by Peter Straub
Franz groaned. He would have to try again. Find us, ugly little Franz? Find us? Still he could hear the awful sound of the huge Kirman being defiled. He threw back the sheet and left his bed.
“Oh, you’re nothing but a real old rogue, that’s what you are,” Queenie said to a white-haired man in a Peugeot commercial.
Franz wandered out of his room and felt for the switch that would illuminate the great front staircase. If someone really was down there, maybe the light would scare them off: Franz had no interest in heroics. He paused at the top of the curved staircase and listened intently.
Ignoring the hot whispers from the depths of his public rooms, he decided to do no more than to peek into the rooms. He would not even bother to turn on the lights.
Just a quick turn around the downstairs, then back up. Franz set off into the Tranquillity Chamber, which he had to pass through to get to the other rooms. As he had decided, he did not switch on the lights, but he saw perfectly well that the big Kirman, all its complexities resolved into a single field of black, was safe and the velvet curtains unmarked. He passed through a door and was in a wide circular hallway interrupted by arched doorways to other chambers. It was in this hallway that Patsy McCloud had seared his self-esteem. All the heart left him suddenly: if he had not heard the Tonight Show audience roar like a zooful of beasts, he would have gone back upstairs on the momentum of his next breath. But the audience screamed and roared, and Franz saw Queenie tilting her head and making some chirpy comment—and he walked across the dim hallway to look into the first arch.
Here was his casket showroom: perhaps two hundred square feet with ranks of caskets displayed on pedestals. He knew this room would be empty. Since the Tranquillity Chamber was empty, all the other rooms would have to be empty too. Now his check of the rooms was merely a formal gesture. He just glanced in, and then turned away.
And then he turned back again, uncomfortable. That smell—he had smelled something. He was suddenly jarred by the recognition that his showroom stank of urine. It smelled like an Army latrine, in fact, the stench blossoming out around him as he stood transfixed in the door of the shadowy room.
“Now, then,” he said. “What in heaven’s name . . . ?”
Franzie, you found us!
Franz felt all the air leave his body. In the midst of the incredible urine stench, now so strong that he could almost see the fumes coiling in the air, two bulky figures were visible back behind the second rank of caskets.
Found us! Found us! You win the prize, Franzie!
“Prize, what prize? What in the name of heaven . . . ?” He was so shocked by this realization of his worst fantasies that he could not really take it in properly. Two men, these men, had broken into his building and . . . peed on his inventory of caskets! “Get out of here,” he said, outrage beginning to take root in his fear and shock.
His hand tremblingly found the light switch. He punched it in and the showroom jumped into being, awash with light and rich with the burnished surfaces of the forty caskets on their mahogany pedestals. And then he knew that he was crazier than six Queenies. The men were Chief Tony Archer and his deputy, both of whom were dead.
Filling the air in the right half of his showroom he saw what must have been a million flies; as the concentrated noise of their buzzing blew him back in revulsion—into the left side of the room, so he knocked aside two of the red leather chairs against the wall—the smell of dead urine towered up around him.
Then the solid, writhing mass of flies whirled apart and scattered through the showroom. Just now rising from one of the red chairs to the right of the entrance was a gray-haired man in a soiled white suit. His face was slick and shiny. As Franz focused on the man he took in two things simultaneously: this man in the dusty white suit ridged with dirt was Dr. Van Horne, and the doctor had become a leaker. Like Richard Allbee, he was not sure where he had first heard the term, but he recognized the symptoms. Wren Van Horne was only a week or two from having to bandage himself together—his skin seemed to be in constant motion, sliding minutely, checking, moving again.
“Oh, I’m sure, yes,” Dr. Van Horne said. “You want the prize, don’t you?”
“Prize?” Franz numbly repeated.
“Why, you finally found us,” Dr. Van Horne said, and held out his right hand. In it was a delicately curved scalpel. The doctor stepped toward Franz, his face jigging, and laid open the undertaker’s neck with one rapid sweep of the blade.
When he was done with Franz Holland, the doctor went slowly upstairs, where Queenie was telling Jack Nicholson that if he washed more, just like she did, he wouldn’t feel so downright rotten all the time.
3
“You wouldn’t believe what happens in my office. I can’t believe what happens in my office.”
Ulick Byrne and Sarah Spry were taking their time over lunch at a pretty little restaurant on the Post Road called Sweethaven—this had been Sarah’s choice. Sarah liked the ferns, the pale polished wooden floor, and the crěpes and salads and quiches on the menu were what she considered a substantial lunch. That they had only a wine license was a matter of indifference to her. Ulick Byrne had resigned himself to the absence of gin and in fact felt too ill to lament the absence of anything he considered actual food. At all the other tables in the room women sat and talked, sat and smoked, deliberated over whether to order the crěpe with shrimp, scallions, and white wine sauce or the crěpe with asparagus and what the menu called “a delicate, creamy cheese of cheeses from the French.” He was the only man in the restaurant, and felt, on top of his illness, like an odorous old bear invited into a dollhouse.
Sarah said, “I’d believe it. Have you taken a look at the newspaper lately?”
Ulick unhappily prodded what was left of his Crěpe Surprise. He had eaten everything in it that resembled meat, and he wondered if he’d cause a scandal if he asked for catsup to cover up the taste of the yogurt or whatever it was that had been in there. “To tell you the truth, I hardly ever did read the Gazette. Sometimes I used to look at your column, like everybody else. But I have too much to read at work. I barely have fifteen minutes for the Times in the mornings.”
“Well, the old Gazette isn’t half-bad, for a little tabloid that comes out twice a week. We do a good job of covering this town. If I do say so myself. But—and this really gripes me—even if we came up with a great story about the cause of everything that’s going on here, and I mean a great story, Pulitzer-prize-great, nobody’d be able to read it. Because it’d be so full of misprints it’d look like an eye chart.”
Ulick was staring at a woman across the room and deciding that he could do without catsup after all. The woman, slim and unsettlingly like Stony Friedgood in appearance, with sharp neat features softened by a wealth of dark hair, had smeared her lipstick from the base of her nose nearly to the point of her chin. When she opened her mouth, Ulick noticed that she had not neglected her teeth. Neither of the woman’s two companions seemed to mind that their friend’s face looked like a road accident.
“I thought the paper looked a little funny the last time I saw it.” The headline, he thought, had read REASSESSMENT MEANS EXTRU EASTWOOD AND TIME FAIL.
The plump blond woman seated next to the lipstick lady nonchalantly unbuttoned her blouse and folded it back over a large sun-tanned breast. She hefted the breast in her hand for a moment, making some conversational point, and then popped it back inside the cheesecloth blouse.
“It always looks funny,” Sarah said. “My editor reads the proof every morning, he slaves over it to check all the errors, and about half the paragraphs come out one hundred percent dogfood. You’re not eating. Don’t you feel well?”
“I feel like dogfood,” he said, not adding that he also felt as though he had just eaten it. “My stomach’s no good. Maybe I have a temperature, I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I don’t even care much. I’ve been losing my temper a lot too. My secretary’s about to quit because of the way I’ve been shouting at her.”
Sarah reached under the table and patted his knee.
“What’s that for?”
“Just to tell you to take it easy, assistant. Too many men are losing their tempers around Hampstead these days. I don’t want you to get in any fights. Especially not with your secretary.”
“The way I feel, she’d walk all over me. Have you any idea of what’s going on in my office? I don’t know what I am anymore—some kind of shrink, maybe. People come in, clients I’ve had for years, they say hello, they sit down, their faces go all funny, and they burst into tears. I just can’t sit there and watch people cry. It drives me up the wall. I’ll tell you something else. Two of my clients killed themselves in the past three days. These are guys. One guy shot himself in the head, the other one drank a bottle of weedkiller. They had good jobs . . . hell, they had great jobs. I can’t figure this shit out anymore.”
“Yeah. If I didn’t have something interesting to show you, I’d get depressed, and then I’d start to cry, and you’d have to find something to break.”
“Something to show me?” He unthinkingly glanced over at the plump blond woman in the cheesecloth blouse.
“Don’t worry, Ulick. I’m not going to disrobe. I wanted you to see this picture from the Woodville Herald. They’re owned by the same chain that owns us, and some of the features are shared, but of course most of it is entirely different. I sent over a request to see their issues for the third and fourth weeks of May. On the front page of the May nineteenth issue I saw a photograph that interested me. I got their photo editor to send me an enlarged glossy. I think you’ll be interested too.” She bent down, picked up her bag, and took out a manila envelope. From the envelope Sarah extracted an eight-by-ten shiny photograph.
Ulick took it from her. He could not imagine why she thought he would be interested in the photograph. It depicted, in harsh clear black and white, a group of men standing in what looked like a parking lot. The two men in the center were apparently being questioned by the others, who stood about them in a rough circle. Byrne could identify none of their faces “So?” he asked her.
“The two men in the center are the scientists who were in charge of the Telpro installation in Woodville, Theodore Wise and William Pierce. This photograph was taken at a sort of impromptu press conference on the day those people died in the plant.”
“Okay,” Byrne said. “What’s the point?”
“Him.” Sarah tapped a fingernail on the bulky figure of a fuzzy-haired man in a sweatshirt. The words KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ were dimly legible across the front of the shirt. “Do you know who that is?”
“Some greaseball.”
Sarah permitted herself the indulgence of a taut little smile. “That greaseball is Leo Friedgood. A friend of mine in the police department identified him for me.”
Ulick’s eyebrows contracted; he raised the photograph closer to his face. “Friedgood was there? On May seventeenth? He was at Woodville Solvent?”
“Obviously.”
He put the photograph down on the edge of the table. “I’m damned if I can figure this out. But if Friedgood was there, then Telpro sent him there. And if they sent him there, they wanted him to do something. They must have felt that . . .” He paused, thinking. “They must have felt that more had gone wrong than the staff on hand could manage. The question is, what’s happened to Friedgood? He hasn’t been in his house for weeks.”
“Telpro,” Sarah said.
“You have it all figured out, don’t you? Telpro. Iron Hank Haugejas. They put Leo away somewhere—they’re keeping him out of sight, because he’s the only person not directly related to Woodville Solvent who knows what really happened there.”
“Who knows Telpro’s level of responsibility for what’s going on in Hampstead.” Sarah neatly inserted the photograph back in the envelope, the envelope back in her bag. “Do you know what I want to do? I’d like to rattle General Haugejas’ cage a little bit. I think it’s time to do something drastic. I want to go to his office and see what he says about Leo Friedgood and Woodville Solvent.”
“In that case, you’d better take your lawyer with you.”
“Did you have any plans for the afternoon?”
* * *
Ulick Byrne did not want to admit it to himself, but he was professionally as well as personally excited about what might arise from a meeting with General Henry Haugejas. He was convinced—even on the tiny evidence he and Sarah had—that Haugejas and Telpro had conspired to hide whatever had really happened in Woodville on the seventeenth of May. Haugejas was a rough customer, and Telpro had a million lawyers, but suppose that he and Sarah could catch them with their pants down? Ulick could sniff out the beginnings of a series of lawsuits that would add up to billions of dollars. It would be a scandal many times larger than Watergate, and every bit as clear-cut, as black and white: the principal lawyer for the citizens of Hampstead would become famous overnight, especially if he had personally helped to uncover the scandal.
Sarah noticed that as Ulick Byrne drove toward Manhattan on I-95, as he crossed over the Triboro Bridge, as he putted along in the traffic down FDR Drive, he now and then looked as though he were trying not to grin.
* * *
When they reached the Telpro building on East Fifty-ninth Street, Sarah bustled him past the guard’s desk in the lobby and led him into a waiting elevator. “How do you know where you’re going?” Ulick asked her.
The elevator doors silently closed, leaving them alone in a humming wood-paneled box. “I’m a reporter,” she said. “I’m also a reporter who is a lot older than you. When Iron Hank retired, so to speak, from the military, he made a pompous speech about how all his future battles would be fought from behind a desk on the twentieth floor of a building on East Fifty-ninth Street.” She pushed a glowing disk on the elevator panel. “So we’re going to give him one of those battles.”
Byrne shrugged. “Of course he might have moved offices a dozen times since then.”
“Then we get directed to the right floor. But the main thing is, we got past the desk.”
“Now we have to get past his secretary.”
On the twentieth floor they stepped into a wide corridor leading to a glass door with SPECIAL PROJECTS painted on it in stark black letters. Behind the desk a red-haired secretary or receptionist sat at an elaborate desk. She lifted her head and smiled as the two of them came through the door and across the thick tan carpet. Ulick was forced to admit that Sarah Spry managed rather better than he did the business of getting over the width of carpet with the air of having a perfect right to be there. “May I help you?” the girl asked.
“We’d like to see General Haugejas, please,” Sarah said firmly. “But we’d like to have a word with his secretary first.”
The girl behind the desk looked puzzled. “Do you have an appointment with the General?”
“Please let us speak to his secretary,” Sarah said. She silenced Ulick with her eyes. “You can tell her that a journalist from the Hampstead Gazette and an attorney have come in connection with the events that took place at Woodville Solvent.”
“Woodville Solvent? The Hampstead Gazette?” The girl lifted a telephone receiver the same color as the carpet, punched a single digit, and spoke softly into it for a moment. She looked up wide-eyed at them. “May I have your names?”
“Mr. Byrne and Mrs. Spry,” Ulick said.
The receptionist spoke quietly into the receiver again. Then she smiled brightly at them. Mrs. Winthrop would be coming out any minute to meet them.
Any minute turned out to be thirty-one minutes later. Mrs. Winthrop turned out to be a Chinese woman in her late twenties. In a crisp dress the same flat black as her hair and large round glasses tinted amber past the level of her eyes, Mrs. Winthrop possessed a beautiful smile and a force of personality that immediately vaporized the red-haired receptionist. She took Ulick Byrne’s hand while she pronounced his name and fried him with her smile, and shook it like a man. He felt as though
he had just been weighed, measured, and sent out to be washed. She had moved on to Sarah. Byrne found himself wondering what Mr. Winthrop was like.
“Won’t you please come back to my office?” she said, and turned smartly around to lead them down another softly lighted corridor. After several twists and turns, she opened a large blond oaken door and showed them into an office with a wide black desk and a long black leather couch. Bright abstract paintings decorated the walls. Mrs. Winthrop moved luxuriantly around the back of the desk and sat down. “I must explain that General Haugejas never sees anyone who does not have an appointment, so even if he were here this afternoon it would be impossible for you to meet him.”
“He isn’t here?” Sarah said.
“He isn’t even expected back until tomorrow, Mrs. Spry. But I’m sure that he would want me to find out what concerns you so that he can get back to you about it. I wonder if you could explain to me why a gossip columnist on the Hampstead newspaper and a lawyer who chiefly specializes in real-estate transactions are interested in General Haugejas?”
And from that point on—we must assume, judging by the quickness of the General’s response—Mrs. Winthrop recorded every word pronounced in her office. The tape recorder would have caught Ulick’s growing annoyance, Sarah’s increasing distemper, their obvious belief that Henry Haugejas was on the other side of the door behind Mrs. Winthrop’s desk. (In this they were wrong—the General was attending the board meeting of a bank down on Wall Street that afternoon.) The recorder would certainly have stored Ulick’s remark that Telpro had killed children in Hampstead, Connecticut, and his frequent questions about the presence of Leo Friedgood at the plant in Woodville. Feng-chi Winthrop, who had sent him there, merely looked vaguely puzzled at the barrage of accusations which came from the two doomed and frustrated people on her leather couch.
4
On the next day, Friday, the twenty-fifth of July, General Henry Haugejas, accompanied by two aides, ceremoniously arrived in the streets of Hampstead—not in the front seat of a flag-bedecked jeep, as he had arrived in certain carefully chosen Korean villages, but in the backseat of a limousine.