Interior Darkness: Selected Stories

by Peter Straub

  Large as it was, the table offered no obstacle to a gaunt, red-haired individual moving from the command post to the records, or from any particular shelf of records to the cabinetlike space housing the turntable and other sound equipment. The table cooperated, it must have done. At one time—shortly after Little Red or John Elder managed to get the unwieldy thing off the sidewalk and into the sitting room—the table must have functioned properly, that is as a literal support system. The table undoubtedly performed this useful function for many months. After that…entropy took over, and the literal support system began to disappear beneath the mass and quantity of material it was required literally to support. In time, the table vanished, as an old car abandoned in a field gradually vanishes beneath and into the mound of weeds that overtakes it, or as the genial scientist who became ferocious Swamp Thing vanished beneath and into the vegetation that had surrounded, supported, nourished his wounded body. Little Red’s is the Swamp Thing of the table family.

  From the command post and the guest’s chair, the center of the sitting room can be seen to be dominated by a large, unstable mound rising from the floor to a height of something like three and a half feet and comprised in part of old catalogs from Levenger, Sharper Image, and Herrington; copies of Downbeat, Jazz Times, and Biblical Archaeology Review; record sleeves and CD jewel boxes; takeout menus; flyers distributed on behalf of drugstores; copies of Life magazine containing particularly eloquent photographs of Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald; books about crop circles and alien visitations; books about miracles; concert programs of considerable sentimental value; sheets of notepaper scribbled over with cryptic messages (What in the world does mogrom mean? Or rambichure?); the innards of old newspapers; photographs of jazz musicians purchased from a man on the corner of West Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue; posters awaiting reassignment to the walls; and other suchlike objects submerged too deeply to be identified. Like the dishes in the sink, the mound seems to be increasing in size through a version of parthenogenesis.

  Leaning against the irregular sides of Swamp Thing are yet more records, perhaps as few as fifty, perhaps as many as a hundred, already alphabetized; and around the listing, accordion-shaped constructions formed by propped-up records sit a varying number of cardboard boxes filled with still more records, these newly acquired from a specialist dealer or at a vintage record show. (John Elder, who in his luxurious seclusion possesses eighty to ninety thousand records stored on industrial metal shelves, annually attends a record fair in Newark, New Jersey, where he allows Little Red a corner at his lavish table.)

  Long-playing records may be acquired virtually anywhere: in little shops tucked into obscure byways; from remote bins in vast retail outlets; from boxes carelessly arranged on the counters of small-town Woolworth’s stores; within the outer circles of urban flea markets located in elementary-school playgrounds; from boxes, marked $1 EACH, displayed by unofficial sidewalk vendors who with their hangers-on lounge behind their wares on lawn furniture, smoking cigars and muffled up against the cold.

  So Little Red gets and he spends, but when it comes to records he gets a lot more than he spends. His friends and followers occasionally give him CDs, and Little Red enjoys the convenience of compact discs; however, as long as they do not skip, he much prefers the sound of LPs, even scratchy ones. They are warmer and more resonant: the atmosphere of distant places, distant times inhabits long-playing vinyl records, whereas CDs are always in the here and now.

  And what Little Red gets must in time be accommodated within his vast system, and a new old Duke Ellington record will eventually have to find its correct alpha-chronological position.

  The word Little Red uses for this placement process is “filing.” “Filing” records has become his daily task, his joy, his curse, his primary occupation.

  Little Red, His Filing

  Should you telephone Little Red and should he answer, you, like numerous others, might ask, with a hopeful lilt in your voice, what he has been up to lately.

  “Nothing much,” Little Red will answer. “Doing a lot of filing.”

  “Ah,” you say.

  “Got started yesterday afternoon around three, right after S—— and G—— G—— left. They were here since about ten o’clock the night before—we played some cards. Between three and six I filed at least two hundred records. Something like that, anyhow. Then I was thinking about going out and having dinner somewhere, but R—— was coming over at eight, and I looked at the boxes on the floor, and I just kept on filing. R—— left an hour ago, and I went right back into it. Got a lot of work done, man. The next time you come over, you’ll see a big difference.”

  This assertion means only that Little Red sees a great difference. Nine times out of ten, you won’t have a prayer. Swamp Thing will seem no less massive than on your previous visit; the boxes of records and accordion shapes will appear untouched.

  Of course, time-lapse photography would prove you wrong, for Little Red’s collection, filed and unfiled, is in constant motion. Occasionally, as in the case of the Japanese Gentleman, or during one of Little Red’s visits to the record fair, albums are sold, leaving gaps on the shelves. These gaps are soon filled with the new old records from the accordions, which have already been alphabetized, and from the boxes, which have not. The customary progress of an album is from box to accordion, then finally to the shelf, after a consultation of the discographical record has pinned down its chronological moment. (Those discographies are in constant use, and their contents heavily annotated, underlined, and highlighted in a variety of cheerful colors.)

  The quantity of rearrangement necessitated by the box-accordion-shelf progression would be daunting, exhausting, unbearable to anyone but Little Red. The insertion onto the proper shelf of four recently acquired Roy Eldridge LPs could easily involve redistributing two or three hundred records over four long shelves, so that a three-inch gap at the beginning of the Monk section might be transferred laterally and up to the midst of the Roys. The transferal of this gap requires twenty minutes of shifting and moving, not counting the time previously spent in chronologicizing the new acquisitions with the aid of the (sometimes warring) discographies. It’s surprisingly dirty work, too. After ten or twelve hours of unbroken filing, Little Red resembles a coal miner at shift’s end, grubby from head to foot, with grime concentrated on his face and hands, bleary-eyed, his hair in wisps and tangles.

  At the end of your conversation, Little Red will say, “You can come over tonight, if you feel like it. It doesn’t matter how late it is. I’ll be up.”

  —

  None of Little Red’s friends, followers, or acquaintances has ever seen him in the act of filing his records. He files only when alone.

  Miracles Attributed to Little Red

  1. The Miracle of the Japanese Gentleman

  The Japanese people include a surprising number of record collectors, a good half of whom specialize in jazz. Japanese collectors are famous for the purity of their standards, also for their willingness to expend great sums in pursuit of the prizes they desire. One of these gentlemen, a Kyoto businessman named Mr. Yoshi, learned of Little Red’s collection from John Elder, with whom he had done business for many years. By this time, Mr. Yoshi’s collection nearly equaled John Elder’s in size, though only in the numbers of LP, EP, and 78 records it contained. In memorabilia, Mr. Yoshi lagged far behind his friend: when it comes to items like plaster or ceramic effigies of Louis Armstrong, signed photos of Louis Armstrong, and oversized white handkerchiefs once unfurled onstage by Louis Armstrong, John Elder is and always will be in a class by himself.

  Little Red knew that the Japanese Gentleman had a particular interest in Blue Note and Riverside recordings from the 1950s, especially those by Sonny Clark and Kenny Dorham. Mr. Yoshi would accept only records in or near mint condition and in their original state—original cover art and record label, as if they had been issued yesterday and were essentially unplayed.

  Little Red’s mon
thly rent payment of $980 was coming due, and his bank balance stood at a dismal $205.65. The sale of two mint-condition records to Mr. Yoshi could yield the amount needed, but Little Red faced the insurmountable problem of not owning any mint-condition Sonny Clark or Kenny Dorham records on the Blue Note or Riverside labels. He had, it is true, a dim memory of once seeing The Sonny Clark Trio, the pianist’s first recording as a leader for Blue Note and an object greatly coveted by Japanese collectors, pass through his hands, but that was the entire content of the memory: the record’s shiny sleeve passing into and then out of his hands. He had not been conscious of its value on the collector’s market; Sonny Clark had never been one of his favorites. However, he knew that he had once purchased a nice copy of Kenny Dorham’s Una Mas, maybe not in mint condition but Excellent, at least Very Good anyhow, A to A–, worth perhaps $150 to $200 to a fanatical Japanese collector who did not already own one.

  Little Red scanned the spines of his Kenny Dorham records without finding a single original 1963 copy of Una Mas. He had a Japanese reissue, but imagine offering a Japanese reissue to a Japanese collector!

  Yet if he had neither of the most desired records, he did have a good number of consolation prizes, Blue Notes and Riversides maybe not exactly unplayed but certainly eminently playable and with sleeves in Fine to Very Fine condition. These twenty records he coaxed from the shelves and stacked on a folding chair for immediate viewing. With luck, he imagined, they could go for $30 to $40 apiece—he had seen them listed at that price in the catalogs. If he sold them all, he would make about $700, leaving him only a few dollars short of his rent.

  Mr. Yoshi appeared at precisely the designated hour and wasted no time before examining the records set aside for him. Five-seven, with a severe face and iron-gray hair, he wore a beautiful dark blue pinstriped suit and gleaming black loafers. His English was rudimentary, but his tact was sublime. He had to pick his way around Swamp Thing to reach the folding chair, but the Japanese Gentleman acknowledged its monstrous presence by not so much as a raised eyebrow. For him, Swamp Thing did not exist. All that existed, all that deserved notice, was the stack of records passed to him, two at a time, by Little Red.

  “No good,” he said. “Not for me.”

  “That’s a shame,” said his host, hiding his disappointment. “I hope your trip hasn’t been wasted.”

  Mr. Yoshi ignored this remark and turned to face the crowded shelves. “Many records,” he said. “Many, many.” Little Red understood it was a show of politeness, and he appreciated the gesture.

  “For sale?”

  “Some, I guess,” said Little Red. “Take a look.”

  The Japanese Gentleman cautiously made his way around the accordions and through the boxes on Swamp Thing’s perimeter. When he stood before the shelves, he clasped his hands behind his back. “You have Blue Note?”

  “Sure,” said Little Red. “All through there. Riverside, too.”

  “You have Sonny Clark, Kenny Dorham?”

  “Some Kenny, yeah,” said Little Red, pointing to a shelf. “Right there.”

  “Aha,” said Mr. Yoshi, moving closer. “I have funny feeling…”

  Little Red clasped his own hands behind his back, and the Japanese Gentleman began to brush the tip of his index finger against the spines of the Dorham records. “Here is reason for funny feeling,” he said, and extracted a single record. “Una Mas. Blue Note, 1963. Excellent condition.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Little Red.

  But the record in Mr. Yoshi’s right hand was not the Japanese reissue. The Japanese Gentleman was holding, in a state akin to reverence, exactly what he had said it was, the original Blue Note issue from 1963, in immaculate condition.

  “Huh!” said Little Red.

  “Must look,” said Mr. Yoshi, and slid the record from its sleeve. No less than his shoes, the grooved black vinyl shone.

  “You try to keep this one for yourself,” Mr. Yoshi teased. “Suppose I give you five hundred dollars, would you sell?”

  “Uh, sure,” said Little Red.

  “What else you hiding here?” asked Mr. Yoshi, more to the intoxicating shelves than to Little Red. He picked his way along, flicking his fingers on the spines. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Not bad. Uh-oh, very bad. Poor, poor condition. Should throw out, no good anymore to listen.”

  Little Red said he would think about it.

  “I have funny feeling again.” Mr. Yoshi stiffened his spine and glared at the spines of the records. “Oh yes, very funny feeling.”

  Little Red came closer.

  “Something here.”

  The Japanese Gentleman leaned forward and pushed two B– Sonny Clark Trio records on Savoy as far apart as they would go, about a quarter of an inch. A collector’s instincts are not those of an ordinary man. He twitched out the Sonny Clark Trio records and passed them to Little Red without turning his head. His hand slid into the widened gap, his head moved nearer. “Aha.”

  Very gently, Mr. Yoshi pulled out his arm from between the records. A fine layer of dust darkened his white, elegant cuff. When his hand cleared the shelf, it brought into view two LPs which had been shoved into an opening once occupied by John Elder’s long-departed reel-to-reel tape recorder. On the albums’ identical covers, staggered red, blue, green, and yellow bars formed keyboard patterns. The Sonny Clark Trio, Blue Note, 1957, still in their plastic wrappers.

  “You hide, I find,” said the Japanese Gentleman. “This the Sonny Clark mother lode!”

  “Sure looks like it,” said dumbfounded Little Red.

  “All three records, I give two thousand dollars. Right now. In cash.”

  “Talked me into it,” said Little Red, and the Japanese Gentleman counted out two months’ rent in new, sequentially numbered $100 bills and pressed them into his host’s waiting hand. Little Red threw in a plastic LP carrier that looked a bit like a briefcase, and Dr. Yoshi left beaming.

  After the departure of the Japanese Gentleman, Little Red remembered the wad of bills remaining in his guest’s wallet after the removal of twenty hundreds and realized that he could have asked for and received another ten.

  Don’t be greedy, he told himself. Be grateful.

  2. The Miracle of the Weeping Child

  Late on a winter night, Little Red emerged from stuporous slumber and observed that he was fully dressed and seated at his command post in the freezing semidarkness. Across the room, the twinkling screen displayed in black and white a fly-like Louis Jourdan scaling down the facade of a hideous castle. (He had thought to enjoy the BBC’s ’70s Dracula as a reward for long hours of filing.) By the dim lamplight he saw that the time was 3:25. He had been asleep for about an hour and a half. His arms ached from the evening’s labor; the emptiness in his stomach reminded him that he had failed to eat anything during the course of the busy day. Little Red’s hands and feet were painfully cold. He reached down for the plaid blanket strewn at the left-hand side of his recliner. Even in his state of mild befuddlement, Little Red wondered what had pulled him so urgently into wakefulness.

  How many days had passed without the refreshment of sleep? Two? Three? When deprived so long of sleep, the rebelling body and mind yield to phantoms. Elements of the invisible world take on untrustworthy form and weight, and their shapes speak in profoundly ambiguous voices. Little Red had been in this condition many times before; now he wished only to return to the realm from which he had been torn.

  A push on the lever tilted the back of the chair to an angle conducive to slumber. Little Red draped the blanket over his legs and drew its upper portion high upon his chest.

  Faintly but clearly, from somewhere in his apartment came the sound of a child weeping in either pain or despair. As soon as Little Red heard the sound, he knew that this was what had awakened him: a dream had rippled and broken beneath its pressure. He had been pulled upward, drawn up into the cold.

  It came again, this time it seemed from the kitchen: a hiccup of tears, a muffled sob.

  “
Anybody there?” asked Little Red in a blurry voice. Wearily, he turned his head toward the kitchen and peered at the nothing he had expected to see. Of course no distraught child sat weeping in his kitchen. Little Red supposed that it had been two or three years since he had even seen a child.

  He dropped his head back into the pillowy comfort of the recliner and heard it again—the cry of a child in misery. This time it seemed not to come from the kitchen but from the opposite end of his apartment, either the bathroom or the front room that served as storage shed and bedroom. Although Little Red understood that the sound was a hallucination and the child did not exist, that the sound should seem to emanate from the bedroom disturbed him greatly. He kept his bedroom to himself. Only in extreme cases had he allowed a visitor entrance to this most private of his chambers.

  He closed his eyes, but the sound continued. False, false perception! He refused to be persuaded. There was no child; the misery was his own, and it derived from exhaustion. Little Red nearly arose from his command post to unplug his telephone, but his body declined to cooperate.

  The child fell silent. Relieved, Little Red again closed his eyes and folded his hands beneath the rough warmth of the woolen blanket. A delightful rubbery sensation overtook the length of his body, and his mind lurched toward a dream. A series of sharp cries burst like tracers within his skull, startling him back into wakefulness.

  Little Red cursed and raised his head. He heard another flaring outcry, then another, and the sound subsided back into pathetic weeping. “Go to sleep!” he yelled, and at that moment realized what had happened: a woman, not a child, was standing distressed on the sidewalk outside his big front window, crying loudly enough to be audible deep within. A woman sobbing on West Fifty-fifth Street at 3:30 in the morning, no remedy existed for a situation like that. He could do nothing but wait for her to leave. An offer of assistance or support would earn only rebuff, vituperation, insults, and the threat of criminal charges. Nothing could be done, Little Red advised himself. Leave well enough alone, stay out. He shut his eyes and waited for quiet. At least he had identified the problem, and sooner or later the problem would take care of itself. Tired as he was, he thought he might fall asleep before the poor creature moved on. He might, yes, for he felt the gravity of approaching unconsciousness slip into his body’s empty spaces despite the piteous noises floating through his window.