The Throat

by Peter Straub

  I set the box down and opened the four flaps on its top. There was another box inside it. “Damn it,” I said, and jumped up to go to the front of the furnace.

  “Find anything?” John was at the top of the stairs.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I pulled down the handle and swung open the door.

  “There’s nothing upstairs. Just bare rooms.” Every other stair groaned beneath his weight. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking the furnace,” I said. “I just found two empty boxes.”

  The interior of the furnace was about the size of a baby carriage. Fine white ash lay across the bottom of the furnace, and black soot coated the grate. John came up beside me.

  “I think we lost them,” I said.

  “Hold on,” John said. “He didn’t burn anything here. See that stuff?” He pointed at a nearly invisible area on the furnace wall, a section slightly lighter in color than the rest of the interior that I had taken for some kind of stain. John reached into the furnace and dragged it down with his fingers—the ancient spiderweb pulled toward him, then broke and collapsed into a single dirty gray rope.

  The boxes lay where I had left them, the flaps of the outer box open on the smooth side of the one inside it. When I shook them, something rattled. “Let’s pull them apart,” I said.

  John came forward and flattened his hands on the box. I thrust my fingers inside and tugged. The inner box slid smoothly out. The brown tape across its top flaps had been slit down the middle. I bent up the flaps. Another, smaller box was inside it. I pulled out the third box. About the size of a toaster, it too had been cut open before being inserted into the nest. When I shook it, a papery, slithery sound came from inside the box.

  “Guess you found the easter egg,” John said.

  I righted the box on the floor and opened it. A square white envelope lay in the bottom of the carton. I picked it up. The envelope was thicker and heavier than I expected. I carried it to the light at the head of the stairs. John watched me open the flap.

  “Pictures,” he said.

  The old square, white-bordered photographs looked tiny by contemporary standards. I took them out of the envelope and stared at the first one. Some Dumky child had scribbled over its surface. Beneath the crazy lines, the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn was still visible. I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next. At first, it looked like a copy of the photograph I had just seen. There were fewer scribbles on this one. Then I saw that the photographer had moved a few feet nearer the opening of the tunnel, and the fan of vertical bricks at the top of the arch showed more clearly through the overlay of scribbles.

  The next one showed a neatly made bed beneath a framed painting invisible behind the mirrored explosion of the flash. Beside the bed, half of a door filled the frame. A little Dumky had scratched XXXXXXXXXXX across the door and the wall. He had run out of patience before he got to the bed, and the X’s broke down into scrawls and loops.

  “What’s that?” John asked.

  The next photograph was of the same bed and door taken from an angle that included the corner of a dressing table. The details of the room lay buried under a lot more scribbled ink.

  “A picture of room 218 at the St. Alwyn,” I said, and looked up at Ransom’s face. “Bob Bandolier took pictures of the sites before he did the murders.”

  I uncovered the next image, scarcely touched by the little Dumkys. Here, rendered in soft brown tones, was the Livermore Avenue side of the Idle Hour, where Monty Leland had been murdered. The photograph beneath had been taken from a spot nearer the corner of South Sixth and showed more of the tavern’s side. A zigzag of ink ran across the wooden boards like a bolt of lightning.

  “The guy was an obsessive’s obsessive. It was planned out, like a campaign.”

  I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and found myself looking at a photograph almost unreadable beneath inky loops and scratches. I lifted it nearer my face. It had to be a picture of Heinz Stenmitz’s butcher shop, but something about the size or shape of the building buried beneath the ink bothered me.

  The next was nearly as bad. The edge of a building that might equally have been the Taj Mahal, the White House, or the place where I lived on Grand Street dove beneath a hedge of scribbles.

  “They worked that one over,” John said.

  I peered down at the picture, trying to figure out what troubled me about it. I could only barely remember the front of Stenmitz’s shop. One side of the sign that projected out in a big V above the window read HOME-MADE SAUSAGES; the other side, QUALITY MEATS. Something like that seemed visible underneath the scrawls, but the proportions of the building seemed wrong.

  “It must be the butcher shop, right?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “How come they’re squirreled away in these boxes?”

  “Fee must have found them in a drawer—wherever his father kept them. He put them down here to protect them—he must have thought that no one would ever find them.”

  “What do we do with them?”

  I already had an idea about that.

  I sorted through the photographs and chose the clearest of each pair. John took the envelope, and I passed him the others. He slid them into the envelope and tucked in the flap. Then he turned over the envelope and held it up close to his face, as I had done with the last photograph. “Well, well.”

  “What?”

  “Take a look.” He pointed to faint, spidery pencil marks on its top left-hand corner.

  In faint, almost ladylike thin gray letters, the words BLUE ROSE appeared on the yellowing paper.

  “Let’s leave these here,” I said, and put the envelope in the smallest box, folded the top shut, and slid the box into the next, and then inserted this one into the largest box, folded its flaps shut, and pushed it back behind the furnace.

  “Why?” John asked.

  “Because we know they’re here.” He frowned and pushed his eyebrows together, trying to figure it out. I said, “Someday, we might want to show that Bob Bandolier was Blue Rose. So we leave the envelope here.”

  “Okay, but where are the notes?”

  I raised my shoulders. “They have to be somewhere.”

  “Great.” John walked to the end of the basement, as if trying to make the boxes of notes materialize out of the shadows and concrete blocks. After he passed out of sight behind the furnace, I heard him coming up on the far side of the basement. “Maybe he hid them under the furnace grate.”

  We went back around to the front of the furnace. John opened the door and stuck his head inside. “Ugh.” He reached inside and tried to pick up the grate. “Stuck.” He withdrew his hand, which was streaked with gray and black on the back and completely blackened on the palm. The sleeve of the blue silk jacket had a vertical black stripe just below the elbow. John grimaced at the mess on his hand. “Well, I don’t think they’re in here.”

  “No,” I said. “They’re probably still in the boxes. He doesn’t know that we know they exist.”

  I took another, pointless look around the basement.

  John said, “What the hell, let’s go home.”

  We went upstairs and back out into the fog. John locked the door behind us.

  I got lost somewhere north of the valley and nearly ran into a car backing out of a driveway. It took me nearly two hours to get back to Ely Place, and when we pulled up in front of his house, John said, “Got any other great ideas?”

  I didn’t remind him that the idea had been his.

  8

  WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” John asked. We were in the kitchen, eating a big salad I had made out of a tired head of lettuce, half of an onion, some old Monterey jack cheese, and cut-up slices of the remaining luncheon meat.

  “We have to do some shopping,” I said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I chewed for a little while, thinking. “We have to work out a way to get him to take us to those notes. And I’ve been running a
few lines of research. I want to continue with those.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “I’ll tell you when I have some results.” I didn’t want to tell him about Tom Pasmore.

  “Does that mean that you want to use the car again?”

  “A little later, if that’s all right,” I said.

  “Okay. I really do have to get down to the college to take care of my syllabus and a few other things. Maybe you could drive me there and pick me up later?”

  “Are you going to set up Alan’s courses, too?”

  “I don’t have any choice. April’s estate is still locked up, until it gets out of probate.”

  I didn’t want to ask him about the size of April’s estate.

  “It’ll be a couple of million,” he said. “Two something, according to the lawyers. Plus about half a million from her life insurance. Taxes will eat up a lot of it.”

  “There’ll be a lot left over,” I said.

  “Not enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To be comfortable, I mean, really comfortable, for the rest of my life,” he said. “Maybe I’ll want to travel for a while. You know what?” He leaned back and looked at me frankly. “I have gone through an amazing amount of shit in my life, and I don’t want any more. I just want the money to be there.”

  “While you travel,” I said.

  “That’s right. Maybe I’ll write a book. You know what this is about, don’t you? I’ve been locked up inside Millhaven and Arkham College for a long time, and I have to find a new direction.”

  He looked at me, hard, and I nodded. This sounded almost like the old John Ransom, the one for whose sake I had come to Millhaven.

  “After all, I’ve been Alan Brookner’s constant companion for about ten years. I could bring his ideas to the popular audience. People are always ready for real insights packaged in an accessible way. Think about Joseph Campbell. Think about Bill Moyers. I’m ready to move on to the next level.”

  “So let’s see if I get this right,” I said. “First you’re going to travel around the world, and then you’re going to popularize Alan’s ideas, and after that you’re going to be on television.”

  “Come off it, I’m serious,” he said. “I want to take time off to rethink my own experience and see if I can write a book that would do some good. Then I could take it from there.”

  “I like a man with a great dream,” I said.

  “I think it is a great dream.” John looked at me for a couple of beats, trying to figure out if I was making fun of him and ready to feel injured.

  “When you do the book, I could help you find the right agent.”

  He nodded. “Great, thanks, Tim. By the way.”

  I looked attentively at him, wondering what was next.

  “If the fog lets up by tomorrow, I’m going to take the car out of Purdum and drive it to Chicago. You know, like I said? Feel like coming along?”

  He wanted me to drive him to Purdum—he probably wanted me to drive the Mercedes to Chicago, too. “I have lots of things to do tomorrow,” I said, not knowing how true that statement was. “We’ll see what happens.”

  John seemed inclined to stay downstairs with the television. Jimbo was telling us that police had reported half a dozen cases of vandalism and looting in stores along Messmer Avenue, the main shopping street in Millhaven’s black ghetto. Merlin Waterford had refused to acknowledge the existence of the Committee for a Just Millhaven, claiming that “the capture of one lunatic does not justify tinkering with our superb system of local government.”

  I picked up 365 Days, a book by a doctor named Ronald Glasser who had treated servicemen wounded in Vietnam, and took it upstairs with me.

  9

  ILAID THE FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS on the bed and stretched out beside them. In soft brown-gray tones, visible to various degrees beneath the ballpoint scribbles, the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn, room 218, the flank of the Idle Hour, and what had to be Heinz Stenmitz’s butcher shop looked back at me. A powerful sense of time past—of difference—came from them. The arched passage and the exterior of the Idle Hour had not changed in forty years, but everything around them had been through wars, recessions, and the long disillusionment that followed the narcotic Reagan years.

  I looked at the photograph of the hotel room where James Treadwell had died, set it aside and held the fourth photograph under the bedside lamp. It had to be the butcher shop, but something still troubled me—then I remembered the stench of blood and Mr. Stenmitz bending his great blond beast-head toward me. I dropped the photo onto the bed and picked up 365 Days.

  Around three-thirty, John began hollering up the stairs that we’d better get going if we wanted to get to Arkham by four. I got into a jacket and put the four photographs in the pocket.

  John was standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding a black briefcase. His other hand was balled into a pocket of the silk jacket. “Where will you be going, anyhow?” he asked me.

  “I’ll probably hit the computers at the university library,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, as if now he had everything finally figured out.

  “There might be some more information about Elvee.”

  He leaned forward and peered at my eyes. “Are you all right? Your eyes are red.”

  “I ran out of Murine. If I get involved in something at the library, would you mind taking a cab home?”

  “Try to wrap it up before seven,” he said, looking grumpy. “After that, everything snaps shut like a trap. Budget cuts.”

  Twenty minutes later, I dropped John off in front of Arkham’s seedy quadrangle and watched him disappear into the heavy gray clouds. A few dim lights burned down from windows in the dark shapes of the college buildings. In the fog, Arkham looked like an insane asylum on the moors. Then I cruised slowly down the street. When a pay telephone swam up out of the murk, I double-parked the car and called Tom’s number.

  After his message ended, I said that I had to see him as soon as possible, he should call me as soon as he got up, I had to be back at John’s—

  The line clicked. “Come on over,” Tom said.

  “You’re up already?”

  “I’m still up,” he said.

  10

  DO YOU KNOW how many Allentowns there are in America?” Tom asked me. “Twenty-one. Some of them aren’t even in the standard atlases. I didn’t bother with Allentown, Georgia, Allentown, Florida, Allentown, Utah, or Allentown, Delaware, because they all have populations under three thousand—it’s an arbitrary cutoff, but not even Fee Bandolier could get away with committing a string of murders in a town that size.”

  The start-up menus glowed from the monitors of his computers. Tom looked a little pale and his hair was rumpled, but the only other indication that he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours was that his necktie had been pulled below the undone top button of his shirt. He was wearing the same long silk robe he’d had on the other day.

  “So I went through every one of the sixteen other Allentowns, looking for a Jane Wright who had been murdered in May 1977. Nothing. No Jane Wright. Most of these towns are so small that there were no murders at all in that month. All I could do then was go back to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and take another look.”

  “And?”

  “I found something good.”

  “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  “In time.” Tom smiled at me. “You sounded like you had something pretty good yourself, on the phone.”

  There was no point in trying to get him to say anything until he was ready. I took a sip of his coffee and said, “April Ransom’s car is in a garage in Purdum. John panicked when he found it in front of his house with blood all over the seats, and he took it to Alan’s garage and cleaned it up and then stashed it out of town.”

  “Did he, now?” Tom tilted his head back and regarded me through half-closed eyes. “I thought he knew where that car was.” He was smiling again, that same slow, almost luxuriant s
mile I had seen on the day I had brought John Ransom to meet him. “Somehow, I see that we do not think he is a guilty party here. Tell me the rest of it.”

  “After I left your house the other day, Paul Fontaine pushed me into an unmarked car and drove me out to Pine Knoll.” I told him everything that had happened—Bob Bandolier’s middle name and Andy Belin, Billy Ritz, my brawl and John’s account of the night April was beaten. I described our visit to the house on South Seventh Street and brought the photographs out of my jacket pocket and put them on the table in front of us. Tom scarcely moved during my long recital—his eyes opened a bit when I got to Andy Belin, he nodded when I described calling the cab company, and he smiled again when I described the fight with John, but that was all.

  Finally, he said, “Hadn’t it already occurred to you that Fee Bandolier was a Millhaven policeman?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course it hadn’t.”

  “But someone took Bob Bandolier’s statements out of the Blue Rose file—only a policeman could do that, and only his son would want to.”

  He took in my response to these remarks. “Don’t get angry with me. I didn’t mention it because you wouldn’t have believed me. Or was I wrong about that?”

  “You weren’t wrong.”

  “Then let’s think about what else we have here.” He closed his eyes and said nothing for at least an entire minute. Then he said, “Preservation.” He smoothed out the front of the silk robe and nodded to himself.

  “Maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit,” I said.

  “Didn’t John say Fee’s house looked like a museum of the year 1945?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s his power source—his battery. He keeps that house to step back into his childhood and taste it again. It’s a kind of shrine. It’s like that ghost village in Vietnam you told me about.”