Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology

by Peter Straub

  “Ann! Ann!” I shouted.

  I dragged myself from under her—she had begun to groan and vomit again—and, staring back over my shoulder at the smiling creatures in the passage, ran out of the kitchen and out of the house. I could hear myself sobbing with panic—“I’m phoning Lucas, I can’t stand this, I’m going to phone Lucas”—as if I were still talking to her. I blundered about the village until I found the telephone box opposite the church.

  I remember Sprake—though it seems too well-put to have been him—once saying, “It’s no triumph to feel you’ve given life the slip.” We were talking about Lucas Fisher. “You can’t live intensely except at the cost of the self. In the end, Lucas’s reluctance to give himself wholeheartedly will make him shabby and unreal. He’ll end up walking the streets at night staring into lighted shop windows.” At the time I thought this harsh. I still believed that with Lucas it was a matter of energy rather than will, of the lows and undependable zones of a cyclic personality rather than any deliberate reservation of powers.

  When I told Lucas, “Something’s gone badly wrong here,” he was silent. After a moment or two I prompted him. “Lucas?”

  I thought I heard him say:

  “For God’s sake, put that down and leave me alone.”

  “This line must be bad,” I said. “You sound a long way off. Is there someone with you?”

  He was silent again—“Lucas? Can you hear me?”—and then he asked, “How is Ann? I mean, in herself?”

  “Not well,” I said. “She’s having some sort of attack. You don’t know how relieved I am to talk to someone. Lucas, there are two completely hallucinatory figures in that passage outside her kitchen. What they’re doing to one another is…look, they’re a kind of dead white color, and they’re smiling at her all the time. It’s the most appalling thing—”

  He said, “Wait a minute. Do you mean that you can see them too?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say. The thing is that I don’t know how to help her. Lucas?”

  The line had gone dead. I put the receiver down and dialed his number again. The engaged signal went on and on. Afterward I would tell Ann, “Someone else must have called him,” but I knew he had simply taken his phone off the hook. I stood there for some time, anyway, shivering in the wind that blustered down off the moor, in the hope that he would change his mind. In the end, I got so cold, I had to give up and go back. Sleet blew into my face all the way through the village. The church clock said half past six, but everything was dark and untenanted. All I could hear was the wind rustling the black plastic bags of rubbish piled around the dustbins.

  “Fuck you, Lucas,” I whispered. “Fuck you, then.”

  Ann’s house was as silent as the rest. I went into the front garden and pressed my face up to the window, in case I could see into the kitchen through the open living room door; but from that angle, the only thing visible was a wall calendar with a color photograph of a Persian cat: October. I couldn’t see Ann. I stood in the flower bed and the sleet turned to snow.

  The kitchen was filled less with the smell of vomit than a sourness you felt somewhere in the back of your throat. Outside, the passage lay deserted under the bright suicidal wash of fluorescent light. It was hard to imagine anything had happened out there. At the same time, nothing looked comfortable, not the disposition of the old roof slates, or the clumps of fern growing out of the revetment, or even the way the snow was settling in the gaps between the flagstones. I found that I didn’t want to turn my back on the window. If I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the white couple, all I could remember was the way they had smiled. A still, cold air seeped in above the sink, and the cats came up to rub against my legs and get underfoot; the taps were still running.

  In her confusion Ann had opened all the kitchen cupboards and strewn their contents on the floor. Saucepans, cutlery, and packets of dried food had been mixed up with a polythene bucket and some yellow J-cloths; she had upset a bottle of household detergent among several tins of cat food, some of which had been half opened, some merely pierced, before she dropped them or forgot where she had put the opener. It was hard to see what she had been trying to do. I picked it all up and put it away. To make them leave me alone, I fed the cats. Once or twice I heard her moving about on the floor above.

  She was in the bathroom, slumped on the old-fashioned pink lino by the sink, trying to get her clothes off. “For God’s sake, go away,” she said. “I can do it.”

  “Oh, Ann.”

  “Put some disinfectant in the blue bucket, then.”

  “Who are they, Ann?” I asked.

  That was later, when I had gotten her to bed. She answered:

  “Once it starts, you never get free.”

  I was annoyed.

  “Free from what, Ann?”

  “You know,” she said. “Lucas said you had hallucinations for weeks afterward.”

  “Lucas had no right to say that!”

  This sounded absurd, so I added as lightly as I could, “It was a long time ago. I’m not sure anymore.”

  The migraine had left her exhausted, though much more relaxed. She had washed her hair, and between us we had found her a fresh nightdress to wear. Sitting up in the cheerful little bedroom with its cheap ornaments and modern wallpaper, she looked vague and young; she kept apologizing for the design on her Continental quilt, some bold diagrammatic flowers in black and red, the intertwined stems of which she traced with the index finger of her right hand across a clean white background. “Do you like this? I don’t really know why I bought it. Things look so bright and energetic in the shops,” she said wistfully, “but as soon as you get them home, they just seem crude.” The older cat had jumped up onto the bed; whenever Ann spoke, it purred loudly. “He shouldn’t be in here, and he knows it.” She wouldn’t eat or drink, but I had persuaded her to take some more propranolol, and so far she had kept it down.

  “Once it starts, you never get free,” she repeated. Her finger followed the pattern across the quilt. Inadvertently she touched the cat’s dry, graying fur, stared suddenly at her own hand as if it had misled her. “It was some sort of smell that followed you about, Lucas seemed to think.”

  “Some sort,” I agreed.

  “You won’t get rid of it by ignoring it. We both tried that to begin with. A scent of roses, Lucas said.” She laughed and took my hand. “Very romantic! I’ve no sense of smell—I lost it years ago, luckily.”

  This reminded her of something else.

  “The first time I had a fit,” she said, “I kept it from my mother because I saw a vision with it. I was only a child, really. The vision was very clear: a seashore, steep and with no sand, and men and women lying on some rocks in the sunshine like lizards, staring quite blankly at the spray as it exploded up in front of them; huge waves that might have been on a cinema screen for all the notice they took of them.”

  She narrowed her eyes, puzzled. “You wondered why they had so little common sense.”

  She tried to push the cat off her bed, but it only bent its body in a rubbery way and avoided her hand. She yawned suddenly.

  “At the same time,” she went on after a pause, “I could see that some spiders had made their webs between the rocks, just a foot or two above the tide line.” Though they trembled and were sometimes filled with spray-like dewdrops so that they glittered in the sun, the webs remained unbroken. She couldn’t describe, she said, the sense of anxiety with which this filled her. “So close to all that violence. You wondered why they had so little common sense,” she repeated. “The last thing I heard was someone saying, ‘On your own, you really can hear voices in the tide….’”

  Before she fell asleep, she clutched my hand harder and said:

  “I’m so glad you got something out of it. Lucas and I never did. Roses! It was worth it for that.”

  I thought of us as we had been twenty years before. I spent the night in the living room and awoke quite early in the morning. I didn’t know where
I was until I walked in a drugged way to the window and saw the street full of snow.

  For a long time after that last meeting with Sprake, I had a recurrent dream of him. His hands were clasped tightly across his chest, the left hand holding the wrist of the right, and he was going quickly from room to room of the British Museum. Whenever he came to a corner or a junction of corridors, he stopped abruptly and stared at the wall in front of him for thirty seconds before turning very precisely to face in the right direction before he moved on. He did this with the air of a man who has for some reason taught himself to walk with his eyes closed through a perfectly familiar building; but there was also, in the way he stared at the walls—and particularly in the way he held himself so upright and rigid—a profoundly hierarchal air, an air of premeditation and ritual. His shoes, and the bottoms of his faded corduroy trousers, were soaking wet, just as they had been the morning after the rite, when the four of us had walked back through the damp fields in the bright sunshine. He wore no socks.

  In the dream I was always hurrying to catch up with him. I was stopping every so often to write something in a notebook, hoping he wouldn’t see me. He strode purposefully through the Museum, from cabinet to cabinet of twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts. Suddenly he stopped, looked back at me, and said:

  “There are sperm in this picture. You can see them quite plainly. What are sperm doing in a religious picture?”

  He smiled, opened his eyes very wide.

  Pointing to the side of his own head with one finger, he began to shout and laugh incoherently.

  When he had gone, I saw that he had been examining a New Testament miniature from Queen Melisande’s Psalter, depicting “The Women at the Sepulchre.” In it an angel was drawing Mary Magdalene’s attention to some strange luminous shapes that hovered in the air in front of her. They did, in fact, look something like the spermatozoa that often border the tormented Paris paintings of Edvard Munch.

  I would wake up abruptly from this dream, to find that it was morning and that I had been crying.

  Ann was still asleep when I left the house, with the expression people have on their faces when they can’t believe what they remember about themselves. “On your own, you really can hear voices in the tide, cries for help or attention,” she had said. “I started to menstruate the same day. For years I was convinced that my fits began then too.”

  That was the last time I saw her.

  A warm front had moved in from the southwest during the night; the snow had already begun to melt, the Pennine stations looked like leaky downspouts, the moors were locked beneath gray clouds. Two little boys sat opposite me on the train until Stalybridge, holding their Day Rover tickets thoughtfully in their laps. They might have been eight or nine years old. They were dressed in tiny, perfect workman’s jackets, tight trousers, Dr. Marten’s boots. Close up, their shaven skulls were bluish and vulnerable, perfectly shaped. They looked like acolytes in a Buddhist temple: calm, wide-eyed, compliant. By the time I got to Manchester, a fine rain was falling. It was blowing the full length of Market Street and through the door of the Kardomah Café, where I had arranged to meet Lucas Fisher.

  The first thing he said was, “Look at these pies! They aren’t plastic, you know, like a modern pie. These are from the plaster era of café pies, the earthenware era. Terra-cotta pies, realistically painted, glazed in places to have exactly the cracks and imperfections any real pie would have! Aren’t they wonderful? I’m going to eat one.”

  I sat down next to him.

  “What happened to you last night, Lucas? It was a bloody nightmare.”

  He looked away. “How is Ann?” he asked. I could feel him trembling.

  “Fuck off, Lucas.”

  He smiled over at a toddler in an appalling yellow suit. The child stared back vacantly, upset, knowing full well they were from competing species. A woman near us said, “I hear you’re going to your grandma’s for dinner on Sunday. Something special, I expect?” Lucas glared at her, as if she had been speaking to him. She added: “If you’re going to buy toys this afternoon, remember to look at them where they are, so that no one can accuse you of stealing. Don’t take them off the shelf.” From somewhere near the kitchens came a noise like a tray of crockery falling down a short flight of stairs; Lucas seemed to hate this. He shuddered.

  “Let’s get out!” he said. He looked savage and ill. “I feel it as badly as Ann,” he said. He accused me: “You never think of that.” He looked over at the toddler again. “Spend long enough in places like this and your spirit will heave itself inside out.”

  “Come on, Lucas, don’t be spoiled. I thought you liked the pies here.”

  All afternoon he walked urgently about the streets, as if he were on his own. I could hardly keep up with him. The city centre was full of wheelchairs, old women slumped in them with impatient, collapsed faces, partially bald, done up in crisp white raincoats. Lucas had turned up the collar of his gray cashmere jacket against the rain but left the jacket itself hanging open, its sleeves rolled untidily back above his bare wrists. He left me breathless. He was forty years old, but he still had the ravenous face of an adolescent. Eventually he stopped and said, “I’m sorry.” It was halfway through the afternoon, but the neon signs were on and the lower windows of the office blocks were already lit up. Near Piccadilly Station, an arm of the canal appears suddenly from under the road; he stopped and gazed down at its rain-pocked surface, dim and oily, scattered with lumps of floating Styrofoam like seagulls in the fading light.

  “You often see fires on the bank down there,” he said. “They live a whole life down there, people with nowhere else to go. You can hear them singing and shouting on the old towpath.”

  He looked at me with wonder.

  “We aren’t much different, are we? We never came to anything, either.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say.

  “It’s not so much that Sprake encouraged us to ruin something in ourselves,” he said, “as that we never got anything in return for it. Have you ever seen Joan of Arc kneel down to pray in the Kardomah Café? And then a small boy comes in leading something that looks like a goat, and it gets on her there and then and fucks her in a ray of sunlight?”

  “Look, Lucas,” I explained, “I’m never doing this again. I was frightened last night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Lucas, you always are.”

  “It isn’t one of my better days today.”

  “For God’s sake, fasten your coat.”

  “I can’t seem to get cold.”

  He gazed dreamily down at the water—it had darkened into a bottomless, opal-colored trench between the buildings—perhaps seeing goats, fires, people who had nowhere to go. “‘We worked but we were not paid,’” he quoted. Something forced him to ask shyly:

  “You haven’t heard from Sprake?”

  I felt sick with patience. I seemed to be filled up with it.

  “I haven’t seen Sprake for twenty years, Lucas. You know that. I haven’t seen him for twenty years.”

  “I understand. It’s just that I can’t bear to think of Ann on her own in a place like that. I wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise. We said we’d always stick together, but—”

  “Go home, Lucas. Go home now.”

  He turned away miserably and walked off. I meant to leave him to that maze of unredeemed streets between Piccadilly and Victoria, the failing pornography and pet shops, the weed-grown car parks that lie in the shadow of the yellowish-tiled hulk of the Arndale Centre. In the end, I couldn’t. He had gotten as far as the Tib Street fruit market when a small figure came out of a side street and began to follow him closely along the pavement, imitating his typical walk, head thrust forward, hands in pockets. When he stopped to button his jacket, it stopped too. Its own coat was so long, it trailed in the gutter. I started running to catch up with them, and it paused under a street lamp to stare back at me. In the sodium light I saw that it was neither a child nor a dwarf but somet
hing of both, with the eyes and gait of a large monkey. Its eyes were quite blank, stupid and implacable in a pink face. Lucas became aware of it suddenly and jumped with surprise; he ran a few aimless steps, shouting, then dodged around a corner, but it only followed him hurriedly. I thought I heard him pleading, “Why don’t you leave me alone?” and in answer came a voice at once tinny and muffled, barely audible but strained, as if it were shouting. Then there was a terrific clatter and I saw some large object like an old zinc dustbin fly out and go rolling about in the middle of the road.

  “Lucas!” I called.

  When I rounded the corner, the street was full of smashed fruit boxes and crates; rotten vegetables were scattered everywhere; a barrow lay as if it had been thrown along the pavement. There was such a sense of violence and disorder and idiocy that I couldn’t express it to myself. But neither Lucas nor his persecutor was there; and though I walked about for an hour afterward, looking into doorways, I saw nobody at all.

  A few months later Lucas wrote to tell me that Ann had died.

  “A scent of roses,” I remembered her saying. “How lucky you were!”

  “It was a wonderful summer for roses, anyway,” I had answered. “I never knew a year like it.” All June, the hedgerows were full of dog roses, with their elusive, fragile odor. I hadn’t seen them since I was a boy. The gardens were bursting with Gallicas, great blowsy things whose fragrance was like a drug. “How can we ever say that Sprake had anything to do with that, Ann?”

  But I sent roses to her funeral, anyway, though I didn’t go myself.