A Dark Matter (54 page)
Authors: Peter Straub
Tags: #Psychic trauma, #Nineteen sixties, #Horror, #High school students, #Rites and ceremonies, #Fiction, #Suspense fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Horror Fiction, #Madison (Wis.), #Good and Evil
“I remember you seeing it, too.”
She could remember that moment from more perspectives than one, I realized.
“But go on,” she said, and I had an uncanny certainty that she knew what was on my mind.
“I was wondering if you also saw me making a fool of myself on the Boardwalk outside that hotel of yours.”
“It’s not my hotel, but yes, I did.” She set the glasses back down on the table and let her arms hang at her sides. “Of course, when I was seventeen, I couldn’t be sure it was you, lurking there. I only figured it out later on.”
“I was an idiot,” I said.
“You even knew you were being idiotic,” she said. “That’s why you bought that stupid hat and those terrible sunglasses.”
“Can I apologize now?”
“You can do anything you like. As I said to Jason Boatman, you’re fine as is.”
“Do you mean that?”
“As much as I did then. Maybe a little more.”
I smiled, and understood with absolute certainty that she was aware of it. “We don’t really want to know Jason anymore, do we?”
“Leading the life of a thief for better than four decades does very little for your character. He turned into a bore. But maybe he always was boring, and we didn’t notice.”
With that, she probed the glasses with her fingers and fitted them back into her hand. Then she picked up the whiskey glass and walked without hesitation into the kitchen. I followed after her, carrying two fistfuls of silverware. She put the glasses on the counter, and after disposing of the silver I placed the half-tumbler in the dishwasher and the wine glasses in the sink.
She leaned against the butcher-block island and waited for me.
“What you did, that was wonderful,” I said.
“Do you mean back then, or now?”
“Just now. With all of us there.”
“Thanks. I have to get to bed, though. I’m worn out.”
I cupped one cheek in my hand and looked at her.
“But while we’re on the subject,” she said, “you should know that I do think that the wretched Keith Hayward actually did something great, too. Selfless, anyhow.”
“You think he really did sacrifice himself? You said you weren’t sure.”
“Nobody wanted to hear it. Jason and Hootie, they hated the idea.”
“It doesn’t sound much like Hayward, you have to admit that.”
“I know. But I was
with
him, I went to the diner with him. He felt miserable—he didn’t even understand this, but he actually loved Miller, in his pathetic way. That he turned him over to his murderous uncle made him sick with guilt.”
“But how would that … why would he … ?”
“Sacrifice himself for me? Because he knew I understood about Miller. That he wasn’t completely evil, that there was at least some kind of spark in him.”
“So he traded his life for yours.”
“Meredith obviously thought he did it for her, to save
her
life. Maybe I’m as delusional as she is. Neither one of us will ever really know. But I saw him think. He knew I understood.”
“So he …”
“He was making up for Miller,” she said. “Yep. That’s what I think.”
“Astounding.”
I lifted her hand and placed it where mine had been, on my cheek. She did not pull her hand away. For a moment, we stood there without moving or talking.
“Go on,” she said.
“I feel … it’s like … I have the feeling that we’ve been set free.”
“Do you feel that, too? Good.”
At last, she smiled at me. With a final pat, she dropped her hand. “Now that you’re a free man, do you plan to write a book about Mallon and what all of us did?”
“It feels like I already wrote that book.”
“Ah.” She smiled again. “So?”
I couldn’t help it—laughter ignited within me and flew from my throat.
So?
Acknowledgments
Gratitude and admiration to my friend Brian Evenson, whose extraordinary novel
The Open Curtain
suggested both the material and approach of the subchapter entitled “The Dark Matter, II.” Good Brian cannot say he wasn’t warned. Bradford Morrow, Neil Gaiman, Gary Wolfe, Bill Sheehan, and Bernadette Bosky, early readers of this novel when it was very much in progress, offered wise, helpful, and supportive comments and advice, for which I am deeply grateful. I also owe thanks to the small press publishers who created exquisite limited editions of earlier variants of some of this material, Thomas and Elizabeth Monteleone and William Schafer. To the original “Eel,” Lee Boudreaux, I sweep off my hat and bow low in admiration and wonder. My agent, David Gernert, supplied wisdom, psychic comfort, and excellent advice on the many occasions when these were needed. My editors, Stacy Creamer and Alison Callahan, were immensely helpful in bringing this long project into balance and clarity. Jay Andersen performed his usual keen-eyed amateur copyediting during the book’s earlier stages. Lila Kalinich knows what she did, and it is too deep, almost, for words. Of my wife, Susan Straub, I can say only that my nearly lifelong debt of love given and returned and lived with really is too deep for words: it goes down as far as I do.
About the Author
Peter Straub has written nineteen novels and won, multiple times, every award his expanding genre bestows. He lived in Ireland and England for a decade, and now lives in a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife, Susan, the founder and director of the Read To Me program.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Seafront Corporation
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Title page photograph by Chad Riley/UpperCut Images/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Straub, Peter, 1943–
A dark matter : a novel / Peter Straub.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.T6914D37 2010
813′.54—dc22 2009020028
eISBN: 978-0-385-53013-2
v3.0