by Peter Straub
Bill turned his back on the bed, swung his chair around, and plucked the newspaper from under his arm. After he had scanned the headlines without making much effort to take them in, habit led him to the obituaries on the last two pages of the financial section. As soon as he had folded the pages back, a photograph of a sly, mild face with a recessed chin and tiny spectacles lurking above an overgrown nose levitated up from the columns of newsprint. The headline announced CHARLES CHIPP TRAYNOR, POPULAR WAR HISTORIAN, TARRED BY SCANDAL.
Helplessly, Bill read the first paragraph of Chippie’s obituary. Four days past, this once-renowned historian whose career had been destroyed by charges of plagiarism and fraud had committed suicide by leaping from the window of his fifteenth-story apartment on the Upper West Side.
Four days ago? Bill thought. It seemed to him that was when Chippie Traynor had first appeared in the Salon. He dropped the paper, with the effect that Traynor’s fleshy nose and mild eyes peered up at him from the floor. The terrible little man seemed to be everywhere, despite having gone. He could sense Chippie Traynor floating outside his window like a small, inoffensive balloon from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Children would say, “Who’s that?” and their parents would look up, shield their eyes, shrug, and say, “I don’t know, hon. Wasn’t he in a Disney cartoon?” Only he was not in a Disney cartoon, and the children and their parents could not see him, and he wasn’t at all cute. One of his eyes had been injured. This Chippie Traynor, not the one that had given them a view of his backside in the Salon, hovered outside Bill Messenger’s window, whispering the wretched and insinuating secrets of the despised, the contemptible, the rejected and fallen from grace.
Bill turned from the window and took a single step into the nowhere that awaited him. He had nowhere to go, he knew, so nowhere had to be where he was going. It was probably going to be a lot like this place, only less comfortable. Much, much less comfortable. With nowhere to go, he reached out his hand and picked up the dull brown book lying at the foot of his bed. Bringing it toward his body felt like reeling in some monstrous fish that struggled against the line. There were faint water marks on the front cover, and it bore a faint, familiar smell. When he had it within reading distance, Bill turned the spine up and read the title and author’s name: In the Middle of the Trenches, by Charles Chipp Traynor. It was the book he had blurbed. Max Baccarat had published it, and Tony Flax had rhapsodized over it in the Sunday Times book review section. About a hundred pages from the end, a bookmark in the shape of a thin silver cord with a hook at one end protruded from the top of the book.
Bill opened the book at the place indicated, and the slender bookmark slithered downwards like a living thing. Then the hook caught the top of the pages, and its length hung shining and swaying over the bottom edge. No longer able to resist, Bill read some random sentences, then two long paragraphs. This section undoubtedly had been lifted from the oral histories, and it recounted an odd event in the life of a young man who, years before his induction into the Armed Forces, had come upon a strange house deep in the piney woods of East Texas and been so unsettled by what he had seen through its windows that he brought a rifle with him on his next visit. Bill realized that he had never read this part of the book. In fact, he had written his blurb after merely skimming through the first two chapters. He thought Max had read even less of the book than he had. In a hurry to meet his deadline, Tony Flax had probably read the first half.
At the end of his account, the former soldier said, “In the many times over the years when I thought about this incident, it always seemed to me that the man I shot was myself. It seemed my own eye I had destroyed, my own socket that bled.”
Uncollected Stories
Mallon the Guru
Near the end of what he later called his “developmental period,” the American guru Spencer Mallon spent four months traveling through India with his spiritual leader, Urdang, a fearsome German with a deceptively mild manner. In the third of these months, they were granted an audience with a yogi, a great holy man who lived in the village of Sankwal. However, an odd, unsettling thing happened as soon as Mallon and Urdang reached the outskirts of the village. A carrion crow plummeted out of the sky and landed, with an audible thump and a skirl of feathers, dead on the dusty ground immediately in front of them. Instantly, villagers began streaming toward them, whether because of the crow or because he and Urdang were fair-skinned strangers, Mallon did not know. He fought the uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by strangers gibbering away in a language he would never understand, and in the midst of this great difficulty tried to find the peace and balance he sometimes experienced during his almost daily, generally two-hour meditations.
An unclean foot with tuberous three-inch nails flipped aside the dead bird. The villagers drew closer, close enough to touch, and leaning in and jabbering with great intensity, urged them forward by tugging at their shirts and waistbands. They, or perhaps just he, Spencer Mallon, was being urged, importuned, begged to execute some unimaginable service. They wished him to perform some kind of task, but the task remained mysterious. The mystery became clearer only after a rickety hut seemed almost to materialize mirage-like from the barren scrap of land where it squatted. One of the men urging Mallon along yanked his sleeve more forcefully and implored him, with flapping, birdlike gestures, to go into the hut, evidently his, to enter it and see something—the man indicated the necessity for vision by jabbing a black fingernail at his protuberant right eye.
I have been chosen, Mallon thought. I, not Urdang, have been elected by these ignorant and suffering people.
Within the dim, hot enclosure, he was invited to gaze at a small child with huge, impassive eyes and limbs like twigs. The child appeared to be dying. Dark yellow crusts ringed its nostrils and its mouth.
Staring at Mallon, the trembling villager raised one of his own hands and brushed his fingertips gently against the boy’s enormous forehead. Then he waved Mallon closer to the child’s pallet.
“Don’t you get it?” Urdang said. “You’re supposed to touch the boy.”
Reluctantly, unsure of what he was actually being asked to do and fearful of contracting some hideous disease, Mallon lowered his extended fingers toward the skeletal head as if he were about to dip them into a pail of reeking fluid drawn from the communal cesspit.
Kid, he thought, I sure as hell hope we’re going to see a miracle cure.
At the moment of contact a tiny particle of energy, a radiant erg as quick and flowing as mercury, passed directly from his hand through the fragile wall of the boy’s skull.
In the midst of this extremely interesting phenomenon, the father collapsed to his knees and began to croon in gratitude.
“How do these people know about me?” he asked.
“The real question is, what do they think you did?” Urdang said. “And how do they think they know it? Once we have had our audience, I suggest we put on our skates.”
Urdang, Mallon realized, had no idea of what had just happened. It was the restoration of a cosmic balance: a bird died, and a child was saved. He had been the fulcrum between death and the restoration. A perfect Indian experience had been given to him. The great yogi would embrace him as he would a son, he would open his house and his ashram and welcome him as a student of unprecedented capabilities.
Proceeding down a narrow lane in the village proper, Mallon carelessly extended two fingers and ran them along a foot or two of the mud-plastered wall at his side. He had no plan, no purpose beyond just seeing what was going to happen, for he knew that in some fashion his touch would alter the universe. The results of his test were deeply gratifying: on the wall, the two lines traced by his fingers glowed a brilliant neon blue that brightened and intensified until it threatened to sear the eyes. The villagers spun around and waved their arms, releasing an ecstatic babble threaded with high-pitched cries of joy. Along with everybody else, Mallon had stopped moving to look at the marvelous, miraculous wall. An electrical buzz and hum
filled all the spaces within his body; he felt as though he could shoot sparks from his fingers.
I should touch that kid all over again, he thought. He’d zoom right up off the bed.
In seconds, the vibrant blue lines cooled, shrank, and faded back into the dull khaki of the wall. The villagers thrust forward, rubbed the wall, flattened themselves against it, spoke to it in whispers. Those who kissed the wall came away with mouths and noses painted white with dust. Only Mallon, and perhaps Urdang, had been chagrined to see the evidence of his magic vanish so quickly from the world.
The babbling crowd, not at all disappointed, clustered again around him and pushed him forward. Their filthy, black-nailed hands gave him many a fond pat and awed, stroking caress. Eventually they came to a high yellow wall and an iron gate. Urdang pushed himself through the crowd and opened the gate upon a long, lush flower garden. At the distant end of the garden stood a graceful terra-cotta building with a row of windows on both sides of its elaborately tiled front door. The dark heads of young women appeared in the windows. Giggling, the women retreated backward.
The villagers thrust Mallon and Urdang forward. The gates clanged behind them. Far away, an ox-cart creaked. Cattle lowed from behind the creamy-looking terra-cotta building.
I am in love with all of India! Mallon thought.
“Come nearer,” said a dry, penetrating voice.
A small man in a dhoti of dazzling white sat in the lotus position just in front of a fountain placed in the middle of the garden. A moment before, Mallon had noticed neither the man nor the fountain.
“I believe that you, sir, are Urdang,” the man said. “But who is your most peculiar follower?”
“His name is Spencer Mallon,” Urdang said. “But, Master, with all due respect, he is not peculiar.”
“This man is a peculiarity entire unto himself,” said the little man. “Please sit down.”
They sat before him, adjusting themselves into the lotus position as well as they could, Urdang easily and perfectly, Mallon less so. He considered it extremely likely that in some deeply positive way he actually was peculiar. Peculiarity of his kind amounted to a great distinction, as the Master understood and poor Urdang did not.
Before them, the great holy man contemplated them in a silence mysteriously shaped by the harsh angles and shining curves of his shaven head and hard, nutlike face. Mallon gathered from the quality of the silence that the yogi was after all not unreservedly pleased by the homage of their visit. Of course the difficult element had to be Urdang—the presence of Urdang in this sacred place. After something like nine or ten minutes, the yogi turned his head to one side and, speaking either to the flowers or the splashing fountain, ordered sweet tea and honey cakes. These delights were delivered by two of the dark-haired girls, who wore beautiful, highly colored saris and sandals with little bells on the straps.
“Is it true that when you came into our village, a carrion crow came toppling dead from the sky?” asked the holy man.
Urdang and Mallon nodded.
“That is a sign, Urdang. We must consider the meaning of this sign.”
“Let us do so, then,” Urdang said. “I believe the sign to be auspicious. That which eats death is itself devoured by it.”
“Yet death comes tumbling into our village.”
“Immediately afterward, this young man touched the forehead of a dying child and restored him to good health.”
“No one of this young man’s age and position can do this,” said the yogi. “Such a feat requires great holiness, but even great holiness is not sufficient. One must have spent decades in study and meditation.”
“And yet it happened. Death was banished.”
“Death is never banished, it merely travels elsewhere. Your student greatly distresses me.”
“Dear Master, as the villagers led us toward your house, this man I have brought to you extended one arm and—”
The yogi silenced him with a wave of the hand. “I am not concerned with such displays. Fireworks do not impress me. Yes, they indicate the presence of a gift, but of what use is this gift, to what purposes will it be turned?”
Mallon had touched a dying child, the Master said, yet had he restored it to health? Even if he had, was the healing truly his work? Mere belief could heal as successfully as other forces, temporarily. Was Mallon well schooled in the Sutras? How great was his knowledge of Buddhist teachings?
Urdang replied that Mallon was not a Buddhist.
“Then why have you come?”
Mallon spoke from his heart. “I come for your blessing, dear Master.”
“You cannot have my blessing. I ask for yours instead.” The holy man spoke as if to an ancient enemy.
“My blessing?” Mallon asked.
“Render it unto me as you did to the child.”
Confused and irritated, Mallon scooted forward and extended a hand. Almost, he wished to withhold his blessing as had the yogi, but he could not behave so childishly in front of Urdang. The holy man leaned forward and permitted his brow to be brushed. If any molten particle of energy flew from his hand into the yogi’s brainpan, Mallon did not feel its passage.
The Master’s face contracted, no mean trick, and for a moment he closed his eyes.
“Well?” Mallon said. Urdang gasped at his rudeness.
“It is very much as I thought,” said the Master, opening his eyes. “I cannot be responsible for your Spencer Mallon, and you must not request any more of me. I see it all very clearly. Already, this most peculiar, this most dangerously peculiar man has awakened disorder within our village. He must leave Sankwal immediately, and you who brought him here, Urdang, you must leave with him.”
“If that is your wish, Master,” Urdang said. “But perhaps—”
“No. No more. You would be wise to separate yourself from this student as soon as you can do so honorably. And as for you, young man…”
He turned his sorrowful eyes upon Mallon, and Mallon could feel his spirit hovering near, irate and fearful.
“I advise you to take great, great care in everything you do. But it would be wisest if you did nothing at all.”
“Master, why are you afraid of me?” Mallon asked. “I want only to love you.” In truth, he had wished to love the Master before he met him. Now, he wanted only to leave the village and its frightened, envious yogi far behind him. And, he realized, if Urdang wanted to leave him, that would be fine, too.
“I am grateful you do not,” the Master said. “You will go from my village now, both of you.”
When Urdang opened the gates, the lanes were empty. The villagers had fled back to their homes. The air darkened, and rain began to fall. Before they reached open ground, the earth had been churned to mud. A loud cry came from the hut of the poor man with the sick child, whether of joy or pain they could not say.
The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine
1997
“So, do we get lunch again today?” Ballard asked. They had reached the steaming, humid end of November.
“We got fucking lunch yesterday,” replied the naked woman splayed on the long table: knees bent, one hip elevated, one boneless-looking arm draped along the curves of her body, which despite its hidden scars appeared to be at least a decade younger than her face. “Why should today be different?”
After an outwardly privileged childhood polluted by parental misconduct, a superior education, and two failed marriages, Sandrine Loy had evolved into a rebellious, still-exploratory woman of forty-three. At present, her voice had a well-honed edge, as if she were explaining something to a person of questionable intelligence.
Two days before joining Sandrine on this river journey, Ballard had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday at a dinner in Hong Kong, one of the cities where he conducted his odd business. Sandrine had not been invited to the dinner and would not have attended if she had. The formal, ceremonious side of Ballard’s life, which he found so satisfying, interested her not at all.
Without in
any way adjusting the facts of the extraordinary body she had put on display, Sandrine lowered her eyes from the ceiling and examined him with a glance brimming with false curiosity and false innocence. The glance also contained a flicker of genuine irritation.
Abruptly and with vivid recall, Ballard found himself remembering the late afternoon in 1969 when, nine floors above Park Avenue, upon a carpet of almost unutterable richness in a room hung with paintings by Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder, he had stood with a rich scapegrace and client named Lauritzen Loy, his host, to greet Loy’s daughter on her return from another grueling day at Dalton School, then observed the sidelong, graceful, slightly miffed entrance of a fifteen-year-old girl in pigtails and a Jackson Brown sweatshirt two sizes too large, met her gray-green eyes, and felt the very shape of his universe alter in some drastic way, either expanding a thousand times or contracting to a pinpoint, he could not tell. The second their eyes met, the girl blushed, violently.
She hadn’t liked that, not at all.
“I didn’t say it was going to be different, and I don’t think it will.” He turned to look at her, making sure to meet her gaze before letting his eye travel down her neck, over her breasts, the bowl of her belly, the slope of her pubis, the length of her legs. “Are you in a more than ordinarily bad mood?”
“You’re snapping at me.”
Ballard sighed. “You gave me that look. You said, ‘Why should today be different?’ ”
“Have it your way, old man. But as a victory, it’s fucking pathetic. It’s hollow.”
She rolled onto her back and gave her body a firm little shake that settled it more securely onto the steel surface of the table. The metal, only slightly cooler than her skin, felt good against it. In this climate, nothing not on ice or in a freezer, not even a corpse, could ever truly get cold.