by Peter Straub
“I think it would be better if we talked in private,” I said. “What about your flat?”
For twenty years he had lived in the same single room above the Atlantis Bookshop. He was reluctant to take me there, I could see, though it was only next door, and I had been there before. At first he tried to pretend it would be difficult to get in. “The shop’s closed,” he said. “We’d have to use the other door.” Then he admitted:
“I can’t go back there for an hour or two. I did something last night that means it may not be safe.”
He grinned.
“You know the sort of thing I mean,” he said.
I couldn’t get him to explain further. The cuts on his wrists made me remember how panicky Ann and Lucas had been when I last spoke to them. All at once I was determined to see inside the room.
“If you don’t want to go back there for a bit,” I suggested, “we could always talk in the Museum.”
Researching in the manuscript collection one afternoon a year before, he had turned a page of Jean de Wavrin’s Chroniques d’Angleterre—that oblique history no complete version of which is known—and come upon a miniature depicting in strange, unreal greens and blues the coronation procession of Richard Coeur de Lion. Part of it had moved; which part, he would never say. “Why, if it is a coronation,” he had written almost plaintively to me at the time, “are these four men carrying a coffin? And who is walking there under the awning—with the bishops not with them?” After that he had avoided the building as much as possible, though he could always see its tall iron railings at the end of the street. He had begun, he told me, to doubt the authenticity of some of the items in the medieval collection. In fact, he was frightened of them.
“It would be quieter there,” I insisted.
He didn’t respond but sat hunched over the Church Times, staring into the street with his hands clamped violently together in front of him. I could see him thinking.
“That fucking pile of shit!” he said eventually.
He got to his feet.
“Come on, then. It’s probably cleared out by now, anyway.”
Rain dripped from the blue-and-gold front of the Atlantis. There was a faded notice, CLOSED FOR COMPLETE REFURBISHMENT. The window display had been taken down, but they had left a few books on a shelf for the look of things. I could make out, through the condensation on the plate glass, de Vries’s classic Dictionary of Symbols & Imagery. When I pointed it out to Sprake, he only stared at me contemptuously. He fumbled with his key. Inside, the shop smelled of cut timber, new plaster, paint, but this gave way on the stairs to an odor of cooking. Sprake’s bed-sitter, which was quite large and on the top floor, had uncurtained sash windows on opposing walls. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem well lit.
From one window you could see the sodden facades of Museum Street, bright green deposits on the ledges, stucco scrolls and garlands gray with pigeon dung; out of the other, part of the blackened clock tower of St. George’s Bloomsbury, a reproduction of the tomb of Mausoleus lowering up against the racing clouds.
“I once heard that clock strike twenty-one,” said Sprake.
“I can believe that,” I said, though I didn’t. “Do you think I could have some tea?”
He was silent for a minute. Then he laughed.
“I’m not going to help them,” he said. “You know that. I wouldn’t be allowed to. What you do in the Pleroma is irretrievable.”
“All that was over and done with twenty years ago, Ann.”
“I know. I know that. But—”
She stopped suddenly, and then went on in a muffled voice, “Will you just come here a minute? Just for a minute?”
The house, like many in the Pennines, had been built right into the side of the valley. A near vertical bank of earth, cut to accommodate it, was held back by a dry-stone revetment twenty or thirty feet high, black with damp even in the middle of July, dusted with lichen and tufted with fern like a cliff. In December, the water streamed down the revetment day after day and, collecting in a stone trough underneath, made a sound like a tap left running in the night. Along the back of the house ran a passage hardly two feet wide, full of broken roof slates and other rubbish. It was a dismal place.
“You’re all right,” I told Ann, who was staring, puzzled, into the gathering dark, her head on one side and the tea towel held up to her mouth as if she thought she might be sick.
“It knows who we are,” she whispered. “Despite the precautions, it always remembers us.”
She shuddered, pulled herself away from the window, and began pouring water so clumsily into the coffee filter that I put my arm around her shoulders and said, “Look, you’d better go and sit down before you scald yourself. I’ll finish this, and then you can tell me what’s the matter.”
She hesitated.
“Come on,” I said. “All right?”
“All right.”
She went into the living room and sat down heavily. One of the cats ran into the kitchen and looked up at me. “Don’t give them milk,” she called. “They had it this morning.”
“How are you feeling?” I asked. “In yourself, I mean?”
“About how you’d expect.” She had taken some propranolol, she said, but it never seemed to help much. “It shortens the headaches, I suppose.” As a side effect, though, it made her feel so tired. “It slows my heartbeat down. I can feel it slow right down.” She watched the steam rising from her coffee cup, first slowly, and then with a rapid, plaiting motion as it was caught by some tiny draft. Eddies form and break to the same rhythm on the surface of a deep, smooth river. A slow coil, a sudden whirl. What was tranquil is revealed as a mass of complications that can be resolved only as motion.
I remembered when I had first met her: she was twenty then, a small, excitable, attractive girl who wore moss-colored jersey dresses to show off her waist and hips. Later, fear coarsened her. With the divorce a few gray streaks appeared in her blond bell of hair, and she chopped it raggedly off and dyed it black. She drew in on herself. Her body broadened into a kind of dogged, muscular heaviness. Even her hands and feet seemed to become bigger.
“You’re old before you know it,” she would say. “Before you know it.” Separated from Lucas, she was easily chafed by her surroundings; moved every six months or so, although never very far, and always to the same sort of dilapidated, drearily furnished cottage, though you suspected that she was looking for precisely the things that made her nervous and ill; and tried to keep down to fifty cigarettes a day.
“Why did Sprake never help us?” she asked me. “You must know.”
Sprake fished two cups out of a plastic washing-up bowl and put tea bags in them.
“Don’t tell me you’re frightened too!” he said. “I expected more from you.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure whether I was afraid or not. I’m not sure today. The tea, when it came, had a distinctly greasy aftertaste, as if somehow he had fried it. I made myself drink half while Sprake watched me cynically.
“You ought to sit down,” he said. “You’re worn-out.” When I refused, he shrugged and went on as if we were still at the Tivoli. “Nobody tricked them, or tried to pretend it would be easy. If you get anything out of an experiment like that, it’s by keeping your head and taking your chance. If you try to move cautiously, you may never be allowed to move at all.”
He looked thoughtful.
“I’ve seen what happens to people who lose their nerve.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“They were hardly recognizable, some of them.”
I put the teacup down.
“I don’t want to know,” I said.
“I bet you don’t.”
He smiled to himself.
“Oh, they were still alive,” he said softly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“You talked us into this,” I reminded him.
“You talked yourselves into it.”
Most of the light from the street was
absorbed as soon as it entered the room, by the dull green wallpaper and sticky-looking yellow veneer of the furniture. The rest leaked eventually into the litter on the floor, pages of crumpled and partly burned typescript, hair clippings, broken chalks that had been used the night before to draw something on the flaking lino: among this stuff, it died. Though I knew Sprake was playing some sort of game with me, I couldn’t see what it was; I couldn’t make the effort. In the end, he had to make it for me.
When I said from the door, “You’ll get sick of all this mess one day,” he only grinned, nodded, and advised me:
“Come back when you know what you want. Get rid of Lucas Fisher, he’s an amateur. Bring the girl if you must.”
“Fuck off, Sprake.”
He let me find my own way back down to the street.
That night I had to tell Lucas, “We aren’t going to be hearing from Sprake again.”
“Christ,” he said, and for a second I thought he was going to cry. “Ann feels so ill,” he whispered. “What did he say?”
“Forget him. He could never have helped us.”
“Ann and I are getting married,” Lucas said in a rush.
What could I have done? I knew as well as he did that they were doing it only out of a need for comfort. Nothing would be gained by making them admit it. Besides, I was so tired by then, I could hardly stand. Some kind of visual fault, a neon zigzag like a bright little flight of stairs, kept showing up in my left eye. So I congratulated Lucas and, as soon as I could, began thinking about something else.
“Sprake’s terrified of the British Museum,” I said. “In a way, I sympathize with him.”
As a child I had hated it too. All the conversations, every echo of a voice or a footstep or a rustle of clothes, gathered up in its high ceilings in a kind of undifferentiated rumble and sigh—the blurred and melted remains of meaning—which made you feel as if you had been abandoned in a derelict swimming bath. Later, when I was a teenager, it was the vast, shapeless heads in Room 25 that frightened me, the vagueness of the inscriptions. I saw clearly what was there—“Red sandstone head of a king”…“Red granite head from a colossal figure of a king”—but what was I looking at? The faceless wooden figure of Ramses emerged perpetually from an alcove near the lavatory door, a Ramses who had to support himself with a stick—split, syphilitic, worm-eaten by his passage through the world, but still condemned to struggle helplessly on.
“We want to go and live up north,” Lucas said. “Away from all this.”
As the afternoon wore on, Ann became steadily more disturbed. “Listen,” she would ask me, “is that someone in the passage? You can always tell me the truth.” After she had promised several times in a vague way—“I can’t send you out without anything to eat. I’ll cook us something in a minute, if you’ll make some more coffee”—I realized she was frightened to go back into the kitchen. “No matter how much coffee I drink,” she explained, “my throat is dry. It’s all that smoking.” She returned often to the theme of age. She had always hated to feel old. “You comb your hair in the mornings and it’s just another ten years gone, every loose hair, every bit of dandruff, like a lot of old snapshots showering down.” She shook her head and said, as if the connection would be quite clear to me:
“We moved around a lot after university. It wasn’t that I couldn’t settle, more that I had to leave something behind every so often, as a sort of sacrifice. If I liked a job I was in, I would always give it up. Poor old Lucas!”
She laughed.
“Do you ever feel like that?” She made a face. “I don’t suppose you do,” she said. “I remember the first house we lived in, over near Dunford Bridge. It was huge, and falling apart inside. It was always on the market until we bought it. Everyone who’d had it before us had tried some new way of dividing it up to make it livable. They put in a new staircase or knocked two rooms together. They’d abandoned parts of it because they couldn’t afford to heat it all. Then they’d buggered off before anything was finished and left it to the next one—”
She broke off suddenly.
“I could never keep it tidy,” she said.
“Lucas always loved it.”
“Does he say that? You don’t want to pay too much attention to him,” she warned me. “The garden was so full of builders’ rubbish, we could never grow anything. And the winters!” She shuddered. “Well, you know what it’s like out there. The rooms reeked of Calor gas; before he’d been there a week, Lucas had every kind of portable heater you could think of. I hated the cold, but never as much as he did.”
With an amused tenderness she chided him—“Lucas, Lucas, Lucas”—as if he were in the room there with us. “How you hated it, and how untidy you were!”
By now it was dark outside, but the younger cat was still staring out into the grayish, sleety well of the garden, beyond which you could just make out—as a swelling line of shadow with low clouds racing over it—the edge of the moor. Ann kept asking the cat what it could see. “There are children buried all over the moor,” she told the cat. Eventually she got up with a sigh and pushed it onto the floor. “That’s where cats belong. Cats belong on the floor.” Some paper flowers were knocked down; stooping to gather them up, she said, “If there is a God, a real one, He gave up long ago. He isn’t so much bitter as apathetic.” She winced, held her hands up to her eyes.
“You don’t mind if I turn the main light off?” And then: “He’s filtered away into everything, so that now there’s only this infinitely thin, stretched thing, presenting itself in every atom, so tired it can’t go on, so haggard you can only feel sorry for it and its mistakes. That’s the real God. What we saw is something that’s taken its place.”
“What did we see, Ann?”
She stared at me.
“You know, I was never sure what Lucas thought he wanted from me.” The dull yellow light of a table lamp fell across the left side of her face. She was lighting cigarettes almost constantly, stubbing them out, half smoked, into the nest of old ends that had accumulated in the saucer of her cup. “Can you imagine? In all those years I never knew what he wanted from me.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment or two. She looked at me, puzzled, and said, “I don’t feel he ever loved me.” She buried her face in her hands. I got up, with some idea of comforting her. Without warning, she lurched out of her chair and in a groping, desperately confused manner took a few steps toward me. There, in the middle of the room, she stumbled into a low fretwork table someone had brought back from a visit to Kashmir twenty years before. Two or three paperback books and a vase of anemones went flying. The anemones were blowsy, past their best. She looked down at The Last of Cheri and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, strewn with great blue and red petals like dirty tissue paper; she touched them thoughtfully with her toe. The smell of the fetid flower water made her retch.
“Oh, dear,” she murmured. “Whatever shall we do, Lucas?”
“I’m not Lucas,” I said gently. “Go and sit down, Ann.”
While I was gathering the books and wiping their covers, she must have overcome her fear of the kitchen—or, I thought later, simply forgotten it—because I heard her rummaging about for the dustpan and brush she kept under the sink. By now, I imagined, she could hardly see for the migraine; I called impatiently, “Let me do that, Ann. Be sensible.” There was a gasp, a clatter, my name repeated twice. “Ann, are you all right?”
No one answered.
“Hello? Ann?”
I found her by the sink. She had let go of the brush and pan and was twisting a damp floor cloth so tightly in her hands that the muscles of her short forearms stood out like a carpenter’s. Water had dribbled out of it and down her skirt.
“Ann?”
She was looking out of the window into the narrow passage where, clearly illuminated by the fluorescent tube in the kitchen ceiling, something big and white hung in the air, turning to and fro like a chrysalis in a privet hedge.
“Christ!”
I said.
It wriggled and was still, as though whatever it contained was tired of the effort to get out. After a moment it curled up from its tapered base, seemed to split, welded itself together again. All at once I saw that these movements were actually those of two organisms, two human figures hanging in the air, unsupported, quite naked, writhing and embracing and parting and writhing together again, never presenting the same angle twice, so that now you viewed the man from the back, now the woman, now both of them from one side or the other. When I first saw them, the woman’s mouth was fastened on the man’s. Her eyes were closed; later she rested her head on his shoulder. Later still, they both turned their attention to Ann. They had very pale skin, with the curious bloom of white chocolate; but that might have been an effect of the light. Sleet blew between us and them in eddies, but never obscured them.
“What are they, Ann?”
“There’s no limit to suffering,” she said. Her voice was slurred and thick. “They follow me wherever I go.”
I found it hard to look away from them.
“Is this why you move so often?” It was all I could think of to say.
“No.”
The two figures were locked together in something that—had their eyes been fastened on each other rather than on Ann—might have been described as love. They swung and turned slowly against the black, wet wall like fish in a tank. They were smiling. Ann groaned and began vomiting noisily into the sink. I held her shoulders. “Get them away,” she said indistinctly. “Why do they always look at me?” She coughed, wiped her mouth, ran the cold tap. She had begun to shiver, in powerful, disconnected spasms. “Get them away.”
Though I knew quite well they were there, it was my mistake that I never believed them to be real. I thought she might calm down if she couldn’t see them. But she wouldn’t let me turn the light out or close the curtains; and when I tried to encourage her to let go of the edge of the sink and come into the living room with me, she only shook her head and retched miserably. “No, leave me,” she said. “I don’t want you now.” Her body had gone rigid, as awkward as a child’s. She was very strong. “Just try to come away, Ann, please.” She looked at me helplessly and said, “I’ve got nothing to wipe my nose with.” I pulled at her angrily, and we fell down. My shoulder was on the dustpan, my mouth full of her hair, which smelled of cigarette ashes. I felt her hands move over me.