by Peter Straub
“Let’s go,” Don said, and looked hard at Peter to make sure he knew enough to keep quiet.
* * *
Using their hands, they pushed snow away from the back door to open it; and then, moving quietly in single file, they entered. To Peter the house seemed nearly as dark as it had been on the night he and Jim Hardie had broken in. Until Don had led him through the kitchen, he had not been sure that he would be able to take the first step over the threshold. Even then, he feared for a moment that he would faint or scream—the gloom in the house whispered about him.
In the hallway, Don pointed to the cellar door. He and Ricky took their knives from their pockets, and Don pulled the door open. The writer led them soundlessly down the wooden steps to the basement.
Peter knew that this and the landing would be the worst places for him. He took a quick glance under the staircase and saw only a floating spider web. Then he and Don went slowly toward the octopus-armed furnace while Ricky Hawthorne moved down the other side of the basement. The big knife felt solid and good in his hands, and even when he knew that he would soon have to look at the place where Sears had found his mother and Jim Hardie, Peter also knew that he would not pass out or yell or do anything childish: the knife seemed to pass some of its competence into him.
They reached the deeply shadowed area beside the furnace. Don stepped behind the furnace with no hesitation, and Peter followed, gripping the handle of the knife. You have to slash up, he remembered from some old adventure story. If you bring the blade down it’s easier to take away from you. He saw Ricky coming around from the other side, already shrugging.
Don lowered the axe; both men looked beneath the workbench across the near wall. Peter shivered. That was where they had been. Of course nothing was there now: he knew by the way Don and Ricky straightened up that no Gregory Bate had jumped out, ready to begin talking . . . there wouldn’t even be bloodstains. Peter sensed that the men were waiting for him to move, and he bent quickly and took a second’s glance beneath the workbench. Only shadowed cement wall, a gray cement floor. He straightened up.
“Top floor now,” Don whispered, and Ricky nodded.
When they reached the brown stain on the landing Peter clutched the knife tightly and swallowed; looked quickly back over his shoulder to make sure Bate wasn’t standing down there in a Harpo Marx wig and sunglasses, grinning up at them; and checked the next flight of stairs. Ricky Hawthorne turned to interrogate him with a kind look. He nodded—okay—and continued softly after the men.
Outside the first bedroom door at the top of the house Ricky paused and nodded. Peter hefted his knife: it might be the room the old men had dreamed about, whatever that meant, but it was also the room where he had met Freddy Robinson, the room where he might have died. Don stepped in front of Ricky and put his hand very firmly on the knob. Ricky glanced at him, set his mouth, nodded. Don turned the knob and pushed the door open. Peter saw an abrupt line of sweat run down the side of the writer’s face, as sudden as a tapped spring, and everything in him went dry. Don moved rapidly through the door, bringing the axe up as he went. Peter’s legs carried him into the room as if an invisible cord pulled him along.
He took in the bedroom in a series of snapshotlike tableaux: Don beside him, crouching, axe held up to one side; an empty bed; dusty floor; a bare wall; the window he had forced open centuries ago; Ricky Hawthorne planted beside him open-mouthed, holding out his knife as if he were trying to give it away; a wall with a small mirror. An empty bedroom.
Don lowered his axe, the tension cautiously leaving his face; Ricky Hawthorne began to prowl around the room as if he’d have to see every inch of it before he could believe that Anna Mostyn and the Bates weren’t hiding there. Peter realized that he was holding the knife slackly at his side; he realized that he was relaxed. The room was safe. And if this room was safe, then the house was too. He looked at Don, who lifted the edges of his mouth in a closed smile.
Then he felt idiotic, standing inside the door smiling at Don, and he went forward, double-checking all the places Ricky Hawthorne had already examined. Nothing under the bed. An empty closet. He went up to the far wall; a muscle jumped in the small of his back, loosening with a snap like a rubber band. Peter brushed his fingers against the wall: cold. And dirty. Gray stuff came away on his fingers. He glanced into the mirror.
Shockingly loud, Ricky Hawthorne’s voice shouted at him from across the room: “Not the mirror, Peter!”
But it was already too late. He’d been caught by a breeze from the depth of the mirror, and turned unthinkingly to look deeply into it. His own face was fading to a pale outline and beneath the outline, on the other side of it, swimming up, was the face of a woman. He did not know her, but he took her in as if he were in love: light freckles, softly brown-blond hair, soft shining eyes, the mouth bracketed by the most tender lines he’d ever seen. She touched all the tension in him, all the feeling he had, and he saw things in her face that he knew were beyond his understanding, promises and songs and betrayals he would not know for years. He felt all the shallowness and insularity of his relationships with the girls he had known and kissed and strained against, and saw that the areas in him which had gone out to women had never been enough, had never been complete. And, in a rush of tenderness, an enveloping nimbus of emotion, she was speaking to him. Beautiful Peter. You want to be one of us. You already are one of us. He did not move or speak, but he nodded and said yes. And so are your friends, Peter. You can live through all time, singing the one song which is my song—you can be with me and them forever, moving like a song. Just use the knife, Peter, use your knife, you know how, do it beautifully, raise your knife, lift your knife, raise your knife and turn—
He was bringing the knife up when the mirror went falling, still musically speaking, though he couldn’t hear it so well for the sound of a blow and a voice near his head: the mirror hit the floor and split.
“It was a trick, Peter,” Ricky Hawthorne was saying. “I should have warned you before, but I was afraid to speak,” his face and experienced eyes so near to Peter’s own face that Peter, looking down in shock, saw in surreal close-up the tight loops in the knot of Ricky’s bow tie. “Just a trick.” Peter trembled and embraced him.
When they separated, Peter bent down to the two halves of the mirror and held his palm over one of the pieces. A delicious wind (the one song which is my song) lilted up from it. He felt or sensed Ricky stiffening beside him: half of a tender mouth glimmered beneath his hand, just visible. He drove his heel into the broken mirror, then brought it down again and again, splitting the silvery glass into a scattered jigsaw puzzle.
10
Fifteen minutes later they were back in the car, traveling slowly toward the center of town, following the random, looping trail of plowed streets. “She wants to make us like Gregory and Fenny,” Peter said. “That’s what she meant. ‘Live through all time.’ She wants to turn us into those things.”
“We don’t have to let it happen,” Don said.
“You talk so brave sometimes.” Peter shook his head. “She said I already was one of them. Because when I saw Gregory turn into—you know—he said he was me. It was like Jim. Just keeping going. Never stopping. Never doubting.”
“And you liked that in Jim Hardie,” Don said, and Peter nodded, his face marked with tears. “I would too,” Don said. “Energy is always likeable.”
“But she knows I’m the weak link,” Peter said, and put his hand to his face. “She tried to use me, and it almost worked. She could use me to get you and Ricky.”
“The difference between you—between all of us—and Gregory Bate,” Don said, “is that Gregory wanted to be used. He chose it. He sought it.”
“But she almost made me choose it too,” Peter said. “God, I hate them.”
Ricky spoke from the back seat. “They’ve taken your mother, most of my friends and Don’s brother, Peter. We all hate
them. She could do to any of us what she did to you back there.”
As Ricky continued to speak comfortingly from the back, Don drove on, no longer bothering to notice the desolation caused by the snow: there would be more of it in an hour, in a day or two at the most, and then Milburn would not only be sealed off from outside but a sprung trap. One more heavy snow would see a wave of death to take half the town.
“Stop the car,” Peter said. “Stop.” He laughed. “I know where they are. The place of dreams.” His laughter was high-pitched and tremulous, spiraled out of the boy’s hysteria. “The place of dreams, didn’t she say? And what’s the only place in town that stayed open all during the storms?”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Don asked, turning around on the seat to look at Peter’s face, suddenly open and sure.
“There,” Peter said, and Don followed the line of his pointing finger.
Across the street from them, in giant red neon letters:
RIALTO
And beneath that, in smaller black letters, one last proof of Anna Mostyn’s wit:
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
11
Stella checked her watch for the sixtieth time, and then stood up to compare what it said with the clock on the mantel. The mantel clock was three minutes ahead, as it always was. Ricky and the other two had been gone somewhere between thirty and thirty-three minutes. She thought she knew how Ricky had felt on Christmas morning—that if he didn’t get out of the house and start moving, something terrible would happen. And now Stella knew that if she did not get over to the Robinson house in one hell of a hurry that Ricky would be in awful danger. He had said to give them an hour, but that was surely too long. Whatever had frightened Ricky and the rest of the Chowder Society was in that house, waiting to strike again. Stella would never have described herself as a feminist, but she had long ago seen how men mistakenly assumed that they had to do everything themselves. The Milly Sheehans locked their doors and hallucinated—or whatever—when their men died or left them. If some inexplicable catastrophe took their men, they cowered behind female passivity and waited for the reading of the will.
Ricky had simply assumed that she was not fit to join them. Even a boy was of more use than she. She looked again at her watch. Another minute had gone by.
Stella went to the downstairs closet and put on her coat: then she took it off, thinking that, after all, maybe she would not be able to help Ricky. “Nuts,” she said out loud, and pulled the coat on again and went out the door.
At least it was not snowing now: and Leon Churchill, who had gaped at her since he was a boy of twelve, had cleared some of the streets. Len Shaw from the service station, another remote-control conquest, had cleared their driveway as soon as his plow could make it to the Hawthorne house—in an unfair world, Stella had no compunctions about taking unfair advantage of her looks. She started her car easily (Len, denied Stella, had given almost erotic attention to the Volvo’s engine) and rolled down the drive out into the street.
By now Stella, having decided to go there, was in an almost frantic hurry to get to Montgomery Street. Direct access was blocked by the unplowed roads, and she put her foot down on the accelerator and followed the maze of streets Leon had opened—she groaned when she realized that she was being taken all the way over to the high school. From there she’d have to cut down School Road to Harding Lane, and then over on Lone Pine Road back the way she had started and then on Candlemaker Street past the Rialto. Working out this circuitous map in her head, Stella let the car get nearly to her normal driving speed. The drops and elevations left by Churchill’s handling of the plow jolted her against the wheel, but she took the corner into School Road quickly, not seeing in the woolly light that the level of the roadbed dropped seven inches. When the front end slammed down onto the packed snow, Stella floored the accelerator, still trying to think of the roads that could take her to Montgomery once she got off Candlemaker Street.
The rear end of the car spun out sideways, struck a metal fence and a mailbox, and then continued to revolve around so that Stella was traveling astraddle the road: in a cold panic, she wrenched at the wheel just as the car dropped into another of Churchill’s terraces. The car rolled up on its side, wheels spinning, and then dropped down, still traveling, onto the metal fence.
“Damn,” she said, and clenched her hands on the wheel and breathed deeply, forcing herself to stop trembling. She swung the door open and looked down. If she edged off the seat and let her legs dangle, she would be only three or four feet from the ground. The car could stay where it was—in any case, it had to. She’d need a tow-truck to pull it off the fence. Stella let her legs hang out of the open door, took another deep breath and pushed herself off the seat.
She landed hard, but stayed on her feet and began walking down School Road without once looking back at her car. Door open, key in the ignition, leaning against the fence like a stuffed toy—she had to get to Ricky. Ahead of her a quarter of a mile down the road, the high school was a fuzzy dark-brown cloud.
Stella had just realized that she would have to hitchhike when a blue car appeared out of the gray blur behind her. For the first time in her life, Stella Hawthorne turned to face an oncoming car and stuck out her thumb.
The blue car rolled toward her and began to brake. Stella lowered her arm as the car drew up beside her. When she bent down and looked in she saw a pudgy man bending sideways and giving her a shy welcoming look. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for her. “It’s against my principles,” he said, “but you look like you need a ride.”
Stella got in and leaned back against the seat, forgetting for the moment that this helpful little man would not be able to read her mind. Then she and the car started forward and she said, “Oh, please excuse me, I just had an accident and I’m not thinking right. I must—”
“Please, Mrs. Hawthorne,” the man said, turning his head to smile at her. “Don’t waste your breath. I assume you were going to Montgomery Street. You needn’t bother. That was all a mistake.”
“You know me?” Stella asked. “But how did you know—”
The man silenced her by reaching out with a boxer’s quickness and tightening his hand around her hair. “Soft,” he said, and his voice, formerly as shyly ingratiating as the man’s appearance, was the quietest she’d ever heard.
12
Don was the first of them to see Clark Mulligan’s body. The theater owner lay huddled on the carpet behind the candy counter—another corpse bearing the signs of the Bate brothers’ appetites. “Yes, Peter,” he said, turning away from the body, “you’re right. They’re inside.”
“Mr. Mulligan?” Peter asked quietly.
Ricky came up to the counter and looked over. “Oh, no.” He drew his knife from his coat pocket. “We still don’t know that what we’re trying to do is possible, do we? For all we know, we need wooden stakes or silver bullets or a fire or . . .”
“No,” Peter said. “We don’t need any of those things. We have everything we need right here.” The boy was very pale, and he avoided looking over the counter at Mulligan’s body, but the determination set deeply in his face was unlike anything Don had ever seen: it was fear’s negation. “That was just how they killed vampires and werewolves—what they thought were vampires and werewolves. They could have used anything.” He challenged Don directly. “Isn’t that what you think?”
“Yes,” Don said, not adding that it was one thing to offer a theory in comfortable rooms, another to stake your life on it.
“I do too,” Peter said. He held his knife, blade up, so rigidly that Don could sense the tautness of his muscles all the way up his arm. “I know they’re inside. Let’s go.”
Then Ricky spoke and simply said what was obvious. “We don’t have a choice.”
Don lifted his axe and held the head pressed flat against his chest; went quietly to the d
oors to the stalls; slipped inside. The other two followed him.
* * *
He flattened himself out against the wall in the dark theater, realizing that he had never considered that the movie might be running. Giant forms moved across the screen, bellowing, rampaging. The Bates must have killed Clark Mulligan less than an hour before the three of them had arrived. Clark had set up the film, started it as he had done every day during the storms, and come down to find Gregory and Fenny waiting for him in the lobby. Don inched sideways along the back wall, looking for a movement in the seats ahead of him.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw only the rounded backs of the seats stretching away. The heavy blade of the axe pressed against his chest. The movie’s soundtrack filled his head with shouts and cries. It played to an empty theater. And of all the spectacles to which their enemy had treated him, Don thought that this was surely the strangest—the horror on the screen, the turmoil of voices and music washing out in darkness over all those empty seats. He looked sideways toward Peter Barnes and even in the dark saw the set of his face. He pointed to the far aisle; then bent forward to see Ricky, who was only a shadow against the wall, and motioned toward the wide middle aisle. Peter immediately moved away toward the other side of the theater. Ricky went more slowly to the center, and checked Peter and Don’s position before bending down to make sure Gregory or Fenny was not hiding in the row. Then they advanced forward, checking each row in turn.
And what if Ricky finds them? Don thought. Could we get to him in time to save him? He’s exposed, way out there in the open.
But Ricky, holding his knife out to one side, moved down the wide center aisle, looking calmly on either side of him as if he were looking for a lost ticket—he was being as thorough as he had been in Anna Mostyn’s house.
Don moved in tandem with the others, straining to see into the darkness between the rows. Candy wrappers, torn paper, what looked like a winter’s worth of dust, rows of seats, some torn, some taped together, a few in every row with broken arms—and in the middle of each row, a well of darkness that wanted to suck him toward it. Above him, ahead of him, the film paraded a succession of images Don caught as disconnected frames whenever he looked up from the floor of the theater. Corpses pushing themselves up from their graves, cars rolling dangerously fast around corners, a girl’s stricken face . . . Don glanced up at the screen and thought for a moment he was seeing a film of himself in Anna Mostyn’s cellar.