Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology

by Peter Straub

  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 she-beens, also of restaurants, cafés, 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 hardly 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 acknowledgment 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.)

  Shortly after your entrance into his domain, his den, his consulting room, his confessional, Little Red will tender the offer of a bottle of Beck’s beer from the Stygian depths of his kitchen. On the few occasions when his refrigerator is empty of Beck’s beer, he will have requested that you purchase a six-pack on your way, and will reimburse you for the purchase upon your arrival.

  His hands will be slim, artistic, and often in motion.

  He will sometimes appear to stoop, yet at other times, especially when displeased, will adopt an almost military posture. A mild rash, consisting of a scattering of welts a tad redder than his hair and beard will now and then constellate the visible areas of his face. From time to time, he will display the symptoms of pain, of an affliction or afflictions not readily diagnosed. These symptoms may endure for weeks. Such is his humanity, Little Red will often depress his buzzer (should the buzzer be operational) and admit his guests, his supplicants, when in great physical discomfort.

  He will not remind you of anyone you know. Little Red is not a type.

  The closest you will come to thinking that someone has reminded you of Little Red will occur in the midst of a movie seen late in a summer afternoon on which you have decided to use a darkened theater to walk away from your troubles for a couple of hours. As you sit surrounded by empty seats in the pleasant murk, watching a scene depicting a lavish party or a crowded restaurant, an unnamed extra will move through the door and depart, and at first you will feel no more than a mild tingle of recognition all the more compelling for having no obvious referent. Someone is going, someone has gone, that is all you will know. Then the tilt of the departing head or the negligent gesture of a hand will return to you a quality more closely akin to the emotional context of memory than to memory itself, and with the image of Little Red rising into your mind, you will find yourself pierced by an unexpected sense of loss, longing, and sweetness, as if someone had just spoken the name of a long-vanished, once-dear childhood friend.

  LITTLE RED, HIS DWELLING-PLACE

  He came to West 55th Street in his early thirties, just at the final cusp of his youth, after the years of wandering. From Long Island he had moved into Manhattan, no one now knows where—Little Red himself may have forgotten the address, so little had he come into his adult estate. To earn his keep, he “waited.” Kyle’s small collection of jazz records, also Kyle’s enthusiasm for Count Basie, Maynard Ferguson, and Ella Fitzgerald, had given direction to his younger brother’s yearnings, and it was during this period that Little Red made his initial forays into the world of which he would later become so central an element.

  Photographs were taken, and he kept them. Should you be privileged to enter Little Red’s inmost circle of acquaintances, he will one night fetch from its hidey-hole an old album of cross-grained fabric and display its treasures: snapshots of the boyish, impossibly y
outhful, impossibly fresh, Little Red, his hair short and healthy, his face shining, his spirit fragrant, in the company of legendary heroes. The album contains no photographs of other kinds. Its centerpiece is a three-by-five, taken outside a sun-drenched tent during a mid-sixties Newport Jazz Festival, of a dewy Little Red leaning forward and smiling at the camera as Louis Armstrong, horn tucked beneath his elbow, imparts a never-to-be-forgotten bit of wisdom. On Armstrong’s other side, grinning broadly, hovers a bearded man in his mid-forties. This is John Elder, who has been called “the first Little Red.” Little Red was sixteen, already on his way.

  From New York he wandered, “waiting,” from city to city. A hidden design guided his feet, represented by an elderly, dung-colored Volkswagen Beetle with a retractable sunroof and a minimum of trunk space. Directed by the design, the VW brought him to New Orleans, birthplace of Mighty Pops, and there he began his true instruction in certain sacred mysteries. New Orleans was instructive, New Orleans left a mark. And his journey through the kitchens and dining rooms of great restaurants, his tutelage under their pitiless taskmasters, ensured that henceforth he would never have to go long without remunerative employment.

  It was in New Orleans that small groups of people, almost always male, began to visit Little Red at all hours of day or night. Some stayed half an hour; others lingered for days, participating in the simple, modest life of the apartment. John Elder is said to have visited the young couple. In those days, John Elder crisscrossed the country, staying with friends, turning up in jazz clubs to be embraced between sets by the musicians. Sometimes late at night, he spoke in a low voice to those seated on the floor around his chair. During these gatherings, John Elder oft-times mentioned Little Red, referring to him as his son.

  Did John Elder precede Little Red to Aspen, Colorado? Although we have no documentation, the evidence suggests he did. An acquaintance of both men can recall Zoot Sims, the late tenor saxophonist, mentioning strolling into the kitchen of the Red Onion, Aspen’s best jazz club, late on an afternoon in the spring of 1972 and finding John Elder deep in conversation with the owner over giant bowls of pasta. If this memory is accurate, John Elder was preparing the way—six months later, Little Red began working at the Red Onion.

  He lived above a garage in a one-bedroom apartment accessible only by an exterior wooden staircase. As in New Orleans, individuals and small groups of men called upon him, in nearly every case having telephoned beforehand, to share his company for an hour or a span of days. Up the staircase they mounted, in all sorts of weather, to press the buzzer and await admittance. Little Red entertained his visitors with records and television programs; he invited them to partake of the Italian meals prepared by his wife, who always made herself scarce on these occasions. He produced bottles of Beck’s beer from the refrigerator. Late at night, he spoke softly and without notes for an hour or two, no more. It was enough.

  And too much for his wife, however, for she vanished from his life midway through his residency in Aspen. Single once more, pulling behind the VW a small U-Haul trailer filled with records, Little Red returned to Manhattan in the summer of 1973 and proceeded directly to the apartment on West 55th Street then occupied by his old friend and mentor, John Elder, who unquestioningly turned over to his new guest the large front room of his long, railroad-style apartment.

  The dwelling-place Little Red has inhabited alone since 1976, when John Elder retired into luxurious seclusion, parses itself as three good-sized rooms laid end-to-end. Between the front room with its big shielded window and the sitting room lies a semi-warren of two small chambers separated by a door.

  These chambers, the first containing a sink and shower stall, the second a toilet, exist in a condition of perpetual chiaroscuro, perhaps to conceal the stains encrusted on the fittings, especially the shower stall and curtain. Those visitors to Little Red’s realm who have been compelled to wash their hands after the ritual of defecation generally glance at the shower arrangement, which in the ambient darkness at first tends to resemble a hulking stranger more than it does a structure designed for bodily cleansing, shudder at what they think, what they fear they may have seen there, then execute a one-quarter turn of the entire body before groping for the limp, threadbare towels drooping from a pair of hooks.

  Beyond the sitting room and reached via a doorless opening in the wall is the kitchen.

  Oh the kitchen, oh me oh my.

  The kitchen has devolved into a progressive squalor. Empty bottles of Beck’s in six-pack configurations piled chest-high dominate something like three-fourths of the grubby floor. Towers of filthy dishes and smeared glasses loom above the sink. The dirty dishes and beer bottles appear organic, as if they have grown untouched here in the gloom over the decades of Little Red’s occupancy, producing bottle after bottle and plate after plate of the same ancient substance.

  Heavy shades, the dusty tan of nicotine, conceal the kitchen’s two windows, and a single forty-watt bulb dangles from a fraying cord over the landscape of stacked empties.

  In the sitting room, a second low-wattage bulb of great antiquity oversees the long shelves, the two chairs, and the accumulation of goods before them. Not the only source of light in this barely illuminated chamber, the bulb has been in place, off and on but for several years mostly off, during the entire term of Little Red’s occupancy of the apartment. “John Elder was using that lightbulb when I moved in,” he says. “When you get that old, you’ll need a lot of rest, too.” Two ornate table lamps, one beside the command post and the other immediately to the visitor’s right, shed a ghostlike yellow pall. Little Red has no intrinsic need of bright light, including that of the sun. Shadow and relative darkness ease the eyes, calm the soul. The images on the rectangular screen burn more sharply in low light, and the low, moving banner charting the moment-by-moment activity of the stock market marches along with perfect clarity, every encoded symbol crisp as a snap bean.

  A giant shelving arrangement blankets the wall facing the two chairs, and Little Red’s beloved television set occupies one of its open cabinets. Another black shelf, located just to the right of the television, holds his audio equipment—a CD player, a tape recorder, a tuner, a turntable, an amplifier, as well as the machines they have superseded, which are stacked beneath them, as if beneath headstones. A squat black speaker stands at either end of the topmost shelf. A cabinet located beneath the right-hand speaker houses several multivolume discographies, some so worn with use they are held together with rubber bands. All the remaining shelves support ranks of long-playing records. Records also fill the lower half of the freestanding bookshelf in front of the narrow wall leading from the small foyer area into the sitting room. Little Red must strain to reach the LPs located on the highest shelf; cardboard boxes of yet more jazz records stand before the ground-level shelves, their awkwardness and weight blocking access to the LPs arrayed behind them. Sometimes Little Red will wish to play a record hidden behind one of the boxes, then pause to consider the problems involved—the bending, the shoving, the risk to his lower back, the high concentration of dust likely to be disturbed—and will decide to feature another artist, one situated in a more convenient portion of the alphabet.

  The records were alphabetized long ago. Two or three years after the accomplishment of the stupendous task, Little Red further refined the system by placing the records in alpha-chronological order, so that they stood not only in relation to the artists’ placement in the alphabet, but also by date of recording, running from earliest to latest, oldest to newest, in each individual case. This process took him nearly a year to complete and occupied most of his free time—the time not given to his callers—during that period. For the callers kept coming, so they did, in numbers unceasing.

  Actually, the alpha-chronologicalization process has not yet reached total completion, nor will it, nor can it, for reasons to be divulged in the next section of this account. Alpha-chronologicalization is an endless labor.

  What occupies the territory betwe
en the chairs and the bookshelves constitutes the grave, grave problem of this room. The territory in question makes up the central portion of Little Red’s sitting room, which under optimum conditions would provide a companionable open space for passage to and from the kitchen, to and from the bathroom and the front door, modest exercise, pacing, and for those so disposed, floor-sitting. Such a space would grant Little Red unimpeded access to the thousands of records packed onto the heavily-laden shelves (in some cases so tightly that the withdrawal of a single LP involves pulling out an extra three or four on either side).

  Once, a table of eccentric design was installed in the middle of the sitting room. At the time, it would have been a considerable amenity, with its broad, flat top for the temporary disposal of the inner and outer sleeves of the record being played, perhaps as well the sleeves containing those records to be played after that one. A large, square table it was, roughly the size of two steamer trunks placed side by side, and trunklike in its solidity from top to bottom, for its flanks contained a clever nest of drawers for the disposition of magazines, gewgaws, and knickknacks. It is believed that Little Red found this useful object on the street, the source of a good deal of his household furnishings, but it is possible that John Elder found it on the street, and that the table was already in place when Little Red was welcomed within.

  Large as it was, the table offered no obstacle to a gaunt, red-haired individual moving from the command post to the records, or from any particular shelf of records to the cabinet-like space housing the turntable and other sound equipment. The table cooperated, it must have done. At one time—shortly after Little Red or John Elder managed to get the unwieldy thing off the sidewalk and into the sitting room—the table must have functioned properly, that is as a literal support system. The table undoubtedly performed this useful function for many months. After that…entropy took over, and the literal support system began to disappear beneath the mass and quantity of material it was required literally to support. In time, the table vanished, as an old car abandoned in a field gradually vanishes beneath and into the mound of weeds that overtakes it, or as the genial scientist who became ferocious Swamp Thing vanished beneath and into the vegetation that had surrounded, supported, nourished his wounded body. Little Red’s is the Swamp Thing of the table family.