A Dark Matter by Peter Straub Read Free Book Online Page B

looking for its source. It is important to note here that none of the graduate students roaming the stacks observed the pulsing, orange-pink glow. The glow led him across the stacks in the direction of the elevators, growing more vibrant as he went, and finally brought him to the closed metal door of a carrel. There could be no doubt that the carrel was the source of the glowing color, for it streamed out over the top, around the sides, and beneath the bottom of the metal door. For once in his life, Mallon was uncertain of his mission. It seemed to him that he had drawn near to the defining mystery of his life—the great transformation that alone could give to his existence the meaning he knew it must possess—and the sheer importance of what he had come upon paralyzed him.
    Two students coming down the narrow passage outside the carrel looked at him oddly and asked if anything was wrong.
    “You maybe see a trace of color in the air around that door?” he asked them, referring to the pulsing, wavering waterfall of radiant orange-pink light that streamed toward them.
    “Color?” asked one of the students. Both of them turned to look at the door to the carrel.
    “Something bright,” Mallon said, and the waterfall of radiant light seemed to double in intensity.
    “You need to get some sleep, bro,” the young man said, and the two of them left.
    When they were out of sight, Mallon summoned his courage and gave the door a feeble rap. No response came. He rapped again, more forcefully. This time, an irritated voice called, “What is it?”
    “I have to talk to you,” Mallon said.
    “Who is that?”
    “You don’t know me,” Mallon said. “But unlike everyone else in this building, I can see light pouring out of your carrel.”
    “You see light coming from my carrel?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you a student here?”
    “No.”
    Pause.
    “Are you on the faculty, God help us?”
    “No, I’m not.”
    “How did you get in this library? Are you on the staff?”
    “Someone gave me a fake student card.”
    He heard the man in the carrel scrape his chair back from the desk. Footsteps approached the door.
    “Okay, what color is the light you see?”
    “Kind of like the color of cranberry juice mixed with orange juice,” Mallon said.
    “I guess you better get in here,” the man said.
    Mallon heard the clicking of the lock, and the door swung open.
    That’s it? The story ended when the guy opened the door?
    You’ll see. Everything stops when you open the door .
    About a week later, on Saturday, October 15, 1966, the eight of them—Mallon, the Eel, Hootie, Boats, Dill Olson, Meredith Bright, Hayward, and Milstrap—went out to the agronomy meadow at the end of Glasshouse Road, climbed over the concrete barrier, and went through a rehearsal that seemed to satisfy Mallon. That night, they all trooped off to a party at the Beta Delt house, home to the fraternity Hayward and Milstrap belonged to. I wasn’t invited and heard about it only later. That night, I finally got through to the Eel around midnight, and she had reached a stage of drunkenness well past incoherence. The next day she was too hungover to talk to me, and that evening, she and all the rest of that doomed bunch followed Spencer Mallon back to the agronomy meadow.
    Then there was only silence; there came rumors of a “black Mass,” of a “pagan ritual,” nonsense like that, given heat by the disappearance of one young man and the discovery of another’s hideously mutilated corpse. Brett Milstrap had vanished from the earth, it seemed, and the cruelly mangled corpse had been Keith Hayward’s. For a while, policemen stalked through our houses, through our school, everywhere we went, asking the same questions over and over. In their wake came reporters, photographers, and men with dark suits and tennis ball haircuts who hung around the edges of the action, watching and taking notes, whose presence was never explained. Lee stayed at Jason’s house for a