Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology

by Peter Straub

  Then he opened his eyes again and swung his legs from beneath the blanket’s embrace and out of the chair, for he was Little Red and could not do otherwise. The woman’s misery was intolerable, how could he pretend not to hear it? Thinking to peek around the side of the front window’s shade, Little Red pushed himself out of the command center and marched stiff-legged into the toilet.

  As if the woman had heard his footsteps, the noise cut off. He paused, took a slow step forward. Just let me get a look at you, he thought. If you don’t look completely crazy, I’ll give you whatever help you can accept. In a moment he had passed through the bathroom and was opening the door to his bedroom, the only section of the apartment we have not as yet seen.

  The weeping settled into a low, steady, fearful wail. The woman must have heard him, he thought, but was too frightened to leave the window. “Can’t be as bad as that,” he said, making his slow way down the side of the bed toward the far wall, where an upright piano covered half of the big window. Now the wailing seemed very close at hand. Little Red imagined the woman huddled against his building, her head bent to his window. Her mechanical cries pierced his heart. He almost felt like going outside immediately.

  Little Red reached the right edge of the window and touched the stiff, dark material of the shade. Unraised for nearly forty years, it smelled like a sick animal. A pulse of high-pitched keening filled his ears, and a dark shape that huddled beside the piano moved nearer the wall. Little Red dropped his hand from the shade and stepped back, fearing that he had come upon a monstrous rat. His heart pounded, and his breath caught in his throat. Even the most ambitious rat could not grow so large; Little Red quieted his impulse to run from the room and looked down at the being crouching beside the piano.

  A small dark head bent over upraised knees tucked under a white stretched-out T-shirt. Two small feet shone pale in the darkness. Little Red stared at the creature before him, which appeared to tighten down into itself, as if trying to disappear. A choked sound of combined misery and terror came from the little being. It was a child after all: he had been right the first time.

  “How did you get in here?” Little Red asked.

  The child hugged its knees and buried its face. The sound it made went up in pitch and became a fast, repeated ih ih ih.

  Little Red lowered himself to the floor beside the child. “You don’t have to be so afraid,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  A single eye peeked at him, then dropped back to the T-shirt and the bent knees. The boy was about five or six, with short brown hair and thin arms and legs. He shivered from the cold. Little Red patted him lightly on the back and was surprised by the relief aroused in him by the solidity of what he touched.

  “Do you have a name?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “No?”

  “No.” It was the smallest whisper.

  “That’s too bad. I bet you have a name, really.”

  No response, except that the shivering child had stopped whimpering ih ih ih.

  “Can you tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “I’m cold,” the boy whispered.

  “Well, sure you are,” said Little Red. “Here we are in the middle of winter, and all you have on is a T-shirt. Hold on, I’m going to get you a blanket.”

  Little Red pushed himself to his feet and went quickly to the sitting room, fearing that the child might vanish before his return. But why do I want him to stay? he asked himself, and had no answer.

  When he came back, the child was still huddled alongside the piano. Little Red draped the blanket over his shoulders and once again sat beside him.

  “Better?”

  “A little.” His teeth made tiny clicking noises.

  Little Red rubbed a hand on the boy’s blanket-covered arms and back.

  “I want to lie down,” the child said.

  “Will you tell me your name now?”

  “I don’t have a name.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Where I am? I’m here.”

  “Where do you live? What’s your address? Or how about your phone number? You’re old enough to know your phone number.”

  “I want to lie down,” the boy said. “Put me on the bed. Please.” He nodded at Little Red’s bed, in the darkness seemingly buried beneath the rounded bodies of many sleeping animals. These were the mounds of T-shirts, underpants, socks, sweatshirts, and jeans Little Red had taken, the previous night, to the 24-hour Laundromat on the corner of 55th Street and 9th Avenue. He had filled five washers, then five dryers, with his semi-annual wash, taken the refreshed clothing home in black garbage bags, and sorted it all on his bed, where it was likely to remain for the entirety of the coming month, if not longer.

  “Whatever you say,” said Little Red, and lifted the child in his arms and carried him to the bed. The boy seemed to weigh no more than a handful of kitchen matches. He leaned over the bed and nestled the child between a pile of balled socks and a heap of folded jazz festival T-shirts. “You can’t stay here, you know, little boy,” he said.

  The child said, “I’m not going to stay here. This is just where I am.”

  “You don’t have to be scared anymore.”

  “I thought you were going to hurt me.” For a second his eyes narrowed, and his skin seemed to shrink over his skull. He was actually a very unattractive little boy, thought Little Red. The child looked devious and greedy, like an urchin who had lived too long by its wits. In some ways, he had the face of a sour, bad-tempered old man. Little Red felt as though he had surrendered his bed to a beast like a weasel, a coyote.

  But he’s only a little boy, Little Red told Little Red, who did not believe him. This was not a child—this was something that had come in from the freezing night. “Do you think you can go to sleep now?”

  But the child—the being—had slipped into unconsciousness before Little Red asked the question.

  What to do with him? The ugly little thing asleep in the midst of Little Red’s laundry was never going to produce an address or a telephone number, that was certain. Probably it was telling the truth about not having a name.

  But that was crazy—he had gone too long without sleep, and his mind could no longer work right. A wave of deep weariness rolled through him, bringing with it the recognition that his mind could no longer work at all, at least not rationally. If he did not lie down, he was going to fall asleep standing up. So Little Red got his knees up on the mattress, pushed aside some heaps of clothing, stretched out, and watched his eyes close by themselves.

  Asleep, he inhaled the scent of clean laundry, which seemed the most beautiful odor in the world. Clean laundry smelled like sunshine, fresh air, and good health. This lovely smell contained a hint of the celestial, of the better world that heaven is said to be. It would be presumptuous to speak of angels, but if angels wore robes, those robes would smell like the clean, fluffy socks and underwear surrounding Little Red and his nameless guest. The guest’s own odor now and then came to Little Red. Mingled with the metallic odor of steam vented from underground regions, the sharp, gamy tang of fox sometimes cut through the fragrance of the laundry, for in his sleep Little Red had shifted nearer to the child.

  To sleeping Little Red, the two scents twisted together and became a single thing, an odor of architectural complexity filled with wide plazas and long colonnades, also with certain cramped, secret dens and cells. And from the hidden dens and cells a creature came in pursuit of him, whether for good or ill he did not know. But in pursuit it came: Little Red felt the displacement of the air as it rushed down long corridors, and there were times when he spun around a corner an instant before his pursuer would have caught sight of him. And though he continued to run as if for his life, Little Red still did not know if the creature meant him well or meant to do him harm.

  He twisted and squirmed in imitation of the motions of his dream-body, and it so fell out that eventually he had folded his body around that of his littl
e guest, and the animal smell became paramount.

  During what happened next, Little Red could not make out whether he was asleep and dreaming of being half-awake, or half-awake and still dreaming of being asleep. He seemed to pass back and forth between two states of being with no registration of their boundaries. His hand had fallen on the child’s chest—he remembered that, for instantly he had thought to snatch it back from this accidental contact. Yet in pulling back his hand he had somehow succeeded in pulling the child with it, though his hand was empty and his fingers open. The child, the child-thing, floated up from the rumpled blanket and the disarranged piles of laundry, clinging to Little Red’s hand as metal clings to a magnet. That was how it seemed to Little Red: the boy adhered to his raised hand, the boy followed the hand to his side, and when the boy-thing came to rest beside him, the boy-thing smiled a wicked smile and bit him in the neck.

  The gamy stink of fox streamed into his nostrils, and he cried out in pain and terror…and in a moment the child-thing was stroking his head and telling him he had nothing to fear, and the next moment he dropped through the floor of sleep into darkness and knew nothing.

  Little Red awakened in late afternoon of the following day. He felt wonderfully rested and restored. A decade might have been subtracted from his age, and he became a lad of forty once again. Two separate mental events took place at virtually the same moment, which came as he sat up and stretched out his arms in a tremendous yawn. He remembered the weeping child he had placed in this bed; and he noticed that one of his arms was spattered with drying blood.

  He gasped and looked down at his chest, his waist, his legs. Bloodstains covered his clothes like thrown paint. The blanket and the folded clothing littered across the bed were drenched in blood. There were feathery splashes of blood on the dusty floor. Spattered bloodstains mounted the colorless wall.

  For a moment, Little Red’s heart stopped moving. His breathing was harsh and shallow. Gingerly, he swung his legs to the floor and got out of bed. First he looked at the blanket, which would have to be thrown out, then, still in shock, down at his own body. Red blotches bloomed on his shirt. The bottom of his shirt and the top of his jeans were sodden, too soaked in blood to have dried.

  Little Red peeled the shirt off over his head and dropped it to the floor. His chest was irregularly stained with blood but otherwise undamaged. He saw no wounds on his arms. His fingers unbuckled his belt and undid his zipper, and he pushed his jeans down to his ankles. The Chinese slippers fell off his feet when he stepped out of the wet jeans. From mid-thigh to feet, he was unmarked; from navel to mid-thigh he was solid red.

  Yet he felt no pain. The blood could not be his. Had something terrible happened to the child? Moaning, Little Red scattered the clothing across the bed, looked in the corners of the room, and went as far as the entrance to the sitting room, but saw no trace of his guest. Neither did he see further bloodstains. The child, the thing, had disappeared.

  When Little Red stood before his bathroom mirror, he remembered the dream, if it had been a dream, and leaned forward to inspect the side of his neck. The skin was pale and unbroken. So it had been a dream, all of it.

  Then he remembered the sounds of weeping that had awakened him at his command post, and ih ih ih, and he remembered the weight of the child in his arms and his foxy smell. Little Red turned on his shower and stepped into the stall. Blood sluiced down his body, his groin, his legs to the drain. He remembered the blissful fragrance of his clean laundry. That magnificent odor, containing room upon room. Thinking to aid a distressed woman, he had discovered a terrified child, or something that looked like a child, and had given it a night’s shelter and a bed of socks and underwear. Standing in the warm spray of the shower, Little Red said, “In faith, a miracle.”

  3. The Miracle of C—M—and Vic Dickenson

  Late one summer afternoon, C—M—, a young trombonist of growing reputation, sat in Little Red’s guest chair listening to Very Saxy and bemoaning the state of his talent.

  “I feel stuck,” he said. “I’m playing pretty well….”

  “You’re playing great,” said Little Red.

  “Thanks, but I feel like there’s some direction I ought to go, but I can’t figure out what it is. I keep doing the same things over and over. It’s like, I don’t know, like I have to wash my ears before I’ll be able to make any progress.”

  “Ah,” said Little Red. “Let me play something for you.” He rose from his chair.

  “What?”

  “Just listen.”

  “I don’t need this jive bullshit, Little Red.”

  “I said, just listen.”

  “Okay, but if you were a musician, you’d know this isn’t how it works.”

  “Fine,” said Little Red, and placed on the turntable a record by the Vic Dickenson Trio—trombone, bass, and guitar—made in 1949. “I’m going to my bedroom for a few minutes,” he said. “Something screwy happened to my laundry a while ago, and I have to throw about half of it away.”

  C—M—leaned forward to rest his forearms on his knees, the posture in which he listened most carefully.

  Little Red disappeared through the door to the toilet and went to his bedroom. Whatever he did there occupied him for approximately twenty minutes, after which he returned to the sitting room.

  His face wet with tears, C—M—was leaning far back in his chair, looking as though he had just been dropped from a considerable height. “God bless you,” he said. “God bless you, Little Red!”

  4. The Miracle of the Blind Beggar-Man

  He had been seeing the man for the better part of the year, seated on a wooden box next to the flowers outside the Korean deli on the corner of 55th Street and 8th Avenue, shaking a white paper cup salted with coins. Tall, heavy, dressed always in a double-breasted dark blue pinstriped suit of wondrous age, his skin a rich chocolate brown, the man was at his post four days every week from about nine in the morning to well past midnight. Whatever the weather, he covered his head with an ancient brown fedora, and he always wore dark glasses with lenses the size of quarters.

  He was present on days when it rained and days when it snowed. On sweltering days, he never removed his hat to wipe his forehead, and on days when the temperature dropped into the teens he wore neither gloves nor overcoat. Once he had registered the man’s presence, Little Red soon observed that he took in much more money than the other panhandlers who worked Hell’s Kitchen. The reason for his success, Little Red surmised, was that his demeanor was as unvarying as his wardrobe.

  He was a beggar who did not beg. Instead, he allowed you to give him money. Enthroned on his box, elbows planted on his knees, cup upright in his hand, he offered a steady stream of greetings, compliments, and benedictions to those who walked by.

  You’re sure looking fine today, miss…God bless you, son…You make sure to have a good day today, sir…God bless you, ma’am…Honey, you make me happy every time you come by…God bless you…God bless…God bless…

  And so it happened that one day Little Red dropped a dollar bill into the waiting cup.

  “God bless,” the man said.

  On the following day, Little Red gave him another dollar.

  “Thank you and God bless you, son,” the man said.

  The next day, Little Red put two dollars in the cup.

  “Thank you, Little Red, God bless you,” said the man.

  “How did you learn my name?” asked Little Red. “And how did you know it was me?”

  “I hear they come to you, the peoples,” the man said. “Night and day, they come. Ain’t that the righteous truth? Night and day.”

  “They come, each in his own way,” said Little Red. “But how do you know my name?”

  “I always knew who you were,” said the man. “And now I know what you are.”

  Little Red placed another dollar in his cup.

  “Maybe I come see you myself, one day.”

  “Maybe you will,” said Little Red.

 
; 5. The Miracle of the Greedy Demon ( from Book I, Little Red, His Trials )

  The greedy demons were everywhere. He saw them in the patrons’ eyes—the demons, glaring out, saying more, more. While Little Red dressed to go to work, while he laced up his sturdy shoes, while taking the crosstown bus, as he opened the door to the bar and the headwaiter’s desk, his stomach tightened at the thought of the waiting demons. Where demons reign, all joy is hollow, all happiness is pain in disguise, all pleasure merely the product of gratified envy. Daily, as he padded to the back of the restaurant to don his bow tie and white jacket, he feared he would be driven away by the flat, toxic stench of evil.

  This occurred in the waning days of Little Red’s youth, when he had not as yet entered fully into his adult estate.

  The demons gathered here because they enjoyed each other’s company. Demons can always recognize other demons, but the human beings they inhabit are ignorant of their possession and don’t have a clue what is going on. They suppose they simply enjoy going to certain restaurants, or, say, a particular restaurant, because the food is decent and the atmosphere pleasant. The human beings possessed by demons fail to notice that while the prices have gone up a bit, the food has slipped and the atmosphere grown leaden, sour, stale. The headwaiter notices only that a strange languor has taken hold of the service staff, but he feels too languid himself to get excited about it. Ninety-nine percent of the waiters fail to notice that they seldom wish to look their patrons in the eye and record only that the place seems rather dimmer than it once was. Only Little Red sees the frantic demons jigging in the eyes of the torpid diners; only Little Red understands, and what he understands sickens him.

  There came a day when a once-handsome gentleman in a blue blazer as taut as a sausage casing waved Little Red to his table and ordered a second 16-oz. rib eye steak, rare, and a second order of onion rings, and oh yeah, might as well throw in a second bottle of that Napa Valley cabernet.