Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,215

bare canvas. She was a work of art, a living painting with a beating heart and eyes outlined in fiery yellow like the tropical flowers she loved.

Once when they were doing the bossa nova and thought I was asleep on a stack of records, I saw her slip her tongue into the heart of a bird-of-paradise and I thought I’d die. They danced like they were built for each other, Mother and Daddy: not just the bossa nova but the mambo, the samba, the tango. Lana cocked her hips for Perez Prado and swung to Count Basie and jumped to Louis Prima. There was Sinatra, of course, the Ultimate Big Spender. “Isle of Capri” was Lana’s favorite, though she liked others: “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “Love is the Tender Trap,” and the melancholy “Don’t Cry, Joe” that was like a dance hall after closing.

Daddy would hold Mother close, his dark head buried in her shoulder. “Amorino, amorino…” he whispered over and over, like a man lost at sea and found.

Don’t cry, Joe

Let her go, let her go, let her go

Lana’s voice warm and dark as espresso at midnight.

You’ve gotta realize this is the windup

Things will be much better when you make your mind up…

Dancing slow and easy, her hands wrapped in his hair, pulling, pulling…

Daddy could sing, too. But mostly he liked to play the drums, with a subtle, expert flick of his wrists. A true musician, Joe Caiola lost himself in the rhythm, a ghost of a cigarette in the ashtray, a cylinder of burned ash.

Sometimes it would be jazz drumming with lots of metal brushes, with his eyes half-closed like window shades. The fringe of the brushes was like the fringe of his eyelashes sweeping his cheekbone. It was an angular face with too many planes and corners. It sliced shadows in the lamplight and made a chiaroscuro of his features.

“A face you could get cut on,” I’d heard my mother say more than once.

“Or a face you could cut,” Daddy teased back with a swat of brushes.

Tino laughed, ice clinking in his glass with a little cha cha cha. Jack Daniel’s and ice. That’s how he liked it. “Maybe a face Cassie could cut, eh, Joe?”

Daddy ice-picked a look at him while Mother, poured into a jade silk sheath, slipped out from behind the Chinese screen. The needle swung across Martin Denny’s Exotica on the hi-fi. Screeching birds with jeweled plumes, grinning monkeys, and purring leopards, growling things on the prowl in the heart of the jungle where claws cut to the quick.

“You hear what I said, Lana?” Tino lazily tipped back his J.D.

“Don’t tempt me, Tino,” Lana said, waving a finger at him. Polished fingernails the shade of dragonfly wings. “Don’t…”

She smiled at them both with a curve of lips, and most times it would be fine, but sometimes there’d be something behind that smile, a sheet-lightning flash that raised the hairs on my neck.

Sometimes Daddy called Mother his Scarlet Tornado. Sometimes, his Red Flame.

White ice melting red flame, burning the glass, the two as one.

I was alone in the cemetery. The air was wet with late-winter rain that had already soaked me and my shredded heart through the skin. A brisk wind shook a wash of icy drops from the shadow-dark cypresses. It rattled the twisted branches of the live oaks that grew behind the crypt and shed their leaves in the angel’s fountain. All around me stormed a cyclone of needles, of torn black leaves. They whipped around the worn crevices of the headstones with leafy tongues. They clung like leeches to my shivering body. God, I was cold.

I stared at the birds lined up in the trees like snipers. They watched my every movement. Talons raked straight to the heart, deep enough to draw blood. What was I doing here?

Chasing the ghost of a song.

My hands started to shake but I couldn’t leave.

“I can’t leave,” I whispered. To the birds, to myself, I wasn’t sure. The wind carried my voice through the branches of the black oaks, rustled the wings of the birds whose eyes had never left me, not once in forty years. I had to hear that song again. I had to know.

In the early 1940s, before I was born, my mother had some throwaway parts in crime movies. She was invariably cast as the siren for whom they dragged the rivers while the opening credits ran: Murder on the Rocks. The Sweet Kill. Venus Under Glass. Sonata for