by Peter Straub
“Look what you did!” Harry screamed. “You wrecked everything! Damn it! What do you think is going to happen to us?”
“What’s Mom going to do?” Eddie asked in a voice only slightly above a whisper.
“You don’t know?” Harry yelled. “You’re dead!”
Eddie started to weep.
Harry bunched his hands into fists and clamped his eyes shut. They were both dead, that was the real truth. Harry opened his eyes, which felt hot and oddly heavy, and stared at his sobbing, red-smeared, useless little brother. “Blue rose,” he said.
10
Little Eddie’s hands fell to his sides. His chin dropped, and his mouth fell open. Blood ran in a smooth wide band down the left side of his face, dipped under the line of his jaw, and continued on down his neck and into his T-shirt. Pooled blood in his left eyebrow dripped steadily onto the floor, as if from a faucet.
“You are going deep asleep,” Harry said. Where was the hat pin? He looked back to the single standing chair and saw the mother-of-pearl head glistening on the floor near it. “Your whole body is numb.” He moved over to the pin, bent down, and picked it up. The metal shaft felt warm in his fingers. “You can feel no pain.” He went back to Little Eddie. “Nothing can hurt you.” Harry’s breath seemed to be breathing itself, forcing itself into his throat in hot harsh shallow pants, then expelling itself out.
“Did you hear me, Little Eddie?”
In his gravelly, slow-moving hypnotized voice, Little Eddie said, “I heard you.”
“And you can feel no pain?”
“I can feel no pain.”
Harry drew his arm back, the point of the hat pin extending forward from his fist, and then jerked his hand forward as hard as he could and stuck the pin into Eddie’s abdomen right through the blood-soaked T-shirt. He exhaled sharply, and tasted a sour misery on his breath.
“You don’t feel a thing.”
“I don’t feel a thing.”
Harry opened his right hand and drove his palm against the head of the pin, hammering it in another few inches. Little Eddie looked like a voodoo doll. A kind of sparkling light surrounded him. Harry gripped the head of the pin with his thumb and forefinger and yanked it out. He held it up and inspected it. Glittering light surrounded the pin, too. The long shaft was painted with blood. Harry slipped the point into his mouth and closed his lips around the warm metal.
He saw himself, a man in another life, standing in a row with men like himself in a bleak gray landscape defined by barbed wire. Emaciated people in rags shuffled up toward them and spat on their clothes. The smells of dead flesh and burning flesh hung in the air. Then the vision was gone, and Little Eddie stood before him again, surrounded by layers of glittering light.
Harry grimaced or grinned, he could not have told the difference, and drove his long spike deep into Eddie’s stomach.
Eddie uttered a small “Oof.”
“You don’t feel anything, Eddie,” Harry whispered. “You feel good all over. You never felt better in your life.”
“Never felt better in my life.”
Harry slowly pulled out the pin and cleaned it with his fingers.
He was able to remember every single thing anyone had ever told him about Tommy Golz.
“Now you’re going to play a funny, funny game,” he said. “This is called the Tommy Golz game because it’s going to keep you safe from Mrs. Franken. Are you ready?” Harry carefully slid the pin into the fabric of his shirt collar, all the while watching Eddie’s slack blood-streaked person. Vibrating bands of light beat rhythmically and steadily about Eddie’s face.
“Ready,” Eddie said.
“I’m going to give you your instructions now, Little Eddie. Pay attention to everything I say and it’s all going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay—as long as you play the game exactly the way I tell you. You understand, don’t you?”
“I understand.”
“Tell me what I just said.”
“Everything’s going to be okay as long as I play the game exactly the way you tell me.” A dollop of blood slid off Eddie’s eyebrow and splashed onto his already soaked T-shirt.
“Good, Eddie. Now the first thing you do is fall down—not now, when I tell you. I’m going to give you all the instructions, and then I’m going to count backward from ten, and when I get to one, you’ll start playing the game. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So first you fall down, Little Eddie. You fall down real hard. Then comes the fun part of the game. You bang your head on the floor. You start to go crazy. You twitch, and you bang your hands and feet on the floor. You do that for a long time. I guess you do that until you count to about a hundred. You foam at the mouth, you twist all over the place. You get real stiff, and then you get real loose, and then you get real stiff, and then real loose again, and all this time you’re banging your head and your hands and feet on the floor, and you’re twisting all over the place. Then when you finish counting to a hundred in your head, you do the last thing. You swallow your tongue. And that’s the game. When you swallow your tongue you’re the winner. And then nothing bad can ever happen to you, and Mrs. Franken won’t be able to hurt you ever ever ever.”
Harry stopped talking. His hands were shaking. After a second he realized that his insides were shaking too. His raised his trembling fingers to his shirt collar and felt the hat pin.
“Tell me how you win the game, Little Eddie. What is the last thing you do?”
“I swallow my tongue.”
“Right. And then Mrs. Franken and Mom will never be able to hurt you, because you won the game.”
“Good,” said Little Eddie. The glittering light shimmered about him.
“Okay, we’ll start playing right now,” Harry said. “Ten.” He went toward the attic steps. “Nine.” He reached the steps. “Eight.”
He went down one step. “Seven.” Harry descended another two steps. “Six.” When he went down another two steps, he called up in a slightly louder voice, “Five.”
Now his head was beneath the level of the attic floor, and he could not see Little Eddie anymore. All he could hear was the soft, occasional plop of liquid hitting the floor.
“Four.”
“Three.”
“Two.” He was now at the door to the attic steps. Harry opened the door, stepped through it, breathed hard, and shouted “One!” up the stairs.
He heard a thud, and then quickly closed the door behind him.
Harry went across the hall and into the “dormitory” bedroom. There seemed to be a strange absence of light in the hallway. For a second he saw—was sure he saw—a line of dark trees across a wall of barbed wire. Harry closed this door behind him too, and went to his narrow bed and sat down. He could feel blood beating in his face; his eyes seemed oddly warm, as if they were heated by filaments. Harry slowly, almost reverently, extracted the hat pin from his collar and set it on his pillow. “A hundred,” he said. “Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four…”
When he had counted down to “one,” he stood up and left the bedroom. He went quickly downstairs without looking at the door behind which lay the attic steps. On the ground floor he slipped into Maryrose’s bedroom, crossed over to her desk, and slid open the bottom right-hand drawer. From the drawer he took a velvet-covered box. This he opened, and jabbed the hat pin into the ball of material, studded with pins of all sizes and descriptions, from which he had taken it. He replaced the box in the drawer, pushed the drawer into the desk, and quickly left the room and went upstairs.
Back in his own bedroom, Harry took off his clothes and climbed into his bed. His face still burned.
—
He must have fallen asleep very quickly, because the next thing he knew Albert was slamming his way into the bedroom and tossing his clothes and boots all over the place. “You asleep?” Albert asked. “You left the attic light on, you fuckin’ dummies, but if you think I’m gonna save your fuckin’ asses and go up and t
urn it off, you’re even stupider than you look.”
Harry was careful not to move a finger, not to move even a hair.
He held his breath while Albert threw himself onto his bed, and when Albert’s breathing relaxed and slowed, Harry followed his big brother into sleep. He did not awaken again until he heard his father half-screeching, half-sobbing up in the attic, and that was very late at night.
11
Sonny came from Fort Sill, George all the way from Germany. Between them, they held up a sodden Edgar Beevers at the grave site while a minister Harry had never seen before read from a Bible as cracked and rubbed as an old brown shoe. Between his two older sons, Harry’s father looked bent and ancient, a skinny old man only steps from the grave himself. Sonny and George despised their father, Harry saw—they held him up on sufferance, in part because they had chipped in thirty dollars apiece to buy him a suit and did not want to see it collapse with its owner inside onto the lumpy clay of the graves. His whiskers glistened in the sun, and moisture shone beneath his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. He had been shaking too severely for either Sonny or George to shave him, and had been capable of moving in a straight line only after George let him take a couple of long swallows from a leather-covered flask he took out of his duffel bag.
The minister uttered a few sage words on the subject of epilepsy.
Sonny and George looked as solid as brick walls in their uniforms, like prison guards or actual prisons themselves. Next to them, Albert looked shrunken and unfinished. Albert wore the green plaid sport jacket in which he had graduated from the eighth grade, and his wrists hung prominent and red four inches below the bottoms of the sleeves. His motorcycle boots were visible beneath his light gray trousers, but they, like the green jacket, had lost their flash. Like Albert, too: ever since the discovery of Eddie’s body, Albert had gone around the house looking as if he’d just bitten off the end of his tongue and was trying to decide whether or not to spit it out. He never looked anybody in the eye, and he rarely spoke. Albert acted as though a gigantic padlock had been fixed to the middle of his chest and he was damned if he’d ever take it off. He had not asked Sonny or George a single question about the army. Every now and then he would utter a remark about the gas station so toneless that it suffocated any reply.
Harry looked at Albert standing beside their mother, kneading his hands together and keeping his eyes fixed as if by decree on the square foot of ground before him. Albert glanced over at Harry, he knew he was being looked at, and did what to Harry was an extraordinary thing. Albert froze. All expression drained out of his face, and his hands locked immovably together. He’s that way because he told Little Eddie that he wished he would die, Harry thought for the tenth or eleventh time since he realized this, and with undiminished awe. Then was he lying? Harry wondered. And if he really did wish that Little Eddie would drop dead, why isn’t he happy now? Didn’t he get what he wanted? Albert would never spit out that piece of his tongue, Harry thought, watching his brother blink slowly and sightlessly toward the ground.
Harry shifted his gaze uneasily to his father, still propped up between George and Sonny, heard that the minister was finally reaching the end of his speech, and took a fast look at his mother. Maryrose was standing very straight in a black dress and black sunglasses, holding the straps of her bag in front of her with both hands. Except for the color of her clothes, she could have been a spectator at a tennis match. Harry knew by the way she was holding her face that she was wishing she could smoke. Dying for a cigarette, he thought, ha ha, the Monster Mash, it’s a graveyard smash.
The minister finished speaking, and made a rhetorical gesture with his hands. The coffin sank on ropes into the rough earth. Harry’s father began to weep loudly. First George, then Sonny, picked up large damp shovel-marked pieces of the clay and dropped them on the coffin. Edgar Beevers nearly fell in after his own tiny clod, but George contemptuously swung him back. Maryrose marched forward, bent and picked up a random piece of clay with thumb and forefinger as if using tweezers, dropped it, and turned away before it struck. Albert fixed his eyes on Harry—his own clod had split apart in his hand and crumbled away between his fingers. Harry shook his head no. He did not want to drop dirt on Eddie’s coffin and make that noise. He did not want to look at Eddie’s coffin again. There was enough dirt around to do the job without him hitting that metal box like he was trying to ring Eddie’s doorbell. He stepped back.
“Mom says we have to get back to the house,” Albert said.
Maryrose lit up as soon as they got into the single black car they had rented through the funeral parlor, and breathed out acrid smoke over everybody crowded into the backseat. The car reversed into a narrow graveyard lane, and turned down the main road toward the front gates.
In the front seat, next to the driver, Edgar Beevers drooped sideways and leaned his head against the window, leaving a blurred streak on the glass.
“How in the name of hell could Little Eddie have epilepsy without anybody knowing about it?” George asked.
Albert stiffened and stared out the window.
“Well, that’s epilepsy,” Maryrose said. “Eddie could have gone for years without having an attack.” That she worked in a hospital always gave her remarks of this sort a unique gravity, almost as if she were a doctor.
“Must have been some fit,” Sonny said, squeezed into place between Harry and Albert.
“Grand mal,” Maryrose said, and took another hungry drag on her cigarette.
“Poor little bastard,” George said. “Sorry, Mom.”
“I know you’re in the armed forces, and armed forces people speak very freely, but I wish you would not use that kind of language.”
Harry, jammed into Sonny’s rock-hard side, felt his brother’s body twitch with a hidden laugh, though Sonny’s face did not alter.
“I said I was sorry, Mom,” George said.
“Yes. Driver! Driver!” Maryrose was leaning forward, reaching out one claw to tap the chauffeur’s shoulder. “Livermore is the next street. Do you know South Sixth Street?”
“I’ll get you there,” the driver said.
This is not my family, Harry thought. I came from somewhere else and my rules are different from theirs.
His father mumbled something inaudible as soon as they got in the door, and disappeared into his curtained-off cubicle. Maryrose put her sunglasses in her purse and marched into the kitchen to warm the coffee cake and the macaroni casserole, both made that morning, in the oven. Sonny and George wandered into the living room and sat down on opposite ends of the couch. They did not look at each other—George picked up a Reader’s Digest from the table and began leafing through it backward, and Sonny folded his hands in his lap and stared at his thumbs. Albert’s footsteps plodded up the stairs, crossed the landing, and went into the dormitory bedroom.
“What’s she in the kitchen for?” Sonny asked, speaking to his hands. “Nobody’s going to come. Nobody ever comes here, because she never wanted them to.”
“Albert’s taking this kind of hard, Harry,” George said. He propped the magazine against the stiff folds of his uniform and looked across the room at his little brother. Harry had seated himself beside the door, as out of the way as possible. George’s attentions rather frightened him, though George had behaved with consistent kindness ever since his arrival two days after Eddie’s death. His crew cut still bristled and he could still break rocks with his chin, but some violent demon seemed to have left him. “You think he’ll be okay?”
“Him? Sure.” Harry tilted his head, grimaced.
“He didn’t see Little Eddie first, did he?”
“No, Dad did,” Harry said. “He saw the light on in the attic when he came home, I guess. Albert went up there, though. I guess there was so much blood Dad thought somebody broke in and killed Eddie. But he just bumped his head, and that’s where the blood came from.”
“Head wounds bleed like bastards,” Sonny said. “A guy hit me with a bottle once
in Tokyo, I thought I was gonna bleed to death right there.”
“And Mom’s stuff got all messed up?” George asked quietly.
This time Sonny looked up.
“Pretty much, I guess. The dress rack got knocked down. Dad cleaned up what he could, the next day. One of the cane-back chairs got broke, and a hunk got knocked out of the teak table. And the mirror got broken into a million pieces.”
Sonny shook his head, and made a soft whistling sound through his pursed lips.
“She’s a tough old gal,” George said. “I hear her coming though, so we have to stop, Harry. But we can talk tonight.”
Harry nodded.
12
After dinner that night, when Maryrose had gone to bed—the hospital had given her two nights off—Harry sat across the kitchen table from a George who clearly had something to say. Sonny had polished off a six-pack by himself in front of the television and had gone up to the dormitory bedroom by himself. Albert had disappeared shortly after dinner, and their father had never emerged from his cubicle beside the junk room.
“I’m glad Pete Petrosian came over,” George said. “He’s a good old boy. Ate two helpings, too.”
Harry was startled by George’s use of their neighbor’s first name—he was not even sure that he had ever heard it before.
Mr. Petrosian had been their only caller that afternoon. Harry had seen that his mother was grateful that someone had come, and despite her preparations wanted no more company after Mr. Petrosian had left.
“Think I’ll get a beer, that is if Sonny didn’t drink it all,” George said, and stood up and opened the fridge. His uniform looked as if it had been painted on his body, and his muscles bulged and moved like a horse’s. “Two left,” he said. “Good thing you’re underage.” George popped the caps off both bottles and came back to the table. “So what the devil was Little Eddie doing up there, anyhow? Trying on dresses?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I was asleep.”