Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

Because I was not nothing, I glimpsed the Meaning of Tragedy.

  Each Tuesday and Friday of these four sunless weeks, my consultants and guides lovingly bathed and dressed my wounds, arrayed me in my warmest clothes (for I never after ceased to feel the blast of arctic wind against my flesh), and escorted me to my office, where I was presumed much reduced by grief as well as by certain household accidents attributed to grief.

  On the first of these Tuesdays, a flushed-looking Mrs. Rampage offered her consolations and presented me with the morning newspapers, an inch-thick pile of faxes, two inches of legal documents, and a tray filled with official-looking letters. The newspapers described the fire and eulogized Marguerite; the increasingly threatening faxes declared Chartwell, Munster, and Stout’s intention to ruin me professionally and personally in the face of my continuing refusal to return the accompanying documents along with all records having reference to their client; the documents were those in question; the letters, produced by the various legal firms representing all my other cryptic gentlemen, deplored the (unspecified) circumstances necessitating their clients’ universal desire for change in re financial management. These lawyers also desired all relevant records, disks, etc., etc., urgently. Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff roistered behind their screen. I signed the documents in a shaky hand and requested Mrs. Rampage to have these shipped with the desired records to Chartwell, Munster, and Stout. “And dispatch all these other records, too,” I said, handing her the letters. “I am now going in for my lunch.”

  Tottering toward the executive dining room, now and then I glanced into smoke-filled offices to observe my much-altered underlings. Some of them appeared, after a fashion, to be working. Several were reading paperback novels, which might be construed as work of a kind. One of the Skipper’s assistants was unsuccessfully lofting paper airplanes toward his wastepaper basket. Gilligan’s secretary lay asleep on her office couch, and a records clerk lay sleeping on the file room floor. In the dining room, Charlie-Charlie Rackett hurried forward to assist me to my accustomed chair. Gilligan and the Skipper gave me sullen looks from their usual lunchtime station, an unaccustomed bottle of Scotch whiskey between them. Charlie-Charlie lowered me into my seat and said, “Terrible news about your wife, sir.”

  “More terrible than you know,” I said.

  Gilligan took a gulp of whiskey and displayed his middle finger, I gathered to me rather than Charlie-Charlie.

  “Afternoonish,” I said.

  “Very much so, sir,” said Charlie-Charlie, and bent closer to the brim of the homburg and my ear. “About that little request you made the other day. The right men aren’t nearly so easy to find as they used to be, sir, but I’m still on the job.”

  My laughter startled him. “No squab today, Charlie-Charlie. Just bring me a bowl of tomato soup.”

  I had partaken of no more than two or three delicious mouthfuls when Gilligan lurched up beside me. “Look here,” he said, “it’s too bad about your wife and everything, I really mean it, honest, but that drunken act you put on in my office cost me my biggest client, not to forget that you took his girlfriend home with you.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I have no further need of your services. Pack your things and be out of here by three o’clock.”

  He listed to one side and straightened himself up. “You can’t mean that.”

  “I can and do,” I said. “Your part in the grand design at work in the universe no longer has any connection with my own.”

  “You must be as crazy as you look,” he said, and unsteadily departed.

  I returned to my office and gently lowered myself into my seat. After I had removed my gloves and accomplished some minor repair work to the tips of my fingers with the tape and gauze pads thoughtfully inserted by the detectives into the pockets of my coat, I slowly drew the left glove over my fingers and became aware of feminine giggles amid the coarser sounds of male amusement behind the screen. I coughed into the glove and heard a tiny shriek. Soon, though not immediately, a blushing Mrs. Rampage emerged from cover, patting her hair and adjusting her skirt. “Sir, I’m so sorry, I didn’t expect . . .” She was staring at my right hand, which had not as yet been inserted into its glove.

  “Lawn-mower accident,” I said. “Mr. Gilligan has been released, and I should like you to prepare the necessary papers. Also, I want to see all of our operating figures for the past year, as significant changes have been dictated by the grand design at work in the universe.”

  Mrs. Rampage flew from the room. For the next several hours, as for nearly every remaining hour I spent at my desk on the Tuesdays and Fridays thereafter, I addressed with a carefree spirit the details involved in shrinking the staff to the smallest number possible and turning the entire business over to the Skipper. Graham Leeson’s abrupt disappearance greatly occupied the newspapers, and when not occupied as described I read that my arch rival and competitor had been a notorious Don Juan, i.e., a compulsive womanizer, a flaw in his otherwise immaculate character held by some to have played a substantive role in his sudden absence. As Mr. Clubb had predicted, a clerk at the —— Hotel revealed Leeson’s sessions with my late wife, and for a time professional and amateur gossipmongers alike speculated that he had caused the disastrous fire. This came to nothing. Before the month had ended, Leeson sightings were reported in Monaco, the Swiss Alps, and Argentina, locations accommodating to sportsmen—after four years of varsity football at the University of Southern California, Leeson had won an Olympic silver medal in weight lifting while earning his MBA at Wharton.

  In the limousine at the end of each day, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff braced me in happy anticipation of the lessons to come as we sped back through illusory sunlight toward the real darkness.

  10

  The Meaning of Tragedy

  Everything, from the designs of the laughing gods down to the lowliest cells in the human digestive tract, is changing all the time, every particle of being large and small is eternally in motion, but this simple truism, so transparent on its surface, evokes immediate headache and stupefaction when applied to itself, not unlike the sentence “Every word that comes out of my mouth is a bald-faced lie.” The gods are ever laughing while we are always clutching our heads and looking for a soft place to lie down, and what I beheld in my momentary glimpses of the meaning of tragedy preceding, during, and after the experience of dental floss was so composed of paradox that I can state it only in cloud or vapor form, as:

  The meaning of tragedy is: All is in order, all is in train.

  The meaning of tragedy is: It only hurts for a little while.

  The meaning of tragedy is: Change is the first law of life.

  11

  So it took place that one day their task was done, their lives and mine were to move forward into separate areas of the grand design, and all that was left before preparing my own departure was to stand, bundled up against the nonexistent arctic wind, on the bottom step and wave farewell with my remaining hand while shedding buckets and bathtubs of tears with my remaining eye. Chaplinesque in their black suits and bowlers, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff ambled cheerily toward the glittering avenue and my bank, where arrangements had been made for the transfer into their hands of all but a small portion of my private fortune by my private banker, virtually his final act in that capacity. At the distant corner, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, by then only tiny figures blurred by my tears, turned, ostensibly to bid farewell, actually, as I knew, to watch as I mounted my steps and went back within the house, and with a salute I honored this last painful agreement between us.

  A more pronounced version of the office’s metamorphosis had taken place inside my town house, but with the relative ease practice gives even to one whose step is halting, whose progress is interrupted by frequent pauses for breath and the passing of certain shooting pains, I skirted the mounds of rubble, the dangerous loose tiles, more dangerous open holes in the floor, and the regions submerged under water and toiled up the resilient staircase, moved with infinite care acro
ss the boards bridging the former landing, and made my way into the former kitchen, where broken pipes and limp wires protruding from the lathe marked the sites of those appliances rendered pointless by the gradual disappearance of the household staff. (In a voice choked with feeling, Mr. Moncrieff, Reggie Moncrieff, Reggie, the last to go, had informed me that his final month in my service had been “as fine as my days with the Duke, sir, every bit as noble as ever it was with that excellent old gentleman.”) The remaining cupboard yielded a flagon of jenever, a tumbler, and a Monte Cristo torpedo, and with the tumbler filled and the cigar alight I hobbled through the devastated corridors toward my bed, there to gather my strength for the ardors of the coming day.

  In good time, I arose to observe the final appointments of the life soon to be abandoned. It is possible to do up one’s shoelaces and knot one’s necktie as neatly with a single hand as with two, and shirt buttons eventually become a breeze. Into my traveling bag I folded a few modest essentials atop the flagon and the cigar box, and into a pad of shirts nestled the black lucite cube prepared at my request by my instructor-guides and containing, mingled with the ashes of the satchel and its contents, the few bony nuggets rescued from Green Chimneys. The traveling bag accompanied me first to my lawyer’s office, where I signed papers making over the wreckage of the town house to the European gentleman who had purchased it sight unseen as a “fixer upper” for a fraction of its (considerably reduced) value. Next I visited the melancholy banker and withdrew the pittance remaining in my accounts. And then, glad of heart and free of all unnecessary encumbrance, I took my place in the sidewalk queue to await transportation by means of a kindly kneeling bus to the great terminus where I should employ the ticket reassuringly lodged within my breast pocket.

  Long before the arrival of the bus, a handsome limousine crawled past in the traffic, and glancing idly within, I observed Mr. Chester Montfort de M—— smoothing the air with a languid gesture while in conversation with the two stout, bowler-hatted men on his either side. Soon, doubtless, he would begin his instructions in the whopbopaloobop.

  12

  What is a pittance in a great city may be a modest fortune in a hamlet, and a returned prodigal might be welcomed far in excess of his true deserts. I entered New Covenant quietly, unobtrusively, with the humility of a new convert uncertain of his station, inwardly rejoicing to see all unchanged from the days of my youth. When I purchased a dignified but unshowy house on Scripture Street, I announced only that I had known the village in my childhood, had traveled far, and now in my retirement wished no more than to immerse myself in the life of the community, exercising my skills only inasmuch as they might be requested of an elderly invalid. How well the aged invalid had known the village, how far and to what end had he traveled, and the nature of his skills remained unspecified. Had I not attended daily services at the Temple, the rest of my days might have passed in pleasant anonymity and frequent perusals of a little book I had obtained at the terminus, for while my surname was so deeply of New Covenant that it could be read on a dozen headstones in the Temple graveyard, I had fled so early in life and so long ago that my individual identity had been entirely forgotten. New Covenant is curious—intensely curious—but it does not wish to pry. One fact and one only led to the metaphoric slaughter of the fatted calf and the prodigal’s elevation. On the day when, some five or six months after his installation on Scripture Street, the afflicted newcomer’s faithful Temple attendance was rewarded with an invitation to read the Lesson for the Day, Matthew 5:43–48, seated amid numerous offspring and offspring’s offspring in the barnie-pews for the first time since an unhappy tumble from a hayloft was Delbert Mudge.

  My old classmate had weathered into a white-haired, sturdy replica of his own grandfather, and although his hips still gave him considerable difficulty his mind had suffered no comparable stiffening. Delbert knew my name as well as his own, and though he could not connect it to the wizened old party counseling him from the lectern to embrace his enemies, the old party’s face and voice so clearly evoked the deceased lawyer who had been my father that he recognized me before I had spoken the whole of the initial verse. The grand design at work in the universe once again could be seen at its mysterious business: Unknown to me, my entirely selfish efforts on behalf of Charlie-Charlie Rackett, my representation to his parole board and his subsequent hiring as my spy, had been noted by all of barnie-world. I, a child of Scripture Street, had become a hero to generations of barnies! After hugging me at the conclusion of the fateful service, Delbert Mudge implored my assistance in the resolution of a fiscal imbroglio that threatened his family’s cohesion. I of course assented, with the condition that my services should be free of charge. The Mudge imbroglio proved elementary, and soon I was performing similar services for other barnie-clans. After listening to a half dozen accounts of my miracles while setting broken barnie-bones, New Covenant’s physician visited my Scripture Street habitation under cover of night, was prescribed the solution to his uncomplicated problem, and sang my praises to his fellow townies. Within a year, by which time all New Covenant had become aware of my “tragedy” and consequent “reawakening,” I was managing the Temple’s funds as well as those of barn and town. Three years later, our reverend having in his ninety-first year, as the Racketts and Mudges put it, “woke up dead,” I submitted by popular acclaim to appointment in his place.

  Daily, I assume the honored place assigned me. Ceremonious vestments assure that my patchwork scars remain unseen. The lucite box and its relics are interred deep within the sacred ground beneath the Temple where I must one day join my predecessors—some bony fragments of Graham Leeson reside there, too, mingled with Marguerite’s more numerous specks and nuggets. Eye patch elegantly in place, I lean forward upon the malacca cane and, while flourishing the stump of my right hand as if in demonstration, with my ruined tongue whisper what I know none shall understand, the homily beginning, It only . . . To this I append in silent exhalation the two words concluding that little book brought to my attention by an agreeable murderer and purchased at the great grand station long ago, these: Ah, humanity!

  “A POWERFUL GATHERING OF SUSPENSE AND HORROR STORIES.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Compelling . . . Magic Terror is bliss for readers whose love of the eerie doesn’t preclude a taste for literary elegance. . . . [Straub] is one of the few fin-de-siècle writers whose stories can stand alongside works by twentieth-century masters of the macabre such as King, Robert Aickman, Shirley Jackson, and Edith Wharton.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “There is no safety in this literate and much praised cluster of stories. It’s beautifully written stuff that breaks into the place where you live, breaching all psychologically installed security systems. . . . And although we desire to read it for many reasons, the truest one is that Peter Straub writes with compassion. He gets the link between modern horror and classic tragedy.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The protagonist of each of these stories has had a horrible, frightening life. Yet, the compassion you feel for them doesn’t keep your skin from crawling as you descend deeper and deeper into their terrible, twisted minds.”

  —The New York Post

  “MASTERFUL . . . HIS PLOTS ARE AS FULL OF TWISTS AND TURNS AS THEY ARE OF SHOCKS AND CHILLS.”

  —Baton Rouge Magazine

  “As in all of Straub’s works, the stories here are carefully crafted. This is a book lovers of horror fiction won’t want to miss.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “In subtle images, Peter Straub brings back forgotten childhood nightmares. His seven short stories in Magic Terror eat away slowly at the unsuspecting reader. . . . His terror lurks in the cries for help hidden inside victims’ minds. . . . Readers think about Straub’s endings long after they put his books down.”

  —The Freelance Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

  “The most shocking fiction collection in years creates a b
rilliant kaleidoscope of psychological shadow worlds. The terrain of these extraordinary stories is marked by brutality, heartbreak, despair, wonder, and an unexpected humor that allows empathy to flourish in the most unlikely circumstances.”

  —The Third Alternative magazine

  “The most magical thing about Magic Terror is its sheer bloodcurdling range. . . . No two of the seven remotely resembling each other except in the brilliance of the invention and the writing, and in Straub’s power to spook you out of your wits.”

  —DONALD HARINGTON, author of When Angels Rest

  “SUPERB . . .

  [A] BRILLIANT, HAUNTING COLLECTION . . .

  The magic is in Straub’s polished writing, the terrors are in the tales. Nobody does it better.”

  —The Post and Courier (South Carolina)

  “With a literary genius that vibrates between dark and light, fantasy and reality, horror and humor, Straub is a dedicated storyteller who dives into our emotional well again and again. . . . [Straub has] an extraordinary gift for commingling a wide range of raw emotions in his stories. . . . Magic Terror is as complex a collection as you’re likely to encounter.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “Harrowingly rendered . . . Straub effortlessly plumbs the hearts and minds of a range of well-developed characters. . . . Mixing stark realism with black comedy, and reverberating with echoes of Conrad, Melville, and the Brothers Grimm, these excursions to the dark side of life set a high standard for the literature of contemporary magic.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Seven wonderful tales . . . Compelling and scary.”

  —DONALD WESTLAKE, Author of The Hook and The Ax

  Also by Peter Straub

  NOVELS

  MR. X

  THE HELLFIRE CLUB

  THE THROAT

  MRS. GOD

  MYSTERY

  KOKO

  THE TALISMAN (with Stephen King)