Read Online A Dark Matter by Peter Straub - Free Book Online

and the others for at least a part of the journey I had refused to take. Imagination gave me access to some of the experience the rest of them had shared. The hospital parts of the story were based on what I saw on my visits to the Lamont with Donald Olson, formerly the heroic Dill .
    When I got up the nerve to give Hootie a copy, he took two or three days to read it and came back with a little tucked-in smile that I did not know how to read. He sat down and said, “Man, and I thought Mallon was a magician. It’s like you were there, right there with me.”
    So here Howard Bly is speaking, pretty much as he did to me, of the way the early part of his life kept penetrating his long second act, the decades he spent in that hospital. Even more than most people, Hootie was marinated in his own history. I think he knew that he had to wait until he caught up with himself before he could begin to catch up with the people he so lovingly thought of during his long days on the ward .
    The names have all been restored to their original forms. I trust I do not have to cite the provenance of the eccentric words in the first paragraph .
    | Hootie’s Blues |
    Neither agomphious nor arctoid, neither creodont nor czigany, Howard Bly knew himself a lonely, imperfect being ever scrambling to imitate the manners and habits of those he loved and admired, not to mention worshipped, as was the case with Spencer Mallon. God knows, he needed the man, the more than man, the heroic marvel Mallon was.
    Which was exactly how Captain Fountain’s book came in. Captain Fountain transformed Howard Bly’s life by the simple mechanism of demonstrating to him the existence of a secret code that if fully understood would surely reveal the unknown and hidden structure of the world, or at least of what was called reality.
    He had come across the great tome while rooting through an old box in the store’s basement. By this time Troy and Roy, who would surely have ruined everything, were a problem no longer, having been drafted the previous year and sent to Vietnam, where all their top-secret games of soldiering and snipering no doubt came in handy, at least until Roy got killed.
    The contents of the box made it clear that they belonged to Troy. A rusty knife, a squirrel’s tail, old arrowheads, a broken compass, pictures of naked women torn from glossy magazines. (Roy would have had more nudes and a couple of broken Zippo lighters.) Jammed up against one side of the box was a slim white hard-backed volume that Troy Bly had undoubtedly purchased in one of his rare bouts of self-improvement. He had wanted to expand his vocabulary, doubtless because an advertisement had convinced him that females were sexually aroused by big words. Hootie didn’t care about that. He didn’t believe it either, at least as it applied to the girls at Madison West. Anyhow, he did not want to make out with any of the popular girls at his school. Sometimes, although he could scarcely admit it to himself, he thought about holding the Eel in his arms, about lying down in the grass with the Eel. Holding and being held. The Eel’s lips on his. It was shameful, yes, he knew that, his friends would find him disgusting, and Eel’s “Twin” would be enraged; hurt, too, which was much worse.
    Howard never imagined that the words in Captain Fountain’s book would cause the Eel to desire him. He thought the Captain’s book greater by far than a sex potion. The flat, flinty shimmer of the words on the page caused him to fall in love, for he had stumbled upon a kind of ultimate security blanket: a vocabulary known only, he imagined, to priests of an unknown and secret order.
O morigerous [obsequious],
morology [nonsense],
morpheme [a word reduced to its basic element],
morphology [dealing with the structure of plants and animals],
O nabla [ancient Hebrew harp],
nacelle [small boat],
O nacket [tennis ball]!
    Meredith Bright … Meredith Bright loved him because he looked like an angel.