Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,171

and slept until I woke up again. Little Red almost always went to sleep in his chair, and when I woke up I would see him, tilted back, his eyes closed, looking like the most peaceful man in the world.

He talked to me, but it wasn’t as though he was teaching me anything, exactly. We talked back and forth, off and on, during the days and nights, in the way friends do, and to me everything seemed comfortable, familiar, as it should be.

One morning he told me that I had to go, it was time. “You’re kidding,” I said. “This is perfect. I don’t really have to leave, do I?”

“You must go,” he said. I wanted to fall to the floor and beg, I wanted to clutch the cuffs of his trousers and hang on until he changed his mind.

He shoved me out into the hallway and locked the door behind me. I had no choice but to leave. I stumbled down the hall and wandered into the streets, remembering a night when I’d seen a mouse creep out of his kitchen, bless him by name, and receive his blessing in return. When I had staggered three or four blocks south on 8th Avenue, I realized that I could never again go back.

It was a mistake that I had been there in the first place—he had taken me in by mistake, and my place was not in that crowded apartment. My place might be anywhere, a jail cell, a suburban bedroom with tacky paintings on the wall, a bench in a subway station, anywhere but in that apartment.

I often try to remember the things he said to me. My heart thickens, my throat constricts, a few words come back, but how can I know if they are the right words? He can never tell me if they are.

I think: some kind of love did pass between us. But how could Little Red have loved me? He could not, it is impossible. And yet, R—, a fearful, awkward bit of being, a particle hidden deep within myself, has no choice but to think that maybe, just maybe, in spite of everything, he does after all love me.

So tell me, old friend, have you ever heard of Little Red?

Yours,

C—

The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet

Stephen King

The barbecue was over. It had been a good one; drinks, charcoaled T-bones, rare, a green salad, and Meg’s special dressing. They had started at five. Now it was eight-thirty and almost dusk—the time when a big party is just starting to get rowdy. But they weren’t a big party. There were just the five of them: the agent and his wife, the celebrated young writer and his wife, and the magazine editor, who was in his early sixties and looked older. The editor stuck to Fresca. The agent had told the young writer before the editor arrived that there had once been a drinking problem there. It was gone now, and so was the editor’s wife…which was why they were five instead of six.

Instead of getting rowdy, an introspective mood fell over them as it started to get dark in the young writer’s backyard, which fronted the lake. The young writer’s first novel had been well reviewed and had sold a lot of copies. He was a lucky young man, and to his credit he knew it.

The conversation had turned with playful gruesomeness from the young writer’s early success to other writers who had made their marks early and had then committed suicide. Ross Lockridge was touched upon, and Tom Hagen. The agent’s wife mentioned Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and the young writer said that he didn’t think Plath qualified as a successful writer. She had not committed suicide because of success, he said; she had gained success because she had committed suicide. The agent smiled.

“Please, couldn’t we talk about something else?” the young writer’s wife asked, a little nervously.

Ignoring her, the agent said, “And madness. There have been those who have gone mad because of success.” The agent had the mild but nonetheless rolling tones of an actor offstage.

The writer’s wife was about to protest again—she knew that her husband not only liked to talk about these things so he could joke about them, and he wanted to joke about them because he thought about them too much—when the magazine editor spoke up. What he said was so odd she forgot to protest.

“Madness is a flexible bullet.”

The agent’s wife looked startled. The young writer leaned