by Peter Straub
Now, was that lyric? Was that phantasmal? For Des O’Hara, still groggy from the long flight from Australia and the experience, eight hours later, of burying his two children, seeing his wife in the mirror had something of each of those qualities in it: without knowing how, he understood that he would never see her again. She was very clearly on the wrong side of the mirror—on the inside, looking toward him from around the back of the frame. The flowers she had put on their table gleamed whitely, the wallpaper behind them made a dark plane intersected by white stripes, and these familiar things occupied the same world as himself: Mikki’s broad stricken face loomed toward him like a face trapped beneath the ice of a frozen river. Her terror made her seem to be smiling. When he turned on the light she was gone.
It is likely that many people had such experiences. Without knowing it, they were in the belly of the whale.
Superficially the town looked the same. If you let your eye glide over the anomalies you saw the old pretty Hampstead, the big houses and the acres of lawn. But what you’d be overlooking would be that many of those big houses were vacant, their windows blank empty staring eyes, and that the long lawns were rapidly turning back into meadow. People tended to stay at home after nightfall, so they did not see the fires that sprang up here and there around town—they might hear the loud voices of the wandering kids who set fire to the abandoned houses, but they closed their ears to anything else. Screams? Shouts? When, last night? Why, we didn’t hear a thing—of course we’ve been awfully busy packing these past few days, it seems like we fall asleep all over the house, scarcely have the energy to get to bed, and then we have these funny dreams . . .
If they were sane, they closed their ears and kept on packing. If they saw men brawling on Main Street—well-dressed men, men who had to put down their briefcases to get really into the bloody work of eye-gouging and nose-biting—they shrugged and hurried home. They were putting their stuff in storage for a little while, that’s what they were doing, and wasn’t it too bad about the climate of violence you saw everywhere in America these days? Why, just yesterday on the Phil Donahue Show . . . Why, the world’s a crazy place, everybody knows that now. . . . If they were sane, they mumbled such things to themselves, kept on packing, and hoped the crazy outcries on the street—cries like those of pigs and dogs and wolves—would keep on moving down toward the end of the block.
Sometimes at night, Patsy and Tabby could hear these voices of the so-called sane mumbling in their heads.
Yeah, we sure managed to get a lot of stuff in the old wagon, we’re thinking of taking the kids out to see John’s boys, after all they have the same father, it’s all one family. . . .
No, I haven’t seen old Mrs. Ellis around lately, funny, I haven’t even thought about her in a couple of days and we used to say hello every morning. . . .
A man all in bandages, you say? Must have been the world’s worst case of poison ivy, don’t you reckon? . . .
Burned? The Ellis house? Why, I can’t believe I didn’t notice that, I go past that house twice a day, I guess my mind’s just been on getting our things together so we can get off to Kiowah Island tomorrow morning. . . .
And underneath the false calm of these mumbled sentences is a frantic, driven urgency, not at all sane, which is saying let’s go let’s go let’s get outta here, don’t listen to them, just go GO GO GO GET GOING BEFORE IT HAPPENS. . . .
Patsy and Tabby could hear that too; by the second week of July they had seen a couple of people with shining, ruined skin, and one day Patsy heard a gang of children shouting, “Leaker! Leaker!” and saw them throwing stones at a bandaged man trying to scurry around in back of Greenblatt’s; and they were none too sure of their own sanity, but they could not get out of there, they could not GET GOING, and they had to listen to whatever came their way.
Tabby could see his father’s life and his own sliding toward the condition of the earliest, worst days in Florida. Clark was drinking steadily from noon onward, and Tabby often had to try to bully him into eating. He hated doing this—shouting at his father, banging a pan against the stove in an only half-simulated rage—and hated even more that it worked. Sometimes Clark shouted back at him, and sometimes he stalked away from the table, but usually he bowed his head like a child and ate the food Tabby cooked for him. If Berkeley Woodhouse were there, she’d finger a little food into her mouth, laugh at both of them, and roll back to the television. Television and bed seemed to be all his father’s mistress cared about. As the day went on, her bright lipstick began to drop off her mouth and go staggering down the side of her face.
Tabby kept Patsy away from his house—he wouldn’t have minded if Graham had seen Berkeley and his father at the end of a day, but Patsy’s seeing them would have humiliated him.
It was as though he had looked away for the blink of an eye, and in that blink his father had somehow contrived to ruin himself. At least in Florida Clark had had to find work, he had kept moving, he had changed his shirts and his underwear; but now with his own father’s money to cushion him, he had become as torpid as a lizard on a rock. Tabby imagined that if he sniffed his father’s palm, if he smelled his old T-shirts, he would be smelling booze—so soaked in it were Clark’s pores. And one night, looking at his father glumly poke a forkful of instant mashed potato into his mouth, Tabby thought he saw a dim light hovering behind Clark’s head, a little spectral light that moved when he moved. Berkeley was noisily fiddling with the ice cubes, so he could not ask her, but it seemed to him as though all the alcohol in his father had taken visible form. A fly circled in from nowhere and landed on Clark’s hand. Clark stared at it as if it were an exotic bird, clumsily raised his hand: and then smashed the hand down on the table. The fly zipped off to investigate Clark’s hair, and on the surface of the table—or just beneath the surface of the table—a pool of blood seemed to rise up out of the wood. Tabby stared at it: the blood flattened out like oil beneath the pressure of his father’s fist. Just for a moment—and this was phantasmal, it made poor Tabby shake—he saw Berkeley’s lovely blurry face beneath that fist, staring in terror upward through the film on the top of the table. He turned around, and she was still knocking the ice tray against the side of the sink, her Tareyton lolling against her lower lip; one hip was elevated to get more power into the chop chop chop of the ice tray against the aluminum. That was reality, and the face pressing up in terror against the surface of the table in a flat puddle of blood was only vision. When he looked back at his father, he saw that smudge of whitish gray behind his head dimming out, disappearing like the gray cat Richard had described. Tabby went back to his desultory conversation with his father, and heard again the racket Berkeley was making at the sink; he had not been conscious that a noise in his ears had deafened him. The gold at Berkeley’s wrist looked red.
Des O’Hara, who had lost everything and did not comprehend how, and who understood much less than Tabby of why, carried a full bottle of Delamain cognac out to his garage at six-thirty on the morning of Wednesday, the ninth of July. He got into his car, started the engine, turned on the radio, and drank cognac and listened to a tenor saxophone player named Scott Hamilton tenderly make his way through “I Would Do Anything for You” on WYRS as the carbon monoxide stole his life from him. He was in the whale’s belly and he knew it, and he wanted it no more.
* * *
Richard Allbee, who was walking up Mount Avenue to his job every morning, also thought that either the world or he was slipping a gear—he saw such oddness on these walks! Both John Roehm, the contractor he had hired for the Hillhaven job, and the client knew what had happened to Richard; the client had asked him if he wanted to put the job off for a couple of months, but Richard, who knew that John Roehm had his own bills to pay, had insisted on starting the work on the agreed day. This had been a good idea. After his first period of mourning—that period of deep shock, during which he had almost had to remind himself to breathe, when he had burrowed deep inside his fantasy—and after he had ta
lked and cried with Graham and Patsy and Tabby, working helped to carry him out of himself. In fact, he could leave his misery for minutes at a time just watching John Roehm work. If carpentry were an art, John Roehm would have been a Rembrandt: he’d lay his big hands on a piece of heavy unwieldy oak and make it dance and sing, he was so good he could practically whittle the porch pickets they had to make as part of the Hillhaven job. And an old-timer like Roehm appreciated the techniques Richard wanted to use in the interior of the house—making molds to replace the broken plaster ceilingwork, cutting the beads in at the corner of the window trim and doorjambs where someone twenty years ago had “modernized” them away. Roehm was also interested in testing the library paneling with mineral spirits and lacquer thinner to determine its original shade. All this spoke right to Richard’s heart, and sometimes he felt tears jumping to his eyes as he watched white-bearded old Roehm execute some dazzling and offhand bit of craftsman’s artistry with a saw and a section of oak. It is possible that John Roehm and the Hillhaven restoration saved Richard from Desmond O’Hara’s fate—he had to do a lot of the lifting and carrying, since his and Roehm’s assistants kept quitting, and even though he looked five years older than he had in May, he was gaining new muscle. At night he fell down straight into exhausted sleep. He broiled something in his kitchen, not looking at the place on the counter where the severed telephone receiver had lain, ate his pork chop or steak with a cold bottle of beer, and started yawning before eight-thirty. So his days were okay: apart from his feeling, at any unguarded moment, that his stomach and heart and probably his lungs too had been blown away on the seventeenth of June, Richard was okay at work. If he watched the direction in which his thoughts were taking him, and took the hammerblows when they came because he was half-prepared for them, he was fine at work. It was during his walks up to Hillhaven on Mount Avenue that he most doubted his capacity to get through the day.
It was a good and useful walk, and it got him to work with his muscles stretched and ready. Between the big houses on Mount Avenue he could see flashes of the Sound, and when he turned the last corner, pausing to look at the massive ivy-covered house where Graham had met Dorothy Bach at the end of the twenties, he had arrived at low flat Hillhaven beach. By the middle of summer, this beach was filled with people all day long, and from them rose a dense compacted odor of sun and salt, of tanning lotions and sweat. In the mornings the tide was in, and the blue-black water muscled right up to the first row of sunbathers, stretched out on their towels across a rack of drying seaweed; in the evenings as Richard walked home the beach trailed off into a bumpy landscape of glittering salt pools and shells through which brawny seagulls hunted and pecked. These visions of ordinariness, of the world going through its customary cycles, helped Richard wean himself from the considerably less ordinary visions he had passed on his way to Hillhaven beach.
The first odd thing Richard saw, back at the start of the Hillhaven job—the first day, in fact, that he had decided to start walking the two miles between his house and the new job—was that Charlie Antolini had at last got himself out of the hammock and was now painting his house. All that was odd about Charlie’s paint job was the exuberant cheer of the painter and the color he was slopping on his house. Charlie Antolini grinned down from his scaffold when he saw Richard going past, he shouted out, “Hey, buddy! Great day, huh? Un-fucking-believable!” From the big paintbrush in Charlie Antolini’s extended hand dripped strings of bright pink—pink so bright it seemed to sizzle when it fell on the grass and bushes beneath the scaffold. On the house, this paint had a Day-Glo aggressiveness. Charlie, that first morning, had covered half a side wall of his barnlike colonial. It took Richard a moment to see that he had also covered the shutters, the sills, and the windows with this glaring glossy pink.
As the days went on, Richard saw Charlie Antolini not only cover all his windows with the paint and slop it on the front door in the spirit of a man christening a ship, but (“Let’s make this ol’ momma really shine, hey? Whaddaya say?”) climb up on the roof and start slapping it on the shingling there. Richard stopped walking, called something back to Charlie, and held his breath as he saw his neighbor approach his enormous television antenna. Would he upend a bucket over the skeletal contraption, or would he try to trace all those angles and lines with his brush? He saw Charlie briefly consider the problem, and solve it pointillistically. He dabbed pink swabs on the main post of the antenna, and waved his brush over the rest to speckle it; then Charlie winked at Richard, happy that someone had witnessed his ingenuity.
Along about this time Richard also witnessed Flo Antolini speeding off down Beach Trail in a car so full of suitcases that the rear window was blocked.
Yes, those things Richard certainly saw, there was no doubt about them. But other things were not so easy.
Did he, for example, really see a tall spindly man dressed in a shabby frock coat and droopy gray leggings jogging past him as he took his walk to work? The man resembled some foolish frog-hunting bird, or a scarecrow so hapless that his fields were picked clean of seeds in minutes, but he resembled something or someone else even more, and Richard turned to watch him clumsily thump past, trying to find the resemblance in his memory. He saw jug ears redly irradiated in the early light, and then he had it: He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at the top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose. . . . It was Ichabod Crane, the Connecticut schoolteacher of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Richard watched him thud along Mount Avenue, his flat head bobbing in time with his steps, Ichabod Crane with flapping hands and feet, and when he turned into a curve, Richard went out into the middle of the road to be able to see him a moment longer.
Ichabod Crane. On Mount Avenue. In a world where his wife had been so brutally killed, that was as possible as anything else.
The oddness increased. The day after seeing Ichabod Crane jog past him, Richard looked into a car driving down Mount Avenue and saw an apparition from the twenties in Berlin—from the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood. Behind the wheel was a blond woman dressed in male formal wear, black evening clothes, jetty studs winking from the starched white shirtfront, neat black tie strapping a wing collar. She wore a monocle and smoked a yellow cigarette in a long ivory holder. Her hair was cut like a boy’s, and in the instant Richard had of her, he saw that her skin was cratered with tiny scars. Her eyes slid toward him, and he froze in mid-stride: she was not from his world, she was malignant as a tumor, and her glance on his skin felt like the cut of a knife. Then the woman sped down Mount Avenue, and Richard was sure that the earth opened to take her car the instant that she rounded the curve in front of Tabby’s old house.
The next day Richard saw a man whose entire body seemed to be wrapped in bandages duck behind a gatepost on the inland side of Mount Avenue as he approached, but this he knew was no hallucination. The man was a “leaker”—Richard was not even sure where he had first heard the awful term, but he knew it. There were children in Hampstead who chased these poor dying creatures through the streets, trying to pierce the protective shell of bandages and let the life out of them. It was no wonder the poor leaker fled when he saw someone coming. Richard could hear the man breathing huskily from behind the thick concrete gatepost as he walked by, and he started to say, “It’s all right, I’m just walking to work,” but he got no further than the first word when the panicked leaker jumped up from his shelter and flung himself down the road away from Richard. Richard’s heart moved, watching the poor doomed creature flap off down Mount Avenue—this was worse than seeing the woman from hell, for the suffering leaker, a fellow being in distress, spoke more directly to him, gave him back an image of himself. Desperation, extremity, panic.
And several days later, as if the torment of these moments were ordained to grow in a geometrical p
rogression, what he saw was much worse. After that, he drove up Mount Avenue to Hillhaven and kept his eyes straight ahead.
It began simply. A nondescript black car came up from behind Richard only a few minutes after he had started to stride up the Golden Mile, flashed its brake lights and pulled over. The driver would have the Hagstrom Atlas for Patchin County open on his lap, and as soon as Richard came near enough to be seen through the side window, he would ask, “Is this Mount Avenue?” Or “Am I going the right way to get to Hillhaven?” Any pedestrian on Mount Avenue was likely to be buttonholed by a driver made insecure by the absence of road signs. The black car—some kind of Chevrolet, Richard saw—sat quietly by the side of the road, waiting for Richard to draw up beside it. It trembled once, like a sleepy dog.
The car had stopped directly in front of the old Smithfield house.
Richard stepped forward, eager to be helpful, and the driver’s door opened. Then the passenger door swung open too. Richard hesitated for a moment, and the hesitation may have saved his life. One of the rear doors, the one on his side, also opened. Richard took a step backward—suddenly the innocuous little car seemed surrounded by a sinister light. Three of its doors open as it sat beside the road on the sunny July morning, the black Chevrolet resembled a squatting insect, a beetle. A fly. For a second nothing happened except that Richard’s mouth dried: he did not know why, but he was afraid of whatever was in that car.
Then Laura stepped out of the passenger side of the black Chevrolet.
