Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  “It’s just a ghost town.”

  Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and around in his hands before he drank. “I have to get the major into camp.”

  “A real ghost town,” I said. “Complete with ghosts.”

  “I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.” He drank what was left in his glass and stood up. He had decided not to say any more about it. “Let’s take care of Major Bachelor, Bob,” he said.

  “Right.”

  Ransom carried our bottle to the bar and paid Mike. I stepped toward him to do the same, and Ransom said, “Taken care of.”

  There was that phrase again—it seemed I had been hearing it all day, and that its meaning would not stay still.

  Ransom and Bob picked up the major between them. They were strong enough to lift him easily. Bachelor’s greasy head rolled forward. Bob put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own pocket. Together they carried the major to the door.

  I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It was dark now, and light from the lanterns spilled out through the gaps in the windows.

  All of us went down the rotting steps, the major bobbing between the other two.

  Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the major into the backseat. Bob squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.

  John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for the next part of his job.

  “I’ll give you a ride back to camp,” he said. “We don’t want an M.P. to get a close look at you.”

  I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backward. “You know why that mortar round came in, don’t you?” he asked me. He grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of camp. “He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a lieutenant went straight for the place instead.” He was still grinning. “It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of round-eyes going in there.”

  “He didn’t send in any more fire.”

  “No. He didn’t want to damage the place. It’s supposed to stay the way it is. I don’t think they’d use the word, but that village is supposed to be like a kind of monument.” He glanced at me again. “To shame.”

  For some reason, all I could think of was the drunken major in the seat behind me, who had said that you were responsible for the people you wanted to protect. Ransom said, “Did you go into any of the huts? Did you see anything unusual there?”

  “I went into a hut. I saw something unusual.”

  “A list of names?”

  “I thought that’s what they were.”

  “Okay,” Ransom said. “You know a little Vietnamese?”

  “A little.”

  “You notice anything about those names?”

  I could not remember. My Vietnamese had been picked up in bars and markets, and was almost completely oral.

  “Four of them were from a family named Trang. Trang was the village chief, like his father before him, and his grandfather before him. Trang had four daughters. As each one got to the age of six or seven, he took them down into that underground room and chained them to the posts and raped them. A lot of those huts have hidden storage areas, but Trang must have modified his after his first daughter was born. The funny thing is, I think everybody in the village knew what he was doing. I’m not saying they thought it was okay, but they let it happen. They could pretend they didn’t know: the girls never complained, and nobody ever heard any screams. I guess Trang was a good enough chief. When the daughters got to sixteen, they left for the cities. Sent back money, too. So maybe they thought it was okay, but I don’t think they did, myself, do you?”

  “How would I know? But there’s a man in my platoon, a guy from—”

  “I think there’s a difference between private and public shame. Between what’s acknowledged and what is not acknowledged. That’s what Bachelor has to cope with, when he gets to Langley. Some things are acceptable, as long as you don’t talk about them.” He looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. “Because the way I see it, this is a whole general issue. The issue is: what is expressible? This goes way beyond the tendency of people to tolerate thoughts, actions, or behavior they would otherwise find unacceptable.”

  I had never heard a soldier speak this way before. It was a little bit like being back in Berkeley.

  “I’m talking about the difference between what is expressed and what is described,” Ransom said. “A lot of experience is unacknowledged. Religion lets us handle some of the unacknowledged stuff in an acceptable way. But suppose—just suppose—that you were forced to confront extreme experience directly, without any mediation?”

  “I have,” I said. “You have, too.”

  “More extreme than combat, more extreme than terror. Something like what happened to the major: He encountered God. Demands were made upon him. He had to move out of the ordinary, even as he defined it.”

  Ransom was telling me how Major Bachelor had wound up being brought to Camp Crandall with his wife’s skull, but none of it was clear to me.

  “I’ve been learning things,” Ransom told me. He was almost whispering. “Think about what would make all the people of a village pick up and leave, when sacred obligation ties them to that village.”

  “I don’t know the answer,” I said.

  “An even more sacred obligation, created by a really spectacular sense of shame. When a crime is too great to live with, the memory of it becomes sacred. Becomes the crime itself—”

  I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut’s basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.

  “Here we have this village and its chief. The village knows but does not know what the chief has been doing. They are used to consulting and obeying him. Then—one day, a little boy disappears.”

  My heart gave a thud.

  “A little boy. Say: three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He’s just gone—poof. Well, this is Vietnam, right? You turn your back, your kid wanders away, some animal gets him. He could get lost in the jungle and wander into a claymore. Someone like you might even shoot him. He could fall into a booby trap and never be seen again. It could happen.

  “A couple of months later, it happens again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they really look, not just Mom and Grandma, all their friends. They scour the village. The villagers scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest.

  “And guess what happens next. This is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees a ghost. This old lady is part of the extended family of the first lost kid, but the ghost she sees isn’t the kid’s—it’s the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a drunkard, in fact. A local no-good, in fact. He’s just standing near the well with his hands together, he’s hungry—that’s what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants more. He wants to be fed. The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.

  “Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Evil forces have been set loose. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she’s about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. She used to be a friendly old lady, but she doesn’t look too friendly now. She’s hungry, too, like all ghosts. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does?
She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl’s face, and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers.

  “The next night, another little boy disappears. Two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chief’s hut. Among them are a sister who died during the war with the French and a twenty-year-old first wife who died of dengue fever. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, who looks something like what we could call a vampire, he saw her pass into the chief’s hut without the benefit of the door.

  “These people believe in ghosts, Underhill, they know ghosts exist, but it is extremely rare for them to see these ghosts. And these people are like psychoanalysts, because they do not believe in accidents. Every event contains meaning.

  “The dead twenty-year-old wife comes back out through the wall of the chief’s hut. Her hands are empty but dripping with red, and she is licking them like a starving cat.

  “The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. They are as afraid of what they’re thinking as they are of all the ghosts moving around them. The ghosts are part of what they know they know, even though most of them have never seen one until now. What is going through their minds is something new: new because it was hidden.

  “The mothers and grandmothers go to the chief’s door and begin howling like dogs. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find. They find the end of Bong To.”

  Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.

  “But what happened?” I asked. “How did you hear about it?”

  He shrugged. “We learned all this in interrogation. When the women found the underground room, they knew the chief had forced the boys into sex, and then killed them. They didn’t know what he had done with the bodies, but they knew he had killed the boys. The next time the V.C. paid one of their courtesy calls, they told the cadre leader what they knew. The V.C. did the rest. They were disgusted—Trang had betrayed them, too—betrayed everything he was supposed to represent. One of the V.C. we captured took the chief downstairs into his underground room and chained the man to the posts, wrote the names of the dead boys and Trang’s daughters on the padding that covered the walls, and then . . . then they did what they did to him. They probably carried out the pieces and threw them into the excrement pit. And over months, bit by bit, not all at once but slowly, everybody in the village moved out. By that time, they were seeing ghosts all the time. They had crossed a kind of border.”

  “Do you think they really saw ghosts?” I asked him. “I mean, do you think they were real ghosts?”

  “If you want an expert opinion, you’d have to ask Major Bachelor. He has a lot to say about ghosts.” He hesitated for a moment, and then leaned over to open my door. “But if you ask me, sure they did.”

  I got out of the jeep and closed the door.

  Ransom peered at me. “Take better care of yourself.”

  “Good luck with your Bru.”

  “The Bru are fantastic.” He slammed the jeep into gear and shot away, cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took off to wherever he was going.

  Two weeks later Leonard Hamnet managed to get the Lutheran chaplain at Crandall to write a letter to the Tin Man for him, and two days after that he was in a clean uniform, packing up his kit for an overnight flight to an air force base in California. From there he was connecting to a Memphis flight, and from there the army had booked him onto a six-passenger puddle jumper to Lookout Mountain.

  When I came into Hamnet’s tent he was zipping his bag shut in a zone of quiet afforded him by the other men. He did not want to talk about where he was going or the reason he was going there, and instead of answering my questions about his flights, he unzipped a pocket on the side of his bag and handed me a thick folder of airline tickets.

  I looked through them and gave them back. “Hard travel,” I said.

  “From now on, everything is easy,” Hamnet said. He seemed rigid and constrained as he zipped the precious tickets back into the bag. By this time his wife’s letter was a rag held together with Scotch tape. I could picture him reading and rereading it, for the thousandth or two thousandth time, on the long flight over the Pacific.

  “They need your help,” I said. “I’m glad they’re going to get it.”

  “That’s right.” Hamnet waited for me to leave him alone.

  Because his bag seemed heavy, I asked about the length of his leave. He wanted to get the tickets back out of the bag rather than answer me directly, but he forced himself to speak. “They gave me seven days. Plus travel time.”

  “Good,” I said, meaninglessly, and then there was nothing left to say, and we both knew it. Hamnet hoisted his bag off his bunk and turned to the door without any of the usual farewells and embraces. Some of the other men called to him, but he seemed to hear nothing but his own thoughts. I followed him outside and stood beside him in the heat. Hamnet was wearing a tie and his boots had a high polish. He was already sweating through his stiff khaki shirt. He would not meet my eyes. In a minute a jeep pulled up before us. The Lutheran chaplain had surpassed himself.

  “Good-bye, Leonard,” I said, and Hamnet tossed his bag in back and got into the jeep. He sat up straight as a statue. The private driving the jeep said something to him as they drove off, but Hamnet did not reply. I bet he did not say a word to the stewardesses, either, or to the cabdrivers or baggage handlers or anyone else who witnessed his long journey home.

  3

  On the day after Leonard Hamnet was scheduled to return, Lieutenant Joys called Michael Poole and myself into his quarters to tell us what had happened back in Tennessee. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand, and he seemed both angry and embarrassed. Hamnet would not be returning to the platoon. It was a little funny. Well, of course it wasn’t funny at all. The whole thing was terrible—that was what it was. Someone was to blame, too. Irresponsible decisions had been made, and we’d all be lucky if there wasn’t an investigation. We were closest to the man, hadn’t we seen what was likely to happen? If not, what the hell was our excuse?

  Didn’t we have any inkling of what the man was planning to do?

  Well, yes, at the beginning, Poole and I said. But he seemed to have adjusted.

  We have stupidity and incompetence all the way down the line here, said Lieutenant Elijah Joys. Here is a man who manages to carry a semiautomatic weapon through security at three different airports, bring it into a courthouse, and carry out threats he made months before, without anybody stopping him.

  I remembered the bag Hamnet had tossed into the back of the jeep; I remembered the reluctance with which he had zipped it open to show me his tickets. Hamnet had not carried his weapon through airport security. He had just shipped it home in his bag and walked straight through customs in his clean uniform and shiny boots.

  As soon as the foreman had announced the guilty verdict, Leonard Hamnet had gotten to his feet, pulled the semiautomatic pistol from inside his jacket, and executed Mr. Brewster where he was sitting at the defense table. While people shouted and screamed and dove for cover, while the courthouse officer tried to unsnap his gun, Hamnet killed his wife and his son. By the time he raised the pistol to his own head, the security officer had shot him twice in the chest. He died on the operating table at Lookout Mountain Lutheran Hospital, and his mother had requested that his remains receive burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

  His mother. Arlington. I ask you.

  That was what the Lieutenant said. His mother. Arlington. I ask you.

  A private from Indianapolis named E. W. Burroughs won the
six hundred and twenty dollars in the Elijah fund when Lieutenant Joys was killed by a fragmentation bomb thirty-two days before the end of his tour. After that we were delivered unsuspecting into the hands of Harry Beevers, the Lost Boss, the worst lieutenant in the world. Private Burroughs died a week later, down in Dragon Valley along with Tiano and Calvin Hill and lots of others, when Lieutenant Beevers walked us into a mined field, where we spent forty-eight hours under fire between two companies of NVA. I suppose Burroughs’s mother back in Indianapolis got the six hundred and twenty dollars.

  BUNNY IS

  GOOD BREAD

  for Stephen King

  PART ONE

  1

  Fee’s first memory was of a vision of fire, not an actual fire but an imagined fire leaping upward at an enormous grate upon which lay a naked man. Attached to this image was the accompanying memory of his father gripping the telephone. For a moment his father, Bob Bandolier, the one and only king of this realm, seemed rubbery, almost boneless with shock. He repeated the word, and a second time five-year-old Fielding Bandolier, little blond Fee, saw the flames jumping at the blackening figure on the grate. “I’m fired? This has got to be a joke.”

  The flames engulfed the tiny man on the slanting grate. The man opened his mouth to screech. This was hell, it was interesting. Fee was scorched, too, by those flames. His father saw the child looking up at him, and the child saw his father take in his presence. A fire of pain and anger flashed out of his father’s face, and Fee’s insides froze. His father waved him away with a back-paddling gesture of his left hand. In the murk of their apartment, Bob Bandolier’s crisp white shirt gleamed like an apparition. The creases from the laundry jutted up from the shirt’s starched surface.

  “You know why I haven’t been coming in,” he said. “This is not a matter where I have a choice. You will never, ever find a man who is as devoted—”

  He listened, bowing over as if crushing down a spring in his chest. Fee crept backward across the room, hoping to make no noise at all. When he backed into the chaise against the far wall, he instinctively dropped to his knees and crawled beneath it, still looking at the way his father was bending over the telephone. Fee bumped into a dark furry lump, Jude the cat, and clamped it to his chest until it stopped struggling.