The Complete Short Fiction of Peter Straub Volume Two Read online

  THE COMPLETE SHORT FICTION OF PETER STRAUB

  Volume 2

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Crossroad Press digital edition 2021

  Original publication by Borderlands Press—2021

  Copyright © Peter Straub

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Peter Straub has written numerous horror and supernatural fiction novels, including Julia and Ghost Story, as well as The Talisman, which he co-wrote with Stephen King. Straub has received such literary honors as the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, and International Horror Guild Award.

  Bibliography

  Novels

  A Dark Matter

  Black House (with Stephen King)

  Floating Dragon

  Ghost Story

  If You Could See Me Now

  In the Night Room

  Julia

  Koko

  Lost Boy, Lost Girl

  Marriages

  Mr. X

  Mystery

  Shadowland

  The Hellfire Club

  The Talisman (with Stephen King)

  The Throat

  Under Venus

  Short Story Collections

  5 Stories

  Houses Without Doors

  Interior Darkness

  Magic Terror

  The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories

  Novellas

  A Special Place-The Heart of a Dark Matter

  Bunny is Good Bread

  Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff

  Mrs. God

  Pork Pie Hat

  The Buffalo Hunter: A Novella

  The General’s Wife

  The Ghost Village

  The Process (is a Process All its Own)

  Poetry

  Ishmael

  Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970—1975

  My Life in Pictures

  Open Air

  Non-fiction

  Sides

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  for Susan

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Blue Rose

  The Buffalo Hunter

  Mrs. God

  Bunny Is Good Bread

  Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff

  Pork Pie Hat

  A Special Place: the Heart of a Dark Matter

  The Process (is a Process All Its Own)

  Introduction

  Be Aware, Be Awake, Be Like Music

  In childhood, the frequent command, lispingly delivered, that his parents give the Audiobook treatment to passing billboards foretold the hunger for the printed page that in turn presaged wee Petie’s eventual desire to break through the veil, choose adventure, and burrow as deeply as possible into ongoing narrative of any kind. Pirates, animals, thieves, pilots, detectives, maidens on perilous journeys: nearly everything worked for me. I wanted to take shelter in books, I wanted to live there, where everything I saw and heard, everything I found, instantly became a form of nourishment. I liked being in rooms I’d never seen before, with people I hadn’t previously met, especially if they were older than myself and speaking with great fluency of matters I only half-understood.

  Home wasn’t much like that. The ancestral manse didn’t often buzz with promise, especially erotic promise. On the whole, I found the realm of my parents, my brothers, all the people we collectively knew, and their various mores and behaviors to be boring and terrifying in equal measure, yet on a daily basis all of that was less compelling than fiction. While the physical world seemed contingent, capricious, and in its details stupefyingly boring, fiction spoke of larger harmonies and nobler purposes, of hidden correspondences, shafts of light on things half-seen. And of course the constant pulse and flare of both sheer story and its rolling, ever-gathering storyness tended to sweep me along.

  In those days, my life, relatively calm only on the surface, permitted me the sense of a deep internal coherence primarily when I was emotionally invested in some school project—I embraced writing assignments in the manner of a lion embracing a gazelle—or, far more frequently, more luxuriously, when I was reading. From third grade on, I devoured novels, maxing out at the library, using hoarded-up money to buy those double-facing science fiction paperbacks from drugstore racks, reading borrowed books, library books, stolen books, books found in abandoned cabins. I carried a book wherever I went, into the living room or a neighboring back yard, I think once even to a campfire, lest the unthinkable should happen and for five minutes or more I might wind up with nothing to contemplate but myself. In its bookishness, in its neediness, and in its insistence, all of this sounds fairly predictive of the career I wound up having. I admit here that, had some older person with a Tarot pack muttered to the devoted reader of Ace Doubles that if he played his cards right, he might very possibly wind up being a novelist, the knotted-up, aspiring, perhaps unbearable person I was at fourteen or fifteen would have floated away on a cloud of gratified conceit, misunderstanding everything, especially the emotional cost of grounding one’s life in the seductive process of fiction.

  The possibility of writing stories never occurred to me until I was about sixteen, when I had moved on from science fiction and started to mainline Thomas Wolfe. (By eighteen, I still liked Wolfe but was over him, pretty much. The same goes for science fiction, which I ignored until my mid-fifties, when I discovered that it had grown up alongside me.) The word most often used by other people to describe the child-me was “nervous.” Throughout childhood and adolescence, I was twitchy and tightly wound, incapable of stillness or quietude, devoid of anything resembling patience, hyper-talkative though cursed with a vicious stutter, and inclined to leap a few inches into the air when startled. Nonetheless, academically I did very well throughout grade school. Baby, fifth grade, sixth grade, I got out there and performed.

  So when in adult life I dug into a trove of grade-school report cards in the expectation of disinterring unbroken reams of praise from dazzled teachers, I found instead comment after comment along the lines of

/>   “Peter is talking to himself a little less this year,” I realized that I should take another look at those years, this time with the possibility of seeing myself as I actually had been.

  At the time, everyone took in the jumpiness, the stuttering, the nerviness, but no one put it all together; everyone went on assuming, absolutely understandably, that my self-presentation fit comfortably within the general patterns of normal childhood.

  The truth is that my behavioral quirks did actually conform to a specific pattern. This pattern, familiar now but largely unrecognized in the early Fifties, traces the dimensions and depths of the unacknowledged division between the performance of the affected child’s clamorous outer self (clamorous if the child was anything like l’il Pete) and its internal life. Certain inevitable consequences follow from the built-in sense of imposture. One has no choice but to accept this unhappy psychic arrangement, which must never be expressed or, really, admitted. It is never conscious.

  What brings about such a radical division in the self—between the outer life that is an attempt to display intelligent competence, and the threatened interior life given over to an ineradicable sense of impersonation—is trauma. I think childhood trauma is never escaped, only half-consciously minimized or actually forgotten. Fifty and sixty years ago, one’s parents innocently but firmly recommended the feel-better option of amnesia. But if you were the right kind of child, you could manage amnesia for yourself.

  One day in my sixth year, I sat in the heat of a summer day on my bedroom floor with my legs folded before me and realized that I could make myself forget a certain cycle of terrible events that I found so profoundly disturbing as to be beyond unacceptable—in its unimaginably destructive wake it left what seemed to be only blackened timbers, broken glass, and smoke. You can take my word for this or not, but somehow I knew that the psychic exercise of a cold, willed forgetting would damage me forever. (On the other hand, the secret was far too much for my child-self to handle, so an unknowable amount of damage was on the way anyhow.) That moment retains its clarity, the sense of momentarily holding things in balance, as does the sense even then of drastically underestimating the stakes. Because the present was of greater importance to me than the future, I thrust the cycle and its terrible events into uttermost darkness. The then-forgotten foul matter involved what had happened between myself and an unemployed neighborhood dad, some good old pop, who had volunteered to spend a number of our sweltering Milwaukee summer afternoons accompanying me to the movies, just a few blocks away. Grateful for any help during those brief periods when childcare had been dumped in his lap, my father handed me over to this actual monster. Had he known what the amiable guy from across the street was actually intending to do to me, he would have pounded him into the nearest ICU.

  Please don’t doubt me on this: from my point of view, that would have been absolutely the right thing to do. It has taken me a long time to come to this position. Active, predatory pedophiles wreak grave, long-lasting damage on their victims, and I’d like to see them shoved into ditches and doused in gasoline.

  The following year, when the monster-dad had been, except at the deepest frequencies, forgotten—a year and some odd months later, I walked out onto busy Capital Drive and head-on into the path of a helpless car. Ever watchful, trauma had called in my debt. A vivid near-death moment preceded operations that left long scars like seams tucked into the least visible part of my body. At my release from the hospital, a plaster cast gleamed, white and stiff, over the entire lower half of my body. Eventually, this cast began to turn sour and smell bad beneath its layer of graffiti and was replaced with one that covered only my right leg. I spent an endless time burning with rage in a wheelchair, then a long period on crutches. By spring of the following year, I had to learn to walk again. After that, I had to train myself to stop limping, although my right leg, which had required a second operation, was an inch and a half longer than my left. After I did that, it was autumn again, and I returned to my old class, out of which I had been promoted a few months before the accident.

  At the time it was though I had been abducted for a year by the fairies and returned to the human world unchanged: back with my old class, I appeared to be the same boy in the same place, like a jigsaw piece that has worried its way back into the puzzle. Unfortunately, a year in fairyland changes everything, so this picture is a doomed fantasy of remediation. Of my previous self, only my name and my appetite for reading remained; all else had darkened, become fearful. I have never really recovered from knowing that in seconds I was going to be hit and probably killed by the car that had suddenly appeared on my right, so close I can see the pattern on its grill. And now closer. Then intimately close. Because a perpetual state of terror is as unacceptable to one’s pride as it would be to another child, I set about impersonating a normal boy, one whose name was identical to mine. I didn’t think I had a choice, I don’t remember choosing: it was necessary to survive.

  I’m talking about a collision between will, pretense, imagination, and memory. The psyche rejects the feeling of having been torn by claiming it had never been injured in the first place. Inevitably, denial plays a crucial role; over time, one develops a capacity for denial so great and powerful as to be Oz-like. Quite helpful in one’s youth, this capacity eventually becomes—behind one’s rapidly aging back, we might say—a major-league impediment. Authenticity, which cannot flourish in this context, wilts away and is lost for good. You are an actor; you believe you can master the role you are already playing, that you can slip into it like a new suit; poor darling, you think nobody’s going to notice that the collar droops and the sleeves are too long.

  What happened was that I turned into a chatterbox with a tendency toward ghost stories and outbreaks of antisocial behavior. My friends had become bores, able to talk only of sports and television.

  It wasn’t their fault, they were still children. I had to pretend to be a child like them. Anger and terror had gone underground. When it was time to bubble over, I bubbled over. Reading and, later on, listening to jazz solos could always bring me to me a kind of safety, because they let me loose within grand imaginative structures. What seemed infinite existed within a bounded state. By the time I was eighteen I was writing stories, sporadically. Once I started, it took me a long time to settle into writing, and for a long time after that I was still pretty green.

  The story that appears first here, “Blue Rose,” is also the first real short story I wrote. I had recently turned forty. By then I had learned how to wrap my hands around the most radioactive part of my imagination and control it at least enough to wring fiction out of it. I didn’t understand what I was doing or how it worked, but the sacred process had rescued me from the humiliation of spending the rest of my life as a clerk selling other people’s books in some obscure North London shop. By the time I turned to writing a short story about the childhood of Harry Beevers, I’d written six novels, and we’d left England and settled down uncomfortably in Westport, Connecticut. Three years later, I had worked hard enough to begin to learn what my imagination could do when I dropped the reins and let my horses gallop. In the process, I’d also become exhausted, and I decided to take a year off.

  In actuality, it probably lasted about nine months, but in some other actuality, it could have lasted a year and a half. I read a great many books, I messed around with my children, I drank a lot in the sun and acquired a perfect tan, I finally discovered drugs, I spent a lot of time with jazz musicians and in jazz clubs. Much of what I did in that time amounted to more or less elaborate self-medication. By September or October, I was ready to go to work again. I also started seeing an excellent shrink, and before long had embarked on the lengthy, revelatory process of psychoanalysis that soon caused me to feel that I might actually be able to raise my game.

  I wanted to portray the demonic, but in the form of psychic and spiritual demons instead of literal ones. I had defined myself as a horror writer, and now I wanted to see what horror could
do when you stripped away the metaphoric layer, where evil beings were literal entities, and dealt entirely in the realistic mode—to let myself enter the thoughtless world itself, where men and women were stuck with each other, or not, and went off to their jobs every day, or not. Most of the writers I loved at the time—Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Henry James, Paul Scott—spent the vast majority of their time following characters through the very different physical worlds they inhabited.

  Despite those differences, there seemed to be a genial readerly agreement that all these worlds were one, and that world reflected ours: we were white, of northern European stock, and of more or less some version of middle class. Unconscious of these restrictions, we readers peered into those worlds and by taking in their Venn diagrams could see each author through the eyes of the others, in the process widening our view of ourselves, if we were lucky.

  Somehow the sacred, although usually out of sight, seemed to inhabit this beautiful process. It still seems somehow sacred to me, the process of fiction-making.

  Part of which is to say: I wished to write only of things I believed in, not things I invented from the ground up. I felt I wanted to be more responsible, more truthful. And it may seem perverse, but I wanted to do that in a book about a group of middle-aged Vietnam veterans who travel to various Asian cities in search of an old comrade. The only supernatural elements would be the products of mania and psychosis.

  This project would eventually become Koko, but after so much time off, I didn’t feel ready to take it on. It scared me, a little. As a way of sidling into the book, I decided to write a short story about an episode in the boyhood of a dodgy New York lawyer named Harry Beevers, who had been the Lieutenant in charge of Koko’s central cast. As soon as I began working on the story, I felt that I understood Harry’s childhood. It had been like mine, only worse, like my childhood as written by Samuel Beckett. He was born into a family that exhibited several of the conditions existing in the backgrounds of known serial killers. I’d been doing a great deal of research about Vietnam, the Special Forces, and the Montagnyards, also about psychic violence.