A Dark Matter by Peter Straub

week or two, refusing to speak to anyone but Hootie and Boats and those who could force her to talk to them. Mallon had fled, all three parties agreed on that point, and Dill Olson had followed in his wake; Meredith Bright had taken off at a dead run, packed up her clothes, and camped out at the airport until she could get a flight back home to Arkansas, where police questioned her for hours, day after day, until it was clear that she had almost nothing to tell them.
    The police never did catch up with Mallon and Dilly, who evaded questioning without even really trying to: after recuperating for a short time in Chicago (actually, in the same Cedar Street apartment I bought many years later, located in a building across the street from my present house), they hit the campus trail as a double act. Mallon took Dill over , he somehow incorporated him, of course with his victim’s full cooperation. Olson loved Mallon, too, as much as my girlfriend and Boats did, and I guess he was content to follow his idol around the country, doing whatever he was asked to do. My information about Dill Olson’s fate came from Lee, who had some sort of intermittent, flickering, but nonetheless reliable connection to him. I was never to know any of the specifics about this, of course, as I had missed the boat, definitively, and so had been spared the mysterious experience that came to define their lives. There was a magic circle, and I stood beyond its periphery.
    Here’s who was inside the circle, and this is what they wound up doing:
    Hootie Bly, we learned, had become a permanent resident of the psychiatric ward at the Lamont Hospital, where he spoke only in quotations from Hawthorne and outbursts of unknown words from Captain Fountain’s dictionary.
    Before graduation, Jason “Boats” Boatman left school and became a full-time professional thief. Was that enough, could that have been enough for him?
    Dilly Olson had surrendered his life to the man he had unofficially adopted as his father, and this was what he gained from his surrender: a secondhand imitation of a life, a weary existence as the magician’s apprentice, subsisting on scraps that fell from the master’s hand, being clothed in the master’s cast-offs, and sleeping on strangers’ couches with the brokenhearted girls his master discarded. Years later, Lee told me that Mallon had retired, but Don Olson was carrying on as the mage’s replacement, or the new, improved model, or something similar. He had learned a lot in the intervening years, he had digested the Tibetan Book of the Dead , the I Ching , and the works of Giordano Bruno, Raymond Lully, Norman O. Brown, and God knows who else, and the trade of traveling guru, after all, was all he knew. But still. When I think of the heroic boy he once was …
    Of Meredith Bright and Brett Milstrap I knew nothing, but presumably they each had a story to tell, should I be able to find them.
    And of course the final figure left standing within the circle was my wife, Lee Truax, the most beautiful woman in any room she happened to enter, blessed with intelligence, courage, excellent health, a stunning house, a wonderful career as board member, counselor, and troubleshooter to the noble ACB. Her husband loved her, however imperfect his literal faithfulness, and the basis of his not inconsiderable success, his breakthrough book, The Agents of Darkness , had been his attempt to deal with the unfathomable event in the meadow and could therefore be seen as a tribute to the woman to whom it was dedicated. (Nearly all of his books were dedicated to his wife.) Thanks to this husband, myself, she had and always would have enough money never to worry about her finances. However, Lee Truax had been afflicted, too, cruelly, and although her affliction had first made itself known only in her early thirties, since when it had darkened and deepened, she had understood immediately that its origin had been Mallon’s great event in the