. They must have weighed a total of at least seven hundred pounds, and they had big, grouchy faces. Their children were waddling in circles, whining. The couple saw me looking at them from a foot away and fell silent in wondering amazement. No one ever talked to them, I realized.
“I’ll make this brief,” I said. “Are you traveling to, or changing planes in, Milwaukee?”
“Are we what?” asked the wife.
“No,” said her husband.
“No what?” she aske
d him. You don’t tell him our. He didn’t. He doesn’t. You don’t, you always, you never.
Don and I walked away from the squabbling couple, through the wide empty space, and outside to the parking lot.
“I’m almost tempted to say …” Olson began, and I told him not to.
Once we got on the long, straight highway to Milwaukee, Olson switched on the radio and tuned it to Newsradio 620 WTMJ, the Milwaukee NBC affiliate, just then and for the next two hours broadcasting Midday with Joe Ruddler, a call-in show that very few people called in to, because the host, Mr. Ruddler, formerly a sports newscaster in Millhaven, Illinois, much preferred talking to listening. (Ruddler also fancied SHOUTING, BELLOWING, and RANTING. He liked to refer to his career as a television sportscaster as “When my name was in lights” or “When I was in the BIG LEAGUES.”) Don had learned that attending to such programs in his off-hours, or while in transit, provided a bottomless well of local information that often proved useful to him during his residencies in the communities where he plied his unusual trade. Mallon, he said, had done the same.
Joe Ruddler was outraged about his phone bill. On his landline, he had made only five calls, for which the total cost was twenty-two cents. Yet his bill was for the amount of thirty-two dollars and seven cents. How did these CLOWNS manage a trick like that?? Joe Ruddler’s outrage flowed out from a self-replenishing fountain.
When we were about forty miles from Milwaukee, Ruddler dialed his voice way down and said, “We just got some grim news here, friends, and I want to take the liberty of sharing it with you. I’m jumping the gun on the official announcement, but to an old broadcaster like myself the news is news, and ought to be reported straight and true in a timely fashion, not sifted and filleted and spun this way and that until black turns into white and vicey-versy.”
“No,” I said. “It can’t be.”
“Can’t be what?”
“So pardon me for shaking up your day, my friends, forgive me if you can for bringing Mr. Death into our conversation here. We’d prefer to keep him out, I know, but when Mr. Death walks into the room, people tend to give him all their attention, because our Mr. Death is ONE GOSH-DARNED SERIOUS FELLOW. Well, prepare to pay attention, folks.