A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  Lots of times, the Eel had said to herself that she had learned much more from good old Twin than she ever did from Spencer Mallon.

  She wanted to tell them one specific reason why she believed that everything she had told them was the literal truth. It was about something that happened long, long after they had all been high-school students in Madison, long after the Eel and Lee Harwell got married, and so long after the onset of her blindness that she had become involved with the ACB, especially its chapters in Chicago and Rehoboth Beach.

  So there was this one time …

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I will be, if you let me explain this,” said the Eel.

  So this one time she had to go, she was asked to go, to Rehoboth Beach to see if she could straighten out an ACB problem there before they had to get the police involved. It had to do with a criminal matter, funds being stolen from the treasury, always a little bit at a time, but it was adding up to a sizable amount, an amount in the low five figures. You have to know—the Eel loved the Rehoboth Beach chapter. She had spent a lot of time helping them get organized, and she agreed to do whatever she could as soon as they asked.

  There was no reason to go through everything that happened while she was in Delaware that time. The Eel solved their problem. She got the thief to confess, the funds were restored on a payment schedule, and back home to Chicago she went, filled with the satisfaction of having done her job well. However, there was more to the story. During the four days she spent in that beach resort, something had happened that distressed her greatly and made it extremely difficult to go on. It brought back everything that had befallen the Eel out in the meadow, and she’d had to work hard to set it aside and stick to her task. Although she was unable to betray what was happening to her, and in fact was not allowed to show any of this by the nature of her role, she had gone through a period of disgust and revulsion, a nausea that included a healthy portion of outright loathing. If she had shown any of this turmoil, her entire mission would have gone right down the drain.

  You have to picture a good-sized boardroom with a big table in the middle. There were no lights burning, because all of the people who entered this room were blind. The other thing you have to try to imagine is that the surroundings were almost stiflingly luxurious. Heavy gold candlesticks, gold candlesnuffers. A couple of tapestries, a crystal chandelier. Now, none of them could see any of that, but it all made for a certain atmosphere—it was the air you breathe when you’re setting up something massive, something dirty at the core. In that room, the Eel spent about an hour with a woman who had committed a murder.

  Her story, and it was just a story, came out of the blue. It had nothing to do with the stolen money. The woman who had committed the murder was trying to shock her—she knew the Eel wasn’t going to turn her in. That was part of the deal from the beginning. They could speak with impunity, no matter they might say. However, this particular woman, the murderer, told her a lie. She falsified what had happened to present herself as more of a victim than a killer.

  An old lover of hers had blinded her, and her testimony sent the man to jail. She told Eel that after his release, he discovered where she was living and called her to ask for a brief meeting. She refused, but he begged and begged, and finally she agreed to meet him for coffee at a place near her apartment. On the day, things went surprisingly well, and she said yes when he asked if he could walk her home. When she got to this part of her story, the Eel felt—she was sure she felt—some other presence slip in behind her. It took her a couple of seconds to realize, or if you must, to imagine, that it was Keith Hayward, some part of Keith Hayward, that had joined her.

  The woman said that the man dragged her across a vacant lot and down into a ravine, where instead of raping her, he just held her down for a while, let her go, and said that he had wanted to let her know how he’d felt every day during the years he’d been in prison. She was so infuriated, she said, that she flipped out and hit him in the head with a rock. And kept on hitting him with the rock until she’d smashed in his head. At which point a young admirer wandered into the scene and helped her get cleaned up before he went back to the ravine and disposed of the body.

  When she came to the part about the vacant lot, Keith Hayward’s arm slithered over her shoulder. The Eel could almost hear his breath in her ear, his head was so close to hers. It was like being embraced from behind by a slug. She was too afraid and disgusted to move, and of course she couldn’t let the other woman know what was happening. But here’s what she could feel: Keith Hayward loved this woman’s story, it thrilled him down to his dirty little toes. When her story ended, he had a kind of shivery ecstasy—like a demonic version of an orgasm! It was hearing about the murder that turned him on, she thought. And she thought he knew that she owed him that much, anyhow.

  Yes, owed him, that’s what she said. She thought she owed him that much, at least—the squalid pleasure the woman’s story gave him. On the last day of his life, she had made an extensive journey through his mind and his memory, after all. It was even possible that he had sacrificed his life for her. She didn’t think that’s what happened, but she could not dismiss it out of hand. She’d spent a lot of time in the inner world of Keith Hayward, anyhow, and she’d been left with enough of a sense of connection to let him join her at that appalling moment. Nothing goes one way, you know, no matter what you think.

  A couple of months later, she was going over all this in her head, mainly because her head wouldn’t let her do anything else, and she remembered feeling that, as terrible as this sounds, Hayward was getting too much pleasure, and that his pleasure was too complicated, for what he and she were hearing. He had heard more than she had, but she couldn’t imagine what it could have been. A little while later, one day when she was working on a report in her office upstairs here, it came to her that slimy Keith Hayward had immediately understood that the woman was lying. She had set up the meeting, she had lured the man into the ravine, and her admirer had jumped out of the bushes and killed him. As much as the murder, Keith had gotten off on the lie!

  “So that’s why I think it was real,” the Eel said. “I could feel him there with me in that room—our old friend, Keith Hayward, come back to cash in an IOU with my name on it. I don’t know how I ever got through that interview. Before I could face the ACB people again, I had to go up to my room and take a shower. But okay, I said to myself, now I know it was true, now I know it all really did happen.”

  She slumped against the back of her chair and let her hands drop to her sides. “I don’t think I can say any more. Except I don’t believe that Shane dies at the end of Shane. Mallon was full of bull puckey.”

  “Yep, I agree,” Hootie said. “I don’t think he dies, either.”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” Boatman said.

  “There’s no way Shane dies,” said Don. “Eel, you got that right.”

  They were giving serial assent to everything she had told them. They had signed on to the party of the Eel; they were believers.

  “You’re with us, right, Lee?” Don asked. “I don’t have to ask, I know.”

  “At the end of that movie, Shane is a goner,” I said. “He was dead before he hit the ground.”

  A shocked silence filled the room.

  “And at the end of Casablanca,” I said, “Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walk straight into the propeller of that plane and get chopped to pieces.”

  Slowly, Hootie, Boatman, and Olson all revolved their heads toward me. Lee Truax snickered. The three other men in the room turned from me to gaze at her. Then Hootie pointed at me and laughed. Don shook his head, rocked back in his chair, and grinned.

  “I don’t understand humor like that,” Jason said. “Sorry, I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to get it,” the Eel said. “You’re plenty fine as is.”

  In anticipation of a long evening, we had prepared a great deal of food, and after she had come to the end of her tal
e and reassured Boatman, kindly but falsely, that his lack of even a rudimentary sense of humor did not diminish him in her eyes, everyone followed us into the dining room and helped themselves to slices of rare beef from a standing rib roast, roasted chicken, steamed mixed vegetables, steamed asparagus, sautéed mushrooms, sweet potato chips, and as a nod to the ghost of Keith Hayward, a cherry pie I had brought home from a neighborhood bakery. Bottles of a Russian River pinot noir, a Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, a chilled Alsatian pinot gris, sixteen-year-old single-malt scotch, twenty-year-old bourbon, water from icebergs, and Welch’s grape juice stood on a sideboard with glasses, an ice bucket, and tongs.

  The conversation felt anticlimactic to all, and dropped into frequent silences where the only sounds to be heard were the clicking and scraping of silverware on china. Ice cubes rattled in a glass of grape juice.

  I said, “I suppose there’s no hope for that Milstrap kid, but can he at least look forward to dying?”

  “I don’t think so,” Don said. “I don’t think anything dies in that world. They don’t even age. They just keep getting crazier and crazier.”

  “Is that some kind of release, at least? Some kind of escape?”

  “From what I’ve seen,” Hootie said, “things don’t get better when you go crazy. They tend to get worse, fast.”

  “That may not be true for Milstrap,” Boatman said. “The last time I saw him was maybe eighteen months ago. He was sitting on the curb on Morrison Street, just watching the students walk by, it looked like. You know the deal—khaki shorts, polo shirt, madras jacket. Bass Weejuns with no socks. Still dressing like a mid-sixties frat boy.”

  “I sometimes wonder, where does he get his clothes?” asked Don. “What is there, a dispensary somewhere?”

  “No idea. But the point is, he didn’t look crazy. He didn’t even look so desperate, the way he used to. Man, there were times I saw that guy, I crossed the street rather than get near him. On Morrison Street, though, he just looked kind of resigned and worn out. He waved at me, only he had this unhappy-looking smile on his face.”

  “Maybe he was waving good-bye,” Hootie said. “I’m sorry he didn’t come to see me, too.” He bit into a steamed carrot and chewed for a couple of seconds. “But I’m glad he didn’t, too.”

  Soon after, the aging men who carried within them the glowing embers of Dill, Boats, and Hootie said their good-byes, hugged me, kissed the Eel, who had grown weary, and set out for their various destinations.

  Eel and I closed our front door and went back to the dining room to pick up the dishes and pack away the leftover food. When she returned from the kitchen after rinsing off their dinner plates, I said, “Go to bed, sweetie. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “I’ll just do a little more.” She tucked the stems of a handful of wine glasses between her fingers and with her free hand picked up a short, fat cocktail glass that shed, as if in successive rings, the smell of expensive whiskey.

  “Um, I’d like to ask you something,” I said, and gave her a glance that felt so uncertain and divided that I imagined it was what stopped her in her course toward the kitchen.

  No, I thought, it wasn’t the way I looked at her. How could it be? She heard something in my voice.

  “Oh,” she said, her voice neutral. “Please do.”

  I had the feeling that she already knew what I wanted to ask her. I plunged into it anyhow. “I thought it was nice, when you were skylarking around, that you saw us in that pub garden in Camden Town. July of 1976 was a lovely month. I still remember seeing that skylark.”

  “I remember you seeing it, too.”

  She could remember that moment from more perspectives than one, I realized.

  “But go on,” she said, and I had an uncanny certainty that she knew what was on my mind.

  “I was wondering if you also saw me making a fool of myself on the Boardwalk outside that hotel of yours.”

  “It’s not my hotel, but yes, I did.” She set the glasses back down on the table and let her arms hang at her sides. “Of course, when I was seventeen, I couldn’t be sure it was you, lurking there. I only figured it out later on.”

  “I was an idiot,” I said.

  “You even knew you were being idiotic,” she said. “That’s why you bought that stupid hat and those terrible sunglasses.”

  “Can I apologize now?”

  “You can do anything you like. As I said to Jason Boatman, you’re fine as is.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “As much as I did then. Maybe a little more.”

  I smiled, and understood with absolute certainty that she was aware of it. “We don’t really want to know Jason anymore, do we?”

  “Leading the life of a thief for better than four decades does very little for your character. He turned into a bore. But maybe he always was boring, and we didn’t notice.”

  With that, she probed the glasses with her fingers and fitted them back into her hand. Then she picked up the whiskey glass and walked without hesitation into the kitchen. I followed after her, carrying two fistfuls of silverware. She put the glasses on the counter, and after disposing of the silver I placed the half-tumbler in the dishwasher and the wine glasses in the sink.

  She leaned against the butcher-block island and waited for me.

  “What you did, that was wonderful,” I said.

  “Do you mean back then, or now?”

  “Just now. With all of us there.”

  “Thanks. I have to get to bed, though. I’m worn out.”

  I cupped one cheek in my hand and looked at her.

  “But while we’re on the subject,” she said, “you should know that I do think that the wretched Keith Hayward actually did something great, too. Selfless, anyhow.”

  “You think he really did sacrifice himself? You said you weren’t sure.”

  “Nobody wanted to hear it. Jason and Hootie, they hated the idea.”

  “It doesn’t sound much like Hayward, you have to admit that.”

  “I know. But I was with him, I went to the diner with him. He felt miserable—he didn’t even understand this, but he actually loved Miller, in his pathetic way. That he turned him over to his murderous uncle made him sick with guilt.”

  “But how would that … why would he … ?”

  “Sacrifice himself for me? Because he knew I understood about Miller. That he wasn’t completely evil, that there was at least some kind of spark in him.”

  “So he traded his life for yours.”

  “Meredith obviously thought he did it for her, to save her life. Maybe I’m as delusional as she is. Neither one of us will ever really know. But I saw him think. He knew I understood.”

  “So he …”

  “He was making up for Miller,” she said. “Yep. That’s what I think.”

  “Astounding.”

  I lifted her hand and placed it where mine had been, on my cheek. She did not pull her hand away. For a moment, we stood there without moving or talking.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “I feel … it’s like … I have the feeling that we’ve been set free.”

  “Do you feel that, too? Good.”

  At last, she smiled at me. With a final pat, she dropped her hand. “Now that you’re a free man, do you plan to write a book about Mallon and what all of us did?”

  “It feels like I already wrote that book.”

  “Ah.” She smiled again. “So?”

  I couldn’t help it—laughter ignited within me and flew from my throat. So?

  Acknowledgments

  Gratitude and admiration to my friend Brian Evenson, whose extraordinary novel The Open Curtain suggested both the material and approach of the subchapter entitled “The Dark Matter, II.” Good Brian cannot say he wasn’t warned. Bradford Morrow, Neil Gaiman, Gary Wolfe, Bill Sheehan, and Bernadette Bosky, early readers of this novel when it was very much in progress, offered wise, helpful, and supportive comments and advice, for which I am deeply grateful. I a
lso owe thanks to the small press publishers who created exquisite limited editions of earlier variants of some of this material, Thomas and Elizabeth Monteleone and William Schafer. To the original “Eel,” Lee Boudreaux, I sweep off my hat and bow low in admiration and wonder. My agent, David Gernert, supplied wisdom, psychic comfort, and excellent advice on the many occasions when these were needed. My editors, Stacy Creamer and Alison Callahan, were immensely helpful in bringing this long project into balance and clarity. Jay Andersen performed his usual keen-eyed amateur copyediting during the book’s earlier stages. Lila Kalinich knows what she did, and it is too deep, almost, for words. Of my wife, Susan Straub, I can say only that my nearly lifelong debt of love given and returned and lived with really is too deep for words: it goes down as far as I do.

  About the Author

  Peter Straub has written nineteen novels and won, multiple times, every award his expanding genre bestows. He lived in Ireland and England for a decade, and now lives in a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife, Susan, the founder and director of the Read To Me program.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Seafront Corporation

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Title page photograph by Chad Riley/UpperCut Images/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Straub, Peter, 1943–

  A dark matter : a novel / Peter Straub.—1st ed.