Magic Terror. Peter Straub
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two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us – just one. One mortar, one round. That was the first thing. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth, and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. Whoever fired the mortar should have had an excellent idea of our location, and I experienced that endless moment of pure, terrifying helplessness – a moment in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to let go of it – until the shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us, and shell fragments whizzed through the air. One of the fragments sailed over us, sliced a hamburger-size wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage’s helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground, and a little smoke drifted up from it.
We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, except that he was breathing. Hamnet shouldered his pack and picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder. He saw me looking at him.
‘I gotta take care of these people,’ he said.
The other thing I did not understand – apart from why there had been only one mortar round – came when we entered the village.
Lieutenant Harry Beevers had yet to join us, and we were nearly a year away from the events at Ia Thuc, when everything, the world and ourselves within the world, went crazy. I have to explain what happened. Lieutenant Harry Beevers killed thirty children in a cave at Ia Thuc and their bodies disappeared, but Michael Poole and I went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened in there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands. A pitiful character named Victor Spitalny ran into the cave when he heard gunfire, and came pinwheeling out right away, screaming, covered with welts or hives that vanished almost as soon as he came out into the air. Poor Spitalny had touched it too. Because I was twenty and already writing books in my head, I thought that the cave was the place where the other Tom Sawyer ended, where Injun Joe raped Becky Thatcher and slit Tom’s throat.
When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of Ia Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong – it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The little huts, still inhabitable, were empty – something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again. It was a ghost village, in a country where people thought the earth was sanctified by their ancestors’ bodies.
Poole’s map said that the place was named Bong To.
Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.
Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. ‘I caught a head wound,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner,’ Hamnet said.
Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. ‘I see double,’ he said. ‘I’ll never get that helmet back on.’
The medic said, ‘Take it easy, we’ll get you out of here.’
‘Out of here?’ Spanky brightened up.
‘Back to Crandall,’ the medic said.
Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. ‘There ain’t nobody here,’ Spitalny said. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.
Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat.
‘Spitalny, Tiano,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now.’
Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was Spitalny’s only friend, said, ‘You do it this time, Lieutenant.’
Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.
‘Hey, I’m gone, I’m already there,’ Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes had found us.
‘So?’ Poole said.
Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots. He said, ‘I have to go home, Lieutenant. I don’t mean no disrespect, but I cannot take this shit much longer.’
The Lieutenant said he was working on it.
Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village.
Spanky Burrage said, ‘Good quiet place for Ham to catch up on his reading.’
‘Maybe I better take a look,’ the Lieutenant said. He flicked the lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.
The Lieutenant said something almost inaudible from inside the hut. He came back outside in a hurry, looking disturbed and puzzled even in the darkness.
‘Underhill, Poole,’ he said, ‘I want you to see this.’
Poole and I glanced at each other. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. Poole seemed to be a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the Lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen’s eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same.
‘What is it, Lieutenant?’ he asked.
The Lieutenant gestured for us to come to the hut, then turned around and went back inside. There was no reason for us not to follow him. The Lieutenant was a jerk, but Harry Beevers, our next lieutenant, was a baron, an earl among jerks, and we nearly always did whatever dumb thing he told us to do. Poole was so ragged and edgy that he looked as if he felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I didn’t have an idea in the world what was going on in Poole’s mind. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.
The Lieutenant was standing in the doorway, looking over his shoulder and fingering his sidearm. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on the lighter. The sudden hollows and shadows in his face made him resemble one of the corpses I had opened up when I was in graves registration at Camp White Star.
‘You want to know what it is, Poole? Okay, you tell me what it is.’
He held the lighter before him like a torch and marched into the hut. I imagined the entire dry, flimsy structure bursting into heat and flame. This Lieutenant was not destined to get home walking and breathing, and I pitied and hated him about equally, but I did not want to turn into toast because he had found an American body inside a hut and didn’t know what to do about it. I’d heard of platoons finding the mutilated corpses of American prisoners, and hoped that this was not our turn.
And then, in the instant before I smelled blood and saw the Lieutenant stoop to lift a panel on the floor, I thought that what had spooked him was not the body of an American POW but of a child who had been murdered and left behind in this empty place. The Lieutenant had probably not seen any dead children yet. Some part of the Lieutenant was still worrying about what a girl named Becky Roddenburger was getting up to back at Idaho