Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  Now I feel different about his story, and about him, too. He was a great man, and I was an unworldly kid. He was drunk, and I was priggishly sober, but in every important way, he was functioning far above my level. Hat had lived forty-nine years as a black man in America, and I’d spent all of my twenty-one years in white suburbs. He was an immensely talented musician, a man who virtually thought in music, and I can’t even hum in tune. That I expected to understand anything at all about him staggers me now. Back then, I didn’t know anything about grief, and Hat wore grief about him daily, like a cloak. Now that I am the age he was then, I see that most of what is called information is interpretation, and interpretation is always partial.

  Probably Hat was putting me on, jiving me, though not maliciously. He certainly was not telling me the literal truth, though I have never been able to learn what was the literal truth of this case. It’s all so unreliable. A woman named Mary Randolph lived first in one place, then she lived in another. It’s possible that even Hat never knew what was the literal truth behind the story he told me—possible, I mean, that he was still trying to work out what the truth was, nearly forty years after the fact.

  2

  He started telling me the story after we heard what I thought were gunshots from the street. I jumped from the chair and rushed to the windows, which looked out onto Eighth Avenue. “Kids,” Hat said. In the hard yellow light of the streetlamps, four or five teenage boys trotted up the avenue. Three of them carried paper bags. “Kids shooting?” I asked. My amazement tells you how long ago this was.

  “Fireworks,” Hat said. “Every Halloween in New York, fool kids run around with bags full of fireworks, trying to blow their hands off.”

  Here and in what follows, I am not going to try to represent the way Hat actually spoke. I cannot indicate the way his voice glided over certain words and turned others into mushy growls, though he expressed more than half of his meaning by sound; and I don’t want to reproduce his constant, reflexive obscenity. Hat couldn’t utter four words in a row without throwing in a “motherfucker.” Mostly, I have replaced his obscenities with other words, and the reader can imagine what was really said. Also, if I tried to imitate his grammar, I’d sound racist and he would sound stupid. Hat left school in the fourth grade, and his language, though precise, was casual. To add to these difficulties, Hat employed a private language of his own, a code to ensure that he would be understood only by the people he wished to understand him. I have replaced most of his code words with their equivalents.

  It must have been around one in the morning, which means that I had been in his room about four hours. Until Hat explained the “gunshots,” I had forgotten that it was Halloween night, and I told him this as I turned away from the window.

  “I never forget about Halloween,” Hat said. “If I can, I stay home on Halloween. Don’t want to be out on the street, that night.”

  He had already given me proof that he was superstitious, and as he spoke he glanced almost nervously around the room, as if looking for sinister presences.

  “You’d feel in danger?” I asked.

  He rolled gin around in his mouth and looked at me as he had in the alley behind the club, taking note of qualities I myself did not yet perceive. This did not feel at all judgmental. The nervousness I thought I had seen had disappeared, and his manner seemed marginally more concentrated than earlier in the evening. He swallowed the gin and looked at me without speaking for a couple of seconds.

  “No,” he said. “Not exactly. But I wouldn’t feel safe, either.”

  I sat with my pen half an inch from the page of my notebook, uncertain whether or not to write this down.

  “I’m from Mississippi, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “Funny things happen down there. Back when I was a little kid, it was a whole different world. Know what I mean?”

  “I can guess,” I said.

  He nodded. “Sometimes people disappeared. They’d be gone. All kinds of stuff used to happen, stuff you wouldn’t even believe in now. I met a witch-lady once who could put curses on you, make you go blind and crazy. Another time, I saw a mean, murdering son of a bitch named Eddie Grimes die and come back to life—he got shot to death at a dance we were playing, he was dead, and a woman bent down and whispered to him, and Eddie Grimes stood right back up on his feet. The man who shot him took off double-quick, and he must have kept on going, because we never saw him after that.”

  “Did you start playing again?” I asked, taking notes as fast as I could.

  “We never stopped,” Hat said. “You let the people deal with what’s going on, but you gotta keep on playing.”

  “Did you live in the country?” I asked, thinking that all of this sounded like Dog patch—witches and walking dead men.

  He shook his head. “I was brought up in town, Woodland, Mississippi. On the river. Where we lived was called Dark town, you know, but most of Woodland was white, with nice houses and all. Lots of our people did the cooking and washing in the big houses on Miller’s Hill, that kind of work. In fact, we lived in a pretty nice house, for Darktown—the band always did well, and my father had a couple of other jobs on top of that. He was a good piano player, mainly, but he could play any kind of instrument. And he was a big, strong guy, nice-looking, real light-complected, so he was called Red, which was what that meant in those days. People respected him.”

  Another long, rattling burst of explosions came from Eighth Avenue. I wanted to ask him again about leaving his father’s band, but Hat once more gave his little room a quick inspection, swallowed another mouthful of gin, and went on talking.

  “We even went out trick-or-treating on Halloween, you know, like the white kids. I guess our people didn’t do that everywhere, but we did. Naturally, we stuck to our neighborhood, and probably we got a lot less than the kids from Miller’s Hill, but they didn’t have anything up there that tasted as good as the apples and candy we brought home in our bags. Around us, folks made instead of bought, and that’s the difference.” He smiled at either the memory or the unexpected sentimentality he had just revealed—for a moment, he looked both lost in time and uneasy with himself for having said too much. “Or maybe I just remember it that way, you know? Anyhow, we used to raise some hell, too. You were supposed to raise hell, on Halloween.”

  “You went out with your brothers?” I asked.

  “No, no, they were—” He flipped his hand in the air, dismissing whatever it was that his brothers had been. “I was always apart, you dig? Me, I was always into my own little things. I was that way right from the beginning. I play like that—never play like anyone else, don’t even play like myself. You gotta find new places for yourself, or else nothing’s happening, isn’t that right? Don’t want to be a repeater pencil.” He saluted this declaration with another swallow of gin. “Back in those days, I used to go out with a boy named Rodney Sparks—we called him Dee, short for Demon, ’cause Dee Sparks would do anything that came into his head. That boy was the bravest little bastard I ever knew. He’d wrassle a mad dog. And the reason was, Dee was the preacher’s boy. If you happen to be the preacher’s boy, seems like you gotta prove every way you can that you’re no Buster Brown, you know? So I hung with Dee, because I wasn’t any Buster Brown, either. This is when we were eleven, around then—the time when you talk about girls, you know, but you still aren’t too sure what that’s about. You don’t know what anything’s about, to tell the truth. You along for the ride, you trying to pack in as much fun as possible. So Dee was my right hand, and when I went out on Halloween in Woodland, I went out with him.”

  He rolled his eyes toward the window and said, “Yeah.” An expression I could not at all read took over his face. By the standards of ordinary people, Hat almost always looked detached, even impassive, tuned to some private wavelength, and this sense of detachment had intensified. I thought he was changing mental gears, dismissing his childhood, and opened my mouth to ask him about Grant Kilbert. But he raised
his glass to his mouth again and rolled his eyes back to me, and the quality of his gaze told me to keep quiet.

  “I didn’t know it,” he said, “but I was getting ready to stop being a little boy. To stop believing in little-boy things and start seeing like a grown-up. I guess that’s part of what I liked about Dee Sparks—he seemed like he was a lot more grown-up than I was, shows you what my head was like. The age we were, this would have been the last time we went out on Halloween to get apples and candy. From then on, we would have gone out mainly to raise hell. Scare the shit out of little kids. But the way it turned out, it was the last time we ever went out on Halloween.”

  He finished off the gin in his glass and reached down to pick the bottle up off the floor and pour another few inches into the tumbler. “Here I am, sitting in this room. There’s my horn over there. Here’s this bottle. You know what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t. I had no idea what he was saying. The hint of fatality clung to his earlier statement, and for a second I thought he was going to say that he was here but Dee Sparks was nowhere because Dee Sparks had died in Woodland, Mississippi, at the age of eleven on Halloween night. Hat was looking at me with a steady curiosity that compelled a response. “What happened?” I asked.

  Now I know that he was saying, It has come down to just this, my room, my horn, my bottle. My question was as good as any other response.

  “If I was to tell you everything that happened, we’d have to stay in this room for a month.” He smiled and straightened up on the bed. His ankles were crossed, and for the first time I noticed that his feet, shod in dark suede shoes with crepe soles, did not quite touch the floor. “And, you know, I never tell anybody everything, I always have to keep something back for myself. Things turned out all right. Only thing I mind is, I should have earned more money. Grant Kilbert, he earned a lot of money, and some of that was mine, you know.”

  “Were you friends?” I asked.

  “I knew the man.” He tilted his head and stared at the ceiling for so long that eventually I looked up at it, too. It was not a remarkable ceiling. A circular section near the center had been replastered not long before.

  “No matter where you live, there are places you’re not supposed to go,” he said, still gazing up. “And sooner or later, you’re gonna wind up there.” He smiled at me again. “Where we lived, the place you weren’t supposed to go was called The Backs. Out of town, stuck in the woods off one little path. In Darktown, we had all kinds from preachers on down. We had washerwomen and blacksmiths and carpenters, and we had some no-good thieving trash, too, like Eddie Grimes, that man who came back from being dead. In The Backs, they started with trash like Eddie Grimes, and went down from there. Sometimes, our people went out there to buy a jug, and sometimes they went there to get a woman, but they never talked about it. The Backs was rough. What they had was rough.” He rolled his eyes at me and said, “That witch-lady I told you about, she lived in The Backs.” He snickered. “Man, they were a mean bunch of people. They’d cut you, you looked at ’em bad. But one thing funny about the place, white and colored lived there just the same—it was integrated. Backs people were so evil, color didn’t make no difference to them. They hated everybody anyhow, on principle.” Hat pointed his glass at me, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes. “At least, that was what everybody said. So this particular Halloween, Dee Sparks says to me after we finish with Darktown, we ought to head out to The Backs and see what the place is really like. Maybe we can have some fun.

  “The idea of going out to The Backs kind of scared me, but being scared was part of the fun—Halloween, right? And if anyplace in Woodland was perfect for all that Halloween shit, you know, someplace where you might really see a ghost or a goblin, The Backs was better than the graveyard.” Hat shook his head, holding the glass out at a right angle to his body. A silvery amusement momentarily transformed him, and it struck me that his innate elegance, the product of his character and bearing much more than of the handsome suit and the suede shoes, had been paid for by the surviving of a thousand unimaginable difficulties, each painful to a varying degree. Then I realized that what I meant by elegance was really dignity, that for the first time I had recognized actual dignity in another human being, and that dignity was nothing like the self-congratulatory superiority people usually mistook for it.

  “We were just little babies, and we wanted some of those good old Halloween scares. Like those dumbbells out on the street, tossing firecrackers at each other.” Hat wiped his free hand down over his face and made sure that I was prepared to write down everything he said. (The tapes had already been used up.) “When I’m done, tell me if we found it, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  3

  “Dee showed up at my house just after dinner, dressed in an old sheet with two eyeholes cut in it and carrying a paper bag. His big old shoes stuck out underneath the sheet. I had the same costume, but it was the one my brother used the year before, and it dragged along the ground and my feet got caught in it. The eyeholes kept sliding away from my eyes. My mother gave me a bag and told me to behave myself and get home before eight. It didn’t take but half an hour to cover all the likely houses in Dark town, but she knew I’d want to fool around with Dee for an hour or so afterwards.”

  “Then up and down the streets we go, knocking on the doors where they’d give us stuff and making a little mischief where we knew they wouldn’t. Nothing real bad, just banging on the door and running like hell, throwing rocks on the roof, little stuff. A few places, we plain and simple stayed away from—the places where people like Eddie Grimes lived. I always thought that was funny. We knew enough to steer clear of those houses, but we were still crazy to get out to The Backs.”

  “Only way I can figure it is, The Backs was forbidden. Nobody had to tell us to stay away from Eddie Grimes’s house at night. You wouldn’t even go there in the daylight, ’cause Eddie Grimes would get you and that would be that.”

  “Anyhow, Dee kept us moving along real quick, and when folks asked us questions or said they wouldn’t give us stuff unless we sang a song, he moaned like a ghost and shook his bag in their faces, so we could get away faster. He was so excited, I think he was almost shaking.”

  “Me, I was excited, too. Not like Dee—sort of sick-excited, the way people must feel the first time they use a parachute. Scared-excited.”

  “As soon as we got away from the last house, Dee crossed the street and started running down the side of the little general store we all used. I knew where he was going. Out behind the store was a field, and on the other side of the field was Meridian Road, which took you out into the woods and to the path up to The Backs. When he realized that I wasn’t next to him, he turned around and yelled at me to hurry up. No, I said inside myself, I ain’t gonna jump outa this here airplane, I’m not dumb enough to do that. And then I pulled up my sheet and scrunched up my eye to look through the one hole close enough to see through, and I took off after him.”

  “It was beginning to get dark when Dee and I left my house, and now it was dark. The Backs was about a mile and a half away, or at least the path was. We didn’t know how far along that path you had to go before you got there. Hell, we didn’t even know what it was—I was still thinking the place was a collection of little houses, like a sort of shadow-Woodland. And then, while we were crossing the field, I stepped on my costume and fell down flat on my face. Enough of this stuff, I said, and yanked the damned thing off. Dee started cussing me out, I wasn’t doing this the right way, we had to keep our costumes on in case anybody saw us, did I forget that this is Halloween, on Halloween a costume protected you. So I told him I’d put it back on when we got there. If I kept on falling down, it’d take us twice as long. That shut him up.”

  “As soon as I got that blasted sheet over my head, I discovered that I could see at least a little ways ahead of me. The moon was up, and a lot of stars were out. Under his sheet, Dee Sparks looked a little bit like a real ghost. It kind of gli
mmered. You couldn’t really make out its edges, so the darn thing, like, floated. But I could see his legs and those big old shoes sticking out.”

  “We got out of the field and started up Meridian Road, and pretty soon the trees came up right to the ditches alongside the road, and I couldn’t see too well anymore. The road seemed like it went smack into the woods and disappeared. The trees looked taller and thicker than in the daytime, and now and then something right at the edge of the woods shone round and white, like an eye—reflecting the moonlight, I guess. Spooked me. I didn’t think we’d ever be able to find the path up to The Backs, and that was fine with me. I thought we might go along the road another ten, fifteen minutes, and then turn around and go home. Dee was swooping around up in front of me, flapping his sheet and acting bughouse. He sure wasn’t trying too hard to find that path.”

  “After we walked about a mile down Meridian Road, I saw headlights like yellow dots coming toward us fast—Dee didn’t see anything at all, running around in circles the way he was. I shouted at him to get off the road, and he took off like a rabbit—disappeared into the woods before I did. I jumped the ditch and hunkered down behind a pine about ten feet off the road to see who was coming. There weren’t many cars in Woodland in those days, and I knew every one of them. When the car came by, it was Dr. Garland’s old red Cord—Dr. Garland was a white man, but he had two waiting rooms and took colored patients, so colored patients was mostly what he had. And the man was a heavy drinker, heavy drinker. He zipped by, goin’ at least fifty, which was mighty fast for those days, probably as fast as that old Cord would go. For about a second, I saw Dr. Garland’s face under his white hair, and his mouth was wide open, stretched like he was screaming. After he passed, I waited a long time before I came out of the woods. Turning around and going home would have been fine with me. Dr. Garland changed everything. Normally, he was kind of slow and quiet, you know, and I could still see that black screaming hole opened up in his face—he looked like he was being tortured, like he was in hell. I sure as hell didn’t want to see whatever he had seen.”