A Dark Matter (31 page)

“Yes, the schedule,” I said.

Meredith Walsh swung her tight, furious face toward me and drilled me with an unspoken question.

“You’re talking about the time frame you developed by doing a horoscope of the group. You were supposed to begin by … I don’t remember. Seven-twenty?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Donald, do you remember?
He
did, and he wasn’t even there! Do you know how much work it is, to work up a star chart and do a horoscope? I did that for free, I did it out of love, and none of you little jackasses took it seriously!”

“Hey, things happened,” Olson said. “You gotta go with the flow.”

“No, you don’t. We were held up by a good ninety minutes, maybe more. By then, things had
changed
. We weren’t in the optimum position for success anymore. We should have bagged it, we should have called a rain date. We should have gone home to our hovels and waited until I could work out the next time we’d have a
chance
of success.”

“A lousy hour and a half,” Don said.

“Even an hour makes a difference, Don.”

“Spencer had some doubts about that, you know.”

“To his sorrow,” she said.

When the group finally reunited, Mallon refused to listen to her. Well, he didn’t actually
refuse
, he just dismissed her worries and ignored her advice. He blew her off, was what he did. The actual situation, the one he should have known enough to care about, was that by the time they assembled in the wreckage and puddles left behind by the cops and the demonstrators, it was past eight-thirty, and the light was going fast. All of her calculations had been thrown off, and from what she remembered of the astrological signs, from here on out things looked pretty grim. If you missed the window that had just slammed shut, it was best to wait a couple of days. That was how she interpreted the chart, anyhow. But as they stood and talked about it on a water-darkened sidewalk covered with soaked, pulpy leaflets, Meredith understood that her warnings meant nothing to Spencer. He was in forward gear, and he was going to stay that way.

If you’re looking for someone to blame, pick HIM.

   The students had fled, and the cops and firemen had finally wandered back to their stations to file statements and process arrests. Mallon and the high-school kids had emerged from behind the cement walls of the parking garage where they had sheltered during the uproar. Meredith could see that with one exception, their group as a whole was rattled by what had just happened. Keith Hayward, the exception, seemed exhilarated by the free-for-all they had just witnessed. Violence perked the guy right up, Meredith observed, it lightened his step, it brightened his eyes. When he was in this fresh, lively mood, she also observed, Hayward wasn’t so horrible looking any more. You could almost think he was kind of attractive in some really eccentric way. This transformation spooked her a little bit, but more than that, it interested her. It spoke of some vital, previously unsuspected force within Hayward—a force that would almost certainly be connected to the “private room,” obviously some sort of sex pad, he had mentioned to her in private a couple of times.

He was playing it as cool as he could, and the way he met her eyes when she gave up on Mallon and turned away toward the devastated street—Keith Hayward, actually meeting her eyes!—suggested that the sex pad was in his mind again. So why not? Maybe she’d have a look. Meredith had no doubt that she could control Hayward, no matter what he had in mind, and if she allowed him to think he was taking her out, that they had a “date,” Spencer Mallon would take notice, all right.

She sent Keith Hayward a little smile to cherish and fold up into his pocket, and saw it zing straight to the center of the target.

Mallon made a short speech to them all, asking them to calm down and gather their thoughts and put away all the bad energy (“Even you, Keith,” he said, which make Hayward sulk and Milstrap chortle, causing her to realize that Milstrap
liked
Hayward’s bad energy, what a creep), and think about the task ahead of them. Out there in the meadow, they had to be straight. Could they do that? Could they put this unfortunate delay behind them? (Total bullshit, of course. He’d already made up his mind.) He looked at Donald and asked, What about it, Dilly-O? Can we get ourselves together? A shock, in a way, because he was showing that he thought Donald, not that “Boats” boy, was the leader of the little group. And Donald said, do you remember, Donald?

   “I said, We’re already together,” Don said, looking grim.

   That’s right. Donald spoke up, Donald gave him what he wanted. Spencer loved that. It got his juices flowing. He said, Okay, let’s get our wagon train on the trail, all right? He wasn’t looking at Hootie and the Eel, but Meredith was, and she had to say, they seemed to be what people used to call a little peaked. A little
drawn
. Especially Hootie. All through her life, Meredith seldom had anything like a maternal impulse, she wasn’t built that way, sorry, but something about Hootie made her almost want to pick him up and carry him out to the agronomy meadow. And funny thing, although Meredith knew Hootie was as love-struck with her as those other boys were, from then on right through to the day’s horrible finish, Hootie kept his eyes glued on the Eel. She
meant
something to him, you could see that.

Along they went through town, and the farther they got from University Avenue the more remote all the excitement back there became. Everything looked so normal, you almost couldn’t believe how savage the world had become. Some residential parts of Madison, you could be in New England or the Bay Area. Great-looking houses on tree-lined streets, places where you think you have a handle on life. Through these kindly, professorial streets they walked, moving deliberately—thanks to their knot-headed leader—toward death and ruin. Then the professor-style streets dropped away, and the houses got smaller and farther apart, and after that they were walking past foundries and machine shops and auto-parts stores and chain-link fences that blocked off filthy windows no one would ever want to look through anyhow, and after that they strode, wandered, or strutted, according to their individual styles, into Glasshouse Road.

Instinctively, they drew closer together. Spencer dropped back to protect them from the rear while issuing remarks such as—Just keep moving forward, me buckos, me hearties, there’s nothing to be afraid of here, unless Eel’s Dad wants to come out for another round of fisticuffs—

Which proved he wasn’t as confident and upbeat as he was pretending to be, didn’t it, because since when did Spencer Mallon ever say cornball junk like me buckos me hearties, right? Hootie whispered something to the Eel, too. No wonder, after that stupid crack. Not that Meredith was feeling especially sympathetic toward the Eel in those days, since she’d gone out with Spencer just a few nights before—did Lee Harwell, supposedly the girl’s twin, know that?

Does that come as a shock? It was a shock to Meredith, you can bet on that—her lover, her Master, her guide betrayed her, in a sense, by taking out this
high school girl
after they’d had a nasty argument, about guess what, that same
high school girl
. The rat, her lover, whom Meredith had hoped was going to stay with her or at least take her with him if he actually did take off after the ceremony, as he said he would, had gone out on a
date
with this girl, this child, who, let’s face it, was pretty cute, kind of an Audrey-Hepburn-in-the-larval-stage thing. Not only that, he took her to the best restaurant in town, the Falls.

Didn’t know that, did you, Harwell? The Falls.

   I turned to Donald Olson and saw on his face the answer to the question I had yet to ask. “I didn’t, no. You did, though.”

Olson hesitated, then said, “Yes. Spencer felt close to her.”

“‘Spencer felt close to her,’” Meredith said, mocking the words. “Is that right? He felt
closer
to me.”

“Hmm,” I said. “He took her to the Falls? She never mentioned that to me.”

Olson’s lips tightened, making him look as though he had just bitten down on a tough little seed and heard a crunch that might have been a tooth.

“All this happened a long, long time ago,” I said, rejecting the sleepless hours of the previous night. “I mean, I guess I’m surprised, but it’s totally meaningless, after all.”

“I’m curious about something,” Meredith said. “Did your girlfriend say anything to you that night after she got home, or maybe the next day? You must have asked her about it.”

“I didn’t even see her that night. In fact, I barely talked to her all day. That night, nobody answered her phone at home. It turned out, she ran out of the meadow with Boats, Jason Boatman, and spent the night on his couch. When I went over there, Boats wouldn’t let me in. He said everything got screwed up, he couldn’t talk about it, and Eel was just conked out and didn’t want to see anybody, not even me.”

“But when you and she were finally together, and you were able to talk to each other in private, what did she tell you?”

“Nothing. She said she couldn’t tell me anything. It was no use, because if she didn’t understand it, I sure wouldn’t be able to, either. Lee was really angry at Mallon, that much was clear. I thought it was because he had taken off and left them all to deal with the mess—and because he more or less stole Don, her best friend, apart from me. Our best friend, come to think of it.”

“That’s nice,” Olson said. “But Meredith, keep going.”

“Yes, please don’t stop,” I said. “I want to hear what happened during the ceremony.”

“Good luck,” Meredith said. “It got completely crazy out in that meadow. People say nutso stuff about piled-up corpses and millions of dogs, and monsters flying out of orange clouds … I didn’t see anything like that. The truth is, I kind of liked what I saw. It didn’t scare me at all. That was where and when I started to figure things out, right there. A queen gave me a gift, and that changed everything.”

   Now that they were getting close to the meadow, they were really getting together, too, like Donald said. You could feel something happen, on the way down Glasshouse Road. Hard to say what it was, exactly, but for the first and last time in her life Meredith felt like part of a
unit—
like a participating member of a group that informed her identity. Like a bee in a beehive, or the shortstop on a good baseball team. Teams had captains, bees had queens, and they had Spencer Mallon. Total trust, total faith. How often do you feel that way? Spencer Mallon collected innocence, all right, but Meredith would never have guessed that hers was part of the package.

What a sap.

Anyhow, there she was, a dewy young thing madly in love with her handsome adventurer/philosopher/magician, moving down Glasshouse Road with these people she suddenly felt tremendously connected to, and there’s this feeling of threat, small at first, barely noticeable, but it got stronger with every foot of ground they cover. Something, maybe a lot of somethings, was watching them. Then subtle noises began to reach them from behind, and these noises got closer and closer while the group, breathing as one, moved forward, Mallon in the lead. Those things that were following them didn’t sound like bikers. Didn’t even sound like anything human. Nobody looked back, not even Hayward, not even Milstrap, who for once seemed to have forgotten how to sneer. He glanced over at Meredith to see how she was doing, or maybe just to see if her shorts were riding up, and his face looked as white as cottage cheese.

Eventually
someone
looked around, she couldn’t remember who, and after that they all did. Except her. Meredith wanted to keep moving, which she gathered was what those
things
wanted her to do, so everything was cool on that front, no need for anyone to get upset. She was walking along behind Mallon and Don and Eel, and it looked to her like they looked back at pretty much the same moment—the Eel snapped her head forward in less than a second, but Spencer and Don kept looking a while longer, and their faces went as pale as Milstrap’s. Both of them looked her in the eye to check her out …

   “I wasn’t checking you out,” Don said. “I needed to see you.”

   … or because they needed to see her, whatever that meant. Mallon said, Keep moving, troops, they aren’t really there, and that’s not what they really look like, anyhow.

   She again broke away from her narrative. “But what
did
they look like, Don? I never knew.”

“Biker dogs, like dogs in biker jackets,” he said, almost chuckling at the combination of threat and absurdity in this image. “Big, savage-looking, snarling dogs, standing up. Walking on their hind legs. I was too scared to look at them for very long, but I thought they had feet instead of paws. They were wearing motorcycle boots.”

“Mallon kept going,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Wouldn’t you think that would be enough to tell him to stop? But no, he thought he was going to change the world, he thought he was going to see what was on the other side.”

“They wanted him to keep going, and you know why? I finally figured this out. They had no more idea what was going to happen than he did.”

   Mallon held them together, he got them to do what he wanted, which was to reach the end of that street, slide over the concrete barrier, and walk into the meadow. Never thinking that he was being pushed by forces he did not understand and could not control—not Spencer! He thought he was one of the lords of creation, and everything he did was going to turn out well, especially that night. Because it
was
almost night now; it was dark and getting darker. Meredith wouldn’t have been able to find the spot they had picked out, but Donald seemed to have a good memory of where it was, and Mallon went right alongside him. He looked back just once, and his face relaxed, so Meredith could look back, too. One lonely drunk wandered out of the House of Ko-Reck-Shun and went staggering down the middle of now-empty Glasshouse Road.
That’s the old world
, Meredith said to herself,
the one we’re leaving behind—so sad and lost. What will the new world be like?