by Peter Straub
I stared at her for a moment, trying to reconcile the memory of what I had experienced with my instinct to deny Joy’s version of the simple.
“I had this feeling of …”
“Of what?” Her voice had an impatient edge.
“Falling.”
“Well, of course. C’est normal. I don’t know why I should have to explain it to you. When you go backwards, it feels like you’re falling. How else could it feel? I hope you know how lucky you are. Hardly anybody can ever do that. Some can do it once but never again. Queenie couldn’t, and Nettie can’t do it, and for sure May never could. There was Daddy, and then me, when I had the strength, and now there’s you. You know what Daddy used to say?”
I shook my head.
“He used to say he ate time. He didn’t like it, but he ate it anyhow, because an ability like that has a reason behind it, and if you have the ability, you have to find the reason. He said once he saw Omar and Sylvan Dunstan robbing dead soldiers on a battlefield, and he thought maybe that was the reason he had the ability.”
“What’s the reason you had it?”
“Maybe so Howard Dunstan could make me unhappy. Maybe so I could talk to you. I hope your reason is better than mine.”
“Howard made your mother unhappy,” I said.
“Yes.” Joy nodded. “In a great many ways.”
“He had other women.”
“Didn’t he, though! Up and down, and hither and yon, and there’s the car, I’ll be going, don’t wait up.”
“Did he have children by any of his other women?”
She looked at me with a show of interest. “Would you care to hear a funny story?”
I nodded.
“One day, I finished my lesson with our French tutor, which I had alone because I was gifted in French, and Queenie and Nettie, who were not, came in for their lesson. May was sick in bed. She wouldn’t eat, you see, my sister May hardly ate a speck all through her childhood. I was all alone with nothing to do. Well, I got up the courage to slip into my father’s study, which was a room I loved but was not supposed to enter sans permission. Can you guess what especially fascinated me in that room?”
“The fox,” I said.
Joy clapped her hands. “I loved that fox! I thought if I looked at him long enough, old Reynard would forget I was there and finish that step he was taking. I wanted to see him move une fois seulement. I was kneeling in front of the fireplace, and the telephone rang. Oh! I nearly fainted. Daddy came walking to the study door, boom, boom, boom. I ran around the back of his couch. In he marched, boom, boom. Slammed the door. I saw the bottom of his legs going toward his desk. He picked up the receiver and did not speak for quite a while. Then it was ‘Ellie. Please calm down.’ I knew he was talking to une autre femme. He said, ‘All will be well. He will think it’s his.’ When he hung up, he said, ‘An excess of cannon smoke.’ Then he walked out, not stamping at all.”
“You never knew who Ellie was?”
“We never met any Ellies,” Joy said. “We never met anybody.”
She peered at the dark hallway. “I should be attending to my duties.” Joy showed me out with more dispatch than I would have thought her capable.
88
A metal brick pushed into the small of my back when I got behind the wheel. I unclipped the holster and put Toby’s pistol on the passenger seat. It was about 9:30 on a Monday night in June. The lamps cast yellow circles like spotlights on the sidewalk. Cherry Street looked improbably beautiful, and the world seemed motionless. All I had to do was get to the Brazen Head and catch up on my sleep. This schedule felt almost sinfully luxurious. I decided to drive along the streets I had walked after my first visit with Joy, to erase the impressions made when I had seen them through a veil of grief and rage.
I turned left at the end of the block, and a pair of headlights sped toward me from down the street. The cab of a pickup flew past in a gray blur. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the truck swerve into Cherry Street.
I took the next right and saw green light shining above the intersection of Pine Street and Cordwainer Avenue, three blocks ahead. I didn’t care if I got there before it changed; I was enjoying the journey. Frame houses like Nettie’s rolled past my windows. As I coasted down another block, the light stayed green, and I nudged the foot pedal. A white dazzle of light burst in my mirror. I looked up and saw, half a block away, the gray pickup speeding toward me with its beams on high.
My stomach jumped into my throat. Mountry had come again to Cherry Street. I flattened the accelerator. The pickup’s lights doubled in size while my little car swam forward. With a clank that shook the chassis like a wet dog, it dropped into a lower gear and shot ahead.
The light changed to yellow when I was about thirty feet from the intersection. It was still on yellow as I blasted my horn and barreled out into Cordwainer Avenue. In my rearview mirror, the headlights of the pickup kept coming.
On the far side of the median, two cars jolted to a halt a moment before I flew past them. In the mirror, I saw the pickup run the red light. It slammed into an oncoming car and sent it skidding across the road. The dazzle in my mirror wobbled and swung back.
Ahead lay the chain-link fences and one-story brick buildings of Pine Street. I glanced into the mirror and saw the pickup fly out of the intersection.
Looking for a way out, I bent toward the windshield. A massive figure was standing under a street lamp. The warrior in the red and green dashiki whom I had encountered on the day my mother died turned his head to watch me flash by.
The dazzle filled the rearview mirror. I slammed the brake pedal. The Taurus’s back end spun to the right, and I cranked the wheel the same way. The landscape revolved around me. The pistol sailed off the passenger seat. When the car stopped moving, I was looking into the lights of the pickup. I released the brake and stamped on the accelerator. The car jolted forward, shuddered, stalled. I smelled burning rubber and frying circuits. The dashboard lights went off.
The doors of the pickup opened on a burst of hoarse laughter. Joe Staggers jumped out of the cab. A heavyset man lumbered toward me from the other side of the truck. He was carrying a baseball bat. Staggers hitched up his belt. “Looks like Mr. Dunstan’s car quit on him. Isn’t that a damn shame?”
His friend laughed, yuk, yuk, yuk.
I turned the key, and the Taurus muttered. Joe Staggers slapped its hood. “Hey, don’t you want to talk to us?”
Yuk, yuk, yuk.
I groped under the dash without touching anything but the floor mat.
Joe Staggers’s face filled the window like a Halloween pumpkin. “Coming out to play?” He reached for the door handle.
I was going to have to fight two men. No matter how well I fought, they were going to kill me. I was minutes from a miserable, painful death. Suddenly, Aunt Joy’s voice spoke to me with absolute clarity. He used to say he ate time.
You can use time, if you’re able.
My stomach knotted. I closed my eyes and dropped into darkness.
When I opened my eyes again, I knew that I had eaten time. I was still in the car. Staggers had disappeared. The lights of his pickup were gone. Nothing around me resembled the Pine Street I had left. Tar-paper shacks grew from a muddy field ending at a wooden fence with a NO TRESPASSING sign. Far back from the road, flames from a trash barrel in front of a ramshackle wooden structure illuminated a dozen men in clothing like layers of dried mud. It could have been a photograph from the Depression. My head cleared enough for me to realize that it was the Depression. I had fallen through nearly sixty years.
At first cautiously, then with a kind of surly boldness, the men moved toward me. Suspicion and hostility came from them like an odor.
I turned the key. The ignition growled.
One of them shouted, “You spyin’ on us, Fancy Dan? What’s that you’re drivin’?”
Uncertain, intimidated, they gathered at the side of the road. The man who had shouted drew a knife from his pocket
and stepped forward. The others shuffled along behind him.
I tried to remember what I had done a moment before. Footsteps plodded toward me. I thought of Joe Staggers; I remembered walking over a grass carpet into the wreckage on New Providence Road. For the first time, I grasped the means I had used twice before. I wish I could describe it, but it would be like trying to explain a color. The bolt once more passed through my forehead. I ate time, although it felt as though I were the one being eaten.
Headlights streamed through the darkness, and someone yelped. I swallowed vomit.
Staggers was beside his pickup, his brutal face turned to look over his shoulder. Four feet away, Yuk Yuk stared at me in utter terror.
“Get in the truck, Shorty,” Staggers ordered. Yuk Yuk let go of the bat and blundered around the front of the truck.
I twisted the key. The dash lights glowed, and the engine came to life.
89
Numbly, I went through the usual night-time rituals and got into bed. I would never understand what was happening to me. All the familiar definitions had disappeared. I would never be able to go back to writing computer programs, because I was no longer the person who had done that. I lost myself in a mystery novel until I turned off the light.
At 6:00 A.M., I woke damp with sweat and forced myself out of bed, showered, and pulled on a blue polo shirt and my last pair of fresh jeans. I picked up the Beretta. Six-thirty A.M. was a ridiculous hour to wear a pistol. I put it down again. Joe Staggers had been humiliated, and he was going to come after me again, but not in the daytime. I stashed the gun behind the minibar and went to a diner for scrambled eggs and coffee.
On my way to the pawnshop, I bought a copy of the Echo at a newsstand. The mayor of Edgerton had introduced his good friend Stewart Hatch to a gathering of the local press. The mayor’s good friend had announced the construction of an arts center and convention facility on the banks of the Mississippi immediately north of St. Ann’s Community Hospital, at the cost of no more than half of the hospital’s extensive parking space.
A smaller headline at the bottom of the front page reported MURDER IN OLD TOWN. Cassandra Little, thirty-two, a bartender at the Speedway Lounge, had been brutally slain in her Low Street apartment. When she failed to come to work, the Speedway’s manager, Bruce McMicken, had gone to Little’s residence and discovered her body. A Police Department source speculated that Ms. Little had surprised a burglar.
On Chester Street, charred beams and incinerated wreckage had settled into the basement of the rooming house. The walls on either side looked like burnt toast.
I turned into Lanyard Street. Toby was probably still in bed. I let myself in and spent about twenty minutes straightening the shelves and sweeping the floor. Then I arranged the papers on the counter and discovered two slips tucked under a paperweight. I took them toward the office and saw light shining through the crack at the bottom of the door.
“I wondered where you were,” I said, and went in. Toby Kraft looked at me moodily from behind his desk. “Didn’t you …” My question vaporized.
From the neck down, a sheet of blood painted his chest. The white filaments drifting across the top of his head made his hair look like a wig. His eyes were colored stones, and his cottage-cheese face looked grumpy. For a moment, I thought Toby was going to jump up and laugh at my shock. I took a step forward and saw the gash in his neck. Abruptly, the smell of blood bloomed in the air.
Robert?
I wanted to walk out and keep traveling until I got somewhere only the waiters and street vendors spoke English. Then I went back into the shop and called the police.
The moment I hung up, I remembered the lawyer with the funny name and dug his card out of my wallet.
C. Clayton Creech said, “Murdered? How?”
“Someone cut his throat.”
“Is the safe closed?”
“Yes.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Yes.”
“Do two things right now. Take the ledger out of his bottom desk drawer and hide it in the storeroom. When you’re done, I’ll tell you the second.”
His dry, unemphatic voice was without any resonance. I thought this was not the first time C. Clayton Creech had been told of the murder of a client. I tried not to look at Toby’s body when I took the ledger out of the drawer, and after I wedged it between two boxes in the storeroom, I returned to the telephone.
“We are entering into an agreement, Mr. Dunstan. For the sum of one dollar, I have been hired as your legal representative. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“I don’t need a legal representative,” I said.
“You will. In accordance with Mr. Kraft’s wishes, I want to meet you and the other surviving members of his late wife’s family at two o’clock this afternoon. At that time, you will understand why I prefer not to speak of this matter in the presence of the police. Keep your trap shut until I get there.”
I put down the receiver and waited for Lieutenant Rowley.
90
A police car followed by a dark blue sedan came whooping down Lanyard Street and pulled up in front of the shop. Two men in uniforms left the squad car and watched Rowley climb out of the sedan. He charged up to the door, saw me coming, and banged his fist against the glass. Rowley kept on banging until I opened up.
“What the hell are you doing here, Dunstan?”
“I was helping out in the shop. This is my second day.”
“You found the body?”
“You know I did. I gave my name when I called headquarters.”
Rowley pointed at one of the cops. “Nelson, get the preliminaries from Mr. Dunstan and take him to headquarters. Where’s the body?”
“Back there,” I said.
Rowley stormed into the office. Toby seemed to be looking at me, and I had the crazy impulse to go in and straighten out his hair. Two more police cars swung in front of the shop. Captain Mullan and a detective I had not seen before got out of the second one.
Mullan gave me an arctic glance before going into the office. The detective followed him. I heard Mullan say, “You know, I don’t think I really believe this shit.”
Two more squad cars and an ambulance screeched up in front of the building. Suddenly, the shop was filled with policemen. Officer Nelson flipped to a clean page of his notebook.
Mullan emerged from the office with Rowley treading on his heels. When Rowley saw the other detective, his jaw snapped shut.
“I thought this was me,” said the detective.
“What’s Oster doing here?”
Mullan’s expression was completely disingenuous. “Don’t you have the Little case?”
“You know I do.”
“Then go back to headquarters, Lieutenant. Detective Oster’s getting this one.”
All the policemen in the shop were staring at Rowley. “Fine,” he said. A trace of red came into his cheeks. “But Dunstan’s already—”
“Already what, Lieutenant?”
Every head in the room turned to a gaunt, pale man in a gray suit who seemed to have appeared at my side through some magical agency, as if from a burst of smoke. He had thin, colorless hair, a narrow, deeply lined face, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a mouth like a mail slot. I recognized his flat, dry voice. “Please, Lieutenant, go on.”
“Just what we need,” Rowley said. “C. Clayton Creech.”
Creech was impervious to Rowley’s contempt. He would be impervious to most things. Far past shock or surprise, Creech existed in a state of neutral readiness for whatever might come his way. You could not show him anything he had not already witnessed so often that it was incapable of provoking anything but ironic recognition. He was so far beyond conventional human responses that he might as well have been from another planet. Under the circumstances, his presence made me feel more relaxed than I would have thought possible.
“This is your lawyer?” Mullan asked.
“He is.”
Rowley made a dis
gusted noise and pushed his way through the crowd of uniformed policemen. Officer Nelson looked uncertainly at Oster and said, “I was about to question him.”
“Do that,” Oster said.
As if inquiring about the score of a minor-league baseball game in a distant city, Creech asked, “Is my client to be taken to headquarters?”
“Your client will be invited to assist us in our investigation.” Mullan turned wearily to me. “Would you be willing to make out a statement at Police Headquarters?”
Without moving a muscle, Creech encouraged assent.
“Of course,” I said.
“I shall be present during the questioning,” Creech said. “If my client wishes.”
“I’d like Mr. Creech to be present,” I said.
A tired-looking man with mushroom-colored skin came in and pronounced Toby dead. The ambulance attendants carried out what looked like a giant loaf of bread hidden under a sheet.
Mullan said, “The counselor won’t mind if I tell you we found out who was responsible for last night’s fire.”
Creech’s motionless figure somehow displayed mild curiosity.
“Carl Sandburg Elementary put up a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to an arrest.”
“Handsome gesture,” Creech said.
Mullan smiled. “Late yesterday afternoon, your old friend Frenchy La Chapelle and a miscreant called To Me From Me Blunt decided to unwind over a bottle of bourbon and a crack pipe.”
“Toomey Frommey?” I asked.
“To Me, From Me,” Mullan said. “Six years ago, this genius went to the post office to pick up a suitcase full of grass from Humboldt County, California. He used his own name and return address on the shipping label. Luckily for him, he was one of Mr. Creech’s clients, and he walked.”
“Lamentable negligence on the part of the arresting officers,” Creech said.
“After they got high, Frenchy started bragging about the money he got for torching a building on Chester Street. To Me From Me decided that his obligations as a citizen outweighed his loyalty to a friend. We brought Frenchy in and charged him, and he was put in a cell. Just before four o’clock this morning, a strange thing happened to Mr. La Chapelle.”