by Peter Straub
Ted Wise and Bill Pierce read the reporter’s article on their computer screens in Montana—since the disappearance and presumed death of General Haugejas, their division had been stripped down to just the two of them and a secretary. Their laboratory had been dismantled sixteen days before, all the other scientists scattered to Telpro plants and installations, some of them in universities, across the country. Wise and Pierce had supervised the virtual destruction of the project they had headed for nearly two years, sent off the rest of their staff and carefully isolated and bottled their entire stock of DRG-16. They knew they would never create a DRG-17. In the afternoon of the eighth day of their existence in an essentially jobless limbo, a Telpro truck driven by an Army Spec 4 in civilian clothes carried away the padded crate which held the big metal bottles. Wise and Pierce had loaded the crate onto the back of the truck themselves. The Spec 4 jumped up into the truck’s bay and slapped a gummed label to the crate. MACHINE TOOL PARTS.
“What do you suppose they’ll do with the stuff now?” Bill Pierce asked his boss as they stood by the gate and watched the truck turn east on the dusty road toward the highway. The truck already looked very small, dwarfed by the immense desolation of the landscape.
Wise knew. “It’ll go in the drink,” he said. “They’ll put it in another container and drop it off a boat and hope the stuff’ll sit on the bottom forever. There won’t be any records on it.”
“Do you think we’ll get another project?” Pierce asked. The truck was still in sight, the size of a Matchbox toy.
“What do you think?” Wise said. His lips were dry and chapped, and the prominent front teeth looked dirty.
“I say we got a chance.”
“Sure. If Haugejas turns out to be immortal.” He ran his tongue over his front teeth. “Remember Leo Friedgood?” he suddenly asked. “I hope that son of a bitch got what was coming to him.”
After another eight days of their limbo, Pierce gave a peculiar shout while reading excerpts from the New York Times on the computer service. Wise looked up blearily from his cot in the office. “They find Haugejas?” he asked.
“Oh, God,” Pierce said. “Come here and take a look at this.”
Wise staggered over to the terminal. After he had read the first two paragraphs of the article the young reporter had written about Pat Dobbin and the others, he no longer felt tired. “That’s it,” he said. The memory of Tom Gay screaming behind a glass wall, never far from his mind, momentarily blotted out the green-on-charcoal words on the terminal. “That’s really it. A wild card—that’s what I told Friedgood, isn’t it?” He rubbed his eyes, then leaned closer to the terminal, as if that might change the words.
“What do we do now?” Pierce asked him. “I think I know what I want to do. I think I’ll do it even if you don’t agree.”
Wise gave him a look that for a moment was purely fearful. “You know what the consequences will be, don’t you?”
“No. Neither do you. But I think we’ve been sitting on this too long already. I say we call up this reporter, and his editor, and anyone else we can think of, and start telling the truth.”
Wise passed his tongue over his front teeth. He looked at the glowing terminal again. “That’s what I say too.”
* * *
Two of the consequences Dr. Theodore Wise had foreseen took place immediately after the impromptu press conference at the Best Western just outside of Butte: he and Dr. William Pierce were fired, and half an hour later were held for questioning by the Montana state police on the telexed request of the state police of Connecticut. The press conference had been a wilder affair than he had imagined: television cameras had materialized around him, reporters had shouted questions at the tops of their voices, someone always seemed to be running into the suite with a headset over his ears and another loud question.
“How does it feel to know that you killed all those children?” a woman in sunglasses and a fringed buckskin jacket asked him.
Wise swallowed: he tasted cigarettes, though he did not smoke. “Well, that result . . .” he began, trying to answer the question honestly. “That result was one of the reasons Dr. Pierce and I assumed that our work was unrelated to the tragedies in Connecticut. Our results fell within certain parameters, and that was really pretty far off the map. Children drowning themselves, I mean.” His face reddened. “I still cannot think that our product was responsible for such a thing. Agreed, it is morally shocking. But in our subjects we never saw any inclinations toward suicide, whether individual or mass.”
“Your subjects were apes!” a man in a plaid shirt yelled from the back of the room.
“No, they were monkeys,” Wise said. “We did see frequent cases of instantaneous death, to a total percentage of five to eight ranging through all categories of DRG.”
More pandemonium, and such a flurry of questions that Wise answered the only one he was certain he had heard correctly. “Yes, I would assume that the DRG was responsible for a portion of deaths in the area on the day of the accident.”
Bill Pierce stood up; he had seen two policemen enter the suite.
“What should they do in Hampstead?” a man’s voice called through the shouting evoked by Wise’s answer.
“Put a fence around it,” Pierce said.
* * *
That was only the first of dozens of news conferences dealing with Hampstead and DRG. The Telpro press officer held one, then another, and then another: at each of these appearances he denied what he called “the allegations”; he defended the record of General Henry Haugejas; he promised a full review of the situation. He said nothing. The Pentagon press attaché said no more, but said it only twice. The parents of Harvey Washington, one of the three young men who had died, held a press conference in their living room to accuse the Telpro scientists of racism. The Secretary of Defense, questioned about the Hampstead furor—for it was that by now—said, “Happily, we’re in a condition of complete deniability on that.” So many demonstrators were appearing in front of the Telpro building every day that the New York police cordoned off the sidewalk on East Fifty-ninth Street to keep the pedestrian traffic moving. A Senate subcommittee was formed; the subcommittee subpoenaed a truckload of files and documents from Telpro, and then it promptly got lost in them. Two film deals had been nailed down before Dr. Wise and Dr. Pierce had spent as many weeks repeating their story. Time magazine ran a feature titled “The Strange Story of Patchin County.” Newsweek asked: “What’s Happening in Hampstead?” Newsday wondered: “Did DRG Create a Killer?”
As Graham Williams had predicted, the commuter trains no longer stopped at the Hampstead, Greenbank, and Hillhaven stations—once Pat Dobbin had pitied the men so driven that they lined up on those platforms even on a Saturday, but even if Dobbin had pity enough now to give some of it away, there was no one left to take it from him. The trains swept by empty platforms. Now and then a man, not always the same man, showed up where he had been used to catching his train to Grand Central. His suit was very likely misbuttoned and his hair uncombed; his briefcase was empty; he could not have explained what, precisely, he was doing. In any case, he had arrived at the wrong time. This composite man rubbed a bruise on the side of his face or nudged a loose tooth with his tongue—he had a murky but satisfying memory of a fight in the parking lot at Kiddietown (or at the bar in the Chez Normand, or in front of the checkout counter at Grand Union) but could not quite remember why he had been fighting nor why it had felt so good. Eventually the man wandered off or jumped down to poke around on the tracks or took off his clothes or smiled and tossed his briefcase through a station window or . . . whatever it was he did, if he was still there when the next train rushed past, the noise and furor and color of Conrail’s hasty visit probably frightened him.
Graham Williams had not foreseen that the state police would install roadblocks on the thruway exits and entrances for Hampstead and Patchin, but he would have known that the effect of the state closing off these towns was almost negligible
, at least in the towns themselves. Hampstead people could not drive to New York anymore, not unless they took Route 1 up to the far end of Patchin and could talk their way through a police inspection post—but Hampstead people did not often feel like coming out anymore. By the time of Wise’s press conference, all those who wanted to go had left. Those who remained had enough to think about without bothering themselves with trips to Bloomingdale’s.
For even the most deranged and the most violent, for even the fifteen-year-old who had discovered a mad blooming joy in splashing gasoline on a wooden house and throwing a blazing book of matches at it, Hampstead had come to be filled with odd dreads and terrors: as if they too secretly were “leakers” and could be tracked down and destroyed. Hampstead people heard voices at night, drifting down the attic stairs or whining outside the bedroom window. The voices were almost but not quite recognizable . . . it may be the mind fought those recognitions. Even the craziest, even the most violent, made sure now to lock their doors at night, and to lock the bedroom doors too. Walking the tree-lined streets, people kept their eyes straight ahead; golfing, they silently agreed to skirt certain fairways—there were places that made you feel funny, that was all, and you stayed away from them.
More and more, sudden holes appeared in the fabric of daily life, holes that once had been filled with people. Both Archie Monaghan and his partner, beefy Tom Flynn, just stopped coming to their office in the last week of July. Their secretaries continued to come to work until they had typed up the last land contract, duplicated the last will, filed the last deposition. Then they found their way down the hall to the offices of another law firm, Shobin Schuyler Mink Fine & McFeeley, where the secretaries had brought in a television set and spent the days engrossed in soap operas and game shows—they sent out to the deli for lunches. Shobin and Fine had left town in early June, Schuyler a week later. Mink had been killed in a hit-and-run accident outside the Framboise restaurant, and McFeeley’s body was later found in the same spot of rough on the golf course that yielded up the bodies of Archie Monaghan and Tom Flynn. The women felt better being together; they wanted one another’s company.
Around the Krell house on Poor Fox Road, the weeds had started to die: no one saw, so no one asked why, but the crabgrass and dandelions, the wild timothy and ragweed, were beginning to shrivel and turn black around the edges. On Kendall Point the plants were dying too, and sometimes the ground seemed to breathe out a gray dingy smoke—but that must have been mist.
2
A troubled Tabby Smithfield was walking down Beach Trail in late-afternoon sunlight three days after the long night in Graham’s living room. For these three days Tabby had spun back and forth across a difficult internal point—knowing that he had to make a decision, he had succeeded only in confusing himself. Tabby had withdrawn a little bit from the other three, afraid that his uncertainty might force him into saying too much. He did not want to discuss what was on his mind with anyone until he was sure of his feelings; and even then, he wanted to talk about his decision with Patsy alone before the two men got involved. With any luck, they would not get involved until everything was over: Tabby knew that Richard and Graham would never approve of his going alone against the Dragon.
When Tabby reached the end of Beach Trail he turned left. He looked over his shoulder and ran across Mount Avenue, the simple physical release of pushing himself off the crumbling blacktop momentarily blotting out his problems. After a few seconds of comparative bliss, he slowed to a walk again. A moment later he again looked back over his shoulder. All he saw was the gently curving length of Mount Avenue unreeling itself beneath the oaks to Gravesend Beach. Tabby paused, put his hands in the pockets of his tan corduroy jeans, and made sure no one was hiding behind one of the big old trees. Finally he shrugged and turned around; began walking again toward the house where he had been born.
He still had the nagging, persistent feeling that someone was following him.
When he looked around again he saw only the crumbling and pitted road, the massive old trees, the glossy banks of myrtle before brick walls. Sunlight trembled on the road, cut into patterns by the leaves. Tabby lifted himself onto the balls of his feet and started walking forward again.
Still that prickly feeling persisted.
The four of them had eaten their meals together since that long night of talk; Graham and Richard spent most of their time trying to figure out if there had been any pattern in the kind of person chosen by the Dragon, or if the killings had revealed anything they might have overlooked. Patsy sat in on these discussions, she pretended to be thinking as concentratedly as the two men, but Tabby had always felt her sliding away—sending him little questioning darts. He had resisted these, but the notion of rejecting anything Patsy McCloud offered him contradicted everything he felt about her and helped send him back into himself. At meals he ate little, said almost nothing.
He could do it: he held to that. Graham’s long story about Bates Krell had been narrated in a kind of code he alone had understood; deciphered, the code meant that only Tabby Smithfield, of the four of them, could destroy the Dragon. But did it mean that he had to act single-handedly, as Graham had? Much of Tabby wanted to do it alone, to prove himself to the others at the same time as he kept the secret of the attempted burglary—all of that now swarmed with shame and blackness for Tabby, he could not imagine or remember how he had wound up crouched in the back of Gary Starbuck’s van, everything leading to that moment had been like a whirlpool hauling him down into itself against his will.
Graham had made a point of stressing that when he met Bates Krell he had been closer to Tabby’s age than to Richard and Patsy’s. And at least to Tabby, most of the emphasis of Graham’s story had been on his isolation. Graham had trusted himself to act alone, and when he had needed help he had found it. You could not go bob, bob, bobbing through as many schoolyards as Tabby had without learning that the great gifts in life went to those who acted all along as though they expected them.
When he thought about that long wing of fire lashing out to murder his father, Tabby knew that he had to kill the Dragon: it was only when he actually thought about doing it that he had to confront his fear.
When he thought about going back into Dr. Van Horne’s house, his stomach froze.
Now Tabby stood before the iron pickets of the fence, looking across the yellowing lawn to the house his grandfather had owned—the house Monty Smithfield had probably assumed would pass in time to Tabby. On this land three hundred years ago Gideon Winter had set in motion the series of events that would irrevocably alter Tabby’s life. For Tabby that was the strongest proof that he was meant to destroy the old man in the house above Gravesend Beach. The very fact of his birth in this house was part of his having been chosen.
Yes, Tabby said to himself. The killing of Wren Van Horne was his job.
A shadow fell across the baking grass just before him, and Tabby jumped—he had been deep in his private world. He whirled to face the shadow’s owner, frantic, convinced that Wren Van Horne had followed him up Mount Avenue and was now going to try to kill him: and instead of the doctor he saw before him the one person he would truly have been willing to see.
“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. “I guess I sort of sneaked up on you—I didn’t mean to startle you, Tabby.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Tabby said. “I mean, okay. I guess you really did startle me. Wow. I must have jumped about a foot.”
They smiled at each other, and Tabby felt her mind brush his. He deliberately shuttered his thoughts, and felt the brusqueness of it: if Patsy had excluded him in that way, it would have felt as though his fingers had been caught in a door.
“Sorry,” Patsy said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Tabby shook his head. “No, it’s me. I guess I’m nervous or something. What are Richard and Graham up to?”
“The same thing they were up to when you left. Talk, talk, talk. I think they’re actually having a wonderful time, in spite of their
frustrations.”
“And so you decided to follow me. Or did Graham tell you to follow me? I guess everybody thinks I’m holding out on them.”
Patsy shook her head vehemently. “Of course Graham didn’t send me after you, Tabby, and if he had, I would have told him to go to hell. I came here because I wanted to talk to you and I thought that I’d find you here—nobody sent me. I’m not spying on you.”
“Yeah, I guess I believe you.” He smiled back at her.
you do believe me, don’t you? it’s important.
I do you know I do
but you’re still holding out on us
Patsyyyy . . .
I think you want to tell me—I think you want help
yes yes yes okay
“Okay,” Tabby repeated. “You’re right, I do. I do want help. But only yours.”
mine is the only help I can offer
“You know what I mean.”
She nodded. “The only thing I don’t know is why.”
“Didn’t you ever do anything that embarrassed you? Can’t you understand that?”
A faint trace of color appeared in Patsy’s face.
you’d risk all our lives because of embarrassment? Is that all that kept—
“No, that’s not all,” Tabby said quickly. “Maybe ‘embarrassment’ is the wrong word.”
“I bet it’s not so bad,” she said, coming nearer and daring now to put her hand on his shoulder. “Whatever you were doing, Tabby, it wouldn’t seem so terrible to us.”
He shook his head.
“But you know also that you can’t keep silent any longer. If you know something . . .”
Their eyes met. “Oh, I know,” Tabby said. “I was just thinking about that.”