Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

Zack’s grinning face was four feet away, looking absurdly young beneath his streaming black hair. His eyes seemed to have no white at all. He said something inaudible, choked by his own pleasure.

Then he repeated it. “This is where it happened, isn’t it, Miles?” He was exuding crazy glee.

“What?” I said, my stomach frozen.

“You and Alison’s aunt. Hey?” His mouth was lifted in a loose insane smile.

I turned away and began to swim as strongly as I could toward the lip of the quarry. His voice was calling, but not to me.

Water was thrashing behind me. Now he was calling to me. “You don’t talk, do you? You don’t talk, do you?” His voice was loud and brutal.

Eight feet from safety I felt a hand catch my ankle. When I kicked out with my free leg, another hand grasped my calf, and then I was yanked backward and down. While two hands held my legs, other hands pushed my shoulders, and I felt a heavy body riding my back, beginning to squeeze my chest. The one on top leaned forward to wrap arms around my neck, and cushiony breasts pressed against me. I bucked underwater, but she clamped me with greater force, expelling the rest of the air from my lungs. Games, I thought, and breast-stroked, thinking that my breath would outlast hers. Zack still clung to my ankles. I kicked idly, resolved not to give them the satisfaction of a struggle. Then I realized that she was close enough to the surface to raise her head and breathe, and a spurt of fear made me fight.

I shook violently, but she forced me deeper into the tunnel of water. The hands on my legs let go, and I knew that Zack too was going up to breathe. My chest fought for air. In moments, Zack appeared before me under the water and raised his arms to my shoulders. I swung at him, but the blow was ridiculously slowed by the water. He dug his fingers into my shoulders and held me helpless, prone in the water. Astride me, the Woodsman squeezed and squeezed.

If I had been alone with the Woodsman, I could have thrown or pulled her off, but while Zack held me and pinned my arms, I could do nothing but struggle; making my air problem worse. As I grew weaker, Zack moved in nearer and put his hands on the small of my back, pulling me down even further. I realized with shock and horror that he was erect when a fleshy club bumped my hip.

In the next instant I breathed in a gulp of burning water, and I knew that they were going to kill me.

Then their hands and arms fell away, the weight of Alison rolled off my back, and I was helped to the surface.

I held to the rock edge of the quarry, coughing painfully. Water came up like vomit. Getting out of the quarry was impossible; I clung with my weak arms and my head lolled against my shoulder. After a moment I could lever myself up far enough so that my forearms were flat on the hot stone, and I bent my head to rest on them. Through half-opened eyes, not really recognizing what I saw, I noticed Zack sliding out of the water and up onto rock as easily as an eel. Then he bent down and braced himself to take the arm of the naked girl. That bastard nearly killed me and it turned him on, I thought, and an emotion half fear and half anger gave me the energy to struggle up onto the edge of stone. I lay in the sun., shivering, my skin burning where it touched the hot smooth rock.

He sat down beside me. I saw only a spidery flank with thin black hairs streaming across white skin. “Hey, Miles. Hey, man. You okay?”

I rolled away, onto my back. The hot stone seared me. I closed my eyes, still coughing. When I opened my eyes, they were blocking the sun, standing above me. They were black against the flat blue sky. Alison knelt to cradle my head. “Let me alone,” I said. I wriggled away. “Did you plan that?”

“It was just fun, Miles,” he said. “We were playing.”

“Poor old Miles, he ‘most drowned,” crooned Alison, and came toward me again and pushed herself against me. I was engulfed in cool wet skin. Involuntarily, I looked at Zack. “I’m sorry, man,” he said, unselfconsciously manipulating his testicles. I turned my eyes away and found myself staring at Alison’s soft heavy breasts and firm belly. “Give me a towel,” I ordered. Zack stepped away toward the pile of clothing.

Alison brought her face closer to mine. “This is where it happened, isn’t it? You can tell Zack. You could tell him anything. That’s why he wanted to meet you here. He heard about it at Freebo’s. That’s why he knows you understand him. He wants you to be brothers. Didn’t you hear what he was saying before?”

I fought to stand up, and after a moment she released me. Zack was coming toward me, a pink towel in one hand. The other hand held an open switchblade. I stepped backwards.

When Zack saw what must have been in my face, he tossed me the towel and said, “Hey, man. I want to help you take off the bandage. It’s not doing you any good any more.”

After knotting the towel around my waist, I looked at my left hand. It was caught in a soggy limp mass of gauze, a webby useless thing already half off my palm. Zack took my hand in his and before I had time to push him away, neatly sliced the mess of gauze away from my palm. Then he ripped away the tape in one quick motion.

Above the base of my thumb was a reddish triangle of new skin, defined by a thin red line on all three sides. I gingerly touched the spot with uncurling fingers. It was delicate, but it had healed. Zack threw the drowned package of tape and gauze up into the bushes. I looked at him and his eyes were crazy and gleeful. His face was very young, framed by long smooth Indian’s hair.

“You’re my best friend,” he said. He held out his left palm, and the image of him as a thin lead-white Indian lurched into stronger focus in my mind. He stood there, skinny, his ribs thrusting beneath his skin, dripping, dangling, armored in loony radiance. His dog’s eyes filled with shining light. “I’ll prove it to you, Miles. We can be brothers.” He raised the switchblade like a scalpel and deliberately sliced his left palm. Then he dropped the blade and continued to hold his palm out toward me, inviting me to press mine against it. Allison screamed when she looked up at the sound of the knife clattering and saw blood dripping onto the flat rock.

“Miles!” she screeched. “Go to the truck! Get the bandages! Go!”

Zack’s face did not alter by a millimeter: he was still encased in the armor of crazy light. “You did it,” I said, still grasping the dimensions of what I had seen. “It’s you.”

“Miles,” Alison sobbed, “run, run, please run.”

Zack stood shining at me with dog’s eyes and loose smile. To escape the light of the smile I ran around him, around the Tin Woodsman who was rushing toward Zack, and sprinted in bare feet and flapping towel up to the black van.

When I yanked down on the handle of the rear doors and pushed them open, something that had been wedged against one of them fell out into the dust. I looked down and saw a familiar shape just ceasing to roll. It was one of the old wide-hipped eight-ounce Coke bottles.

“What did you do that for?” she asked, still naked, the water dried by the sun from all but her darkened hair, as the paperback of She began to sink into the water of the quarry. I was conscious of Zack behind us, standing near his dropped knife on the hot stone, and I was aware of having too many reasons to be able to roll them up into a single answer. I was sending a chip of Alison into the place where she had died; I was furious with them both and with myself for not knowing how to reckon with what I suspected, the sight of the Coke bottle having brought back clearly what Polar Bears Hovre had told me; I was simply overcome with anger and disgust and throwing away something I valued was the simplest way to express that I had looked into the face of damnation. When I had crawled into the back of the van, I had seen, glittering amidst the rubble of spare parts, one of the thousand-faceted doorknobs I had removed from my desk.