Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  Fee nodded.

  Bob Bandolier walked away without looking back. He was tall and almost slim in his tight black coat. Nobody else on the street looked like him—all the other men wore plaid caps and old army jackets.

  In a little while, smiling Mrs. Sunchana came up the walk carrying a bag of groceries. “Fee, you are enjoying the sunshine? You don’t feel the cold today?” Her slight foreign accent made her speech sound musical, and her creamy round face, with its dark eyes and black eyebrows beneath her black bangs, could seem either witchlike or guilelessly pretty. Mrs. Sunchana looked nothing at all like Fee’s mother—short, compact, and energetic where his mother was tall, thin, and weary; dark and cheerful where she was sorrowing and fair.

  “I’m not cold,” he said, though the chill licked in under the collar of his jacket, and his ears had begun to tingle. Mrs. Sunchana smiled at him again, said, “Hold this for me, Fee,” and thrust the grocery bag onto his lap. He gripped the heavy bag as she opened her purse and searched for her key. There were no lines in her face at all. Both her cheeks and her lips were plump with health and life—for a second, bending over her black plastic purse and frowning with concentration, she seemed almost volcanic to Fee, and he wondered what it would be like to have this woman for his mother. He thought of her plump strong arms closing around him. Her face expanded above him. A rapture that was half terror filled his body.

  For a second he was her child.

  Mrs. Sunchana unlocked the door and held it open with one hip while she bent to take the groceries from Fee’s lap. Fee looked down into the bag and saw a cardboard carton of brown eggs and a box of sugar-covered doughnuts. Mrs. Sunchana’s live black hair brushed his forehead. The world wavered before him, and a trembling electricity filled his head. She drew the bag out of his arms, then quizzed him with a look.

  “Coming in?”

  “I’m going to the movies pretty soon.”

  “You don’t want to wait inside, where it is warm?”

  He shook his head. Mrs. Sunchana tightened her grip on the grocery bag. The expression on her face frightened him, and he turned away to look at the empty sidewalk.

  “Is your mother all right, Fee?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Sunchana nodded.

  “We’re letting her sleep until my dad gets home.”

  Mrs. Sunchana kept nodding as she backed through the door. Fee remembered the eggs and the sugary doughnuts, and turned around again before she could see how hungry he was. “Do you know what time it is?”

  She leaned over the bag to look at her watch. “About ten-thirty. Why, Fee?”

  A black car moved down the street, its tires swishing through the fallen elm leaves. The front door clicked shut behind him.

  A minute later, a window slid upward in its frame. A painful self-consciousness brought him to his feet. He put his hands in his pockets.

  Fee walked stiffly and slowly down the path to the sidewalk and turned left toward Livermore Avenue. He remembered the moment when Mrs. Sunchana’s electrically alive hair had moved against his forehead, and an extraordinary internal pain sent him gliding over the pavement.

  The elms of Livermore Avenue interlocked their branches far overhead. Preoccupied men and women in coats moved up and down past the shop fronts. Fee was away from his block, and no one was going to ask him questions. Fee glanced to his right and experienced a sharp flame of anger and disgrace that somehow seemed connected to Mrs. Sunchana’s questions about his mother.

  But of course what was across the street had nothing to do with his mother. Beyond the slowly moving vehicles, the high boxy automobiles and the slat-sided trucks, a dark, arched passage led into a narrow alley. In front of the brick passage was a tall gray building with what to Fee looked like a hundred windows, and behind it was the blank facade of a smaller, brown brick building. The gray building was the St. Alwyn Hotel, the smaller building its annex. Fee felt that he was no longer supposed to look at the St. Alwyn. The St. Alwyn had done something bad, grievously bad—it had opened a most terrible hole in the world, and from that hole had issued hellish screams and groans.

  A pure, terrible ache occurred in the middle of his body. From across the street, the St. Alwyn leered at him. Cold gray air sifted through his clothing. Brilliant leaves packed the gutters; water more transparent than the air streamed over and through the leaves. The ache within Fee threatened to blow him apart. He wanted to lower his face into the water—to dissolve into the transparent stream.

  A man in a dark coat had appeared at the end of the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn, and Fee’s heart moved with an involuntary constriction of pain and love before he consciously took in that the man was his father.

  His father staring at a spot on the tunnel wall.

  Why was his father behind the hated St. Alwyn, when he was supposed to be working at the Hotel Hepton?

  His father looked from side to side, then moved into the darkness of the tunnel.

  Bob Bandolier began fleeing down the alley. A confusion of feelings like voices raised in Fee’s chest.

  Now the alley was empty. Fee walked a few yards along the sidewalk, looking down at the clear water moving through the brilliant leaves. The sorrow and misery within him threatened to overflow. Without thinking, Fee dropped to his knees and thrust both of his hands into the water. A shock of cold bit into him. His small white hands sank farther than he had expected into the transparent water, and handcuffs made of burning ice formed around his wrists. The leaves drifted apart when he touched them. A brown stain oozed out and drifted, obscuring the leaves. Gasping, Fee pulled his hands from the water and wiped them on his jacket. He leaned over the gutter to watch the brown stain pour from the hole he had made in the leaves. Whatever it was, he had turned it loose, set it free.

  4

  The box of popcorn warmed Fee’s hands. The Beldame Oriental Theater’s luxurious space, with its floating cherubs and robed women raising lamps, its gilded arabesques and swooping curves of plaster, lay all about him. Empty rows of seats extended forward and back, and high up in the darkness hung the huge raft of the balcony. An old woman in a flowerpot hat sat far down in the second row; off to his left a congregation of shapeless men drank from pint bottles in paper bags.

  This happened every day, Fee realized.

  MOVIETONE NEWS blared from the screen, and a voice like a descending fist spoke over film of soldiers pointing rifles into dark skies, of a black boxer with a knotted forehead knocking down a white boxer in a brilliant spray of sweat. Women in bathing suits and sashes stood in a row and smiled at the camera; a woman in a long gown raised a crown from her head and placed it on the glowing black hair of a woman who looked like Mrs. Sunchana. It was Mrs. Sunchana, Fee thought, but then saw that her face was thinner than Mrs. Sunchana’s, and his panic calmed.

  The grinning heads of a gray cat and a small brown mouse popped onto the screen. Fee laughed in delight. In cartoons the music was loud and relentless, and the animals behaved like bad children. Characters were turned to smoking ruins, pressed flat, dismembered, broken like twigs, consumed by fires, and in seconds were whole again. Cartoons were about not being hurt.

  Abruptly, he was running through a cartoon house, alongside a cartoon mouse. The mouse ran upright on his legs, like a human being. Behind him, also on whirling back legs, ran the cat. The mouse scorched a track through the carpet and zoomed into a neat mouse hole seconds before the cat’s huge paw filled the hole. Fee brought salty popcorn to his mouth. Jerry Mouse sat at a little table and ate a mouse-sized steak with a knife and a fork. Fee drank in the enormity of his pleasure, the self-delight and swagger of the mouse, and the jealous rage of Tom Cat, rolling his giant bloodshot eye at the mouse hole.

  After the cartoon, Fee walked up the aisle to buy a hot dog. Two or three people had taken seats in the vast space behind him. An old woman wrapped in a hairy brown coat mumbled to herself; a teenage boy cutting school cocked his feet on the seat in fro
nt of him. Fee saw the outline of a big man’s head and shoulders on the other side of the theater, looked away, felt an odd sense of recognition, and looked back at an empty seat. He had been seen, but who had seen him?

  Fee pushed through the wide doors into the lobby. A skinny man in a red jacket stood behind the candy counter, and an usher exhaled smoke from a velvet bench. The door to the men’s room was just now swinging shut.

  Fee bought a steaming hot dog and squirted ketchup onto it, wrapped it in a flimsy paper napkin, and hurried back into the theater. He heard the door of the men’s room sliding across the lobby carpet. He rushed down the aisle and took his seat as the titles came up on the screen.

  The stars of From Dangerous Depths were Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino. It was directed by Robert Siodmak. Fee had never heard of any of these people, nor of any of the supporting actors, and he was disappointed that the movie was not in color.

  Charlie Carpenter (Robert Ryan) was a tall, well-dressed accountant who lived alone in a hotel room like those at the St. Alwyn. Charlie Carpenter put a wide-brimmed hat on the floor and flipped cards into it. He wore a necktie at home and, like Bob Bandolier, he peered into the mirror to scowl at his handsome, embittered face. At work he snubbed his office mates, and after work he drank in a bar. On Sundays he attended mass. One day, Charlie Carpenter noticed a discrepancy in the accounts, but when he asked about it, his angry supervisor (William Bendix) said that he had come upon traces of the Elijah Fund—this fund was used for certain investments, it was none of Charlie’s business, he should never have discovered it in the first place, a junior clerk had made a mistake, Charlie must forget he’d ever heard of it. When Charlie wondered about the corporate officers in control of the fund, his supervisor reluctantly gave him two names, Fenton Welles and Lily Sheehan, but warned him to leave the matter alone.

  Fenton Welles (Ralph Meeker) and Lily Sheehan (Ida Lupino) owned comfortable houses in the wealthy part of town. Charlie Carpenter scanned their lawn parties through field glasses; he followed them to their country houses on opposite sides of Random Lake, fifty miles north of the city.

  Lily Sheehan summoned Charlie to her office. He feared that she knew he had been following her, but Lily gave Charlie a cigarette and sat on the edge of her desk and said she had noticed that his reports were unusually perceptive. Charlie was a smart loner, just the sort of man whose help she needed.

  Lily had suspicions about Fenton Welles. Charlie didn’t have to know more than he should know, but Lily thought that Welles had been stealing from the company by manipulating a confidential fund. Was Charlie willing to work for her?

  Charlie broke the lock on Fenton Welles’s back door and groped through the dark house. Using a flashlight, he found the staircase and worked his way upstairs. He found the master bedroom and went to the desk. Just as he opened the center drawer and found a folder marked ELIJAH, the front door opened downstairs. Holding his breath, he looked in the file and saw photographs of various men, alone and in groups, in military uniform. He put the file back in the drawer, climbed out the window, and scrambled down the roof until he could jump onto the lawn. A dog charged him out of the darkness, and Charlie picked up a heavy stick beneath a tree and battered the dog to death.

  Lily Sheehan told Charlie to take a room at the Random Lake Motel, rent a motorboat, and break into Welles’s house when he was at a country club dance. Charlie and Lily were both smoking, and Lily prowled around him. She sat on the arm of his chair. Her dress seemed tighter.

  In the dark behind him, somebody whistled.

  Charlie and Lily kissed.

  The music behind Charlie Carpenter announced doom, ruin, death. He pulled a carton from a closet in Fenton Welles’s lake house and dumped its contents onto the floor. Stacks of bills held together with rubber bands fell out of the carton, along with a big envelope marked ELIJAH. Charlie opened the envelope and pulled out photographs of Fenton Welles and Lily Sheehan shot through the window of a restaurant, Fenton Welles and Lily walking down a street arm in arm, Fenton Welles and Lily in the backseat of a taxi, driving away.

  “Aha,” said a voice from the back of the theater.

  An angry, betrayed Charlie shouted at Lily Sheehan, waved a fist in the air, kicked at furniture. These sounds, Fee knew, were those that came before the screams and the sobs.

  But the beatings did not come. Lily Sheehan began to cry, and Charlie took her in his arms.

  He’s evil, Lily said.

  A stunned look bloomed in Charlie’s dark eyes.

  It’s the only way I’ll ever be free.

  “Watch out,” the man called, and Fee turned around and squinted into the back of the theater.

  In the second row from the back, far under the beam of light from the projectionist’s booth, a big man with light hair leaned forward with his hands held up like binoculars. “Peekaboo,” he said. Fee whirled around, his face burning.

  “I know who you are,” the man said.

  I’m all the soul you need, Lily said from the screen.

  Fenton Welles walked in from a round of golf at the Random Lake Country Club, and Charlie Carpenter came sneering out from behind the staircase with a fireplace poker raised in his right hand. He smashed it down onto Welles’s head.

  Lily wiped the last trace of blood from Charlie’s face with a tiny handkerchief, and for a second Fee had it, he knew the name of the man behind him, but this knowledge disappeared into the dread taking place on the screen, where Lily and Charlie lay in a shadowy bed talking about the next thing Charlie must do.

  Death death death sang the soundtrack.

  Charlie hid in the shadowy corner of William Bendix’s office. Slanting shadows of the blinds fell across his suit, his face, his broad-brimmed hat.

  A sweet pressure built in Fee’s chest.

  William Bendix walked into his office, and suddenly Fee knew the identity of the man behind him. Charlie Carpenter stepped out of the shadow-stripes with a knife in his hands. William Bendix smiled and waggled his fat hands—what’s going on here, Miss Sheehan told him there wouldn’t be any trouble—and Charlie rammed the knife into his chest.

  Fee remembered the odor of raw meat, the heavy smell of blood in Mr. Stenmitz’s shop.

  Charlie Carpenter scrubbed his hands and face in the company bathroom until the basin was black with blood. Charlie ripped towel after towel from the dispenser, blotted his face, and threw the damp towels on the floor. Impatient, Charlie Carpenter rode a train out of the city, and two girls across the aisle peeked at him, wondering Who’s that handsome guy? and Why is he so nervous? The train pulled past the front of an immense Catholic church with stained-glass windows blazing with light.

  Fee turned around to see the big head and wide shoulders of Heinz Stenmitz. In the darkness, he could just make out white teeth shining in a smile. Joking, Mr. Stenmitz put his hands to his eyes again and pretended to peer at Fee through binoculars.

  Fee giggled.

  Mr. Stenmitz motioned for Fee to join him, and Fee got out of his seat and walked up the long aisle toward the back of the theater. Mr. Stenmitz wound his hand in the air, reeling him in. He patted the seat beside him and leaned over and whispered, “Sit here next to your old friend Heinz.” Fee sat down. Mr. Stenmitz’s hand swallowed his. “I’m very very glad you’re here,” he whispered. “This movie is too scary for me to see alone.”

  Charlie Carpenter piloted a motorboat across Random Lake. It was early morning. Drops of foam spattered across his lapels. Charlie was smiling a dark, funny smile.

  “Do you know what?” Mr. Stenmitz asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you know what?”

  Fee giggled. “No, what?”

  “You have to guess.”

  There was blood everywhere on the screen but it was invisible blood, it was the blood scrubbed from the office floor and washed away in the sink.

  The boat slid into the reeds, and Charlie jumped out onto marshy ground—the boat will drift away, Char
lie doesn’t care about the boat, it’s nothing but a stolen boat, let it go, let it be gone . . .

  An unimaginable time later Fee found himself standing in the dark outside the Beldame Oriental Theater. The last thing he could remember was Lily Sheehan turning from her stove and saying Decided to stop off on your way to work, Charlie? She wore a long white robe, and her hair looked loose and full. You’re full of surprises. I thought you’d be here last night. His face burned, and his heart was pounding. Smoke and oil filled his stomach.

  He felt appallingly, astoundingly dirty.

  The world turned spangly and gray. The headlights on Livermore Avenue swung toward him. The smoke in his stomach spilled upward into his throat.

  Fee moved a step deeper into the comparative darkness of the street and bent over the curb. Something that looked and tasted like smoke drifted from his mouth. He gagged and wiped his mouth and his eyes. It seemed to him that an enormous arm lay across his shoulders, that a deep low voice was saying—was saying—

  No.

  Fee fled down Livermore Avenue.

  PART TWO

  1

  He turned into his street and saw the neat row of cement blocks bisecting the dead lawn and the concrete steps leading up to the rosebushes and the front door.

  Nothing around him was real. The moon had been painted, and the houses had no backs, and everything he saw was a fraction of an inch thick, like paint.

  He watched himself sit down on the front steps. The night darkened. Footsteps came down the stairs from the Sunchanas’ apartment, and the relief of dread focused his attention. The lock turned, and the door opened.

  “Fee, poor child,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “I thought I heard you crying.”

  “I wasn’t crying,” Fee said in a wobbly voice, but he felt cold tears on his cheeks.

  “Won’t your mother let you in?” Mrs. Sunchana stepped around him, and he scooted aside to let her pass.

  He wiped his face on his sleeve. She was still waiting for an answer. “My mother’s sick,” he said. “I’m waiting for my daddy to come back.”