by Peter Straub
“I know,” Don said. “I thought—”
“Wait. Let me finish. Can’t you see how puny we’d look to them? We live—what? A miserable sixty-seventy years, maybe. They’d live for centuries—for a century of centuries. Becoming anything they want to become. Our lives are made by accident, by coincidence, by a blind combination of genes—they make themselves by will. They would detest us. And they’d be right. Next to them, we would be detestable.”
“No,” Don said. “That’s all wrong. They’re savage and cruel, they live on death . . .” He felt as though he were about to be sick. “You can’t say those things.”
“Your problem is that you’re still caught up in the story you were telling yourself—even though you’re out of it, that story is still hanging around in your memory somewhere. You know, your doctor told me he never saw anything like it—when you flipped, you flipped into a story. You’d be walking down the hall in the hospital, and you’d be carrying on a conversation with people who weren’t there. You were all wrapped up in some sort of plot. Impressed the hell out of the doctors. You’d be talking to them, and they’d talk back, but you answered back like you were talking to some guy named Sears or another guy named Ricky . . .” David smiled and shook his head.
“What happened at the end of the story?” Don asked.
“Huh?”
“What happened at the end of the story?” Don set down his fork and leaned forward, staring at his brother’s bland face.
“They didn’t let you get there,” David said. “They were afraid to—looked like you were setting yourself up to get killed. See, that was part of your problem. You invented these fantastic beautiful creatures, and then you ‘wrote’ yourself into the story as their enemy. But nothing like that could ever be defeated. No matter how hard you tried, they’d always win in the end.”
“No, that isn’t . . .” Don said. That wasn’t correct: he could only remember the vague outlines of the “story” David was talking about, but he was sure David was wrong.
“Your doctors said it was the most interesting way for a novelist to commit suicide they ever heard of. So they couldn’t let you push it to the end, do you see? They had to bring you out of it.”
Don sat as if in freezing wind.
* * *
“Hello and welcome back,” Sears said. “We’ve all had that dream, but I imagine you must be the first to have it at one of our meetings.”
“What?” said Ricky, snapping up his head and seeing before him Sears’s beloved library: the glass-fronted bookcases, the leather chairs drawn into a circle, the dark windows. Immediately across from him, Sears drew on his cigar and gazed at him with what looked like mild annoyance. Lewis and John, holding their whiskey glasses and dressed like Sears in black tie, appeared to be more embarrassed than annoyed.
“What dream?” Ricky said, and shook his head. He too was in evening dress: by the cigar, by the quality of the darkness, by a thousand familiar details, he knew they were at the last stage of a Chowder Society meeting.
“You dozed off,” John said. “Right after you finished your story.”
“Story?”
“And then,” Sears said, “you looked right at me and said, ‘You’re dead.’”
“Oh. The nightmare,” Ricky said. “Oh, yes. Did I really? My goodness, I’m cold.”
“At our age, we all have poor circulation,” said Dr. Jaffrey.
“What’s the date?”
“You really were out,” Sears said, lifting his eyebrows. “It’s the ninth of October.”
“And is Don here? Where is Don?” Ricky looked frantically around the library, as if Edward’s nephew might be hiding under a chair.
“Really, Ricky,” Sears grumped. “We just voted on writing to him, if you remember. It is extremely unlikely that he should appear before the letter is written.”
“We have to tell him about Eva Galli,” Ricky said, remembering the vote. “It’s imperative.”
John smiled thinly, and Lewis leaned back in his chair, looking at Ricky as if he thought he’d lost his mind.
“You do make the most amazing reversals,” Sears said. “Gentlemen, since our friend here evidently needs his sleep, perhaps we’d better call it a night.”
“Sears,” Ricky said, suddenly galvanized by another memory.
“Yes, Ricky?”
“Next time we meet—when we meet at John’s house—don’t tell the story you have in mind. You cannot tell that story. It will have the most appalling consequences.”
“Stay here a moment, Ricky,” Sears ordered, and showed the other two men out of the room.
He came back carrying the freshly fired-up cigar and a bottle. “You seem to need a drink. It must have been quite a dream.”
“Was I out long?” He could hear, down on the street, the sound of Lewis trying to start up the Morgan.
“Ten minutes. No longer. Now what was that about my story for next time?”
Ricky opened his mouth, tried to recapture what had been so important only minutes before, and realized that he must look very foolish. “I don’t know any more. Something about Eva Galli.”
“I can promise you I was not going to speak about that. I don’t imagine any of us ever shall, and I think that really is for the best, don’t you?”
“No. No. We have to—” Ricky realized he was going to mention Donald Wanderley again, and blushed. “I suppose it must have been part of my dream. Is my window open, Sears? I’m actually freezing. And I feel so tired. I can’t imagine what . . .”
“Age. No more or less. We’re coming to the end of our span, Ricky. All of us. We’ve lived long enough, haven’t we?”
Ricky shook his head.
“John’s dying already. You can see it in his face, can’t you?”
“Yes, I thought I saw . . .” Ricky said, thinking back to a time at the start of the meeting—a plane of darkness sliding across John Jaffrey’s forehead—which now seemed to have happened years before.
“Death. That’s what you thought you saw. It’s true, my old friend.” Sears smiled benignly at him. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and you mentioning Eva Galli—well, it stirs it all up. I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking.” Sears drew on the cigar and leaned massively forward. “I think Edward did not die of natural causes. I think he was given a vision of such terrible and unearthly beauty that the shock to his poor mortal system killed him. I think we have been skirting the edges of that beauty in our stories for a year.”
“No, not beauty,” Ricky said. “Something obscene—something terrible.”
“Hold it. I want you to consider the possibility of another race of beings—powerful, all-knowing, beautiful beings. If they existed, they would detest us. We would be cattle compared to them. They’d live for centuries—for a century of centuries, so that you and I would look like children to them. They would not be bound by accident, coincidence or a blind combination of genes. They’d be right to detest us: beside them, we would be detestable.” Sears stood up, put down his glass, and began to pace. “Eva Galli. That was where we missed our chance. Ricky, we could have seen things worth our pathetic lives to see.”
“They’re even vainer than we are, Sears,” Ricky said. “Oh. Now I remember. The Bates. That’s the story you can’t tell.”
“Oh, that’s all finished now,” Sears said. “Everything is finished now.” He walked to Ricky, and leaned on his chair looking down at him. “I fear that from now on all of us are—is it hors commerce or de combat?”
“In your case, I am sure it is hors de combat,” Ricky said, remembering his lines. He felt terribly ill, shivering, he felt the onslaught of the worst cold of his life: it lay like smoke in his lungs and weighted his arms like a winter’s worth of snow.
Sears leaned toward him. “That’s true for all of us, Ricky. But still, it was quit
e a journey, wasn’t it?” Sears plugged the cigar in his mouth and reached out to palp Ricky’s neck. “I thought I saw swollen glands. You’ll be lucky not to die of pneumonia.” Sears’s massive hand circled Ricky’s throat.
Helplessly, Ricky sneezed.
* * *
“Pay attention to me,” David said. “Do you understand the importance of this? You put yourself in a position where the only logical end is your death. So although you consciously imagined these beings you invented as evil, unconsciously you saw that they were superior. That’s why your ‘story’ was so dangerous. Unconsciously, according to your doctor, you saw that they were going to kill you. You invented something so superior to yourself that you wanted to give your life to them. That’s dangerous stuff, kid.”
Don shook his head.
David put down his knife and fork. “Let’s try an experiment. I can prove to you that you want to live. Okay?”
“I know I want to live.” He looked across the indisputably real street and saw the indisputably real woman walking up the other side, still tugged along by the sheepdog. No: not walking up the other side, he realized, but coming down it, as she had just come down his side. It was like a film in which the same extra is shown in different scenes, in different roles, jarring you with his presence, reminding you that this is only invention. Still, there she was, moving briskly behind the handsome dog, not an invention but part of the street.
“I’ll prove it. I’m going to put my hands around your throat and choke you. When you want me to stop, just say stop.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
David reached quickly across the table and gripped his throat. “Stop,” he said. David tightened his muscles, and went up off his chair, knocking the table aside. The carafe toppled and bubbled wine over the tablecloth. None of the other diners appeared to notice, but went on eating and talking in their indisputably real way, indisputably forking food into their indisputably real mouths. “Stop,” he tried to say, but now David’s hands were bearing down too hard, and he could not form the word. David’s face was that of a man writing a report or casting a fly: he knocked the table over with his hip.
Then David’s face was not his, but the head of an antlered stag or the huge head of an owl or both of those.
Shockingly near, a man explosively sneezed.
* * *
“Hello, Peter. So you want to look behind the scenes.” Clark Mulligan backed away from the door of the projection room, inviting him in. “Nice of you to bring him up, Mrs. Barnes. I don’t get much company up here. What’s the matter? You look sort of confused, Pete.”
Peter opened his mouth, closed it again. “I—”
“You could thank him, Peter,” his mother said dryly.
“That movie probably shook him up,” Mulligan said. “It has that effect on people. I’ve seen it hundreds of times by now, but it still gets me. That’s all it was, Pete. A movie.”
“A movie?” Peter said. “No—we were coming up the stairs . . .” He held out his hand and saw the Bowie knife.
“That’s where the reel ended. Your mother said you were interested in seeing how it all looks from up here. Since you’re the only people in the theater, there’s no harm in that, is there?”
“Peter, what in the world are you doing with that knife?” his mother asked. “Give it to me immediately.”
“No, I have to—ah. I have to—” Peter stepped away from his mother and looked confusedly around at the little projection booth. A corduroy coat draped from a hook; a calendar, a mimeographed piece of paper had been tacked to the rear wall. It was as cold as if Mulligan were showing the movie in the street.
“You’d better settle down, Pete,” Mulligan said. “Now here you can see our projectors, the last reel is all ready to go in this one, see, I get them all set up beforehand and when a little mark shows up in a couple of the frames I know I have so many seconds to start up the—”
“What happens at the end?” Peter asked. “I can’t get straight in my head just what’s—”
“Oh, they all die, of course,” Mulligan said. “There’s no other way for it to end, is there? When you compare them with what they’re fighting, they really do seem sort of pathetic, don’t they? They’re just accidental little people, after all, and what they’re fighting is—well, splendid, after all. You can watch the ending up here with me, if you’d like. Is that okay with you, Mrs. Barnes?”
“He’d better,” Christina said, sidling toward him. “He went into some kind of trance down there. Give me that knife, Peter.”
Peter put the knife behind his back.
“Oh, he’ll see it soon enough, Mrs. Barnes,” Mulligan said, and flicked up a switch on the second projector.
“See what?” Peter asked. “I’m freezing to death.”
“The heaters are broken. I’m liable to get chilblains up here. See what? Well, the two men are killed first, of course, and then . . . but watch it for yourself.”
Peter bent forward to look through the slot in the wall, and there was the empty interior of the Rialto, there the hollow beam of light widening toward the screen . . .
Beside him, an unseen Ricky Hawthorne loudly sneezed, and he was aware of everything shifting again, the walls of the projection booth seemed to waver, he saw something recoil in disgust, something with the huge head of an animal recoiling as if Ricky had spat on it, and then Clark Mulligan locked back into place again, saying, “Film has a rough spot there, I guess, it’s okay now,” but his voice was trembling, and his mother was saying, “Give me the knife, Peter.”
“It’s all a trick,” he said. “It’s another slimy trick.”
“Peter, don’t be rude,” his mother said.
Clark Mulligan looked toward him with concern and puzzlement on his face, and Peter, remembering the advice from some old adventure story, brought the Bowie knife up into Mulligan’s bulging stomach. His mother screamed, already beginning to melt like everything around him, and Peter locked both hands on the bone handle and levered the knife up. He cried out in sorrow and misery, and Mulligan fell back into the projectors, knocking them off their stands.
19
“Oh, Sears,” Ricky said—gasped. His throat blazed. “Oh, my poor friends.” For a moment they had all been alive again, and their fragile world had been whole: the double loss of his friends and their comfortable world reverberated through the whole of his being, and tears burned in his eyes.
“Look, Ricky,” he heard Don saying, and the voice was compelling enough to make him turn his head. When he saw what was happening on the floor of the apartment, he sat up. “Peter did it,” he heard Don say beside him.
The boy was standing six feet away from them, his eyes intent on the body of the woman lying some little way from them. Don was on his knees, rubbing his neck. Ricky met Don’s eyes, saw both horror and pain there, and then both of them looked back down at Anna Mostyn.
For a moment she looked as she had when he had first seen her in the reception room at Wheat Row: a young woman with a lovely fox face and dark hair: even now the old man saw the real intelligence and false humanity in her oval face. Her hand clutched the bone handle protruding out just below her breastbone; dark blood already poured from the long wound. The woman thrashed on the floor, contorting her face; her eyes fluttered. Random flakes of snow whirled in through the open window and settled down on each of them.
Anna Mostyn’s eyes flew open, and Ricky braced himself, thinking she would say something; but the lovely eyes drifted out of focus, not seeming to recognize any of the men. A wave of blood gushed from her wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across her body and touching the knees of the two men; she half-smiled, and a third wave rushed across her body and pooled on the floor.
For an instant only, as if the corpse of Anna Mostyn were a film, a photographic transparency over another substance, the three of them saw
a writhing life through the dead woman’s skin—no simple stag or owl, no human or animal body, but a mouth opened beneath Anna Mostyn’s mouth and a body constrained within Anna Mostyn’s bloody clothing moved with ferocious life: it was as swirling and varied as an oil slick, and it angrily flashed out at them for the moment it was visible; then it blackened and faded, and only the dead woman lay on the floor.
In the next second, the color of her face died to chalky white and her limbs curled inward, forced by a wind the others could not feel. The dead woman drew up like a sheet of paper tossed on a fire, drawing in, her entire body curling inward like her arms and legs. She fluttered and shrank before them, becoming half her size, then a quarter of her size, no longer anything human, merely a piece of tortured flesh curling and shrinking before them, hurtled and buffeted by an unfelt wind.
The tenement room itself seemed to exhale, releasing a surprisingly human sigh through whatever was left of her throat. A green light flashed about them, flaring like a thousand matches: and the remainder of Anna Mostyn’s body fluttered once more and disappeared into itself. Ricky, by now leaning forward on his hands and knees, saw how the particles of snow falling where the body had been spun around in a vortex and followed it into oblivion.
Thirteen blocks away, the house across the street from John Jaffrey’s on Montgomery Street expoded into itself. Milly Sheehan heard the crack of the explosion, and when she rushed to her front window she was in time to see the façade of Eva Galli’s house fold inward like cardboard, and then break up into separate bricks flying inward to the fire already roaring up through the center of the house.
* * *
“The lynx,” Ricky breathed. Don took his eyes from the spot on the floor where Anna Mostyn had dwindled into vacant air, and saw a sparrow sitting on the sill of the open window. The little bird cocked its head at the three of them, Don and Ricky already beginning to move across the floor toward it, Peter still gazing at the empty floor, and then the sparrow lifted itself off the sill and flew out through the window.