Magic Terror by Peter Straub Page B

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,