A Dark Matter (9 page)

And on the day after the tense gathering in the basement, Howard thought he saw one of the agent-creatures that had followed Mallon through the streets of Austin.

As if emanating from his pores, the acrid stench of a bad dream had floated alongside him, darkening everything before him. Shadows deepened. Water seemed to gush from the tap, his toothpaste tube to swell in protest as he squeezed. His mouth tasted more of blood than Colgate. Back in his bedroom, the poison within him infected the view from his window, that of a barren street stretched like an eggshell over a roaring void.

It was Saturday, thank goodness.

Howard shoved his legs into a pair of jeans, thrust his head through the neck of a bright red Badger T-shirt, and slid his feet into moccasins. The rehearsal was to take place that afternoon, and a restlessness compounded of fear and impatience caused him to grab a cruller and a half pint of milk from their cabinets and sail through the side door before he had bitten into the pastry. Slanting down from State Street, Gorham Street offered the same spectacle of unopened shops and empty parking places in front of closed stores.

Oozing through his pores, his terrible dream contaminated whatever struck his eye. Fat snakes lurked in the deep shadows of the gutters. The cruller, which should have been sweet, crispy on the outside and as yielding as cake within, crumbled in his mouth like plaster.

For hours, it seemed, he had dreamed of Keith Hayward driving through a desert at night. Beside the road grew scrub punctuated by occasional tall cacti. Hot air devoid of moisture blew from the dream over the dreamer. A college boy as good-looking as the Swedish exchange students who sometimes dropped into the Aluminum Room lounged in the passenger seat of the red sports car. Improbably, his name was Maverick McCool. If you were named Maverick McCool, especially if you looked like a Swedish exchange student, girls, even girls like Meredith Bright, probably hung out on the sidewalk, praying for you to walk past your window.

The abrupt intrusion of Meredith Bright into his reverie brought with it the information that the red car was her Skylark. Keith Hayward should have been forbidden even to touch Meredith’s car. From the shock of this revulsion had come the real horror of the dream, the knowledge of what was in the trunk.

Keith Hayward had murdered Meredith Bright, dismembered her body, stuffed her remains into two black garbage bags, and crammed the bags into the Skylark’s modest trunk. Unaware of their freight, Maverick McCool smiled at something said by monstrous Keith Hayward. That Hayward had already murdered a number of other people and intended to go on accumulating victims for a long, long time spoke from every part of the image in Howard’s mind—and the smiling passenger was to be the next victim! Poor McCool! A grimy, frigid wave of horror had snapped Howard into wakefulness. In his panic, his first impulse had been to get to the phone and call Meredith Bright. Howard swung his legs over the side of his bed, and before he pushed himself upright, realized that he did not know her telephone number. He fell back panting on the bed, feeling as though he were trying to blow the terrible dream out of his body and into the morning air.

From nowhere in particular, the phrase
serial killer
seemed to enter his mind. With it came memories of headlines and TV news stories about the Milwaukee maniac called “the Ladykiller.” How many women had he murdered and, according to the police chief in Milwaukee, turned to
bloody rags?
Five? Six?
This is a man who murders women and turns their corpses into bloody rags
, the detective had said, whatever his name was, Hooper, Cooper, something like that.
Do you imagine that we would ever allow a monster like that to run free?
Unfortunately, they had allowed him to do exactly that, so run free he had, the monster, piling up more corpses until he died of old age or retired to Florida.

Up ahead, a figure turned the corner onto Gorham Street and became a half-seen silhouette in the glare of the sunlight.

Terror thrust its roots into Howard’s guts. Keith Hayward had just walked into the dazzle at the top of Gorham Street and now, quick as a ferret, begun to move toward him. Too frightened to step back, Howard awaited the fiend’s attack. He opened his mouth to scream.

A second later, the downpouring light revealed that the man advancing upon him was not Hayward, but someone far more frightening, one of the “dogs” Mallon had warned them about. In terror so great he could not so much as moan, Howard shuffled backward, stumbled over his own feet, and dropped to the sidewalk, hard. Pain flared in his left hip, and his buttock felt as though it had been struck with a sledgehammer. Gasping with pain and fear, he propped himself up on an elbow and realized that no one stood in front of him.

On the sunlit sidewalk, a footstep sounded. Gray trouser legs and two polished black wingtips. The knees bent as their owner leaned over. Howard looked up into the face of an unremarkable man in his mid-thirties with a cap of thick but very short dark hair. Flinty amusement shone in his pale blue eyes.

Howard held out his right arm, half expecting the man to pull him to his feet. The man bent closer and mouthed the words
Sorry, kid
. Howard dropped his arm and tried to scoot backwards, but his feet were still tangled, and his right ankle throbbed. The man stooped down and settled his hands on his knees.

“Did something frighten you?” His voice was low, soft, and not quite human.

Howard nodded.

“You should probably pay attention to that,” the man said. The reedy metallic quality at the center of his voice made it sound as though it were projected from somewhere inside him rather than created in his throat.

“Were you in the girls’ bathroom at Madison West?” Howard asked.

“I go where I like,” the man said, again sounding as though some other smaller man within him was talking through a megaphone. “Close your eyes now, son.”

Terrified, he obeyed. For a second the air directly before Howard Bly became as hot as the wind from his dream desert. The sound of footfalls mutated into something softer that padded away, clicking.

No
, he thought at the time; in the hospital, pretending to look at the first page of an old paperback of L. Shelby Austin’s
The Moondreamers
found in the Game Room, the old Howard shook his head at his stupidity.

Ant-Ant Antonio glanced up from one of the jigsaw tables, and old Howard Bly gave him an empty-headed look and said, “Portmanteau redivivus.” If Hayward had cut Meredith up according to plan, he could have stashed her body in a
portmanteau
, but he would have to be
redivivus
to do it now.

“Mr. Bly, you da m-m-man,” Ant-Ant told him.

Because Ant-Ant expected him to nod, Howard nodded.

Although he had imagined he was going to tell Mallon everything, that afternoon young Howard failed to describe either his nightmare or the sudden appearance on the sidewalk of the “agent.” His hero’s customary lordliness could not quite conceal the heightened flutter in his nerves and bloodstream. Howard remained convinced that only he and Eel had observed their hero’s anxiety. Did that mean they had to protect him?

At the same time, he’d had to protect himself, too, from Keith Hayward. Okay, Hayward hadn’t murdered Meredith Bright. All the same, Howard thought, something inside him had so darkened and shriveled that he could easily become one of those guys who traveled around the country murdering strangers. Or one of those demons who lurk like spiders in the webs of their terrible apartments, and dart out to pick off their victims. Back when they were all in fifth or sixth grade, they had paid as much attention as the grown-ups would allow to the Ladykiller.

Young Howard wanted to control the mixture of fear and revulsion Keith aroused in him. The idea that his suspicions might put Hayward on alert made him feel as though hot tar was being pumped into his stomach.

When everyone who wanted to take part in the rehearsal had met, as instructed, at the busy corner of University Avenue and North Francis, on the edge of the campus but not on it, Howard had placed himself as far as possible from Hayward, who began their march by sticking close to Mallon and jabbering away like a monkey.

Brett Milstrap hung in there on his other side, now and then tossing in a comment. Milstrap looked amused. In fact, Milstrap always seemed to be amused around his roommate. Basically, the guy was using Hayward to prop up his own ego. The Eel had once told Hootie that Milstrap looked like a student who had just cheated on a test, which was pretty brilliant, Hootie thought. Even the yellow polo shirt and khaki pants he was wearing, classics of the preppy wardrobe, could not disguise the falsity at the center of his being. And he
loved
being creepy in his own special way, you couldn’t miss it. No wonder he was Hayward’s best friend.

On the other hand, Spencer’s willingness to tolerate Keith Hayward’s company just baffled Hootie. The frat boy’s inner illness seemed so obvious that Howard wondered if Mallon simply wished to keep an eye on him. Maybe he was trying to neutralize this horrible killer-in-the-making. In that case, what was supposed to happen to the rest of them when Mallon took off?

The thought of Mallon’s desertion made Howard want to reel across the sidewalk.

After a couple of blocks Hayward must have tired of trying to impress Mallon, because he turned to Milstrap and pretended to say something in confidence while Mallon continued on ahead. Carrying shopping bags filled with stolen materials, Dilly-O and Boats strolled along behind. The Eel, who trusted Hayward no more than Howard did, sent him a half smile, half grimace that told him he was not alone in his loathing of their mutual enemy. He sped up, patted the Eel on the shoulder as he went by, and slipped in next to Mallon, who turned from intense conversation with Meredith Bright and looked down at him.

“Do you have a question?”

“Why didn’t you take Meredith’s car?”

“I guess
all
of us couldn’t fit in,” Meredith said.

Mallon ignored her. “We have to stick together now. I think that’s part of the whole deal.”

“Is this meadow far away?”

Mallon smiled. “Maybe a mile and a half.”

“All right,” Howard said, aware that Meredith Bright was taking in this conversation with a look of impatience on her face.

“I sense you have something else in mind,” Mallon said.

Meredith Bright turned her head from him.

“Do you want to talk about it in private?”

Hootie nodded.

Mallon whispered something to Meredith, who, looking annoyed, slipped back behind them, but not far enough to join the Eel.

“So what’s your problem?” Mallon asked him.

He snapped back into focus. “I had a nightmare about Keith,” he said, and abruptly realized that he did not want to tell Mallon the whole of his dream.

“Aha,” Mallon said.

“I know you can’t really tell anything from dreams,” he began.

“Hootie my boy, you have a lot to learn.”

This, Howard thought, was going to be like swimming upstream. “Okay. I dreamed that he murdered people. I know that doesn’t mean he really does, but I had the dream in the first place because I think something’s wrong with him.”

“I guess so,” Mallon said. “You and the Eel keep bringing it up.”

“There
is
something wrong with him,” Howard insisted.

In the Crafts Room, pretending now to be interested in the second page of
The Moondreamers
, the older, fatter, gray-haired Howard nodded.

“S-Sure lovin’ that book, aren’t we, Howard?” said nosy Ant-Ant, cruising by.

“Quacksalver,” Howard shot back, informing ignorant Ant-Ant Anthony that he was a charlatan.

“I know,” Mallon told the angelic boy-Howard who had relished the nickname Hootie. “And you know I know, Hootie.”

“He’s sick inside,” Howard said. “I think he likes to hurt people.” He decided not to amplify this remark with references to dismembered bodies and the trunks of cars. If he ever got around to Maverick McCool, Mallon would laugh him right back to State Street, and he would be too embarrassed ever to talk to his hero again.

“Sometimes, Hootie, you amaze me.”

“So you know, too,” he said, fighting not to show how deeply his hero’s condescension had wounded him. “Why do you let him stay with us?”

“We need warm bodies. With Keith, we get a two-for-one deal, because Milstrap goes wherever he does. Oh, the guy’s different, I know that. Don’t you remember what I said to him at our gathering?”

“He’s worse than you think,” Howard said, miserable that Mallon refused to take him seriously. “I can’t stand being in the same room with him. I can’t stand
looking
at him.”

Mallon gripped Hootie’s upper arm, walked him across the sidewalk, and pushed his shoulder up against a plate-glass window. For a half second of sudden panic, maybe less, Howard imagined that he had seen Brett Milstrap inside the shop gazing at them through the big windows. It was impossible—side by side with Hayward, Milstrap came sailing by at just that moment, deliberately ignoring them.