The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Come over here.”

  Tom’s voice came from a penumbra of light behind the furnace. I picked up the thermos and followed the beam of my own light across the dirty floor to the side of the furnace and then shone it on Tom. “He was here,” he said. “Take a look.”

  I misheard him to say He’s here, and, thinking that Fee’s corpse lay on the ground beside the gun with which he had killed himself, experienced an involuntary surge of rage, sorrow, grief, and pain, all mingled with something that felt like regret or disappointment. My light swept over a pair of cardboard boxes. Did I want him to live, in spite of everything he had done? Or did I simply want to be in at the end, like Tom Pasmore? Raging at both Fee and myself, I aimed my light at Tom’s chest and said, “I can’t find him.”

  “I said, he was here.” Tom took my hand and aimed the beam of light on the boxes I had overlooked in my search for the corpse.

  Their flaps lay open, and one box was tipped onto its side, exposing an empty interior. Ragged holes of various sizes had been chewed into two sides of the box still upright. Tom had tried to prepare me, but as much as a body, the empty boxes were the end of our quest. I said, “We lost him.”

  “Not yet,” Tom said.

  “But if he moved the notes to some other safe house, all he has to do now is kill Dick Mueller.” I placed my hand on my forehead, seeing horrible things. “Oh, God. It might already be too late.”

  “Mueller’s safe,” came Tom’s voice from the darkness beside me. “I called his house last night. His answering machine said that he was on vacation with his family for the next two weeks. He didn’t say where.”

  “But what if Fee called him? He’d know …” It didn’t matter, I saw.

  “He still has to come back,” Tom said. “He knows somebody’s trying to blackmail him.”

  That was right. He had to come back. “But where did he put those notes?”

  “Well, I have an idea about that.” I remembered Tom saying something like this earlier and waited for him to explain. “It’s an obvious last resort,” Tom said. “In fact, it’s been in front of our face all along. It was even in front of his face, but he didn’t see it either, until today.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “I can’t believe you won’t see it for yourself,” Tom said. “So far, you’ve seen everything else, haven’t you? If you still don’t know by the time we’re done here, I’ll tell you.”

  “Smug asshole,” I said. We separated again to probe the rest of the theater’s basement.

  On a hydraulic platform beneath the stage, I found an organ—not the “mighty Wurlitzer” that would have appeared in a billow of curtains before the start of features in the thirties, but a tough, bluesy little Hammond B-3.

  The old dressing rooms on the basement’s left side were nothing but barren concrete holes with plywood counters to suggest the twelve-foot mirrors and rings of light bulbs that had once stood along their far walls.

  “Well, now we know where everything is,” Tom said.

  Back in the office, Tom led me past the glimmering robes and pushed the rack back into place. We went back out into the lobby, and he relocked the door. I started toward the entrance we had used on our way out, but Tom said, “Other side.”

  His instincts were better than mine. From the far side of the theater, we would be invisible to anyone entering through the back door, while he—Fee—would be outlined in the column of gray light the instant he came inside. I walked past the altar and pulpit to the padded doors on the far side of the lobby and let us back into the darkness.

  10

  WE MOVED BLINDLY down the far aisle, touching the backs of the seats for guidance, moving through total blackness, a huge coffin, where every step brought us up against what looked like a solid, unyielding black wall that retreated as we moved forward.

  Tom touched my shoulder. We had not yet reached the wide separation between rows in the middle of the theater, but could have been anywhere from the third row to the twentieth. The black wall still stood before me, ready to step back if I stepped forward. I groped for the worn plush of the chair beside me, pushed down the seat, and slid into it. I heard Tom moving into the seat directly in front of me and sensed him turning around. I put out my right hand and felt his arm on the back of the seat. I made out the faint shape of his head and upper body. “All right?” he asked.

  “I usually like to sit closer to the screen,” I said.

  “We’re probably in for a long wait.”

  “What do you want to do when he comes in?”

  “If he comes through the exit door, we do what we have to do until he settles down. If he checks the place out with a flashlight, we get out of our seats and crouch down here in the aisle. Or we flatten out under the seats. I don’t think he’s going to be very thorough, because he’ll be confident about being the first one here. The point is to get him comfortable. Once he sits down to wait it out, we split up and come toward him from opposite ends. Silently, if possible. When we get close, scream your head off. I’ll do the same. He won’t know where the hell we are, he won’t know how many of us there are, and we should have a good chance to take him.”

  “What happens after that?”

  “Are you thinking about disarming him and taking him to Armory Place? Do you think he’ll confess? Or that we’d ever walk out of Armory Place? You know what would happen.”

  I said nothing.

  “Tim, I don’t even believe in the death penalty. But right now, the only alternative is to get out of here and go back home. In a couple of years, maybe ten years, he’ll make a mistake and get caught. Is that good enough?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’ve spent about fifteen years working to get innocent men off death row—saving lives. That’s what I believe in. But this isn’t like anything else I know—it’s as if we discovered that Ted Bundy was a detective with so many fallbacks and paper trails that he could never be brought to justice in the normal way.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t interested in justice.”

  “Do you want to know how I really see this? I don’t think I could say this to anyone else. There aren’t many people who would understand it.”

  “Of course I want to know,” I said. By now I could dimly make out Tom’s face. Absolute seriousness shone out of him, along with something else that made me brace myself for whatever he would say.

  “We’re going to set him free,” he said.

  As a euphemism for execution, the phrase was ludicrous.

  “Thanks for sharing that,” I said.

  “Remember your own experience. Remember what happened to your sister.”

  I saw my sister sailing before me into a realm of utter mystery and felt Tom’s psychic assurance, his depth of understanding, strike me like a tide.

  “Who is he now? Is that worth saving? That person is a being who has to kill over and over again to satisfy a rage so deep that nothing could ever touch it. But who is he, really?”

  “Fee Bandolier,” I said.

  “Right. Somewhere, in some part of himself he can’t reach, he is a small boy named Fielding Bandolier. That boy passed through hell. You’ve been obsessed with Fee Bandolier even before you really knew he existed. You almost made him up out of your own history. You’ve even seen him. Do you know why?”

  “Because I identify with him,” I said.

  “You see him because you love him,” Tom said. “You love the child he was, and that child is still present enough to make himself visible to you, and he makes himself visible to your imagination because you love him.”

  I remembered the child who came forward out of swirling dark, on his open palm the word that cannot be read or spoken. He was the child of the night, William Damrosch, Fee Bandolier, and myself, all of whom had passed through the filthy hands of Heinz Stenmitz.

  “Do you remember telling me about your old nurse, Hattie Bascombe, who said that the world is half night? What she didn’t say was
that the other half is night, too.”

  Too moved to speak, I nodded.

  “Now let’s get to the important stuff,” Tom said.

  “What?”

  “Give me that thermos you’ve been carrying around. I don’t want to be asleep when he finally gets here.”

  I handed him the thermos, and he poured some of the coffee into its top and drank. When he had finished, he passed the thermos back to me. I didn’t think I would ever sleep again.

  11

  HE’S PSYCHIC, I THOUGHT. It was as if Tom Pasmore had seen into my mind. I felt intense gratitude and another, darker emotion combining resentment and fear. Tom had probed into private matters. My early memories, those that had refused to come on command in front of my old house or my family’s graves, came flooding into me. One of these, of course, was Heinz Stenmitz. Another, equally powerful, was my sister’s last day of life and my brief journey across the border into the territory from which she had never returned. I had never spoken of these moments to Tom—I had just learned of one, and of the other I never spoke, never, not to anyone. Every particle of my consciousness fled from it. That moment could not be held in the mind, because it held terror and ecstasy so great they threatened to tear the body apart. Yet some portion of the self retained and remembered. While knowing nothing of this, Tom Pasmore still knew all about it. My resentment vanished when I realized that he had read a version of it in one of the books I had written with my collaborator; he was smart and perceptive enough to have worked out the rest by himself. He had not probed: he had just told me what he knew. I sat in the dark behind Tom, realizing that what had sounded like sentimental froth made me chime with agreement—I wanted to release Fee Bandolier. I wanted to set him free.

  12

  ISAT IN THE DARK behind Tom Pasmore, wide awake and loose in time. Forty years collapsed into a single endless moment in which I was a child watching a movie called From Dangerous Depths while a huge blond man who smelled like blood ran his hand over my chest and spoke the unspeakable, I was a soldier in an underground room staring at an altar to the Minotaur, a greenhorn pearl diver unbuttoning the shirt of a mutilated dead man named Andrew T. Majors, a shred of infinite being speeding toward an annihilating ecstasy, a wounded animal in St. Mary’s Hospital, a man with a notebook walking through a city park. I turned around to look six rows back and saw myself kneeling before Heinz Stenmitz, doing what he wanted me to do, what I thought I had to do to stay alive. You survived, I said silently, you survived everything. His pain and terror were mine, because I had survived them. Because I had survived them, they had educated me; because they were a taste always in my mouth, they had helped to keep me sane in Vietnam. What was unbearable was what had to be borne. Without the consciousness of the unbearable, you put your feet where Fee had placed his, or ended up as unaware as Ralph Ransom. I thought of John, whose life had once seemed so golden to me, peering into the depths of Holy Sepulchre, and of the closed-off place where his readiness for experience had taken him.

  I thought for a long time of what had happened to John Ransom.

  13

  IDON’T KNOW HOW LONG Tom and I sat waiting in the dark theater. After I started thinking about John, I got restless. I stood up to stretch and pace the aisle. Tom never left his seat. He sat without moving for long periods, as if we were at an opera. (Even when I am at the opera, I have trouble sitting still.) After two or three hours in the dark, I could make out most of the stage and the great hanging weight of the curtain, without being able to see individual folds. When I looked back, I could see the shape of the double doors into the lobby. All of the seats more than four or five rows ahead of me congealed into a single object. I got back into my seat and leaned back, thinking about Fee and John and Franklin Bachelor, and after half an hour had to get up and swing my arms and walk down toward the stage and the curtains again. When I got back into my seat and settled down, I heard a noise from the other side of the theater—a creak. “Tom,” I said.

  “Old buildings make noise,” he said.

  Half an hour later, the back door rattled. “What about that?” I asked.

  “Uh huh,” he said.

  The door rattled again. Both of us were sitting up straight, leaning forward. The door rattled a third time, and then nothing happened for a long time. Tom leaned back. “I think some kid saw that the chain was unhooked,” he said.

  We sat in the dark for another long period. I looked at my watch, but the hands were invisible. I crossed my legs and closed my eyes and was instantly in Saigon, the restaurant not the city, trying to tell Vinh about John Ransom. He was working on the accounts, and he wasn’t interested in John Ransom. “Write a letter to Maggie,” he said. “She knows more than you think.” I came awake with a jerk and felt under the seat for the thermos. “Me, too,” Tom said.

  The ceiling ticked. A footstep sounded in the lobby. The ceiling ticked again. Tom sat like a statue. Write a letter to Maggie? I thought, and realized to whom I could write a letter about John Ransom. She was probably a person who shared certain of Maggie’s gifts. Time wore on. I yawned. At least an hour passed, second by slow second. Then the alley door rattled again.

  “Wait for it,” Tom said.

  There was an unendurable silence for a few seconds, and then a key slotted into the keyhole. The sound was as clear as if I stood on the other side of the door. When the door swung open, Tom eased out of his seat and crouched beside it. I did the same. Someone walked into the space between the alley door and the theater exit. The exit door cracked open an inch, and gray light filtered through the crack. It opened wider, and a man stepped into the column of gray light and became a silhouette. He turned to look behind him, exposing his profile in the column of gray light. It was Monroe, and he had a gun in his hand.

  14

  MONROE STEPPED FORWARD and let the exit door close behind him. The dark shape of his body moved a few steps alongside the stage. He stopped moving to let his eyes adjust. Tom and I crouched behind the seats, waiting for him either to take a seat or to check to see if his caller had already arrived. Monroe remained standing in the far aisle, listening, hard. Monroe was good—he stood next to the stage for so long that my legs began to cramp. The hot circle below my shoulder blade started to throb.

  Monroe relaxed and pulled a police baton from his belt. A beam of light flew from the end of the baton and darted from the middle of the front seats to the rear doors on his side, then to the wall six or seven feet down from John and me.

  Monroe walked up the aisle, training the light along the rows of seats. He reached the wide central passage that divided the front seats from the rear and paused, working out if he’d be wasting his time by going farther. Tom noiselessly lowered himself to the floor. I sank to my knees and kept my eyes on Monroe. The detective moved across the divide between the seats and went up another two rows. Then he scanned the light in long sweeps across the seats in front of him. If he walked up another five rows, he’d have to see us, and I held my breath and waited for the cramp in my legs to subside.

  Monroe turned around. The beam of light flitted across the wall beside us, traveled over the folds of the curtains, and struck the exit door. Monroe started to move back down the far aisle. I watched him reach the side of the stage, turn around to stab his light in a long pass back over the seats, and then push through the door. I sat down and stretched out my legs. Tom looked up at me and put his finger to his mouth. The alley door opened.

  “He’s getting away,” I whispered.

  Tom shushed me.

  The back door opened and closed in a flurry of footsteps. The exit door swung in. Monroe and a man in a blue running suit came back into the theater. Monroe said, “Well, I don’t think anyone got in.”

  “But they unlocked the chain,” said the other man.

  “Why do you think I called you?”

  “It’s funny,” said the other man. “I mean, they take the chain off, and then they lock the door? Only but two other people got
the keys.”

  “Church people?”

  “My deacon has one. And the owner’s got one, that’s for sure. But he never shows his face—I never even met the man. Did you look at my office?”

  “Do you keep any money in there?”

  “Money?” The other man chuckled. “Holy Spirit is just a little storefront church, you know. But I keep the hymnals, choir robes, that kind of thing, in my office.”

  “Let’s have a look, Reverend,” Monroe said, and they set off up the aisle, the flashlight trained straight ahead of them. I lowered myself to the carpet and heard them pass by on the other end of the long row of seats and open the doors to the lobby.

  As soon as they had left the theater, Tom slid into his row and I into mine, scooting along the cool concrete floor. The murmur of voices from the lobby ceased when the two men went into the office. I flattened out on the dusty concrete, my face an inch from a patch of fossilized gum. I could see the bushy outline of Tom’s head and the pale blot of his left hand through the seat supports. The lobby doors swung in again.

  “It doesn’t make sense at all to me, officer,” said the reverend. “But tomorrow, I’m getting the locks changed, and I’m buying a new padlock for that chain.”

  I stopped breathing and tried to disappear into the floor. My cheek flattened out against the wad of gum. It felt like dead skin. The two men came down the far aisle. My heart accelerated as they approached my row. Their slow footsteps neared me, passed me, continued down the aisle.