“How did he see out of them?” Lew said, leaning back, crossing his arms.
I nodded, was liking this.
The good thing about voluntary book discussions is that I don’t have to play dentist. Getting people to talk’s not like pulling teeth.
“Because they were—because there were flames in his eye sockets, right?” Marcy said.
We all nodded, as if seeing the devil again as King had drawn him: tall, neatly dressed in a black suit. Subtle claws at the ends of his fingertips. Instead of eyes, just orange flickering flames. And a mouth that could open well past what any human jawbone would allow. And the teeth. Those teeth.
“Maybe he doesn’t have to subscribe to our rules of biology,” I said, looking around the circle for support.
“He has to eat,” Gwen said, all on her own. “He eats that fish, right?”
“It’s not a human hunger, though,” Lew said. “Just doing it for meanness, like. To show off, scare that kid.”
“Good, good,” I said, wanting to stand because it’s the main way I know to think. “But, remember, this is eighty years ago for this old man remembering it now. What would you say if I offered that he just encountered a bad man in the woods that day, then, because of his upbringing, he started to remember him as the devil. He started to add the stuff he knew from Sunday school. Claws, flame, teeth…”
“He does fall asleep before it all happens,” Evelyn said, hooking another stitch, pulling it through.
She was our cynic.
“But is it any less scary if it’s a dream or if it’s real?” Marcy asked.
“Or even if it was just a serial killer,” Jackie added. “That’s pretty scary too, isn’t it?”
“Damn straight,” Lew said, clapping his knee.
“But for every killer there’s a cop, right?” I asked.
Shrugging nods all the way around. This is what they would have been paying for, had they been paying.
“So, follow me now. If there’s devils, then there’s also…?”
“More devils?” Gwen said.
“Kids,” Marcy corrected.
“He means angels,” Evelyn said, stabbing with a needle.
I nodded like I’d been caught, was about to shift gears into my thesis when Lew said, “But who wants to read a story about an angel, right?”
I lowered my face to smile—he was right—and when I looked back up to the group, the twin doors on the other side of the gym were opening up.
Because they were on cylinders, were designed to not crush fingers, we all got the guy’s outline before we got him.
He was tall, spindly, top-hatted. His dark suit ragged at the edges, and not quite long enough for his legs or his arms.
For an instant his eyes flashed, taking my breath away, but in the next instant he was wearing a pair of those old pince-nez, their twin lenses catching the light.
Beside me, Gwen flinched. Jackie took her hand, pulled it across, to her own lap.
“Speak of the—” Lew said just loud enough for the book circle, and chuckled.
The spindly man hooked a stray chair by the door, dragged it all the long way across the wooden floor of the gym to us and set it down, opposite me.
“Room for one more?” he asked.
“How’d you hear about us?” I said, trying to sound casual.
He gave me a smile and a wink, then flapped open a much-folded piece of paper. One of my flyers. All of which I was pretty sure I’d collected, once we had a quorum.
“Looks like he’s invited,” Evelyn said.
“A scarf,” the spindly man said, about her crochet-job.
“Don’t know just yet,” Evelyn said back. Definitely a challenge in her voice. For all of us.
We had a rhythm, had already relaxed into our assigned roles.
The spindly man’s eyes made the circuit of our little circle, lingering maybe a touch too long on Gwen, then launching two fingers off his right eyebrow in salute to Lew.
“Even the moneyhandlers,” he said, about Marcy.
“And you?” she said right back to him, like he wasn’t the first ornery customer she’d had to deal with.
“Just happened to be strolling by,” he said, refolding the flyer, stuffing it in the waist pocket of his vest. “What’s the story, doc?” he said then, right to me.
I breathed in, breathed out.
Evidently we were doing this.
“Stephen King,” I said, then, pointedly, “The Man in the Black Suit.”
“Ahh,” the spindly man said, his eyes on Gwen again. “The King man cometh. I know him well, you could say.”
“We were just talking about how if you admit devils,” Drake said, “then that means the door must be open for angels as well.”
“Or more demons,” the spindly man said, sitting back into his chair. “Inside every angel, there’s a demon waiting to claw out, right? But please, don’t let me interrupt.”
And so we went valiantly forward. Just with not much heart.
Instead of listening, or contributing, the spindly man extracted Marcy’s plate from under her chair, then used his finger to scoop her thin layer of leftover dumplings into his wide mouth.
I heard myself traipsing back through Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” for the group, trying to establish it as the literary antecedent for King this time out. Upon hearing “Hawthorne,” Jackie of course made Gwen recite what she knew about The Scarlet Letter.
It gave the spindly man more excuse to stare her up and down. To—and this was the only word for it—malinger.
“But—” I started, not at all sure where I was going, just that I had to pull his eyes off Gwen.
The spindly man was already speaking, though: “Go into the forest, taste the intangible. You come back with the story, never the proof. Am I right?”
Silence. Welcome to the land of crickets, I said in my head, quoting one of my former students.
Lew coughed an old man cough deep in his chest. Marcy scuffled her shoes on the gym floor. Drake stared into his lap, his fingertips drumming some arcane, personal rhythm against each other.
“Good,” I said at last. “Proof. It’s what we were talking about before you got here. If you can prove the vital tenets of a religion, then you lose the possibility of faith. So, King’s man in this black suit, by showing this boy that he was real, he also cored out the boy’s eventual leap of faith. Leaving him to lead a hollow life, as established by all the years between nine and ninety being, as far as we see on the page, empty, devoid of content. Not even interesting enough to paraphrase.”
Sometimes you have to knock a student down with preparation.
The spindly man just grinned a sharp grin.
“Proof,” he said. “We’ve all got proof, man. I bet every one of us has a story like this kid’s. Don’t we?”
Nobody said no.
“You,” he said to Marcy. “You’ve seen the devil, haven’t you?”
“We usually don’t—” I tried, but he held a hand out to me like a crossing guard might, his palm and fingers straight up.
Worse, I actually stopped.
“I don’t know what it was,” Marcy said.
The spindly man smiled. Lowered his hand.
“We were twelve,” Marcy said. “I’d told my mom I was staying at Reese’s, and she said she was staying at my house. You know. So we were going to camp under the old windmill. It was a dare.”
“Dare, dare,” the spindly man urged.
“Of course we didn’t sleep,” Marcy said, her eyes flashing up to Jackie in something like apology, as if she were being a bad influence on Gwen here. “Then, about two or three in the morning, our flashlights both died at once. And we looked up the side of the windmill. The moon was bright that night, and right above us.”
“No,” Lew said, and I looked to him.
Did he know where this story was going?
“And then, coming down the side of the windmill, already about ten feet from the to
p, I don’t know. There was somebody, okay? Maybe it was just a jacket a worker had left tied up there.”
“Because they always do that,” the spindly man said.
“We ran,” Marcy said. “We ran and we ran, and he was behind us the whole way. We just knew.”
“And you came back with the story,” the spindly man said. “That’s your proof. Good. Do we think she’s lying, folks? Is her story enough for you, or do you need her to have scars on her back, from sharp fingernails? Or a dead friend, who wasn’t quite fast enough?”
“She did die,” Marcy said, her voice cracking a bit. “Later that year. Got hit on the highway, trying to go…we didn’t know where. Oh God.”
She turned her head, balancing tears in her eyes.
“And you?” the spindly man said to Lew.
“Me,” Evelyn said, uncharacteristically. “One night coming home from bringing dinner to my husband on the night shift, I noticed the fuel gage was too far in the red. And there were only cotton fields between me and home, and there were these wild packs of dogs that year. My cousin had already been mauled. But then, right when the engine sputtered, a pair of headlights popped on in my rearview, and stayed there all the way until I pulled into the driveway. And then the car died.”
“An angel,” Gwen said.
Evelyn just stared at the spindly man.
“Next,” he said, no humor in his voice at all.
“Who are you anyway?” Lew said.
“Somebody who needs proof,” the spindly man said.
“Of what?” Lew said.
“The intangible,” the spindly man over-enunciated. “You know.”
“I don’t have to tell you,” Lew said. “I never even told my wife.”
“Of course, of course,” the spindly man said, all manners now. “Just leave Marcy running home through the darkness all alone.”
Lew looked from the spindly man to Marcy. Then to me.
“So maybe I saw something once,” he said.
Just to have control again, I nodded for him to continue.
The spindly man shifted his chair in anticipation.
“We were at…well, it doesn’t matter,” Lew started off. “Way past the DMZ. Deep, no support. Somebody was shooting at us from a fortified position. So we ventilated his little roost, and he stopped shooting like you have to. Because you’re dead.”
“Exactly,” the spindly man said. “The dead don’t shoot, of course they don’t. What is this, television?”
Lew wasn’t listening to him anymore, though.
“Only, once we broke cover, that dead sniper, he came back up over the lip of his little parapet. Except—I was the only one to see it—he was still dead. And there was another man up there with him. Moving that dead sniper’s arms like a puppet. Putting his finger on the trigger. We lost three more men that day.”
“And you made it home,” the spindly man said. “Good for you. You’re living breathing proof of the intangible. You saw it, respected it, and were given your life in return. Who else, now?”
There was Jackie, Gwen, Drake, and me.
“When her father died,” Jackie started, her hand gripping Gwen’s knee, but then Drake cut in: “I used to lie in my bed all night. I knew there weren’t any monsters in the closet, or under the bed. That was stupid. But outside. Outside was much bigger.”
“It is, it is,” the spindly man said, smiling again, his lips thin enough as to hardly even be there at all.
“So one night,” Drake said. “One night I decided I was going to call it out. My fear, I mean. I was going to get up, go to my window, peek out the corner. If nobody was there, then it was just all in my head. But then, when I pulled the curtain to the side, there was a pair of eyes looking back at me.”
The spindly man laughed in his chest.
Jackie gripped Gwen’s hand harder.
“It was my own reflection,” Drake said then, right to the spindly man. “It was proof I was being stupid. That I was a kid. Does that count?”
“Did it feel stupid?” the spindly man asked. “Or did you sleep in your parents’ room that night?”
Drake didn’t say anything. Just drummed his fingers.
“After my husband passed over,” Jackie said then, speaking for her and Gwen both, evidently, “we could hear something in the garage some nights.”
“Mom,” Gwen said, trying to shut her up.
“And one time I finally went out there, with a spatula.”
“To scramble some brains…” the spindly man said.
“There was a puppy,” Jackie said. “He’d left us a puppy.”
“The garage door was open, Mom,” Gwen said.
“And, tell me,” the spindly man said. “Did you keep it, this puppy? Are you giving it unmonitored access to your house now?”
“Unmonitored?” Lew said, defensive.
“Who knows what our pets are up to when we’re away,” the spindly man said, angling his narrow face over at me now. “They could stand up on two legs, walk all around. Sniff at the vents for things only a dog could smell living up there. Waiting up there.”
“Stop,” Evelyn said.
The spindly man was still watching me.
“Good professor?” he said.
I looked from face to face of the group.
This wasn’t at all where I’d meant this discussion to go. But, I had to admit, what we were doing, it was showing what we brought to the story. Which had to reveal, in part, the means by which it had got to us. Like an archetypal well of shared stories. One King had the savvy to tap into.
We all had a devil on our back trail.
Or, in my case, in front of me.
“The day of the wreck,” I said, swallowing loudly. At least in my ears. “The driver of the furniture truck. I don’t think he was a person. Not anymore. I think he’d been waiting all day just to cross that intersection. He was—he was smiling when we hit him. And you don’t smile, do you? What kind of a person smiles when a kid’s about to get disfigured for life?”
Jackie reached across Gwen to pat my thigh.
“Now,” the spindly man said, to the group. “The good doctor here. Do you actually believe a man in a black suit was driving that truck that day, or has his own memory and guilt altered his memory of it?”
“This is over,” I said, standing, my chair scraping away from me. It was too loud in the tight gym. Too sudden. And I didn’t care.
“But—” Marcy said.
“He’s right,” Lew said, standing as well, his eyes with mine.
The soldier, always looking for someone to guard. It was so cliché, so stupid. And I was so thankful for him.
He went around collecting plates, everybody else standing to help, to arrange.
Everybody except the spindly man.
He hadn’t moved from his chair. He was just letting the group course around him, his arms crossed like he was in a pout, and wanted us to know it.
As was custom in our little group, I stayed in what had been our circle, shook hands and gripped shoulders. It made me feel like the captain going down with the ship. Lew held onto my hand longer than he had to, pulled me close.
“You good?” he said, meaning the spindly man.
“I’m golden,” I said, and smiled to prove it, then ducked my head for Evelyn to drape her just-made scarf around my neck.
She pecked me on the cheek, Drake shook my hand, and the last one through the double doors was Gwen. She looked back to me, her eyes plaintive, almost. Like she was telling me no.
I raised my hand in farewell.
Behind me, the spindly man coughed into his hand.
“We have to leave now,” I told him.
“Thought it went until eight,” he said, standing to face me.
“Not tonight.”
When I reached for his chair, to put it up, he took it instead, jerked it away.
“Good selection,” he said. “‘The Man in the Black Suit.’ I identify with it, you could say.�
�
“You never told us your proof,” I said. “Of the intangible.”
We were standing at center court.
“Some of us don’t need proof,” he said, measuring his words. “But, tonight. Next campfire I find myself at, I might tell the riveting story of the book group. The one who didn’t know what they were playing with. The one who thought stories are just made up. What do you think, doc? I got a winner there?”
“Tonight was a horror story for us,” I told him, more than a little proud of myself for coming up with that, “not you.”
“So I take I’m…uninvited?” he said.
“Will that stop you?” I said back.
He looked to the dark gym behind me. To get me to look as well, it seemed.
I didn’t. I wouldn’t.
“Maybe tonight’s story isn’t even over yet,” he said, then, before I could reply, he was pushing back into the double doors. “Tell Captain Lewis thank you if you will, for the dish. And for remembering.”
“Rememb—?” I started, but now he was tipping his hat, bowing out.
Gone.
I finally breathed.
And looked behind me, now that I could.
The whole gym was dark, a patchwork of deeper and deeper shadows. At work tonight, there was going to be walls and walls of shadows, I knew. Me moving silently through them with a cart, a dolly, a back brace. A broken son. One I was so grateful for it hurt.
I wanted to cry, I think.
Instead, I straightened the spindly man’s chair. It was already straight, but I wanted to make it straighter.
Next I turned like always, to nod bye to the ghost of the book group. To thank it for keeping me sane, for letting me give back, pay my dues.
And then I walked across the thick blue sideline, for the double doors that would lock comfortably behind me, and only looked up when I was almost there, to the crashbars, the door handles.
Two points of flame, flickering in the reflection.
My back straightened and I gulped air as quietly as I could.
Behind me. The spindly man, he’d crept around to a side door, let himself in, was standing behind me now, his fingertips extending into claws, his rows of teeth glistening against each other, his eyes on fire.
I jerked back from the reflection. It was a stupid move, should have sent me right into his chest.
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