Read Online A Dark Matter by Peter Straub - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Peter Straub
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers, Suspense fiction, Horror, Good and Evil, Psychic trauma, Nineteen sixties, High school students, Rites and ceremonies, Horror Fiction, Madison (Wis.)
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She had whispered this information into his blushing ear at the finish of the Gorham Street assembly, placed one long cool hand against each side of his face, leaned smiling in so that her own face became a billboard golden and lavish, and in a soft voice that sank trembling into the pit of his stomach and flew out to the endings of his nerves, told him, Hootie, you look just like a beautiful porcelain angel, and that’s why I love you .
No one would understand his feelings for the Eel, not even the Eel, but being totally in love with Meredith Bright made sense to everyone. Also, they all knew that she liked him. Along with the Eel, Hootie was one of her favorites. Of course Spencer Mallon was Meredith Bright’s special favorite, he was the man she had chosen in the way she would choose a movie star like Tab Hunter or a famous singer like Paul McCartney, and the two of them got in bed together and did sex things—over Hootie’s heart crept a certain secret picture that made him feel as though he were melting like a snowman on a warm day. In the secret picture, Howard Bly lay on a narrow bed squeezed between Spencer Mallon and Meredith Bright. As they clasped each other, their arms wrapped him in a double embrace. His face pressed against Meredith Bright’s ripe and blossoming bosom, and Spencer Mallon’s flat, muscular chest pressed against the back of his head. Down below, something was happening that he could not define or describe but came wrapped in images of great storms and blowing curtains.
In rushed:
lallation [baby talk]
lalochergia [use of obscenity to decrease tension]
murrey [dark red]
Closely followed by:
mugient [bellowing]
mymy [bed]
prushun [boy who desires to have sex with an adult male]
And:
pruritic [causing hysterical itching]
This, too, became a part of the secret hidden behind the obscurest of words, not to mention at the heart of sacred texts. And within Spencer Mallon, whom Hootie loved as he had never loved before. Which was one reason his “story” about following him down a hotel corridor to two doors and having to guess which one was his had been so unsettling. If you were right, there was Spencer Mallon, right in front of you—taking care of things. But if you picked wrong … had he ever told them what happened if they picked the wrong door?
(You were eaten by a tiger.)
Long ago, Howard Bly had seen someone eaten by a tiger. He needed to see no more. One of them was to inhabit the country of the blind, Spencer had said, and it should have been him, Howard Bly. In the place he lived, there was nothing to look at anyway.
Because of Spencer Mallon, Howard Bly had a special hatred of doors. For hours on end, the attendant named Ant-Ant Antonio Argudin crouched hidden behind a door marked PERSONNEL ONLY where he smoked his stinky cigarettes, only guess what, Howard never once knocked on it. And guess what again? Howard Bly had lived in the hospital for forty years, he knew what was behind the PERSONNEL door, and it didn’t scare him. A dull green room with broken-down furniture and an ashtray nobody was supposed to use … an ugly table with a coffeemaker, magazines lying on another old table. Men’s magazines. Magazines for men. Howard had seen them, but he hadn’t looked. That was where they went, the attendants—Ant-Ant, Robert C. (for Crushwell), Ferdinand Czardo, Robert G. (for Gurnee), and Max Byway—when they wanted to be by themselves.
On the sixteenth of October in the year 1966, Mallon had succeeded in opening his door, and what happened after that was so terrible that Howard had encircled himself with the sacred stones of his words, and they had kept him safe in the midst of the reeking-storming-down-pink-orange light. Until a huge and fatal orb made of sentences had knocked everything out of Howard Bly’s head and sent him spinning cock-a-hoop through a hundred stories that comforted him, mocked him, tortured him, babied him, and showed him the only way he
No one would understand his feelings for the Eel, not even the Eel, but being totally in love with Meredith Bright made sense to everyone. Also, they all knew that she liked him. Along with the Eel, Hootie was one of her favorites. Of course Spencer Mallon was Meredith Bright’s special favorite, he was the man she had chosen in the way she would choose a movie star like Tab Hunter or a famous singer like Paul McCartney, and the two of them got in bed together and did sex things—over Hootie’s heart crept a certain secret picture that made him feel as though he were melting like a snowman on a warm day. In the secret picture, Howard Bly lay on a narrow bed squeezed between Spencer Mallon and Meredith Bright. As they clasped each other, their arms wrapped him in a double embrace. His face pressed against Meredith Bright’s ripe and blossoming bosom, and Spencer Mallon’s flat, muscular chest pressed against the back of his head. Down below, something was happening that he could not define or describe but came wrapped in images of great storms and blowing curtains.
In rushed:
lallation [baby talk]
lalochergia [use of obscenity to decrease tension]
murrey [dark red]
Closely followed by:
mugient [bellowing]
mymy [bed]
prushun [boy who desires to have sex with an adult male]
And:
pruritic [causing hysterical itching]
This, too, became a part of the secret hidden behind the obscurest of words, not to mention at the heart of sacred texts. And within Spencer Mallon, whom Hootie loved as he had never loved before. Which was one reason his “story” about following him down a hotel corridor to two doors and having to guess which one was his had been so unsettling. If you were right, there was Spencer Mallon, right in front of you—taking care of things. But if you picked wrong … had he ever told them what happened if they picked the wrong door?
(You were eaten by a tiger.)
Long ago, Howard Bly had seen someone eaten by a tiger. He needed to see no more. One of them was to inhabit the country of the blind, Spencer had said, and it should have been him, Howard Bly. In the place he lived, there was nothing to look at anyway.
Because of Spencer Mallon, Howard Bly had a special hatred of doors. For hours on end, the attendant named Ant-Ant Antonio Argudin crouched hidden behind a door marked PERSONNEL ONLY where he smoked his stinky cigarettes, only guess what, Howard never once knocked on it. And guess what again? Howard Bly had lived in the hospital for forty years, he knew what was behind the PERSONNEL door, and it didn’t scare him. A dull green room with broken-down furniture and an ashtray nobody was supposed to use … an ugly table with a coffeemaker, magazines lying on another old table. Men’s magazines. Magazines for men. Howard had seen them, but he hadn’t looked. That was where they went, the attendants—Ant-Ant, Robert C. (for Crushwell), Ferdinand Czardo, Robert G. (for Gurnee), and Max Byway—when they wanted to be by themselves.
On the sixteenth of October in the year 1966, Mallon had succeeded in opening his door, and what happened after that was so terrible that Howard had encircled himself with the sacred stones of his words, and they had kept him safe in the midst of the reeking-storming-down-pink-orange light. Until a huge and fatal orb made of sentences had knocked everything out of Howard Bly’s head and sent him spinning cock-a-hoop through a hundred stories that comforted him, mocked him, tortured him, babied him, and showed him the only way he
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