The Throat

by Peter Straub

  The New York Times brought news of the upheavals in Millhaven. Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan first appeared on page A6, and within two days had moved to A2. The next day, there was another story on A2, and then he landed on the front page and stayed there for a week. Tom Pasmore sent me bundles of the Ledger, two or three issues wrapped up in a parcel the size of a pre-Christmas Sunday Times, and Geoffrey Bough and a lot of other Millhaven reporters filled in the details my own newspaper left out. Once the extent of Hogan’s crimes became known, Ross McCandless and several other police officials retired. Merlin Waterford was forced out of office and replaced by a liberal Democrat of Norwegian stock who had been a Rhodes scholar and had a surprisingly good relationship with the African-American community, largely, I thought, because he had never, ever said anything even faintly stupid.

  Some of the less lurid portions of Michael Hogan’s diarylike notes were printed in first the Ledger, then the Times. Then some of what Hannah Belknap would call the gooshier sections were printed. People, Time, and Newsweek all ran long stories about Millhaven and Hogan, Hogan and Walter Dragonette, Hogan and William Damrosch. The FBI announced that Hogan had murdered fifty-three men and women, in Pensacola, Florida, where he had been known as Felix Hart, Allerton, Ohio, where he had been Leonard “Lenny” Valentine, and Millhaven. There were short, carefully censored stories about his career as Franklin Bachelor.

  Demonstrators packed into Armory Place all over again, marches filled Illinois Avenue, photographs of Hogan’s victims filled the newspapers and magazines. From the cell where he was waiting for his trial, Walter Dragonette told a reporter that in his experience Detective Sergeant Hogan had always been a gentleman, and it was time for the healing to begin.

  After a great deal of legal wrangling, eighteen innocent men were released from the jails where they had been serving life sentences. Two innocent men in Florida had already been executed. All eighteen, along with the families of the two dead men, filed monumental lawsuits against the police departments responsible for the arrests.

  In September, a consortium of publishers announced that they were bringing out The Confessions of Michael Hogan as a mass-market paperback, profits to go to the families of the victims.

  In October I finished the first draft of The Kingdom of Heaven, looked around, and noticed that the sun still beat down on the Soho sidewalks, the temperature was still in the high seventies and low eighties, and that the young market traders in the restaurants and coffee shops on the weekends were beginning to look like Jimbo on my last evening in my hometown. Daddy had come home with ominous news about layoffs. Some of the young men in the carefully casual clothes were wearing stubbly three-day beards and chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. I began rewriting and editing The Kingdom of Heaven, and by early December, when I finished the book, delivered it to my agent and my publisher, and gave copies to my friends, the temperatures had fallen only as far as the mid-forties.

  A week later, I had lunch at Chanterelle with Ann Folger, my editor. No bohemian, Ann is a crisp, empathie blond woman in her mid-thirties, good company and a good editor. She had some useful ideas about improving a few sections of the book, work that I could do in a couple of days.

  Happy about our conversation and fonder than ever of Ann Folger, I walked back to my loft and dragged out of the closet where I had hidden it my own copy of The Confessions of Michael Hogan—the parcel with my name and address on it that Tom Pasmore had mailed, one window away from me in Millhaven’s central post office. It had never been opened. I carried it downstairs and heaved it into the Saigon dumpster. Then I went back upstairs and began work on the final revisions.

  2

  THE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY, and December was still pretending to be mid-October. I got up late and put on a jacket to go out for breakfast and a walk before finishing the revisions. Soho doesn’t get as relentless about Christmas as midtown Manhattan, but still I saw a few Santas and glittery trees sprayed with fake snow in shop windows, and the sound system in the cafe where I had an almond croissant and two cups of French Roast coffee was playing a slow-moving baroque ecstasy I eventually recognized as Corelli’s Christmas Concerto. And then I realized that I was in the cafe where I’d been just before I saw Allen Stone getting out of his car. That seemed to have happened years, not months, before—I remembered those weeks when I had written twenty pages a night, almost three hundred pages altogether, and found that I was mourning the disappearance of that entranced, magical state. To find it again, if it could be found without the disturbance that had surrounded it, I’d have to write another book.

  When I got back to my loft, the telephone started ringing as soon as I pushed the key into the lock. I opened the door and rushed inside, peeling off my jacket as I went. The answering machine picked up before I got to the desk, and I heard Tom Pasmore’s voice coming through its speaker. “Hi, it’s me, the Nero Wolfe of Eastern Shore Drive, and I have some mixed news for you, so—”

  I picked up. “I’m here,” I said. “Hello! What’s this mixed news? More amazing developments in Millhaven?”

  “Well, we’re having a three-day snowstorm. Counting the wind chill factor, it’s eighteen below here. How is your book coming along?”

  “It’s done,” I said. “Why don’t you come here and help me celebrate?”

  “Maybe I will. If it ever stops snowing, I could come for the holidays. Do you mean it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Get out of that icebox and spend a week in sunny New York. I’d love to see you.” I paused, but he did not say anything, and I felt a premonitory chill. “All the excitement must be over by now, isn’t it?”

  “Definitely,” Tom said. “Unless you count Isobel Archer’s big move—she got a network job, and she’s moving to New York in a couple of weeks.”

  “That can’t be the mixed news you called about.”

  “No. The mixed news is about John Ransom.”

  I waited for it.

  Tom said, “I heard it on the news this morning—I usually listen to the news before I go to bed. John died in a car crash about two o’clock last night. It was the middle of the storm, and he was all alone on the east-west expressway. He rammed right into an abutment. At first they thought it was an accident, a skid or something, but he turned out to have about triple the legal alcohol level in his blood.”

  “It could still have been an accident,” I said, seeing John barreling along through the storm in the middle of the night, clamping a three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka between his thighs. The image was of endless night, almost demonic in its despair.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “No,” I said. “I think he killed himself.”

  “So do I,” Tom said. “The poor bastard.”

  That would have been the last word on John Ransom, but for a letter that I found in my mailbox, by the sort of ironic coincidence forbidden to fiction but in which the real world revels, late that same afternoon.

  To get my mail, I have to leave my loft and go downstairs to the rank of boxes in the entry, one door away from the entrance to Saigon. The mail generally comes around four in the afternoon, and sometimes I get to the boxes before the mailman. Like all writers, I am obsessive about the mail, which brings money, contracts, reviews, royalty statements, letters from fans, and Publishers Weekly, where I can check on the relative progress of myself and my myriad colleagues. On the day I heard from Tom, I went down late because I wanted to finish up my revisions, and when I finally got downstairs I saw that the box was stuffed with envelopes. I immediately pitched into the big garbage can we had installed beneath the boxes all envelopes covered with printing, all appeals for funds, all offers to subscribe to esoteric literary journals published by universities. Two were left, one from my foreign agent, the other from some foreign country that liked exotic stamps. My name was hand-printed on the second envelope in clear, rounded letters.

  I went back upstairs, sat at my desk, and peered at the stamps on the second envelope. A
tiger, a huge fleshy flower, a man in a white robe up to his knees in a brown river. With a small shock, I realized that the letter was from India. I tore open the envelope and removed a single sheet of filmy paper, tinted rose.

  Dear Timothy Underhill,

  I am late in responding because your letter took an extra time to reach us here. The address you used was rather vague. But as you see, it did arrive! You ask about your friend John Ransom. It is difficult to know what to say. You will understand that I cannot go into details, but I feel that I may inform you that we at the ashram were moved by your friend’s plight at the time he came to us. He was suffering. He required our help. Ultimately, however, we were forced to ask him to leave—a painful affair for all concerned. John Ransom was a disruptive influence here. He could not open himself, he could not find his true being, he was lost and blind in an eternal violence. There would have been no question of his being allowed to return. I am sorry to write these things to you about your friend, but I do hope that his spiritual search has after so many years finally brought him peace. Perhaps it has.

  Yours sincerely,

  Mina

  3

  TWO DAYS AFTER RECEIVING MINA’S LETTER and faxing a copy to Tom, my revisions delivered to Ann Folger, I walked past the video store again, the same video store I had been passing on my walks nearly every day since my return, and this time, with literally nothing in the world to do, I remembered that during my period of insomnia I had seen something in the window that interested me. I went back and looked over the posters of movie stars. The movie stars were not very interesting. Maybe I had just been thinking about Babette’s Feast again. Then I saw the announcement about the old noir films and remembered.

  I went into the shop and rented From Dangerous Depths, the movie Fee Bandolier and I had both seen at the Beldame Oriental, the movie that had seen us at the moment of our greatest vulnerability.

  As soon as I got home, I pushed it into the VCR and turned on the television set. I sat on my couch and unbuttoned my jacket and watched the advertisements for other films in the series spool across the screen. The titles came up, and the movie began. Half an hour later, jolted, engrossed, I remembered to take off my jacket.

  From Dangerous Depths was like a Hitchcock version of Fritz Lang’s M, simultaneously roughed up and domesticated for an American audience. I had remembered nothing of this story; I had blanked it out entirely. But Fee Bandolier had not blocked it out. Fee had carried the story with him wherever he went, to Vietnam, to Florida and Ohio and Millhaven.

  A banker played by William Bendix abducted a child from a playground, carried him into a basement, and slit his throat. Over his corpse, he crooned the dead boy’s name. The next day, he went to his bank and charmed his employees, presided over meetings about loans and mortgages. At six o’clock, he went home to his wife, Grace, played by Ida Lupino. An old school friend of the banker’s, a detective played by Robert Ryan, came for dinner and wound up talking about a case he found disturbing. The case involved the disappearance of several children. Over dessert, Robert Ryan blurted out his fear that the children had been killed. Didn’t they know a certain family? William Bendix and Ida Lupino looked across the table at their friend, their faces dull with anticipatory horror. Yes, they did know the family. Their son, Ryan said, was the last child to have vanished. “No!” cried Ida Lupino. “Their only child?” Dinner came to an end. Forty-five minutes later in real time, in movie time three days after the dinner, William Bendix offered a ride home to another small boy and took him into the same basement. After murdering the boy, he lovingly sang the boy’s name over his corpse. The next day, Robert Ryan visited the child’s parents, who wept as they showed him photographs. The movie ended with Ida Lupino turning away to call Robert Ryan after shooting her husband in the heart.

  Tingling, I watched the cast list roll the already known names toward the top of the screen:

  Lenny Valentine–Robert Ryan

  Franklin Bachelor–William Bendix

  Grace Bachelor–Ida Lupino

  And then, after the names of various detectives, bank employees, and townspeople, the names of the two murdered boys:

  Felix Hart–Bobby Driscoll

  Mike Hogan–Dean Stockwell

  4

  IEJECTED THE TAPE from the VCR and slid the cassette back into its box. I walked three times around my loft, torn between laughter and tears. I thought of Fee Bandolier, a child staring at a movie screen from a seat in the wide central aisle of the Beldame Oriental; probably it had always been Robert Ryan, not Clark Gable; of whom Michael Hogan had reminded me. At last I sat at my desk and dialed Tom Pasmore’s telephone number. His answering machine cut in after two rings. At the end of a twenty-four-hour day, Tom had finally gone to bed. I waited through his message and said to the tape, “This is the John Galsworthy of Grand Street. If you want to learn the only thing you don’t already know, call me as soon as you get up.”

  I took the tape out of the box and watched it again, thinking of Fee Bandolier, the man I had known and the first Fee, the child Fee, my other self, delivered to me at so many times and in so many places by imagination. There he was, and I was there too, beside him, crying and laughing at the same time, waiting for the telephone to ring.

  ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

  KOKO

  Book One of the Blue Rose Trilogy

  Koko. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They are Vietnam vets—a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting someone from the past who has risen from the darkness to kill and kill and kill.

  Fiction/978-0-307-47220-5

  MYSTERY

  Book Two of the Blue Rose Trilogy

  Tom Pasmore, ten years old, survives a near-fatal accident. During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder and finds he has clues to solving it that he shouldn’t. Lamont von Heilitz has spent his life solving mysteries, until he wanted to know nothing more of the terror of life and the horror of death. When a new murder disrupts their world of wealth, power, and pleasure, the two must form an unlikely partnership to confront demons from the past and the dark secrets that still haunt the present.

  Fiction/978-0-307-47222-9

  POE’S CHILDREN

  The New Horror

  Peter Straub has gathered here twenty-four bone-chilling, nail-biting, frightfully imaginative stories that represent the best of contemporary horror writing. The collection includes stories by Dan Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, M. John Harrison, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, Jonathan Carroll, M. Rickert, Thomas Tessier, David J. Schow, Glen Hirshberg, Thomas Ligotti, Benjamin Percy, Bradford Morrow, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Ellen Klages, Tia V. Travis, Graham Joyce, Neil Gaiman, John Crowley, and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson. Fiction/978-0-307-38640-3

  ANCHOR BOOKS

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