by Peter Straub
Soft but insistent raps at the door awakened him. N looked at his watch: eleven-thirty, earlier than he had expected. “I’ll be right there.” He stood up, stretched, refastened the towel around his waist. A mist of sickeningly floral perfume enveloped him when he unlocked the door. Wearing a raincoat over her nightgown, Albertine slipped into the room. N kissed her neck and grazed at her avid mouth, smiling as she moved him toward the bed.
She closed the door behind her, and the three men in the corridor stepped forward in unison, like soldiers. The one on the right jerked open a refuse bag and extended it toward her. She shoved the bloody cleaver and the ruined nightgown into the depths of the bag. The man quizzed her with a look. “You can go in,” she said, grateful he had not exercised his abominable French. All three of them bowed. Despite her promises to herself, she was unable to keep from bowing back. Humiliated, she straightened up again, feeling their eyes moving over her face, hands, feet, ankles, hair, and whatever they detected of her body through the raincoat. Albertine moved aside, and they filed through the door to begin their work.
Her father stood up from his desk behind the counter when she descended into the darkened lobby. Beneath the long table, Gaston, the black-and-white dog, stirred in his sleep. “Did it go well?” her father asked. He, too, inspected her for bloodstains.
“How do you think it went?” she said. “He was almost asleep. By the time he knew what was happening, his chest was wide open.”
The lock on the front door responded to the keypad and clicked open. The two permanent Americans eyed her as they came through the arch. Gaston raised his head, sighed, and went back to sleep. She said, “Those idiots in the berets are up there now. How long have you been using Japanese, anyhow?”
“Maybe six months.” The one in the tweed jacket spoke in English because he knew English annoyed her, and annoyance was how he flirted. “Hey, we love those wild and crazy guys, they’re our little samurai brothers.”
“Don’t let your stupid brothers miss the briefcase in the closet,” she said. The ugly one in the running suit leered at her. “That man had good clothes. You could try wearing some nice clothes, for a change.”
“His stuff goes straight into the fire,” the ugly one said. “We don’t even look at it. You know, we’re talking about a real character. Kind of a legend. I heard lots of amazing stories about him.”
“Thank you, Albertine,” said her father. He did not want her to hear the amazing stories.
“You ought to thank me,” she said. “The old rooster made me take a bath. On top of that, I wasted my perfume because he wanted me to smell like a girl in Bora Bora.”
Both of the Americans stared at the floor.
“What does it mean to say,” she asked, and in her heavily accented English said, “I wish I had that swing in my backyard?”
The permanent Americans glanced at each other. The one in the tweed jacket clapped his hands over his eyes. The ugly one said, “Albertine, you’re the ideal woman. Everybody worships you.”
“Good, then I should get more money.” She wheeled around to go downstairs, and the ugly one sang out, “Izz-unt it roman-tic?” Beneath his sweet false tremulous tenor came the rumble of the disposal truck as it backed toward the entrance.
THE GHOST
VILLAGE
1
In Vietnam I knew a man who went quietly and purposefully crazy because his wife wrote him that his son had been sexually abused—“messed with”—by the leader of their church choir. This man was a black six-foot-six grunt named Leonard Hamnet, from a small town in Tennessee named Archibald. Before writing, his wife had waited until she had endured the entire business of going to the police, talking to other parents, returning to the police with another accusation, and finally succeeding in having the man charged. He was up for trial in two months. Leonard Hamnet was no happier about that than he was about the original injury.
“I got to murder him, you know, but I’m seriously thinking on murdering her, too,” he said. He still held the letter in his hands, and he was speaking to Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Conor Linklater, SP4 Cotton, Calvin Hill, Tina Pumo, the magnificent M. O. Dengler, and myself. “All this is going on, my boy needs help, this here Mr. Brewster needs to be dismantled, needs to be racked and stacked, and she don’t tell me! Makes me want to put her down, man. Take her damn head off and put it up on a stake in the yard, man. With a sign saying: Here is one stupid woman.”
We were in the unofficial part of Camp Crandall known as No Man’s Land, located between the wire perimeter and a shack, also unofficial, where a cunning little weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor. No Man’s Land, so called because the C.O. pretended it did not exist, contained a mound of old tires, a piss tube, and a lot of dusty red ground. Leonard Hamnet gave the letter in his hand a dispirited look, folded it into the pocket of his fatigues, and began to roam around the heap of tires, aiming kicks at the ones that stuck out farthest. “One stupid woman,” he repeated. Dust exploded up from a burst, worn-down wheel of rubber.
I wanted to make sure Hamnet knew he was angry with Mr. Brewster, not his wife, and said, “She was trying—”
Hamnet’s great glistening bull’s head turned toward me.
“Look at what the woman did. She nailed that bastard. She got other people to admit that he messed with their kids, too. That must be almost impossible. And she had the guy arrested. He’s going to be put away for a long time.”
“I’ll put that bitch away, too,” Hamnet said, and kicked an old gray tire hard enough to push it nearly a foot back into the heap. All the other tires shuddered and moved. For a second it seemed that the entire mound might collapse.
“This is my boy I’m talking about here,” Hamnet said. “This shit has gone far enough.”
“The important thing,” Dengler said, “is to take care of your boy. You have to see he gets help.”
“How’m I gonna do that from here?” Hamnet shouted.
“Write him a letter,” Dengler said. “Tell him you love him. Tell him he did right to go to his mother. Tell him you think about him all the time.”
Hamnet took the letter from his pocket and stared at it. It was already stained and wrinkled. I did not think it could survive many more of Hamnet’s readings. His face seemed to get heavier, no easy trick with a face like Hamnet’s. “I got to get home,” he said. “I got to get back home and take care of these people.”
Hamnet began putting in requests for compassionate leave relentlessly—one request a day. When we were out on patrol, sometimes I saw him unfold the tattered sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket and read it two or three times, concentrating intensely. When the letter began to shred along the folds, Hamnet taped it together.
We were going out on four- and five-day patrols during that period, taking a lot of casualties. Hamnet performed well in the field, but he had retreated so far within himself that he spoke in monosyllables. He wore a dull, glazed look, and moved like a man who had just eaten a heavy dinner. I thought he looked like a man who had given up, and when people gave up they did not last long—they were already very close to death, and other people avoided them.
We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. We had to eat cold C rations because heating them with C-4 would have been like putting up billboards and arc lights. We couldn’t smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. Hamnet’s C rations consisted of an old can of Spam that dated from an earlier war and a can of peaches. He saw Spanky staring at the peaches and tossed him the can. Then he dropped the Spam between his legs. Death was almost visible around him. He fingered the note out of his pocket and tried to read it in the damp gray twilight.
At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the Lieutenant yelled, “Shit!” and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.
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The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy named Tyrell Budd coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.
One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the damp but solid ground on the other side of the paddy. Here the trees were much sparser, and a little group of thatched huts was visible through them.
Then two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. That was the first thing. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth, and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. Whoever fired the mortar should have had an excellent idea of our location, and I experienced that endless moment of pure, terrifying helplessness—a moment in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to let go of it—until the shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us, and shell fragments whizzed through the air. One of the fragments sailed over us, sliced a hamburger-size wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage’s helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground, and a little smoke drifted up from it.
We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, except that he was breathing. Hamnet shouldered his pack and picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder. He saw me looking at him.
“I gotta take care of these people,” he said.
The other thing I did not understand—apart from why there had been only one mortar round—came when we entered the village.
Lieutenant Harry Beevers had yet to join us, and we were nearly a year away from the events at Ia Thuc, when everything, the world and ourselves within the world, went crazy. I have to explain what happened. Lieutenant Harry Beevers killed thirty children in a cave at Ia Thuc and their bodies disappeared, but Michael Poole and I went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened in there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands. A pitiful character named Victor Spitalny ran into the cave when he heard gunfire, and came pinwheeling out right away, screaming, covered with welts or hives that vanished almost as soon as he came out into the air. Poor Spitalny had touched it, too. Because I was twenty and already writing books in my head, I thought that the cave was the place where the other Tom Sawyer ended, where Injun Joe raped Becky Thatcher and slit Tom’s throat.
When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of Ia Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The little huts, still inhabitable, were empty—something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again. It was a ghost village, in a country where people thought the earth was sanctified by their ancestors’ bodies.
Poole’s map said that the place was named Bong To.
Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.
Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. “I caught a head wound,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner,” Hamnet said.
Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. “I see double,” he said. “I’ll never get that helmet back on.”
The medic said, “Take it easy, we’ll get you out of here.”
“Out of here?” Spanky brightened up.
“Back to Crandall,” the medic said.
Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. “There ain’t nobody here,” Spitalny said. “What the fuck is going on?” He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.
Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat.
“Spitalny, Tiano,” the Lieutenant said. “Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now.”
Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six-and-a-half months later and was Spitalny’s only friend, said, “You do it this time, Lieutenant.”
Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.
“Hey, I’m gone, I’m already there,” Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes had found us.
“So?” Poole said.
Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots. He said, “I have to go home, Lieutenant. I don’t mean no disrespect, but I cannot take this shit much longer.”
The Lieutenant said he was working on it.
Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village.
Spanky Burrage said, “Good quiet place for Ham to catch up on his reading.”
“Maybe I better take a look,” the Lieutenant said. He flicked the lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.
The Lieutenant said something almost inaudible from inside the hut. He came back outside in a hurry, looking disturbed and puzzled even in the darkness.
“Underhill, Poole,” he said, “I want you to see this.”
Poole and I glanced at each other. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. Poole seemed to be a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the Lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hens’ eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same.
“What is it, Lieutenant?” he asked.
The Lieutenant gestured for us to come to the hut, then turned around and went back inside. There was no reason for us not to follow him. The Lieutenant was a jerk, but Harry Beevers, our next lieutenant, was a baron, an earl among jerks, and we nearly always did whatever dumb thing he told us to do. Poole was so ragged and edgy that he looked as if he felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I didn’t have an idea in the world what was going on in Poole’s mind. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.
The Lieutenant was standing in the doorway, looking over his shoulder and fingering his sidearm. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on the lighter. The sudden hollows and shadows in his face made him resemble one of the corpses I had opened up when I was in graves registration at Camp White Star.
“You want to know what it is, Poole? Okay, you tell me what it is.”
He held the lighter before him like a torch and marched into the hut. I imagined the entire dry, flimsy structure bursting into heat and flame. This Lieutenant was not destined to get home walking and breathing, and I pitied and hated him about equally, but I did not want to turn into toast be
cause he had found an American body inside a hut and didn’t know what to do about it. I’d heard of platoons finding the mutilated corpses of American prisoners, and hoped that this was not our turn.
And then, in the instant before I smelled blood and saw the Lieutenant stoop to lift a panel on the floor, I thought that what had spooked him was not the body of an American POW but of a child who had been murdered and left behind in this empty place. The Lieutenant had probably not seen any dead children yet. Some part of the Lieutenant was still worrying about what a girl named Becky Roddenburger was getting up to back at Idaho State, and a dead child would be too much reality for him.
He pulled up the wooden panel in the floor, and I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The Lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell of blood floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The Lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. “Now. Tell me what this is.”
“It’s where they hide the kids when people like us show up,” I said. “Smells like something went wrong. Did you take a look?”
I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn’t about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.
“Taking a look is your job, Underhill,” he said.
For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches leashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.
“Give me the lighter,” Poole said, and grabbed it away from the Lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the Lieutenant and myself by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The Lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.
