A Dark Matter (49 page)

The Eel, though still concerned with Keith Hayward, understood that Mallon saw himself engulfed in the foul orange-red fog and beleaguered by hundreds of savage dogs. Of the reckless panorama before them, he took in only glimpses. He had no idea of the actual majesty of his failure. Over in front of Don and the fraternity boys, a kind of drunken circus roistered away, a wild party on some cold and distant planet where all the inhabitants were made of shiny wet metal. In an atmosphere of lunatic festivity, a mad king rode around teetering atop a bear; a bellowing queen aimed a long stick at various people, directing curses at them in the way the ten-year-old Brett Milstrap had aimed a pretend bullet at the skylark-Eel skimming above him. The mad, faceless queen gyrated toward Eel as if wound on a spring, leveled her silver rod, and made a simple check mark in the air. Painlessly, a small cold capsule struck the surface of the Eel’s right eye and slipped within like a diver into a pool. Instantly, the capsule was absorbed.

My eye!
thought the Eel. Then, in the odd, harrowing rush that followed, she managed to forget this event until the darkening vision of her early thirties returned it to her.

In front of Mallon a naked woman who looked nearly green posed listlessly before a dead landscape with a slow-moving camel, a floating dress, a white dove …

An extraordinary hubbub came from these scenes: hooting and yelling from the mad queen’s blank world, loud groans from the territory behind the green woman. In a crackling thunderstorm, a red-haired giant with a raised sword screamed at Boats. In the scene before the Eel, an ancient couple, he with a long Don Quixote beard, both of them with streaming white hair, leaned into a fierce wind and twisted their necks around, viciously, to expose the ugly faces with enormous, pointed noses on the backs of their heads.

They were nothing to these figures. Insofar as human beings entered into their notice, they existed to be tormented and dispatched. These things had the transparent, empty viewpoint of gods. (The actual deity is another matter.) Mallon had called them up, but now that they were here, he barely saw them, and had no idea what to do with them.

At that point, the Eel saw Brett Milstrap bend down and tug at something, an edge, a seam with a break in the thread. She had the feeling that this idea was so terrible that he should forget about it immediately. On the other hand, Brett Milstrap seemed to have been created to invent terrible ideas.

The biggest problem with the world over there on the other side of the tough air-membrane gliding around her, Eel gathered, was that it was both lunatic and poisonous. Being crazy and toxic, according to some sources it had frightened Mallon’s beloved Cornelius Agrippa right back into Christianity. If it hadn’t, it should have. These faceless kings and queens, wilting girls, floating shirts, giant ranting warriors, and the rest, these camels and dragons and curious pigs, failed to make sense because they were utterly incapable of logic or coherence. Rationality had no place in their world. They could not make sense; sense wasn’t in them. Meaning had come late to the world, and they had no use for it.

In the meadow, Brett Milstrap was standing in front of the seam he had opened, revealing a single, inhumanly bright light surrounded by darkness. The Eel saw him bend toward the opening, probably in hopes of getting a better view of that strange, blank realm.

Alongside him, Hayward seemed to have forgotten all about his frat brother, nor did he demonstrate much care for the spirit world. From the fixity of his glance, evidently he had been staring at the Meredith-Hootie-Eel trio for some time. Eel could not tell if the object of his gaze was Meredith or herself. All she knew for sure was that he was not staring at Hootie. According to everything she had intuited about the sorry Keith Hayward, he had some kind of punitive crush on Meredith. Yet his eye seemed to flick back and forth between them, a matter that disturbed her, profoundly. The Eel did not desire the attentions of Keith Hayward.

Sweat shone on his face, and his eyes looked hot, almost poached. Distracted by the thoughts jittering across his brain, he took a hesitating forward step, then another, more decisive step. On the other side of Hootie Bly, Meredith subtly rearranged her stance, a shift in the angle of one hip and one shoulder, in a way that claimed Hayward for herself alone. She was welcome to him, that idiot. With his third step Hayward burst into a run, and maybe Meredith couldn’t or didn’t want to see it, but he was looking straight at the Eel. He was the Unappeasable itself—she didn’t know how she had failed to see it before, that Hayward out-Boatsed Boats—and he
wanted
her.

Because he knew, too! He had seen something. Hayward had taken in some portion of Eel’s journey, and what he had taken in had unhinged him. The Eel wished she could transform herself into a real skylark and take off into the night sky, because her terrified body refused to move. She had become an inert, passive thing, a statue.

And she really did think she was going to die. So do you know what she learned? She learned that she would be all right when her time came. The Eel would not surrender her hold on life sweating and trembling with fear. Standing in the meadow at that extraordinary moment, she thought,
if that asshole psycho is actually going to murder me, at least I have seen what I have seen today, and at least I have had love, and at least I didn’t let my father ruin my life. A life is a life, and this one was mine
.

Now, she wasn’t claiming that at the age of seventeen or eighteen, whatever she was that night, she said these exact things to herself in this exact way, but she was going in that direction. She thought she had been a tremendously brave, savvy girl, and she wished that she could be more like that now. Over time, she thought, the Eel had softened up. She thought it was too bad it didn’t work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years.

But obviously, she didn’t die, did she?

Now she’s getting close to the part that is going to be really difficult to talk about.

Well, before they got to the really
hard
part, they had to deal with Keith Hayward. From
inside
Keith Hayward.

All this time, however, two other things were happening. Behind Hayward, the Eel was vaguely aware that Brett Milstrap was leaning closer to the opening he had forced in the fabric between this world and theirs—like a cat that could not keep from poking its head into an inviting bag. Brett moved even closer by a crucial half inch, and then he was
gone
, sucked right in. It happened so quickly that all Eel saw was only a pair of brown Bass Weejun loafers flying through the entry point, which instantly zipped itself shut—then, just before his roommate blocked her view, Milstrap appeared far back in the cold world of the lunatic spirits, running hard toward the foreground, his face a mask of panic.

Determined to sink his claws into the Eel, Hayward clattered forward, all knees and elbows. If it had not been for the second process then taking place before her, the Eel would have been snatched up and carried off, soon to be a goner. However, the demonic being Mallon had awakened was whirling in their direction, and it fixed her and Hootie Bly in its sights. Of Mallon’s band, only they had seen it! Hayward wanted Eel, but the
thing
wanted both of them. As it launched itself—and it was a lot faster than Hayward—it helplessly moved into partial visibility. What very briefly had appeared to be a bristly pig with a faintly manlike head and an air of aggrieved entitlement was stretching out and putting on bulk as it raced toward them. As if in strobelike flashes, the Eel saw dark gloves that had burst their seams, and a dusty, stained, black swallowtail jacket. A few lazy-seeming flies continued to describe circles around its upper reaches.

When this industrious being had nearly drawn parallel to Hayward, and was in fact only a single stride from overtaking him, Keith glanced to his side and—the Eel supposed—took in what was gaining on him. Without losing a beat or slackening pace, Hayward went through what was evidently a complex mental process. Then, with a strange, questioning glance at the petrified Eel (in the few seconds since last we checked in, her serenity had shredded), he threw himself into the path of the demonic creature that was the primary result of Mallon’s work.

So what did Keith Hayward do? Attack the thing beside him? Sacrifice himself so that Eel, or Hootie, or both (but not Meredith, though like them she came in for the benefits) could live through the night? Hayward died, and if Eel and Hootie hadn’t survived, they wouldn’t be in Chicago this night, but what actually happened in the moment? And what happened in the moment just
before?

Well, here’s one thing that happened, or might have happened.

In the sliver of time between Hayward’s puzzling glance at Eel and his leap into the creature’s trajectory, the Eel traveled again, skylark or not, at incredible speed into HaywardWorld, you might say. She said she “traveled,” but there was no sense of flight or transition—she was skimming over what appeared to be small backyards in a city like Milwaukee, but the light was a strange blue-purple, and the air was of no temperature at all, and nothing moved or grew or breathed. She understood that she had come to an interior world, a world held in memory. This time around, she had not been released, and she had not chosen to embark. She had been plucked from her space and thrown here. This was another thing Mallon had done unaware: he had given her access to Keith Hayward, the last person to whom she would have desired any such thing.

But here she was, and there
he
was, the same sallow-faced child with the head that looked subtly misshapen whom she had seen as a playground outcast, now a few years on, lying on his back on the worn-out grass, clearly turning something over in his mind. The musing boy looked up and seemed to notice her in the same second that she saw he was holding a long kitchen knife in one hand. This was merely a memory, she reminded herself, but the idea of being
seen
sent sparkles of alarm through her chest and stomach.

Of course she was not seen. His eyes moved across the sky, tracing some odd Haywardian thought—or, she wondered, tracking a skylark?—and he sat up and sprang to his feet. The boy was out of his yard and into the alley before she could move, and she floated over the fence and saw him already down at the end of the block, turning the corner.

Then she was at the end of the block following close upon him as he trotted up the street and ducked into an overgrown empty lot, where he slid in behind a brick wall and hunkered down in a thriving stand of Queen Ann’s lace. Keith tilted left to dig into his right pocket, from which he tugged a small plastic bag containing eraser-sized nibs of cooked brown meat that looked as though they had been worried off a couple of hamburgers. He reached in, withdrew about half of the nibs and gobbets, and deep within the flowering weeds arranged them into a miniature ziggurat. With a final pat to the heaped-up hamburger pellets, Keith scooted backward and leaned against the wall. With both hands, he anchored the base of the knife on his groin and held the blade upright.

Sweat poured out of his hairline and bloomed on his cheeks. His eyes twitched. He tightened his mouth into a single downturned line.

Long minutes later, a scrawny cat padded into the nest beneath the white canopy of Queen Ann’s lace. Hayward said, “Nice kitty, kitty, kitty. Don’t you want this nice new lunch I made for you, kitty kitty?”

Purring, the cat flattened lower to the ground and slid creeping up to the mound of hamburger meat. Its nose fluttered. The cat dipped its head toward the food and licked.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Keith said, “you skinny, funny-looking little creep.” He slowly extended a hand and began to stroke the animal’s spine. When the cat opened its jaws and took a real bite, Keith’s hand tightened around the cat’s neck and jerked it upright. He slammed the spitting, clawing animal against the brick wall and thrust the knife into the middle of its back. A thin stream of blood spurted out and soon dwindled. The cat’s paws curled inward; its tail curled up. The boy drew the knife down the cat’s midsection, slicing it like a melon, and the whole thin body went limp.