by Peter Straub
“Donald,” came Meredith’s voice. Both of them looked back. “It will be a very long time before you ask me again for money.”
the dark matter
She’s empty,” I said to Don as we turned toward I-94 and the journey back to Madison. “The emptiest human being I’ve ever met. There’s nothing there but hunger and the desire to manipulate.”
“What did I tell you?” Olson asked.
“When she first came into the room, I swear, I fell in love with her. Twenty minutes later, I thought she was an unlikable hag with a great plastic surgeon. By the time we left, not that it wasn’t interesting, because it really was, but by the end I couldn’t wait to get away from her. And she was still hiding something.”
“Well, yeah. Always. What do you think she was hiding right then?”
“She didn’t tell us what she saw when she looked at Lee.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t think she did look at the Eel. I don’t think she could. Too much hatred.”
I gave him a perplexed look. “Isn’t that a little over the top?” Olson did not respond. “Anyhow, what I really meant was that she was hiding something about that crazy king and queen. It might have been something she didn’t really know she was keeping back.”
“She kept back a lot she didn’t know,” Olson told me. “All those figures in her dioramas represent spirits that Henry Cornelius Agrippa claimed could be called up by invoking certain specific rites. The Bear King and the Bellowing Queen with the distaff, the ones that gradually took over, are the Spirits of Mercury, which, according to Agrippa, create horror and fear in whoever summons them. Meredith says they smiled at her, but according to Meredith, Jack the Ripper would smile at her, too. The naked green girl and the camel and the dove in front of Spencer were the shapes of the Spirits of Venus, which were supposed to be seductive and provocative. The red guy and that other stuff in front of Boats were the shapes of the spirits of Mars, which cause trouble.”
“Maybe this is a stupid question, but why would anyone call up these characters?”
“First, because they could—it demonstrates their power, their knowledge, their command. Second, because you’re supposed to be able to make the characters do things for you. All of the characters Meredith saw were evil spirits, and when you summon them, you should have Pentacles and Sigils ready to contain them. Pentacles and Sigils are basically written symbols or sacred pictures shown in a double circle and surrounded by Bible verses and the names of angels. All of this magical juju is specially chosen for whatever effect you’re trying to create.”
“But Mallon didn’t do any of that. He just had ropes.”
“Oh, he had spells, too, but he didn’t know anything about what I just told you. It all comes from Cornelius Agrippa’s book Of Magical Ceremonies, which didn’t appear until 1565, thirty years after Agrippa died. Mallon and the few other people who did research on Agrippa really only dealt with his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, because everyone thought the later one was fraudulent. Well, not Aleister Crowley, but no scholar ever took Crowley seriously.”
Now we were already out of Milwaukee on I-94, and the sun was shining on the wide fields on both sides.
“Until you mentioned him, I’d never heard of Cornelius Agrippa. In the sixteenth century, was he a big deal? A famous philosopher?”
“I guess you could say that. To everybody like us, Spencer and me, he was the greatest of all the Renaissance magicians, but Agrippa had a tough old life. He was a soldier, a scholar, a diplomat, a spy, a doctor who never had any medical training, a lecturer, and he was married a bunch of times. He didn’t get paid very often. To secure the patronage he needed to do his work and disseminate his ideas, Agrippa had to keep jumping around Germany, France, and Spain. High point of his life may have been when he was made a professor of theology at the age of twenty-three.
“Of course wherever he went the conventional clergy accused him of heresy, because he was, you know, interested in magic, Raymond Lully, the kabbala, astrology. He had to keep scrambling to find ways to publish his books. The guy was thrown into a Brussels jail because he couldn’t pay his debts, and the Dominican monks at Louvain accused him of impiety. People were executed for that offense. Other monks claimed he had manufactured gold, which would put him in the devil’s party. Actually, he said he had seen it done and knew how to do it, but could not do it himself. When he was forty-nine, the emperor of Germany condemned him as a heretic, and he fled to France, got sick, and died. The guy had written about a million words and lived five or six lives.”
“God, he must have been Mallon’s hero.”
“Pretty much. Mine, too. His Three Books, and the fourth, are the most important books of occult wisdom in the Western world. And either despite that or because of it, Agrippa died broke and alone, surrounded by his enemies. In the long run, it looks like that’s what our kind of magic gets you.”
I uttered a noncommittal grunt. Donald Olson did not appear to be offended. I stuck my elbow out the window, got the needle up to seventy, and managed to keep it there for most of our long and strangely calm return to Madison. Outside the village of Wales, the column of black smoke had disappeared from the fields and the sky.
“Damn,” Don said. “I’d pay a million dollars to know what text Mallon was quoting out there. Want to know the funny part? He didn’t know what it was, either! He told me it just came to him, and afterward he couldn’t remember what the hell he’d said.”
“Thank God,” I said.
At the steady rate of seventy miles per hour, we entered Madison and before long were rounding the Square and driving down into the parking garage. After we had freshened up and reconvened in the lounge, I pulled my iPhone from my pocket and enjoyed a long conversation with my wife. The Eel, for so I had begun to think of her again, was full of news about her friends and colleagues in the ACB, her experiences in the city (a Tina Howe play, Mahler’s Ninth by the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, dinner with old friends in their apartment at the Watergate), and her plans for the next few days. The Rehoboth Beach people, plus Missy Landrieu, were asking her to come down to chair their meeting the following Wednesday, and she thought she would do it. She’d been gone so long, another few days wouldn’t make much of a difference. Lee would get a ticket for Saturday. Besides, Missy was a great character, a hoot, and as he had always said, you got the best crab cakes in the world in Maryland. He wouldn’t mind, would he? She supposed Don Olson was still sponging off him.
“He’s staying with me, yes, but he’s not exactly sponging. I loaned him some money when he first showed up, but he paid me back right away. And he’s been very helpful to me with this new project of mine.”
Lee Truax had some doubts about this new project.
“We met the former Meredith Bright this morning. She’s a horror, but she had an interesting story about what happened that day.”
Lee Truax imagined that Meredith Whatever-her-name-was would be like the beta versions of some of those word-processing systems for the blind, the ones that garbled every third word and transformed boring reports into surrealism!
“Well, when we both get back home I’ll tell you what she said. For instance, I didn’t know you ran into an anti-war riot on your way out to the meadow.”
“Oh, that was no big deal. We hid behind a wall in a parking lot, and no one ever noticed we were there. Meredith made a big deal about being behind schedule, but no one else thought it was important. Now, what’s this in your messages about Hootie?”
Everything about Hootie, Howard as he was known now, was amazing, I said. His apparent crack-up on the day Don and I had taken him outside for the first time in decades had actually led to a stupendous breakthrough. For four amazing days, Howard Bly, good old Hootie, had taken one giant step after another.
“It all started with him lying on the hospital floor, saying something very simple. He said, ‘Don’t do that. Take it back.’ First words he’d spoken that we
ren’t quoted in thirty-seven years, ever since he’s been here. Then this girl who works there came up to him—we didn’t know it, but she’d had lots of conversations with him—she came up and knelt down, and he whispered something. You’d never guess what he said to this girl.”
The Eel supposed that was correct. Since she could not guess, why not tell her?
“Hootie whispered, ‘She is our skylark, and I know it.’ When Pargeeta told me, she asked if it made any sense. ‘A lot,’ I said.”
“Yes,” my wife said, sounding reluctant. “It does make a lot of sense, and only he would know that. Really know it, I mean.”
I paused before asking her the question she once had batted away with a wounding dismissal. “I’m going to talk to Howard today about what happened in the meadow. He knows, and he’s prepared. One day, will you tell me what you think happened then?”
She also hesitated, and for a longer time than I. “After all this time, I could try. Will Dilly be there?”
“He might be. I don’t know yet. Do you think I’ll understand why you waited so long to speak?” I meant one thing by this question; by her answer, “You certainly will,” she meant another.
“What you’re going to tell me can’t be as flat-out crazy as Meredith Walsh’s story.”
She chuckled. “Mine is so beyond flat-out crazy, I think it breaks new ground. Remember … I’m the Skylark.”
“I know that, but I don’t know how I know.”
“There are times when I think you’ve had a very strange marriage.”
“All marriages are strange. Just give them enough time.”
“Or maybe you just had a very strange wife.”
Within me, words arose from the place where they were connected directly to feelings, and I said, “The truth is, I’d marry my wife all over again.”
“Oh, Lee. That was such an incredibly nice thing to say.”
“Do you have to go back to Rehoboth Beach?”
She inhaled, and I knew what she would tell me. “No, of course not, but I’d like to. It’s not far from Washington, and I won’t be long.”
“You plan to be there Wednesday to Saturday of next week.”
“Yes, if you don’t mind. I’ll probably get a room at the usual place.”
Exactly as I had heard her deciding what to do, I now could hear her desire deliberately to change subjects. “I think I’d like to see Hootie, too. He was always such a beautiful boy.”
“Over the last forty years, he’s changed a bit.”
“He’ll still be beautiful to me. If he really does get out of that hospital, could he come to Chicago? In time?”
“Are you serious about this?”
“I owe him something. In the days when I could have visited him, they refused to let me see him. Then we left for New York, and life got so busy, and I let him become part of the past. And there he’s been, all this time, in that terrible place. Could he function in the outside world? Is he too damaged to ever be able to live on his own?”
“Well, he’s certainly come a long way, and in a very short time. I have to say, he is kind of charming. In fact, this young woman who works in the Lamont, Pargeeta Parmendera, loves him. They’re pals! Even when he could talk only in quotations from The Scarlet Letter and a romance novel that was lying around the ward, they had long conversations about everything under the sun.”
“Pargeeta is undoubtedly very attractive.”
“She’s a knockout. At first, I thought she was the head psychiatrist’s mistress, but instead she was the guy’s old babysitter.”
“And what does Hootie look like now?”
I groped for something telling, and the perfect description came to me. “He looks like a character from The Wind in the Willows. He could be Mole.”
“He sounds darling.”
“He is darling. It’s amazing. He’s been in here his whole life, but he feels no resentment. He thinks it was the right place for him. He says he was waiting to get well enough so we could show up and make him even better.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I hardly know what I believe anymore.”
“You intend to stay in touch with Hootie, don’t you?”
“Eel, I’m not going to walk out on him now.”
“You called me Eel!”
“Sorry! Don really tried to use your name, but he kept backsliding. Before long, I was doing it, too.”
“I don’t mind, actually. The Eel was a good kid, if I remember correctly. But you can only call me Eel in front of Hootie and Don.”
“Agreed.”
Lee Truax waited a second before saying, “You seem to like Don more than you did at first.”
“We’ve spent a lot of time together. You know how after you’ve had someone’s company for four or five days, you start wishing he’d leave? That hasn’t happened. I like having the guy around, and I have to say, he’s been very helpful to me.”
“You mean, helpful to this new project.”
“Well, yeah. He was a decent guy back then, and I think he still is.”
“Are you sorry now that you didn’t come along with the rest of us?” She was silent for a moment. “Do you wish you’d met Spencer Mallon?”
I think I might have done that this morning, I thought, and said, “No.”
“You can’t be telling the truth.”
“If I’d been there with the rest of your gang, I wouldn’t able to think about everything from this angle. I like being at my own little angle. It’s like standing on the sidewalk, looking in through someone’s picture window, and trying to make sense of what you see.”
She thought about what I had said, and I could picture her with the phone in her hand, staring blindly ahead in the darkened hotel room, her features half in shadow. When finally she spoke, it was with a degree of warmth that surprised me. “One day, I’ll try to help, too, but I’ll have to work up to it.”
After I disconnected, I realized that I had told her nothing about our miraculous rescue from death in a plane crash. It was better that way, I thought. She need never hear of that incident.
When we drove into the Lamont’s parking lot, a slim dark shape moved from the shadow of the great walnut tree. The tremor of unease that visited me disappeared when the gliding figure moved into the sunlight and became Pargeeta Parmendera.
“Hi,” I said, although I could see that Pargeeta was not in the mood for social niceties. As she marched up to the car it was clear that speaking to Howard Bly’s friends had been uppermost in her mind for some time.
“Yeah, hi,” she said, and came to a halt directly in front of me. “Sorry. I just have to say this. I waited out here because I was pretty sure you’d be getting here around this time.”
“How long were you standing there?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Twenty minutes?”
“You were standing under that tree for twenty minutes?”
“It might have been more like half an hour. Please. I was sure you’d come here sooner or later, and I wanted to explain something before we get inside. I don’t want you to think I’m a horrible person.”
“Nobody could think that, Pargeeta.”
“Okay, but you saw my face, the expression on my face, which I don’t even know what it was. Only you saw it.”
“I don’t know what you’re raving about, sweetie.”
“I saw you notice. When Howard was sitting on the floor, and Dr. Greengrass was talking to him.”
I did know what troubled her, I realized. In Pargeeta’s face I had seen something troubled and conflicted, and she was right to think it had disturbed me. “Ah,” I said. “Yes.”
“You do know what I’m raving about.”
“Well, maybe he does,” Don began, but fell silent when I flicked an irritated glance at him.
“It’s not serious,” I said.
“To me it is! I went crazy, worrying about what you thought. I’m not a bad person. Howard’s wonderful, and I adore him
, but I don’t want to make him stay here forever.”
“You understood right away that he was going to leave.”
“He talked without quoting! And he said ‘Farewell’ twice!”
“You’re right.” She thought Hootie’s farewell had been for her.
She threw out her arms, and her face twisted. “Why am I the only person who ever hears him? Howard will tell you everything, you just have to understand the way he talks.”
“You don’t want to lose your friend, do you? Now that it’s easy to understand what Howard is saying, he’ll be able to move into a halfway house.”
“Well, duh,” she said. “You see my dilemma.”
“And to make it worse, you’re really proud of him, too.”
“Wouldn’t you be? It’s fantastic, how he could let himself talk again. And it was because of the two of you. You showed up, and he just blossomed!”
“You do all the work, and we turn up and get all the credit.”
“Yeah, there’s that. Only it didn’t feel like work.” She raised both hands and flicked away tears I hadn’t seen.
“Howard owes a lot to your friendship. He knows that.”
“Howard wants to see the Eel. That’s your wife, isn’t it? Her nickname was the Eel, and his was Hootie.”
“You’ve been having long conversations with him.”
“While I still can,” she said. “But I do want him to see your wife again, I really do.”
“Then we’ll have to make sure you’re there, too, one day.”
“Is it time to go inside yet?” Don asked.
Dr. Greengrass beckoned us into his office and invited us to sit down. The progress of everybody’s favorite patient continued at its astounding pace, though he had showed some signs of backsliding today, in his friends’ absence. Some moodiness, loss of appetite, and a couple of instances of his “quote mark” arm gestures to indicate that he was selecting his phrases from a wider context.