by Peter Straub
He turned away, pulled another two feet of books from a shelf behind him, and with the same confidence of having calculated within a tolerance of a millionth of an inch, slid them in them beside the first group of books.
“Gotta get packed up pretty damn quick. It’s all over here, and I have to go. I don’t know where yet, but it doesn’t matter a good goddam. In this line of work, you’re never really out of a J-O-B.”
The Eel supposed they weren’t. Could she get out of here, too, please? And what was going to happen Keith? It looked like—
“What it looks like is what it is. Good-bye, Hayward, and farewell. Too bad, you know, because this kid, he was one in a million. They don’t turn out Keith Haywards every day, you can bet on that. Rare. Very rare. But you got a glimpse of the big guy?”
Unfortunately, yes.
“You said a mouthful. That guy, his name is Badshite, and he doesn’t like anyone to see him. Winds his crank, you know? Means he’s got to dole out some heavy-duty punishment, and Keith just put himself in the way. Sort of volunteered, the damn kid. Pisses me off, he was coming along so well. We could have gone a long way together, him and me.”
He volunteered?
“Sure looked like it to me. Of course, he has no idea what Badshite is going to do to him. People really don’t understand demons at all.” He sighed. “You guys don’t get it, and probably you never will.”
Don’t get what?
Doity Toid’s eyes turned a hot red. He plucked a brass paperweight from the desk, and for a moment Eel feared he was going to peg it at her. An expression of contempt passed over his face and faded into what looked to Eel like a mixture of weariness and acceptance.
“You ready for this? You need us. That’s the deal. That’s why we’re here.”
She wondered—if there were demons, didn’t that mean that angels existed, too?
The demon shuddered with distaste. “What are you, a sap? You don’t need big protective cops with wings, you need us. People are angels, get it? (Pee-pul ah angels, geddit?) But without us, you got nothing really worth having.”
Eel thought that was completely crazy, sorry.
Doity Toid slid the paperweight into a space exactly its size and came around the desk. He was scratching his curly head and giving her sideways glances. His sudden fit of ill-temper had vanished completely. With him came a whiff of feces, almost too faint to be detected, which dissipated as quickly as it had come. The demon perched himself on the front of the desk, crossed his legs at the ankles, and ran his long fingers through the rufous beard.
It came to her that as frightened as she had been at various moments, she had never been in fear of her life, nor was she now. They—whoever they were—wanted her here because they wanted to teach her something. Her only real fear was that she would not be capable of fully understanding it, seeing it from all sides: she feared that in telling other people about it, she would mess it up.
Doity Toid didn’t sound anything like a college professor of his era, but in his khaki trousers, rumpled blue blazer, and blue shirt, he looked like one. His feet were shod in cordovan Weejuns, like Milstrap’s. His considering, patient air also struck her as professorial.
“You guys, you people, you all run on one big engine, all the same for everybody, the whole world over. Know the name of that engine?”
Love? she speculated.
“Good try, but completely wrong, sorry. (SAH-ree.) The name of the engine is story.”
He gestured behind him, where a green chalkboard had appeared in front of the half-emptied shelves. When he rotated an index finger, the word story wrote itself in nice cursive letters on the board.
“If you want to get fancy, we could use the word narrative.”
He wiggled the finger, and narrative wrote itself across the board beneath the first word.
“And what does a narrative need? The presence of evil, that’s what. Think of the first story, the one about Adam and Eve and the Garden. The first human beings decide—they choose, out of their own free will—to do the wrong thing, to commit an evil act. And because of that, they are driven from the sinless Garden into this place, the good old gorgeous (GAW-juss) fallen world. Turns out, what do you know, this world of ours only came about because of an act of evil! The first demon, who appeared in the form of a sexy, sexy snake, more or less created your goddam world, you could say. And how do we know this, how is the information given to us? ‘Unto’ us, as the other team likes to put it? In a story, a neat little narrative packed into a few short pages of Genesis.”
Okay, said the Eel. I think I got it.
“Then try this one on. We give you free will, so we are responsible for your entire moral life. You can’t have a story without including a bad deed or a bad intention, you certainly can’t have redemption without you got some bad behavior to make it juicy, and decent behavior only exists because of the tremendous temptation provided by its opposite.”
Doity Toid hitched himself closer to her on the top of the desk. He leaned forward. Deep in their caves, his eyes shone unsettling amber.
“And here comes a real biggie, little sweetie. When you think about evil, you have to think about love, and vicey-versy. Love love love, you people love to love, you love to talk about love, you even sing about love, over and over, all the time. It gives me gas. It makes me feel nauseous (NAW-shus). It gives me a royal pain in the tuchis. I could puke ground glass and razor blades for a week, all this crapola about love. Because, what is the opposite of love? Come on, tell me, you got a tongue on you, I know that much.”
The opposite of love was hate, said the Eel.
The demon tilted back his head and laughed. The laughter of demons was rich and dark, and contempt invariably honed it to a nasty edge.
“Oh, that’s what you all say. And that’s what all of you actually think, one and all. From presidents and kings to bums in the gutter, who by the way are almost all gone. Used to be, you couldn’t walk down a couple of blocks without seeing some poor ruined jobless homeless clapped-out lush booze-hound glue-sniffing coke-snorting junkie meth head stretched out in the gutter and stinking to high heaven of piss and shit. Even the cops didn’t want to handle these guys, but they had to, it was their job to throw them in the vehicle and drag them off to jail where they could sober up until the next binge. Those guys are almost all gone now, and I can’t figure it out. What happened? Where’d they go? Did they all die of their bad habits, and no new ones got made? Why not? Where are the new down-and-outers, the new old guys with bad teeth and stinky breath and bad B.O. and filthy, ripped clothes and bruised, dirty faces and bare footsies all bruised and swollen?”
The world changes, said the Eel, who had rather enjoyed the last part of his rant.
“Yeah, you got that right, kiddo. They can’t ride the rails anymore, Skid Row is done for, the Bowery is middle-class, gentrified all to hell, public tolerance is over, it doesn’t exist any more—turns out, to have lousy shiftless self-destructive bums, first you have to have a generous society, go figure.”
But what was the right answer?
“The right answer to what? You’re beginning to get on my nerves. I was told, you know, hey, take a little confab with this girl, and here we are, but I have to pack up my stuff now, because this here is like the Bowery—it isn’t going to exist much longer, you know?”
What is the opposite of love? asked the Eel.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot the topic.”
Engaged again, the demon drew up one leg and knitted his fingers around its knee, making him look more than ever like an eager academic in front of a class. He was grinning at her.
“Hate can’t be the opposite of love, dummy. You still don’t get it, do you? Hate is love. The opposite of love is evil. Of course, evil does include hatred, but it’s only a small subset. When love goes bad and wrong, that’s when evil is created.”
He released his knee and leaned forward and threw out his arms. For a moment, his eyes flashed a traffic-lig
ht red. His craggy, bearded face moved forward, pushing toward Eel through the stale air.
“You stupid human beings, the whole thing is right in front of you, but on you go, debating whether evil is internal or external, inherent in everyone or created by circumstance. Nature or nurture, I can’t believe you’re still debating that dim-witted opposition. The world is not divided into two. You have evil within you, you contain evil, that’s the basic idea. When you open the door, what do you get, the lady or the tiger? Whoops, sorry, you get both, because the lady is the tiger.
“Let’s not even get into death, okay? Millions of dumbbells believe that death is evil, as though they thought they should be immortal. Without death, you would have no beauty, no meaning … and when you try to work around death, or when you act as though you can avoid it, right then evil is set free.”
The Eel told him that she did not think she really understood what he was saying. As she spoke, she was surprised to feel tears on her face. She had not known she was crying, nor did she know for how long.
“It will come back to you, in bits and pieces,” said Doity Toid. He pushed himself off the desk and gave her a kindly, brown-eyed look. “Just make sure you remember the part about the lady and the tiger. It might help you out, when you get to the last stop.”
The last stop?
“Walk up those stairs and open the door. We have to leave our lovely Mr. Hayward before Badshite gets his teeth into him. Walk over to the bus stop and get on the bus.”
The bus?
“It’s waiting. Hurry up, now. None of us have much time.”
She wiped tears off her face with the palm of her hand and realized that what had made her cry was the demon’s kindness. That was all, nothing more. Then she gasped. No, there was one more thing. She did not know how she could have left it until now.
Keith was going to save her life, and maybe Hootie’s, too, by throwing himself before Badshite, was that right? He volunteered, wasn’t that what her new friend had told her? So evil didn’t have to stay that way, did it?
“Stay what way? You’re still thinking either/or, you dummy, when there is no either/or, it’s both. Mallon, the poor dope, he was right about that part, at least. And maybe Keith was more interested in something like Badshite than he was in you and your little towheaded buddy. It could be as simple as that, you know.”
He really did say towheaded, as if his favorite author was Booth Tarkington or someone like that. Later in her life, the Eel remembered all those books he’d been packing up, and she thought that many of them had probably been novels. Demons like Doity Toid, they were a sort of literary bunch.
Anyhow, he had dismissed her and turned back to his packing, so the Eel looked to her left, saw against the wall a steep flight of stairs that looked like the steps up to an old attic, and waved good-bye. He did not see the gesture. The fecal smell she had noticed earlier reached her again, and she fled as quickly as she could.
The narrow white door at the top of the stairs opened out onto an empty urban street late into twilight. Exhaling puffs of white exhaust beneath a harsh yellow sodium arc light, a double-decker bus containing only the driver and a conductor waited at a bus stop across the wide sidewalk. Tall, dirty brick buildings lined the street. Lamps burned in only a few windows, a couple of inches of light shining beneath pulled-down shades. It seemed that she was in London.
The conductor bent to peer at her through one of the side windows, and she trotted across the sidewalk and stepped up onto the open back of the bus. Immediately, the driver dropped the transmission into gear, and the bus set off with a jolt that nearly sent her sprawling into the street. The conductor, a beefy man with deep wrinkles in his forehead and a permanent frown, grasped her arm and tugged her firmly into the body of the bus.
Where should I sit?
Turning his broad back to her, the conductor asked, in an accent she would have guessed was perfect Cockney, “Why should I bloody care where you sit?”
Sir, could you please tell me where we are going?
“We are not going anywhere,” the conductor said in a choked, indignant voice. Still he would not turn to face her. “I am going to White City. You are going elsewhere.”
Do you know where?
At that, he did swivel his upper body and again revealed his face to her. Tiny, caramel-colored eyes peered at her out of a ruined moonscape. His mouth slid to the left and twitched open into a smile crowded with broken teeth.
“TAKE A SEAT, IF YOU PLEASE.”
She walked up a few rows and dropped into an empty seat. Then she moved over to the window and watched the empty city roll by. Wherever she was, it was a long way from the agronomy meadow, Mallon, and Hootie. Twin was even more distant. A moment of profound doubt claimed her: she was lost in an unknown and unreal world, and instead of trying to escape it, she was speeding deeper into its territory. The driver accelerated down the avenues and thoroughfares, blowing past the bus stops that were almost always empty. Twice, and at widely separated stops, a man in a long gray coat, a gray fedora, and sunglasses attempted to stop the careering bus by raising an arm punctuated with a black-gloved hand, and both times, to the Eel’s immense gratitude, the driver ignored the summons and rocketed past. The men in gray, Eel felt, wanted to throw her off the platform, or pull her off—they wanted to thwart her mission, they wanted to keep her from arriving at the last stop.
Intending to jump onto the back platform, the second man had run after the bus, but the reckless driver picked up more speed and left him stumbling down the middle of an avenue called (she thought) Indignation Heights. So fast were they moving, Eel was unable to make out most of the street signs they passed. Every time they zoomed around a corner, the bus seemed to tilt into the curve like a motorcyclist.
A long straightaway named Climber’s Corner? A wide, reeking avenue called Wherewithal Way?
From a neighborhood of great public buildings filmed with soot and pierced with blackened windows they sped into broad streets (Warlove Terrace? Blooded Place?) lined with solid, respectable residential buildings, each with a massive bow front and a great Georgian door.
Without a sideways look, the burly conductor clumped up the aisle and dumped himself into the seat immediately behind the driver. Around another corner they wheeled, into a sunken, down-sloping region of three-story brick commercial buildings where immense stone churches with towers, arches, and darkened columns sprouted like giant toads at every other corner.
To get farther from the conductor, Eel slipped out of her row and moved well back. When she sat down again, the conductor leaned toward the driver and whispered something. When he straightened up again, he turned his head and looked straight at her, brimming over with hostility and something else, something like resentment. He blamed her for having to work this endless route as evening fled into night. The simmering conductor and the stolid but reckless driver were her chauffeurs, piloting her through this endless city.
The shops and churches fell behind them, and the streets narrowed. The buildings grew shabbier, smaller, huddled side by side instead of arrayed in ranks like soldiers. The dark, unclean windows shrank. Dodger Place, the Hatters, Mandolin Terrace. A tight, rackety corner yielded to Slightly Street, then Crumbledun Row.
Street after street of dark tenements flew past the rocketing bus, with never a light in the scanty windows. The Eel slumped in her seat and rested her head on the bar of the next row forward. The tenements grew smaller and meaner. The bus rolled past a sign that announced either Mysterium or Mysteriac (graffiti had obliterated the final letters) Place. The sodium lights had dimmed and stood only one to a block.
At Tremens Passage, the bus hurtled around a corner, rolled twenty or thirty feet, and jerked to an abrupt halt. The driver swiveled in his enclosure; the conductor heaved himself to his feet and, with the expression of an executioner setting off for the scaffold, advanced down the aisle. The bus had halted before the meanest tenement on the meanest of all the streets down which
they had flown. The dark, narrow building looked as though its neighbors propped it up.
I can’t get out here, the Eel said. Please, don’t make me.
Implacable, the conductor moved forward until he reached the Eel’s row. She scooted sideways to the last seat.
How do I get home? What am I supposed to do?
“I’m sick of your whining,” said the conductor, and reached forward and trapped her wrist in his enormous hand. “And I’m sick of you.”
What am I supposed to do?
“You could always curl up and perish in the street.” He pulled her from the seat and into the aisle as if she weighed no more than a kitten.
Up in his enclosure, the driver cackled.
She tried to shriek, but only a dry, barely human moan came out of her mouth.
The conductor dragged her to the platform and threw her off the bus. In less than a second, long before the Eel could have gathered herself and tried to jump back on, the conductor had whirled around and hooked a pole with his elbow, and the bus was racing off, dwindling as it disappeared into the night.
The weak arc light seemed to turn its idiot head toward her. Maybe the stupid light was curious about what she intended to do next. As if in guidance, a whisper of sound, more the suggestion of sound than sound itself, an exhalation without air, seemed to reach her from the repulsive, unsafe-looking building before which the bus had dropped her. Eel regarded the tenement for a while.
To get a closer look, she took a step toward it. On the instant, the front door clicked open. Her heart gave a quick extra beat. At the top of the steps, the door moved forward in its frame by no more than a subtle quarter of an inch.
Something wanted her to go up those steps and through the door. In a window on the top floor, a curtain seemed to flicker. Was she being invited in? Stupid, stupid question. Of course she was being invited into this wretched building, this site of an endless succession of tears and sorrows and murdered hopes. But why in the world would she … ?