A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

Though he must have heard his voice, Mallon paid him no heed. Boats moved faster, more recklessly, bumping into tree trunks and stumbling over raised, snakelike roots. He scraped his forehead on a branch, and quick blood slid down past his eye and over his cheek. The swipe of his hand smeared the blood across the entire side of his face. He wiped his hand on his shirt and left a ragged stain. Boats moved to within ten feet of the clearing and saw the source of all the meaning in his life, Spencer Mallon, turned away from him in jeans, a chambray shirt, a safari jacket, and Dingo boots. His hair, rough looking and a touch too long, tended to bob when he moved. Even from behind, he looked shockingly young. Jason “Boats” Boatman had reached the weary age of forty-five: some long and equally weary years later, he would run into Lee Harwell, the once-famous author, on the sidewalk just outside the side entrance of the Pfister Hotel. Donald “Dilly” Olson was even more shockingly youthful. Seated with his back against a tree, a cigarette, most likely a Tareyton, dangling from the first two fingers of his right hand, and clothed in his high-school uniform of T-shirt, worn jeans, and moccasins, Don Olson looked youthful because he was only eighteen years old.

  Boats had forgotten what a handsome kid Dilly had been. Really, he should have gone into pictures, or something.

  “Yeah, sure,” Olson said. “By the way, this stuff never happened.”

  “Not to you,” Boats said. “To me, it did.”

  Making a more concerted effort to wipe the blood off his face, Boats moved up to the edge of the clearing and stood between two maples. Blue sunlight devoid of warmth fell in spangles on his arms and legs. He pressed his dirty handkerchief to the wound pulsing on his forehead.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “You know what? I’m pretty weirded out by all this shit. What did we do, go back in time?”

  Dilly looked across at him and raised the smoking cigarette to his lips. He inhaled and blew out a thin, fast-moving stream of smoke. His face was a mask of boredom.

  Mallon turned around, slowly, with an almost balletic self-awareness. Now that Boats was much older than the Spencer Mallon who had so entranced him, he could see in the man’s face all the qualities that had escaped him in high school—laziness, vanity, selfishness, and a willingness to deceive. Something else, too: the innate watchfulness of the true show-off. All these traits were visible in him, but they were not all that was visible. As Mallon crossed his arms and tilted his head, causing his hair to dip charmingly to one side, Boats saw that Mallon really did have the extra quality, the aura of being in possession of more, also of being slightly larger than his body, that he found he now remembered with a helpless love. The man was a born magician.

  “Well, no, actually, Jason,” said smiling Mallon. He had registered every one of Boats’s instant perceptions. “It’s good to see you again, too. But that isn’t possible. No one can go back in time. Time isn’t linear, not at all. Instead of going backward and forward, it goes sideways. Time is a vast field of simultaneity. One member of my happy little band has learned this lesson, well, I could say the hard way, but perhaps it is best to say that he has learned it profoundly. That would be Brett Milstrap, of course, Keith’s roommate. Keith had a spectacular amount of promise, I thought, being so wicked, but I never much cared for Brett. I imagine you’ve seen him now and then, as you make your rounds.”

  “Yes,” Boats said, “I have. But … so this is me now, where I am, and you’re the you and Dill of 1966, which would flip me out if I already weren’t so flipped out, and to tell you the truth … Jeez, I’m sorry I’m bleeding like this, I hit my head on a branch back there … well, what I was going to say is, I always hoped I would see you again, because I thought you could explain everything to me.”

  “Just you wait,” said Dill, bored and hostile.

  “You want to stop bleeding? No problem.” Mallon thrust his index finger at Boats’s forehead. The wound stopped pulsing. “All better now. Throw that disgusting hankie thing away, will you?”

  Boats felt funny about doing it, but what the hell, it was 1966. Pollution had not yet been invented. He took the handkerchief from his forehead and tossed it behind him.

  “Feel better now?”

  “Not really. What’s going on?”

  “Jesus, kid. You finally see us again after all these years, and that’s all you can say? All right. I’ll explain again.”

  He stepped forward and thrust his right arm out straight before him. “Think of this as a highway. In time. A big highway, running through all of time. Okay?”

  He thrust his left arm out sideways and held it rigid, making himself look like a demented traffic cop. “And this is a smaller, narrower road, a state highway, not an interstate. They intersect at me, I’m the crossroads here. When you get to me, you can turn off, you can go anywhere you like, because these intersections are all over the place.”

  “And that’s how I got to you?”

  Mallon lowered his arms and smiled in a way that looked neither warm nor friendly. “Well, it’s more like how we got to you, Boats.”

  He turned away and made an actorish flourish with his right arm. “The blood ran down over the dog’s jaw. Stained his muzzle red. Blood ran across the entire surface of the bar. You don’t think that was a message?”

  “You’re giving me a message?” Boats asked.

  The party noises exploded all around him, very near, jeering, insane, and hostile. The unseen crowd bellowed and giggled, the invisible woman screamed her laughter. As if commanded to his score by the din, Dilly scrambled upright, opened his mouth freakishly wide, and in a dense, insistent tenor voice that drilled through the surrounding cacophony, blared, I NEED WHAT YOU NEED I NEED WHAT YOU NEED I NEED WHAT YOU NEED …

  Mallon faced Boats again, flapping his hand in dismissal. In a quiet voice half suffocated by the din, he said, “Weren’t you listening? Go back and start over.”

  The deafening noise ceased; the blue light dimmed. The world went dark for the space of three frames: a moment only, almost not noticeable, yet nonetheless a cessation, a total, if however brief, erasure.

  The last of the maple trees interrupted Boats’s view of the clearing, yet he still had the feeling it was empty. At this distance, he should have been able to glimpse the figures whose voices had led him this far, but all he could make out through the trunks of the maples was a sunlit oval of tall grasses backed by another thick grouping of trees.

  “SPENCER!” he shouted. “DILLY! WHERE ARE YOU?”

  … picked up that severed hand and threw it into the corner, spoke Mallon’s voice …. dog … carried the hand outside, the wounded mans wrist … having a drink from a glass …

  “Sticky with his own blood,” Boats whispered. “The glass was sticky with his own blood.”

  How did he know those words?

  From the ground beside a large exposed root like an imperfectly buried fire hose, a red and white rag caught his eye, and he bent over and picked it up. Impossibly, it much resembled one of his own unusually large and exceptionally soft handkerchiefs, for which he had a variety of uses. Boats would almost have sworn the handkerchief was his, but it had been left here, wet and discolored with blood, by someone else. He had never been on this island—this shore?—before in his life. Boats dropped the sodden handkerchief next to the bulge of the root, and it folded down into itself, like an origami replica of a duck hiding its head beneath an outspread wing.

  Then he remembered where he had heard Mallon’s words. “You said that at La Bella Capri, in …”

  Dilly’s voice silenced him before he could say the basement there.

  … what he needs, what he needs, that’s all he knows, it’s all he thinks about, he’s been like that since he was a teenager … I need, I need, I need, it’s enough already, other people have needs, too, and they don’t go around stealing for a living …

  Mallon’s voice broke in, canceling Dill’s: … the dog tore that hand to shreds … knuckle and gristle … blood dripped over that goddam black muzzle …
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br />   Boatman stepped through the last of the trees and looked wildly around, though he knew the clearing was empty. When the illusion that he might glimpse his tormentors snickering at him from behind the trees on the other side of the open patch faded, there swept through him a bitter disappointment that was both specific and familiar. Boatman felt as though he had been wearing it around him like an old coat most of his life. Now, Spencer Mallon’s voice sounded from some invisible source, but that source was not Mallon.

  Mallon was not present, Mallon was the absence that turns itself inside out.

  Mallon’s voice said, Violence is woven right into the fabric of our time …

  “So you keep saying, but what good is that?” Boats asked, moving closer to the place the voice seemed to be coming from.

  The tall, mustard-colored grasses thinned out, creating almost a mini-clearing within the clearing. From this hole in the yellow grasses came the voice of Spencer Mallon, saying, this foolhardy young idiot … wisdom, some of it just came through.

  Boats leaned over the circular parting in the grasses and looked down. Seven or eight inches beneath the fuzzy tops of the grasses sat an irregular tree stump with a ragged edge where the trunk had snapped off. A small black tape recorder was propped against the raised part of the edge. The voice of Spencer Mallon emerged from the little machine, telling him, Instead of going backward and forward, time goes sideways.

  Boats reached down and picked up the tape recorder. It had been made in Germany, and it worked perfectly. Long before it would fail to perform its function, it was going to be obsolete, a historical novelty, a toy no one any longer would want to use for the purpose of transporting sounds through time.

  Throw away that disgusting hankie, will you? Mallon asked.

  “I already did,” Boats said. He looked around the stump and spotted a good-sized rock nestled in the grass about four feet away. Flecks of mica speckled on its sharp angles. Boats took a single stride and raised the black machine over his head.

  Before he could smash the German recorder into the rock and forever destroy its useless perfection, Mallon’s voice said, Last chance, you dope.

  Another cessation; another erasure into absolute darkness.

  This time, he emerged from the darkness in utter confusion, addled, feeling as if he had just been shot from a rifle and flown, like a bullet, a great distance at incredible speed. His entire body ached, especially his legs and his chest. His arms felt like noodles, and his head throbbed. Only gradually, he became aware that he was using a wire hanger to drag a thin triangle of polished wood, roughly five feet long at its base, across a dusty concrete floor that had recently been painted a hard, dark blue. The hook of the hanger fit into a hole drilled into the triangular thing, and his fingers were hooked into one of the hanger’s corners. Baffled and weary, Boats stopped dragging the wooden triangle and tried to figure out where he was.

  A great deal of the concrete floor had been painted the dark blue he stood upon. Where the blue ended, the floor had been painted a light, khaki brown that extended perhaps ten feet before yielding to a long section painted a dark, forest green. Of the three painted areas, the blue was by far the largest, and the khaki brown the smallest. Boats didn’t get it. He had been on some kind of island, he was almost certain of that, and Spencer Mallon had sent him away to … a huge basement? An abandoned factory?

  Boats dropped the wire hanger, and the heavy wooden triangle clattered to the floor. At the center of the polished wood, he saw a familiar set of letters and a symbol he knew well. His father’s trademark, the joined C and B. A short distance away was a sheet torn from one of the notebooks he had used in high school. He walked away and picked it up from the blue floor. On it was written Lake Michigan.

  “Lake Michigan,” he said, and dropped the paper.

  Boats turned around and looked at the broad tan stripe perhaps twenty yards distant. He had been trying to pull the wooden triangle out of the blue and onto the brown. A second sheet of notebook paper lay on the brown paint, and another, far distant, on the green. He trudged onto the brown paint and leaned over the limp sheet of notebook paper. Printed on it in large block letters were the words Beach or Shore.

  “Okay,” he said. “I sort of get it.”

  It took him only moments to move across the painted beach and enter the green sector, and after a little more limping along he picked up another sheet of notebook paper. It said, of course, Woods or Forest. He straightened up and saw that the room, already enormous, had enlarged. A long way ahead of him three folding chairs formed a rough circle around some small object he could not distinguish. Previously, he had registered the presence of walls, probably of cement blocks, off to the sides and at the front and back of the basement; now, he saw no walls, nothing that defined the space he was in.

  Actually, it was nothing at all, he understood. It was the place where nothing was anything, and everything was everything.

  Jason Boatman had a sudden flash of Keith Hayward’s face out in the agronomy meadow, appearing and disappearing, looking sick with anticipation in the flicker of candlelight. Had he noticed that, back then? Boats didn’t think so, but there it had been, the image of Hayward staring at something, sick with hunger, starved, waiting for this dreadful moment. Boats thought he knew who it was Hayward had been staring at, wearing that expression on his face. And it wasn’t who you thought it was, no it was not.

  Boats gathered that he was supposed to walk to the chairs. His legs felt as though they could not move a single step, and his head had settled down into a nice steady throb. His chest hurt as though an enraged strongman had struck him there several times. He didn’t feel like going anywhere, but in the place where everything was everything, there was no anywhere, because all places were the same.

  He took an unhappy step forward, and an invisible branch struck him in the forehead, opening a wound that throbbed and bled. A white card on the floor said HANDKERCHIEF.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Boats said, and pressed his sleeve against the wound.

  Dripping blood onto the painted concrete, Boats left the tan stripe and entered the green area, which seemed now to go on to the horizon. He looked over his shoulder and saw the same was true of the blue section of the floor—like the lake it represented, it exceeded the eye’s capacity to take it in. Then he pushed his aching legs toward the chairs.

  A note on one of the folding chairs said MALLON. The other two notes said DILLY and BOATS. Immediately behind Dill’s chair was another note card that read TREE. Looking at what the chairs circled, Boats sat down on his card, crossed his knees, and folded his hands together. Six or seven old, well-worn dolls had been stripped of whatever clothing they had worn and stacked on top of one another. In the round heads, most of the eyes were closed, but two of the dolls stared upward open-eyed, both observant and blind for eternity. None of the little bodies had any more gender than was suggested by their ambiguous faces. Dirt that seemed baked on darkened the plastic faces; cracks and fissures threaded the ceramic heads. Most of the doll hair had been either pulled out or burned away.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “A child is the same as a doll. They both mean nothing. It’s a shitty old world.”

  And that was what it was about, he supposed. An aching body, an empty room, a stack of beat-up old dolls. Notes left behind by an absent and irritated god. It was a parody of meaning, an empty mockery—mockery completely without humor. Nothing meant any more than the wire hanger he had used to pull his “boat” to the “beach or shore.” The wire hanger spoke of a death-in-life. Stretching to infinity on all sides, Death-in-life surrounded him.

  On impulse, knowing that he could not be permitted the last word, Boatman leaned forward across the stack of dolls to inspect one of the note cards, and saw that while he had been musing, the battered old dolls had been transformed into dead babies. What was now directly beneath his outstretched hand was a diminished version of what he had seen in the meadow. Too shocked to breathe, too shock
ed even to gasp, he snatched back his hand. Blood from his hand dripped onto the little heap of bodies that lay with their mouths open, heads lolling, fingers limp, little rows of teeth white against the dull red of their mouths, the bruised, crusted, dead-white skin, the tiny white penises, the small, folded slits … For some reason, it was the teeth that horrified him most: so inert and exposed.

  In an instant, the transformation reversed itself, and he was back with the pile of naked dolls in the flat, dead world of the wire hanger. Even his relief was a dire, humorless mockery.

  Boatman once again extended his hand over the sprawling, dead-faced dolls, more slowly than before, and leaned forward until he could touch the card that said MALLON. He closed his fingers on the edge of the card and brought it toward him. Through the name on the card he could see the shadowy traces of something written on its other side.

  He slowly turned it over. On the back of the card a single word had been written in squared-off, careful block letters. CONGRATULATIONS.

  the phenomenon of flight

  A Week Later

  Scarcely believing what I was doing, I rented a blister-red Honda Accord at the Salisbury-Ocean City Wicomico Regional airport, to which I had taken an uncomfortable and unreasonably delayed series of flights, and in that vehicle I traveled up Ocean Highway to US 13, now and then saying to the gospel singers and salvation merchants delivered to me by the Accord’s radio, “I know I shouldn’t be doing this, it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” thence into Rehoboth Beach. I drove, searching for a municipal parking lot, along the one-way streets past gift shops, bed-and-breakfasts, and cafés. I coasted down Lake Avenue and Lakeview Avenue and Grenoble Place. Twenty minutes later, thoroughly lost, I stopped alongside a policeman who was eating an ice-cream cone while seated on a bicycle and asked him if there happened to be a parking lot anywhere near the Golden Atlantic Sands Hotel and Conference Center, wherever that happened to be. The policeman said, “You’re in luck today, sir, and welcome to our town,” and pointed toward an empty parking spot across the street. “That big, long building right in front of us happens to be your destination, the beautiful Golden Atlantic Sands.”