Peter Straub - Magic Terror

N steered the rented Peugeot through the opening in the wall and parked beside the entrance of the auberge. Beyond the old stable doors to his left, a dark-haired girl in a bright blue dress hoisted a flour sack off the floor. She dropped it on the counter in front of her and ripped it open. When he got out of the car, the girl gave him a flat, indifferent glance before she dipped into the bag and smeared a handful of flour across a cutting board. Far up in the chill gray air, thick clouds slowly moved across the sky. To the south, smoky clouds snagged on trees and clung to the slopes of the mountains. N took his carry-on bag and the black laptop satchel from the trunk of the Peugeot, pushed down the lid, and looked through the kitchen doors. The girl in the blue dress raised a cleaver and slammed it down onto a plucked, headless chicken. N pulled out the handle of the carry-on and rolled it behind him to the glass enclosure of the entrance.

He moved through and passed beneath the arch into the narrow, unlighted lobby. A long table stacked with brochures stood against the far wall. On the other side, wide doors opened into a dining room with four lines of joined tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths and set for dinner. A blackened hearth containing two metal grilles took up the back wall of the dining room. On the left side of the hearth, male voices filtered through a door topped with a glowing stained-glass panel.

N moved past the dining room to a counter and an untidy little office – a desk and table heaped with record books and loose papers, a worn armchair. Keys linked to numbered metal squares hung from numbered hooks. A clock beside a poster advertising Ossau-Iraty cheese said that the time was five-thirty, forty-five minutes later than he had been expected. ‘ Bonjour. Monsieur? Madame ?’ No one answered. N went to the staircase to the left of the office. Four steps down, a corridor led past two doors with circular windows at eye level, like the doors into the kitchens of diners in his long-ago youth. Opposite were doors numbered 101, 102, 103. A wider section of staircase ascended to a landing and reversed to continue to the next floor. ‘ Bonjour.’ His voice reverberated in the stairwell. He caught a brief, vivid trace of old sweat and unwashed flesh.

Leaving the carry-on at the counter, he carried the satchel to the dining room doors. Someone beyond barked out a phrase, others laughed. N walked down the rows of tables and approached the door with the stained-glass panel. He knocked twice, then pushed the door open.

Empty tables fanned out from a door onto the parking lot. A man in a rumpled tweed jacket and with the face of a dissolute academic; a sallow, hound-faced man in a lumpy blue running suit; and a plump, bald bartender glanced at him and then leaned forward to continue their conversation in lowered voices. N put his satchel on the bar and took a stool. The bartender eyed him and slowly came up the bar, eyebrows raised.

In French, N said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but there is no one at the desk.’

The man extended his hand across the bar. He glanced back at his staring friends, then smiled mirthlessly at N. ‘Mr Cash? We had been told to expect you earlier.’

N shook his limp hand. ‘I had trouble driving down from Pau.’

‘Car trouble?’

‘No, finding the road out of Oloron,’ N said. He had driven twice through the southern end of the old city, guessing at the exits to be taken out of the roundabouts, until a toothless ancient at a crosswalk had responded to his shout of ‘Montory?’ by pointing toward the highway.

‘Oloron is not helpful to people trying to find these little towns.’ The innkeeper looked over his shoulder and repeated the remark. His friends were nearing the stage of drunkenness where they would be able to drive more confidently than they could walk.

The hound-faced man in the running suit said, ‘In Oloron, if you ask “Where is Montory?” they answer, “What is Montory?”

‘All right,’ said his friend. ‘What is it?’

The innkeeper turned back to N. ‘Are your bags in your car?’

N took his satchel off the bar. ‘It’s in front of the counter.’

The innkeeper ducked out and led N into the dining room. Like dogs, the other two trailed after them. ‘You speak French very well, Mr Cash. I would say that it is not typically American to have an excellent French accent. You live in Paris, perhaps?’

‘Thank you,’ N said. ‘I live in New York.’ This was technically true. In an average year, N spent more time in his Upper East Side apartment than he did in his lodge in Gstaad. During the past two years, which had not been average, he had lived primarily in hotel rooms in San Salvador, Managua, Houston, Prague, Bonn, Tel Aviv, and Singapore.

‘But you have spent perhaps a week in Paris?’

‘I was there a couple of days,’ N said.

Behind him, one of the men said, ‘Paris is under Japanese occupation. I hear they serve raw fish instead of cervelas at the Brasserie Lipp.’

They came out into the lobby. N and the innkeeper went to the counter, and the two other men pretended to be interested in the tourist brochures.

‘How many nights do you spend with us? Two, was it, or three?’

‘Probably two,’ said N, knowing that these details had already been arranged.

‘Will you join us for dinner tonight?’

‘I am sorry to say that I cannot.’

Momentary displeasure surfaced in the innkeeper’s face. He waved toward his dining room and declared, ‘Join us tomorrow for our roasted mutton, but you must reserve at least an hour in advance. Do you expect to be out in the evenings?’

‘I do.’

‘We lock the doors at eleven. There is a bell, but as I have no desire to leave my bed to answer it, I prefer you to use the keypad at the entrance. Punch twenty-three forty-five to open the door. Easy, right? Twenty-three forty-five. Then go behind the counter and pick up your key. On going out again the next day, leave it on the counter, and it will be replaced on the rack. What brings you to the Basque country, Mr Cash?’

‘A combination of business and pleasure.’

‘Your business is …?’

‘I write travel articles,’ N said. ‘This is a beautiful part of the world.’

‘You have been to the Basque country before?’

N blinked, nudged by a memory that refused to surface. ‘I’m not sure. In my kind of work, you visit too many places. I might have been here a long time ago.’

‘We opened in 1961, but we’ve expanded since then.’ He slapped the key and its metal plate down on the counter.

N put his cases on the bed, opened the shutters, and leaned out of the window, as if looking for the memory that had escaped him. The road sloped past the auberge and continued uphill through the tiny center of the village. On the covered terrace of the cement-block building directly opposite, a woman in a sweater sat behind a cash register at a display case filled with what a sign called ‘regional delicacies’. Beyond, green fields stretched out toward the wooded mountains. At almost exactly the point where someone would stop entering Montory and start leaving it, the red enclosure of the telephone booth he had been told to use stood against a gray stone wall.

The innkeeper’s friends staggered into the parking lot and left in a mud-spattered old Renault. A delivery truck with the word Comet stenciled on a side panel pulled in and came to a halt in front of the old stable doors. A man in a blue work suit climbed out, opened the back of the truck, pulled down a burlap sack from a neat pile, and set it down inside the kitchen. A blond woman in her fifties wearing a white apron emerged from the interior and tugged out the next sack. She wobbled backward beneath its weight, recovered, and carried it inside. The girl in the blue dress sauntered into view and leaned against the doorway a foot or two from where the delivery man was heaving his second sack onto the first. Brown dust puffed out from between the sacks. As the man straightened up, he gave her a look of straightforward appraisal. The dress was stretched tight across her breasts and hips, and her face had a coarse, vibrant prettiness entirely at odds with the bored contempt of her expression. She responded to his greeting with a few grudging words. The woman in the apron came out again and pointed to the sacks on the floor. The girl shrugged. The delivery man executed a mocking bow. The girl bent down, slid her forearms beneath the sacks, lifted them waist-high, and carried them deeper into the kitchen.