A Dark Matter by Peter Straub Page A

His ruined clothes fluttering about his skinny body, Eel’s father shambled around in a circle, lowered his head, and tried a sloppy one-two combination that came nowhere near his moving target. Keith Hayward was still braying haw haw haw .
    Mallon dodged another weightless blow and gave the Eel a look of pure handsome perplexity. “I don’t want to hit the guy.”
    “Knock him out, I don’t give a shit,” the Eel said.
    “Fuck this,” Dilly-O said. He rushed into the fray, came up on the old man from behind, and caught him under the arms. Then he spun him across the sidewalk, shoved him through the yawning door, and propelled him back into the bar.
    “First time anyone was ever thrown into that place,” said Brett Milstrap.
    “You know it? You been to the House of Ko-Reck-Shun?” asked Mallon, keeping an eye on the doorway. Lazy, drunken laughter sounded from the interior.
    “Well, once, yeah,” Milstrap said. “I was really drunk, and these guys took me there, and I think somebody maybe tied me up … ?” He closed his mouth and made blackboard-erasing motions with his right hand. “Whoa.”
    “Should have gone to Scuzzy’s instead,” said the Eel, demonstrating if not full recovery from the embarrassment at least the desire to tough it out.
    “Are you kidding? We came from Scuzzy’s.”
    “How do you feel, really?” Mallon asked. “If you like, we could take your father home, make sure nothing happens to him.”
    “He’ll get home fine by himself. He just won’t remember any of this.”
    “You have to be a little shook up,” Mallon said. “Come on.”
    “No, you come on,” the Eel said. “I want to see our meadow.”
    “Then take a look at it.” He swept one arm toward the concrete barriers and the end of the street, making a comedy of presenting all of them with the shimmering swath of grass on which Howard had imagined him reciting ancient Greek.
    By turning to look in the direction Mallon was pointing, this enlarged version of the little band was declaring itself, it occurred to Howard, ready for whatever expansions of consciousness might be in the offing. It was brave—brave all the way round. It was amazing, how Mallon managed to stack all these layers in his comedy, his gesture of giving them the meadow. In the Crafts Room, tears spilled from Howard’s eyes as he, too, regarded the dazzling meadow where their lives had submitted to such gorgeous ruin. He saw it whole, and he saw it pure, for in his imagination the meadow had been untouched by everything that had touched them .
    The meadow before them, that sun-struck meadow in the last moments when it was no more than an irregular field owned by the UW Department of Agriculture …

    The agronomy meadow, in effect an enormous and complex grassland, was bounded on two sides by state highways, on its distant far end by a dense wood owned by the forestry department. Near the highway that swooped by far off to their right, a long row of metal devices like sun reflectors had been slanted over little squares of variegated grasses. Immediately behind the shining reflectors stood a line of red wooden boxes with their lids propped open. The shimmering grassy space of the meadow, perhaps twenty square acres altogether, spread out over the ground like an enormous blanket, rising up here and there into little folds and peaks and corrugations, elsewhere disappearing into deeper folds or swales that might have been made by man but long ago had been absorbed into the meadow’s fabric.
    “I see why you picked it,” Meredith said.
    “Oh? Why did I do that?”
    “You tell him, Hootie,” Meredith said, and placed a cool white hand on the back of his sweaty neck. “You and Eel, you’re good at seeing things.”
    Hootie cast a sideways glance at the Eel, who was fidgeting with impatience. “Because we could hide in one of those valley things.” He thought about standing in one of the little valleys. “Then you’d have to look up at the