A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  “Come on, you’re quoting again,” I said. “I live in Chicago. So what was that?”

  “Tess of the d’Urbervilles. If I go to Chicago, could I see the Eel? Could I see you together?”

  I nodded.

  “And Dilly? Where do you live? What are you?”

  “I live on the road, basically, but I might settle down in Chicago,” Don said. “I think I really might. Hell of a good town.”

  Hootie nodded. “I have heard of Chicago.”

  “A man can’t be a teenager forever.”

  “Or a little child, neither.”

  After speaking this lovely phrase, which may or may not have been a quotation, Hootie turned his head once again to me and uttered another astonishment. The pale, peaceful blue I remembered from forty years back still hung in his eyes. “The Eel is blind, isn’t she?”

  I regarded him for a long time. Howard Bly did not blink.

  “How do you happen to know that, Hootie?”

  “It was the shiny lady with the stick. I saw it all. You don’t know what I saw. I don’t, even.”

  “But you’re going to try to tell us.”

  “That’s why we’re here.” Another dancing gleam at me. “That’s why the little Nuhiva’s bumping along astern there.”

  “Joseph Conrad.”

  Hootie giggled and pressed a hand to his mouth. I was a real comedian. “Jack London. Are you ready?”

  “If you’re willing.”

  Hootie closed his eyes and tilted his head back. In time, and at Hootie speed, his story emerged.

  | Hootie’s Cale |

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was intensely dark and radiantly bright. What you knew was only what you thought you knew, nothing more. It was about Oneness. It was about Allness. When Spencer stood before them, when Spencer opened his golden mouth and spoke, Hootie Bly heard angelic choirs. But with Keith Hayward, who was actually there on the actual first day Meredith Bright had in their presence gloriously enhanced the Tick-Tock Diner by the simple act of walking in, who had come in minutes after Hootie’s radiant goddess had departed … with Keith everything got yanked upside down to display the wriggling bugs and writhing snakes. Keith had something to do with that terrible god-and-demon show at the end, Hootie knew that much, that Cornelius Agrippa business Mallon loved so much.

  Not everyone you meet in the nuthouse is nuts, you know. And if you’re in a place like Madison, even the nuts in the nuthouse can have some interesting things to say. You don’t have to be a professor to read a book. Those shiny mercury-people weren’t total mysteries to the kind of person who went nosing around the same library stacks that Spencer Mallon used to haunt, that is, whenever he wasn’t seducing girls of college age and even younger.

  Hootie always knew.

  Some say old Cornelius Agrippa opened up something that shook him—terrified him—so badly that he backed away altogether and became a devout Catholic.

  And we were afraid a lot in those days, weren’t we? All of us, the whole country. Someone like Mallon, he could feel things ticking toward an explosion. That’s a heck of a gift, let me tell you. He foresaw that all those big people would be shot down, he knew insanity was roaring toward us all … JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm … Every time one of those things happened, Hootie Bly thought of Keith Hayward, and said to himself, I have been here before; this is not my first time. John, Martin, Robert, Malcolm, plus whatever else you want to throw in there. How about the time they blew up that building on the campus right here and killed a grad student? World bursts into flame, smoke pours upward from the blaze, wounded people are screaming. This is how it feels, you get me, even if everybody’s just standing around poleaxed. This is how you feel inside yourself, in the middle of a war. You get that end-of-the-world feeling. You don’t need weapons and uniforms to have a war.

  On that terrible day, Spencer was jumpy as a grasshopper. He took his merry band of children to the old movie theater to see the ancient organist and a crummy movie, and he left them there! To do one of his secret things. And when he finished that and the movie was over, he met them on the sidewalk and led them straight into combat! Did he think it was an accident that the world was blowing itself up on the same exact corner where he was supposed to meet Hayward and Milstrap? Did Hootie’s leader and beloved ever think about that at all? No, he just got them behind a cement wall and waited it out! And then finally it was over, vastly to Hootie’s relief—because Hootie wasn’t like Keith, he hated violence and commotion and everybody yelling like madmen—finally there was something like quiet, if not actual silence. Sounds of dripping water and retreating crowds, and no more thrown stones, and beer bottles smashing into walls. They came creeping out into the waterlogged mess, and who’s bopping around across the street? Good old Keith. All jazzed up. Eyes glowing.

  The Eel, that’s the main thing, though. Later, Hootie Bly saw her travel like no one has ever traveled before or since. And Spencer Mallon saw it, too, and it was nearly too much for him. For poor Hootie, though, there was no “nearly.” For Hootie, it was too much. He couldn’t stand up under it. Not even that. Worse. Not only could Hootie not stand up under it, what he couldn’t stand up under wasn’t even the whole thing. He didn’t come close to the whole thing. He folded, he crumpled, he was knocked flat.

  Just then, though, when they were gathering together in the center of the ruined street, Hootie looked at the Eel, and the Eel looked back and smiled, and this whole world came out of her eyes and surrounded him … warm and dark and lovely, able to hold him up and get him walking along … don’t mind if I cry, it won’t be the last time, that’s for sure. She did that for Hootie, and it was only the first amazing thing she did for him that day.

  So they walked and walked, and eventually they got to that scary road, that Glasshouse Road, where the trolls and goblins lived all the livelong day, and on Glasshouse Road they were not alone. Hootie kept his eyes on his darling, the Eel, that whole time, but Eel looked back over her shoulder, and Hootie was pretty sure Mallon did, too, and the way Eel’s face tightened up and got kind of dry the second she looked back, that told Hootie all he wanted to know. As long as she could keep walking, he could, too, but no one could make him look. He could hear these leathery whispers of fabric and the sound of boots … it was not-dogs, he knew that. Un-dogs. Sad truth is, after everything that happened that day, it took Hootie a long, long time to get halfway used to dogs again.

  People in Lamont, some men on his ward, they used to have these animal companions, they called them?

  Why did that happen? Didn’t they know? Anything can make itself look like a dog, didn’t they understand that? These things, these un-dogs, these idea-dogs, Spencer hated them, and they couldn’t stand him, either. Some days, Hootie didn’t think they liked anything at all, that they hung around like a bunch of angry cops, ready to pound the shit out of somebody. Other days, he thought they didn’t give a shit about human beings, we were just part of some job we’d never understand because it was totally way beyond us.

  Hootie, now … Hootie would be looking out of the window in his room, one morning, any old morning, and he’d see one of those things out on the lawn, staring up at him … it was saying, maybe everybody else forgot all about you, but we didn’t.

  The rest of a day like that, Hootie wouldn’t be able to eat. That night, he wouldn’t get any sleep, either.

  He’d rather have held Keith Hayward’s hand than look behind him on Glasshouse Road.

  So up they get into the meadow, and already everything was all screwed up because it was getting dark. Meredith Bright was in a snit about her horoscope. Hootie felt bad about that, because it was his belief that wonderful Meredith Bright should always be happy. But once they got close enough, they could see the white circle really easy. It was shining. Shining? Hey, that circle almost led them straight to it. Okay, Meredith was in her snit, and she wanted to stop everything, but everybody else, man, they were on board, even Keith and Mi
lstrap.

  Actually, you couldn’t even begin to see that white circle when you first walked into the meadow. In order to really see it, you had to get up into the little swale, the fold, and then it was smack dab in front of you on the grassy rise. Only, this was the funny part, before they got there, they sort of could see it. They could see something, anyhow, a dazzle like a ring of white sparks above the dark, half-visible ground—a sign! They were being told where to go!

  Then they had to do the thing with the ropes. Next, holding their candles, they had to arrange themselves opposite that glowing white circle. Meredith and Eel were angry at each other, so Hootie was forced to stand between them like some kind of barrier, not that he minded. Standing next to the Eel made it easier to keep an eye on her. And the Eel, man, she was watching everything: Mallon for sure, and Boats and Dill, but she checked in on Hayward and Milstrap, too.

  Those guys, they were off. It was like—you do your thing, and we’ll do ours. We got a private thing going on over here. That was how it looked. Everybody was excited, everybody was all caught up in the ceremony, only these two looked like they were sharing a joke. Funny, when you think about what happed to them—they practically smirked at Mallon. It made Hootie feel sick to his stomach, because contempt had no role in this ceremony. What they needed from each other was love and respect, and instead you got … smirking! The roiling in his lower regions said to Hootie, You’d better get your skates on, because nothing is going to turn out right here, just look, it’s already wrong. Never ignore warnings that come from your troubled innards. That he did ignore it means that little Hootie accepted all the terrible crap that was waiting for him. He said, I won’t I can’t I’m staying here no matter what happens, I will NOT leave Spencer Mallon!

  And just like before, the minute Spencer told them to take out their matches and light their candles and hold them aloft, those other things came crowding in. Like a host of moths, all glimmer-gray and shadow-brown, but they weren’t moths. In brief, vivid images, the flares and spurts of light illuminated paws and muzzles and pointed teeth and buttons glinting on vests and suit jackets. A satin hatband captured a flare of match light, then slipped back into the teeming obscurity. And others came, too, hidden amongst those upright not-dogs. Bad things. Eel knew about them, but no one else did.

  I don’t like this, he said. They’re here again.

  Mallon hushed him, and for some reason a sad, bitter line from The Scarlet Letter unfurled in his mind and rolled from his mouth: Must I sink down here, and die at once?

  Mallon hushed him again, and Hayward swore at him, and Mallon hushed Hayward, too.

  Keith Hayward aimed a smirk and a dip of the head at Meredith, but her face settled into a mask of distaste, and she flicked him away. Meredith didn’t know of the Others, and neither did Keith. Did Eel? He thought the Eel knew everything, for she was already in another realm, yes, he could tell, the Eel had taken a step away, a step out. His poor heart folded and creased with pain, for he knew he could never follow her. Yet at the same time, his creased and folded heart expanded with love for wondrous Eel, who could know such freedom. Her boyish head went tilting back, her dark eyes shone wide open, a smile lightly touched her mouth. This is what happened: for Hootie, right then the Eel became the Skylark, just as Mallon had said. She was taking flight, and she was singing, though he could not hear a note, so earthbound and coarse were his ears.

  Then what did fill his ears was the inside-out sound of Mallon on the verge of speech. It was a grand, grand moment. Electric. Sizzling. Like an invisible flash of lightning, a deep, unheard roll of thunder. Spencer Mallon breathed in, and the air changed. In one second, when Mallon was standing on his spot with his candle raised, eyes closed, handsome mouth just beginning to open for the release of the inspired words, the air tightened up and wrapped itself around them. Around Hootie Bly, for sure! Like cloth, like a sheet, soft, slippery, cool to the touch. Because it was still merely air, elements and beings could continue to traffic through it, but not without some effort.

  All around them, shadowy forms glided through the atmosphere on the other side of the membrane that wrapped them around, and Spencer inhaled more deeply, trembling with the power of what would momentarily spill from his mouth, and the world around them darkened, and little Hootie began to realize that some of what lay waiting out there in the world beyond their membrane was purely hostile. Immediately after he registered the dim presences of those beings that were laying in wait, he began to smell their hot, sharp, rank fetor. This bright stench drifted toward him, curled into his nostrils, wandered stinging into his sinuses, and dripped acidlike down his throat.

  Mallon was already singing. Maybe the word is chanting. Surrounded by music, words burst from him and exploded into the atmosphere—Hootie never noticed the transition from the rampant inside-out silence to this blaring, bronzy glory: he felt as though a pertinent second or two had been cut from the film of his life. Then they broke in.

  He had time to glimpse them only, a red giant with a sword, a giant swine, an ancient man and woman, a drunken king made of wet mirrors. Terror made him close his eyes. Fear for Eel, fear for his beloved Mallon, made him open them again. He could not push his head down into the sand while these two were in danger.

  It was as though they had, all of them but for Eel, gone to hell. Though it was actually night, the red sun had reappeared, huge and too close to the earth.

  On the dark rise ten feet to the right of the painted circle, something vague, dark, and mightily pissed off was flickering in and out of sight. A few flies spun dizzied about it, transported by its terrible stink of goats, pigs, sewage, death, both all and none of these—the stink of total emptiness, total absence. The filthy creature did not want to be seen; it was not like the terrible god-demons that capered all about it; they demanded attention, and the twisting, flickering thing wished to escape all notice. It did its work unseen, Hootie understood. Despite its ever-constant activity, it had been created by some dire hand or agency to pass beneath the human radar.

  When this recognition came to him, Hootie endured another that was much, much worse. It stopped him where he stood. It was as though a supernatural hand had loosened a valve, and all the blood had drained from his body. Hootie had been dropped into the paralysis of a confrontation with utter entire blankness, in which no action, no combination of words, no emotion however powerful or refined, had any meaning, could make a bit of difference. All was leveled flat by the flick of this creature’s tail, if it had one; by the movement of its eyes, the passing through the resistant air of its blasphemous hand. All was flattened, turned to salt, turned to shit.

  His legs weakened, and he sank to his knees, at which surrender the demonic thing underwent a violent spasm and succeeded at last in wresting itself from sight. The movement of the spinning flies and a pattern advancing through the grass told Hootie where the terrible obscenity was going. Like the roaring sun, it appeared to be coming his way. Hootie could no more have moved than he could have translated the molten bronze of Latin phrases pouring from Mallon’s mouth. The demon of midday, the Noonday Demon, for such it was, slid another two feet toward him. He and the Eel saw it, no one else.

  Only a very few seconds, Hootie thought, were left to him. On the other side of Spencer Mallon, whom he now understood he would lose by the simple expedient of death, no, not death, erasure, the condescending, ruinous roommates were yielding to separate impulses: vile Keith Hayward was running toward Hootie’s group, with great lunging strides that would take him straight to the Eel. His eyes were black stones, and his hands reached out like claws. Brett Milstrap, still somehow capable of looking as though everything about him was faintly absurd, managed to wedge a crack into the fabric of the madhouse scene taking place before him. Hootie glimpsed a great darkness and a single, hideously mechanical light.

  Then he became aware that the nighttime sun’s giant sphere, tinted yellow, then red, then yellow again, pulsing with what he understood to
be a kind of consciousness, had swung from the depths of the sky and approached even nearer to the meadow. In what should have been Howard Bly’s last second of life, and precisely simultaneous with Brett Milstrap’s disappearance from our realm, Keith Hayward’s forward progress intersected that of the creature steaming toward Hootie. Through the sudden fountain of blood that abruptly replaced the psychotic frat boy, Hootie looked, for a moment only, at the pulsing, flagrant ball hurtling toward him and realized that it was entirely dangerous. At only the last possible second, he grasped that this sphere was not one thing, but was instead made of many, many words and sentences: hot words, boiling sentences, many, many thousands of sentences, thrashing and coiling like monstrous, endless, interconnected snakes. And he knew all those sentences; they were within him.

  He could never describe the jumble of contradictions that followed. The moment the boiling sentence-sun struck him, he was absorbed into its substance and disappeared from this realm. He slipped out of his body, which was consumed, and threaded into a comforting subject-verb-object sequence; thence into a concatenation of independent clauses that scattered him amongst a hive of semicolons. He became an Indian in a great forest, and his name was Uncas. At the same time, bored and indifferent functionaries in the guise of upright dogs clothed in old-fashioned garments half carried, half supported him into a barren room with one high window, and there they permitted him to slip onto a thin pallet unrolled along the far wall. Someone he could not see brought him soup. Something unseen so frightened him he urinated into his trousers. Several complex sentences took him up, carried him into winter, and dumped him on the back of a wagon pursued by wolves. He said, I need no medicine, though his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous than before. A trout leaped from a Spanish trout stream and dropped into his rush-lined creel. A ferocious, formal woman in black spun from a great window opening onto the rocky, surging Cornish coast. Would he, now a nameless she, care to leap? Spencer Mallon broke his heart for good by taking off, without a glance, without a word, into a billowing orange-yellow cloud that stank of corpses, sewage, and eternity. A woman with a dirty face castrated a screaming pig and tossed its pizzle at him. A rabbit died. A puppy died. An emperor died. He was in love with an Italian nurse, and after her death, he walked home in the rain. A bookcase fell on an unpleasant and impecunious man, and it killed him. A man in a handsome uniform threw a book on a pyre made entirely of burning books. Weeping, Hootie Bly again pissed his pants and crawled he knew not where, overseen by idea-dogs, scarecrow-dogs, coat-hanger-dogs.