The Throat

saying goodbye by telephone to her son, Theodore Bundy, the serial killer who was executed for murder yesterday morning in Florida.

Whenever I see this terrible photograph, I think about taking it down. I try to remember why I cut it out in the first place. Then I open the refrigerator door.

The telephone rang as soon as I pulled the handle, and I closed the door and went into the loft's main room to answer it.

I said, 'Hello,' and the voice on the other end said the same thing and then paused. 'Am I speaking to Timothy Underhill? Timothy Underhill, the writer?'

When I admitted to my identity, my caller said, 'Well, it's been a long time since we've met. Tim, this is John Ransom.'

And then I felt an of course: as if I had known he would call, that predetermined events were about to unfold, and that I had been waiting for this for days.

'I was just thinking about you,' I said, because in Central Park I had remembered the last time I had seen him—he had been nothing like the friendly, self-justifying captain I had met on the edge of Camp White Star, parroting slogans about stopping communism. He had reminded me of Scoot. Around his neck had been a necklace of dried blackened little things I'd taken for ears before I saw that they were tongues. I had not seen him since, but I never forgot certain things he had said on that day.

'Well, I've been thinking about you, too,' he said. Now he sounded a long way from the man who had worn the necklace of tongues. 'I've been reading The Divided Man.'

'Thanks,' I said, and wondered if that was what he was calling about. He sounded tired and slow.

'That's not what I mean. I thought you'd like to know something. Maybe you'll even want to come out here.'

'Out where?'

'Millhaven,' he said. Then he laughed, and I thought that he might be drunk. 'I guess you don't know I came back here. I'm a professor here, at Arkham College.'

That was a surprise. Arkham, a group of redbrick buildings around a trampled little common, was a gloomy institution just west of Millhaven's downtown. The bricks had long ago turned sooty and brown, and the windows never looked clean. It had never been a particularly good school, and I knew of no reason why it should have improved.

'I teach religion,' he said. 'We have a small department.'

'It's nice to hear from you again,' I said, beginning to disengage myself from the conversation and him.

'No, listen. You might be interested in something that happened. I want, I'd like to talk to you about it.'

'What happened?' I asked.

'Someone attacked two people and wrote blue rose near their bodies. The first person died, but the second one is in a coma. She's still alive.'

'Oh.' I couldn't say any more. 'Is that really true?'

'The second one was April,' he said.

My blood stopped moving.

'My wife, April. She's still in a coma.'

'My God,' I said. 'I'm sorry, John. What happened?'

He gave me a sketchy version of the attack on his wife. 'I just wanted to ask you a question. If you have an answer, that's great. And if you can't answer, that's okay too.'

I asked him what the question was, but I thought I already knew what he was going to ask.

'Do you still think that detective, Damrosch, the one you called Esterhaz in the book, killed those people?'

'No,' I said—almost sighed, because I half suspected what a truthful answer to that question would mean. 'I learned some things since I wrote that book.'

'About the Blue Rose murderer?'

'You don't think it's the same person, do you?' I asked.

'Well, I do, yes.' John Ransom hesitated. 'After all, if Damrosch wasn't the murderer, then nobody ever caught the guy. He just walked away.'

'This must be very hard on you.'

He hesitated. 'I just wanted to talk to you about it. I'm— I'm—I'm not in great shape, I guess, but I don't want to intrude on you anymore. You told me more than enough already. I'm not even sure what I'm asking.'

'Yes, you are,' I said.

'I guess I was wondering if you might want to come out to talk about it. I guess I was thinking I could use some help.'

You are sworn to secrecy.

Let us begin at the beginning.

PART TWO

FRANKLIN BACHELOR

1

My second encounter with John Ransom in Vietnam took place while I was trying to readjust myself after an odd and unsettling four-day patrol. I did not understand what had happened—I didn't understand something I'd seen. Actually, two inexplicable things had happened on the last day of the patrol, and when I came across John Ransom, he explained both of them to me.

We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. Damp gray twilight settled around us. We couldn't smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. A black, six-six, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound grunt named Leonard Hamnet fingered a letter he had received months before out of his pocket and squinted at it, trying to read it for the thousandth time while spooning canned peaches into his mouth. By now, the precious letter was a rag held together with tape.

At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the lieutenant yelled, 'Shit!' and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.

The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy, named Tyrell Budd, coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.

One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the solid ground on the other side of the paddy. A little group of thatched huts was visible through the sparse trees. Then the two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. I experienced that endless moment of pure helplessness in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to leave it. The shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us. A shell fragment whizzed overhead, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage's helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground. A little smoke drifted up from it.

We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, but he was breathing. Leonard Hamnet picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder.