“What’s going on here, Mr. Veech?” demands Voke.
Cheev ignores him and continues his laughing duet with the dummy. Even after Voke touches the booth and says, “Go to sleep, dummy,” Cheev still laughs all by himself, as if he too is an automaton without control over his actions. Voke knocks Cheev to the floor, which seems to hit the right mechanism to shut off his voice. At least he is quiet for a few moments. Then he raises his eyes from the floor and glares up at Voke.
“Why did you have to do that to them?” he asks with a deeply stricken reproachfulness. His voice is rough from all that laughter; it sounds like grinding machinery.
“I’m hot going to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have heard about what happened, not that I should care. But you can’t hold me responsible, Mr. Veech. I never leave my loft, you know that. However, you’re perfectly free to go, if you go now. Haven’t you caused me enough trouble!”
“Why did it have to happen like that?” Cheev protests.
“How should I know? You said you didn’t mind what form the solution to your problem took. Besides, I think it all worked out for the best. Those two were making a fool of you, Mr. Veech. They wanted each other and now they have each other, so to speak, while you are free to move on to your next disaster. Wait one moment, I know what’s bothering you,” says Voke with sudden enlightenment.
“You’re distressed because it all ended up with their demise and not yours.
Death is always the best thing, Mr. Veech, but who would have thought you could appreciate such a view? I’ve underestimated you, no doubt about it. My apologies.”
“No,” screams Cheev, quivering like a sick animal. Voke now becomes excited.
“No? Noooo? What is the matter with you, young friend? Why do you set me up for these disappointments? I’ve had quite enough without your adding to the heap.
Take a lesson from the Ticket Man here. Do you see him whining? No, he is silent, he is still. A dummy’s silence is the most soothing silence of all, and his stillness is the perfect stillness of the unborn. He could be making a fuss, but he isn’t. And it is precisely his lack of action, his unfulfilled nature that makes him the ideal companion, my only true friend it seems. Deadwood, I adore you. Look at how his hands rest upon his lap in empty prayer. Look at the noble bearing of his collapsed and powerless limbs. Look at his numb lips muttering nothing, and look at those eyes—how they gaze on and on forever!”
Voke takes a closer look at the dummy’s eyes, and his own begin to lower with dark intentness. He leans against the booth for the closest possible scrutiny, his hands adhering to the glass as if by the force of some powerful suction.
Inside the booth, the dummy’s eyes have changed. They are now dripping little drops of blood, which appear black in the red haze surrounding him.
Voke pulls himself away from the booth and turns to Cheev.
“You’ve been tampering with him!” he bellows as best he can.
Cheev blinks a few leftover tears of false laughter out of his eyes, and his lips form a true smile. “I didn’t do a thing,” he whispers mockingly. “Don’t blame me for your troubles!”
Voke seems to be momentarily paralyzed with outrage, though his face is twisted by a thousand thoughts of action. Cheev apparently is aware of the danger and his eyes search throughout the room, possibly for a means of escape or for a weapon to use against his antagonist. He fixes on something and begins to move toward it in a crouch.
“Where do you think you’re going?” says Voke, now liberated from the disabling effects of his rage.
Cheev is trying to reach something on the floor that is the approximate size and shape of a coffin. Only one corner of the long black box sticks out of the shadows into the bluish green glare of the loft. A thick strip of gleaming silver edges the object and is secured to it with silvery bolts.
“Get away from there,” shouts Voke as Cheev stoops over the box, fingering its lid.
But before he can open it, before he can make another move, Voke makes his.
“I’ve done my best for you, Mr. Veech, and you’ve given me nothing but grief.
I’ve tried to deliver you from the fate of your friends … but now I deliver you to it. Join them, Cheev. “
At these words, Cheev’s body begins to rise in a puppet’s hunch, then soars up into the tenebrous rafters and beyond, transported by unseen wires. His arms and legs twitch uncontrollably during the elevation, and his screams… fade.
But Voke pays no attention to his victim’s progress. His baggy clothes flapping hysterically, he rushes to the object so recently threatened with violation. He drags it toward an open spot on the floor. The light from the walls, ghastly and oceanic, shines on the coffin’s silky black surface. Voke is on his knees before the coffin, tenderly testing its security with his fingertips. As if each accumulated moment of deliberation were a blasphemy, he suddenly lifts back the lid.
Laid out inside is a young woman whose beauty has been unnaturally perpetuated by a fanatic of her form. Voke gazes for some time at the corpse, then finally says: “Always the best thing, my dear. Always the best thing.”
He is still kneeling before the coffin as his features begin to undergo the ravages of various, obviously conflicting, phases of feeling. Eyes, mouth, the whole facial structure is called upon to perform gruesome acrobatics of expression. Ultimately an impossible task is relieved or avoided by laughter: the liberating laughter of an innocent derangement, of a virgin madness. Voke rises to his feet by the powers of his idiotic hilarity. He begins to move about in a weird dance—hopping and bouncing and bobbing. His laughter grows worse as he gyres aimlessly, and his gestures become more convulsive. Through complete lack of attention, or perhaps by momentarily regaining it, Voke makes his way out of the loft and is now laughing into the dark abyss beyond the precarious railing at the top of the crooked stairway. His final laugh seems to stick in his throat; he goes over the railing and falls without a sound, his baggy clothes flapping uselessly.
Thus the screams you now hear are not those of the plummeting Voke. Neither are they the screams of Cheev, who is long gone, nor the supernatural echoes of Prena and Lamm’s cries of horror. These screams, the ones from beyond the door at the top of the stairs, belong only to a dummy who now feels warm drops of blood sliding thickly over his lacquered cheeks, and who has been left—alone and alive— in the shadows of an abandoned loft. And his eyes are rolling like mad marbles.
Alice’s Last Adventure
Preston, stop laughing. They ate the whole backyard. They ate your mother’s favorite flowers! It’s not funny, Preston.” “Aaaaa ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Aaaaa ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
—PRESTON AND THE STARVING SHADOWS
A long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half-world between childhood and adolescence. He would not give up the bold satisfaction of eating insects (cripsy flies and crunchy beetles are his favorites), nor that peculiar drunkenness of a child’s brain, induplicable once grown-up sobriety has set perniciously in. The result was that Preston successfully negotiated several decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty; he lived unchanged throughout many a perverse adventure in the forties and fifties and even into the sixties. He lived long after I ceased writing about him.
Did he have a prototype? I should say so. One doesn’t just invent a character like Preston using only the pitiful powers of imagination. He was very much a concoction of reality, later adapted for my popular series of children’s books.
Preston’s status in both reality and imagination has always had a great fascination for me. In the past year, however, this issue has especially demanded my attention, not without some personal annoyance and even anxiety.
Then again, perhaps I’m just getting senile.
My age is no secret, since it can be looked up in a number of literary reference sources (see Children’s Authors of Today) whose information is only a few years off—I won’t tell you in which direction. Over two decades ago, when the last Preston book appeared
(Preston and the Upside-Down Face), one reviewer rather snootily referred to me as the “‘Grande Damned’ of a particular sort of children’s literature.” What sort you can imagine if you don’t otherwise know, if you didn’t grow up—or not grow up, as it were—reading Preston’s adventures with the Dead Mask, the Starving Shadows, or
