by Peter Straub
Trembling, he shifted, drew up his knees, and fixed his eyes on the closet door. There came the pad of a soft footfall, the first faint click of a doorknob gripped and revolved. In the quarter second before the door began to swing open, time stopped for Mark Underhill.
Dust motes hung unmoving in the still air.
There came a sound, quiet at first, not to be identified. As it grew, he thought it was the overtone of a note from an upright bass, hanging in the air after the note itself had faded—
Then he thought he heard the hot buzzing metallic hum of a thousand cicadas. A mindless drone, greedy, intrusive . . . were there cicadas in Millhaven?
Cicadas? he thought. I don’t even know what a cicada looks like!
Ten feet to his left, the door opened on its hinges, and unlocked from some old chamber in his memory, the smell of chocolate-chip cookies drifted toward him—his mother had been baking cookies, and now they were swelling swelling swelling on the baking pan, melting beyond their boundaries, pushing up and forward and out. A slight figure slipped into the room.
That day, she told him her name.
The next, she threw off the simple things she had been wearing, then undressed him, and led him to the sheet-covered sofa. After that, Mark felt as if branded. She brought him hand in hand to the giant’s terrible bed and taught him to arrange his limbs in its grooves and hollows, which received her as well as him, so that they seemed almost to remake the giant’s bed beneath them as they moved.
He could not say to Jimbo: I wore her body like a second skin.
Is this real? he asked.
As real as it can be, she said. As real as I can make it.
Time changed its old, old nature and gave them its first, primal face. A single hour rocketed by in a lazy month. There was no time.
Go now and think, she said. Do you leave your world with me or in some lesser way? For all in your world must in their own time leave it.
She said, Make haste make haste the sun swims round the Dark Man cometh. But you may come with me.
Mark met his dearest friend and knew he would do so no more. He walked into the park on a summer evening and sat on a familiar bench. The first faint coolness of the coming night touched his cheek. The breeze said, Make haste make haste. Soon he rose and walked.
23
“Apparently he wants to talk to you,” Philip said. “You know that. I already told you.”
“It would be nice to know why.”
Philip pulled into a parking lot a block away from police headquarters, where some nineteen hours earlier Ronald Lloyd-Jones had been fingerprinted, photographed, stripped of his valuables and personal items, and formally charged with multiple homicides. The attending officers considered that he had endured these humiliations with an unsettling degree of good humor. He had refused to make a statement until his lawyer was present, but guess what? His lawyer was on a golfing vacation in St. Croix and would not be returning for another two or three days. Under the circumstances, he requested the dignity of a private cell, regular meals, and the use of legal pads and writing implements with which he could, as he said, “begin to organize my defense.” And, oh, by the way—did his arrest have any connection to the two gentlemen who had driven up to his house that afternoon, asking directions to Loblolly Road? The first half dozen officers he encountered knew nothing and, repulsed by their big, smiling captive, would have remained silent even if they had been able to answer his question. The seventh officer Lloyd-Jones met in the course of his busy afternoon was Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus. Pohlhaus informed Lloyd-Jones that he could not go into that matter.
—Then tell me, Lloyd-Jones said, since you must feel you have grounds for my arrest, were you acting on the basis of an identification made from a sketch?
Franz Pohlhaus allowed that a police sketch had played a role in the events of the afternoon.
—Was your witness the strange old lady who approached me in Sherman Park while I was engaged in an innocent conversation?
—Anything is possible, sir.
—Sounds like a yes to me. And the man who came to my front door was checking out my resemblance to the sketch made from that woman’s description?
—I cannot really tell you that, sir.
—This man came accompanied by someone else. If I am not mistaken, the gentleman accompanying him was Mr. Thomas Pasmore.
—You are not mistaken, Pohlhaus said.
—I am honored.
That was it for the rest of the evening. Ronald Lloyd-Jones was granted his single-occupancy cell, a dinner he declined to eat, and writing implements. The following morning the sergeant once again met Lloyd-Jones in an interrogation room. Lloyd-Jones complained of being unable to bathe himself, and Pohlhaus explained that he would not be able to shower until the initial proceedings had been completed. Unless he wanted to give a full confession at that moment, his shower would have to be delayed until the arrival of his attorney.
—If that’s how you want to play it, Lloyd-Jones said. But in your position, I would do everything in my power to make me a comfortable prisoner.
—You seem pretty comfortable to me, Mr. Lloyd-Jones, Pohlhaus said.
Lloyd-Jones said he had been doing some thinking, primarily about Thomas Pasmore. —I read the papers like everyone else, you know, and I have some idea how Mr. Pasmore works his miracles. Uses public documents and public records a good deal, doesn’t he?
—That is well known, Pohlhaus said.
—Sounds to me like a fellow who’s good with computers and codes and passwords could get into a lot of trouble that way. If he were to step outside of the legal limits, all sorts of evidence would be inadmissible, wouldn’t it?
This gave Sergeant Pohlhaus an uneasy moment. He had no idea how many legal boundaries Tom Pasmore might have stepped over.
—Would you be willing to tell me who the other man was, the one I actually spoke to?
—You’re going to find that out anyhow, as soon as your lawyer shows up, so I might as well tell you. His name is Timothy Underhill.
—Timothy Underhill the writer?
—That’s right, yes.
—You’re kidding me.
Pohlhaus gave him a glare that would have burned the eyelashes off an ordinary man.
—Forget everything I told you, Lloyd-Jones said. Get Tim Underhill to come down here, because I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him now. I’m not talking to anyone else until that happens.
“I think he knows you,” Pohlhaus told Tim as the three of them went through the maze of corridors. “Your books, I mean.”
“What gives you that idea?”
“His reaction to your name.”
Tim was a little winded from their race through the hallways. In the rush, he had been able to take in only Pohlhaus’s excitement and, pinned to the message boards they passed, the usual business cards offering the services of lawyers specializing in divorce. Pohlhaus came to a stop in front of a green door marked B.
“He wants to talk to you alone,” he said. “Your brother and I, along with the lieutenant from the Homicide Squad, will be watching through a one-way mirror. A voice-activated machine will record everything the two of you say.”
“What do you want me to do?” Tim asked.
“Let him talk. See if you can get him to say anything about your nephew. You could ask him about Joseph Kalendar. With luck, maybe he’ll divulge where he hid the bodies. What can I tell you? The more he says, the better.”
“Is he in there now?” Tim felt a moment of irrational terror. Despite his curiosity, walking into that room was the last thing he wanted to do.
Pohlhaus nodded. “Let me give you a proper introduction.”
He opened the door, and for a second Tim thought he smelled something acrid, smoky, and bitter. Then Pohlhaus walked into the room, and the odor disappeared. Fighting the impulse to turn around and walk away, Tim followed the sergeant’s tall, slender back, straight as a plumb line, into the interrogation r
oom. The man at the far side of a wide green metal table had already risen to his feet, and was staring at him with an expectant smile. Apart from the light in his eyes and his expression of comic chagrin, he could have been a fan waiting in an autograph line.
“You two have met before,” Pohlhaus said. “Tim Underhill, Ronald Lloyd-Jones.”
Lloyd-Jones grinned and held out a firm, pink hand, which Tim reluctantly shook.
“Mr. Lloyd-Jones, you may wish to remember that you are being observed, and that your conversation will be recorded. Once again, anything you say may be used against you. And I would like you to verify that you have declined to have your attorney present for this interview.”
“Bobby will get his turn later,” Lloyd-Jones said.
“Then I will leave you to it.”
As soon as Pohlhaus had left, Lloyd-Jones gestured to the chair on the other side of the table and said, “We might as well make ourselves comfortable.”
Unwilling to surrender control so quickly, Tim said, “Satisfy my curiosity. Why did you ask to see me?”
“I like your books—what other reason could I have? You’re one of my favorite writers. Have a seat, please.”
They lowered themselves to their chairs.
“My friend, you need a new author photo,” Lloyd-Jones said. “If the sergeant hadn’t told me who you were, I’d never had recognized you. How old is that picture, anyhow?”
“Too old, I gather.”
“Make your publisher pay for someone good, someone with style. You have a nice face, you know, you should make the most of it.”
The way you made the most of yours, Tim said to himself.
Which was exactly what Lloyd-Jones wanted him to think, he realized. He had no real interest in Timothy Underhill; he wanted to amuse himself. No mere incarceration could keep him from playing his games.
“I’m sorry I failed to recognize Tom Pasmore before you drove away. One of Millhaven’s most famous residents, wouldn’t you say?”
Tim nodded. This encounter was beginning to make him feel as though soon he would have to lie down.
“I suppose Mr. Pasmore was the one who thought I was worth a visit. To compare with the sketch, I mean.”
“Yes,” Tim said.
“What exactly was his basis for focusing on me?”
“Your name came up.”
Lloyd-Jones gave him a smile of pure sympathy. Light danced in his slightly close-set eyes. “Let’s think about that a little more. I understand from reading about your friend that he gets many of his—shall we say, inspirations?—from public records. So clever, I’ve always thought. If you can remember, I’d be very interested to know if it was something in the public records that brought my name to Mr. Pasmore’s attention. And to yours, of course.”
“It was, yes.”
“Tom Pasmore, true to form. And what sort of records were they, Tim? Tax records, something of that sort?”
“We wanted to find out who owned Joseph Kalendar’s old house,” Tim said. “And there you were.”
Lloyd-Jones blinked, and some of the suppressed glee drained from his face. He recovered almost instantaneously. “Oh, yes, of course. I bought that little place as an investment, then never did anything with it. Let’s go on to something a great deal more important to me.
“Here I am, identified by you as the person some elderly female described to a police sketch artist after something silly brought him to her attention. She objected to a harmless chat I was having with a delightful young man in Sherman Park. I freely admit to being the man in the sketch, for I certainly am the man who was chatting with the boy. But I believe that is about as far as you can go, isn’t it?”
The room seemed to be a degree or two warmer and a bit darker and dimmer, as if the overhead lights were failing.
“Go with what?”
“The identification. A woman sees me in the park, a police artist draws up a sketch, you see a resemblance between me and the sketch . . .” He looked up at the mirror behind Tim’s head. “And what does that prove, Sergeant? Nothing at all. It certainly is not the basis for an arrest, is it, unless talking to people in the park has suddenly become a crime.”
“I suppose they must have more to go on.”
Lloyd-Jones regarded Tim as he would a charming though backward pupil. “Why in the world should you and Mr. Pasmore have been interested in that little house on Michigan Street?”
Tim took a photograph Philip had given him from his pocket and slid it across the table toward Lloyd-Jones, who raised his expressive eyebrows and gazed blandly down at it. “Nice-looking boy. Your son?”
“My nephew, Mark Underhill. Does he look familiar to you? Have you ever seen him before?”
“Let me see.” He drew the photograph toward him and bent over it. The thought that he might touch it made Tim feel ill.
Lloyd-Jones smiled at him and deliberately, using only the tips of his fingers, slid the photograph back across the table. “I don’t think he looks familiar, but it’s hard to be sure. Especially with an old photograph like that one.”
“Mark was fascinated with what you called that little house on Michigan Street. According to his best friend, he went so far as to break in and look around. He found all kinds of interesting things. It didn’t take him long to learn its history.”
“That’s really too bad. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Why is that, Mr. Lloyd-Jones?”
“Please—call me Ronnie. I insist.”
The thought of Franz Pohlhaus watching from the other side of the mirror made Tim acquiesce. “If you like.”
“Good. Of course, what I find regrettable is that your nephew trespassed on my property. And since you have told me that he did, I must tell you that although I could not recognize him from that picture, I did in fact notice a teenage boy lurking around that house from time to time.”
“How did you happen to notice him, Ronnie?”
“From inside, how else? Through the window. Now and again, I used the place as a getaway. I liked to go over there and collect my thoughts. It was extraordinarily peaceful. I’d just sit in the dark and, I suppose you could say, meditate. Your nephew’s persistent attentions were a terrible distraction. One night he and his friend went so far as to shine a light in the window. I was in there at the time, and I sort of showed myself. Scared the hell out of the little snoops.”
“Were there other times when you deliberately showed yourself to my nephew?”
A smile tucked the corners of Ronnie’s mouth. “Yes, a few. Once, I stood up the hill with my back turned to him. I did things like that a couple of times. I was hoping it might frighten him off, just a bit.”
“Did you ever go into his house? On the day of his mother’s funeral, did you let yourself into his kitchen?”
Ronnie looked shocked. “Please let me express my sympathy for the loss of your sister-in-law. But no, of course not. I’d never do a thing like that.”
“Why did you think standing with your back to him would be frightening?”
“Because of Joseph Kalendar, of course. Kalendar was in the habit of turning his back on photographers. He did it as often as possible. I assume that Kalendar was the reason for the boys’ fixation on my property.”
“You were interested in Kalendar yourself, weren’t you?”
“Most people in this city were interested in Joseph Kalendar, at one time.”
“In 1980, maybe. Not now.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Tim. Have people forgotten about Jack the Ripper? Men of colorful accomplishments tend to be remembered long after their deaths. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The walls seemed to have drawn in, the air become foul. The rage and depression streaming from smiling Ronnie Lloyd-Jones made Tim feel as though he were trapped in a cave with him. It was as if Ronnie were standing on his chest.
“Up to a point, I agree with you.”
“I am very, very happy to hear that, Tim. I have a proposition t
o make to you.”
Tim knew what the “proposition” was going to be, and the thought of it made him feel sick.
“Can I be frank, Tim? I’d like nothing better than to be frank with you.”
“Sure, you be Frank. I’ll be Dino.”
Tim was looking hard at a spot on the table between his spread-out hands. The muscles in his neck and upper arms had begun to ache. A long time ago, someone had used a pocketknife to scratch a slogan into the top of the table. THEEZ COPPS SUK.
“You’re a brilliant writer, Tim. You understand things. You’re insightful. And you’re a great storyteller.”
“Don’t do this,” Tim said.
“We could do an enormous amount of good for each other. I want it to be a partnership. The second I heard that you were the man who came to my door yesterday, I understood why you’d come. You’re the only person in the world who could do justice to my story.”
Before Tim had time to react, Ronnie Lloyd-Jones leaned across the table and forced him, as if by black art, to meet his eyes.
“Please understand me—I’m not confessing to anything. I say this to you personally and for the record. I am completely innocent of these Sherman Park murders, so of course I can’t confess to them. What I can do, however, and this might be helpful to everyone, is to describe a certain hypothetical situation. Shall we consider this hypothetical situation?”
“I don’t think I could stop you,” Tim said.
“I’m going to pretend that I am the Sherman Park Killer. If I were guilty of his crimes, I would be able to give you complete details of every murder, going back to before people knew there was a Sherman Park Killer. If I were guilty of those crimes, I would give you access to every aspect of my life. Still speaking hypothetically, I would tell you exactly where to find the bodies. All of them. I assure you, there would be a tidy little number.”
“Impossible,” Tim said.
“All I’d expect is an account that presented my hypothetical point of view. Fair-mindedness is what we’re looking for here. Joseph Kalendar would have to be a part of it. The spiritual rapport, the scale of his achievement. The scale of mine, plus a close look at the workings of my psyche.
