by Peter Straub
7
THE STORY OF THE LEAVES
His mother had a nosebleed from her mouth. The boy put his hand in the water to stop her from going, and a cloud swarmed out of the leaves and darkened all the water like a stain.
THE STORY OF THE MOVIE
Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan held hands and looked out of the screen. Kiss me, Lily said, and the dead boy leaned over and kissed it by taking it into his mouth. Every day the same thing happened in the seats of the Beldame Oriental. The end of the movie was so terrible that you could never remember it, not even if you tried.
THE STORY OF THE NOSEBLEED
When Mrs. Sunchana saw it, she said, “Do you call that a nosebleed?” His father said, “What else could you call it?”
THE STORY OF THE MOVIE
Lily Sheehan wrapped her arms around Charlie Carpenter the way Someone wrapped his arms around the dead boy. Something grew between her legs and from that Something Charlie Carpenter did take suck. We remember folds of gray flesh. Whenever the warm silky fluid shuddered out, it tasted like bread.
THE STORY OF THE BLUE ROSE
Charlie Carpenter rang Lily Sheehan’s bell, and when she opened the door he gave her a blue rose. This stands for dying, for death. My daddy met the man who grew them, and when the man tried to run away my daddy shot him in the back.
THE STORY OF THE MOVIE
After a long time, the movie ended. Robert Ryan lay in a pool of blood, and a rank, feral odor filled the air. Lily Sheehan closed her front door and a little boat drifted away across Random Lake. A few people left their seats and walked up the aisle and swung open the doors to the lobby. My entire body is buzzing, with what feelings I do not know. In my hands I can feel the weight of plums in a coarse sack, my fingers retain the heat of—my hands tingle. No other world exists but this, with its empty seats and the enormous body beside mine. I am doubly dead, I am buried beneath the carpet, strewn with flecks of popcorn, of the Beldame Oriental. My heart buzzes when the enormous man pulls me tight into his chest. The story of the movie was too terrible to remember. I say, yes, I will be back tomorrow. I have forgotten everything. Words from the radio gong through my mind. Jack Armstrong, Lucky Strikes, the Irish songs on Saint Patrick’s Day when I was sick and stayed in bed all day and heard my mother humming and talking to herself while she cleaned the rooms we lived in.
THE STORY OF MY FIRST VICTIM
The first person I ever killed was a six-year-old boy named Lance Torkelson. I was thirteen. We were in a quarry in Tangent, Ohio, and I made Lance hold my erection in his hand and put the tip against his face. Amazed by sensation, I cried out, and the semen shot out like ropes and clung to his face. If I had kept my mouth shut he would have been all right, but my yelling frightened him and he began to wail. I was still shooting and pumping—some of it hit Lance’s throat and slid down inside his collar. He screamed. I picked up a rock and hit Lance as hard as I could on the side of his head. He fell right down. Then I hit him until something broke and his head felt soft. My cock was still hard, but there was nothing left inside me. I tossed aside the rock and watched myself stay so stiff and alive, so ready. I could hardly believe what had happened. I never knew that was how it worked.
8
A sudden change in air pressure brought him groaning out of the movie. His entire body felt taut with misery. She’s dead, he thought, she just died. Into his bedroom floated the odors of beer and garbage. The darkness above his bed whirled itself into a pattern as meaningless as an oil slick. He tossed back his covers and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. The shape in the darkness above him shifted and rolled.
Everything in his room, his bed and dresser, the toys and clothes on the floor, had been thrown into unfamiliarity by the white light that filtered in through the gauze curtains. His room seemed larger than in the daytime. A deep sound had been reaching him since he had thrown off his blankets, a deep mechanical rasp that poured up from the floor and through the walls. This sound flowed up from the earth—it was the earth itself at work, the great machine at the heart of the earth.
He came into the living room. Pale moonlight covered the carpet and chaise. Sleeping Jude had curled into a dark knot, from which only the points of her ears protruded. All the furniture looked as if it would float away if he touched it. The bedroom door had been closed. The earth’s great chugging machinelike noise went on.
The sound grew louder as he approached the bedroom door. A great confusion went through him like a fog.
He stood in the moonlight-flooded room with his hand frozen to the knob and gulped down fire. A certain terrible knowledge had come to him: the rasping sound that had awakened him was the sound of his mother’s breathing, a relentless struggle to draw in air and then force it out again. Fee nearly passed out on the spot—the cloud of confusion had left him so swiftly that it was as if he had been stripped. He had thought his mother was dead, but now she was going to have to die all over again.
He turned the knob and opened the door, and the rattling sounds not only became louder but increased in size and mass. Inside the Beldame Oriental, you paused while your eyes adjusted to the darkness. Lightly counter pointing the noises of his mother’s body attempting to keep itself alive came the milder sounds of his father’s snores.
He stepped into the bedroom, and the shapes before him gradually coalesced and solidified. His mother lay with her hands on her chest, her face pointed to the ceiling. It sounded as if, length by length, something long and rough and reluctantly surrendered were being torn out of her. Face up on the mattress to the right of the bed, clad only in white boxer shorts, lay his father’s pale, muscular body, an arm curved over the top of his head, a leg bent at the knee. A constellation of beer bottles fanned out beside his mattress.
Fee wiped his hands over his eyes and finally saw that his mother’s hands shook up and down with the rapid regular quiver of a small animal’s heartbeat. He reached out and lay his fingers on her forearm. It moved with the same quick pulse as her hands. Another ragged inhalation negotiated air into his mother, and when he tightened his hold on her arm, invisible hands tore the breath out of her. The little boat his mother rowed was now only the tiniest speck on the black water.
His mother’s body seemed as long as a city block. How could he do anything to affect what was happening to that body? The hands curling into her chest were as big as his head. The nails that sprouted from those hands were longer than his fingers. Her chin separated volumes of darkness. His mother’s face was as wide as a map. All of this size and power shrank him—her struggle erased him, breath by breath.
The hands on her breasts jittered on. The sounds of taking in and releasing air no longer seemed to have anything to do with breathing. They were the sounds of combat, of scores of men dying at either hand, of heavy feet thudding into the earth, of shells destroying ancient trees, of aircraft moving through the sky. Men groaned on a battlefield. The air was pink with shell burst. Garish yellow tracers ripped across it.
Fee opened his eyes. His mother’s body was a battlefield. Her feet trembled beneath the sheet; her breathing settled into a raspy, inhuman chug. He reached out to touch her arm again, and the arm danced away from his fingers. He wailed in loneliness and terror, but the sounds coming from her mouth obliterated his cry. Her arms shot up three or four inches and slammed down onto her body. Two fingernails cracked off with sharp popping sounds like the snapping of chicken bones. The long yellow fingernails rolled down the sheet and clicked together at the side of the bed. Fee felt that whatever was happening inside his mother was also happening to him. He could feel the great hands reaching down inside him, grasping his essence and tearing it out.
For an instant, she stopped moving. Her hands hung in the air with their fingernails intertwined; her feet were planted flat on the mattress; her hips floated up. Her feet skidded out, and her hips collapsed back to the bed. The sheet drifted down to her waist. The smell of blood filled the room. His mother’s hands fe
ll back on her breasts, and the rumpled sheet turned a deep red which soaked down to her knees. At her waist, blood darkened and rose through the gathered sheet.
Something inside his mother made a soft ripping sound.
Her breathing began again in midbeat, softer than before. Fee could feel the enormous hands within him pulling harder at some limp, exhausted thing. Groans rose from the ruined earth. Her breathing moved in and out like a freight train. His own breath pounded in and out with hers.
Her hands settled into the sides of her chest. The long nails clicked. He looked for, but did not see, the broken fingernails that had rolled toward him—he was afraid to look down and see them curling beside his naked feet. If he had stepped on them, he would have screeched like an owl.
He pulled in a searing rush of air. Blood and death dragged themselves far into his body and snagged on his flesh so that they stayed behind when he exhaled in time with his mother. Somehow blood had coated his hands, and he left dark prints on the bed.
The rhythm of their breathing halted. His heart halted, too. The giant hands clamped down inside his mother’s body. A breath caught in her throat and pushed itself out with a sharp exclamation. He and his mother drew in a ragged lungful of blood and death and released a mouthful of steam.
The little rower on the black lake trembled on the horizon.
Sips of air entered her mouth, paused, and got lost. She took in two, waited, waited, and released one. A long time passed. Amazed, he noticed feeble daylight leaking into the room. Her mouth was furry with labor and dehydration. His mother took another sip of air and lost it inside herself. She did not take another.
Fee observed that he had left his body and could see himself standing by the bed.
He waited, not breathing, for what would happen next. He saw that he was smaller than he had imagined, and that beneath the streaks of blood on his face, he looked blank with fear. Bruises covered his chest, arms, and back. He saw himself gripping his mother’s arm—he had not known he was doing that.
A ripple moved through his mother’s body, beginning near her ankles and passing up her legs and into her hips. It rolled through her belly and entered her chest. Those powerful hands had found what they wanted, and now they would never let go of it.
Her face tightened as if around a bad taste. Both of them, his body and himself standing beside his body, leaned over the bed. The movement made its way into her throat, then moved like a current up into her head. Something inside him grabbed his essential substance and squeezed. His feet left the ground. A silent explosion transformed the shape and pressure of the air, transformed color, transformed everything. A final twitch cleared her forehead of lines, her head came to rest on the pillow, and it was over. For a moment he saw or thought he saw some small white thing move rapidly toward the ceiling. Fee was back in his body. He reeled back from the bed.
His father said, “Hey? Huh?”
Fee screamed—he had forgotten that his father was on the other side of the bed.
Bob Bandolier’s puffy face appeared above the midpoint of the body on the bed. He rubbed his eyes, then took in the bloody sheet. He staggered to his feet. “Get out of here, Fee. This is no place for you.”
“Mom is dead,” Fee said.
His father moved around the bed so quickly that Fee did not see him move at all—he simply appeared beside him and pushed him toward the door. “Do what I say, right now.”
Fee walked out of the bedroom.
His father yelled, “She’s going to be okay!”
Fee moved on damp, cold feet to the chaise and lay down.
“Close your eyes,” his father said.
Obediently, Fee closed his eyes. When he heard the bedroom door close, he opened them again. The sheet made a wet, sloppy sound when it hit the floor. Fee let himself revisit what had happened. He heard the inhuman, chugging noise come out of his throat. He drummed his feet against the back of the chaise. Something in his stomach flipped into the back of his throat and filled his mouth with the taste of vomit. In his mind, he leaned over and smoothed the wrinkles from his mother’s forehead.
The bedroom door banged open, and he closed his eyes.
Bob Bandolier came walking fast through the living room. “You ought to be in bed,” he said, but without heat. Fee kept his eyes shut. His father went into the kitchen. Water gushed from the tap: a drawer opened, an object rustled against other objects, the drawer closed. All this had happened before, therefore it was comforting. In Fee’s mind Charlie Carpenter stood at the wheel of his motorboat and sped across the glossy lake. A bearded man in Arab dress lifted his head and took into his mouth the last drop from an enormous cup. The warm liquid fell on his tongue like bread, but burned as he swallowed it. His father carried a sloshing pail past him, and the pail exuded the surpassing sweetness and cleanliness of the dishwashing soap. The bedroom door slammed shut, and Fee opened his eyes again.
They were still open when Bob Bandolier walked out with the bucket and sponge in one hand, a huge red wad wrapped in the dripping rubber sheet under the other arm. “I have to talk to you,” he said to Fee. “After I get this stuff downstairs.”
Fee nodded. His father walked toward the kitchen and the basement stairs.
Downstairs, the washing machine gurgled and hummed. Footsteps came up the stairs, the door closed. There came the sound of cupboard doors, of liquid gurgling from a bottle. Bob Bandolier came back into the living room. He was wearing a stretched-out T-shirt and striped boxer shorts, and he was carrying a glass half full of whiskey. His hair stood up on the crown of his head, and his face was still puffy.
“This isn’t easy, kid.” He looked around for somewhere to sit, and moved backward three or four feet to lower himself into a chair. He swung his eyes up at Fee and sipped from the glass. “We did our best, we did everything we could, but it just didn’t pan out. This is going to be hard on both of us, but we can help each other out. We can be buddies.” He drank without taking his eyes from Fee.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“All that help and love we gave your mother—it didn’t do the job.” He took a swallow of his drink, and this time lowered his eyes before raising them again to Fee’s. “She passed away last night. It was very peaceful. She did not suffer, Fee.”
“Oh,” Fee said.
“When you were trying to get her attention in there, before I chased you out, she was already gone. She was already in heaven.”
“Uh-huh,” Fee said.
Bob Bandolier dropped his head and looked down for a little time. He scratched his head. He swallowed more whiskey. “It’s hard to believe.” He shook his head. “That it could end like this. That woman.” He looked away, then turned back to Fee with tears in his eyes. “That woman, she loved me. She was the best. Lots of people think they know me, but your mother knew what I was really capable of—for good and bad.” Another shake of the head. He wiped his eyes. “Anna, Anna was what a wife should be. She was what people should be. She was obedient. She knew the meaning of duty. She didn’t question my decisions more than three, four times in all the years we spent together, she was clean, she could cook . . .” He raised his wet eyes. “And she was one hell of a mother to you, Fee. Never forget that. There was never a dirty floor in this house.”
He put down his glass and covered his face with his hands. Suffocated sobs leaked through his fingers.
“This isn’t over,” his father said. “This isn’t over by a long shot.”
Fee sighed.
“I know who’s to blame,” his father said to the floor. Then he raised his head. “How do you think this all started?”
Fee said nothing.
“A hotshot at the St. Alwyn Hotel decided that he didn’t need me anymore. That is when the trouble started. And why did I miss some time at the job? Because I had to take care of my wife.”
He grinned at nothing. “They didn’t have the simple decency to understand that a man has to take care of his wife.
” His ghastly smile was like a convulsion. “But my campaign has started, sonny boy. I have fired the first shot. Let them pay heed.” He leaned forward. “And the next time I won’t be interrupted.
“She didn’t only die,” Bob Bandolier said. “The St. Alwyn killed her.” He finished his whiskey, and his face convulsed again. “They didn’t get it. In sickness as in health, you know? And they think someone else can do Bob Bandolier’s job. You think they asked the guests? They did not. They could have asked that nigger saxophone player—even him. Glenroy Breakstone. Every night that man said, ’Good evening, Mr. Bandolier,’ when he wouldn’t waste two words on anyone else—thought he was too important. But he paid his respects to me, he did. Did they want to know? Well, now they’re going to find out. Things are going to happen.” He composed his face. “It’s my whole life—like that woman in there.”