A Dark Matter (10 page)

Mallon bent down and spoke directly into his ear. His voice was soft and rapid. “I have taken Hayward’s problems into consideration and will do my absolute damnedest to use them tomorrow evening.”

“Use them?”

“For
us
. Don’t you think what is inside that wretched kid exists also in the hidden world?”

Young Howard could not speak. Old Howard felt his eyes prickle.

“We want to let it give us the privilege of seeing what it’s all about. It’ll be contained, it’ll be held—I have spells for binding and unbinding, they’re ancient, they’re well tested, they do what they’re supposed to do, these spells. I think there’s a good chance that exposure to this force could reach out to Keith and fix him.”

Young Howard shook his head; the old Howard pressed his hands to his eyes, like Mallon on Gorham Street. “He can’t—”

“For the first time in his life, he’ll get a good look at this crazy force whipping around inside him. Don’t you think that would change a man?”

“Have you ever seen anything like that happen?”

Mallon straightened up and looked ahead. Some thirty feet away the group had come to a halt. Meredith and the little band were looking back at them. Hayward, whispering to Brett Milstrap, had turned his back.

“We’re holding things up,” Mallon said. Howard thought he meant
Let’s not leave Meredith alone up there
. They began moving forward again.

Mallon’s voice had returned to its usual register, and it was filled with all his old authority. “Not exactly, no, but I’ve seen things like that.”

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?”

Mallon’s eye cut toward him again, and Howard said, “Don’t tell me that stuff about seeing a man’s hand cut off in a bar.”

Spencer Mallon placed a hand on the side of his face and squinted ahead. Keith Hayward stopped whispering to his roommate and turned a dark glance upon them.

“The weirdest thing,” Mallon said. He smiled. “Usually, the closest you get is the feeling that something
almost
happened—that the veil trembled for a second, and you came close to seeing what was on the other side. Or that some extraordinary force was hovering just out of sight, almost close enough to touch, but you weren’t good enough to hold it there, or strong enough, or concentrated enough, or that something else in the room screwed things up. That’s what happens most of the time.”

Mallon looked up the block to the others, most of whom were now looking back with undisguised curiosity. Dill seemed almost on the verge of anger. Mallon swept his fingers through the air, telling them to keep moving forward.

“But four, five years ago, when I was in Austin, this strange thing happened. And
that
was absolutely the weirdest place my investigations ever took me. It was around the time the agent left a note for me on the garbage can, remember? I said that something extraordinary happened there, but I didn’t get specific.”

“I remember,” Howard said, offended that Mallon might think it possible he had forgotten.

“Also, I didn’t mention that I was living with this girl, Antonia. Looked a little like Alexandra, remember her from La Bella Capri? Antonia was the first woman I ever knew who considered herself a witch, a Wiccan. So one day Antonia and I are lying around on her bed. It’s about five o’clock in the afternoon, and we’re supposed to get up and meet some people, only she says,
Why don’t you and I try to do something here?

“We went into the living room and stood side by side on her rug, naked. She’s burning some laurel and myrtle and cypress in a bowl, and she dipped a little oil of something or other into another bowl, a big one, with some other dried herbs crushed up into it. She lit seven candles. Then she sang something, I have no idea what, but it sounded exactly right. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘what do we do now?’

“‘Just give it your best shot,’ Antonia said.

“Because I didn’t expect anything to happen, I began to quote the first thing that came to mind, a passage I had memorized a couple of days before from Campanella’s
Universalis Philosophiae
. I
do
know Latin, you know. And Greek. Anyhow, I’m rattling away in the Roman Empire’s good old mother tongue, something about inhaling the Spirit of the World and hearing planetary music, and I notice that this dense, powerful odor is coming from the burning herbs—actually, it smells like sex plus death, if that makes any sense! Eros and Thanatos, the old Greeks called it. I’m getting turned on all over again,
very
turned on. Words are still pouring out of my mouth, and all of a sudden it is clear to me that what I’m doing is another form of sex, sort of a whole body sex. Antonia is moaning away beside me, and I’m right at the point when I don’t think I can hold out a second longer, and then it’s like the floor drops away beneath me, and I’m not in that room anymore.

“I’m on a dark plain. Fires are burning on the horizon. The sky is red. It all happens so fast, I don’t have time to be scared. Then I understand that
something is there with me
, only I don’t know what is. I can’t see it, I just know it’s close. This huge, monstrous
being
is big, it’s invisible, and it is really, really interested in me. I can hear it turning around to get a look at me, and all of a sudden I’m so scared I practically faint … before I can blink, I’m back in Antonia’s living room. She’s kneeling on the floor, bent over. It looks like she’s praying to Allah. Which wouldn’t have been a bad idea, come to think of it. There’s a strong, strange smell in the room, like old blankets and cold ashes.

“I asked her if she was all right, but she didn’t answer. I bent down and rubbed her back. She lifted her head, and it’s covered with blood, her whole face is bloody. Turns out, she just had a bloody nose, but it looked like she’d been knifed, or beaten up. I asked if she was all right all over again. She shook her head. ‘What happened?’ I asked. I even asked, ‘Did you see it?’”

Spencer laughed, apparently at his own foolishness.

“What did she say?” Howard asked.

“She said, ‘Get the hell out of my house, and never come back,’ that’s what she said. You have to admit, Hootie, it was a truly weird experience.”

“You don’t know what happened to her?”

“She had her own trip, that’s what happened to her, and she couldn’t handle it. Right now, you’re thinking, ‘Why would he want to do that again? Wasn’t it terrible enough for him?’ Right?”

“Well …” Hootie said. “Wasn’t it?”

“It came from me, don’t you get it?
I produced
what I saw—an image of pure sexual force. Okay, it looked pretty dark, but the woman with me was a
witch
, for God’s sake! Don’t you think she added in some kind of potion to keep me under her spell? It didn’t work, and it bounced back on her, that’s all. In our case, right now, I think something a lot more
comprehensive
is going to happen.” Mallon settled his hands on Howard’s shoulders, and lowered the handsome shield of his face to within inches of the boy’s.

In the Crafts Room, the fat old Howard Bly turned to the wall to keep the attendant from seeing him weep.

“Hey, everybody,” said sadistic Ant-Ant Anthony. “Check out Mr. Vocabulary B-Boy. He’s having q-quite a d-day. Aren’t you, Mr. B-Bly?”

Decades back in time, Spencer Mallon was saying, “And let’s face it, Hootie. Although you may not know it, I’m finished here—it’s all over, more or less.” His breath smelled like freshly cut hay.
“They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
, in case you’ve ever read Thomas Wyatt. That’s all she wrote, apart from the fun all of us are going to have over the next day and a half.”

“Fun?” Howard asked.

“Just you wait. I have a little surprise arranged for all of you. I’m going to make your dreams come true.” He grinned and ruffled Hootie’s dead-straight hair.

For the rest of the walk to the agronomy meadow, Howard Bly had to deal with the questions Boats and Dill fired at him.

He said: “It’s not important what we talked about.”

He said: “What I wanted to know, I found out. He doesn’t trust Hayward either.”

He said: “But yeah, I trust
him
. He’s really trying to learn new things, you know.”

He said: “Yeah, it’s a little scary. He’s seen some really weird stuff.”

He said: “No, I have no idea what the surprise is.”

Looking back down the sidewalk in frustration, he caught sight of an outright impossibility. Ten yards back, Brett Milstrap stood in the middle of the sidewalk, trying to wave all of them back. He did not look like a student who had just cheated on a test, he looked weary and despairing in his bright yellow shirt and khaki pants. He seemed to be both the age he really was and decades older. The only problem was, Brett Milstrap was now walking up University Avenue side by side with his roommate and only friend, Jack the Ripper. Hootie swung around to check and found that along with the rest of their party, the roommates had turned the next corner and were no longer in view. The same was true of Boats and Dilly. Apparently, Milstrap had doubled back in one hell of a hurry to head off the expedition from the rear. It made no sense at all.

The Eel leaned around the corner and urged him to pick up the pace, for God’s sake.

“Hey,” Hootie said, and looked back over his shoulder to see that the imploring figure had disappeared. “Is Milstrap up there?”

“Right up front with his best buddy.”

The group embarked on a series of smaller roads new to Hootie and his friends. The houses grew farther and farther apart. Eventually they reached the slightly wider and more substantial Glasshouse Road, where residences disappeared altogether. Arrowing straight toward a long flat greensward that had to be their destination, it was Madison’s most disreputable street. All the businesses rejected by the city’s more conventional sectors seemed to have settled here.
RUDY’S TATTOOS
was flanked by two run-down rightward-tilting bars with rows of motorcycles propped outside. Continuing on both sides down to the end of the street stood Pedro’s Magic Emporium, Monster Comix, Capital Guns, Badger Pawnshop, Badger Guns, Scott Myers School of Martial Arts, Knife And Blade World, Hank Wagner’s Pistol Range, Scuzzy’s Midnight Lounge, Whips ’N Chains, Betty’s Boudoir, stores with signs proclaiming
LEATHER: ALL LEATHER
and
WEAPONS SALE OR RENT
, and an unnamed store with a streaky, unclean display window papered with magazine covers depicting naked men and women. These businesses occupied small, one-story buildings roughly the size of the Aluminum Room but shabbier. At the far end of Glasshouse, two bars,
THE DOWNBEAT TAP ROOM
and
HOUSE OF KO-RECK-SHUN
, faced each other on opposite sides of the street.

Just past the street’s blunt end lay an enormous, shimmering swath of green that looked as though it had come from a world altogether more generous and expansive. When Howard looked at it, he thought for some reason of what Mallon had said about his high school and imagined him standing on the meadow’s green carpet with his arms wide, declaiming in ancient Greek.

By common though unspoken agreement, the group moved to the middle of the street. For most of its length, the journey down Glasshouse Road felt like a trip through a ghost village. Low, dim music floated from the biker bars, along with a barely audible buzz of conversation. Although lights burned in the windows of the gun shops, customers neither entered or emerged. Hank Wagner appeared to have taken the day off from target shooting, and no one was stocking up on dirty magazines. In one of the biker bars behind them, a growling voice uttered a fragrant curse. With a sound like the snapping of wood, something broke. Several dogs, or things that sounded like dogs, began to mutter in dog language. The little group drew more tightly together, with Spencer Mallon and Dilly-O, watchful and listening hard, at their head. “Don’t look back,” Mallon said.
“Don’t look back.”

Hootie found himself bracketed between the Eel and Keith Hayward, who had drifted up out of nowhere. Hayward’s hand fell on his shoulder like a metal claw.

“Does silence give you the runs, baby face?” Hayward whispered.

Hootie jerked away, shuddering.

Then voices filled the air, and the sound of booted feet striking pavement. A lot of motorcycles roared into life. The little group in the middle of the road froze, then quickly began drifting to the right, away from the uproar of the motorbikes.

“Let’s step along here,” Mallon said, sounding more nervous than he probably wanted to appear. “We want to get up on the sidewalk.” He reached out for Meredith Bright and yanked her to his side.

With Mallon in the lead, the little group scrambled onto the sidewalk. Hayward had rushed up behind Howard Bly, who was at first aware only of the thin, ravaged face lowering itself toward his right shoulder, exhaling breath so sour it seemed to have been twice recycled. A skinny arm encircled with stiff dark hair like bristles snagged his waist. Hootie’s mind went white with revulsion.

“Widdle Hoo-dee scaiwed, widdle Hoo-dee aw fwightened of the big, bad motowcycohs,” Hayward hissed.

In a panic of loathing, Hootie struggled against the bony arm pressing him into Hayward’s body, and felt it drop away of itself. Hayward had lost interest in him, and now he was thrusting himself past Meredith and toward the front of the group. Heading elsewhere, the roaring of the motorbikes faded behind them. Howard became aware of some kind of scuffle taking place up on the sidewalk outside the House of Ko-Reck-Shun. Mallon, Meredith, Dill, and now Keith Hayward kept him from seeing it. He gathered up his courage in both hands and moved toward Mallon’s free side, Hayward’s touch seeming to burn through his clothing. Howard could hear the Monster (the Eel’s name for him) braying his stupid laugh,
haw haw haw
, as he went around the side of the group, wondering what could be so terrible that it amused Keith Hayward, wondering also why the Eel was nowhere in sight. When Howard reached Mallon’s safe side, both questions were answered. The Eel stood rigid with shame and rage on the sidewalk outside the seedy House of Ko-Reck-Shun, being upbraided by a spectacularly drunken old man who had obviously just come out of the bar.