Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  “It has been proved a thousand times over,” said Mr. Clubb.

  “Shock being a healer,” said Mr. Cuff. “Shock being a balm like salt water to the human body, yet if you have too much of shock or salt water, the body gives up the ghost. After I seared the wound, it looked to me like he and his body got together and voted to take the next bus to what is generally considered a better world.” He held up an index finger and stared into my eyes while forking kidneys into his mouth. “This, sir, is a process. A process can’t happen all at once, and every reasonable precaution was taken. Mr. Clubb and I do not have, nor ever have had, the reputation for carelessness in our undertakings.”

  “And never shall.” Mr. Clubb washed down whatever was in his mouth with half a glass of cognac.

  “Despite the process under way,” said Mr. Cuff, “the gentleman’s left wrist was bound tightly to the stump. Rope was again attached to the areas of the chest and legs, a gag went back into his mouth, and besides all that I had the pleasure of whapping my hammer once and once only on the region of his temple, for the purpose of keeping him out of action until we were ready for him in case he was not boarding the bus. I took a moment to turn him over and gratify my little soldier, which I trust was in no way exceeding our agreement, sir.” He granted me a look of the purest innocence.

  “Continue,” I said, “although you must grant that your tale is utterly without verification.”

  “Sir,” said Mr. Clubb, “we know one another better than that.” He bent over so far that his head disappeared beneath the table, and I heard the undoing of a clasp. Resurfacing, he placed between us on the table an object wrapped in one of the towels Marguerite had purchased for Green Chimneys. “If verification is your desire, and I intend no reflection, sir, for a man in your line of business has grown out of the habit of taking a fellow at his word, here you have wrapped up like a birthday present the finest verification of this portion of our tale to be found in all the world.”

  “And yours to keep, if you’re taken that way,” said Mr. Cuff.

  I had no doubts whatsoever concerning the nature of the trophy set before me, and therefore I deliberately composed myself before pulling away the folds of toweling. Yet for all my preparations the spectacle of the actual trophy itself affected me more greatly than I would have thought possible, and at the very center of the nausea rising within me I experienced the first faint stirrings of enlightenment. Poor man, I thought, poor mankind.

  I refolded the material over the crablike thing and said, “Thank you. I meant to imply no reservations concerning your veracity.”

  “Beautifully said, sir, and much appreciated. Men like ourselves, honest at every point, have found that persons in the habit of duplicity often cannot understand the truth. Liars are the bane of our existence. And yet, such is the nature of this funny old world, we’d be out of business without them.”

  Mr. Cuff smiled up at the chandelier in rueful appreciation of the world’s contradictions. “When I replaced him on the bed, Mr. Clubb went hither and yon, collecting the remainder of the tools for the job at hand.”

  “When you say you replaced him on the bed,” I broke in, “is it your meaning—”

  “Your meaning might differ from mine, sir, and mine, being that of a fellow raised without the benefits of a literary education, may be simpler than yours. But bear in mind that every guild has its legacy of customs and traditions which no serious practitioner can ignore without thumbing his nose at all he holds dear. For those brought up into our trade, physical punishment of a female subject invariably begins with the act most associated in the feminine mind with humiliation of the most rigorous sort. With males the same is generally true. Neglect this step, and you lose an advantage which can never be regained. It is the foundation without which the structure cannot stand, and the foundation must be set in place even when conditions make the job distasteful, which is no picnic, take my word for it.” He shook his head and fell silent.

  “We could tell you stories to curl your hair,” said Mr. Clubb. “Matter for another day. It was on the order of nine-thirty when our materials had been assembled, the preliminaries taken care of, and business could begin in earnest. This is a moment, sir, ever cherished by professionals such as ourselves. It is of an eternal freshness. You are on the brink of testing yourself against your past achievements and those of masters gone before. Your skill, your imagination, your timing and resolve will be called upon to work together with your hard-earned knowledge of the human body, because it is a question of being able to sense when to press on and when to hold back, of, I can say, having that instinct for the right technique at the right time you can acquire only through experience. During this moment you hope that the subject, your partner in the most intimate relationship which can exist between two people, owns the spiritual resolve and physical capacity to inspire your best work. The subject is our instrument, and the nature of the instrument is vital. Faced with an out-of-tune, broken-down piano, even the greatest virtuoso is up Shit Creek without a paddle. Sometimes, sir, our work has left us tasting ashes for weeks on end, and when you’re tasting ashes in your mouth you have trouble remembering the grand design and your wee part in that majestical pattern.”

  As if to supplant the taste in question and without benefit of knife and fork, Mr. Clubb bit off a generous portion of steak and moistened it with a gulp of cognac. Chewing with loud smacks of the lips and tongue, he thrust a spoon into the kedgeree and began moodily slapping it onto his plate while seeming for the first time to notice the Canalettos on the walls.

  “We started off, sir, as well as we ever have,” said Mr. Cuff, “and better than most times. The fingernails was a thing of rare beauty, sir, the fingernails was prime. And the hair was on the same transcendent level.”

  “The fingernails?” I asked. “The hair?”

  “Prime,” said Mr. Clubb with a melancholy spray of food. “If they could be done better, which they could not, I should like to be there as to applaud with my own hands.”

  I looked at Mr. Cuff, and he said, “The fingernails and the hair might appear to be your traditional steps two and three, but they are in actual fact steps one and two, the first procedure being more like basic groundwork than part of the performance work itself. Doing the fingernails and the hair tells you an immense quantity about the subject’s pain level, style of resistance, and aggression/passivity balance, and that information, sir, is your virtual bible once you go past step four or five.”

  “How many steps are there?” I asked.

  “A novice would tell you fifteen,” said Mr. Cuff. “A competent journeyman would say twenty. Men such as us know there to be at least a hundred, but in their various combinations and refinements they come out into the thousands. At the basic or kindergarten level, they are, after the first two: foot soles; teeth; fingers and toes; tongue; nipples; rectum; genital area; electrification; general piercing; specific piercing; small amputation; damage to inner organs; eyes, minor; eyes, major; large amputation; local flaying; and so forth.”

  At mention of “tongue,” Mr. Clubb had shoved a spoonful of kedgeree into his mouth and scowled at the paintings directly across from him. At “electrification,” he had thrust himself out of his chair and crossed behind me to scrutinize them more closely. While Mr. Cuff continued my education, he twisted in his chair to observe his partner’s actions, and I did the same.

  After “and so forth,” Mr. Cuff fell silent. The two of us watched Mr. Clubb moving back and forth in evident agitation before the paintings. He settled at last before a depiction of a regatta on the Grand Canal and took two deep breaths. Then he raised his spoon like a dagger and drove it into the painting to slice beneath a handsome ship, come up at its bow, and continue cutting until he had deleted the ship from the painting. “Now that, sir, is local flaying,” he said. He moved to the next picture, which gave a view of the Piazzetta. In seconds he had sliced all the canvas from the frame. “And that, sir, is what is meant by genera
l flaying.” He crumpled the canvas in his hands, threw it to the ground, and stamped on it.

  “He is not quite himself,” said Mr. Cuff.

  “Oh, but I am, I am myself to an alarming degree, I am,” said Mr. Clubb. He tromped back to the table and bent beneath it. Instead of the second folded towel I had anticipated, he produced his satchel and used it to sweep away the plates and serving dishes in front of him. He reached within and slapped down beside me the towel I had expected. “Open it,” he said. I unfolded the towel. “Are these not, to the last particular, what you requested, sir?”

  It was, to the last particular, what I had requested. Marguerite had not thought to remove her wedding band before her assignation, and her . . . I cannot describe the other but to say that it lay like the egg perhaps of some small shore bird in the familiar palm. Another portion of my eventual enlightenment moved into place within me, and I thought: Here we are, this is all of us, this crab and this egg. I bent over and vomited beside my chair. When I had finished, I grabbed the cognac bottle and swallowed greedily, twice. The liquor burned down my throat, struck my stomach like a branding iron, and rebounded. I leaned sideways and, with a dizzied spasm of throat and guts, expelled another reeking contribution to the mess on the carpet.

  “It is a Roman conclusion to a meal, sir,” said Mr. Cuff.

  Mr. Moncrieff opened the kitchen door and peeked in. He observed the mutilated paintings and the objects nested in the striped towel and watched me wipe a string of vomit from my mouth. He withdrew for a moment and reappeared holding a tall can of ground coffee, wordlessly sprinkled its contents over the evidence of my distress, and vanished back into the kitchen. From the depths of my wretchedness, I marveled at the perfection of this display of butler decorum.

  I draped the toweling over the crab and the egg. “You are conscientious fellows,” I said.

  “Conscientious to a fault, sir,” said Mr. Cuff, not without a touch of kindness. “For a person in the normal way of living cannot begin to comprehend the actual meaning of that term, nor is he liable to understand the fierce requirements it puts on a man’s head. And so it comes about that persons in the normal way of living try to back out long after backing out is possible, even though we explain exactly what is going to happen at the very beginning. They listen, but they do not hear, and it’s the rare civilian who has the common sense to know that if you stand in a fire you must be burned. And if you turn the world upside down, you’re standing on your head with everybody else.”

  “Or,” said Mr. Clubb, calming his own fires with another deep draft of cognac, “as the Golden Rule has it, what you do is sooner or later done back to you.”

  Although I was still one who listened but could not hear, a tingle of premonition went up my spine. “Please go on with your report,” I said.

  “The responses of the subject were all one could wish,” said Mr. Clubb. “I could go so far as to say that her responses were a thing of beauty. A subject who can render you one magnificent scream after another while maintaining a basic self-possession and not breaking down is a subject highly attuned to her own pain, sir, and one to be cherished. You see, there comes a moment when they understand that they are changed for good, they have passed over the border into another realm, from which there is no return, and some of them can’t handle it and turn, you might say, sir, to mush. With some it happens right at the foundation stage, a sad disappointment because thereafter all the rest of the work could be done by the crudest apprentice. It takes some at the nipples stage, and at the genital stage quite a few more. Most of them comprehend irreversibility during the piercings, and by the stage of small amputation ninety percent have shown you what they are made of. The lady did not come to the point until we had begun the eye work, and she passed with flying colors, sir. But it was then the male upped and put his foot in it.”

  “And eye work is delicate going,” said Mr. Cuff. “Requiring two men, if you want it done even close to right. But I couldn’t have turned my back on the fellow for more than a minute and a half.”

  “Less,” said Mr. Clubb. “And him lying there in the corner meek as a baby. No fight left in him at all, you would have said. You would have said, that fellow there is not going to risk so much as opening his eyes until his eyes are opened for him.”

  “But up he gets, without a rope on him, sir,” said Mr. Cuff, “which you would have said was beyond the powers of a fellow who had recently lost a hand.”

  “Up he gets and on he comes,” said Mr. Clubb. “In defiance of all of Nature’s mighty laws. Before I know what’s what, he has his good arm around Mr. Cuff’s neck and is earnestly trying to snap that neck while beating Mr. Cuff about the head with his stump, a situation which compels me to set aside the task at hand and take up a knife and ram it into his back a fair old number of times. The next thing I know, he’s on me, and it’s up to Mr. Cuff to peel him off and set him on the floor.”

  “And then, you see, your concentration is gone,” said Mr. Cuff. “After something like that, you might as well be starting all over again at the beginning. Imagine if you are playing a piano about as well as ever you did in your life, and along comes another piano with blood in its eye and jumps on your back. It was pitiful, that’s all I can say about it. But I got the fellow down and jabbed him here and there until he was still, and then I got the one item we count on as a surefire last resort for incapacitation.”

  “What is that item?” I asked.

  “Dental floss,” said Mr. Clubb. “Dental floss cannot be overestimated in our line of work. It is the razor wire of everyday life, and fishing line cannot hold a candle to it, for fishing line is dull, but dental floss is both dull and sharp. It has a hundred uses, and a book should be written on the subject.”

  “What do you do with it?” I asked.

  “It is applied to a male subject,” he said. “Applied artfully and in a manner perfected only over years of experience. The application is of a lovely subtlety. During the process, the subject must be in a helpless, preferably an unconscious, position. When the subject regains the first fuzzy inklings of consciousness, he is aware of no more than a vague discomfort like unto a form of tingling, similar to when a foot has gone to sleep. In a wonderfully short period of time, that discomfort builds itself up, ascending to mild pain, severe pain, and outright agony. Then it goes past agony. The final stage is a mystical condition I don’t think there is a word for which, but it closely resembles ecstasy. Hallucinations are common. Out-of-body experiences are common. We have seen men speak in tongues, even when tongues were, strictly speaking, organs they no longer possessed. We have seen wonders, Mr. Cuff and I.”

  “That we have,” said Mr. Cuff. “The ordinary civilian sort of fellow can be a miracle, sir.”

  “Of which the person in question was one, to be sure,” said Mr. Clubb. “But he has to be said to be in a category all by himself, a man in a million you could put it, which is the cause of my mentioning the grand design ever a mystery to us who glimpse but a part of the whole. You see, the fellow refused to play by the time-honored rules. He was in an awesome degree of suffering and torment, sir, but he would not do us the favor to lie down and quit.”

  “The mind was not right,” said Mr. Cuff. “Where the proper mind goes to the spiritual, sir, as just described, this was that one mind in ten million, I’d estimate, which moves to the animal at the reptile level. If you cut off the head of a venomous reptile and detach it from the body, that head will still attempt to strike. So it was with our boy. Bleeding from a dozen wounds. Minus one hand. Seriously concussed. The dental floss murdering all possibility of thought. Every nerve in his body howling like a banshee. Yet up he comes with his eyes red and the foam dripping from his mouth. We put him down again, and I did what I hate, because it takes all feeling away from the body along with the motor capacity, and cracked his spine right at the base of the head. Or would have, if his spine had been a normal thing instead of solid steel in a thick india-rubber case. Which i
s what put us in mind of weight lifting, sir, an activity resulting in such development about the top of the spine you need a hacksaw to get even close to it.”

  “We were already behind schedule,” said Mr. Clubb, “and with the time required to get back into the proper frame of mind, we had at least seven or eight hours of work ahead of us. And you had to double that, because while we could knock the fellow out, he wouldn’t have the decency to stay out more than a few minutes at a time. The natural thing, him being only the secondary subject, would have been to kill him outright so we could get on with the real job, but improving our working conditions by that fashion would require an amendment to our contract. Which comes under the heading of Instructions from the Client.”

  “And it was eleven o’clock,” said Mr. Cuff.

  “The exact time scheduled for our conference,” said Mr. Clubb. “My partner was forced to clobber the fellow into senselessness, how many times was it, Mr. Cuff, while I prayed for our client to do us the grace of answering his phone during twenty rings?”

  “Three times, Mr. Clubb, three times exactly,” said Mr. Cuff. “The blow each time more powerful than the last, which, combined with his having a skull made of granite, led to a painful swelling of my hand.”

  “The dilemma stared us in the face,” said Mr. Clubb. “Client unreachable. Impeded in the performance of our duties. State of mind, very foul. In such a pickle, we could do naught but obey the instructions given us by our hearts. Remove the gentleman’s head, I told my partner, and take care not to be bitten once it’s off. Mr. Cuff took up an axe. Some haste was called for, the fellow just beginning to stir again. Mr. Cuff moved into position. Then from the bed, where all had been lovely silence but for soft moans and whimpers, we hear a god-awful yowling ruckus of the most desperate and importunate protest. It was of a sort to melt the heart, sir. Were we not experienced professionals who enjoy pride in our work, I believe we might have been persuaded almost to grant the fellow mercy, despite his being a pest of the first water. But now those heart-melting screeches reach the ears of the pest and rouse him into movement just at the moment Mr. Cuff lowers the boom, so to speak.”