by Peter Straub
(Freddy, you’re not really afraid of meeting a pretty girl for a late-night conversation, are you? What’s the matter with you, anyhow? And why did you think she knew exactly what you were going to say?)
3
Do you get the point? Harold Sims asked Stella Hawthorne, absently stroking her right breast. Do you see? It’s just a story. That’s the kind of thing my colleagues are into now. Stories! The point about this thing the Indian was chasing is that it has to show itself—it can’t resist identifying itself—it’s not just evil, it’s vain. And I’m supposed to tell dumb horror stories like that, dumb stories like some stupid hack . . .
* * *
“All right, Jim, what’s the story?” Peter Barnes asked. “What’s this big idea of yours?” The cold air rushing into Jim Hardie’s car had sobered Peter considerably: now when he concentrated he could make the four yellow beams of their headlights slide together into two. Jim Hardie was still laughing—a mean, determined laughter, and Peter knew that Jim was going to do something to somebody whether he was with him or not.
“Aw, this is great,” Hardie said, and banged the horn. Even in the dark his face was a red mask in which the eyes were slits: that was the way Jim Hardie always looked while he was doing his most outrageous stunts, and whenever Peter Barnes ever took the time really to think about it, he was grateful that in a year he was going off to college and getting away from a friend who could look as crazy as that. Jim Hardie, drunk or otherwise stimulated, was capable of frightening wildness. What was either almost admirable or even more frightening was that he never lost his physical or verbal efficiency, no matter how drunk he was. Half-drunk, like now, he never slurred his words or staggered; wholly drunk, he was a figure of pure anarchy. “We’re gonna tear things up,” he said.
“Great,” Peter said. He knew better than to protest; besides, Jim always got away with everything he did. Ever since they had met in grade school, Jim Hardie had talked his way out of trouble—he was wild, but not stupid. Even Walt Hardesty had never gotten anything on him—not even burning down the old Pugh barn because dumb Penny Draeger had told him that the Dedham girls, whom he hated, were using it as a stable.
“Might as well catch a few grins before you go to Cornell, hey?” Jim said. “Might as well catch all the grins you can get, because I hear that place is the pits.” Jim had always said that he saw no point in going to college, but he occasionally showed that he resented Peter’s acceptance, by early admission, to Cornell. Peter knew that all Jim Hardie wanted was for them to go on raising hell, a perpetual eighteen, forever.
“So is Milburn,” Peter said.
“Good point, my son. It sure as shit is. But let’s at least liven the place up, huh? So that’s what we’re going to do tonight, Priscilla. And just in case you thought you were going to dry up in the course of our adventures, your old friend James took care of that.” Hardie unzipped his coat and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. “Golden hands, you turd, golden hands.” He unscrewed the cap with one hand and drank while he drove, and his face grew red and taut. “You want a shluck?”
Peter shook his head; the smell nauseated him.
“Stupid bartender turned his back, right? Zoom. Asshole knew it was gone, too, but he was too much of a dipshit to say anything to me. You know something, Peter? It’s depressing, having competition no better than that.” He laughed, and Peter Barnes laughed too.
“Well, what are we going to do?”
Hardie passed him the bottle again, and this time he drank. The headlights swam apart and became four, and he shook his head, forcing them back to two.
“Hah! We are gonna peep, my boy, we are gonna take a look at a lady.” Hardie pulled at the bottle, chuckled, dribbled bourbon down his chin.
“Peep? Like a peeping Tom?” He let his head roll toward Hardie, who could obviously steam on to morning and through the next day, getting less predictable all the time.
“Peep. Look. Shoot a beaver. If you don’t like it, jump out of the car.”
“On a lady?”
“Well, not on a man, shitface.”
“What, hide in a bush and look through . . .”
“Not exactly. Not exactly. Someplace much better.”
“Who is it?”
“That bitch at the hotel.”
Peter was now more confused than ever. “The one you were talking about? The one from New York?”
“Yeah.” Jim swung the car around the square, passing the hotel without even bothering to look at it.
“I thought you were balling her.”
“Well, I lied, man. So what? So I exaggerate a little. Truth is, she never let me put a hand on her. Look, I’m sorry I made up a little adventure about her, okay? She made me feel like a jerk. Taking her out to Humphrey’s, giving her all my best lines—well, I want to take a look at her when she doesn’t know I’m there.”
Jim bent forward and, disregarding the road altogether for a reckless amount of time, groped under his seat. When he straightened up again, he was grinning widely and holding a long brass-trimmed telescope. “With this. Hell of a good scope, Junior—cost me sixty bucks in the Apple.”
“Mmn.” Peter lolled back against the seat. “This is the grungiest thing I ever heard of.”
A moment later, he became aware that Jim was stopping the car. He pushed himself forward and peered through the window. “Oh no. Not here.”
“This is it, babe. Move your ass.”
Hardie shoved his shoulder, and Peter opened the door and half-rolled out of the car. St. Michael’s cathedral loomed before them, huge and forbidding in the darkness.
* * *
Both boys stood shivering in their windbreakers by a side door of the cathedral. “Now what are you going to do, kick the door in? There’s a padlock on it, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Shut your trap. I work in a hotel, remember?” Hardie produced a bundle of keys on a ring from beneath his jacket. The other hand held the telescope and the bottle. “Go over there and take a piss or something while I try the keys.” He set the bottle down on the step and bent toward the lock.
Peter walked away down the long gray side of the church. From this side, it looked like a prison. He unzipped, steamingly pissed, staggered and splashed on his boots. Then he leaned against the church with one arm, stood as if deep in reflection, and quietly vomited between his feet. That too steamed. He was thinking about walking home when Jim Hardie called, “Come on, Clarabelle.” He turned around and there was Hardie grinning at him, waving the keys and the bottle at him beside an open door. He resembled one of the gargoyles on the cathedral’s façade.
“No,” he said.
“Come on. Or don’t you have hair on your balls?”
Peter trudged forward, and Hardie reached out and yanked him through the door.
Inside, the cathedral was cold, and dark with an undersea darkness. Peter stopped still, his feet on brick, feeling an immense space around him. He reached out his hands and touched chill air. Behind him, he heard Jim Hardie getting all of his things together. “Hey, where’s your goddamned hand? Here, take this.” The telescope slapped against his palm. Hardie’s footsteps went away off to the side, clicking on the brick floor.
He turned and saw Hardie’s hair flickering in the dark. “Move it. There are some stairs around here someplace . . .”
Peter took a step forward and crashed into some sort of bench.
“Quiet.”
“I can’t see you!”
“Shit. Over here.” There was a movement in the darkness: he understood that Jim was waving, and cautiously moved toward him.
“You see the stairs? We go up there. To a sort of balcony.”
“You did this before,” Peter said, amazed.
“Sure I did it before. Don’t be a dope. Sometimes I used to take Penny here and screw around in the pews. What the hell? S
he’s not Catholic either.”
Peter’s eyes were adjusting, and diffused light from a high circular window helped him to see the interior of the church. He had never been inside St. Michael’s before. It was much larger than the white suburban box in which his parents spent an hour on Easter and Christmas day. Enormous pillars divided the vast space; an altar cloth shone like a ghost. He burped and tasted vomit. The staircase Jim was pointing to was wide, of brick, and curved against the inner skin of the cathedral.
“We go up there, and we wind up right in the front, facing the square. Her room is on the square, see? With a good telescope we can look right in.”
“It’s dumb.”
“I’ll explain later, shithead. Let’s go up.” He began to go quickly up the stairs. Peter stayed behind. “Wait,” Hardie said, turning around and descending a couple of the steps. “You need a cigarette.” He grinned at Peter, pulled out his cigarettes and gave one to Peter.
“Here?”
“Shit, yes. Nobody’s going to see you.” He lit his cigarette and Peter’s. The flame of the lighter reddened the walls, made everything else disappear. The smoke helped the taste in Peter’s mouth, somehow making the vomit taste more like beer again. “Take a drag or two. See? It’s okay.” He blew out smoke, but with the flame extinguished, Peter could only hear him exhale. He drew on his own cigarette again. Hardie was right; it calmed him. “Just come on up now.” He started again, and Peter followed.
At the top, far up inside the church, they followed a narrow gallery around to the front of the church. There a window with a broad stone sill looked across the square. Jim was sitting with his legs up on the sill when Peter reached him. “Would you believe it,” he said. “I once had a beautiful moment with Penny right on this spot.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out. Peter saw him wink in the gray illumination from the window. “Drives ’em crazy. They can’t figure out who was smoking. Here. Have a drink.” He held the bottle out.
Peter shook his head and gave him the telescope. “Okay, we’re here. Now explain.” He sat on the cold sill and jammed his hands into the windbreaker’s pockets.
Hardie looked at his watch. “First, some magic. Look out the window.” Peter looked: the square, the dark buildings, bare trees. The Archer Hotel across the square had no lighted windows. “One, two, three.” On three the lights in the square switched off. “It’s two o’clock.”
“Some magic.”
“Well, if you’re so hot, turn them back on.” Hardie swung around, kneeling on the stone, and put the telescope to his eyes. “Too bad her light’s not on. But if she gets near the window I’ll be able to see her. You want a look?”
Peter took the telescope and trained it on the hotel.
“She’s in the room above the front door. Straight across and a little bit down.”
“I got the window. There’s nothing there.” Then he saw a red flash in the blackness of the room. “Wait She’s smoking.”
Hardie grabbed the telescope from him. “Right. Sitting there smoking.”
“So explain why we broke into a church to watch her smoke.”
“Well, the first day she comes to the hotel I tried to come on with her, right? She puts me down. Then a little bit later she asks me if I’ll take her out. She says she wants to see Humphrey’s Place. So I take her there, but she’s barely paying attention to me. Really pissed me off, man. I mean, why waste my time if she’s not interested, right? Well, you know why? She wanted to meet Lewis Benedikt. You know him, right? The guy who was supposed to of offed his wife over in France.”
“Spain,” said Peter, who had very complicated ideas about Lewis Benedikt.
“Who cares? Anyhow, I’m sure that’s why she asked me to take her there. So she’s hot for wife-killers.”
“I don’t think he did it.” Peter said. “He’s a good guy. I mean, I think he’s a good guy. I think that women sometimes sort of—you know—”
“Shit, I don’t care if he did it or not. Hey, she’s moving. He was silent; Peter was startled a moment later to have the telescope thrust into his hands. “Take a look. Fast.”
Peter lifted the telescope, searched for the window, scanned past the top of the A in the hotel’s sign. Back to the A; then straight up. He involuntarily moved several inches back on the sill. The woman stood at the window, smiling, holding a cigarette, looking right into his eyes. He thought he might have to vomit again. “She’s looking at us!”
“Get serious. We’re way across the square. It’s dark out. But you see what I mean.”
Peter gave the telescope back to Jim, who resumed looking at the woman’s window. “See what you mean about what?”
“Well, she’s weird. Two o’clock, and she’s in her room in the dark with all her clothes on, smoking?”
“So what?”
“Look, I lived in that hotel all my life, right? So I know how people act in hotels. Even the old farts who stay with us. They watch television, they want room service, they leave their clothes all over the room, you get bottles on cabinets and rings on the tables, they have little parties in their rooms and you have to scrub the carpet afterward. At night you can hear them talking to themselves, snoring, spitting—well, you can hear everything they do. You can hear them pissing in the sink. The walls are thick but the doors aren’t, see? If you’re out in the hall you can practically hear them brush their teeth.”
“So what?” Peter asked again.
“So she doesn’t do any of that. She never makes any noise at all. She doesn’t watch TV. Her room hardly ever needs to be cleaned. Even the bed is always made up. Strange, huh? So what does she do, sleep on top of the covers? Stay up all night?”
“Is she still there?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see.” Peter took the telescope. The woman was still standing at her window, smiling faintly as if she knew they were talking about her. Peter shivered. He gave back the telescope.
“I’ll tell you some more. I carried her suitcase up when she checked in. Now I’ve toted about a million suitcases, believe me, and that one was empty. She might have had a few newspapers in it, nothing more. Once when she was at work I looked in her closets—nothing. No clothes. But she didn’t always wear the same thing, man. So what the hell did she do, wear them in layers? Two days later I checked again, and this time the closet was full of clothes—just like she knew someone came in to look. That was the night she asked me to take her to Humphrey’s, and I figured she was going to chew me out. But no, she hardly talked to me at all. About the only thing she said was, ‘I want you to introduce me to that man.’ ‘Lewis Benedikt?’ I said, and she nodded, like she already knew his name. I took her up to him, and he ran away like a rabbit.”
“Benedikt did? What for?”
“I thought he was afraid of her.” Jim put the telescope down and lit another cigarette, looking at Peter all the time. “And you know something? I was too. There’s just something in the way she looks at you sometimes.”
“Like if she thinks you were poking around in her room.”
“Maybe. But it’s a heavy look, man. It really gets you. There’s one other thing too. If you walk along the halls at night, you can tell if people have their lights on, right? The light comes through the bottom of the door. Well, she never has her lights on. Never. But one night—well, this is crazy.”
“Tell me.”
“One night I saw some flickering underneath her door. Flickering light—like radium or something, you know? A kind of greenish light. Cold light. It wasn’t a fire or anything, and it wasn’t from our lamps.”
“That’s stupid.”
“I saw it.”
“But it doesn’t mean anything. Green light.”
“Not just green—sort of glowing. Sort of silvery. Anyhow, that’s why I wanted us to take a look at her.”
“Well, y
ou did, so let’s go home. My father’ll be angry if I’m late!”
“Hold on.” He looked through the telescope again. “I think something’s happening. She’s not at the window any more. Holy shit.” He lowered the telescope. “She opened the door and went out. I saw her go into the hall.”
“She’s coming over here!” Peter scuttled off the sill and moved down the gallery toward the stairs.
“Don’t wet your pants, Priscilla. She isn’t coming here. She couldn’t see us, remember? But if she’s going somewhere, I want to see where. You coming or not?” He was already gathering up his cigarettes, the bottle, his bundle of keys. “Come on. We gotta hurry. She’ll be out of the door in two minutes.”
“I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying!”
They pounded along the gallery and down the stairs. Hardie ran through the side aisles of the cathedral and pushed the door open, which gave stumbling Peter enough light to avoid the pillars and the edges of the pews. Out in the night, Jim clipped the padlock back on the door and ran to the car. Peter’s heart beat rapidly, in part from relief at being out of the church. Yet he was still tense. He pictured the woman he had seen in the window coming across the snowy square toward them, the wicked queen from Snow White, a woman who never turned on a light or slept in a bed and who could see him on a black night through a church window.
He realized that his head was clear. As he got into the car beside Jim, he said, “Fear sobers you up.”
“She wasn’t coming here, idiot,” Hardie said, but pulled away from the side of the cathedral out to the south side of the square so rapidly that his tires squealed. Peter looked anxiously into the long expanse of the square—white ground broken by bare trees and the dim statue—but saw no evil queen drifting toward them. The picture had been so clear in his mind that, disbelieving, he continued to scan the town square after Jim had turned into Wheat Row.
“She’s on the steps,” Jim whispered when they were nearly to the corner. Looking toward the hotel through the bare trees, Peter saw the woman calmly descending to the sidewalk. She wore the long coat, a fluttering scarf, a hat. She looked so absurdly normal in this clothing, turning out into the deserted street past two in the morning, that Peter laughed and shuddered at once.