Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  Kingsley started at him, horrified. He took another slug of his drink.

  “I get a hundred dollars a day, and a hundred right now,” Bunting said.

  Bunting drove to an address in Bay City that Kingsley’s secretary gave him. The bungalow where Kingsley’s mother had lived with Chris Lavery lay on the edge of the V forming the inner end of a deep canyon. It was built downward, and the front door was slightly below street level. Patio furniture stood on the roof. The bedrooms would be in the basement, and lowest of all, like the corner pocket on a pool table, was the garage. Korean moss edged the flat stones of the front walk. An iron knocker hung on the narrow door below a metal grille.

  Bunting pounded the knocker against the door. When nothing happened, he pushed the bell. Then he hammered on the knocker again. No one came to the door. He walked around the side of the house and lifted the garage door to eye level. A car with white sidewalls was inside the garage. He went back to the front door.

  Bunting pushed the bell and banged on the door, thinking that Chris Lavery might have been sleeping off a hangover. When there was still no response, Bunting twisted back and forth in front of the door, uncertain of his next step. He would have to drive up to the lake, that was certain, but now he felt that he would drive all day and get nowhere—at Puma Point there would be another empty building, and he would stand at another door, knocking and ringing, and nobody would ever let him in. He would stand outside in the dark, banging on a locked door.

  How had he become a detective? What had made him do it? That was the mystery, it seemed to him, not the whereabouts of some rich idiot who had married a playboy. He touched the little pink Ama bottle in his shoulder holster, for comfort.

  Bunting stepped off the porch and walked back around the side of the house to the garage. He swung up the door, went inside, and pulled the door down behind him. The car with whitewalls was a big roadster convertible that would gulp down gasoline like it was vodka and looked as if it could hit a hundred and twenty on the highway. Bunting realized that if he had the key, he could turn on the ignition, lean back in the seat, stick his good old bottle in his mouth, and take the long, long ride. He could make the long goodbye, the one you never came back from.

  But he did not have the key to the roadster, and even if he did, he had a business card with a tommy gun in the corner; he had to detect. At the back of the garage was a plywood door leading into the house. The door was locked with something the builder had bought at a five and dime, and Bunting kicked at the door until it broke open. Wooden splinters and tinny pieces of metal sprayed into the hallway.

  Bunting stepped inside. His heart was beating fast, and he thought, with sudden clarity: This is why I’m a detective. It was not just the excitement, it was the sense of imminent discovery. The whole house lay above him like a beating heart, and he was in a passage inside that heart.

  The hushed warm smell of late morning in a closed house came to him, along with the odor of Vat 69. Bunting began moving down the hall. He glanced into a guest bedroom with drawn blinds. At the end of the hall he stepped into an elaborately furnished bedroom where a crystal greyhound stood on a smeary mirror-top table. Two pillows lay side by side on the unmade bed, and a pink towel with lipstick smears hung over the side of the wastebasket. Red lipstick smears lay like slashes across one of the pillows. Some foul, emphatic perfume hung in the air.

  Bunting turned to the bathroom door and put his hand on the knob.

  No, he did not want to look in the bathroom—he suddenly realized that he wanted to be anyplace at all, a Sumatran jungle, a polar ice cap, rather than where he was. The lipstick stain on the towel dripped steadily onto the carpet, turning it into a squashy red mush. He looked at the bed, and saw that the second pillow glistened with red that had leaked onto the sheet.

  No, he said inside himself, please no, not again. One of them is in there, or both of them are in there, and it’ll look like a butcher shop, you don’t want, you can’t, it’s too much.…

  He turned the knob and opened the door. His eyes were nearly closed. Drools and sprays of blood covered the floor. A fine spattering of blood misted the shower curtain.

  It’s only Bunting, finding another body. Body-a-day Bunting, they call him.

  He walked through the blood and pushed back the shower curtain.

  The tub was empty—only a thick layer of blood lay on the bottom of the tub, slowly oozing down the drain.

  The hideous clanging of a bell came to him through the bathroom windows. A white space in the air filled with the sound of the bell. Bunting clapped his hands to his ears. His neck hurt, and his back ached. He turned to flee the bathroom, but the bathroom had disappeared into empty white space. His legs could not move. Pain encased his body like St. Elmo’s fire, and he groaned aloud and closed his eyes and opened them to the unbearable enclosure of his room and the shrieking clock.

  For a moment he knew that the walls of this room were splashed with someone’s blood, and he dropped the book and scuttled off the bed, gasping with pain and terror. His legs folded away, and he fell full-length on the floor. His legs cried out, his entire body cried out. He could not move. He began writhing toward the door, moaning, and stopped only when he realized that he was back in his room. He lay on his carpet, panting, until the blood had returned to his legs enough for him to stand up and go into the bathroom. He had a difficult moment when he had to pull back the shower curtain, but none of the numerous stains on the porcelain and the wall tiles were red, and hot water soon brought him back into his daily life.

  SEVEN

  The next significant event in Bunting’s life followed the strange experience just described as if it had been rooted in or inspired by it, and began shortly after he left his building to go to work. He had a slight headache, and his hands trembled: it had seemed to him while tying his necktie that his face had subtly altered in a way that the discolored bags under his eyes did not entirely account for. His cheeks looked sunken, and his skin was an almost unnatural white. He supposed that he had not slept at all. He looked as if he were still staring at the bloody bathtub.

  A layer of skin had been peeled away from him. All the colors and noises on the street seemed brighter and louder, everything seemed several notches more alive—the cars streaming down the avenue, the men and women rushing along the sidewalk, the ragged bums holding their paper bags. Even the little pieces of grit and paper whirled by the wind seemed like messages. Although he was never truly conscious of this, Bunting usually tried to take in as little as possible on his way to work. He thought of himself as in a transparent bubble which protected him from unnecessary pain and distraction. That was how you lived in New York City—you moved around inside an envelope of tough resistant varnish. A crew of men in orange hard hats and jackets were taking up the concrete sidewalk down the block from his building, and the sound of a jackhammer pounded in Bunting’s ears. For a second the world wobbled around him, and he was back in the Los Angeles of forty years before, on his way to see a man named Derace Kingsley. He shuddered, then remembered: in the first paragraph of The Lady in the Lake, he had seen workmen taking up a rubber sidewalk.

  For a second the clouds parted, and bright sunlight fell upon Bunting and everything before him. Then the air went dark.

  The sound of the jackhammers abruptly ceased, and the workmen behind Bunting began shout indistinct, urgent words. They had found something under the sidewalk, and because Bunting had to get away from what they had found, he took one quick step toward his bus stop. Then a wall of water smashed against his head—without any warning, a thick drenching rainfall had soaked his clothes, his hair, and everything and everybody about him. The air turned black in an instant, and a loud roll of thunder, followed immediately by a crack of lightning that illuminated the frozen street, obliterated the shouts of the workmen. The lightning turned the world white for a brief electric moment: Bunting could not move. His suit was a wet rag, and his hair streamed down the sides of his face. The
sudden rainfall and the lightning that illuminated the water bouncing crazily off the roof of the bus shelter threw Bunting right out of his frame. What had been promised for days had finally arrived. His eyes had been washed clean of habit, and he saw.

  People thrust past him verything blazed and burned with life. Being streamed from every particle of the world—wood, metal, glass, or flesh. Gars, fire hydrants, the concrete and crushed stones of the road, each individual raindrop, all contained the same living substance that Bunting himself contained— and this was what was significant about himself and them. If Bunting had been religious, he would have felt that he had been given a direct, unmediated vision of God: since he was not, his experience was of the sacredness of the world itself.

  All of this took place in a few seconds, but those seconds were out of time altogether. When the experience began to fade, and Bunting began to slip out of eternity back into time, he wiped the mixture of rain and tears from his face and started to move toward the bus shelter. It seemed that he too had overflowed. He moved beneath the roof of the bus shelter. Several people were looking at him oddly. He wondered what his face looked like—it seemed to him that he might be glowing. The bus appeared in the rainy darkness up the avenue, lurching and rolling through the potholes like an ocean liner. What had happened to him—what he was already beginning to think of as his “experience”—was similar, he realized, to what he felt when he tumbled into The Buffalo Hunter.

  He sighed loudly and wiped his eyes. The people nearest him moved away.

  EIGHT

  He arrived at DataComCorp soaked and irritable, not knowing why. He wanted to push people who got in his way, to yell at anyone who slowed him down. He blamed this feeling on having to arrive at the office in wet clothes. The truth was that discomfort caused only the smallest part of his anger. Bunting felt as if he had been forced into an enclosure too small for him: he had left a mansion and returned to a hovel. The glimpse of the mansion made the hovel unendurable.

  He came stamping out of the elevator and scowled at the receptionist. As soon as he was inside his cubicle, he ripped off his suit jacket and threw it at a chair. He yanked down his tie and rubbed his neck and forehead with his damp handkerchief. In a dull, ignorant fury he banged his fist against his computer’s on switch and began punching in data. If Bunting had been in a better mood, his natural caution would have protected him from the mistake he made after Frank Herko appeared in his cubicle. As it was, he didn’t have a chance—foolhardy anger spoke for him.

  “The Great Lover returns at last,” Herko said.

  “Leave me alone,” said Bunting.

  “Bunting the Infallible shows up still drunk after partying with his lovely bimbo, misses work for two days, doesn’t answer his phone, shows up half-drowned—”

  “Get out, Frank,” Bunting said.

  “—and madder than a stuck bull, probably suffering from flu if not your actual pneumonia—”

  Bunting sneezed.

  “—and expects the only person who really understands him to shut up and leave him alone. God, you’re soaked. Don’t you have any sense? Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

  Bunting growled. Herko slipped out of the cubicle, and a minute later returned with both hands full of wadded, brown paper napkins from the dispenser in the men’s room. “Dry yourself off, will you?”

  Bunting snarled and swabbed his face with some of the napkins. He scrubbed napkins in his hair, unbuttoned his shirt and rubbed napkins over his damp chest.

  “So what were you doing?” Herko asked. “Coming down with double pneumonia?”

  Herko was an hysterical fool. Also, he thought he owned Bunting. Bunting did not feel ownable. “Thanks for the napkins,” he said. “Now get out of here.”

  Herko threw up his hands. “I just wanted to tell you that I set up your date with Marty for tomorrow night. I suppose that’s still all right, or do you want to kill me for that, too?”

  Around Bunting the world went white. His blood stopped moving in his veins. “You set up my date?”

  “Well, Marty was eager to meet you. Eight o’clock, at the bar at One Fifth Avenue. Then you’re in the Village, you can go to eat at a million places right around there.” Herko leaned forward to peer at Bunting’s face. “What’s the matter? You sick again? Maybe you should go home.”

  Bunting whirled to face his computer. “I’m okay. Will you get the hell out of here?”

  “Jesus,” Herko said. “How about some thanks?”

  “Don’t do me any more favors, okay?” Bunting did not take his eyes from his screen, and Herko retreated.

  Late in the afternoon, Bunting put his head around the door of his friend’s cubicle. Herko glanced up, frowning. “I’m sorry,” Bunting said. “I was in a bad mood this morning. I know I was rude, and I want to apologize.”

  “Okay,” Herko said. “That’s all right.” He was still a little stiff and wounded. “It’s okay about the date, right? Tomorrow night?”

  “Well,” Bunting said, and saw Herko’s face tighten. “No, it’s fine. Sure. That’s great. Thanks.”

  “You’ll love the bar,” Herko said. “And then you’re right down there in the Village. Million restaurants, all around you.”

  Bunting had never been in Greenwich Village, and knew only of the restaurants, many of them invented, to which he had taken Veronica. Then something else occurred to him.

  “You like Raymond Chandler, don’t you?” he asked, having remembered an earlier conversation.

  “Ray is my man, my main man.”

  “Do you remember that part in The Lady in the Lake where Marlowe first goes to Chris Lavery’s house?”

  Herko nodded, instantly in a better mood.

  “What does he find?”

  “He finds Chris Lavery.”

  “Alive?”

  “Well, how else could he talk to him?”

  “He doesn’t find a lot of blood splashed all over the bathroom, does he?”

  “What’s happening to you?” Herko asked. “You starting to put the great literature of our time through a mental shredder, or what?”

  “Or what,” Bunting said, though it seemed that he had certainly shuffled, if not actually shredded, the pages he had read. He backed out of the cubicle and disappeared into his own.

  Herko sat quiet with surprise for a moment, then yelled, “Long fangs! Long, long fangs! Bunting’s gone a-hunting!” He howled like a wolf.

  Some of the ladies giggled, and one of them said that he shouldn’t tease. Herko started laughing big chesty barrelhouse laughs.

  Bunting sat behind his computer, trying to force himself to concentrate on his work. Herko gasped for breath, then went on rolling out laughter. The bubble of noise about him suddenly evoked the image of the workmen who had exclaimed, an instant before the sudden storm, over the hole they had made in the sidewalk: they had found a dead man in that hole.

  Bunting knew this with a sudden and absolute certainty. The men working on the sidewalk had looked down into that hole and seen a rotting corpse, or a heap of bones and a skull in a dusty suit, or a body in some stage between these two. Bunting saw the open mouth, the matted hair, the staring eyes and the writhing maggots. He tried to wrench himself back into the present, where his own living body sat in a damp shirt before a computer terminal filled with what for the moment looked alarmingly like gibberish.

  DATATRAX 30 CARTONS MONMOUTH NJ BLUE CODE RED CODE

  Jesus stepped past the rock at the mouth of the tomb, spread his arms wide, and sailed off in his dusty white robe into a flawless blue sky.

  That’s my body, he thought. My body.

  Something the size of a walnut rattled in his stomach, grew to the size of an apple, then developed a point that lengthened into a needle. Bunting held his hands to his stomach and rushed out of the Data Entry room into the corridor. He banged through the men’s room door and entered a toilet stall not much smaller than his cubicle. He pressed his necktie to his chest to avoid spatte
ring, bent over, and vomited.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Bunting looked up from his screen and saw the flash of a green dress moving past the door of his cubicle. The color was a dark flat green that both stood out from the office’s pale walls and harmonized with them, and for an instant it seemed to float toward Bunting, who had been daydreaming about nothing in particular. The flat green jumped into sharp focus; then it was gone. The air the woman had filled hummed with her absence, and suddenly all the world Bunting could see promised to overflow with sacred and eternal being, as it had that morning. Bunting braced himself and fought the rising sense of expectancy—he did not know why, but he had to resist. The world instantly lost the feeling of trembling anticipation that had filled it a moment before: every detail fell back into itself. Jesus went back into his cave and rolled the rock back across the entrance. The workmen standing in the rain looked down into an empty hole. Bunting was still alive, or still dead. He had been saved. The tree had fallen in the deep forest, and no one had heard it, so it still stood.

  That night Bunting again set his alarm and went back into The Lady in the Lake. He was driving into the mountains, and once he got to a place called Bubbling Springs, the air grew cool. Canoes and row-boats went back and forth on Puma Lake, and speedboats filled with squealing girls zipped past, leaving wide foamy wakes. Bunting drove through meadows dotted with white irises and purple lupines. He turned off at a sign for Little Fawn Lake and crawled past granite rocks. He drove past a waterfall and through a maze of black oak trees. Now everything about him sang with meaning, and he was alive within this meaning, as alive as he was supposed to be, equal to the significance of every detail within the landscape. A woodpecker peered around a tree trunk, an oval lake curled at the bottom of a valley, a small bark-covered cabin stood against a stand of oaks. This information came toward and into him in a steady stream, every glowing feather and shining outcropping of rock and inch of wood overflowing with its portion of being, and Bunting, the eye around which this speaking world cohered, moved through this stream of information undeflected and undisturbed.