by Peter Straub
“Yes. From the other side of a one-way mirror. What if he wants to know my cousin’s name?”
“Your cousin’s name is Arnold Trueright.”
“Give me a break,” I said.
“Seriously. Arnold Trueright is my accountant and he lives at 304 Loblolly Road.”
Shaking my head, I took my foot off the brake and rolled up the long, curving driveway. Gradually, the house came into view. Half Manderley, half Bill Gates. The enormous round window looked like a well-tended blister.
I got out of the car, knowing that at least one camera, and probably two, were trained on me, and thought of “Ronnie” scrutinizing my image. It was a deeply uncomfortable moment. When I looked back at Tom Pasmore, he flipped his hand toward the front door. A team of horses could have fit through that thing. The flat gold button of the bell shone from the fluted center of the frame. I pushed it down and heard nothing. I pushed it again.
Without warning, the door swung open. I found myself looking into the bland face and intense, lively eyes of a large, black-haired man in a blue blazer, a white shirt, and khakis. His nice white smile and nearly snub nose made him appear friendly, harmless, eager to please. Professor Bellinger’s description to the police sketch artist had been as accurate as Sergeant Pohlhaus hoped it would be.
“Sir,” he said, and glanced quickly at Tom in the passenger seat, then back to me. Instantly, he noticed something in my face or eyes. “What? Do we know each other?”
“No,” I said, alarmed. “For a second I thought you looked familiar. I guess you kind of remind me of Robert Wagner twenty years ago.”
“I’m flattered,” he said. “Is there some way I can assist you gentlemen? I’m sure you rang my bell for a reason.”
“We got lost,” I said. “I’m trying to find my cousin’s house on Loblolly Road, but I keep driving around and around past the same houses.”
“What part of Loblolly Road?”
“Number 304.”
He hmmmed. His eyes were full of light and amusement. My bowels felt cold and watery. “What’s your cousin’s name, by the way? Maybe I know him.”
“Arnold Trueright.”
“Arnold Trueright, the daredevil CPA. Right over on Loblolly, that’s correct.” He gave me excellent directions back the way we had come. Then he peered into the car and gave Tom a cheerful little wave. “Who’s your well-dressed friend? Another cousin?”
In my haste to get away from Ronald Lloyd-Jones’s chilling force field, I said something stupid. “Another accountant, actually.”
“Accountants don’t look like that. Your friend reminds me of someone . . . someone rather well known who lives in town, I can’t think of who it is. Name’s right on the tip of my . . .” Still smiling in Tom’s direction, he shook his head. His own folly amused him. “Never mind. Not important. Take care, now.”
“Absolutely,” I said, and moved away as quickly as I could without revealing my alarm.
Lloyd-Jones disappeared behind his fortress door before I got to the car.
“That was him,” I said. “That’s the son of a bitch who tried to pick up the boy in the park.”
“Sometimes,” Tom said, “I really am forced to admire my genius.”
While we were driving past Arnold Trueright’s beautiful imitation Victorian on Loblolly Road, Tom talked to Franz Pohlhaus on his cell phone. It was simple, he was saying. I’d been so convinced that the Michigan Street house had something to do with Mark’s disappearance that we looked up the property records and drove out to see what its owner looked like. What do you know, he looks just like the police sketch of the mysterious Ronnie! Sounded like good probable cause, didn’t Sergeant Pohlhaus agree?
Evidently, the sergeant did agree.
“Rich people don’t get arrested the way poor people do,” Tom said. “It’s going to take hours to get all their ducks in a row. They’ll get him in the end, however. They’ll come out with a search warrant and tear that house apart. Lloyd-Jones is going to be taken away in handcuffs. No matter how loudly his lawyer yells, he’s going to get arrested, booked, and charged with at least a couple of murders, depending on what and how much they find in his house. He will not get bail. Your Professor Bellinger will positively I.D. him as the man she saw in Sherman Park, and sooner or later, the police will uncover human remains. Just for people like him, I wish this state still had the death penalty. Nevertheless, thanks to you and me, Mr. Lloyd-Jones is going to spend the rest of his life alone in a cell. Unless he’s killed in prison, which is actually pretty likely.”
“I wish Mark were here to see this,” I said. “Boy. I feel like I could run a marathon, or jump over a building. What happens now?”
“Pohlhaus promised to keep me in the loop. He’ll call me after Lloyd-Jones gets processed through, and he’ll let me know if the search of his house turns up anything incriminating. From the look of the guy, they’ll find enough to indict him.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s so arrogant, that’s why. At the very least, I bet we’re going to find out that he’s obsessed with Joseph Kalendar. That’s why he bought that house on Michigan Street. And I bet somewhere in this house, in a closet, an attic room, something like that, he has a little shrine to Joseph Kalendar.”
He took in the expression on my face, leaned toward me, and patted my knee. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to make a stop downtown.”
All the way back to Eastern Shore Drive, I kept seeing Ronald Lloyd-Jones’s face in front of me. The impact he had made on me diminished hardly at all as the miles rolled by. He had smiled, he had called me “Sir” and probed my story. He had been completely accommodating and agreeable. He had frightened me very badly. For far too many people, a number at which I could not even guess, that amused, well-cared-for face had been the last thing they had seen. Ronald Lloyd-Jones had appointed himself the escort to the next world, and he loved his work. After having met him, I was even more grateful that Mark was elsewhere.
As proof or reassurance or something of the kind, he wonderfully showed himself to me while I drove Tom to his errand, which turned out to be picking up a Basque beret and a gray homburg hat at one of the few places in America where such things can still be found. Identifying a serial killer, buying two fancy hats, this was a real Tom Pasmore kind of day. We had just pulled up at the light on the corner of Orson and Jefferson streets, directly across from the little pocket park where on my first day back in Millhaven I had seen two boys who turned out to be Mark and Jimbo. At that moment, just before the light changed, there occurred the remarkable event I alluded to earlier, the one that has elevated my spirits from then to now.
Not looking at anything in particular but merely letting my gaze drift across the immediate surroundings, I happened to take in the large plate-glass window of a crowded Starbucks. Young people read newspapers at small tables or picked at the keyboards of their laptops. The first thing that caught my attention was the stunning combination of almost unearthly beauty and real richness and warmth of character shining forth in the face of a young woman at one of the window tables. No matter how long you live, said a voice in my head, you’ll never see anything more beautiful than that.
A kind of electrical tingle ran up my arms. A boy—a young man—was leaning across the table, saying something to the young woman. I noticed that the young man wore layered T-shirts like Mark’s before I saw that the young man was Mark. He turned his head to the window, to me, and in that half second, two things became radiantly clear: he seemed more adult than he had been, and he was blazingly happy.
It was a gift. Not the only one, but the first. Mark and his “Lucy Cleveland,” whose real name I knew, had exited their elsewhere long enough to display themselves before me in all the fullness of their new lives. After all, the elsewhere was right next door.
The light changed. The horns erupted and hallooed behind me, and I made myself accelerate slowly forward, toward the Pforzheimer and Grand Avenue. A big loop onto Pr
ospect Avenue, then Eastern Shore Drive would bring us home. A share of that blazing joy resided in me now, and I thought it would be mine for eternity. It partook of eternity. What I had seen, that glory, burned in my memory. What I saw there and then, on Jefferson Street at approximately four-thirty in the afternoon, burns in me still, as I sit here in Tom Pasmore’s vast, eccentric living room waiting to hear from Sergeant Pohlhaus or one of his juniors.
God bless Mark Underhill, I say within the resounding chambers of my heart and mind, God bless Lucy Cleveland, too, though already they are so blessed, they have the power to bless me.
This, too, was a blessing, and I had kept it a secret since the day Philip called to accuse me of hiding his son in my loft. I could have said, “Actually, Philip, two days after he vanished, Mark sent me an e-mail,” but certain things about the e-mail made me decide to keep it to myself, at least until I got to Millhaven. The “Subject” and “From” lines would have raised questions I could not have answered, and they might even have led Philip and the authorities to question its authenticity. Certain other things about the e-mail, sitting ever at the back of my mind, had given direction to my search. Philip and Sergeant Pohlhaus would have dismissed it as a fraud, so I had kept it to myself until this moment. But after that incredible gift, I could not resist; I had to share what I knew. So I showed Mark’s “posthumous” e-mail to Tom.
He had made our drinks. We were sprawled on the sofas in the section of the big, mazy room where the sound equipment lives. Tom was tilted back like Henry Higgins, his eyes closed, listening to whatever he’d put in the CD player. Mozart piano sonatas, maybe, Mitsuko Uchida or Alfred Brendel, I don’t know which—I wasn’t paying attention to either the music or what he told me about it. Little Richard could have been playing Mozart. I could barely hear. The roaring of angels’ wings filled my ears.
“This is going to sound pretty crazy to you,” I said.
Tom opened his eyes.
“When we were stopped at Cathedral Square, I saw Mark through the Starbucks window. He was with Lucy Cleveland.”
“You mean Lily Kalendar?” Tom said.
“What she calls herself doesn’t matter,” I said. “You should have seen her.”
“As beautiful as Mark told his friend.”
“You have no idea.”
“If you’d said something at the time, I could have seen them, too.”
“I don’t think I could have said anything. I was so stunned, and then so grateful.”
“You’re sure it was Mark?”
“I couldn’t be wrong about this, Tom.”
“How did he look?”
“A little older. More experienced. Very, very happy.”
“I take it this—sighting—was not an accident.”
“He wanted me to see them. He wanted me to know he was all right.”
Tom said a strange thing then. “Maybe you think he’s all right because the Sherman Park Killer is being arrested this evening.” When it became clear that I had not understood his remark, he added, “Because he can tell us where he put the bodies.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t really get you.”
“Final resting places and all that. Decent burials. No more speculation on the part of the families. Everybody can get down to the business of grief.”
“I don’t have to grieve for Mark,” I insisted. “I’ll see him again, here and there. Maybe I won’t see him now for years, but I will see him again. He can show himself to me anywhere. And he will always be with Lucy Cleveland.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Tom said. “You might see him anywhere.”
“Which means, Tom, that he was not a victim of that monster I talked to today. He was not mistreated and tortured. He was not subject to the desires of that psychotic creep. What happened to Shane Auslander and Dewey Dell and all the others did not happen to Mark Underhill. His name is not on that list.”
“I see,” Tom said, meaning that he didn’t.
“You will,” I said. “I want to show you something. Would you mind going back up to the computer room?”
“You want to show me something on a computer?” He was already standing up.
“I want to show you something on my computer.”
He led me up the stairs. Inside the room, he went around turning on the lights.
“Should I use a specific machine, or doesn’t it matter?” I asked.
“Use the one I used to look up the address.”
I sat down in front of the keyboard and typed in Gotomypc.com, a site that lets me connect to the monitor of my own computer from the keyboard of a remote machine.
I got to the website and put in my user name and password. Much faster on Tom’s T1 line than on Mark’s computer, the screen changed and asked me for my access code. I tapped it in.
On Tom’s beautiful nineteen-inch screen, my seventeen-inch screen appeared, a little smaller and muddier than in reality, but my screen all the same.
“Fascinating,” Tom said. “Do you use all those programs?”
“Of course not,” I said, and clicked on the envelope that stood for Outlook Express.
Three-fourths of the headings in boldface were spam. Size Does Matter, Earn $50,000 in Three Days at Home, Other Singles in Your Area, Free Viagra Pak. I took a moment to delete them.
“Now look at this one.” I clicked on Subject: lost boy lost girl; From: munderhill. “Do you see that date?”
“Um,” Tom said. “Looks like it was sent on Sunday, the twentieth of June.”
“That was two days after Mark’s disappearance.”
“My goodness.” Tom put a hand to his mouth and bent toward the screen. “Right you are. Extraordinary.”
This e-mail appeared on my screen and Tom’s.
From: munderhill
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 4:32 AM
Subject: lost boy lost girl
u know u have done work enuf
u can rest old writer
we r 2gether
in this other world
rite next door
m
“Print that out,” Tom said.
“If I did, it would use my printer, not yours.”
He grimaced. Nice as he is, Tom likes getting his own way. “‘u can rest old writer’?”
“He’s telling me not to worry about him.”
“‘u know u have done work enuf’? What does that mean? He wants you to stop writing?”
“I’ve done enough for him,” I said. “I’ve done all I have to do.”
“There’s no domain name,” Tom said. “Where did he send it from?”
“From wherever they are.”
“This is astonishing—two days after . . .”
“Back in New York,” I said, “before I knew that Mark’s mother had killed herself and I would have to come here, I saw lost boy lost girl stenciled on the sidewalk. In black paint. The next time I looked, it was gone.”
“They do that to advertise things.”
“I know, Tom. I’m just telling you what I saw. I never even mentioned it to Mark.”
“I think you liked the phrase,” Tom said. “I think you saw it on the sidewalk, and it stuck in your head. Somehow or other, you told Mark about it. That’s the way you work. It’s the way all writers work.”
“You don’t know everything,” I said.
Tom put his hands in his jacket pockets and bent his neck. He frowned at his shoes. “Tim,” he said. His voice was as relaxed and soft as an old glove. “Is this thing real?”
“As real as it can be,” I said.
On a humid, sunny afternoon in June, Mark Underhill sat at the bottom of the stairs in an empty house he knew not to be empty. It never had been, he thought. A presence had inhabited it from the first. The presence was female, and she had come for him. Her arrival in the house, which once had been a stage for the enactment of unspeakable and sacred horrors, had tumbled him off his skateboard and root
ed him to the middle of Michigan Street. In what now seemed the last days of his childhood, she had stopped him cold. She had whispered to his mind, to his heart, and without hearing he had heard.
A light footstep sounded from somewhere above him. Successive footsteps proceeded softly overhead, he thought either in the bedroom or the corridor hidden behind it.
Above, a door opened or closed. Mark’s body tightened, then relaxed. He thought he heard faraway laughter.
When he thought of the giant’s bed two rooms away, the entire house filled with heat and light. The ugly added room that contained the bed rang and vibrated with a deep, resonant note that only a second before had melted into the material of the floor and walls. A great tuning fork had been struck. This was what he had been called to witness, Mark thought—this enormous thing that had already passed from view. The great feathers of its mighty wings beat the air, and in the tumult of its wake rode endless loss. His heart filled.
Mark listened to the small, light footsteps descending a staircase parallel to his, but narrower, steeper, and enclosed. When she at last showed herself, if this time she did, she would emerge through the closet door ten feet to his left. The footsteps chimed like brush strokes. It was like hearing someone stepping down a passage within his own head.
As though it shared his substance, 3323 North Michigan contracted, and he felt himself contract around his excitement. The little brush strokes descended another few steps and drew level.
That sound of wing beats; blood rushing through his ears. No, he thought, actual wing beats, those of birds that were not there and, to begin with, were not even birds.
He had no idea what was going to happen to him. He had put himself here, and now he would have to accept what occurred. If there was any comfort in the sudden chill awareness that everything was about to be immeasurably different, it was that he had not been placed in this moment randomly, by luck or chance. It had been waiting for him ever since the house had risen up before him like a castle rising from a plain.
