A Dark Matter Page 4

  “Do you mind if I go?”

  At that second, I could have rewritten her future. Right there. Mine, too. But it wasn’t in me. She so much wanted to waste her time sitting at the feet of this peripatetic con man that I could not object. It should have been harmless; the only consequence should have been the memory of a tedious and confusing hour or two. I said:

  “No, I don’t mind, you should do what you want.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I should.”

  She went, and they went, and arrived early, and took a side table and ordered a pizza and gobbled away while the real university students arrived, among them Brett Milstrap and the disconcerting Keith Hayward, who sneered at them as he and his roommate commandeered a table near the front. Soon, the clubby downstairs room had filled up with students attracted by whatever they had heard about the evening’s star attraction. At ten after eight, a ruffle of conversation and laughter from the top of the staircase drew the attention of all, who swiveled their heads toward the arched, cavelike stucco entrance at the foot of the stairs to observe the grand entrance of Meredith Bright, a lush, darkly beautiful young woman later introduced as Alexandra, and Spencer Mallon, who, accompanied by his stunning acolytes, entered the downstairs room in a flurry of beautiful faces, rough blond hair, a safari jacket, and weathered brown boots, “like,” Hootie Bly told me later, “a god.”

  I formed a clear mental picture of this being only fifteen years later, in 1981, when having gone alone to the first showing that day of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I saw Indiana Jones, in the person of Harrison Ford, striding through clouds of dust and sand. A safari jacket, a dashing hat, a weathered face neither young nor old. Out loud, I said, “Good Lord, that’s Spencer Mallon,” but no one heard me, I hope. The theater was two-thirds empty, and I was at the end of the row third from the back, surrounded by vacant seats. Much later, in a rare moment Lee described Mallon’s face as “vulpine,” so I altered the Indiana Jones model a bit, but not by much.

  Within seconds of his appearance in the entry at the foot of the stairs, Mallon separated himself from the adoring women and led them to the foremost table, whirled a chair back to front, parked himself on it astraddle, and began to talk, ravishingly. “For anyone else,” an awed Hootie told me, “the way he talks would be like singing.” It wasn’t that the guru chanted, rather that his voice was surpassingly musical, capable of tremendous range, and distinguished by the beauty of his timbre, I guess you’d call it. He had to have had something, God knows, and an extraordinarily beautiful voice can be very persuasive.

  Mallon described wandering through Tibet; he talked about The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in the mid-to late sixties virtually the Bible for phonies. In Tibetan bars, the Eel and Hootie told me, Spencer Mallon had twice—two times!—seen one man sever the hand of another, seen the blood rush down the length of the bar, and seen the man with the hatchet snatch up the severed hand and throw it to a waiting dog. It had been a sign, a signal, and he had come to explain its meaning.

  After they finally opened up a little, both Hootie and my girlfriend reported that despite the severed hands and streams of blood it had been like listening to music, except music that had meaning flowing through it. “He made you see things,” both of them said, although when not in the guru’s presence they found it difficult to describe his message. “I can’t repeat any of that stuff,” Hootie told me; the Eel said, “Sorry, but if you weren’t there, there’s no way I can make you understand what he said to us.”

  Then she added, “Because he said it to us, get it?”

  She was deliberately excluding me, depositing me on the far side of a line she had drawn in the sand. They had been singled out, my four friends, they had been elevated to a height so great I was scarcely visible anymore. Mallon had signaled them to remain after the UW students left, and when they and the two girlfriends, as spectacular as magicians’ assistants, remained alone in the lower room, for once without Hayward and Milstrap, the sage told them they would help him at last achieve something, a breakthrough, I’m not sure what he said about it, but it was going to be a breakthrough anyhow, the culmination of all his work to date. He thought, he hoped so. The vessels had shattered, he said, and divine sparks flew through the fallen world. The divine sparks yearned to be reunited: and when they were reunited, the fallen world would be transformed into a glorious tapestry. Perhaps they would be privileged to witness the transformation, in whatever sense, whatever manifestation, and for however long. The little band from Madison West felt essential to him, he needed them … It was like that, a sense of immanence, urgency, promise.

  “Trust me,” he said, perhaps to all of them, but specifically to Dill. “When the tide rises, you shall be by my side.”

  Olson told this to me in a private moment, and I did not think he was boasting: for once, Dilly seemed to be at peace with himself. I suppose that was when I started to get scared. Or maybe I mean alarmed. What did this mysterious guy mean, anyhow, by “When the tide rises”? What tide, and how would it “rise”?

  Before they separated, he told my friends to meet him two nights later, and gave them the address of the Gorham Street apartment of Hayward and Milstrap. During the next two school days, my friends were quivering with excitement, and after I had twice refused my girlfriend’s invitation to join them in diving down the rabbit hole, I was excluded from their accumulating expectancy. They had joined shoulders against me. I’d missed my last chance. But of course I did not at all want to pursue them into the rabbit hole. What I did want to do was to persuade Eel, at least, that she and they were being exploited by a handsome fraud who may have said he was interested in causing great transformations through occult means but was undoubtedly after earthier goals.

  In fact, even before the Gorham Street gathering, the guru’s reputation had begun to shred. The beauty named Alexandra, one of Mallon’s companions on his first outing, came up to Hootie in the Tick-Tock (where they now went every afternoon, straight from school) and tried to warn him from associating with the man. Too bad—by then Hootie loved his hero, and Alexandra’s tales of his amorality and double-dealing hurt him, on Mallon’s behalf. Hootie thought she must have been inventing most of her story; that somehow Spencer had brought this huge-eyed, wild-haired, gypsylike dame to hysterical tears impressed the dickens out of Hootie. And that Mallon should have been kicked out of a fraternity house or two sounded like either an exaggeration or an actual lie—someone was lying anyhow, he thought, probably the fraternity boys because they were angry that Mallon had moved on. When the ranting woman warned Hootie that Mallon would probably try to move in with one of his group, he flushed with excitement and hoped it 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 sca
ry. 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 unsettled, almost threatened. He could not deny that part of his unease was the completely irrational feeling that despite appearances this man was not in fact a human being. Mallon ducked into a side street and moved quickly to the next intersection, where he found the man waiting for him, still on the other side of the street.

  Mallon thought he had no choice: he marched across the street to confront his pursuer. The man in the gray suit retreated, frowning. By the time Mallon had crossed the street, the man had somehow managed to disappear. Mallon had not seen him dip into a shop or behind a parked car, he had not seen him do anything at all. One second, the man who only appeared to be human (he thought) had been walking backward with a look of displeasure on his face; the next, he had been absorbed into the pale brick of the building behind him.

  If only for a second, had Mallon glanced away?

  Around he turned, and on toward the coffee shop he continued. After he had rounded the corner and returned to 15th Street, he sensed a commotion taking place behind him, and, nerves prickling, looked over his shoulder. Half a block away, the not-quite-human figure in the gray suit came to an abrupt halt and stared straight ahead.

  “Why are you following me?” Mallon asked.

  The being in the suit pushed his hands into his pockets and shrugged. “Has it occurred to you to wonder what else might be following you?” But for its oddly mechanical quality, his voice sounded almost perfectly human.

  “Do you have any idea what a useless question that is?”

  “Take care, sir,” the figure said. “I mean that sincerely.”

  Mallon whirled around and strode, though he did not jog, to the diner. All the while, he had the feeling that the man was behind him, although whenever he looked back, his pursuer was nowhere to be seen.

  Inside the diner, he moved straight down the length of the counter past the booths, ignoring the empty seats. Marge, the waitress, asked him what was up.

  “I’m trying to shake somebody,” he told her. “Can I go through the kitchen?”

  “Spencer,” she said, “you can walk through my kitchen anytime.”

  Mallon came out into a wide alleyway where a cluster of garbage cans stood against the wall to his right. One of them, silvery where the others were dark, looked as though it had been purchased that morning. An unlined yellow index card bearing a few written words had been taped to its shiny lid.

  He knew that the card had been left for him. Although a toxic fog seemed to hover about it, he could not force himself to walk away without reading the words. He peeled the card away from the gleaming lid and raised it to his eyes. In blue-black ink that still looked wet, the words on the card read, QUIT WHILE YOU’RE BEHIND, SPENCER. OUR DOGS HAVE LONG TEETH.

  Story #2

  A year later, Mallon had wandered to New York, a city he seldom visited, and soon he found himself with little money and less to do. The Columbia University students whose promise had seemed so great when he began working with them had proved to be incurious dilettantes. A helpful admirer had provided him with a forged student card, and while the last of his money ran out, he spent his days in the library roaming through the literature of the arcane and occult. When in his research he came across a particularly helpful volume, he looked to see if it had been consulted in the past decade; if it had not, he withdrew it from the library, informally.

  Prowling through the stacks one day, he seemed to catch an odd light filtering into the long shelves of books. The light appeared to come from somewhere near the library’s central core. At first he paid it no attention, since it was faint and intermittent, no more than an occasional half-seen rosy pulse. An odd spectacle for a library, perhaps, but odd things often happened at Columbia University.

  When the pulse became brighter and more distracting, Mallon began to move through the stacks, 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.”

  “A
re 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 week or two, refusing to speak to anyone but Hootie and Boats and those who could force her to talk to them. Mallon had fled, all three parties agreed on that point, and Dill Olson had followed in his wake; Meredith Bright had taken off at a dead run, packed up her clothes, and camped out at the airport until she could get a flight back home to Arkansas, where police questioned her for hours, day after day, until it was clear that she had almost nothing to tell them.