Peter Straub - Magic Terror

Hill tossed his cigarette away in an arc of light. Poole and Lieutenant Joys came out of the hut behind me. Leonard Hamnet patted his pocket to reassure himself that he still had his letter. I looked back at the right of the group, and the two dead men were gone.

‘Let’s saddle up,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘We aren’t doing any good around here.’

‘Tim?’ Dengler asked. He had not taken his eyes off me since I had come out of the hut. I shook my head.

‘Well, what was it?’ asked Tina Pumo. ‘Was it juicy?’

Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.

‘Aren’t we gonna torch this place?’ asked Spitalny.

The Lieutenant ignored him. ‘Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post. Field Interrogation Post.’

‘No shit,’ said Pumo.

‘These people are into torture, Pumo. It’s just another indication.’

‘Gotcha.’ Pumo glanced at me and his eyes grew curious. Dengler moved closer.

‘I was just remembering something,’ I said. ‘Something from the world.’

‘You better forget about the world while you’re over here, Underhill,’ the Lieutenant told me. ‘I’m trying to keep you alive, in case you hadn’t noticed, but you have to cooperate with me.’ His Adam’s apple jumped like a begging puppy.

As soon as he went ahead to lead us out of the village, I gave twenty dollars to Spanky and said, ‘Two weeks from today.’

‘My man,’ Spanky said.

The rest of the patrol was uneventful.

The next night we had showers, real food, alcohol, cots to sleep in. Sheets and pillows. Two new guys replaced Tyrell Budd and Thomas Blevins, whose names were never mentioned again, at least by me, until long after the war was over and Poole, Linklater, Pumo, and I looked them up, along with the rest of our dead, on the Wall in Washington. I wanted to forget the patrol, especially what I had seen and experienced inside the hut. I wanted the oblivion that came in powdered form.

I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was sitting in the brothers’ tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R&R in Taipei. Spanky Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisal: great jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his friends back in Little Rock and that he knew so well he could find individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions, changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under different names – ‘Cherokee’ and ‘KoKo’, ‘Indiana’ and ‘Donna Lee’ – or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words – ‘I Thought About You’ (Art Tatum), ‘You and the Night and the Music’ (Sonny Rollins), ‘I Love You’ (Bill Evans), ‘If I Could Be with You’ (Ike Quebec), ‘You Leave Me Breathless’ (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, ‘Thou Swell’, by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.

On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown’s music sounded regal and unearthly. Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Garden. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. We were out of the war. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.

After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, ‘Enough.’ The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.

‘I’m gonna have a smoke and a drink,’ Hill announced, and pushed himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light, the light from another world, began to fade. Hill sighed, plopped a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to Wilson Manly’s shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.

Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces’ Radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.

‘Leonard,’ I said, and he swung his big buffalo’s head toward me. ‘You still putting in for compassionate leave?’

He nodded. ‘You know what I gotta do.’

‘Yes,’ Dengler said, in a slow, quiet voice.

‘They gonna let me take care of my people. They gonna send me back.’

He spoke with a complete absence of nuance, like a man who had learned to get what he wanted by parroting words without knowing what they meant.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. For a second he seemed as alien as Hamnet. ‘What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it’ll just go on like this day after day until some of us get killed and the rest of us go home, or do you think it’s going to get stranger and stranger?’ He did not wait for me to answer. ‘I think it’ll always sort of look the same, but it won’t be – I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that’s what happens when you’re out here long enough. The edges melt.’

‘Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler,’ Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.

Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, and never looked as though he belonged in uniform. ‘Here’s what I mean, kind of,’ he said. ‘When we were listening to that trumpet player –’

‘ Brownie , Clifford Brown,’ Spanky whispered.

‘– I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time.’

‘Sweetie- pie ,’ Spanky said softly. ‘You pretty hip, for a little ofay square.’

‘When we were back in that village, last week,’ Dengler said. ‘Tell me about that.’

I said that he had been there too.

‘But something happened to you. Something special.’

‘I put twenty bucks in the Elijah fund,’ I said.

‘Only twenty?’ Cotton asked.

‘What was in that hut?’ Dengler asked.

I shook my head.

‘All right,’ Dengler said. ‘But it’s happening, isn’t it? Things are changing.’

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Cotton and Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and a murdered child. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Fine,’ Dengler said.

‘What the fuck you sayin’ is fine?’ Cotton said. ‘I don’t mind listening to that music, but I do draw the line at this bullshit.’ He flipped himself off his bunk and pointed a finger at me. ‘What date you give Spanky?’

‘Twentieth.’

‘He last longer than that.’ Cotton tilted his head as the song on the radio ended. Armed Forces’ Radio began playing a song by Moby Grape. Disgusted, he turned back to me. ‘Check it out. End of August. He be so tired, he be sleepwalkin’. Be halfway through his tour. The fool will go to pieces, and that’s when he’ll get it.’