by Peter Straub
I can’t say that I was always helpful. Sometimes I’d tell her I had to come home because the ice cream would melt if I didn’t get it into the freezer right away. I’m not sure that was very reassuring.
What I tried not to think about was what if I never could find my way home, what if things weren’t as I’d left them. What if everything had changed? One night I got lost along the southern edge of the city after a late night movie and wandered for an hour or so convinced that my worst fantasies had come true.
The man on the ceiling smiles and begins devouring my dream of the sky.
A wise man asks me, when I’ve told him this story of my vanishing home again, “And then what?”
I glare at him. He’s supposed to understand me. “What do you mean?”
“And then what happens? After you discover that your house and your family have disappeared?”
“Not disappeared,” I point out irritably. “Have never existed.”
“Yes. Have never existed. And then what happens?”
I’ve never thought of that. The never-having-existed seems final enough, awful enough. I can’t think of anything to say, so I don’t say anything, hoping he will. But he’s wise, and he knows how to use silence. He just sits there, being calm, until finally I say, “I don’t know.”
“Maybe it would be interesting to find out,” he suggests.
So we try. He eases me into a light trance; I’m eager and highly suggestible, and I trust this man, so my consciousness alters easily. He guides me through the fantasy again and again, using my own words and some of his own. But every time I stop at the point where I come home and there isn’t any home. The point where I look up and my life, my love, isn’t there. Has never existed.
I don’t know what happens next. I can’t imagine what happens next. Do I die? Does the man on the ceiling take me into his house? Does he fly away with me into an endless sky? Does he help me create another life, another miracle?
That’s why I write. To find out what happens next.
So what happens next? This might happen:
After the man on the ceiling devours my life I imagine it back again: I fill in the walls, the doorways, the empty rooms with colors and furnishings different from, but similar to, the ones I imagine to have been there before. Our lives are full of angels of all kinds. So I call on some of those other angels to get my life back.
I write myself a life, and it is very different from the one I had before, and yet very much the same. I make mistakes different from the ones I made with my children before. I love Melanie the same way I did before. Different wonderful things happen. The same sad, wonderful events recur.
The man on the ceiling just smiles at me and makes of these new imaginings his dessert. So what happens next? In a different kind of story I might take out a machete and chop him into little bits of shadow. Or I might blast him into daylight with a machine gun. I might douse him with lighter fluid and set him on fire.
But I don’t write those kinds of stories.
And besides, the man on the ceiling is a necessary angel.
There are so many truths to tell. There are so many different lives I could dream for myself.
What happens next?
There are so many stories to tell. I could tell this story:
The man from the ceiling was waiting for Melanie behind the fence (an ugly, bare, chain-link and chicken wire fence, not the black wrought iron fence plaited with rosebushes that she’d made up), where her home had never existed. He beckoned to her. He called her by name, his own special name for her, a name she never got used to no matter how often he said it, which was often. He reached for her, trying to touch her but not quite touching.
She could have turned and run away from him. He wouldn’t have chased her down. His arms wouldn’t have telescoped long and impossibly jointed to capture her at the end of the block. His teeth wouldn’t have pushed themselves out of his mouth in gigantic segmented fangs to cut her off at the knees, to bite her head off. He wouldn’t have sucked her blood.
But he’d have kept calling her, using his special name for her. And he’d have scaled her windows, dropped from her roof, crawled across her ceiling again that night, and every night for the rest of her life.
So Melanie went toward him. Held out her arms.
There are so many different dreams. That one was Melanie’s. This one is mine:
I sit down at the kitchen table. The man on the ceiling lies on my plate, collapsed and folded up neatly in the center. I slice him into hundreds of oily little pieces which I put into my mouth one morsel at a time. I bite through his patchwork wings. I gnaw on his inky heart. I chew his long, narrow fingers well. I make of him my daily meal of darkness.
There are so many stories to tell.
And all of the stories are true.
We wait for whatever happens next.
We stay available.
We name it to make it real.
It was hard for us to write this piece.
For one thing, we write differently. My stories tend more toward magical realism, Steve’s more toward surrealism. Realism, in both cases, but we argued over form: “This isn’t a story! It doesn’t have a plot!”
“What do you want from a plot? Important things happen, and it does move from A to B.”
In our fiction, Melanie’s monsters usually are ultimately either vanquished or accepted, while at the end of my stories you often find out that the darkness in one form or another lives on and on. There’s no escaping it, and I question whether you should try to escape it in the first place.
Since words can only approximate both the monsters and the vanquishment, we wrote each other worried notes in the margins of this story.
“I don’t know if we can really use the word ‘divine.’”
“If someone looked inside your dreams, would they really see only darkness?”
It was hard for us to write this piece.
“This upsets me,” Melanie would say.
Steve would nod. “Maybe we can’t do this.”
“Oh, we have to,” I’d insist. “We’ve gone too far to stop now. I want to see what happens.”
This piece is about writing and horror and fear and about love. We’re utterly separate from each other, of course, yet there’s a country we share, a rich and wonderful place, a divine place, and we create it by naming all of its parts, all of the angels and all of the demons who live there with us.
What happens next?
There are so many stories to tell.
We could tell
another story:
The Great God Pan
M. John Harrison
But is there really something far more horrible than ever could resolve itself into reality, and is it that something which terrifies me so?
—Katherine Mansfield
Journals, March 1914
Ann took drugs to manage her epilepsy. They often made her depressed and difficult to deal with; and Lucas, who was nervous himself, never knew what to do. After their divorce he relied increasingly on me as a go-between. “I don’t like the sound of her voice,” he would tell me. “You try her.” The drugs gave her a screaming, false-sounding laugh that went on and on. Though he had remained sympathetic over the years, Lucas was always embarrassed and upset by it. I think it frightened him. “See if you can get any sense out of her.” It was guilt, I think, that encouraged him to see me as a steadying influence: not his own guilt so much as the guilt he felt all three of us shared. “See what she says.”
On this occasion what she said was:
“Look, if you bring on one of my turns, bloody Lucas Fisher will regret it. What business is it of his how I feel, anyway?”
I was used to her, so I said carefully, “It was just that you wouldn’t talk to him. He was worried that something was happening. Is there something wrong, Ann?” She didn’t answer, but I had hardly expected her to. “If you don’t want to see me,” I suggested, “couldn’t you tell me now?
”
I thought she was going to hang up, but in the end there was only a kind of paroxysm of silence. I was phoning her from a call box in the middle of Huddersfield. The shopping precinct outside was full of pale bright sunshine, but windy and cold; sleet was forecast for later in the day. Two or three teenagers went past, talking and laughing. I heard one of them say, “What acid rain’s got to do with my career, I don’t know. But that’s what they asked me: ‘What do you know about acid rain?’” When they had gone, I could hear Ann breathing raggedly.
“Hello?” I said.
Suddenly she shouted, “Are you mad? I’m not talking on the phone. Before you know it, the whole thing’s public property!”
Sometimes she was more dependent on medication than usual; you knew when, because she tended to use that phrase over and over again. One of the first things I ever heard her say was, “It looks so easy, doesn’t it? But before you know it, the bloody thing’s just slipped straight out of your hands,” as she bent down nervously to pick up the bits of a broken glass. How old were we then? Twenty? Lucas believed she was reflecting in language some experience either of the drugs or the disease itself, but I’m not sure he was right. Another thing she often said was, “I mean, you have to be careful, don’t you?” drawing out in a wondering, childlike way both care and don’t, so that you saw immediately it was a mannerism learned in adolescence.
“You must be mad if you think I’m talking on the phone!”
I said quickly, “Okay, then, Ann. I’ll come over this evening.”
“You might as well come now and get it over with. I don’t feel well.”
Epilepsy since the age of twelve or thirteen, as regular as clockwork; and then, later, a classic migraine to fill in the gaps, a complication which, rightly or wrongly, she had always associated with our experiments at Cambridge in the late sixties. She must never get angry or excited. “I reserve my adrenaline,” she would explain, looking down at herself with a comical distaste. “It’s a physical thing. I can’t let it go at the time.” Afterward, though, the reservoir would burst, and it would all be released at once by some minor stimulus—a lost shoe, a missed bus, rain—to cause her hallucinations, vomiting, loss of bowel control. “Oh, and then euphoria. It’s wonderfully relaxing,” she would say bitterly. “Just like sex.”
“Okay, Ann, I’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”
“Piss off. Things are coming to bits here. I can already see the little floating lights.”
As soon as she put the receiver down, I telephoned Lucas.
“I’m not doing this again,” I said. “Lucas, she isn’t well. I thought she was going to have an attack there and then.”
“She’ll see you, though? The thing is, she just kept putting the phone down on me. She’ll see you today?”
“You knew she would.”
“Good.”
I hung up.
“Lucas, you’re a bastard,” I told the shopping precinct.
The bus from Huddersfield wound its way for thirty minutes through exhausted mill villages given over to hairdressing, dog breeding, and an undercapitalized tourist trade. I got off the bus at three o’clock in the afternoon. It seemed much later. The church clock was already lit, and a mysterious yellow light was slanting across the window of the nave—someone was inside with only a forty-watt bulb for illumination. Cars went past endlessly as I waited to cross the road, their exhaust steaming in the dark air. For a village it was quite noisy: tires hissing on the wet road, the bang and clink of soft-drink bottles being unloaded from a lorry, some children I couldn’t see, chanting one word over and over again. Suddenly, above all this, I heard the pure musical note of a thrush and stepped out into the road.
“You’re sure no one got off the bus behind you?”
Ann kept me on the doorstep while she looked anxiously up and down the street, but once I was inside, she seemed glad to have someone to talk to.
“You’d better take your coat off. Sit down. I’ll make you some coffee. No, here, just push the cat off the chair. He knows he’s not supposed to be there.”
It was an old cat, black and white, with dull, dry fur, and when I picked it up, it was just a lot of bones and heat that weighed nothing. I set it down carefully on the carpet, but it jumped back onto my knee again immediately and began to dribble on my pullover. Another, younger animal was crouching on the windowsill, shifting its feet uncomfortably among the little intricate baskets of paper flowers as it stared out into the falling sleet, the empty garden. “Get down off there!” Ann shouted suddenly. It ignored her. She shrugged. “They act as if they own the place.” It smelled as if they did. “They were strays,” she said. “I don’t know why I encouraged them.” Then, as though she were still talking about the cats:
“How’s Lucas?”
“He’s surprisingly well,” I said. “You ought to keep in touch with him, you know.”
“I know.” She smiled briefly. “And how are you? I never see you.”
“Not bad. Feeling my age.”
“You don’t know the half of it yet,” she said. She was standing in the kitchen doorway holding a tea towel in one hand and a cup in the other. “None of us do.” It was a familiar complaint. When she saw I was too preoccupied to listen, she went and banged things about in the sink. I heard water rushing into the kettle. While it filled up, she said something she knew I wouldn’t catch; then, turning off the tap:
“Something’s going on in the Pleroma. Something new. I can feel it.”
“Ann,” I said, “all that was over and done with twenty years ago.”
The fact is that even at the time I wasn’t at all sure what we had done. This will seem odd to you, I suppose; but it was 1968 or 1969, and all I remember now is a June evening drenched with the half-confectionary, half-corrupt smell of hawthorn blossoms. It was so thick, we seemed to swim through it, through that and the hot evening light that poured between the hedgerows like transparent gold. I remember Sprake because you don’t forget him. What the four of us did escapes me, as does its significance. There was, undoubtedly, a loss; but whether you described what was lost as “innocence” was very much up to you—anyway, that was how it appeared to me. Lucas and Ann made a lot more of it from the very start. They took it to heart. Afterward—perhaps two or three months afterward, when it was plain that something had gone wrong, when things first started to pull out of shape—it was Ann and Lucas who convinced me to go and talk to Sprake, whom we had promised never to contact again. They wanted to see if what we had done could somehow be reversed or annulled; if what we’d lost could be bought back again.
“I don’t think it works that way,” I warned them; but I could see they weren’t listening.
“He’ll have to help us,” Lucas said.
“Why did we ever do it?” Ann asked me.
Though he hated the British Museum, Sprake had always lived one way or another in its shadow. I met him at the Tivoli Espresso Bar, where I knew he would be every afternoon. He was wearing a thick, old-fashioned black overcoat—the weather that October was raw and damp—but from the way his wrists stuck out of the sleeves, long and fragile-looking and dirty, covered with sore grazes as though he had been fighting with some small animal, I suspected he wore no shirt or jacket underneath it. For some reason he had bought a copy of the Church Times. The top half of his body curled painfully around it; along with his stoop and his gray-stubbled lower jaw, the newspaper gave him the appearance of a disappointed verger. It was folded carefully to display part of a headline, but I never saw him open it.
At the Tivoli in those days, they always had the radio on. Their coffee was watery and, like most espresso, too hot to taste of anything. Sprake and I sat on stools by the window. We rested our elbows on a narrow counter littered with dirty cups and half-eaten sandwiches and watched the pedestrians in Museum Street. After ten minutes, a woman’s voice said clearly from behind us:
“The fact is, the children just won’t try.”
&n
bsp; Sprake jumped and glanced round haggardly, as if he expected to have to answer this.
“It’s the radio,” I reassured him.
He stared at me the way you would stare at someone who was mad, and it was some time before he went on with what he had been saying.
“You knew what you were doing. You got what you wanted, and you weren’t tricked in any way.”
“No,” I admitted tiredly.
My eyes ached, even though I had slept on the journey down, waking—just as the train from Cambridge crawled the last mile into London—to see sheets of newspaper fluttering round the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower.
“I can see that,” I said. “That isn’t at issue. But I’d like to be able to reassure them in some way….”
Sprake wasn’t listening. It had come on to rain quite hard, driving visitors—mainly Germans and Americans who were touring the Museum—in from the street. They all seemed to be wearing brand-new clothes. The Tivoli filled with steam from the espresso machine, and the air was heavy with the smell of wet coats. People trying to find seats constantly brushed our backs, murmuring, “Excuse me, please. Excuse me.” Sprake soon became irritated, though I think their politeness affected him more than the disturbance itself. “Dog muck,” he said loudly in a matter-of-fact voice; and then, as a whole family pushed past him one by one, “Three generations of rabbits.” None of them seemed to take offense, though they must have heard him. A drenched-looking woman in a purple coat came in, looked anxiously for an empty seat, and, when she couldn’t see one, hurried out again. “Mad bitch!” Sprake called after her. “Get yourself reamed out.” He stared challengingly at the other customers.