A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  The world changed in that endless moment before Spencer Mallon began to chant in Latin, that time during which the glowing words embedded in the unreeling chant hovered near as pure possibility, spoken though as yet unspoken, present nonetheless. In the suspended silence, Meredith could feel the change in every element of the world present to her: the simultaneous tightening and relaxation of the air, now revealed for the first time as an actual membrane wrapped about them all, here loose and yielding, there firm and ungiving. In the long, long moment when Mallon hung fire and waited for his deepest self to give him words, Meredith felt the ground quiver under her feet, then immediately began to smell the fragrance trails of something raw, hot, sweet, and sexual. Crushed mandarin oranges, cane sugar, sliced habañero peppers sizzling in a pan, the flesh inside the juicy lower lip of Bobby Flynn, her first serious boyfriend, new blood spurting from a wound, sweat, thick white lilies, semen, a freshly sliced fig, all these odors and fragrances and stinks coiled around each other, rubbed flanks and floated toward them from the expansive, greedy world Meredith sensed behind the membrane of the air itself, a world she wished both to flee and to embrace.

  In that long moment, Meredith still saw them all: the high-school kids beside her radiant now with terror (no, that was just Hootie, whose fear she could smell, separate from the sexy hot pepper/lily/Bobby-Flynn’s-lower-lip odor building up behind the bulging membrane that wrapped them round), Hootie charged with terror and little Eel for some reason radiant with, well, radiance, a phenomenon Meredith Bright found striking, more than that, more than striking, yes, amazing, with her eyes wide open, her soul visible to any who cared to look, a tomboy on fire, which, more than striking as it was, Meredith chose to behold no longer just at the moment it began to change and darken; poor Boats staring at the circle as though his life would pour through it, also as though he suspected he would one day have to steal that, too; then Mallon with the words beginning to spill into his throat from his mysterious inner source, eyes clamped shut, candle aloft like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, Mallon higher than a kite, higher than a cloud, so excited the guy had a hard-on, every vessel and nerve in his body quivering with anticipation, alive with the sense that everything was about to change now, now the moment before the moment, the most beautiful, the last drop and essence of what had been, of everything that was to be lost—

  Then you, Donald, with her eyes closed Meredith saw you, so handsome, attending to Mallon the way the Secret Service attends to the president, with your secret hopes sizzling in your heart and those talents you didn’t know you had just beginning to come into bud, poor thing, and a few feet beyond, the frat boys over there, so unappealing—how in the world had Meredith for as much as a second found Keith Hayward appealing?—looking trapped, looking uncertain, no conviction in the way they held their candles aloft, Hayward cutting his eyes toward Meredith, his dull animal lust so ugly when stacked against the weird strange sexy sweet power beginning to barrel toward them from some distant point beyond the coiling membrane of the air, the distant point which had just now snagged doomed Brett Milstrap’s attention and curiosity, and which he was now really doing his best, his damnedest, to make out and peer into, his neck bent, his head tilted, and a little sweat leaking out of the dark sharp point of his widow’s peak …

  Only then had Meredith fully taken in the oddness of being able to see in such detail with her eyes clamped shut.

  So, at the exact moment that Mallon’s words began to pour from his throat, at the very moment she heard his beautiful voice and realized that he was singing, and what’s more singing in Latin, she opened her eyes and beheld what was taking place in that meadow.

  It wasn’t anything like one thing, that was what first struck her. Little dramas, each of them in equal parts deeply disturbing and completely fascinating, were taking place all over that low rise in front of them. The circle could hardly be seen, and the ropes, Meredith saw, would be useless. You couldn’t tie down these visions, you couldn’t bind them. They weren’t solid, not really, and they were more like scenes than mere beings or creatures. The only one she could see clearly, however, was the one playing itself out before the Eel, Hootie, and her. In front of their little group, an old man with a long beard and an old woman leaning on a cane (but it wasn’t a cane, whispered a cool voice in her mind, that length of wood was called a staffe) stood on dead-white soil before a great juniper tree. An enormous pig and a small, scaly dragon with drooping wings lolled on the white earth beside them, staring with hooded, suspicious eyes at Mallon, as if awaiting instruction. As soon as the old couple saw that they were being observed, their heads revolved to reveal at the backs of their heads second faces with long, beaky, inquisitive noses and shimmering eyes.

  “Wait,” Don said, his voice a velvet bruise. “You actually saw all this shit? What about the dogs, you know, the dog-things?”

  “Can’t you be patient enough to hear what I have to say? Anyhow, the dogs weren’t important, no matter whatever Mallon deigned to share with you.”

  “Of course they were important,” Olson said, a little too loudly.

  Could she continue? A little bit along the rise, and in front of Boats, it looked like a big, red-faced man in bloody rags was waving a sword, but Meredith couldn’t see him very well. Some kind of animal was rearing behind him. Maybe a deer, too, with antlers. These things, they were like on the other side of a plate-glass window, all of these scenes were like that, separated from them by big windows, so the students couldn’t hear them. Each scene had its own weather. Lightning kept flashing behind the big guy with the sword, but Meredith’s people, that horrible old couple, they came from a completely white world disturbed by a strong wind that twisted the man’s beard and tore at their hair.

  In front of Mallon she glimpsed a naked woman, isn’t that a surprise, but only for the moment it took her to see that the naked woman was a greeny whitish color. He had an animal, too, something weird, she couldn’t tell what. A dove was lurching through the air all around the white-green woman, that woman the color of a corpse …

  Do you know, when she thinks about this now, it’s like they were in a museum? These scenes were like dioramas in front of them, only the dioramas were alive, and the things in them moved. All she could see, way off to the side where Don and the frat boys were stationed, was this crazy world like a wild party. A king was riding on a bear, waving his arms and thrashing every which way, and a queen, an angry queen, was shouting and pointing here and there with a long stick—the Bear King and the Roaring Queen, Meredith called them. They had a big dog, like a hound of some kind, and all of them were made of shiny silver, or something like that, and none of them had faces, just these smooth shiny liquid surfaces. In back of them all sorts of other figures were cavorting away, and you knew it was really noisy in that world—

  Donald was running around in circles, and Mallon was staring straight ahead as if he was about to go into shock, and Keith Hayward, he wasn’t paying any attention at all to this amazing stuff going on right in front of their faces, and neither was Milstrap. Keith was staring right at Meredith, and Hayward’s terrible face—because it was terrible, anything she might have once thought to the contrary was dead wrong—looked like a cement mask hung in front of a blazing fire. Meredith said to herself, That guy better stay where he is, because he’s completely off his rocker.

  The world of the Bear King and the crazy queen spilled from its diorama and rolled through all the others, filling their spaces and the spaces between. All the silvery people reeled around, declaiming to themselves with drunken, oversize gestures. Meredith thought this scene had a wild, spooky charm. It delighted her, especially when the mad queen swung in her direction and leveled the staff at her head.

  Some kind of light, grainy beam flew from the end of the staff and struck Meredith’s forehead with an impact like that of a flying moth, then passed through the wall of her skull and entered her brain, where it became a short, cool wand. The wand pulsed once, th
en evaporated into her brain tissue.

  The great blessing had been bestowed and received.

  The Bear King waved a beer stein and slapped his mount on the head, and the Roaring Queen swung her arm a couple of inches and aimed her distaff (it seemed to Meredith) at the Eel. Then Meredith paid no more attention to anyone or anything else, be it visionary royal personage, visionary animal creature, or ordinary everyday human commoner, because all of her attention was focused on the three great principles that had begun to take root in the center of her brain and just then were clearing their throats and getting ready to sound off. When they spoke, however, it was not in the southern-politician, ham-bone tones she had expected from this windup, but in a slender, cool female voice.

  And that, gentlemen, was when Meredith Bright finally began to figure things out. The great blessing was, you could say, a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Only the new heaven and earth were not at all what people imagined they would be, no no no. Meredith giggled at the disparity between the world as it truly was and what almost everyone, including her former addlepated self, imagined it to be. What came from the point of that distaff was wisdom—the wisdom of those three great principles.

  Yes, Meredith knew, Meredith understood, the men before her wanted to hear more about this wisdom that had been passed on so efficiently from a realm beyond all understanding, but they’d have to wait, because they still had more to learn about the events of that all-important evening.

  A whole lot seemed to happen all at once. The crazy scene in front of them began to move forward, as if to surround them, which would have meant they’d be lost forever in some eternal horror show, but it had moved only the tiniest part of a centimeter, say, the tiniest distance possible, which no one but Meredith and maybe the Eel even noticed, and the dog-things were just beginning to perk up, when two things happened at the far end of their row. The first was that Keith Hayward, of course not noticing the peril he was about to be in, that idiot, jumped out of position and started to sprint toward Meredith. He wanted to pick her up and snatch her away—Hayward wanted to kidnap her, she understood that: she was really clear about his mission. It was in his terrible, terrible eyes, that intention. Or desire, or whatever you call it. He’d starved long enough, and he was going to make his move.

  At the same time, Brett Milstrap finally got his hands on that weird point in space he had been looking at and puzzling over so long. He was concentrating so hard he never even noticed that his partner had taken off and left him by himself. While Hayward was barreling toward Meredith, Milstrap bent over and tugged at something like a seam on the edge of the eternal diorama. When he got his fingers through the crack he had spotted, he closed his fists and pulled, hard. Muscles Meredith hadn’t known the kid possessed popped out on his forearms, and he leaned into his work. A four-foot section of the diorama peeled up like a flexible screen, and both the Bear King and the insane queen turned to gaze at what he was doing. The king banged his heels into the bear’s sides, the appalled queen roared and flailed her long stick, they wanted him to stop—

  But then Meredith could see no more, as some big dark form slipped in front of her and blocked her vision. At first, she thought it was one of the dog-creatures, for all of those things were beginning to move forward in order (Meredith realized) to shield their group from the happy campers in eternity, or whatever it was. But it was not a dog-creature, it was too big, and besides it had a really weird smell, so awful it was almost beautiful. Honestly, if you made that odor into a perfume, some women would wear it all the time, and a lot of women would wear it maybe once a year, when a little serious business had to be done. That smell, that weird fragrance, made Meredith dizzy, which meant her vision lost a little reliability, since it’s hard to know if you’re seeing things accurately when the ground is wobbling and your knees don’t work and a funny floating sensation has taken over what used to be your head.

  Right? I mean, you can’t really be sure.

  However, while Meredith was coping with the effects of that odor, which she realized was much the same as the raw hot sexy crushed-mandarin-orange-inside-of-Bobby-Flynn’s-lower-lip smell she had enjoyed earlier, only dialed way up, it seemed to her that the creature before her slowly, slowly turned to her and gave her a beatific smile only slightly undercut by the fact of the smiling lips being red with the blood of Keith Hayward, and the parallel fact that Keith Hayward’s limp and utterly dead body, minus its head and right arm, drooped from the great creature’s hands. She couldn’t really describe this thing. It appeared to shapeshift from something like a short King Kong to a terrible naked old male giant with streaming white hair, its maw filled with flesh and shattered bone, and from that to an almost cartoonish purple thing that spat out red and white bits of Keith Hayward even as it graced her with its smile. Actually, all of them smiled at Meredith Bright, the big ape, the naked giant, and the cartoon—all of them smiled, and leftover bits of Keith Hayward dribbled and oozed from all three of their mouths, which were really all the same mouth.

  At this point, I had the odd sensation that while Meredith was telling me the truth about all this smiling, she was, although she may not have even been aware of it, also lying, and about something I could define only as obscene. Meredith Walsh, I advised myself, inhabited a dizzying moral realm. I asked her a question.

  No, the smiling didn’t surprise Meredith, why should it? In those days, and for a good long time after, decades actually, everybody who crossed the path of Meredith Bright, including even the people who looked at her from the other side of the street, not forgetting even the men driving pizza wagons through the streets of Madison, Fayetteville, Greenwich, Connecticut, and so on, all of these people, these stupid men, they smiled at her until their faces ached. That was how it worked. If the Bear King and the Bellowing Queen had possessed faces, they would have smiled at her, too. In fact, although they did not have actual faces, visible ones, they smiled at her anyhow.

  Meredith smiled back, of course, being polite, and as she did so, the creature vanished. Through the empty space he had just finished occupying, she happened to catch a glimpse of Brett Milstrap making an irrevocable decision, if that’s what it was. It might have been a whim, even an accident. Milstrap had managed to peel back a long section of the Bear King’s chaotic world, exposing a deep blackness pieced by one laserlike white light. That’s all she could see back there, anyhow. Milstrap leaned into the gap and was sucked in, instantly gone. The gap sealed up, and for a couple of seconds, Meredith caught sight of him far back in the riotous world of shiny people and shiny things. He was waving his arms. He knew Meredith had seen him, and he wanted her to help him escape! Brett Milstrap lowered his arms, leaned forward, and began to run as fast as he could, as if he thought he could outrace his destiny. Before he had taken three long strides, he winked out of sight and disappeared.

  Meredith checked her fellow travelers, wondering if they had witnessed these two extraordinary events, and to her amazement discovered that they were all on separate wavelengths. Now, she wasn’t sure how she knew these things. Empathy had never exactly been her strong suit. But looking at Boats, she knew instantly that he found himself in a field of corpses, rising to his feet near a great tower made entirely of the bodies of dead children. Both Donald and Mallon saw billows of downpouring rose-orange light and upright dogs in human clothing, except Mallon saw more dogs and nastier ones. Mallon’s dogs wanted to kill him for his audacity and his incompetence, and he had to take off and get out of there in a hurry. The hurry was crucial for another reason, that Mallon had also seen Keith Hayward ripped to pieces by some huge and ferocious creature he could not identify, but which he knew he had summoned to the meadow.

  When Meredith turned her gaze to Hootie, what she saw, a mighty blazing sun crowded stuffed crammed jammed with words and sentences, nearly flattened her. She thought it may have been the face of God burning through all those humming writhing coiling sentences and paragraphs, all of them making t
heir claim and all of them sacred … Hootie was too much for her. She knew that if she looked a moment longer into God’s massive, sentence-packed face she would crack and fall asunder, a broken vessel, so she did what she had to do and took off running. Because Mallon and Donald were still fighting through the pouring neon light, she could have been the first to leave. The first who wound up alive and on earth, anyhow.

  And now, Meredith imagined Donald undoubtedly wanted her to tell him something explanatory about the dogs. He’d heard something, hadn’t he? A long time ago, he’d heard one of his friends mention a “dog”—or heard little Eel say something he didn’t understand about “dogs,” right?—and he had been smart enough to figure something out. Well, here’s what she had to say. The creatures that these men called dogs, and Lee Harwell wrote about in his entertaining book—no, of course she hadn’t read it, but she’d heard enough about the novel to know what he had done—were not dogs or “agents” or anything of the kind. They were what kept us from seeing that which we are not equipped to see. All these Mallon people were marked now, and the “dogs” kept an eye on them, not to keep them safe, because they cared nothing for human beings—Meredith thought they saw people as garbage—but to ensure that none of them got so far out of line again. Meredith had seen the dog-things advance toward the eternal, chaotic realm, and she knew what they really looked like, but she could not, not ever, describe them. It wasn’t possible. Our words don’t go that far, sorry.

  “Oh, the three great principles?” Meredith Walsh asked, enjoying her moment even as she detested those with whom it was shared. “You want to know what they are? Are you interested in learning what the loony-tune queen sent to me, which changed my life entirely?”