Poe's Children

by Peter Straub

  They are in the woods. The fire is low. It’s night. All the little girls are in their sleeping bags. They’ve brushed their teeth and spit, they’ve washed their faces with water from the kettle, they’ve zipped up the zippers of their sleeping bags.

  A counselor named Charlie is saying, “I am the ghost with the one black eye, I am the ghost with the one black eye.”

  Charlie holds her flashlight under her chin. Her eyes are two black holes in her face. Her mouth yawns open, the light shining through her teeth. Her shadow eats up the trunk of the tree she sits under.

  During the daytime Charlie teaches horseback riding. She isn’t much older than Louise or Louise. She’s pretty and she lets them ride the horses bareback sometimes. But that’s daytime Charlie. Nighttime Charlie is the one sitting next to the fire. Nighttime Charlie is the one who tells stories.

  “Are you afraid?” Louise says.

  “No,” Louise says.

  They hold hands. They don’t look at each other. They keep their eyes on Charlie.

  Louise says, “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” Louise says. “Not as long as you’re here.”

  The Sadness of Detail

  Jonathan Carroll

  I used to spend a lot of time at the Café Bremen. The coffee there is bitter and delicious, and the teal-blue velvet seats are as comfortable as old friends. The large windows greet the morning light like Herr Ritter, the waiter, greets anyone who comes in. You don’t have to order much: a cup of tea or a glass of wine. The croissants come from the bakery next door and are delivered twice a day. Late in the evening, the café bakes its own specialty for the night-owl customers—” heavies,” a kind of sugar doughnut the size of a pocket watch. A wonderful treat is to go in there late on a winter night and have a warm plate full of them.

  The Bremen is open nineteen hours a day. December twenty-fourth is the only day of the year it’s closed, but on Christmas it opens again, wearing green and red tablecloths, full of people in bright new sweaters or singles looking a little less lonely on a day when people should be home.

  There are small, real pleasures in life—the latest issue of our favorite magazine, a fresh pack of cigarettes, the smell of things baking. You can have all of them in that café you can be happy there without any of them.

  I often went in to sit, look out the window, and hum. A secret vice. My husband sneaks candy bars, my mother reads movie magazines, I hum. Give me a free hour with nothing to do and a good window to stare out of and I’ll gladly hum you all of Mahler’s Fifth or any song off the Beatles’ White Album.

  I’m the first to admit I’m not very good at it, but humming is only meant for an audience of one, yourself, and anyone who eavesdrops does it at their own peril.

  This happened on a late November afternoon when the whole town seemed one liquid glaze of reflected light and rain. A day when the rain is colder than snow and everything feels meaner, harder edged. A day to stay inside and read a book, drink soup out of a thick white cup.

  I’d decided to treat myself to the Bremen because I was beat. Arguing with the children, a trip to the dentist, then endless shopping for invisible things—toilet paper, glue, salt. Things no one ever knows are there until they’re gone and are then needed desperately. An invisible day where you exhaust yourself running around, doing thankless errands that are necessary but meaningless: the housewife’s oxymoron.

  Walking in, wet and loaded down with bags, I think I groaned with joy when I saw my favorite table was empty. I flew to it like a tired robin to its nest.

  Herr Ritter came right over, looking elegant and very nineteenth century in his black suit and bow tie, a white towel as always draped carefully over his arm.

  “You look very tired. A hard day?”

  “A nothing day, Herr Ritter.”

  He suggested a piece of cream cake, damn the calories, but I ordered a glass of red wine instead. There was an hour before the kids would be home. An hour to let the knots inside slowly untie themselves while I looked out the window and watched the now-romantic rain. How long could it have been, two minutes? Three? Almost without knowing it, I’d begun to hum, but then from the booth behind, someone gave a loud, long “Sssh!”

  Embarrassed, I turned and saw an old man with a very pink face glaring at me.

  “Not everyone likes Neil Diamond, you know!”

  The perfect end to a perfect day: now I was on trial for humming “Holly Holy.”

  I made an “excuse me” face and was about to turn around again when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a number of photographs he had spread out on the table in front of him. Most of the pictures were of my family and me.

  “Where did you get those?”

  He reached behind him and, picking one up, handed it to me. Not looking at it, he said, “That is your son in nine years. He’s wearing a patch because he lost that eye in an automobile accident. He wanted to be a pilot, as you know, but one needs good eyesight for that, so he paints houses instead and drinks a lot. The girl in the picture is the one he lives with. She takes heroin.”

  My son, Adam, is nine and the only thing that matters to him in the world is airplanes. We call his room the hangar because he’s covered every wall with pictures of the Blue Angels, the British Red Arrows, and the Italian Frecce Tricolori precision flying teams. There are models and magazines and so many different airplane things in his room that it’s a little overwhelming. Recently he spent a week writing to all of the major airlines (including Air Maroc and Tarom, the national airline of Romania), asking what one has to do to qualify as a pilot for their company. My husband and I have always been both charmed and proud of Adam’s obsession and have never thought of him as anything but a future pilot. In the picture I held, our little boy with a crew cut and smart green eyes looked like a haggard eighteen-year-old panhandler. The expression on his face was a bad combination of boredom, bitterness, and no hope. It was obviously Adam in a few years, but a young man far past the end of his line, someone you’d sneer at or move to avoid if you saw him approaching on the street.

  And the eye patch! Imagining the mutilation of one of our children is as wrenching as the thought of them dead. None of that is…allowed. It cannot be. And if, tragically, it does happen, then it is always our fault, no matter their age or the circumstances. As parents, our wings must always be large enough to cover and protect them from hurt or pain. It is in our contract with God when we take on the responsibility of their lives. I remember so well the character in Macbeth who, upon learning of the deaths of all his children, starts calling them “chicks.” “Where are all my little chicks?” The sight of my son wearing an eye patch gave me the taste of blood in my mouth.

  “Who are you?”

  “Here’s one of your husband after the divorce. He thinks that new mustache is becoming. I think it’s a little silly.”

  Willy has tried on and off for years to grow a mustache. Each one looked worse than the last. Once in the middle of a very nasty fight, I said he always began one at the same time as he began an affair. That stopped them.

  In the picture, besides the mustache, he was wearing one of those typically silly heavy-metal fan T-shirts (covered with flames and lightning) announcing a group called Braindead. What was ominous about that was Adam had recently brought home an album by Braindead and said they were “awesome.”

  “My name is Thursday, Frau Becker.”

  “Today is Thursday.”

  “That’s right. If we’d met yesterday, I’d be Wednesday—”

  “Who are you? What’s this about? What are these pictures?”

  “They’re your future. Or rather, one of them. Futures are unstable, tricky things. They depend on different factors.

  “The way you’re going now, the way you handle your life and those around you, this is what will happen.” He pointed to the picture I held and then opened both hands in a gesture that said, “What can you do? That’s the way it is.”

  “I don’t beli
eve it. Get away from me!” I moved to turn, but he touched my shoulder.

  “Your favorite smell is burning wood. You always lie when you say the first person you ever slept with was Joe Newman. The first was really your parents’ handyman, Leon Bell.”

  No one knew that. Not my husband, my sister, no one. Leon Bell! I thought of him so rarely. He was kind and gentle but it still hurt, and I was so scared someone would come home and find us in my bed. “What do you want?” I asked.

  He took the photograph out of my hand and put it back on the table with the others.

  “Futures can change. They’re like the lines on our hands. Fate is a negotiable thing. I’m here to negotiate with you.”

  “What do I have that you want?”

  “Your talent. Remember the drawing you did the other night of the child under the tree? I want it. Bring me the picture and your son’ll be saved.”

  “That’s all? It was only a sketch! It took ten minutes. I did it while watching television!”

  “Bring it to me here tomorrow at exactly this time.”

  “How can I believe you?”

  He picked up a photograph that had been covered by the others. He held it in front of my eyes: my old bedroom. Leon Bell and me.

  “I don’t even know you. Why are you doing this to me?”

  He slid the pictures together as if they were cards he was about to shuffle. “Go home and find that drawing.”

  I was pretty good once. Went to art school on a full scholarship and some of my teachers said I had the makings to be a real painter. But you know how I reacted to that? Got scared. I painted because I liked it. When people started looking carefully at my work and with their hands on their checkbooks, I ran away and got married. Marriage (and its responsibilities) is a perfect rock to hide behind when an enemy (parents, maturity, success) is out gunning for you. Squeeze down into a ball behind it and virtually nothing can touch you. For me, being happy didn’t mean being a successful artist. I saw success as stress and demands I’d never be able to fulfill, thus disappointing people who thought I was better than I really was.

  Just recently, now that the children were old enough to get their own snacks, I’d bought some expensive English oil paints and two stretched canvases. But I’ve been almost too embarrassed to bring them out because the only “art” I’ve done in the last years has been funny sketches for the kids or a little scribble at the bottom of a letter to a good friend.

  Plus the sketchbook, my oldest friend. I’d always wanted to keep a diary but never had the kind of persistence that’s needed to save something in writing about every day you live. My sketchbook is different because the day I began it, when I was seventeen, I promised myself to make drawings in there only when I wanted or when an event was so important (the birth of the kids, the day I discovered Willy was having an affair) that I had to “say” something about it. As an old woman I’d give it to my children and say, “These are things you didn’t know. They aren’t important now except to tell you more about me, if that interests you.” Or maybe I’ll only look at it, then sigh and throw it away.

  I go through the book sometimes, but it generally depresses me, even the good parts, the nice memories. Because there is so much sadness in the details. How current and glamorous I thought I was, wearing striped bellbottom pants to a big party just after we were married. Or one of Willy at his desk, smoking a cigar, so happy to be finishing the article on Fischer von Erlach that he had thought would make his career but which was never even published. I drew these things carefully and in great detail, but all I see now are the silly pants or the spread of his excited fingers on the typewriter. But if it depresses me, why do I continue drawing in the book? Because it is the only life I have and I am not pretentious enough to think I know answers now that might come to me when I’m older. I keep hoping thirty or forty years from now when I look at those drawings, I’ll have some kind of revelation that will make parts of my life clearer to me.

  I couldn’t find the drawing he wanted. I went through everything: wastebaskets, drawers, the kids’ old homework papers. How brutally panic can build when you can’t find something needed! Whatever you are looking for becomes the most important object in the world, however trivial—a suitcase key, a year-old receipt from the gas company. Your apartment becomes an enemy—hiding the thing you need, indifferent to your pleas. It wasn’t in my sketchbook, on the telephone table, stuck in a coat pocket. Neither the gray prairies under the beds nor the false pine and chemical smells in the kitchen closet offered anything. Would my son really lose his eye if I couldn’t find one stupid little drawing? Yes, that’s what the old man said. I believed him after seeing the picture of Leon and me together.

  It was a terrible night, trying to be good old normal “Mom” to the family, while madly exploring every corner of our place for the picture. At dinner I casually asked if anyone had seen it in their travels. No one had. They were used to my drawings and doodles around the house. Now and then someone liked one and took it to their room but no luck with this one.

  Throughout the evening I kept glancing at Adam, which gave me further reason to search. He had plain eyes but they were smart and welcoming. He looked straight at you in a conversation, gave you his full attention.

  At midnight there were no further places to look. The drawing was gone. Sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice, I knew that there were only two things I could do when I met Thursday at the Bremen the next afternoon: Tell the truth or try and re-create from memory the drawing he demanded. It was such a simple sketch that I didn’t think there would be much trouble drawing something that looked similar, but exactly the same? Not possible.

  I went into the living room and got my clipboard. At least the paper would be the same. Willy bought the stuff by the ream because it was cheap and sturdy and we both liked using it. You didn’t feel guilty crumpling up a piece if you’d made a mistake. I could easily see myself crumpling up that damned drawing and not thinking about it again. A child standing under a tree. A little girl in jeans. A chestnut tree. What was special about it?

  It took five minutes to do, five minutes to be sure it was as I remembered, five more minutes with it in my lap knowing it was hopeless. Fifteen minutes from start to finish.

  The next afternoon before I’d even sat down, Thursday was tapping an insistent finger on the marble table. “Did you find it? Do you have it?”

  “Yes. It is in my bag.”

  Everything about him relaxed. His face went slack, the finger lay down with the rest of his palm on the table, he leaned back against the velvet seat. “That’s great. Give it to me, please.”

  He was feeling better, but I wasn’t. As coolly as I could, I pulled the wrinkled piece of paper out of my purse.

  Before leaving the apartment I’d crumpled up the drawing into a tight ball to perhaps fool him a little. If he didn’t look too closely, maybe I’d be safe. Maybe I wouldn’t. There wasn’t much chance of being lucky, but at that point what else could I hope for?

  Yet watching how carefully he flattened out the paper and pored over it as if it were some unique and priceless document, I knew he’d notice the difference any moment and everything would go to hell from there. I took off my coat and slid into the booth.

  He looked up from the picture. “You can hum if you’d like. I’ll just be a minute.”

  I liked this café so much, but today it had been changed by this man into an unpleasant, menacing place where all I wanted to do was finish our business and leave. Even the sight of Herr Ritter standing there at the counter reading the newspaper was irritating. How could life go on so normally when the worst kind of magic was in the air, thick as cigar smoke?

  “You have a good memory.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He reached into his breast pocket and took out a piece of paper. Unfolding it, he held up the original drawing of the little girl under the tree I’d done.

  “You had it!”

 
; He nodded. “Both of us played tricks. I said you had it; you were trying to give me a copy and saying it was the original. Who was more dishonest?”

  “But I couldn’t find it because you had it! Why did you do that?”

  “Because we had to see how well you remember things. It’s very important.”

  “What about my son?” I asked. “Will he be all right?”

  “I guarantee he will. I can show you a photograph of him then, but it might be better just knowing he’ll be fine and will live a very contented life. Because of what you did for him here.” He pointed to the second drawing. “Do you want to see the photograph of him?”

  I was tempted but finally said no. “Just tell me if he’ll be a pilot.”

  Thursday crossed his arms. “He’ll be captain of a Concorde flying the Paris-to-Caracas route. One day his plane will be hijacked, but your Adam will do something so clever and heroic that he single-handedly will save the plane and the passengers. A genuinely heroic act. There’ll even be a cover story about him in Time magazine titled ‘Maybe There Are Still Heroes.’ He held up the drawing. “Your son. Because of this.”

  “What about my getting divorced?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He took another piece of folded paper out of his pocket along with the nub of a pencil. “Draw a pear.”

  “A pear?”

  “Yes. Draw a picture of a pear, then I can tell you.”

  I took the pencil and smoothed the paper on the table. “I don’t understand any of this, Mr. Thursday.”

  A pear. A fat bottom and a half-so-fat top. A stem. A little cross-hatching to give it shadow and depth. One pear.

  I handed it to him and he barely gave it a glance before folding it and putting it in another pocket.

  “There will be a divorce because you will leave your husband, not vice versa, as you fear.”