by Peter Straub
In Tabby’s eyes the old man could see the pinhead dots of light which were the stars.
“He killed me—he killed me because of your meddling—he killed me because you took us to that marker and read us his name—God damn you! Damn you!” The boy’s head lolled back against the rock, blood drooled from the ragged second mouth. “You asked for this, and I damn your soul to hell!”
“Tabby,” Graham began, “if you are Tabby, you know I would never—”
The boy’s head rolled back again. “You know what happened in the Black Summer, don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?”
Graham shook his head. “Not everything. Tabby—”
“You don’t—you don’t know anything. Because this is what happened. This.” The head rolled to the side, fixing Graham with a look of idiot glee. “Me. I’m what happened. Me. This isn’t even what I look like now—you don’t know that either. You wanna see? You wanna see what I’m like now? You might as well know what you’re looking for.”
“Looking for?”
“‘Four Hearths’ is just one hearth now, Graham.” The drooling mouth split with laughter and then the whole body instantly shrank, blackening, to a dwarfish mummy. The dry little husk whispered on the flat surface of the rock. Ashy sections crumbled off.
Graham looked in horror at the blackened remains of Tabby’s body. Shaking, he bent forward, no longer noticing the agonies in his elbow and hips, and laid his fingertips on the black crust. As soon as he touched it, the little husk cracked into uncountable pieces—gray dust rose up, lighter than air, from the fractures. The thousands of shreds of ash on the surface of the boulder stirred, broke into particles the size of houseflies, spun crazily apart.
Still trembling, Graham painfully straightened himself. For a second the world turned red again and canted up like the deck of a boat at sea—he was gripping his right elbow, his face locked in an old man’s Mayan grimace. Tabby was dead. “Four Hearths” had burned down and Tabby had been killed there. The Dragon had turned lovely Tabby into a thing like a blackened cocoon. Holding his flaring elbow close in to his ribs, Graham wept for Tabby—for his own weakness too.
Finally he wandered off the boulder’s flat top back onto the slope of the gorge. Damn you, Tabby had said to him through his blood-spattered mouth. I damn your soul to hell. Graham’s tired feet found themselves moving sideways up the mossy slope: through wet eyes, he saw where he had torn the side out of a bush. I damn your soul to hell. Damn you. When he pulled himself over the top of the little gorge, the lights of the bar’s windows struck his eyes like needles. Behind the glass, men and women, damned too, filtered back and forth through an underwater light. Fish in a bowl, Graham thought, fish in a barrel. He fell once on the way to his car.
3
Three days earlier, Richard Allbee had begun walking to the job up in Hillhaven again. John Roehm, who knew nothing of what had happened on Richard’s last walk, had been unsubtly encouraging him to leave his car at home—Roehm evidently believed that when you were thrown off a horse, you got right back on again. “Best exercise in the world,” Roehm said as sawdust flew from the ripsaw into his beard and fell like golden dandruff to his red shirt. “You’ll stay healthy all your life, long as you walk a couple miles a day.” Richard had given in—and maybe surrender was best, for despite his fears the walks had gone uneventfully.
John Roehm’s benign bearded smile of total approval greeted him on the first two mornings like a reward. On the third day—the day of the fire at “Four Hearths”—the smile was there, but Richard was less sure of the wisdom of applying horse-training metaphors to Patchin County.
He had been approaching the point on his walk where trouble always seemed most imminent, where that emotional disaster he feared blew trumpets and bugles at him as soon as he drew near—it was the section of Mount Avenue that traveled from one stone gate to the other, thirty yards down, of Tabby’s childhood house. Walking past that gray mansion, Richard pulled back his shoulders and increased his pace, he sweated out the distance, wanting only to make it well past the other end of the drive.
On the day that “Four Hearths” would burn to the ground and kill everybody inside, Richard Allbee had gone no more than half the distance between the two stone gates when he saw that he would again have welcomed the sight of feverish little Charles Daisy. A woman in a long dress he remembered stepped out from behind a tree and waited for him. Her feet were bare and pale in the dark myrtle which grew between the iron fenceposts and the road. The woman was Laura. As soon as he had seen her, she began coming toward him.
Sweat burst from him and instantly soaked his shirt. He clutched the handle of his briefcase, clamped the rolled plans more firmly under his arm, and as firmly kept his eyes on the surface of the road before him. Pebbles, cracks in the asphalt, a pigeon feather ragged as an old toothbrush, loomed up as if magnified, and disappeared when he stepped over them.
She wanted him to look at her, but he would not, could not. His body would not let him see how badly hers had been treated.
He felt her pleading, and shook his head. If he saw her mangled and destroyed—saw her once again—that was the end of him. She would have him, then. He heard her feet whispering through the rubbery myrtle. Her silence was worse than speech would have been—he heard also how the dress slid across her hips, brushed against the little plants. He squinted, ground his teeth, plunged ahead.
He passed the second gate—the other end of the long drive up to Monty Smithfield’s former house—and groaned out loud when Laura’s specter did not disappear. Still he would not look at her. The myrtle had ended, and Laura’s feet were moving over gravel, causing a sound like rolled dice.
She did not leave him until he reached the bend in the road just before the long white stretch of Hillhaven’s beach. No children there now—parents were terrified of letting their children get near the water—but a few intrepid women in bikinis lay on the sand, reading the summer’s novels and deepening their tans. Richard’s eyes were nearly closed: he was squinting so that he could see as little as possible without walking in front of an oncoming car. He sensed, then saw the approach of the beach through his filmy eyes; then he knew that she was gone. All he heard was the water slapping itself into the mild froth that hissed into the shingle; he registered her subtraction from his side as a sudden push of warm air against his ribs.
At the job, John Roehm took one look at him and left him alone all morning—a sacrifice of self, for the old man loved to talk. Richard knew that he was getting ready to put boiled linseed oil on some of the new flooring they had cut into the dining room, and that he wanted to hem and haw about the amount of coloring to use in the oil. John Roehm could cook up a good thirty minutes of ideas about such a topic. But Richard conferred with the client, who appeared to notice nothing wrong or unusual about him, marked up his plans some more, and did two hours’ lonely work on the roof trying to shape up a cornice. Still he bit down hard on nothing; in his inner ear he kept hearing bare feet whisper through tough green myrtle.
* * *
Laura returned for Richard while unconscious Graham Williams stirred on a flat boulder; while Tabby Smithfield flattened himself against the cellar wall and tried to shut out the voice, his father’s, which came from a being not his father. She came at night, and Richard was almost prepared for her.
He had gone to bed early, promising himself that he would walk up Mount Avenue the next day, and the day after that, and every day until Laura stopped appearing. He would not even cross the street: he would do just as he had done, walk blindly on, refusing to look at or speak to her. Richard opened the book he had been reading, The Woman in White, and tried to lose himself in the plight of Marian Halcombe. The print kept receding away from him, and more than once he read the same paragraph without noticing: Richard had assumed that he would have difficulty falling asleep, as he usually did these days, and the assumption kept him from realizing that he was in fact already drowsing. For a time he strug
gled with Wilkie Collins’ prose so stubbornly that he twice picked up the book after it had fallen from his hands. The third time the book dropped onto his chest he put the marker between the pages and placed the novel on the bedside table. Just as he did so, he realized that he had not only assumed that he would be awake most of the night, he had wanted to be awake; wakefulness felt like protection. Once the thought became conscious, it was foolish. Richard turned off his light and slid down between his sheets. The house was dark.
A moment later the lights in the hallway went on and spilled brightness into the room. Richard’s heart gave a great startled thud. He sat up and saw the open doorway, the hall filled with light, and the door to the nursery, also wide open. That door had been closed since the last policeman walked out of the house. Richard had not wanted to enter the nursery ever again. If he’d found the key, he would have locked the nursery and kept it locked. “Who’s there?” he called out, hoping that the old wiring had blundered into itself and caused the light to switch on. “Who’s out there?”
Laura stepped through the nursery doorway and into the bright hall. For a moment she stood outside Richard’s room, perfectly still. Her face and chest were streaked with blood, blood had clotted her hair; below the thorax she was an open wound. This time he had to look. He did not dare to take his eyes off her. She wanted him to know, or the Dragon wanted him to know, what had happened to her.
He looked at the mutilated body of his wife and eased himself out of the bed. The Dragon had sent her; or she herself was the Dragon. He remembered that night after the McClouds’ awful dinner party, when he and Laura had undressed together and made love in their rented house. Waterbed love, potbellied-stove love. She had looked totemic, wholly beautiful to him. I don’t want to lose you, Richard. He was shaking, whether with fear, disgust, or rage, he could not tell. Instead, he had lost her.
Laura stepped nearer, and Richard backed away toward the bathroom, keeping the bed between himself and Laura. She slowly stepped out of the light into the darkness of the bedroom—for a long moment she was only a shadow, a Laura-shaped outline against the light, and Richard almost melted onto the floor: his wife had come back. Then he was assailed by those odors another specter, Billy Bentley, had pushed toward him from an elevator in a Providence hotel: rot, sewage, evil swamp gases, feces, death.
“Get out of here,” he said.
She moved toward him, circling down toward the foot of the bed. Her eyes gleamed whitely. The wound in her belly flapped like a shirttail.
“You’re not Laura,” he said.
The end of her mouth lifted in a taunting half-smile.
“Are you going to try to kill me?” he said. “Fine, kill me. I can’t take this anymore. I went crazy when you died. Do you think I want to live here all by myself?”
She passed through a stark vertical shadow, and when she emerged again into the light from the hallway her skin was whole. The blood and wounds had gone—as if Richard’s memories had created her fresh. Now she was his wife again, stepping nearer and nearer through the dim light.
His breath caught in his throat; his skin tingled, suddenly cold.
Laura stepped right up before him, still with the half-smile playing on her mouth. She reached out to him, and he stepped backward—her fingers just grazed his bare chest.
His skin raised and blistered where she had touched him. The pain sank into him like knives—Laura or not, she was real enough to kill him. Smiling, she came forward again, reaching out.
“No,” he said, moving backward toward the bathroom door. “Go away. I can’t fight you.”
She forced him into the bathroom, and he continued backing away. The whites of her eyes shone in the darkness of the bathroom, and Richard’s skin moved in revulsion.
He could back out of the hall entrance to the bathroom, he was not cornered; all of the house was available to him. Laura crept nearer, and he jumped back, feeling behind him for the knob of the hallway door.
“Go,” he said. “Get out of here.”
She crept nearer, and his hand found the knob. He jerked the door open behind him and walked backward out into the hall.
Here the light above the staircase, the light which had announced Laura’s presence, cast everything into banality—they were not in the chiaroscuro of the bedroom, but at the top of the main staircase. In real light. And his naked wife was coming playfully for him out of the bathroom door, real light falling on her real flesh and catching in her hair. She was smiling a typical Laura-smile. Richard backed slowly away from her, touching the top of the banister. Here in the light, Laura’s presence seemed almost ordinary. She tilted her head, then made a playful little darting movement toward him, and he jerked back.
They stood unmoving at the top of the staircase for a moment. Richard knew that she meant to kill him, and here in this banal everyday light it seemed impossible that he should ever have been willing to die. She was a creature of the Dragon, not Laura. Laura had belonged to the world of affections and friendships and work. This thing before him, so perfect, was a betrayal of her.
Richard, who knew every inch of his new house, knew that one of the pickets supporting the banister was like a loose tooth—twenty times he had jiggled the picket, promising himself he would get around to fixing it. Watching Laura very carefully, Richard took another step backward and reached sideways and down: his hand fell on sculptured wood that rattled in its socket at his touch. He pulled as hard as he could, and the picket splintered away from the single nail holding it. Even before the two-foot-long piece of wood was securely in his hand, Laura was rushing at him.
He had time only to try to jump out of the way and club at her. She groped for him, but he moved sideways, bringing down the picket. It struck her smooth shoulder and knocked her into the banister: where it had touched her skin, it darkened and released a wisp of smoke.
Laura straightened herself, then deliberately touched the top of the banister with her forefinger. An orange flame the size of a match sprouted on the molded banister, blistering the layers of paint. Richard remembered how that touch had felt, carving into him. The little flame guttered out. Laura dashed at him, and again he swung hard at her, connecting with one of her arms. A tiny flame shot up on the picket, disappeared when Richard swung his weapon around in the air.
That terrible odor of rot and death boomed toward him again. He saw that where Laura’s feet had trod, the carpet had blackened and scorched. She charged at him again, driving him backward through the open nursery door.
As she entered, he swung at her head and she raised her arms too late to deflect the blow. The impact knocked her sideways; she sprawled onto the hardwood of the nursery floor, blackening the varnish. Richard jumped forward and brought his club down again, smashing her forehead. What he was doing seemed almost geometric to him, a series of steps he had to go through cleanly, in perfect order and without emotion. Long bruises were already appearing on Laura’s skin; her right arm dangled. He chopped down at the head again, and she reached out and grasped his ankle with her left hand.
Searing pain knocked him down. She was grinning at him, and an alligator had closed its teeth on his ankle. In a rage now, Richard drove the ragged end of the picket into her face. The picket jumped into flame, and she released his ankle.
Richard got on his knees and battered at her as she tried to crawl toward him.
Then something happened that he did not understand, was not even sure had actually happened, until Graham Williams talked to them all late that night. The picket, now burning like a torch, seemed to tremble in his hands—it seemed living. He smashed it down on the Laura-thing’s head, and for a moment it seemed lit from within, golden. He raised it and battered down again, and it quivered in his hands like a bird. “You’re not Laura,” he breathed, and smashed once again at her head. She had ceased to move. He pushed himself across the floor away from her.
A film of blue flame ran lightly across the naked body on the hardwood floor, flickering
lightly across the splayed legs. Richard sat up and watched the flames feed upon each other, redden and grow. He had not been geometric, he had beaten this thing into defeat in the same room where his wife had been murdered, and now he was drained by his feelings of rage and triumph.
A shape stirred and expanded within the fire over Laura’s body: before it became definite, Laura rolled up into the flames and was consumed. Then the flames concentrated, and Richard saw big wings flicker out of the center of the fire—he drew back from the suddenly intensified heat, and a bat made of flame lifted from the charred floor.
Heat rolled over Richard, rolled into him, and the force of it pushed him back into the wall—as if a giant hand had given him a shove. For a moment the entire room shimmered—blue lines of fire chasing wildly over the floor and walls—and then the window exploded outward, and the flexing fire-bat exploded out with it.
Richard peeled himself away from the wall. His face felt sore and dry—sunburned. The nursery was full of drifting ash and the smell of frying wood. On the floor was a large charred circle on the perimeter of which lay his picket, or what was left of it. The stub of the picket was black too, and glints of red rose and died along its length. Richard managed to stand. He went slowly across the blackened floor to the hole where the window had been. A furious, raging fire rode on its own wings into the black sky. When he looked down, he saw Tabby Smithfield standing down there on his front lawn, staring up at him with a face like a white smudge.
* * *
“And I looked down,” Tabby told him in a shaking voice, “and I saw a lead pipe—just lying on the floor of the cellar. So . . . so I picked it up and smashed the window, just smashed it . . . and then there was some old stuff in there, trunks and stuff from my grandfather, and I piled it together and climbed up on it. And then I climbed out of the window. I cut myself, but not too bad. Anyhow, I got outside . . . I saw my house burn right up—it was like one big sheet of flames, the whole house . . . and I knew my father was dead. So I ran over here.”
