Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,47

he will. But he’s wise, and he knows how to use silence. He just sits there, being calm, until finally I say, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe it would be interesting to find out,” he suggests.

So we try. He eases me into a light trance; I’m eager and highly suggestible, and I trust this man, so my consciousness alters easily. He guides me through the fantasy again and again, using my own words and some of his own. But every time I stop at the point where I come home and there isn’t any home. The point where I look up and my life, my love, isn’t there. Has never existed.

I don’t know what happens next. I can’t imagine what happens next. Do I die? Does the man on the ceiling take me into his house? Does he fly away with me into an endless sky? Does he help me create another life, another miracle?

That’s why I write. To find out what happens next.

So what happens next? This might happen:

After the man on the ceiling devours my life I imagine it back again: I fill in the walls, the doorways, the empty rooms with colors and furnishings different from, but similar to, the ones I imagine to have been there before. Our lives are full of angels of all kinds. So I call on some of those other angels to get my life back.

I write myself a life, and it is very different from the one I had before, and yet very much the same. I make mistakes different from the ones I made with my children before. I love Melanie the same way I did before. Different wonderful things happen. The same sad, wonderful events recur.

The man on the ceiling just smiles at me and makes of these new imaginings his dessert. So what happens next? In a different kind of story I might take out a machete and chop him into little bits of shadow. Or I might blast him into daylight with a machine gun. I might douse him with lighter fluid and set him on fire.

But I don’t write those kinds of stories.

And besides, the man on the ceiling is a necessary angel.

There are so many truths to tell. There are so many different lives I could dream for myself.

What happens next?

There are so many stories to tell. I could tell this story:

The man from the ceiling was waiting for Melanie behind the fence (an ugly, bare, chain-link and chicken wire fence, not the black wrought iron fence plaited with rosebushes that she’d made up), where her home had never existed. He beckoned to her. He called her by name, his own special name for her, a name she never got used to no matter how often he said it, which was often. He reached for her, trying to touch her but not quite touching.

She could have turned and run away from him. He wouldn’t have chased her down. His arms wouldn’t have telescoped long and impossibly jointed to capture her at the end of the block. His teeth wouldn’t have pushed themselves out of his mouth in gigantic segmented fangs to cut her off at the knees, to bite her head off. He wouldn’t have sucked her blood.

But he’d have kept calling her, using his special name for her. And he’d have scaled her windows, dropped from her roof, crawled across her ceiling again that night, and every night for the rest of her life.

So Melanie went toward him. Held out her arms.

There are so many different dreams. That one was Melanie’s. This one is mine:

I sit down at the kitchen table. The man on the ceiling lies on my plate, collapsed and folded up neatly in the center. I slice him into hundreds of oily little pieces which I put into my mouth one morsel at a time. I bite through his patchwork wings. I gnaw on his inky heart. I chew his long, narrow fingers well. I make of him my daily meal of darkness.

There are so many stories to tell.

And all of the stories are true.

We wait for whatever happens next.

We stay available.

We name it to make it real.

It was hard for us to write this piece.

For one thing, we write differently. My stories tend more toward magical realism, Steve’s more toward surrealism. Realism, in both cases, but we argued over form: “This isn’t a story! It doesn’t have a plot!”

“What do you want from a plot? Important things happen, and it does move