The Throat

by Peter Straub

  The skinny reporter windmilled backward and went down with a howl of surprise. In the moment of shock that followed, John swung at Bough’s photographer, who backed away while firing off a sequence of motor-driven pictures that appeared at the top of the next day’s second section. John whirled away from him and rushed at the photographer from Chicago, who had prowled up beside him. John grasped the man’s camera with one hand, his neck with the other, and bowled him over, snapping the camera’s strap. John wound up like a pitcher and fired the camera toward the street. It struck a car and bounced off onto the concrete. Then he whirled on the man holding the Minicam.

  Geoffrey Bough scrambled to his feet, and John turned away from the Minicam operator, who showed signs of a willingness to fight, and pushed Bough back down on the ground.

  Reestablished in the middle of Ely Place, Isobel Archer held the microphone up to her American Sweetheart face and said something to the cameras that caused an outbreak of mirth among the assembled neighbors. John dropped his hands and stepped away from the scrambling, sputtering reporter. Bough jumped to his feet and followed the other reporters and camera people to the street. He brushed off his dirty jeans and inspected a grass stain on his right knee, missing the comparable stain on his right elbow. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” he said.

  John raised his fists and began to charge. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the steps—if he had not cooperated with me, I could not have held him. In the second or so that he resisted me, I knew that these days, for all his flab, John Ransom was considerably stronger than I was. We got up the steps and I opened the door. Ransom stormed inside and whirled around to face me.

  “What the hell was that shit you were coming up with out there?”

  “I don’t think Dragonette killed your wife,” I said. “I don’t think he killed the man behind the St. Alwyn, either.”

  “Are you crazy?” Ransom stared at me as if I had just betrayed him. “How can you say that? Everybody knows he killed April. We even heard him say he killed April.”

  “I was thinking about everything while you were upstairs, and I realized that Dragonette didn’t know enough about these murders to have done them. He doesn’t even know what happened.”

  He glared at me for a moment and then turned away in frustration and sat down on the couch and took in what the local TV stations were doing. Isobel Archer gloated beautifully into the camera and said, “And so a startling new development in the Dragonette story, as a friend of the Ransom family casts doubt on the police case here.” She raised a notebook to just within camera range. “We will have tape on this as soon as possible, but my notes show that the words were: ‘I don’t think he did it. I think the police will reject that portion of his confession, in time.’ “She lowered the notebook, and an audible pop! whisked her into darkness and silence.

  Ransom slammed the remote onto the table. “Don’t you get it? They’re going to start blaming me.”

  “John,” I said, “why would Dragonette interrupt his busy little schedule of murder and dismemberment at home to reenact the Blue Rose murders? Don’t they sound like two completely different types of crime? Two different kinds of mind at work?”

  He looked sourly at me. “That’s why you went out there and threw raw meat to those animals?”

  “Not exactly.” I went to the couch and sat down beside him. Ransom looked at me suspiciously and moved a few inches away. He began rearranging the Vietnam books into neater, lower stacks. “I want to know the truth,” I said.

  He grunted. “What actual reasons do you have for thinking that Dragonette isn’t guilty? The guy seems perfect to me.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Okay.” Ransom, who had been slouching back against the couch, sat up straight. “One. He confessed. Two. He’s crazy enough to have done it. Three. He knew April from his visits to the office. Four. He always liked the Blue Rose murders, just like you. Five. Could there really be two people in Millhaven who are crazy enough to do it? Six. Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan, who happen to be very good cops and who have put away lots of killers, think the guy is guilty. Fontaine might be a little weird sometimes, but Hogan is something else—he’s one smart, powerful guy. I mean, he reminds me of the best guys I knew in the service. There’s no bullshit about Hogan, none.”

  I nodded. Like me, John had been impressed by Michael Hogan.

  “And last, what is it, seven? Seven. He could find out all about April and her condition from his mother’s old pal Betty Grable at the hospital.”

  “I think it was Mary Graebel, different spelling,” I said. “And you’re right, he did find out April was at Shady Mount. When I came down in the elevator with Fontaine this morning, an old lady working behind the counter almost passed out when she saw us. I bet that was Mary Graebel.”

  “She knew she helped kill April,” John said. “The cow couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”

  “She thought she helped her old friend’s son kill April. That’s different.”

  “What makes you so sure he didn’t?”

  “Dragonette claimed that he couldn’t remember anything he had done to that cop in April’s room, Mangelotti. He overheard Fontaine joking that Mangelotti was dead—so he claimed that he had murdered him. Then Fontaine said he was exaggerating, so Dragonette said he was exaggerating, too!”

  “He’s playing mind games,” John said.

  “He didn’t know what happened to Mangelotti. Also, he had no idea that April had been killed until he heard it over the police radio. That was the point that always bothered me.”

  “Why would he confess if he didn’t do it? That still doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe you didn’t notice, but Walter Dragonette is not the most sensible man in the world.”

  Ransom leaned forward and stared down at the floor for a time, considering what I had been saying. “So there’s another guy out there.”

  I saw a mental picture of those drawings where the eye wanders over the leaves of an oak tree until the dagger leaps out of concealment, and the brickwork on the side of a house reveals a running man, a trumpet, an open door.

  “You and your brainstorms.” He shook his head, now almost smiling. “I’m going to have to live with the repercussions of shoving that reporter around.”

  “What do you think they’ll be?”

  He shifted one of the stacks of novels sideways half an inch, back a quarter-inch. “I suppose my neighbors are more convinced than ever that I killed my wife.”

  “Did you, John?” I asked him. “This is just between you and me.”

  “You’re asking me if I killed April?”

  His face heated as before, but without the violence I had seen in him just before he had gone after Geoffrey Bough. He stared at me, trying to look intimidating. “Is this something Tom Pasmore asked you to say?”

  I shook my head.

  “The answer is no. If you ask me that once more, I’ll throw you out of this house. Are you satisfied?”

  “I had to ask,” I said.

  2

  FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, John Ransom and I watched the city fall apart on local television. When we were inside his house, we ignored the knot of reporters, varying from a steady core of three to a rumbling mob of fifteen, occupying his front lawn. We also ignored their efforts to lure us outside. They rang the bell at regular intervals, pressed their faces against the windows, yelled his name or mine with doglike repetitiveness … Every hour or so, either John or I would get up from the day’s fifth, sixth, or fifteenth contemplation of the names and faces of the victims to check the enemy through the narrow window slits on either side of the door. It felt like a medieval siege, plus telephones.

  We ate lunch in front of the set; we ate dinner in front of the set.

  Someone banged imperiously on the front door. Someone else fingered open the mail slot and yelled, “Timothy Underhill! Who killed April Ransom?”

  “Who killed Laura Palmer?” muttered Ransom, mostly t
o himself.

  This was on the day, Saturday, that Arkham’s dean of humanities had left a message on the answering machine that Arkham’s trustees, board of visitors, and alumni society had registered separate complaints about the televised language and behavior of the religion department’s Professor Ransom. Would Professor Ransom please offer some assurance that all legal matters would be concluded by the beginning of the fall term? And it followed our struggles back and forth through the mob on our way to Trott Brothers Funeral Parlor.

  So he wasn’t doing too badly, considering everything. The worst aspect of our experience at Trott Brothers had been the manner of Joyce “Just call me Joyce” Trott Brophy, the daughter and only child of the single remaining Mr. Trott. Just Call Me Joyce made the reporters seem genteel. Obese and hugely pregnant, professionally oblivious to grief, she had long ago decided that the best way to meet the stricken people life brought her way was with the resolute self-involvement she would have called “common sense.”

  “We’re doing a beautiful job on your little lady, Mr. Ransom, you’re going to say she looks as beautiful as she did on her wedding day. This here coffin is the one I’m recommending to you for display purposes during the service, we can talk about the urn later, we got some real beauties, but look here at this satin, plump and firm and shiny as you can get it—be the perfect frame around a pretty picture, if you don’t mind my saying so. You wouldn’t believe the pains I get carrying this baby back and forth around this showroom, boy, if Walter Dragonette showed up here he’d get two for the price of one, that’d give my daddy the job of his life, wouldn’t it, by golly, that’s gas this time. You ever get those real bad gas pains? I better sit down here while you and your friend talk things over, just don’t pay any attention to me, Lord, I heard everything anyhow, people hardly know what they’re saying when they come in here.”

  We had at least two hours of Just Call Me Joyce, which demonstrated once again that when endured long enough, even the really horrible can become boring. In that time John rented the “display” coffin, ordered the funeral announcements and the obituary notice, booked time at the crematorium, bought an urn and a slot in a mausoleum, secured the “Chapel of Rest” and the services of a nondenominational minister for the memorial service, hired a car for the procession to the mausoleum, ordered flowers, commissioned makeup and a hairdo for the departed, bought an organist and an organ and ninety minutes’ worth of recorded classical music, and wrote a check for something like ten thousand dollars. “Well, I sure do like a man who knows what he wants,” said Just Call Me Joyce. “Some of these folks, they come in here and dicker like they thought they could take it with them when they go. Let me tell you, I been there, and they can’t.”

  “You’ve been there?” I asked.

  “Everything that happens to you after you’re dead, I been there for it,” she said. “And anything you want to know about, I can tell you about it.”

  “I guess we can go home now,” Ransom said.

  Early in the evening, Ransom was seated in the darkening room, staring at its one bright spot, the screen, which once again gave a view of the chanting crowd at Armory Place. I thought about Just Call Me Joyce and her baby. Someday the child would take over the funeral home. I saw this child as a man in his mid-forties, grinning broadly and pressing the flesh, slamming widowers on the back, breaking the ice with an anecdote about trout fishing, Lordy that was the biggest ole fish anybody ever pulled out of that river, oof, there goes my sciatica again, just give me a minute here, folks.

  A door in my mind clicked open and let in a flood of light, and without saying anything to Ransom, I went back upstairs to my room and filled about fifteen sheets of the legal pad I had remembered at the last minute to slip into my carry-on bag. All by itself, my book had taken another stride forward.

  3

  WHAT HAD OPENED THE DOOR into the imaginative space was the collision of Walter Dragonette with the certainty that Just Call Me Joyce’s child would be just like his mother. When I had arrived at Shady Mount that morning, I’d had an idea which April Ransom’s death had erased—but everything since then had secretly increased the little room of my idea, so that by the time it came back to me through imagination’s door, it had grown into an entire wing, with its own hallways, staircases, and windows.

  I saw that I could use some of Walter Dragonette’s life while writing about Charlie Carpenter’s childhood. Charlie had killed other people before he met Lily Sheehan: a small boy, a young mother, and two or three other people in the towns where he had lived before he had come back home. Millhaven would be Charlie’s hometown, but it would have another name in the book. Charlie’s deeds were like Walter Dragonette’s, but the circumstances of his childhood were mine, heightened to a terrible pitch. There would be a figure like Dragonette’s Mr. Lancer. My entire being felt a jolt as I saw the huge head of Heinz Stenmitz lower itself toward mine—pale blue eyes and the odor of bloody meat.

  During Charlie’s early childhood, his father had killed several people for no better motive than revenge, and the five-year-old Charlie had taken his father’s secret into himself. If I described everything through Charlie’s eyes, I could begin to work out what could make someone turn out like Walter Dragonette. The Ledger had tried to do that, clumsily, by questioning sociologists, priests, and policemen; and it was what I had been doing when I put the photograph of Ted Bundy’s mother up on my refrigerator.

  For the second time that day, my book bloomed into life within me.

  I saw five-year-old Charlie Carpenter in my old bedroom on South Sixth Street, looking at the pattern of dark blue roses climbing the paler blue wallpaper in a swirl of misery and despair as his father beat up his mother. Charlie was trying to go into the wallpaper, to escape into the safe, lifeless perfection of the folded petals and the tangle of stalks.

  I saw the child walking along Livermore Avenue to the Beldame Oriental, where in a back row the Minotaur waited to yank him bodily into a movie about treachery and arousal. Reality flattened out under the Minotaur’s instruction—the real feelings aroused by the things he did would tear you into bloody rags, so you forgot it all. You cut up the memory, you buried it in a million different holes. The Minotaur was happy with you, he held you close and his hands crushed against you and the world died.

  Because columns of numbers were completely emotionless, Charlie was a bookkeeper. He would live in hotel rooms because they were impersonal. He would have recurring dreams and regular habits. He would never sleep with a woman unless he had already killed her, very carefully and thoroughly, in his head. Once every couple of months, he would have quick, impersonal sex with men, and maybe once a year, when he had allowed himself to drink too much, he would annoy some man he picked up in a gay bar by babbling hysterical baby talk while rubbing the stranger’s erection over his face.

  Charlie had been in the service in Vietnam.

  He would kill Lily Sheehan as soon as he got into her lake house. That was why he stole the boat and let it drift into the reeds, and why he showed up at Lily’s house so early in the morning.

  I had to go back through the first third of the novel and insert the changes necessary to imply the background that I had just invented for Charlie. What the reader saw of him—his bloodless affection for his boring job, his avoidance of intimacy—would have sinister implications. The reader would sense that Lily Sheehan was putting herself in danger when she began her attempts to lure Charlie into the plot that had reminded me of Kent Smith and Gloria Grahame. You, dear heart, dear Reader, you without whom no book exists at all, who had begun reading what appeared to be a novel about an innocent lured into a trap would gradually sense that the woman who was trying to manipulate the innocent was going to get a nasty surprise.

  The first third of the book would end with Lily Sheehan’s murder. The second third of the book would be the account of Charlie’s childhood—and it came to me that the child-Charlie would have a different name, so that at first you,
dear Reader, would wonder why you were suddenly following the life of a pathetic child who had no connection to the events of the book’s first two hundred pages! This confusion would end when the child, aged eighteen, enlisted in the army under the name Charles Carpenter. Charlie’s capture would take up the final third.

  The title of this novel would be The Kingdom of Heaven, and its epigraph would be the verses from the Thomas gospel I had read in Central Park.

  The inner music of The Kingdom of Heaven would be the search for the Minotaur. Charlie would have returned to Millhaven (whatever it was called in the book) because, though he had only the most partial glimpse of this, he wanted to find the man who had abused him in the Beldame Oriental. Memories of the Minotaur would haunt his life and the last third of the book, and once—without quite knowing why—he would visit the shell of the theater and have an experience similar to mine of yesterday morning.

  The Minotaur would be like a fearsome God hidden at the bottom of a deep cave, his traces and effects scattered everywhere through the visible world.

  Then I had a final insight before going back downstairs. The movie five-year-old Charlie Carpenter was watching when a smiling monster slid into the seat next to his was From Dangerous Depths. It did not matter that I had never seen it—though I could see it, if I stayed in Millhaven long enough—because all I needed was the title.

  Now I needed a reason for a child so young to be sent to the movies on several days in succession, and that too arrived as soon as I became aware of its necessity. Young Charlie’s mother lay dying in the Carpenter house. Again the necessary image surged forward out of the immediate past. I saw April Ransom’s pale, bruised, unconscious body stretched out on white sheets. A fresh understanding arrived with the image, and I knew that Charlie’s father had beaten his wife into unconsciousness and was letting her die. For a week or more, the little boy who grew up to be Charlie Carpenter had lived with his dying mother and the father who killed her, and during those terrible days he had met the Minotaur and been devoured.