Mystery

by Peter Straub

  Tom closed his book and looked across the lake. Featureless as ink blots, the empty lodges sat beneath the enormous trees. An off-duty waiter chorded on a guitar beside an open window on the third floor of the club building. Another person, probably another club waiter going home, carried a flashlight between the lodges across the lake.

  But a club waiter only had to go upstairs to go home. The flashlight bobbed along, intermittently visible as it moved between the lodges and the trees. The only other light across the lake shone in an upstairs room in the Langenheim lodge, and the moving light disappeared behind a dark, barely visible corner of this structure. Neil Langenheim went out for a walk to sober up before he went to bed, Tom thought, and read another page of Agatha Christie while most of his mind listened for Sarah Spence’s footsteps coming around the side of the lodge.

  The next time he looked up, the flashlight was bobbing along between the Harbinger and Jacobs lodges. Tom watched it flicker until it disappeared. After a time the light emerged from behind the Jacobs lodge and began bobbing in and out of sight in the long stretch of wooded land between the Jacobs lodge and Lamont von Heilitz’s. Tom set down his book and walked out on his dock. A big grey moth flew silently past his head and bumped against a window. From the end of his dock, Tom could see only the shadowy blackness of oaks and maples on von Heilitz’s property and the front end of his stubby dock in the black water, tipped with yellow light from the clubhouse. The flashlight did not appear on the marshy end of the lake, working its way around to the club. When the light did not appear for another several minutes, Tom remembered that at least one empty Eagle Lake lodge had been broken into. He tilted the face of his watch toward the lighted window. It was ten-thirty, and nearly everyone around the lake would be asleep. Tom trotted back along the dock.

  He stopped at the door to scribble Wait for me—back soon on the note for Sarah, and then moved down the steps into the dark track around the lake.

  Tom ran past the Spences’ lodge, where only the porch light burned, and then back into the darkness beneath the great trees until he came to the club. Tall lights burned in the parking lot, and in second and third-floor windows. The moon sailed through dark clouds and gave them silvery borders. Up at the narrow, treeless end of the lake, frogs croaked in the reeds. The guitarist in the club played the same chords over and over. No light shone among the trees around the Shadow’s lodge. Tom ran around the top end of the lake, and his shoes slapped noisily on the beaten earth. Moonlight gave him the curve of the path back into the trees. The guitar grew fainter. Tom trotted past the narrow road coming down through the forest from the highway, and went back beneath the trees. Von Heilitz’s lodge was only forty or fifty feet ahead, hidden by the darkness and the massive fir trees that grew down to the lake. Tom wondered what he would do if he saw someone carrying stereo equipment out of the lodge.

  He moved off the track and walked quietly across von Heilitz’s property until he came to within sight of the lodge. Moonlight streamed down between the trees. No light showed through the shuttered windows. He moved up on the porch, tried the door, and found that it was locked. Unless the burglar had left the house while Tom was rounding the top of the lake, he was still inside. There would be another door on the lake side of the lodge, and this was probably where he had entered. Tom stepped down from the porch and moved backwards toward the track to see if he could see any light moving behind the shutters in the upstairs rooms.

  The house was completely dark. Tom stepped back on the track and looked west. Here the moonlight showed a white narrow trail, as clear as a path in a dream, leading westward. Far down this trail a spreading yellow beam bobbed from tree to tree, going away from Tom.

  “Damn,” he said. He had not been quick enough to catch the burglar inside the Shadow’s lodge. Maybe the man had heard him coming and run off before getting inside. Tom began walking quickly after the figure with the flashlight.

  He passed a big dark shape that had to be the Jacobs lodge, then the Harbinger lodge. The flashlight kept moving. Tom thought he would wind up following the man all the way to the compound.

  By the time the track reached Neil Langenheim’s lodge, the trees on its right side blocked the moonlight. The beam of the flashlight bobbed and wandered, striking the grey bark of oaks, the dusty path, dense shrubbery between the trees. Tom managed to shorten the distance between himself and the man with the light. He could hear his heart beating.

  Keeping his eye on the wandering beam of the flashlight, he slipped off his loafers, and started forward again with his shoes in his hand.

  Somewhere between the Thielman lodge and Roddy Deepdale’s place, the beam of light swung to the right, illuminating a cavern formed by leaves and branches, and disappeared into the cavern.

  The cavern had to be a second path, beating deeper into the woods. He ran toward it. Small stones dug into his feet. Trees across from the Langenheim lodge closed in above his head and blocked the moonlight. The sense of open space before him disappeared. He stopped running and held his arms out before him. Then yellow light flashed between trees off to the right before him, disappeared, and flashed again. He made his way around the curve of the path before the Thielman lodge, and ran forward through an open patch of moonlight toward a gap like a dark narrow door between two maples that might have been a path. Yellow light danced like an ignis fatuus deep in the trees.

  Tom turned into the gap between the maples, and the flashlight vanished again. He made his way forward in darkness. Animals whirred and scattered, and something scampered along a branch. He stepped forward. The light flashed again. In a sudden shaft of moonlight, he saw the path curving deep into the forest before him. He went ahead on complaining feet, his arms out before him.

  A branch slapped the side of his head. His big toe struck something rough and scaly that might have been a root. Then he pushed away the branch, stepped over the obstruction, and inched forward. Another flash of light came from far ahead of him. The path kept melting away before him—spidery twigs scrabbled on his cheek, and his right foot landed on something cool and wet.

  The traces of the flashlight disappeared completely into the forest. The side of his arm brushed the rough bark of an oak. He had lost the path in the darkness. Tom turned around and began to inch his way back to the lodges.

  Twigs snatched at his clothes, soft wet ground sucked at his feet. The path had disappeared from behind him as well as in front of him. Tom put his arms up before his face and pushed forward—he hoped it was forward.

  A few panicky minutes later, he glimpsed light in front of him, and fought his way toward it. The light grew stronger and shone through gaps between the trees. Before him, the trees and underbrush came to an abrupt stop—he saw a tall spotlight and a wide plane of flat monochrome green like a golf course. It seemed entirely foreign, like nothing at Eagle Lake.

  Tom wound through a dense stand of maples, walked over damp leaves, and came out into bright light and smooth short grass. Across the lawn stood a long straight redwood building with a high deck and curtained windows. He was standing on Roddy Deepdale’s lawn.

  He walked down to the water and made his way along the shore to Roddy’s dock and padded across it in his wet socks. On the other side of the dock he walked along the shoreline, startling two birds into flight, until the trees on his grandfather’s property began. Then the light on his own deck guided him through the oaks behind his grandfather’s lodge.

  A figure moved out of the shadows at the far side of the deck. “Tom?” Sarah Spence came into the light. “Where did you go?”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t go home,” he said. He climbed up on the deck and put his arms around her. “Did your mother tell you I called?”

  She shook her head against his chest. “I didn’t go home, I just came here as soon as Buddy let me go. He wasn’t very happy with me. I had to promise I’d go out for a drive with
him tomorrow afternoon.” She pulled a broken twig off his jacket. “What have you been doing?”

  “Do you know a path that leads up into the forest, near the Thielman lodge?”

  “You tried to take a path through the woods in the middle of the night?”

  “I saw someone prowling around the lodges on the other side of the lake. There have been a lot of burglaries up here in the past few years—”

  “Besides the one at Roddy’s?”

  “You’d know about it, if Ralph Redwing let you read the local newspaper.”

  “So you followed him into the woods. Your whole life is one big excursion.”

  “So is yours,” he said. He kissed her.

  “Could we go inside?”

  “Barbara Deane’s upstairs.”

  “So what?” She took him to the door and led him inside. “Ah, a couch. That’s what we need. Or is there something better in the next room?” She opened the door and peered into the big sitting room. “Ugh. It looks like a funeral parlor.”

  “Don’t wake up Barbara Deane.”

  “What is she, anyhow? Your babysitter or your bodyguard?” Sarah closed the door and came back to Tom. “I hope she’s not your bodyguard.” She put her arms around him.

  “Did you go back to the compound after dinner?”

  She looked up at him. “Why?”

  “Did you see Jerry and his friends there?”

  “They leave Buddy and me alone, unless he wants them for something. He even sent Kip away—he wanted to make faces at me for paying too much attention to you. As far as I know, Jerry and the other guys were in their lodge. They have a whole big place all to themselves.”

  “Have you ever been inside it?”

  “No!”

  “Sometime when nobody’s around, could you get me in there?”

  She looked distinctly unhappy for a moment. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for you to come up here in the first place.”

  He sat down beside her. “Maybe we should have just stayed on the plane.”

  “Why don’t we stop talking?” Sarah said.

  The next morning Tom woke up in darkness, shocked out of sleep by a nightmare that blew apart into smoke as soon as he tried to remember it. He looked at his watch: six-thirty. He groaned and got out of bed. Millions of dots of water and a dozen trickling rivulets covered his window. The tree outside was a dark blur.

  He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, and put on a bathing suit and a sweatshirt. Downstairs, he padded out on the deck.

  For a moment only his shivers let him know that he was not still dreaming. Distinct, feathery curls of white-grey smoke rose up from every part of the lake and hung in place as if anchored to the hard blue surface of the water. A few of the curls of smoke moved very slightly, turned and leaned. Across the lake, a low fog hung in a gauzy white pane between the trunks of the trees, but this was not fog—the fog was not an endless series of frozen white dervishes held to the lake like balloons to the wrist of the balloon-man. The lake seemed to be smoldering deep within itself.

  He pulled the sweatshirt over his head and tossed it on one of the chairs. Then he sat on the end of the dock and put his legs in silky, startlingly warm water. Tom lowered himself into the lake and pushed away from the dock. Instantly he was in another world. The ripple of his body cutting through the silken water was the loudest sound on earth.

  White-grey feathers bent around him, slid through him, flattened against his eyes, swam through his skin and re-formed themselves when he was gone. He lifted his arm from the water, and saw the smoke drifting from his flesh. He swam into the shallow water near the dock and stood up. Curls of mist clung to his body like clouds. Dark air chilled his puckering skin. He climbed back up on the dock and the feathery little clouds dissipated against or into his body. A trace of red lay over the dark trees on the eastern horizon.

  In jeans, a shirt, and a warm sweater, he got back to the deck in time to see the top of the red sun move up over the trees. The curls of mist on the lake vanished as the light touched them, and the surface of the water turned transparent, showing the dark blue beneath, like a second layer of skin. Separate rays of light struck the docks, and sparkled off the windows of the club and Sarah’s lodge. At the north end of the lake, reeds glowed in the early sun. Tom moved down off the dock when the sun had cleared the tops of the trees on the horizon.

  He walked around the side of the lodge and began moving north on the track, feeling as if he were seeing everything for the first time. The world looked impossibly clean, cleanly opened to reveal itself. Even the dust on the path sparkled with a secret freshness the day would gradually conceal. Past the compound, past the old cars against a whitewashed fence at the club; around the north end and the narrow marsh, where the reeds thrust up out of the ooze and a hundred silvery, nearly transparent fish the size of his little finger darted away in unison when his blunt shadow fell among them.

  Tom walked through the trees to Lamont von Heilitz’s lodge and looked for broken windows or scratches on the locks, any sign of actual or attempted break-in. The doors were locked, and every shutter was locked tight. The intruder must have heard him coming and fled up the path into the woods.

  Tom walked past the shuttered lodges. Raccoons had tipped over a garbage can outside the Langenheims’ place. Cigarette butts, beer cans, and vodka bottles lay strewn over pale wild grass at the foot of a forty-foot oak.

  He cut toward the Thielman lodge, thinking about Arthur Thielman walking his dogs down to see the Shadow the day after his wife had been killed. He wished that he could see it—see what had happened on the dock in front of this lodge on that night. He went around to the front of the empty lodge, and saw the green space Roddy Deepdale had created around his own lodge. In those days only untouched land had stood between his grandfather’s place and the Thielmans’. He jumped up on the deck and scuffed at dry leaves and a layer of grit. Across the lake, a stooped white-haired man in a white jacket moved across a window at the front of the club, setting up a table for breakfast.

  Two deer, one of them a buck with lacy antlers, moved on delicate legs out of the trees on the far side of the compound and picked their way across soft ground between the docks to the edge of the water. The doe leaned forward, bent her front legs at the knees, and knelt to drink. The stag walked into the water and saw Tom standing on the dock across the lake. Tom did not move. Ankle-deep in the water, the stag watched him. Finally he lowered his head and drank. The fuzz on the tips of his antlers glowed a soft pinkish-brown. Tom saw the old waiter leaning against the window, watching the deer lap at the water. When they had finished they moved out of the water and drifted back into the trees. Tom left the dock and walked back around the side of the lodge.

  A little way past the Thielman lodge, the trees on the right side of the track separated around a narrow path that led straight between the oaks and maples for something like twenty or thirty feet, then slanted west into deep forest. Leaf mulch and brown dry needles covered the surface of the path. Tom looked back along the track curving behind the lodges, and stepped on the path.

  The lake disappeared behind him.

  He came to the curve in the path, and went deeper into the woods. Dense woodland stretched away on both sides. Pale, almost white light slanted down through the canopy and touched leaning trunks and brushy deadfalls. Here and there white fog still curled in the low places. The path led down a gorge, a basinlike valley in the forest, up through a stand of walnut trees with nuts like tough green baseballs, and back to level ground.

  Far off to his right, so deep in the woods that it seemed a part of them, a grey-green shack materialized between the trunks of oak trees and disappeared into the background as soon as Tom took another step. On the other side of the path, a shack made of black boards, with a small black chimney pipe jutting from its roof, was half-hidden behind the thick trunks of walnut trees.

  Something moved in the woods to his right. Tom snapped his head si
deways. Light diffused through massive trunks, and trees felled by lightning or disease slanted grey through the brown and green. He moved forward, and again sensed movement on his right. This time he saw the head of a doe lifting toward him from beneath the diagonal line of a dead branch; then the rest of the doe came into focus, and she bounded off through a clear patch of sunlight. The doe disappeared behind a wall of fir trees. On the far side of the patch of sunlight, the white splash of a face appeared against a dark background of leaves, then disappeared like the doe.

  Tom stopped moving.

  The doe snapped branches as it ran deeper into the woods.

  Tom stepped forward again, looked around, and saw only the patch of sunlight and the grey diagonal of the fallen branch.

  The path widened before him. Pale morning light fell on the long grass of a clearing ahead and on the pine trees behind it. On the other side of the clearing, the path would wind through oaks and pines until it came to a road—maybe the highway between Grand Forks and Eagle Lake, maybe some deserted county trunk road. It was a long way to carry stolen goods, but nobody could say it wasn’t secluded.

  This theory collapsed halfway to the clearing, when the stone and glass side of a house appeared. He walked nearer. More of the house came into view. Additions of large mortared stone with windows in thick stone embrasures stood on either side of a small brown shack with a wooden stoop before its front door. A big stone chimney came out of the slanting roof of the right side. Bright pansies and geraniums grew around the front of the house.

  Just as Tom decided to walk back to the lake, something stirred in the woods beside him. He looked over his shoulder. A burly, black-haired man in a red plaid shirt stood twenty yards away beside an oak. The oak was not larger around than the man. He crossed his arms over his chest and regarded Tom.