A Dark Matter (47 page)

Horrified, the Eel twisted against the white concrete wall and stared at Spencer Mallon, who had jumped onto the seat of a convenient metal chair and propped his elbows on the top of the wall. His leather jacket, his boots, his perfect hair, and his lightly sunburned face, these aspects of his being took on an abrupt iconic weight, as if the image before her now had been reproduced on a thousand posters: the handsome creases in his face when he smiled, the crinkles at the ends of his eyes, one hand raised in greeting to an unseen rioter.

“Don’t die,” she said, and her words were instantly lost within the roar and rumble of the street.

He could not have heard, but he turned toward her and smiled down. Rocket shells should have been bursting in the sky above, white loops and spirals should have printed themselves on the pale upper air. His beautiful mouth shaped words she could begin to make out, and he jabbed a finger toward the street. Whatever it was, he wanted her to see it, too. She dropped to her knees and scooted along to the edge of the wall, where she could peer out in relative safety.

And there, in the violent street, the Eel saw the first real sign that this day the world was going to turn itself inside out. And even in the midst of the craziness and chaos rioting out there, what she saw was so unexpected, actually so
impossible
, that she thought she had been mistaken. Because, to begin with, she saw a flash of bone.

But what cleared the street for this vision was extraordinary in itself. It was like watching some behemoth launch itself into view with a plunging demon on its back, a figure so large and terrifying that everyone in sight, students, cops, and firemen, dropped what they were doing and ran for cover. The creature was simply the largest, most enormous horse the Eel had ever seen, an ink-black horse that resembled a heroic, rearing statue brought to massive life. And the face-masked officer mounted on its back, the muscles in his thighs and arms bulging, might have been a general of monumental frame who had raised his huge sword only that he might slash it down again. Together, they seemed superhuman, supernatural, a joined figure of savage retribution called out of an uneasy slumber to enforce the civil order.

The giant horse
did
rear, and the massive assault cop in the saddle
did
raise his long riot stick like a sword, and on his great mount swept like an avenging angel down the length of University Avenue, scattering students and policemen alike, then rearing and wheeling to charge slashing back. None could stand before him, and yet the protestors kept re-forming in his wake, then scattering all over again before his next charge. It was in that context that the Eel saw the flash of bone.

It appeared, then vanished, and where she looked to find it again, she saw only a smudge of dirty khaki as a soldier inside an old uniform whirled away from the horse and its implacable rider. An old uniform, still stained from the battlefield, its insignia obscure … she looked again and saw a skeletal arm, then a skull to which some limp hair and rotting flesh still clung. The skeleton of a dead soldier had come to join the protest, and a few of his fellows had joined him. Rifle in hand, a tall, broad man with three stripes on his arm ran toward the plunging horse, unimpeded by possessing only half a head and intestines that followed him like a silver rope. The skeleton jigged and jittered, and the dead sergeant slipped out of the way a moment before the horse could run him down.

No one else saw the dead soldiers, Eel knew.

Had Mallon taken in the rotting dead men, did he rejoice at their presence? The capering dead meant that a veil had been torn, the customary rules overturned … She looked back up at her beloved on his chair and realized that he had not after all seen the dancing corpses; he was looking at her and pointing somewhere farther off.

The Eel glanced in that direction and spotted Meredith Bright: of course. Who else would Mallon be looking for, who else would be all that he
could
see, really? She looked a bit frightened by the disturbance before her but not as scared as Eel would have thought she’d be—instead, she seemed frustrated, eager but irritated, in a hurry to proceed to their destination.

Her doomed calculations had been thrown off by at least an hour, probably more. The horoscope was her great contribution to the venture, and she was going to be miffed if it became irrelevant. It seemed likely, thought the Eel with a savage splash of joy, that very soon Meredith would be forced to discover that from the beginning her hero/savior/philosopher king had been merely humoring her.

Spencer was waving at Meredith, and Meredith was looking back and forth between Mallon and Keith Hayward. Neither one of them had seen the dead soldiers. Maybe only she thought it made sense for the spirits of dead soldiers to join protests against the war that had stolen their lives. It seemed plenty sensible to the Eel. Under their circumstances, she’d do the same, if she could. They didn’t
like
being dead, these poor guys. They thought they’d been cheated, which she found completely reasonable. It seemed strange but not unsettling to Eel that she did not find these aggrieved ghosts frightening. Keith Hayward, though,
that
was scary. He had arrived at a hysterical pitch of joy that made him jig in place—of course, she should have understood it before, Keith had seen the ghost-skeletons, too. Had he ever! How had she missed it, it was so completely obvious. What Keith was looking at, what he was
drinking in
, was driving him out of his mind with happiness. Death turned the guy on! Spencer had no idea what he had invited into their circle.

Spencer was playing a game, the Eel recognized. She wondered why she had not always known it: from the beginning, he described everything as one kind of game or another. The worst game of all, the most destructive, was “the reality game.” He and Meredith actually talked this way.

   “He didn’t know what he was doing?” asked Jason Boatman.

“The answer is no, but I requested that you do not interrupt me, especially with questions,” Eel said. “If anyone else jumps in, I’m done, I’m outta here.”

“Sorry,” Boats said.

   So far, we’ve had only prologue,
continued the Eel
. The prologue has to do with death, and the story of what she did that day revolves around death and evil, evil and death, with appearances in featured roles by two completely different demons, and they are both frightening, but there is something else, too, something greater and wiser and better in every way, something she could dare to approach no more than any of them could, which is not at all, because it was the scariest of all. Her experience wasn’t all one sided, far from it, only the two sides don’t turn out to be what you think they are. The Eel is still trying to work it out.

After the cops and the firemen wandered off, their little group reassembled itself from its various hidey-holes, and the Eel saw that she had been right about Meredith. The girl was insulted and angry. She felt betrayed. Mallon didn’t even pretend to care about the effect of a long delay on their horoscope. He didn’t believe, no matter what she said, that this was one of the very few times when a delay would have serious consequences. Spencer, she told him, I think our window just shut. Fine, he said, we’ll open another one.

People should be careful about the things they say.

Furious, Meredith turned away from Mallon and deliberately made goo-goo bedroom eyes at Keith Hayward, who came close to levitating. Meredith thought it was romance, and love, and young lust, or whatever, and sure, it was partly those things … but mainly it was something else, the side of Keith the Eel had first noticed for really the first time just a little while before. Eel still had no idea of its shape or dimensions, she just knew that he was even sicker than she had thought. A good deal of her experience that evening was going to consist of becoming familiar with the nature and scope of Hayward’s illness.

Mallon cranked them up with a few words and broke Jason’s heart by asking Don if he thought they could pull it off. In spite of screwing up the horoscope, he meant, but Don didn’t get that, and neither did Boats. To them, it felt as though Spencer had anointed Dill as his apprentice and successor. The Eel wondered,
What is poor Dilly going to do if Spencer dies today? What do we all do?

Anyhow, Don said what Spencer wanted him to say, and they set off. Hootie kept his eye on the Eel all through the rest of the night, right up until the moment he lost consciousness—Hootie knew something, he had seen something, and the Eel thought he had probably taken in the moment when she had seen the dead soldiers. She was worried about all of them, but he was worried about her. They were so connected, he had almost seen the walking dead himself … so she had to put him back together, which she did with a smile and a look filled to the brim with love. The Eel loved Hootie, and with that look she declared her intention of protecting him all the way through to the end.

On Glasshouse Road, she kept him focused and moving forward, and after she had glanced around at the source of the strange noises that followed them, she silently let him know that he should not turn his head. That was a funny experience, Glasshouse Road. Most of the boys looked around, and what they would have seen, she knew, was the spectacle of those oversized dogs, dressed like men and upright on their hind legs, dogs that might have stepped out of that dumb painting her father brought back from the saloon except they weren’t friendly or harmless anymore, were they? They would have looked savage, like Hell’s Angel dogs, biker-thug dogs that would have attacked if Mallon and his little band had done anything but go forward. That’s what they all saw, and the Eel saw it, too, but it wasn’t
all
she saw.

Brett Milstrap was moving forward with the lock-step, barely contained fury of the insane. When she looked forward toward the end of the street, she could see Brett Milstrap up there, too, mooching along with a sideways smirk on his almost-handsome face at the right hand of Keith Hayward. The Brett up front knew nothing of the enraged Brett stumping along behind, but the one back there hated his position and wanted to swap. Somehow, Eel understood that this exchange wasn’t supposed to be in the cards. It was an impossibility. Brett had been the victim of one of those mistakes, those errors, that can never be made right again.

Here we come to another really strange part of the evening. In the troubled journey up Glasshouse Road they had cohered into a true unit—she had felt it happening, and she knew the others had, too, even Hayward and Milstrap—and at the center of that unit, she recognized, stood Eel Truax. Not Spencer, for Spencer, whom at this moment she loved entirely, was going simply to be the mechanism that launched her. He only half knew it, because his vanity recoiled before any such knowledge; his own centrality to whatever took place around him was a great foundation stone of his existence, but he did at least have a half knowledge of his true role. That was what permitted him to fulfill it.

And Spencer’s role was going to be great, the Eel knew. It all depended on him, really, since she would never be able to do her part if he failed in his. And
look
at the guy! Even before Don led them into that little folded-in part of the meadow, even before they all saw that white circle shining out at them like an invitation, Spencer had been absolutely glowing with his conviction that he was doing the right thing.

Mallon’s vibrant conviction that on this night they would all achieve the extraordinary swayed them all, she thought. After a while, even Meredith seemed to relinquish her desire for control. And even the fraternity boys stared at her in a way that suggested their ideal woman had moved into a realm beyond the merely sensual. That realm, filled with hints of transcendence, seemed to lie all about them. By the time they were really getting ready to kick things off, it had become the most beautiful evening the Eel had ever seen. The moon and the stars came out, shining pale and growing brighter and brighter as the evening went on. Hootie was still keeping track of Eel, who could see that he thought the stars and the glowing points of light from the traffic had become twice as beautiful because they had passed through her—Hootie saw them as she did, and he was determined to miss nothing.

As for the Eel, she had a feeling about Spencer Mallon: that he was going to be able after all to reach down into himself and produce the key that would allow her to spring free and do whatever unimaginable things she was meant to do. The man was humming with purpose, focused, electric, joyful. He was so beautiful, it almost hurt to look at him. The Eel could at least persuade herself that this man had become so in tune with himself and his goals that he could not possibly die in the execution of his task. This ceremony
was not
going to kill him. Which could mean only that he would after all simply take off for some other part of the country. This version of the future made the Eel no happier than it had when Mallon had first revealed it, but as an outcome it was a million times better than death.

So mixed in with her pleasure and admiration of the much-loved Spencer Mallon as he helped the boys loop the ropes in front of the white circle and passed out the candles and matches, mixed in also with her sense of brimming transcendence, was the painful awareness that no matter what the two of them managed to accomplish that night, he would soon be lost to her forever. Think about it—wouldn’t that have some effect on what happened afterward, exactly the same way as Keith Hayward’s terrible illness? The Eel had death and loss in her mind, too, even while she could feel herself humming and trembling toward this
… consummation
that hung unseen before her.

Once they had all their equipment laid out, they seemed almost to start breathing together. Inhaling and exhaling at the same time, all of them. The Eel was intensely aware of the intimacy of that moment. It didn’t matter that she and Meredith had been grouped so closely together, they seemed almost of the same substance. Their mutual detestation endured, but weightlessly.