Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,50

transparent gold. I remember Sprake because you don’t forget him. What the four of us did escapes me, as does its significance. There was, undoubtedly, a loss; but whether you described what was lost as “innocence” was very much up to you—anyway, that was how it appeared to me. Lucas and Ann made a lot more of it from the very start. They took it to heart. Afterward—perhaps two or three months afterward, when it was plain that something had gone wrong, when things first started to pull out of shape—it was Ann and Lucas who convinced me to go and talk to Sprake, whom we had promised never to contact again. They wanted to see if what we had done could somehow be reversed or annulled; if what we’d lost could be bought back again.

“I don’t think it works that way,” I warned them; but I could see they weren’t listening.

“He’ll have to help us,” Lucas said.

“Why did we ever do it?” Ann asked me.

Though he hated the British Museum, Sprake had always lived one way or another in its shadow. I met him at the Tivoli Espresso Bar, where I knew he would be every afternoon. He was wearing a thick, old-fashioned black overcoat—the weather that October was raw and damp—but from the way his wrists stuck out of the sleeves, long and fragile-looking and dirty, covered with sore grazes as though he had been fighting with some small animal, I suspected he wore no shirt or jacket underneath it. For some reason he had bought a copy of the Church Times. The top half of his body curled painfully around it; along with his stoop and his gray-stubbled lower jaw, the newspaper gave him the appearance of a disappointed verger. It was folded carefully to display part of a headline, but I never saw him open it.

At the Tivoli in those days, they always had the radio on. Their coffee was watery and, like most espresso, too hot to taste of anything. Sprake and I sat on stools by the window. We rested our elbows on a narrow counter littered with dirty cups and half-eaten sandwiches and watched the pedestrians in Museum Street. After ten minutes, a woman’s voice said clearly from behind us:

“The fact is, the children just won’t try.”

Sprake jumped and glanced round haggardly, as if he expected to have to answer this.

“It’s the radio,” I reassured him.

He stared at me the way you would stare at someone who was mad, and it was some time before he went on with what he had been saying.

“You knew what you were doing. You got what you wanted, and you weren’t tricked in any way.”

“No,” I admitted tiredly.

My eyes ached, even though I had slept on the journey down, waking—just as the train from Cambridge crawled the last mile into London—to see sheets of newspaper fluttering round the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower.

“I can see that,” I said. “That isn’t at issue. But I’d like to be able to reassure them in some way….”

Sprake wasn’t listening. It had come on to rain quite hard, driving visitors—mainly Germans and Americans who were touring the Museum—in from the street. They all seemed to be wearing brand-new clothes. The Tivoli filled with steam from the espresso machine, and the air was heavy with the smell of wet coats. People trying to find seats constantly brushed our backs, murmuring, “Excuse me, please. Excuse me.” Sprake soon became irritated, though I think their politeness affected him more than the disturbance itself. “Dog muck,” he said loudly in a matter-of-fact voice; and then, as a whole family pushed past him one by one, “Three generations of rabbits.” None of them seemed to take offense, though they must have heard him. A drenched-looking woman in a purple coat came in, looked anxiously for an empty seat, and, when she couldn’t see one, hurried out again. “Mad bitch!” Sprake called after her. “Get yourself reamed out.” He stared challengingly at the other customers.

“I think it would be better if we talked in private,” I said. “What about your flat?”

For twenty years he had lived in the same single room above the Atlantis Bookshop. He was reluctant to take me there, I could see, though it was only next door, and I had been there before. At first he tried to pretend it would be difficult to get in. “The shop’s closed,” he said. “We’d have to use the other