A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  On Glasshouse Road, she kept him focused and moving forward, and after she had glanced around at the source of the strange noises that followed them, she silently let him know that he should not turn his head. That was a funny experience, Glasshouse Road. Most of the boys looked around, and what they would have seen, she knew, was the spectacle of those oversized dogs, dressed like men and upright on their hind legs, dogs that might have stepped out of that dumb painting her father brought back from the saloon except they weren’t friendly or harmless anymore, were they? They would have looked savage, like Hell’s Angel dogs, biker-thug dogs that would have attacked if Mallon and his little band had done anything but go forward. That’s what they all saw, and the Eel saw it, too, but it wasn’t all she saw.

  Brett Milstrap was moving forward with the lock-step, barely contained fury of the insane. When she looked forward toward the end of the street, she could see Brett Milstrap up there, too, mooching along with a sideways smirk on his almost-handsome face at the right hand of Keith Hayward. The Brett up front knew nothing of the enraged Brett stumping along behind, but the one back there hated his position and wanted to swap. Somehow, Eel understood that this exchange wasn’t supposed to be in the cards. It was an impossibility. Brett had been the victim of one of those mistakes, those errors, that can never be made right again.

  Here we come to another really strange part of the evening. In the troubled journey up Glasshouse Road they had cohered into a true unit—she had felt it happening, and she knew the others had, too, even Hayward and Milstrap—and at the center of that unit, she recognized, stood Eel Truax. Not Spencer, for Spencer, whom at this moment she loved entirely, was going simply to be the mechanism that launched her. He only half knew it, because his vanity recoiled before any such knowledge; his own centrality to whatever took place around him was a great foundation stone of his existence, but he did at least have a half knowledge of his true role. That was what permitted him to fulfill it.

  And Spencer’s role was going to be great, the Eel knew. It all depended on him, really, since she would never be able to do her part if he failed in his. And look at the guy! Even before Don led them into that little folded-in part of the meadow, even before they all saw that white circle shining out at them like an invitation, Spencer had been absolutely glowing with his conviction that he was doing the right thing.

  Mallon’s vibrant conviction that on this night they would all achieve the extraordinary swayed them all, she thought. After a while, even Meredith seemed to relinquish her desire for control. And even the fraternity boys stared at her in a way that suggested their ideal woman had moved into a realm beyond the merely sensual. That realm, filled with hints of transcendence, seemed to lie all about them. By the time they were really getting ready to kick things off, it had become the most beautiful evening the Eel had ever seen. The moon and the stars came out, shining pale and growing brighter and brighter as the evening went on. Hootie was still keeping track of Eel, who could see that he thought the stars and the glowing points of light from the traffic had become twice as beautiful because they had passed through her—Hootie saw them as she did, and he was determined to miss nothing.

  As for the Eel, she had a feeling about Spencer Mallon: that he was going to be able after all to reach down into himself and produce the key that would allow her to spring free and do whatever unimaginable things she was meant to do. The man was humming with purpose, focused, electric, joyful. He was so beautiful, it almost hurt to look at him. The Eel could at least persuade herself that this man had become so in tune with himself and his goals that he could not possibly die in the execution of his task. This ceremony was not going to kill him. Which could mean only that he would after all simply take off for some other part of the country. This version of the future made the Eel no happier than it had when Mallon had first revealed it, but as an outcome it was a million times better than death.

  So mixed in with her pleasure and admiration of the much-loved Spencer Mallon as he helped the boys loop the ropes in front of the white circle and passed out the candles and matches, mixed in also with her sense of brimming transcendence, was the painful awareness that no matter what the two of them managed to accomplish that night, he would soon be lost to her forever. Think about it—wouldn’t that have some effect on what happened afterward, exactly the same way as Keith Hayward’s terrible illness? The Eel had death and loss in her mind, too, even while she could feel herself humming and trembling toward this … consummation that hung unseen before her.

  Once they had all their equipment laid out, they seemed almost to start breathing together. Inhaling and exhaling at the same time, all of them. The Eel was intensely aware of the intimacy of that moment. It didn’t matter that she and Meredith had been grouped so closely together, they seemed almost of the same substance. Their mutual detestation endured, but weightlessly.

  When they got to the part where they raised their lighted candles and waited for Mallon to begin, Hootie tightened down into himself and complained about “them” having arrived, and everyone who was thinking supposed that he was talking about the dogs, didn’t they, Hootie?

  Please don’t answer, I know you saw something else around us, too, something that had come in with the dogs. Something hiding amongst them. It’s what you saw on that day last year when my husband and Don took you outside the Lamont for the first time. By that time, you understood them so well you knew it was saying good-bye, and you felt a terrible pity. Jason Boatman is going to be amazed that what you pitied so much was what he called the Dark Matter, but that’s what it was.

  Hootie, who could feel compassion for something like that, must have one of the purest hearts in the world. The Eel knows. She saw one of them, too, before she went on her long journey and wound up in the most amazing of all the places she visited, the most despairing … at the end of the journey that began with such a sense of richness and fullness, almost of luxury, she found herself faced again with the filthy piece of shit that started moving in and out of vision the second Mallon drew in his breath to speak, to sing: the creature that told her how misguided Spencer had been, how foolish, yet at the same time, how close he had come to the breakthrough he had been seeking all his life. A red-bearded demon with a ponytail, bad teeth, and an old-time Noo Yawk accent …

  First, though … first, she became the skylark. The most wonderful moment she ever had or ever will. It was like getting dessert before dinner, or getting the reprieve before the punishment.

  Hootie, watching, knew something had happened that he couldn’t share. It had come to her too quickly, too massively, to be shared. She was on the inside of an experience that had locked him out. The only reason she wasn’t devastated, Hootie, was that she knew you could love what was happening to her. And in his own way, Spencer Mallon could love her, too, for the same reason. He understood that she had gone beyond him, and if he felt envy, it was only for a second.

  The air got thicker somehow, more like a membrane. Unseen things, unseen lives were shooting and spinning around—she became aware of them for a second only. Because then Mallon found his words, or his words found him, and his head fell back and his chest expanded, his fingers spread apart, and this great sound came out of him.

  Right then, crazy as it sounds, she became two people, or one person and one soul, or something like that. Her soul lived in her imagination, she knows that much. Hootie saw it happen, and Spencer did, too.

  Spencer didn’t know, and neither did anyone else but Hootie, about the final thing that sent the Eel on her way. It was the terror, revulsion, and shock that shot through her immediately after she noticed a strange motion happening in the scrubby grass about ten feet to the right of the circle. This motion, this activity, meant that the circle had been drawn in the wrong place. Mallon wasn’t even looking in the right direction! Hootie was the only other person out there who saw what really happened.

  A terrible being woke up, that’s what actually happened out there. Not only
had Mallon awakened it when it did not wish to be awakened, he missed the entire thing. The Eel wished she had missed it, too. The creature struggling to its feet on the worn-out grass might have been invisible, but it terrified her—it made her want to fall to the ground and press her eyes into the dirt. She could tell by the movement of the sparse grass that the thing was twitching with irritation, that it wished to remain unseen. No one was ever supposed to see it as it made its way to and fro in the world, causing men to fall off ladders, and babies to stiffen and die, and corn crops to wither, women to lose unborn babies in a bloody flux, drunken drivers to steer into oncoming lanes, husbands to beat wives, women to roast their husbands alive in their beds like cockroaches, old friends to quarrel and separate. It moved through its boundless territory, bringing chaos and disorder, bringing despair.

  A few flies spun away from its reeking hide. The Eel could sense the creature shifting its ugly head and moving a step forward, a step sideways. Her hopes had curdled inside her—the others were all seeing whatever they saw, but what they smelled was it. In the midst of her revulsion and terror, it came to her that the demonic monster before her was the famous Noonday Demon, rumors of which her father and his corpselike pals had whispered after the slaughter of miserable afternoons at the House of Ko-Reck-Shun: the savage demon of the second rate, the demon of everyday evil. It had entered through a door Mallon had opened without knowing how to close. This was the pure demon of the vengeful, of envy-unto-sickness. As the demon of what was grasping and inferior and unappeasable, it could never be sated, satisfied, pacified, or put to rest. Probably she had breathed its fumes all of her life.

  Mallon was staring at her, barely able to see her through the stinking orange cloud he had created out of nothing.

  The Eel ascended a notch or two up a narrow passage that had taken shape around her. It rose to intersect other, larger passageways she intuited more than saw. From her new position, Eel was permitted to understand what had had happened six years earlier in the stacks of the Columbia University library: drawn to the carrel that was the source of the same glowing color now engulfing them, Spencer Mallon had knocked, answered an array of questions, and been reluctantly admitted. It came to her that she knew all of this because Don “Dilly” Olson had once dared to ask his mentor about it, and his mentor had dared to tell the truth.

  On that day, Eel entered the great course of time and observed something that, although it was not to happen for another ten or eleven years, was taking place close at hand, which she could see by turning her head. What Mallon said to you, Don, was Want to know what that asshole in the carrel told me? I never understood it, so I might as well give it to you, kiddo. What that freaky-looking jerk said to me was, I feel sorry for you. I have control over what I do, and you probably never will.

  The Eel watched it take place though she stood in the door of the hotel room where mentor and pupil shared a pint bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, no ice, no water. Then she spread her wings and lifted off. In the meadow, Hootie and Spencer Mallon watched the Eel’s soul in its flight until it was lost in the darkness. The Eel’s body sipped the momentarily foul air, trembled before impersonal evil, and took in the antics of the other beings Mallon had succeeded in welcoming into our world. This Eel, the physical Eel, witnessed Milstrap’s stupid, bull-headed disappearance into the riotous world of the gods and avatars. But the rest of Eel, her essential self, soared up into a dazzling expanse of sparkling avenues and wandering byways linked to roads broad and narrow, and she understood that Mallon, all unknowing, had given her access to the heart of time, which lay like a huge map on all sides, neither two-dimensional nor three, but both simultaneously. With the addition of breathing, static time, the fourth dimension had been set in place. Across its great map she was free to travel as she wished.

  The Eel was putting this the only way she knew how. She thought that she separated into two equal parts, one of them a skylark. That happened. Yes. It happened. Even if the entire amazing episode came directly from the imagination of the Eel left behind in the meadow.

  With Mallon’s song filling her ears, ecstatic Eel soared in giddy flight through many skies:

  At recess in 1953, Milwaukee schoolchildren ran panting through the concrete schoolyard in a game of tag, ignoring one small boy seated alone beneath the jungle gym. He followed them with his eyes, but he never moved his head. Alone on the playground, this boy set apart looked up at the passing skylark. In her flight, Eel knew that the boy was Keith Hayward, and her heart ached in sorrow and pain;

  with a brief skim down an avenue and a twirl into a narrow lane, the skylark was ascending at a steep angle, pouring out her song, over the garden of a Camden Town pub, London, 1976. Amongst the people at round tables scattered through the potted trees, a smiling dark woman prodded the shoulder of a man in a black sweater, who amazed and joyous shot to his feet and pointed, grinning, at the first skylark he had ever seen or heard;

  in 1958, she whirled over the heads of Indian villagers who gazed up in slow incomprehension while the lean, leather-jacketed American who had been the center of their attention placed one hand atop his rough blond hair, tilted his head, and for a moment appeared to go into a swoon;

  then it was the summer of 1957, and she was soaring over a handsome backyard pool in Fox Point, Wisconsin, where a sullen-looking twelve-year-old boy with a prominent widow’s peak pushed his right hand into his bathing shorts and fondled himself as he raised his left, pointed the barrel of his index finger at her, and twice lowered the hammer of his thumb;

  then the skylark wheeled through a shining passage and entered the future, in the form of a soaring, high-summer whirl above the Great Lawn and Belvedere Castle in Central Park, New York City, for the sake of middle-aged men and women strung out like a necklace along the paths. The birdwatchers gasped and fumbled for their notebooks, their cameras, their cell phones, that they might document the appearance before them of the never seen, the impossible, the soon-to-vanish;

  after that blatant bit of exuberance, a wheeling turn into a darkening lane and a cold, dead diorama from a corner of the future, where under a painted sun in a painted sky a skinny, aging Boats Boatman, soon to have the worst experience of his life, looked up at her baffled from the strip of concrete between a marina and a long artificial lawn pocked with artificial brown footprints in two straight lines. The prints were his and those of a huge non-dog with pointed white plastic teeth that shed the bare moonlight of exposed bone; for a terrible second, she saw herself, a small brown bird with outspread wings, from the perspective of an eye placed beneath the dog’s ugly, inert muzzle; at the heart of a strident tumult of voices a steely tenor voice trumpeted I want what you want;

  the Eel shuddered away, her outpouring song interrupted so brusquely that back in the meadow, Hootie cast her a look of terror and alarm.

  Her shock and dismay at the painted sky and the dead world beneath it, the plastic teeth of the stuffed dog, Boats’s distress, the deadly tenor voice and its invasive assertion, and Hootie’s fear for her sent Eel tumbling through frame after frame:

  standing before his useless “workbench,” her father dropped a shot glass, which shattered against the floor and sprayed whiskey across the Eel’s infant feet;

  in the next room, the invisible, fly-haunted Noonday Demon lounged up to a secondhand crib, and Colby Truax, the Eel’s baby brother, twitched once and died;

  Roy Bly’s head exploded into hanks of hair and bloody brain matter on a jungle trail in Vietnam;

  sprawled across chairs, in a year when the Eel could still see, she and Lee Harwell, unthinkingly happy there at the beginning of the great problems they would face together and apart, she home from her bartending job, he away from his desk for the first time that day, read aloud to each other from a book called Rivers and Mountains on East Seventh Street;

  the last frame was of a sun-streaked State Street in early autumn and the large, unclean window of the Tick-Tock Diner through which the fal
len Eel, now a skylark no longer but merely a transient speck drifting across the sidewalk, could dimly see herself and her companions of the little band all leaning toward the scrawny figure addressing them, in this frame visible only in one-quarter view but clearly identifiable as Keith Hayward,

  to whom, the fallen Eel understood, something truly terrible was going to happen; but not before she learned a great deal more about him.

  In the darkening meadow from which a soul-portion of her had ventured forth, the Eel stood close to Hootie Bly and watched Mallon’s lunatic spirits riot before them. That these spirits had taken him by surprise, that he was absolutely stunned by what he had called up and brought into being, could be read both in the expression on his face and his posture. Now, at what should have been the moment of his greatest triumph, he stood stock still and cursing. He looked exhausted and unprepared: an actor who had been thrust onstage before he learned his lines.

  The Eel, though still concerned with Keith Hayward, understood that Mallon saw himself engulfed in the foul orange-red fog and beleaguered by hundreds of savage dogs. Of the reckless panorama before them, he took in only glimpses. He had no idea of the actual majesty of his failure. Over in front of Don and the fraternity boys, a kind of drunken circus roistered away, a wild party on some cold and distant planet where all the inhabitants were made of shiny wet metal. In an atmosphere of lunatic festivity, a mad king rode around teetering atop a bear; a bellowing queen aimed a long stick at various people, directing curses at them in the way the ten-year-old Brett Milstrap had aimed a pretend bullet at the skylark-Eel skimming above him. The mad, faceless queen gyrated toward Eel as if wound on a spring, leveled her silver rod, and made a simple check mark in the air. Painlessly, a small cold capsule struck the surface of the Eel’s right eye and slipped within like a diver into a pool. Instantly, the capsule was absorbed.