Interior Darkness by Peter Straub

Author:Peter Straub
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

4

Hat fell silent, and I sat with my pen ready over the notebook, waiting for more. When I realized that he had finished, I asked, “What did she die of?”

“Nobody ever told me.”

“And nobody ever found who had killed Mary Randolph.”

The limpid, colorless eyes momentarily rested on me. “Was she killed?”

“Did you ever become friends with Dee Sparks again? Did you at least talk about it with him?”

“Surely did not. Nothing to talk about.”

This was a remarkable statement, considering that for an hour he had done nothing but talk about what had happened to the two of them, but I let it go. Hat was still looking at me with his unreadable eyes. His face had become particularly bland, almost immobile. It was not possible to imagine this man as an active eleven-year-old boy. “Now you heard me out, answer my question,” he said.

I couldn’t remember the question.

“Did we find what we were looking for?”

Scares—that was what they had been looking for. “I think you found a lot more than that,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “That’s right. They was more.”

Then I asked him some question about his family’s band, he lubricated himself with another swallow of gin, and the interview returned to more typical matters. But the experience of listening to him had changed. After I had heard the long, unresolved tale of his Halloween night, everything Hat said seemed to have two separate meanings, the daylight meaning created by sequences of ordinary English words, and another, nighttime meaning, far less determined and knowable. He was like a man discoursing with eerie rationality in the midst of a particularly surreal dream: like a man carrying on an ordinary conversation with one foot placed on solid ground and the other suspended above a bottomless abyss. I focused on the rationality, on the foot placed in the context I understood; the rest was unsettling to the point of being frightening. By six-thirty, when he kindly called me “Miss Rosemary” and opened his door, I felt as if I’d spent several weeks, if not whole months, in his room.

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