A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  Then there was only silence; there came rumors of a “black Mass,” of a “pagan ritual,” nonsense like that, given heat by the disappearance of one young man and the discovery of another’s hideously mutilated corpse. Brett Milstrap had vanished from the earth, it seemed, and the cruelly mangled corpse had been Keith Hayward’s. For a while, policemen stalked through our houses, through our school, everywhere we went, asking the same questions over and over. In their wake came reporters, photographers, and men with dark suits and tennis ball haircuts who hung around the edges of the action, watching and taking notes, whose presence was never explained. Lee stayed at Jason’s house for a week or two, refusing to speak to anyone but Hootie and Boats and those who could force her to talk to them. Mallon had fled, all three parties agreed on that point, and Dill Olson had followed in his wake; Meredith Bright had taken off at a dead run, packed up her clothes, and camped out at the airport until she could get a flight back home to Arkansas, where police questioned her for hours, day after day, until it was clear that she had almost nothing to tell them.

  The police never did catch up with Mallon and Dilly, who evaded questioning without even really trying to: after recuperating for a short time in Chicago (actually, in the same Cedar Street apartment I bought many years later, located in a building across the street from my present house), they hit the campus trail as a double act. Mallon took Dill over, he somehow incorporated him, of course with his victim’s full cooperation. Olson loved Mallon, too, as much as my girlfriend and Boats did, and I guess he was content to follow his idol around the country, doing whatever he was asked to do. My information about Dill Olson’s fate came from Lee, who had some sort of intermittent, flickering, but nonetheless reliable connection to him. I was never to know any of the specifics about this, of course, as I had missed the boat, definitively, and so had been spared the mysterious experience that came to define their lives. There was a magic circle, and I stood beyond its periphery.

  Here’s who was inside the circle, and this is what they wound up doing:

  Hootie Bly, we learned, had become a permanent resident of the psychiatric ward at the Lamont Hospital, where he spoke only in quotations from Hawthorne and outbursts of unknown words from Captain Fountain’s dictionary.

  Before graduation, Jason “Boats” Boatman left school and became a full-time professional thief. Was that enough, could that have been enough for him?

  Dilly Olson had surrendered his life to the man he had unofficially adopted as his father, and this was what he gained from his surrender: a secondhand imitation of a life, a weary existence as the magician’s apprentice, subsisting on scraps that fell from the master’s hand, being clothed in the master’s cast-offs, and sleeping on strangers’ couches with the brokenhearted girls his master discarded. Years later, Lee told me that Mallon had retired, but Don Olson was carrying on as the mage’s replacement, or the new, improved model, or something similar. He had learned a lot in the intervening years, he had digested the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, and the works of Giordano Bruno, Raymond Lully, Norman O. Brown, and God knows who else, and the trade of traveling guru, after all, was all he knew. But still. When I think of the heroic boy he once was …

  Of Meredith Bright and Brett Milstrap I knew nothing, but presumably they each had a story to tell, should I be able to find them.

  And of course the final figure left standing within the circle was my wife, Lee Truax, the most beautiful woman in any room she happened to enter, blessed with intelligence, courage, excellent health, a stunning house, a wonderful career as board member, counselor, and troubleshooter to the noble ACB. Her husband loved her, however imperfect his literal faithfulness, and the basis of his not inconsiderable success, his breakthrough book, The Agents of Darkness, had been his attempt to deal with the unfathomable event in the meadow and could therefore be seen as a tribute to the woman to whom it was dedicated. (Nearly all of his books were dedicated to his wife.) Thanks to this husband, myself, she had and always would have enough money never to worry about her finances. However, Lee Truax had been afflicted, too, cruelly, and although her affliction had first made itself known only in her early thirties, since when it had darkened and deepened, she had understood immediately that its origin had been Mallon’s great event in the meadow.

  There they were, my wife and onetime friends, still in their sacred circle; and here was I, on the outside, after all the intervening decades still baffled by what had happened to them.

  A well-known voice on NPR had brought Hawthorne to me, and after Hawthorne, Hootie Bly, still interred in that damned mental hospital. Because of Hootie, everything else had flooded in. The lean hound coursing through the snow, the peeling lacquer on our sleds, the whole townscape of Madison’s west side, a glass of water shining like the epitome of everything that could not be known, all that eluded definition … The faces of those who had been my most intimate friends, who had shared everything with me until the moment I refused to follow them into discipleship: their beautiful faces blazed before me. Half of their incandescence was what we had meant to each other, and the other half came from precisely what I had never known, never understood.

  Why had they, each in his or her own way, not only jumped off the rails but jumped into such distorted lives? For a second, the room wobbled and everything in my life seemed at stake.

  I needed to know: as soon as that recognition struck me, I knew that I feared whatever might turn up in the effort to know what had really happened out there in the meadow. Yet, I needed to know, and my need was stronger than the fear of whatever might crawl out of the knowledge I might turn up. All this time, I admitted to myself, I had been jealous of them for whatever they had seen out there, no matter that it had screwed them up, each in a different way.

  Her Level Gaze had just withered away beneath my hand, and although I had become fascinated with Detective Cooper’s fearsome revelations about the Hayward family—Two dark stars! Direct genetic transmission of a dreadful psychopathology! And this poor old brutal detective, taking his secrets to a beer-sodden grave!—I didn’t really want to give a year or more of my life to writing about it all.

  Honestly, I thought it was beyond me. My agent and my publisher were making tactful noises about a nonfiction book, but as I stood in my kitchen and wiped startled tears from my face the last thing on my mind was the possibility of writing about my lost world, my lost ruined friends, and whatever my wife might have hidden from me. (Hidden to protect me, even.) No, I realized, I didn’t have to write about it. In fact I really did not want to put this warm and breathing material, only just glimpsed, through all the familiar, sometimes laborious gestures demanded by writing. Right then, all of that effort felt mechanical and factory-like, industrial. What I glimpsed had sped away into invisibility, like a white hare tracked through deep snow … I wanted the experience of following the ever-vanishing hare, not the experience of turning the pursuit into writing.

  So, fine. Maybe I didn’t have a book. What I did have, a project that had come wrapped in necessity, felt infinitely better.

  The first thing I did, once I had calmed down sufficiently to use a keyboard, was to e-mail Lee in Washington. It was her past as well as mine, and if I intended to open a curtain she had insisted on keeping closed, she deserved to know about it. For the rest of the afternoon, instead of pretending to work I caught up on my Netflix movies (Wall-E and The Dark Knight), and about once an hour checked my cell phone for e-mail. I did not actually expect Lee to reply immediately, but at 6:22 my time, 7:22 hers, she responded by telling me that it would be interesting to see how far I got. (Lee uses various speech recognition systems, and while her early attempts resulted in a lot of typos and mistaken words, by now her messages are generally free of errors.) And she was writing back so quickly, she explained, because she had just learned something that might be useful to me. Donald Olson had run into some trouble a couple of years ago, and in fact she had heard that he was just being released from jai
l in a day or two and would undoubtedly be grateful for a place to stay on his first few nights of freedom. If I liked, I could meet him for lunch somewhere in Chicago, and if he passed muster, invite him to use our guest room. It would be all right with her, she assured me.

  I e-mailed back, thanking her for the information about our long-ago friend, and said that if she truly would not mind, I would probably do as she suggested. How, if I dare ask, had she learned of Olson’s situation? And how could I get in touch with him?

  You know I have my sources, she wrote back. But don’t worry about writing to Don. I gather that he prefers to get in touch with people rather than the other way around.

  I’ll wait to hear from him then, I told her. How are things going, anyhow? Are you enjoying yourself?

  Busy busy busy, she wrote back. Meetings meetings meetings. Sometimes the mills grind exceeding small, but I have a lot of ACB friends in the DC area who seem willing to listen to me complain. Please let me know what happens with Don Olson, will you?

  I typed, o.c. o.c., using our ancient code that meant of course, of course.

  Then for a couple of days I read, watched movies, took walks, and waited for the phone to ring. One day it did.

  hootie’s blues

  Two or three years after everything happened, and I had learned all that I was ever going to know about what had befallen my friends out in the university’s agronomy meadow and was just about to start a new book that would have nothing to do with any of this, at that moment of odd psychic drifting when a hundred little notions wake up and start humming, the possibility of a story came to me. It only indirectly concerned the main story of Mallon and my friends, which had been given to me in a series of fragments. Even back at the beginning I knew that I never really wanted to turn all of that into either straightforward fiction or the kind of neither-this-nor-that called “creative nonfiction.” This would be a story poised right on the narrow wall between fiction and memoir, and based on a number of things confessed to me by Howard “Hootie” Bly during the period when he was living down the street from me in the formerly ratty Cedar Hotel. In the last months of his residence at the Cedar, Hootie met the love of his life and future partner, and together they moved to an affluent northern suburb. We had spent a good deal of time together, Hootie and my wife and I, as had Hootie and I separately, and eventually, in bits and pieces strung out over many of our private conversations, he told me what had happened on October 15, the day before the great event—the day of the “rehearsal.” With only a few small changes, I thought, I could make something interesting of Hootie’s funny, unresolved tale. It was about preparing for something forever out of reach. For once, the idea of working so close to the literal truth excited me, so I set aside my new novel and spent about three weeks writing what I called “Tootie’s Blues.” “Tootie” was Hootie, of course, Spencer Mallon was “Dexter Fallon,” Dill Olson was “Tom Nelson,” and so on. When I had finished it, it did seem pretty good to me, but I had no idea what to do with it. I forwarded it as an attachment to David Garson, but he never said a word about it. I thought he was, in his way, being polite. The only alternative I saw was that it had vanished into deep cyberspace. Either way, the chances of the long story’s publication in The New Yorker seemed nonexistent. Then I dragged its folder from my desktop into my “Stories” file and forgot about it, mostly.

  At the time, I didn’t realize that I gave up on the story so easily because its publication had never been the point. Writing it was the point. I wanted to write it—I wanted to inhabit the seventeen-year-old Howard Bly’s point of view—because in that way and no other would it be possible for me to join Eel and the others for at least a part of the journey I had refused to take. Imagination gave me access to some of the experience the rest of them had shared. The hospital parts of the story were based on what I saw on my visits to the Lamont with Donald Olson, formerly the heroic Dill.

  When I got up the nerve to give Hootie a copy, he took two or three days to read it and came back with a little tucked-in smile that I did not know how to read. He sat down and said, “Man, and I thought Mallon was a magician. It’s like you were there, right there with me.”

  So here Howard Bly is speaking, pretty much as he did to me, of the way the early part of his life kept penetrating his long second act, the decades he spent in that hospital. Even more than most people, Hootie was marinated in his own history. I think he knew that he had to wait until he caught up with himself before he could begin to catch up with the people he so lovingly thought of during his long days on the ward.

  The names have all been restored to their original forms. I trust I do not have to cite the provenance of the eccentric words in the first paragraph.

  | Hootie’s Blues |

  Neither agomphious nor arctoid, neither creodont nor czigany, Howard Bly knew himself a lonely, imperfect being ever scrambling to imitate the manners and habits of those he loved and admired, not to mention worshipped, as was the case with Spencer Mallon. God knows, he needed the man, the more than man, the heroic marvel Mallon was.

  Which was exactly how Captain Fountain’s book came in. Captain Fountain transformed Howard Bly’s life by the simple mechanism of demonstrating to him the existence of a secret code that if fully understood would surely reveal the unknown and hidden structure of the world, or at least of what was called reality.

  He had come across the great tome while rooting through an old box in the store’s basement. By this time Troy and Roy, who would surely have ruined everything, were a problem no longer, having been drafted the previous year and sent to Vietnam, where all their top-secret games of soldiering and snipering no doubt came in handy, at least until Roy got killed.

  The contents of the box made it clear that they belonged to Troy. A rusty knife, a squirrel’s tail, old arrowheads, a broken compass, pictures of naked women torn from glossy magazines. (Roy would have had more nudes and a couple of broken Zippo lighters.) Jammed up against one side of the box was a slim white hard-backed volume that Troy Bly had undoubtedly purchased in one of his rare bouts of self-improvement. He had wanted to expand his vocabulary, doubtless because an advertisement had convinced him that females were sexually aroused by big words. Hootie didn’t care about that. He didn’t believe it either, at least as it applied to the girls at Madison West. Anyhow, he did not want to make out with any of the popular girls at his school. Sometimes, although he could scarcely admit it to himself, he thought about holding the Eel in his arms, about lying down in the grass with the Eel. Holding and being held. The Eel’s lips on his. It was shameful, yes, he knew that, his friends would find him disgusting, and Eel’s “Twin” would be enraged; hurt, too, which was much worse.

  Howard never imagined that the words in Captain Fountain’s book would cause the Eel to desire him. He thought the Captain’s book greater by far than a sex potion. The flat, flinty shimmer of the words on the page caused him to fall in love, for he had stumbled upon a kind of ultimate security blanket: a vocabulary known only, he imagined, to priests of an unknown and secret order.

  O morigerous [obsequious],

  morology [nonsense],

  morpheme [a word reduced to its basic element],

  morphology [dealing with the structure of plants and animals],

  O nabla [ancient Hebrew harp],

  nacelle [small boat],

  O nacket [tennis ball]!

  Meredith Bright … Meredith Bright loved him because he looked like an angel. She had whispered this information into his blushing ear at the finish of the Gorham Street assembly, placed one long cool hand against each side of his face, leaned smiling in so that her own face became a billboard golden and lavish, and in a soft voice that sank trembling into the pit of his stomach and flew out to the endings of his nerves, told him, Hootie, you look just like a beautiful porcelain angel, and that’s why I love you.

  No one would understand his feelings for the Eel, not even the Eel, but being totally in love with Meredith Br
ight made sense to everyone. Also, they all knew that she liked him. Along with the Eel, Hootie was one of her favorites. Of course Spencer Mallon was Meredith Bright’s special favorite, he was the man she had chosen in the way she would choose a movie star like Tab Hunter or a famous singer like Paul McCartney, and the two of them got in bed together and did sex things—over Hootie’s heart crept a certain secret picture that made him feel as though he were melting like a snowman on a warm day. In the secret picture, Howard Bly lay on a narrow bed squeezed between Spencer Mallon and Meredith Bright. As they clasped each other, their arms wrapped him in a double embrace. His face pressed against Meredith Bright’s ripe and blossoming bosom, and Spencer Mallon’s flat, muscular chest pressed against the back of his head. Down below, something was happening that he could not define or describe but came wrapped in images of great storms and blowing curtains.

  In rushed:

  lallation [baby talk]

  lalochergia [use of obscenity to decrease tension]

  murrey [dark red]

  Closely followed by:

  mugient [bellowing]

  mymy [bed]

  prushun [boy who desires to have sex with an adult male]

  And:

  pruritic [causing hysterical itching]

  This, too, became a part of the secret hidden behind the obscurest of words, not to mention at the heart of sacred texts. And within Spencer Mallon, whom Hootie loved as he had never loved before. Which was one reason his “story” about following him down a hotel corridor to two doors and having to guess which one was his had been so unsettling. If you were right, there was Spencer Mallon, right in front of you—taking care of things. But if you picked wrong … had he ever told them what happened if they picked the wrong door?