by Peter Straub
“I can’t remember anything he said, except that he’d meet us across the street after the second screening. You don’t mean that, do you?”
“No, I mean what he said about movies and secret messages. Spencer thought that certain movies contained hidden communications that were intended only for the few who were capable of understanding them. That morning, he wanted to tell us about a secret hidden in the ending of Shane. Shane was one of his favorite movies.”
| Skylarking |
Apart from Lee, the Eel said, probably they could all remember how Spencer walked them down the aisle to the second row, but how many of them knew why he did that? The screen shed a light of its own, that’s why, and even when the rest of the enormous theater was in total darkness, the first three or four rows were illuminated by a thin, silvery glow that looked like moonlight. Mallon wanted them to be visible.
Years afterward, the Eel thought Mallon wanted to make sure they would stick to his game plan. He was slipping them into a pocket until it was time to take them out again and set them on their way. The Eel had no proof of this, but it seemed very likely to her that their great leader had given an usher five bucks to make sure they stayed in their seats.
An entire invisible world, Spencer thought, had become aware of his band of youngsters, and he wished to shield them from the denizens of that world until all was in proper alignment. And besides that, he had private business to take care of. His supposedly number-one girlfriend, Meredith, was furious with him over a certain wrong he had done her, and he had to make it up to her the best way he knew how, by screwing her until her brains dribbled out of her ears. Pardon my French, as the boys say. That’s the way Mallon talked when he got onto this subject. Pardon my French, please, young lady. What were her ears supposed to be made of, anyhow? Crystal?
Eel Truax knew what was going on, she was no idiot. She didn’t like it—she didn’t like anything about the deal, if you want to know the truth. He put her in a crummy position, and there was nothing she could do about it. And what Mallon chose to tell them—all of them, really, but mainly her, the Eel—didn’t help, not one bit. He wanted to explain something about death.
So death was there right at the beginning. Mallon put it right in front of them. Only they all thought he was just talking about this Western movie from ten years ago, the one with the kid that looked like Hootie. They’d all seen it on TV; they knew what he was talking about. Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, and Jean Arthur, that blond woman who was in a million movies. Jack Palance, the ultimate snaky bad guy. Man comes to town, helps a sod-buster, makes friends with his family and this whole community that’s being threatened by ranchers. Finally the man reveals he’s a famous gunfighter and does battle with the other team’s gunfighter. He wins, everything is fine again, and the gunfighter rides off into the sunset. Only, Mallon told them before he ran out to hump his girlfriend back into a good mood, the gunfighter, Shane, dies at the end of Shane.
In the last shot, Alan Ladd slumps over his saddle. The other guy put a bullet in him, and he’s dying, only he didn’t want the boy, Billy, to know that. The movie is about the mystery of death in our culture, how that mystery is hidden. Shane is a killer. That’s what he does. If Shane isn’t a killer, the movie doesn’t work, get it? If he’s just another hired man, Van Heflin, Billy’s dad, is going to be shot down in the muddy street. And if that happens, evil wins. But for most of the movie, this wandering killer, Shane, comes across as just a nice, friendly guy … so his death has to be passed off in a kind of code, in a gesture most people will never even see …
Mallon knew, the Eel now thought. (At the time, she had come to a different conclusion.) He knew what Keith Hayward was, and thanks to her husband, Lee Truax now knew a lot more than she wished she did about that subject, and it seemed to her now that Spencer also knew that Hayward was going to be killed out in that meadow. He told them all, too, only he told them in code, like his version of the movie.
After that, they sat through two showings of that stupid Alan Arkin movie and stuffed horrible movie-lobby candy into their mouths.
Finally the second showing was over, and they were allowed to troop outside, where good old Guess Who was waiting for them, big big grin on his face. Wonder of wonders, Miss America, Miss Badger Beauty, was nowhere in sight. Which meant that he had ditched her to pick them up by himself.
Of course Mallon had just climbed out of her bed, that much was obvious no matter where she was at this moment, and poor Eel felt like a big stupid knife had been stuck in her guts, but something came to her as their little band filed across the street to join the other two. It was a sudden insight about the Golden Girl, Meredith Bright, everybody’s ideal woman, and probably it could only have come to the Eel when its subject was nowhere in sight. When Meredith was around, she was too distracting! You know what it was, Eel’s insight? That there wasn’t much to Meredith, and she’d be trading on her looks way into middle age. All she had was this strange combination of innocence and greed, and once the innocence was taken away from her, as it undoubtedly would be, the greed would be all that was left: greed, wrapped in a pretty package. Meredith didn’t even know that she was going to hate Mallon one day, but she would, all right, because Spencer Mallon was never going to satisfy all that need, all that desire …
In a way, Meredith reminded the Eel of Boats, but Boats lusted only for things, stuff you could pick up and jam into a sack. The things that got Meredith all hot and bothered were on another scale altogether. Power and money, the ultimate American package, that was what she was after.
While Mallon was taking them to their rendezvous point with Hayward and Milstrap, they walked straight into a hellacious protest riot, with cops on horseback and fire hoses, and kids getting clouted in the head with nightsticks, people yelling into bullhorns, complete chaos. Total uproar.
The cops had gone out of control by the time their group got close to the scene, and they were all about busting heads and throwing kids into paddy wagons. It infuriated the cops, that the protest leaders had dared to stage an action off campus. Taking it to the citizens broke the fragile contract that had been the only thing keeping the cops to some sort of standard of behavior. They were pissed off and didn’t mind showing it, and that made the protestors more and more outrageous. The clamor they had been hearing came from the students screaming and yelling up University Avenue, not to get away from the cops and their shields and horses but to provoke them into the brutal excess and lawlessness that was their true condition as agents of the state. And, boy oh boy, did it work! By the time Mallon and his core group had made it to North Charter Street through the running crowds, the place was a battleground.
Except for one last-minute stroke of luck, whether good or bad is up to you, they would inevitably have been drawn into the maelstrom, struck with clubs, trampled by horses, assaulted, beaten, and dragged off to jail. But Mallon looked over his shoulder and saw a big new parking garage, and that was all he needed. He pointed, he turned and ran, and the four of them followed him, a second before the firemen arrived with high-pressure hoses and began bowling the students over and sweeping them away. They got out just in time to avoid being turned into waterlogged refuse.
Of course it wasn’t all over when the firemen went into their act. Plenty of students were still primed to do battle, and most of the police were having too much fun to quit. You can only aim a hose in one direction at a time, after all. So once they were all safe behind their concrete wall, there was still a lot to watch. Only, the Eel saw more than she wanted to, and it all seemed to flow from what Spencer Mallon had told them about the end of Shane after they had taken their second-row seats.
At the beginning, though, she saw Keith Hayward and Brett Milstrap, and for the first time really took in how strange they were, both as a couple and individually. When the Eel caught sight of the frat boys, they were slipping along the fronts of the buildings on University, staying as far back as they could from the sidewalks and the street, where all the act
ion was taking place. They were making their way toward the intersection on the same side of the street as the parking garage, so the Eel was able mainly to see the boy in front, Hayward. Behind him, Milstrap appeared in flashes and snatches. They were creeping along like spies, their hands flattened on the walls at their back, slightly bent at the waist, eyes on the commotion. Hayward was loving what he saw—the Eel should have known how he’d be, but when she saw his reaction to chaos, she was shocked.
It was so inhuman, that joy, so perverse … so innately wicked. His eyes were alight; he was grinning and bobbing his chest up and down in an unconscious, delighted chicken dance. Hayward didn’t even know he was doing it, the Eel thought. Probably he was chuckling, too. The strangest part of it was the cold, terrible impersonality of his body’s movements.
Which was the moment a dire perception snapped into focus. Mallon said, Shane dies at the end of the movie: wasn’t Mallon their version of Shane? It seemed so obvious to the Eel, she could not imagine why she had not understood him immediately. He had given her the message, and she had fumbled it in her hands all the while they had trekked after him through the streets of Madison into this grinding chaos. Mallon had told her that he was going to lead them into the moment of transformation and pay for it with his life. That was why he had been so explicit about leaving them after the end of his ceremony, and they had one and all misunderstood him. Mallon was not just leaving town. When he said leaving, he meant leaving.
Horrified, the Eel twisted against the white concrete wall and stared at Spencer Mallon, who had jumped onto the seat of a convenient metal chair and propped his elbows on the top of the wall. His leather jacket, his boots, his perfect hair, and his lightly sunburned face, these aspects of his being took on an abrupt iconic weight, as if the image before her now had been reproduced on a thousand posters: the handsome creases in his face when he smiled, the crinkles at the ends of his eyes, one hand raised in greeting to an unseen rioter.
“Don’t die,” she said, and her words were instantly lost within the roar and rumble of the street.
He could not have heard, but he turned toward her and smiled down. Rocket shells should have been bursting in the sky above, white loops and spirals should have printed themselves on the pale upper air. His beautiful mouth shaped words she could begin to make out, and he jabbed a finger toward the street. Whatever it was, he wanted her to see it, too. She dropped to her knees and scooted along to the edge of the wall, where she could peer out in relative safety.
And there, in the violent street, the Eel saw the first real sign that this day the world was going to turn itself inside out. And even in the midst of the craziness and chaos rioting out there, what she saw was so unexpected, actually so impossible, that she thought she had been mistaken. Because, to begin with, she saw a flash of bone.
But what cleared the street for this vision was extraordinary in itself. It was like watching some behemoth launch itself into view with a plunging demon on its back, a figure so large and terrifying that everyone in sight, students, cops, and firemen, dropped what they were doing and ran for cover. The creature was simply the largest, most enormous horse the Eel had ever seen, an ink-black horse that resembled a heroic, rearing statue brought to massive life. And the face-masked officer mounted on its back, the muscles in his thighs and arms bulging, might have been a general of monumental frame who had raised his huge sword only that he might slash it down again. Together, they seemed superhuman, supernatural, a joined figure of savage retribution called out of an uneasy slumber to enforce the civil order.
The giant horse did rear, and the massive assault cop in the saddle did raise his long riot stick like a sword, and on his great mount swept like an avenging angel down the length of University Avenue, scattering students and policemen alike, then rearing and wheeling to charge slashing back. None could stand before him, and yet the protestors kept re-forming in his wake, then scattering all over again before his next charge. It was in that context that the Eel saw the flash of bone.
It appeared, then vanished, and where she looked to find it again, she saw only a smudge of dirty khaki as a soldier inside an old uniform whirled away from the horse and its implacable rider. An old uniform, still stained from the battlefield, its insignia obscure … she looked again and saw a skeletal arm, then a skull to which some limp hair and rotting flesh still clung. The skeleton of a dead soldier had come to join the protest, and a few of his fellows had joined him. Rifle in hand, a tall, broad man with three stripes on his arm ran toward the plunging horse, unimpeded by possessing only half a head and intestines that followed him like a silver rope. The skeleton jigged and jittered, and the dead sergeant slipped out of the way a moment before the horse could run him down.
No one else saw the dead soldiers, Eel knew.
Had Mallon taken in the rotting dead men, did he rejoice at their presence? The capering dead meant that a veil had been torn, the customary rules overturned … She looked back up at her beloved on his chair and realized that he had not after all seen the dancing corpses; he was looking at her and pointing somewhere farther off.
The Eel glanced in that direction and spotted Meredith Bright: of course. Who else would Mallon be looking for, who else would be all that he could see, really? She looked a bit frightened by the disturbance before her but not as scared as Eel would have thought she’d be—instead, she seemed frustrated, eager but irritated, in a hurry to proceed to their destination.
Her doomed calculations had been thrown off by at least an hour, probably more. The horoscope was her great contribution to the venture, and she was going to be miffed if it became irrelevant. It seemed likely, thought the Eel with a savage splash of joy, that very soon Meredith would be forced to discover that from the beginning her hero/savior/philosopher king had been merely humoring her.
Spencer was waving at Meredith, and Meredith was looking back and forth between Mallon and Keith Hayward. Neither one of them had seen the dead soldiers. Maybe only she thought it made sense for the spirits of dead soldiers to join protests against the war that had stolen their lives. It seemed plenty sensible to the Eel. Under their circumstances, she’d do the same, if she could. They didn’t like being dead, these poor guys. They thought they’d been cheated, which she found completely reasonable. It seemed strange but not unsettling to Eel that she did not find these aggrieved ghosts frightening. Keith Hayward, though, that was scary. He had arrived at a hysterical pitch of joy that made him jig in place—of course, she should have understood it before, Keith had seen the ghost-skeletons, too. Had he ever! How had she missed it, it was so completely obvious. What Keith was looking at, what he was drinking in, was driving him out of his mind with happiness. Death turned the guy on! Spencer had no idea what he had invited into their circle.
Spencer was playing a game, the Eel recognized. She wondered why she had not always known it: from the beginning, he described everything as one kind of game or another. The worst game of all, the most destructive, was “the reality game.” He and Meredith actually talked this way.
“He didn’t know what he was doing?” asked Jason Boatman.
“The answer is no, but I requested that you do not interrupt me, especially with questions,” Eel said. “If anyone else jumps in, I’m done, I’m outta here.”
“Sorry,” Boats said.
So far, we’ve had only prologue, continued the Eel. The prologue has to do with death, and the story of what she did that day revolves around death and evil, evil and death, with appearances in featured roles by two completely different demons, and they are both frightening, but there is something else, too, something greater and wiser and better in every way, something she could dare to approach no more than any of them could, which is not at all, because it was the scariest of all. Her experience wasn’t all one sided, far from it, only the two sides don’t turn out to be what you think they are. The Eel is still trying to work it out.
After the cops and the firemen wandered off, their littl
e group reassembled itself from its various hidey-holes, and the Eel saw that she had been right about Meredith. The girl was insulted and angry. She felt betrayed. Mallon didn’t even pretend to care about the effect of a long delay on their horoscope. He didn’t believe, no matter what she said, that this was one of the very few times when a delay would have serious consequences. Spencer, she told him, I think our window just shut. Fine, he said, we’ll open another one.
People should be careful about the things they say.
Furious, Meredith turned away from Mallon and deliberately made goo-goo bedroom eyes at Keith Hayward, who came close to levitating. Meredith thought it was romance, and love, and young lust, or whatever, and sure, it was partly those things … but mainly it was something else, the side of Keith the Eel had first noticed for really the first time just a little while before. Eel still had no idea of its shape or dimensions, she just knew that he was even sicker than she had thought. A good deal of her experience that evening was going to consist of becoming familiar with the nature and scope of Hayward’s illness.
Mallon cranked them up with a few words and broke Jason’s heart by asking Don if he thought they could pull it off. In spite of screwing up the horoscope, he meant, but Don didn’t get that, and neither did Boats. To them, it felt as though Spencer had anointed Dill as his apprentice and successor. The Eel wondered, What is poor Dilly going to do if Spencer dies today? What do we all do?
Anyhow, Don said what Spencer wanted him to say, and they set off. Hootie kept his eye on the Eel all through the rest of the night, right up until the moment he lost consciousness—Hootie knew something, he had seen something, and the Eel thought he had probably taken in the moment when she had seen the dead soldiers. She was worried about all of them, but he was worried about her. They were so connected, he had almost seen the walking dead himself … so she had to put him back together, which she did with a smile and a look filled to the brim with love. The Eel loved Hootie, and with that look she declared her intention of protecting him all the way through to the end.
