The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “Nothing,” she said.

  Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

  She didn’t really care about getting to the bottom of things. She didn’t care about the mystery. She wasn’t even protecting her good name. She was protecting that room.

  “She’s proper pissed,” Mudd-Gaddis said.

  “I’ve never even seen the room,” Lydia Conscience said.

  “Neither have I,” said Rena Morgan.

  Noah and Tony hadn’t. Nor had Janet Order. Benny, of course, couldn’t wait to get back there but knew there would be little point if anyone else came along.

  They turned to Benny. He was the oldest. He had the Swiss Army knife that could get them in.

  “It’d be breaking and entering,” Benny said.

  “But not for the first time,” Rena Morgan said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Rena said, “that by now you’re so practiced all the risk is removed. It isn’t as if it were anything stealthy.”

  “Anything furtive,” Lydia Conscience said.

  “Clandestine,” said Janet Order.

  “Anything hugger-mugger.”

  “Hole-and-corner.”

  Benny Maxine looked from one girl to the other. “What’s going on?” he asked. If they had told him “sorority” he wouldn’t have known what they meant. They wouldn’t themselves. They were friends now, close as they’d been that day on the island, closer than their mortality could take them. (Closer than Tony and Noah, who slept in the intensive care ward together and made sure they sat next to each other at every meal and on all the rides. Who regarded each other as best friends. Closer than that.)

  “What could be in there?” Lydia Conscience said.

  “Something important,” Janet Order said.

  “Do you think she has a lover?” asked Rena Morgan.

  “A lover? Why would she have a lover?” Benny said angrily. “What do you mean do you think she has a lover?”

  “That maybe she’s in love,” Rena said.

  “She’s not in love,” Benny said.

  “How would you know what people are?” Rena said.

  “Come on,” Benny said. “She’s not in love.”

  “What’s in that room?”

  “Take us. Please? Do let’s go see.”

  “Come on, Benny.”

  “Please.”

  “It’s crazy,” he said.

  “We’ve been on all the other rides.”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  “She’s proper pissed, Ben.”

  “There’s nothing there,” he said again.

  Though of course there was. Her human geography. At least his memory of it. The sexual topography of those elliptical hollows, the two dark shadows, those twin stained darning eggs in her ass. At least there’d be the bedspread on which she’d lain.

  So if he agreed to take them it was to honor the memory of those delicious relics.

  7

  They went at night.

  They didn’t tell anyone where they were going and didn’t take the trouble to work out elaborate alibis. What happened was they simply managed to peel off individually from their respective groups. They’d handled themselves, Noah suggested, rather like flying aces in an aerobatic squadron. When one of them left, the ones who remained took up the slack and made just that much more noise, that much more fuss, neither adding nor detracting one whit from the general collective level of demand that any seven terminally ill children might put up under a similar set of dream holiday conditions. And really, when you came to think of it, it was quite a performance, one of the best-yet illusions in the magical kingdom. They weren’t missed until after they were missing.

  Any one of them could have told you straight off about 822’s appeal. As soon as they saw it, it became for them what it was supposed to have been for Miss Cottle: a hidey-hole, a sort of clubhouse. Perhaps this was one of the reasons they were so neat. They managed to lie about the room, to fill its three chairs—four if you counted Mudd-Gaddis’s wheelchair—and queen-sized bed—at once the girls had taken it for their own—and even—the boys—put their feet up on the wide round table, to use, in fact, all the long, deep olive oblong room with its dark modern furniture without sullying the least of its pristine from-the-hands- of-housekeeping appearance. There were tricks. Rena Morgan directed the fellows to shut flush each drawer in the bed tables, each louvered drawer in the dresser. Lydia Conscience told them they must keep the sound off if they turned on the TV. And Janet Order, their third expert in camouflage, suggested that all the advertising cards be removed from the top of the trimline TV and hidden away, that they untangle the cord on the telephone and draw the patternless brown drapes.

  So they sat, lay about in this curious rowdy tidiness—well, they were dying—and trim, discounted cleanliness and order. Very much at home. Very much at ease. They might have been snug and dry in a treehouse in rain. They watched the soundless images on TV as if they were logs on a hearth.

  Each felt restored, returned to some precious condition of privacy they’d almost forgotten.

  “When do you think they’ll think to look for us here?” one of them asked at last.

  “They’ve already thought it,” Janet Order said.

  “Too right,” said Benny.

  “Oh,” said Rena Morgan, “then why haven’t they caught us?”

  “Because they’re embarrassed,” Lydia said.

  “Embarrassed.”

  “Well, they are,” Benny Maxine said.

  “Sure,” Rena said. “I suppose they’re afraid they’ll bust in and catch us out in some big orgy.”

  “That’s not what they think,” Tony Word said.

  “You know a lot about it.”

  “Rena, it’s not.”

  “No,” Noah Cloth said, “they’re embarrassed for Miss Cottle.”

  “Or scared of her,” Benny said.

  “Because she lowered the boom on them.”

  “The room boom.”

  “Probably they’ll call first.”

  “No,” Rena said, “they’ll never be able to get the number out of the hotel switchboard. Isn’t that right, Benny? They don’t give out unpublished numbers? Isn’t that what you said?”

  “For God’s sake, Rena,” Janet Order said, “once they have the room number they have the phone number too.”

  “Little old daftie me,” Rena Morgan said.

  “They won’t expect us to answer,” Benny said, “but probably they will call first. Give us time to clear out.”

  “Of course we mustn’t answer,” Rena said, glaring at Janet. “What, and tangle the phone cord?”

  “Ladies!” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said.

  Rena patted the bedspread beside her. “Want to come up here, Noah, and rest by my side? There’s acres of room. Noah? Noey?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What about you, Tony? Tonah?”

  “Of course maybe they won’t realize most of us have figured it out and they’ll expect us to answer,” Lydia Conscience said. “I mean, maybe our friends haven’t figured it out themselves. Or maybe they’re just not the ladies and gentlemen you give them credit for, Ben.”

  “Maybe,” Benny said. “I don’t think we can take the chance. If the phone rings we scarper.”

  “I agree with Benny,” Rena Morgan said. She looked around the clubhouse. “Shall we put it to a vote? Who’ll make a motion?”

  “Rena, for Christ’s sake,” Janet Order said.

  “What is this, Rena?” Lydia asked.

  “Well what?” Rena shot back. “Isn’t this our all-purpose, syndicalist, council-in-the-treehouse synod and social club? Aren’t we supposed to make motions? How do we occupy ourselves when we’re finished with old business? Or is the only thing on our plate what to do if the phone rings?”

  “Rena’s got a bug up her ass.”

  “Ladies!”

  Benny Maxine punched off the t
elevision. “Who’s up for a ghost story?”

  “A ghost story?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “I love a good ghost story.”

  “So do I.”

  “Lots of gore.”

  “Gobs of guts hanging about, decorating the room like strings of popcorn.”

  “Moans. Howls of pain.”

  “I love a good ghost story.”

  “Takes me mind off things.”

  “Who’ll go first?”

  “Benny.”

  “It was his idea.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “You go first, Ben?”

  “How do I know you won’t cry?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Suppose it’s so terrible you can’t help yourself?”

  “I won’t cry.”

  “You give me a forfeit if you do?”

  “What forfeit?”

  “Your money?”

  “Benny!”

  “You know what money means to Noah.”

  “I’m only trying to make it interesting. I’m trying to make it interesting for us all. You bet too. Bet me my ghost story can’t make him cry.”

  “Wait a minute,” Noah said. “What do I get if it doesn’t? What do you forfeit?”

  Maxine considered. “Forty dollars,” he said. “And I’ll lay you two-to-one odds.”

  “Noah?”

  “Go ahead,” Noah said, “he can’t do it.”

  “They laid their bets down and Benny began.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was this lad name of Noah Cloth—”

  “Benny!”

  “—lad name of Noah Cloth. Now Noah was a fine little fellow in all respects save one. He was even quite properly named, Noah was, for he had a disease and ripped real easy. Easy as cloth! The disease was called osteosarcoma, a deadly cancer, and it was the single most common bone tumor in children. There was only one way to deal with it, and that was to amputate. Wherever it showed up, that’s where Noah’s doctors had to cut. If it showed up in a finger they would chop off the finger; if it showed up in a leg the leg would come off.”

  “No fair.”

  “No fair?”

  “No, no fair. You said a ghost story.”

  “What’s no fair? He dies,” Benny argued reasonably. “I kill him, he dies. The bone cancer gets him. He dies. He dies and comes back. He appears to his poor grieving parents, his sorrowful mum, his heartbusted dad.” He glanced over at Noah to gauge the boy’s reaction. The kid was chewing his lips, but Benny couldn’t tell whether he was on the verge of tears or laughter. “It’s not too late to back out,” he said. “You want to back out?” The boy shook his head. Benny continued his tale.

  “Though the cancer took a long time to tear through Cloth, Noah wasn’t even into his teens when he passed. When he finally died there almost wasn’t enough left of him to put in the ground. I mean, he was that cut up. All they could put together for his little casket—from its size you’d think they were burying a small dog—were the pieces of his face and head they hadn’t had to saw on yet: some of his jawbone, the long bone that supports his nose, the bony socket of his left eye like the mounting for a missing jewel, pieces of skull like bits of pottery. And the remains of his diseased frame all wired up like the dinosaur in the museum. There was an elbow like a patch on a jacket. There was some shin, a fragment of ankle, maybe a sixth of his spine. There was his pelvis all eaten away and looking like a hive and, curiously, most of the toes on his right foot.”

  Benny Maxine looked sharply at Noah Cloth. It wasn’t pleasant what he had to do next, but his honor as a gambler was at stake. Still, if the kid had shown him only the merest sign of submission he would have called it off. He stared at Noah. It wasn’t laughter or tears that struggled for supremacy. Terror sat in his face like a tic.

  Benny took a deep breath, rose from the chair in which he’d been sitting, and slowly paced along the wall as he spoke.

  “Noah Cloth died on an operating table in a hospital in Surrey on the Tuesday following his twelfth birthday.”

  The children gasped and Benny Maxine went on.

  “The undertakers had to work on him harder than ever the surgeons did just to make him acceptable for Christian burial. They did him with wax and with wire, working from the photographs of infants as their model. They wrapped him in a shroud and, obedient to the wishes of Mr. and Mrs. Cloth, buried him at midnight in an unmarked grave away from the sight of men. No one was permitted to come to the funeral. Even the Cloths stayed away.

  “His cerements decayed in the damp grave. The wax that held him together dissolved and returned to the earth. The wires that ran through what was left of his bones rusted and became a part of the generalized tetanus of the world, and Noah Cloth was reduced, shrunken, boiled down, distilled into a sort of pointless dice. He was no longer, if he ever had been, a part of the respectable dead. Terminally ill from the day he was born, chipped away at and chipped away at by disease, nickel-and- dimed by the scalpels and hacksaws of his doctors, he was as unfit for the grave as he was for the world, and his spirit, caged now in that scant handful of spared, untouched bone like the undiscarded remnant marble of the sculptor’s intention, rose up from the vast lake of the dead and returned one night to his parents’ flat, there to bury itself in the bed he’d slept in as a boy, in the small room which, when he’d not been in hospital, had been his grave in life!

  “It was Mrs. Cloth who first heard the macabre rattle of his bones. She was in bed and very frightened and tried to rouse her husband, for the queer click sounds that Noah made in death were not unlike the sounds her boy had made in life. She shook him and shook him but he would not rouse. ‘Husband,’ she hissed in his ear, ‘husband, wake up! There are noises coming from Noah’s room!’ But his son’s life and his son’s death had taken so much from the poor man that he slept as one dead himself. So Mrs. Cloth got out of bed and followed the queer chattering sounds like the frozen blood-barren noises of men exposed to the cold.

  “She reached her son’s room and snapped on the light.”

  Benny paused, his back against the wall, studying Noah. Noah watched him, not daring to breathe. “Noah?” Benny called in a perfect rendition of a ruined mother’s cracked old voice. “Noah, is that you?” And seemed in very fright and weakness to swoon, his back and neck buckling, in that precise instant catching the master switch that controlled the electricity in the room and with one smart swift convulsion plunged 822 into total darkness.

  Here is what happened.

  Janet Order and Lydia Conscience screamed.

  Benny Maxine got his cry out of Noah Cloth.

  Tony Word bit his tongue and wondered if he’d infected himself.

  Charles Mudd-Gaddis thought for a moment that he had fallen asleep.

  Rena Morgan caught her breath and marveled at Benny Maxine’s timing.

  Mickey Mouse materialized on the ceiling in full color.

  Pluto stood behind the Mouse’s shoulder staring down at the children.

  Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

  In complete darkness—the tightly drawn drapes, the lightproof rubberized curtains behind them, the room’s somber-toned, dark-olive furniture, the plastic cards removed from the top of the television, the very thickness and density of the children themselves—the hidey-hole functioned exactly like a sort of camera obscura.

  Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

  The protective peephole in the door through which guests could observe their callers before admitting them had, in 822, been inadvertently reversed, installed in concave rather than convex relation to a guest’s eye (not only a reasonable explanation, but a positively scientific one), the glazed, grommetlike eyepiece turned into a sort of light-collecting lens.

  Everything.

  In a normal camera obscura the image would have been projected onto a facing surface, the patternless brown drapes. That’s what should
have happened in 822. So why the ceiling? Because it was a room in a major hotel catering to guests not only from all over the country but from all over the world, to guests of different social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, to smokers and nonsmokers, to people who lit votive candles, to romantics on their first honeymoons or even on their second or third, to men and women not on honeymoons at all but quite as romantic as the just-marrieds, who took their meals from room-service carts by the light of flickering candles, to adolescents and a range of the mystic-inclined who would not live in an unmediated environment and burned incense at the altar of their senses. So, in a way, Mickey and Pluto were on the ceiling rather than on the drapes because of the fire regulations and the insurance premiums, the thin layer of slightly glossy fire retardant on the drapes, which, just out of plumb from vertical true, canted their images down onto the retardant-soaked rug, which bounced the light off the floor and refracted it onto the ceiling. That’s why.

  All this happening too quickly to account for. Everything happening too quickly to account for. The children squealing, the girls and the boys, scurrying for cover, almost knocking Mudd-Gaddis out of his wheelchair in the ensuing melee. Holding their hands over their heads for protection, the way, one imagines, their remote ancestors might have responded to comets in the sky, portents.

  “Jesus!” they screamed.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Help!”

  Benny Maxine, no less frightened than the others (indeed, if anything, more so; in their wild, blind wake, brushed by their dark stampede, his tender, battered organs touched, rubbed, pushed, and pained by the adiabatic conflagrancies of their blacked-out skirmishes), wheeled about, found the wall switch, and fumbled light into the room.

  Mickey and Pluto disappeared at once and, seconds later, there was a loud knock on the door.

  “It’s them,” Lydia said. “They didn’t call after all.”

  “Hah!” Rena Morgan said.

  “Well, we’d best get it over with,” Benny said, and opened the door.

  The Mouse and the Dog were standing there.

  “Hi, kids,” said Mickey Mouse in his high clear voice like a reed instrument, like music toward the top of a clarinet. “We’re the good guys. We’re”—he raised his strange hand, like a fielder’s mitt with its four stump digits, against the side of his fixed grin—“these Moonies, sort of. But wholesome. Really, kids. Wholesome. I think so, anyway. Forty-eight highway, thirty-two city. Your mileage may vary. It probably does.”