If You Could See Me Now

  PRAISE FOR PETER STRAUB

  “You expect the horrifying in the fiction of Peter Straub…and you get it.”

  —The New York Times

  “More than a good storyteller with a talent for scaring readers. He’s a writer who transcends his genre.”

  —USA Today

  “[Straub] is a master at blurring the supernatural, the real-world-scary, and the monsters in your psyche.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Not since Edgar Allan Poe has an author taken such liberties with his readers’ nerves.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “Straub’s literary specialty…is not dreams but nightmares….He’s particularly adept at the kind of creepy psychological yarn pioneered by Henry James and modernized by Shirley Jackson.”

  —Salon

  “Straub is the master of subtle, smoldering dread.”

  —People

  “Peter Straub is one of his generation’s best storytellers….[Stephen] King goes for your jugular; Straub goes for your brain.”

  —Tor.com

  ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

  NOVELS

  The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine

  A Dark Matter

  In the Night Room

  Lost Boy, Lost Girl

  Black House (with Stephen King)

  Mr. X

  The Hellfire Club

  The Throat

  Mrs. God

  Mystery

  Koko

  The Talisman (with Stephen King)

  Floating Dragon

  Shadowland

  Ghost Story

  If You Could See Me Now

  Julia

  Under Venus

  Marriages

  POETRY

  My Life in Pictures

  Ishmael

  Open Air

  Leeson Park and Belsize Square

  The Devil’s Wine

  COLLECTIONS

  Wild Animals

  Houses without Doors

  Magic Terror

  Peter Straub’s Ghosts (editor)

  Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists (editor)

  Poe’s Children (editor)

  5 Stories

  American Fantastic Tales (editor)

  PETER STRAUB

  IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW

  Peter Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books. His many accolades include multiple Bram Stoker Awards, most recently for his novel A Dark Matter, and lifetime achievement awards from the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Awards. Straub was the editor of the two-volume Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales. He lives in New York City.

  www.peterstraub.net

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2015

  Copyright © 1977 by Peter Straub

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House, Ltd., Toronto. Originally published by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., New York, in 1977.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Anchor Books edition as follows:

  Straub, Peter.

  If you could see me now / Peter Straub. — First Anchor Books edition.

  pages cm

  1. Cousins—Fiction. 2. Paranoia—Fiction.

  3. Spirits—Fiction. 4. Wisconsin—Fiction.

  5. Horror fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T6914I36 2015 813’.54—dc23

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780804172851

  eBook ISBN 9780804172868

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  Front cover image © phillip suddick/Moment Select/Getty Images

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Peter Straub

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  July 21, 1955

  To Get to Arden

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  I Light Out for the Territories

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  for Carol Smith

  and for Robin and Justin

  in memory of

  a hundred long-distance calls

  ‘There’s a long statement in the papers, sir, about a murder…

  But someone is always being murdered, and I didn’t read it.’

  DAVID COPPERFIELD

  You can walk away from anything but a strong smell: it haunts you, calls you back.

  Book of the Cranberry Islands,

  RICHARD GROSSINGER

  “Winter has already started,” said Alison.

  “Huh?”

  “Winter started a month ago.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “What day is it?”

  “The twenty-first of July. Thursday.”

  “God, look at those stars,” she said. “I’d like to take a big step off the planet and just go sailing through them.” He and Alison, cousins from opposite ends of the continent, lay side by side on their grandmother’s lawn in that part of rural Wisconsin nearest the Mississippi River, and looked up past the dark massive heads of the walnut trees to the sky. Oral Roberts’s country voice came drifting to them from the porch of their grandmother’s house. “My spirit is passing into you,” Oral Roberts was shouting, and Alison’s mother, Loretta Greening, softly laughed. The boy turned his head sideways on the coarse, springy grass and looked at his cousin’s profile. It was fox sharp, ardent, and if will could lift her off the earth she would already be sailing away from him. He caught her smell of cold, bracing water. “God,” she repeated, “I’d just buzz around up there, wouldn’t I? I feel that way sometimes when I listen to Gerry Mulligan. Do you know about him?”

  He did not.

  “Boy, you should really live in California. In San Francisco. Not just because we could see each other more, but Florida is so damn far away from everything. Gerry Mulligan would just slay you. He’s really cool. Progressive jazz.”

  “I do wish we lived near you. That would be neat.”

  “I hate all my relatives except for you and my father.” She turned her head toward his face and gave him a smile of brilliant, heart-stopping whiteness. “And I suppose I see him even less than I see you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “You could look at it that way.” She turned away from him again. They could hear their mothers’ voices mingling with the noise from the radio. Their grandmother, Jessie, the shrewd center of the family, was doing something in the kitchen, and from time to time through the crossweave of the sisters’ conversation on the porch slid her softer voice. She had been closeted all day with cousin Duane (pronounced Dew-ane), who was about to be married. Their grandmother opposed the marriage, the children knew, for reasons tenuous but forceful.

  “You got into trouble again last year,” Alison said.

  He grunted assent, embarrassed, not wanting to talk about it. She was not supposed to know about the side of him that got into trouble. Last time it had very nearly been serious, and the entire
messy context of the trouble raged in his dreams several nights a week.

  “You get into a lot of trouble, don’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I get into a little trouble, too. Not like you, but enough to make them notice me. I had to change schools. How many times have you changed schools?”

  “Four times. But the second time was—the second time was just because one of the teachers hated me.”

  “I had an affair with my art teacher.”

  He looked at her sharply, but could not tell if she were lying. He thought that she probably was not.

  “Is that why they made you leave?”

  “No. They kicked me out because they caught me smoking.”

  Now he knew that it was true—lies were never as anticlimactic as that. He felt intensely jealous and intensely interested. Both of these feelings were mixed with a large measure of admiration. At fourteen, a year older than he, Alison was part of the passionate adult world of affairs and cigarettes and cocktails. She had previously revealed to him her enthusiasm for martinis “with a twist,” whatever a twist was.

  “Old Duane would like to have an affair with you,” he said.

  She snickered. “Well, I’m afraid old Duane doesn’t have much of a chance.” Then, rushing at him with all of her unexpected, ardent force, she rolled rapidly over onto her side and faced him. “Do you know what he did yesterday? He asked me if I wanted to go out for a ride in his pickup, this was while you and your mother were visiting Auntie Rinn, and I said sure, why not, and he took me for a drive and he put his hand on my knee as soon as we left the driveway. He only took it off when we passed the church.” She laughed again, as if this last detail were the conclusive proof of Duane’s unsuitability as a lover.

  “You let him?”

  “His hand was sweating,” Alison said through her laughter—indeed said it so loudly that the boy wondered if Duane could hear it—“and it felt like he was rubbing tractor grease or something all over my knee. I said, ‘I bet you don’t have much luck with girls, do you, Duane?’ and he pulled over and made me get out.”

  “Are there any boys you like up here?” He wanted her to give a flat negative, and her reply at first made him flush with satisfaction.

  “Here? Are you kidding? First of all, I don’t like the boys very much, they’re so inexperienced, and I don’t like the aroma of the barnyard that surrounds most farmboys. But I think Polar Bears Hovre is sort of good-looking.”

  Polar Bears, so called because of the whiteness of his hair, was the son of the Arden Township policeman, and he was a tall, rather chunky boy of nearly Duane’s age who had several times driven over to the Updahl farm to ogle Alison. He was a famous tearaway, though as far as the boy knew, he had not yet been made to leave any schools.

  “He thinks you’re good-looking too, but I suppose even a lout like Polar Bears would notice that.”

  “Well, you know that I only love you.” But she said it so lightly that the phrase seemed smooth with overuse.

  “I’ll accept that,” he said, thinking it sounded sophisticated—the kind of thing her art teacher might say.

  Duane had begun to shout in the kitchen, but they, like their mothers on the porch, ignored it.

  “Why did you say that about winter? That winter was starting?”

  She touched his nose with a finger, and the gesture made his face blaze. “Because on this day last month we had the longest day of the year. Summer’s lease is fading, dear one. Do you like Auntie Rinn? I think there’s something spooky about her. She’s really off the wall.”

  “Yeah,” he said vehemently. “She’s eerie. She said something to me about you. When Mom was out looking at her herbs.”

  Alison seemed to stiffen, as if she knew that the old woman’s comment would not have been complimentary. “What did she say about me? She listens to my mother too much.”

  “It was…she said I should watch out for you. She said you were my snare. She said you’d be my snare even if we weren’t cousins, even if we didn’t know each other, but since we are cousins, that it was much more dangerous. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Snare,” Alison said. “Well, maybe I am your snare. It sounds like a nice thing to be.”

  “Nice for me, you mean.”

  She smiled, not agreeing or disagreeing, and rolled back to look again at the shining starry sky. When she spoke, she said, “I’m bored. Let’s do something to celebrate the beginning of winter.”

  “There’s nothing to do.”

  “Polar Bears could think of something,” she said sweetly. “I know. Let’s go swimming. Let’s go up to the quarry. I’d like to go swimming. Hey? Let’s do it.”

  It seemed like a dubious proposition to him. “They won’t let us do it.”

  “You wait and see. I’ll show you how we swim in California.”

  He wondered aloud how they would travel the eight miles to the quarry. It was in the hills just outside Arden.

  “Wait and see.” She jumped up from the grass and began to march toward the farmhouse. Oral Roberts had ceased faith healing for another week, and now the sounds of a dance band mingled with the voices of their mothers. He ran to catch up with her and followed her through the screen door of the porch.

  Loretta Greening, a softer, taller version of Alison, was sitting on the porch sofa with his mother. The two women looked very much alike. His mother was smiling; Alison’s wore her perpetual look of nervous excitement mixed with discontent. After a moment the boy noticed Duane seated on a wicker chair at the far end of the porch. Slapping a fist noiselessly against his thigh, he appeared to be considerably more discontented than Mrs. Greening. He was staring at Alison as though he hated her, but she blithely ignored him.

  “Give me the keys to the car,” Alison said. “We want to go for a drive.”

  Mrs. Greening shrugged to her sister.

  “Oh, no,” said the boy’s mother. “Alison is too young to drive, isn’t she?”

  “It’s for practice,” Alison said. “Just on the back roads. I have to practice or I’ll never pass the test.”

  Duane was still staring at her.

  “I have this theory,” Mrs. Greening said to the boy’s mother. “You always let them do what they want to do.”

  “Because I’ll learn from my mistakes.”

  “Well, don’t you think—” his mother began.

  “Here,” said Mrs. Greening and tossed her the keys. “For God’s sake watch out for that old fool Hovre. He’d rather give you a ticket than chew that disgusting tobacco.”

  “Oh, we’re not going anywhere near Arden,” Alison said.

  Duane had put his hands on the arms of his chair. The boy realized with sickening certainty that Duane was going to invite himself along, and he feared that his mother would insist on their allowing him to drive the Greening Pontiac.

  But Alison acted too quickly for either Duane or his mother to speak. “Okay, thanks,” she said and wheeled back through the door of the porch. By the time the boy could react, she was already sliding into the car.

  “We pulled that one off all right, didn’t we?” she said minutes later, as they were swinging out of the valley road onto the state highway to Arden. He was looking out the back window, where he thought he had seen the lights of Duane’s pickup truck. But it could have been any truck from one of the farms in the valley.

  He was about to agree with her when she spoke again, strangely counterpointing his thoughts. It was a common experience between them, this access to each other’s thoughts and fantasies, and the boy thought that it was what Auntie Rinn had noticed.

  “Old Duane was just about to invite himself along, wasn’t he? I wouldn’t mind him if he wasn’t so pa-thet-ic. He sort of can’t do anything right. Did you see that house he was building for his girlfriend?” She began to giggle. The house had become a subterranean family joke, unmentionable before Duane’s parents.

  “I just heard about it,” he said. “It sure so
unds funny. He didn’t want me to see it. Duane and I don’t really get along. We had a big fight last year.”

  “And you didn’t even sneak out there just to take a peek? Jesus H. Christ, it’s amazing. It’s…” she broke down into giggles, unable to characterize the house any better. “And,” she said gasping, “you’re not supposed to mention it to Duane, you can’t make just the teeniest tiniest little comment…” She was laughing uncontrollably.

  Because the car was weaving in and out of its lane, he said, “How did you learn to drive? My parents won’t even let me touch the car.”

  “Oh, from these greasers I sometimes hang around with.”

  He merely grunted, having no idea what greasers were, and thinking that they sounded even worse than the art teacher.

  “Do you know what we should do?” Alison said. “We should make a pact. A really serious pact. A vow. To make sure that whatever happens, you know, no matter who we marry, since we can’t really marry each other, that we stay in touch—no, stay together.” She looked at him oddly for a moment, and then swung the car to the side of the road. “Let’s make a vow. This is important. If we don’t, we can’t be sure.”

  He looked at her dumbly, amazed by this sudden emotion. “You mean, promise to see one another when we’re married?”

  “Married, not married, if we’re living in Paris or Africa—anything. Let’s say—let’s say we’ll meet here on some date. On this date in ten years. No, that’s not far away enough. In twenty years. I’ll be thirty-four and you’ll be thirty-three. That’s lots younger than our mothers. July twenty-first, um, 1975. If there’s still a world in 1975. Promise. Make me a vow.” She was looking at him with such intensity that he did not even attempt to turn the absurd promise into a joke.

  “I vow.”

  “And I vow. At the farm, twenty years from now. And if you forget, I’ll come after you. If you forget, God help you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now we have to kiss.”

  His body seemed to become lighter in weight. Alison’s face seemed larger than its true size, more challenging and masklike. Behind the mask her eyes shone at him. With difficulty, he made his body move on the car seat. He bent toward her. His heart began to gong. When her suddenly enormous face drew near his, their lips brushed. His first sensation was of the unexpected cushiony softness of Alison’s lips, then this was supplanted by an awareness of her breathing warmth. Alison pressed her mouth harder against his, and he felt her hands at the back of his head. Her tongue darted through his lips.