Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  He stood up. “Now there’s things to do. Your mom is dead, but the world goes on.”

  All of a sudden the truth came to Fee. He was one-half dead himself; half of him belonged to his dead mother. His father went to the telephone. “We’re going to be all right. Everybody else, watch out.” He peered at the telephone for a second, trying to remember a number, then dialed.

  The Sunchanas began walking around their bedroom.

  “Dr. Hudson, this is Bob Bandolier.” His imitation of a smile appeared and disappeared. “I know it’s early, Hudson. I’m not calling to pass the time of day. Do you know where I live? . . . Because. . . . Yes, I’m serious. You better believe I’m serious.”

  Fee got off the chaise. He bent down and picked up fat black Jude, who began purring. His hands and arms were still covered with drying blood, and his fingers showed red against the black fur.

  “Because I need you here right now, old pal. My wife died during the night, and I need a death certificate so I can take care of her.”

  Long individual cat hairs adhered to the backs of Fee’s fingers.

  “Hudson.”

  Overhead, a toilet flushed.

  Fee carried Jude to the window.

  “Hudson, listen to me. Remember how I covered your ass? I was the night manager, I know what goes on.”

  Fee wiped his eyes and looked out the window. Some invisible person was out there, looking in.

  “I’d say you were a busy boy, that’s what was going on.”

  “Call it heart disease,” his father said.

  Jude could see the invisible person. Jude had always seen the invisible people—they were nothing new to her. The Sunchanas moved around in their bedroom, getting dressed.

  “We’ll cremate,” his father said.

  For some reason, Fee blushed.

  “Hello, give me Mr. Ledwell,” his father said. “I’m Bob Bandolier. Mr. Ledwell? Bob Bandolier. I’m sorry to have to say that my wife passed away during the night and unless I am absolutely required, I’d like to stay home today. There are many arrangements to make, and I have a young son. . . . She’d been ill, yes, sir, gravely ill, but it’s still a great tragedy for the two of us. . . .”

  Fee’s eyes filled, and a tear slipped down his cheek. Held too tightly, Jude uttered a high-pitched cry of irritation and sank a claw into Fee’s forearm.

  “That is much appreciated, sir,” said Bob Bandolier. He put down the phone and in a different voice said, “That old lush of a doctor will be here as soon as he can find a whole suit from the clothes on the floor. We have work to do, so stop crying and get dressed. Hear me?”

  9

  Bob Bandolier opened the door as Mr. Sunchana was leaving for work, and Fee saw their upstairs neighbors take in their undistinguished-looking visitor: the black bag, the wrinkled suit, the cigarette burned down to his lips. Dr. Hudson was shown to the bedroom and escorted in.

  When Dr. Hudson came back out of the bedroom, he looked at his watch and began filling out a printed form at the dining room table. Bob Bandolier supplied his wife’s maiden name (Dymczeck), date of birth (August 16, 1928), place of birth (Azure, Ohio). The cause of death was respiratory failure.

  Half an hour after the doctor left, two men in dark suits arrived to wrap Fee’s mother in the sheet that covered her and carry her away on a stretcher.

  Bob Bandolier shaved twice, giving his face a military glaze. He dressed in a dark blue suit. He took a shot of whiskey while he looked through the knife drawer. Finally he slipped a black-handled paring knife into the pocket of his suit jacket. He put on his dark overcoat and told Fee that he would be home soon. He let himself out of the apartment and locked the door behind him.

  An hour later, he returned in a mood so foul that when he struck Fee, his son could tell that he was being beaten simply because he was within reach. It had nothing to do with him. To keep the Sunchanas from hearing, he tried to keep silent. Anger made Bob Bandolier so clumsy that he cut himself taking the paring knife out of his pocket. Bob Bandolier raged and stamped his feet and wrapped his finger in tissue paper—another outburst when he could not find bandages, I can’t find any bandages, don’t we even have any goddamned bandages? He opened a fresh bottle and poured drink after drink after drink.

  In the morning, Bob Bandolier dressed in the same blue suit and returned to the Hotel Hepton. Fee, who had said he was too sick to go to the movies, spent the day waiting to see the invisible people.

  Some nights later, Bob remembered to cook dinner, and long after the moon had risen and his son lay in a semiconscious stupor on the living room rug, sucking on his pain as if on a piece of candy, he returned to the knife drawer in ruminating, well-fed, well-exercised fashion, and selected a six-inch blade with a carved wooden handle. Many hours later, Fee came awake long enough to register that his father was actually carrying him to bed, and knew at once from the exultant triumph he saw in his father’s handsome face that late at night, when no one had seen him, Bob Bandolier had gone back to the St. Alwyn Hotel.

  Their life became regular again. Bob Bandolier left sandwiches on the table and locked the door behind him—he seemed to have forgotten about the Beldame Oriental, or to have decided that going to and from the theater exposed his son to unwelcome attention from the neighbors: better to lock him up and leave him alone.

  One night Fee awakened when his father picked him up from the chaise, and when he saw the gleeful face burning over his, he knew again that his father had been to the hotel he hated: that his father hated the St. Alwyn because he loved it, and that this time at least he had managed to get inside it.

  Sometimes it was as if Fee had never had a mother at all. Now and then he saw the cat staring at empty air, and knew that Jude could see one of the people from the invisible world. From Dangerous Depths returned to him, and alone in the empty room he played at being Charlie Carpenter—Charlie killing the big dog, Charlie stepping away from the wall to batter William Bendix to death, Charlie dying while Lily Sheehan smiled.

  After his father gave him a box of crayons and a pad of paper left behind by a guest at the Hepton, Fee spent days drawing pictures of enormous feet smashing houses, feet crushing men and women, crushing whole cities, of people sprawled dead in bomb craters and encampments as a pair of giant feet walked away. He hid these drawings beneath his bed. Once he lowered a drawing of a naked foot onto his exposed penis and nearly fainted from a combination of bliss and terror. He was Charlie Carpenter, living out Charlie Carpenter’s secret history.

  Whenever he saw the Sunchanas, either alone or with his father, they fled behind their front door. Bob Bandolier said, “Never uttered a word about your mother, never dropped a card or paid her the honor of making a telephone call. People like that are no better than animals.”

  On the night of October twenty-fifth, Bob Bandolier came home from work restless and impatient despite the two steaks and the bottle of whiskey he had in a big brown bag, and he slapped his son almost as soon as he took off his coat. He fried the steaks and drank the whiskey from the bottle. Every ten minutes he left the table to check on the state of his collar, the perfection of the knot in his necktie, the gloss of his mustache. The Hotel Hepton, once second only to the Pforzheimer, was a “sewer,” a “sty.” He could see it now. They thought they knew what it was all about, but the penny-pinching assholes didn’t have the first idea. They get a first-class hotel man, and what do they do to him? Give him lectures. Suggest he say less to the guests. Even the St. Alwyn, even the St. Alwyn, the hotel that had done the greatest damage to him, the hotel that had insulted and injured him, had actually managed to kill his wife, hadn’t been so stupid. Maybe he ought to “switch operations,” “change the battlefield,” “carry the fight into another theater.” You give and give, and this—this humiliation—was how they repaid you.

  Staring through the window the next morning, Fee finally glimpsed one of the invisible people. He nearly fainted. She was a pale, unhappy-looking blond woman, a w
oman who had seemed ghostly even when she had been alive. She had come to see him, Fee knew. She was looking for him—as if his lost mother were trying to find him. The second that the tears came into his eyes, the woman on the sidewalk vanished. Hurriedly, almost guiltily, he wiped the tears off his face. If he could, he would have gone through the door and followed her—straight to the St. Alwyn Hotel, for that was where she was going.

  The next great change in Fee’s life began after his father discovered his drawings. In the midst of the whirlwind caused by this next change, for the second time an inhabitant of the invisible world appeared before Fee, in a form and manner suggesting that he had caused a death.

  It began as a calm dinner. There was the “hypocritical lowlife” who gave orders to Bob Bandolier, there was an “untrustworthy and corrupt” colleague, there were mentions of the fine Christian woman Anna Bandolier had been—Fee warmed his hands at the fire of his father’s loves and hates. In the midst of the pleasure he took from this warmth, he realized that his father had asked him a question. He asked to hear it again.

  “Whatever happened to the drawing paper and those crayons I gave you? That stuff costs money, you know.”

  It had not cost Bob Bandolier any money, but that was secondary: the loss or waste of the precious materials would be a crime. You did not have to want to be bad to succeed in being as bad as possible.

  “I don’t know,” Fee said, but his eyes shifted sideways.

  “Oh, you don’t know,” said Bob Bandolier, his manner transformed in an instant. Fee was very close now to being beaten, but a beating was preferable to having his father see his drawings.

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  Again Fee glanced toward the hallway and his bedroom. His father jumped out of his chair, leaned across the table, and pushed him over in his chair.

  Bob Bandolier rushed around the table and pulled him up by his collar. “Are you so goddamned stupid you think you can get away with lying to me?”

  Fee blubbered and whined, and his father pulled him into the hallway.

  “You could have made it easy for yourself, but you made it hard. What did you do? Break the crayons? Tear up the paper?”

  Fee shook his head, trying to work out how much truth he could give his father without showing him the drawings.

  “Then show me.” His father pulled him into his room and pushed him toward the bed. “Where are they?”

  Again Fee could not avoid self-betrayal: he looked beneath his bed.

  “I see.”

  Fee wailed “Nooo,” and scrambled under the bed in a crazy attempt to protect the drawings with his own body.

  Swearing, his father got down on the floor, reached beneath the bed, grabbed Fee’s arm, and pulled him out. Sweating, struggling Fee threw his armful of drawings into the room and feebly struck his father. He tried to charge out of his arms to destroy the drawings—he wanted to cram them into his mouth, rip them to confetti, escape through the front door and run down the block.

  For a time they were both roaring and screaming. Fee ran out of breath, but he continued to writhe.

  His father hit him on the ear and said, “I should rip your heart out.”

  Fee went limp—the drawings lay all about them, waiting to be seen. Bob Bandolier’s attention went out to the images on the big pieces of paper. Then he put Fee down and bent to pick up the two drawings closest to him.

  Fee hid his face in his arms.

  “Feet,” his father said. “What the hell? I don’t get it.”

  He moved around the room, turning over the pictures. He flipped one over and displayed it to Fee: the giant’s feet striding away from a flattened movie theater.

  “You are going to tell me what this is about, right now.”

  An absolutely unprecedented thing happened to Fee Bandolier: he opened his mouth and spoke words over which he had no control at all. Someone else inside him spoke these words. Fee heard them as they proceeded from his mouth, but forgot them as soon as they were uttered.

  Finally he had said it all, though he could not have repeated a single word if he had been held over a fire. His father’s face had turned red. Troubled in some absolutely new way, Bob Bandolier seemed uncertain whether to comfort Fee or to beat him up. He could no longer meet Fee’s eyes. He wandered around the room, picking up scattered drawings. After a few seconds he dropped them back onto the floor.

  “Pick these up. Then get rid of them. I never want to see any of this ever again.”

  The first sign of the change was in Bob Bandolier’s new attitude toward his son. For Fee, the new attitude suggested that he had simultaneously become both much better and much worse. His father never struck him anymore, but Fee felt that his father did not want to touch him in any way. Days and nights passed almost wordlessly. Fee began to feel that he, too, had become invisible, at least to his father. Bob Bandolier drank, but instead of talking he read and reread that morning’s copy of the Ledger.

  On the night of November seventh, the closing of the front door awakened Fee. From the perfect quiet in the apartment, he knew his father had just gone out. He was sleeping again when his father returned.

  The following morning, Fee turned toward his bedroom window as he zipped up his pants, and all the breath seemed to leave his body. A dark-haired boy roughly his own age stood looking in from the little front lawn. He had been waiting for Fee to notice him, but made no effort to communicate. He did not have to. The boy’s plaid shirt was too large for him, as if he had stolen or scrounged it. His dirty tan trousers ended above his ankles. On a cold November morning in Millhaven, his feet were bare. The dark eyes beneath the scrappy black hair burned angrily, and the sallow face was frozen with rage. He seemed to quiver with feeling, but Fee had the oddest conviction that all this feeling was not about him—it concerned someone else. The boy had come because of a complicity, an understanding, between them. Dirty, battered-looking, he stared in to find his emotions matched by Fielding Bandolier. But Fielding Bandolier could not match the feelings that came streaming from the boy: he could only remember the sensation of speaking without willing to speak. Something inside him was weeping and gnashing its teeth, but Fee could scarcely hear it.

  If you forgot you were in a movie, your own feelings would tear you into bloody rags.

  Fee looked down to fasten the button on his waistband. When he looked back through the window, he saw the boy growing fainter and fainter, like a drawing being erased. Traces of the lawn and sidewalk shone through him. All at once it seemed to Fee that something vastly important, an absolutely precious quantity, was fading from his world. Once this quantity was gone, it would be lost forever. Fee moved toward the window, but by now he could not see the blazing dark eyes, and when he touched the glass the boy had disappeared.

  That was all right, he told himself; really, he had lost nothing.

  Bob Bandolier spent another evening poring over the Ledger, which had a large photograph of Heinz Stenmitz on its front page. He ordered Fee to bed early, and Fee felt that he was being dismissed because his father did not want to have a witness to his anxiety.

  For he was anxious—he was nervous. His leg jittered when he sat at the table, and he jumped whenever the telephone rang. The calls that came were never the call that his father feared, but their innocence did not quiet his anxiety. For something like a week, Fee’s few attempts to talk to his father met either angry silence or a command to shut up, and Fee knew that only his father’s reluctance to touch him saved him from a blow.

  Over the following days, Bob Bandolier relaxed. He would forget who was in the room with him, and lapse back into the old talk of the “hypocritical lowlife” and the “corrupt gang” that worked with him. Then he would look up from his plate or his newspaper, see his son, and blush with a feeling for which he refused to find words. Fee witnessed the old anger only once, when he walked into Bob Bandolier’s bedroom and found him sitting on the bed, leafing through a small stack of papers from the s
hoe box beside him. His father’s face darkened, and his eyes darkened, and for a second Fee knew the sick, familiar thrill of knowing he was to be beaten. The beating did not happen. His father slipped the papers into the shoe box and told him to find something to do in the other room, fast.

  Bob Bandolier came home with the news that the Hepton had let him go—the hypocritical lowlife had finally managed to catch him in the meat locker, and the bastard would not listen to any explanations. It was okay, though. The St. Alwyn was taking him back. After everything he had been through, he wouldn’t mind going back to the old St. Alwyn. He had settled his score, and now they could go forward.

  He and Fee could not go forward together, however, at least not for a while. It wasn’t working. He needed quiet, he had to work things out. Fee needed to have a woman around, he needed to play with other kids. Anna’s sister Judy in Azure had written, saying that she and her husband, Arnold, would be willing to take the boy in, if Bob was finding it difficult to raise the boy by himself.

  His father stared at his hands as he said all this to Fee, and looked up only when he had reached this point.

  “It’s all arranged.”

  Bob Bandolier turned his head to look at the window, the porcelain figures, the sleeping cat, anything but his son. Bob Bandolier detested Judy and Arnold, exactly as he detested Anna’s brother, Hank, and his wife, Wilda. Fee understood that his father detested him, too.

  Bob Bandolier took Fee to the train station in downtown Mill haven, and in a confusion of color and noise passed him and his cardboard suitcase, along with a five-dollar bill, into the hands of a conductor. Fee rode all the way from Mill haven to Chicago by himself, and in Chicago the pitying conductor made sure he boarded the train to Cleveland. He followed his father’s orders and talked to no one during the long journey through Illinois and Ohio, though several people, chiefly elderly women, spoke to him. At Cleveland, Judy and Arnold Leatherwood were waiting for him, and drove the sleeping boy the remaining two hundred miles to Azure.