Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  There's more confusion. The little girl has come forward and taken hold of his pant leg.

  She's just standing there holding it, looking up at him. “Jeffrey,” she says, somewhat sadly, as if there is some secret, precious request she wishes to make but is afraid to give voice to.

  "We have to go sit down," Myrddin says, bending to her, speaking sweetly. "We have to do what Myrddin wants."

  Her small mouth opens wide, as if she's trying to yawn, and with pale eyes quite calm and staring she emits a screech, an ear-piercing, non-human shriek that brings everything to a stop. Myrddin/Buster steps back, with his amazement and his inebriate heart. Everyone gathers around the girl, who continues to scream, less piercing now, her hands fisted at her sides, those pale eyes closed tight.

  "What happened?" the man in the DAD cap wants to know. "Where the hell's the magic tricks?"

  "I told you, all I needed is a table."

  "What'd you say to her to make her cry?" DAD indicates the little girl, who is giving forth a series of broken, grief-stricken howls.

  "I want magic tricks," the birthday boy says, loud. "Where's the magic tricks?"

  "Perhaps if we moved the whole thing inside," the woman without a birthmark says, fingering her left ear and making a face.

  Use a Q-Tip, Myrddin thinks.

  The card table has somehow made its way to him, through the confusion and grief. DAD sets it down and opens it.

  "There," he says proudly, as if he has just split the atom.

  In the next moment, Myrddin realizes that someone's removed the little girl. Everything's relatively quiet again, though her cries are coming through the walls of one of the rooms inside the house. There are perhaps fifteen children, mostly seated before him, and five or six men and women behind them, or kneeling with them.

  "OK, now," DAD says. "Myrddin the Somewhat Terrific."

  "Hello, little boys and girls," Myrddin says, deciding that the table will have to suffice. "I'm happy to be here. Are you glad to see me?" A general uproar commences.

  "Well, good," he says. "Because just look what I have in my magic bag." And with a flourish he brings out the hat that he will release LeFey from. The bird is encased in a fold of shiny cloth, pulsing there. He can feel it. He rambles on, talking fast, or trying to, and when the time comes to reveal the bird, he almost flubs it. But Witch flaps his wings and makes enough of a commotion to distract even the adults, who applaud and urge the stunned children to applaud. "Isn't that wonderful," Myrddin hears. "Out of nowhere."

  "He had it hidden away," says the birthday boy, who has managed to temper his astonishment. He's the type who heaps scorn on those things he can’t understand, or own.

  "Now," Myrddin says, "for my next spell, I need a helper from the audience." He looks right at the birthday boy—round face, short nose, freckles. Bright red hair. Little green eyes. The whole countenance speaks of glutted appetites and sloth. This kid could be on the Roman coins, an emperor. Like Caligula without the whimsical wit. He's not used to being compelled to do anything, but he seems eager for a chance to get into the act. "How about you," Myrddin says to him.

  The others, led by their parents, cheer.

  The birthday boy gets to his feet and makes his way over the bodies of the other children to stand with Myrddin. In order for the trick to work, Myrddin must get everyone watching the birthday boy, and there's another star-covered, pointed hat he keeps in the bag for this purpose.

  "Now," he says to the boy, "since you're part of the show, you have to wear a costume." He produces the hat as if from behind the boy's ear. Another cheer goes up. He puts the hat on the boy's head and adjusts it, crouching down. The green eyes stare impassively at him; there's no hint of awe or fascination in them. "There we are," he says. "What a handsome, mysterious-looking fellow you are."

  The birthday boy takes off the hat and looks at it as if a large, mythical bird has just dropped a large, mythical turd on his head.

  Myrddin takes a deep breath. “We have to wear the hat to be onstage."

  "Ain't a stage," the boy says.

  Definitely an Einsteinian brain-trust here.

  "But," Myrddin says for the benefit of the adults. "Didn't you know that all the world's a stage?" He tries to put the hat on him again, but the boy moves from under his reach and slaps his hand away. "We have to wear the hat," Myrddin says, trying to control his anger. "We can't do the magic without our magic hats." He tries once more, and the boy waits until the hat is on, then simply removes it and holds it behind him, shying away when Myrddin tries to retrieve it. The noise of the others now sounds like the crowd at a prizefight; there's a contest going on, and they're enjoying it. "Give Myrddin the hat. We want magic, don't we?"

  "Do the magic," the boy demands.

  "Give me the hat."

  "I won't."

  Sometimes life for Myrddin is just too fun to endure.

  He looks around. There’s no support from the adults. Perhaps if he weren't a little tipsy; perhaps if he didn't feel ridiculous and sick at heart and forlorn, with his wedding cake and his odd mistaken romance, his loneliness, which he has always borne gracefully and with humor, and his general dismay; perhaps if he were to find it in himself to deny the sudden, overwhelming sense of the unearned affection given this lumpish, slovenly version of stupid complacent spoiled satiation standing before him—he might've simply gone on to the next trick.

  Instead, at precisely that moment when everyone seems to pause, he leans down and says, "Give me the hat, you little prick."

  The green eyes widen.

  The quiet is heavy with disbelief. Even the small children can tell that something's happened to change everything.

  "Myrddin has another trick," Buster says, loud, "where he makes the birthday boy expand like an ugly pimple and then pop like a balloon. It’s especially fun if he's a fat birthday boy."

  A stirring among the adults.

  "Especially if he's an ugly, offensive, grotesque slab of superfluous flesh like this one here."

  "Now just a minute," says DAD.

  "Give it up, you irritating post-Arthurian dipshit," Rodney says to the birthday boy, who drops the hat and then, seeming to remember that defiance is expected, makes a face. Sticks out his tongue.

  Myrddin is quick with his hands by training, and he grabs the tongue.

  "Awwwk," the boy says. "Aw-aw-aw."

  "Abracadabra." Rodney lets go and the boy falls backward onto the lap of one of the other children. More cries. "Whoops, time to sit down," says Myrddin/Buster. "Sorry you had to leave so soon."

  Very quickly, he's being forcibly removed. They're rougher than gangsters. They lift him, punch him, tear at his costume—even the women. Someone hits him with a spoon. The whole scene boils over onto the lawn, where someone has released Mordred from his case. He moves about wide-eyed, hopping between running children, evading them, as Myrddin the Befuddled and Put-Upon cannot evade the adults. He's being pummeled because he keeps trying to return for his rabbit. And the adults won't let him off the curb. "Okay," he says finally, collecting himself. He wants to let them know he's not like this all the time; wants to say it's circumstances, grief, personal pain hidden inside seeming brightness and cleverness. He's a man in love, humiliated, wrong about everything. He wants to tell them, but he can't speak for a moment, can't even quite catch his breath. He stands in the middle of the street, his ancient robe torn, his face bleeding, all his magic strewn everywhere. "I would at least like to collect my rabbit," he says, and is appalled at the absurd sound of it—its huge difference from what he intended to say. He straightens, pushes the grime from his face, adjusts the clown nose, and looks at them. "I would say that even though I wasn't as patient as I could've been, the adults have not comported themselves well here," he says.

  "Drunk," one of the women says.

  Almost everyone's chasing Mordred now. One of the older boys approaches, carrying LeFey's case. LeFey looks out the air hole, impervious, quiet as a bad idea
. And now one of the men, someone Myrddin hasn't noticed before, an older man clearly wearing a hairpiece, brings Mordred to him. "Bless you," Myrddin says, staring into the man's sleepy, deploring eyes.

  "I don't think we'll pay you," the man says. The others are filing back into the house, herding the children before them.

  Myrddin/Buster speaks to the man. 'The rabbit appears out of fire. By the way, have I mentioned that I don’t really belong here? I’m out of place, out of time—you know, in the midst of a Billy Pilgrim: Unstuck. Po-tweet”"

  The man nods. "Go home and sleep it off, asshole."

  "Right. Thank you. Compliments are always appreciated." He makes another unseen wave with his hand and changes the large letters of DAD to smaller letters that say: I AM A CONVICTED PORNOGRAPHER. IN CASE OF NUDITY, PLEASE LOAN ME A CAMERA.

  He puts Mordred in his compartment, stuffs everything in its place in the trunk. Then he gets in the car and drives away. Around the corner he stops, wipes off what he can of the makeup; it's as if he's trying to remove the stain of bad opinion and disapproval. Nothing feels any different. He drives to the suburban street where she lives with her parents, and by the time he gets there it's almost dark.

  The houses are set back in the trees. He sees lighted windows, hears music, the sound of children playing in the yards. He parks the car and gets out. A breezy April dusk. "I am Myrddin the Soft-Hearted," he says. "Hearken to me.” Then he sobs. He can't believe it. "Jeez," he says, "I’m a bit pathetic today, aren’t I?"

  He opens the back door of the car, leans in to get the cake. He'd forgot how heavy it is. Staggering with it, making his way along the sidewalk, intending to leave it on her doorstep, he has an inspiration. Hesitating only for the moment it takes to make sure there are no cars coming, he goes out and sets it down in the middle of the street. Part of the top sags from having bumped his shoulder as he pulled it off the back seat. The bride and groom are almost supine, one on top of the other—a precursor of pleasures yet to come. He straightens them, steps back and looks at it. In the dusky light it looks blue. It sags just right, with just the right angle expressing disappointment and sorrow. Yes, he thinks. This is the place for it. The aptness of it, sitting out like this, where anyone might come by and splatter it all over creation, makes him feel a faint sense of release, as if he were at the end of a story. Everything will be all right if he can think of it that way. He's wiping his eyes, thinking of moving to another town. Failures are beginning to catch up to him, and he's still achingly in love. He thinks how he has suffered the pangs of failure and misadventure, but in this painful instance there's symmetry, and he will make the one eloquent gesture—leaving a wedding cake in the middle of the road, like a pylon made of icing. Yes.

  He walks back to the car, gets in, pulls around, and backs into the driveway of the house across the street from hers. Leaving the engine idling, he rolls the window down and rests his arm on the sill, gazing at the incongruous shape of the cake there in the falling dark. He feels almost glad—almost, in some strange inexpressible way, vindicated. He imagines what she might do if she saw him here, imagines that she comes running from her house, calling his name, looking at the cake and admiring it. He conjures a picture of her, attacking the tiers of pink sugar, and the muscles of his abdomen tighten. But then this all gives way to something else: images of destruction, of flying dollops of icing. He's surprised to find that he wants her to stay where she is, doing whatever she's doing. He realizes that what he wants—and for the moment all he really wants—is what he now has: a perfect vantage point from which to watch oncoming cars. Turning the engine off, he makes another imperceptible wave with his hand. The cake is now the size of a castle, taking up all of the center of the street and several feet of surrounding yards.

  “Indeed, I shall dub thee Carmelot.”

  Not a great joke, but it makes him laugh, sitting there in his quiet car. And so he waits, concentrating on the giant castle-cake and the brouhaha that will undoubtedly ensue once someone notices it. He's a man imbued with interest, almost peaceful with it—almost, in fact, happy with it. Sitting there in his quiet car.

  We Now Pause for Station Identification

  Introduction by Jonathan Maberry

  This is about Gary Braunbeck…so let me talk about me for a minute.

  I’ll get to the Gary stuff. Bear with me.

  I’m a horror guy. Always been, even before I started writing it.

  When I was a kid I had a wonderfully spooky grandmother. She was two or three years older than God. Basically a collection of mobile wrinkles in the shape of an old lady. Kind of weird. Kind of like Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter books as a ninety-year old. Had a pet crow, read tarot cards, like that. She knew stuff, too. She knew about the things that go bump in the dark, and she delighted in telling me all about them. Mind you, this stuff totally freaked my sisters out. They thought she was weird in all the wrong ways. I loved her. She knew the cool stuff. The stuff I wanted to hear. She told me about the things people believed in the places she lived as a girl. Alsace-Lorraine, on the border of France and Germany. And rural Scotland. She was forty when she gave birth to my mother, and my mother was forty-one when she had me, a change-of-life baby. I was born in 1958, so that meant my grandmother was born in 1877.

  Yeah.

  She died twenty-three days after her hundred-and-first birthday.

  She knew the old stuff. The legends of vampires and werewolves, ghouls and witches, imps and goblins. She was a living encyclopedia of darkness. And she encouraged me to read about it and know it.

  When I was seven years old I started watching monster movies. The old Universal and RKO stuff and the newer Hammer flicks. I was sold. And my older brother had a huge stack of EC comics from the fifties.

  When I was ten years old my best friend and I snuck into the Midway Theater, a cavernous old Art Deco theater that had seen better decades. It was crumbling and unsafe and spooky and wonderful. On October 2, 1968 we were hiding in the balcony—which had been officially closed and condemned as unsafe—to watch the world premiere of Night of the Living Dead.

  When I was thirteen my middle school librarian introduced me to a couple of writers she knew. Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury.

  So, yeah. That was my childhood.

  I grew up in a world of monsters.

  As I went from preteen to tween to teenager I made the switch from mostly watching movies and reading horror comics to reading prose. First it was Shirley Jackson’s glorious The Haunting of Hill House, then I moved onto Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Am Legend, Dracula, Carmilla…

  If you read enough horror you first become familiar with the tropes. Then you become a little jaded. Then, if you read a lot, you can start to burn out.

  That happened to me. I read every damn horror novel and short story I could get my hands on. All through the seventies, eighties, nineties and oughts. I will admit to becoming a bit blasé after a while. There are only so many times a person can be scared. Only so many times a reader can be jolted. Only a limited number of times something can come at you from the blind side.

  Or so I thought.

  Then I read my first story by Gary A. Braunbeck. Actually I read a bunch of them. I was in a dark place in my life. Good friends had died in faraway places. I divorced my first wife. Life felt bleak. I searched for something edgy and intense to make me feel something, to sharpen the emotions that had become blunted through pain and grief. Yeah, I read horror as therapy.

  A bookseller—also now dead, from a bookstore now gone—suggested a collection of creepy tales called Things Left Behind. Stories by a writer I’d never heard of. Usually that’s a “Danger, Will Robinson” moment. But I bought the book and took it with me on a long, sad walk in Wissahickon Park in Philadelphia. I found a quiet bench under a big oak and settled down with the intention of reading one story. If I didn’t like it, I would have left the book on the bench for someone else to find. I do that kind of thing.

 
I read eleven of the stories on that bench. More than half the book.

  And when I was done the sun was still as bright, the shadows under the trees as dark, the gurgling stream and the ducks and the butterflies all as they had been, but the day had changed. Or I had.

  Up till then I’d been a nonfiction writer part-time and a martial arts instructor full-time. Up till then I’d never even thought about writing fiction.

  Up till then I’d been gloomy and sad and depressed.

  Those stories flipped some kind of switch. The change was not as dramatic as having all the lights come on inside my head…but something changed. I changed.

  As I walked out of the park—still carrying the book—I began to think about the spooky things my grandmother had told me about, and the movies and books I’d devoured. I thought about the sorrows in my life, and the horrors. It was at that moment that I understood that horror fiction was a kind of escape hatch. Reading those stories took me away from my life for a while. Those stories chilled me. Moved me. And inspired me.

  I didn’t jump right into writing fiction, but from that day forward I would never go another day without thinking about it. About stories. About the layers of meaning.

  A handful of years later I encountered another of Braunbeck’s stories, and this one hit me even harder. In 2005, I read “We Pause Now for Station Identification.” It was different. It was a claustrophobic, paranoid story laced with desperation and sadness. I loved it. Devoured it. Read it four or five times over a period of a couple of days.

  The story was riveting, and I use that word with precision. It grabbed me, made me sit absolutely still and pay attention. It was like leaning in to hear a broadcast on one of those days in which the world changes. I’ve lived through days like that. The assassinations of the Kennedy’s, of Martin Luther King, the moon landing, the end of Vietnam, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Challenger explosion, 9/11. Moments on which history pivots. This story was written with that gravitas but without a single trace of pretention. It was a great story well told. It left me excited and hungry for more. I wasn’t at all surprised when the Horror Writers Association awarded “Station Identification” the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction.