“I have heard men grow pale when they hear of Tom Requiem’s reputation as a great fighter, and tender-hearted women blush when they hear stories of his prowess as a lover, but when we come to inquire as to where these stories originate what do we find? Why, that they have come from the lips of the great lover himself. He is a liar, born and bred, a man who likes nothing better than to weave fabrications and fantastications, and make the world his fool by having us believe them! This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will prove today, as I uncover his crimes and deceits. By the time I am done telling you the truth about Thomas Absalom Requiem you will find very little to admire about him, I’ll wager, and much to hold in the profoundest contempt.”
Prosecutors are not always good at doing as they promise they’ll do, but this one was an exception. By the time the lengthy trial was over, Tom Requiem’s many reputations were in tatters. His female conquests had come into the witness box and given lists of his inadequacies, while those he had reputedly fought against in human combat told of his street-dog tricks.
“There you have it then,” said the prosecutor. “Tom Requiem is a cheat, a philanderer and a murderer. He may have an innocent look on his face right now, but I beg you—be not deceived!—he is fully deserving of the hangman’s noose.”
The Jury agreed, and the judge declared the next day that Tom Requiem would be hanged by the neck until dead. And God have mercy on his soul.
That night, well after midnight, Tom had a visitor. He introduced himself as Joshua Kemp. He was to be Tom’s hangman.
“I will be merciful,” Kemp said, “for I see no purpose in prolonging a man’s agony.” He drew closer to Tom as he spoke and glanced back over his shoulder to be certain that nobody was listening at the door. “But,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Should you find by some wild chance that I did not complete tomorrow’s business—”
“What are you saying?”
“Keep your voice down and listen. There are those parties who would like to see you preserved from so short a life.”
“Well, well,” said Tom. “Not that I’m not grateful an’ all, but why would anybody work to save my sorry neck from the noose?”
Kemp tugged at the collar of his shirt, as though this subject was growing a little too uncomfortable for him. “Better I don’t talk about that,” he said. “I just came here to tell you to take courage and for God’s sake, play dead. You may be buried, but you’ll be dug up again. That’s a promise.”
“Buried... alive?” Tom Requiem murmured.
“That’s the word to keep remembering,” the hangman said. “Alive. Alive.”
“Oh, I’ll remember,” Tom replied.
So the next day, with his head shorn of its shiny locks and his chest shaved clean, Tom Requiem was taken to the gallows, where a huge crowd waited to see judgment done. Despite his conversation with Kemp of the previous night, he did not feel much reassured. He watched the hangman’s face—right up until the moment when the burlap sack was put over his head—searching for some sign, however small, of reassurance. A wink, a tiny smile. But there was nothing but sweat on Kemp’s face. Then the bag came down like a black curtain, and Tom heard himself breathing hard in darkness. The murmur of the crowd receded to near silence. The priest came to the end of his prayer. There was clatter, and a terrible emptiness beneath his feet. Then he fell, down and down, and the darkness became a blaze of white, so bright that it burned all his thoughts away.
What happened then was all fragments, coming and going. He saw faces, looking down at him, contemptuous faces, laughing faces. He saw a doctor come and give him a cursory glance (a doctor, it should be said, with a most peculiar look in his eyes, as though there were many fires burning in his head) and then apparently dismissing him as a dead thing; as worthless. All that was easy enough to take. What followed was not. What followed was the stuff of nightmares, and in that tiny place in his head where Tom Requiem was still alive he was a tiny ball of fear. To see the coffin sides rising around him as was put in that plain wooden box! To see the lid slid into place, eclipsing the last of the light, until there was nothing, nothing, nothing to see but darkness! To hear the wood creak around him as the coffin was carried to the grave, and the sound of the digging, and the raw rasp of the ropes as they were hauled beneath the box to drop it down into the grave! And finally—oh worst of all, the very worst!—the sound of the earth rattling down onto the lid of the coffin, becoming more and more muffled as the grave filled up, until there was no sound at all. Nothing!
It had all been a terrible trick, he began to think. This was his enemy’s way of revenging themselves on him. Death hadn’t been enough. They’d wanted to try him by hope, leaving him alive in the grave, knowing that eventually he would lose his sanity.
He could feel it slipping away, moment by moment, heart-beat by heart-beat. There he had nothing to pray to in this darkness. No God that he believed in. No loving Virgin Mother who would have forgiven him his trespasses. He was beyond all help.
Or was he?
What was that sound in the earth?
Somebody digging, was it?
Did he dare believe that after all somebody was going to come and save him from this place of torments? Or was it just his crazed mind playing tricks on him? Yes, that it was! It was just one last proof of his insanity, because, listen, listen, the sound wasn’t even coming from above, it was coming from below!
Ridiculous. How could anybody be digging upwards from below?
And yet…and yet….
The more he listened, the more he seemed to hear the sound of shovels cutting through dirt, and voices even, the voices of the diggers, getting louder as they approached.
Finally, he heard a spade strike against the board beneath him. The coffin reverberated. He wanted to weep with relief. He was going to be saved! The question remained as to what manner of creature would dig a man out of his grave from below, but frankly he didn’t much care: a savior was a savior, whatever shape it came in, and from whatever direction.
Now he felt hands on the coffin from all sides and people talking all around. He couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, but some of them were perhaps giving orders, for a few seconds later several powerful instruments (perhaps crowbars) were tearing at the underside of his coffin. Light broke through, yellow light, and finally the bottom of the coffin was removed completely, and he dropped into the arms of those who had worked to save him.
There were three of them: small, quick-eyed creatures with painted faces. They introduced themselves: Clovio, Heeler and Bleb.
But it wasn’t the diggers who claimed most of Tom Requiem’s attention, it was their master. He knew the man, though not his name. This was the fellow whom Tom had presumed to be a doctor, who had briefly examined him before incarceration. No wonder he had spotted no sign of life in the hanged man. He’d been in the plot all along.
His eyes burned brighter now, and when they fixed their gaze on “the dead man” Tom felt the rigidities of death fall away, and life flooded back into his body, from scalp to sole.
“Welcome,” said the Doctor. “No doubt you are surprised to see me down here.”
“Yeah. I guess I am,” Tom said. His voice was low from the constriction his wind-pipe had lately taken, but the Doctor had a quick cure for that.
“Drink this!” he said, handing a silver flask to Requiem.
Never one for half measures, Tom knocked back two full throatfuls of the liquor, which coursed through his cold body most pleasantly.
“We haven’t brought you down here into the Underland out of simple compassion, Tom,” the Doctor went on.
“No?”
“No, we have work for you to do. We will dress you in a costume befitting a shaman, and you will go out into the world to lead an Infernal Parade. The world has grown complacent, Tom; and fat with its own certainties. It’s time to send some fears into the hearts of men.”
Tom thought of the crowd that had assembled in
such howling numbers to see him hanged by the neck until dead.
“It will be my pleasure,” he said. “Where do I begin?”
LITTLE RED’S TANGO
By Peter Straub
Little Red Perceived as a Mystery
What a mystery is Little Red! How he sustains himself, how he lives, how he gets through his days, what passes through his mind as he endures that extraordinary journey…. Is not mystery precisely that which does not yield, does not give access?
Little Red, His Wife, His Parents, His Brothers
Little is known of the woman he married. Little Red seldom speaks of her, except now and then to say, “My wife was half-Sicilian” or “All you have to know about my wife is that she was half-Sicilian.” Some have speculated, though not in the presence of Little Red, that the long-vanished wife was no more than a fictional or mythic character created to lend solidity to his otherwise amorphous history. Years have been lost. Decades have been lost. (In a sense, an entire life has been lost; some might say Little Red’s.) The existence of a wife, even an anonymous one, does lend a semblance of structure to the lost years.
Half of her was Sicilian; the other half may have been Irish. “People like that you don’t mess with,” says Little Red. “Even when you mess with them, you don’t mess with them, know what I mean?”
The parents are likewise anonymous, though no one has ever speculated that they may have been fictional or mythic. Even anonymous parents must be of flesh and blood. Since Little Red has mentioned, in his flat, dry Long Island accent, a term in the Uniondale High School jazz ensemble, we can assume that for a substantial period his family resided in Uniondale, Long Island. There were, apparently, two brothers, both older. The three boys grew up in circumstances modest but otherwise unspecified. A lunch counter, a diner, a small mom-and-pop grocery may have been in the picture. Some connection with food, with nourishment.
Little Red’s long years spent waiting on tables, his decades as a “waiter,” continue this nourishment-theme, which eventually becomes inseparable from the very conception of Little Red’s existence. In at least one important way, nourishment lies at the heart of the mystery. Most good mysteries are rooted in the question of nourishment. As concepts, nourishment and sacrifice walk hand in hand, like old friends everywhere. Think of Judy Garland. The wedding at Cana. Think of the fish grilled at night on the Galilean shore. A fire, the fish in the simple pan, the flickeringly illuminated men.
The brothers have not passed through the record entirely unremarked, nor are they anonymous. In the blurry comet-trail of Little Red’s history, the brothers exist as sparks, embers, brief coruscations. Blind, unknowing, they shared his early life, the life of Uniondale. They were, categorically, brothers, intent on their bellies, their toys, their cars and their neuroses, all of that, and attuned not at all to the little red-haired boy who stumbled wide-eyed in their wake. Kyle, the recluse; Ernie, the hopeless. These are the names spoken by Little Red. After graduation from high school, the recluse lived one town over with a much older woman until his aging parents bought a trailer and relocated to rural Georgia, whereupon he moved into a smaller trailer on the same lot. When his father died, Kyle sold the little trailer and settled in with his mother. The hopeless brother, Ernie, followed Kyle and parents to Georgia within six weeks of their departure from Suffolk County. He soon found both a custodial position in a local middle school and a girlfriend, whom he married before the year was out. Ernie’s weight, 285 pounds on his wedding day, ballooned to 350 soon after. No longer capable of fulfilling his custodial duties, he went on welfare. Kyle, though potentially a talented musician, experienced nausea and an abrupt surge in blood pressure at the thought of performing in public, so that source of income was forever closed to him. Fortunately, his only other talent, that of putting elderly women at their ease, served him well—his mother’s will left him her trailer and the sum of $40,000, twice the amount bequested to her other two sons.
We should note that, before Kyle’s windfall, Little Red periodically mailed him small sums of money—money he could ill-afford to give away—and that he did the same for brother Ernie, although Ernie’s most useful talent was that of attracting precisely the amount of money he needed at exactly the moment he needed it. While temporarily separated from his spouse, between subsistence-level jobs and cruelly hungry, Ernie waddled a-slouching past an abandoned warehouse, was tempted by the presence of a paper sack placed on the black leather passenger seat of an aubergine Lincoln Town Car, tested the door, found it open, snatched up the sack, and rushed Ernie-style into the cobweb-strewn shelter of the warehouse. An initial search of the bag revealed two foil-wrapped cheeseburgers, still warm. A deeper investigation uncovered an 8-ounce bottle of Poland Spring water and a green Clingfilm-covered brick comprised of $2,300 in new fifties and twenties.
Although Ernie described this coup in great detail to his youngest brother, he never considered, not for a moment, sharing the booty.
These people are his immediate family. Witnesses to the trials, joys, despairs, and breakthroughs of his childhood, they noticed nothing. Of the actualities of his life, they knew less than nothing, for what they imagined they knew was either peripheral or inaccurate. Kyle and Ernie mistook the tip for the iceberg. And deep within herself, their mother had chosen, when most she might have considered her youngest son’s life, to avert her eyes.
Little Red carries these people in his heart. He grieves for them; he forgives them everything.
What He Has Been
Over many years and in several cities, a waiter and a bartender; a bass player, briefly; a husband, a son, a nephew; a dweller in caves; an adept of certain magisterial substances; a friend most willing and devoted; a reader, chiefly of crime, horror, and science fiction; an investor and day trader; a dedicated watcher of cable television, especially the History, Discovery and Sci-Fi channels; an intimate of nightclubs, joints, dives, and after-hour shebeens, also of restaurants, cafes, and diners; a purveyor of secret knowledge; a photographer; a wavering candle-flame; a voice of conundrums; a figure of steadfast loyalty; an intermittent beacon; a path beaten through the undergrowth.
The Beatitudes of Little Red, I
Whatsoever can be repaid, should be repaid with kindness.
Whatsoever can be borrowed, should be borrowed modestly.
Tip extravagantly, for they need the money more than you do.
You can never go wrong by thinking of God as Louis Armstrong.
Those who swing, should swing some more.
Something always comes along. It really does.
Cleanliness is fine, as far as it goes.
Remember—even when you are alone, you’re in the middle of a party.
The blues ain’t nothin’ but a feeling, but what a feeling.
What goes up sometimes just keeps right on going.
Try to eat solid food at least once a day.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with television.
Anybody who thinks he sees everything around him isn’t looking.
When you get your crib the way you like it, stay there.
Order can be created in even the smallest things, but that doesn’t mean you have to create it.
Clothes are for sleeping in, too. The same goes for chairs.
Everyone makes mistakes, including deities and higher powers.
Avoid the powerful, for they will undoubtedly try to hurt you.
Doing one right thing in the course of a day is good enough.
Stick to beer, mainly.
Pay attention to musicians.
Accept your imperfections, for they can bring you to Paradise.
No one should ever feel guilty about fantasies, no matter how shameful they may be, for a thought is not a deed.
Sooner or later, jazz music will tell you everything you need to know.
There is no significant difference between night and day.
Immediately after death, human beings become so beautiful you can har
dly bear to look at them.
To one extent or another, all children are telepathic.
If you want to sleep, sleep. Simple as that.
Do your absolute best to avoid saying bad things about people, especially those you dislike.
In the long run, grasshoppers and ants all wind up in the same place.
Little Red, His Appearance
When you meet Little Red for the first time, what do you see?
He will be standing in the doorway of his ground-floor apartment on West 55th Street, glancing to one side and backing away to give you entry. The atmosphere, the tone created by these gestures, will be welcoming and gracious in an old-fashioned, even almost rural, manner.
He will be wearing jeans and an old T-shirt, or a worn gray bathrobe, or a chain-store woolen sweater and black trousers. Black, rubber-soled Chinese slippers purchased from a sidewalk vendor will cover his narrow feet. Very slightly, his high, pale forehead will bulge forward beneath his long red hair, which will have been pulled back from his face and fastened into a ragged ponytail by means of a twisted rubber band. An untrimmed beard, curled at the bottom like a giant ruff, will cover much of his face. When he speaks, the small, discolored pegs of his teeth will flicker beneath the fringe of his mustache.
Little Red will strike you as gaunt, in fact nearly haggard. He will seem detached from the world beyond the entrance of his apartment building. West 55th Street, and the rest of Manhattan will fade from consciousness as you step through the door and move past your host, who, still gazing to one side, will be gesturing toward the empty chair separated from his recliner by a small, round, marble-topped table or nightstand heaped with paperback books, pads of paper, ballpoint pens upright in a cup.
When first you enter Little Red’s domain, and every subsequent time thereafter, he will suggest dignity, solicitude, and pleasure in the fact of your company. Little Red admits only those from whom he can be assured of at least some degree of acknowledgement of that which they will receive from him. People who have proven themselves indifferent to the rewards of Little Red’s hospitality are forbidden return, no matter how many times they press his buzzer or rap a quarter against his big, dusty front window. He can tell them by their buzzes, their rings, their raps: He knows the identities of most of his callers well before he glances down the corridor to find them standing before his building’s glass entrance. (Of course nearly all of Little Red’s visitors take the precaution of telephoning him before they venture to West 55th Street, both for the customary reason of confirming his availability and for one other reason, which shall be disclosed in good time.)
Mister October - Volume Two Page 2