by Peter Straub
“I already said good-bye to Emily,” Tabby said.
“Okay. Nice and quiet.”
“Nice and quiet,” Tabby called out, and they went down the stairs to the front door. The voices of Emily and the housekeeper drifted quietly from the kitchen.
Clark opened the door. Frigid January air cut into them. The ground was frosted with white, pocked here and there with the tracks of squirrels and raccoons. “Daddy,” Tabby whispered. Clark looked once more back at the interior of the house, back at the marble hall, the thick rugs and plush furniture, the big paintings of ships. “Daddy.”
“What?” He closed the door behind them.
“That man was bad.”
“What man, Tabby?”
Tabby looked confused and lost for a moment—an expression on his son’s face that Clark had come to know well. “It doesn’t matter, Tabby,” he said. “There aren’t any bad men.”
He threw the suitcases into the backseat and drove through the open gates.
When they turned west on the thruway, Tabby shouted out, “We’re going to You Nork!”
“We’re going to the airport, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, the airport. To ride on the airplane. For a surprise.”
“Yeah,” Clark said. And pushed the car up to seventy.
11
May 17, 1980
When Stony pushed open the bedroom door with her hip, she saw that the man was already in bed. He had propped himself up on two pillows. His skin was very white—against the pink sheets, his face and hairless chest were the color of cottage cheese. His whole face looked glazed. She said, “You don’t waste any time.”
“Time,” the man said. “Never do.”
“You’re sure you’re all right?” His clothes were thrown on the floor beside the bed. Stony held out his drink, but the man appeared not to notice—he was gazing at her glass-eyed—and she put the drink on the bedside table.
“I’m really all right.”
Stony shrugged, sat down and took off her shoes.
“I was here before,” the man said.
Stony pushed her skirt over her hips. “Do you mean in this house? Before we moved in? Did you know the Allenbys?”
He shook his head. “I was here before.”
“Oh, we’ve all been here before,” Stony said. “This is bigger than football.”
12
May 17, 1980
You were dreaming for a long time and then you were not. You were asleep in a place you did not know, and when you awakened you were someone else. You had a drink in your hand and a woman was looking at you and Dragon the world was yours again.
13
January 6, 1971
“Airplane,” Tabby said once in a voice full of wonder, and then was silent as Monty Smithfield’s car rolled down the thruway past the lower end of Hampstead, past fields and houses, past Norrington, past the office buildings and high-rise motels of Woodville with their bright signs, under bridges and past the crank of the window at toll booths, past Kingsport, into Westchester County where the thruway grew grimy and pitted, into Queens.
“What’s the matter?” his father asked brusquely as they took the interchange which led to Long Island. For some time everything they passed looked bleakly threatening. From the trim hills and sparkling landscapes of Patchin County they had gone into the land of the alien. Tabby felt that here was the world that had killed his mother. “Don’t you want to take a trip?”
“No.”
His father cursed. Cars gray with filth complained about them.
“I want to be home,” Tabby said.
“From now on we’re going to have a new home. Everything’s going to be different, Tabby.”
“Everything’s different now.”
“I don’t have any choice, Tabs—I have a new job.” The first time he was to utter that lie; it would become habitual.
* * *
Clark left the car in the long-term parking garage. Gray concrete blocks mounted tomblike on all sides; the air too was gray, smelling of dust and grease. When Tabby opened his door and climbed out, he saw a wide stain on the concrete beside him and thought it was a living thing. A hoarse shout boomed from the level beneath. Portents of a world without love or grace.
“Move it, Tabby. I can’t help it—I’m nervous.”
Tabby moved it. He trotted beside his father all the way to the elevator and stood in the shelter of his legs.
The elevator lurched downward. Inspected by. Permit issued by. In case of emergency use telephone. “The emergency is getting to the airport,” said a man in cowboy boots and a leather jacket. A woman with lion hair laughed, exposing feral lipstick-stained teeth. When she saw Tabby staring at her, she mussed his hair and said, “Cute.”
“Stop daydreaming,” Clark said, pushing his way into cold air. Doors whooshed open; they entered the terminal. Clark loaded the suitcase on the scale, produced a folder. “Nonsmoking,” he said.
“Daddy,” Tabby said. “Please, Daddy.”
“What? What the hell is it now?”
“We didn’t bring Spiderman.”
“We’ll get another one.”
“I don’t want—”
Clark grabbed his hand and jerked him toward the escalator. Tabby cried out in fear and despair, for in that second he saw the wide crowded terminal as filled with dead people—corpses flung here and there, one naked man covered with crawling white sores. It was only the vision of a moment, less than a second even, and when it passed his mouth was still making that noise. “Tabby,” his father said more gently, “you’ll get a new one.”
“Uh huh,” Tabby said, not knowing what had happened to him, but knowing that somewhere on the edges of what he had seen had been a boy with burning clothes, and that the boy had been the most important part of what he had seen. Because he was the boy. Bright red and yellow lights filled his vision, and he swayed on his feet. The little dots of light swarmed.
His father was kneeling beside him, holding him up. They were no longer on the escalator, and people were pushing past them. “Hey, Tabs,” his father was saying. “Are you okay? You want some water?”
“No. Fine.”
“Pretty soon we’ll be on that old airplane. Then we have a nice ride, and then we’ll be in Florida. It’s nice and warm in Florida. There’ll be sun and palm trees and places to swim. And good tennis courts we can play on. Everything’s going to be great.”
Tabby looked past his father’s shoulder and saw a corridor endlessly long down which some half-ran, others rode on a moving belt. “Sure,” he whispered.
“We need this, Tabby.”
The boy nodded.
“Have you ever seen the tops of clouds? We’ll be able to look down and see what’s on top of the clouds.”
Tabby looked up with a flicker of interest.
His father stood; they stepped on the moving belt. Tabby thought of the tops of clouds, of an upside-down world.
Then ahead of them was a wall of light—a curved wall of windows, blindingly bright with sun, before which huge numbers blazed: 43, 44, 45. People eaten by the sunlight lined at desks. Floppy suit bags claimed chairs in the bays before the windows. Animated uniforms strutted down a shadowed arch.
Tabby saw a familiar body, a flame of silver hair. “Grandpa!”
14
May 17, 1980
You carelessly put down the drink and it spilled to the floor. You watched the woman’s face change and you took her not without tenderness by the wrist.
15
January 6, 1971
“I thought you’d try a dumb stunt like this,” said the old man. “Did you actually think you’d get away with it?”
Tabby froze between the two men.
“You can come to me, Tabby,” his grandfather said. He extended a hand. “We’ll all go home again and forget about this.”
“To hell with you,” his father said. “Stay put, Tabby. No—go sit down on one of the chairs in there.”
“Quit calling it a stunt,” Clark said.
The old man shrugged. “Call it what you like. The boy is staying here. You can do what you like.”
“Sit down over there, Tabby,” Clark ordered. Tabby was incapable of going anywhere. “How’d you know I was going to be here?”
“You talk like a child. Nothing could have been easier than to figure out what you were up to. All right, Clark? Are you ready to give up this ridiculous idea?”
“Go to hell. You’re not going to get my son.”
“Come to me, Tabby. We’ll let your father decide how crazy he wants to be.”
Tabby made his own decision; for that comforting voice, for the softness of the cashmere coat and suit with chalky stripes. In that way he thought he was deciding for both of them, for a present that was like the past. He expected no more than that.
He stepped toward Monty Smithfield, and heard his father scream, “Tabby!” His grandfather bent down and took his hand.
“Let go of my son!” his father screamed.
Tabby felt his world shredding—“Get away from him, no-good!” his grandfather yelled—and his soul, what seemed to be his soul, divided in two as if sliced by a cleaver. In such confusion, no reason. Monty’s hand closed hard around his own, hard enough to make him cry out.
“Let go of my son,” Clark growled, “you old bastard.” He took Tabby’s other hand and tried to pull the boy toward him.
For what seemed an endless time, neither of them let go. Tabby was too panicked and shocked to utter a sound. His father and grandfather hauled on his arms as if they wanted to pull him apart. He was only dimly aware of other people rushing toward them. “Let go,” his grandfather barked in a voice not his. “You can’t have him, you can’t have him,” his father said. In their voices he heard that they would indeed pull him apart.
“Daddy, I see something!” he screamed.
He did. He saw something that would not happen for nine years, four months, and eleven days.
16
May 17, 1980
For a moment you paused in your occupation; you had a witness.
From Stony Baxter Friedgood, the last of life bubbled out.
17
January 6, 1971
“I see something, Daddy!” Tabby wailed, unable to say any more.
He became aware that his grandfather had dropped his hand. When he opened his eyes he saw a tall man in a blue uniform grasping his grandfather’s shoulder; he was on his knees in front of his father, looking up dazedly, seeing the angry pilot and his grandfather and the others behind them. His grandfather’s face was very red.
“Are we going to settle this here or do we call the cops?” the pilot asked.
Tabby got slowly to his feet.
“I’ve had enough of you,” his grandfather said. “You’re totally irresponsible. Go. Get out of my sight.”
“Just what I had in mind,” his father said in a ragged voice.
“You’ll deserve everything that happens to you. But my grandson will not. That’s the terrible pity—he’ll pay for your stupidity.”
“At least there’s one thing you won’t pay for.”
The old man shrugged himself away from the pilot. “If you think that’s an answer, I’m sorry for you.”
“Okay?” the pilot asked.
“No,” said Monty Smithfield.
“If he leaves the terminal,” said Clark, “yeah, sure.” There was triumph in it.
Tabby backed away and leaned against a sand-filled ashtray. He watched his grandfather shake out his sleeves and turn away down the long corridor. “That bitch Emily called him,” his father said.
Tabby’s legs were trembling.
“What was all that about seeing something?” his father asked. Both of them were watching the old man march straight-backed down the corridor to the moving belt.
“I don’t know.”
They sat in the lounge twenty minutes, neither of them speaking. The animated uniforms glanced at them anxiously from time to time, as if suspecting that it might have been wiser after all to have called the police.
After the Eastern 727 took off, Clark Smithfield unbuckled his seat belt and turned grinning to his son. “From now on we’re a couple of poor guys.”
PART ONE
Entry
Were such things here as we do speak about?
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
1
What Sarah Didn’t See
1
May 17, 1980; a wonderful day, you would have said if you lived in Patchin County. No clouds, no moisture to spoil anybody’s picnic on this Saturday—there would be a drought, but now the grass was still green and sappy. At Franco’s, Pat Dobbin and his fellows had a few beers before lunch and looked out the front window at the train station and pitied the commuters so dogged that they went to work in New York on a Saturday like this (Dobbin left before Stony Friedgood came in—he had drawings for a children’s book called The Eagle-Bear Stories he wanted to get back to). Bobby Fritz, the gardener for most of the big houses above Gravesend Beach, rolled back and forth on his giant lawnmower, already working on his summer’s tan. Graham Williams erased a sentence, wrote it inside-out, and smiled. Patsy McCloud carried her Herman Wouk novel outside and sat in a lawn chair to read in the sun. When her husband, Les, jogged by in his red play-suit, she lowered her head and concentrated on the page; and when Les saw her perched on the chair, her neck bent like an awkward bird, he bellowed, “Lunch, girl! Lunch! Get busy!” Patsy read until the end of the chapter. Les would not make the swing back into Charleston Road for half an hour. Then she went inside, not to make the roast-beef-and-onion sandwich he would demand, but to write in her diary.
For we are in the company of diarists. Graham Williams kept a journal, Richard Allbee had done the same since he was a famous twelve-year-old boy, one of the stars of Daddy’s Here, which was brought to several million American homes by the National Broadcasting Company, Ivory soap, Ipana toothpaste, and the Ford Motor Company. Richard did not make an entry until ten at night, Laura already in bed exhausted from packing, when he wrote: Home. But this isn’t home. May it become so. He paused a moment, looked out the window at enfolding night, and put down Still it is beautiful here. Casa nueva, vida nueva.
* * *
If, on that day which was Stony Friedgood’s last and the Allbees’ first day in Patchin County, we had an aerial view of Hampstead, Connecticut, we would first have noticed the profusion of trees—Greenbank, where the Allbees would live, in particular looked forested. The Sound cradled the eastern edge of the town, and here are two strips of bright gold: Sawtell Beach, near the country club, is where most of the town goes to swim and sunbathe. Gravesend Beach is smaller and somewhat rockier. This is where the fishermen come at six in the morning, looking for bluefish from June to late September: it is Greenbank’s local beach. Above it on a steep bluff perches the old Van Horne house. Along what should be the southern edge of town runs the Nowhatan River, fifty feet wide just before it narrows down at the parking lot beside Hampstead’s business district. (In fact, the town extends a mile or two south of the river.) The Yacht Club, a vast assemblage of moored boats, sits in the curve of the estuary across from the country club and its smaller marina—from the air all these boats are little fluttering stamps, brown, red, blue, and white. Hampstead itself, roughly trapezoidal, is divided by the Conrail tracks, highway I-95, and the Post Road. All three of these go through Hillhaven and Patchin, and through Norrington and Woodville as well on their way to New York: but from the look of this town, you would never know that New York existed. On Hampstead’s northwestern edge lie placid little manmade lakes and reservoirs. The great bossy heads of the trees half-obscure the houses and roads beneath them, and obscure too the Mercedeses and Volvos, the Datsuns and Toyotas and Volkswagens which c
ruise along them. As the lights go on, you can see the massive white-columned front of the Congregational Church on the Post Road just before it dips into the business district—it is flanked, on either side of its extensive lawn, by a bank (which has copied its style), and a mansard-roofed shopping center with a record store, a theater, an ice-cream parlor, a health-food store, a craft shop (macrame holders for pots and giant effigies of Snoopy), and a store where you can buy down jackets and woolly hats for twice what they would cost in Norrington or Woodville.
And very late in the day, when Richard Allbee wrote God help us both in his unpretentious little book, you would have seen the streaming headlamps and flickering rooflights of two patrol cars speeding from the police station along the Post Road, then down leafy Sawtell Road, and up the Greenbank Road to the Friedgood house. Where every window poured light.
Seconds before they reached the Friedgood house, a light went out in the offices of the Hampstead Gazette on Main Street, just across from the bookstore. Sarah Spry finished her column for Wednesday’s paper, and was going home. Once again, Hampstead’s famous, near-famous, and obscure had been immortalized in the Gazette.
2
This is part of what Sarah wrote for that Wednesday’s column:
WHAT SARAH SAW
Thistown presents a shifting kaleidoscope of moods and impressions. Thistown gives us memories and joys and ever-changing beauties. Our wonderful painters and writers and musicians give us spice . . . how many of you know that famed F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (the Gatsby man) and his family lived a stone’s throw from Sawtell Beach, in the Mr. and Mrs. Irving Fisher house on Bluefish Hill, in the twenties? Or that EUGENE O’NEILL and JOHN BARRYMORE and GEORGE S. KAUFMAN too sojourned for a time here on the shores of Long Island Sound with us? If you ask Ada Hoff of that grand ol’ institution, the Books ‘n Bobs Bookstore right across Main Street from this great newspaper (chuckle), she might tell you of the day when poet w. H. AUDEN dropped in to buy a cookbook by Thistown’s TOMMY BIGELOW—way to go, Tommy!
