by Peter Straub
“The Knacker for ’im.”
A T-shirted paunch and a thick arm holding a baseball bat heaved into view. The man came to a halt and looked behind him, at the building across the lane, then at the old lavender warehouse. He ticked the bat against a cobble.
“See a guy come down this way?”
The boy in the doorway said, “Seen a couple.”
“A tourist.”
“Ran down there,” the boy said. “Puffin’ hard.”
The gut swung around. “How long ago?”
“Just passed by.”
The man with the bat moved away, and soon my rescuer and I slipped back through the door. I asked if they lived in the old building.
“We sleeps here when it’s hot.”
“Sometimes we gets fetchin’ money,” said the smaller boy.
“For instance,” Nolly said, “if you needed a certain thing, we maybe could find that thing for you.”
“Can you help me find my way out of here?”
They glanced at each other.
“For a buck,” I said.
Nolly extended a grubby hand, and I surrendered another dollar. So quickly that I scarcely saw him go, he set off down Lavender in the direction opposite to that taken by my pursuer. I followed him through passages called Shoelace, Musk, and Pineapple.
“Where do we come out?”
I would see when we got there.
We turned off Pineapple into Honey, a six-foot passage with a lamp burning at its far end. Plodding footsteps reached us from an adjoining lane. Nolly hesitated. A second later came the overlapping sound of leather soles ticking against stone cobbles. Nolly darted down the length of Honey. I ran after him, all too aware that the men could hear me as well as I heard them. We came out into a pocket court called White Mouse Yard, and Nolly pointed across to a dim opening. “Take Silk,” he said. “Go Silk, Glass, Beer, and you’re out.” He raced into an adjacent lane.
The approaching footsteps grew louder.
I ran into Silk. The heavy steps came toward me, and I stopped and looked back. The sound swung around through the narrow lane and appeared to come from before me. I moved ahead and heard the lighter, ticking footfalls from somewhere on either side. At the bottom of the lane I turned blindly into what I hoped was Glass, jogged toward the lamp at the next crossing of the lanes, and realized that the only steps I heard were my own. Cursing, I wrenched off my loafers.
In front of me, a broad figure shifted around the corner and filled the center of the lane beneath the lamp. The figure raised a baseball bat and charged.
At that moment, someone grabbed my collar, spun me aside, and pushed me onto the cobbles. When I raised my head, I saw him pounce—stride forward and leap like a tiger upon the man in front of me. I groped for my shoes. The baseball bat scraped against the side of the passage, flashed upward, and swung down. I heard a squashy, battered-watermelon noise. The bat landed with a heavier, softer impact. I moved back from the carnage, and the bat skittered toward me over the cobbles.
Overhead, a man leaned through a bright square of window. In the faint light, a ponderous corpse sprawled over the cobblestones. A slim figure in a blue suit sauntered to the far end of Glass and paused. A dreamlike terror made half of anticipation arose in me.
The man at the crossing of the lanes took an unhurried step into the light and turned to face me. What he was going to say made him smile. No longer dreamlike but imported in every particular from an actual dream, terror glued me to the cobbles. The thought of what he would say filled me with horror.
“Ned, never turn down a lady’s invitation.” His voice was mine and not mine.
My obscene double glimmered at me in affectionate, mocking contempt. For a fragment of a second, I caught in his face an echo of the sense of recognition that had vaulted me out of my nightmare. At the moment he vanished down the gauzy lane, I realized that Star had given me his name.
I felt like fainting, like falling down and weeping for a grief lodged at the center of my heart, like ascending two feet off the ground and detonating into bloody scraps. Robert had shown himself to me. Helplessly, as if to follow, I stepped forward, then turned and ran.
39 Mr.X
What comes over me? What demon undoes me with visitations of the river-bankish state?
I bow my head in disgrace, that I questioned my Master and his Works. Who am I? Who was my true father? Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left!
(While transcribing these lovely words, I was gripped by a tide of laughter from which I only now begin to recover. I wipe away joyous tears and continue.)
I here record my Breakthroughs in the order they were granted.
The depression evident in the previous entry had discouraged me from night-time rambles. As a result, I collapsed into bed before midnight and arose at wretched sunrise. Seated before the unsullied section of my dining table, I was searching through the rubble for a half-eaten cruller deposited there no more than a week ago, when my hand closed around the stony cruller, and a great light shone upon me from the dark, dark heavens, and an invisible orchestra released a giant chord, complete with kettledrums. The arrival of this radiant, light-filled (darkness-filled) harmony spoke of one thing only. That instant, Star Dunstan had ceased to be and given up the ghost, farewell, goombye, ta ta, amen.
Apart from the sense of revenge given me by the Star-sow’s passing, my instantaneous knowledge of the event whisked the doomy clouds from the internal skies. Here, here, was proof that all was not illusion, that my Mission endured. My ferocious fathers smiled down, to the extent that such Beings can be said to smile. I tossed the fossilized cruller in the direction of the garbage pail, anyhow toward the glistening mound where the pail used to be, and leaped up to pace the open bits of floor until sufficient time had passed for the body to be discovered. After perhaps ten minutes, I dialed Edgerton’s second-best hospital and experienced an uneasy moment in which my call was transferred to the intensive care unit. Even worse, one Nurse Zwick announced that although ICU patients could not receive telephone calls directly, my message would be passed on to the patient in question. I identified the patient in question. The admirable Zwick hesitated no more than a half second before telling me in businesslike tones that Ms. Valerie Dunstan had but moments ago expired.
Even when anticipated, an event such as this blows away the cobwebs.
Revived, I spent the day perusing the Providence Master’s Sacred Texts, in the process noting a hundred speaking touches in tales I had once discounted, for instance, to give but one instance, although I had read “Pickman’s Model” countless times, until this very day I had not taken in the relevance of these lines:
At a guess I’ll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys … that aren’t suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them…. These ancient places are … overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace….
The Providence Master was describing Hatchtown!
I once again propose—envision—a Valhalla-like Museum of the Elder Gods. The Record of my adventures, opened to this very page of the Boorum & Pease journal, lies installed upon a likeness of my table alongside a replica of my Mont Blanc (medium-point) pen in a diorama-like affair a few steps or slithers beyond a representation of the Master’s own desk and writing implements. An animated representation of myself rises from the desk and paces to the sink, there to stand in a speaking pose, perhaps even actually to speak some poignant lines from this Record. It would be fitting, after all …
The sympathetic reader will understand my tears.
The Sage had turned his flat, almond-shaped eye upon me and winked. My tears were those of long-withheld, healing resolution. The word ecstasy would not be out of place.
So it was that later I seized the opportunity of a thirty-minute “break” or surcease in that humble occupation which enables me to pay the rent and keep body and soul together to slip out
and partake of the night air. I was ready for anything, and with the Master’s confirming periods ringing in my inner ear I went adventuring through Hatchtown’s byways and hidden courts.
40 Mr.X
I faded through the bands of tourists, sticking to the shadows out of habit, even though most of those idiots would have had trouble seeing me if I stood under a lamp post and played “Lady of Spain” on an accordion.
In my progress up Word Street, I noticed four middle-aged ruffians skulking out of Purse Lane. Three of the four carried baseball bats, and their glances up and down the street, their investigations through the open doors of taverns, declared them hounds sniffing for a coon. Mountry’s rough, backwoods atmosphere enveloped them like a fog. All hills and vales strung together with muddy roads disfigured by shacks whose weedy front yards sprouted old cars, broken appliances, and now and then a few pigs, Mountry had provided an unending supply of brutal dumbbells back in my days of art and crime. I did not suppose it had changed much over the years. I wandered unseen toward the bully-boys, and the ripest of plums dropped straight into my astonished hand.
The plum’s descent began with the sight of Frenchy La Chapelle bopping on the balls of his feet as he kept a wary eye on the hound pack. He knew about them; they made him nervous. Although alike in breaking every law they could at every opportunity, Frenchy and the Mountry boys were of different species and as instinctively natural enemies as the cobra and the mongoose. Their antithetical physical types increased the instinctive hostility, the Frenchys tending toward a rodentlike sleekness and the rednecks sharing an inclination to potato-sack bellies and beefsteak faces.
I sauntered invisible alongside the bully-boys. Their commander muttered this heavenly imprecation: “Dunstan’s around somewhere. Check out the alleys and meet me back at the Speedway.”
My heart, that old warhorse, foamed at the bit.
I hastened across the street and materialized beside Frenchy. In years past, I now and again had summoned him to my service, invariably with the sense of mysteriously accommodating myself within a range of visibilities rather than anything as decisive as making myself visible. As far as Frenchy is concerned, one minute I’m not there and the next minute I am, and the process dismays him far more than he wants to let on.
When he became aware of my presence, he flinched, then twitched his narrow shoulders and pretended he was doing loosening-up exercises. People like Frenchy never loosen up, and their only exercise is running from the police. “How come I never see you sneakin’ up on me?”
“You don’t look in the right places,” I said.
He gave a rim-shot laugh, rat! tat!, bounced up and down, and glanced across Word Street.
“Do you know those hillbillies?”
He shot me a wary look, then thrust his hands into the pockets of the leather jacket. “Might have seen ’em in the Speedway.”
I raised my head to expose, beneath the brim of my hat, my left eye.
“One of ’em’s called Joe Staggers,” he said. “I’m kind of busy right now.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “Two nights ago, you were busy behind Lanyard Street with Clyde Prentiss. Tonight you have nothing to do but listen to me.”
Frenchy jittered himself back into a semblance of confidence. “Clyde’s only a friend of mine, all right?”
“The old Grueber warehouse,” I said. “Microwaves. How many did you get before Clyde’s mishap, a dozen?”
Frenchy breathed through his mouth while admiring the lighted upper windows of a tenement across the street. “Around ten. I dumped ’em in the river.”
He was telling me what he should have done. All twelve of the stolen microwaves were stacked against a wall of his tiny apartment.
“Clyde Prentiss represents a threat to your freedom,” I said. “If he should happen to recover, he’ll turn you in for a reduced sentence. Some would say Clyde should have done his friends the favor of dying.”
Frenchy tried to look unconcerned. “The poor guy could go at any moment. Bad heart. Fifty-fifty chance.”
“I am going to improve those odds, Frenchy,” I said. He stopped twitching. “After tonight, you won’t have to worry about Prentiss. In return, you will perform a number of errands for me. You will be remunerated. This is your first installment.” A fifty-dollar bill passed from my hand into Frenchy’s pallid hand, thence into a zippered pocket.
He ventured a sidelong glance. “Uh, are you saying …”
“You know perfectly well what I’m saying. Who are those meatheads after?” I wanted to learn how much he knew.
“A guy named Dunstan took some bread off ’em in a card game. They’re sore.”
“Would you recognize Dunstan if you saw him?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to work through the lanes. If you see Dunstan, tell him that someone wants to meet him in Veal Yard. Show him the way. If you run into Staggers or his pals, send them in the opposite direction.”
He moved away, and I said, “Unload those microwaves in Chicago.”
Frenchy took off as though jet-propelled. I slipped back across Word Street and into the nearest lane. My long-delayed encounter with Master Dunstan would not occur until the brat’s birthday, but in the meantime it was my ironic duty to protect him from harm. I went gliding up Horsehair with every anticipation of spilling a quantity of Mountry blood.
Though I could wish for half a dozen Horsehairs, one will do. Swelling and contracting in width, a back alley’s back alley, it snakes back and forth through Hatchtown, and from within its walls the experienced listener can discern a great deal of what is going on around him. In high good humor, I awaited broadcasts from Mountry.
Hatchtown residents stumbled home, lurched into taverns, wrangled, copulated. Children squalled, slept, squalled again. I was pretty sure I heard Piney Woods humming to himself as he shambled along Leather toward Word Street, but it may have been some other derelict old enough to remember “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” I ducked into Veal Yard, and the music for which I had been searching came to me from the direction of Pitch and Treacle.
The music in question was the click-slop, click-slop of cobblestones meeting steel-tipped boots with run-down heels, highstyle footwear amongst Mountry’s finest. I made my way into Wax. The yokel made pursuit all the easier by rapping his baseball bat against the bricks, producing a sharp, ringing tock! vivid as a flare. I was still unable to distinguish whether he was on Pitch or Treacle, but a little extra speed would bring me to the point where the two lanes flowed together into Lavender only seconds behind my quarry. Concentrating on the click-slop, click-slop and the occasional, radarish tock!, I ignored the other sounds drifting from adjacent lanes. Then two different sets of footsteps snagged my attention.
To those who can hear, footsteps are as good as fingerprints. Two men of approximately the same weight walking across wet ground in identical pairs of shoes leave virtually identical impressions, but the sounds they make will differ in a thousand ways. What made me attend to the pair of footsteps coming from Pitch or Treacle was their unreasonable similarity. (They were not identical. Even identical twins do not replicate each other’s tread, they cannot.) One man, the first, moved in fearfully, with an irregularity that betrayed overindulgence in alcohol. The man behind him glided along in confident high spirits, not only unimpaired but as if the concept of impairments or obstacles did not exist for him—it was the walk of an unearthly being.
I must allude now to a circumstance beyond the grasp of any mortal reader. In the stride of an unearthly being nothing even faintly like morality may be detected. A transcendent ruthlessness resounded from the tread of the second pair of footsteps drawing near the joining of Pitch and Treacle and their meeting with the more spacious Lavender.
And yet! Although the first set of footfalls contained virtually no resonance of the so-to-speak angelic or unearthly, it uncannily resembled the second.
It was like
I felt as though
> I might have been standing before
You Mighty Ones, in his present euphoria Your Servant can find no better description of the emotional state induced by this impossible resemblance than the adjective most beloved of the Providence Master, eldritch. I had heard the footsteps of my son. Aware that the redneck was in pursuit, he possessed the capacity to mislead him with the false signal of, I don’t know what you call it, an auditory hallucination. I could do many things, but this stunt was as beyond me as time travel. With the awareness that my adversary was more supple than I had supposed, I got myself once more in motion and hastened through Horsehair’s convolutions only to arrive at Lavender after the fact.
From Horsehair’s opening, I glimpsed lounging in the doorway of an abandoned warehouse one of the band of urchins who gather there at night. The bully-boy was swaggering off. After a moment of appalled indecision, I thought it possible that the wicked offspring had after all spoken to Frenchy. Back down Horsehair I flew to vacant Veal Yard.
Cursing, I rushed through the byway and heard, mystifyingly, the hallucinatory footsteps and those of a child moving down Lavender. Eventually I came near enough to recognize the child as Nolly Wheadle, whom I had betimes dispatched on harmless errands. When I realized that our journey was taking us toward Hatchtown’s southern border, the exercise suddenly became clear: though my only-begotten son might have occult powers denied his father, he didn’t know beans about geography. He had hired Nolly to lead him out!
Complete understanding did not arrive until after the pair in front of me reached a patch of cobbles named White Mouse Yard, where both they and I, a cautious distance behind, heard the click-slop, click-slop of the bully trudging down a nearby lane. The next sound to reach us, the tread of unearthly footsteps, blasted all my conjectures into powder. Nolly fled, yelling directions to the tourist. My son and adversary approached, but in the destruction of every certainty I could not tell from where—I concealed myself within Horsehair. The tourist pounded into Silk, and I sped to the next lane. At the opening onto Glass, I wedged myself against the bricks, looked out at a lamplit corner, and was given the third and greatest revelation of the day.