by Peter Straub
Then it was as if all the joy and sweetness that had ever existed behind the door at the top of the stairs had come coiling down, as invisible as a fragrance, and wound itself around the Eel. A great impersonal beauty spoke from the center of the joy, and a great, exquisite pain pierced her heart with awareness of the loss at the heart of all the world’s sweetness. The Eel felt as though a great curtain had been rolled away from before her emotional life, and that for a long second she stood within an ultimate meaning: the meaning that beat at the center of the piercing sadness within the extravagant beauty and joy of every moment on earth. Then almost as soon as it had been experienced the sense of a revealed meaning slipped away, and even then she knew she would not be able to remember that astounding, slippery moment in all its interlocking, swooning parts. It did not leave her; it fled.
That’s the way it was, thought the Eel, you did what you could with the little bit you managed to keep. The next thing that came to her was that, no matter what it might cost her in the long run, she had to get into that amazing house as soon as she could move her legs.
“Sorry about all these tears,” said the Eel, who had sobbed during this latter portion of her account.
“Lee?”
She held out a wad of wet tissues, which I took from her and replaced with dry, folded ones.
“Oh, this is hard,” she said. “Please, stick with me.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “Can you go on?”
“Oh, yeah.” She smiled in my direction. “If you can take it, I can.”
Her coward legs didn’t exactly feel like moving, said the Eel, but she forced them to carry her forward onto the bottom step. The sense of a great revealed meaning still clung to her.
The Eel moved up the front steps and paused in front of the door. It hung open by maybe half an inch. The crack revealed only charcoal-colored darkness. For a moment, her enterprise showed itself to her as doubtful and riddled with danger. A thug in a bus conductor’s uniform had thrown her into the street before an evil-looking building on the verge of collapse: now she thought she should go inside? On the advice of a demon?
Her trembling hand met the rough surface of the cracked paint at the edge of the door.
The paint seemed to be of no color at all. She did not believe in the existence of a non-color, yet here it was, neither gray nor white, nor green, nor yellow, nor alabaster, nor ivory, nor any of the actual colors it suggested in its nothingness. Though dead, in the gray light and the hint of a reflection from the sodium lamp, it seemed to shimmer, the shade of a raindrop as it squeezes from the underside of a cloud.
For a sliver of a second Eel thought she hovered on the lip of an abyss, like Brett Milstrap but worse. Then she said to herself, I have been brought to this place, however roughly, and it will all be for nothing if I do not go in. She grasped the edge of the door, opened a two-foot gap, and slipped inside the old building.
Her first impression, that nothing happened, came to her on a grim tide of disappointment. A part of her mind had expected a revelation, a key to the grand puzzle about beauty, sweetness, and pain the building had sent to her. Now she stood between a peeling, off-kilter door and a dark, unsafe-looking staircase in a gritty entryway. Even the dust seemed tired. Generations of thwarted lives had traversed that staircase.
The Eel stepped carefully across the filthy floor. When she settled her left foot on the first step, the dust-gray remains of the stair carpet, once a gay color and now of the same raindrop nullity as the paint on the door, crumbled into particles and sifted down. Touching the banister with the tip of a single finger, she lifted her right foot and placed it beside the left, causing identical destruction to the wasted fibers. She moved up to the second step, looked up, and called out a greeting.
Hello?
Silence responded with more silence.
Is anyone up there?
Silence again. She thought of her voice floating up the stairs, coiling through the rooms, closets, bathroom, and moving through the third floor, announcing itself in every chamber, large and small. If Eel could follow her voice as weightlessly and as fast, she wondered, what might she see? A top-floor curtain had flickered, a door had opened. Some force had invited her to enter, or so she had imagined. More than imagined, felt. The second she had moved toward the building, a bolt of insight had practically lifted her off her feet and carried her forward. Had all of that come from the tenement, or from some being inside it?
Before she had even finished asking herself the question, the conviction that the answer was a being, not the building, slammed into her with a rough, undeniable authority. It was like being slapped by the giant hand of a monstrous creature impatient with her doubts and fears.
Of course I am here, you idiotic child. How could I summon you if I were not?
If demons existed, then, presumably, so did a Deity. Even before the Eel had worked out what this involved for her, she began to tremble.
Knowing only that the attempt was necessary, she found that her body was willing to move up another two stairs. Then she realized that her knees, like poor doomed Miller’s, were trembling, so violently that soon she would be unable to stand. The tenement wavered around her. Eel stopped moving, lowered herself, and flattened her upper body against the steps. The wall to her left turned to liquid, to a gas, to nothing, and the short hallway beyond the banister shredded away like the stair carpet beneath her feet.
Unmoving cold air hung about her. Beneath her hands, her cheek, and her hip burned the icy touch of cold marble. Directly to her right, where a moment ago the banister and a dead, colorless wall had been, hung a vast, dark three-dimensional space pierced with pinpricks it took her a moment to recognize as stars. This was so far beyond being too much to take in that she closed her eyes and for a moment concentrated on the unusual experience of feeling her pulse beating in her brain. Before she risked opening her eyes again, she turned her head forward to look at no more than what was directly before them.
The great, though dread, temptation was to peek sideways, but she could not allow herself to take such a risk until she had anchored herself in the near at hand. Flattened against a slab of dark green marble shot through with white and gold tracers, her fingers seemed small, pale, and only barely useful. That freezing marble had replaced the staircase became her immediate focus. Everything else would fall into place as soon as she had worked out the question of the unstable staircase. This was pretty feeble, but it would do. The Eel raised herself up onto her knees and saw that the flight of steps inside the fragile tenement had indeed been transformed into green marble. Strange, yes; bizarre, certainly. Oh, we can all agree on that point, can’t we? Yes, we are in agreement here. But it is everything else that is the problem.
Because the minute we let our eyes wander from this handsome if puzzling marble staircase, categories such as bizarre and strange dwindle into cold, hard pebbles; they become nothing, poor things. It will be a long time before the word bizarre stirs anything in the Eel but a dim wonder at its insufficiency. The marble stairs were floating unsupported in midair, in fact not only in midair but apparently in deep space: unsupported, hanging there like a satellite. On both sides was nothing but frigid, unmoving air; beneath and behind, the same. In all her seventeen years, the Eel had never felt so frightened, so dislocated and imperiled. She was stuck between planets and surrounded by the cold, pinprick lights of stars. The real problem, however, was what lay at the top of the stairs.
Earlier that day, what seemed several hours earlier but had been actually only a couple of minutes, she had seen a partially opened door at the top of the tenement’s front steps. Superficially, this was also true of her present situation. At the top of the marble stairs to which she had been transported hung a partially opened door. It was taller and broader, altogether grander. Unlike the front door of the tenement, this door, her door, spilled out a dazzling light.
The light undid her.
No, not just the light. Everyth
ing about the room above her unstrung the Eel. Occasionally, the light varied in such a way as to betray the presence of something moving inside the room. A man walking back and forth, a woman pacing. Something that was neither man nor woman moving slowly, deliberately within its chamber, letting her know it was there. Of this presence within the room, Eel could not think. The saliva dried in her mouth; the small blond hairs on her arms bristled straight up, like quills.
The room, she thought, would be small and still, almost barren. Whatever its physical size, the being within it was neither small nor still. Love and indifference, the civilized and the savage, compassion and cruelty, overwhelming beauty and shattering ugliness, every possible human and natural quality teemed within it, seethed there, expanded beyond our capacity for understanding, therefore unbearable—it was too beautiful, too glorious, also too furious, too destructive, and too utterly unknowable to be contemplated for longer than a nanosecond.
As an example of the millionth part of what it contained, the waiting being at the top of the stairs surrendered to her these images, strung end to end until she could take no more:
A bellowing king swept his sword downward and severed the infected arm of a weeping peasant;
a bartender with coarse black hair and a peasant’s impassive face brought down a cleaver and severed a thieving patron’s hand;
a surgeon in a white operating room cut off a patient’s hand with a clean swipe of a bone saw;
a naked lover cut off his nude lover’s pale hand with the brutal kiss of a chef’s knife;
in an empty equipment room, a grim-faced schoolboy pulled a long knife from his waistband and detached the hand of a looming, red-faced gym teacher whose other hand fumbled in his fly;
a thug in an alley hacked off an old woman’s hand with a swift blow of his knife;
a machinist bit his lip and thrust his hand into a die-cutter;
an Arab in a sweeping robe brought down an ax and severed the hand of a thrice-convicted pickpocket.
At this ninth iteration, the Eel cried out for release: and was given:
a golden field of mustard-flower;
a bright, dancing mountain stream;
a shaft of sunlight between the skyscraper canyons of a Manhattan avenue;
a radiant face glimpsed at a window;
a candle guttering, then flaring;
a little girl in a princess outfit treading barefoot across a sparkling green lawn;
a glass of water atop a table in an empty room;
and knew that, seen one way, the presence in the room above was the glass of water, and that pure, transparent entity was abiding and unendurable; and that the purpose of the non-dogs had been to protect human beings by keeping them from close contact with that abiding and unendurable presence.
Assailed by both love and terror, an unbearable combination, the seventeen-year-old Eel, who had been weeping uncontrollably, cradled her head on her forearms, urinated into her blue jeans, and wept some more. Warm liquid rushed down her legs, cooling as it intersected the marble platforms of the steps. Her back heaved, her eyes overflowed, her stomach trembled. To the extent that she could think at all, she thought, So the Great Mystery and the Final Secret is that we cannot tolerate the Great Mystery and Final Secret.
When she finally reached an interruption in her hiccupping, weeping, and moaning, Eel found that her hands were splayed on grass, not marble, and that stone treads were not digging into her thighs and hips. With a huge, disbelieving gasp of air, she struggled to her feet. Five feet away along the rise, Keith Hayward’s mutilated body lay at the center of a pool of blood soaking into the grass. Hootie had vanished. Meredith had vanished. Boats was squatting on the ground, sobbing and clutching his head.
Dazed, Spencer Mallon wandered around in a loose, irregular oval, obviously unable to see most of what was actually before him. The capering spirits and godlets had sunk back into their realm, and through the pink-orange mist that had marked the limit of his vision, Mallon spotted Dilly Olson, who was looking straight at him in adoration, poised to do whatever he wished. That Mallon could see the Eel, too, was obvious in his returning gaze, which told her that after all he had witnessed at least some of what she had done. Her face was a mess, and urine darkened both legs of her jeans. These defects had no effect on Mallon. Burnished by his actual modesty, everything she loved in him glowed like a campfire. Yet no matter how greatly he admired her, Mallon was going to leave; with Dilly attached to him as if by a leash, he was going to take off at a dead run.
He turned from her and began to trot toward Glasshouse Road. The golden leash already taut, Dilly ran with him. In a moment, they had fled. The surprising weight of her misery pushed the Eel back into the afternoon of the previous day, where she had become a ragged white scrap blowing forlorn across the meadow, unseen by all but Hootie Bly.
“I saw that!” Hootie burst out. “You have to be telling the truth. I never talked about that with anybody. Oh! I interrupted you. I’m so sorry, Eel. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“You didn’t interrupt me, I was finished. I’m pretty sure I am, anyhow. After what I just went through, I’d better be.”
The world beyond the windows had turned dark. Boatman had switched on a single low lamp during her account, and its glow left large shadowy spaces at the periphery of the room.
The Eel wiped her face with a clutch of tissues, blew her nose into them, then walked to the wastebasket beside the fireplace and dropped them. The wad of tissues missed the wastebasket by a couple of inches. In the dim light, the four of us in the room regarded the slowly unfolding tissues and decided to pretend that they had gone into the basket.
“Wow, what do you know, I missed,” said Lee Truax. “The sound the basket makes is really different. You’d hear it yourself, if you paid attention to anything. Thanks, guys. Now, of course, I’m embarrassed by your tact.”
She lowered herself, and reached out for the tissues. On her second try, she found them. “Seems I’m a little off right now,” she said, taking care to position the wad over the basket before she dropped it.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I asked.
“Because I don’t feel like sitting down right now. If I stay on my feet, I have at least a chance of maintaining my composure. Really lost it back there, didn’t I? Well, I just …” Her face went loose with a sudden wave of emotion. “I just …” Her eyes clamped down, she shook her head and made abrupt waving-away motions with her right hand.
“We’d be exactly the same,” I said. “Cry all you like, Lee. And really, get off your feet.”
“I’d be a million times worse than you are,” Hootie said. “Eel, you’re awesome. That’s what you are, awesome.”
She ignored these compliments and, in one of those moments that discomfit and unsettle the guests of a couple that begin to snipe at each other in public, spoke directly to me. “I don’t want to get off my feet, all right? I just said that to you. There’s something I still have to say.”
“Well … good. Please, go on. Are you going to sit down again?” I stood up and moved a step toward her.
“We’re both going to sit down. I don’t need any help. I’m in my own house. Please, Lee.”
“Okay,” I said. “Of course you are. Sorry.”
“Everybody keeps apologizing to me today. Please, guys, don’t keep doing that.”
She walked in the direction of her chair, obviously feeling her way with her foot at only the last minute. After she sat down again, Lee Truax closed her hands on her armrests and drew herself up straight in the chair, her back easily six inches from the back of the chair. She looked like the queen of a small, rather bohemian realm with a good deal of gold in the treasury. My eyes misted, and somehow the Eel seemed to know it, for she turned her head to me and said, “Oh, I’m not all that special, you know. Don’t make a fuss.”
“Noted,” I said, remembering not to apologize.
“I didn’t know I had any more to say,” Lee told them,
“and then I found myself fumbling with that Kleenex, and I realized that after making you listen to so much crazy stuff, I owed you this much. So I’m almost done, but not quite. I want you to know as much about all this as I do. That seems fair, doesn’t it?”
We muttered sounds of assent, and the Eel leaned forward and settled her elbows on her knees. “All right,” she said.
| Final Thoughts from the Eel |
So the main question about everything she had said, the Eel continued, was whether or not it all happened, wasn’t that right? Or put it another way: did the Eel actually believe that all of that wild stuff actually took place? Did Spencer Mallon peel back the material of our world at least far enough for a horde of spirits and demons to come tumbling out? Did she zoom inside Keith Hayward and enjoy a chummy conversation with a literary demon who affected an old-fashioned New York street accent? Had she been thrown off a London bus, had she pissed herself on marble stairs before the Godhead? Every single thing she witnessed and did could have been the result of stress and fear—of hormones, even, the product of chemicals firing in her brain.
But.
As goofy, as flat-out loony as it seemed even to her, she still thought that every bit of it really happened. If the only place where it actually happened was her imagination, then it still really did happen.
Lots of times, the Eel had said to herself that she had learned much more from good old Twin than she ever did from Spencer Mallon.
She wanted to tell them one specific reason why she believed that everything she had told them was the literal truth. It was about something that happened long, long after they had all been high-school students in Madison, long after the Eel and Lee Harwell got married, and so long after the onset of her blindness that she had become involved with the ACB, especially its chapters in Chicago and Rehoboth Beach.
So there was this one time …
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I will be, if you let me explain this,” said the Eel.