Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  The second thing I noticed was that everything—

  At that moment, hunger slammed into me, stronger, more forceful, and far more enduring than the river of volts that had separated me from my former self. As avid as the others, as raptly appreciative of all you still living could not see, I moved to the glass and fastened my ravenous gaze upon the nearest mortal man.

  Posted beside the blazing azalea bush on Boy Teuteburg’s front lawn, I observe, mild word, what is disposed so generously to be observed. After all that has been said, there is no need to describe, as I had intended at the beginning of our journey, all I see before me. Tulip Lane is thronged with my fellow Invisibles, wandering this way and that on their self-appointed rounds; some six or seven fellow Invisibles are at this moment stretched out upon Boy Teuteburg’s high-grade lawn of imported Kentucky bluegrass, enjoying the particularly lambent skies we have at this time of year while awaiting the all-important, significance-drenched arrival of a sweet human being, Tulip Lane resident or service personage. These waiting ones, myself included, resemble those eager ticket buyers who, returning to a favorite play for the umpty-umpth time, clutch their handbags or opera glasses in the dark and lean forward as the curtain rises, breath suspended, eyes wide, hearts already trilling, as the actors begin to assemble in their accustomed places, their dear, familiar words to be spoken, the old dilemmas faced once again, and the plot to spin, this time perhaps toward a conclusion equal to the intensity of our attention. Will they get it right, this time? Will they see? No, of course not, they will never see, but we lean forward in passionate concentration as their aching voices lift again and enthrall us with everything they do not know.

  Boy is an old Boy now, in his eighties I believe, though it may be his nineties—distinctions of this sort no longer compel—and, wonderfully, an honored personage. He ascended, needless to say without my vote, into public life around the time of my own “ascension” to the second floor, and continued to rise until a convenient majority elected him mayor shortly before my demise, and upon that plateau he resided through four terms, or sixteen years, after which ill health (emphysema) restrained him from further elevation. His mansion on Tulip Lane contains, I am told, many rooms—seventeen, not counting two kitchens and six bathrooms. I do not bring myself here to admire the mansion of my old adversary, now confined, I gather, to an upper floor and dependent on a wheelchair and an uninterrupted flow of oxygen. I certainly do not report to Tulip Lane at this time of the day to gloat. (Even Boy Teuteburg is a splendid presence now, a figure who plants his feet on the stage and raises his brave and frail voice.) I come here to witness a certain moment.

  A little girl opens the door of the room beyond the window next to the azalea. She is Boy Teuteburg’s youngest grandchild, the only offspring of the failed second marriage of his youngest child, Sherrie-Lynn, daughter of his own failed second and final marriage. Her name is Amber, Jasmine, Opal, something like that—Tiffany! Her name is Tiffany! Tiffany is five or six, a solemn, dark-haired little personage generally attired in a practical one-piece denim garment with bib and shoulder straps, like a farmer’s overalls but white, and printed with a tiny, repeated pattern, flower, puppy, or kitten. Food stains, small explosions of ketchup and the like, provide a secondary layer of decoration. Beneath this winning garment Tiffany most often wears a long-sleeved cotton turtleneck, blue or white, or a white cotton T-shirt, as appropriate to the season; on her feet are clumsy but informal shoes of a sort that first appeared about a decade or two ago, somewhat resembling space boots, somewhat resembling basketball sneakers; in Tiffany’s case, the sides of these swollen-looking objects sport pink check marks. Tiffany is a sallow, almost olive-skinned child in whom almost none of her grandfather’s genetic inheritance is visible. Whitish-gray streaks of dust (housekeeping has slacked off considerably since Mayor Teuteburg’s retirement to the upper floor) can often be observed on her round, inward-looking little face, as well as upon the wrinkled sleeves of her turtleneck and the ironic pastoral of the white overalls.

  Smudgy of eye; streaky with white-gray dust; sallow of skin; dark hair depending in wisps and floaters from where it had been carelessly gathered at the back, and her wispy bangs unevenly cut; each pudgy hand dirt-crusted in a different fashion, one likely to be trailing a single foot-long blond hair, formerly her mother’s; introspective without notable intelligence, thus liable to fits of selfishness and brooding; round of face, arm, wrist, hand, and belly, thus liable for obesity in adulthood; yet withal surpassingly charming; yet gloriously, wholly beautiful.

  This little miracle enters the room at the usual hour, marches directly to the television set located beneath our window, tucks her lower lip beneath her teeth—pearly white, straight as a Roman road—and snaps the set on. It is time for the adventures of Tom and Jerry. By now, most of those Invisibles who had been sprawled on the Kentucky blue have joined me at the window, and as matters proceed, some of those who have found themselves on Tulip Lane will wander up, too. Tiffany backpedals to a point on the floor well in advance of the nearest chair. The chairs have been positioned for adults, who do not understand television as Tiffany does and in any case do not ever watch in wondering awe the multiform adventures of Tom and Jerry. She slumps over her crossed ankles, back bent, clumsy shoes with pink check marks nearly in her lap, hands at her sides, round face beneath uneven bangs dowsing the screen. Tiffany does not laugh and only rarely smiles. She is engaged in serious business.

  Generally, her none-too-clean hands flop all anyhow on her flowered denim knees, on her pink-checked feet, or in the little well between the feet and the rest of her body. At other times, Tiffany’s hands go exploring unregarded on the floor about her. These forays deposit another fine, mouse-gray layer of dust or grime on whatever sectors of the probing hands come in contact with the hardwood floor.

  During the forays, the small person’s face maintains a soft immobility, the soft unconscious composure of a deep-diving rapture; and the conjunction of softness and immobility renders each inner delight, each moment of identification or elation, each collusion between drama and witness—in short, you people, each emotion that would cause another child to roll giggling on the floor or draw her smeary fists up to her face, each emotion is rendered instantly visible—written in subtle but powerful runes on the blank page that is Tiffany’s face. As the eerie tube-light washes over this enchanted child’s features, her lips tighten or loosen; an adult frown redraws her forehead; mysterious pouches ’neath her eyes swell with horror or with tears; a hidden smile tucks the corners of her mouth; joy leaps candlelike into her eyes; the whole face irradiates with soul-pleasure. I have not even mentioned the dreamy play brought over the wide cheeks and the area beneath the eyes by thousands of tiny muscle movements, each invoking the separate character, character as in fictional character, of a piquant, momentary shadow.

  And from time to time, a probing hand returns to base and alights on a knee, a space shoe, wanders for a second through the dangling wisps, hesitates, and then, with excruciating patience, approaches the opening mouth and, finger by finger, enters to be sucked, tongued, warmed, above all cleaned of its layers of debris. Tiffany is eating. She will eat anything she finds, anything she picks up. It all goes into her mouth and is absorbed into Tiffany. Cookie crumbs; dust; loose threads from who knows what fabric; now and then a button or a coin. When she is through with her fingers, she might graze over the palm. More often, she will extend a newly washed forefinger and push it into a nostril, there to rummage until a glistening morsel is extracted, this morsel unhesitatingly to be brought to the portals of the mouth and slipped within, then munched until it too has been absorbed into the Tiffany from whence it came.

  We watch so intently, we crowd so close, thrusting into the azalea, that sometimes, having heard a dim version of what twice I heard on Erie Street, she yanks her eyes from the screen and glances upward. She sees but a window, a bush. Instantly, she returns to the screen and her ceaseless meal. I have given
you Ethel Carroway letting fall her child, and I have given you myself, Frank Wardwell, battering in a tyrant’s brains; but no riper spectacle have I summoned to the boards than Tiffany. She embraces and encompasses living Ethel and living Frank, and exactly so, my dear ones, does Tiffany embrace and encompass you.

  MR. CLUBB

  AND MR. CUFF

  1

  I never intended to go astray, nor did I know what that meant. My journey began in an isolated hamlet notable for the piety of its inhabitants, and when I vowed to escape New Covenant I assumed that the values instilled within me there would forever be my guide. And so, with a depth of paradox I still only begin to comprehend, they have been. My journey, so triumphant, also so excruciating, is both from my native village and of it. For all its splendor, my life has been that of a child of New Covenant.

  When in my limousine I scanned The Wall Street Journal, when in the private elevator I ascended to the rosewood-paneled office with harbor views, when in the partners’ dining room I ordered squab on a mesclun bed from a prison-rescued waiter known to me alone as Charlie-Charlie, also when I navigated for my clients the complex waters of financial planning, above all when before her seduction by my enemy Graham Leeson I returned homeward to luxuriate in the attentions of my stunning Marguerite, when transported within the embraces of my wife, even then I carried within the frame houses dropped like afterthoughts down the streets of New Covenant, the stiff faces and suspicious eyes, the stony cordialities before and after services in the grim great Temple, the blank storefronts along Harmony Street—tattooed within me was the ugly, enigmatic beauty of my birthplace. Therefore I believe that when I strayed, and stray I did, make no mistake, it was but to come home, for I claim that the two strange gentlemen who beckoned me into error were the night of its night, the dust of its dust. In the period of my life’s greatest turmoil—the month of my exposure to Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, “Private Detectives Extraordinaire,” as their business card described them—in the midst of the uproar I felt that I saw the contradictory dimensions of . . .

  I felt I saw . . . had seen, had at least glimpsed . . . what a wiser man might call . . . try to imagine the sheer difficulty of actually writing these words . . . the Meaning of Tragedy. You smirk; I don’t blame you: in your place I’d do the same, but I assure you I saw something.

  I must sketch in the few details necessary for you to understand my story. A day’s walk from New York State’s Canadian border, New Covenant was (and still is, still is) a town of just under a thousand inhabitants united by the puritanical Protestantism of the Church of the New Covenant, whose founders had broken away from the even more puritanical Saints of the Covenant. (The Saints had proscribed sexual congress in the hope of hastening the Second Coming.) The village flourished during the end of the nineteenth century and settled into its permanent form around 1920.

  To wit: Temple Square, where the Temple of the New Covenant and its bell tower, flanked left and right by the Youth Bible Study Center and the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School, dominate a modest greensward. Southerly stand the shop fronts of Harmony Street, the bank, also the modest placards indicating the locations of New Covenant’s doctor, lawyer, and dentist; south of Harmony Street lie the two streets of frame houses sheltering the town’s clerks and artisans, beyond these the farms of the rural faithful, beyond the farmland deep forest. North of Temple Square is Scripture Street, two blocks lined with the residences of the reverend and his Board of Brethren, the aforementioned doctor, dentist, and lawyer, the president and vice president of the bank, also the families of some few wealthy converts devoted to Temple affairs. North of Scripture Street are more farms, then the resumption of the great forest, in which our village described a sort of clearing.

  My father was New Covenant’s lawyer, and to Scripture Street was I born. Sundays I spent in the Youth Bible Study Center, weekdays in the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School. New Covenant was my world, its people all I knew of the world. Three-fourths of all mankind consisted of gaunt, bony, blond-haired individuals with chiseled features and blazing blue eyes, the men six feet or taller in height, the women some inches shorter—the remaining fourth being the Racketts, Mudges, and Blunts, our farm families, who after generations of intermarriage had coalesced into a tribe of squat, black-haired, gap-toothed, moon-faced males and females seldom taller than five feet, four or five inches. Until I went to college I thought that all people were divided into the races of town and barn, fair and dark, the spotless and the mud-spattered, the reverential and the sly.

  Though Racketts, Mudges, and Blunts attended our school and worshiped in our Temple, though they were at least as prosperous as we in town, we knew them tainted with an essential inferiority. Rather than intelligent they seemed crafty, rather than spiritual, animal. Both in classrooms and Temple, they sat together, watchful as dogs compelled for the nonce to be “good,” now and again tilting their heads to pass a whispered comment. Despite Sunday baths and Sunday clothes, they bore an unerasable odor redolent of the barnyard. Their public self-effacement seemed to mask a peasant amusement, and when they separated into their wagons and other vehicles, they could be heard to share a peasant laughter.

  I found this mysterious race unsettling, in fact profoundly annoying. At some level they frightened me—I found them compelling. Oppressed from my earliest days by life in New Covenant, I felt an inadmissible fascination for this secretive brood. Despite their inferiority, I wished to know what they knew. Locked deep within their shabbiness and shame I sensed the presence of a freedom I did not understand but found thrilling.

  Because town never socialized with barn, our contacts were restricted to places of education, worship, and commerce. It would have been as unthinkable for me to take a seat beside Delbert Mudge or Charlie-Charlie Rackett in our fourth-grade classroom as for Delbert or Charlie-Charlie to invite me for an overnight in their farmhouse bedrooms. Did Delbert and Charlie-Charlie actually have bedrooms, where they slept alone in their own beds? I recall mornings when the atmosphere about Delbert and Charlie-Charlie suggested nights spent in close proximity to the pigpen, others when their worn dungarees exuded a freshness redolent of sunshine, wildflowers, and raspberries.

  During recess an inviolable border separated the townies at the northern end of our play area from the barnies at the southern. Our play, superficially similar, demonstrated our essential differences, for we could not cast off the unconscious stiffness resulting from constant adult measurement of our spiritual worthiness. In contrast, the barnies did not play at playing but actually played, plunging back and forth across the grass, chortling over victories, grinning as they muttered what must have been jokes. (We were not adept at jokes.) When school closed at end of day, I tracked the homebound progress of Delbert, Charlie-Charlie, and clan with envious eyes and a divided heart.

  Why should they have seemed in possession of a liberty I desired? After graduation from Middle School, we townies progressed to Shady Glen’s Consolidated High, there to monitor ourselves and our fellows while encountering the temptations of the wider world, in some cases then advancing into colleges and universities. Having concluded their educations with the seventh grade’s long division and “Hiawatha” recitations, the barnies one and all returned to their barns. Some few, some very few of us, among whom I had determined early on to be numbered, left for good, thereafter to be celebrated, denounced, or mourned. One of us, Caleb Thurlow, violated every standard of caste and morality by marrying Munna Blunt and vanishing into barnie-dom. A disgraced, disinherited pariah during my childhood, Thurlow’s increasingly pronounced stoop and decreasing teeth terrifyingly mutated him into a blond, wasted barnie-parody on his furtive annual Christmas appearances at Temple. One of them, one only, my old classmate Charlie-Charlie Rackett, escaped his ordained destiny in our twentieth year by liberating a plow horse and Webley-Vickers pistol from the family farm to commit serial armed robbery upon Shady Glen’s George Washington Inn, Tow
n Square Feed & Grain, and Allsorts Emporium. Every witness to his crimes recognized what, if not who, he was, and Charlie-Charlie was apprehended while boarding the Albany train in the next village west. During the course of my own journey from and of New Covenant, I tracked Charlie-Charlie’s gloomy progress through the way stations of the penal system until at last I could secure his release at a parole hearing with the offer of a respectable job in the financial-planning industry.

  I had by then established myself as absolute monarch of three floors in a Wall Street monolith. With my two junior partners, I enjoyed the services of a fleet of paralegals, interns, analysts, investigators, and secretaries. I had chosen these partners carefully, for as well as the usual expertise, skill, and dedication, I required other, less conventional qualities.

  I had sniffed out intelligent but unimaginative men of some slight moral laziness; capable of cutting corners when they thought no one would notice; controlled drinkers and secret drug takers: juniors with reason to be grateful for their positions. I wanted no zealousness. My employees were to be steadfastly incurious and able enough to handle their clients satisfactorily, at least with my paternal assistance.

  My growing prominence had attracted the famous, the established, the notorious. Film stars and athletes, civic leaders, corporate pashas, and heirs to long-standing family fortunes regularly visited our offices, as did a number of conspicuously well-tailored gentlemen who had accumulated their wealth in a more colorful fashion. To these clients I suggested financial stratagems responsive to their labyrinthine needs. I had not schemed for their business. It simply came to me, willy-nilly, as our Temple held that salvation came to the elect. One May morning, a cryptic fellow in a pin-striped suit appeared in my office to pose a series of delicate questions. As soon as he opened his mouth, the cryptic fellow summoned irresistibly from memory a dour, squinting member of the Board of Brethren of New Covenant’s Temple. I knew this man, and instantly I found the tone most acceptable to him. Tone is all to such people. After our interview he directed others of his kind to my office, and by December my business had tripled. Individually and universally these gentlemen pungently reminded me of the village I had long ago escaped, and I cherished my suspicious buccaneers even as I celebrated the distance between my moral life and theirs. While sheltering these self-justifying figures within elaborate trusts, while legitimizing subterranean floods of cash, I immersed myself within a familiar atmosphere of pious denial. Rebuking home, I was home.