by Peter Straub
When the Robbins had entered, they had nodded vaguely to us — he taught only upperclassmen. Then Mr. Robbin had turned his radium-seeking gaze on Del and said, 'You're Nightingale, aren't you? New boy? Getting on all right?' Gossip had informed all of the school that Del Nightingale was a fabulously wealthy orphan, one of whose legal guardians was a bank he in fact owned. Robbin sat beside his wife and held up an arm; With the other hand he indicated his wrist watch. 'Satellite tonight. Five to ten. An artificial star. A miracle.'
Besides Tom, Del, and myself, the waiters were Bobby Hollingsworth, Tom Pinfold — still grouchy about the game — and Morris Fielding. Morris, who played piano, had volunteered on the chance that the band might be worth hearing.
Shortly after eight the musicians arrived, carrying their instrument cases. Several carloads of sophomores and juniors followed them into the auditorium. The ones with dates went for paper cups of punch, the ones without leaned against the wall and watched the musicians setting up on the cavernous stage.
Dwarfed on the immense apron of the stage, the eleven men in the band sat down in their chairs and began riffling through sheet music. Morris and I had great hopes for one of the tenor saxophone players, who wore dark glasses. They put their horns in their mouths and began to play 'There's a Small Hotel.'
Hollis Wax and a prefect named Paul Derringer came in with their dates just after eight-thirty; seeing that no one had yet begun to dance, they moved to the senior tables and began looking around for our white coats. 'This is going to be a great homecoming dance,' Wax said to his date as I approached. 'After a fiasco like today.' Then to me: 'Gin and tonic. For all of us.' He tilted his head to look at the band. 'Look at those guys. Bunch of oompah shoe salesmen. One of 'em's blind.' I went off to get the punch. 'Bring us the Everly Brothers too, while you're up,' Wax called out.
Within the next twenty minutes most of the seniors arrived, dressed as their fathers had been at the game; at most of the dances, the school relaxed its rule about ties and jackets. The first brave couples went out into the big empty space and began to dance. Mr. and Mrs. Robbin got up wearily from their table and meandered around the dance floor. Bobby Hollingsworth and I made up another batch of punch by pouring grape juice, sparkling water, and root beer into a cut-glass bowl. The band began on 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams,' and Mr. Robbin's head twisted back and forth as he computed distances between the couples nearest him. Like Dave Brick, he generally wore a slide rule slung from his belt, and he looked as though he missed it. The tenor player in the sunglasses stood up to solo, and proved that he had been worth waiting for. Bobby Hollingsworth turned smiling to me as we ladled out the terrible punch, and nodded toward Terry Peters, who was standing near one of the large doors on the outside wall. Beside him was a stunning girl. Peters was unscrewing the cap off a silvery flask and making sure that Mr. Robbin was looking the other way. He poured from the flask into his date's cup and his own.
Morris Fielding rushed up to me carrying a tray and said, 'Six cups. Isn't he great? He really blows! Who do you think influenced him, Bill Perkins or Zoot Sims?'
Just as Morris was leaving with his six cups of punch, Terry Peters wheeled his date out the door, moving so quickly that almost no one saw him go. Bobby Holingsworth started laughing, and then abruptly stopped. I too stopped what I was doing. Skeleton Ridpath, in a black sweater and black trousers, slipped in through the closing door and eased it shut behind him. His awful fleshless face was exalted. He crept along behind the tables, going toward the stage. Our tenor player was emoting on the chord changes of 'Sometimes I'm Happy,' but I barely heard him. I watched Skeleton lift a cup of punch from an unattended table and move closer to Del Nightingale, finally drawing near enough to reach out and touch his shoulder. Instead he poured the awful stuff down Del's collar.
Del jumped and uttered a noise like the squeal of a month-old puppy. He whirled around and saw Skeleton before him and promptly backed into a table. 'Gee, I'm sorry, Florence,' Skeleton said, showing the palms of his hands in a false gesture of sympathy. I could barely hear his words, but I took in straight and clear the taunting mock-humility in which they were encased. The two boys, the small one in the white jacket and the one like a black worm, circled around, each walking backward. Only Bobby Hollingsworth and I saw this, apart from two or three amused seniors at a nearby table. When Skeleton and Del had circled completely around, Skeleton opened his mouth and I saw his lips move: Catch you later, hey, Florence? Del started backpedaling away, butted up against the same table, then turned his back on Ridpath and went for the side door into the hallway. Skeleton slumped into one of the camp chairs near the steps. He ran a bony hand over his face and grinned up at nothing in particular. On his face was still that look of abstract, unearthly good cheer.
When the band took an intermission I watched Skeleton climb up the steps and disappear behind the instrument stands.
Mr. Robbin kept checking his watch after the band's return, and when he was satisfied the satellite was visible, he stood, cupped his hands to his mouth, and said, 'Anybody wants to see a miracle, come out now.' His wife dutifully stood up beside him, but no one else paid any attention. He shouted, 'Come on! This is more important than dancing.' Finally he waved the band to a sputtering halt. 'You guys too,' he said. 'Take a break. Get some fresh air.'
'Shit, man,' said the bass player, inspiring some laughter from the students on the dance floor. Two of the trumpet players immediately plugged cigarettes into their mouths. Most of the other musicians shrugged and set down their horns.
24
Tom Said Later
When the rest of the school and the band filed out into the cold air — Tom said later — Skeleton stole away from whatever he had been doing at the back of the stage and took a chair fifteen feet from the hall door, to one side of the refectory table. He was leaning back smiling at them when Tom and Del returned from the bathroom. 'Cleaned up now?' he asked. 'Must have been pretty uncomfortable, all that crap going down your shirt.'
'Leave him alone,' Tom said. Both boys skirted Ridpath and went to the far side of the long table.
'Shut up, stupid. You think I'm talking to you?' Ridpath twisted his chair so that he was looking directly at them again. A few musicians smoked on an otherwise empty stage; a few couples bent toward each other at the far end of the auditorium. 'You're afraid of me, aren't you, Florence?'
The question was devastatingly simple.
'Yes,' Del answered.
'Yes, what?'
'Yes, Mr. Ridpath.'
'Yeah. That's good. Because you'll do anything I tell you to, just the way you're supposed to. I get sick looking at you, you know that. You look like a little bug, Florence, a shitty little cockroach. . . . ' Ridpath stood up, and Tom saw flecks of white at the edges of his mouth. He had somehow strolled up to the front of the table without their seeing him move: he threw out a stabbing punch, and Del jumped backward to avoid it.
Tom opened his mouth, and Skeleton whispered fiercely: 'Keep out of this, Flanagan, or I'll tear you apart.' He turned his shining gaze toward Del again.
'You saw him too.'
Del shook his head.
'I know you did. I saw you. Who is he? Come on, runt. Who is he? He wants me to do something, doesn't he?'
'You're crazy,' Del said.
'Oh no I'm not oh no I'm not oh no I'm not,' Skeleton said softly, all in a rush, leaning over the table toward Del. 'See, nobody's watching. We might as well be all alone here.' He snatched at Del's hand and clamped his fingers around the wrist. 'Who was he?'
Del shook his head.
'You saw him. You know him.'
Del's whole being constricted with revulsion, and he tried to wrench himself away. Skeleton changed his grip with a wrestler's quickness and began to squeeze Del's hand in his. 'Little girl,' he muttered. 'Trying to hide from me, aren't you, little girl?' Ridpath did his best to break the bones in Del's hand.
Tom lunged at Skeleton's wrist.
Skeleton jerked his hand aloft, nearly lifting Del off the floor. Then he looked at Tom in fury and despair and still with that sick gladness and swung his arm down hard into the side of the punch bowl. At the last second he released his fingers and used his palm to smack Del's hand against the heavy bowl.
Del screamed. The bowl shattered, and purple-brownish liquid gouted into the air. The two boys were instantly soaked, Skeleton less so because he had jumped back immediately after the impact; Del half-fell into the mess on the table.
'I want to know,' Skeleton said, and ran out through the hall door.
When the rest of us came back into the auditorium, after seeing a red speck drift far above Over the field house, Tom and Del were mopping the floor. Del's hand, not broken, bled in a straight line across his knuckles: his face stricken, he wielded the mop with one hand while awkwardly holding his torn hand out from his side, letting it bleed into a bucket.
'Jeez, you monkeys are clumsy,' Mr. Robbin said, and ordered his wife to get cotton and tape from the first-aid box in the office.
25
Night
'But why not tell me? I'm your best friend.'
'There's nothing to tell.'
'But I bet I know who it is already.'
'Dandy.'
'What's the big mystery?'
'Don't ask me, ask Skeleton. I don't even know what he's talking about.'
26
Alis Volat
The next weekend we had an away game at Ventnor Prep, which was just over a hundred miles to the north, in a suburb even more affluent than our own, and was indisputably a first-rate school: unlike Carson, Ventnor was known all over the Southwest. It was the only school for three states around with a crew team. They also had a fencing squad and a rugby team. We thought of Ventnor as a school for intolerable snobs. It owned a famous collection of antique porcelain and glassware which was supposed to exert a refining influence on the students there.
The bus ride took two and a half hours, and when we arrived we were soon given refreshment — presumably we needed Cokes and watercress sandwiches to toughen us up for the game. Members of the Ventnor Mothers' Committee served the waferlike sandwiches in a reception room that appeared to have been modeled on Laker Broome's office. This was a 'pregame mixer,' to be followed by a 'postgame tea,' but there was no mixing. The Ventnor boys clustered on one side of the reception room, we on the other.
Skeleton Ridpath spoke to no one on the way down and in the reception room drank five or six glasses of Coke and prowled around looking at the ornaments on the shelves. These were a display of some of the famous antiques, but Skeleton remained unrefined. He grinned whenever he looked at Del. He looked ghastly, ready for a hospital bed.
Del's hand was still bandaged, and the white gauze flashed like a lamp against his olive skin. He wore a tailored blue blazer, a white shirt, a blue-and-red-striped tie. In this sober outfit he somehow appeared prematurely sophisticated. The dazzling whiteness of new gauze against his skin was dashing as a medal — romantic as an eyepatch. He suddenly appeared to already — novelizing me in the role of one destined to be famous.
Mr. Ridpath coughed into his hand, said, 'Well, boys,' and began to herd us toward the locker room.
Once again, both games ended in disaster. The JV's lost by three touchdowns; the varsity made a touchdown in the first quarter, but the Ventnor quarterback snapped off two passes which brought them ahead, and in the second half a fullback named Creech recovered a fumble and ran thirty yards. After that our defense fell to bits. Ventnor simply marched down the field every time they had the ball. 'This place is so rich they buy athletes,' Chip Hogan told me as we filed out of the stands to walk across several hundred yards of manicured field to return to the reception room and the tea. 'Did you see those two huge guys in the line . . . and that enormous fullback? I know those guys from the city. They get scholarships and living allowances, and uniform allowances. They even get a training table at meals. Nobody stuffs them full of veal birds.' He gritted his teeth. 'See you at the shitty tea,' he said, and began to run because he could not bear to move more slowly.
At the bottom of the stands, I could go either the way Chip was running, directly across the football field and over a hill to the main building, or along a path which followed the landscaped contours of the grounds and trailed up and down the little rises past the artificial lake. About half my class was visible on this path, too embarrassed by our failure to want to appear at the tea before they had to. I turned away from the school buildings and went down the path toward my friends.
'Jesus, I don't want any of their tea,' Bobby Hollingsworth said after I had caught up with them.
'We don't have any choice, really,' said Morris. 'But to tell you the truth, I'd rather lie down here and go to sleep.'
'Maybe we'll have some fun on the bus going home,' Tom suggested.
'With Ridpath on the bus? Get serious.' Bobby jammed his hands in his pockets and ostentatiously surveyed the grounds. 'Can you believe this place? Have you ever seen anything more nouveau riche? It makes me sick.'
'I think it's kind of pretty,' Del said.
'Well, shit, Florence, why don't you buy it?' Bobby flamed out. 'Give it to somebody for Christmas.'
'Don't jump down his throat,' Tom said. 'You're just mad because we lost again.'
'I guess,' Bobby said. Of course he would not apologize. 'I suppose you like losing. Lose a game, horse around on the bus. Right? Get your jollies. Why not get Florence to buy the bus, then we could kick Ridpath off. Jesus.'
Del had begun to look extremely uncomfortable, and said something about getting cold. He obviously intended that all of us start walking again and join the team in the reception room.
From where we stood, backed by the big trees shielding the lake, we could see across all of the school's grounds to the gymnasium and the other buildings. Most of the varsity players had showered and changed and were walking in small slow-moving groups toward the administration building. It was too dark and they were too far away for us to really see their faces, but we could identify them by their various gaits and postures. Miles Teagarden and Terry Peters slouched along between the two buildings. Teagarden, who had fumbled, was bent over so far he appeared to be policing the grass. 'Ugh,' Tom said when Skeleton Ridpath lounged through the door of the gym — his was a figure no one could mistake. Skeleton ambled toward the rear door of the administration building. Defeat held no embarrassment for him.
Then I heard Del, already six or seven feet ahead of us, moan softly: just as if he'd been lightly punched in the gut. The man in the Foreign Intrigue costume was walking, very erect and unselfconsciously, down into one of the sculptured hollows between ourselves and the school. His back toward us, he was moving toward the grandstand and football field. Around him the darkening air was granular, pointillistic. The brim of his hat pulled down, the belt of his coat dangling, the ends swinging.
'Let's move it, Del,' Tom said.
But Del stood frozen in position, and so all of us watched the man receding into the hollow.
'The janitor works late around here,' said Bobby Hollingsworth. 'I hope he breaks his neck.'
Del held his bandaged hand chest-high, as if flashing a signal or warding off a blow.
'I don't see the point of watching the janitor,' Morris Fielding said. 'I'm getting cold too.'
'No, he's a Ventnor parent,' said Bob Sherman. 'Those coats cost about two hundred bucks.'
'See you there,' Morris said, and resolutely turned his back and set off down the path.
'Two hundred bucks for a coat,' Sherman mused.
By now all of us were watching the retreating figure as if mesmerized. The ends of his wide belt swung, the tails of the coat billowed. The dark air glimmered around him and seemed to melt into his clothing. For the second time that day, I fantasized that I was seeing not an ordinary mortal but a figure from the world of Romance.
He disappeared around the side of the grandstand.
'Oh, let's move,' Tom said. 'Maybe we can catch up with Morris.'
More than a hundred yards away, Skeleton Ridpath let out a wild shriek — a sound not of terror but of some terrible consummation. I looked over at him and saw his gaunt arms flung up above his head, his body twitching in a grotesque jig. He was positively dancing. Then I faintly heard the beating of wings, and glanced back over my shoulder to see a huge bird lifting itself up over the grandstand.
'Yeah, let's go,' Del said in an utterly toneless voice. He yanked at Tom's arm and pulled him down the path in the direction Morris Fielding had gone.
One more event of that day must be recorded. When we joined the tea, the reception room was much more crowded than it had been during the mixer. Ventnor fathers leaned patronizingly toward men in wrinkled gabardine jackets who were surely Ventnor leathers, Ventnor mothers poured lemon tea from the Ventnor silver to other Ventnor mothers. They all looked understandably smug. I was given a cup of the delicate tea by a woman with the elastic, self-aware beauty of a model and went to stand beside Dave Brick. He too had never left the bench. 'I just worked it out,' Brick said, flipping his slide rule into its holster. 'Two-point-three-six of our school would fit into what they've got here. I'm talking about land mass.' 'Terrific,' I said. Skeleton Ridpath drifted past holding a cup of tea in a swimming saucer. He looked crazy enough to levitate. Brick and I backed away, but Skeleton was not paying attention to us. He went a few paces toward one wall, then moonily shifted off at an angle. His mousy hair was still slicked down from the shower. I saw Ventnor parents stare at him, then look quickly away. Skeleton drifted up to the shelves of things where he had browsed before the games. Dave Brick and I, not believing, saw him lift a small glass object from a shelf and slide it in his pocket.
27
Tom's Room
Here there were no star charts, skulls, exotic fish; no photographs of magicians, only of Tom and his father on horseback, sitting in a rowboat with fishing poles, toting shotguns across a Montana field. The only other, picture was a reproduction of one of the Blue Period Picasso's sad-faced acrobats. One side of the room held a built-in desk and a rank of shelves: after returning from Ventnor, both boys had eaten dinner with Tom's parents and then gone into the bedroom to study.
