Of dipping his enemy into a bathtub of piranhas
Slowly-first the toes-then the feet… then
Watching that face twisted in a-
The face… the fac… he didn’t remember the face
And when he tried to recall
What his enemy had done
He couldn’t remember that either
He had grown old
Old in plotting, old in dreaming, old in list making
Soon he might forget that there was an enemy at all
There was the terrifying possibility
That he might die before the other did
And his enemy would go unpunished
Or worse-the enemy might die first-
Of natural causes
Depriving him of his sweet revenge
He must act now
But how?
No time for the exquisite pleasure of slow starvation
He had no access to exotic poisons
Ants and bees were… unpredictable
And how do you train a gorilla
For something like that?
Stabbing? Choking? Amputations?
They needed an expert hand
And he was experienced in thought-not execution
A bullet… the bullet was it
Too quick? Yes, but after all
It was the intensity of the agony, rather than the duration
And-the horror-in those beady little eyes
The realization-ha ha
He bought a gun
He went to the house of his enemy
At least he remembered the address
He peered in the window
There he was-older and feeble
But as vile and despicable as ever
Even more vile and despicable in his decay
He levelled the gun
In a moment it would be all over
Flash-bang--plop-all over
The years of scheming and plotting
The endless plans-the endless lists
Flash-bang-scream-plop
He took aim between those red rheumy eyes
And then the thought struck him
The gun-was it loaded?
What if it misfired?
And what if he only wounded him
His hand was not that steady
Let him off with just the pain of a wound?
And be apprehended by the law?
Or miss him completely-
And, be apprehended by him
Find himself in his power
What horrible retribution that insidious
Mind might extract
No-not the gun-
A stupid choice-conceived in haste-big mistake
He dropped the gun and hurried home
He sat down in his chair
Until his heart stopped pounding
He leaned back
He closed his eyes
He thought about the rats
They wouldn’t be that hard to come by
And yes, he was none too strong
But the other looked even weaker
Choking and stabbing were not out of the question
And what about garotte?
Feeding him broken glass?-or metal filings?
Or… or breaking his bones
All of them-one at a time-every tiny little
Bone of the foot-one at a time-
Or-hey-sewing the tip of his penis
Into his abdomen-yes-and then forcing
Him to drink gallons of Bloody Mary mix-mixed with lye
He got up and got his list
He danced into the kitchen
He made himself a nice cup of tea
He brought it back to his chair
And settled back down
Bludgeoning!-he hadn’t thought of that before
Watching the pieces of that diseased brain-fly like…
Like confetti-ha ha ha ha ha ha
Bludgeoning-yes.
He put it under B.
Peter Straub
The suave trickster instincts of Peter Straub have never before been displayed quite as they are found here. From the quaintly comic yet undeniably sinister entrance of the titular pair to the scenes of extreme unpleasantness that follow, the author (renowned for such extravaganzas of the macabre as ‘Ghost Story’ and ‘Floating Dragon’,) takes his elegant time scaring us out of our wits.
The good news is that restraint does figure as a definite factor in the ghastly delicacy of Mr. Straub’s overall effect; the bad news, as I perhaps don’t need to tell you, is that restraint is a word with more than one meaning.
Still, it is clear that a great deal of fun went into the composition of ‘Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff.’ And that’s news as good as it gets. Whether he’s delving into the past in novels such as ‘Koko’, ‘Mystery’, or, most recently. ‘The Hellfire Club’, or scraping the edge of our psyches in the present, Peter Straub is a writer we love to see enjoy himself. Even-and especially-at the expense of our own peace of mind.
Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff
1.
I never intended to go astray, nor did I know what that meant. My journey began in an isolated hamlet notable for the piety of its inhabitants, and when I vowed to escape New Covenant I assumed that the values instilled within me there would forever be my guide. And so, with a depth of paradox I still only begin to comprehend, they have been. My journey, so triumphant, also so excruciating, is both from my native village and of it. For all its splendour, my life has been that of a child of New Covenant.
When in my limousine I scanned The Wall Street Journal, when in the private elevator I ascended to the rosewood-panelled office with harbour views, when in the partners’ dining room I ordered squab on a mesclun bed from a prison-rescued waiter known to me alone as Charlie-Charlie, also when I navigated for my clients the complex waters of financial planning, above all when before her seduction by my enemy Graham Leeson I returned homeward to luxuriate in the attentions of my stunning Marguerite, when transported within the embraces of my wife, even then I carried within the frame houses dropped like afterthoughts down the streets of New Covenant, the stiff faces and suspicious eyes, the stony cordialities before and after services in the grim great Temple-the blank storefronts along Harmony Street-tattooed within me was the ugly, enigmatic beauty of my birthplace. Therefore I believe that when I strayed, and stray I did, make no mistake, it was but to come home, for I claim that the two strange gentlemen who beckoned me into error were the night of its night, the dust of its dust. In the period of my life’s greatest turmoil-the month of my exposure to Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, ‘Private Detectives Extraordinaire,’ as their business card described them-in the midst of the uproar I felt that I saw the contradictory dimensions of…
of…
I felt I saw… had seen, had at least glimpsed… what a wiser man might call… try to imagine the sheer difficulty of actually writing these words… the Meaning of Tragedy. You smirk, I don’t blame you, in your place I’d do the same, but I assure you I saw something.
I must sketch in the few details necessary to understand my story. A day’s walk from New York State’s Canadian border, New Covenant was (and still is, still is) a town of just under a thousand inhabitants united by the puritanical Protestantism of the Church of the New Covenant, whose founders had broken away from the even more puritanical Saints of the Covenant. (The Saints had proscribed sexual congress in the hope of hastening the Second Coming.) The village flourished during the end of the nineteenth century, and settled into its permanent form around 1920.
To wit: Temple Square, where the Temple of the New Covenant and its bell tower, flanked left and right by the Youth Bible Study Centre and the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School, dominate a modest greensward. Southerly stand the shop fronts of Harmony Street, the bank, also the modest placards indicating the locations of New Covenant’s doctor, lawyer, and dentist; south of Harmony Street lie the two streets of frame houses sheltering the town’s clerks and artisans, beyond these the farms of the rural faithful, beyond the farmland deep forest. North of Temple Square is Scripture Street, two blocks lined with the residences of the reverend and his Board of Brethren, the aforementioned doctor, dentist, and lawyer, the president and vice-president of the bank, also the families of some few wealthy converts devoted to Temple affairs. North of Scripture Street are more farms, then the resumption of the great forest in which our village described a sort of clearing.