A Dark Matter by Peter Straub Read Free Book Online

would be him! And in fact, not long after the Gorham Street meeting, Spencer Mallon did wind up spending a couple of nights in the basement of Badger Foods, the Blys’ little corner grocery store.
    Not that I was aware of Mallon’s location, because I was not. The Eel, with whom I had spent nearly every school and weekend night for a year and a half, continued to sit next to me in class, but otherwise acted as though she had embarked on some luxury cruise that I had declined, inexplicably, to share with her. At night, she barely gave me five minutes on the telephone. I had missed, all but literally, the boat, and the Eel was so entranced with the details of her voyage she had little time left over for me.
    All I knew of the Gorham Street séance was that my girlfriend had wound up being seated at a long table beside Keith Hayward while Mallon held forth. “He was great, but you wouldn’t understand, so I’m not even going to try,” she told me. “But boy, I’m never getting that close to Keith Hayward again. You know, that guy I was telling you about, with the thin face and the wrinkled-up forehead? And acne scars? He’s seriously bad news.”
    Had he tried to pick her up? At least for those with eyes, the Eel was so cute that I could hardly have blamed him.
    My question angered her. “No, you idiot. It’s not what he did, it’s what he is . That guy’s scary. I mean, really scary. He got mad at something—well, Spencer called him out for staring at his girlfriend, that Meredith, who doesn’t deserve him, by the way—and he didn’t like being called on it, not at all , and I don’t know, I guess I grinned at him for getting pissed off, and then he was pissed off at me , and I looked at him, and the guy’s eyes looked like black holes. I’m not kidding. Black puddles, with horrible, horrible things swimming around way way down. Something’s wrong with Hayward. And Spencer knows it, too, but he doesn’t see how sick that asshole really is.”
    I thought that she was probably right about this, at least in a way. The Eel had clearer, quicker insights into people than I did, and undoubtedly she still does. In Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, she once performed a delicate service for her favorite organization, the American Confederation of the Blind, that completely stunned me when she later described it. What she did there amounted to psychic detection, and it was absolutely successful. In any case, I learned from Detective Cooper’s memoir how rightly Lee had read Keith Hayward, and now it terrifies me that she should have spent five minutes in his company. At the time, he didn’t sound too dangerous, just off balance, desperately unhappy, probably introverted and bitter about it. A lot of people are like that, and many of them would have struck the seventeen-year-old Eel Truax as disturbed; Keith Hayward, on the other hand, was as sick as she described him to me, Mallon, and everyone else in their group. Only Hootie really took her at her word, and of course no one paid any attention to what Hootie thought.

    At the Gorham Street gathering, Spencer Mallon told his followers two stories, and I will set them down here as they were told to me.
Story #1
    A few weeks into a new academic year, Mallon was spending a couple of weeks moving between fraternity houses and student flophouses near the University in Austin, Texas. Although nothing of an unusual or illuminating nature had as yet taken place, he’d been sensing the immanence of some extraordinary event. (And in fact, something quite extraordinary did happen, though it did not play a part in the story he wanted to tell.) On the morning in question, he walked out onto the hot, stony sidewalks on East 15th Street and strayed toward his favorite coffee shop, the Frontier Diner. Soon he became aware that a man in a suit and a necktie was tagging after him on the other side of the street. For some reason, perhaps the formality of his wardrobe, the man made him feel