Mystery

by Peter Straub

  “I want so much to do this right,” von Heilitz said. “If I botch this, you’ll never forgive me, and neither will I.”

  Tom opened his mouth, but could not speak—a sudden deep strangeness stopped his tongue.

  Von Heilitz looked down, trying to begin, and his forehead contorted even more alarmingly. When he spoke, what he asked astonished Tom.

  “How do you get on with Victor Pasmore?”

  The boy almost laughed. “I don’t,” he said. “Not really.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know. He sort of hates me, I guess. We’re too different.”

  “What would he say if he knew that you and I know each other?”

  “He’d carry on, I guess—he warned me away from you.” Tom felt the old man’s mixture of tension and earnestness. “What is this all about?”

  Von Heilitz looked at him, looked at the silvery grass, back up at Tom. “This is the part I have to do right.” He took a deep breath. “I met a young woman in 1945. I was much older than she was, but she appealed to me a great deal—enormously. Something happened to me that I had thought would never happen. I started by being touched by her, and as I got to know her better, I began to love her. I felt that she needed me. We had to meet secretly, because her father hated me—I was the most unsuitable man she could have chosen, but she had chosen me. In those days, I still traveled a great deal, but I started refusing cases so that I wouldn’t have to leave her.”

  “Are you saying—”

  He shook his head and walked a few steps away and looked at the forest. “She became pregnant, and didn’t tell me. I heard about a very exciting case, one that really intrigued me, and I took it. We decided to get married after I came back from the case, and to—to lessen the shock, we went out in public for a week. We attended a concert together, we went to a restaurant, we went to a party held by people who were not in our own circle, but who lived on another part of the island. It was such a relief to do things like that. When I left for my trip, I asked her to come with me, but she felt she had to stay at home to face her father. I thought she could do that. She had become much stronger, or so I thought. She wouldn’t let me deal with her father, you see—she said there would be time for that when I came back.”

  He turned to face Tom again. “When I called her, her father wouldn’t let me speak to her. I gave up the case and flew back to Mill Walk the next day, but they were gone. She had told her father everything—even that she was pregnant. Her father kept her away from Mill Walk, and in effect bought her a fiancé on the mainland. She—she had collapsed. They came back to Mill Walk, and the marriage took place in days. Her father threatened to put her in a mental hospital if I ever saw her again. Two months after the marriage, she gave birth to a son. I suppose her father bribed the Registrar to issue a false marriage certificate. From that time on, Tom, I never accepted another job that would take me off the island. She belonged to her father again—probably she always belonged to her father. But I watched that boy. Nobody would let me see him, but I watched him. I loved him.”

  “That’s why you visited me in the hospital,” Tom said. Feelings too strong to be recognized froze him to the moonlit grass. He felt as if his body were being pulled in different directions, as though ice and fire had been poured into his head.

  “I love you,” the old man said. “I’m very proud of you, and I love you, but I know I don’t deserve your love. I’m a rotten father.”

  Tom stepped toward him, and von Heilitz somehow crossed the ground between them without seeming to move. The old man tentatively put his arms around Tom, and Tom stood rigid for a second. Then something broke inside him—a layer like a shelf of rock he had lived with all his life without ever recognizing—and he began to sob. The sob seemed to come from beneath the shelf of rock, from a place that had been untouched all his life. He put his arms around von Heilitz, and felt an unbelievable lightness and vividness of being, as if the world had come streaming into him.

  “Well, at least I told you,” the old man said. “Did I botch it?”

  “Yeah, you talked too much,” Tom said.

  “I had a lot to say!”

  Tom laughed, and tears ran down his face and dampened the shoulder of von Heilitz’s coat. “I guess you did.”

  “It’s going to take both of us a while to adjust to this,” von Heilitz said. “And I want you to know that I think Victor Pasmore probably did his best—he certainly didn’t want you to grow up like me. He tried to give you what he thought was a normal boyhood.”

  Tom pulled back and looked at the old man’s face. It no longer looked masklike, but utterly familiar.

  “He did a pretty good job, actually, given the circumstances. It couldn’t have been easy for him.”

  The world had changed completely while remaining the same: the difference was that now he could understand, or at least begin to understand, details of his life that had been inexplicable except as proof of his oddness and unsuitability.

  “Oh, if you think you made a botch of it—” Tom said.

  “Let’s go inside,” von Heilitz said.

  Less than an hour later Tom was back in the lodge alone, waiting. When Lamont von Heilitz had learned that Tom wanted to return to the lodge to meet Sarah Spence, he had reluctantly let him go, with the promise that he would be waiting outside at one. Mrs. Truehart had gone to bed, and he and the old man had talked in soft voices about themselves, reliving their history. The conversation about Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz would have to wait, von Heilitz said, there were too many details to iron out, too many pieces of information to dovetail—there was a lot of it he still did not understand, and understanding would take more time than they had. “We have at least five hours in the air,” he told Tom. “Tim Truehart is flying us to Minneapolis, where we get our plane to Mill Walk. There’ll be time. When we land at David Redwing field, we should have everything worked out.”

  “Just tell me the name,” Tom had pleaded.

  Von Heilitz smiled and walked him to the door. “I want you to tell me the name.”

  So, too restless to sit down, too nervous about Jerry Hasek to turn on any lights, Tom waited for Sarah, hoping that she had not already tried to find him at the lodge. In the end, he slipped outside and waited behind an oak tree set back from the track between her lodge and his.

  He heard the sound of her feet landing softly on the beaten earth, but did not come out from behind the tree until he saw her white shirt glimmer in the darkness. Her face and arms, already tanned, looked very dark against the shirt and the darker blond of her hair. She was walking quickly, and by the time he stepped out on the track she was nearly abreast of him.

  “Oh!”

  “It’s me,” he said softly.

  “You scared me.” She came nearer, seeming to sift through the darkness, and touched the front of his shirt.

  “You scared me too. I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

  “My double life takes up a lot of time—I had to go to the White Bear with Buddy and watch him get drunk.”

  Tom remembered Buddy rubbing her back, and her own hand resting on Buddy’s. “I wish you didn’t have to have this double life of yours.”

  She stepped closer to him. “You seem so jumpy. Is it about me, or this afternoon? You shouldn’t be insecure about me, Tom, and I think Jerry and his friends ran off. Ralph couldn’t find them after dinner.”

  “Nappy got arrested,” Tom said. “Maybe they did take off. But it probably isn’t that. I’m going back to Mill Walk tonight. A lot of stuff is happening, and I just found out—well, I just learned something very important about myself. I feel kind of overloaded.”

  “Tonight? How soon tonight?”

  “In about an hour.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Then let’s go inside.”

  She put her arm around his waist, and together they began walking toward the almost invisible lodge. “How are you getting back? There aren’t any planes
at night.”

  “We’re going to Minneapolis,” he said.

  “We?”

  “Me and someone else. The Chief of Police has a little plane, and he’s taking us there.”

  She tilted her head and looked up at him as they walked along.

  “It’s Lamont von Heilitz, but Sarah, you can’t tell anybody he was here. This is serious. Nobody can know.”

  “Do you think I talk about the things you tell me?”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” he said.

  Her arms folded around him, and her face tilted toward his—made half of night and darkness. Her face filled his eyes. He kissed her, and it was like kissing the night. Sometimes she did talk about the things he told her, and sometimes he wondered, and to her these were the same, because they were both exciting. Like being engaged to be engaged; you got things both ways.

  “Are we going to go into your lodge, or are we just going to stand out here?”

  “Let’s go in,” he said.

  He led her up the steps, let her in, and locked the door behind them.

  He sensed more than saw her turning toward him. “Nobody ever locks their doors up north.”

  “Nobody but me.”

  “My father isn’t going to come looking for us.”

  “It isn’t your father I’m worried about.”

  She found his cheek with her hand. “Where are the lights? I can’t even see you in here.”

  “We don’t need lights,” he said. “Just follow me.”

  “In the dark?”

  “I like being in the dark.” He was going to say something else, but saw her teeth flash in the darkness and reached for her. His hand fell on her hip. “I just found out that I’m not who I thought I was.”

  “You never were who you thought you were.”

  “Maybe nobody was who I thought they were.”

  “Maybee-ee,” she half-sang, half-whispered, and stepped closer into his grasp. “Am I following you somewhere?”

  He took her hand and led her around the furniture toward the staircase in the dark. “Here,” he said, and put her hand on the bottom of the banister. Then he clamped his arm around her waist, and slowly took the stairs with her. In the deep blackness, it felt like falling in reverse.

  She stopped moving at the top of the stairs, and whispered, “The handrail disappeared.”

  Tom nudged her to the left, where faint light from the window showed the dark shape of a doorway. They moved together down the shadowy hallway. Tom leaned over the doorknob and noiselessly pulled the door toward him.

  There was just enough dim light in the room to reveal the bed and the table. Black leaves flattened against the window. Sarah’s arms were around his neck as soon as he closed the door. He smelled tobacco smoke in her hair.

  Certain things she said:

  Tom. Oh.

  I love this, don’t you love this?

  Say you love me.

  Yes, that. Do that some more.

  I love the way—the way you fill me up.

  Bite me. Bite me.

  Oh, God.

  Harder, yes, yes, yes …

  Let’s roll over—

  Oh! Oh! Oh!

  Sweet baby—

  Oh, my God, look at you! Put it, put it … yesss.

  Tell me you love me.

  —I love you.

  Sarah’s head lay heavy on his chest. Whatever this was, it was good enough.

  Jeanine Thielman in a dripping white dress rose up from the lake—her face dead and heavy—walking toward him through feathers of smoke—her mouth gaping open like a trap and her white tongue flapping as she struggled to speak. In his sleep Tom heard her scream, and his eyes swam open to an oily blackness. Jeanine Thielman’s drowned body lay across his, and pain muffled his head. His chest was filled with oily rags, and something foul churned in his stomach. A scream? He tried to see his bedroom. The hairs in his nose crisped with heat. All he could see through the blackness was a fuzzy red rectangle—that was a window. A rushing, roaring sound came to him at last. He shook his head, and nearly threw up. He moaned, and slid out from under the body atop his own. The movement brought his hips over the side of the narrow bed, and he tumbled to the floor. He stared at a hand dripping off the bed before his eyes, and realized that the hand belonged to Sarah Spence. The floor warmed his knees.

  Tom inhaled, and felt as though he had drawn fire into his nose. “Sarah,” he said, “wake up! Wake up!” He yanked on her arm, and pulled her body toward him. Her eyes were slits. She said, “Whuzza?”

  “The lodge is on fire,” he said, uttering something he had not known until it was spoken.

  Her eyes rolled back into her head. Tom leaned over the bed and put his hands under her arms and pulled her toward him. She fell on top of him, and flailed out with one hand, hitting the side of his head. Tom fell back. The air was cooler and clearer on the floor. He noticed that he was wearing a shirt. Hadn’t he taken his shirt off? He reached up and pulled a sheet off the bed. Then he slapped Sarah’s face, hard.

  “Shit,” she said, distinctly. Her eyes opened again, and she coughed as if she were trying to push her stomach out through her throat. “My head hurts. My chest hurts.”

  Tom roughly put the sheet around her, then snatched off the blanket and put it over her like a hood. The bottom sheet lay loose and tangled on the bed, and he reached up and snapped it toward him and tugged it up over his body and began crawling toward the door. He heard Sarah crawling after him, coughing, through the furnace noise of the fire.

  He bumped into the door and reached up. The brass knob felt warm, not hot, and he turned it. Voices and screams and the roaring noise came in on a rush of hot air. He flattened himself on the hot floor and snaked forward to look into the hallway.

  A wall of boiling black smoke rolled toward him from the back end of the house. The door of the big bedroom and half of the staircase were invisible behind or within it. Dry wood snapped, sending streamers of glowing sparks through the blackness.

  “Breathe through the sheet,” he yelled, and looked backward at Sarah. Her face peered out into the smoke from beneath the blanket, dazed and puffy, like that of a suddenly awakened child. She crawled forward another inch, tried to move the sheet up over her mouth, and collapsed under the blanket.

  Tom wound his own sheet around his neck and went back and got his arms under Sarah. The blanket slithered off when he lifted her body, and he went back down on his knees and grabbed for it and pulled it over her. The blanket seemed important, essential. He got his right arm behind her shoulders, his left under her knees, and staggered upright. His eyes burned. He carried her out of the bedroom into the hall.

  The force of the heat nearly knocked him down, and Sarah struggled in his arms, awkward in the blanket. His own sheet trailed like a shroud. Tom ran straight into the blast of heat—like a hand trying to hold him back. Burning air moved into his mouth and singed his throat and lungs, and he nearly fell again. Something banged into his hip, supporting him, and he realized it was the top of the banister. With sudden strength, he slung Sarah’s body over his shoulder. A loose flap of the blanket curled against his face. He was already moving down the stairs. Voices drifted toward him through the noise of the fire, but they were not real voices.

  Halfway down the stairs, he saw sparks and red lines of fire jumping across the sitting room. A beam thundered down from the back of the house, and a shower of sparks and individual flames flew out from the study, encased in dense smoke. Curls of smoke rose from the sofa and chairs. The rugs had begun to burn inward from the edges, and ovals of flame from the rugs were just now touching the legs of the chairs and tables and running up the walls. The curtains snapped into flame.

  He ran off the stairs and turned in a circle, unable to see any way out. He had not taken a breath in minutes, and his chest fought for air that would kill him. The front door was locked, and flames coursed across its top. A runner of fire sped across the floor, and an old chair went up like a c
andle with an audible poof! A heavy piece of wood came crashing down into the study. Flames ran across the ceiling. He went across the floor, jumping over a low distinct line of flames, sobbing with frustration. Sarah was a limp heavy weight over his shoulder. His eyebrows and eyelashes sizzled away in the heat.

  Tom reached the front door and reached for the lock with a sheet-entangled hand. The metal burned his fingers. He fumbled, then grasped it through the sheet, and turned it over, freeing the door. The sheet came away from his hand. He put his palm on the doorknob, and felt his skin adhering to the metal. He screamed, and turned the knob. A thunderous crash and an explosion happened at his back. Fire sprang across the wood directly in front of his eyes. Tom closed his eyes, ducked his head, and pushed at the door. Cold sweet air poured over him, and the fire directly behind him roared like a thousand beasts. He staggered forward into the screen door, heard it splinter and crash, and then moved across the porch on legs made of water, gulping in air. People he could not see screamed or yelled. His stomach turned itself inside out, and he vomited down the front of his body, soaking his sheet. He tasted smoke and ashes, as if he had thrown up a full ashtray. He could hear the top of the porch roaring away above him.

  Tom walked off the porch on his wobbling legs and felt the weight of Sarah magically disappear from his shoulder, as if she had flown away. He opened his eyes without seeing, stepped into empty air, and sank into someone’s arms.

  Some time later he came to in the act of vomiting again. Hands held his shoulders. The air was unnaturally hot, but cooler than he expected: how could that be? He pushed himself back from the pink and brown puddle on the earth, and his feet snagged the bottom of the blanket that encased him. His vomit stank like charred wood, and so did the contradictory air. He tilted his head and saw flames jumping into the air on the other side of a row of people in robes and pajamas. A siren screamed. He remembered screams—a siren’s? Bitsy Langenheim, in a yellow Japanese kimono with flapping sleeves and chrysanthemums the color of fire, looked over her shoulder and frowned at him. Leaves burst into flame on a tall oak tree ahead of them, and everybody backed a step toward him.