Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  “I could hear the Cord’s engine after the taillights disappeared. I turned around and saw that I was all alone on the road. Dee Sparks was nowhere in sight. A couple of times, real soft, I called out his name. Then I called his name a little louder. Away off in the woods, I heard Dee giggle. I said he could run around all night if he liked but I was going home, and then I saw that pale silver sheet moving through the trees, and I started back down Meridian Road. After about twenty paces, I looked back, and there he was, standing in the middle of the road in that silly sheet, watching me go. Come on, I said, let’s get back. He paid me no mind. Wasn’t that Dr. Garland? Where was he going, as fast as that? What was happening? When I said the doctor was probably out on some emergency, Dee said the man was going home—he lived in Woodland, didn’t he?”

  “Then I thought maybe Dr. Garland had been up in The Backs. And Dee thought the same thing, which made him want to go there all the more. Now he was determined. Maybe we’d see some dead guy. We stood there until I understood that he was going to go by himself if I didn’t go with him. That meant that I had to go. Wild as he was, Dee’d get himself into some kind of mess for sure if I wasn’t there to hold him down. So I said okay, I was coming along, and Dee started swooping along like before, saying crazy stuff. There was no way we were going to be able to find some little old path that went up into the woods. It was so dark, you couldn’t see the separate trees, only giant black walls on both sides of the road.”

  “We went so far along Meridian Road I was sure we must have passed it. Dee was running around in circles about ten feet ahead of me. I told him that we’d missed the path, and now it was time to get back home. He laughed at me and ran across to the right side of the road and disappeared into the darkness.”

  “I told him to get back, damn it, and he laughed some more and said I should come to him. Why? I said, and he said, Because this here is the path, dummy. I didn’t believe him—came right up to where he disappeared. All I could see was a black wall that could have been trees or just plain night. Moron, Dee said, look down. And I did. Sure enough, one of those white things like an eye shone up from where the ditch should have been. I bent down and touched cold little stones, and the shining dot of white went off like a light—a pebble that caught the moonlight just right. Bending down like that, I could see the hump of grass growing up between the tire tracks that led out onto Meridian Road. He’d found the path, all right.”

  “At night, Dee Sparks could see one hell of a lot better than me. He spotted the break in the ditch from across the road. He was already walking up the path in those big old shoes, turning around every other step to look back at me, make sure I was coming along behind him. When I started following him, Dee told me to get my sheet back on, and I pulled the thing over my head even though I’d rather have sucked the water out of a hollow stump. But I knew he was right—on Halloween, especially in a place like where we were, you were safer in a costume.”

  “From then on in, we were in No Man’s Land. Neither one of us had any idea how far we had to go to get to The Backs, or what it would look like once we got there. Once I set foot on that wagon track I knew for sure The Backs wasn’t anything like the way I thought. It was a lot more primitive than a bunch of houses in the woods. Maybe they didn’t even have houses! Maybe they lived in caves!”

  “Naturally, after I got that blamed costume over my head, I couldn’t see for a while. Dee kept hissing at me to hurry up, and I kept cussing him out. Finally I bunched up a couple handfuls of the sheet right under my chin and held it against my neck, and that way I could see pretty well and walk without tripping all over myself. All I had to do was follow Dee, and that was easy. He was only a couple of inches in front of me, and even through one eyehole, I could see that silvery sheet moving along.”

  “Things moved in the woods, and once in a while an owl hooted. To tell you the truth, I never did like being out in the woods at night. Even back then, give me a nice warm barroom instead, and I’d be happy. Only animal I ever liked was a cat, because a cat is soft to the touch, and it’ll fall asleep on your lap. But this was even worse than usual, because of Halloween, and even before we got to The Backs, I wasn’t sure if what I heard moving around in the woods was just a possum or a fox or something a lot worse, something with funny eyes and long teeth that liked the taste of little boys. Maybe Eddie Grimes was out there, looking for whatever kind of treat Eddie Grimes liked on Halloween night. Once I thought of that, I got so close to Dee Sparks I could smell him right through his sheet.”

  “You know what Dee Sparks smelled like? Like sweat, and a little bit like the soap the preacher made him use on his hands and face before dinner, but really like a fire in a junction box. A sharp, kind of bitter smell. That’s how excited he was.”

  “After a while we were going uphill, and then we got to the top of the rise, and a breeze pressed my sheet against my face. We started going downhill, and over Dee’s electrical fire, I could smell wood smoke. And something else I couldn’t name. Dee stopped moving so sudden, I bumped into him. I asked him what he could see. Nothing but the woods, he said, but we’re getting there. People are up ahead somewhere. And they got a still. We got to be real quiet from here on out, he told me, as if he had to, and to let him know I understood I pulled him off the path into the woods.”

  “Well, I thought, at least I know what Dr. Garland was after.”

  “Dee and I went snaking through the trees—me holding that blamed sheet under my chin so I could see out of one eye, at least, and walk without falling down. I was glad for that big fat pad of pine needles on the ground. An elephant could have walked over that stuff as quiet as a beetle. We went along a little farther, and it got so I could smell all kinds of stuff—burned sugar, crushed juniper berries, tobacco juice, grease. And after Dee and I moved a little bit along, I heard voices, and that was enough for me. Those voices sounded angry.”

  “I yanked at Dee’s sheet and squatted down—I wasn’t going any farther without taking a good look. He slipped down beside me. I pushed the wad of material under my chin up over my face, grabbed another handful, and yanked that up, too, to look out from under the bottom of the sheet. Once I could actually see where we were, I almost passed out. Twenty feet away through the trees, a kerosene lantern lit up the grease-paper window cut into the back of a little wooden shack, and a big raggedy guy carrying another kerosene lantern came stepping out of a door we couldn’t see and stumbled toward a shed. On the other side of the building I could see the yellow square of a window in another shack, and past that, another one, a sliver of yellow shining out through the trees. Dee was crouched next to me, and when I turned to look at him, I could see another chink of yellow light from somewhere off in the woods over that way. Whether he knew it or not, he’d just about walked us straight into the middle of The Backs.”

  “He whispered for me to cover my face. I shook my head. Both of us watched the big guy stagger toward the shed. Somewhere in front of us, a woman screeched, and I almost dumped a load in my pants. Dee stuck his hand out from under his sheet and held it out, as if I needed him to tell me to be quiet. The woman screeched again, and the big guy sort of swayed back and forth. The light from the lantern swung around in big circles. I saw that the woods were full of little paths that ran between the shacks. The light hit the shack, and it wasn’t even wood, but tar paper. The woman laughed or maybe sobbed. Whoever was inside the shack shouted, and the raggedy guy wobbled toward the shed again. He was so drunk he couldn’t even walk straight. When he got to the shed, he set down the lantern and bent to get in.”

  “Dee put his mouth up to my ear and whispered, Cover up—you don’t want these people to see who you are. Rip the eyeholes, if you can’t see good enough.”

  “I didn’t want anyone in The Backs to see my face. I let the costume drop down over me again, and stuck my fingers in the nearest eyehole and pulled. Every living thing for about a mile around must have heard that cloth ripping. The big guy came out of
the shed like someone pulled him out on a string, yanked the lantern up off the ground, and held it in our direction. Then we could see his face, and it was Eddie Grimes. You wouldn’t want to run into Eddie Grimes anywhere, but The Backs was the last place you’d want to come across him. I was afraid he was going to start looking for us, but that woman started making stuck-pig noises, and the man in the shack yelled something, and Grimes ducked back into the shed and came out with a jug. He lumbered back toward the shack and disappeared around the front of it. Dee and I could hear him arguing with the man inside.”

  “I jerked my thumb toward Meridian Road, but Dee shook his head. I whispered, Didn’t you already see Eddie Grimes, and isn’t that enough for you? He shook his head again. His eyes were gleaming behind that sheet. So what do you want, I asked, and he said, I want to see that girl. We don’t even know where she is, I whispered, and Dee said, All we got to do is follow her sound.”

  “Dee and I sat and listened for a while. Every now and then, she let out a sort of whoop, and then she’d sort of cry, and after that she might say a word or two that sounded almost ordinary before she got going again or crying or laughing, the two all mixed up together. Sometimes we could hear other noises coming from the shacks, and none of them sounded happy. People were grumbling and arguing or just plain talking to themselves, but at least they sounded normal. That lady, she sounded like Halloween—like something that came up out of a grave.”

  “Probably you’re thinking what I was hearing was sex—that I was too young to know how much noise ladies make when they’re having fun. Well, maybe I was only eleven, but I grew up in Darktown, not Miller’s Hill, and our walls were none too thick. What was going on with this lady didn’t have anything to do with fun. The strange thing is, Dee didn’t know that—he thought just what you were thinking. He wanted to see this lady getting humped. Maybe he even thought he could sneak in and get some for himself, I don’t know. The main thing is, he thought he was listening to some wild sex, and he wanted to get close enough to see it. Well, I thought, his daddy was a preacher, and maybe preachers didn’t do it once they got kids. And Dee didn’t have an older brother like mine, who sneaked girls into the house whenever he thought he wouldn’t get caught.”

  “He started sliding sideways through the woods, and I had to follow him. I’d seen enough of The Backs to last me the rest of my life, but I couldn’t run off and leave Dee behind. And at least he was going at it the right way, circling around the shacks sideways, instead of trying to sneak straight through them. I started off after him. I could see a little better ever since I ripped at my eyehole, but I still had to hold my blasted costume bunched up under my chin, and if I moved my head or my hand the wrong way, the hole moved away from my eye and I couldn’t see anything at all.”

  “So naturally, the first thing that happened was that I lost sight of Dee Sparks. My foot came down in a hole and I stumbled ahead for a few steps, completely blind, and then I hit a tree. I just came to a halt, sure that Eddie Grimes and a few other murderers were about to jump on me. For a couple of seconds I stood as still as a wooden Indian, too scared to move. When I didn’t hear anything, I hauled at my costume until I could see out of it. No murderers were coming toward me from the shack beside the still. Eddie Grimes was saying You don’t understand over and over, like he was so drunk that one phrase got stuck in his head, and he couldn’t say or hear anything else. That woman yipped, like an animal noise, not a human one—like a fox barking. I sidled up next to the tree I’d run into and looked around for Dee. All I could see were dark trees and that one yellow window I’d seen before. To hell with Dee Sparks, I said to myself, and pulled the costume off over my head. I could see better, but there wasn’t any glimmer of white over that way. He’d gone so far ahead of me I couldn’t even see him.”

  “So I had to catch up with him, didn’t I? I knew where he was going—the woman’s noises were coming from the shack way up there in the woods—and I knew he was going to sneak around the outside of the shacks. In a couple of seconds, after he noticed I wasn’t there, he was going to stop and wait for me. Makes sense, doesn’t it? All I had to do was keep going toward that shack off to the side until I ran into him. I shoved my costume inside my shirt, and then I did something else—set my bag of candy down next to the tree. I’d clean forgotten about it ever since I saw Eddie Grimes’s face, and if I had to run, I’d go faster without holding on to a lot of apples and chunks of taffy.”

  “About a minute later, I came out into the open between two big old chinaberry trees. There was a patch of grass between me and the next stand of trees. The woman made a gargling sound that ended in one of those fox-yips, and I looked up in that direction and saw that the clearing extended in a straight line up and down, like a path. Stars shone out of the patch of darkness between the two parts of the woods. And when I started to walk across it, I felt a grassy hump between two beaten tracks. The path into The Backs off Meridian Road curved around somewhere up ahead and wound back down through the shacks before it came to a dead end. It had to come to a dead end, because it sure didn’t join back up with Meridian Road.”

  “And this was how I’d managed to lose sight of Dee Sparks. Instead of avoiding the path and working his way north through the woods, he’d just taken the easiest way toward the woman’s shack. Hell, I’d had to pull him off the path in the first place! By the time I got out of my sheet, he was probably way up there, out in the open for anyone to see and too excited to notice that he was all by himself. What I had to do was what I’d been trying to do all along, save his ass from anybody who might see him.”

  “As soon as I started going as soft as I could up the path, I saw that saving Dee Sparks’s ass might be a tougher job than I thought—maybe I couldn’t even save my own. When I first took off my costume, I’d seen lights from three or four shacks. I thought that’s what The Backs was—three or four shacks. But after I started up the path, I saw a low square shape standing between two trees at the edge of the woods and realized that it was another shack. Whoever was inside had extinguished his kerosene lamp, or maybe wasn’t home. About twenty, thirty feet on, there was another shack, all dark, and the only reason I noticed that one was, I heard voices coming from it, a man and a woman, both of them sounding drunk and slowed down. Deeper in the woods past that one, another grease-paper window gleamed through the trees like a firefly. There were shacks all over the woods. As soon as I realized that Dee and I might not be the only people walking through The Backs on Halloween night, I bent down low to the ground and damn near slowed to a standstill. The only thing Dee had going for him, I thought, was good night vision—at least he might spot someone before they spotted him.”

  “A noise came from one of those shacks, and I stopped cold, with my heart pounding away like a bass drum. Then a big voice yelled out, Who’s that? and I just lay down in the track and tried to disappear. Who’s there? Here I was calling Dee a fool, and I was making more noise than he did. I heard that man walk outside his door, and my heart pretty near exploded. Then the woman moaned up ahead, and the man who’d heard me swore to himself and went back inside. I just lay there in the dirt for a while. The woman moaned again, and this time it sounded scarier than ever, because it had a kind of a chuckle in it. She was crazy. Or she was a witch, and if she was having sex, it was with the devil. That was enough to make me start crawling along, and I kept on crawling until I was long past the shack where the man had heard me. Finally I got up on my feet again, thinking that if I didn’t see Dee Sparks real soon, I was going to sneak back to Meridian Road by myself. If Dee Sparks wanted to see a witch in bed with the devil, he could do it without me.”

  “And then I thought I was a fool not to ditch Dee, because hadn’t he ditched me? After all this time, he must have noticed that I wasn’t with him anymore. Did he come back and look for me? The hell he did.”

  “And right then I would have gone back home, but for two things. The first was that I heard that woman make another soun
d—a sound that was hardly human, but wasn’t made by any animal. It wasn’t even loud. And it sure as hell wasn’t any witch in bed with the devil. It made me want to throw up. That woman was being hurt. She wasn’t just getting beat up—I knew what that sounded like—she was being hurt bad enough to drive her crazy, bad enough to kill her. Because you couldn’t live through being hurt bad enough to make that sound. I was in The Backs, sure enough, and the place was even worse than it was supposed to be. Someone was killing a woman, everybody could hear it, and all that happened was that Eddie Grimes fetched another jug back from the still. I froze. When I could move, I pulled my ghost costume out from inside my shirt, because Dee was right, and for certain I didn’t want anybody seeing my face out there on this night. And then the second thing happened. While I was pulling the sheet over my head, I saw something pale lying in the grass a couple of feet back toward the woods I’d come out of, and when I looked at it, it turned into Dee Sparks’s Halloween bag.”

  “I went up to the bag and touched it to make sure about what it was. I’d found Dee’s bag, all right. And it was empty. Flat. He had stuffed the contents into his pockets and left the bag behind. What that meant was, I couldn’t turn around and leave him—because he hadn’t left me after all. He’d waited for me until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he’d emptied his bag and left it behind as a sign. He was counting on me to see in the dark as well as he could. But I wouldn’t have seen it at all if that woman hadn’t stopped me cold.”

  “The top of the bag was pointing north, so Dee was still heading toward the woman’s shack. I looked up that way, and all I could see was a solid wall of darkness underneath a lighter darkness filled with stars. For about a second, I realized, I had felt pure relief. Dee had ditched me, so I could ditch him and go home. Now I was stuck with Dee all over again.”