Twilight Eyes

By Dean R. Koontz


Synopsis:
There really are goblins in the world, hideous, loathsome creatures
bent on the slow, painful destruction of mankind.
THEY'RE OUT THERE Waiting. Watching. Unseen by normal eyes, but all
too visible to Slim MacKenzie, a young man blessed-or cursed-by
TwilightEyes...
THEY'RE OUT THERE Lurking in the darkest shadows of an eerie, moonlit
carnival. Feeding their twisted needs with human suffering. And
fiendishly plotting the downfall of the human race...
THEY'RE OUT THERE But don't scream.
They'll hear you...
Berkley Books by Dean Koontz THE BAD PLACE
COLD FIRE
DARKFALL
THE FACE OF FEAR
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
LIGHTNING
THE MASK
MIDNIGHT
NIGHT CHILLS
PHANTOMS
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
SHATTERED
STRANGERS
TWILIGHT EYES
THE VISION
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
WATCHERS
WHISPERS
BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher.has received any payment for this "stripped book."
A slightly different version of Part One of TWILIGHT EYES was published
in a special illustrated hardcover edition for collectors by The Land
of Enchantment in November 1985. This is the first publication of the
complete story.
TWILIGHT EYES
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author PRINTING
HISTORY Berkley edition / September 1987
All rights reserved.
Copyright @ 1985, 1987 by Nkui, Inc. Back cover photo copyright @
Jerry Bauer.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or
any other means, without permission.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison
Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
ISBN: 0-425-10065-0
This book is dedicated to Tim and Serena Powers and Jim and Viki
Blaylock because they are fellow toilers in the vineyards and because
it seems fining that such a strange story should be dedicated to
strange peopk.
A BERKLEY BOOK @ TM 757,375
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200
Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
The name "BERKLEY" and the "B" logo are trademarks belonging to Berkley
Publishing Corporation.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
20 19 18 17 16 15
I had thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made
them well, for they imitated humanity so abominably.
-Shakespeare Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.
Hope is the dream of a waking man.
-Pliny the Elder I am on the side of the unregenerate to affirm the
worth of life as an end in itself.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
PART ONE TWILIGHT EYES . . . the still sad music of humanity ...
-William Wordsworth
Humanity ain't always what's pretty. Some of the worst killers are
pretty. Humanity ain't always what sounds nice and falls smooth on the
ear, 'cause any pitchman can charm a snake, but some pitchmen ain't too
humane. A person shows humanity when he's there you need him, when be
takes you in, when he has a genuine kind word, when he makes you feel
not alone, when he makes your fight his fight. That's what humanity
is, if you want to know. And-if we had a little more of it in this
world, maybe we could get ourselves out of the handbasket we're in ...
or at least stop carrying that handbasket straight to Hell, the way we
have been for so long.
-an anonymous carnival pitchman.1
The Carnival
That was the year they murdered our president in Dallas. It was the
end of innocence, the end of a certain way of thinking and being, and
some were despondent and said it was the death of hope, as well. But
though falling autumn leaves may reveal skeletal branches, spring
reclothes the wood; a beloved grandmother dies, but as compensation for
the loss, her grandchild enters the world strong and curious; when one
day ends, the next begins, for in this infinite universe there is no
final conclusion to anything, definitely not to hope. From the ashes
of the old age, another age is born, and birth is hope. The year that
followed the assassination would bring us the Beatles, new directions
in modern art that would alter the way we viewed our environment, and
the beginning of a refreshing distrust of government. If it also
contained the germinating seeds of war, this should only serve to teach
us that-like hope-terror and pain and despair are constant companions
in this life, a lesson that is never without value.
I came to the carnival in the sixth month of my seventeenth year, in
the darkest hours of the night, on a Thursday in August, more than
three months before that death in Dallas.
During the following week, what happened to me would change my life as
profoundly as assassination could transform the future of a nation,
though upon my anval the shuttered
3
and deserted midway seemed an unlikely place for destiny to be waiting.
At four o'clock in the morning, the county fairgrounds had been closed
for almost four hours. The carnies had shut down the Ferris wheel,
Dive Bomber, Tilt-a-Whirl, and other rides.
"They had closed up their hanky-panks, grab-joints, pitch-anddunks,
pokerino parlors, had turned off the lights and killed the music and
folded up the gaudy glamour. With the departure of the marks, the
carnies had gone to their travel trailers, which were parked in a large
meadow south of the midway.
Now the tattooed man, the midgets, dwarves, hustlers, the women from
the girly shows, the pitchmen, the bottle-pitch and ring-toss
operators, the man who made cotton candy for a living, the woman who
dipped apples in caramel sauce, the bearded lady, the three-eyed man,
and all the others were asleep or fighting insomnia or making love as
if they were ordinary citizens-which, in this world, they were.
A three-quarter moon, sliding down one side of the sky, was still high
enough to shed a pale wintry glow that seemed anachronistic in the hot,
humid, graveyard hours of an August night in Pennsylvania. As I
strolled through the lot, getting a feel for the place, I noticed how
strangely white my own hands looked in that frosty luminescence, like
the hands of a dead man or ghost. That was when I first perceived the
lurking presence of Death among the rides and hanky-panks, and sensed
dimly that the carnival would be the site of murder and much blood.
Overhead, lines of plastic pennants hung limp in the muggy air; they
were bright triangles when touched by sunshine or splashed in the
dazzling glow of ten thousand carnival lights but were bled of color
now, so they seemed like scores of sleeping bats suspended above the
sawdust-carpeted concourse.
As I passed by the silent carousel a frozen stampede was halted in.mid-gallop-black stallions, white mares, pintos, palominos,
mustangs-charging forward without proceeding, as if the river of time
had parted around them. Like a thin spray of metallic paint, traces of
moonlight adhered to the brass poles that transfixed the horses, but in
that eerie radiance the brass was silver and cold.
I had jumped the high fence that ringed the county fairgrounds, for the
gates had been closed when I arrived. Now I felt vaguely guilty, a
thief in search of booty, which was odd, for I was no thief and
harbored no criminal intentions toward anyone in the carnival.
I was a murderer, wanted by the police in Oregon, but I felt no guilt
about the blood I had spilled out there at the other end of the
continent. I killed my Uncle Denton with an ax because I wasn't strong
enough to finish him with my bare hands. Neither remorse nor guilt
pursued me, for Uncle Denton had been one of them.
The police, however, did pursue me, and I couldn't be sure that even
three thousand miles of flight had won me any safety. I no longer used
my real name, Carl Stanfeuss. At first I had called myself Dan Jones,
then Joe Dann, then Harry Murphy. Now I was Slim MacKenzie, and I
figured I would stay Slim for a while; I liked the sound of it. Slim
MacKenzie. It was the kind of name a guy might have if he were John
Wayne's best buddy in one of the Duke's Westerns. I had let my hair
grow longer, though it was still brown.
There was not much else I could do to alter my appearance, other than
stay free long enough for time to make a different man of me.
What I hoped to get from the carnival was sanctuary, anonymity, a place
to sleep, three square meals a day, and pocket money, all of which I
intended to earn. In spite of being a murderer, I was the least
dangerous desperado ever to ride out of the West.
Nevertheless, I felt like a thief that first night, and I expected
someone to raise an alarm, to come running at me through the maze of
rides, hamburger stands, and cotton candy kiosks. A couple of security
guards must have been cruising the fairgrounds, but when I made my
entrance they were nowhere in sight. Listening for the sound of their
car, I continued my nocturnal tour of the famous midway of the Sombra
Brothers Carnival, the second largest road show in the country.
At last I stopped by the giant Ferris wheel, to which darkness brought
a chilling transformation: In the glow of the moon, at this dead hour,
it did not resemble a machine, especially not a machine designed for
amusement, but gave the impression of being the skeleton of a huge
prehistoric beast. The girders and beams and cross-supports might not
have been wood and metal but bony accretions of calcium and other
minerals, the last remains of a decomposed leviathan washed up on the
lonely beach of an ancient sea.
Standing in the complex pattern of moon-shadows cast by that imagined
paleolithic fossil, I peered up at the black two-seat baskets all
hanging motionless, and I knew this wheel would play a role in a
pivotal event in my life. I did not know how or why or when, but I
knew without doubt that something momentous and terrible would happen
here. I knew.
Reliable premonitions are part of my gift. Not the most important
part. Not the most useful, startling, or frightening part, either. I
possess other special talents that I use but do not understand. They
are talents that have shaped my life but which I cannot control or
employ at will. I have Twilight Eyes.
Looking up at the Ferris wheel, I did not actually see details of the
dreadful event that lay in the future, but I was drenched in a wave of
morbid sensations, flooding impressions of terror, pain, and death. I.swayed and nearly fell to my knees. I could not breathe, and my heart
hammered wildly, and my testicles drew tight, and for an instant I felt
as if lightning had struck me.
Then the squall passed, and the last of the psychic energies sluiced
through me, and there remained nothing but the low, barely detectable
vibrations that could have been sensed only by someone like me, ominous
vibrations emanating from the wheel, as if it were radiating scattered
particles of the death-energy stored within it, much the way a storm
sky charges the day with uneasy expectation even before the first bolt
of lightning or clap of thunder.
I could breathe again. My heart slowed. The hot, thick August night
had raised a greasy film of perspiration on my face long before I had
entered the midway, but now sweat poured from me. I pulled up the
T-shirt I was wearing and blotted my face.
Partly in the hope that I could somehow clarify those foggy,
clairvoyant perceptions of danger and see exactly what violence lay
ahead, and partly because I was determined not to be intimidated by the
aura of evil that clung to the big machine, I shrugged off the backpack
I had been carrying, unrolled my sleeping bag, and made ready to pass
the last hours of the night right there in the faint patchwork of
purple-black shadows and ash-gray moonlight, with the wheel looming
over me. The air was so heavy and warm that I used the sleeping bag
only as a mattress. I lay on my back, staring up at the towering
amusement ride, then at the stars visible beyond the curve of it and
between its beams. Although I tried, I sensed nothing more of the
future, but I did see a humbling plenitude of stars and thought about
the immensity of space and felt lonelier than ever.
Less than a quarter of an hour passed before I grew drowsy, and just as
my eyes were about to flutter shut, I heard movement on the abandoned
midway, not far from me. It was a crisp, crackling sound, as of
someone stepping on discarded candy wrappers. I raised up and
listened. The crackling stopped, but it was followed by the thump of
heavy footsteps on hard-packed earth.
A moment later a gloom-shrouded figure moved out from beside a tent
that housed one of the kootch shows, hurried across the concourse,
slipped into the darkness on the far side of the Ferris wheel, no more
than twenty feet away from me, reappeared in the moonlight by the
Caterpillar. It was a man, quite big-unless the shadows, like
voluminous cloaks, gave him a deceptively large appearance. He hurried
away, unaware of me. I had only a glimpse of him, saw nothing of his
face, but I shot to my feet, shaking, suddenly cold in spite of the
August heat, for what little I had seen of him was enough to generate a
current of fear that sizzled the length of my spine.
It was one of them.
I withdrew the knife hidden in my boot. As I turned the blade in my
hand, lambent moonbeams licked along the cutting edge.
I hesitated. I told myself to pack up and leave, get out, seek shelter
elsewhere.
Oh, but I was weary of running and needed a place to call home. Weary
and disoriented by too many highways, too many towns, too many
strangers, too-many changes. During the past few months I had worked
in half a dozen gillys and ragbags, the bottom of the carnival
business, and I had heard how much better the life was when you were
hooked up with an organization like E. James Strates, the Vivona
Brothers, Royal American, or the Sombra Brothers Shows. And now that I
had walked this midway in the dark, soaking up both physical and
psychic impressions, I wanted to stay. In spite of the bad aura around.the Ferris wheel, in spite of the premonition that murder would be done
and blood spilled in the days to come, the Sombra outfit gave off
other, better emanations, and I sensed I could find happiness here too.
I wanted to stay more than I had ever wanted anything else.
I needed a home and friends.
I was only seventeen.
But if I were to stay, he must die. I didn't think I could live in the
carnival knowing that one of them nested in it too.
I held the knife at my side.
I went after him, past the Caterpillar, around the back of the
Tilt-a-Whirl, stepping over thick power cables, trying to t avoid
putting a foot down on any litter that would reveal my presence to him
as it had revealed him to me. We moved toward the dark, quiet center
of the carnival.
2
The Goblin
He was up to no good, but his kind always are. He scurried through the
archipelago of night, rushing across the islands of moonlight, much
preferring the deep pools of darkness and hesitating there only when he
needed to reconnoiter, dodging from one bit of cover to the next,
repeatedly glancing behind but never glimpsing or sensing me.
I followed noiselessly through the center of the midway, not on either
of the parallel concourses but through the rides and past the backs of
game stands and refreshment shacks, past the Whip, between the Tip Top
and the Whirlwind, observing him from concealment provided by now
dormant gasoline-powered generators, trucks, and other equipment
scattered the length of the grounds. His destination proved to be the
open-air Dodgem Car pavilion, where he paused for one last look around,
then climbed the two steps, unhitched the gate, and stepped under the
electrical-grid ceiling, moving among the small cars that were parked
wherever their last paying drivers had left them, from one end of the
wooden floor to the other.
Perhaps I could have hidden in the nearby shadows, there to observe him
for a while, until I had some idea of his intentions. Perhaps that
would have been the wisest course, for I knew less of the enemy in
those days than I know now and might have benefited by even the most
trivial addition to my meager store of knowledge. However, my hatred
of the goblins-which was the only name that I could think to give
them-was exceeded only by my fear, and I worried that delaying the
confrontation would erode my courage. With perfect stealth, which was
not one of my special gifts but, rather, a consequence of being
seventeen and lithe and in excellent physical condition, I approached
the Dodgem Car pavilion and followed the goblin inside.
The two-seat cars were small, only slightly higher than my knees. A
pole rose from the rear of each car to the ceiling grid, from which
power was drawn down to allow the driver to collide violently with the
other maniacally piloted vehicles.
When the marks crowded the midway, the area around the Dodgem Cars was
usually one of the noisiest places in the carnival, the air rent with
screams and cries of attack, but now it was as preternaturally silent
as the petrified stampede of the carousel horses. Because the cars
were low and offered virtually no concealment, and because the raised
floor was wood with a crawlspace underneath that encouraged every
footstep to echo in the still night air, an undetected advance was not.easy.
My enemy unwittingly assisted me by concentrating intently upon
whatever task had brought him out into the moon-ruled carnival, most of
his caution having been expended on the journey here. He was on his
knees at the rear of a car halfway across the long rectangular
pavilion, his head bowed over the focus of a flashlight beam.
As I edged closer, the amber back splash of the light confirmed that he
was indeed a large specimen, with a thick neck and broad shoulders.
His wide back was visibly well muscled under the tightly stretched
material of his yellow and brown-checkered shirt.
In addition to the flashlight, he had brought a cloth tool pouch, which
he had unrolled and placed on the floor beside him. The tools nestled
in an array of pockets and glinted as errant rays from the flashlight
found them and bounced off their smoothly machined surfaces. He worked
quickly, with only a little noise, but the soft scrape and tick and
squeak of metal against metal was sufficient to mask my steady advance.
I intended to steal within six feet of him, then launch myself on him
and ram my blade into his neck, seek and sever the jugular, before he
realized that he was not alone.
However, in spite of the noises he made and in spite of my cat-soft
approach, when I was still twelve or fifteen feet from him, he suddenly
became aware that he was being watched, and he half turned from his
mysterious task, looking back and up at me, astonished, owl-eyed.
From the Eveready pocket flash, which he had propped on the fat rubber
bumper of the car, light streamed across his face, diminishing in
intensity from chin to hairline, distorting his features, creating
queer shadows above his prominent cheekbones, and making his bright
eyes seem fantastically sunken. Without the grotesque effect of the
light, he still would have had a hard, cruel look, thanks to a bony
forehead, eyebrows grown together over a wide nose, a prognathous jaw,
and a thin slash of a mouth that, because of the overly generous
features that surrounded it, seemed even more a slit than it really
was.
Because I held the knife at my side, shielded from him by the position
of my body, he still did not realize the degree of his danger. With a
boldness born of the smug superiority that is characteristic of all the
goblins I have ever encountered, he tried to bluff me.
"Here, what's this?" he asked gruffly. "What're you doing here? Are
you with the show? Never seen you around. What're you up to?"
Looking down at him, heart pounding, sick with terror, I could see what
others could not. I saw the goblin within, beyond his masquerade.
And this is the most difficult thing of all to explain, this ability to
perceive the beast within, for it is not as if my psychic sight peels
back the human countenance and reveals the lurking horror underneath,
nor is it that I can discard the illusion of humanity and obtain an
unobstructed view of the malignant illusionist who thinks he deceives
me. Instead I see both at once, the human and the monstrous, the
former superimposed upon the latter. Maybe I can best explain by way
of an analogy drawn from the art of pottery. At a gallery in Carmel,
California, I once saw a vase with a gloriously transparent red glaze,
luminescent as air at the open door of some mighty furnace; it gave the
impression of fantastic depth, magical three-dimensional realms and
vast realities, within the flat surface of the clay. I see something
much like that when I look at a goblin. The human form is solid and
real in its own way, but through the glaze I see the other reality
within.
There in the Dodgem Car pavilion I saw through the midnight mechanic's.human glaze to the demonic masquerader within.
"Well, speak up," the goblin said impatiently, not even bothering to
rise from his knees. He had no fear of ordinary human beings, for in
his experience they could not harm him.
He did not know that I was not ordinary. "Are you part of the show?
Do the Sombra Brothers employ you? Or are you just a stupid, nosy kid
poking into other people's business?"
The creature within the human hulk was both porcine and canine, with
thick, dark, mottled skin the shade and character of aged brass. Its
skull was shaped like that of a German shepherd, the mouth filled with
wickedly pointed teeth and hooked fangs that seemed neither canine nor
porcine but reptilian. The snout more closely resembled that of pig
than dog, with quivering, fleshy nostrils. It had the beady, red,
malevolent eyes of a mean hog, around which the pebbled amber skin
shaded darker until it was the green of beetie's wings. When it spoke,
I saw a coiled tongue unfold part way inside its mouth. Its
five-fingered hands were humanlike, although with an extra joint in
each, and the knuckles were larger, bonier. Worse, it had claws, black
and gnarled, pointed and well honed. The body was like that of a dog
that had evolved to such an extent that nature meant for it to stand
upright in imitation of a man, and for the most part there was an
appearance of grace in its form, except in its shoulders and knotted
arms, which seemed to contain too much malformed bone to allow fluid
movement.
A second or two passed in silence, a silence occasioned by my fear and
by a distaste for the bloody task confronting me.
My hesitancy probably seemed like guilty confusion, for he started to
bluster at me some more and was surprised when, instead of running away
or making a flimsy excuse, I flung myself upon him.
"Monster. Demon. I know what you are," I said through clenched teeth
as I rammed the knife deep.
I struck at his neck, at the throbbing artery, missed. Instead the
blade plunged into the top of his shoulder, slipping through muscle and
cartilage, between bones.
He grunted with pain but did not howl or scream. My declaration
stunned him. He wanted interruption no more than I did.
I tore the knife out of him as he fell back against the Dodgem Car, and
taking advantage of his momentary shock, I stabbed again.
If he had been an ordinary man, he would have been lost, defeated as
much by the temporary paralysis of terror and surprise as by the
ferocity of my attack. However, he was a goblin, and although he was
encumbered by his disguise of human flesh and bone, he was not limited
to human reaction.
With inhumanly quick reflexes he brought up one beefy arm to shield
himself and hunched his shoulders and drew his head in as if he were a
turtle, the net effect of which was to deflect my second blow. The
blade sliced lightly across his arm and skipped over the top of his
skull, gouging his scalp but doing no serious damage.
Even as my knife ripped up a small patch of skin and hair, he was
shifting from a defensive to an offensive posture, and I knew I was in
trouble. I was atop him, shoving him against the car, and I tried
driving a knee into his crotch to give myself time to wield the knife
again, but he blocked the knee and grabbed a handful of my T-shirt. I
knew that his other hand was coming for my eyes, so I threw myself
backward, pushing off him with one foot on his chest. My T-shirt tore
from collar to hem, but I was free, tumbling across the floor, between
two cars..In the great genetic lottery that is God's idea of efficient
management, I had won not only my psychic gifts but also a natural
athletic ability, and I had always been quick and agile.
If I had not been thus blessed, I would never have survived my first
fight with a goblin (my Uncle Denton), let alone that nightmare battle
among the Dodgem Cars.
Our struggles had dislodged the Eveready propped on the rubber bumper,
which fell to the floor and went out, leaving us to war in shadows,
able to see each other only by the indirect, milky radiance of the
waning moon. Even as I tumbled away and came to my feet in a crouch,
he was launching up from the car, rushing toward me, his face a black
blank except for a pale disc of cataractic light shimmering in one eye.
As he descended on me, I swung the knife up from the floor in a skyward
arc, but he jerked back. As the blade swept by a quarter of an inch
from the tip of his nose, he seized the wrist of my knife hand. With
his greater size came superior strength, and he was able to hold my
right arm rigidly above my head.
He pulled back his right arm and drove his fist into my throat, a
terrible blow that would have crushed my windpipe if it had landed
squarely. But I lowered my head and twisted away from him, taking the
impact half in the throat and half in the neck. Nevertheless, the
punch was devastating. I gagged, couldn't draw breath. Behind my
watering eyes I saw a rising darkness much deeper than the night around
us.
Desperate, with an adrenaline-stoked strength born of panic, I saw his
fist drawing back to take another whack at me, and I abruptly stopped
struggling. Instead I embraced him, clung to him, so he would not be
able to put power behind his punches, and in frustrating his
counterattack I found both my breath and hope.
We stumbled several steps across the floor, turning, dipping, breathing
hard, his left hand still locked around my right wrist, our two arms
raised. We must have looked like a bizarre pair of clumsy apache
dancers performing without benefit of music.
When we drew close to the scalloped wooden railing that ringed the
pavilion, where the ash-silver moonlight was brightest, I saw through
my adversary's human glaze with unusual and startling clarity, not
because of the moon but because my psychic power seemed to surge for a
moment. His counterfeit features faded until they were like the barely
visible lines and planes of a crystal mask. Beyond the now perfectly
transparent costume, the hellish details and nauseating textures of the
dog-pig thing were more vivid and real than I had ever perceived
before-or wished to perceive. Its long tongue, as forked as that of a
serpent, pebbled and wart-covered, oily and dark, flickered out of its
ragged-toothed mouth. Between its upper lip and its snout there was a
band of what at first appeared to be crusted mucus but was evidently an
agglomeration of scaly moles, small cysts, and bristling warts. The
thick-rimmed nostrils were dilated, quivering. The mottled flesh of
the face looked unhealthy-worse, putrescent.
And the eyes.
The eyes.
Red, with fractured black irises like broken glass, they fixed on mine,
and for a moment, as we struggled there by the pavilion railing, I
seemed to fall away within those eyes, as if they were bottomless wells
filled with fire. I was aware of hatred so intense that it almost
scared me, but the eyes gave a view of more than mere loathing and
rage. They also revealed an evil far more ancient than the human race
and as pure as a gas flame, so malignant that it could have withered a.man the way the gaze of the Medusa turned the most courageous warriors
to stone. Yet, worse than the evil was the palpable sense of madness,
an insanity beyond human comprehension or description, though not
beyond human apprehension. For those eyes somehow conveyed to me the
knowledge that the creature's hatred of humankind was not just one
facet of its sickness but was at the very core of its madness, and that
all the perverse invention and fevered plotting of its insane mind was
directed solely toward the suffering and destruction of as many men,
women, and children as it was able to touch.
I was sickened and repelled by what I saw in those eyes and by this
intimate physical contact with the creature, but I dared not break my
embrace of it, for that would have been the death of me. Therefore I
clung even tighter, closer, and we bumped against the railing, then
staggered a few steps away from it.
He had made a vise of his left hand and was determinedly grinding the
bones in my right wrist, trying to reduce them to splinters and calcium
dust-or at least force me to release the knife. The pain was
excruciating, but I held on to the weapon, and with more than a small
measure of revulsion I bit his face, his cheek, then found his ear and
bit it off.
He gasped but did not shriek, indicating a desire for privacy even
greater than mine and a stoic resolve that I could never hope to match.
However, though he stifled a cry as I spat out his ruined ear, he was
not so inured to pain and fear that he could continue the battle
without flinching. He faltered, reeled backward, smashed into a roof
post, brought one hand to his bleeding cheek, then to his head in a
frantic search for the ear that was no longer attached. He was still
holding my right arm above my head, but he was not as powerful as he
had been, and I twisted free of him.
That might have been the moment to thrust the knife into his guts, but
restricted circulation numbed my hand, and I could barely maintain a
grip on the weapon. An attack would have been foolhardy; my senseless
fingers might have dropped the knife at the crucial moment.
Gagging on the taste of blood, resisting the urge to vomit, I backed
rapidly away from him, transferring the weapon to my left hand, working
my right hand vigorously, opening and closing it, with the hope of
exercising the numbness out of those fingers. That hand began to
tingle, and I knew it would be back to normal in a few minutes.
Of course, he didn't willingly give me the minutes I required. With a
fury so bright that it should have lit the night, he charged toward me,
forcing me to dodge between two of the miniature cars and vault over
another. We circled the pavilion for a while, our roles somewhat
reversed from what they had been when I'd first crept in through the
gate. Now he was the cat-one-eared but undeterred, and I the mouse
with one numb paw. And although I scurried about with a quickness and
limberness and cunning born of a renewed and acute sense of mortality,
he did what cats always do with mice: He inevitably closed the gap in
spite of all my maneuvers and stratagems.
The slow pursuit was eerily quiet, marked only by the thump of
footfalls on the hollow floor, the bone-dry scrape of shoes on wood,
the creak-rattle of the Dodgem Cars as we occasionally put a hand out
to steady ourselves in the process of slipping over or around them, and
heavy breathing. No words of anger, no threats, no pleas for mercy or
reason, no cries for help. Neither of us would give the other the
satisfaction of a whimper of pain.
Gradually circulation returned to my right hand, and although my
tortured wrist was swollen and throbbing, I thought I had recovered.sufficiently to employ a skill that I had learned from a man named
Nerves MacPhearson in another, less fancy carnival where I had passed a
few weeks in Michigan, earlier in the summer, after fleeing the police
in Oregon.
Nerves MacPhearson, sage and mentor and much-missed, was a
knife-thrower extraordinaire.
Wishing Nerves was with me now, I slipped the knife-which had a
weighted handle and overall balance designed for throwing-from left
hand to right. I hadn't thrown it at the goblin when he'd been
kneeling at the Dodgem Car, for his position had not allowed a clear
and mortal hit.
And I hadn't thrown it the first time that I had broken free of him
because, in truth, I didn't trust my skill.
Nerves had taught me a lot about the theory and practice of
knife-throwing. And even after saying good-bye to him and moving on
from the show in which we had traveled together for a while, I
continued to study the weapon, expending hundreds of additional hours
refining my skill. However, I was most definitely not good enough to
throw the knife at the goblin as a first resort. Considering my
enemy's advantages of size and strength, if I only slightly wounded him
or missed altogether, I would be virtually defenseless.
Now, however, having tangled with him in hand-to-hand combat, I knew
that I was no match for him and that a well-calculated toss of the
knife was my only chance of survival. He didn't seem to notice that in
transferring the knife to my left hand, I had gripped it by the blade
instead of the handle, and when I turned and ran into a long stretch of
pavilion where there were no obstructing cars, he assumed that fear had
gotten the better of me and that I was running from the fight. He came
after me, heedless of his own safety now, triumphant. When I heard his
heavy footfalls on the boards behind me, I stopped, whirled, judged
position-angle-velocity in a wink, and let the blade fly.
Ivanhoe himself, letting loose with his best-placed arrow, could have
done no better than I did with my tumbling knife.
It tumbled exactly the right number of times and struck at precisely
the right whirling moment, taking him in the throat and burying itself
to the hilt. The point must have been sticking out the back of his
neck, for the blade was six inches long. He came to an abrupt, swaying
halt, and his mouth popped open. The light where he stood was meager
but sufficient to show the surprise in both the human eyes and in the
firey demon eyes beyond. A single jet of blood, like a gush of ebony
oil in the gloom, spouted from his mouth, and he made croaking noises.
He drew breath with a futile hiss and rattle.
He looked astonished.
He put his hands to the knife.
He fell to his knees.
But he did not die.
With what appeared to be monumental effort, the goblin began to shuck
out of its human shell. More accurately, nothing was sloughed off;
rather, the human form began to lose definition. Facial features
melted together, and the body began to change as well. The
transformation from one state to the other seemed agonizing,
exhausting. As the creature dropped forward on its hands and knees,
the human masquerade kept reasserting itself, and that horrid pig-snout
appeared, receded, and reappeared several times. Likewise, the skull
flowed into a canine shape, held for a moment, began to revert to human
proportions, then reasserted itself with new vigor, sprouting murderous
teeth..I backed away, reached the railing, and paused there, prepared to vault
across and onto the midway if the goblin should magically acquire new
strength and immunity from the knife wound merely by virtue of its
hideous metamorphosis.
Perhaps, in its goblin form, it was capable of healing itself in a way
it could not while trapped in the human condition. That seemed
unlikely, fantastic-though no more fantastic than the very fact of its
existence.
At last, having devolved almost completely, working its huge jaws and
gnashing its teeth, clothes hanging absurdly on its altered frame,
claws having punched out through the leather of its shoes, it dragged
itself across the pavilion floor in my direction. Its malformed
shoulders, arms, and hips, all burdened with strange excrescences of
useless bone, worked laboriously, although I had the feeling that they
would have driven the beast forward with inexplicable grace and speed
if it had not been wounded and weakened. Unfiltered by the costume of
humanity, its eyes were now not simply red but luminous as well; they
did not shine with refracted light like the eyes of a cat but poured
forth a bloody radiance that shimmered in the air before them and laid
a red swath on the otherwise dark floor.
For a moment I was certain that the metamorphosis did, in fact, renew
the enemy, and I am sure that is why it changed.
In its human form it was trapped and rapidly dying, but in its goblin
identity it could call upon an alien strength that might not save it
but might, at least, give it enough additional resources to pursue and
kill me as a last defiant act. Because we were alone here, because
there was no one else to see what it became, it risked this revelation.
I had witnessed such a thing once before in similar circumstances, with
another goblin, in a small town south of Milwaukee. It was no less
terrifying the second time. The creature swelled with a new vitality.
It seized the handle of the knife in one clawed hand, tore the blade
out of its throat, and threw it aside. Slavering, drooling blood, but
grinning like a fiend risen from the Pit, it scuttled toward me on all
fours.
I leapt up onto the railing and was about to go over when I heard a car
approaching along the wide concourse that passed beside the pavilion.
I figured it must be the long-anticipated security guards making their
rounds.
Hissing, thumping its short, thick tail against the floorboards, the
beast had nearly reached the railing. It glared up at me, eyes lit
with murderous intention.
The engine of the approaching car grew louder, but I did not rush to
the security men for help. I knew the goblin would not obligingly
maintain its true form for their inspection; instead it would reclothe
itself in its disguise, and I would be leading the guards to what would
appear to be a dead or dying man, my victim. Therefore, as the
headlights became visible but before the car pulled into view, I leapt
off the railing, back into the pavilion, jumping over the beast, which
reared up and tried to grab me but missed.
I landed on both feet, skidded to my hands and knees, rolled, came onto
hands and knees again, and crawled most of the way across the pavilion
before turning and looking back. The twin ruby gleams of the goblin's
hot gaze were fixed on me. The shattered throat, broken windpipe, and
spurting arteries had weakened it, and it was reduced to slithering on
its belly. It came slowly like a tropical lizard suffering from
cold-thickened blood, closing the gap between us with evident agony but
equal determination. It was twenty feet away..Beyond the goblin, beyond the pavilion, the headlights of the oncoming
car grew brighter still; then the Ford sedan itself appeared, cruising
slowly, engine purring, tires making an oddly soft sound in the sawdust
and litter. The lights fell on the concourse, not on the Dodgem Car
structure, but one of the security men in the sedan was operating a
spotlight, which he now swept along the side of the pavilion.
I pressed flat to the floor.
The goblin was fifteen feet away from me and inching nearer.
The waist-high railing that encircled the Dodgem Car field of battle
was so heavy and solid that the spaces between the thick and closely
set balusters were narrower than the balusters themselves. That design
was fortunate; although the spotlight flickered through the gaps, there
was no place where the guards could get a good look into the pavilion,
certainly not as long as they continued to move.
The dying goblin flopped forward with another spasmodic flexing of its
powerful legs, heaving into a patch of moonglow, where I could see
blood oozing from its piggish snout and dripping from its mouth.
Twelve feet away. It snapped its jaws and shuddered and heaved again,
its head moving out of the light, into shadow. Ten feet.
I slid backward, staying flat on my belly, eager to get farther from
this living gargoyle-but I froze after moving only a couple of feet,
for the cruising security car had come to a full stop on the concourse,
directly beside the Dodgem Car attraction. I told myself that it must
be part of the guards' routine to stop every so often along their
patrol route, that they had not halted in response to anything they had
seen in the pavilion, and I prayed fervently that such would prove to
be the case. Nevertheless, on a night as warm and sticky as this one,
they would be riding with their windows open, and once stopped, they
were more likely to hear any sound that I or the goblin made. With
that in mind I ceased retreating from my enemy, skinned myself to the
floor, and silently cursed this nasty bit of luck.
With a grunt and a lurch and a hard-drawn breath, the wounded beast
dragged itself closer to me, reclosing the gap I had begun to widen,
once more only ten feet away. Its vermilion eyes were not as clear or
bright as they had been, muddy now, their strange depths clouded, as
mysterious and foreboding as the lanterns of a distant ghost ship seen
at night on a dark and fogbound sea.
From the car the guards played the spotlight over the shuttered
hanky-panks on the far side of the concourse, then slowly moved it
around until it was stabbing brightly at the flank of the pavilion,
spearing between the wide supports of the balustrade. Though it was
unlikely they would spot either me or the goblin past the screen of
balusters and among the score of miniature cars, it was not unlikely
that, above the noise of the Ford's idling engine, they might hear the
monster's wheezing inhalations or the thump of its tail upon the hollow
floor.
I nearly shrieked out loud: Die, damn you!
It heaved itself forward more energetically than before, covering a
full five feet, and thudded down on its belly with little more than one
yard separating us.
The spotlight stopped moving.
The security men had heard something.
A dazzling lance of light cut between two balusters, its point
embedding in the pavilion floor eight or ten feet to my left. In the
beam's narrow revelatory width the wood planks-the grain, nicks,
scrapes, gouges, and stains-were, at least from my deck-level point of
view, preternaturally revealed in the most amazing and intricate.detail.
A tiny up-thrusting splinter seemed like a towering tree-as if the
spotlight not only illuminated but also magnified what it touched.
With a soft sputter, the goblin's breath passed out of its ruined
throat-and no new breath was drawn in. To my great relief the glow
faded from its hateful eyes: blazing fire subsiding to flickering
flame, flame to hot coals, hot coals to dull embers.
The beam of the spotlight moved in this direction, paused again, no
more than six feet from the dying goblin.
And now the creature underwent another remarkable transformation, like
a movie werewolf's final reaction to a silver bullet, relinquishing its
phantasmic form and once more dressing itself in the comparatively
mundane face and limbs and skin of a human being. Its last energies
were committed to maintaining the secrecy of its race's presence in the
midst of ordinary men. The gargoyle was gone. A dead man lay in the
gloom before me. A dead man whom I had killed.
I could no longer see the goblin within.
The transparent human glaze was not a glaze any more but a convincing
paint job, beyond which there seemed no mysteries whatsoever.
On the concourse the Ford eased forward a bit, stopped again, and the
guards' spotlight slid across a few more balusters, then found another
gap through which to pry. It probed the floor of the pavilion and
touched the heel of one of the dead man's shoes.
I held my breath.
I could see the dust on that portion of his shoe, the pattern of wear
along the rubber edge, and a tiny bit of paper stuck to the place where
the heel joined the sole. Of course, I was considerably closer than
the guard in the Ford, who was probably squinting along the track of
his light, but if I could see so much, so clearly, surely he could see
a little, enough to damn me.
Two or three seconds ticked by.
Two or three more.
The light glided to another gap. This time it was to my right, several
itches beyond the other foot of the corpse.
A shiver of relief passed through me, and I took a breath-but held it
unreleased when the light moved back a few balusters, seeking its
previous point of interest.
Panicked, I slid forward as silently as possible, seized the corpse by
the arms, and jerked it toward me, though only a couple of inches, not
far enough to cause a lot of noise.
Again the beam bored through the railing toward the heel of the dead
man's shoe. I had acted quickly enough, however. The heel was now
just one safe inch beyond the spotlight's inquisitive reach.
My heart ticked far faster than a clock, two beats to every second, for
the events of the past quarter of an hour had wound me far too tight.
After eight beats, four seconds, the light moved away, and the Ford
drove off slowly along the concourse, toward the back end of the lot,
and I was safe.
No, not safe. Safer.
I still had to dispose of the corpse and clean up the blood before
daylight made things more difficult for me and before morning brought
the carnies back onto their midway. When I stood up, a pinwheel of
pain whirled in each knee, for when I had jumped off the balustrade and
over the crawling goblin, I had stumbled and fallen to my hands and
knees with little of that grace about which I was boasting earlier.
The palms of my hands were mildly abraded as well, but neither that
discomfort nor the other-nor the pain in my right wrist where the.goblin had squeezed so hard, nor the ache in my neck and throat where I
had been punched-could be allowed to hinder me.
Staring down at the night-clad remains of my enemy, trying to arrive at
the easiest plan for moving his heavy corpse, I suddenly remembered my
backpack and sleeping bag, which I had left by the Ferris wheel. They
were small objects, half in shadow and half in vague pearly moonlight,
not likely to be noticed by the patrol. On the other hand, the
carnival's security men had made their circuit of this midway so many
times that they knew exactly what they should see at any given place
along the route, and it was easy to imagine their eyes floating past
the backpack, past the sleeping bag-only to return abruptly, the way
the spotlight beam had returned unexpectedly to probe toward the corpse
again. If they saw my gear, if they found proof that some drifter had
come over the fence during the night and had bedded down on the midway,
they would swiftly return to the Dodgem Cars pavilion to double-check
it. And find the blood. And the body.
Jesus.
I had to get to the Ferris wheel before they did.
I hurried to the railing, vaulted over it, and ran back through the
dark heart of the midway, legs pumping and arms cutting the thick moist
air away from me and hair flying wildly, as if there were a demon
behind me, which there was, though it was dead.
3
The Wandering Dead
Sometimes I feel that all things in this life are subjective, that
nothing in the universe can be objectively quantified-qualifieddefined,
that physicists and carpenters alike are made fools by the assumption
that they can weigh and measure the tools and materials with which they
work and can arrive at real figures that mean something. Granted, when
that philosophy possesses me, I'm usually in a bleak mood that
precludes rational thought, fit for nothing but getting drunk or going
to bed.
Still, as shaky proof of the concept, I offer my perceptions of the
carnival that night as I ran from the Dodgem Car pavilion, through the
equipment-strewn and cable-tangled center of the midway, trying to beat
the Sombra Brothers' security men to the Ferris wheel.
Before that race began, the night had seemed only dimly illuminated by
the moon. Now the lunar light was not soft but harsh, not ash-pearl
but white, intense. Minutes ago the deserted midway was shadow-swathed
and mostly undivulged, but now it was like a prison yard bathed in the
merciless glare of a dozen giant arc lamps that melted all the shadows
and evaporated every sheltering pocket of darkness. With each panicked
stride I was sure I would be spotted, and I cursed the moon. Likewise,
although the wide center of the midway had been crammed with trucks and
equipment that had provided hundreds of points of cover when I'd
followed the goblin to the Dodgem Car pavilion, it was now as open and
inhospitable as the aforementioned prison yard. I felt unmasked,
uncloaked, conspicuous, naked. Between the trucks and generators and
amusement rides and hanky-panks, I caught glimpses of the patrol car as
it moved slowly toward the back end of the lot, and I was sure the
guards must be getting glimpses of me, too, even though my position was
not revealed by a laboring engine and blazing headlights.
Amazingly I reached the Ferris wheel ahead of the security men. "They
had driven the length of the first long concourse and had turned right,
into the shorter curved promenade along the rear of the midway, where.all the kootch shows were set up. They were rolling toward the next
turn, where they would swing right again and enter the second of the
two long concourses. The Ferris wheel was only ten yards from that
second turn, and I would be spotted the moment they rounded the bend.
I clambered over the pipe fence that encircled the giant wheel, tripped
on a cable, went down in the dust hard enough to knock the wind out of
me, and crawled frantically toward the backpack and sleeping bag with
all the grace of a crippled crab.
I scooped up my gear in two seconds flat and took three steps toward
the low fence, but a couple of items fell out of the open backpack, and
I had to return for them. I saw the Ford beginning its turn into the
second concourse, and as it swung around the bend its headlights swept
toward me, dispelling any thought of retreating into the center of the
midway. They would spot me as I went over the pipe fence, and the
chase would be on. Indecisive, I stood there like the biggest dope
ever born, immobilized by chains of guilt.
Then I scrambled-leapt-dived for the Ferris wheel's ticket booth. It
was closer than the fence, much closer than the dubious cover that lay
beyond the fence, but, sweet Jesus, it was tiny. Just a one-person
cubicle, hardly more than four feet on a side, with a pagoda-style
roof. I crouched against one wall of that ticket booth, my backpack
and bunched-up sleeping bag clutched against me, pinned by the
searchlight moon, convinced that a foot or knee or hip was exposed.
As the Ford cruised past the Ferris wheel, I moved around the booth,
always keeping it between me and the guards.
Their spotlight probed around me, past me . . . then they departed
without raising an alarm. I hunkered in the moon shadow cast by one
edge of the pagoda-style roof, and I watched them drive all the way
down the concourse. They continued at a sedate pace and stopped three
times to shine the spotlight over one thing or another, taking five
minutes to reach the end of the promenade. I was afraid they would
turn right at the front end of the midway, which would mean they were
heading back toward the first concourse and were going to make another
circuit. But they went left instead, off toward the grandstand and the
mile-long racetrack, ultimately to the barns and stables where the
livestock shows and competitions were held.
In spite of the August heat, my teeth were chattering. My heart
hammered so hard and loud that I was surprised they hadn't heard it
above the rumble of their sedan's engine. My breathing was as noisy as
a bellows. I was a regular one-man band, specializing in rhythm
unsullied by melody.
I slumped back against the booth, until the shakes passed, until I
trusted myself to deal with the corpse I had left in the Dodgem Car
pavilion. Disposing of the body would require steady nerves, calm, and
the caution of a mouse at a cat show.
Eventually, when in control of myself once more, I rolled up my
sleeping bag, cinched it into a tight bundle, and carried both it and
the backpack into the deep shadows by the Tilt-aWhirl. I left
everything where I could find it again but where it could not be seen
from the concourse.
I returned to the Dodgem Cars.
All was still.
The gate creaked slightly when I pushed it open.
Each step I took echoed under the wooden floor.
I didn't care. This time I was not sneaking up on anyone.
Moonlight shimmered beyond the open sides of the pavilion.
The glossy paint on the balustrade seemed to glow..Here under the roof, thick shadows clustered.
Shadows and moist heat.
The miniature cars huddled like sheep in a dark pasture.
The body was gone.
My first thought was that I had forgotten exactly where I had left the
corpse: Perhaps it was beyond that other pair of Dodgem Cars, or over
there in that other sable pool beyond the moonlight's reach. Then it
occurred to me that the goblin might not have been dead when I left it.
Dying, yes, it had definitely been mortally injured, but perhaps not
actually dead, and maybe it had managed to drag itself to another
corner of the building before expiring. I began searching back and
forth, through and between the cars, gingerly poking into every lake
and puddle of blackness, with no success but with increasing agitation.
I stopped. I listened.
Silence.
I made myself receptive to psychic vibrations.
Nothing.
I thought I renumbered under which car the flashlight had rolled when
it had been knocked off the bumper. I looked and found it-and was
reassured that I had not dreamed the entire battle with the goblin,
When I clicked the switch, the Eveready came on. Hooding the beam with
one hand, I swept the floor with light and saw other proof that the
violent encounter I remembered had not been the events of a nightmare.
Blood.
Plenty of blood. It was thickening and soaking into the wood,
deepening to a shade between crimson and maroon, with a look Of rust
around the edges, drying up, but it was undeniably blood, and from the
sprays and streaks and pools of gore, I could recreate the fight as I
recalled it.
I found my knife, too, and it was spotted with dried blood.
I started to return it to the sheath inside my boot, then looked warily
at the night around me and decided to keep the weapon ready.
The blood, the knife . . . But the body was gone.
And the tool Pouch was missing as well.
I wanted to run, get the hell out of there, without even delaying long
enough to return to the Tilt-a-whirl for my gear, just bolt down the
concourse, kicking up clouds of sawdust, to the front gate of the
county fairgrounds, climb over that, and run some more, Jesus, run
without stopping for hours and hours, on into the morning, on through
the Pennsylvania mountains, into the wilderness, until I found a stream
where I could wash off the blood and the stink of my enemy, where I
could find a mossy bed and lie down in the concealment of ferns, where
I could sleep in peace without fear of being seen by anyone-any thing.
I was only a seventeen-year-old boy.
But during the past few months my fantastic and terrifying experiences
had hardened me and forced me to grow up fast.
Survival demanded that this boy conduct himself like a man, and not
just any man but one with nerves of steel and a will of iron.
Instead of running, I went outside and walked around the building,
studying the dusty earth in the flashlight beam. I could find no trail
of blood, which there would surely have been if the goblin had retained
enough strength to crawl away. I knew from experience that these
creatures were no more immune to death than I was; they could not
miraculously heal themselves, rise up, and come back from the grave.
Uncle Denton had not been invincible; once dead, he stayed dead. This
one too: He had been dead on the pavilion floor, indisputably dead; he
still was dead; somewhere, dead..Which left only one other explanation for his disappearance: Someone
had found his body and had carried it away.
Why? Why not call the police? Whoever found the corpse could not know
that it had once been animated by a demonic creature with a face
suitable for the galleries of Hell. My unknown conspirator would have
seen a dead man, nothing more. Why would he help a stranger conceal a
murder?
I suspected that I was being watched.
The shakes came back. With an effort I got rid of them.
I had work to do.
Inside the pavilion again, I returned to the Dodgem Car on which the
goblin had been working when I surprised him. At the rear of it, the
lid was ' raised, exposing the motor and the power connection between
the temiinus of the grid-tapping pole and the alternator. I peered at
those mechanical guts for a minute or so, but I could not see what he
had been doing, could not even tell whether he had tinkered with
anything before I had interrupted him.
The ticket booth for the Dodgem Cars was not locked, and in one corner
of that tiny enclosure I found a broom, a dustpan, and a bucket
containing a few soiled rags. With the rags I wiped up what blood had
not already dried on the wooden floor. I brought handfuls of powdery,
summer-bleached dirt into the building, sifted it over the moist,
reddish splotches wherever I found them, ground it in with my boots,
then swept up. The bloodstains remained, but the character of them was
changed, so they looked no more recent than-or different from-the
countless grease and oil spots that overlaid one another along the
entire length of the platform. I replaced the broom and dustpan in the
booth but threw the bloody rags into a trash barrel along the
concourse, burying them under empty popcorn boxes and crumpled
snow-cone papers and other garbage, where I also deposited the dead
man's flashlight.
I still sensed that I was being watched. It gave me the creeps.
Standing in the center of the concourse, I slowly turned in a circle,
surveying the carnival around,me, where the pennants still hung like
sleeping bats, where the shuttered hankypanks and grab-joints were
tomb-black, tomb-silent, and I perceived no sign of life. The setting
moon, now balanced on the mountainous skyline, silhouetted the far-off
Ferris wheel and the Dive Bomber and the Tip Top, which somehow brought
to mind the colossal futuristic Martian fighting machines in H. G.
Wells's The War of the Worlds.
I was not alone. No doubt of it now. I sensed someone out there, but
I could not perceive his identity, understand his intentions, or
pinpoint his location.
Unknown eyes watched.
Unknown ears listened.
And abruptly the midway was once more different from what it had been,
no longer like a barren prison yard where I stood helplessly and
hopelessly exposed in the accusatory glare Of arc lamps. In fact, the
night was suddenly not bright enough to suit me, not by half, rapidly
growing darker, bringing gloom of a depth and menace never before seen
or imagined. I cursed the betrayal represented by the setting moon.
The feeling of exposure did not recede with the moon, and now it was
aggravated by a growing claustrophobia.
The midway became a place of unlit and alien forms, as Profoundly
disturbing as a collection of weirdly shaped gravestones carved and
erected by an inscrutable race on another world. All familiarity fled;
every structure, every machine, every article was strange. I felt.crowded, closed in, trapped, and for a moment I was afraid to move,
certain that, no matter where I turned, I would be walking into open
jaws, into the grip of something hostile.
"Who's there?" I asked.
No answer.
"Where have you taken the body?"
The dark carnival was a perfect acoustic sponge; it abSOrbed my voice,
and the silence was undisturbed, as if I had never spoken.
"What do you want from me?" I demanded of the unknown watcher. "Are
you friend or enemy?"
Perhaps he did not know which he was, for he did not answer, though I
sensed that a time would come when he would reveal himself and make his
intentions clear.
That was the moment when I knew, with clairvoyant certainty, that I
couldn't have run away from the Sombra Brothers' midway even if I had
tried. It was neither whim nor a fugitive's desperation that had
brought me there. Something important was meant to happen to me in
that carnival. Destiny had been my guide, and when I had enacted the
role required of me, then and only then would destiny release me to a
future of my own choosing.
4
Goblin Dreams
Most county fairs have horse races in addition to livestock shows,
carnivals and kootch dancers, so most fairgrounds have locker rooms and
showers under their grandstands, for the convenience of jockeys and
sulky drivers. this place was no exception. The door was locked, but
that could not stop me. I was no longer just an Oregon farm boy, no
Matter how devoutly I might have wished to regain that lost innocence;
I was, instead, a young man with knowledge of the road. I carried a
thin, stiff strip of plastic in my wallet, and I used it now to open
the flimsy lock in less than a minute. I went inside, switched on the
lights, and relocked the door behind me.
Green metal toilet stalls were lined up on the left, chipped sinks and
age-yellowed mirrors on the 'right, showers at the far end. A double
row of scratched and dented lockers, back to back, ran through the
center of the big room, with scarred benches in front of them.
Bare cement floor. Concrete block walls. Exposed fluorescent ceiling
lights. Vaguely foul odors sweat, urine, stale liniment, fungus-and a
pungent, overriding scent of pine disinfectant gave the air an unsavory
richness that made me grimace but was not quite-though almost
disgusting enough to trigger the gag reflex. Not a swell place.
Not a place you were likely to meet any of the Kennedys, for instance,
or Cary Grant. But there were no windows here, which meant I could
safely leave the lights on, and it was much cooler-though no less
humid-than the dusty fair grounds outside.
First thing, I rinsed the metallic taste of blood out of my mouth and
brushed my teeth. In the cloudy mirror above the sink, my eyes were so
wild and haunted that I quickly looked away from them.
My T-shirt was torn. Both my shirt and jeans were bloody After I
showered, washing the stink of the goblin out of my hair, and dried off
with a bunch of paper towels, I dressed in another T-shirt and a pair
of ' jeans that I took out of my backpack. At one of the sinks, I
washed some of the blood out of the ruined T-shirt, soaked the jeans as
well, wrung them, then buried them in a nearly full trash barrel by the.door, unwilling to risk being caught with incriminating, bloodstained
clothing in my pack. My remaining wardrobe consisted entirely of the
new jeans I had put on, the T-shirt I wore, one other T-shirt, three
pair of briefs, socks, and a thin corduroy ' jacket.
You travel light when you're wanted for murder. The only heavy things
you carry are memories, fear, and loneliness.
I decided the safest place to spend the last hour of the night was
there in the locker room beneath the grandstand. I unrolled my
sleeping bag on the floor, in front of the door, and stretched out on
it. No one could get inside without alerting me the moment he began to
work the lock, and my body would serve as a doorstop to keep intruders
out.
I left the lights on.
I was not afraid of the dark. I simply preferred not to subject myself
to it.
Closing my eyes, I thought of Oregon. . . .
I was homesick for the farm, for the verdant meadows where I had played
as a child, in the shadow of the mighty Siskiyou Mountains, which made
the mountains of the East seem ancient, worn, and tarnished. In
memories that now unfolded like incredibly elaborate origami
sculptures, I saw the rising ramparts of the Siskiyous, forested with
her on her of enormous Sitka spruce, with scattered Brewer's spruce
(the most beautiful of all the conifers), Lawson cypress, Douglas fir,
tangerine-scented white fir that was rivaled in aromatic influence only
by the tufted incense cedar, dogwood with no scent but with brilliant
leaves, big-leaf maple, pendulous western maple, neat ranks of
dark-green Sadler oak, and even in the faded light of memory that scene
took my breath away.
My cousin Kerry Harkenfield, Uncle Denton's stepson, met a particularly
ugly death midst all that beauty. He was murdered. He had been My
favorite cousin and best friend.
Even months after his death, even by the time I found myself in the
Sombra Brothers carnival, I still felt the loss of him.
Acutely.
Opening my eyes, staring up at the water-stained and dustfilmed
acoustic tiles of the locker-room ceiling, I forced myself to block out
the chilling recollection of Kerry's shattered body. There were better
memories of Oregon. . . .
In the Yard in front of our house, there had been a large Brewer's
spruce, usually called a weeping spruce, arching branches draped with
elegant shawls of green-black lace. In summer, the shiny foliage was a
display field for sunlight in much the same way that a jeweler's velvet
pad shows gems to their best advantage; the boughs were often draped
with insubstantial but dazzling chains and linked beads and flashing
necklaces and shimmering jeweled arcs composed purely of sunshine. In
winter, snow encrusted the weeping spruce, conforming to its peculiar
shape; if the day was bright, the tree seemed like a Christmas
celebrant-but if the day was gray, the tree was a mourner in a
graveyard, the very embodiment of misery and gloom.
That spruce had been in its mourning clothes the day I killed my Uncle
Denton. I had an ax. He had only his bare hands. Nevertheless,
disposing of him was not easy.
Another bad memory. I shifted, closed my eyes again. If there was any
hope of getting to sleep, I would have to think only of the good times,
of Mom and Dad and my sisters.
I was born in the white farmhouse that stood behind the Brewer's
spruce, a much-wanted boy and much-loved child, first and only son of.Cynthia and Kurt Stanfeuss. My two sisters had just enough tomboy in
them to make good playmates for an only brother, just enough feminine
grace and sensibility to instill in me some manners, sophistication,
and refinement that I might not otherwise have acquired in the rustic
world of the rural Siskiyou valleys.
Sarah Louise, blond and fair like our father, was two years older than
I. From a young age she could draw and paint with such skill that you
would have thought She had been a famous artist in a prior life, and it
was her dream to earn her living with brushes and palette. She had a
special empathy with animals. She could handle any horse well and
effortlessly, charm a pouting cat, calm a chicken yard full of nervous
hens just by walking among them, and quickly coax a sheepish grin and a
wag of the tail from even the meanest dog.
Jennifer Ruth, brunette and almond-skinned like our mother, was three
years older than I. She was a voracious reader of fantasies and
adventure stories, as was Sarah, but Jenny had no artistic talent to
speak of, although she made an art form of her way with figures. Her
affinity for numbers, for all forms and disciplines of mathematics, was
a constant astonishment to everyone else in the Stanfeuss household,
for the rest of us, given a choice between adding a long column of sums
and putting a collar on a porcupine, would have opted for the porcupine
every time. Jenny also had a photographic memory.
She could quote word-for-word from books she had read years ago, and
both Sarah and I were deeply envious of the ease with which Jenny
compiled report card after report card of straight-a grades.
Biological magic and the rarest serendipity were evident in the
blending of my mother and father's genes, for none of their children
escaped the burden of extraordinary talent. Not that it was difficult
to understand how they could have produced us. They were gifted, too,
in their own ways.
My father was a musical genius, and I use the word genius in its
original meaning, not as an indication of IQ but to express the fact
that he had an exceptional natural capacity, in this case a capacity
for music. There was no instrument that he could not play well within
a day of picking it up, and within a week he could perform the most
complex and demanding numbers with a facility that others labored years
to acquire. A piano stood in our parlor, and Dad would often play,
from memory, tunes he had heard only that morning, on the radio, while
driving the pickup into town.
For a few months after he was killed, all the music went out of our
house, both literally and figuratively.
I was fifteen when my father died, and at the time I believed his death
was an accident, which was what everyone else thought too. Most of
them still think so. Now I know that Uncle Denton killed him.
But I had killed Denton, so why couldn't I sleep? Revenge had been
taken, rough justice done, so why couldn't I find at least an hour or
two of peace? Why was each night an ordeal?
I could sleep only when insomnia led to a state of exhaustion so
complete that the choice was reduced to sleep or madness.
I tossed. I turned.
I thought of my mother, who was as special as my father had been. Mom
had a way with green, growing things; plants thrived for her as animals
obeyed her younger daughter, the way mathematical problems resolved
themselves for her elder daughter. One quick look at any plant, a
brief touch of leaf or stem, and Mom knew precisely what nutrients or
special care her green friend required. Her vegetable garden always
produced the biggest and best-tasting tomatoes anyone had ever eaten,.the juiciest corn, the sweetest onions. Mom was a healer too. Oh, not
a faith healer, mind you, not a quack of any kind; she made no claim of
psychic power, and she did not heal by a laying-on of hands. She was
an herbalist, mixing her own poultices, salves, and ointments, blending
delicious medicinal teas. No one in the Stanfeuss family ever
contracted a bad cold, never anything worse than one-day sniffles. We
suffered neither cold sores, influenza, bronchitis, pinkeye, nor the
other ills that children bring home from school and pass on to their
parents. Neighbors and relatives often came by for my mother's herbal
concoctions, and though she was frequently offered money, she never
accepted a penny in return; she felt that it would be blasphemous to
receive any compensation for her gift other than the joy of employing
it for the benefit of her family and others.
And, of course, I am also gifted, though my special abilities are far
different from the more rational talents of my siblings and parents.
In me the genetic serendipity of Cynthia and Kurt Stanfeuss was not
mere magic but almost sorcery.
According to my Grandmother Stanfeuss, who possesses a treasure of
arcane folk wisdom, I have Twilight Eyes. They are the very color of
twilight, an odd shade that is more purple than blue, with a particular
clarity and a trick of refracting light in such a way that they appear
slightly luminous and strange and (I am told) unusually beautiful.
Grandma says that not even one in half a million people have such eyes,
and I must admit I have never seen others like mine.
Upon first seeing me, blanket-wrapped in my mother's arms, Grandma told
my folks that Twilight Eyes in a newborn baby were a harbinger of
psychic ability; if they did not change color by the child's second
birthday (as mine did not), then according to Grandma-folk tales have
it that the psychic ability will be unusually strong and manifested in
a variety of ways.
Grandma was right.
And as I thought of Grandma's softly seamed and gentle face, as I
pictured her own warm and loving eyes (sea-green), I found not peace
but at least a state of truce. Sleep stole to me in the armistice like
an army nurse bringing anesthetics across a temporarily silenced
battleground.
My dreams were of goblins. They frequently are.
in the last dream of several, my Uncle Denton screamed at me as I
wielded the ax: No! I'm not a goblin! I'm just like you, Carl. What
are you talking about? Are you mad? There aren't goblins. No such
thing. You're crazy, Carl. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Insane! You're
insane! Insane! In real life he had not screamed, had not denied my
accusations. In real life our battle had been grim and bitterly waged.
But three hours after sleep claimed me, I woke with Denton's voice
still echoing at me from out of the dream. "Insane! You're insane,
Carl!
Oh, my God, you're insane! I was shaking, sweat-drenched, disoriented,
and feverish with doubt.
Gasping, whimpering, I stumbled to the nearest sink, turned on the cold
water, and splashed my face. The lingering images of the dream
receded, faded, vanished.
Reluctantly I raised my head and looked in the mirror.
Sometimes I have difficulty confronting the reflection of my own
strange eyes because I am afraid I will see madness in them. This was
one of those times.
I could not rule out the possibility, however remote, that the goblins
were nothing more than phantoms of my tortured imagination. God knows,.I wanted to rule it out, to be unshaken in my convictions, but the
possibility of delusion and insanity remained, periodically draining me
of will and purpose as surely as a leech steals vital blood.
Now I stared into my own anguished eyes, and they were so unusual that
the reflection of them was not flat and twodimensional, as it would
have been with any other man's eyes; the mirror image seemed to have as
much depth and reality and power as the real eyes. I probed my own
gaze honestly and relentlessly, but I could see no trace of lunacy.
I told myself that my ability to see through the goblins' disguises was
as unquestionable as my other psychic talents. I knew my other powers
were real and reliable, for numerous people had benefited from my
clairvoyance and had been astonished by it. My Grandmother Stanfeuss
called me "the little seer," because I could sometimes see the future
and sometimes see moments in other people's pasts. And, damn it, I
could see goblins, too, and the fact that I was the only one who saw
them was no reason to distrust my vision.
But doubt remained.
"Someday," I said to my somber reflection in the yellowed mirror, "that
doubt will surface at the wrong moment.
It'll overwhelm you when you're fighting for your life with a goblin.
Then it will be the death of you."
5
Fretiks Three hours of sleep, a few minutes to wash, a few minutes more
to roll up my sleeping bag and harness myself to the backpack, made it
nine-thirty by the time I opened the lockerroom door and went outside.
The day was hot and cloudless.
The air was not as moist as it had been last night. A refreshing
breeze made me feel rested and clean, and it blew the doubts into
deeper reaches of my mind, much the same way it gathered up litter and
old leaves, packing them into corners formed by the fairground
buildings and shrubbery, not disposing of the trash altogether but at
least keeping it out from underfoot. I was glad to be alive.
I returned to the midway and was surprised by what I found. My last
impression of the carnival, before I deserted it last night, was one of
looming danger, bleakness, and oppression, but in daylight the place
seemed harmless, even cheerful. The hundreds of pennants, all
colorless in the moonbleached hours of the night, were now crimson like
Christmas bows, yellow as marigolds, emerald-green, white,
electrichlue, and orange-orange; they rippled-fluttered-snapped in the
wind. The amusement rides gleamed and sparkled so brightly in the
sharp August sun that even from a short distance they appeared not
merely newer and fancier than they were but seemed to be plated with
silver and finest gold, like elf-made machines in a fairy tale.
At nine-thirty the fairground gates had not yet opened to the public.
Only a few carnies had ventured back to the midway.
On the concourse two men were picking up litter with spike-tipped poles
and stuffing it into large bags slung from their shoulders. We said:
"Hi"and " 'lo" to one another.
A burly man with dark hair and a handlebar mustache was standing on the
barker's platform at the fun house, five feet above the ground, his
hands on his hips, staring back and up at the giant clown's face that
formed the entire front of the attraction. He must have seen me from
the corner of his eye, for he turned and looked down and asked my
opinion as to whether the clown's nose needed painting. I said, "Well,
it looks fine to me. Looks like it was painted just last week. A nice.bright red."
And he said, "Was painted just last week. Used to be yellow, been
yellow fourteen years, and then a month ago I got myself married for
the first time, and my wife, Giselle, says a clown's nose should be
red, and since I'm damned sweet on Giselle, I decided to paint it, see,
which I did, but now I'll W-God-croaked if I don't think it was a
mistake, because when it was yellow, it was a nose with character, you
know, and now it's just like every clown's nose you've ever seen in
your whole God-blasted life, and what's the good of that?" He did not
seem to want an answer, for he jumped off the platform and, grumbling,
stalked around the side of the fun house, out of sight.
I ambled along the concourse until I came to the Whip, where a wiry
little man was repairing the generator. His hair was that shade of
orange that isn't auburn and isn't red but which everyone calls red,
anyway, and his freckles were so numerous and bright that they appeared
unreal, as if they had been carefully painted on his cheeks and nose.
I told him I was Slim MacKenzie, and he didn't tell me who he was. I
sensed that clannish, secretive mind-set of a lifelong carny, so I
talked for a bit about the gillies and ragbags I'd worked in the
Midwest, all the way through Ohio, while he continued to tinker with
the generator and remained mute. At last I must have convinced him
that I was on the level, for he wiped his greasy hands on a rag, told
me his name was Rudy Morton but everyone called him Red, nodded at me,
and said, "You lookin' for work?" I said that I was, and he said,
"Jelly Jordan does all the hiring. He's our patch, and he's Arturo
Sombra's right-hand man. You'll probably find him at the headquarters
compound." He told me where that was, out near the front of the
midway, and I thanked him, and I know he watched for some time as I
walked away, although I didn't once glance back at him.
I cut across the sunny midway rather than walk around the entire
concourse, and the next carny I met was a big man coming toward me with
his head down, hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, altogether too
defeated-looking for a day as golden as this one. He must have been
six-four, with massive shoulders and huge arms, two hundred and seventy
pounds of muscle, a striking figure even when he slouched.
His head was held so low between those Herculean shoulders that I could
see nothing of his face, and I knew he did not see me. He walked
between the hulking equipment, stepping on cables, plowing through
accumulations of litter, self-absorbed.
I was afraid that I would startle him, so before I was atop him, I
called out, "Lovely morning, isn't it?" He took two more steps, as if
he required that long to register that my greeting was aimed at him.
We were only eight feet apart when he looked up at me, revealing a face
that froze my marrow.
Goblin! I thought.
I almost reached for the knife within my boot.
Oh, Jesus, God, no, another Goblin!
"You said something?" he asked.
When the wave of shock had passed through me, I saw that he was not a
goblin, after all-or at least not a goblin like the others. He had a
nightmare face, but there was nothing of pig or dog in it. No fleshy
snout, no fangs, no flickering, serpentine tongue. He was human but a
freak, his skull so malformed that it proved God had strange, macabre
moments. In fact . . .
Imagine yourself a divine sculptor, working in the medium of
flesh-blood-bone, with a bad hangover and a despicable sense of humor.
Now start sculpting with a huge brutal jaw that does not recede as it.approaches your creation's ears (the way the jawline does in normal
faces) but terminates abruptly in ugly knotted lumps of bone
reminiscent of the neck bolts featured in the movie version of the
Frankenstein monster.
Now, just above those unsightly lumps, give your hapless creation a
pair of ears like wads of crumpled cabbage leaves.
A mouth inspired by the scoop of a steam shovel. Throw in some big
square teeth, too many of them, crowding one another and overlapping at
several points, and all a permanent shade of yellow so gross that your
creation will be ashamed to open his mouth in polite company. Sound
like enough cruelty to vent any godly anger that you may have been
feeling?
Wrong. You are apparently in a truly cosmic rage, a deific lather
sufficient to make the universe quiver from one end to the other, for
you also sculpt a forehead thick enough to act as armor plating, build
it up until it overhangs the eyes and transforms the underlying sockets
into caves. Now, in a fever of malignant creation, you carve a hole in
that forehead, above the right eye but closer to the temple than the
socket below, and plug in a third eye that is without iris or pupil,
just an oval of undifferentiated burnt-orange tissue. That done, you
add two final touches that are unquestionably the mark of malevolent
genius: You pop a noble and perfectly made nose into the center of that
grisly mug, to taunt your creation with ideas of what might have been;
within the two lower sockets you imbed a pair of clear, brown, warm,
intelligent, beautiful, normal eyes, exquisitely expressive, so that
anyone who sees them must quickly look away or weep uncontrollably with
pity for the sensitive soul trapped within this hulk. Are you still
with me? You probably don't want to play God any more. What gets into
Him sometimes? Don't you wonder? If a creation like this can result
merely from His moodiness or pique, just imagine what state of mind He
must have been in when He was seriously upset, when He made Hell and
cast the rebel angels into it.
This prank of God spoke again, and his voice was soft and kind: "I'm
sorry. Did you say something? I was woolgathering.
"Urn . . . uh . . . I said . . . lovely morning.
"Yes. I guess it is. You're new, aren't you?"
"Uh . . . I'm Carl . . . Slim.
"Carl Slim?"
"No . . . uh ... Slim MacKenzie," I said, head tilted back to stare up
at him.
"Joel Tuck," he said.
I could not adjust to the rich timbre and soft tone of his voice. From
the look of him, I expected a broken-glass, shattered-rock voice full
of cold hostility.
He offered a hand. I shook it. It was like anybody else's hand,
though bigger.
"I own the ten-in-one," he said.
"Ah," I said, trying not to look at the blank orange eye but staring,
anyway.
A ten-in-one was a sideshow, usually a freak show, with at least ten
attractions-or freaks-under the same tent.
"Not just the owner," Joel Tuck said. "I'm the star attraction too."
"No doubt," I said.
He burst out laughing, and I flushed with embarrassment, but he would
not permit me to sputter through an apology. He shook his deformed
head and put one massive hand on my shoulder and, grinning, assured me
that no offense had been taken.."In fact," he said, surprisingly garrulous, "it's refreshing to meet a
carny for the Just time and have him show his shock. You know, most of
the marks who pay to get in the ten-in-one, they point and gasp and
talk about me right in front of my face. Very few of them have the wit
or grace to leave the sideshow a better person, with gratitude for
their own good fortune. A bunch of crass, small-minded . . . well,
you know what marks are like. But carnies . . . sometimes, in their
own way, they can be just as bad."
I nodded, as if I knew what he was talking about. I had managed to
look away from his third eye, but now I couldn't seem to take my eyes
off his steam-shovel mouth. It clapped open and shut, and his knotted
jaws creaked and bulged, and I thought of Disneyland. The year before
my father died, he took us down to California, to Disneyland, which was
new then, but even in those days they had what they called the
audio-animatronic robots, with lifelike faces and movements, convincing
in every detail except for their mouths, which clapped open and shut
with none of the intricate and subtle movements of real mouths. Joel
Tuck seemed like a macabre audio-animatronic robot that the Disneyland
guys had built as a joke, intending to put a good scare into Uncle
Wait.
God pity me for having been so insensitive, but I expected that
grotesque man to be equally grotesque in thought and word.
Instead he said, "Carnies are all so painfully aware of their tradition
of tolerance and brotherhood. Sometimes their diplomacy is irritating.
But you! Ah, now, you have struck just the right note. Not morbidly
curious or smugly superior or full of effusive declarations of false
pity like the marks. Not unstintingly diplomatic, not given to studied
indifference like most carnies. Understandably shocked, not ashamed of
your instinctive reactions, a boy who knows his manners but still has a
wholesome curiosity and a welcome frankness-that's you, Slim MacKenzie,
and I'm pleased to make your acquaintance.
"Likewise.
His generosity in analyzing my reactions and motivations made me blush
even brighter, but he pretended not to notice.
He said, "Well, I must be going. There's an eleven o'clock show call,
and I've got to get the ten-in-one ready to open.
Besides, when there are marks on the midway, I don't go outside the
tent with my face uncovered. Wouldn't be right if someone who didn't
want to see this mug got exposed to it.
Besides, I don't believe in giving the bastards a free show!"
"See you later, then," I said, my gaze drifting back to his third eye,
which blinked once, almost as if winking at me.
He took two steps, his size fourteen shoes raising small clouds of
white dust from the August-parched earth. Then he turned to me again,
hesitated, and at last said, "What do you want from the carnival, Slim
MacKenzie?"
"What ... you mean ... from this carnival in particular?"
"From the life in general."
"Well . . . a place to sleep."
His jaws bunched and shifted. "You'll got that."
"Three square meals a day."
"that too."
"Pocket money."
"You'll do better than that. You're young, bright, quick. I can see
all that. You'll do well. What else?"
"You mean . . . what else do I want?"
"Yes. What else?".I sighed. "Anonymity."
"Ah." His expression might have been a conspiratorial smile or a
grimace; it was not always easy to tell what that twisted face meant to
convey. His mouth was open slightly, his teeth like the stained and
weathered pickets of an ancient fence, as he contemplated me and what
I'd said, as if he might inquire further or offer advice, but he was
too good a carny to pry. He merely said "Ah" again.
"Sanctuary," I said, almost wishing he would pry, suddenly struck by
the crazy urge to take him into my confidence and tell him about the
goblins, Uncle Denton. For months, since the first time I had killed a
goblin, I had required unfaltering strength of purpose and character in
order to survive, and in that time and through all my travels I had not
encountered anyone who seemed to have been tempered by a fire as hot as
that which had tempered me. Now, in Joel Tuck, I sensed that I had
found a man whose suffering, anguish, and loneliness had been far
greater than mine, endured far longer; he was a man who had accepted
the unacceptable with uncommon strength and grace. Here was someone
who might understand what it was like to live always in a nightmare,
without a moment's respite. In spite of his monstrous face, there was
something fatherly about him, and I had the extraordinary urge to lean
on him and let the tears flow at last, at long last, and tell him about
the demonic creatures that stalked the earth unseen.
But self-control was my most precious possession, and suspicion was the
asset that had proven most valuable for survival, and I could not
easily put aside either attitude. I merely repeated: "Sanctuary."
"Sanctuary," he said. "I believe you'll find that too. I surely hope
you do because . . . I think you need it, Slim MacKenzie. I think you
need it desperately."
That comment was so out of character with the rest of our brief
conversation that it jolted me.
We stared at each other for a moment.
This time I looked not at the blind, orange orb in his forehead but at
his other eyes. In them I thought I saw compassion.
Psychically I sensed in him a reaching-out, a warmth.
However, I also perceived a secretiveness that was not apparent in his
manner, a discomfiting indication that he was more than he seemed to
be-that he was, in some vague way, perhaps even dangerous.
A shudder of dread passed through me, but I didn't know if I should be
afraid of him or of something that would happen to him.
The moment broke like a fragile thread-abruptly but with no great
drama.
"See you around," he said.
"Yeah," I said, my mouth so dry and my throat so constricted that I
couldn't have said more.
He turned and walked away.
I watched him until he was out of sight-the same way that the mechanic,
Red Morton, had watched me when I walked away from the Whip.
Again I thought of leaving the carnival and finding a place where the
omens and portents were less disturbing. But I was down to my last few
pennies, and I was tired of being on the road alone, and I needed to
belong somewhere-and I was enough of a seer to know that you can't walk
away from Destiny no matter how ardently you might wish to do so.
Besides, the Sombra Brothers Carnival was obviously a good and
companionable place for a freak to settle down. Joel Tuck and me.
Freaks.
6.Daughter of the Sun The carnival headquarters was lodged in three
brightly painted trailers-each white with a brilliant rainbow design
sweeping across it. "They were arranged in an incomplete square, the
front side missing. A portable picket fence surrounded the enclosure.
Mr. Timothy "Jelly" Jordan had an office in the long trailer on the
left, which also housed the accountant and the woman who dispensed
rolls of tickets every morning.
I waited for half an hour in the plain, linoleum-floored room where the
bald accountant, Mr. Dooley, was poring through piles of papers. As
he worked, he nibbled steadily from a dish of radishes and
pepperoncinis and black olives, and his spicy breath permeated the
room, though none of the people who came in seemed bothered by it-or
even aware of it.
I half expected one of the visitors to rush in with word that a carny
was missing or even that one had been found dead in the vicinity of the
Dodgem Car pavilion, and then they would all look at me because I was
an outsider, the newcomer, a likely suspect, and they would see guilt
in my face, and . . .
But no alarm was raised.
At last I was told that Mr. Jordan was ready to see me, and when I
entered his office at the back of the trailer, I saw at once why he had
been given his nickname. He was a good two or @ inches shy of six
feet, six or seven inches shorter than Joel Tuck, but he weighed about
as much as Tuck, at least two hundred and seventy pounds. He had a
face like a pudding, a round nose that might have been a pale plum, and
a chin as shapeless as a dumpling.
When I walked through his door, a toy car was running in circles on the
top of his desk. It was a little convertible with four tiny clowns
sitting in it, and as it moved, the clowns took turns popping up and
then sitting down again.
Picking up another toy, he said, "Look at this one. Just got it
yesterday.
It's absolutely great. Absolutely."
He put it down, and I saw that it was a metal dog with jointed legs
that propelled it across the desk in a series of slow somersaults. He
watched it, eyes shining with delight.
Glancing around the room, I saw toys everywhere. One wall was fitted
with bookshelves that held no books, just a colorful collection of
miniature windup cars, trucks, figurines, and a tiny windmill that
probably boasted moving blades. In one corner two marionettes hung
from a peg to prevent the control strings from tangling, and in another
corner a ventriloquist's dummy was perched attentively on a stool.
I looked back at the desk in time to see the dog complete one last,
even slower somersault. Then, with the power provided by the final
unwinding length of spring, it sat up on its haunches and raised its
forepaws, as if begging for approval of its stunts.
Jelly Jordan looked at me, grinning broadly. "Ain't that just
absolutely the absolute?"
I liked him immediately.
"Terrific," I said.
"So you want to join up with Sombra Brothers, do you?"
he asked, leaning back in his chair as soon as I had settled in
another.
"Yes, sir.
"I don't suppose you're a concessionaire with your own shop, looking to
pay a privilege for a spot on the midway.."No, sir. I'm only seventeen."
"Oh, don't plead youth with me! I've known concessionaires that young.
Knew a kid who started at fifteen as a weight-guesser, had a real
attractive spiel, charmed the marks and did real well, added a couple
of other small games to her little empire, then managed to buy herself
a duck shoot by the time she was your age, and duck shoots don't come
cheap.
Thirty-five thousand bucks, in fact."
"Well, I guess by comparison to her I'm already a loser in life. "
Jelly Jordan grinned. He had a nice grin. "Then you'll be wanting to
be an employee of the Sombra Brothers."
"Yes, sir. Or if one of the concessionaires is looking for a helper of
any kind . . . " "I suppose you ain't nothing but a roughie,
dime-a-dozen muscle, can't do more than put up the Dive Bomber and the
Ferris wheel and load trucks and hump equipment around on your back.
Is that right? Nothing more to offer than your sweat?"
I leaned forward in my chair. "I can operate any hankypank there ever
was, any winner-every-time game. I can run a mouse-in-the-hole as
slick as anyone. I can barker a little, hell, better than two-thirds
of the guys I've heard chatting up the tip in the gillies and ragbags
where I've worked, though I don't claim to be as good as the born
pitchmen who probably wind up in the best outfits, like yours. I'm a
real good Bozo for a pitch-and-dunk because I don't mind getting wet,
and because the insults I throw at the marks aren't nasty but funny,
and they always react to funny better. I can do lots of stuff . "
"Well, well," Jelly Jordan said, "seems like the gods are smiling on
the Sombra Brothers today, damned if they ain't, sending us such a
splendid young jack-of-all-trades. Absolutely splendid. Absolute."
"Kid me all you want, Mr. Jordan, but please find something for me. I
swear I won't disappoint you."
He stood up and stretched, and his belly jiggled. "Well, Slim, I think
I'll tell Rya Raines about you. She's a concessionaire. She needs
someone to run the high-striker for her.
Ever done that?"
'Sure.
"Okay. If she likes you, and if you can get along with her, you're all
set. If you can't get along with her, come back and see me, and I'll
set you up with someone else or put you on the Sombra Brothers
payroll."
I got up, too. "This Mrs. Raines-" "Miss.""Since you brought it up .
. . is she difficult to get along with or something?"
He smiled. "You'll see. Now, as for sleeping arrangements, I figure
you ain't come rolling in here with your own trailer any more than your
own concession, so you'll want to bunk down in one of the show's
dormitory trailers. I'll find out who needs another roommate, and you
can pay the first week's rent to Cash Dooley, the accountant you met in
the other room." I fidgeted. "Uh, well, I left a backpack and
sleeping bag out there, and I really prefer bunking down under the
stars.
Healthier.
"Don't allow that here," he said. "If we did, we'd have a bunch of
roughies sleeping on the ground, drinking out in the open, copulating
with everything from women to stray cats, which would make us look like
some absolute ragbag outfit, which we sure ain't. We're a class act
all the way."
"Oh." He cocked his head and squinted at me. "Broke?"
"Well . . ."."Can't pay rent?"
I shrugged.
"We'll carry you for two weeks," he said. "After that you pay like
everybody else."
"Gee, thanks, Mr. Jordan."
"Call me Jelly now that you're one of us."
"Thanks, Jelly, but I'll let you carry me for just one week.
After that I'll be on my feet. Now, should I go straight on up to the
high-striker from here? I know where it is, and I know you have an
eleven o'clock show call today, which means about ten minutes until the
gates open."
He was still squinting at me. The fat bunched around his eyes, and his
plum nose wrinkled up as if it might turn into a prune. He said, "You
have breakfast yet?"
"No, sir. Wasn't hungry."
"It's almost lunchtime."
"Still not hungry.
"I'm always hungry," he said. "You have dinner last night?"
"Me?"
"You."
"Sure."
He frowned skeptically, dug in his pocket, pulled out a pair of
one-dollar bills, and came around the desk with his hand held toward
me.
"Oh, no, Mr. Jordan-" "Jelly-" "-Jelly. I couldn't accept it."
"Just a loan," he said, taking my hand and stuffing the money in it.
"You'll pay me back. That's an absolute fact."
"But I'm not that broke. I have some money."
"How much?"
"Well . . . ten bucks.
He grinned again. "Show me."
Huh?"
"Liar. How much, really?"
I looked down at my feet.
"Really, now? Tell the truth," he said warningly.
"Well . . . ummm . . . twelve cents."
"Oh, yes, I see. You're an absolute Rockefeller. Good heavens, I am
definitely mortified to think I tried to loan you money. A wealthy man
at seventeen, clearly an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune!" He gave me
two more bucks. "Now you listen to me, Mr. Filthy Rich Playboy, you
go to Sam Trizer's grab-joint by the merry-go-round. It's one of the
best on the lot, and he opens early to serve carnies. Get yourself a
good lunch and then go see Rya Raines at her high-striker." I nodded,
embarrassed by my poverty because a Stanfeuss never relied on anyone
but another Stanfeuss. Nevertheless, humbled and self-reproachful, I
was also grateful for the fat man's good-humored charity.
When I reached the door and opened it, he said, "Wait a minute." I
looked back and saw that he was staring at me in a different way than
before. He had been sizing me up to determine my character, my
abilities, and my sense of responsibility, but now he was looking at me
the way a handicapper might examine a horse on which he intended to
place a bet. "You're a strong youngster," he said. "Good biceps.
Good shoulders. You move well too. You look like you could take care
of yourself in a tight situation."
As some answer seemed required, I said, "Well . . . I have, yeah." I
wondered what he would say if I told him that I had killed four goblins
so far-four pig-faced, dog-fanged, serpent-tongued things with.murderous red eyes and claws like rapiers.
He regarded me in silence for a moment, then at last said, "Listen, if
you can get along with Rya, that's who you'll work for. But tomorrow
I'd like you to do a special job for me. There probably won't be any
tough stuff, but the potential's there. Worse comes to worst, you
might have to duke it out with someone. But I suspect you'll just have
to stand around and look intimidating."
"Whatever you want," I said.
"You ain't going to ask what the job,is?"
"You can explain it tomorrow."
"You don't want a chance to turn it down?"
"Nope."
"There're some risks involved."
I held up the four dollars he had given me. "You've bought yourself a
risk taker."
"You come cheap."
"It wasn't the four bucks that bought me, Jelly. It was the kindness.
" He was uncomfortable with the compliment. "Get the hell out of here,
grab your lunch, and start earning your keep. We don't like deadbeats
on the lot."
Feeling better than I had felt in months, I went out to the front
office, and Cash Dooley said I could leave my gear with him until they
found trailer space for me, and then I went to Sam Trizer's grab-joint
for a bite of lunch. They call these places "grab-joints" or
"grab-stands" because there's no place to sit, so you just have to grab
your food and eat on the fly. I had two perfect chili dogs, French
fries, a vanilla shake, and then headed up the midway.
As county fairs go, this was better than average, almost large, but not
nearly as big as the important fairs in places like Milwaukee, St.
Paul, Topeka, Pittsburgh, and Little Rock, where paid admissions could
top a quarter of a million on a good day. Nonetheless, Thursday was
getting close to the weekend. And it was summer when -the kids were
out of school, and a lot of people were on vacation. Besides, in rural
Pennsylvania the fair was as much excitement as there ever was-people
came from fifty or sixty miles around-so even though the gates had just
opened, a thousand marks had come onto the midway already. All the
hartky-panks and other games were ready for business, their operators
beginning to pitch the passing tip, and many of the rides were running.
The scent of popcorn was in the air, and diesel fuel, and cookhouse
grease. The gaudy fantasy was just cranking up its engine, but in a
few hours it would be running at full-tilt-a thousand exotic sounds, an
all-encompassing blaze of color and motion that would eventually seem
to expand until it had become the universe, until it was impossible to
believe that anything existed beyond the carnival grounds.
I passed the Dodgem Cars, half expecting to see police and a crowd of
horrified onlookers, but the ticket booth was open, and the cars were
in operation, and the marks were screaming but only at one another as
they crashed their rubber-bumpered vehicles together. If anyone had
noticed the fresh stains on the pavilion floor, he hadn't realized they
were blood.
I wondered where my unknown helper had taken the corpse, wondered when
he would finally come forward and make himself known to me. And when
he did reveal himself, what would he want from me for his continued
silence?
The high-striker was two-thirds of the way along the first concourse,
on the outside edge of the midway, tucked between a balloon game and a
fortune-teller's small, striped tent. It was a simple device that.consisted of an eighteen-inch square striking pad mounted on springs
and designed to measure impact, a backdrop shaped like a
twenty-foot-high thermometer, and a bell at the top of the thermometer.
Guys who wanted to impress their dates had only to pay fifty cents,
take the sledgehammer provided by the operator, swing it hard, and land
a blow on the striking pad. This would drive a small wooden block up
the thermometer, which was divided into five sections: GRANDMA,
GRANDPA, GOOD BOY, TOUGH GUY, and HE-MAN. If you were enough of a
he-man to drive the block all the way to the top and ring the bell, you
not only impressed your girl and had a better chance of getting in her
pants before the night was over, but you also won a cheap stuffed
animal.
Beside this high-striker stood a rack of furry teddy bears that didn't
look half as cheap as the usual prizes in a game of this sort, and on a
stool beside the teddy bears sat the most beautiful girl I had ever
seen. She was wearing brown corduroy jeans and a
brown-and-red-checkered blouse, and I vaguely noticed that her body was
lean and excitingly proportioned, but truthfully I did not pay much
attention to the way she was built-not then, later-for initially my
attention was entirely captured by her hair and face. Thick, soft,
silky, shimmering hair, too blond to be called auburn, too auburn to be
blond, was combed across one side of her face, half obscuring one eye,
reminding me of Veronica Lake, that movie star of an earlier era. If
there was any fault at all in her exquisite face, it was that the very
perfection of her features also gave her a slightly cool, distant, and
unattainable look. Her eyes were large, blue, and limpid. The hot
August sun streamed over her as if she were on a stage instead of
perched on a battered wooden stool, and it didn't illuminate her the
same way it did everyone else on the midway; the sun seemed to favor
her, beaming upon her the way a father might look upon a favorite
daughter, accenting the natural luster of her hair, proudly revealing
the porcelain smoothness of her complexion, lovingly molding itself to
her sculpted cheekbones and artfully chiseled nose, suggesting but not
fully illuminating great depth and many mysteries in her entrancing
eyes.
I stood, dumbstruck, and watched her for a minute or two while she went
through her spiel. She teased a mark out of the onlookers, took his
fifty cents, sympathized with his inability to drive the wooden block
above GOOD BOY, and smoothly enticed him into shelling out a buck for
three more whacks at it. She broke all the rules for ballying an
attraction: She never taunted the marks, not even a little; she hardly
ever raised her voice to a shout, yet somehow her message carried above
the music from the gypsy fortune-teller's tent, the competing spiel of
the balloon game pitchman next door, and the ever-growing roar of the
waking midway. Most unusual of all, she never got off the stool, did
not attempt to draw the marks to her with an energetic display of
pitchmanship, did not employ dramatic gestures, comic dance steps, loud
jokes, sexual innuendo, double entendres, or any of the standard
techniques. Her patter was slyly amusing, and she was gorgeous; that
was enough, and she was smart enough to know it was enough.
She took my breath away.
With a self-conscious shuffle that I sometimes had around pretty girls,
I finally approached her, and she thought I was a mark who wanted to
swing the hammer, but I said, "No, I'm looking for Miss Raines."
"Why?" I "Jelly Jordan sent me."
"You're Slim? I'm Rya Raines."
"Oh," I said, startled, because she seemed like just a girl, hardly.older than me, not the kind of canny and aggressive concessionaire for
whom I expected to be working.
A faint frown reshaped her face slightly, but it did not detract from
her beauty. "How old are you?"
"Seventeen.
"You look younger."
"Going on eighteen," I said defensively.
"That's the usual progression."
"What?"
"After that it'll be nineteen, then twenty, and then there'll be no
stopping you," she said, a distinct note of sarcasm in her voice.
Sensing that she was the type most likely to respond better to spunk
than to subservience, I smiled and said, "I guess it wasn't like that
with you. Looks to me like you jumped straight from twelve to ninety."
She didn't smile back at me, and the coolness didn't go out of her, but
she gave up the frown. "You can talk?"
"Aren't I talking?"
"You know what I mean."
By way of an answer, I picked up the sledgehammer, swung it at the
striking pad hard enough to ring the bell and attract the attention of
the nearest marks, turned toward the concourse, and launched into a
spiel. In a few minutes I brought in three bucks.
"You'll do," Rya Raines said. When she talked to me, she stared
straight into my eyes, and her gaze made me hotter than the August sun.
"All you have to know is that the game isn't gaffed, which you've
already proved, and I don't want you being an alibi agent. Gaffed
games and alibi agents aren't allowed on the Sombra Brothers' lot, and
I wouldn't have them even if they were allowed. It's not easy to ring
that bell; pretty damned hard, in fact; but the mark gets a fair shot
at winning, and when he does win, he gets the prize, no alibis."
"I got you." Taking off her coin apron and change-maker and passing
them to me, she spoke as firmly and briskly as any no-nonsense junior
executive at General Motors: "I'll send someone around at five o'clock,
and you'll be off from five till eight, for supper, for a nap if you
need it, then you'll come back on and stay on until the midway closes
down. You'll bring the receipts to me, at my trailer, tonight, down in
the meadow. I have an Airstream, the largest they make. You'll
recognize it because it's the only one hitched to a brand-new, red,
one-ton Chevy pickup. If you play straight, if you don't do anything
stupid like trying to skim the take, you'll do all right working for
me. I own a few other concessions, and I'm always on the lookout for a
right type who can handle responsibility. You get paid the end of
every day, and if you're a good enough pitchman to improve on the
average take, then you'll get a slice of the higher profits. If you're
straight with me, you'll get a better deal from nobody. But-listen up
now and be warned-if you jack me around,- buster, I'll see to it that
you wind up with your balls in a sling. We understand each other?"
"Yes. "Good."
Remembering Jelly Jordan's reference to the girl who had started out as
a weight-guesser and had worked her way up to a major concession by the
age of seventeen, I said, "Uh, one of these other games you own-is it a
duck shoot?"
"Duck shoot, one guess-your-weight stand, one bottle-pitch, one
grab-stand that specializes in pizza, a kiddy ride called the Happy
Toonerville Trolley, and seventy percent interest in a sideshow called
Animal Oddities," she said crisply. "And I'm neither twelve nor
ninety; I'm twenty-one, and I've come a hell of a long way from nothing.in a hell of a short time. I didn't put it all together by being naive
or soft or dumb.
There's nothing of the mark in me, and as long as you remember that,
Slim, we'll get along just fine." ' Without asking if I had any more
questions, she walked off along the concourse. With each brisk stride
she took, her small, firm, high ass worked prettily in her tight jeans.
I watched her until she was out of sight in the growing crowd. Then,
with a sudden realization of my condition, I put down the change-maker
and the apron, turned to the high striker, picked up the sledgehammer,
swung it seven times, one after the other, ringing the bell with six of
the blows, not pausing until I could face the passing marks without the
embarrassment of a very visible erection.
As the afternoon wore on, I ballyed the high-striker with genuine
pleasure. The trickle of marks grew to a stream and then to a river,
flowing endlessly along the concourse in the warm summer glare, and I
pulled in their shiny half-dollars almost as successfully as if I had
been reaching into their pockets.
Even when I saw the first goblin of the day, at a few minutes past two
o'clock, my good mood and high enthusiasm stayed with me. I was
accustomed to seeing seven or eight goblins a week, considerably more
if I was working in an outfit that drew decent crowds or was traveling
through a big city where there were lots of people. I had long ago
figured that one out of every four or five hundred people is a goblin
in disguise, which means perhaps half a million in the U.S. alone, so
if I had not adjusted to seeing them everywhere I went, I would have
gone mad before ever arriving at the Sombra Brothers Carnival. I knew
by now that they were not aware of the special threat I posed to them;
they did not realize that I could see through their masquerade, so they
took no special interest in me. I had the itch to kill every one of
them I saw, for I knew by experience that they were hostile to all
mankind and had no purpose but to cause pain and misery on the earth.
However, I seldom encountered them in lonely circumstances that
permitted attack, and unless I wanted to learn what the inside of a
prison was like, I did not dare slaughter one of the hateful creatures
in full view of witnesses who could not perceive the devil under the
human costume.
The goblin that strolled by the high-striker shortly after two o'clock
was comfortably ensconced in the body of a mark: a big, towheaded,
open-faced, good-natured farm boy, eighteen or nineteen, dressed in a
tank top, cutoff jeans, and sandals.
He was with two other guys his age, neither of whom was a goblin, and
he was just about the most innocent-looking citizen you ever saw,
joking and cutting up a little, enjoying himself. But beneath the
human glaze a goblin peered out with eyes of fire.
The farm boy did not stop at the high-striker, and I kept my spiel
unspooling as I watched him pass by, and not ten minutes later I saw a
second beast. This one had assumed the appearance of a stocky,
gray-haired man of about fifty-five, but his alien shape was grossly
apparent to me.
I know that what I see is not actually the physical goblin itself
encased in some sort of plastic flesh. The human body is real enough.
What I perceive is, I suppose, either the spirit of the goblin or the
biological potential of its shape-shifting flesh.
And, at a quarter of three, I saw two more of them.
Outwardly they were just a pair of attractive teenage girls, small-town
gawkers dazzled by the carnival. Within lurked monstrous entities with
quivering pink snouts..By four o'clock, forty goblins had passed by the high striker, and a
couple of them had even stopped to test their strength, and by that
time my good mood had finally vanished. The crowd on the midway could
not have numbered more than six or eight thousand, so the monsters
among them far exceeded the usual ratio.
Something was going on; something was meant to happen on the Sombra
Brothers' midway this afternoon; this extraordinary convocation of
goblins had one purpose-to witness human misery and suffering. As a
species, they seemed not merely to enjoy our pain but to thrive on it,
feed on it, as if our agony was their only-or primary-sustenance. I
had seen them together in large groups only at scenes of tragedy: the
funeral of four high school football players who had been killed in a
bus accident back in my hometown a few years ago; a terrible automobile
pile-up in Colorado; a fire in Chicago. Now, the more goblins I saw
among the ordinary marks, the colder I became there in the August heat.
By the time the explanation came to me, I was so on edge that I was
seriously considering using the knife in my boot, slashing at least one
or two of them, and running for my life.
Then I realized what must have happened. They had come to see an
accident at the Dodgem Car pavilion, expecting a rider to be maimed or
killed. Yes. Of course. That was what the bastard had been up to
last night, before I had confronted and killed him; he had been setting
up an "accident." Now that I thought about it, I was sure I knew what
had been intended, for he had been tinkering with the power feed to the
motor of one of the small cars. By killing him, I had unknowingly
saved some poor mark from electrocution.
Word had gone out on the goblin network: Death, pain, horrible
mutilation, and mass hysteria at the carnival tomorrow! Don't miss
this stupendous show! Bring the wife and kids! Blood and burning
flesh! A show for the whole family!
Responding to that message, they had come, but the promised feast of
human misery had not been laid out for them, so they were wandering the
concourses, trying to figure out what had happened, maybe even looking
for the goblin I had murdered.
From four o'clock until five, when the relief pitchman showed up, my
spirits rose steadily, for I saw no more of my enemy. Off duty, I
spent half an hour searching through the crowd, but the goblins all
seemed to have gone away in disappointment.
I returned to Sam Trizer's grab-stand for a bite of supper.
After I had eaten, I felt much better, and I was even whistling when,
on my way to the carnival headquarters to see about my trailer
assignment, I encountered Jelly Jordan by the -carousel.
"How goes it?" he asked, raising his voice above the calliope music.
"Terrific." We moved beside the ticket booth, out of the swarming
marks.
He was eating a chocolate doughnut. He licked his lips and said, "Rya
doesn't seem to've bitten off any of your ears or fingers."
"She's nice," I said.
He raised his eyebrows.
"Well, she is," I said defensively. "A little gruff, maybe, and
certainly plainspoken. But underneath all that, there's a decent lady,
sensitive, worth knowing."
"Oh, you're right. Absolutely. I ain't surprised by what you say-just
that you saw through her hard-bitten act so quickly. Most people don't
take time to see the niceness in her, and some people never see."
My spirits rose further when I heard his confirmation of my vague
psychic impressions. I wanted her to be nice. I wanted her to be a.good person under the Ice Maiden act. I wanted her to be a person
worth knowing. Hell, what it came down to-I just wanted her, and I
didn't want to be wanting someone who was genuinely a bitch.
"Cash Dooley found trailer accommodations for you," Jelly said.
"Better settle in while you're on your break."
"I'll do that," I said.
I was feeling great as I started to turn away from him, but then I saw
something out of the corner of my eye that brought me crashing down. I
swung back on him, praying that I had imagined what I thought I had
seen, but it was not imagination; it was still there. Blood. There
was blood all over Jelly Jordan's face. Not real blood, you
understand. He was finishing his chocolate doughnut, unhurt, feeling
no pain.
What I saw was a clairvoyant vision, an omen of violence to come. Not
merely violence, either. Superimposed on Jelly's living face was an
image of his face in death, his eyes open and sightless, his chubby
cheeks smeared with blood. He was not just swimming down the
time-stream toward injury but . . . toward imminent death.
He blinked at me. "What?"
"Uh . . ."
The precognitive flash faded.
"Something wrong, Slim?"
The vision was gone.
There was no way I could tell him and make him believe.
And even if I could make him believe, there was no way I could change
the future.
"Slim?"
"No," I said. "Nothing wrong. I just .
"Well?"
"Wanted to thank you again."
"You're too damned grateful, boy. I can't stand slobbering puppies."
He scowled. "Now get the hell out of my sight."
I hesitated. Then to cover my confusion and fear, I said, "Is that
your Rya Raines imitation?"
He blinked again and grinned at me. "Yeah. How was it?"
"Not nearly mean enough."
I left him laughing, and as I moved away I tried to persuade myself
that my premonitions did not always come to pass (although they did)
-and that, even if he was going to die, it wouldn't be soon (although I
sensed it would be very soon, indeed) -and that even if it would be
soon, there was surely something I could do to prevent it.
Something.
Surely something.
7
Night Visitor The crowd began to thin out and the midway began to shut
down at midnight, but I kept the high-striker open until twelve-thirty,
snaring a last few half-dollars, because I wanted to report a HE-MAN
(rather than a GOOD BOY) take for my first day on the job. By the time
I closed the concession and headed for the meadow at the back of the
county fairgrounds, where the carnies had established their mobile
community, it was a few minutes after one o'clock.
Behind me, the last lights on the midway winked off when I left, almost
as if the whole show had been for my benefit alone.
Ahead and below, in a large field ringed by woods, almost three hundred.trailers were lined up in neat rows. Most were owned by the
concessionaires and their families, but a score or two were the
property of the Sombra Brothers and were rented out to those carnies,
like me, who did not hold title to their own accommodations. Some
called this caravan "Gibtown-on-wheels." During the winter, when there
were no show dates, most of these people traveled south to Gibsonton,
Florida-"Gibtown" to the natives who had built the place-which was
entirely populated by carnies. Gibtown was their haven, their reliable
retreat, the one place in the world that was truly home. From
mid-October to late November they headed toward Gibtown, streaming in
from all the shows in the country, from the big outfits like E. James
Strates and from the littlest gillies and ragbags. There in the
Florida sunshine they either had prettily landscaped lots waiting for
their trailers or they had bigger trailers mounted on permanent
concrete foundations, and in that sanctuary they remained until a new
tour started in the spring. Even in the off-season they preferred to
be together, separate from the straight world, which they tended to
find too dull, unfriendly, and smallminded, filled with too many
unnecessary rules. While on the road, regardless of where their
business took them during their peripatetic season, they held fast to
the ideal of Gibsonton, and they returned every night to a familiar
place, to this Gibtown-on-wheels.
The rest of modern America seems bent upon fragmentation: Year by year
there is less coherence in every ethnic group; churches and other
institutions, once the glue of society, are frequently said to be
worthless and even oppressive, as if our countrymen see a perversely
appealing chaos in the mechanism of the universe and wish to emulate
it, even if emulation leads to obliteration. Among carnies, however,
there is a strong and treasured sense of community that, year by year,
never diminishes.
As I came down the hillside path, into the summer-warm meadow, with all
the sounds of the midway stilled, with crickets singing in the dark,
the amber lights at all those trailer windows had a ghostly quality.
They appeared to shimmer in the humid air, not much like electric
illumination but rather like the camp fires and oil lamps in a
primitive settlement of an earlier era. In fact, with its modern
details draped in darkness and distorted by strange patterns of curtain
and blind-filtered light, Gibsonton-on-wheels had the look and feel of
an assemblage of gypsy wagons drawn up against the disapproval of the
surrounding natives in a rural nineteenth-century European landscape.
As I approached and then walked in among the first trailers, lights
were extinguished here and there as weary carnies went to bed.
The meadow was marked by a quietude born of the carnies' universal
respect for their neighbors: There were no loud radios or TVs, no
crying babies left unattended, no noisy arguments, no barking dogs, all
of which you might expect to find in a so-called respectable
neighborhood out in the straight world. Also, daylight would have
shown that the avenues between the trailers were free of litter.
Earlier, during my break, I had brought my gear down to the rental
trailer that three other guys were sharing with Me, and while I had
been in the meadow I had wandered around until I had found the
Airstream that belonged to Rya Raines.
Now, laden with coins and with a thick sheaf of dollar bills in one
pouch of my change apron, I went directly to her place.
The door was open, and I saw Rya sitting in an armchair, in a fall of
buttery light from a reading lamp. She was talking to a dwarf.
I rapped on the open door, and she said, "Come on in, Slim." I went up.the three metal steps and in, and the dwarf, a woman, turned to look at
me. She was of indeterminate age-twenty or fifty, hard to tell-about
forty inches tall, with a normal trunk, shortened extremities, and a
large head.
We were introduced; the little woman's name was Irma Lorus, and she ran
the bottle-pitch for Rya. She wore a pair of children's tennis shoes,
black pants, and a loose peach-colored blouse with short sleeves. Her
black hair was thick and glossy and, like raven's wings, it had deep
blue highlights; it was lovely, and she was evidently proud of it, for
much thought had gone into the way it was cut and shaped around her
oversize face.
"Ah, yes," Irma said, offering her small hand, shaking.
"I've heard about you, Slim MacKenzie. Mrs. Frazelli, who owns the
Bingo Palace with her husband Tony, says you're too young to be on your
own, says you're in desperate need of a home-cooked meal and a mother's
attention. Harv Seveen, who has one of the kootch shows, says you look
like you're either dodging the draftboard or maybe running from the
cops because they caught you at some small diddle . . .
like maybe joyriding in somebody else's car; either way, he figures
you're a right type. The pitchmen say you know how to draw the marks,
and with a few more years under your belt, you might even become the
best talker on the lot. Now, Bob Weyland, who has the carousel, is a
mite worried 'cause his daughter thinks you're a dreamboat and says
she'll just die if you don't notice her; she's sixteen, and her name's
Tina, and she's worth noticing too. And Madame Zena, otherwise known
as Mrs. Pearl Yarnell from the Bronx, our gypsy fortune-teller, says
you're a Taurus, five years older than you look, and that you're
running from a tragic love affair."
I was not surprised that a number of carnies had drifted by the
high-striker to have a look at me. It was a tight community, and I was
a newcomer, and their curiosity was to be expected. I was, however,
embarrassed by the report of Tina Weyland's infatuation and amused to
hear Madame Zena's 11 psychic" impressions of me. "Well, Irma," I
said, " I , in actually a Taurus, seventeen years old, never had a girl
even give me the chance to have my heart broken-and if Mrs. Frazelli
is any good in the kitchen, you can tell her that I cry myself to sleep
each and every night, just thinking about home-cooked meals."
"You're welcome at my place too," Irma said, smiling.
"Come meet Paulie, my husband. Fact is, why don't you stop over about
eight o'clock Sunday night, once we've set up at the next stop on the
tour. I'll fix you chicken chili and my famous Black Forest cake for
dessert."
"I'll be there," I promised.
In my experience, of all carnies, dwarves were the quickest to accept a
stranger, to open up, the first to trust and smile and laugh.
Initially I had attributed their apparently universal friendliness to
the combative disadvantage of their size, figuring that when you were
that small, you had to be friendly in order to avoid becoming an easy
target for bullies, drunks, and muggers. However, as I had become
better acquainted with a couple of the little people, I had gradually
realized that my simplistic analysis of their extroverted personalities
was ungenerous. As a group-and almost to an individual-dwarves were
strong-willed, self-assured, and self-reliant. They are no more afraid
of life than are people of ordinary stature.
Their extroversion springs from other causes, not least of all from a
compassion born of suffering. BUt that night, in Rya Raines's
Airstream trailer, still young and learning, I had not yet attained an.understanding of their psychology.
That night I didn't understand Rya, either, but I was struck by the
radically different temperaments of these two women.
Irma was warm and outgoing, but Rya Raines remained cool and
introverted. Irma had a lovely smile and made full use of it, but Rya
studied me with those crystalline blue eyes that took in everything and
gave back nothing, and she remained expressionless.
Sitting in the armchair, barefoot, one leg straight out in front of her
and the other bent, Rya was the essence of a young man's dreams. She
wore white shorts and a pale yellow T-shirt. Her bare legs were well
tanned, with slender ankles, lovely calves, smooth brown knees, and
taut thighs. I wanted to slide my hands up those legs and feel the
firm musculature of those thighs. Instead I put my hands in the change
apron, so she wouldn't see them shaking. Her T-shirt, slightly damp in
the August heat, clung alluringly to her full breasts, and I could see
her nipples through the thin cotton.
Rya and Irma made quite a contrast, genetic glory and genetic chaos,
opposite end-rungs on the ladder of biological fantasy. Rya Raines was
the epitome of human female physicality, perfection of line and form,
the dream made real, nature's promise and intention fulfilled. But
Irma was a reminder that, for all its intricate mechanisms and
millennia of practice, nature seldom succeeded in the task that God had
given it: Bring them forth in my image. If nature was a divine
invention, a God-inspired mechanism, as my Grandma used to say it was,
then why didn't He come back and repair the damned thing? Obviously it
was a machine with real potential, as witness Rya Raines.
"You look seventeen," the dwarf woman said, "but damned if you act or
feel like it."
Not knowing what to say, I said only, "Well .
"You may be seventeen, but you're a man, all right. I think I'll tell
Bob Weyland you're too much a man for Tina, for sure. There's a
toughness in you."
"Something . . . dark," Rya said.
"Yes," In-na said. "Something dark. That too."
They were curious, but they were also carnies, and while they didn't
mind telling me what I was like, they could never bring themselves to
ask about me without my invitation.
Irma left, and at the kitchen table I counted out the receipts for Rya.
She said the take was twenty percent higher than average, paid me a
day's wages in cash, and gave me thirty percent of the twenty percent
increase, which seemed more than fair to me, since I had not expected
to share in the improved profits until I had been around a couple
weeks.
By the time we finished the accounting, I took off the change apron
without embarrassment, for the erection it had been concealing was now
gone. She was standing right beside me at the table, and I could still
see the inadequately draped contours of her beautiful breasts, and her
face still took my breath away, but the racing engine of my libido had
decelerated to a sluggish idle in response to her businesslike attitude
and her intransigent coolness.
I told her that Jelly Jordan had asked me to do a job for him tomorrow,
that I didn't know when I'd be available to run the high-striker, but
she already knew that.
She said, "When you've done whatever Jelly needs You for, go to the
high-striker and relieve Marco, the fella who handled it during your
break today. He'll be running it while you're away.
I thanked her for my pay, for the opportunity to prove myself, and she.made no response whatsoever, so I turned and went awkwardly to the
door.
Then: "Slim?"
I stopped, turned to her again. "Yeah?"
She stood with her hands on her hips, a scowl on her face, eyes
narrowed, forbiddingly defiant, and I thought she was going to chew me
out about something, but she said, ' Welcome aboard." I don't think
that she even knew how defiant she looked-or that she knew how to look
any other way.
"Thanks," I said. "Feels good to have a ship under me."
Clairvoyantly, I sensed an appealing tenderness in her, a special
vulnerability beneath the armor that she had evolved as protection from
the world. What I had told Jelly was true; I did indeed feel there was
a sensitive woman beyond the hard-bitten Amazon image in which she hid.
But as I stood in the doorway and looked back at her, where she posed
defiantly beside the dining table that was piled with money, I sensed
something else as well, a sadness that I had not been aware of before.
It was a profound, well-concealed, and abiding melancholy. Even as
vague and undefined as those psychic emanations were, they moved me
deeply, and I wanted to return to her and put my arms around her, not
with the slightest sexual intent but to comfort her and perhaps to draw
off some of her mysterious anguish.
I did not go to her, did not take her in my arms, for I knew my motives
would be misunderstood. Hell, I figured she would knee me in the
crotch, give me the bum's rush out the door, push me down the metal
steps, send me sprawling on the ground, and fire me.
"You keep doing this well at the high-striker," she said, you won't be
stuck there long. I'll move you up to something better."
"I'll do my best."
Moving toward the armchair, where she'd been when I first entered, she
said, "I'll be buying another concession or two during the next year.
Big concessions. I'll need reliable people to help me run them I
realized she did not want me to go. Not that she was attracted to me;
not that I was irresistible or anything like that. Rya Raines simply
did not want to be alone right now.
Usually, yes. But not right now. She would have tried to hold on to
her guest no matter who it had been. I did not act upon my perception
of her loneliness, for I also sensed that she was not aware of how
obvious it was; if she realized that her carefully drawn mask of tough
self-reliance was temporarily transparent, she would be embarrassed.
And angry. And, of course, she would take her anger out on me.
So all I said was, "Well, I hope I'll never disappoint."
And I smiled, nodded, and said, "See you tomorrow." And I went out the
door.
She did not call to me. In my postadolescent, always horny, immature,
unabashedly romantic heart of hearts, I hoped that she would speak,
that when I turned I would find her there in the trailer doorway,
breathtakingly backlit, that she would say-softly, softly-something
unimaginably seductive, and that I would take her to bed for a night of
unrestrained passion. In real life nothing ever works out that way.
At the bottom of the steps, I did turn and look back, and I did see
her, and she was looking after me, but she was still inside, where she
had settled again into the armchair. She presented such a stunningly
erotic picture that for a moment I could not have moved even if I had
known a goblin was bearing down on me with murder in its eyes. Her
bare legs were stretched out in front of her and slightly spread, and
the light from the reading lamp gave her supple skin an oiled sheen..The downfall of light left shadows beneath her breasts, which
emphasized the enticing shape of them. Her slender arms, her delicate
throat, her faultless face, her auburn-blond hair-all glowed, glorious
and golden. She was not merely revealed and lovingly caressed by the
light; rather she seemed to be the source of the light, as if
she-instead of the lamp -were the radiant object. Night had come, but
the sun had not left her.
I turned away from the open door and, heart pounding, took three steps
into the night, along the avenue between the trailers, but stopped in
shock as I saw Rya Raines appear in the darkness before me. This Rya
was dressed in jeans and a soiled blouse. She was at first a wavery,
watery image, colorless, like a film projected on a rippling black
sheet.
Within a second or two, however, she acquired a solidity
indistinguishable from reality, though she was most definitely not
real. This Rya was not erotic, either; her face was ghastly pale, and
blood trickled from one corner of her voluptuous mouth. I saw that her
blouse was not dirty but bloodstained, Her neck, shoulders, chest, and
belly were dark with blood.
In a moth-wing voice, each word fluttering softly from her blood-damp
lips, she said, "Dying, dying don't let me die "No," I said, speaking
even more quietly than the apparition, and I stupidly stepped forward
to embrace and comfort the vision of Rya with a grace and swift
responsiveness that had eluded me when it had been the real woman
seeking comfort. "No. I won't let you die."
With the inconstancy of a figure in a dream, she was suddenly no longer
there. The night was empty.
I stumbled through the muggy air where she had been.
I fell to my knees and hung my head.
I stayed that way for a while.
I did not want to accept the message of the vision. But I could not
escape it.
Had I come three thousand miles, had I obligingly allowed Destiny to
choose a new home for me, had I begun to make new friends only to see
them all destroyed in some unguessable cataclysm?
If only I could foresee the danger, then I could warn Rya and Jelly and
anyone else who might be a potential victim and if I could convince
them of my powers, they could take steps to avoid death. But though I
made myself as receptive as possible, I could not obtain even a hint of
the nature of the oncoming disaster.
I just knew it involved the goblins.
I was nauseous with anticipation of losses to come.
After kneeling in the dust and dry grass for uncounted minutes, I
struggled to my feet. No one had seen or heard me. Rya had not come
to the door of her trailer, had not looked out. I was alone in
moonlight and cricket-song. I could not stand up straight; my stomach
rolled and cramped.
More lights had gone off while I had been inside, and still others
winked out as I watched. Someone was making a late meal of eggs and
onions, and the night was redolent with a sublime fragrance that would
ordinarily have made me hungry but which, in my current condition, only
increased my queasiness. Shaky, I set out for the trailer where I had
been assigned a bed.
The morning had dawned with hope, and when I had returned to the
carnival from the locker room under the grandstand, the place had
seemed bright and filled with promise. But just as darkness had come
to the midway a short time ago, so it came to me now, poured over me,.through me, and filled me up.
When I had almost reached my trailer, I became aware of eyes upon me,
although no one was in sight. From behind, under, or within one of the
many trailers, someone was watching, and I was more than half certain
it was he who had carried off the goblin's corpse from the Dodgem Car
pavilion and had later spied on me from an unknown corner of the
night-mantled midway.
I was too stunned and despairing to care. I went to my trailer and to
bed.
The trailer had a small kitchen, living room, one bath, and two
bedrooms. In each bedroom were two beds. My roommate was a guy named
Barney Quadlow, a roughie, very big and slow-witted, perfectly content
to drift through life, giving not a thought to what would happen to him
when he was too old to heave and tote equipment, confident that the
carnival would take care of him-which it would. I had met him earlier,
and we had talked, though not long. I did not know him well, but he
seemed amiable enough, and when I had probed at him with my sixth
sense, I had discovered a personality more placid than any I had ever
before encountered.
I suspected that the goblin I had killed at the Dodgem Car pavilion was
a roughie like Barney, which would explain why no great fuss had been
raised when he had turned up missing. Roughies were not the most
dependable employees; many of them had wanderlust, and sometimes not
even the carnival moved around enough for them, so they just split.
Barney was asleep, breathing deeply, and I was careful not to wake him.
I stripped to my underwear, folded my clothes, put them on a chair, and
stretched out on my bed, on top of the sheets. The window was open,
and a mild breeze found its way into the room, but the night was very
warm.
I did not expect to sleep. Sometimes, however, despair can be like
weariness, a weight dragging on the mind, and in a surprisingly short
time, no more than a minute, that weight pulled me down into a welcome
oblivion.
In the cemetery-still, graveyard-dark middle of the night, I came half
awake and thought I saw a hulking figure standing in the bedroom
doorway. No lights were on. The trailer was filled with multilayered
shadows, all different shades of black, so I could not see who stood
there. Reluctant to wake up, I told myself that it was Barney Quadlow,
coming from-or going to-the bathroom, but the looming figure neither
departed nor entered, merely stood there, watching. Besides, I could
hear Barney's deep and rhythmic breathing from the adjacent bed- So I
told myself that it was one of the other two men who shared the trailer
. . . but I had met them, as well, and neither was this large.
Then, besotted and befuddled by sleep, I decided that it must be Death,
the Grim Reaper himself, come to collect my life. Instead of bolting
up in panic, I closed my eyes and drifted off again. Mere death did
not frighten me; in the bleak mood that had accompanied me into sleep
and had informed my dim dreams, I was not particularly averse to a
visit from Death-if, indeed, that was who he was.
I returned to Oregon. That was the only means by which I dared go home
again. In dreams.
After four and a half hours of sleep, which was a long rest for me, I
was wide-awake at six-fifteen, Friday morning.
Barney still slept, as did the others in the next room. Gray light,
like dust, sifted in through the window. The figure in the doorway was
gone-if it had ever been there.
I got up and quietly retrieved a clean T-shirt, briefs, and a pair of.socks from the backpack, which I had stowed in the closet yesterday.
Sticky, grimy, pleasurably anticipating a shower, I put those items of
clothes in one of my boots, picked up the boots, turned to the chair to
pick up my jeans, and saw two slips of white paper lying on the denim.
I could not remember putting them there, and I could not read them
easily in the gray light, so I tucked them in one hand, picked up my
jeans as well, and went silently down the hall to the bathroom. In
there I closed the door, switched on the light, and put down the boots
and jeans.
I peered at one slip of paper. Then the other.
The ominous figure in the doorway had not been an illusion or a figment
of my imagination, after all. He had left two items he thought might
be of interest to me.
They were free passes of the kind that Sombra Brothers issued by the
bucketful to swill-seeking local authorities and VIPs in every town
where the carnival played.
The first was for a ride on the Dodgem Cars.
The second was for the Ferris wheel.
8
Darkness at Noon
Established on coal fields that were now depleted, sustained by a
single steel mill and a regional railroad yard, steadily decaying but
not yet quite aware of the inevitability of its decline, the small city
of Yontsdown (population 22,450, according to the welcome sign at the
edge of the, city limits), in mostly mountainous Yontsdown County,
Pennsylvania, was the next stop on the Sombra Brothers tour. When the
current engagement was concluded, Saturday night, the midway would be
torn down, packed up, and carted a hundred miles across the state, to
the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds.
The miners, mill workers, and rail-yard employees were accustomed to
evenings and weekends structured around either the TV set, local bars,
or one of the three Catholic churches that were always holding socials
and covered-dish suppers, and they would receive the carnival just as
eagerly as the farmers had done at the previous stop.
Friday morning I went to Yontsdown with Jelly Jordan and a man named
Luke Bendingo, who drove the car. I sat up front with Luke, and our
portly boss sat alone in back, neatly dressed in black slacks, a maroon
summer-weight shirt, and a herringbone jacket, looking less like a
carny than like a well-fed country squire. From the luxury of Jelly's
airconditioned yellow Cadillac, we could enjoy the green beauty of the
humid August landscape as we drove through farm country, then into the
hills.
We were going to Yontsdown to grease the rails ahead of the show train,
which would be rolling in during the early morning hours on Sunday.
The rails we were greasing were not actually those on which the train
would run; they were, instead, the rails that led straight into the
pockets of Yontsdown's elected officials and civil servants.
Jelly was the general manager of the Sombra Brothers Carnival, which
was a demanding and important job. But he was also the "patch," and
his duties in that capacity could sometimes be more important than
anything he did while wearing the mantle of GM. Every carnival
employed a man whose job it was to bribe public officials, and they
called him the patch because he went ahead of the show and patched
things up with cops, city and county councilmen, and certain other key.government employees, "gifting" them with folding money and books of
free tickets for their families and friends. If a carnival tried to
operate without a patch, without the additional overhead of bribery,
the police would raid the midway in a vengeful mood. They would close
down the games, even if it was an honest outfit that did not bilk the
marks out of their dough. Spiteful, exercising their authority with a
gleeful disregard for fairness and propriety, the cops would board up
even the cleanest girlie shows, misapply the Health Department codes to
shutter all the grab-stands, legally declare the thrill rides hazardous
when they were patently safe, quickly and effectively choking the
carnival into submission. Jelly intended to prevent just such a
catastrophe in Yontsdown.
He was a good man for the job. A patch needed to be charming, amusing,
and likable, and Jelly was all those things.
A patch had to be a smooth talker, thoroughly ingratiating, able to pay
a bribe without making it seem like a bribe. In order to maintain the
illusion that the payoff was nothing more than a gift from a friend-and
thereby allow the corrupt officials to keep their self-respect and
dignity-a patch had to remember details about the police chiefs and
sheriffs and mayors and other officials with whom he dealt year after
year, so he could ask them specific questions about their wives and
could refer to their children by name. He had to be interested in them
and appear glad to see them again. Yet he dared not act too friendly;
after all, he was only a carny, almost a subhuman species in the eyes
of many straight types, and excessive familiarity was sure to be met
with cold rejection. Sometimes he had to be tough, as well,
diplomatically refusing to meet demands for more sugar than the
carnival was willing to pay. Being a patch was akin to performing a
high-wire act, without net, over a pit occupied by hungry bears and
lions.
As we drove through the Pennsylvania countryside on our mission of
genteel corruption, Jelly entertained Luke Bendingo and me with an
endless stream of jokes, limericks, puns, and hilarious anecdotes from
his years on the road. He told each joke with evident relish and
recited every limerick with sly style and gusto. I realized that, to
him, wordplay and clever rhymes and surprising punch lines were just
more toys, convenient playthings to occupy him when the other toys on
his office shelves were not within easy reach. Although he was an
effective general manager, overseeing a multimillion-dollar operation,
and a tough patch who could handle himself well in tricky situations,
he still determinedly indulged a part of himself that had never grown
up, a happy child still facing the world with wonderment from beneath
forty-five years of rude experience and untold pounds of fat.
I relaxed and tried to enjoy myself, and I did somewhat, but I could
not forget the vision of Jelly's blood-covered face, eyes open in a
sightless gaze, which I had seen yesterday. I had once saved my mother
from serious injury and perhaps death by convincing her of the
reliability of my psychic foresight and persuading her to change from
one airliner to another; now, if only I could foresee the exact nature
of the danger that Jelly faced, the day and hour when it would come, I
might be able to persuade him and save him, as well.
I told myself that more detailed visions would come to me in time, that
I would be able to protect any newfound friends.
Although I did not entirely believe what I told myself, I held fast to
enough hope to forestall a steep descent into total despair. I even
responded to Jelly's good humor with a few carny stories I had heard,
and he gave them more laughter than they deserved..From the moment we set out on our journey, Luke, a rangy man of forty
with hawklike features, spoke in one-word sentences; yeah and no and oh
and Jesus seemed to comprise his entire vocabulary. At first I thought
he was moody or downright unfriendly. But he laughed as much as I did,
and his manner was otherwise not cold or distant, and when he finally
tried to chime in with more than a one-word response, I discovered he
was a stutterer and that his reticence was a result of that affliction.
Occasionally, between jokes and limericks, Jelly told us something
about Lisle Kelsko, the chief of police in Yontsdown, with whom we
would conduct most of our business. He casually parceled out the
information as if it were not particularly important or interesting,
but gradually he painted a very nasty picture. According to Jelly,
Kelsko was an ignorant bastard. But he was not stupid. Kelsko was a
toad. But he was proud. Kelsko was a pathological liar, but he was
not a sucker for the lies of others, the way most liars were, for he
had not lost the ability to perceive the difference between truth and
falsehood. He simply had no respect for that difference. Kelsko was
vicious, sadistic, arrogant, stubborn, and by far the most difficult
man with whom Jelly had to deal in this or any of the other ten states
in which the Sombra Brothers outfit played.
"You expecting trouble?" I asked.
"Kelsko takes the sugar, never presses for too much," Jelly said, "but
sometimes he likes to give us a warning."
"What kind of warning?" I asked.
"Likes to have a few of his men pound on us a little."
"Are you . . . talking about a beating?" I asked uneasily.
"You absolutely got it, kid."
"How regular does this happen?"
"We been coming here nine years since Kelsko was made chief of police,
and it's happened six out of the nine."
Luke Bendingo took one big-knuckled hand from the steering wheel and
pointed to an inch-long white scar that curved down from the corner of
his right eye.
I said, "You got that in a fight with Kelsko's men?"
"Yeah," Luke said. "The rotten b-b-b-bastards."
"You say they're warning us?" I asked. "Warning us?
What kind of crap is that?"
Jelly said, "Kelsko wants us to understand that he takes our bribes but
that he can't be pushed around."
"So why doesn't he just tell us?"
Jelly scowled and shook his head. "Kid, this here is coal mining
country, even though they don't take much out of the ground any more,
and it always will be coal-mining country because the people who worked
the mines are still here, and those people never change. Never.
Damned if they do. Mining is a hard and dangerous life, and it breeds
hard and dangerous men, sullen and stubborn types. To go down in the
mines, you have to be either desperate, stupid, or so damned macho that
you got to prove you're meaner than the mines themselves. Even those
who never set foot in a mine shaft . . . well, they got their
tough-guy attitudes from their old men. People up in these hills
purely love a fight, just for the absolute fun of it. If Kelsko just
chewed us out, just gave us a verbal warning, then he'd miss out on his
fun."
It was probably my imagination, fed by fears of billy clubs and
weighted saps and rubber hoses, but as we rose into more mountainous
country, the day seemed to become less bright, less warm, less
promising than it had been when we started out. The trees seemed.considerably less beautiful than the pines and firs and spruces that I
so well remembered from Oregon, and the ramparts of these Eastern
mountains, geologically more ancient than the Siskiyous, gave an
impression of dark and graceless age, decadence, malevolence born of
weariness. I was aware that I was letting my emotions color what I
saw. This part of the world had a beauty unique unto it, as did
Oregon. I knew it was irrational to attribute human feelings and
intentions to a landscape, yet I could not shake the feeling that the
encroaching mountains were watching our passage and meant to swallow us
forever.
"But if Kelsko's men jump us," I said, "we can't fight back. Not
against cops. Not in a police station, for God's sake. We'll wind up
in jail on charges of assault and battery."
From the backseat, Jelly said, "Oh, it ain't going to happen in the
station house. Not anywhere around the courthouse, either, where we
got to go to fill the pockets of the county councilmen. Not even
within the city limits. Absolutely not. Absolutely guarantee it.
And. though it's always Kelsko's so-called lawmen, they won't be
wearing uniforms.
He sends them off duty, in street clothes. They wait for us as we're
coming out of town, block our way on a quiet stretch of road. Three
times they even run us off the pavement to make us stop."
"And fight?" I said.
"Yeah.
"And you fight back?"
"Damn right," Jelly said.
Luke said, "One year J-J-Jelly b-broke a g-g-guy's arm."
"I shouldn't've done it," Jelly said. "That was going too far, see.
Asking for trouble."
Turning in my seat and regarding the fat man from a new and more
respectful point of view, I said, "But if you're permitted to fight
back, if it's not just a police beating, then why don't you bring along
some of the really big carnies and crush the bastards? Why guys like
me and Luke?"
"Oh," Jelly said "they wouldn't like that. They want to beat on us a
little, and they want to take a few licks of their own because that
proves it was a real fight, see. They want to prove to themselves that
they're hardheaded, iron-assed, coal-country boys, just like their
daddies, but they don't actually want to risk getting the shit beat out
of them. If I come in here with somebody like Barney Quadlow or Deke
Feeny, the strongman in Tom Catshank's sideshow . . . why, Kelsko's
boys would back off fast, wouldn't fight at all."
"What's wrong with that? You don't like these fights?"
"Hell, no!" Jelly said, and Luke echoed that sentiment.
And Jelly said, "But, see, if they don't get their fight, if they don't
get to deliver Kelsko's warning, then they'll make trouble for us once
we get the midway set up."
"Once you endure the fight," I said, "then they let you go about your
business unhampered."
"You got it now."
"It's like . . . the fight is tribute you got to pay to get in."
"Sorta, yeah."
"It's crazy," I said.
"Absolutely."
"Juvenile."
"Like I told you, this here's coal country."
We rode in silence for a minute or two..I wondered if this was the danger that was bearing down on Jelly.
Maybe the fight would get out of hand this year. Maybe one of Kelsko's
men would be a closet psychopath who would not be able to control
himself once he started beating on Jelly, and maybe he would be so
strong that none of us could pull him off until it was too late.
I was scared.
I breathed deeply and attempted to reach into the stream of psychic
energies that always flowed over and through me, seeking confirmation
of my worst fears, seeking some indication, no matter how slight, that
Jelly Jordan's rendezvous with Death would be in Yontsdown. I could
sense nothing useful; maybe that was good. If this was where Jelly's
crisis would arise, then surely I would pick up at least a hint of it.
Surely.
Sighing, I said, "I guess I'm just the kind of bodyguard you need. Big
enough to keep myself from being hurt too bad . . . but not so big
that I come out of it unbloodied."
"They got to see some blood," Jelly agreed. "That's what satisfies
them."
"Jesus.
"I warned you yesterday," Jelly said.
"I know."
"I told you that you ought to hear what the job was."
"I know.
"But you were so grateful for work that you leaped before you looked.
Hell, you leaped before you even knew what you was leaping over, and
now halfway through the jump you look down and see a Tiger that wants
to reach up and bite off your balls!"
Luke Bendingo laughed.
"I guess I've learned a valuable lesson here," I said.
"Absolutely," Jelly said. "In fact, it's such a damned valuable
lesson, I'm half persuaded that giving you cash pay for this job is
just too deplorably generous of me."
The sky had begun to cloud over.
On both sides of the highway, pine-studded slopes shouldered closer.
Mixed among the pines were twisted oaks with gnarled black trunks, some
burdened with large, lumpy, cancerous mounds of ligneous fungus.
We passed a long abandoned mine head, set back a hundred yards from the
road, and a half-demolished tipple beside a weed-choked railroad spur,
both crusted with black grime, and then several houses, gray and
peeling, in need of paint.
Rusting hulks of automobiles, set up on concrete blocks, were so
prevalent that you might have thought they were a preferred lawn
decoration, like birdbaths and plaster flamingos in certain other
neighborhoods.
"What you ought to do next year," I said, "is bring Joel Tuck with you
and march him right in to Kelsko's office."
"Wouldn't that b-b-be s-something!" Luke said, and slapped the
dashboard with one hand.
I said, "You just have Joel stand there beside you, never saying
anything, mind you, never making any threats or unfriendly gestures,
even smiling, smiling real friendly, just fixing Kelsko with that third
eye, that blank orange eye, and I'll bet nobody would be waiting for
you when you left town.
"Well, of course, they wouldn't!" Jelly said. "They'd all be back at
the station house, cleaning the poop out of their pants." We laughed,
and some of the tension went out of us, but our spirits did not soar
all the way back to where they had been because, a few minutes later,.we crossed the city limits of Yontsdown.
In spite of its twentieth-century industry-the steel mill from which
gray smoke and white steam plumed up in the distance, the busy rail
yards-Yontsdown looked and felt medieval. Under a summer sky that was
swiftly plating over with iron-colored clouds, we drove on narrow
streets, a couple of which were actually cobblestoned. Even with the
empty mountains all around and much land available, the houses were
crowded together, each looming over the other, most half mummified with
-a funereal skin of grayish-yellow dust, at least a third of them in
need of paint or new roofs or new floorboards for their sagging front
porches. The shops, grocery stores, and offices all had an air of
bleakness, and there were few, if any, signs of prosperity. A black,
Depression-era iron bridge linked the shores of the muddy river that
split the town in two, and the Cadillac's tires sang a somber,
mournful, one-note tune as we drove across that metal-floored span.
The few tall buildings were no higher than six or eight stories, brick
and granite structures that contributed to the medieval atmosphere
because, to me at least, they resembled small-scale castles: blank
windows that seemed as defensively narrow as arrow loops; recessed
doorways with massive granite lintels of unnecessary size for the
modest weight they had to carry, doorways so guarded and unwelcoming in
appearance that I would not have been surprised to see the pointed tips
of a raised portcullis above one of them; here and there the flat roofs
had crenelated brows quite like a castle's battlements.
I did not like the place.
We passed a rambling, two-story brick building, one wing of which had
been gutted by fire. Portions of the slate roof had caved in, and most
of the windows had been blown out by the heat, and the brick-long ago
discolored by years of accumulated pollutants from the mill, mines, and
rail yards was marked by anthracite fans of soot above each of the
gaping windows. Restoration had begun, and construction workers were
on the site when we drove by.
"That there's the only elementary school in town," Jelly said from the
back seat. "Was a big explosion in the heating oil tank last April,
even though it was a warm day and the furnace was turned off. Don't
know if they ever did figure out what went wrong. Terrible thing. r
read about it in the papers. It was national news. Seven little kids
burned to death, horrible thing, but it would've been a whole lot worse
if there hadn't been a couple of heroes among the teachers. It's an
absolute miracle they didn't lose forty or fifty kids, even a hundred."
"J-J-J-Jesus, th-that's awful," Luke Bendingo said. "Little k-k-kids."
He shook his head. "S-sometimes it's a hard w-w-w-world.
"Ain't that the truth," Jelly said.
I turned to look back at the school after we had passed it. I was
getting very bad vibrations from that burned-out structure, and I had
the unshakable feeling that more tragedy lay in its future.
We stopped at a red traffic light, beside a coffee shop, in front of
which stood a newspaper vending machine. From the car I could read the
headline on the Yontsdown Register: BOTULISM KILLS FOUR AT CHURCH
PICNIC.
Jelly must have seen the headline, too, for he said, "This sorry,
damned town needs a carnival even more than usual.
We drove two more blocks, parked in the lot behind the municipal
building, near several black-and-white patrol cars, and got out of the
Cadillac. That four-story pile of sandstone and granite, which housed
both the city government and police headquarters, was the most medieval
building of them all. Iron bars shielded its narrow, deeply recessed.windows.
Its flat roof was encircled by a low wall that looked even more like a
castle's battlements than anything I had seen thus far, complete with
regularly spaced embrasures and squared-off merlons; the merions-which
were the high segments of the stone crenelations that alternated with
the open embrasures-boasted arrow loops and putlog holes, and they were
even topped with pointed stone finials.
The Yontsdown Municipal Building was not merely architecturally
forbidding; there was, as well, a feeling of malevolent life in the
structure. I had the disquieting notion that this agglomeration of
stone and mortar and steel had somehow acquired consciousness, that it
was watching us as we got out of the car, and that going inside would
be like blithely walking between the teeth and into the gaping mouth of
a dragon.
I did not know if this somber impression was psychic in nature or
whether my imagination was galloping away with me; sometimes it is not
easy to be sure which is the case.
Perhaps I was experiencing a seizure of paranoia. Perhaps I was seeing
danger, pain, and death where they did not really exist. I am subject
to spells of paranoia. I admit it. You would be paranoid, too, if you
could see the things that I see, the unhuman creatures that walk
disguised among us. . . .
"Slim?" Jelly said. "What's wrong?"
"Uh . nothing."
"You look kinda pasty."
"I'm okay."
"They won't jump us here."
"I'm not worried about that," I said.
"I told you . . . there ain't never any trouble in town."
"I know. I'm not afraid of the fight. Don't worry about me. I never
ran from a fight in my whole life, and I sure won't run from this one."
Frowning, Jelly said, "Didn't think you would."
"Let's go see Kelsko," I said.
We entered the building through the rear because, on a mission of
bribery, you do not walk in the front door, announce yourself to the
receptionist, and state your business.
Jelly went in first, and Luke was right behind him, and I went last,
holding the door and pausing a moment to look back at the yellow
Cadillac, which was by far the brightest object in that dreary
cityscape. In fact, it was too bright to suit me. I thought of
brilliantly colored butterflies that, because of their dazzling finery,
attract predatory birds and are devoured in a final flutter of
multitude wings; the Caddy suddenly seemed like a symbol of our
nayvetd, haplessness, and vulnerability.
The rear door opened on a service corridor, and to the right were
stairs leading up. Jelly started climbing, and we followed.
It was two minutes past noon, and we had an appointment with Chief
Lisle Kelsko for the lunch hour, though not for lunch itself, because
we were carnies, and most straight folks preferred not to break bread
with the likes of us. Especially straight folks whose pockets we were
surreptitiously lining with payoffs.
The jail and the police station itself were on the ground floor in this
wing, but Kelsko's office was a place apart. We went up six flights of
concrete steps, through a fire door, into the third-floor hall, all
without seeing anyone. The corridor was floored with dark green vinyl
tiles, buffed to a high polish, and the air smelled of a mildly
unpleasant disinfectant. Three doors down the hall from the rear.stairwell, we came to the private office of the chief of police. The
top half of the door was opaque glass with his name and title stenciled
in black letters, and it was standing open. We went inside.
My palms were damp.
My heart was drumming.
I did not know why.
Regardless of what Jelly said, I was wary of an ambush, but that was
not what frightened me now.
Something else. Something . . . elusive . . .
No lamp burned in the outer office, and there was only one barred
window by a watercooler. Since the once blue summer sky outside had
almost entirely surrendered to the advancing armada of dark clouds, and
since the slats of the venetian blinds were tipped halfway between the
vertical and the horizontal, the mealy light was barely sufficient to
reveal the metal filing cabinets, worktable bearing hot plate and
coffeepot, empty coatrack, enormous wall map of the county, and three
wooden chairs with their backs against one wall. The secretary's desk
was a shadowy hulk, neatly kept, currently untenanted.
Lisle Kelsko had probably sent his secretary off for an early lunch to
eliminate the possibility that she would overhear something.
The door to the inner office was- ajar. Beyond it were light and,
presumably, life. Unhesitantly Jelly moved across the unlighted room,
toward the inner door, and we followed.
Pressure was building in my chest.
My mouth was so dry that I felt as if I had been eating dust.
Jelly rapped lightly on the inner door.
A voice issued through the narrow opening: "Come in, come in." It was
a baritone voice, and even in those four short words it conveyed calm
authority and smug superiority.
Jelly went in, and Luke was right behind him, and I heard Jelly saying,
"Hello, hello, Chief Kelsko, what a pleasure to see you again," and
when I entered, last of all, I saw a surprisingly simple room-gray
walls, white venetian blinds utilitarian furniture, no photographs or
paintings on the walls: almost as drab as a cell-and then I saw Kelsko
behind a big metal desk, regarding us with undisguised contempt, and my
breath caught in my throat, for the identity of Kelsko was a sham, and
within that human form, beyond the human glaze, was the most
vicious-looking goblin I had ever seen.
Perhaps I should have suspected that in a place like Yontsdown the
authorities might be goblins. But the thought of people living under
the malevolent rule of such creatures was so terrible that I had
blocked it.
I will never know how I managed to conceal my shock, my disgust, and my
awareness of Kelsko's evil secret. As I stood there stupidly beside
Luke, hands fisted at my sides, immobilized but also made spring-tense
by fear, I felt as obvious as a cat with its back arched and its ears
flattened, and I was certain that Kelsko would see my repulsion and
immediately perceive the reason for it. But he did not. He hardly
glanced at either me or Luke, his attention fixed on Jelly.
Kelsko was in his early fifties, about five-nine, stocky, forty pounds
overweight. He wore a khaki uniform but carried no revolver. Under
brush-cut hair the shade of gunmetal, he had a square, hard,
rough-looking face. His bushy eyebrows met over eyes bracketed by
thick bone, and his mouth was a mean slash.
The goblin within Kelsko was no visual treat, either. I have never
seen one of the beasts that was less than hideous, although some are
slightly less hideous than others. Some have eyes not quite so fierce..Some have teeth less sharp than others. Some have faces a degree less
predatory than their miscreant brethren. (To me this slight variety in
the appearances of the goblins seemed to prove they were real and not
just phantoms of a diseased mind; for if I had been imagining them, if
they were only figments of a madman's primal fear, they would all look
alike. Would they not?) The demonic creature in Kelsko had red eyes
that not only burned with hatred but were the very molten essence of
hatred, more penetrating than those of any goblin I had encountered
prior to this. The beetle-green skin around its eyes was webbed with
cracks and thickened with what might have been scar tissue. The
obscene fleshiness of its quivering pig-snout was made even more
repellent by the addition of wattled skin around its nostrils, pale
wrinkled lobes that fluttered (and glistened wetly) when it drew or
expelled breath and that might have been the result of extreme age.
Indeed the psychic emanations pouring forth from this monster gave an
impression of incredibly ancient evil, an evil of such antiquity that
by comparison it made the pyramids seem modern; it was a poisonous stew
of malevolent emotions and wicked intentions, cooked at high heat for
ages, until any possibility of a charitable or innocent thought had
been boiled away long ago.
Jelly played the role of the ingratiating patch with enthusiasm and
enormous skill, and Lisle Kelsko pretended to be nothing more than a
hopelessly hard-nosed, hard-assed, narrowminded, amoral, authoritarian,
coal-country cop. Jelly was convincing, but the thing that
impersonated Kelsko deserved an Oscar. At times its performance was so
perfect that even to my eyes its human glaze became opaque, the goblin
fading until it was just an amorphous shadow within the human flesh,
forcing me to strain to bring it back into focus.
From my point of view, our situation became even more intolerable when,
a minute after we entered Kelsko's office, a uniformed officer came in
behind us and closed the door. He, too, was a goblin. This man-shell
was about thirty, tall, lean, with thick brown hair combed straight
back from a good-looking, Italian face. The goblin at the core was
frightening but noticeably less repulsive than the beast in Kelsko.
When the door closed behind us with a thump, I jumped.
From his chair, out of which he had not deigned to rise upon our entry
and from which he dispensed only steely-eyed glares and flat unfriendly
responses to Jelly's friendly patter, Chief Lisle Kelsko flicked a
glance at me. My expression must have been odd, for Luke Bendingo gave
me an odd one of his own, then winked to indicate everything was
copacetic.
When the young cop went to a corner and stood with his arms crossed on
his chest, where I could see him, I relaxed a bit, though not much.
I had never before been in a room with two goblins at the same time,
let alone two goblins posing as cops and one carrying a loaded side
arm. I wanted to lunge at them; I wanted to pound their hateful faces;
I wanted to run; I wanted to pull the knife from my boot and plant it
in Kelsko's throat; I wanted to scream; I wanted to puke; I wanted to
grab the young cop's revolver and blow his head off, pump a few shots
into Kelsko's chest as well. But all I could do was stand there beside
Luke, keep the fear out of my eyes and off my face, and strive to
appear intimidating.
The meeting lasted less than ten minutes and was not a fraction as bad
as Jelly had led me to believe it would be.
Kelsko did not taunt or humiliate or challenge us as much as I had been
told he would. He was not as demanding, sarcastic, rude, foulmouthed,
quarrelsome, or threatening as the Kelsko in Jelly's colorful stories..He was icy, yes, arrogant, yes, and filled with unconcealed loathing
for us. No doubt about that.
He was supercharged with violence, like a high-tension power line, and
if we cut through his insulation, either by insulting him or talking
back or giving the slightest indication that we thought ourselves
superior to him, he would deliver a megavolt assault that we would
never forget. But we remained docile and subservient and eager to
please, and he restrained himself. Jelly put the envelope of money on
the desk and passed along booklets of free tickets, all the while
telling jokes and inquiring after the chief's family, and in short
order we did what we had come to do, and we were dismissed.
We returned to the third-floor corridor, went to the rear stairs again,
climbed to the fourth floor, which was deserted now that the lunch hour
was well begun, and went from one dreary hall to another to another,
until we had reached the wing where the mayor had his office. As we
walked, our footsteps clicking on the dark vinyl tiles, Jelly looked
increasingly worried.
At one point, relieved to be out of the goblins' company and
remembering what Jelly had told me in the car, I said, "Well, that
wasn't so bad."
"Yeah. That's what worries me," Jelly said.
"Me t-t-too," Luke said.
I said, "What do you mean?"
"It was too damned easy," Jelly said. "Ain't never been a time since I
knew him that Kelsko was that cooperative.
Something's wrong."
"Like what?" I asked.
"I wish I knew," Jelly said.
"S-s-something's up."
"Something," Jelly agreed.
The mayor's office was not as plain as that of the chief of police.
The elegant desk was mahogany, and the other pieces of tasteful and
expensive furniture-in the English style of a first-rate men's club,
upholstered in hunter's-green leather-stood on plush gold carpeting.
The walls were festooned with civic awards and photographs of His Honor
involved in all manner of charitable activities.
Albert Spectorsky, elected occupant of the office, was a tall, florid
man, conservatively dressed in a blue suit and white shirt and blue
tie, with features formed by indulgence.
A fondness for rich food was visible in the moon-round shape of his
face and in the plentitude of chins below his ripe mouth. A taste for
fine whiskey was evident in the broken blood vessels that gave his
cheeks and bulbous nose a ruddy glow. And there was, in everything
about him, an undefinable but unmistakable air of promiscuity, sexual
perversion, and whore-chasing lust. What made him electable was a
marvelously warm laugh, an appealing manner, and an ability to
concentrate so intently and sympathetically on what you were saying
that he could make you feel as if you were the most important person in
the world, at least as far as he was concerned. He was a joke-teller,
a backslapper, a hail-fellow-well-met. And it was a sham. Because
what he really was, beneath it all, was a goblin.
Mayor Spectorsky did not ignore Luke and me, the way Kelsko had done.
He even offered us his hand.
I shook it.
I touched him, and somehow I maintained control of myself, which was
not easy, because touching him was worse than touching any of the four
goblins that I had killed over the past four months. Touching him was.the way I would imagine it would be if you came face-to-face with Satan
and were required to shake his hand; like an outpouring of bile, evil
surged from him, gushing into me at the point of contact made by our
clasped hands, contaminating me, sickening me; a lightning bolt of
unrelenting hatred and a fierce rage exploded from him as well, blasted
through me, and kicked my pulse rate to at least a hundred and fifty.
"Glad to see ya," he said, smiling broadly. "Glad to see ya. We
always look forward to the coming of the carnival!"
This goblin's performance was every bit the equal of Chief Lisle
Kelsko's superb portrayal of humankind, and like Kelsko, this one was
an especially repellent example of its species, snaggletoothed and
withered and wart-covered and pockmarked and nearly left postulant by
the passage of uncountable years. Its radiant crimson eyes seemed to
have taken their color from oceans of human blood that it alone had
caused to be spilled, and from uncharted depths of red-hot human agony
that it alone had inflicted upon our abused race.
Jelly and Luke felt a little better after our meeting with Mayor
Spectorsky because he was, they said, the same as always.
But I felt worse.
Jelly had been right when he had said that they were up to something.
A deep, thawless chill had reached into every part of me.
Ice hardened in my bones.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
God help us.
The Yontsdown County Courthouse was across the street from the city
municipal building. In the offices adjacent to the courtroom, various
county officials conducted their business.
In one of these suites of rooms, the president of the county council,
Mary Vanaletto, was waiting for us.
She was a goblin too.
Jelly treated her differently from the way he had treated Kelsko and
Spectorsky, not because he sensed that she was a goblin or anything
more-or less-than human, but because she was a woman, and attractive as
well. She appeared to be about forty, a slim brunette with big eyes
and a sensuous mouth, and when Jelly poured on the charm, she reacted
so well-blushing, flirting, giggling, eating up the compliments he paid
her-that he began to get sincere about it. He clearly thought he was
making one hell of an impression on her, but I could see that she was
putting on a performance far superior to his. Within the clever human
disguise the goblin-not nearly as ancient and decadent as Kelsko and
Spectorsky desired nothing more intensely than to kill Jelly, kill all
of us.
As far as I could tell, that was what every goblin wanted-the pleasure
of slaughtering human beings, one after the other, though not in an
unrelieved frenzy, not in one long blowbath; they wanted to parcel out
the slaughter, kill us one at a time so they could savor the blood and
misery. Mary Vanaletto had that same sadistic need, and as I watched
Jelly hold her hand and pat her shoulder and generally -make nice with
her, I required all my self-restraint to keep from tearing him away
from her and yelling, "Run!" There was something else about Mary
Vanaletto, a factor other than her true goblin nature, that made my
skin break out in gooseflesh. It was something I had never encountered
before and, even in my bleakest nightmares, had not imagined. Through
the transparent human glaze I saw not one goblin but four: a full-size
creature of the sort to which I was accustomed and three small beasts
with closed eyes and half formed features. The three seemed to exist.within the large goblin that was pretending to be Mary
Vanaletto-specifically, within its abdomen-and they were curled
motionlessly in recognizably fetal positions. This frightful,
gruesome, abominable monstrosity was pregnant.
It had never occurred to me that the goblins could breed.
The very fact of their existence was enough to deal with. The prospect
of generations of goblins yet unborn, destined to ride herd on us human
cattle, was unthinkable. Instead I thought of them as risen from Hell
or descended from another world, their numbers on earth limited to
whatever they had begun with; in my mind they were all most mysterious
and immaculate (though sinister) conceptions.
Not any more.
As Jelly teased and entertained Mary Vanaletto, as Luke grinningly
followed their witticisms from his perch on the chair beside mine, I
rebelled at the sickening mental image of a dog-mouthed goblin ramming
its vilely deformed penis into the cold and mutant vagina of a red-eyed
and pig-snouted bitch, both of them panting and slobbering and
grunting, wart-covered tongues lolling, their grotesque bodies
convulsed in ecstasy. But as soon as I managed to push that unbearable
image out of my mind, a worse picture came to me: newborn goblins,
small, the color of grubs, smooth and shiny and moist, mad red eyes
glimmering, with sharp little claws and pointed teeth not yet grown
into wicked fangs, three of them, slithering and pushing and squirming
out of their mother's stinking womb.
No.
Oh, Jesus, please, no, if I did not put such a thought out of my mind
at once, I would reach for the knife in my boot and destroy this
Yontsdown County councilwoman in full view of Jelly and Luke, -and then
none of us would leave this town alive.
Somehow I endured.
Somehow I got away from that office with my sanity intact and my knife
still in my boot.
On our way out of the county building, we passed through the
echo-filled foyer, with its marble floor and huge mullioned windows and
arched ceiling, off which the main courtroom opened. On impulse I
stepped to the massive, brass-handled oak doors, opened one of them a
crack, and peered inside.
The current case had reached the stage of concluding arguments, so they
had not yet recessed for lunch. The judge was a goblin. The
prosecuting attorney was a goblin. The two uniformed guards and the
court stenographer were fully human, but three members of the jury were
goblins.
Jelly said, "What're you doing, Slim?"
Further shaken by what I had seen in the courtroom, I let the door ease
shut, and I rejoined Jelly and Luke. "Nothing.
Just curious."
Outside, at the corner, we recrossed the street, and I studied the
other pedestrians and the drivers of the vehicles halted by the traffic
light. Out of about forty people- on that dingy thoroughfare, I saw
two goblins, which was twenty times the usual ratio.
We were finished making payoffs, so we headed past the municipal
building to the parking lot behind it. When we were twenty feet from
the yellow Cadillac, I said, ' "Just a minute. I got to take a look at
something." I turned and strode back the way we had come.
Jelly called after me. "Where you going?"
"Just a minute," I said, breaking into a run.
Heart hammering, lungs expanding and contracting with all the.flexibility of cast iron, I went past the side of the municipal
building, around to the front, up a set of granite steps, through glass
doors, into a lobby less grand than the one at the courthouse. Various
agencies of the city government had their public offices on the first
floor, and police headquarters was to the left. I pushed through a set
of walnut-framed, frosted-glass doors, into an antechamber encircled by
a wooden railing.
The on-duty desk sergeant worked on a platform two feet higher than the
rest of the floor. He was a goblin.
A ballpoint pen in one hand, he raised his eyes from a file on which he
had been working, looked down at me, and said, "Can I help you?"
Beyond him was a large open area that held a dozen desks, a score of
tall filing cabinets, a photocopier, and other office equipment. A
teletype chattered in one corner. Of the eight clerical workers, three
were goblins. Of the four men who worked apart from the clerks and
appeared to be plainclothes detectives, two were goblins. Three
uniformed officers were present at the moment, and all were goblins.
In Yontsdown the goblins not only walked among the ordinary citizens,
preying upon them at random. Here, the war between our species was
well organized-at least on the goblins' side. Here, the subversive
masqueraders made the laws and enforced them, and pity the poor bastard
who was guilty of even the slightest infraction.
"What was it you wanted?" the desk sergeant asked.
"Uh . . . I'm looking for the City Department of Health."
"Across the hall," he said impatiently.
"Yeah," I said, pretending befuddlement. "This must be the police
station."
"It's sure no ballet school," he said.
I left, conscious of his crimson eyes burning into my back, and I
returned to the yellow Cadillac, where Jelly Jordan and Luke Bendingo
were waiting, curious-and unaware.
"What're you up to?" Jelly asked.
"Wanted to have a closer look at the front entrance to this building
here."
"Why?"
"I'm a nut about architecture."
"Is that so?"
"Yeah.
"Since when?"
"Since I was a kid."
"You're still a kid."
"And you're not, but you're a nut about toys, which is a whole lot
stranger than being a nut about architecture."
He stared at me a moment, then smiled and shrugged.
"Guess you're right But toys are more fun."
As we got in the car I said, "Oh, I don't know. Architecture can be
fascinating. And this town's full of terrific examples of Gothic and
medieval style."
"Medieval?" Jelly said as Luke started the engine. "You mean like the
Dark Ages?"
"Yeah."' "Well, you're right about that. This burg is straight from
the Dark Ages, sure enough."
On our way out of town, we approached the burned-out elementary school
again, where seven children had died the past April. The first time we
had passed the building, I had received precognitive vibrations of more
tragedy to come.
Now, as I stared at the blasted windows and soot-smeared walls, and as.we drew relentlessly nearer, a wave of clairvoyant impressions flowed
off those fire-scorched bricks and swept toward me. To my sixth sense
it was a wave every bit as real as an onrushing wall of water, with a
weight and force to be reckoned with, a churning mass of possibilities
and probabilities and unthinkable tragedies. Such an extraordinary
amount of human suffering and anguish was associated with this
structure that it was not merely wrapped in an ominous aura but was
afloat in a sea of death-energy. The wave was coming with
freight-train speed and power, like one of those giant combers rushing
toward the beach in every film you have ever seen of Hawaii, but black
and ominous, unlike anything I had encountered before, and I was
suddenly terrified of it. There was a fine spray of psychic energy
flung out in advance of the wave itself, and as these invisible
droplets spattered across my receptive mind I "heard" children
screaming in pain and terror . . . fire roaring and hissing and making
a snick-snap-gabble-crackle sound like sadistic laughter . . .
alarm bells clanging a wall collapsing with a thunderous crash . . .
shouting . . . distant sirens. . . . I "saw" unspeakable horrors: an
apocalyptic conflagration . . . a teacher with her hair aflame.....
children stumbling blindly through smothering smoke..... other children
desperately and futilely taking refuge beneath schoolroom desks as
smoldering slabs of the ceiling slammed down on them. . . . Some of
what I was hearing and seeing was from the fire that had already been,
the April pyre, but some images were from a fire not yet lit, sights
and sounds of a nightmare that lay in the future, and in both cases I
perceived that the school's abrupt combustion was neither accidental
nor caused by human error nor attributable to machine failure, but was
the work of goblins. I was beginning to feel the children's pain, the
searing heat, and beginning to experience their terror. The psychic
wave bore down on me, towering higher . . . higher, growing darker, a
black tsunami so powerful that it surely would crush me, so cold that
it would leech all the warmth of life from my flesh. I closed my eyes
and refused to look at the half-ruined school as we drew nearer it, and
I tried desperately to build the mental equivalent of a lead shield
around my sixth sense, to shut out the unwanted clairvoyant radiations
that, instead of water, composed the oncoming destructive wave. To
turn my mind away from the school, I thought of my mother and sisters,
thought of Oregon, the Siskiyous . . . thought of Rya Raines's
exquisitely sculpted face and sun-spangled hair. Memories and
fantasies of Rya were what effectively armored me against the onslaught
of the psychic tsunami, which now hit me, battered me, and washed
through me without breaking me to pieces or carrying me away.
I waited half a minute, until I felt nothing paranormal whatsoever,
then opened my eyes. The school was behind us.
We were approaching the old iron bridge, which looked as if it were
constructed from fossilized black bones.
Because Jelly was in the backseat again, and because Luke was paying
strict attention to his driving (possibly fearing the slightest
infraction of the Yontsdown traffic laws would bring one of Kelsko's
men down on us with particular fury), neither of them noticed the
peculiar seizure that, for a minute, had rendered me as speechless and
helplessly rigid as any afflicted, unmedicated epileptic. I was
grateful that there was no need to make up an explanation, for I did
not trust myself to speak without betraying my turmoil.
I was overwhelmed with pity for the human inhabitants of this
godforsaken place. With one school fire already seared into the city's
history, with a much worse blaze to come, I was quite sure of what I.would discover if I went to the nearest firehouse: goblins. I thought
of the headline we had seen in the local paper-BOTULISM KILLS FOUR AT
CHURCH PICNic-and I knew what I would find if I paid a visit to the
priest at the rectory: a demonic beast in a backwards collar,
dispensing blessings and sympathy-just as it must have dispensed the
deadly bacterial toxins in the potato salad and baked-bean
casserole-while leering gleefully within its remarkable disguise. What
a crowd of goblins must have gathered in front of the elementary school
that day, the moment the alarm went off, to watch the erupting
catastrophe with counterfeit horror, ostentatiously grieving while
surreptitiously feeding on the human agony the way we would go to
McDonald's for lunch, each child's scream like a bite of a juicy Big
Mac, each radiant flash of pain like a crisp French fry.
Dressed as city officials, professing shock and a shattering sense of
loss, they would have lurked at the city morgue, hungrily observing the
fathers who reluctantly came to identify the grisly, charred remains of
their beloved offspring.
Posing as grief-stricken friends and neighbors, they would have gone to
the homes of bereaved parents, offering moral support and comfort, but
secretly sucking up the sweet psychic pudding of anguish and misery,
just as, months later, they were now hovering about the families of
those who had been poisoned at the church picnic. Regardless of the
respect and admiration-or lack of it-in which the deceased was held, no
funeral in Yontsdown would ever be lightly attended. There was a snake
pit full of goblins here, and they would slither off to feed wherever a
banquet of suffering was laid out for them. And if fate did not
produce enough victims to suit their taste, they would do a little
cooking of their own-torch a school, orchestrate a major traffic
accident, carefully plan a deadly industrial mishap at the steel mill
or down at the rail yards . . .
The most frightening aspect of what I had discovered in Yontsdown was
not merely the startling concentration of goblins, but their heretofore
unseen desire and ability to organize themselves and take control of
human institutions.
Until this moment I had seen the goblins as roving predators,
insinuating themselves throughout society, and more or less choosing
their victims at random and on the spur of the moment. But they had
plucked up the reins of power in Yontsdown and, with terrifying
purposefulness, had transformed the entire town and surrounding county
into a private game preserve.
And they were breeding here in the Pennsylvania mountains, in this
coal-country backwater where the rest of the world seldom cast a
glance.
Breeding.
Jesus.
I wondered how many other nests of these vampires existed in other dark
corners of the world. And vampires they were, in their own way, for I
sensed that they - drew their primary nourishment not from the blood
itself but from the radiant auras of pain, anguish, and fear that were
produced by human beings in desperate trouble. A meaningless
distinction. To cattle destined for the butcher's block, it does not
matter which portions of their anatomy are most esteemed at the dinner
table.
We drove out of town with considerably less conversation than had
marked our trip in. Jelly and Luke were dreading the ambush by
Kelsko's men, and I was still rendered speechless by all that I had
seen and by the bleak future of the children at Yontsdown Elementary.School.
We crossed the city limits.
We passed the stand of black, gnarled oaks burdened with strange
fungus.
No one stopped us.
No one tried to run us off the road.
"Soon," Jelly said.
One mile out of the city.
We passed the outlying houses that were in need of paint and new roofs,
where the rusting hulks of automobiles stood on concrete blocks in the
front yards.
Nothing.
Jelly and Luke grew more tense.
"He let us off too easy," Jelly said, meaning Kelsko.
"Somewhere in the next half mile . . -" A mile and a half out of the
city.
"He wanted to give us a false sense of security," Jelly said, "then hit
us like a ton of bricks. That's what he was up to. And now they'll
smash us. These coal-country boys got to have their fun."
Two miles.
"Wouldn't be like them to miss out on their fun. Any second they'll
come at us.........
Two and a half miles.
Now Jelly said that the trouble would come at the abandoned mine, where
the ruins of the railroad tipple and other structures poked jagged,
toothlike timbers and metal fragments at the lowering gray sky.
But those monuments to vanished industry appeared, and we passed them
by without incident.
Three miles.
Four.
Ten miles beyond the city limits Jelly finally sighed and relaxed.
"They're going to let us off this time."
"Why?" Luke asked suspiciously.
"it ain't exactly unprecedented. There've been a couple other years
they didn't pick a fight," Jelly said. "Never gave us a reason. This
year . . . well . . . maybe it's because of the school fire and the
tragedy at that church picnic yesterday.
Maybe even Lisle Kelsko's seen enough nastiness this year and doesn't
want to risk scaring us off. Like I said, seems like these poor damned
people need a carnival this year more than ever."
As we headed back across Pennsylvania, planning to stop along the way
for a late lunch, aiming to arrive at the Sombra Brothers Carnival by
early evening, Jelly and Luke's spirits began to rise, but mine did
not. I knew why Kelsko had spared us the usual brawl. It was because
he had something worse in mind for next week, when we were all set up
on the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds. The Ferris wheel. I did not know
exactly when it would happen, and I did not know exactly what they had
in mind, but I knew that the goblins would sabotage the Ferris wheel
and that my disquieting visions of blood on the midway would, like evil
buds, soon blossom into dark reality.
Contrasts
After a late lunch, after we got back on the highway for the last hour
and a half of the return trip, memories of Yontsdown were still
weighing heavily on me, and I could no longer tolerate the strain of
having to participate in the conversation and laugh at Jelly's jokes,.even though some of them were quite funny. To escape, I pretended to
nap, slumped in my seat, head lolling to one side.
Fevered thoughts buzzed through my mind. . . .
What are the goblins? Where do they come from?
Is each goblin a puppet master, a parasite, seeding itself deep in
human flesh, then taking control of its host's mind, operating the
stolen body as if the corpus were its own? Or are the bodies merely
imitation humans, vat-grown costumes that they don as easily as we slip
into a new suit?
Countless times over the years I had considered these questions and a
thousand others. The problem was that there were too damned many
answers, any of which might have been true, but none of which I could
scientifically verify-or with which I could even feel comfortable.
I had seen my share of flying-saucer movies, so I was not without a
pool of fanciful ideas in which to dip my bucket.
And after seeing my first goblin, I had become an avid science-fiction
reader, hoping that some novelist had already conceived of this
situation and had come up with an explanation that would serve as well
for me as it did for his fictional characters. From those often
flamboyant tales, I acquired many theories for consideration: The
goblins might be aliens from a distant world who crashed here by
accident, or landed with the intention of conquering us, or came to
test our suitability for full partnership in the galactic government,
or wanted only to steal all of our uranium for use in their hyperdrive
spaceship engines, or simply wanted to package us in plastic tubes to
provide tasty snacks during extended and boring journeys along the
spiral arms of the galaxy. I considered those possibilities and more,
did not reject anything, no matter how crazy-or silly-it seemed, but
remained dubious of every explanation those science-fiction novels had
for me.
For one thing, I had difficulty believing that a race capable of
cruising across the light-years would -come that momentous distance
merely to crash their ship while trying to put it down; their machines
would be flawless; their computers would make no mistakes. And if such
an advanced race wanted to conquer us, the war would be over in a
single afternoon. so, while those books provided hundreds of hours of
wonderful entertainment, they gave me no raft to which I could cling
during the bad times, no understanding of the goblins, and certainly no
hint as to what I should do about them and how I might defeat them.
The other obvious theory was that they were demons that had climbed
straight up from Hell with a Satan-given ability to cloud men's minds,
so we saw only other men when we looked at them. I believed in God (or
told myself that I did), and my relationship with Him was at times so
strongly adversarial (on my part, anyway) that I had no difficulty
believing He would permit the existence of a place as foul as Hell. My
folks were Lutherans. They had taken me and Sarah and Jenny to church
nearly every Sunday, and sometimes I had wanted to stand up on my pew
and rail at the minister: "If God is good, then why does He let people
die? Why did he give cancer to that nice Mrs. Hurley down the road
from us? If He's so good, then why did He let the Thompsons' boy die
over there in Korea?" Although the faith rubbed off on me a little
bit, it did not interfere with my ability to reason, and I was never
able to come to terms with the contradiction between the doctrine of
God's infinite mercy and the cruelty of the cosmos that He had created
for us. Therefore Hell and eternal damnation and demons were not
merely conceivable; they seemed almost an essential bit of design in a
universe built by a divine architect as seemingly perverse as He who.had drawn up the plans for ours.
Yet believing in Hell and demons, I still could not believe that the
goblins could be explained by the application of that mythology. If
they had risen from Hell, there would have been something . . . well,
something cosmic about them-an awesome sense of deific forces at work,
of ultimate knowledge and purpose in their manner and activity, but I
felt none of that in the meager psychic static that radiated from them.
Furthermore Lucifer's lieutenants would possess unlimited power, but
these goblins were actually in many ways less powerful than I, with
none of my extraordinary gifts or insights. For demons they were too
easily dispatched. No ax or knife or gun would bring down one of
Satan's henchmen.
If they had looked more like dogs and less like pigs, I would have been
half convinced that they were werewolves, in spite of the fact that
they prowled all the time rather than only when the moon was full.
Like the fabled werewolf, they seemed to be shape-changers, imitating
human form with uncanny skill but capable of reverting to their true
hideous appearance if that was required, as in the Dodgem Car pavilion.
And if they had fed on blood in a literal sense, I would have settled
for the vampire legend, would have changed my name to Dr. van Helsing,
and would have (long ago and happily) begun to sharpen a virtual forest
of wooden stakes.
But neither of those explanations seemed to fit, although I was sure
that other psychics had seen these goblins hundreds of years ago and
that from those sightings had sprung the first tales of human
metamorphosis into bat-form and lupine horror. Indeed Viad the
Impaler, the real-life Transylvanian monarch whose bloodthirsty
interest in imaginative mass executions had inspired the fictional
character of Dracula, had very likely been a goblin; after all, Viad
was a man who seemed to revel in human suffering, which is the basic
trait of all goblins that it has been my misfortune to observe.
So, that afternoon in the yellow Cadillac, on the way back from
Yontsdown, I asked myself the familiar questions and stretched my mind
to find and encompass some understanding, but I remained utterly
unenlightened. I could have saved myself all that effort if I could
have looked into the future only several days ahead, for I was that
close to learning the truth about the goblins. I was not aware that
revelations impended, but I would learn the truth on the next to the
last night of the carnival's engagement in Yontsdown. And when, at
last, I discovered the origins and motivations of the hateful goblins,
it would make perfect sense-immediate and terrible sense-and I would
wish, with a fervor equal to Adam's when the garden gate closed behind
him, that I had never acquired such knowledge. But now I feigned
sleep, mouth open, letting my body move loosely with the surge and sway
of the Cadillac, and I strained toward understanding, longed for
explanations.
We returned to the Sombra Brothers Carnival at five-thirty Friday
afternoon. The midway, still bathed in summer sun but with all its
lights ablaze as well, was crowded with marks. I went directly to the
high-striker, took over from Marco, who had been filling in for me, and
set to work relieving the passersby of the coins and folding money that
burdened their pockets.
Throughout the long evening not a single goblin appeared on the
concourse, but that did not cheer me. There would be plenty of goblins
on the midway in Yontsdown, next week; the lot would be crawling with
them, especially around the Ferris wheel, where their faces would be
greasy-bright with sadistic anticipation..Marco returned to take my place at eight o'clock, giving me an hour for
dinner. Not particularly hungry, I wandered around the concourse
instead of heading for a grab-stand, and in a few minutes I was
standing in front of Shockville, the ten-in-one owned by Joel Tuck.
A luridly illustrated banner stretched all the way across the front of
the attraction: HUMAN ODDITIES FROM EVERY CORNER OF THE WORLD. The
bold and colorful depictions of Jack-FourHands (an Indian with an extra
pair of arms), Lila the Tattooed Lady, 750-pound Gloria Neames ("the
fattest woman in the world"), and other genuine and self-made freaks
were unmistakably the work of David C. "Snap" Wyatt, the last of the
great circus and carnival artists, whose banners decorated the tents of
every sideshow operator who could afford them. Judging from the human
oddities promised within this ten-in-one, Joel Tuck could not only
afford Wyatt but had assembled a lineup to which only Wyatt's bizarre
talents could have done justice.
As twilight approached, a large tip had gathered in front of
Shockville, gawking up at Mr. Wyatt's imaginatively monstrous images,
listening to the pitchman's ballyhoo. Although they showed some
reluctance and occasionally spoke of the indignity of putting poor
cripples on display, most of the guys clearly wanted to go into the
tent. Some of the women were squeamish and wanted to be teased and
prodded into such a daring expedition, but most of them, men and women,
were gradually moving toward the ticket booth.
Something pulled me too.
Not the morbid curiosity that gripped the marks.
Something . . . darker. Something within the tent wanted me to come
see it . . . something that, I sensed, I must know about if I were to
survive the next week and make the Sombra Brothers Carnival my home.
Like a bat sucking blood, a chilly premonition lay on the back of my
neck, drawing all the warmth out of me.
Although I could have been admitted free, I bought a ticket for two
bucks, a steep price in those days, and I went inside.
The tent was partitioned into four long chambers, with a roped-off
walkway that serpentined through all the rooms. In each chamber were
three stalls, in each stall a platform, on each platform a chair, and
on each chair a human oddity. Joel Tuck's ten-in-one was a rare argain
for the marks-two extra attractions to gawk at, two additional reasons
to doubt the benign intentions of God. Behind each freak, extending
the length of the stall, a large and colorfully illustrated sign
outlined the history and explained the medical nature of the deformity
that made each living exhibit worthy of a featured spot in Shockville.
The contrast between the marks' behavior outside and in here was
startling. On the concourse they had seemed morally opposed to the
concept of a freak show, or at least mildly repulsed, even while being
irresistibly drawn by curiosity.
But in the tent those civilized attitudes were not in evidence.
Perhaps they had not been convictions but merely hollow platitudes,
disguises beneath which true, savage human nature hid itself. Now they
pointed and laughed and gasped at the twisted people they had paid to
see, as if those upon the platforms were not only deformed but deaf, or
too simple-minded to understand the abuse directed at them. Some marks
made tasteless jokes; even the best of them were only decent enough to
remain silent, none decent enough to tell their crude companions to
shut up. To me the "exhibits" in the ten-in-one demanded the same
reverence as one might bring to the paintings of old masters in a
museum, for they surely illuminate the meaning of life as well as the
work of Rembrandt or Matisse or van Gogh. Like great art, these freaks.can touch the heart, remind us of our primal fears, induce in us a
humble appreciation for our own condition and existence, and embody the
rage we usually feel when we are forced to consider the cold
indifference of this imperfect universe. I saw none of those
perceptions in the marks, though I might have been too hard on them.
Nevertheless, before I had been in the tent more than two minutes, it
seemed as if the real freaks were those who had paid to take this
macabre tour.
Anyway, they got their money's worth. In the first stall
Jack-Four-Hands was sitting, shirtless, revealing an extra pair of
arms-stunted and withered but functional-growing out of his sides, just
a couple of inches below and slightly behind a pair of ordinary,
healthy arms. The lower appendages were somewhat deformed and
obviously weak, but he was clasping a newspaper with them, while he
used his regular hands to hold a cold drink and eat peanuts. In the
next stall was Lila the Tattooed Lady, a self-made freak. After Lila
came Flippo the Seal Boy, Mr. Six (six toes on each foot, six fingers
on each hand), the Alligator Man, Roberta the Rubber Woman, an albino
simply called Ghost, and others presented for the "education and
amazement of those who possess an inquiring mind and a healthy
curiosity about the mysteries of life," as the pitchman outside had put
it.
I moved slowly from stall to stall, one of the silent ones.
At each exhibit I paused just long enough to determine whether or not
this was the source of the psychic magnetism that I had felt pulling at
me when I had been out on the concourse.
I still felt it tugging. . . .
I went deeper into Shockville.
The next human oddity was more well received by the marks than any
other: Miss Gloria Neames, the 750-pound woman, who was supposed to be
the fattest fat lady on earth.
It was a claim I would not have considered disputing, neither the part
about her size nor the part about her being a lady, for as gargantuan
as she was, I nevertheless sensed in her a demure manner and
sensitivity that were very appealing. She was seated on a specially
built, sturdy chair. Getting up must have been difficult for her, and
walking must have been nearly impossible without assistance; even
breathing was an ordeal, judging by the sound of her.
She was a mountain of a woman in a red muumuu, with an enormous belly
rolling up to an overhanging shelf of bosoms so immense that they
ceased to have any recognizable anatomical purpose. Her arms looked
unreal, like half-comic and half-heroic sculptures of arms rendered
from mounds of mottled lard, and her multiple chins drooped so far down
her neck that they almost touched her breastbone. Her moon-round face
was startling, serene like the face of a Buddha, but also unexpectedly
beautiful; within that bloated countenance, like an image superimposed
on another photograph, was the arresting and moving promise of the thin
and gorgeous Gloria Neames that might have been.
Some of the marks liked Gloria because she gave them an opportunity to
tease their girlfriends and wives-"You ever get that fat, baby, you
better look for a freak-show job of your own, 'cause you sure aren't
staying with me!"-pretending to be joking but getting across an earnest
message. And the wives and girlfriends, especially those at whom the
message was aimed, those who were a little overweight themselves, liked
Gloria because in her presence they felt positively svelte and stylish
by comparison. Hell, beside her, Jelly would have looked like one of
those starving Asian children in a magazine ad for CARE. And nearly.everyone liked the fact that Gloria talked to them, which many of the
freaks did not. She answered their questions and gracefully turned
aside impertinent and too personal inquiries without embarrassing
either herself or the jackasses who asked.
Standing at the fat lady's stall, I had the psychic impression that she
would play an important role in my life, but I knew it was not Gloria
who had drawn me into Shockville. That ominous and irresistible
magnetism continued to tug at me, and I drifted toward the source,
deeper into the sideshow tent.
The last stall, the twelfth, was occupied by Joel Tuck, he of the
cabbage ears, he of the steam-shovel mouth and bile-yellow teeth, he of
the Frankensteinian brow, he of the third eye, giant and freak and
businessman and philosopher. He was reading a book, oblivious of his
surroundings-and of me-but positioned so the marks could look up into
his face and see every grim detail.
This was what had drawn me. At first I thought the adducent power that
I felt was originating in Joel Tuck himself, and perhaps a measure of
it was, but not all of it; part of the magnetism came from the place,
from the earthen floor of the stall. Beyond the rope and stanchions
that delineated the limits of the public area, there was an open space,
about six feet wide, between that line of demarcation and the edge of
the wooden platform on which Joel Tuck sat. My eyes were drawn to that
dusty, sawdust-covered patch of ground, and as I stared at it a dark
heat rose from the earth, a disturbing warmth totally separate from the
cloying August heat that stuck to every square foot of the midway; this
was a heat that only I could have felt. It had no smell, yet it was
like the odorous steam rising off a bed of manure on the farm. It made
me think of death, of the heat that is the product of decomposition and
rises from a rotting body. I could not grasp what it signified, though
I wondered if what I sensed was that this spot would become a secret
grave, perhaps even my own. And, indeed, as I dwelt on that shuddery
possibility, I became increasingly certain that I stood at the brink of
a grave that would be opened in the near future and that some bloody
corpse would be stashed there in the deepest hours of the night, and
that "Why, if it isn't Carl Slim," Joel said, finally noticing me.
"Oh, no, wait, sorry. Just Slim, wasn't it? Slim MacKenzie." He was
poking fun at me, and I smiled, and the occult emanations rising from
the ground faded quickly: dim, dimmer, gone.
The river of marks had ceased to flow for a moment, and I was
temporarily alone with Joel. I said, "How's business?"
"Good. It's almost always good," he said in that mellow rich timbre,
like the announcer on an FM station that played only classical music.
"And what of you? Are you getting what you wanted from the carnival?"
"A place to sleep, three square meals a day, better than just pocket
money-yeah, I'm doing all right."
"Anonymity?" he asked.
"That, too, I guess."
"Sanctuary?"
"So far."
As before, I sensed in this strange man a fatherliness, an ability and
willingness to provide comfort, friendship, guidance. But I also
sensed, as I had before, danger in him, an indefinable threat, and I
could not understand how he could encompass both potentials in regard
to me. He might be mentor or enemy, one or the other but surely not
both, yet I felt those conflicting possibilities in him, so I did not
open myself to him as I might otherwise have done.
"What do you think of the girl?" he asked from his seat upon the.platform.
"What girl?"
"Is there any other?"
"You mean . . . Rya Raines?"
"Do you like her?"
"Sure. She's all right.
"Is that all?"
"What else?"
"Ask nearly any other man on this midway what he thinks of Miss Rya
Raines, and he'll rhapsodize for half an hour about her face and
body-and gripe for another half hour about her personality, and then
he'll rhapsodize some more, but he'll never just say, 'She's all right'
and be done with it."
"She's nice."
"You're infatuated," he said, his bony jaws working laboriously, his
yellow teeth clacking together when he stressed the harder consonants.
"Oh . . . no. No. Not me," I said.
"Bullshit."
I shrugged.
His orange eye fixing me with a blind yet penetrating stare, his other
two eyes rolling with mock impatience, he said, "Oh, come, come, of
course you-are. Infatuated. Maybe worse. Maybe falling in love.
"Well, really, she's older than me," I said uncomfortably.
"Only a few years."
"But still older."
"And in terms of experience and wit and intelligence, you're older than
your years, at least as old as she is. Stop fencing with me, Slim
MacKenzie. You're infatuated. Admit it."
"Well, she's very beautiful."
"And beneath?"
"Huh?"
"Beneath?" he repeated.
"Are you asking if her beauty is more than skin deep?"
"Is it?" he asked.
Surprised at how successfully he was drawing me out, I said, "Well, she
likes you to think she's hard-bitten . . . but inside . . . well, I
see some qualities every bit as attractive as her face."
He nodded. "I would agree."
Farther back in the tent, a group of laughing marks approached.
Talking faster, leaning forward in his chair to take advantage of our
last moments of privacy, Joel said, "But you know . . . there's
sadness in her too." I thought of the bleak mood in which I had left
her last night, the clutching loneliness and despair that seemed to be
dragging her down into some dark, private pit. "Yes, I'm aware of it.
I don't know where it comes from, that sadness, or what it means, but I
am aware of it."
"Here's something to think about," he said, then hesitated.
"What?"
He peered at me with such intensity that I could almost believe he was
reading my soul with some psychic power of his own. Then he sighed and
said, "Such a stunningly beautiful surface she has, and beauty
underneath, as well, we're agreed on that . . . but is it possible
that there is another underneath' below the 'underneath' that you can
see?"
I shook my head. "I don't think she's a deceiving person."
"Oh, we all are, my young friend! We all deceive. Some of us deceive
the whole world, every single fellow creature we meet. Some of us.deceive only selected people, wives and lovers, or mothers and fathers.
And some of us deceive only ourselves. But none of us is totally
honest with everyone all the time, in all matters. Hell, the need to
deceive is just one more curse that our sorry species has to bear."
"What are you trying to tell me about her?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said, his tension suddenly flowing away.
He leaned back in his chair. "Nothing."
"Why are you being so cryptic?"
, The?" I "Cryptic.
"I wouldn't know how," he said, his mutant face bearing the most
enigmatic expression I had ever seen on anyone.
The marks reached the twelfth stall, two couples in their early
twenties, the girls with heavily lacquered bouffant hair and too much
makeup, the guys in checkered slacks and clashing shirts, a quartet of
country sophisticates. One of the girls, the porky one, squealed in
fright when she saw Joel Tuck. The other girl squealed because her
friend had done it, and the men put protective arms around their women,
as if there were a real danger that Joel Tuck would bound off his small
stage with either rape or cannibalism in mind.
While the marks made their comments, Joel Tuck lifted his book and
returned to his reading, ignoring them when they asked questions of
him, retreating into a dignity so solid that it was almost tangible.
In fact, it was a dignity that even the marks could sense and that, in
time, intimidated them into respectful silence.
More marks arrived, and I stood there for a moment longer, watching
Joel, breathing in the odors of sun-heated canvas and sawdust and dust.
Then I let my gaze slide to that patch of sawdust-covered earth between
the rope and the platform, and again I received images of decomposition
and death, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not figure out
exactly what these dark vibrations meant. Except . . . I still had
the disquieting feeling this dirt would be turned with a spade to make
a grave for me.
I knew I would come back. When the midway was closed down. When the
freaks were gone. When the tent was deserted. I would sneak back to
stare at this portentous plot of dirt, to place my hands against the
ground, to attempt to wrench a more explicit warning from the psychic
energy that was concentrated here. I had to armor myself against the
oncoming danger, and I could not do that until I knew precisely what
the danger was.
When I left the ten-in-one and returned to the concourse, the twilight
sky was the same color as my eyes.
Because it was the next to the last night of the engagement, and a
Friday, the marks lingered longer, and the midway closed up later than
the night before. It was almost one-thirty by the time I had locked
away the teddy bears at the high-striker and, laden with coins that
jingled with every step I took, went down to the meadow, to Rya's
trailer.
Thin, wispy clouds were backlit by the moon, which painted their lacy
edges purest silver. They filigreed the night sky.
Having dealt with her other cashiers already, she was waiting for me,
dressed much as she had been the night before: pale green shorts, white
T-shirt, no jewelry, no need of jewelry, more radiant in her unadorned
beauty than she could have been in any number of diamond necklaces.
She was in an uncommunicative mood, speaking only when spoken to, then
responding in monosyllables. She took the money, put it away in a
closet, and gave me half a day's wages, which I tucked into a pocket of
my jeans..As she performed these chores I watched her intently, not merely
because she was lovely but because I had not forgotten last night's
vision, just outside the trailer, when an apparitional Rya, smeared
with blood and bleeding from one corner of her mouth, had shimmered
into existence before my eyes and had softly pleaded with me not to let
her die. I hoped that, in the presence of the real Rya once more, I'd
find my clairvoyance stimulated, that new and more detailed
premonitions would come to me, so I could warn her about a specific
danger. But all that I got from being close to her again was a renewed
sense of the deep sadness in her-and sexually aroused.
Once paid, I had no excuse to hang around. I said good night and went
to the door.
"Tomorrow will be a busy day," she said before I took that first step
out.
I looked back at her. "Saturdays always are."
"And tomorrow night is slough night-we tear it all down.
And Sunday we would set up in Yontsdown, but I did not want to think
about that.
She said, "There's always so much to do on Saturdays that I have
trouble sleeping Friday nights."
I suspected that, like me, she had trouble sleeping most nights and
that, when she did sleep, she often awoke unrested.
Awkwardly, I said, "I know what you mean."
"Walking helps," she said. "Sometimes, on Friday nights, I go out on
the dark midway and walk around and around the promenade, working off
excess energy, letting the stillness sort of . . . flow into me. It's
peaceful when it's shuttered, when the marks are gone and the lights
are out. Even better . . . when we're playing at a place like this,
where the fairgrounds are in open country, I walk the nearby fields or
even the woods if there's a road through them or a good trail-and if
there's a moon."
Except for her stern lecture about operating the high-striker, this was
the longest speech I had heard her make, and it was the closest she had
come to trying to establish rapport with me, but her voice remained as
impersonal and businesslike as it was during working hours. In fact,
it was even cooler than before because it was without the effervescent
excitement of the entrepreneur engaged in hustling a buck. h was a
flat voice now, indifferent, as if all purpose and meaning and interest
fled her with the closing of the midway and did not return until the
next day's show call. Indeed it was such a flat voice, so drab and
weary, that without the special insight of my sixth sense I might have
been unaware that she was actually reaching out to me, in need of human
contact. I knew that she was trying to be casual, even friendly, but
that did not come easy to her.
"There's a moon tonight," I said.
"Yes."
"And fields nearby."
"Yes."
"And woods."
She looked down at her bare feet.
"I was planning on taking a walk myself," I said.
Without meeting my eyes she went to the armchair, in front of which she
had left a pair of tennis shoes. She slipped into them and came to me.
We walked. We wound through the temporary streets of the trailer town,
then into open meadow where the wild grass was black and silver in the
night-shadows and moonbeams. It was also knee-high and must have
tickled her bare legs, but she did not complain. We walked in silence.for a while, at first because we were too awkward with each other to
settle into comfortable conversation, then because conversation began
to seem unimportant.
At the edge of the meadow, we turned northwest, following the line of
trees, and a welcome breeze rose at our backs. The towering ramparts
of the post-midnight forest rose with castellated forrnidability, as if
they were not serried ranks of pines and maples and birches but,
instead, solid black barriers that couldn't be breached, only scaled.
Eventually, half a mile behind the midway, we came to a place where a
single-lane dirt road split the woods, leading upward into night and
strangeness.
Without a word to each other we turned onto the road and kept walking,
and we went perhaps another two hundred yards before she finally spoke.
"Do you dream?"
"Sometimes," I said.
"About what?"
"Goblins," I said truthfully, although I would begin to lie if she
pressed me for elucidation.
"Nightmares," she said.
"Yes."
"Are your dreams usually nightmares?"
"Yes." Although those Pennsylvania mountains lacked the vastness and
the sense of a primordial age that made the Siskiyous so impressive,
there was nonetheless a humbling silence of the sort to be found only
in the wilderness, a hush more reverent than that in a cathedral, which
encouraged us to speak softly, almost in whispers, though there was no
one to overhear.
"Mine too," she said. "Nightmares. Not just usually.
Always."
"Goblins?" I asked.
. 'No."
She said no more, and I knew she would tell me more only when she chose
to.
We walked. The forest crowded close on both sides. In the moonlight
the dirt road had a gray phosphorescence that made it look like a bed
of ash, as if God's chariot had raced through the woods, wheels burning
with divine fire, leaving a trail of total combustion.
In a while she said, "Graveyards."
"In your dreams?"
She spoke as softly as the breeze. "Yes. Not always the same
graveyard. Sometimes it's on a flat field, stretching to every
horizon, one headstone after the other, all of them exactly alike."
Her voice became softer still. "And sometimes it's a snowy cemetery on
a hill, with leafless trees that have lots of black and spiky branches,
and with tombstones terracing down and down, all different kinds of
them, marble obelisks and low granite slabs, statues that've been
tilted and worn by too many winters . . . and I keep walking toward
the bottom of the cemetery, the bottom of the hill . . . toward the
road that leads out . . . and I'm sure there's a road down there
somewhere . . . but I just can't find it." Her tone was not only soft
now but so bleak that I felt a cold line drawn along my spine, as if
her voice were an icy blade impressed upon my skin. "At first I move
slowly between monuments, afraid of slipping and falling in the snow,
but when I go down several levels and still don't see the road below .
. . I start moving faster . . . and faster . . . and pretty soon I'm
running, stumbling, falling, getting up, running on, dodging between
the stones, plunging down the hillside . . . " A pause..A breath. Shallow. Expelled with a faint sigh of dread and with a few
more words: "Then you know what I find?"
I thought I did. As we reached the crest of a low hill and kept
walking, I said, "You see a name on one of the tombstones, and it's
yours."
She shuddered. "One of them is mine. I sense it in every dream. But
I never find it, no. I almost wish I would. I think . . . if I found
it . . . found my own grave . . . then I would stop dreaming about
these things.........
Because you would not wake up, I thought. You would be dead for real.
That was what they said happened if you did not wake up before you died
in a dream. Die in a dream-and never wake up again.
She said, "What I find when I go down the hillside far enough is . .
the road I'm looking for . . . except it isn't a road any more.
They've buried people and erected headstones right in the asphalt, as
if they had so many to plant that they ran out of room in the graveyard
and had to put them wherever there was space. Hundreds of stones, four
across, row after row, all the way along the road. So . . . you see .
. . the road isn't a way out any more. It's just another part of the
cemetery now. And below it the dead trees and more monuments just keep
shelving down and down, as far as I can see.
And the worst thing is . . . somehow, I know that all these people are
dead . . . because .
"Because what'?"
"Because of me," she said miserably. "Because I killed them."
"You sound as if you actually feel guilty," I said.
"I do."
"But it's only a dream."
"When I wake up . . . it lingers . . . too real for a dream.
It has more meaning than just a dream. It's . . . an omen, maybe.
"But you're not a killer."
"No."
"Then what could it mean?"
"I don't know," she said.
"Just dreamstuff, nonsense," I insisted.
"No."
"Then tell me how it makes sense. Tell me what it means.
"I can't," she said.
But as she spoke, I had the disturbing impression that she knew
precisely what the dream meant and that she had now begun to lie to me
just as I would have lied if she had pressed for too many details about
the goblins of my own nightmares.
We had followed the dirt road up and then down a gentle hill, along a
quarter-of-a-mile curve, through a burst of oaks where there was less
moonlight, perhaps a distance of one mile altogether. Finally we came
to the road's end on the shore of a small lake surrounded by forest.
The gently sloping bank that led into the water was covered with lush,
soft grass. The lake looked like an enormous pool of oil and would
have looked like nothing whatsoever if the moon and scattered
frost-white stars had not been reflected in its surface, thereby
vaguely illuminating a few eddies and ripples. The breeze-ruffled
grass, like that in the meadow behind the trailer town, was black with
a thin silver edge to each tender blade.
She sat down on the grass, and I beside her.
She seemed to want silence again.
I obliged.
Sitting beneath the vault of night, listening to far crickets and the.quiet splash of fish taking insects off the surface of the water,
conversation was again quite unnecessary. It was enough for me to be
at her side, separated from her by less than the length of an arm.
I was struck by the contrast between this place and those in which I
had spent the rest of this day. First Yontsdown, with its smokestacks
and medieval buildings and omnipresent sense of impending doom, then
the midway with its gaudy pleasures and swarms of marks. It was a
relief, now, to pass a little time in a place where there was no proof
of man's existence other than the dirt road leading in, which we kept
at our backs and which I tried to put out of mind. Gregarious by
nature, there nevertheless were occasions when I became as weary of the
company of other human beings as I was repelled and disgusted by the
goblins. And sometimes, when I saw men and women being as cruel to one
another as the marks had been in Joel Tuck's sideshow tent that very
day, it seemed to me that we deserved the goblins, that we were a
tragically flawed race incapable of adequately appreciating the miracle
of our existence and that we had earned the vicious attentions of the
goblins by our own despicable actions against one another. After all,
many of the gods we worshiped were, to one degree or another,
judgmental and demanding and capable of heart-stopping cruelty. Who
could say that they might not visit a plague of goblins on us and call
it just punishment for sins indulged? Here, in the tranquillity of the
forest, however, a cleansing energy washed through me, and gradually I
began to feel better, in spite of all the talk of graveyards and
nightmares with which we had occupied ourselves.
Then, after a while, I became aware that Rya was weeping.
She made no sound, and her body was not racked with silent sobs. I was
alerted to her condition only when I began to receive a psychic
impression of that terrible sadness, welling up anew in her. Looking
sidewise, I saw a glistening tear tracking down her smooth cheek,
another spot of silver in the moonlight.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"Don't want to talk?"
She shook her head again.
Acutely aware that she needed comforting, that she had come to me
expressly for comforting, but not knowing how to provide it, I turned
my eyes from her and looked out at the oily blackness of the lake. She
shorted out my logic circuits, damn it. She was different from anyone
I had ever known, with puzzling depths and dark secrets, and it seemed
to me that I dared not respond to her as casually and forthrightly as I
would have responded to anyone else. I felt as if I were an astronaut
making first contact with an alien from another world, overwhelmed by
an appreciation for the gulf between us, afraid to proceed lest the
initial communication be misunderstood. Therefore I found myself
unable to respond at all, unable to act. I told myself that I had been
foolish to dream of heating the coolness between us, that I had been an
idiot for imagining that a close relationship with her was possible,
that I had gotten in over my head with this one, that these waters were
too dark and strange, that I would never understand her and -and then
she kissed me.
She pressed her pliant lips to mine, and her mouth opened to me, and I
returned her kiss with a passion I had never experienced before, our
tongues seeking and melting together until I could not tell hers from
mine. I put both hands in her glorious hair-an auburn-blond mix in
daylight but now Argentine-and let it run through my fingers. It felt
the way spun moonlight might feel if it could be fashioned into a cool.and silken thread. I touched her face, and the texture of her skin
sent a shiver through me. I slid my hands lower, along her neck,
holding her by the shoulders as our kisses deepened, then at last
cupping her full breasts.
From the moment she had leaned against me and had given that first
kiss, she had been shaking. I sensed that these were not tremors of
erotic anticipation, but were evidence of an uncertainty, awkwardness,
shyness, and fear of rejection not dissimilar to my own state of mind.
Now, suddenly, a stronger shiver passed through her. She pulled away
from me and said, "Oh, hell."
"What?" I asked, breathless.
"Why can't .
"What?"
two people .
"What?"
Tears streamed down her face now. Her voice quavered: just reach out
to each other . . - " "You reached, I reached."
". . . and push aside that barrier .
"There's no barrier. Not now."
I sensed that sadness in her, a well of loneliness too deep to be
plumbed, a grayness, an apartness, and I was afraid that it was going
to overwhelm her at the worst possible moment, force upon us the very
estrangement that she professed to fear.
She said, "It's there..... always there . . . always so hard to make
any real contact..... any real "It's easy," I said.
"No. , "We're more than halfway."
a pit, a gulf .
"Shut up," I said as gently and lovingly as I had ever said two words,
and I took hold of her again, kissed her again.
We kissed and caressed with rapidly increasing fervor but with a
determination to savor this first exploration. Although we must have
sat there on the grass for no more than five or ten minutes, it seemed
that whole days passed unheeded.
When she again pulled away from me, I started to protest.
But she said, "Hush," in such a way that I knew I should be quiet. She
rose to her feet, and with none of the frustrating fumbling with
buttons-clasps-zippers that could sometimes bring a chill to ardor, her
clothes slipped away from her, and she stood thrillingly revealed.
Even at night in this dark woods, she seemed to be the daughter of the
sun, for moonglow was nothing more than a reflection of solar light,
and now every beam of that secondhand sunshine appeared to find its way
to her. The rays of the moon made her skin translucent and accentuated
the exquisitely sensuous curves and planes, convexities and
concavities, of her faultless body. Eros in a fluid interfolding of
black and silver: the frost-silver sphere of firm buttocks, perfectly
cleft by darkness; a frostlike film molded to the enticing musculature
of one thigh; a few crisp, shiny pubic hairs touched by a glint of
silver; the concavity of her belly, curving from the pearly touch of
moonlight into a smooth little pocket of shadow, then swelling back
into the pearliness again before reaching the darkness beneath the
heavy breasts; and-oh, yes-her breasts, uptilted, heart-rendingly
contoured, the turgid nipples painted half silver and half black.
Milky light, snowy light, platinum light shone upon-and seemingly from
within-her elegant, smooth shoulders, traced the delicate line of her
throat, and licked along the fragile ridges and folds of one shell-like
ear.
She descended like some celestial entity, as from a great height, with.slow grace, and lay upon the thick, soft grass.
I undressed.
I made love to her with hands, with lips, with tongue, and before I
even considered entering her, I had brought her twice to climax. I was
not a great lover-far from it; my sexual experience was limited to two
women at other carnivals before this one. But through my sixth sense I
always seemed to know what was wanted, what would please.
Then, as she lay sprawled on that bed of black grass, I parted her
sleek thighs and moved between them. The initial moment of penetration
was the usual and unremarkable anatomical mechanics, but as we joined,
the experience ceased to be usual, ceased to be unremarkable, was
elevated from mechanics to mysticism, and we became not merely lovers
but a simple organism, instinctively and mindlessly pursuing some
half-glimpsed, mysterious, but desperately desired apotheosis of both
spirit and body. Her responsiveness to me seemed as psychic as mine to
her. As she clung to me, she never moved in disruptive opposition, or
murmured the wrong word, or in any way disturbed the deeply satisfying
and astonishingly complex rhythms of our passion, but matched each flex
and counterflex, each thrust and counterthrust, each shuddering pause,
each throb and stroke, until we had achieved and then surpassed
flawless harmony. The world receded. We were one; we were all; we
were the only.
In that sublime and almost holy condition, ejaculation seemed like a
gross affront, not a natural conclusion to our coupling but a crude
intrusion of base biology. But it was inevitable.
Indeed it was not only inescapable, but also not long in arriving. I
had been within her perhaps four or five minutes when I felt the
eruption building and realized, with some embarrassment, that it was
uncontainable. I began to withdraw from her, but she clasped me
closer, entwining me with her slender legs and arms, her sex tightening
heatedly around mine, and I managed to gasp out the impending danger of
impregnation, but she said, "It's all right, Slim, it's all right, I
can't have babies, anyway, no babies, it's all right, just come in me,
honey, please, come in me, fill me," and with the last few words she
was shaken by another orgasm, and she arched her body against me,
pressed her breasts against my chest, tremors racking her, and suddenly
I was unknotted and untied, and long, fluid ribbons of sperm spooled
out of me, unraveled within her. . .
We were a long time regaining a sense of the world around us and even
longer parting. But at last we lay side by side, on our backs in the
grass, staring up at the night sky, holding hands. We were silent
because, for now, all that needed to be said had already been said
without resorting to words.
Perhaps five long, warm minutes passed before she said, "Who are you,
Slim MacKenzie?"
"Just me."
"Somebody special."
"Are you kidding? Special? I couldn't control myself.
Went off like fireworks. Jeer. I promise more control next time. I'm
no great lover, no Casanova, that's for sure, but I usually have more
endurance than-" "Don't," she said softly. "Don't bring it down like
that.
Don't pretend it wasn't the most natural, the most exciting . . . the
most most you ever knew. Because it was. It was."
"But I-" "It lasted long enough. Just long enough. Now shush."
I shushed.
The filigree of clouds had blown away. The sky was Crystalline. The.moon was a Lalique globe.
This extraordinary day of contrasts had encompassed the most appalling
ugliness and horror, but it had also been filled with beauty that was
almost excruciating in its intensity. The leering goblins in
Yontsdown. To compensate for them: Rya Raines. The grim grayness of
that miserable city. To balance: this splendid canvas of moon and
stars under which I now lay, satiated. The visions of fire and death
at the elementary school. On the other hand: the memory of her
moonlight-kissed body descending to the grass with a promise of joy.
Without Rya it would have been a day of unimaginably stark and
unrelieved despair. There on the shore of that dark lake, she seemed,
at least in that moment, to be the embodiment of all that had gone
right in the divine architect's plans for the universe, and if I could
have located God right then, I would have yanked insistently on the
hem' of his robe and kicked at his shins and would have made a general
nuisance of myself until He agreed that He would reconstruct those vast
portions of His creation that He had screwed up the first time, and
that during the reconstruction He would use Rya Raines as the supreme
example of what was possible if only He would put all his mind and
talent behind the project.
Joel Tuck was wrong. I was not infatuated with her.
I was in love with her.
God help me, I was in love with her. And although I did not know it
then, the time was rapidly approaching when, because of my love for
her, I would desperately need God's help merely to survive.
After a while she let go of my hand and sat up, drew her knees up,
clasped her arms around her bent legs, and stared out at the lightless
lake, in which a fish splashed once and then swam on in silence. I sat
up beside her, and still we felt no need to be any more talkative than
the swimming fishes.
Another distant splash.
A rustle of wind-stirred reeds at water's edge.
Cricket song.
Mournful mating calls of lonely frogs.
In time I realized that she was weeping again.
I put a hand to her face, moistened a fingertip in a tear.
"What?" I asked.
She said nothing.
"Tell me," I said.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Talk.
I was silent.
She was silent.
Eventually the frogs were silent.
When she finally spoke, she said, "The water looks inviting."
"Looks wet is all."
"Appealing."
"Probably covered with algae, and the bottom's mud."
"Sometimes," she said, "in Gibtown, Florida, during the off-season, I
go out to the beach and take long walks, and sometimes I think how nice
it would be to swim out into the sea, out and out, just keep on and
never come back."
There was a shocking spiritual and emotional weariness in her, a
distressing melancholy. I wondered if it had something to do with her
inability to have children. But mere barrenness seemed insufficient
cause for this black despondency. At this moment her voice was that of.a woman whose heart had been corroded by a bitter sadness of such
purity and acidic strength that the source of it defied imagination.
I could not understand how she could plummet from ecstasy to
despondency so quickly. Only minutes ago she had told me that our
lovemaking had been the most most. Now she was almost gladly sinking
back into despair, into an utterly hopeless, sapping, sunless, private
desolation that scared the hell out of me.
She said, "Wouldn't it be nice to swim out as far as you could go and
then, exhausted, swim even farther, until your arms become like lead
and your legs like a diver's weights and-" "No!" I said sharply,
grabbing her face in both hands, turning her head, forcing her to look
at me. "No, it wouldn't be nice. It wouldn't be nice at all. What
are you saying?
What's wrong with you? Why are you like this?"
There was neither an answer on her lips nor in her eyes, just a
bleakness in the latter that was impenetrable even to my sixth sense, a
loneliness that seemed ultimately impervious to any assaults I could
hope to make on it. Seeing this, my gut clenched with fear, and my
heart felt hollow and dead, and tears filled my own eyes.
In desperation I pulled her down onto the grass, kissed her, caressed
her, and began to make love to her again. At first she was reluctant,
but then she began to respond, and soon we were as one, and this time,
in spite of the talk of suicide and in spite of the fact that she would
not allow me to understand the cause of her despair, we were better
together than we had been before. If passion was the only rope that I
could find to throw to her, if it was the only thing that could pull
her back from the spiritual quicksand that was sucking her under, then
it was at least reassuring to know that my passion for her was a
lifeline of infinite length.
Spent, we lay for a while in each other's arms, and the quality of our
mutual silence did not degenerate into funereal gloom, as it had done
before. In time we dressed and started back along the forest road,
toward the fairgrounds.
I was buoyed by the beginning that we had made tonight, and I was
filled with a hope for the future that I had not known since the day I
had first seen a goblin. I wanted to shout, throw my head back, laugh
at the moon, but I did nothing of the sort, for with each step of our
return from the wilderness, I was also afraid, deeply frightened that
she would once again oscillate from happiness to despair, that this
time she would not ever swing back to the light again. And I was
afraid, as well, of the not-forgotten vision of her bloody face and
what that vision might portend. This was a mad brew. of conflicting
emotions and not easily kept below boil, especially not for a
seventeen-year-old boy far from home, cut off from his family, and in
dire need of some affection, purpose, and stability. Fortunately Rya
remained in a good mood all the way back to the door of her Airstream
trailer, sparing me the dispiriting sight of a new descent into those
melancholy realms and leaving me with some small measure of confidence
that eventually I could persuade her to turn away forever from
consideration of that suicidal swim into the uncaring embrace of the
surging Florida seas.
As for the vision . . . well, I would have to find a way to help her
avoid the danger ahead. Unlike the past, the future could be changed.
At her door we kissed.
She said, "I can still feel you within me, your seed, still so hot
inside me, burning. I'll take it to bed with me, curl myself around
the heat of your seed, and it'll be like a watch fire through the.night, keeping the bad dreams away. No graveyards tonight, Slim. No,
not tonight."
Then she went in and closed the door behind her.
Thanks to the goblins, who fill me with a paranoid tension when I'm
awake and who disturb my sleep with nightmares, I am accustomed to
insomnia. For years I have lived with little sleep, a few hours most
nights, none at all on some nights, and gradually my metabolism has
adjusted to the fact that my raveled sleeve of care will never be
entirely mended. Tonight, again, I was wide-awake, though it was now
four o'clock in the morning, but at least this time the cause of my
insomnia was irrepressible joy rather than cold terror.
I walked up to the midway.
I followed the concourse, preoccupied with thoughts of Rya. Such a
torrent of vivid images of Rya filled my mind that I would not have
believed there was room for thoughts of a different kind. But in a
while I realized that I had stopped walking, that my fists were
clenched at my sides, that a chill had taken possession of me, that I
was standing in front of Joel Tuck's Shockville, and that I was there
with a purpose. I was staring at the Snap Wyatt banners strung across
the front of the tent. Those portraits of the freaks were more
disturbing now, in the fading moonbeams that barely limned them, than
they were in the uncompromising light of day, for it was within the
power of the human imagination to conjure up worse atrocities than even
God could commit. While my conscious mind had been fixated on Rya, my
subconscious had dragged me here for the purpose of investigating that
patch of earth in the twelfth stall, from which I had received strong
psychic impressions of death.
Perhaps my own death.
I did not want to go in there.
I wanted to walk away.
As I stared at-the snugged-down flaps of the tent's entrance, the
desire to walk away became an urge to run.
But a key to my future lay within. I had to know exactly what psychic
magnet had drawn me there yesterday afternoon. To maximize my chances
for survival, I had to know why death energies had radiated from the
dirt floor in front of Joel Tuck's platform and why I had sensed that
very plot of ground might become my own grave. I told myself that
there was nothing to fear in the tent. The freaks were, not here but
in their trailers, fast asleep. Even if they had still been in the
tent, none of them would have harmed me. And the tent itself was not
inherently dangerous or evil, just a large canvas structure, haunted
(if at all) by nothing worse than the stupidity and thoughtlessness of
ten thousand marks.
Nevertheless, I was afraid.
Afraid, I went to the securely belayed canvas flaps that closed off the
entrance.
At the flaps I untied one line, trembling.
Trembling, I went inside.
10
The Grave
Humid darkness.
The smell of weathered canvas.
Sawdust.
I stood just inside Shockville, very still, alert, listening..The large, chambered tent was perfectly quiet but had a peculiar
resonance, like a giant conch shell, so I heard the imitation oceanic
susurration of my own blood flowing through the vessels in my ears.
In spite of the silence, regardless of the late hour, I had the
hair-raising feeling that I was not alone.
Squinting into the impenetrable gloom, I stooped and withdrew the knife
from my boot.
Having the blade in my hand did not make me feel more secure. It was
of little use to me if I could not see from which direction the attack
was coming.
The sideshow was on the perimeter of the midway and within easy access
of the fairgrounds' public power lines; therefore, it was not tied to
the carnival's generators, and I did not need to start a diesel engine
to turn on a light. I felt through the darkness to the left and then
to the right of the entrance, searching for either a light switch
mounted on a stanchion or a pull chain dangling from the ceiling.
My psychic sense of danger grew stronger.
Attack seemed ' more imminent by the second.
Where the hell was that switch?
I fumbled, found a thick wooden pole along which snaked a flexible,
segmented power cable.
I heard rough, ragged breathing.
I froze.
Listened.
Nothing.
Then I realized the breathing had been my own. An inconvenient feeling
of foolishness briefly incapacitated me. I stood in lumpish stupidity,
awash in that chagrin familiar to anyone who, as a child, had lain
awake for hours in fear of the monster under the bed, only to discover
upon courageous inspection that the monster did not exist or was, at
worst, only a pair of old, worn tennis shoes.
However, the clairvoyant impression of impending violence did not
lessen. Quite the opposite. Danger seemed to coagulate in the humid,
musty air.
I blindly traced the segmented cable with trembling fingers, found a
junction box, a switch. I flicked it. Overhead, along the roped-off
walkway and in the stalls behind the ropes, bare bulbs brightened.
Knife in hand, I proceeded cautiously past the empty stall where
Jack-Four-Hands had displayed himself yesterday afternoon and where his
pathetic history was still recorded on a canvas backdrop, from the
first room to the second, from second to third, and finally to the
fourth chamber, to the last stall, where Joel Tuck usually took up his
station, where now the threat of death was oppressive, a menacing
current in the air that electrified me.
I stepped up to the rope at Joel Tuck's stall.
The patch of sawdust-sprinkled earth in front of the platform was, to
me, as radiant as a mass of plutonium, although it was not deadly gamma
particles that streamed from it.
Instead I was exposed to uncountable roentgens of death images-and
smells and sounds and tactile sensations-which were beyond the
apprehension of the five senses I share with other human beings but
which registered and were read upon the Geiger counter of my sixth
sense, my clairvoyance. I sensed: open graves in which darkness pooled
like stagnant blood; time-bleached bones in piles with spiderweb
monocles in the empty skull sockets; the scent of moist, newly turned
earth; the heavy grating of a stone lid being slid laboriously off a
sarcophagus; bodies on slabs in rooms that stank of formaldehyde; the.sweet stench of cut roses and carnations that had begun to decompose;
the dankness of a subterranean tomb; the thunk of a wooden coffin lid
dropping shut; a cold hand pressing dead fingers to my face . . .
"Jesus," I said, my voice shaky.
The precognitive flashes-which were, for the most part, symbolic of
death rather than representative of real scenes to come in my life-were
much stronger and much worse now than they had been yesterday
afternoon.
I raised one hand and wiped my face.
I was sheathed in cold sweat.
Trying to marshal the jumble of psychic impressions into some
meaningful order, yet struggling not to be overwhelmed by them, I swung
one leg over the restraining rope, then the other leg, and stepped into
the stall. I was afraid of losing consciousness in the clairvoyant
storm. That was unlikely, but it had happened on a couple of other
occasions, when I had encountered particularly powerful charges of
occult energy, and each time I had awakened hours later with a severe
headache. I dared not pass out in this place, filled as it was with so
much malignant promise. If I lost consciousness in Shockville, I would
be killed where I fell. I was sure of that.
I knelt on the earthen floor in front of the platform.
Go, leave, get out! an inner voice warned.
Gripping the knife so hard that my right hand ached and my knuckles
popped up in bloodless white points, I used my left hand to brush away
the layer of sawdust from a yard square area. Underneath, the dirt was
stamped down but not hard-packed. I was able to dig into it easily
with just my bare hands. The first inch came up in chunks, but farther
down the soil was looser, precisely the opposite of what ought to have
been. Someone had dug a hole here within the last couple of days.
No. Not a hole. Not merely a hole. A grave.
But whose? What body lay below me?
I did not really want to know.
I had to know.
I continued scraping the soil aside.
The death images intensified.
Likewise, the feeling that this excavation had the potential to become
my grave grew stronger as I clawed at the earth.
Yet that did not seem possible because, clearly, another corpse was
already. in tenancy. Perhaps I was misinterpreting the psychic
emanations, a distinct possibility, for I was not always capable of
making sense of the vibrations to which my sixth sense was attuned.
I put my knife aside so I could scoop the earth away with both hands,
and in a couple of minutes I had made a hole about a yard long and two
feet wide, six or eight i Inches deep.
I knew I should go find a shovel, but the soil was quite loose, and I
did not know where to look for a shovel, and besides, I could not stop.
I was compelled to keep digging without even the briefest pause, driven
by a morbid and crazy but undismissable certainty that the occupant of
this grave would prove to be me, that I would pull the dirt off my own
face and see myself looking up at me. In a rapture of terror caused by
the unrelenting outpouring of frightening psychic images, I tore at the
yielding earth in a frenzy now, dripping a cold brine from brow and
nose and chin, grunting like an animal, panting.
lungs afire. I burrowed deeper, snorting in disgust at the ripe
psychic scent of death as if it were a real odor-deeper-but there was
actually no reek of decay in the sideshow tent, only in my
mind-deeper-because the corpse was too fresh to have undergone more.than the earliest, mildest stages of decomposition. Deeper. My hands
were filthy, my fingernails caked with dirt, and bits of soil flew into
my hair and stuck to my face as my burrowing became wilder still. A
part of me drifted back and up, looking down on the frantic animal that
I had become, and that detached part of me wondered if I was mad, just
as it had wondered about the stark and tortured face in the locker-room
mirror the night before last.
A hand.
Pale.
Slightly bluish.
It appeared there in the ground before me, in a position of final
relaxation, as if the dirt around it were a mortuary blanket on which
it had been placed with tender care. Dried blood was crusted on the
fingernails and in the creases of the knuckles.
The psychic death images began to fade as I now made contact with the
real object of death from which they had flowed.
I had dug down perhaps a foot and a half, and now I carefully scooped
more soil out until I had found a second hand, half overlaying the
first . . . and the wrists . . . and part of the arms . . . until it
became evident that the deceased had been laid to rest in the
traditional position, with the arms folded across the chest Then,
alternately unable to breathe and hyperventilating, racked by spasms of
fear that made my teeth chatter, I began to excavate more extensively
above the hands.
A nose.
A broad forehead.
A harp-string glissando, not of sound but of cold vibration, passed
through me.
I did not find it necessary to brush all the earth away from the face,
for I knew when it was half uncovered that it was the man-the goblin-I
had killed in the Dodgem Car pavilion the night before last. His
eyelids were shut, both with a glaucous tint that made it look as if
someone of perverse humor had applied eye shadow to him before
committing him to the ground. His upper lip was curled back at one
corner, in a rigor-mortis sneer, and dirt was packed between his teeth.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement in another part of the
tent.
I gasped, snapped my head around, toward the promenade beyond the rope,
but no one was there. I was convinced I had seen something move, and
then, before I could even get up from the grave to investigate, I saw
it again-Dervish shadows that leapt off the sawdust-carpeted floor,
onto the far wall of the tent, then back to the floor again. They were
accompanied by a low moan, as if some spawn of nightmares had entered
the last chamber of the tent and was shuffling toward me, not yet in
sight of the fourth stall but only a few lumbering steps away.
Joel Tuck?
Clearly it was he who had spirited the dead goblin out of the Dodgem
Car pavilion and buried it here. I had no idea why he had done it;
whether to help me, confuse me, frighten me-I had no basis for
judgment. He might be friend or enemy.
Without looking away from the open side of the stall, expecting trouble
to appear there in one form or another at any moment, I groped blindly
behind me for the knife that I had put aside.
Once more the shadows leapt, and once more they were accompanied by a
soft groan, but abruptly I realized that the groan was only the
threnody of the wind, which had picked up outside. The cavorting
shadows were the harmless work of the wind as well. Each strong gust.found a way inside the tent, and as it blew through the canvas
corridor, it stirred the bare, dangling lights overhead. Those swaying
bulbs briefly gave life to inert shadows.
Relieved, I stopped groping for the knife and turned my attention to
the corpse once again.
Its eyes were open.
I recoiled, then saw that they remained dead and sightless eyes,
covered with a transparent, milky film that refracted the light from
above and looked almost like frost. The dead man's flesh was still
slack, his mouth still set in a rigid sneer, dirt still wadded between
his parted lips and caked between his teeth. His throat bore the
ruinous knife wound-though it did not look as bad as I remembered
it-and no breath entered or escaped him. He was most certainly not
alive.
Evidently the startling retraction of the eyelids was nothing more than
one of those postmortem muscle spasms that often scared the be-jesus
out of young medical students and novice morticians. Yes. Surely.
But .
. . on the other hand . . .
could these nerve reactions and muscle spasms be expected almost two
days after his death? Or were such bizarre reactions limited to the
few hours immediately subsequent to death? Well, all right, then maybe
the eyelids had been held shut by the weight of the earth that had been
packed on top of the carcass; now that the dirt had been removed, the
lids had sprung open.
The dead did not come back to life.
Only crazy people sincerely claimed to have seen walking corpses.
I was not crazy.
I was not.
I stared down at the dead man, and gradually my wild breathing
subsided. The rabbit-fast beat of my heart decelerated too.
There. That was better.
I began to wonder, again, why Joel Tuck had buried the body for me and
why, once having done that favor, he had not come forward to take
credit for it. And why would he have done it in the first place? Why
make himself an accomplice to murder? Unless, of course, Joel Tuck
knew I had not murdered another human being. Was it possible, perhaps
through his third eye, that he saw the goblins, too, and sympathized
with my homicidal urges?
Whatever the case, this was not the time to think about it.
At any moment the security patrol might swing past Shockville and see
that the lights were on. Although I was a carny now, and not the
intruder I had been two nights ago, they would nevertheless want to
know what I was doing in a concession I did not own and in which I did
not work. If they found the grave or, worse, the body, my status as a
carny would not protect me against arrest, prosecution, and lifelong
imprisonment.
Using both hands, I began to push the mounded earth back into the
partially reopened grave. As the damp soil spilled across the dead
man's hands, one hand moved, flinging a few clods of dirt back at me,
flicking it in my face, and the other hand twitched as spasmodically as
a wounded crab, and the cataracted eyes blinked, and as I fell and then
scrambled backward, the corpse raised its head and began to pull itself
out of its less-than-final resting place.
This was no vision, either.
This was real.
I screamed. No sound escaped me..I shook my head violently from side to side in adamant denial of this
impossible sight. It seemed to me that the corpse had risen only
because, moments ago, I had imagined this very same macabre
development, and the insane thought somehow had the terrible power to
make the horror a reality, as if my imagination were a genie that had
mistaken my worst fears for wishes and had granted them. And if that
were the case, then I could stuff the genie of imagination right back
into its lamp, unwish this monstrous apparition, and be saved.
But no matter how hard I shook my head, no matter how desperately I
denied what I saw before me, the corpse did not lie down and play dead
again. With grub-pale hands it groped for the edges of the grave and
pulled itself into a sitting position, looking straight at me, loose
soil. dribbling out of the folds in its shirt, filthy hair frizzed and
tangled and spiked.
I had scooted along the floor until my back was against the canvas
partition that separated this stall from the next. I wanted to stand
up, vault across the rope in front of the stall, and get the hell out
of there, but I could no more easily run than scream.
The corpse grinned, and chunks of moist earth fell from its open mouth,
though dirt remained clotted between its teeth.
The calcimine grins of fleshless skulls, the poison-wet grins of
serpents, the leer of Lugosi in Dracula's cape-all paled by comparison
with this grotesque configuration of bloodless lips and muddy teeth.
I managed to get up onto my knees.
The corpse worked its tongue obscenely, pushing more damp soil from its
mouth, and a weak groan, more weary than threatening, escaped it, a
gaseous sound halfway between a croak and a bubbling rift.
I gasped in a breath and found myself rising somewhat dreamily, as if
inflated by a foul gas expelled from the corpse before me.
Wiping away the salt-sting of cold sweat from the corner of one eye, I
next found myself in a crouch, back bent, shoulders hunched, head held
low, apelike.
But I did not know what to do next, except that I knew I could not run.
Somehow I must deal with the hateful thing, kill it again, do the job
right this time, Jesus, because if I did not deal with it, then it
might drag itself out of here and find the nearest other goblins and
tell them what I had done to it, and then they would know that I could
see through their disguises, and they would tell other goblins, and
pretty soon all of their kind would know about me, and they would
organize and come after me, hunt me down, because I posed a threat to
them that no other human being did.
I now saw, beyond the cataracts sheathing the eyes, beyond the eyes
themselves, a faint red glow, the bloody light of other eyes, goblin
eyes. A tiny glimmer. A faint hellfire flicker. Not the blazing
light of before. Just a distant pulsing ember in each clouded orb. I
could see nothing more of the goblin, no snout or toothy muzzle, just a
suggestion of those hateful eyes, perhaps because the beast was too far
along the road of death to be able to project its full presence back
into this human hulk. But surely even this much was impossible.
Its throat had been torn open, damn it, and its heart had ceased
beating back there in the Dodgem Car pavilion the night before last,
and it had stopped breathing, too, for Christ's sake, had not breathed
for two whole days while buried beneath the sideshow floor-was still
not breathing as far as I could see-and had lost so much blood that
there could not be enough left to sustain its circulatory system.
Its grin broadened as it struggled to pull itself out of the
half-opened grave. But part of its body remained pinned beneath almost.a foot and a half of earth, and it was having a little trouble tearing
free. Nonetheless, with laborious effort and diabolic determination it
continued digging and straining, all the while exhibiting the flailing,
jerky movements of a broken machine.
Although I had left it for dead among the Dodgem Cars, a spark of life
evidently had remained within it. Somehow its kind obviously could
retreat from death when an ordinary man would have no choice but
surrender, retreat into a state of-what?-maybe suspended animation,
something of the sort, defensively curling up around the faintest ember
of life force, jealously guarding it, keeping it aglow. And then what?
Could a nearly dead goblin gradually fan the ember of life into a small
flame, rebuild the flame into a fire, repair its damaged body,
reanimate itself, and come back from the grave? If I had not
disinterred this one, would its ravaged throat have healed and would it
have magically replenished its blood supply? In a couple of weeks,
when the carnival was long gone and the fairgrounds were deserted,
would it have reenacted a grisly version of the Lazarus story, opening
its own grave from the inside?
I felt myself teetering at the brink of a psychological abyss.
If I was not insane already. then I had never been closer to madness
than I was now.
Grunting with frustration, uncoordinated and by all appearances not
terribly strong, the unbreathing but demonically animated cadaver began
to claw at the earth that weighed down its lower body, scooping the
soil aside with slow, stupid industriousness. Its opalescent eyes
never drifted away from me for a moment, watching me intently from
under its low, dirt-smeared brow. Not strong, no, but it was getting
stronger even as I crouched there, transfixed by terror. It attacked
the confining earth with increasing fervor. and the vague red glow in
its eyes was growing brighter.
The knife.
The weapon was beside the grave. The wind-stirred light bulb swung on
its cord overhead, and a bright reflection of it rippled back and forth
along the steel blade that lay on the floor below, imparting a look of
sorcerous power to the weapon. as if it were no mere knife but the
true Excalibur; in fact, to me, at that dark moment, it was as valuable
s any magic sword drawn from a scabbard of stone. But to get my hands
on the knife, I would have to put myself within the reach of the
half-dead thing.
Deep in its torn throat, the corpse made a shrill, wet, cackling noise
that might have been laughter-the laughter of asylum dwellers or of the
damned.
It had almost freed one leg.
With sudden resolve I scuttled forward, toward the knife.
The thing anticipated me, swung -one clumsy arm, and swatted the weapon
away from me. With a clink-tinkle-clink and a final glimmer-flash, the
knife spun through the sawdust and vanished in the blackness under the
edge of the wooden platform that supported Joel Tuck's empty chair.
I did not even consider hand-to-hand combat. I knew I had no chance of
choking or hammering the life out of a zombie.
It would be like fighting quicksand. Slow and weak as the creature
seemed to be, nevertheless it would endure, wait me out, resist, until
I was totally exhausted, and then finish me with slow, heavy blows.
The knife was my only chance.
So I plunged past the shallow grave, and the dead thing clutched my leg
with one frigid hand that instantly passed its own coldness through my
jeans and into my own flesh, but I kicked at it, driving one boot into.the side of its head, and tore loose. Stumbling to the far corner of
the twelve-foot-long stall, I half fell and half dropped to my knees,
then onto my belly, at the spot where the knife had disappeared into
the gap beneath the platform. The opening was perhaps five inches
high, plenty of space to slip an arm through. I reached under there,
felt around, found dirt and sawdust and pebbles and an old bent nail
but no knife. I heard the dead thing gabbling wordlessly behind me,
dirt being flung aside, limbs pulling free of entombment, squashing,
grunting, scrabbling. Not pausing to look back, I pressed right-up
against the platform until the edge of a plank jammed painfully into my
shoulder, and I strained to reach six inches deeper, probed, trying to
see with my fingertips as well as feel, found nothing but a small bit
of wood and a crisp cellophane wrapper from cigarettes or candy, so I
was not getting in there deep enough, and I was tormented by the
thought that my hand was unknowingly within a hair's breadth of the
desired object, and nothing for it but to squeeze in farther, just two
more inches, please-there! Deeper but still no good, no sign of the
knife, so I moved to the left a little, now right, frantically grasping
empty air and dirt and a tuft of dry grass, and now behind me came a
gibbering-chuckling noise and the scrape-thud of a heavy footstep, and
I was whimpering, heard myself whimpering and could not stop-the more
inch!-and under the platform something pricked my thumb, the sharp
point of the knife at last, and I caught the tip of the blade between
thumb and forefinger, pulled it out, reversed my grip on it-but before
I could get up or even roll onto my back, the corpse bent over me and
seized me by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants. lifted
me with more strength than I had expected of it. swung me, pitched me,
and I landed hard.
facedown in the grave, an earthworm against my nose, choking on a
mouthful of dirt.
Gagging, swallowing some dirt, spitting some out, I flopped onto my
back just as the brain-damaged goblin clumped and heaved its
broken-machine body to the edge of the grave. It glanced down. Eyes
of frost and fire. Its inconstant shadow swung back and forth across
me as the light above dipped in the draft.
There was not sufficient distance between us for me to throw the knife
successfully. However, suddenly sensing the dead thing's intention, I
gripped the haft with both hands, held the weapon straight up, and
locked my shoulders and elbows and wrists, pointing the blade at the
creature in the same instant that it spread its arms and, grinning
witlessly, fell toward me. It impaled itself upon the knife, and my
arms buckled under its weight. It collapsed on top of me, knocking my
breath out.
Though the knife was buried to the hilt in its unbeating heart, it
would not yet be still. Its chin lay on my shoulder, and it pressed
one cold and greasy cheek to mine. It muttered senselessly in my ear,
in a tone disconcertingly like that of one in the throes of passion.
Its arms and legs twitched spider-quick though without purpose. and
its hands quivered and jerked.
Empowered by overwhelming disgust and unadulterated terror, I pushed,
squirmed, hit, kicked, bucked, shoved, twisted, clawed. and pulled my
way out from under the creature, until our positions were reversed,
with me atop it, one knee on its groin, the other in the dirt beside
it. I sputtered curses comprised of half words and nonwords that were
every bit as meaningless as the gibberish that passed from my dead
adversary's still moving lips. and I wrenched the knife out of its
heart and stabbed it again, again, once more, in throat and chest and.belly, again, and once more. Lacking aim and enthusiasm, it swung
brick-size fists at me, but even in my mindless frenzy I dodged most
blows with little difficulty, though the few that landed on my arms and
shoulders were effective. Eventually my knife produced the desired
result, cutting out the throbbing cancer of unnatural life that
animated the cold flesh, excising it bit by bit, until the dead thing's
spasming legs grew still, until its arms moved even more slowly and
erratically, until it began to bite its own tongue. Its arms at last
dropped, limp at its sides, and its mouth fell slack, and the faint
crimson light of goblin intelligence went out of its eyes.
I had killed it.
Again.
But killing was not enough. I had to make sure the thing stayed dead.
I could now see that indeed the mortal wound in its throat had
partially healed since the Dodgem Car pavilion.
Until tonight I had not realized that goblins, like the vampires of
European folklore, could sometimes resurrect themselves if they had not
been dispatched with sufficient thoroughness.
Now that I knew the grim truth, I would take no chances.
While a flood tide of adrenaline was still sluicing through me, before
I came crashing down into enervating despair and nausea, I cut off the
creature's head. It was not easy work, but my knife was sharp, the
blade of tempered steel, and I still had the strength of terror and
fury. At least the butchery was bloodless, for I had already drained
this corpse two nights ago.
Outside, with much moaning and hissing, hot summer wind gusted across
the tent. The billowing canvas strained at the anchor ropes and pegs,
crackling, thrumming, flapping, like the wings of a great, dark bird
seeking flight but chained to an earthly perch.
Large, blackish witch-moths darted around the swaying bulbs and added
their swooping shadows to the whirl of light and weird adumbrated
forms. Viewed with eyes that were focused through a lens of panic and
blurred by stinging sweat, that constant phantom movement was maddening
and only worsened the unsettling waves of dizziness that already swept
through me.
When at last I completed the decapitation, I considered putting the
thing's head between its legs, then filling the grave, but that seemed
to be a dangerously incomplete scattering of the remains. I could
easily imagine the corpse, again interred, gradually moving its hands
beneath the earth, reaching down for its severed pate, reassembling
itself, its torn neck knitting up, the pieces of its broken spine
fusing together, crimson light returning to its strange eyes. . . .
Therefore I put the head aside and reburied only the body. I stamped
on the plot, packing the dirt down as well as I could, then spread
sawdust over it again.
Carrying the head by its hair, feeling savage and wild and not liking
that feeling one damned bit, I hurried back to the entrance to
Shockville and switched off the lights.
The flap that I had untied was snapping in the blustery night. I
cautiously looked out at the midway where there was no movement in the
waning light of the setting moon, except for the spectral shapes of
gliding dust-ghosts that the seance wind had conjured up.
I slipped outside, put the head down, retied the canvas at the
entrance, picked the head up again, and hurried stealthily i along the
concourse to the back end of the lot, between two chastely darkened
girlie shows, through a cluster of trucks that stood like slumbering
elephants, past generators and huge, empty wooden grates, across a.deserted field, into the nearest arm of the forest that embraced three
sides of the fairgrounds. With each step I was increasingly afraid
that the head, dangling from its handle of hair, was coming alive
again-a new glow dawning in its eyes, lips writhing, teeth gnashing-and
I held it out to one side, at arm's length, so I would not accidentally
bump it against my leg and give it a chance to sink its teeth deep into
my thigh.
Of course, it was dead, all the life gone from it forever. The
grinding and clacking of its teeth, its thick mutterings of hatred and
anger, were merely my own fevered fantasies. My imagination not only
ran away with me but galloped, raced, stampeded across a nightmare
landscape of horrendous possibilities. When at last I thrashed through
the underbrush beneath the trees, found a small clearing beside a
brook, and put the severed head upon a convenient rock table, even the
wan and eldritch moonbeams provided adequate light to prove that my
fears were groundless and that the object of my terror remained without
life, natural or otherwise.
The earth near the stream was a soft, moist loam, easily dug with bare
hands. The trees, their night-black boughs like witch skirts and
warlock robes, stood sentinel at the perimeter of the clearing while I
scooped a hole, buried the head, tamped down the earth, and concealed
my labors with a scattering of dead leaves and pine needles.
Now, to effect a Lazarean rebirth, the headless corpse would first have
to tear out of its pit in the midway, crawl or stagger sightlessly to
the forest, locate this clearing, and exhume its own head from this
second grave. Although the events of the past hour had instilled in me
an even greater respect for the evil powers of the goblin race, I was
quite certain that they could not overcome such formidable obstacles to
resurrection as these. The beast was dead, and it would remain dead.
The trip from the sideshow to the forest, the digging of the hole, and
the burial of the head had all been accomplished in a near panic. So I
stood in the clearing for a moment, arms hanging limply, and tried to
calm down. It was not easy.
I kept thinking about Uncle Denton, back in Oregon. Had his badly
hacked corpse healed in the privacy of his coffin and had he smashed
his way out of the tomb a few weeks after I had gone on the run from
the law? Had he paid a visit to the farmhouse where my mother and
sisters still lived, to take vengeance on the Stanfeuss family, and had
they become a goblin's victims because of me? No. That was
unthinkable.
I could not live under the smothering weight of that guilt.
Denton had not come back. For one thing, that bloody day I had gone
after him, he had fought with such ferocity that my rage had grown into
a state not unlike a psychotic frenzy, and I had inflicted horrible
damage with the ax, wielding it with mad abandon even after I had known
he was dead; he had been too smashed and thoroughly dismembered to have
knitted himself together again. Furthermore, even if he achieved
resurrection, surely he would not- return to the Stanfeuss house or to
anyplace in the Siskiyou valleys where he was known, for the miracle of
his return from the grave would have shocked the world and focused
relentless attention upon him. I was sure he was still in his coffin,
decomposing-but if he was not in his grave, then he was far from
Oregon, living under a new name, tormenting other innocents, not my
folks.
I turned from the clearing, pressed through the brush, and found my way
back to the open field where the night was redolent with the scent of
goldenrod. I had covered only half the distance to the midway when I.realized that there was still a taste of dirt in my mouth, from the
bite of earth I had unwillingly taken when thrown into the goblin's
grave. That vile taste recalled every detail of the horrors of the
past hour, somehow broke through the guardian numbness that had
protected me from collapse while I had done what had to be done.
Nausea overwhelmed me. I fell to my hands and knees, hung my head, and
vomited in the grass and goldenrod.
When the nausea passed, I crawled a few feet away and flopped onto my
back, blinking at the stars, catching my breath, trying to find the
strength to go on.
It was four-fifty in the morning. The orange sun of dawn was no more
than an hour away.
That thought brought to mind the sightless orange eye in Joel Tuck's
forehead. Joel Tuck . . . he had spirited the body out of the Dodgem
Car pavilion and had buried it, which might have been the act of
someone who knew the goblins for what they were and wanted to help me.
Almost certainly Joel Tuck also had been the one who had come into the
trailer where I was sleeping the previous night and had left the two
passes-one to the Dodgem Cars and one to the Ferris wheel-on my folded
jeans. He had been trying to tell me that he knew what had happened at
the Dodgem Cars and that he also knew, as I did, that something was
going to happen at the Ferris wheel. He saw the goblins, and to some
extent he sensed the malignant energies around the Ferris wheel, though
his own psychic talent was probably not as strong as mine.
This was the first time I had ever encountered anyone with any genuine
psychic abilities, and it was certainly the first time I had come
across anyone who saw the goblins for what they truly were. For a
moment I was overcome with a sense of brotherhood, a kinship so
poignant and so desperately desired that it brought tears to my eyes.
I was not alone.
But why did Joel resort to indirection? Why was he reluctant to let me
know about the brotherhood we shared? Obviously it was because he did
not want me to know who he was. But why not? Because . . . he was
not a friend. It suddenly occurred to me that Joel Tuck might consider
himself neutral in the battle between mankind and the goblin race.
After all, he had been treated worse by ordinary humankind than he had
by goblins, if only because he had encounters with human beings every
day and with goblins only on occasion. An outcast, rejected and even
reviled by society at large, allowed no dignity except within the
sanctuary of the carnival, he might well feel that he had no reason to
oppose the goblins' war against marks. If that was the case, he had
assisted me with the dead body and had pointed me toward the oncoming
danger at the Ferris wheel solely because those goblin schemes directly
affected carnies, the only people to whom he did owe allegiance in this
secret war. He did not want to approach me openly because he sensed
that my vendetta against the demons was not restricted by the
boundaries of the carnival, and he did not want to be drawn into a
wider conflict; he was willing to fight the war only when it came to
him.
He had helped me once, but he would not always help me.
When you came right down to it, I was still pretty much alone.
The moon had set. The night was very dark.
Exhausted, I got up from the grass and goldenrod and returned to the
locker room beneath the grandstand, where I scrubbed my hands, spent
fifteen minutes digging the dirt out from beneath my fingernails, and
showered. Then I went down to the trailer in the meadow where I had
been assigned quarters..My roommate, Barney Quadlow, was snoring loudly.
I undressed and got into bed. I felt physically and mentally numb.
The comfort I had taken-and given-with Rya Raines was only a dim
memory, though we had been together less than two hours ago; the recent
horror was more vivid, and like a newer coat of paint it overlaid the
joy that had been. Now, of my time with Rya, I more clearly recalled
her moodiness, her deep and inexplicable sadness, because I knew that
Rya would sooner or later be the cause of another crisis with which I
would have to deal.
So much on my shoulders.
Too much.
I was only seventeen.
I wept quietly for Oregon, for lost sisters and a mother's love too far
removed.
I longed for sleep.
I desperately needed to get some rest.
Yontsdown was less than two days away.
11
Slough Night
At eight-thirty Saturday morning, after little more than two hours of
sleep, I woke from a nightmare unlike any that I had ever known before.
In the dream I was in a vast graveyard that sloped down a long and
apparently endless series of hills, a place crowded with granite and
marble monuments of all sizes and shapes, some cracked and many canted,
in rows without end, in numbers beyond counting, the very cemetery of
Rya's own dreams. Rya was there, too, running away from me, through
the snow, under the black branches of barren trees. I was chasing her,
and the weird thing was that I felt both love and loathing for her, and
I did not know exactly what I was going to do when I caught her. A
part of me wanted to cover her face with kisses and make love to her,
but another part of me wanted to throttle her until her eyes bulged and
her face turned black and her lovely blue eyes clouded with death.
This savage fury, directed toward someone I loved, scared the hell out
of me, and more than once I stopped. But each time that I halted, she
halted, too, waiting for me among the tombstones on the slope below, as
if she wanted me to catch her. I tried to warn her that this was not a
lover's game, that something was wrong with me, that I might lose
control of myself when I caught her, but I could not will my lips and
tongue to form the words. Each time I stopped, she waved me on, and I
found myself pursuing her once more. And then I knew what must be
wrong with me. There must be a goblin in me! One of the demonkind had
entered me, had taken control of me, destroying my mind and soul,
leaving nothing but my flesh, which was now its flesh, but Rya was not
aware of this; she still saw only Slim, just her loving Slim MacKenzie;
she did not realize what terrible danger she was in, did not understand
that Slim was dead and gone, that his living body served an unhuman
creature now, and if that creature caught her, it would choke the life
out of her, and now it was gaining on her, and she glanced back at
it-me, laughing-she looked so beautiful, beautiful and doomed-and now
it-me was within ten feet of her, eight, six, four, and then I grabbed
hold of her, swung her around -and when I awoke, I could still feel her
throat collapsing in my iron hands.
I sat straight up in bed, listening to the furious beat of my heart and
to my ragged breathing, trying to clear my mind of the nightmare. I.blinked in the morning light and desperately tried to assure myself
that, as vivid and powerful as the scene had been, nevertheless it had
been only a dream, not a premonition of things to come.
Not a premonition.
Please.
The show call was for eleven o'clock, which left me with a couple of
hours on my hands, hours in which I might wind up contemplating the
blood that was also on my hands if I did not, for God's sake, find
something to occupy myself. The fairgrounds were on the edge of the
county seat, a burg of about seven or eight thousand souls, so I walked
into town and had breakfast in a coffee shop, then went next door to a
men's store and bought two pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. I saw
no goblins during the entire visit, and the day was so August-perfect
that I gradually began to feel that everything might turn out all
right-me and Rya, the week in Yontsdown-if I just kept my wits about me
and did not lose hope.
I returned to the fairgrounds at ten-thirty, put the new jeans and
shirts in the trailer, and was on the midway by a quarter of eleven. I
had the high-striker ready for business before show call and had just
sat down on the stool beside it to await the first marks when Rya
appeared.
Golden girl. Bare, tanned legs. Yellow shorts. Four different shades
of yellow in a horizontally striped T-shirt. She was wearing a bra on
the midway because this was 1963, and bralessness in public would have
been shocking to the marks, regardless of how acceptable it was in the
trailer town, among carnies. Her hair was held back from her face with
a knotted yellow bandanna. Radiant.
I stood, attempted to put my hands on her shoulders, tried to kiss her
cheek, but she put one hand against my chest, restraining me, and said,
"I don't want any misunderstanding."
"About what?"
"Last night."
"What could I possibly misunderstand about that?"
"What it means."
"What does it mean?"
She was frowning. "It means I like you-" "Good!"
',-and it means we can give each other pleasure-" "You noticed!"
"-but it doesn't mean I'm your girl or anything like that.
"You sure look like a girl to me," I said.
"On the midway I'm still your boss."
" Ah."
"And you're the employee."
"Ah," I said.
Jesus, I thought.
She said, "And I don't want on the midway."
"God forbid. But we do still off the midway?"
She was utterly unaware of the offensiveness of her approach and tone,
and did not understand the humiliation that her words inflicted;
therefore, she was not sure what my flippancy indicated, but she risked
a smile. She said, "That's right. Off the midway I expect you to be
just as unusually familiar as you want."
"Sounds as if I've got two jobs, the way you put it. Did any unusual .
. . familiarity get to be unusually familiar you hire me for my talent
as a pitchman-or for my body too?"
Her smile faltered. "For your pitch, of course."
"Because, boss, I wouldn't want to think you're taking advantage of
this poor, lowly hired man."." I'm serious, Slim."
"I noticed."
"So why are you making jokes?"
" It's a socially acceptable alternative.
"Huh? To what?"
"Yelling, shouting. rash insults."
"You're mad at me."
"Ah. you're as perceptive as you are beautiful, boss."
"There's no reason for you to get angry."
"No. I guess I'm just a hothead."
"I'm only trying to get things straight between us."
"Very businesslike. I admire that."
"Look, Slim. all I'm saying is that whatever happens between us in
private is one thing-and what happens here on the midway is another."
"Good heavens, I would never suggest we do it right here on the
midway," 'I said.
"You're being difficult."
"You. on the other hand, are a paragon of diplomacy."
"See. some guys, if they got in the boss's pants, they'd figure they
didn't have to pull their share of the load at work any more."
"Do I seem like that kind of guy?" I asked.
"I hope not."
"That didn't exactly sound like a vote of confidence."
"I don't want you to be angry with me." she said.
"I'm not," I said, although I was.
I knew that she had difficulty relating to people on a one-two-one
basis. Because of my psychic perception I had a special appreciation
for the sadness, loneliness, and uncertainty-and resultant defiant
bravura that shaped her character, and I was as sorry for her as I was
angry.
"You are," she said. "You're angry."
"It's all right," I said. "Now I got to get to work." I pointed to
the far end of the concourse. "Here come the marks."
"Are we straight?" she asked.
"Yeah.
"Sure?"
"Yeah.
"See you later," she said.
I watched her walk away, and I loved her and hated her, but mostly I
loved her, this touchingly fragile Amazon. There was no point in being
angry with her; she was an inevitable, elemental force; it made as much
sense to be angry with the wind or the winter cold or the summer heat,
for neither they nor she could be changed by anger.
At one o'clock Marco relieved me for thirty minutes, then for a
three-hour break starting at five. Both times I thought about paying a
visit to Shockville and having a word with the enigmatic Joel Tuck, and
both times I decided against rash action. This was the biggest day of
the engagement, and the crowd was three or four times as large as it
had been during the week, and what I had to say to Joel was nothing
that could be said in front of marks. Besides, I was afraid-in fact,
certain-that he would clam up if I pressed him too hard or fast. He
might deny any knowledge of goblins and secret burials in the dead of
night, and then I would not know how to proceed. I believed I had a
valuable potential ally in the freak-ally and friend and, strangely,
father figure-and I was concerned that a premature confrontation would
drive him away from me. I sensed that it was wiser to let him get to
know me better, give him more time to make up his mind about me. I was.probably the first person he had ever met who could see the goblins
that he saw, just as he was the first I had ever met with that same
thankless ability, so sooner or later his curiosity would overcome his
reticence. Until then I would have to be patient.
Therefore, after a bite of supper, I went down to the meadow, to the
trailer where I had my room, and sacked out for two hours. This time
there were no nightmares. I was too tired to dream.
I was back at the high-striker before eight o'clock. The last five
hours of the engagement passed quickly and profitably in a dry rain of
many-colored light that splashed and drizzled over everything,
including the thundering amusement rides, and was punctuated by peals
of brassy laughter. Pointing, chattering, gaping marks surged past the
high-striker, like water overflowing gutters, and in that flood was a
swept-along litter of paper money and coins, some of which I strained
out and kept for Rya Raines. Finally, by one o'clock in the morning,
the midway began to shut down.
To carnies the last night of a stand is "slough night," and they look
forward to it because there is an irrepressible Gypsy spirit in all of
them. The carnival sheds the town much like a snake sloughs off its
old skin, and as the snake is renewed by the mere act of change. so is
the carny and carnival reborn through the promise of new places and new
pockets to be relieved of new money.
Marco came around to collect the day's take so I could start
dismantling the high-striker without delay. While I attended to that
job, a few hundred other carnies-concessionaires, jointees. jain
auctioneers, animal trainers, stunt acts, wheelmen, pitchmen, midgets,
dwarves, strippers, short-order cooks, roughies, everyone but the
children (who were in bed) and those watching over the children-were at
work, too, tearing down and packing the rides and hanky-panks and
sideshows and grab-stands and other joints, illuminated by the giant
generator-powered midway lights. The small roller coaster, a rarity in
traveling carnivals, constructed entirely of steel pipes, came apart
with a ceaseless clank-pong-clink-spang! that was initially irritating
but that soon seemed like a strange atonal music, not entirely
unpleasant, and eventually became such a part of the background noise
that it ceased to be noticeable.
At the funhouse the clown's face fractured and came down in four parts,
the fourth being the huge yellow nose, which hung for a while alone in
the night as if it were the proboscis of a gargantuan, mocking Cheshire
cat, as given to bizarre vanishing acts as its cousin who had taunted
Alice. Something of dinosaurian proportions. with an appetite to
match, had taken a bite out of the Ferris wheel. At Shockville they
lowered the fifteen-foot-high canvases portraying the twisted forms and
faces of the human oddities; as those billowing and curling banners
slid down their mooring poles with a creak of pulley wheels, the
painted two-dimensional portraits acquired the illusion of
three-dimensional life, winking-grinning-leering-snarling-laughing at
the miring carnies below, then folding up with a kiss of canvas lips to
painted foreheads, @ depthless eyes now contemplating nothing more than
their own noses, two-dimensional reality swiftly replacing the brief
imitation of life. Two bites were gone from the Ferris wheel.
When I finished at the high-striker, I helped pack up Rya Raines's
other concessions, then moved around the collapsing midway, pitching in
wherever I was needed. We unbolted wooden wall panels, folded tents
into parachute bundles for the drop to Yontsdown, disassembled beams
and braces, told jokes as we worked, skinned knuckles, strained
muscles, cut fingers, nailed shut the lids of crates, hefted crates.into trucks, tore up the plank floor of the Dodgem Car pavilion,
grunted, sweated, cursed, laughed, guzzled soda, poured down cold
beers, dodged the two elephants that were rolling the larger beams to
the trucks, sang a few songs (including some that had been written by
Buddy Holly, already dead four and a half years, his body compacted
with that of a Beechcraft Bonanza on the lonely frozen field of a farm
between Clear Lake, Iowa, and Fargo, North Dakota), and we unscrewed
screws, unnailed nails, untied ropes, coiled up a few miles of electric
cables, and the next time I looked toward the Ferris wheel, I
discovered that it had been eaten up entirely, not even one small bone
remaining.
Rudy "Red" Morton, the Sombra Brothers' chief mechanic, whom I had met
at the Whip that first morning on the lot, directed a platoon of men,
and he was in turn guided by Gordon Alwein, who was our bald and
bearded superintendent of transportation. Gordy was responsible for
the final loading of the enormous midway, and since Sombra Brothers
traveled in forty-six railroad cars and ninety huge trucks, his job was
very demanding.
Gradually the midway, like an enormous lamp of many flames, was
extinguished.
Weary, but with an enormously pleasant feeling of community spirit, I
returned to the trailer town in the meadow. Many had already left for
Yontsdown; others would not leave until tomorrow.
I did not go to my own trailer.
I went, instead, to Rya's Airstream.
She was waiting for me.
"I hoped you'd come," she said.
"you knew I would."
'I wanted to say-" "Not necessary."
I'm sorry.
"I'm dirty."
"Want to shower?"
I wanted, and I did.
She had a beer waiting for me when I dried off.
In her bed, where I thought I would be capable of nothing but sleep, we
made a most deliciously slow and easy love, all sighs and murmurs in
the darkness, soft caresses, a dreamy slow-motion pumping of hips, the
whisper of skin against skin, her breath like sweet summer clover.
After a while we seemed to be gliding down into some shadowy but not at
all threatening place, melding as @ glided, joining more completely
with each additional second of descent, and I felt that we were moving
toward a perfect and permanent union, that we were close to becoming
one entity with an identity different from either of our own, which was
a state I much desired, a way to surrender all the bad memories and the
responsibilities and the aching loss of Oregon. Just such a blissful
relinquishing of self seemed within reach if only I could synchronize
the rhythm of intercourse with the beat of her heart, and then, a
moment later, that synchronization was achieved, and through the medium
of my sperm I passed my own heartbeat into her, the two now thumping as
one, and with a lovely shudder and a fading sigh I ceased to exist.
I dreamed of the graveyard. Time-rotted sandstone slabs.
Chipped marble monuments. Weathered granite obelisks and rectangles
and globes on which' perched blackbirds with wickedly hooked bills.
Rya was running. I was chasing. I was going to kill her. I did not
want to kill her, but for some reason I did not understand, I had no
choice other than to bring her down and tear the life out of her. She
left not merely footprints in the snow but footprints filled with.blood.
She was not injured, was not bleeding, so I supposed the blood was
merely a sign, an omen of the slaughter to come, proof of the
inevitability of our roles, victim and murderer, prey and hunter. I
closed on her, and her hair streamed behind her in the wind, and I
grabbed it, and her feet skidded out from under her, and we both fell
among the headstones, and then I was atop her, snarling, going for her
throat, as if I were an animal instead of a man, teeth snapping,
seeking her jugular, and blood spurted, quick warm jets of thick
crimson serum I woke.
Sat up.
Tasted blood.
Shook my head, blinked my eyes, came fully awake.
Still tasted blood.
Oh, Jesus.
It had to be imagination. A lingering bit of the dream.
But it would not go away.
I fumbled for the bedside lamp, snapped it on, and the light seemed
harsh and accusing.
Shadows fled to the corners of the small room.
I brought a hand to my mouth. Pressed trembling fingers to my lips.
Looked at my fingers. Saw blood.
Beside me, Rya was a huddled form under a single sheet, like a body
discreetly covered by thoughtful policemen at the scene of a homicide.
She was half turned away from me. All I could see of her was bright
hair upon her pillow. She did not move. If she was breathing, she was
inhaling and exhaling so shallowly that it was not detectable.
I swallowed hard.
That blood taste. Coppery. Like sucking on an old penny.
No. I had not actually torn her throat out while I dreamed.
Oh, God. Impossible. I was not a madman. I was not a homicidal
maniac. I was not capable of killing someone I loved.
Yet in spite of my desperate denials, a wild and swooping terror, like
a frantic bird, flapped crazily within me and I could not find the
nerve to pull back the sheet and look at Rya. I leaned against the
headboard and put my face in my hands.
In the past few hours I had obtained the first hard evidence that the
goblins were real rather than chimeras of my demented imagination. In
my heart I had always known that they were real, that I was not killing
innocent people under the mad misapprehension that a goblin hid within
them. Yet . . . what I knew in my heart had never been proof against
doubt, and fears of madness had long assailed me. Now I knew that Joel
Tuck saw the demonkind too. And I had battled a corpse that had been
reanimated by a tiny spark of goblin life force, and if it had been the
corpse of an ordinary man, an innocent victim of my mania, it never
could have come back as it had done. Those facts were surely adequate
defense against the charge of insanity that I had often leveled against
myself.
Nevertheless I sat with face in hands, making a mask of my palms and
fingers, reluctant to reach out and touch her, afraid of what I might
have done.
I gagged on the taste of blood. I shuddered and took a deep breath,
and with the breath came the scent of blood.
For the past couple of years, I had suffered grim, dark moments during
which I was overcome with the impression that the world was nothing but
a charnel house, created and set spinning in the void for the sole
purpose of providing a stage for a cosmic Grand Guignol play-and this.was one of those moments. In the grip of this depression, it always
seemed to me that mankind was made only for slaughter, that we either
killed one another, fell prey to the goblins, or became victims of
those whims of fate@ancer, earthquakes, tidal waves, brain tumors,
lightning bolts-that were God's colorful contributions to the plot.
Sometimes it seemed that our lives were defined and circumscribed by
blood. But I had always been able to pull myself out of these pits by
clinging to the belief that my crusade against the goblins would
ultimately save lives and that I would one day discover a way to
convince other men and women of the existence of the monsters that
walked among us in disguise. Then, in my scenario of hope, men would
stop fighting and hurting one another and would turn all their
attention to the real war. But if I had attacked Rya in a delirium and
had torn the life out of her, if I could kill someone I loved, then I
was insane, and any hope for myself or the future of my kind was a
pathetic-then Rya whimpered in her sleep.
I gasped.
She thrashed in response to something in a nightmare of her own, tossed
her head, wrestled with the sheet a moment, until her face and throat
were exposed, then subsided into a less active but still unquiet sleep.
Her face was as lovely as my memory of it-unslashed, unbitten,
unbruised-though her brow was creased and her mouth was pulled into a
teeth-baring grimace by the anxiety that was part of her bad dream.
Her throat was unmarked. No blood was visible.
I was weak with relief, and I thanked God effusively. My usual scorn
for His works was temporarily forgotten.
Naked, confused, and afraid, I got silently out of bed, went to the
bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the light. I looked first at
my hand, which I had touched to my lips, and the blood was still on my
fingers. Then I raised my eyes to the mirror, and I saw the blood on
my chin, glistening on my lips, coating my teeth.
I washed my hands, scrubbed my face, rinsed out my mouth, found some
Lavoris in the medicine cabinet, and got rid of the coppery taste. I
thought I had probably bitten my tongue in my sleep, but the mouthwash
did not sting, and on careful examination I could find no cut that
could account for that mouthful of blood.
Somehow the blood in the dream had acquired actual substance and had
come with me when I awakened, out of the land of nightmare into the
real world of the living. Which was not possible.
I looked at the reflection of my Twilight Eyes.
"What does it mean?" I asked myself.
The mirror image made no answer.
"What exactly the hell is coming?" I demanded.
My looking-glass companion either knew nothing or held his secrets
behind compressed lips.
I returned to the bedroom.
Rya had not escaped her nightmare. She lay half revealed, half
concealed, in a drift of white linen, and her legs scissored as if she
were running, and she said, "Please, please," and she said, "Oh!" and
she seized fistsful of sheets, tossing her head for a moment, then
passing into a more docile state in which she resisted the dream with
only muttered words and occasional faint cries.
I got into bed.
Doctors who specialize in sleep disorders tell us that our dreams are
of surprisingly short duration. Regardless of how long a nightmare
seems to last, the researchers report, it actually plays through from
beginning to end in no more than a few minutes, usually only twenty to.sixty seconds. Obviously Rya Raines had not read what the experts had
to say, for she spent the last half of the night proving them wrong.
Her sleep was tortured by a series of phantom enemies, imagined
battles, and dream pursuits.
I watched her for half an hour in the amber glow of the bedside lamp.
Then I switched out the lamp and sat in darkness for another half hour,
listening to her, realizing that sleep was the same imperfect rest to
her that it was to me. In time I stretched out on my back, and through
the mattress I could feel each twitch and spasm of terror that she
transmitted from the realm of dreams.
I wondered if she was in one of her graveyards.
I wondered if it was the graveyard on the hill.
I wondered what was pursuing her among the tombstones.
I wondered if it was me.
12
October Remembered
From the flung-wide doors of trucks, from the popped-open lids of
crates, like a marvelous spring-loaded mechanism constructed by the
same clever Swiss artisans who am famous for their immensely
complicated town-hall clocks with life size moving figures, the
carnival rebuilt itself upon the midway at the Yontsdown County
Fairgrounds. By seven o'clock Sunday evening it was as if slough night
had never been, as if we remained all season in one place, while one
town after another came to us. Carnies say they love to travel, and
carnies say they could not live without at least a weekly change of
venue, and carnies espouse-hell, they championed-the philosophy of
drifters-Gypsies-outcasts, and carnies are sentimental suckers for
tales and legends of lives lived on the sometimes perilous borders of
society, but wherever they go, carnies carry their village in their
luggage. Their trucks, trailers, cars, baggage, and pockets are
stuffed full of the comfortable familiarities of their lives, and their
respect for tradition is far greater than what you find even in small
Kansas towns huddled-absolutely unchanging, generation after
generation-against the intimidatingly empty vastness of the plains.
Carnies look forward to slough night because it is a statement of their
freedom, in contrast to the imprisonment of the dreary marks who must
always remain behind.
But after one day on the road, carnies are edgy and insecure, for
although the romance of the road belongs to the Gypsy spirit, the road
itself is the work and the property of straight society, and rovers can
go only where society has provided passage. In unconscious awareness
of the vulnerability that attends mobility, carnies greet their arrival
at each new engagement with even more pleasure than they find in the
orderly destruction of slough night.-The carnival is always reassembled
much faster than it is disassembled, and no night of the week is half
as sweet as that first night on a new lot when, simultaneously,
wanderlust has been satisfied for another six days and a sense of
community has been reestablished. Once they have erected the tents and
hammered together the enameled wooden partitions of the various
attractions, once they have flung up their brass and chrome and plastic
and light-strung fortifications of fantasy to protect against all
attacks of reality, they know a deeper peace than at any other time.
Sunday evening, in the trailer owned by Irma and Paulie Lorus where Rya
and I had been invited for a home-cooked meal, everyone was in such.good humor that I was almost able to forget that our schedule had
brought us not to any ordinary town but to a city ruled by goblins, to
a nest where the demons bred. Paulie, who was short but not a dwarf
like his raven-haired wife, was a gifted mimic who treated us to wildly
comic impersonations of movie stars and politicians, including a highly
amusing dialogue between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. He was a
black man, and it was amazing how his rubbery face could reshape itself
and instantly call to mind almost any famous person he wished to be,
regardless of race.
Paulie was a good sleight-of-hand magician, too, and worked in Tom
Catshank's sideshow. For a man of his stature-five-two at the
tallest-his hands were quite large, with long, thin fingers, and his
conversation was punctuated with an amazing array of gestures that were
nearly as expressive as words. I liked him at once.
Rya defrosted a bit, even joined in with some of the joking, and
although she did not entirely drop the cool pose and distant air that
were her trademarks (after all, this was the home of an employee), she
was certainly no drag on the evening.
Then, at the built-in dining nook, over Black Forest cake and coffee,
Irma said, "Poor Gloria Neames."
Rya said, "Why? What happened?"
Irma looked at me. "You know her, Slim?"
"The . . . heavy lady," I said.
"Fat," Paulie said, hands defining a sphere in the air.
"Gloria ain't insulted to be called fat. She don't like being fat,
poor kid, but she has no illusions about what she is. She don't think
she's Monroe or Hepburn or anything like that."
"Well, she can't help what she is, so there's no point being defensive
about it," Irma said. She looked at me. "Bad glands." I said,
"Really?"
"Oh, I know," Irma said, "you figure she eats like a pig and blames it
on bad glands, but in Gloria's case it's true.
Peg Seeton lives with Gloria, you know, sort of takes care of her,
cooks her meals, calls for a couple of roughies whenever Gloria needs
to get around, and Peg says poor Gloria eats hardly any more than you
or me, certainly not enough to sustain seven hundred and fifty pounds.
And Peg would know if Gloria was snacking on the sly because Peg has to
go out to buy groceries, and there isn't much of anywhere Gloria goes
without Peg."
"She can't walk by herself'?" I asked.
"She can, sure," Paulie said, "but it's not easy, and she's deathly
afraid of falling down. Anybody would be, once they go past five or
six hundred pounds. Gloria goes down, she can't get up by herself."
"In fact," Irma said, "she just about can't get up at all.
Oh, yeah, from a chair she can pull herself up, but not if she drops to
the floor or falls flat on her back on the ground. Last time she fell,
no number of roughies could get her up again."
"Seven hundred and fifty pounds is a lot to heave," Paulie said, his
hands dropping abruptly to the booth on either side of him as if forced
down by sudden weight. "She's too well padded to break any bones, but
the humiliation is terrible, even when it's just among us, her own
kind."
"Terrible," Irma agreed, shaking her head sadly.
Rya said, "Last time they finally had to bring a truck over to where
she fell and hook up a winch. Even then it wasn't easy getting her
upright and keeping her there."
"Might sound funny, but it wasn't funny at all," Irma assured me.."You don't see me smiling," I said, appalled by this glimpse of what
the fat woman had to endure.
To my mental list of jokes that God makes at our expense, I added
another item: cancer, earthquakes, tidal waves, brain tumors, lightning
bolts . . . bad glands.
"But none of this is news," Rya said, "except maybe to Slim, so why did
you say 'Poor Gloria' and get us started on her?"
"She's real upset tonight," Irma said.
"She got a speeding ticket," Paulie said.
"That's hardly a major tragedy," Rya said.
"It ain't the ticket that's upset her," Paulie said.
"it was the way the cop treated her," Irma said. To me, she added,
"Gloria has this customized Cadillac specially adapted for her. More
steel in the frame. Backseats have been taken out and then the front
seat pushed more toward the rear.
Hand brakes, hand accelerator. Wider doors so she can get in and out
easy enough. She's got herself the finest car radio you can get and
even a little refrigerator in under the dash so she can carry cold
drinks with her, a propane stove, and toilet facilities-all right there
in the car. She loves that car."
"Sounds expensive," I said.
"Well, yeah, but Gloria is well-to-do," Paulie said. "You got to
realize, in a good week, in a big engagement, like that county fair in
New York State the end of this month, you'll get maybe seven or eight
hundred thousand paid admissions to the midway in just six days, and
out of those . . . maybe a hundred and fifty thousand marks will also
pay to go through Shockville." Astonished, I said, "At two bucks a
head-" "Three hundred thousand for the week," Rya said, picking up the
pot and pouring more coffee for herself. "Joel Tuck splits the take,
half for him-out of- which he pays a hefty concession fee to Sombra
Brothers and all over head-the other half to be divided among his other
eleven attractions."
"Which means over thirteen thousand for Gloria in just that one week,"
Paulie said, his expressive hands counting invisible sheafs of dollar
bills, "which is enough to buy two customized Cadillacs. Not every
week's so good, of course.
Some weeks she does only two thousand, but she probably averages around
five thousand a week from mid-April through mid-October." Irma said,
"The important thing isn't how much the Cadillac cost Gloria, it's how
much freedom it gives her. See, the only time she's mobile at all is
when she's settled in that car.
After all, she's a carny, and to a carny it's damned important to be
free, mobile."
"No," Rya said, "the important thing isn't the freedom the car gives
her. The important thing is this story about the speeding ticket, if
you're ever going to get around to it . . " "Well," Irma said, "Gloria
drove in this morning, see, while Peg brought their pickup and trailer,
and Gloria wasn't half a mile past the county line when a sheriff's
deputy stopped her for speeding. Now, Gloria's been driving twenty-two
years and never had an accident or a ticket."
Paulie made an emphatic gesture with one hand and said, "She's a good
driver, a careful driver, 'cause she knows what a disaster it'd be if
she had an accident in that car. The ambulance attendants would never
get her out. So she's careful and she don't speed."
"So when this Yontsdown County Sheriff's deputy pulls her over," In-na
continued, "she figures it's either a mistake or some kind of speed
trap to bilk strangers, and when it seems to be a trap, she tells the.fuzz that she'll pay the fine.
But that's not good enough for him. He gets abusive with her, insults
her, and he wants her to get out of the car, but she's afraid she'll
fall down, so then he insists she drive to the sheriff's office in
downtown Yontsdown, with him following her, and once they get there he
makes her get out of her car, takes her inside, and they start putting
her through hell, threatening to book her for disobeying an officer of
the law or some bullshit like that."
Finishing his cake, gesturing with a fork now, Paulie said, "They make
poor Gloria traipse back and forth from one end of the county building
to the other, and they don't give her a chance to sit down, so she's
kind of holding on to the wall and holding on to counters and railings
and desks and anything she can lean against along the way, and she says
it was pretty clear they wanted her to fall down because they knew what
a nightmare it'd be for her to get on her feet again. They was all
laughing at her. They wouldn't let her go to the bathroom, either;
said she'd break the commode. As you can figure, her heart ain't none
too good, and she said it was beating so hard, it shook her. They had
poor Gloria reduced to tears by the time she was allowed a phone call,
and believe me, she's not a self-pitying type or quick to cry."
"Then," Irma said," she calls the fairgrounds office, and they call
Jelly to the phone, and he goes into town and rescues her, but by then
she's been at the county building three hours! " Rya said, "I've
always thought Jelly was a good patch.
How could he let this kind of thing happen?"
I told them a little bit about our trip into Yontsdown on Friday.
"Jelly did his job real well. -Everyone got into the trough. This
woman, Mary Vanaletto, from the county council, was the bagman for all
the county payoffs. Jelly gave her cash and free passes for all the
councilmen and the sheriff and his people."
"So maybe she pocketed the whole shmeer for herself and told the others
that we wouldn't pay up this year," Rya said, and now we're in trouble
with the sheriffs department."
"I don't think so," I said. "I think . . . for some reason . . .
they're spoiling for a fight.........
"Why?" Rya asked.
"Well, I don't know . . . but that's the feeling I got on Friday," I
said evasively.
Irma nodded, and Paulie said, "Jelly's already spreading the word. We
got to be on our very, very best behavior this week, 'cause he thinks
they're going to look for any excuse to make trouble for us, close us
down, strong-arm us to make us come through with more sugar."
I knew that it was not our money they wanted; they were after our blood
and pain. But I could not tell Irma, Paulie, and Rya about the
goblins. Even carnies, the most tolerant people in the world, would
find my tales not merely eccentric but insane. And although carnies
honor eccentricity, they are no more enamored of homicidal psychopaths
than is the straight world. I offered no more than innocuous comments
about the possible showdown with Yontsdown officials, keeping the dark
truth to myself.
However, I knew the harassment of Gloria Neames was only the first shot
of the war. Worse lay ahead of us. Worse than being shut down by the
cops. Worse than any of my new friends could imagine. From that
moment it was no longer possible to put the goblins out of my mind, and
the rest of the evening was not as much fun as the earlier part of it
had been.
I smiled, and I laughed, and I continued to join in the conversation,.but a man standing in the middle of a viper's nest is not likely to be
at ease.
We left the Lorus's trailer shortly after eleven o'clock, and Rya said,
"Sleepy?"
"No."
"Me, either."
"Want to walk?" I asked.
"No. There's something else I like to do."
"Oh, yes," I said. "I like to do it too."
"Not that," she said, laughing softly.
"Oh."
"Not yet."
"That sounds more promising."
She lied me up to the midway, Earlier in the day solid shutters of
steel-gray clouds had rolled across the sky, and they were still in
place. The moon and stars were lost beyond the barrier. The carnival
was a construct of shadows: pillars and slabs of darkness; sloping
roofs of blackness; curtains of shade hung on rods of shadow over inky
apertures, overlapping layers of night in all its subtle hues-ebony,
coal, sloe, soot, sulfur-black, anilineblack, alizarin-cyanine, japan,
charcoal, carbon, raven, sable; dark doors in darker walls.
We followed the concourse until Rya stopped by the Ferris wheel. It
was visible only as a series of connected, geometric, black forms
against the slightly less black, moonless sky.
I could feel the bad psychic vibrations pouring from the giant wheel.
As on Wednesday night at the other fairground, I received no detailed
images, no outline of the specific tragedy that would take place here.
However, as before, I was acutely aware that future doom was stored in
this machine the same way electricity collected in the cells of a
battery.
To my surprise Rya opened the gate in the iron-pipe fence and walked to
the Ferris wheel. She glanced back and said, "Come on."
"Where?"
"Up." "There?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"They say we're descended from monkeys."
"Not me.
"All of us."
"I'm descended from ... groundhogs.
"You'll like it."
"Too dangerous."
"Real easy," she said, grabbing hold of the wheel and starting to
climb.
I watched her, a big kid on an adult's version of a jungle gym, and I
was not happy.
I recalled the vision of Rya clothed in blood. I was sure that the
prospect of her death was not actually at hand; the night felt safe,
though not safe enough to slow my racing heart.
"Come back," I said. "Don't."
She paused, fifteen feet off the ground, and looked down at me, her
face obscure. "Come on."
"This is crazy."
"You'll love it."
"But-" "Please, Slim."
"Jesus."
"Don't disappoint me," she said, then turned away from me and continued.to climb.
I had no clairvoyant impression that the Ferris wheel was a danger to
us tonight. The threat from the big machine still lay a few days in
the future; for now it was only wood and steel and hundreds of unlit
lights.
Reluctantly I ascended, discovering that the multitude of braces and
struts provided more handholds ma niches for the feet than I had
expected. The wheel was locked, unmoving, except for some of the
two-seat baskets, which swung gently when the breeze picked up-or when
our exertions were transmitted through the framework, into the sockets,
from which the seats were suspended on thick steel pins. In spite of
what I had said about being descended from groundhogs, I swiftly proved
that my ancestors were apes.
Thankfully Rya did not climb to the topmost basket but stopped two
short of it. She was sitting there, with the safety bar flung open to
allow me to enter, grinning at me in the darkness, when I arrived in a
sweat and a tremble. I swung off the frame and into the metal seat
beside her, and it was almost worth the climb just to elicit that rare
smile.
The act of swinging into the basket made it rock on its pins, and for a
heart-halting moment I thought I was going to pitch outward, slam down
across the frozen waterfall of metal and wood, careening off each
basket below, until I hit the ground with bone-splintering force. But
I clutched the ornamental side of the basket with one hand, gripped the
scalloped back of the seat with the other hand, and rode it out.
With a confidence that I found foolhardy, Rya held on with just one
hand and, while the rocking was at its worst, leaned out, groped for
the unsprung safety bar, seized it, pulled it back, snapped it into its
latch with a clang and rattle.
"There," she said. "Cozy and snug." And she cuddled up next to me.
"I told you it would be nice. Nothing's nicer than a ride on the dark
Ferris wheel with the motor stopped and everything black and silent."
"You come up here often?"
"Yes."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
For long minutes we said nothing more, just sat close and swung gently
on creaking hinges, surveying the sunless world from our dark throne.
When we did speak, it was of things that had never been a part of our
prior conversations@oks, poetry, movies, favorite flowers, music-and I
realized how somber our talk had often been before. It was as if Rya
had left some nameless weight behind in order to be able to make the
ascent, and now an unchained Rya came forth, possessed of an unexpected
lightness of humor and a heretofore unheard girlish giggle. This was
one of the few times since I had met Rya Raines that I did not sense
the mysterious sadness in her.
But then, after a while, I did sense it, though I cannot pinpoint the
moment when that livid tide of melancholy began to flow back into her.
Among other things we spoke of Buddy Holly, whose songs we had sung
while tearing down the midway on slough night, and in a series of
laughable duets we made an a cappella mess of our favorite parts of his
tunes.
Holly's untimely death surely passed through both our minds and might
have been the first step down the cellar stairs toward the gloom in
which she usually dwelt, because a short while later we were talking
about James Dean, dead more than seven years, his life traded in with
his automobile on some lonely California highway. Then Rya began to.chew at the injustice of dying young, chewed and gnawed and worried it
relentlessly, which was when I think I first sensed the sadness
returning to her. I tried to redirect the dialogue, but I had little
success, for she suddenly seemed not only fascinated by morbid subjects
but strangely pleased by them as well.
At last, all the fun gone from her voice, she drew back from me and
said, "What was it like for you last October?
How did you feel?"
For a moment I did not understand what she meant.
She said, "Cuba. October. The blockade, the missiles, the showdown.
We were on the brink, they said. Nuclear war.
Armageddon. How did you feel?"
That October had been a turning point for me and, I suspect, for all of
us who had been old enough to know what the crisis had meant. For me,
it brought home the fact that mankind was now capable of erasing itself
from the face of the earth. And I began to understand that the
goblins-which even then I had been observing for a few years-must be
delighted with the spiraling technological sophistication and
complexity of our society, for it provided them with increasingly
spectacular ways to torture humanity. What would happen if a goblin
rose to a position of political power sufficient to give him control of
The Button in either the U.S. or the Soviet Union? Certainly they
would realize that their species would be eliminated along with our
own; apocalypse would deny them the pleasure of slowly torturing us,
which they appeared to enjoy so much. That would seem to mitigate
against their unleashing the missiles from the silos. But, oh, how
rich a feast of suffering there would be in those last days and hours!
The city-leveling blasts, the firestorms, the rains of radioactive
debris: If the goblins hated us as intensely and maniacally as I
perceived they did, then this was the scenario they would eventually
desire, regardless of its implications for their own survival. Because
of the Cuban crisis I began to realize that I would be forced to take
action against the goblins sooner or later, no matter how pathetically
inadequate my one-man war might be.
The crisis. The turning point. In August of 1962, the Soviet Union
had begun secretly to install an extensive battery of nuclear missiles
in Cuba, with the intention of achieving the capability of launching a
surprise first strike on the United States. On October 22, after
having demanded that the Russians dismantle these provocative launch
facilities, after being rebuffed, and after obtaining additional
evidence that showed a frantic acceleration of the project, President
Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba that would entail the sinking of any
ship that tried to force its way across the quarantine line. Then, on
Saturday, October 27, one of our U-2 planes was shot down by a Soviet
surface-to-air missile, and a U.S. invasion of Cuba was set (we learned
later) for Monday, October 29. World War III seemed only hours away.
However, the Soviets backed down. During the week of the blockade the
average American school-age child went through several air raid drills;
most major cities had practice air raids in which their entire
populations participated; sales of bomb shelters rocketed; existing
shelters were stocked with additional supplies; all the armed services
were put on alert; units of the National Guard were moved to active
status and placed at the president's disposal; churches held special
services and reported dramatic increases in attendance. And if the
goblins had not yet contemplated bringing about the total destruction
of civilization, they surely must have begun to think about it during
the Cuban crisis, for in those days they had fed on a rich brew of our.anxiety, occasioned by the mere anticipation of such a holocaust.
"How did you feel?" Rya asked again as we sat on the unmoving Ferris
wheel above the unlit carnival in an as yet undevastated world.
It would be a few days before I would understand the significance of
our conversation. That night it seemed we had arrived at this morbid
topic sheerly by chance. Even with my psychic perceptions I was unable
to see just how deeply this subject affected her-and why.
How did you feel?
"Scared," I said.
"Where were you that week?"
"Oregon. In high school."
"Did you think it was going to happen?"
"I don't know."
"Did you think you were going to die?"
"We weren't exactly in a target zone."
"But fallout would reach almost everywhere, wouldn't it?"
"I guess."
"So did you think you were going to die?"
"Maybe. I thought about it."
"How did you feel about it?" she asked.
"Not good."
"is that all?"
"I worried about my mother and sisters, about what would happen to
them. My father had been dead for some time, and I was the man of the
house, so it seemed like I should be doing something to protect them,
to insure their survival, you know, but I couldn't think of anything,
and that made me feel so helpless . . . half sick with helplessness."
She seemed disappointed, as if she had hoped for another response from
me, something more dramatic . . . or darker.
"Where were you that week?" I asked.
"Gibtown. There're some military installations not far from there, a
prime target."
"So you expected to die?" I asked.
"Yes."
"So how did you feel about it?"
She was silent.
"Well?" I pressed. "How did you feel about the end of the world?"
"Curious," she said.
That was a disturbing and inadequate answer, but before I could ask for
elaboration, I was distracted by distant lightning, far off to the
west. I said, "We better go down."
'Not yet."
"There's a storm coming."
"We've got plenty of time." She rocked the two-seat basket as if it
were a porch swing, and the hinges creaked. In a voice that made me
cold she said, "When the war didn't happen, I went to the library and
checked out all their books on nuclear weapons. I wanted to know what
it would've been like if it had happened, and all last winter, down
there in Gibtown, I studied up on it. Couldn't get enough about it.
It's fascinating, Slim." Again lightning throbbed out there at the
edge of the world.
Rya's face flickered, and it seemed that the erratic pulse of light
came from within her, that she was a bulb burning out.
Thunder cracked along the jagged line of the far horizon, as if the
lowering sky had collided with the tops of the mountains. Echoes of
the collision rolled sonorously through the clouds above the carnival.
"We better go down," I said..Ignoring me, her voice low but clear, infused with awe, each word as
soft as a footstep on the plush carpet of a funeral home, she said,
"Nuclear holocaust would have a strange beauty, you know, a terrible
beauty. The shabbiness and filth of the cities would all be pulverized
and boiled up in smooth, spreading mushroom clouds, just the way real
mushrooms grow out of manure and take their strength from it.
And picture the sky! Crimson and orange, green with acidic mist,
yellow with sulfurs, churning, roiling, mottled with colors we've never
seen in the sky before, rippling with strange light. . . ."
Like a rebel angel pitched out of paradise, a bolt of lightning burst
brilliantly above, staggered down celestial steps, diminishing as it
descended across the heavens, vanishing into the darkness below. It
was much closer than the previous lightning. The crash of thunder was
louder than before. The air smelled of ozone.
"It's dangerous up here," I said, reaching for the latch that held the
safety bar in place.
She stayed my hand and said, "For months after the war there would be
the most incredible sunsets because of all the pollution and ash
circling high in the atmosphere. And when the ash began to settle out,
there would be a certain beauty in that, too, not unlike a heavy
snowstorm, although it would be the longest blizzard anyone ever saw,
lasting months and months, and even the jungles, where there's never
snow, would be iced and drifted by that storm.........
The air was moist and thick.
Massive war machines of thunder rumbled on battlefields above.
I put my hand on hers, but she held fast to the latch.
She said, "And finally, after a couple of years, the radioactivity
would subside to the point at which it would no longer pose a danger to
life. The sky would be clear and blue again, and the rich ashes would
provide a bed and nutrients for grasses greener and thicker than any
we've ever seen, and the air would be cleaner for all that scouring.
And the insects would rule the earth, and there would be a special
beauty in that too."
Less than a mile away, a whip of lightning cracked in the dark and
briefly scarred the skin of the night.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked, my heart suddenly stuttering faster,
as if the tip of that electric whip had lightly flicked me,
jump-starting an engine of fear.
She said, "You don't think there's beauty in the insect world?"
"Rya, for God's sake, this seat's metal. Most of the wheel is metal.
" "The bright colors of the butterfly, the iridescent green of a
beetle's wings-" "We're the highest goddamned thing in sight.
Lightning's drawn to the highest point-" "-the orange and black of a
ladybug's carapace-" "Rya, if lightning strikes, we'll be fried alive!"
"We'll be okay."
"We've got to get down."
"Not yet, not yet," she whispered.
She would not relinquish the latch.
She said, "With only insects and maybe a few small animals, how clean
it would all be again, how fresh and new!
Without people around to dirty it up, to-" She was interrupted by a
fierce and angry flash. Directly overhead a white craze crackled
across the black dome of the sky, like a zigzagging line of stress in a
ceramic glaze. The accompanying explosion of thunder was so violent
that it made the Ferris wheel vibrate. And yet another thunderclap
boomed, and my bones seemed to rattle together in spite of their
padding of flesh, like a gambler's favorite pairs of dice in the.muffling confinement of a warm felt bag.
"Rya, now, dammit!" I insisted.
"Now," she agreed as a few fat droplets of warm rain began to fall.
In the stroboscopic light, her grin fluctuated between childlike
excitement and macabre glee. She thumbed the latch that she had been
guarding, and she flung the safety bar wide open. "Now! Go! Let's
see who wins-us or the storm! " Because I was the last into the
basket, I had to be the first out, the first to take the gamble. I
swung off the seat, grabbed one of the girders that formed the big
wheel's rim, wrapped my legs around the nearest spoke, which was
another thick girder, and slid down perhaps four feet, at an angle to
the ground, until I was blocked from further descent by one of the
crossbeams that served as braces between the mammoth spokes. For a
moment, still at a deadly height, stricken by vertigo, I clung to that
junction of beams. Some of the enormous raindrops sliced through the
air in front of my face, and some snapped into me with the impact of
lightly thrown pebbles, and some struck the Ferris wheel with an
audible plop-plop-plop. The vertigo did not entirely pass, but Rya
came out onto the frame above me, waiting for me to move down and out
of her way, and lightning flashed again to remind me of the danger of
electrocution, so I drove myself off the spoke, to the crossbeam under
it. Panting, I slid along that beam to the next spoke, and very
quickly it became clear that descent was far more difficult than ascent
because this time we were going backward. The rain fell harder, and
the wind rose, and getting a firm grip on the wet steel became more
difficult by the moment. Several times I slipped, grabbed desperately
at tightly strung cables or girders or slender struts or anything else
that was within reach, whether or not it seemed strong enough to
support me, and I tore a fingernail and got a friction burn on one
palm.
Sometimes the wheel seemed like an enormous web, across which a
many-legged spider of lightning would scuttle at any moment, intent
upon devouring me. But at other times it might have been an enormous
roulette wheel; the whirling rain, brisk wind, and chaotic storm
light-combined with my lingering vertigo-produced an illusion of
movement, a phantom spinning, and when I looked up across the
shadow-flickered expanse of the wheel, it seemed that Rya and I were
two hapless ivory balls being flung toward separate destinies. The
rain combed my sodden hair into my eyes. My soaked jeans soon felt
like armor, dragging me down. When I was about ten feet off the
ground, I slipped and found nothing to grab this time. I shot out into
the rain, arms spread in useless imitation of wings, unleashing a
shrill bird cry of fright. I was sure I was going to hit something
pointed and be impaled thereon. Instead I sprawled in the mud,
knocking the breath out of myself, but I was unhurt.
I rolled onto my back, looked up, and saw Rya still upon the wheel,
lashed by rain, her hair wet and tangled yet snapping like a beribboned
pennant in the wind. Three stories up, her feet slipped off a beam,
and abruptly she was hanging by her hands, all of her weight on her
slender arms, legs kicking as she scrambled to find the unseen girder
below her.
Slipping in the mud, I got to my feet, stood with head tilted back,
face turned up to the rain, watching, breathless.
I had been mad to allow her to climb up there.
This was, after all, where she would die.
This was what my vision had warned against. I should have told her. I
should have stopped her..In spite of her precarious position, in spite of the fact that her arms
must have been ablaze with pain and on the verge of dislocating at the
shoulder sockets, I thought I heard her laughing up there. Then I
realized it must be only the wind fluting through the beams and struts
and cables. Surely the wind.
Lightning was hurled down at the earth again. Around me the carnival
was momentarily incandescent, and above me the Ferris wheel was briefly
revealed in stark detail. For an instant I was sure the bolt had
struck the wheel itself and that a billion volts had seared the flesh
off Rya's bones, but in the less cataclysmic sheet-lightning that
followed the big flash, I saw that she had not only been spared
electrocution but also had gotten her feet under herself. She was
inching down once more.
Foolish as it was, I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted,
"Hurry!"
Spoke to crossbeam, crossbeam to spoke, spoke to crossbeam again, she
descended, but my galloping heartbeat was not reigned in even when she
was down far enough to eliminate the threat of a killing fall. As long
as she clung to any part of the wheel, she was in danger of receiving
the white-hot kiss of the storm.
At last she was only eight feet from the ground. She turned to face
outward, clutching at the wheel with one hand, preparing to jump the
rest of the way, when a night-spearing lance of lightning stabbed into
the earth just beyond the midway, no more than fifty yards distant, and
the crash seemed to fling her off the wheel. She landed on her feet,
stumbled, but I was there to grab her and prevent her from falling in
the mud, and her arms went around me, mine around her. We hugged very
tight, both of us shaking, unable to move, unable to speak, barely able
to breathe.
Another night-shattering fulmination sent a tongue of fire from sky to
earth, and this one did, at last, lick the Ferris wheel, which lit up
along every spoke and crossbeam, each cable a blazing filament, and for
an instant it seemed that the huge machine was encrusted with jewels
through which raced lambent reflections of flames. Then the killing
power was bled off into the earth, through the wheel's supporting frame
and guy wires and anchor chains, which all served as grounding points.
The storm abruptly worsened, became a downpour, a deluge. Rain drummed
on the earth, snapped and thudded against the walls of the tents,
struck a dozen different notes on a variety of metal surfaces, and the
wind shrieked.
We ran across the carnival, through the mud, breathing air tainted with
ozone and with the scent of wet sawdust and with the not entirely
unpleasant odor of elephants, off the midway and down to the meadow,
into the encampment of trailers. On many spider-quick, crab-hinged
legs of electricity, a monster pursued us and seemed always at our
heels. We did not feel safe until we were in Rya's Airstream, with the
door shut behind us.
"That was crazy!" I said.
"Hush," she said.
"Why did you keep us up there when you saw the storm coming ?"
"Hush," she repeated.
"Did you think that was fun?"
She had taken two glasses and a bottle of brandy from one of the
kitchen cabinets. Dripping, smiling, she headed for the bedroom.
Following her, I said, "Fun, for God's sake?"
In the bedroom she splashed brandy in both glasses and handed one to
me..The glass chattered against my teeth. The brandy was warm in the
mouth, hot in the throat, scalding in the stomach.
Rya pulled off her sopping tennis shoes and socks, then skinned out of
her wet T-shirt. Beads of water glimmered and trembled on her bare
arms, shoulders, breasts.
"You could have been killed," I said.
She slipped off her shorts and panties, took another sip of brandy, and
came to me.
"Were you hoping to get killed, for Christ's sake?"
"Hush," she repeated.
I was shuddering uncontrollably.
She seemed calm. If she had been afraid during the climb, the fear had
left her the moment she had touched ground again.
"What is it with you?" I asked.
Instead of answering, she began to undress me.
"Not now," I said. "This isn't the time-" "It's the perfect time," she
insisted.
"I'm not in the mood-" "Perfect mood."
"I can't-" "You can."
"No."
"Yes.
"No."
"See?"
Later we lay for a while in contented silence, on top of the damp
sheets, our bodies tinted gold by the amber light of the bedside lamp.
The sound of rain striking the rounded roof and sluicing along the
curved metal skin of our cocoon was wonderfully soothing.
But I had not forgotten the wheel or the petrifying climb down through
the storm-lashed girders, and after a while I said, "it was almost as
if you wanted lightning to strike while you were hanging up there."
She said nothing.
With the knuckles of my folded hand, I lightly traced the line of her
jaw, then opened my fingers to caress her smooth, supple throat and the
slopes of her breasts. "You're beautiful.
smart, successful. Why take chances like that?"
No answer.
"You have everything to live for."
She remained silent.
The carny's code of privacy restrained me from coming right out and
asking why she had a death wish. But the code did not prohibit me from
commenting on plainly observed events and facts, and it seemed to me
that her suicidal impulse was far from secret. So I said, "Why?" And
I said, "Do you really think there's something . . . attractive about
death?" Unfazed by her continued taciturnity, I said, "I think I love
you." And when even that drew no response, I said, "I don't want
anything to happen to you. I won't let anything happen to you."
She turned on her side, clung to me, buried her face against my neck,
and said, "Hold me," which was, under the circumstances, about the best
answer I could hope for.
Heavy rain was still falling Monday morning. The sky was dark,
tumultuous, clotted, and so low that I felt I could touch it with the
aid of just a little stepladder. According to the weather report, the
skies would not clear until sometime Tuesday. At nine o'clock, the
show call was canceled, and the start of the Yontsdown County Fair was
postponed twenty-four hours. By nine-thirty, card games and knitting
circles and mutual misery societies had sprung up all over
Gibtown-onWheels. By a quarter till ten, the revenue lost on account.of the rain had been exaggerated to such an extent that judging by the
moaning) every concessionaire and pitchman would have been a
millionaire if only the traitorous weather had not brought bankruptcy
instead. And shortly before ten o'clock, Jelly Jordan was found dead
on the carousel.
13
Lizard on a Windowpane
By the time I got to the midway, a hundred carnies were crowded around
the carousel, most of whom I had yet to meet. Some wore yellow rain
slickers with matching shapeless hats, and some wore black vinyl coats,
a few with plastic babushkas, boots or sandals, galoshes or street
shoes, and some were barefoot, and some had thrown coats on over
pajamas, and about half of them carried umbrellas, which came in a
variety of colors yet failed to contribute a note of gaiety to the
gathering. Others had not dressed for the storm at all, rushing out in
disbelief at the dreadful news, unheeding of the weather, and these now
huddled in two kinds of misery-dampness and grief-soaked to the skin
and spotted with mud and looking like refugees lined up at a border
crossing on some war-torn frontier.
I came in T-shirt, jeans, and shoes that had not dried out from the
previous night, and as I approached the crowd at the carousel, I was
impressed and shaken, most of all, by their silence. No one spoke. No
one. Not a word. They were doubly washed by rain and tears, and their
pain was visible in their ashen faces and in their sunken eyes, but
they wept without a sound. This silence was a mark of how deeply they
had loved Jelly Jordan and an indication of how unthinkable it was for
him to be dead; they were so stunned that they could only stand in mute
contemplation of a world without him.
Later, when the shock had worn off, there would be loud lamentations,
uncontrollable sobbing, hysteria, mournful keening, prayers, and
perhaps angry questions asked of God, but at the moment their intense
grief was a perfect vacuum through which sound waves could not travel.
They knew Jelly better than I did, but I couldn't remain discreetly at
the crowd's periphery. I shouldered slowly through the mourners,
whispering "Excuse me" and Sorry" until I reached the raised platform
of the merry-go-round. Rain slanted beneath the red-and-white-striped
roof, beaded on and trickled down the brass poles, and cooled the
wooden horseflesh. I eased past upraised hoofs and enameled teeth
bared in equine excitement, past painted flanks all of a piece with
saddles and stirrups that could not be removed, wended through the herd
on its never-ending journey, until I came to the place where Jelly
Jordan's journey had ended brutally amidst this eternally prancing
multitude.
Jelly lay on his back, on the carousel floor, between a black stallion
and a white mare, eyes open in amazement at finding himself recumbent
in the middle of this trampling drove, as if he had been done in by
their hoofs. His mouth was open, too, lips split, at least one tooth
broken. It almost looked as if a cowboy's red bandanna masked the
lower part of his face, but it was a veil of blood.
He was dressed in an unbuttoned raincoat, white shirt, and dark gray
slacks. The right leg of his trousers was bunched up around his knee,
and part of his thick white calf was exposed.
His right foot was shoeless, and that missing loafer was wedged in the
rigidly fixed stirrup of the black stallion's wooden saddle..Three people were with the corpse. Luke Bendingo, who had driven us to
and from Yontsdown last Friday, stood by the hindquarters of the white
mare, his face the same shade as the horse, and the look he gave
me-blinking eyes, twitching mouth-was a stutter of grief and rage
momentarily repressed by shock. Kneeling on the floor was a man I had
never seen before. He was in his sixties, quite dapper, gray-haired,
with a neatly trimmed gray mustache. He was behind Jelly's body, and
he was holding the dead man's head, as if he were a faith healer intent
on restoring health to the afflicted. He was racked by unvoiced sobs,
and each miserable spasm squeezed more tears out of him. The third was
Joel Tuck, who stood one horse removed from the scene, his back against
a pinto, one huge hand fastened to a brass pole. On that mutant face,
which was a cross between a cubist portrait by Picasso and something
out of one of Mary Shelley's nightmares, the expression could not, for
once, be misread: He was devastated by the loss of Jelly Jordan.
Sirens wailed in the distance, grew louder, louder, then died away with
a moan. A moment later two police sedans approached along the
concourse, their emergency beacons flashing through the lead-gray light
and mist and rain. When they pulled up by the carousel, when I heard
doors opening and closing, I looked over at them and saw that three of
the four arriving Yontsdown officers were goblins.
I felt Joel's eyes on me, and when I looked at him, I was unsettled by
the unexpected suspicion both in his twisted face and in the psychic
aura that enveloped him. I had expected him to be as interested in the
goblin cops as I was, and he did glance at them warily, but I remained
the focus of his attention and suspicion. That look-plus the arrival
of the goblins, plus a cyclonic fury of terrible psychic emanations
that blasted up from the corpse-was just too much to deal with, so I
walked away from there.
For a while I wandered along the back of the midway, as far from the
carousel as I could get, through rain that was sometimes a heavy
drizzle and sometimes a flooding cloudburst, though I was drowning not
in water but in guilt. Joel had seen me kill the man in the Dodgem Car
pavilion and had assumed that I had committed that murder because, like
him, I saw the goblin beyond the human glaze. But now Jelly was dead,
and there had been no goblin in poor Timothy Jordan, and Joel was
wondering if he had misunderstood me. He was probably beginning to
think that perhaps I had not been aware of the goblin residing in my
first victim, that I was just a killer, pure and simple, and that now I
had claimed a second victim, this one innocent. But I had not harmed
Jelly, and it was not Joel Tuck's suspicion that burdened me with
guilt. I felt guilty because I had known Jelly was in danger, had seen
the vision of his face smeared with blood, and I had not alerted him.
I should have been able to foresee the precise moment of his crisis,
should have been able to predict exactly where and when and how he
would meet his death, and I should have been there to prevent it.
Never mind that my psychic powers are limited, that the clairvoyant
images and impressions they bring me are often vague or confusing, and
that I have little-and frequently no-control over them. Never mind
that he would not have believed me even if I had tried to warn him of
the nameless danger that I had sensed. Never mind that I am not-and
cannot be-the savior of the whole damned world and every damned sorry
soul in it. Never mind. I still should have been able to prevent it.
I should have saved him.
I should have.
I should have.
The card games, knitting circles, and other gatherings in.Gibtown-on-Wheels had become knots of mourners. The carnies tried to
help one another accept Jelly's death. Some of them still wept. A few
prayed. But most of them swapped stories about Jelly because memories
were a way of keeping him alive. They sat in circles in the living
rooms of the trailers, and when one finished an anecdote about their
chubby, toy-loving patch, the next in the circle would make a
contribution, and then the next, around and around, and there was even
laughter because Jelly Jordan had been an amusing and exceptional man,
and gradually the terrible bleakness gave way to a bittersweet sadness
that was more easily home. The subtle formality of these proceedings,
the almost unconscious ritual according to which they were conducted,
made them seem remarkably like the Jewish tradition of sitting shivah;
if I had been required to hold my hands above a basin and have water
poured over them before being permitted to enter, and if I had been
provided with a black, yarmulke to cover my head, and if I had found
everyone sitting on mourning stools instead of on chairs and sofas, I
would not have been surprised.
I spent a few hours walking in the rain, and periodically I stopped at
one trailer or another, participated in one shivah or another, and at
each place I picked up another bit of news.
First I learned that the dapper gray-haired man who had been weeping
over Jelly's body was Arturo Sombra, the only living Sombra brother,
owner of the carnival. Jelly Jordan had been his surrogate son and had
been in line to inherit the carnival when the old man passed on. The
cops were making it even harder on Mr. Sombra by proceeding under the
assumption that foul play was involved and that the murderer was a
carny. To everyone's absolute astonishment the cops were even
insinuating that Jelly might have been eliminated because his position
with the company gave him plenty of opportunity to dip his hand in the
till and because maybe he had taken advantage of that opportunity.
They were suggesting that the murderer could even be Mr. Sombra
himself, although there was no good reason to entertain such
suspicions-and considerable reason to reject them out of hand.
They were grilling the old man and Cash Dooley and anyone else who
might have known if Jelly was skimming, and they were as thoroughly
rude and nasty in their interrogations as they knew how to be.
Everyone in the trailer town was outraged.
I was not surprised. I was certain the cops could not seriously be
contemplating accusations of murder against anyone. But three of them
were goblins. They had seen the numbing grief of those hundred
mourners clustered around the carousel; that anguish had not only
delighted them but had whetted their appetite for more human misery.
They would not be able to resist adding to our pain, milking it,
squeezing the last drop of agony from Arturo Sombra and the rest of us.
Later, the word was that the county coroner had arrived, had examined
the body in situ, had asked a few questions of Arturo Sombra, and had
rejected the possibility of foul play.
To everyone's relief, the official determination was "death by
misadventure." Apparently, it was widely known that when he could not
sleep, Jelly sometimes went to the midway, started the carousel (though
not the calliope music), and went for a long ride all by himself. He
loved the merry-go-round. The merry-go-round was the biggest wind-up
toy of them all, much too big to be kept on a shelf in his office.
Usually, because of his size, Jelly sat on one of the elaborately
carved and intricately painted benches that boasted arms in the form of
mermaids or sea horses. But once in a while he climbed onto one of the
horses, which must have been what he did last night. Perhaps worrying.about the revenue that would be lost because of the bad weather,
perhaps concerned about trouble that Chief Lisle Kelsko might stir up,
sleepless and searching for a way to soothe his nerves, Jelly mounted
the black stallion while it was moving, sat in the wooden saddle, one
hand on the brass pole, the summery wind ruffling his hair, gliding
around in the darkness, with no sound but the thunder and pouring rain,
most likely grinning with the unselfconscious pleasure of a child,
maybe whistling, happily ensconced aboard a magic centrifuge that flung
away the years as it whirled, flung away years and worries while it
gathered in dreams, and after a while he began to feel better and
decided to return to bed-but as he dismounted from the stallion, his
right shoe wedged tight in the stirrup, and although his foot pulled
free of the loafer, he fell. In the fall, even as short as it was, he
split his lips and knocked out two teeth and broke his neck.
That was the official determination.
Death by misadventure.
An accident.
A stupid, ridiculous, pointless way to die, but nothing more than a
tragic accident.
Bullshit.
I didn't know exactly what had happened to Jelly Jordan, but I did know
a goblin had murdered him in cold blood.
Earlier, standing over his body, I'd been able to sort three facts from
the kaleidoscopically fragmented images and sensations that had
assaulted me: first, that he had not died on the carousel but, instead,
in the shadow of the Ferris wheel; second, that a goblin had struck him
at least three times, had broken his neck, and had carried him to the
merry-go-round with the assistance of other goblins. The accident had
been staged.
Some assumptions could be made without much fear of error. Unable to
sleep, Jelly had evidently gone for a walk on the midway, in the dark,
in the storm, and he had seen something he should not have seen. What?
He must have glimpsed strangers, not carnies, who had undertaken
Suspicious work at the Ferris wheel, and he must have shouted at them,
unaware that they were not ordinary men. Instead of running, they had
attacked him.
I said that I had clearly sensed three things while standing in the
carousel, looking down at the fat man's uninhabited mortal shell. The
third was the one with which I had the most difficulty dealing, for it
was an intensely personal moment of contact with Jelly, a glimpse
inside his mind that made the loss of him even more poignant.
Clairvoyantly I had perceived his dying thought.
It lingered there with the corpse, waiting to @ read by someone like
me, a scrap of psychic energy like a rag caught on a barbed-wire fence
that marked the boundary between here and eternity. As his life was
extinguished, his last thought was of a set of small, fur-covered
mechanical bears-Papa, Mama, Baby-that his mother had given him for his
seventh birthday. He had loved those toys so much. They had been
special,- the perfect gift at the perfect time, for that birthday had
come only two months after his father had been killed in front of his
eyes, struck by a runaway city bus in Baltimore, and it had been the
windup bears that had at last provided much-needed fantasy and a
temporary refuge from a world that had suddenly seemed too cold, too
cruel, too arbitrary to be endured. Now, dying, Jelly had wondered if
he, himself, were Baby Bear and if, where he was going, he would be
reunited with Mama and Papa. And he was afraid of winding up somewhere
dark and empty, alone..I cannot control my psychic powers. I cannot shut my Twilight Eyes to
these images. If I could, dear God, I never would have tuned in on the
soul-shattering terror of loneliness that had filled Jelly Jordan as he
had dropped into the abyss.
It haunted me that day, as I walked in the rain, as I went to the
trailers where they talked of our patch and mourned him, as I stood by
the Ferris wheel and cursed the demonkind. It haunted me for years
after. In fact, to this day, when sleep eludes me and I am in a
particularly black mood, I sometimes involuntarily recall Jelly's
emotions at death, and they are so vivid that they might as well be my
own emotions. I can handle it now. I can handle almost anything these
days, after what I have been through and all that I have seen. But
that day on the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds . . . I was only
seventeen.
By three o'clock Monday afternoon, the word in the trailer town was
that Jelly's body had been taken to a Yontsdown mortuary, where it was
to be cremated. An urn full of ashes would be returned to Arturo
Sombra either tomorrow or Wednesday, and on Wednesday night, after the
midway shut down, there would be a funeral. The service would be held
at the carousel because Jelly had liked it so much and because,
supposedly, it was there that he had found a way out of this world.
That night Rya Raines and I had dinner together in her trailer. I made
crisp green salads, and she made excellent cheese omelets, but neither
of us ate much. We were not very hungry.
We spent the evening in bed, but we did not make love.
We sat up, braced by pillows, and held hands, drank a little, kissed a
little, talked a little.
More than once, Rya wept for Jelly Jordan, and her tears were a
surprise to me. Although I had no doubt that she was capable of grief,
I had thus far seen her cry only in contemplation of her own mysterious
burden or affliction, and even then she had seemed to release the tears
grudgingly, as if a tremendous inner pressure were forcing them from
her against her will. At all other times-except, of course, in the
naked grip of passion-she took refuge in her cool, hard-bitten,
tight-lipped persona, pretending that the world could not touch her. I
had sensed that her attachments to other carnies were far stronger and
deeper than she was willing to admit even to herself. Now, her sorrow
at the death of the patch seemed proof of my perception.
I had shed tears earlier, but now I was dry-eyed, beyond grief,
immersed in a cold rage. I still mourned Jelly, but more than that, I
wanted to avenge him. And I would. Sooner or later I would kill a few
goblins for no reason other than to even the score, and if I was lucky,
I, might be able to get my hands on the very same creatures that had
broken Jelly's neck.
Besides, my concern had shifted from the dead to the living, and I was
acutely aware that my vision of Rya's death might be fulfilled as
unexpectedly as had been the prophecy of Jelly's demise. And that
possibility was intolerable. I could not-must not, would not, dare
not-allow any harm to come to her. In a circumspect manner that was
decidedly peculiar for a pair of lovers, we were forming a bond unlike
any I had ever known, nor could I imagine another relationship like it
in the future. If Rya Raines died, a part of me would die, too, and
there would be burned-out rooms within me that could never again be
entered.
Preventive measures must be taken. On those nights that I did not
sleep in her trailer, I would post myself, without her knowledge, just
outside her door. I could suffer from insomnia there as well as.anywhere. Furthermore I would probe more relentlessly with my sixth
sense, in search of additional details about the as yet vaguely defined
threat the future held in store for her. If I could predict the
precise moment of her crisis and could pinpoint the source of the
danger, I could protect her. I must not fail her as I had failed Jelly
Jordan.
Perhaps Rya was instinctively aware that she required protection, and
perhaps she was also aware that I intended to be there when she needed
help, for as the evening wore on, she began to share some secrets about
herself, and I sensed that she was telling me things she had told no
one else in the Sombra Brothers Carnival. She was drinking more than
usual.
Although she was not drunk by any definition, I suspected that she was
trying to establish an alibi of inebriation, which would be convenient
when, in the morning, she found herself full of self-reproach and
regret for having told me so much about her past.
"My parents weren't carnies," she said in such a way that it was clear
she wanted to be encouraged in her revelations.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"West Virginia. My people were hill people in West Virginia. We lived
in a ramshackle dump in a hollow up in the hills, probably half a mile
from the nearest other ramshackle dump. Do you know what hill people
are like?"
"Not really."
"Poor," she said scathingly.
"That's nothing to be ashamed of."
"Poor, uneducated, unwilling to be educated, ignorant.
Secretive, withdrawn, suspicious. Set in their ways, stubborn,
close-minded. And some of them . . . a lot of them, maybe -are too
inbred. Cousin marries cousin pretty frequently up in those hills.
And worse than that. Worse than that."
Gradually, with steadily less coaxing, she told me about her mother,
Maralee Sween. Maralee was the fourth of seven children born to first
cousins whose marriage had not been blessed by either minister or state
but existed only by virtue of common law. All of the Sween children
were good-looking kids, but one of the seven was retarded, and five of
the other six were more dumb-witted than not. Maralee was not the
bright one, though she was the best-looking of the seven, a radiant
blonde with luminous green eyes and a lush figure that had every hill
boy sniffing after her from the time she was thirteen. Long before her
ample charms had matured, Maralee had considerable sexual-she could
certainly not say romantic-experience. At an age when many girls are
having their first date and are still unsure of the exact meaning of
"going all the way," Maralee had stopped counting the number of hill
boys who had spread her legs on various grassy beds, in lead-carpeted
glens, in the haylofts of decaying old barns, on a moldering mattress
discarded at the edge of the makeshift dump that the hill people had
started in Harmon's Hollow, and in the musty backseats of different
automobiles in one of the many collections of junked cars of which
hillbillies seemed so fond. Sometimes she'd been a willing participant
in the sex, and sometimes she had not, and most of the time she had not
cared one way or the other. In the hills, her fall from innocence at
such a tender age was not unusual. The only surprise was that she
managed to avoid pregnancy until well past her fourteenth birthday.
In that region of the Appalachians, among those hillbillies, the rule
of law and the morality of polite society were disdained, generally
ignored; however, unlike carnies, the denizens of those remote hollows.did not create their own rules and codes to replace those they
rejected. There is in American literature a tradition of tales about
the "noble savage," and our culture at least pretends to believe that a
life lived close to nature and far from the evils of civilization is
somehow healthier and wiser than the lives that most of us lead. In
fact, the opposite is often true. As men retreat from civilization
they quickly shed the inessential trappings of modern society-luxury
cars, fancy houses, designer clothes, nights at the theater, concert
tickets-and perhaps an argument can be made for the virtues of a
simpler life, but if they go far enough away and stay long enough, they
also shed too many inhibitions. Inhibitions implanted by religion and
society are not generally foolish or pointless or narrow-minded, as it
has recently become fashionable to claim; instead, many of those
inhibitions are highly desirable survival traits that in the long run
contribute to a better-educated, better-fed, more prosperous populace.
The wilderness is wild and encourages wildness; it is the breeding
ground of savagery.
At fourteen Maralee was pregnant, illiterate, uneducated, and virtually
urieducabte, without prospects, with too little imagination to be
terrified for herself, too slow-thinking to fully appreciate the fact
that the rest of her life was destined to be a long, cruel slope into a
terrible abyss. With bovine calm she was sure that someone would come
along to take care of her and the baby. The baby was Rya, and before
Rya was even born, someone did offer to make an honest woman of Maralee
Sween, perhaps proving that God watches over pregnant hillbilly girls
about as well as He looks out for drunks. The chivalrous gentleman in
pursuit of Maralee's hand was Abner Kady, thirty-eight, twenty-six
years her senior, six-five, two hundred and forty pounds, with a neck
almost as thick as his head, the most feared man in a-county where
dangerous rustics were not exactly in short supply.
Abner Kady made a sort of living by brewing moonshine, raising coon
dogs, and engaging in petty theft and occasional grand larceny. Once
or twice a year he would get together with some buddies and hijack a
truck off the state highway, preferably one loaded with cigarettes or
whiskey or some other cargo that could be disposed of at top dollar.
They traded the booty to a fence they knew in Clarksburg, and either
they would have become halfway rich or wound up in prison if they had
worked harder at it, but their ambition was no greater than their
scruples. Kady was not only a moonshiner, brawler, bully, and thief,
but he was a casual rapist as well, taking a woman by force when he was
in the mood for spicing his sex with a bit of danger, but he never had
to take a ride on the prison train because nobody had the guts to
testify against him.
To Maralee Sween, Abner Kady looked like a real catch.
He had a four-room house-hardly more than a shack but with indoor
plumbing-and no one in his family would ever want for whiskey, food, or
clothes. If Abner could not steal what he needed one way, he would
steal it another, and in the hills that was the mark of a good
provider.
He was good to Maralee, too, or at least as good as he was to anyone.
He did not love her. He was not capable of love.
Still, though he browbeat her, he never actually laid a hand on her,
mostly because he was proud of her beauty and endlessly excited by her
body, and he could not have been proud of-or aroused by-damaged
merchandise.
"Besides," Rya said in a voice that now fell to a haunted whisper, "he
didn't want to damage his little fun machine..That's what he called her-his 'little fun machine."
By "fun machine," I sensed that Abner Kady had not meant that he had
good sex with Maralee. It was something else, something dark.
Whatever it was, Rya was unable to speak of it without encouragement,
even though I knew that she desperately wanted to unburden herself.
Therefore I poured another drink for her, held her hand, and with
gentle words I eased her through that mine field of memory.
Tears shimmered in her eyes again, and this time they were not for
Jelly but for herself. She was harder on herself than she was on
anyone else, and she did not allow herself ordinary human weaknesses
like self-pity, so she blinked the tears back regardless of the
emotional stress and turmoil that might have been washed away with them
if she had only allowed them to flow. Haltingly, in a voice that broke
every few words, she said, "He meant that..... she was . . . his baby
machine..... and that..... babies..... could be fun. Especially.....
especially..... girl babies."
I knew then that she was not merely taking me on a Hansel and Gretel
journey into the spooky witch-woods but into a far more frightening
place, into a monstrous memory of a childhood under siege, and I was
not sure that I wanted to go with her. I loved her. I knew that
Jelly's death had not only sorrowed but frightened her, had reminded
her of her own mortality, and had birthed in her a need for intimate
human contact, a contact she could not fully achieve until she had
broken down the barrier that she had erected between herself and the
rest of the world. She needed me to listen, to draw her out, to
understand. I wanted to be there for her. But I was afraid that her
secrets were . . . well, alive and hungry, and that they would reveal
themselves only in return for a piece of my own soul.
I said, "Ah . . . Jesus . . . no.
"Girl babies," she repeated, looking neither at me nor at anything else
in the room, peering back along the spiral of time with obvious dread
and loathing. "Not that he ignored my half brothers. He had uses for
them, too. But he preferred girls. My mother gave him four kids by
the time I was eleven, two girls and two boys. As far back as I can
remember "Touching you," I said thickly.
"Using me," she said.
In a dead voice she recounted those years of fear, violence, and the
foulest abuse. Her story left me cold and black inside.
her . . . I guess since I was at least three . . . he was . . .
probably also the product of cousins, and the miracle is that I didn't
"It was all I knew from the time I was a baby . . . being with him .
. .
doing what he wanted..... touching him . . .
and being in bed with both of them..... my mother and him . . . when
they were doing it. I should've thought it was normal, you know? I
shouldn't have known any better. I should have thought that every
family was like this . . . but I didn't. I knew it was wrong . . .
sick . . . and I hated it. I hated it!"
I held her.
I rocked her in my arms.
She would still not cry for herself.
"I hated Abner. Oh . . . Jesus . . . you can't know how much I hated
him, with every breath I drew, every moment, without relief. You can't
know what it's like to hate that intensely." I thought of my own
feelings toward the goblins, and I wondered if even that could match
the hatred spawned and nurtured in the hellhole of that four-room shack
in the Appalachians. I suspected she was right: I could not know a.hatred as pure as that of which she spoke, for she had been a weak
child unable to strike back, and her hatred had had more years than
mine to grow and intensify.
"But then . . . after I got out of there . . . after enough time had
gone by . . . I came to hate my mother more than him. She was my
mother. Why wasn't I s-sacred to her? How could she . . . let me .
. . b-b-be used like that?"
I had no answer.
This one could not be blamed on God. Most of the time we do not need
either Him or the goblins; we can hurt and destroy one another without
divine or demonic assistance, thank you very much.
"She was so pretty, you know, and not in a brassy way, very
sweet-looking, and I used to think that she must be an angel because
that's what angels were supposed to look like, and she had this . . .
radiance. . . . But eventually I came to see how evil she was. Oh,
part of it was ignorance and low intelligence. She was stupid, Slim.
Hillbilly stupid, the product of a marriage between two first cousins
who would probably wind up either retarded or a three-armed freak in
Joel Tuck's sideshow. But I didn't. And I didn't wind up bearing more
children for Abner to . . . molest. For one thing, because of . . .
because of things he did to me . . . I can never have children. And
besides, when I was eleven, I finally got out of there."
"Eleven?
How?"
"I killed him."
"Good," I said softly.
"While he was sleeping."
"Good.
"I put a butcher knife in his throat."
For almost ten minutes I held her, and neither of us spoke or reached
for a drink or did anything but just be there.
At last I said, "I'm so sorry."
"Don't be."
"I feel so helpless.
"You can't change the past," she said.
No, I thought, but I can sometimes change the future, foresee the
dangers and avoid them, and I hope to God that I can be there when you
need me, the way no one else has ever been for you.
She said, "I've never .
"Told anyone else?"
"Never.
"It's safe with me."
"I know. But . . . why did I choose to tell you?"
"I was here at the right time," I said.
"No. It's more than that."
"What?"
"I don't know," she said. Now she leaned back from me and raised her
eyes and looked into mine. "There's something different about you,
something special."
"Not me," I said uncomfortably.
"Your eyes are so beautiful and unusual. They make me feel . . .
safe. There's such . . . calmness in you. . . . No, not exactly
calmness . . . because you aren't at peace, either.
But strength. Such strength in you. And you're so understanding. But
it isn't just strength and understanding and compassion. It's . . .
something special . . . something I can't define.
"You're embarrassing me," I said.."How old are you, Slim MacKenzie?"
"I told you . seventeen."
"no." "No?"
"Older.
"Seventeen."
"Tell me the truth."
"Well, all right. Seventeen and a half."
"We can't approach the truth by half years," she said.
"That'll take all night. So I'll just tell you how old you are. I
know. Judging from your strength, your calm, your eyes . . . I'd say
you're a hundred . . . with a hundred years of experience.
"Hundred and one in September," I said, smiling.
"Tell me your secret," she said.
"I don't have one."
"Come on. Tell me."
"I'm a simple drifter, a rambler," I said. "You want me to be more
than that because we always want things to be better and nobler and
more interesting than they are. But I'm just me."
"Slim MacKenzie."
"That's right," I lied, not sure why I did not want to open myself to
her the way that she had opened herself to me. I was embarrassed, as I
had told her, though not by anything she had said; my blush was caused
by the fact that I so quickly chose to deceive her. "Slim MacKenzie.
No deep, dark secrets. Boring, in fact. But you're not finished.
What happened after you killed him?"
Silence. She did not want to return to the memories of those days.
But then: "I was only eleven, so I didn't go to jail. In fact, when
the authorities learned what had been going on in that shack, they said
I was the victim."
"And you were."
"They took all the kids away from my mother. They split us up. I've
never seen any of them again. I wound up in a state-run orphanage."
Suddenly I sensed another terrible secret in her, and I knew with
clairvoyant certainty that something had happened in the orphanage that
was at least equal to the horror of Abner Kady.
"And?" I asked.
She looked away from me, reached to the nightstand for her drink, and
said, "And I ran away from there when I was fourteen. I looked older.
I matured early, like my mother. So I didn't have much trouble joining
up with the carnival.
Changed my name to Raines because . . . well, I've always liked the
rain, liked watching it, listening to it. . . . Anyway, I've been here
ever since."
"Building an empire."
"Yeah. To make myself feel like I'm worth something."
"You're worth something," I assured her.
"I don't mean just in money terms."
"Neither do I. " "Though that's part of it. Because ever since I've
been on my own, I've been determined never to be . . . trash . . .
never to sink low again. . . . I'm going to build my little empire,
like you say, and I'm always going to be somebody."
it was easy to see how a child, having endured so much abuse, could
grow up with the feeling that she was worthless and could develop an
obsession with success and achievement. I could understand it, and I
could not fault her for the single-minded, brusque businesswoman that
she had become.
If she had not directed her rage into those endeavors, thereby.relieving the pressure, it would have blown her apart sooner or later.
I was in awe of her strength.
But she still had not allowed herself to cry for herself.
And she was hiding the truth about the orphanage, pretending it had
been an uneventful few years.
However, I did not press her for the rest of the story. For one thing,
I knew that she would tell me sooner or later. The door had opened,
and there would be no closing it again.
Besides, I had already heard enough for one day, too much.
The weight of this new knowledge had left me weak and sick.
We drank.
We talked of other things.
We drank some more.
We turned off the lights and lay sleepless.
Then, for a while, we did sleep.
And dreamed.
The graveyard . . .
In the middle of the night she woke me to make love. It was as good as
it had been before, and when we were sated, I could not keep myself
from wondering that, after the abuse she had endured, she could find
such pleasure in the act.
She said, "Some might have become frigid . . . or promiscuous. I
don't know why I didn't. Except . . . well . . . if I'd gone either
of those ways, it would've meant Abner Kady had won, had broken me.
You understand? But I'll never be broken. Never. I'll bend instead
of break. I'll survive. I'll go on. I'll become the most prosperous
concessionaire in this outfit, and someday I'll own this carnival. By
God, I will!
You see if I don't. That's my goal, but don't you dare tell anyone.
I'll do whatever's necessary, work as hard as I have to, take whatever
risks are called for, and I will own the whole thing, and then I'll be
somebody, and it won't matter where I came from or what happened to me
when I was a little girl, and it won't matter that I never knew my
father or that my mother didn't love me, because I'll have lost all
that, I'll have lost it and forgotten it the way I lost my hillbilly
accent. You see if I don't. See if I don't. You just wait and see.
" As I said when I began this story, hope is a constant companion in
this life. It is the one thing that neither cruel nature, God, nor
other men can wrench from us. Health, wealth, parents, beloved
brothers and sisters, children, friends, the past, the future-all can
be stolen from us as easily as an unguarded purse. But our greatest
treasure, hope, remains. It is a sturdy little motor within, pulling,
ticking, driving us on when reason would suggest surrender. It is both
the most pathetic and noblest thing about us, the most absurd and the
most admirable quality we possess, for as long as we have hope, we also
have the capacity for love, for caring, for decency.
In a while Rya slept again.
I could not.
Jelly was dead. My father was dead. Soon Rya might be dead if I could
not foresee the exact nature of the oncoming danger and turn it away
from her.
I got up in the dark, went to the window, and drew back the drape just
as several bolts of lightning-not as violent as those that had split
the sky earlier in the night but nevertheless bright-blanked out the
view beyond the window and transformed the glass into a flickering
mirror. My pale reflection fluttered flamelike, reminiscent of that
film technique occasionally seen in old movies when the director wants.to indicate the passage of time, and with each dimming and brightening
of the image I felt as if years were being ripped away, that either the
past or the future was being torn from me, but I could not tell which
it was.
For the duration of the lightning barrage, as I faced my ghostly
reflection, I had a flash of solipsistic fear, which sprang from
weariness and sadness, the feeling that only I really existed, that I
encompassed all creation, and that everything and everyone else was a
figment of my imagination.
But then, as the last beat of lightning pulsed and faded, as
transparency flowed back into the glass, I was startled by something
that clung to the outside of the rain-washed window, and the sight of
it blew away the solipsistic fantasy. It was a small lizard, a
chameleon, fixed to the pane with sucker-footed sureness, its belly
revealed to me, its long, slender tail curving down in the shape of a
question mark. It was there all the time that I had seen only my own
reflection, and in becoming abruptly aware of it, I was reminded that
we see so little of anything at which we look, that we are usually
satisfied with simple surfaces, perhaps because the deeper view is
often terrifying in its complexity. Now, beyond the chameleon, I saw
the driving rain, sizzling-rattling curtains of silver beads as more
distant lightning glimmered in a billion plummeting droplets, and
beyond the rain was another trailer next door to this one, and beyond
that lay other trailers, then the unseen midway, and beyond the midway
lay the city of Yontsdown, and beyond Yontsdown . . . eternity.
Rya murmured in her sleep.
In the gloom I returned to the bed.
She was a shadowy shape upon the sheets.
I stood over her, watching her.
I remembered what Joel Tuck had asked me in Shockville last Friday,
when we had been discussing Rya: "Such a stunningly beautiful surface
she has, and beauty underneath as well, we're agreed on that . . . but
is it possible that there is another 'underneath' below the
'underneath' that you can see?"
Until tonight, when she had taken me into her confidence and had shared
with me the nightmare of her childhood, I had seen a Rya who was the
equivalent of my lightning-painted reflection on the glass. Now I saw
deeper and was tempted to believe that I finally knew the real and
complete woman, in all dimensions, but in fact the Rya that I knew now
was only a slightly more detailed shadow of the full reality. I had at
last seen past the surface of her, had seen to the next layer, to the
lizard on the windowpane, but there were countless layers beyond, and I
sensed that I could not save Rya Raines until I had delved much further
into the chambered-nautilus mystery that curved around and around,
almost to infinity within her.
She murmured again.
She thrashed.
"Graves," she said. "So many . . . graves She whimpered.
She said, "Slim . . . oh . . . Slim, no .
She scissored her legs in the sheets, as if running.
. . . no . . . no . . .
Her dream, my dream.
How could we have the same dream?
And why? What did it mean?
I stood over her, and I was able to see the graveyard when I closed my
eyes, able to live the nightmare even as she plummeted through it. I
waited tensely to see if she awoke with a strangled scream. I wanted.to know if in her dream I caught her and tore out her throat the way I
had done in my own version of the nightmare, for if that detail was the
same, then it was more than chance; it must mean something; if both her
dream and mine ended with my teeth sinking into her flesh and with her
blood spurting, then the best thing I could do for her was to leave,
right now, go far away and never see her again, But she did not cry
out. Her dream-panic subsided, and she ceased kicking, and her
breathing became rhythmic, soft.
Outside, the wind and rain sang an epicedium for the dead and for the
living who cling to hope in a graveyard world.
"
It Is Always Lightest just Before the Dark
Tuesday morning, the sky was without sun, and the storm was without
lightning, and the rain was without wind. It fell straight down as if
in exhaustion, a great burden of rain, fell by the pound and by the
hundredweight, fell by the ton, crushing the grass, sighing wearily
over the roofs of the trailers, fell upon the sloped roofs of tents and
slid languidly to the ground and slept there in puddles, dripped from
the Ferris wheel, plopped from the Dive Bomber.
Again the show call was canceled. The start of the Yontsdown County
Fair was postponed another twenty-four hours.
Rya did not regret the previous night's revelations as much as I had
expected she would. At breakfast she smiled more quickly than the Rya
whom I had come to know during the past week, and she was so given to
little shows of affection that she would have forever damaged her
reputation as a hard-nosed bitch if there had been anyone around to
see.
Later, when we paid visits to a couple of other carnies, to see how
they were passing the time, she was more like the Rya they knew: cool,
detached. However, even if she had been as changed in thur company as
she was when alone with me, I am not sure they would have noticed. A
pall lay over Gibtown-on-Wheels, a drab and suffocating blanket of
despondency woven partly from the monotony of the rain, partly from the
loss of income that came with bad weather, but mostly from the fact
that Jelly Jordan was only one day dead. The tragedy of his death was
still very much with them.
After stopping at the Lorus's trailer, at the Frazellis', and at the
Cutshanks', we finally decided to spend the day together, just the two
of us, and then on the way back to Rya's Airstream we made a more
important -decision. She stopped suddenly and gripped my umbrella arm
with her rain-chilled hands. "Slim!" she said, with a shine in her
eyes not quite like anything I'd seen before. So I said, "What?" She
said, "Let's go to the trailer where you've been assigned a bed-and
let's pack your things and move them to my place." So I said, "You
aren't serious," praying to God that she was.
And she said, "Don't tell me you don't want to." I said, "All right, I
won't tell you that." Frowning, she said, "Hey, you know, this isn't
your boss talking." I said, "I didn't think it was." And she said,
"This is your girl talking." I said, "I just want to be sure you've
thought about this." She said, "I have." I said, "It looked like a
spur-of-the-moment thought to me." She said, "That's the way I tried
to make it look, dummy. I didn't want you to think I was a calculating
woman." I said, "I just want to be sure you aren't doing something
rash." -She said, " Rya Raines never does anything rash." So I said,
"I guess that's true, huh?" And it was as easy as that. Fifteen.minutes later, we were living together.
We spent the afternoon making cookies in the tiny kitchen of her
Airstream, four dozen peanut butter and six dozen chocolate chip, and
it was one of the best days of my life.
The mouth-watering aromas, the ceremonial licking of the spoon as each
batch was finished, the joking, the teasing, the shared labor-it all
brought to mind similar afternoons in the kitchen of the Stanfeuss
house in Oregon, with my sisters and my mother. But this was even
better. I had enjoyed but never fully appreciated such afternoons in
Oregon, for I had been too young to realize that I was living through
golden hours, too young to see that all things end. Because I no
longer labored under the childhood delusions of stasis and immortality,
and because I had begun to think that I would never again be able to
sample the simple pleasures of an ordinary domestic life, those hours
in the kitchen with Rya had a poignancy so sharp, it was a sweet aching
in my chest.
We made dinner together, too, and after dinner we listened to the
radio: WBZ in Boston, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Dick Biondi making a fool of
himself out there in Chicago. They played the songs of the time-"He's
So Fine," by the Chiffons; "Surfin' USA," by the Beach Boys; "Rhythm of
the Rain," by the Cascades; "Up on the Roof," by the Drifters; "Blowin'
in the Wind," by Peter, Paul, and Mary; and "Puff (the Magic Dragon),"
by the same; "Limbo Rock" and "Sugar Shack," "Rock Around the Clock,"
and "My Boyfriend's Back"; tunes by Leslie Gorr, the Four Seasons,
Bobby Darin, the Chantays, Ray Charles, Little Eva, Dion, Chubby
Checker, the Shirelles, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, Bobby Lewis, and Elvis,
always Elvis-and if you do not think that was a good year for music,
then you sure as hell weren't there.
did not make love that night, our first as live-in mates, but it could
not have been better if we had. Nothing could have improved that
evening. We had never been closer, not even when melded flesh to
flesh. Although she revealed no more of her secrets, and although I
pretended that I was nothing other than a simple drifter gratified and
amazed to have found a home and someone to love, we nevertheless felt
comfortable with each other, possibly because we harbored secrets in
our minds but not in our hearts.
At eleven o'clock the rain stopped. It suddenly faded from a roar to a
patter, from a patter to a scattered plop-thump of fat drops, which was
the way it had begun two days ago, then ceased altogether, leaving the
night silent and steaming. Standing at the bedroom window, looking out
at the misty darkness, I felt as if the storm had not only cleansed the
world but had washed something out of me as well; however, it was
actually Rya Raines who had washed through me, and what she had
scrubbed away was my loneliness.
Among alabaster slabs in a hillside city of the dead, I seized her and
swung her around to face me, and her eyes were wild with fear, and I
was filled with pain and regret, but her throat was exposed and I went
for it in spite of my regret, felt the soft tissue against my bared
teeth I pitched myself headlong out of sleep before the taste of her
blood was in my mouth. I found myself sitting up in bed, hiding my
face behind my hands, as if she might awaken and somehow, even in the
darkness, be able to read my face and know what violence I had been
about to perpetrate upon her in my dream.
Then, to my surprise, I sensed someone standing in the gloom beside the
bed. With a gasp, still under the influence of the miasma of
conflicting terrors from the nightmare, I flung my hands away from my
face and thrust them out defensively in front of me, drew back against.the headboard.
"Slim?"
It was Rya. She was standing beside the bed, looking down at me,
though in this lap of blackness I could be no more visible to her than
he was to me. She had been watching while I pursued her dream analogue
through cemeterial landscapes, just as I had watched her last night.
"Oh, Rya, it's you," I said thickly, releasing the painfully held
breath in my chest, my heart stuttering.
"What was wrong?" she asked.
"Dream."
"But what kind of dream?"
"Bad."
"Your goblins?"
"No."
"Was it . . . my graveyard?"
I said nothing.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
She said, "Was it?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"From things you said in your sleep."
I looked at the radiant dial of the clock. Three-thirty.
"And was I there in your dream?" she asked.
"Yes."
She made a sound that I could not interpret.
I said, "I was chasing-" "No!" she said quickly. "Don't tell me. It
doesn't matter.
I don't want to hear any more. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't.
" But it seemed clear that she knew it did matter, that she understood
this shared nightmare better than I did, and that she knew precisely
what such a strange thing meant.
Or, with veils of sleep still clinging to me and with torn rags of
dreams muffling my thoughts and perceptions, perhaps in her state of
mind and saw a mystery there was none. She might be reluctant to
discuss the situation merely because it frightened her-not because she
grasped and dreaded the meaning of it.
When I began to speak again, she hushed me and came into my arms. She
had never been more passionate, never more silken or more supple or
more sweetly practiced in the elicitation of my response, but I thought
I detected a new and disturbing quality to her lovemaking, a quiet
desperation, as if she were not only seeking pleasure and closeness in
the act but was pursuing forgetfulness, sanctuary from some dark
knowledge that she could not bear, oblivion.
Wednesday morning the clouds blew away on a wind, and blue sky flew in
with crows and robins and ravens and bluebirds, and the earth still
steamed as if mighty machinery labored in a heat of friction just
beneath the thin crust of the planet, and on the midway the sawdust and
wood shavings were drying out in the blazing August sun. Carnies were
out in force, looking for storm damage, polishing chrome and brass,
snugging down loosened tent flaps, and talking about money weather,"
which this surely was.
An hour before the show call I located Joel Tuck behind the tent that
housed Shockville. He was wearing woodsman's boots with work pants
tucked into the tops of them, and a red plaid shirt with the sleeves
rolled up on his massive arms. He was pounding the tent pegs deeper
into the moist earth, and although he was swinging a hammer instead of
an ax, he looked like a mutant Paul Bunyon.
"I have to talk to you," I said.."I hear you've got new accommodations," he said, putting down the
long-handled sledgehammer.
I blinked. "It got around that fast?"
"What do you have to talk to me about?" he asked, not with blatant
hostility but with a coolness he had never exhibited before.
"The Dodgem Car pavilion, for one thing."
"What about it?"
"I know that you saw what happened there."
"I don't follow you."
"You followed me well enough that night."
His broken, unreadable expression made his face look like a ceramic
mask that had been shattered, then glued back together by a drunkard on
a binge.
When he did not speak, I said, "You buried him under the floor of your
tent."
"Who?"
"The goblin."
"Goblin?"
"That's what I call them, goblins, though you might use another word.
The dictionary says a goblin is 'an imaginary being, a demon in some
mythologies, grotesque, malevolent to man." That's good enough for me.
You call them whatever the hell you want. But I know you see them."
"Do I, then? Goblins?"
"I want you to understand three things. One, I hate them, and I'll
kill them whenever I have a chance-and when I think I can get away with
it. Two, they murdered Jelly Jordan because he stumbled across them
while they were trying to sabotage the Ferris wheel. Three, they won't
give up; they'll be back to finish the job on the wheel, and if we
don't stop them, something terrible is going to happen here later in
the week."
"Is that right?"
"You know it is. You left the pass to the Ferris wheel in my bedroom."
"I did?"
"For Christ's sake den's no man to be so cautious of me!"
I said impatiently. "We've both got the power. We should be allies!"
He raised one eye, and the orange eye above it had to squint to make
room for the look of astonishment in the lower orbs.
I said, "Of all the fortune-tellers and palm readers and psychics that
I've known in other carnivals, you're the first person I've ever met
who actually has some ESP."
"I do?"
"And you're the only one I've ever known who sees the goblins the way I
do."
"Do I?"
"You must."
"Must I?"
"God, you can be infuriating."
'Can I?"
"I've been thinking about it. I know you saw what happened at the
Dodgem Car pavilion and took care of the body-" "Body?"
"-and then tried to warn me about the Ferris wheel in case I didn't
sense the trouble coming. You had some doubts when Jelly was found
dead. You wondered if maybe I was just a psychopath, because you knew
Jelly wasn't a goblin.
But you didn't accuse me; you decided to wait and watch.
That's why I've come to you. To clear things up between us.
To get it out in the open. So you'll know for sure that I see them,.that I hate them, and then we can work together to stop them. We've
got to prevent them from doing whatever they have planned at the Ferris
wheel. I've been over there this morning, getting a feel for the
emanations pouring from it, and I'm sure nothing's going to happen
today. But tomorrow or Friday .
He just stared at me.
"Damn it," I said, " why do you insist on being so goddamned
enigmatic?"
"I'm not being enigmatic," he said.
"You are."
"No, I'm just being dumbfounded."
"Huh?" "dumbfounded. Because, Carl Slim, this is the most amazing
conversation I've ever had in my life, and I haven't understood a thing
you've said."
I sensed that he was in emotional turmoil, and perhaps a large part of
that turmoil was confusion, but I just could not believe that he was
completely baffled by what I had told him.
I stared at him.
He stared at me I said, "Infuriating."
He said, "Oh, I get it."
"What?"
"This is some sort of joke."
"Jesus."
"Some elaborate joke."
" If you didn't want me to know you were here, if You didn't want me to
know I wasn't alone, then why did you help me dispose of the body?"
"Well, I guess, partly because it's a hobby."
what am you talking about?"
"Disposing of bodies," he said. "It's a hobby. Some people collect
postage stamps, and some people build model airplanes, and I dispose of
bodies whenever I find them."
I shook my head in dismay.
"And partly," he said, "it's because I'm such a neat person. I just
can't stand litter, and there's no litter worse than a decomposing
body. Especially a goblin body. So whenever I find one, I clean up
the mess and-" "It isn't a joke!" I said, patience lost.
He blinked all three eyes. "Well, it's either a joke or you're a
deeply disturbed young man, Carl Slim. So far I've liked you, liked
you too much to want to believe you're crazy, so if it's all right with
you, I'll just figure it's a joke."
I turned from him and stalked away, to the corner of the tent and
around it, out to the concourse.
What the hell was his game?
The storm had wrung the worst of the humidity out of the air, and the
muggy August heat did not return with the blue sky. The day was warm
and dry, with the sweet, clean tang of the mountains that surrounded
the fairgrounds, and when the gates opened at noon, the marks came in
numbers we had not expected to see until the weekend.
The carnival, a fantastic loom, used exotic sights and smells and
sounds to weave a dazzling fabric that entranced the marks, a familiar
and supremely comfortable fabric that we carnies drew around ourselves
with joy and relief after two days of rain, after the death of our
patch. The threads of sound included calliope music, "The Stripper" by
David Rose blasting out of speakers at one of the kootch shows, the
roar of the daredevil's motorcycle on the "wooden wall of death," the
whistle-shriek-roar of the rides, the swish of compressed air that
whirled the metal baskets of the Tip Top, diesels running full blast,.the ten-in-one talker pitching the tip, laughing men and women,
shouting and giggling children, and pitchmen everywhere saying, "Tell
ya what I'm gonna do!" Filaments of scents, threads of odors, were
worked through the shuttle, plated on the loom: cook-house grease, hot
popcorn, hot unshelled peanuts, diesel fuel, sawdust, cotton candy,
molten caramel from the fragrantly steaming vats in the candy-apple
stands. Sounds and smells were the texture of the carnival cloth, but
the sights were the dyes that gave it brilliant color: the unpainted,
burnished steel of the Dive Bomber's egg-shaped capsules, upon which
sunlight seemed to melt and spread in shimmering silver films of
mercury; the whirling red baskets of the Tip Top; the sparkling sequins
and shimmering beads and glimmering spangles on the costumes of the
girlie show performers who paraded on the baily platforms with, only
tantalizing promises of the charms to be revealed within the tents; the
red, blue, orange, yellow, white, and green pennants flapping in the
breeze like the wings of a thousand tethered parrots; the giant,
laughing face of the fun-house clown, nose still yellow; the
pumping-spinning brass of the carousel poles. This magic carnival coat
was a rainbow garment with many mysterious pockets, of flamboyant cut
and design; when you put it on, you slipped your arms through a sense
of immortality, as well, and the cares of the real world faded.
Unlike the marks and many of the other carnies, I could not escape all
of my worries in the razzle-dazzle of the show, for I kept waiting for
the first goblins to appear on the concourse.
But the afternoon melted into evening, and the evening gave way to
night, and none of the demonkind appeared. I was neither relieved nor
pleased by their absence. Yontsdown was a nest, a breeding ground, and
there should have been more of them on the midway than usual. I knew
why they had stayed away. They were waiting for the real fun later in
the week. Tonight, no tragedy was scheduled, no pageant of blood and
death, so they were waiting until tomorrow or the day after. Then they
would appear by the score, by the hundred, eager for a ringside seat at
the Ferris wheel. If they had their way, the wheel would probably
experience "mechanical failure" that would cause it either to topple or
to collapse, and it was when this event was imminent that they would
come for a day at the fair.
That night, after the marks were gone, the midway lights were
extinguished except for the bulbs on the merry-goround, where the
carnies gathered to pay their last respects to Jelly Jordan. Hundreds
of us encircled the ride; those in the front rows were limned by amber
and red light that, under the circumstances, was reminiscent of the
candle-glow and stained glass luminosity in a cathedral, while those
who were farther back in this makeshift open-air nave either stood in
reverent shadows or mourning darkness. Some stood on nearby fides, and
some had climbed onto the tops of trucks parked along the center of the
midway. All were silent, as they had been Monday morning, when the
body had first been found.
The urn containing Jelly's ashes was placed on one of the benches, with
mermaids standing an honor guard on both sides and with a cortege of
proudly posed horses both in front of and behind the bier. Arturo
Sombra started the engine that put the carousel in motion, though he
did not switch on the calliope.
While the carousel went around in silence, Cash Dooley read selected
paragraphs from "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," a chapter from Kenneth
Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, which was what Jelly had requested
in his will.
Then the merry-go-round motor was stilled..The horses glided slowly to a full stop.
The lights were turned off.
We went home, and so did Jelly Jordan.
Rya went instantly to sleep, but I could not. I lay awake, wondering
about Joel Tuck, worrying about the Ferris wheel and the vision of
Rya's bloodied face, concerned about the schemes in which the goblins
might even now be engaged.
As the night dragged on, I cursed my Twilight Eyes. There are moments
when I wish I'd been born without psychic powers, especially without
the ability to see the goblins.
Sometimes nothing seems sweeter than the perfect ignorance with which
other people mingle with the demonkind. Maybe it is better not to know
that the beasts are among us. Better than to see . . . then feel
helpless, haunted, and outnumbered.
Ignorance would, at least, be good medicine for insomnia.
Except, of course, if I could not see goblins, I would already be dead,
a victim of my Uncle Denton's sadistic games.
Uncle Denton.
The time has come to talk of treachery, of a goblin masquerading as
human in the midst of my own family, wearing a disguise so perfect that
not even the sharp blade of an ax was able to carve away the false
persona and reveal the monster within.
My father's sister, Aunt Paula, had first married Charlie Forster, and
together they had brought a son, Kerry, into the world, the same year
and month that my folks had delivered me. But Charlie died of cancer,
a sort of goblin of his own that had devoured him from within, and he
was laid in the ground when both Kerry and I were three years old.
Aunt Paula remained single for ten years, raising Kerry on her own.
But then Denton Harkenfield had come into her life, and she had decided
not to. live all her days as a widow.
Denton was a stranger to the valley, not even an Oregonian, hailing
from Oklahoma (or so he said), but everyone accepted him with
remarkable alacrity, considering that third-generation valley people
were often called "new folks" by the majority who could trace their
roots back to the settlement of the Northwest. Denton was handsome,
soft-spoken, polite, modest, quick to laugh, a born storyteller with an
apparently limitless fund of amusing anecdotes and interesting
experiences. He was a man of simple tastes, with no pretensions.
Though he seemed to have money, he did not flaunt it or act as if money
made him any better than the next Joe. Everyone liked him.
Everyone but me.
As a child, I'd not been able to see the goblins clearly, though I knew
they were different from other people.
Occasionally-although not often in rural Oregon-I encountered someone
who had a strange fuzziness about him, a dark-smoky-curling shape
within, and I sensed that I must tread carefully around him, although I
did not understand why.
However, as puberty began to change my hormonal balance and metabolism,
I began to see the goblins more clearly, as vaguely defined demons at
first, then in all their malevolent detail.
By the time Denton Harkenfield came in from Oklahoma-or Hell-I was just
beginning to be able to discern that the smoky spirit within these
people was not merely a mysterious new form of psychic energy but an
actual being, a demon or alien puppet master or creature unknown. In
the months that Denton courted my Aunt Paula, my ability to perceive
the hidden goblin improved steadily until, by the week of the wedding,
I was in a panic at the thought of her marrying such a beast. Yet.there seemed to be nothing that I could do to prevent it.
Everyone else thought Paula was an exceedingly fortunate woman to have
found a man as universally well liked and admired as Denton
Harkenfield. Even Kerry, my favorite cousin and best friend, would
listen to no word spoken against his new father-to-be, who had won him
over even before Paula's heart had been captured, and -who had promised
to adopt him.
My family knew that I was clairvoyant, and my premonitions and psychic
insights were taken seriously. Once, when Mom had to fly back to
Indiana to attend the funeral of her sister, I received distressing
emanations from her airline ticket and was convinced that her plane
would crash. I made such a fuss that she canceled at the last minute
and booked a different flight. In fact, the first plane did not crash,
but there was a small fire aboard in midair; many passengers were
overcome by smoke, and three were asphixiated before the pilot managed
to land. I cannot say for sure that my mother would have been a fourth
victim if she had been aboard, but when I touched her ticket, I felt
not paper but the cold, hard brass of a coffin handle.
However, I had never told anyone about seeing smoky, curling shapes in
some people. For one thing, I did not know what I was seeing or what
it meant. And I had sensed from the start that I would be in terrible
danger if one of those people with the darkness inside was to discover
that I was aware of his difference. It was my secret.
By the week of Aunt Paula's wedding, when I finally could see every
sickening detail of the porcine-canine goblin in Mr. Denton
Harkenfield, I could not just suddenly start babbling about monsters
masquerading as human beings; it would not be credible. You see,
though the accuracy and validity of my occasional clairvoyant visions
had been established, there were many who did not view my unusual
talents as a blessing. My powers, though seldom mentioned or employed,
marked me as "strange," and there were those in our valley who believed
that seers were invariably mentally unstable.
More than a few people had told my parents that I should be watched
closely for signs of delusional behavior or incipient autism, and
although my parents had no patience with such talk, I was sure they
sometimes worried that my gift might eventually prove to be a curse.
The link between psychic ability and mental instability is such a
strong part of folklore that even my grandmother, who believed my
Twilight Eyes were an unmixed and joyous blessing, worried that I would
somehow lose control of the power, that it would turn in upon me and
lead me to destruction. Therefore I was afraid that if I began ranting
about goblins hidden inside human forms, I would reinforce the fears of
those who were sure I would one day wind up in a padded room.
Indeed I had doubts about my own sanity. I knew the folklore, and I
had overheard some of the warnings my parents had been given, and when
I began to see the goblins, I wondered if my mind had begun to fail me.
Furthermore, while I feared the goblin in Denton Harkenfield and sensed
the intense hatred that motivated the creature, I had no concrete
evidence that it intended to harm Aunt Paula, Kerry, or anyone else.
Denton Harkenfield's behavior had been exemplary.
And, finally, I hesitated to sound the alarm because if I was
disbelieved-as would inevitably be the case-I would have done nothing
but alert Uncle Denton to the danger that I posed to his kind. If I
was not hallucinating, if he was a deadly beast, the last thing I
wanted to do was call attention to myself, put myself in a position
where I stood alone and defenseless, to be murdered at his leisure.
The wedding was held, and Denton adopted Kerry, and for months Paula.and Kerry were happier than anyone had ever seen them. The goblin
remained in Denton, but I began to wonder if it was in essence an evil
creature or merely . . .
different from us.
While the Harkenfield family prospered, an unusual amount of tragedy
and disaster was visited upon many of their neighbors in that Siskiyou
valley, but it took me a long time to realize that Uncle Denton was the
source of this uncanny run of bad luck. The Whitborn family, half a
mile from us, a mile from the Harkenfield place, were burned out of
their home when their oil furnace exploded; of the six Whitborn
children, three perished in the fire. A few months later, out on
Goshawkan Lane, all but one of the five members of the Jenerette family
died of carbon monoxide poisoning when a vent on their furnace became
inexplicably clogged, filling the house with deadly fumes in the middle
of the night. And Rebecca Norfron, the thirteen-year-old daughter of
Miles and Hannah Norfron, disappeared while on a walk with her little
dog, Hoppy; she turned up a week later, over at the county seat, twenty
miles away, in an abandoned house; not only had she been killed but
also tortured, and at length. Hoppy was never found.
Then trouble moved closer to home. My grandmother fell down the cellar
stairs at her place, broke her neck, and lay undiscovered for almost a
day. I did not go into Grandma's house after her death, which probably
delayed my discovery that Denton Harkenfield was the source of many of
the valleys' miseries; if I had stood at the top of those cellar steps,
had gone to the bottom to kneel at the spot where they had found
Grandma's body, I would have sensed Uncle Denton's contribution to her
demise, and perhaps I could have stopped him before he caused more
pain. At Grandmother Stanfeuss's funeral, with her body three days
dead and its invisible robes of psychic energy therefore somewhat
depleted, I was nonetheless so afflicted with clairvoyant perceptions
of unspecific violence that I collapsed and had to be taken home. They
thought it was grief that brought me down, but it was the shocking
knowledge that somehow Grandma had been murdered and had died in
terror. But I did not know who had killed her, and I did not even have
a shred of evidence to suggest that murder had been done, and I was
only fourteen, an age when no one listens to you, and I was already
considered strange, so I kept my mouth shut.
I knew Uncle Denton was something more-or less-than human, but I did
not immediately suspect him of murder. I was still confused about him
because Aunt Paula and Kerry loved him so much and because he was nice
to me, always making jokes with me and showing what seemed to be a
genuine interest in my achievements at school and on the junior varsity
wrestling team. He and Aunt Paula gave me wonderful Christmas
presents, and on my birthday he gave me several novels by Robert
Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt plus a crisp new five-dollar bill. I had
seen him do nothing but good, and although I sensed that he virtually
seethed with hatred, I wondered whether I was imagining the rage and
loathing that I perceived within him. If an ordinary human being had
been committing wholesale slaughter, a psychic residue of that villainy
would have clung to him, and I would have detected it sooner or later,
but goblins radiate nothing but hatred, and because I perceived no
specific guilt in Uncle
Denton's aura, I did not suspect that he was my grandmother's killer.
I did notice that when anyone died, Denton spent more time visiting at
the funeral parlor than did any other friend or member of the family.
He was always solicitous, sympathetic, providing the most convenient.shoulder to cry on, running errands for the bereaved, helping in any
way he could, and he usually paid frequent visits to survivors after
their loved ones had been buried, just to see how they were getting
along and to inquire if there was any favor he could perform. He was
widely lauded for his empathy, humanity, and charity, but he modestly
turned aside such praise. This only confused me the more. It was
especially confusing when I could see the goblin within him, which
invariably grinned most wickedly on those occasions of grief and even
seemed to take sustenance from the misery of the mourners. Which was
the true Uncle Denton: the gloating beast within or the good neighbor
and concerned friend?
I still had not arrived at an answer to that question when eight months
later my father was crushed to death beneath his John Deere tractor.
He had been using the tractor to pull up large stones in the new field
that he was preparing for cultivation, a twenty-acre parcel hidden from
our house and barn by an intruding arm of the forest that reached down
from the Siskiyous. My sisters found him when they went to see why he
had not come to the house at dinnertime, and I did not find out about
it until I came home from a wrestling match at school a couple of hours
later. ("Oh, Carl," my sister Jenny had said to me, hugging me tight,
"his poor face, his poor face, all black and dead, his poor face!") By
then Aunt Paula and Uncle Denton were at our place, and he was the rock
to which my mother and sisters clung. He tried to comfort me as well,
and he seemed sincere in both his grief and his offer of sympathy, but
I could see the goblin leering within and fixing me with hot, red eyes.
Although I half believed that the hidden demon was a figure of my
imagination or even proof of my growing madness, I nevertheless
withdrew from Denton and avoided him as much as I could.
At first the county sheriff was suspicious of the death, for there
seemed to be wounds on my father that could not be explained by the
toppling of the tractor. But as no one had a motive for murdering my
dad, and as there was no other evidence whatsoever to point toward foul
play, the sheriff eventually arrived at the conclusion that Dad had not
been killed immediately when the tractor fell over on him, that he had
struggled for some time, and that his other injuries resulted from
those struggles. At the funeral I fell down in a swoon, as I had done
at the services for my grandmother the previous year, and for the same
reason: A punishing wave of psychic energy, a formless surging tide of
violence smashed over me, and I knew that my father had been murdered,
too, but I did not know why or by whom.
Two months later I finally found the courage to go to the field where
Dad had had his accident. There I moved inexorably toward the very
spot where he had perished, drawn by occult forces, and when I knelt on
the earth that had received his blood, I had a vision of Uncle Denton
striking him along the side of the head with a length of pipe, knocking
him unconscious, then rolling the tractor on top of him. My father had
regained consciousness and had lived five minutes, straining against
the weight of the tractor, while Denton Harkenfield had stood over him,
watching, enjoying. The horror of it overwhelmed me, and I passed out,
waking some minutes later with a bad headache and hands squeezed
tightly around, clumps of moist earth.
I spent the next couple of months in secret detective work.
My grandmother's house was sold soon after her death, but I returned
there when the new owners were away, and I let myself in through a
basement window that I knew had no latch. When I stood at the foot and
then at the head of the cellar steps, I received vague but unmistakable
psychic impressions that convinced me Denton had pushed her and then.had come down the steps and had snapped her neck when the fall had not
done the job as planned. I began to think about the unusually long run
of misfortune that people in our valley had experienced for the past
couple of years. I visited the rubble-strewn site of the fire-blasted
Whitborn place where three children had succumbed to flames, and while
the people who had purchased the old Jenerette house were away, I let
myself into their place and laid my hands upon the furnace that had
spewed killing fumes, and in both instances I received strong
clairvoyant impressions of Denton Harkenfield's involvement. When Mom
went into the county seat one Saturday to do some shopping, I rode
along with her, and while she visited several stores I went to the
abandoned house where Rebecca Norfron's tortured and mutilated corpse
had been discovered. There, too, the stain of Denton Harkenfield was
visible to the psychic eye.
For all of that, I had no evidence whatsoever. My tale of goblins
would be no more believable now than when I had first recognized Denton
Harkenfield for what he was, more than two years before. If I publicly
accused him without having the means to insure his arrest, I would
certainly be the next "accident" victim in the valley. I had to have
proof, and I hoped to obtain it by anticipating him with a precognitive
flash of his next crime. If I knew where he would strike, I could be
there to interrupt him in some dramatic fashion, after which his
intended victim-spared only by my intervention-would testify against
him, and he would be put in prison. I dreaded such a confrontation,
afraid that I would botch it and wind up dead alongside the victim I
had meant to save, but I could see no hope in any other course of
action.
I began spending more time around Uncle Denton, though his dual
identity was terrifying and repellent, for I thought that I was more
likely to receive the precognitive flash in his company than away from
him. But to my surprise a year passed without developments of the sort
I was hoping for. I did sense violence building in him on a number of
occasions, but I received no visions of slaughter to come, and each
time that his rage and hatred seemed to have reached an unusually
fierce strength, each time that it seemed he must strike out to relieve
the pressure in him, he would go away on some piece of business or on a
short vacation with Aunt Paula, and he would always return in a more
stable condition, the hatred and rage still in him but temporarily
weakened. I suspected that he was causing suffering wherever he went,
wary of spreading an inordinant amount of misery too close to home.
I could not obtain a clairvoyant vision of these crimes while in his
company because, until he arrived at wherever he was going and looked
over the opportunities for destruction, he did not know, himself, where
he would land a blow.
Then, after our valley had known a year of peace, I began to sense that
Denton intended to bring the war back to the original battleground.
Worse, I perceived that he intended to kill Kerry, my cousin, his own
adopted son, to whom he had given his name. If the goblin in him fed
on human anguish, which I was beginning to suspect, it would enjoy-a
feast of surpassing richness in the aftermath of Keny's death. Aunt
Paula, having lost a husband years before and being deeply attached to
her son, would be destroyed by the loss of Kerry and the goblin would
be with her not just in funeral parlors but twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week, drinking of her agony and despair. As the goblin's
hatred became more bitter day by day, as portents of impending violence
grew increasingly obvious to my sixth sense, I became frantic, for I
could not perceive the place, time, or method of the murder to come..The night before it happened, late last April, I awoke from a nightmare
in which Kerry had been dying in the Siskiyou forests, under towering
spruce and pine. In the dream he was wandering in circles, lost, dying
of exposure, and I kept running after him with a blanket and a thermos
of hot chocolate, but for some reason he did not see or hear me, and in
spite of his weakness he managed to keep ahead of me, until I awoke not
in a state of sheer terror but in frustration.
I could not use my sixth sense to wring any more details from the
ether, but in the morning I went to the Harkenfield place to alert
Kerry to the danger. I was not sure how to lead into the subject and
present my information convincingly, but I knew I must warn him
immediately. On the way I must have considered and rejected a hundred
approaches. However, when I got there, no one was home. I waited
around for a couple of hours, and finally I headed back to our place,
figuring I would return later, toward suppertime. I never saw Kerry
again@alive.
Late that afternoon the word reached us that Uncle Denton and Aunt
Paula were worried about Kerry. That morning, after Aunt Paula had
driven in to the county seat to tend to various matters, Kerry had told
Denton that he was going into the mountains, into the woods back of
their place, to do a little off-season small-game hunting, and he had
said he would return by two o'clock at the latest. At least that was
what Denton claimed. By five o'clock there was still no sign of Kerry.
I expected the worst because it just was not like my cousin to hunt
off-season. I did not believe that he had told Denton any such thing
or that he had gone up into the Siskiyous by himself. Denton had lured
him there on one pretext or another and then had . . . disposed of
him.
Search parties combed the foothills most of that night, 'without
success. At first light they went out in greater force with a pack of
bloodhounds and with me. I had never before used my clairvoyance in a
search of that kind. Because I could not control the power, I did not
think I would be able to sense anything of value, and I did not even
tell them that I intended to bring my special abilities to bear. To my
surprise, in two hours, ahead of the hounds, I experienced a sense of
psychic flashes and found the corpse at the head of a deep and narrow
draw, at the foot of a rocky slope.
Kerry was so badly battered that it was difficult to believe he had
sustained all his injuries in the fall down the side of the ravine.
Under other circumstances the county coroner might have found more than
sufficient evidence to warrant a determination of death at the hands of
another, but the corpse was in no condition to support the subtle
analyses of forensic pathology, especially as practiced by a simple
country physician. During the night, animals-raccoons, perhaps, or
foxes, or wood rats, or weasels-had gotten at the body. Something had
eaten the eyes, and something had burrowed into Kerry's guts; his face
was slashed, and the tips of some fingers were nibbled off.
A few days later I went after Uncle Denton with an ax. I remember how
fiercely he fought, and I remember my agonizing doubts. But I swung
the ax in spite of my reservations, driven by an instinctive awareness
of how quickly and gleefully he would destroy me if I showed the
slightest weakness or hesitation. What I remember most clearly is how
that weapon felt in my hands as I used it on him: It felt like justice.
I do not remember returning from the Harkenfield place to our house.
One moment I was standing over Denton's corpse, then suddenly I was in
the shadow of the brewer's spruce at the Stanfeuss farmhouse, cleaning
the bloody blade of the ax on an old rag. Coming out of my trance, I.dropped the ax and the rag and slowly became aware that the fields
would soon need tilling, that the foothills would soon be green and
beautifully dressed in the raiments of spring, that the Siskiyous
looked more majestic than usual, and that the sky was a piercingly
clear and aching shade of blue, except toward the west, where dark and
ominous thunderheads were rapidly moving in. Standing there in the
sunlight, with sage cloud shadows racing toward me, I knew, without
resort to my clairvoyant powers, that I was probably looking upon that
treasured landscape for the last time. The incoming clouds were an
omen of the stormy and sunless future I had hewn for myself when I had
gone after Denton Harkenfield with that well-sharpened blade.
And now, four months and thousands of miles from those events, lying
next to Rya Raines in the darkness of her bedroom, listening to her
even breathing as she slept, I was compelled to ride the memory train
all the way to the end of the line before I could get off. With
uncontrollable shudders and a thin, cold sweat, I relived the- last
hour at home in Oregon: the hurried packing of my knapsack, my mother's
frightened questions, my refusal to tell her what trouble I had gotten
myself into, the mixture of love and fear in the eyes of my sisters,
the way they longed to embrace and soothe me but drew back at the sight
of the blood on my hands and clothes.
I knew there was no sense telling them about the goblins; even if they
believed me, there was nothing they could do, and I did not want to
burden them with my crusade against the demonkind, for already I had
begun to suspect that inevitably it would become just that, a crusade.
So I had walked away, hours before Denton Harkenfield's body would be
found, and later I had sent my mother and sisters a letter with vague
assertions of Denton's involvement in the deaths of my father and
Kerry. The last stop on the memory train is in some ways the worst:
Mom, Jenny, and Sarah, standing on the front porch, watching me walk
away, all of them weeping, confused, frightened, afraid for me, afraid
of me, left on their own in a world grown cold and bleak. End of the
line.
Thank God. Exhausted but curiously cleansed by the journey, I turned
onto my side, facing Rya, and fell into a deep sleep that was, for the
first time in days, utterly dreamless.
In the morning, over breakfast, feeling guilty about all the secrets I
was keeping from her and looking for a way to lead into a warning about
the unknown threat she faced, I told Rya about my Twilight Eyes. I did
not mention my ability to see the goblins but spoke only of my other
psychic talents, specifically of my clairvoyant ability to sense
oncoming danger. I told her of my mother's airline ticket that had
felt not like paper but like the brass handle of a coffin, and I
recounted other less dramatic instances of accurate premonition. that
was enough for openers; if I had piled on stories of goblins hiding in
human disguises, it would have been too rich a confection to inspire
belief.
To my surprise and gratification she had far less difficulty accepting
what I told her than I had anticipated. At first her hands kept
returning to her coffee mug and she sipped nervously at that brew, as
if, by its heat and slight bitterness, it was a touchstone with which
she could repeatedly test herself to determine if she were dreaming or
awake. But before long she became enthralled by my stories, and it was
soon evident that she believed.
"I knew there was something special about you," she said.
"Didn't I say so just the other night? That wasn't just mushy love
talk, you know. I meant that I really did sense something special . ... something unique and unusual in you. And I was right! " She had
scores of questions, and I answered them as best I could, while
avoiding any mention of the goblins or of Denton Harkenfield's
murderous spree in Oregon, lest her belief collapse. In her reaction
to my revelations, I sensed both wonder and what I thought was a dark
dread, though that second emotion was less clear than the first. She
openly expressed the wonder, but she tried to hide her dismay from me,
and she managed to conceal it with such success that, in spite of my
psychic perceptions, I was not sure that I was not imagining it.
At last I reached across the table, took her hands in mine, and said,
"I have a reason for telling you about all this."
"What?"
"But first, I've got to know whether you really want to.
"Want to what?"
"Live," I said quietly. "Last week . . . you talked about the ocean
down in Florida, about swimming out and out until your arms turned to
lead . . . " With too little conviction she said, "That was just
talk."
"And four nights ago, when we climbed the Ferris wheel, you almost
seemed to want the lightning to catch you there on the girders."
She turned her eyes away from mine, looked down at the yellow smears of
egg yolk and the toast crumbs on her plate, said nothing.
With love that must have been as evident in my voice as Luke Bendingo's
stutter was evident in his, I said, "Rya, there is a certain . . .
strangeness in you."
Well," she said without looking up.
"Since you told me about Abner Kady and your mother, I've begun to
understand why darkness falls over you at times. But understanding
doesn't make me worry any less about it."
"There's no need for you to worry," she said softly.
"Look in my eyes and tell me."
She took a long time in lifting her gaze from the remnants of her
breakfast, but she met my eyes forthrightly when she said, "I have
these . . . spells . . . these depressions . . . and sometimes it
seems that going on is just too difficult. But I'll never give in to
those moods entirely. Oh, I'll never . . . do away with myself. You
don't have to worry about that. I'll always pull myself out of those
funks and go on because I've got two damned good reasons not to give
up. If I gave up, Abner Kady would win, wouldn't he? And I can't ever
allow that. I've got to go on, build up my little empire, and make
something of myself, because every day that I go on and every success I
have is a triumph over him, isn't it?"
"Yes. And what's your other reason?"
"You," she said.
I had hoped that would be her answer.
She said, "Since you've come into my life I've got a second reason to
go on."
I lifted her hands, kissed them.
Although she appeared relatively calm-if teary-on the surface, she was
in an emotional turmoil of which I could make little sense.
I said, "All right. We've got something together that's worth living
for, and the worst thing that could happen now is that we'd somehow
lose each other. So . . . I don't want to scare you . . . but I have
had a..... a sort of premonition . . . that worries me."
"Concerning me?" she said.
"Yes."
Her lovely face darkened. "Is it..... really bad?"."No, no," I lied. "It's just that..... I vaguely sense some trouble
heading your way, so I want you to be careful when I'm not with you.
Don't take any chances or risks-" "What sort of chances? What kind of
risks?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Don't climb up high anywhere, certainly
not up the Ferris wheel again, until I've sensed that the crisis is
past. Don't drive too fast. Be careful.
Be alert. It's probably nothing. I'm probably being a nervous nellie
because you're so valuable to me. But it won't hurt you to be more
alert for a few days, until I have a clearer premonition or until I
sense that the danger is past. Okay?"
"Okay."
I did not tell her about the gruesome vision in which she had been
covered in blood, for I did not want to terrify her.
That would not accomplish anything and might even contribute to the
danger she faced, for exhausted by prolonged and constant terror, she
would not think instinctively or well when the crisis finally came. I
wanted her to be cautious, not constantly afraid, and when we walked up
to the midway a short white later and parted with a kiss, I felt that
she was in approximately that desired state of mind.
The August sun rained golden light upon the carnival, and birds sailed
in a serene blue sky. As I prepared the high striker for business my
spirits rose steadily, until it seemed that I could take flight and
join the birds above if I so desired.
Rya had revealed her secret shame and the horror of her Appalachian
childhood, and I had told her the secret of my Twilight Eyes, and in
this sharing of long-guarded confidences, we had created an important
bond; neither of us was alone any more. I was confident that she would
eventually reveal her other secret, the story of the orphanage, and
when she had done that, I might test her trust in me with hints about
the goblins. I strongly suspected that, given more time with me, she
would one day be able to accept my goblin tales as the truth, even
though she did not have the ability to see the creatures and confirm my
testimony. Certainly there were still problems ahead: the enigmatic
Joel Tuck; the goblins' scheme involving the Ferris wheel, which might
or might not be the same danger that hung over Rya; and our very
presence in Yontsdown, with its abundant demonkind in positions of
power from which they could cause us unguessable misery.
Nevertheless, for the first time I was confident that I would triumph,
that I would be able to avert the disaster at the Ferris wheel, that I
would be able to save Rya, and that my life was, at last, on an upward
track.
It is always lightest just before the dark.
15
Death
Throughout the afternoon and early evening, Thursday was a skein of
bright yarn that unraveled without a knot: pleasantly warm but not
searingly hot, low humidity, a gentle breeze that cooled but never grew
strong enough to cause problems with the tents, thousands of marks
eager to part with their money, and no goblins.
But it changed with nightfall.
First I began to see goblins on the concourse. There were not many of
them, only half a dozen, but the look of them, inside their disguises,
was worse than usual. Their snouts seemed to quiver more obscenely,.and their hot-coal eyes blazed more brightly than ever, with fevered
hatred that exceeded in intensity the malevolence with which they
usually regarded us. I sensed that they had passed the boiling point
and were engaged upon an errand of destruction that would vent some of
the pressure that was building in them.
Then my attention was drawn to the Ferris wheel, which began to undergo
changes that were visible to no eyes but mine. Initially the enormous
machine began to loom even bigger than it was, to rise up slowly like
some living creature that heretofore had been crouched to convey a
false impression of its size. In my vision it rose and swelled until
it was not only the dominating object in the carnival (which it had
always been) but a truly mountainous mechanism, a towering construct
that would crush everyone on the midway if it toppled. By ten o'clock
the hundreds of lights that outlined the wheel appeared to be losing
power, growing dimmer by the minute, until at eleven o'clock the giant
ride was totally dark. A part of me could see that the lights
continued to blaze as before, and when I looked at the wheel out of the
corner of my eye, in a sidelong glance, I could confirm its continued
bright adornment, yet when I looked at it more directly, I saw only an
ominously huge, portentously dark Ferris turning ponderously against a
black sky, as if it were one of the mill wheels of Heaven-the one that
relentlessly grinds out the flour of suffering and cruel misfortune.
I knew what the vision meant. The disaster at the Ferris wheel would
not take place tonight; however, the groundwork for that tragedy would
be laid soon, in the dead hours after the midway had closed. The half
dozen goblins that I had seen were a commando team and would remain on
the fairgrounds after the midway shut down. I felt it, sensed it, knew
it. When all the carnies had gone to bed, the demonkind would crawl
out of their separate hiding places, join forces, and sabotage the
ride, as they had meant to do on Sunday night, when they had been
interrupted by Jelly Jordan. And then, tomorrow, death would visit
some innocent fair-goers who were looking forward to a spin on the big
wheel.
By midnight the mammoth Ferris, seen through my -Twilight Eyes, was not
only without lights but was like a great silent engine that produced
and flung off a deeper darkness of its own. That was much the same
cold and disquieting image I had had of it the first night I had come
onto the Sombra Brothers lot, last week, in another town, though that
strange impression was stronger now and even more deeply disturbing.
The midway began winding down shortly before one o'clock, and contrary
to my usual diligence and industry, I was among the first to shutter.
I had closed the high-striker and bundled up the day's receipts when I
saw Marco passing by on the concourse. I called him over, persuaded
him to take the cash to Rya in her trailer, along with the message that
I had some important business to do and would be late.
As strings and banks and panels of lights winked out from one end of
the midway to the other, as flaps were pulled over tent entrances and
snugged down, as the carnies drifted away singly and in small groups, I
ambled as nonchalantly as possible toward the center of the grounds
and, when unobserved, dropped down and slid into the shadows beneath a
truck. I lay there for ten minutes, where the sun had not been able to
thrust its drying fingers during the last two days, and the dampness
worked its way through my clothes, exacerbating the chill that had
settled into me earlier, when I had begun to notice the changes in the
Ferris wheel.
The last lights were extinguished.
The last generators were switched off, died with a chug, a rattle..The last voices faded, were gone.
I waited another minute or two, then eased out from beneath the truck,
stood, listened, breathed, listened.
After the cacophony of the carnival in motion, the silence of the
carnival at rest was preternatural. Nothing. Not a tick.
Not a scrape. Not a rustle.
Carefully following a discreet route that led through those places
where the night was further darkened by piles of shadows, I crept to
the Tilt-a-Whirl, paused by the ramp that led up to the ride, and again
listened intently. Once more I heard nothing .
I stepped cautiously over the chain at the bottom of the ramp and went
up to the platform in a crouch, so as not to present an obvious
silhouette. The ramp was made of two-byfours, solidly constructed, and
I was wearing sneakers, so I made barely a sound as I ascended. But
once I reached the platform, stealth was not as easily achieved; there,
hour after hour, day after day, the vibrations of the ride's steel
wheels passed through the rails and into the surrounding wood, with the
result that creaks and squeaks nested like termites in every joint of
the structure. The Tilt-a-Whirl platform sloped up toward the back,
and on my way to the top of it, I remained close to the outside
railing, where the floorboard joints were the tightest and protested
the least. Nonetheless, my progress was accompanied by several sharp
little sounds that were startlingly loud in the uncanny quiet of the
deserted midway.
I told myself that the goblins, if they heard at all, would interpret
these indiscretions as the settling noises of inanimate objects, yet I
winced and froze each time the wood cried out beneath my feet.
In a few minutes I passed all the Tilt-a-Whirl cage-swish resembled
giant snails slumbering in the darkness, and came to the top of the
platform, approximately ten feet above the ground, where I crouched
against the railing and looked out across the night-cloaked carnival.
I had chosen that observation post because I could see the base of the
Ferris wheel, plus more of the midway than from any point on the
ground, and also because I was practically invisible there.
The night had taken a few bites out of the moon since last week. It
was not as helpful as it had been when I had pursued the goblin to the
Dodgem Car pavilion. On the other hand, the moon-shadows granted me
the same comforting concealment that gave a sense of security to the
goblins; as much was gained as lost.
And I had one advantage that was invaluable. I knew that they were
here, but they were almost certainly unaware of my presence and could
not know that I was stalking them.
Forty tedious minutes passed before I heard one of the intruders leave
its hiding place. Luck was with me, for the sound-a grating of metal
on metal and a soft squeal of unoiled hinges-came from directly in
front of me, from behind the Tilt-a-Whirl, where trucks and unlit arc
lamps and generators and other pieces of equipment were lined up along
the middle of the midway, with rides on both sides. The protestation
from the hinges was followed swiftly by movement that caught my eye. A
slab of darkness, one of a set of double doors on the back of a truck,
swung open through the deeper darkness around it, and a man came out of
the cargo hold with elaborate caution, twenty feet from me. A man to
anyone else, he was a goblin to me, and the flesh prickled at the back
of my neck. In this poor light I could not see much of the demon
within the human form, but I had no difficulty finding its glowing
crimson eyes.
When the creature had studied the night and had satisfied itself that.it was unobserved and in no danger, it turned back to the open cargo
hold. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was going to call
forth others of its kind from inside the truck, but instead it began to
push the door shut.
I stood, swung one leg over the railing, then the other, and was for an
instant perched on the Tilt-a-Whirl's balustrade, where the beast below
could not have missed me if it had suddenly turned around. But it did
not turn, and although it closed the door and slid the latch bolt home
as quietly as it could, it made enough noise to cover my cat-footed
leap to the ground.
Without looking back toward the dense shadows where I crouched, it
moved off toward the Ferris wheel, which stood two hundred yards
farther up the midway.
I drew the knife from my boot and followed the demon.
It moved with the utmost caution.
So did I.
It made hardly a sound.
I made no sound at all.
I caught up with it alongside another truck. The beast became aware of
me only when I leapt on it, threw one arm around its neck, pulled its
head back hard, and opened its throat with my blade. As I felt its
blood spurting, I released it and stepped out of the way, and it fell
as suddenly and limply as a marionette whose control cords had been
severed. On the ground it twitched for a few seconds, raising its
hands to its gaping throat, where blood jetted black as oil in the
lightless night. It could make no sound, for it could not draw breath
through its ruined windpipe or command a single vibration in its gouged
larynx. In any event, it lived less than half a minute, relinquishing
life with a series of feeble flutters. The radiant red eyes fixed on
me, and as I watched, the light ebbed from them.
Now he seemed like only a middle-aged man with bushy sideburns and a
potbelly.
I pushed the corpse under the truck, to prevent one of the other beasts
from stumbling upon it and being tipped off to the danger. Later I
would have to return, decapitate it, and dig two widely separated
graves for the remains. Now, however, I had other worries.
The odds had improved a little. Five-to-one instead of six-to-one.
But the situation was not heartening.
I tried to kid myself that not all of the six I had seen on the
concourse had stayed past closing time, but it was no good. I knew
they were all nearby, as only I can know such things.
My heart raced, overloading veins and arteries with a surge of blood
that made me feel exceptionally clearheaded, not dizzy or frantic at
all but sensitized to every subtle nuance of the night, much the way
that a hunting fox must feel as it tracks prey in the wild and, at the
same time, remains on guard for those things that regard the fox,
himself, as prey.
Under the half-devoured moon I prowled, a dripping knife in my hand,
its blade glimmering like a magically coherent length of oily liquid.
Snowflake moths air-danced around chrome poles and flit ted back and
forth across other faces of highly polished metal, wherever there was a
vague reflection of waning moonlight.
I stole from one bit of cover to another, listening, watching.
I ran softly in a crouch.
I edged around blind corners.
Crept.
Crawled..Slid.
Eased.
A mosquito tickled across my throat on spindly legs, flimsy wings
beating hard, and I almost swatted it before I realized the sound might
give me away. Instead I closed a hand slowly over it as it began to
feed on me-and crushed it between palm and neck.
I thought I heard something over by the fun house, though it was most
likely my sixth sense that sent me in that direction. The clown's huge
face seemed to wink at me in the gloom, though not with any humor; it
was, instead, the kind of wink that Death might favor you with when he
came to collect your debt, a bleak wink simulated by the writhing of
maggots in an empty eye socket.
A goblin, having boarded a fun-house gondola before closing time, and
having cleverly disembarked from that gondola once inside the
attraction, was now coming out of the enormous gaping mouth of the
clown to keep a rendezvous with the other five intruders at the Ferris
wheel. This one was costumed as an Elvis look-alike, with a ducktail
haircut and a swagger, about twenty-five. I observed it from the cover
of the ticket booth-and as it passed me, I struck.
This time I was not as. quick or forceful as I had been before, and
the beast managed to bring an arm up and deflect the blade as the
cutting edge slashed toward its throat. The razored steel parted the
flesh of its forearm and sliced along the back of its hand, the point
coming to rest between the first knuckles of two fingers. The demon
issued a thin, soft cry, barely audible, but choked that off when it
realized that a scream might draw inquisitive carnies as well as other
goblins.
Even as blood sprang from its arm, the demon tore itself loose of me.
It swung toward me with a lurch and stumble, its luminous eyes bright
with murderous intention.
Before it could regain its balance, I kicked it in the crotch.
Trapped within the human form, it was hostage to the weaknesses of
human physiology, and now it doubled over as pain exploded up from its
crushed testicles. I kicked again, higher this time, and the beast
lowered its head simultaneously, as if to oblige me, and my foot caught
it under the chin. It sprawled backward on -the sawdust-covered
concourse, and I fell atop it, driving my knife deep into its throat,
twisting the blade. I took three or four blows on my head and
shoulders as it made a futile attempt to drive me off, but I succeeded
in letting the life out of the creature like air from a punctured
balloon.
Gasping but keeping in mind the need for silence, I pushed up from the
dead goblin-and was struck from behind, across the base of the skull
and the back of the neck. A many-petaled pain bloomed, but I held on
to consciousness. I fell, rolled, and saw another demon scuttling
toward me, a length of wood in its hands.
I discovered that I had been so stunned by the first blow that I had
dropped my knife. I could see it, gleaming dully, ten feet away, but I
could not reach it in time.
With its black lips drawn back in a wicked snarl beneath its human
glaze, my third adversary was upon me in one blink of its conflagrant
eyes, wielding that length of two-by-four as if it were an ax, chopping
at my face as I had chopped at Denton Harkenfield. I crossed my arms
over my head to save myself from a skull-fracturing blow, and the beast
slammed the heavy club into my arms three times, striking hot bursts of
pain from my bones the way a blacksmith's hammer rings sparks from an
anvil. Then it changed tactics and struck at my unprotected ribs. I.drew up my knees and made a ball of myself and tried to roll away,
toward some object that I might be able to put between us, but the
goblin followed with evil glee, raining blows on my legs, buttocks,
back, sides, and arms. None of them landed with bone-breaking force
because I kept moving away from the arcing wood, but I could not take
this punishment much longer and still have the will and ability to stay
on the move; I began to think that I was a dead man. In desperation I
stopped trying to shield my head and grabbed for the club, but the
demon, towering over me, glaring down at me, easily tore it out of my
grasp, and I succeeded only in taking half a dozen splinters in my
palms and fingers. The creature swept the bludgeon high above its head
and brought it down with the fury of a berserker or a battle-frenzied
samurai. Coming straight at me, the wood looked as big as a toppling
tree, and I knew that this time it would knock either the sense or the
life out of me -but instead the weapon suddenly slipped out of the
goblin's hands, flew off to the right of me, thumped end over end
through the sawdust. And with a hard, low grunt of shock and pain, my
attacker dropped toward me, felled by what seemed to be pure sorcery.
I had to scramble to avoid being pinned beneath the beast, and when I
looked back at it in bewilderment, I saw how I'd been saved. Joel Tuck
stood over the goblin, holding the same sledgehammer that he had been
using Wednesday morning when I had found him pounding in tent pegs
behind Shockville. Joel hammered once more, and the goblin's skull
collapsed with a thud and a wet, sickening sound.
The entire battle had been waged in virtual silence. The loudest noise
had been the thump of the wooden club striking one part of my anatomy
or another, which could not have carried more than a hundred feet or
so.
Still racked with pain and thinking slowly on that account, I watched
numbly as Joel let go of his hammer, grabbed the dead goblin by the
feet, and dragged the corpse off the concourse, concealing it in the
niche formed by the fun-house pitchman's platform and the ticket booth.
By the time he started wrestling the other body, the Elvis look-alike,
into the same hiding place, I had managed to rise up on my knees and
had begun to rub a little of the pain out of my arms and sides.
As I watched him drag the second body behind the ticket booth to pile
it upon the other, I had a darkly giddy moment in which I imagined Joel
beside an enormous stone hearth, rocking in a comfortable chair,
reading a good book, sipping brandy-and occasionally getting up to move
another corpse from a huge stack of them, shoving it into the fireplace
where other dead men and women were already half consumed by flames.
Except for the fact that bodies had taken the place of ordinary logs,
it was a warmly domestic scene, and Joel was even whistling happily as
he jabbed an iron poker at the heap of burning flesh. I felt a wild
giggle building in me, and I knew that I dare not give voice to it, for
then I might never be able to stop cackling. The realization that I
was on the edge of hysteria shocked and frightened me. I shook my head
and banished that bizarre fireside scene from my mind.
By the time I'd recuperated enough to try standing, Joel was there to
help. In the eldritch light of the partial moon, his malformed face
looked not more monstrous than usual, as might be expected, but softer,
less threatening, like a child's amateurish drawing, almost more
amusing than frightening. I leaned against him for a moment, reminded
of how damned big he was, and when I finally spoke, I had the presence
of mind to whisper, "I'm okay."
Neither of us commented on his fortuitous appearance, nor did we make
any reference to his willingness to commit murder in spite of the fact.that he claimed never to have seen a goblin. There would be time for
that later. If we survived.
I hobbled across the concourse to retrieve my knife. Stooping down, I
experienced a moment of dizziness, but I overcame it, plucked the knife
out of the sawdust, rose again, and returned to Joel with that
tongue-between-the-teeth, stiff-necked, square-shouldered,
oh-so-careful posture and gait of a drunkard who thinks he is
successfully faking his way through a sobriety test.
Joel was not deceived by my brave pretense. He took my arm, supported
me as we got off the exposed concourse, and helped me scurry into the
center of the midway. We took refuge in a haven of shadows by the
Caterpillar.
"Broken bones?" he whispered.
"Don't think so."
"Bad cuts?"
"No," I said as I scraped a couple of the biggest splinters out of my
hands. I had escaped serious injury, but I would be sore as hell in
the morning. If I made it to the morning.
"There're more goblins.
He was silent for a moment.
We listened.
From the distance came the forlorn whistle of a train.
Closer, the quick and soft vibration of moth wings.
Breathing. Ours.
At last he whispered, "How many do you think?"
"Maybe six."
"Killed two," he said.
"Including the one I saw you mash?"
"No. That makes three."
Like me, he had known they were going to sabotage the Ferris wheel
tonight. Like me, he had set out to stop them. I wanted to hug him.
"Killed two," I whispered.
9"
You.
"Me."
"Then ... one left?"
"I think."
"Want to go after it?"
"No."
"Oh?"
"Got to go after it."
"Right."
"The Ferris," I hissed.
We slipped along the cluttered midway until we were near the big wheel.
In spite of his size, Joel Tuck moved with athletic grace and in
complete silence. We stopped in a drift of shadows piled against a
short trailer that contained a generator, and when I peered around the
equipment, I saw the sixth goblin standing at the foot of the Ferris.
It was disguised as a tall, rather muscular man of thirty-five, with
curly blond hair. But because it stood in the open, where a sickly
fall of anemic moonlight covered it like talcum powder and revealed it
much as powder might cling to and reveal an invisible man, I was able
to see the goblin within, as well, even from a distance of thirty feet.
Joel whispered, "It's agitated. Wonders where the others are. Got to
take it soon . . . before it gets scared and bolts.".We edged five feet closer to the demon, until we were huddled in the
last bit of cover. To reach the goblin, we would have to leap up,
revealing ourselves, dash twelve feet, vault over the low fence, and
cross another twelve or fifteen feet of cable-strewn ground.
Of course, by the time we were negotiating the fence, our enemy would
have run for its life, and if we could not catch it, the beast would
race back into Yontsdown to warn the others: There are people at the
carnival who can see through our disguises! Then Chief Lisle Kelsko
would find an excuse to raid the midway. He (it) would come armed with
fistsful of search warrants as well as guns, and he would poke his nose
into not only the sideshows and kootch tents and hanky-panks but into
our trailers as well. He would not be satisfied until the goblin
killers were identified among the ordinary carnies and, by one means or
another, eliminated.
If, however, the sixth goblin could be cut down and secretly buried
with its companions, Kelsko might strongly suspect that someone at the
carnival was responsible for their disappearance, but he would not have
proof. And he might not realize that the saboteurs had been destroyed
because their human disguises had been penetrated. If this sixth
goblin did not return to Yontsdown with an explicit warning and
descriptions of Joel and me, there was at least still hope.
My right hand was damp with perspiration. I scrubbed it vigorously on
my jeans, then gripped my throwing knife by the point. My arms ached
from the beating I had taken, but I was pretty sure that I could still
put a blade where I wished. I quickly whispered my intent to Joel, and
when the goblin turned away from me to survey the shadows in the other
direction for its demonic compatriots, I stood up, took several quick
steps, froze as it began to look in my direction once more, and loosed
the knife with all the force and quickness and calculation of which I
was capable.
I had thrown a second too soon and too low. Before the creature could
complete its turn in my direction, the blade sank deep into its
shoulder instead of piercing the tender center of its throat. The
demon staggered backward and collided with the ticket booth. I ran
toward it, stumbled, fell over a cable, and hit the ground hard.
By the time Joel reached the beast, it had pulled the knife from its
shoulder and was reeling, though still on its feet.
With a snarl and a snakelike hiss that definitely were not human, it
slashed at Joel, but he was agile for his size, and he knocked the
knife from its'hand, shoved it hard, and dropped atop it when it
crashed to the ground. He strangled it.
I retrieved my knife, wiped the blade on the leg of my pants, and
returned it to the sheath in my boot.
Even if I had been able to dispatch all six goblins without Joel's
help, I would not have had the strength to bury them by myself. As
huge and well muscled as he was, he could drag two bodies at a time,
while I could handle only one. I would have had to make six trips to
the woods behind the fairgrounds if I had been alone, but the two of us
needed to make the trek just twice.
Furthermore, because of Joel, digging graves was not required. We
dragged the bodies to a spot only twenty feet in from the perimeter of
the forest. There, in a small glade surrounded by trees like
black-frocked priests of a pagan religion, a limestone sinkhole waited
to accept the dead.
As I knelt beside the hole, directing the beam of Joel's flashlight
into its apparently depthless reaches, I said, "How did you know this
was here?"."I always scout the territory when we set up at a new stand. If you
can find something like this, it puts your mind at rest a little to
know it's available if you need it."
" You're at war, too," I said.
"No. Not the way you seem to be. I only kill them when I have no
other choice, when they're going to murder carnies or when they intend
to hurt marks on the lot and let us take the blame for it. I can't do
anything about the misery they inflict on the marks out in the straight
world. It's not that I don't care about the marks, you know. I do.
But I'm only one man, and I can only do so much, and the best I can
hope to do is protect my own."
trees around us rustled their leafy cassocks.
A sepulchral odor wafted out of the sinkhole.
"Have you dropped other goblins in here?" I asked.
"Only two. They usually let us alone in Yontsdown because they're so
busy planning school fires and poisoning folks at church picnics and
that sort of thing."
"You know what a breeding ground this is!"
"Yes."
"When did you bury the others here?" I asked, again peering down into
the bottomless limestone shaft.
"Two years ago. A couple of them came on the lot the next to last
night of the engagement, intending to start a fire that'd sweep through
the whole midway and wipe us out.
Much to their surprise, I interfered with their plans."
Hunched over, hair wild, his malformed face looking even stranger than
usual in the back. splash of the flashlight, the freak pulled the
first corpse to the lip of the sinkhole, as if he were Grendel storing
meat against the privations of winter.
I said, "No. First . . . we've got to cut off their heads. The
bodies can go in the shaft, but the heads have to be buried separately
. . . just in case."
"Huh? In case what?"
I told him about my experience with the goblin that he had buried under
the floor of Shockville last week.
"I've never cut off their heads before," he said.
"Then there's a chance that maybe a couple of them came back." He let
go of the body and stood in silence for a moment, thinking about that
unsettling bit of news. Considering his size and the blood-freezing
juxtaposition of his gnarly features, you might have thought that he
could easily instill terror but never know fear himself. Yet even in
that inadequate light I could see the anxiety in his face and in his
two good eyes, and when he spoke, it was in his voice as well.
"You mean there could be a couple of them out there, somewhere, who
know that I know, about them . . . and maybe they're looking for me .
. . been looking for me a long time and are maybe getting closer?"
"Could be," I said. "I suspect most of them stay dead once you kill
them. Probably only a few retain a strong enough spark of life to
rebuild their bodies and eventually reanimate themselves."
"Even a few is too many," he said uneasily.
I was now holding the flashlight in such a way that the beam sprayed
across the top of the sinkhole, parallel with the ground, and painted
the trunks of a couple of trees at the far side of the clearing. Joel
Tuck looked down through the widening fan of light, at the yawning
mouth of the shaft, as if he expected to see goblin hands reach out of
that darkness, as if he thought his victims had come back to life long
ago but had remained down there where he had put them, just waiting for.him to return.
He said, "I don't think the two I dropped in here would've come back.
I didn't behead them, but I made a damned good job of them, and even if
a spark of life remained in them when I brought them here, the fall
down that hole would surely have finished them for good. Besides, if
they had come back, they would have warned others in Yontsdown, and the
group who came to sabotage the Ferris wheel would've been a hell of a
lot more careful than they were."
Though the sinkhole seemed very deep, though he was most likely right
about the inability of any goblin to come back from that cold,
bottomless grave, we nevertheless decapitated all six of the demons
that we had slain that night.
We consigned their bodies to the hole but buried their heads in a
common grave much farther back in the woods.
On the way back to the carnival, along the forest path, as we pushed
through brambles and weeds, I was so weary that I felt as if my bones
were on the verge of coming unhinged.
Joel Tuck seemed exhausted, too, and we did not have the energy or
clarity of mind to ask each other all the questions for which we needed
answers. I did, however, want to know why he had played dumb on
Wednesday morning, when I had interrupted him while he was pounding
tent pegs and had confronted him with the fact that at our previous
engagement he had buried the goblin for me.
Paraphrasing the question that he had asked me about Rya almost a week
ago, making an answer of it, he said, "Well, Carl Slim, at that time I
wasn't certain I had seen the underneath below your underneath. I knew
there was a goblin killer in you, but I didn't know if that was your
deepest secret. You seemed to be a friend. Any killer of goblins
would -seem to have the right stuff. Lord, yes! But I'm cautious. As
a young child, I was not cautious about people, you see, but I learned.
Oh, I learned! As a little boy, I was desperate to be loved, made
desperate by this nightmare face of mine, in such need of affection and
acceptance that I became attached to anyone who had a kind word for me.
But one by one they all betrayed me. I heard some of them laughing at
me behind my back, and in others I eventually detected a nauseating
pity.
Some trusted friends and guardians won my confidence, only to prove
themselves unworthy of it when they tried to have me permanently
institutionalized for my own good! By then I was eleven years old, and
I knew that people had as many layers to them as onions, and that
before you made friends with someone you had better be sure that every
layer of him was as clean and good as the top skin. You see?"
"I see. But what possible secret did you think I could be concealing
under the secret of my goblin killing?"
"I didn't know. Could've been anything. So I've kept tabs on you.
And tonight, when it looked like that bastard was going to do you in
with the two-by-four, I hadn't yet made up my mind about you."
"Good heavens!"
"But I realized that if I didn't act, I might be losing a friend and
ally. And in this world, friends and allies of your sort are not
easily acquired."
In the meadow between the forest and the midway, with the moon now
gone, with the black arms of the night draped conspiratorially around
our shoulders, we trudged in weary companionship, tall grass whispering
around our legs. Fire flies flickered on all sides of us and flitted
by on lantern-lit missions beyond our understanding. Our passage
brought a temporary halt to cricket songs and to the cries of field.toads, but the chorus swelled again in our wake.
As we neared the back of the big tent that housed Sabrina's Mysteries
of the Nile, a girlie show with an Egyptian gimmick, Joel stopped and
put a big hand on my shoulder, stopping me as well. "There might be
trouble tonight when those six don't show up back in Yontsdown, as
expected.
Maybe you'd better sleep at my trailer. The wife won't mind.
There's an extra bedroom."
That was the first I knew he was married, and although I prided myself
on having a carny's blase attitude toward freaks and such, I was
chagrined to discover that I was startled by the thought of someone
married to Joel Tuck.
"What do you say?" he asked.
"I doubt there'll be any more trouble tonight. Besides, if there is,
my place is with Rya."
He was silent a moment. Then: "I was right, wasn't I"" "About what?"
"Your infatuation."
"It's more than that."
"You . . . love her?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure"" "Yes."
"And are you sure you know the difference between love and
infatuation?"
"What the hell kind of question is that?" I demanded, not really angry
with him, just frustrated, as I detected the resurgence of that
enigmatic streak in him.
"Sorry," he said. "You're not an ordinary seventeen-year-old. You're
not a boy. No boy has learned and seen and done the things that you
have, and I shouldn't forget that. You know what love is, I guess.
You're a man."
"I'm ancient," I said tiredly.
"Does she love you?"
"Yes." .
He was silent for a long time, but he kept his hand on my shoulder,
staying me, as if he were diligently searching for words to convey an
important message that defied even his formidable vocabulary.
I said, "What is it? What's troubling you?"
"I guess, when you say that she loves you . . . this is something you
know not just from what she says but from . . but also by the
application of whatever special talents and perceptions you possess."
"That's right," I said, wondering why my relationship with Rya should
cause him such concern. His questioning in such a delicate area seemed
almost like common nosiness, but I vaguely sensed that there was more
to it, and besides, he had saved my life, so I stifled the first
glimmer of irritation and said, "Clairvoyantly, psychically, I sense
that she loves me. Does that satisfy you? But even if I didn't have
the advantage of my sixth sense, I would know how she felt."
"If you're sure-" "I just said I was."
He sighed. "Again I'm sorry. It's just that . . . I have always been
aware of a . . . a difference in Rya Raines. I've had the feeling
that the underneath below her underneath is . . not good."
"She has a grim secret," I told him. "But it's not something that
she's done. It's something that was done to her."
"She's told you all?"
"Yes .
He nodded his shaggy head and worked his steam-shovel jaw. "Good. I'm
glad to hear it. I've always sensed the good, worthy part of Rya, but.there's been this other thing, this unknown thing, that has aroused
suspicion. . . ."
"As I said, her secret is that she was a victim, not a criminal." He
patted my shoulder once, and we began to walk again, around the back of
the kootch show, around Animal Oddities, between that tent and another,
to the concourse, and from there to Gibtown-on-Wheels. I moved faster
as we drew nearer the trailers. All the talk about Rya reminded me
that she was in danger. Though I'd warned her to be careful, though I
knew she could probably take care of herself once she was aware that
trouble was coming and could not then be blindsided by it, and though I
did not sense she was in peril at this moment, a serpent of
apprehension coiled in the pit of my stomach and I was eager to check
on her.
Joel and I parted with an agreement to meet the next day to satisfy our
curiosity about each other's psychic abilities and to share what
knowledge we had of the goblin race.
Then I headed toward Rya's Airstream, thinking of the night's
slaughter, hoping I was not too grossly smeared with blood, concocting
a story to explain the stains on my jeans and T-shirt if Rya was awake
and had an opportunity to see them. With luck, she would be in bed,
and I could shower and dispose of my clothes while she dreamed.
I felt almost as if I were the Grim Reaper himself, coming home from
work.
I did not know that before dawn this Reaper would need to use his
scythe again.
16
A Total Eclipse of the Heart Rya was sitting in an armchair in the
living room of the Airstream, still dressed in the tan slacks and
emerald-green blouse she had been wearing when I had last seen her on
the midway. She held a glass of Scotch in one hand, and when I got a
look at her face, I stopped three or four words into the deception that
I had formulated on the way home. Something was terribly wrong; it was
visible in her eyes, in the tremor that softened her mouth, in the
sooty rings that had appeared around her eyes, and in the paleness that
aged her.
"What is it?" I asked.
She motioned me to the chair that faced hers, and when I indicated the
stains on my jeans-not too bad now that I saw them in the light-she
said it did not matter and again directed me to the armchair, this time
with a note of impatience. I sat, suddenly aware of the earth and
blood on my hands, realizing that my face very likely had a smear or
two of blood on it. Yet she seemed neither shocked nor curious about
my appearance, uninterested in my whereabouts during the past three
hours, which must be an indication of the seriousness of the news that
she had for me.
As I perched on the edge of the chair, she took a long pull on her
Scotch. The glass rattled against her teeth.
She shuddered and said, "When I was eleven, I killed
Abner Kady, and they took me away from my mother. I already told you
that. They put me in a state-run orphanage. I told you that too. But
what I didn't tell you was that . . . when I went to the orphanage .
. . that was where I first saw them." I stared at her,
uncomprehending.
"Them," she said. "They ran the place. They were in charge. The.director, the assistant director, the head nurse, the doctor who didn't
live in but was on twenty-four-hour call, the counselor, the majority
of the teachers, almost the entire staff were their kind, and I was the
only kid who could see them."
Stunned, I started to get up.
With a gesture she indicated that I should remain where I was. She
said, "There's more."
"You see them too! But this is incredible!"
"Not so incredible," she said. "The carnival is the best home in the
world for social outcasts, and who is more of an outcast than those of
us who see . . . the others?"
"Goblins," I said. "I call them goblins."
"I know. But isn't it logical that our kind would drift into the
carnival . . . or into insane asylums . . . more than anywhere else?"
"Joel Tuck," I said.
She blinked in surprise. "He sees them too?"
"Yes. And I suspect he knows you see the goblins."
" But he's never told me."
"Because he says he detects a darkness in you, and he's a most careful
man."
She finished her Scotch and then stared at the ice cubes in her glass
for a long moment, bleaker than I had ever seen her.
When I started to get up again, she said, "No. Stay there.
Don't come to me, Slim. I don't want you trying to comfort me. I
don't want to be held. Not now. I've got to finish this.
"All right. Go on."
She said, "I had never seen the . . . the-goblins up in the Virginia
hills. Weren't many people around, and we never went far from home,
never saw any outsiders, so I wasn't likely to encounter them. When I
saw them in the orphanage for the first time, I was terrified, but I
sensed I would be eliminated . . . if I let them know I could see
through their charade. With careful questioning and a lot of hinting,
I soon learned that none of the other kids were aware of the beasts
inside our keepers." She raised the Scotch, remembered that she had
finished the whiskey, and held the glass in her lap with both hands to
keep them from shaking. "Can you understand what it was like to be
helpless children at the mercy of those creatures? Oh, they didn't
cause us too much physical injury, because a lot of dead or badly
battered children would have brought an investigation. But the code of
discipline allowed a lot of leeway for vigorous spankings and a wide
variety of punishments. They were masters at psychological torture, as
well, and they kept us in a constant state of fear and despair. They
seemed to feed on our distress, on the psychic energy produced by our
anguish."
I felt as if spicules of ice had formed in my blood.
I longed to hold her, stroke her hair, and assure her that they would
never get their filthy hands on her again, but I sensed that she was
not finished yet and would not appreciate an interruption.
She was almost whispering now. "But there was a worse fate than having
to stay at the orphanage. Adoption. You see, I soon became aware that
the couples who showed up to interview kids for adoption sometimes were
both goblins, and no child was ever given to a family in which at least
one of the parents wasn't . . . of that kind. You get my drift? You
see? You know what was happening to those kids who were adopted? In
the privacy of their new families, beyond the eye of the state, which
might have seen blatant wrongdoing in the orphanage, in the 'sanctity'
of the family where bad secrets are more easily kept, they were.tortured, used as toys for the gratification of goblins that had taken
custody of them. So while it was Hell in the orphanage, it was worse
to be sent home with a couple of them."
The ice spread from my blood into my bones, where it seemed as if my
marrow had frozen solid.
"I avoided adoption by playing stupid, by pretending to have such a low
IQ that torturing me would be no more fun than torturing a dumb animal.
They want response, you see.
That's what thrills them. And I don't mean just your physical response
to the pain they inflict. That's pretty much secondary. What they
want is your anguish, your fear, and it's hard to engender a
satisfyingly complex terror in a dumb animal.
So I avoided adoption, and when I was old enough and tough enough to be
fairly sure of making it on my own, I ran away to the carnival."
"When you were fourteen."
"Yes."
"Old enough and tough enough," I said with grim irony.
"After eleven years of Abner Kady and three years under the thumb of
the goblins," she said, "I was as tough as you can get."
If her endurance, perseverance, strength, and courage had been awesome
before, this new information provided a glimpse of bravery almost too
great to be comprehended. I had found myself a special woman, all
right, a woman whose determination to survive gave rise to reverent
wonder.
I slumped back in my chair, suddenly hammered limp by the horror that I
had just heard. My mouth was dry and bitter, and my stomach was sour,
and there was a great hollowness in me.
I said, "Goddamnit, what are they? Where do they come from? Why. Do
they haunt the human race?"
"I know," she said.
For a moment I did not fully grasp the meaning of those two words.
Then, when I saw that she literally meant that she knew the answers to
my three questions, I came forward on my chair, breathless,
electrified. "How do you know? How did you find out?"
She stared down at her hands, unspeaking.
"Rya?"
"They're our creation," she said.
Startled, I said, "How can that possibly be true?"
"Well, you see . . . mankind has been on this world far longer than
current wisdom has it. There was a civilization many thousands of
years before ours . . . before written history, and it was even more
advanced than ours."
"What do you mean? A lost civilization?"
She nodded. "Lost . . . destroyed. War and the threat of war was as
much a problem for the people of that earlier civilization as it is for
us now. Those nations developed nuclear weapons and reached a
stalemate not unlike the one we're approaching now. But that standoff
didn't lead to an uneasy truce or to peace by necessity. Hell, no.
No. Instead, stalemated, they searched for other means of waging
warfare." A part of me wondered how she could know these things, but I
did not for a moment doubt the truth of what she said, for with my
sixth sense-and perhaps with a wisp of racial memory buried deep in my
subconscious-I perceived an ominous reality to what some listeners
might have thought was only a crazy fantasy or fairy tale. I could not
bear to interrupt her to ask again for the source of her information.
For one thing, she did not seem ready to tell me. And for another
thing, I was spellbound, compelled to attend the seafarer's story, and.she seemed equally obsessed with the need to tell it. No child at
bedtime has ever been more captivated by any wondrous fable, nor has
any condemned man listened with more dread to the judge's reading of
his sentence than I felt as I listened to Rya Raines that night.
"In time," she continued, "they developed the ability to . . . to
tamper with the genetic structure of animals and plants. Not just
tamper but edit, splice one gene to another, excise characteristics or
add them at will."
"That's science fiction."
"To us, yes. To them it was a reality. That breakthrough vastly
improved people's lives by insuring better crops . . .
and a more stable food supply . . . and by creating a host of "new
medicines. But it also had great potential for evil "And that
potential didn't go unexplored for long," I said, not with clairvoyant
insight but with a cynical surety that human nature had been no
different-or better-tens of thousands of years ago than it was in our
own age.
Rya said, "The first goblin was bred purely for military purposes, the
ultimate warrior for a slave army."
Picturing the grotesque demonkind, I said, "But what specific animal
did they alter to come up with this . . . this thing?"
"I don't know exactly, but I think it's not an altered version of
anything so much as . . . an entirely new species on the face of the
earth, a man-made race with intelligence equal to ours. As I
understand it, the goblin is a being with two genetic patterns for
every detail of physical appearance-one pattern essentially human and
one not-plus a vital linking gene that bears the metamorphic talent, so
that the creature has the ability to choose between its two identities
at will, to be-to all outward appearances, at least-a human being, or a
goblin, whichever the moment seems to demand."
"But it's not really a human being even when it looks like one of us,"
I said.
Then, thinking of Abner Kady, it occurred to me that even some genuine
human beings are not human beings.
Rya said, "No. Even when it can pass the most rigorous medical
examination of its tissues, it's always a goblin.
That's its base reality, regardless of the physical mode it chooses at
any particular time. After all, its inhuman viewpoint, its thinking,
its methods of reasoning are all alien to a degree beyond our
comprehension. It Was designed to be able to enter a foreign country,
mingle with people, pass for human . . . then, when most appropriate,
revert to its frightening reality. For instance, say that five
thousand goblins were infiltrated into enemy territory. They could
engage in terrorist attacks, launched at random, disrupting commerce
and society, creating an atmosphere of paranoia.
I could imagine the chaos. Neighbor would suspect neighbor. No one
would trust anyone but members of his immediate family. Society as we
know it could not exist in such an atmosphere of paranoid suspicion.
In time the beleaguered nation would be ground into subservience.
"Or the five thousand could all be programmed to strike at the same
time," Rya said, "erupting in a single murderous rampage that would
claim two hundred thousand lives in one night.
A thing of claws and fangs, a carefully engineered fighting machine
with a heart-stopping appearance, the goblin's purpose was not merely
to kill but also to demoralize.
As I considered the effectiveness of an army of goblin terrorists, I
was temporarily speechless..My muscles were tense, knotted, and I could not relax them. My throat
was tight. My chest ached.
As I listened, a fist of fear clutched my guts and squeezed.
But it was not merely the history of the goblins that affected me.
Something else.
An unfocused prescience.
Something coming. . . .
Something bad.
I had the feeling that when I had at last heard all the details of the
goblins' origins, I would then find myself in the midst of a horror
that was currently beyond my imagination.
Still sitting in her armchair, shoulders slumped, head low, eyes
downcast, Rya said, "This warrior . . . goblin was specifically
designed to be incapable of pity, guilt, shame, love, mercy, and most
other human emotions, though it could imitate them well enough when it
wished to pass as a man or woman. It had no compunctions about
committing acts of extreme violence. In fact . . . if I've understood
the information I've accumulated over the years . . . if I've properly
interpreted the things I've seen . . . the goblin was even engineered
to experience pleasure, when it killed. Hell, its only three emotions
were a limited capacity for fear (which was included by the geneticists
and psychogeneticists as a survival mechanism), hatred, and blood lust.
So . . . condemned to that limited range of experience, the beast
naturally tried to milk the most out of each emotion it'd been
permitted." No human killer in either their civilization or ours, in
all the thousands of years of lost or recorded history, possibly could
have exhibited obsessive, compulsive, psychopathic, homicidal behavior
even one-hundredth as intense as that of these laboratory soldiers. No
religious fanatic, guaranteed a place in heaven for taking up a gun in
God's name, ever slaughtered with such zeal.
My muddy, bloody hands were so tightly curled into fists that my
fingernails pressed painfully into my palms, yet I could not relax
them. It was as if I were a determined penitent, seeking absolution
through the endurance of pain.
But absolution for whom? Whose sins did I feel it was necessary to
atone for?
I said, "But, Jesus, the creation of this warrior . . . it was . . .
it was madness! A thing like that never could be controlled!"
"Apparently they thought it could," she said. "As I understand it,
each goblin that went out of those labs had a control mechanism
implanted in its brain, which was intended to deliver temporarily
crippling jolts of pain and trigger the creature's fear. Through this
device a disobedient warrior could be punished in any corner of the
world, regardless of where it hid," "But something went wrong," I said.
"Something always goes wrong," she said.
Again I asked, "How do you know these things?"
"Give me time. In time I'll explain everything."
"I'll insist on it."
Her voice was bleak and gray, and it became grayer by the moment as she
spoke of other safeguards that had been built into the goblins to
prevent rebellion and unwanted bloodshed.
Of course, they were created sterile. They could not breed; only the
labs could produce more of them. And each goblin underwent intense
conditioning that directed its hatred and murderous urges toward a
narrowly defined ethnic or racial group, so it could be targeted on a
very specific enemy, without fear that it might recklessly kill its
master's allies.."Then what went wrong?" I asked."
"I need more Scotch," she said.
She got up and went into the kitchen.
"Pour me some," I said.
I ached all over, and my hands burned and itched because I had not yet
extracted all the splinters from them. The Scotch would have an
anesthetizing effect.
But it could not anesthetize me against the feeling of impending
danger. That presentiment was growing stronger, and I knew it would
persist regardless of the quantities of liquor that I consumed.
I glanced at the door.
I had not locked it when I had come in. No one locks his doors in
Gibtown, Florida, or in Gibtown-on-Wheels, because carnies never-or
seldom ever-steal from one another.
I got up, went to the door, thumbed in the lock button on the knob, and
slid the bolt latch in place.
I should have felt better then. I did not.
Rya came back from the kitchen and handed me a glass of Scotch on the
rocks.
I resisted the urge to touch her because I sensed that she still did
not want me close. Not until she had told me everything.
I returned to my chair, sat down, and gulped half the Scotch in one
swallow.
She continued, but a replenishment of her whiskey did not improve the
bleak tone of her voice. I sensed that her state of mind was induced
not only by the horrible tale she had to tell but also by some personal
turmoil. Whatever else was eating at her, I could not get a clear
perception of it.
Proceeding with the story, she told me that the secret knowledge of the
goblins' creation soon spread, as knowledge always will, and half a
dozen countries quickly had their own laboratory-made soldiers, similar
to the first goblins but with modifications, refined and improved.
They grew the creatures in vats, by the thousands, and the impact of
this brand of warfare proved to be almost as terrible as a full-scale
nuclear exchange.
"Remember," Rya said, "the goblins were supposedly an alternative to
nuclear combat, a much less destructive means of attaining world
domination."
"Some alternative!"
"Well, if the nation that originated them could've maintained
exclusivity of its technology, it would have conquered the world in a
few years, without resort to atomic weapons.
However, when everyone had goblin soldiers, when the terror was
answered with counter terror, all sides quickly realized that mutual
destruction was as certain through the surrogate soldiers as through
nuclear holocaust. So they reached an agreement to recall and destroy
their goblin armies."
"But someone reneged," I said.
"I don't think so," she said. "I may be wrong about this, I may have
misunderstood . . . but I think some of the soldiers successfully
refused to be recalled.
"Jesus."
"For reasons never discovered, or at least for reasons I don't grasp,
some of the goblins had undergone fundamental changes once out of the
laboratory."
Having been a science buff through most of my childhood and
adolescence, I had a thought or two about the subject. I said,."Perhaps they changed because their chains of artificial chromosomes
and edited genes were too fragilely constructed." She shrugged.
"Anyway, it appears that one result of this mutation was the
development of an ego, a sense of independence."
"Which is a damned dangerous thing in a biologically engineered
psychopathic killer," I said with a shiver.
"An attempt was made to bring them to heel by activating the
pain-producing devices implanted in their brains. Some gave themselves
up. Others were found writhing and squealing in an unexplainable agony
that effectively unmasked them.
But some apparently mutated in still another way-either developed an
incredible tolerance for pain . . . or learned to like it, even thrive
on it."
I could imagine how things had progressed from that point.
I said, "In their perfect human disguises, with intelligence equal to
ours, driven by only hatred and fear and blood lust, they couldn't ever
be found . . . except maybe by subjecting every man and woman in the
world to a brain scan in search of the goblins' defused control
mechanisms. But there'd be a thousand dodges the creatures could use
to avoid going under the scanners. Some would probably produce
counterfeit clearance cards attesting to brain scans they'd never
undergone.
Others would simply flee to wilderness areas and hide out, running
forays into towns and villages only when they needed to steal supplies
. . . or when the lust to kill became an intolerable pressure in them.
In the end most would escape detection. Right? Is that how it was?"
"I don't know. I think so. Something like that. And at some point
after the . . . the worldwide brain-scan program was under way . . .
the authorities discovered that some of the rebel goblins had undergone
one other fundamental mutation-" "They were no longer sterile."
Rya blinked. "How did you know?"
I told her about the pregnant goblin in Yontsdown.
She said, "if I've not misunderstood, most remained sterile, but a lot
became fertile. The legend is-" "What legend?" I asked, finding it
increasingly difficult to contain my curiosity. "Where did you hear
these things?
What legends are you talking about?"
Ignoring the question, still not ready to divulge her sources, she
said, "According to the legends, a woman was caught in the brain-scan
program, and when revealed as a goblin, she was goaded into
transforming into her true shape. When they shot her, as she died, she
ejected a litter of squirming goblin babies. In death she reverted to
the human form, as she had been genetically programed to do (for the
purpose of foiling autopsies and pathologists). And when her offspring
were executed, they metamorphosed into human babies during their death
throes' " "And then mankind knew it had lost the war with the goblins.
" Rya nodded.
They had lost the war because goblin children, formed in the alien womb
instead of in the laboratory, had no control mechanisms to show up on
brain scans; there was no method whatsoever by which their disguises
could be penetrated.
From that point on, man shared the earth with a species that was his
intellectual equal and that had no purpose but to destroy him and all
his works.
Rya finished her Scotch.
I badly wanted a second drink, but I was afraid to get it, for in my
current state of mind a second would surely lead to a third, a third to.a fourth, and I would not stop until I passed out drunk. I could not
afford to indulge myself, for the dark premonition of pending disaster
hung over me more oppressively than ever, the psychic equivalent of a
massive black formation of churning thunderheads settling down over a
summer day.
I looked at the door.
Still locked.
I looked at the windows.
They were open.
But they were jalousies, and no goblin could force its way through one
of them without considerable effort.
"So," Rya said softly, "we weren't happy with the earth God gave us.
Evidently we had heard about Hell in that lost age, and we found the
concept interesting. We found it so interesting, so appealing, that we
brought forth demons of our own design and re-created Hell on earth."
if there was a God, I could almost understand (as never before) why He
would visit pain and suffering upon us.
Looking down in disgust at our use of the world and the life He gave
us, He might very well say, "All right, you ungrateful wretches, all
right! You like to screw up everything? You like to hurt one another?
You like it so much, you make your own devils and turn them loose on
yourselves? All right! So be it! Stand back and let the Master
please you! Watch my smoke, little ones. Here! Take these gifts.
Let there be brain cancer and polio and multiple sclerosis! Let there
be earthquakes and tidal waves! Let there be bad glands! You like?
Hmmm?"
I said, "Somehow the goblins destroyed that earlier civilization, wiped
it off the face of the earth."
She nodded. "It took time. A couple of decades. But according to
legend . . . eventually a few of their kind, passing as human, rose
into the upper social strata and finally attained sufficiently high
political office that they were in a position to wage a nuclear war."
Which, according to the mysterious and unspecified "legends" that she
quoted, they had done. They did not care that most of them would be
wiped out along with our kind; their entire reason for existing was to
harry and destroy us, and if the ultimate fulfillment of their purpose
led to their own swift demise, they were nevertheless powerless to
change their destiny. The missiles flew. Cities were vaporized. No
missile was withheld, no bomber restricted from taking flight. So many
thousands of enormously powerful nuclear devices were detonated that
something happened in the earth's crust, or perhaps there was a change
in the magnetic field and a subsequent shifting of the poles, but for
some reason fault lines responded worldwide, shifted, and produced
quakes of unimaginable magnitude. Thousand-mile stretches of low-lying
land collapsed into the seas, and tidal waves washed halfway across
continents, and volcanoes erupted everywhere.
That holocaust, the subsequent ice age, and thousands of years of time
had ground away every trace of the civilization that had once lit the
many continents as brightly as our carnival lit the midway every night.
More goblins than humans survived, for they were hardier, born
fighters.
The few surviving human beings returned to caves, reverted to savagery,
and with the passing of many cruel seasons their heritage was
forgotten. Although the goblins did not forget and never would, we
forgot the goblins, along with everything else, and in ages to come,
our rare encounters with them in their demon form were the source for
many superstitions-and countless cheap horror films-involving.shapechanging, supernatural entities.
"Now, we've climbed up out of the muck again," Rya said dismally, "and
we've rebuilt civilization, and we've begun to acquire the means to
destroy the world again-" "-and the goblins will one day push the
Button if they get the chance," I finished for her.
"I believe they will," she said. "It is true that they're less capable
fighters than they were in the previous civilization . . . more easily
beaten in hand-to-hand combat . . . more easily deceived. They've
changed, evolved somewhat, due to the passage of so much time and
because of all that nuclear fallout. The radiation sterilized many,
stole the fertility that the original mutations had given them, which
is why they haven't completely overrun the earth and outnumbered us.
And there's been a . . . a slight mitigation of their mania for
destruction. As I understand it, many of them abhor the thought of
another nuclear war . . . at least on a worldwide scale. You see,
they're long-lived; some of them are as much as fifteen hundred years
old, so they aren't that many generations removed from the previous
holocaust. Their stories of the world's end, passed down by their
ancestors, are still fresh and immediate to them. But though most of
them might be satisfied with the current arrangement, stalking and
killing us as if we were nothing more than animals in their private
game preserve, there are a few . . . a few who long to induce human
agony on a nuclear scale again . . . who believe it's their destiny to
wipe us from the face of the earth forever. In ten years or twenty or
forty, one of those is sure to get its chance, don't you think?"
The near certainty of the Armageddon she had described was shocking and
depressing beyond words, but still I feared a more immediate death. My
precognitive awareness of imminent danger had become a constant,
unpleasant pressure inside my skull, though I could not tell where the
trouble would come from or what form it would take.
I was faintly nauseous with apprehension.
Chilled. Slick with sweat. Shivering.
She went into the kitchen for another Scotch.
I stood up. Went to a window. Looked out. Saw nothing. I returned
to the armchair. Sat on the edge of it. Wanted to scream.
Something was coming. . . .
When she returned with her drink and slumped in her chair again, still
withdrawn from me, still grim-faced, I said, "How did you learn about
them? You've got to tell me. Are you able to read their minds or
what?"
"Yes."
"Really?"
"A little."
"I can't get anything from them except . . . a rage, a hatred.
"I see . . . into them a little," Rya said. "Not their exact
thoughts. But when I probe at them, I get images . . . visions.
I think a lot of what I see is more . . . racial memory . . .
things that some of them are not entirely aware of on a conscious
level. But to be honest, it's more than that."
"What? More-how? And what about these legends you spoke of?" Instead
of answering me, she said, "I know what you were doing out there
tonight."
"Huh? What're you talking about? How can you know?"
"I know."
"But-" "And it's futile, Slim."
"It is?"
"They can't be beaten."."I beat my Uncle Denton. I killed him before he could bring any more
misery to my family. Joel and I stopped six of them tonight, and if we
hadn't, they would have rigged the Ferris wheel to collapse. We saved
the lives of who knows how many marks."
"And what does it matter?" she asked. A new note entered her voice,
an earnestness, a dark enthusiasm. "Other goblins will just kill other
marks. You can't save the world. You're risking your life, your
happiness, your sanity-and at most you're involved in a delaying
action. You're not going to win the war. In the long run our demons
have to beat us. It's inevitable. It is our destiny, one we planned
for ourselves a long, long time ago."
I could not see what she was driving at. "What alternative do we have?
If we don't fight, don't protect ourselves, our lives have no meaning.
You and I could be snuffed out at any moment, at their whim!"
She put aside her Scotch and slid to the edge of her seat.
"There is another way."
"What are you talking about?"
Her beautiful eyes fixed on mine, and her gaze was hot.
"Slim, most people aren't worth spit."
I blinked.
She said, "Most people are liars, cheats, adulterers, thieves, bigots,
you name it. They use and abuse one another with as much eagerness as
the goblins abuse us. They aren't worth saving."
"No, no, no," I said. "Not most of them. A lot of people aren't worth
spit, true, but not most of them, Rya."
"In my experience," she said, "hardly any of them are better than the
goblins."
"Your experience wasn't typical, for God's sake. The Abner Kadys and
Maralee Sweens of this world are definitely a minority faction. I can
see why you would feel differently, but you never met my dad or mom, my
sisters, my grandma.
There's more decency in the world than cruelty. Maybe I wouldn't have
said so a week ago, or even yesterday, but now that I hear you talking
like this, now that I hear you saying it's all pointless, I don't have
any doubt there's more good than evil in people. Because . . .
because . . . well, there has to be."
"Listen," she said, her eyes still fixed on mine, a beseeching blue, a
pleading blue, a fierce and almost painful blue, all we can hope for is
a little happiness with a small circle of friends, with a couple people
we love-and the rest of the world be damned. Please, please, Slim,
think about this! It's amazing that we found each other. It's a
miracle. I never thought I would have anything like what we've found
together. We're so compatible . . . so alike . . . that there's even
an overlapping of certain brain waves when we sleep, . . . a psychic
sharing when we make love and when we sleep which is why the sex is so
damned good for us and why we even share the same dreams! We were
meant for each other, and the most important thing, the most important
thing in the world is that we be together all our lives."
"Yes," I said. "I know. I feel it too."
"So you've got to give up your crusade. Stop trying to save the world.
Stop taking these insane risks. Let the goblins do what they have to
do, and we'll just live our own lives in peace.
"But that's the whole point! We can't live in peace. Ignoring them
won't save us. Sooner or later they'll come sniffing around, eager to
feel our hurt, drink our pain-" Slim, wait, wait, listen." She was
agitated now, bristling with nervous energy. She popped up from her
chair and went to the window, took a deep breath of the in-flowing air,.turned to me again, and said, "You agree that what we have together has
to come first, above all else, at all costs. So what if . . . what if
I could show you a way to coexist with the goblins, a way for you to
give up your crusade and not have to worry that they'd ever come after
you or me?"
"How?"
She hesitated.
"Rya?"
"It's the only way, Slim."
"What?"
"It's the only sane way to deal with them."
"Will you, for Christ's sake, tell me?"
She frowned, looked away from me, started to speak, hesitated again,
said, "Shit!" and suddenly threw her Scotch glass across the room at
the wall. Ice cubes flew out of it, shattered as they hit pieces of
furniture or bounced on the carpet, and the glass exploded against the
wall.
Startled, I leapt up, then stood there stupidly as she waved me back
and returned to her own chair.
She sat.
She took a deep breath.
She said, "I want you to hear me out, just listen and don't interrupt,
don't stop me until I'm done, and try to understand.
I've found a way to coexist with them, to make them leave me alone.
See, in the orphanage and later, I realized there was no way to win
with them. "They have all the advantages. I ran away, but there're
goblins everywhere, not just in the orphanage, and you can't really run
away from them no matter where you go. It's pointless. So I took a
risk, a calculated risk, and I approached them, told them that I could
see "You what!"
"Don't interrupt!" she said sharply. "This is . . . this is hard .
. . going to be damned hard . . . and I just want to get through it,
so shut up and let me talk. I told one of the goblins about my psychic
ability, which is, you know, a mutation of our own, a consequence of
that nuclear war, because according to the goblins there weren't people
with any kind of psychic abilitie@lairvoyance, telekenesis, none of
that-in the previous civilization. There aren't many now, but there
were none then. I guess . . . in a twisted sort of way . . . since
the goblins started that war, brought those bombs and ill that
radiation down on us ... well, you could say they sort of created
gifted people like you and me. In an awful sort of way we owe our
special talents to them. Anyway, I told them that I could see through
their human form to . . . I don't know . . . to the goblin potential
within them-" "You've talked to them, and they've told you their . . .
legends! That's how you know about them?"
"Not entirely. They haven't told me much. But all they have to do is
tell me a little, and I quickly have a vision of the rest. It's like .
. . if they open the door a crack, I can push it all the way and see
even the stuff they're trying to hide from me. But that's not
important right now, and I wish to God you wouldn't interrupt. What's
important is that I made it clear to them that I didn't care about
them, didn't care what they did, who they hurt, as long as they didn't
hurt me. And we reached an . . . accommodation - " Astonished, I
collapsed back into my chair, and in spite of her admonition about
interrupting her, I said, "An accommodation? Just like that? But why
would they want to reach an accommodation with you? Why not just kill
you? No matter what you told them, even if they believed you would.keep their secret, you still represented a threat to them. I don't
understand. They had nothing to gain by reaching this . . . this
accommodation." Her pendulum mood had swung again, back toward
darkness and quiet despair. She sagged in her chair. When she spoke,
her voice was barely audible. "They did have something to gain. There
was something I could offer them. You see, I have another psychic
ability that you either don't have . . . or don't have in the same
degree that I do. What I've got is . . . the ability to detect
extrasensory perception in other people, especially when they can see
the goblins. I can detect their power regardless of how hard they
might try to conceal it. I don't always know instantly upon meeting
them.
Sometimes it takes awhile. It's a slowly growing awareness.
But I can perceive hidden psychic gifts in others pretty much the way I
can see the goblins in their disguises. Until tonight I thought this
insight was ... well, infallible ... but now you tell me Joel Tuck sees
the goblins, and I never suspected him.
Still, I think I'm nearly always quick to perceive these things.
I knew there was something special about you, right from the start,
though you turned out to be . . . more special, much more special, in
more ways than I realized at first." She whispered now: "I want to
hold on to you. I never thought I would find someone . . . someone I
needed . . . loved. But you came, and now I want to hold on to you,
but the only way I can do that is if you make the same accommodation
with them that I've made."
I had turned to stone. Immobile as rock, I, sat in the armchair,
listening to my granite heart thump, a hard and cold and heavy sound, a
mournful and hollow sound, each beat like a mallet striking a block of
marble. My love, my need for her, my longing were all still in my
petrified heart but inaccessible, just as beautiful sculptures are
potentialities in any crude block of stone but remain inaccessible and
unrealized to the man who lacks artistic talent and who has no skill
with the chisel. I did not want to believe what she had said, and I
could not bear to think about what came next, yet I was compelled to
listen, to know the worst.
As tears came to her eyes, she said, "When I encounter someone who can
see the goblins, I . . . I report it. I warn one of their kind about
the seer. You see, they don't want open warfare, like there was last
time. They prefer their secrecy. They don't want us organizing
against them, even though it would be hopeless, anyway. So I point out
people who know about them, who might kill them or spread the word.
And the goblins . . . they just ... they eliminate the threat. In
return they guarantee my safety from their kind.
Immunity. They leave me alone. That's all I've ever wanted, Slim. To
be left alone. And if you make the same arrangement with them, then
they'll leave both of us alone . . . and we can be . . . we can stay
. . . together . . . happy-" "Happy?" I did not speak the word so
much as expel it.
"Happy? You think we can be happy, knowing that we survive by . . .
by betraying others?"
"The goblins would get some of them, anyway."
With great effort I moved my cold stone hands to my face and hid in the
cave of fingers, as if I could retreat from these hideous revelations.
But that was a childish fantasy. The ugly truth stayed with me.
"Jesus."
'We could have a life," she said, weeping openly now because she sensed
my horror and the impossibility of my ever reaching the dreadful.accommodation that she had negotiated for herself. "Together..... a
life . . . the way it's been this past week ... even better... much
better . . . us against the world, safe, perfectly safe. And the
goblins don't just guarantee my safety in return for the information I
give them.
They guarantee my success too. I'm very valuable to them, see.
Because, like I said, a lot of people who see the goblins either wind
up in an asylum or a carnival. So . . . so I'm in a perfect position
to . . . well, to turn up more than a few seers like you and me. So
the goblins also help me out, help me get along. Like . . . they
planned an accident at the Dodgem Cars-" "And I stopped it from
happening," I said coldly.
She was surprised. "Oh. Yes. I should have figured you did. But,
see . . . the idea was, once there'd been an accident, the injured
mark would probably sue Hal Dorsey, the man who owns the Dodgem, and
then he would be in financial trouble, what with the legal fees and
everything, and I would be able to buy him out at a good price, take on
a new concession at a cost that was attractive. Oh, shit. Please.
Please listen to me. I see what you're thinking. I sound so . . . so
cold." In fact, though the tears flowed from her, and though I had
never seen anyone more miserable than she was at that moment, she did
indeed seem cold, bitterly cold.
"But, Slim, you've got to understand about Hal Dorsey . He's a
bastard, he really is, a mean son of a bitch, and nobody likes him
'cause he's a user, a user and an abuser, so I'll be damned if I'll
feel sorry about ruining him."
Although I did not want to look at her, I looked. Although I did not
want to speak to her, I spoke. "What's the difference between the
torture that the goblins initiate and the torture you suggest to them?"
"I told you, Hal Dorsey is a-" Raising my voice, I said, "What's the
difference between the behavior of a man like Abner Kady and the way
you betray your own kind?"
She was sobbing now. "I only wanted to be . . . safe. For once in my
life-just once-I wanted to be safe."
I loved her and hated her, pitied and despised her. I wanted her to
share my life, wanted it as intensely as ever, but I knew that I could
not sell my conscience or my birthright for her. When I thought of
what she had told me about Abner Kady and her dull-witted mother, when
I considered the horror of her childhood, when I realized the extent of
her legitimate complaints against the human race and how little she
owed to society, I could understand how she could have decided to
collaborate with the goblins. I could understand, almost forgive, but
I could not agree that it had been right. At that awful moment in
feelings for her were so complex, such a tangled mess of tightly
knotted emotions, that I experienced an uncharacteristic suicidal
longing, so vivid and sweet that it made me cry, and I knew it must be
like the death wish that haunted her every day of her life. I could
see why she had spoken of nuclear war with such enthusiasm and poetry
when we had been together on the Ferris wheel on Sunday night.
With the burden of dark knowledge that she carried, total annihilation
of the Abner Kadys and the goblins and the whole dirty mess of human
civilization must, at times, strike her as a wonderfully freeing,
cleansing possibility.
I said, "You made a deal with the devil."
"If they're devils, then we're gods, because we created them, " she
said.
"That's sophistry," I said. "And this is no goddamned debate." She.said nothing. She just drew herself into a ball and wept
uncontrollably.
I wanted to get up, unlock the door, burst out into the clean night
air, and run, just run and run, forever. But my soul seemed to have
turned to stone, in sympathy with the petrification of my flesh, and
that added weight made it impossible for me to rise up from the chair.
After perhaps a minute during which neither of us could think of
anything to say, I finally broke the silence. "Where the hell do we go
from here?"
"You won't make the . . . accommodation," she said.
I did not even bother answering that question.
"So . . . I've lost you," she said.
I was crying, too. She had lost me, but I had lost her.
Finally I said, "For the sake of others like me . . . others to come .
. . I should break your neck right now. But . . .
God help me . . . I can't. Can't. Can't do it. So . . . I'll pack
my things and go. Another carnival. Another start. We'll . . .
forget."
"No," she said. "It's too late for that."
With the back of my hand I wiped some of the tears out of my eyes.
"Too late?"
"You've done too much killing here. The killing, and your special
relationship with me, has drawn attention."
I did not merely feel someone walking on my grave; I sensed someone
dancing on it, stomping on it. For all the warmth I felt, it seemed
more like a night in February than August.
She said, "Your only hope was to see things my way, to make the same
arrangements with them that I have."
"You're actually . . . going to turn me in?"
"I didn't want to tell them about you . . . not after I got to know
you."
"Then don't."
"You don't understand yet." She shuddered. "The day I met you, before
I realized what you would mean to me, I .
dropped a hint to one of them . . . suggested that I was on the trail
of another seer. So he's waiting for a report.
"Who? Which one of them?"
"The one who's in charge here . . . in Yontsdown."
"In charge among the goblins, you mean?"
He's especially alert, even for one of them. He saw something special
was happening between you and me, and he sensed that you were someone
extraordinary, the one I had hinted about. So he demanded that I
confirm it. I didn't want to. I tried to lie. But he's not stupid.
He's not easily deceived. He kept pressing me. 'Tell me about him,'
he said.
'Tell me about him or things will change between us. You'll no longer
have our immunity." Slim, can't you see? I had . . . no choice."
I heard movement behind me.
I turned my head.
From the narrow hall that led to the back of the trailer, Chief Lisle
Kelsko entered the living room.
17
The Nightmare Fulfilled
Kelsko's Smith & Wesson .45 revolver was in his hand, but he was not.actually pointing it at me because, given the advantages of surprise
and police authority, he did not think he would need to fire the gun.
He was holding it at his side, the muzzle aimed at the floor, but he
would be able to swing it up and fire at the least sign of trouble.
From beneath the square, hard, rough-looking human face, the goblin
leered at me. Under the bushy eyebrows of its human disguise, I saw
the molten demon eyes encircled by cracked, thickened skin. Beyond the
mean slash of the man'smouth, there was the goblin's mouth with its
wickedly sharp teeth and hooked fangs. On first seeing the Kelsko
goblin in its office in Yontsdown, I had been impressed by how much
more malevolent and fierce it looked than many others of its kind-and
how much uglier. Its cracked and wrinkled flesh, wattled skin,
callused lips, blisters, warts, and array of scars seemed to indicate
great age. Rya had said some of them lived to be fifteen hundred, even
older, and it was not difficult to believe that the thing calling
itself Lisle Kelsko was that ancient. It had probably lived thirty or
forty human lives, moving from identity to identity, killing thousands
of us as the centuries passed, directly or indirectly torturing tens of
thousands more, and all those lives and all those years had brought it
here, tonight, to finish me.
"Slim MacKenzie," it said, maintaining its human identity with no
purpose but sarcasm, "I am placing you under arrest as part of the
investigation into several recent homicides." I was not going to let
them put me in their squad car and drive me to some very private
torture chamber. Instant death, here and now, was far more appealing
than submission, so the creature had finished its little speech, I
reached before into my boot and put my hand on my knife. I was
sitting, my back to the goblin, twisted around to look at it, so the
beast could not see either my boot or my hand. For some reason and now
I suppose I knew the reason-I had never told Rya about the knife, and
she did not realize what I was doing until I drew the weapon from the
sheath and, in one fluid movement, stood and turned and threw it.
I was so fast that Kelsko did not have an opportunity to raise the gun
and pull off a shot at me, though the creature did fire one round into
the floor as it fell backward with the blade protruding from its
throat. In that small room the blast sounded like God shouting.
Rya screamed, not in warning so much as in shock, but the Kelsko demon
was dead even as the sound escaped her.
As Kelsko hit the floor, while the crash of gunfire was still echoing
in the trailer, I scrambled to the beast, twisted the knife to finish
the job, pulled it out of the gushing flesh, stood, and turned just in
time to see that Rya had unlocked the door and that a Yontsdown deputy
was coming inside. It was the same officer who had stood in the corner
of Kelsko's office when Jelly, Luke, and I had gone there to deliver
the payoffs; like the chief, this cop was also a goblin. It was coming
off the top step, just this side of the doorway, and I saw its eyes
flick to Kelsko's body, saw it electrified by a sudden awareness of
mortal danger, but by that time I had reversed the knife in my right
hand and had a thrower's grip on it. I tossed the blade and split the
demon's Adam's apple with it, and in the same instant the beast
squeezed the trigger of its Smith & Wesson, but its aim was wide and
the bullet destroyed a lamp to the left of me. The goblin fell
backward, through the open door, off the steps, into the night.
Rya's face was a definition of terror. She thought I was going to kill
her next.
She plunged out of the trailer and ran for her life.
For a moment I stood there, gasping, unable to move, overwhelmed. It.was not the killing that had stunned me; I had killed before-often. It
was not the close call that made my legs feel weak and numb; I had been
through plenty of tight scrapes prior to this. What nailed me there,
immovable, was the shock of how utterly things had changed between me
and. her, the shock of what I had lost and might never find again; it
seemed as if love was nothing more than a cross on which she had
crucified me.
Then my paralysis broke.
I stumbled to the door.
Down the metal steps.
Around the dead deputy.
I saw several carnies who had come out in response to the gunfire. One
of them was Joel Tuck.
"Rya was perhaps a hundred feet away, running down the street" between
the rows of trailers, heading toward the back of the meadow.
As she passed through pools of darkness that alternated with streams of
light from the trailer windows and doorways, the stroboscopic effect
made her seem unreal, as if she were a spectral figure fleeing through
a dreamscape.
I did not want to go after her.
If I caught up with her, I might have to kill her.
I did not want to kill her.
I should just leave. Go. Never look back. Forget.
I went after her.
As in a nightmare, we ran without seeming to go anywhere with infinite
rows of travel trailers bracketing us, ran for what seemed like ten
minutes, twenty, on and on, but I knew that Gibtown-on-Wheels was not
that big, knew that my sense of time was distorted by hysteria, and
actually it must have been less than a minute before we broke out of
the trailers into open field. High grass slashed at my legs, and frogs
leapt out of my way, and a few fireflies snapped against my face.
I ran as fast as I could, then faster, stretching my legs, going for
the longest possible strides, though I was suffering terribly from the
beating I had taken earlier. She had the speed of terror, but I
inevitably closed the gap between us, and by the time she reached the
edge of the woods, I was only forty feet behind her.
She never looked back.
She knew I was there.
Although dawn was near, the night was very dark, and in the forest it
was darker still. Yet in spite of being nearly blind beneath that
canopy of pine needles and leafy boughs, neither of us slowed down
much. As brimming with adrenaline as we were, we seemed to be
demanding and receiving more from our psychic abilities than we had
ever gotten before, for we intuitively found the easiest way through
the woods, going from one narrow deer trail to another, pressing
through barriers of underbrush at their weakest points, leaping from a
table of limestone to a fallen log, across a little brook, along
another deer trail, as if we were nocturnal creatures born for the
night chase, and although I continued to gain on her, I was still more
than twenty feet behind her when we came out of the forest at the top
of a long hill and started down-into a graveyard.
I skidded, stopped myself against a tall monument, and stared down in
horror at the cemetery below. It was big, though it did not go on
forever, as in the dream that Rya had passed to me. Hundreds upon
hundreds of rectangles, squares, and spires of granite and marble
thrust up from the shelving hillside, and most of them were visible to
one degree or another because, at the bottom, there was a street lined.with mercury-vapor arc lamps, which thoroughly illuminated the lower
portion of the graveyard and created a bright backdrop against which
the stones on the higher slopes were silhouetted. There was no snow,
as there had been in the dream, but the mercury-vapor globes produced a
whitish light with a vague trace of blue in which the graveyard grass
appeared to be frosted. The tombstones seemed to be wearing jackets of
ice, and the breeze stirred the trees sufficiently to shake loose a lot
of seeds that were equipped with fuzzy, white membranes for easy
dispersal by the wind, and those seeds whirled through the air and
settled to the ground as if they were snowflakes, so the effect was
startlingly similar to the wintry location in the nightmare.
Rya had not stopped. She was widening the gap between us once more,
following a twisting path down among the headstones.
I wondered if she had known the graveyard was here or whether it was as
much a shock to her as it was to me. She had been to the Yontsdown
County Fairgrounds in previous years, so she might have taken a walk to
the end of the meadow, might have gone through the forest and to the
top of this hill. But if she had known the cemetery was here, why had
she run this way? Why hadn't she gone in another direction and made at
least that small effort to thwart the destiny that we both had seen in
the dream?
I knew the answer to that one: She did not want to die . . .
and yet she did.
She was afraid to let me catch her.
Yet she wanted me to catch her.
I did not know what would happen when I put my hands on her. But I
knew that I could not merely turn back, and I could not stand there in
the boneyard until I had ossified into a monument like all the others.
I followed her.
She had not glanced back at me on the meadow or in the woods, but now
she turned to see if I was still coming, ran on, turned again, then ran
on but with less speed. On the last slope I realized that she was
keening as she ran, an awful wail of grief and anguish, and then I
closed the gap altogether, halted her, turned her toward me.
She was sobbing, and when her eyes met mine, there was a hunted-rabbit
look in them. For a second or two she searched my gaze, then slumped
against me, and for an instant I thought she had seen something she
needed to see in my eyes, but actually she had seen exactly the
opposite, something that terrified her even more. She had leaned
against me not as a lover seeking compassion but as a desperate enemy,
clenching me in order to insure that the deadly thrust was as well
placed as possible. I felt no pain at first, just a spreading warmth,
and when I looked down and saw the knife that she had driven into me, I
was momentarily certain that this was not reality, after all, just one
more nightmare.
My own blade. She had taken it from the throat of the dead deputy. I
gripped the hand that held the knife and prevented her from twisting it
in me, nor could she withdraw it and stab again. It had entered me
about three inches to the left of my navel, which was better than if it
had been centered, where it would have pierced my stomach and colon and
brought certain death. It was still bad, Jesus, no pain yet, but the
spreading warmth was becoming a biting heat. She struggled to wrench
the knife free of me, and I struggled just as hard to keep us rigidly
locked, and my racing mind saw only one solution. As in the dream, I
bent my head, brought my mouth to her throat-and could not do it.
I could not savage her with my teeth as if I were a wild animal, could
not tear open her jugular, could not bear even the thought of her blood.spurting into my mouth. She was not a goblin. She was a human being.
One of my own kind. One of our poor, sick, sorry, and much put-upon
race. She had known suffering, and she had triumphed over it, and if
she had made mistakes, even monstrous mistakes, she had had her
reasons. If I could not condone, I could at least understand, and in
understanding there is forgiveness, and in forgiveness there is hope
One proof of true humanity is' the inability to kill your own kind in
cold blood. Surely. For if that is not proof, then there is no such
thing as true humanity, and we are all goblins in essence.
I raised my head.
I released her hand, the one that held the knife.
She pulled the blade out of me.
I stood, arms at my sides, defenseless.
She drew back her arm.
I closed my eyes.
A second passed, another, three.
I opened my eyes.
She dropped the knife.
Proof.
18
First Epilogue
We got Out of Yontsdown, but only because everyone took extreme risks
to protect Rya and me. Many of the other carnies did not know why two
cops had been killed at her trailer, but they did not have to know or
really want to know.
Joel Tuck made up some story, and while no one believed it for a
minute, everyone was satisfied. They closed ranks around us with
admirable comradeship, blissfully unaware that they were up against an
enemy more formidable than just the straight world and the Yontsdown
Police Department.
Joel loaded the body of the Kelsko thing and its deputy into the patrol
car, drove it to a quiet place, beheaded both corpses, and buried the
heads. Then he took the squad car (with both decapitated bodies) back
into Yontsdown and, just after daybreak, parked it in an alley behind a
warehouse.
Luke Bendingo picked him up and brought him back to the carnival,
unaware of how the dead cops had been mutilated.
The other goblins in Yontsdown might believe that Kelsko had been
murdered by a psycho before ever setting out for the carnival. But
even if they did suspect us, they could prove nothing.
I hid in the trailer belonging to Gloria Neames, the fat lady, Who was
as kind as anyone I have ever known. She, too, had certain psychic
powers. She could levitate small objects if she concentrated on them,
and she could locate lost objects with a divining rod. She could not
see the goblins, but she knew that Joel Tuck and Rya and I saw them,
and because of her own talents-which Joel had been aware of-and because
she was like us in some ways, she believed our tales of the demonkind
more readily than others would have.
As Gloria put it, "God sometimes throws a bone to those of us He maims.
I figure a higher percentage of us freaks are psychic than is true of
the population at large, and I figure we were meant to stick together.
But between you and me, honey, I'd just as soon not be psychic if I
could trade my power for being slim and gorgeous!"
the carnival doctor, a reformed alcoholic named Winston Pennington,.came to Gloria's trailer two or three times every day to treat my
wound. No vital organs or arteries had been pierced. But I developed
a fever, a seriously dehydrating nausea, and delirium, and I do not
remember much of the six days following my confrontation with Rya in
the graveyard.
Rya.
She had to disappear. After all, she was known to many of the
demonkind as a collaborator, and they would continue seeking her out,
asking her to point them toward those who could see through their
masquerade. And she no longer wanted to do that. She was fairly sure
that only Kelsko and his deputy had known about me, and now that they
were dead, I was safe. But she had to vanish. Arturo Sombra filed a
missing persons report on her with the Yontsdown Police, who found no
leads, of course. For the next couple of months Sombra Brothers
operated her concessions on her behalf, but at last the company
exercised a foreclosure option in its contract and took possession of
her businesses. Which they sold to me. Financed by Joel Tuck. At the
end of the season I drove Rya's Airstream to Gibsonton, Florida, and
parked it beside the larger, permanent trailer she kept there. Through
some clever paperwork I became the owner of the Gibsonton property as
well, and I lived there alone from mid-October until a week before
Christmas, when I was joined by a stunningly beautiful woman with eyes
as blue as Rya Raines's, with a body as perfectly sculpted as Rya's,
but with somewhat different facial features and with hair the color of
ravens' wings. She said her name was Cara MacKenzie, my long-lost
cousin from Detroit, and she said we had a lot to talk about.
In fact, in spite of my determination to be understanding and forgiving
and htimati, I still had to work out some of my resentment and
disapproval of what she had done, and we were too awkward with each
other to talk much at all until Christmas Day. Then we could not shut
up. We were a long time feeling each other out, reestablishing ties,
and we did not go to bed together until January 15, and at first it was
not as good as it had been. However, by early February we had decided
that Cara MacKenzie was not my cousin from Detroit, after all, but my
wife, and that winter Gibsonton had one of the biggest weddings it had
ever known.
Perhaps she was not as gorgeous as a brunette as she had been when
blond, and perhaps the few surgical alterations in her face had taken a
slight edge off her beauty, but she was still the loveliest woman in
the world. And more importantly, she had begun to evict the
emotionally crippled Rya, who had been a goblin of a different breed
within her.
The world went on, as the world does.
That was the year they murdered our president in Dallas. It was the
end of innocence, the end of a certain way of thinking and being, and
some were despondent and said it was the death of hope as well. But
though falling autumn leaves may reveal skeletal branches, spring
reclothes the wood.
That was also the year that the Beatles released their first record in
the United States, the year Skeeter Davis's "The End of the World" was
the number-one song, the year the Ronettes recorded "Be My Baby." And
that winter was the winter when Rya and I went back to Yontsdown,
Pennsylvania, for several days in March, to carry the war to the enemy.
But that is another story.
Which follows.
DARK LIGHTNING Numerous Paths of night wind away twilight.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows Something moves within the night that is.not good and is not right.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows The whimper of the dusk is night shedding
its busk.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
19
The First Year of the New War
John Kennedy was dead and buried, but the echoing strains of his
funeral march took a long time to fade away. Throughout much of that
gray winter, the world seemed to turn to no music but a dirge, and the
sky was lower than it had ever been before. Even in Florida, where the
days were usually cloudless, we felt the grayness that we did not see,
and even in the happiness of our new marriage, Rya and I could not
entirely escape either the recognition of the rest of the world's dark
mood or the memory of our own recent horrors.
On December 29, 1963, the Beatles' recording of "I Want to Hold Your
Hand" was played for the first time on an American radio station, and
by the first of February 1964, it was the number-one song in the
country. We needed that music. Through that first tune and those that
followed in profusion, we relearned the meaning of joy. The Fab Four
from Britain became not merely musicians but symbols of life, hope,
change, and survival. That year, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was
followed by "She Loves You" and "Can't Buy Me Love" and "Please Please
Me" and "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Feel Fine," and more than
twenty others, a flood of feel-good music never equaled since.
We needed to feel good, not merely to forget that death in Dallas the
previous November but to distract ourselves from the signs and portents
of death and destruction which, day by day, were growing in number.
That was the year of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, when the conflict in
Vietnam became a full-fledged war-though no one could yet imagine just
how very full it would become. And that may have been the year when
the reality of possible nuclear obliteration finally sank deep into the
national consciousness, for it was expressed in all the arts as it had
never been before, especially in movies like Dr. Strangelove and Seven
Days in May.
We sensed that we were edging along the brink of a terrible chasm, and
the music of the Beatles provided comfort just as whistling in a
graveyard can stave off grim thoughts of moldering corpses.
On Monday afternoon, March 16, two weeks after our wedding, Rya and I
were lying on lime-green towels on the beach, talking softly, listening
to a transistor radio on which at least a third of the programming was
Beatle music or that of their imitators. The beach had been crowded
yesterday, Sunday, but now we had it to ourselves. Out on the lazily
rolling sea, the rays of the Florida sun struck the water and created
the illusion of millions of gold coins, as if a long-lost fortune from
a sunken Spanish galleon was suddenly awash in the tide. The white
sand was being bleached even whiter by the harsh subtropical sunshine,
and our tans were growing deeper by the day, by the hour. I was
cocoa-brown with stored-up sun, but Rya's tone was richer, more golden;
her skin had a hot and honeyed sheen of such erotic power that I could
not resist reaching out from time to time to touch her.
Though her hair was now raven-black instead of blond, she was still a
golden girl, the daughter of the sun, as she had seemed when I'd first
seen her on the midway of the Sombra Brothers Carnival.
A faint melancholy air, like the distant strains of a sad though only.half-heard song, colored all of our days now, which is not to say that
we were sad (which we were not) or that we had seen too much and
learned too much of darkness to be happy. We were often-even
usually-happy. In moderate doses melancholy can be strangely
comforting, darkly sweet; it can, by providing contrast, give an
exquisitely sharp edge to happiness, especially to pleasures of the
flesh. That balmy Monday afternoon we basked in the sun and in our
mildly melancholy mood, knowing that upon returning to our trailer we
would make love and that our joining would be almost unbearably
intense.
Every hour on the hour, the radio news told us of Kitty Genovese, who
had been killed in New York two days ago.
Thirty-eight of her Kew Gardens neighbors had heard her terrified calls
for help and had watched from their windows as an attacker had
repeatedly stabbed her, crept away, then returned to stab her again,
finally killing her on her own doorstep. None of the thirty-eight had
gone to her aid. None called the police until half an hour after Kitty
was dead. Two days later the story was still at the top of the news,
and the whole country was trying to understand what the nightmarish
events in Kew Gardens said about the inhumanity, callousness, and
isolation of modern, urban man and woman. "We just didn't want to get
involved," the thirty-eight onlookers said, as if being of the same
species and age and society as Kitty Genovese was not involvement
enough to elicit mercy and compassion. Of course, as- Rya and I knew,
some of those thirty-eight were almost certainly not human but were
goblins that thrived on the dying woman's pain and on the emotional
turmoil and guilt of the spineless onlookers.
As the news ended, Rya switched off the radio and said, "Not all the
evil in the world comes from the goblins."
"No."
"We're capable of our own atrocities."
"Very capable," I agreed.
She was silent for a moment, listening to distant cries of sea gulls
and to the gentle waves breaking softly on the shore.
At last she said, "Year by year, through the death and suffering and
cruelty that the goblins produce, they force goodness and honesty and
truth into an ever smaller corner.
We live in a world that grows colder and meaner all the time,
Mostly-though not entirely-because of them, a world in which most of
the examples of behavior for younger generations are increasingly bad
examples. Which guarantees that each new generation will be less
compassionate than the one before it. Each new generation will have a
greater tolerance for lies and murder and cruelty. We're less than
twenty years removed from Hitler's mass murders, but do most people
seem to remember or care what happened? Stalin killed at least three
times as many as Hitler, but no one speaks of it.
Now, in China, Mao Tse-tung is killing millions and grinding millions
more to dust in slave-labor camps, but do you hear many cries of
outrage? The trend won't be reversed until "Until?"
"Until we do something about the goblins."
"We?"
"Yes."
"You and me?"
"For a start, yes, you and me."
I remained flat on my back, eyes closed.
Until Rya spoke, I'd felt as if the sun were streaming straight through
me and into the earth, as if I were utterly transparent. In that.imagined transparency I found a measure of release and relief, a
freedom from responsibility and from the grimmer implications of the
latest news on the radio.
. Suddenly, however, contemplating what Rya said, I felt pinned by the
rays of the sun, unable to move, trapped.
"There's nothing we can do," I said uneasily. "At least nothing that
can make a truly major difference. We can try to isolate and kill the
goblins we encounter, but there're probably tens of millions of them.
Killing a few dozen or a few hundred will have no real effect."
"We can do more than kill the ones who come to us," she said. "There's
something else we can do."
I did not respond.
Two hundred yards to the north, gulls were working the beach for bits
of food-small dead fish, scraps of hot-dog buns left behind by
yesterday's crowd. Their distant cries, which had sounded shrill and
greedy, now struck me as cold, mournful, and forlorn.
Rya said, "We can go to them."
I willed her to stop, silently pleaded with her not to continue, but
her will was far stronger than mine, and my unvoiced pleas were without
effect.
"They're concentrated in Yontsdown," she said. "They've got some sort
of nest there, some hideous, stinking nest. And there must be other
places like Yontsdown. They're at war with us, but they wage all the
battles entirely on their own terms. We could change that, Slim. We
could take the battle to them."
I opened my eyes.
She was sitting up, leaning over me, looking down at me.
She was incredibly beautiful and sensuous, but there was fierce
determination and steely strength beneath her radiant femininity, as if
she were the incarnation of an ancient goddess of war.
The gently breaking surf sounded like far-off cannonades, echoes of
distant strife, and the warm breeze made a sorrowful sound in the
feathery palm fronds.
"We could take the battle to them," she repeated.
I thought of my mother and sisters, lost to me now because of my
inability to tuck my head down and stay out of the war, lost to me
because I had taken the battle to Uncle Denton instead of letting him
wage war on his own terms.
I reached up and touched Rya's smooth brow, touched her elegantly
sculpted temple and cheek, her lips.
She kissed my hand.
Her gaze was locked on mine.
She said, "In each other we've found joy and a reason to live, more
than we ever thought we'd have. Now there's a temptation to play
turtle, to pull our heads into our shells, to ignore the rest of the
world. There's a temptation to enjoy what we have together and to say
to hell with everyone else.
And for a while . . . maybe we'd be happy like that. But only for a
while. Sooner or later, because of our cowardice and selfishness, we'd
be overcome with shame, with guilt. I know what I'm talking about,
Slim. Remember, until recently, I lived like that: interested only in
myself, in my own survival.
And day by dreary day I was being eaten alive by guilt.
You've never been like that; you've always had a sense of
responsibility, and you won't be able to shed it, no matter what you
think. And now that I've acquired a sense of responsibility, I'm not
going to be able to give it up. We aren't like those people in New.York who watched Kitty Genovese being stabbed to death and did nothing
about it. We just aren't, Slim. If we try to be like that, we'll
eventually loathe ourselves, and we'll start blaming each other for our
cowardice, and we'll turn bitter, and in time we won't love each other
any more, not the way we love each other now.
Everything we have together-and everything we hope to have-depends upon
our staying involved, making good use of our ability to see the
goblins, and meeting our responsibilities." I lowered my hand to her
knee. So warm, it was . . . so warm.
Finally I said, "And if we die?"
"At least it wouldn't be a useless death.
"And if only one of us dies?"
"The other remains to take vengeance."
"Cold comfort," I observed.
"But we won't die," she said.
"You sound so sure of that."
"I am. Positive."
"I wish I could be so sure."
"You can."
"How?" I asked.
"Believe."
"That's all?"
"Yes. Just believe in the triumph of right over wrong."
"Like believing in Tinkerbell," I said.
"No," Rya said. "Tinkerbell was a fantasy creature sustained only by
faith. But what we're talking about here is goodness, mercy, and
justice-and those are not fantasies.
They'll exist whether you believe in them or not. However, if you
believe, then you will put your beliefs into action; and if you act,
you will help insure that evil doesn't triumph. But only if you act "
"That's quite a line you've got," I said.
She said nothing more.
"You could sell refrigerators to Eskimos."
She only stared.
"Fur coats to Hawaiians."
She waited.
"Reading lamps to the blind."
She would not smile for me.
"Even used cars," I said.
Her eyes were deeper than the sea.
Later, back at the trailer, we made love. In the amber light of the
bedside lamp, her tanned body seemed to be made of honey- and
cinnamon-colored velvet, except where her skimpy two-piece bathing suit
had shielded her from the sun, and there the flawless fabric of her was
paler and even softer.
When, deep within her, my silken semen suddenly began to unravel in
swift liquid threads, it seemed that those filaments were sewing us
together, stitching body to body and soul to soul.
When at last I softened and shrank and slipped from her, I said, "When
will we leave for Yontsdown?"
"Tomorrow?" she whispered.
"All right," I said.
Outside, the descending twilight had pulled with it a wind that came in
from the west, across the Gulf, whipping the palms and rattling the
bamboo and soughing in the Australian pines. The metal walls and roof
of the trailer creaked.
She switched off the light, and we lay together in the gloom, her back.to my belly, listening to the wind, perhaps pleased by our decision and
the courage we were displaying, perhaps proud of ourselves but also
afraid, definitely afraid.
20
Northbound
Joel Tuck was opposed. Opposed to our noble attitude. "Witless
idealism," he called it. Opposed to the trip to Yontsdown.
more foolhardy than courageous." Opposed to the escalation of the war
that we were planning. "Doomed to fail," he said.
That night we had dinner with Joel and his wife, Laura, in their
permanently placed, double-wide house trailer on one of the largest
lots in Gibtown. The property was lushly landscaped-banana palms, half
a dozen colorful varieties of impatiens, ferns, bougainvillaea, even
some star jasmine and the elaborate banks of shrubs and flowers led one
to expect that the interior of the Tuck home would be overfurnished and
overdecorated, perhaps in some heavy European style. However, that
expectation was not fulfilled. Their home was distinctly modern:
simple, clean-lined, almost stark contemporary furniture; two bold
abstract paintings, a few pieces of art glass, but no knickknacks, no
clutter; and the colors were all earth tones-beige and sand-white and
brown-with turquoise as the only accent.
I suspected that this minimalist decor was a conscious attempt to avoid
accentuating Joel's facial deformities. After all, considering his
great size and his nightmarish visage, a house full of beautifully
carved and highly polished ornate
European furniture-whether French or Italian or English, and regardless
of period-surely would have been transformed by his presence and would
have seemed less elegant than Gothic, calling to mind the old dark
houses and haunted castles of countless movies. By contrast, in this
contemporary ambience, the impact of his mutant countenance was
curiously softened, as if he were a piece of ultramodern, surrealistic
sculpture that belonged in such clean, spare rooms as these.
Yet the Tuck home was not cold or the least forbidding.
One long wall of the big living room was covered with off-white wooden
shelves crammed full of hardcover books, which lent considerable warmth
to the place, though Joel and Laura themselves were primarily
responsible for the friendly and comfortable atmosphere that
immediately enveloped visitors. Nearly all the carnies I'd ever met
had welcomed me without reservation and had accepted me as one of their
own; but even among carnies Joel and Laura had a special talent for
friendship.
Last August, on the bloody night when Joel and I had killed and
beheaded and buried six goblins on the dark midway of the Yontsdown
County Fairgrounds, I had been surprised to hear him refer to his wife,
as I had not known he was married. Thereafter, until I met her, I had
been curious about what kind of woman would wed such a man as Joel. I
had imagined all sorts of mates for him, though I had pictured no one
quite like Laura.
For one thing, she was very pretty, slim, and graceful. Not
breathtaking (as Rya was), not a woman to make men tremble at the very
sight of her, but decidedly pretty and desirable: auburn hair, clear
gray eyes, an open face with well-proportioned features, a lovely
smile..She possessed the selfassurance of a woman in her forties but looked no
older than thirty, so I figured her age fell somewhere between. For
another thing, there was nothing of the wounded bird about her, no
shyness, no timidity that would have made it difficult for her to meet
and to charm men more physically attractive and more socially
acceptable than Joel. And there was no air of frigidity, nothing to
suggest that she had married Joel merely because he would be grateful
to her and would therefore demand less frequent carnal relations than
other men.
Indeed she was enormously affectionate by nature-a toucher, a hugger, a
kisser-of-cheeks-and there was every reason to believe that her
demonstrative manner with friends was but a pale shadow of the deep
passion she brought to the marriage bed.
One evening in the week before Christmas, while Rya and Laura were
shopping, while Joel and I drank beer and ate cheese-flavored popcorn
and played two-hand pinochle, Joel had consumed enough bottles of Pabst
Blue Ribbon to induce a sentimentalmood so thick and sweet that he
would have been at risk of falling into a coma if he had been diabetic.
In that condition he could speak of nothing but his much-loved wife.
Laura was so gentle (he said), so kind and loving and generous, and she
was bright, too, and witty, and she could charm a cold candle into
lighting without need of a match.
Perhaps she was no saint (he said), but if anyone closer to sainthood
walked the earth in our time, he damn well wanted to be told who it
was. He assured me that the key to understanding Laura-and to
understanding why she had chosen him-was to realize that she was one of
those rare people who was never impressed by surfaces-appearances,
reputations-or first impressions. She had a knack for seeing deeper
into people-nothing psychic like my or Joel's talent for seeing through
the goblins' disguises but simply good old-fashioned insight. In Joel,
she had seen a man whose love and respect for her was almost boundless
and who, in spite of his monstrous face, was gentler and more capable
of making a deep commitment than most men.
Anyway, that Monday night, March 16, when Rya and I revealed our
intention of carrying the war to the goblins, Laura and Joel responded
as we expected. She frowned, and her gray eyes darkened with worry,
and she touched us and hugged us more than usual, as if each physical
contact was an additional filament in a web of affection that might
bind us to Gibtown and prevent us from embarking upon our dangerous
mission. Joel paced nervously, his malformed head pulled down, his
massive shoulders hunched; then he sat on the couch and fidgeted, but
jumped up again and paced some more-all the while arguing against our
plan and trying to reason with us. But we would not be swayed by
either Laura's affection or Joel's logic, for we were young and bold
and full of righteousness.
Halfway through dinner, when the conversation finally moved on to other
topics, when it seemed the Tucks had reluctantly accepted the
inevitability of our crusade, Joel suddenly put down his knife and
fork, banging them on his plate, shook his grizzled head, and reopened
the debate: "It's a damn suicide pact, that's what it is! If you go to
Yontsdown with the idea of wiping out a nest of goblins, you're just
committing suicide together." He worked his craggy steam-shovel jaw,
as if a few hundred important words had gotten caught in that imperfect
bony mechanism, but when at last he continued, he merely repeated,
"Suicide."
"And now that you've found each other," Laura said, reaching across the
table and gently touching Rya's hand, you've got every reason to live."."We're not going to walk into town and announce ourselves," Rya assured
them. "This isn't the shootout at the OK Corral. We're going to
proceed cautiously. First we need to learn as much as we can about
them, about why there're so many of them in one place."
"And we're going to be well armed," I said.
"Remember, we have an enormous advantage," Rya added.
We can see them, but they don't know we can see them.
We'll be phantoms, waging guerrilla warfare."
"But they know you," Joel reminded her.
"No," she said, shaking her head. Her glossy black hair rippled with
midnight-blue highlights. "They know the old me, when I was a blonde
with a slightly different face. They think that woman's dead. And in
a way . . . she is."
Joel stared at us in frustration. The third eye in his granite ledge
forehead was a mystical muddy-orange and seemed full of secret visions
of an apocalyptic nature. The lid slipped shut. He closed his other
two eyes and sighed deeply, a sigh of resignation and profound sadness.
"Why? Why, damn you? Why do you feel the need to do this crazy
thing?"
"My years in the orphanage, when I was under their thumb," Rya said.
"I want revenge for that."
"And for my cousin Kerry," I said.
"For Jelly Jordan," Rya said.
Joel did not open his eyes. He folded his huge hands on the table. He
almost seemed to be praying.
"And for my father," I said. "One of them murdered my father. And my
grandma. And my Aunt Paula."
"For those kids who died in the school fire in Yontsdown," Rya added
softly.
"And for all those who will die if we don't act," I said.
"To redeem myself," Rya said. "For all the years I worked on their
side."
"Because if we don't do it," I said, "we're going to feel no better
than those people who stood at their windows and watched Kitty Genovese
being cut to pieces."
We all sat and thought about that for a moment.
The night air streamed through the screened windows with a soft hiss
like breath expelled through clenched teeth.
Outside, a greater wind moved through the night as if it were a
creature of enormous dimensions, stalking something in the darkness.
At last Joel said, "But, Jesus, only two of you against so many of them
.
"It's better if it's just two of us," I said. "Two discreet
out-of-towners won't be noticed. We'll be able to poke around without
drawing attention to ourselves, so we'll be more likely to find out why
so many of them are -gathered in one place. And then . . . if we
decide we should wipe out a bunch of them, we can do it stealthily."
In the deep sockets beneath his massive and misshapen forehead, Joel's
brown eyes opened; they were infinitely expressive, filled with
understanding, worry, regret, and perhaps pity.
Reaching across the table to take Rya's hand, reaching catercorner to
put her other hand upon my arm, Laura Tuck said, "If you go back there
and find yourselves in trouble too big to handle alone, we'll come."
"Yes," Joel said with a note of self-disgust that I sensed was not
entirely genuine, "I'm afraid we're just plain dumb enough and
sentimental enough to come."
"And we'll bring other carnies," Laura said..Joel shook his head. "Well, I don't know about that.
Carnies are people who don't function well in the outside world, but
that sure doesn't mean they've got concrete between their ears. They
won't like the odds."
"Doesn't matter," Rya assured them. "We're not going to get in over
our heads."
I said, "We're going to be just as careful as two mice in a house with
a hundred cats."
"We'll be all right," Rya said.
"You don't have to worry about us," I told them.
I think that I actually meant what I said. I think I actually felt
that self-assured. My unjustified confidence could not even be
explained and excused by drunkenness, for I was entirely sober.
In the lonely hours of Tuesday morning, I was awakened by thunder
rumbling far out in the Gulf. I lay for a while, still half asleep,
listening to Rya's measured breathing and to the grumbling heavens.
Gradually, as the cloudy currents Of sleep faded and my mind cleared, I
recalled that I had been havina a nasty dream just before I woke and
that thunder featured in the nightmare.
Because previous dreams had proved prophetic, I tried to recall this
one, but it eluded me. The vague Morphean images rose like wisps of
smoke through my memory, sinuously curling away from me as real smoke
will writhe and slither upward on a draft, dissipating with a speed
directly related to my determination to form them into solid meaningful
pictures. Although I concentrated for a long 'time, I could remember
only a strange and confining place, a long and narrow and mysterious
hallway or perhaps a tunnel, where inky darkness had seemed to ooze out
of the walls and where the only pools of light-inadequate and
mustard-yellow-were widely separated by threatening shadows. I could
not recall where the place had been or what nightmare events had
transpired there, but even my dim and formless recollection generated a
chill deep in my bones and caused my heart to pound with fear.
Out on the Gulf the thunder drew nearer.
In time fat drops of rain fell.
The nightmare receded even farther from my grasp, and gradually my fear
faded with it.
The rhythmic patter of rain on the trailer roof soon lulled me.
Beside me, Rya murmured dreamily.
In the Florida night, only two and a half days from Yontsdown, lying in
summery warmth but anticipating the wintry north toward which I was
being called, I sought sleep again and found it as a suckling child
might find his mother's breast, though instead of milk I once more
drank the dark elixir of the dream. And in the morning, waking with a
shudder and a gasp, I was, as before, unable to recall what that
strange nightmare had been about-which disturbed but did not yet alarm
me.
Gibtown is the winter home for carnies from nearly every road show in
the eastern half of the country, not just from the Sombra Brothers
outfit. Because carnies are, to begin with, outcasts or misfits who
can find no place in straight society, many shows (unlike the Sombra
Brothers) do not ask questions when hiring new workers or contracting
with new concessionaires, and among the honest misfits there are a few
-very few-hard cases, criminal types. Therefore, if you know where to
look in Gibtown, and if you are known to be a trusted member of the
community, you can get almost anything you want.
I wanted a couple of good revolvers that packed a big punch, two
pistols with illegal silencers, a sawed-off shotgun, a fully automatic.rifle, at least one hundred pounds of any kind of plastic explosive,
detonator caps with built-in timers, a dozen vials of sodium pentothal,
a packet of hypodermic syringes, and a few other items not easily
acquired at the nearest K-Mart or Safeway. Within half an hour that
Tuesday morning, a few discreet questions led me to Noriand "Slick
Eddy" Beckwurt, a jam-auction concessionaire who traveled with a big
outfit that spent the season mostly in the Midwest.
Slick Eddy did not look the least bit slick. In fact, he looked
desiccated. He had brittle sand-colored hair, and in spite of the
Florida sun, he was as pallid as the dust in an ancient tomb. His skin
was parched, with webs of fine wrinkles, and his lips were so dry that
they looked scaly. His eyes were a strange shade of pale amber, like
sun-yellowed paper.
He wore crisp khaki pants and a khaki shirt that crackled softly and
whispered when he moved. His low but raspy voice made me think of a
hot desert wind stirring through dead brush. A heavy smoker who kept a
pack of Camels within reach of every chair in sight, he almost seemed
to have been smoke-cured like a slab of pork.
In Slick Eddy's trailer the living room was dimly lit and reeked of
stale cigarettes. The furniture was upholstered in dark brown vinyl
with an imitation leather grain; there were steel-and-glass end tables
and a matching coffee table on which lay copies of the National
Enquirer and several gun magazines. Only one of the three lamps was
lit. The air was cool and dry. All of the windows were covered by
heavy, tightly drawn drapes. Except for the stink of cigarettes, I
could almost have believed that the place was a storage vault where
temperature, light, and humidity were carefully controlled to preserve
delicate art objects or fragile documents.
The rain had stopped near dawn, then started again as I reached Slick
Eddy's place. Now the sound of the drizzle was curiously muffled, as
if the entire trailer were shrouded in heavy drapes like those at the
windows.
Slumped in a brown vinyl chair, Slick Eddy listened impassively and
without interruption as I reeled off my long and outrageous shopping
list. He took deep drags on a cigarette held in a thin-fingered hand
that was permanently discolored with nicotine stains. When I finished
telling him what I wanted, he did not ask a single question, not even
with his parchment-yellow eyes. He merely told me the price, and when
I gave him half the sum as a deposit, he said, "Come back at three
o'clock."
"Today?"
"Yes."
"You can get all this stuff in a few hours?"
"Yes."
"I want quality."
"Of course."
"The plastic explosive has to be very stable, nothing too dangerous to
handle."
"I don't deal in garbage."
"And the pentothal-" He blew out a pungent plume of smoke and said,
"The longer we talk about it, the harder it's going to be for me to
have the stuff here by three o'clock."
I nodded, got up, and went to the door. Glancing back at him once
more, I said, "Aren't you curious?"
"About what?"
"About what I'm up to," I said.
"No."."Surely you must wonder-" 'No.
"If I were you, I'd be curious when people came to me wanting things
like this. If I were you, I'd want to know what I was getting involved
in."
"that's why you're not me," he said.
When the rain stopped, the puddles soon earth, and the leaves dripped
dry, and the slowly rose from the humble posture into which the
downpour had beaten them, but the sky did not clear; it hung low over
the flat Florida coast. The eastward-oozing masses of dark clouds
looked rotten, postulant. The heavy air did not smell clean as it
should have after a hard rain; an odd, musty odor clung to the humid
day, as if the storm had blown some strange contaminant in from the
Gulf.
Rya and I packed three suitcases and loaded them into our beige station
wagon, the sides of which boasted metal panels painted to look like
wood. Even in those days Detroit no longer produced genuine Woodies,
which perhaps was an early sign of how thoroughly the age of quality
and crafts'manship and authenticity was destined to give way to the age
of shoddiness, haste, and clever imitation.
Solemnly-and sometimes tearfully-we said good-bye to Joel and Laura
Tuck, to Gloria Neames, Red Morton, Bob Weyland, Madame Zena, Inna and
Paulie Lotus, and other carnies, telling some that we were taking a
brief pleasure trip, telling others the truth. They wished us well and
tried to encourage us as best they could, but in the eyes of those who
knew our true purpose, we saw doubt, fear, pity, and dismay.
They did not think we would return-or that we would live long enough in
Yontsdown to learn anything important about the goblins nesting there
or to do any worthwhile damage to that enemy. The same thought was in
all their minds, although none of them gave voice to it: We will never
see you again.
At three o'clock, when we went to Slick Eddy's trailer in a far corner
of Gibtown, he was waiting for us with all of the weapons, explosives,
pentothal, and the other items I had ordered. The gear was stowed in
several faded canvas sacks with drawstring tops, and we loaded them
into the wagon as if we merely were handling bags full of dirty clothes
and were on our way to a Laundromat.
Rya agreed to take the wheel for the first leg of the journey soaked
into the blades of grass north. It was my responsibility to keep a
good rock-and-roll station on the radio as the miles rolled past.
But before we had even pulled out of Slick Eddy's driveway, he leaned
down and put his papyrus-crisp face in my open window. With an
exhalation of cigarette-soured breath that left his throat to the
accompaniment of a dry rattle, he said, "If you get tangled up with the
law out there, and if they want to know where you got what you
shouldn't have, then I expect you to act with carny honor and keep me
out of it."
"Of course," Rya said sharply. She clearly did not like Slick Eddy.
"Why insult us by even bringing it up? Do we look like a couple of
sellout artists who'd throw our own people on the fire just to keep
ourselves warm? We're stand-up types."
"I think you are," Slick Eddy said.
"Well, then," she said, but she was not mollified.
Still squinting at us through the open window, Slick Eddy was not yet
satisfied. He seemed to sense that Rya had indeed once been a betrayer
of her own kind. And her reaction to his suspicion might have resulted
less from her dislike of him than from the guilt that she had not yet
entirely purged from herself..Eddy said, "If things go right for you-wherever you're going and
whatever you're up to-and if someday you need me to do more shopping
for you, don't hesitate to call. But if things go wrong, I never want
to see you again."
"If things go wrong," Rya said sharply, "you never will see us again."
He blinked those burned-out amber eyes at her, blinked them at me, and
I could have sworn I heard his lids moving up and down with a soft,
metallic scraping sound like the rusted parts of a machine abrading one
another. He let out a wheezy sigh, and I half expected dust to puff
from between his scaly lips, but the only thing that washed over my
face was another rancid wave of cigarette breath. At last he said,
"Yeah. Yeah . . . I sort Of suspect I never will see you again." As
Rya backed the car out of the driveway, Slick Eddy Beckwurt watched us
go.
"What's he look like to you?" she asked me.
"A desert rat," I said.
"No.
"No?" She said, "Death."
I stared at the receding figure of Slick Eddy.
Suddenly, perhaps because he regretted angering Rya and preferred to
part on a better note, he broke into a smile and waved at us. That was
the worst thing he could have done, for his lean and ascetic face, as
dry as bones and as pale as grave worms, was not made for smiling. In
his skeletal grin I saw neither friendship nor warmth nor pleasure of
any kind but the unholy hunger of the Reaper.
With that macabre image as our last memorable glimpse of Gibtown, the
drive east and north across Florida was somber, almost bleak. Not even
the music of the Beach. Boys, the Beatles, the Dixie Cups, or the Four
Seasons could improve our mood. The mottled sky was like a roof of
slate above, a weight that seemed to press down on the world and
threatened to collapse upon us. We drove in and out of squalls. At
times glittering silvery rain slashed the gray air yet did not brighten
it, mirrored the roadway yet somehow made the pavement even blacker,
streamed in molten rivulets along the macadam berm, or surged and
foamed over the gutters and drainage ditches. When there was no rain,
there was often a fine ashen mist bearding the cypress and pine,
lending something of the look of British moors to the swampy Florida
scrubland. After nightfall we encountered fog, dense in some places.
We spoke little on that first part of our journey, as if afraid that
anything we said would only further depress us. As a measure of the
darkness of our mood, the Supremes' first hit record, "When the Love
Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes," which had reached the charts
six weeks earlier and which was the very definition of "bouncy,"
sounded not at all like an anthem to joy but like a dirge-and the other
tunes on the radio fell on our ears with equally ominous effect.
We ate dinner in a drab roadside cafe, in a booth beside the
bug-spattered, rain-dappled windows. Everything on the menu was either
fried, deep-fried, or breaded and fried.
One of the truck drivers sitting on a stool at the counter was a
goblin. Psychic images emanated from him, and with my Twilight Eyes I
saw that he had often used his tanklike Mack truck to run unwary
motorists off otherwise deserted stretches of Florida highway, ramming
or forcing them into canals where they were trapped inside their cars
and drowned, or into swamps where the stinking, gluey muck sucked them
under. I also perceived that he would murder many more innocents in
the nights to come, perhaps even tonight, though I did not sense that
he posed any danger to Rya and me. I wanted to draw the knife from my.boot, slip up behind him, and slit his throat. But mindful of the
important mission ahead of us, I restrained myself.
Somewhere in Georgia we spent the night in a clapboard motel along the
interstate, not because it was an appealing inn but because exhaustion
abruptly seized us in a desolate and lonely place where no other
accommodations could be found.
The mattress was lumpy, and the worn-out bedsprings provided no
support.
Seconds after the lights were out, we could hear unthinkably large
water bugs skittering across the cracked linoleum floor. We were too
tired-and too frightened of the future to care. In a couple of
minutes, after one sweet kiss, we were asleep.
Again I dreamed of a long, shadowy tunnel insufficiently lit by dim and
widely spaced amber lamps. The ceiling was low. The walls were
curiously rough, though I could not discern the material of which they
were constructed. Again I woke shaking with terror, a scream caught in
my throat. No matter how hard I tried, I could remember nothing that
had happened in the nightmare, nothing to explain the frenzied
hammering of my heart.
The radiant dial of my wristwatch revealed that it was three-ten in the
morning. I had slept only two and a half hours, but I knew that I
would get no more rest that night.
Beside me in the lightless room, still deep in slumber, Rya moaned and
gasped and shuddered.
I wondered if she was now running along the same tenebrous tunnel that
had been featured in my nightmare.
I recalled the other portentous dream we had shared last summer: the
hillside graveyard, forested with tombstones.
That one had been an omen. If we shared another nightmare, we could be
certain that it, too, was a premonition of danger.
In the morning I would ask her what had been the cause of her groans
and shivers in the night. With luck the source of her bad dream would
be more prosaic than mine: the greasy food from the roadside diner.
Meanwhile I lay on my back in the blackness, listening to my own soft
breathing, to.Rya's dreamy murmurs and occasional thrashings, and to
the continuous busy explorations of the many-legged water bugs.
Wednesday morning, March 18, we drove until we found a Stuckey's at an
interchange. Over a reasonably good breakfast of bacon, eggs, grits,
waffles, and coffee, I asked Rya about her dream.
"Last night?" she said, frowning as she soaked up some egg yolk with a
wedge of toast. "I slept like a log. Didn't dream.
"You dreamed," I assured her.
"Really?"
"Continuously.
"Don't remember."
"You moaned a lot. Kicked at the sheets. Not just last night but the
night before as well."
She blinked, paused with the piece of toast halfway to her mouth. "Oh.
I see. You mean . . . you woke up from your own nightmare and found
me in the middle of one too?"
"That's right."
"And you're wondering if .
"If we're sharing the same dream again." I told her about the strange
tunnel, the weak and vaguely flickering lamps. ' :!
wake up with a feeling of having been pursued by something.
"By what?"
"Something . . . something . . . I don't know."."Well," she said, "if I dreamed anything like that, I don't remember
it." She popped the bit of egg-soaked toast into her mouth, chewed,
swallowed. "So we're both having bad dreams. It doesn't have to be .
. . prophetic. Lord knows, we've got good reason not to sleep well.
Tension. Anxiety.
Considering where we're headed, we're bound to have bad dreams.
Doesn't mean a thing."
After breakfast we put in a long day on the road. We did not even stop
for lunch but picked up some crackers and candy bars at a Mobile
station when we stopped for gasoline.
Gradually we left the subtropical heat behind, but the weather
improved. By the time we were halfway through South Carolina, the
skies were cloudless.
Curiously-or not-the high blue day seemed, to me at least, no brighter
than the storm-sullied afternoon during which we had departed the Gulf.
A darkness waited in the pine forests that, for some distance, lined
both sides of the highway, and the gloom seemed to be alive and
observant, as if it were patiently waiting for an opportunity to rush
forth, envelop us, and feed on our bones. Even where the hard, brassy
glare of sunshine fell in full weight, I saw the shadows to.come, saw
the inevitability of nightfall. I was not in high spirits.
Late Wednesday night we stopped in Maryland at a better motel than the
one in Georgia: a good bed, carpet on the floor, and no skittering
water bugs.
We were even wearier than we had been the previous night, but we did
not immediately seek sleep. Instead, somewhat to our surprise, we made
love. Even more surprising: we were insatiable. It began with sweet,
languorous flexings, with long and easy thrusts, with soft contractions
and lazy expansions of the muscles, an almost slow-motion rising and
falling and stroking, as of lovers in an art film, which had a
sweetness and an odd shyness, as if we were joined for the very first
time. But after a while we brought a passion and energy to the act
that was unexpected and at first inexplicable in light of the long
hours of driving that we had just endured.
Rya's exquisite body had never felt more elegantly and sensuously
sculpted, ripe and full, never warmer or more supple, never more
silken-never more precious. The rhythm of her quickening breath, her
small cries of pleasure, her sudden gasps and little moans, and the
urgency with which her hands explored my body and then pulled me
against her-those expressions of her growing excitement fed my own
excitement. I began literally to shudder with pleasure, and each
delicious shudder passed like an electric current from me to her. She
climbed a stairway of climaxes toward breathless heights, and in spite
of a powerful eruption that seemed to empty me of blood and bone marrow
as well as semen, I did not experience the slightest loss of tumescence
but remained with her, ascending toward a peak of erotic and emotional
pleasure that I had never known.
As we had done before-though never with such intensity, and power as
this-we were making ardent love in order to forget, to deny, to evade
the very existence of hooded, scythe-packing Death. We were trying to
scorn and abjure the real dangers ahead and the real fears already with
us. In flesh we sought solace, temporary peace, and strength through
sharing.
Perhaps we also hoped to exhaust ourselves so completely that neither
of us would dream.
But we dreamed.
I found myself within the poorly lit tunnel again, running in terror.from something I could not see. Panic took voice in the hard, flat
echo of my footsteps on a stone floor.
Rya dreamed, too, waking with a scream near dawn, after I had been
awake for hours. I held her. She was shuddering again but not with
pleasure this time. She recalled scraps of the nightmare: dim,
flickering amber lamps; pools of sooty darkness; a tunnel. . . .
Something very bad was going to happen to us in a tunnel.
When, where, what, why-those were things we could not yet foresee.
Thursday I took the wheel and drove north into ' Pennsylvania, while
Rya took charge of the radio. The sky closed up again behind
steel-gray clouds, charred black at the edges, like the war-hammered
doors of a celestial armory.
We left the interstate for a narrower highway.
Officially spring was only days away, but in these northeast mountains,
nature had little regard for the calendar.
Winter was still an unchallenged king and would remain on his throne
through the end of the month, if not longer.
The snow-covered land rose, gently at first, then with greater
determination, and the banks of snow grew higher along the state route.
The road became twistier by the mile, and as I followed its serpentine
course I also snaked back through my memory to the day when Jelly
Jordan, Luke Bendingo, and I had driven to Yontsdown to pass out free
tickets and cash to county officials, hoping to grease the rails for
the Sombra Brothers Carnival.
The land had no less of an ominous quality now than it possessed the
previous summer. Irrationally but undeniably, the mountains themselves
seemed evil, as if earth and stone and forest could somehow evolve,
nurture, and contain malevolent attitudes and intentions. Weathered
formations of rock, poking up here and there through blankets of snow
and soil, resembled the half-rotten teeth of some ascending leviathan
that swam in the earth instead of the sea. In other places, longer
formations made me think of the serrated spines of giant reptiles. The
bleak gray daylight created no distinct shadows, but it plated an ashen
hue to every object, until it seemed as if we had entered an alternate
world where colors-other than gray, black, and white-Aid not exist.
The tall evergreens thrust up like spikes on the armored fist of a
villainous knight. The leafless maples and birches did not exactly
resemble trees but might have been the fossilized skeletons of an
ancient prehuman race. An uncanny number of the winter-stripped oaks
were gnarled and misshapen by fungus.
"We can still turn back," Rya said quietly.
"Do you want to?"
She sighed, "No."
"And really . . . can we?"
"No."
Even the snow lent no sparkle to those malignant mountains. It seemed
different from other snow in more benign regions. It was not the snow
of Christmas-or of skiing, sleighs, snowmen, and snowball battles. It
crusted on the trunks and limbs of the barren trees, but that only
emphasized the black. skeletal aspect of them. More than anything
else, this snow made me think of white-tiled morgue rooms where cold,
dead bodies were dissected in search of the cause and the meaning of
death.
We passed landmarks that were familiar from the summer past: the
abandoned mine head, the half-demolished tipple, the rusting hulks of
automobiles perched on concrete blocks.
The snow concealed some portions of those objects but in no way.diminished their contribution to the pervading atmosphere of despair,
gloom, and senescence.
The three-lane macadam state route was gritty with cinders and sand,
mottled with white patches of salt spread by roadmaintenance crews
after the last big storm. The pavement was utterly free of ice and
snow, and driving conditions were fine.
As we passed the road sign that marked the Yontsdown city limits, Rya
said, "Slim, better slow down."
I glanced at the speedometer and discovered that I was scooting along
at more than fifteen miles an hour over the legal limit, as if I
unconsciously intended to rocket straight through the city and out the
other side.
I eased up on the accelerator, rounded a bend, and saw a police car
parked along the road, right there at the blind end of the curve. The
driver's window was open a crack, just enough for a radar unit to be
hung from it.
As we sailed past, still moving a few miles faster than the limit, I
saw that the cop behind the wheel was a goblin.
21
Winter in Hell I cursed aloud because, although I was exceeding the
speed limit by only two or three miles an hour, I was certain that even
a minor infraction would be sufficient to incur official wrath in this
demon-ruled town. I glanced worriedly at the rearview mirror. On the
roof of the black-and-white, the red emergency beacons began to flash,
pulses of bloody light rippling across the morgue-white snowscape; he
was going to come after us, which was not a promising beginning to our
clandestine mission.
"Damn," Rya said, twisting around in her seat to look out the back
window.
But before the cruiser could pull onto the roadway, another car-a
mud-spattered yellow Buick-rounded the bend, going faster than I was,
and the goblin-policeman's attention shifted to that more flagrant
violator. We drove on, unmolested, as the cop stopped the Buick in our
wake.
A sudden gust of wind pulled a billion threads of snow off the ground,
instantly wove them into a silver-gray curtain, and whipped the curtain
across the road behind us, concealing the Buick and the hapless
motorist and the goblin policeman from my view.
"Close," I said.
Rya said nothing. Ahead and slightly below us lay Yontsdown. She
faced forward again, biting her lower lip as she studied the city into
which we descended.
The previous summer, Yontsdown had appeared grim and medieval. Now, in
the frigid clutch of winter, it was even less appealing than it had
been on the August day when I'd first seen it. In the murky distance
the vomitous smoke and steam rising from the stacks of the filthy steel
mill were darker and more heavily laden with pollutants than before,
like columns of ejaculate from smoldering volcanoes. A few hundred
feet up, the gray steam thinned and was torn to rags by the winter
wind, but the sulfurous smoke spread from mountain peak to mountain
peak.
The combination of darkish clouds and sour yellow fumes gave the
heavens a bruised look. And if the skies were bruised, then the city
below was battered, lacerated, mortally wounded: It seemed to be not
only a dying community but a community of the dying, a city-sized.cemetery. The row houses-many of them shabby, all of them sheathed in
a film of gray dust-and the larger brick and granite buildings had
previously made me think of medieval structures. They still possessed
that anachronistic quality, though this time-with soot-discolored snow
on some rooftops, with dirty icicles hanging from eaves, with icterous
frost marbelizing many window-they also seemed, somehow, like rank
after serried rank of headstones in a graveyard for giants. And from a
distance the train cars in the rail yards might have been enormous
coffins.
I felt as if I were awash in psychic emanations, and nearly every
current in that Stygian sea was dark, cold, and frightening.
We crossed the bridge over the now frozen river, where huge slabs of
jagged ice thrust up in jumbled profusion beneath the metal-grid floor
and beyond the heavy iron railings. The tires did not seem to sing
this time but instead emitted a shrill one-note scream.
On the far side of the bridge, I abruptly pulled the station wagon to
the curb and stopped.
"What're you doing?" Rya asked, looking at the sleazy bar and grill in
front of which I had parked.
It was a cement-block building painted bile-green. Faded red enamel
was peeling off the front door, and though the windows were free of
frost, they were heavily streaked with grease and grime.
She said, "What do you want here?"
"Nothing," I said. "I . . . I just want to switch places with you.
The emanations . . . all around me . . . pouring off everything. . .
. No matter where I look, I see . . . strange and terrible shadows
that aren't real, shadows of death and destruction to come. . . . I
don't think I should drive just now."
"The town didn't affect you like this before."
"Yeah. It did. When I first came in with Luke and Jelly.
Not this bad. And I pretty quickly got in control of myself.
I'll get used to it again, too, in a little while. But right now I
feel . . . battered.
While Rya slid across the seat to take the steering wheel, I got out of
the car and walked unsteadily around-to the other side. The air was
bitterly cold; it smelled of oil, coal dust, gasoline fumes, frying
meat from the grill of the nearby barroom-and (I could have sworn)
brimstone. I got into the passenger's seat, slammed the door, and Rya
pulled away from the curb, steering the car smoothly back into traffic.
"Where to?" she asked.
"Drive across town to the outskirts."
"And?" "Find a quiet motel."
I could not explain the dramatic worsening of the city's effect on me,
although I had a few ideas. Perhaps, for reasons unknown, my psychic
powers had become stronger, my paranormal perceptions more sensitive.
Or perhaps the city's load of grief and terror had grown immeasurably
heavier since my last visit. Or maybe I was more afraid of returning
to this demonic place than I had realized, in which case my nerves were
rubbed raw and were therefore extraordinarily receptive to the dark
energy and formless but hideous images that radiated from buildings,
cars, people, and miscellaneous objects on all sides. Or, by means of
the special vision that my Twilight Eyes provided, perhaps I sensed
that either I or Rya-or maybe both of us.-would die here at the hands
of the goblins; however, if that clairvoyant message was trying to get
through to me, I was evidently emotionally incapable of reading and
accepting it. I could imagine it, but I could not actually bring
myself to "see" the details of such a pointless and horrifying destiny..Approaching the two-story brick school where seven children had burned
to death in a heating-oil explosion and fire, I saw that the
flame-charred wing had been rebuilt since the previous summer, the
slate roof repaired. Even now school was in session: Children were
visible at a few of the windows.
As before, a massive wave of clairvoyant impressions surged off the
walls of that structure and rushed toward me with dismaying power and
substance-occult substance but deadly nonetheless, as real to me as a
murderous tidal wave. Here, as nowhere else I had ever seen, human
suffering and anguish and terror could be measured almost as the ocean
depth might be gauged: in tens, hundreds, even thousands of fathoms. A
thin, cold spray preceded the murderous wave: disjointed augural images
splashing across the surface of my mind. I saw walls and ceilings
bursting into flame..... windows exploding in ten thousand deadly
splinters..... whips of fire lashing through the classrooms on
in-rushing currents of air . . . terrified children with their clothes
aflame . . . a screaming teacher with her hair on fire . . . the
blackened and peeling corpse of another teacher slumped in a corner,
his body fat sizzling and bubbling as if it were bacon on a griddle. .
. .
The last time I had seen the school, I had received visions of both the
fire that had already transpired and of the worse fire to come. But
this time I saw only the future fire, as yet unlit, perhaps because the
oncoming disaster was now closer in time than the blaze that had
already done its work. The extrasensory pictures that sprayed over me
were shockingly more vivid and more hideous than any I had ever known,
each like a drop of sulfuric acid rather than water, painfully searing
its way into my memory and soul: children in mortal agony; flesh
blistering and bubbling and burning like tallow; grinning skulls
appearing through the smoking, melting tissues that once had concealed
them; eye sockets blackened and emptied by hungry flames.
"What's wrong?" Rya asked worriedly.
I realized that I was gasping, shuddering.
"Slim?"
She was letting up on the accelerator; the station wagon was slowing.
"Keep driving," I said, then cried out as the pain of the dying
children became, to a small degree, my pain as well.
"You're hurting," she said.
"Visions."
"Of what?"
"For God's sake . . . keep . driving."
"But-" "Get past . . . the school!"
To expel those words, I'd had to surface from the acid mist of psychic
emanations, which was nearly as difficult as struggling up through a
real cloud of dense and suffocating fumes.
Now I tumbled back down into that shadowy inner realm of unwanted
necromantic sight where the unspeakably gruesome and tragic future of
the Yontsdown Elementary School pressed insistently upon me in grisly,
blood-drenched detail.
I closed my eyes because, when looking upon the school, I was somehow
soliciting the release of the pictures of oncoming destruction that
were locked in its walls, an infinite store of occult images like a
great charge of potential energy that was at the critical point of
kinetic transformation. However, by closing my eyes, I cut the number
of visions only slightly and reduced the power of them not at all. The
main wave of psychic radiation now towered over me and began to crash
down; I was the shore on which this tsunami would break, and when it.broke and receded, the shoreline might be changed forever beyond
recognition. I was desperately afraid that immersion in those
nightmarish visions would leave me emotionally and mentally broken,
even insane, so I chose to defend myself in the same manner as I had
done last summer.
I squeezed my hands into fists, gritted my teeth, pulled my head down,
and with a monumental effort of will I turned my mind away from those
scenes of firey death and concentrated on good memories of Rya: the
love for me that I saw in her clear, direct eyes; the lovely lines of
her face; the perfection of her body, the lovemaking we had shared; the
sweet pleasure of just holding her hand, of just sitting with her and
watching television during a long evening together.......
The wave fell down toward me, down, down.......
I clung to thoughts of Rya.
The wave hitJesus!
-with crushing impact.
I cried out.
"Slim!" a far-off voice called urgently.
I was pinned against the seat. I was assaulted, beaten, pounded,
hammered.
"Slim!"
Rya . . . Rya . . . my only salvation.
I was in the blaze, there with the dying children, over whelmed by
visions of scorched and fire-eaten faces, withered and blackened limbs,
a thousand terrified eyes in which reflected flames writhed and
flickered . . . smoke, blinding smoke pouring up through the hot and
creaking floor . . . and I smelled their burning hair and their
cooking flesh, dodged falling ceilings and other debris . . . I heard
the pitiful wails and screams that were so numerous and of such volume
that they wove together in an eerie music that chilled me to the core
in spite of the fire in which I found myself . . . and those poor
doomed souls stumbled by me-frantic teachers and children-seeking
escape but finding doors inexplicably closed and blocked, and now, dear
God, every child in sight-scores of them-suddenly burst into flames,
and I ran to the nearest of them, tried to smother him beneath me and
put him out, but I was as a ghost in that place, unaffected by the fire
and unable to change what was happening, so my phantom hands passed
straight through the burning boy, straight through the little girl
toward whom I turned next, and as their screams of pain and terror
rose, I began to scream, too, I bellowed and shrieked in rage and in
frustration, I wept and cursed, and finally I fell away, out of the
inferno, down into darkness, silence, deepness, stillness like a marble
shroud.
Up.
Slowly up.
Into light.
Gray, blurry.
Mysterious shapes.
Then it all cleared.
I was slumped in my seat, damp and chilled with sweat.
The station wagon was stopped, parked.
Rya was leaning over me, one cool hand on my brow.
Through her luminous eyes, emotions darted like schooling fish: fear,
curiosity, sympathy, compassion, love.
I straightened up a bit, and she eased back. I felt weak and still
somewhat disoriented.
We were in an Acme Supermarket parking lot. Rows of cars, drably.dressed in winter grime, were divided by low walls of soot-streaked
snow shoved into place by plows during the most recent storm. A few
shoppers shuffled or scurried across the open pavement, their hair and
scarves and coattails flapping in a wind more brisk than it had been
before I had passed out. Some of them were pushing wobbly-wheeled
shopping carts that they used not only to transport groceries but for
support when they slipped on the treacherous ice-spotted pavement.
"Tell me," Rya said.
My mouth was dry. I could taste the bitter ashes of the promised-but
as yet unfulfilled-disaster. My tongue kept sticking to the roof of my
mouth, and it felt thick. Nevertheless, slightly slurring my words and
in a voice pressed flat by a massive weight of weariness, I told her
about the holocaust that would someday wipe out an ungodly number of
Yontsdown's elementary-school children.
Rya was already pale with concern for me, but as I spoke, she grew
paler still. When I finished she was whiter than Yontsdown's polluted
snow, and shadowy smudges had appeared around her eyes. The intensity
of her horror reminded me that she had personal experience of the
goblins' torture of children from the days when she had clung to a
precarious existence in an orphanage overseen by them.
She said, "What can we do?"
"I don't know."
"Can we stop it from happening?"
"I don't think so. The death energy pouring off that building is so
strong . . . overwhelming. The fire seems inevitable. I don't think
we can do anything to stop it."
"We can try," she said fiercely.
I nodded without enthusiasm.
"We must try," she said.
"Yes, all right. But first . . . a motel, somewhere we can crawl in
and shut the door and block out the sight of this hateful town for a
little while."
She found a suitable place just two miles from the supermarket, at the
corner of a not-too-busy intersection. The Traveler's Rest Motel. She
parked in front of the office.
Single-story, about twenty units. Built in a U-shape, with parking in
the middle. The late-afternoon gloom was so deep that the big
orange-and-green neon sign was already switched on; the last three
letters of MOTEL were burned out, and the neon outline of a cartoonish,
yawning face was noseless.
Traveler's Rest was slightly shabbier than the general shabbiness of
Yontsdown, but we were not looking for posh quarters and luxury;
anonymity was our primary need, even more important than reliable heat
and cleanliness, and Traveler's Rest looked as if it could provide
precisely what we sought.
Still drained by the ordeal which I had endured merely by passing the
elementary school, feeling parched and weak ever so weak-from the
debilitating heat of those foreseen flames, I had some difficulty
pulling myself out of the car.
The arctic wind seemed even colder than it actually was, for it
contrasted sharply with the memory of fire that continued to hiss and
flicker within me, vesicating heart and soul. I leaned against the
open door, dragging in quenching breaths of moist March air, which
should have helped but did not. When I slammed the door, I almost fell
backward. I gasped, swayed precariously, got my balance, and leaned
against the station wagon, dizzy, a strange grayness seeping in at the
edges of my vision..Rya came around the car to assist me. "More psychic images?"
"No. It's just . . . the after affects of the ones I already told you
about."
"After effects? But I've never seen you like this before."
"I've never felt like this before," I said.
"They were that bad)" "That bad. I feel . . ."blasted, crushed . . .
as if I left a part of me back there in that burning schoolhouse."
She put one arm around me for support, slipped her other hand under my
arm. There was, as usual, great strength in her.
I felt foolish, melodramatic, but my bone-deep exhaustion and rag-limp
legs were real.
To avoid destroying myself emotionally and psychologically, piece by
piece, I would have to stay far away from the school, take routes
through the city that kept those brick walls out of sight. In this
case, as in no other, my clairvoyant vision was stronger than my
capacity to endure the perceived pain of others. If ever it became
necessary to enter that building to prevent the future tragedy that I
had glimpsed, Rya might have to go inside by herself.
That possibility did not bear consideration.
Step by step, as she helped me around the car and across the pavement
to the motel office, my legs firmed up. My strength slowly returned.
The neon sign, hung on metal pins between two poles, squeaked in the
polar wind. In a brief moment of relative silence that befell the
street, I could hear the leafless branches of the ice-jacketed shrubs
clicking against one another and scraping the walls of the building.
When we were a few feet from the door to the office, when I was just
about able to proceed under my own power again, we heard a dragon-deep
roar in the street behind us. A large, powerful truck-a mud-brown
Peterbilt cab pulling a long open-bed trailer heaped full of coal-was
turning the nearest corner. We both glanced at it, and although Rya
evidently noticed nothing unusual about the vehicle, I was instantly
riveted by the company name and logo painted on the door: a white
circle surrounding a black lightning bolt on a black background, and
the Words LIGHTNING COAL COMPANY.
With my Twilight Eyes I perceived emanations of a unique, disquieting
nature. They were neither as specific nor as shattering as the grim
clairvoyant images of death that had poured off the elementary-school
building, but in spite of their lack of specificity and explosive
effect, they had a disturbing power all their own. They chilled me so
completely that I felt as if needle-fine spicules of ice were forming
in my blood and were adhering to the walls of arteries and veins. A
psychic and prophetic coldness, infinitely worse than the frigid winter
air of March, radiated from the logo and name of that coal company.
I sensed that here was a key to unlocking the mystery of the goblin
nest that had been established in Yontsdown.
"Slim?" Rya said.
"Wait .
"What's wrong?"
"Don't know."
"You're shaking."
"Something . . . something .
As I stared at the truck, it shimmered and appeared translucent, then
almost transparent. Through it, beyond, I saw a strange, vast
emptiness, a lightless and terrible void. I could still see the truck
perfectly well, but at the same time I seemed to be staring straight
through that vehicle at an infinite darkness that was deeper than night
and emptier than the airless reaches between distant stars..I grew colder.
From the fire at the school to ' the sudden arctic chill pouring off
the truck, Yontsdown was welcoming me with the psychic equivalent of a
brass band, albeit a band that played only tenebrous, decadent, and
distressing music.
Though I could not understand why the Lightning Coal Company affected
me so powerfully, I was filled with horror so rich and pure that I was
immobilized by it and barely able to breathe, as one might be totally
disabled by a paralyzing but not deadly dose of curate.
Two goblins, disguised as men, were riding in the Mack.
One noticed me and stared back as if he realized there was something
peculiar about the intensity with which I was studying him and his
truck. As they drove past, he turned to keep his hateful crimson eyes
on me. At the end of the block, the big coal-hauler went through a
changing traffic light, but then it started to slow and began to pull
to the side of the road.
Shaking myself to fling off the disabling dread that had gripped me, I
said, "Quick. Let's get out of here."
Rya said, "Why?"
"Them," I said, indicating the truck that had now stopped at the curb a
block and a half away. "Don't run . . . don't let them see that
they've spooked us . . . but quickly!"
Without further questions she returned to the station wagon with me,
slipped behind the wheel as I settled in the passenger's seat.
Farther down the street, the coal truck was awkwardly executing a
U-Turn, though its maneuvers were illegal. It was blocking traffic in
both directions.
"Damn, they're actually swinging back to take a closer look at us," I
said.
Rya started the engine, threw the station wagon in gear, and swiftly
backed out of the parking space.
Trying not to sound as frightened as I really was, I said, "As long as
we're in their sight, don't move too fast. If possible, we want to
avoid looking as if we're running away." She drove around the
Traveler's Rest Motel, toward the parking-lot exit that led into the
side street.
As we slipped past the corner I saw that the coal truck had completed
its U-Turn back there on the main thoroughfare and then it was out of
sight.
The instant that I could no longer see the truck, the special and
terrible coldness faded. The impression of an infinite void no longer
troubled me.
But what had it meant? What was the formless, faultless darkness I had
seen and recoiled from when I had been looking at the truck?
What in God's name were the goblinkind up to at the Lightning Coal
Company?
"Okay," I said shakily. "Make a lot of turns, one street right after
another, so they won't catch a second glimpse of us. Chances are they
didn't get much of a look at the car, and I'm sure they didn't write
down the license number."
She did as I suggested, taking a random, winding route through the
northeastern outskirts of the city, her glance flicking frequently
toward the rearview mirror.
"Slim, you don't think . . . did they realize you could see straight
through their human masquerade?"
"No. "They just . . . well, I don't know . . . I guess they just saw
how intently I was staring at them . . . how shaken I was. So they.got suspicious and wanted a closer look at me.
Their kind is suspicious by nature. Suspicious and paranoid."
I hoped that was true. I had never encountered a goblin that could
recognize my psychic power. If some of them had the ability to spot
those of us who could see them, then we were in even deeper trouble
than I had always thought, for we would lose our single, secret
advantage.
"What did you see this time?" she asked.
I told her about the void, the image of a vast and lightless emptiness
that had risen in my mind when I had looked at the truck.
"What does it mean, Slim?"
Worried and weary, I did not respond for a minute. I gave myself time
to think, but taking time to think didn't really help. Finally I
sighed and said, "I don't know. The emanations that poured off the
truck . . . they didn't knock the stuffing out of me, yet in their own
way they were even more horrible than the forthcoming fire I sensed at
the school.
But I'm not sure what it meant, what exactly it was that I saw. Except
that somehow . . . through the Lightning Coal Company, I think we'll
be able to learn why so many goblins are concentrated in this damn
town."
"That's the focus?"
I nodded. "Yes."
Of course, I was in no condition to begin an investigation of the
Lightning Coal Company until tomorrow morning. I felt almost as gray
as the winter sky, and no more solid than the ragged beards of mist
that hung down from the ominous faces-warriors and monsters-that an
imaginative eye could discern in the storm clouds. I needed time to
rest, regain my strength, and learn to tune my mind away from at least
some of the continuous background static of clairvoyant images that
crackled and sparked off the buildings and streets and people of
Yontsdown.
Twenty minutes later, day gave way to darkness. You might have thought
that night would cast a concealing cloak over the meanness of that
wretched and noisome city, bringing it at least a small measure of
respectability, but that was not the case. In Yontsdown the night was
not stage makeup, as it might have been elsewhere. Somehow it
emphasized the grubby, smudgy, smoky, foul, and fulsome details of the
streets and drew attention to the grim, medieval quality of much of the
architecture.
We were sure that we had lost the goblins in the Peterbilt, so we
pulled into another motel-the Van Winkle Motor Inn, which was not half
as cute as its name. This was about four times the size of the
Traveler's Rest, two stories. Some rooms opened onto the courtyard,
and others opened onto a promenade-iron posts painted black but
rust-pocked and peeling, an aluminum awning-that circled the back of
the building's four wings. Claiming exhaustion after our long journey,
we requested quiet rooms at the rear of the inn, as far from the
traffic noise as possible, and the desk clerk obliged. Thus we not
only enjoyed quietude but also we could park the station wagon out of
sight of the street, as insurance against its being accidentally
spotted by one of the Lightning Coal Company's goblin employees from
whom we had fled, an improbable but by no means impossible danger.
Our room was a beige-walled box with cheap, sturdy furniture and two
inexpensive prints of clipper ships knifing through choppy seas, their
sails all set and made full-bellied by a bracing wind. The dresser and
nightstands were scarred with old cigarette burns, and the bathroom.mirror was spotted with age, and the shower was not as hot as we would
have liked, but we intended to stay there only one night. In the
morning we would find a small house to rent where we could have greater
privacy to plot against the goblins.
After showering, I felt relaxed enough to venture out into the city
again long as Rya remained at my side, and only as far as the nearest
coffee shop, where we had a good though unremarkable dinner. We saw
nine goblins among the customers during the time we were there. I had
to keep my attention fixed squarely on Rya, for the sight of their
porcine snouts, bloody eyes, and flickering reptilian tongues would
have ruined my appetite.
Even though I did not look at them, I could feel their evil, which was
as palpable to me as cold vapor rising off blocks of dry ice. Enduring
those frigid emanations of inhuman hatred and rage, I slowly learned to
filter out the background hum and hiss of psychic radiation that was
now such a part of Yontsdown, and by the time we left the coffee shop,
I was feeling better than I had since we had entered this city of the
damned.
Back at Van Winkle's Motor Inn, we moved the canvas bags of guns,
explosives, and other illegal items into the room with us, for fear
that gear would be stolen from the station wagon during the night.
For a long time, in bed and darkness, we held each other, neither
speaking nor making love, just holding, holding fast.
Closeness was an antidote for fear, a -medicine for despair.
Rya finally slept.
I listened to the night.
In this place the wind sounded unlike any other wind: predatory. Now
and then I could hear the distant laboring of big trucks carrying heavy
loads, and I wondered if the Lightning Coal Company hauled its product
out of the nearby mines at all hours of the day. And if so-why? It
also seemed to me that night in Yontsdown was more often disturbed by
the wailing sirens of police cars and ambulances than in any other town
or city I had ever known.
At last I slept and, sleeping, dreamed. The frightening tunnel again.
Inconstant amber lights. Oily pools of shadows lying between the
lamps. A low, sometimes jagged ceiling.
Strange smells. The echoes of running footsteps. A shout, a screech.
Mysterious keening. Suddenly the car-shattering whoop-whoop-whoooooop
of an alarm. A breathless, heart-hammering certainty that I was being
pursued When I awoke, with a mucous-wet scream caught in my throat, Rya
awoke simultaneously, gasping for breath and throwing off the covers as
if she were freeing herself from the grasping hands of her enemies.
"Slim!"
"Here.
"Oh, God.
"Just a dream."
We held each other again.
"The tunnel," she said.
"Me too."
"And now I know what it was."
"Me too."
"A mine."
"Yes."
"A coal mine."
"Yes."
"The Lightning Coal Company."
"Yes."."We were there."
"Deep underground," I said.
"And they knew we were there."
"They were hunting us."
"And we had no way out," she said with a shudder.
We both fell silent.
Far away: a howling dog. And occasionally we were brought scraps of
another wind-torn sound that might have been the agonized weeping of a
woman.
In time Rya said, "I'm scared."
"I know," I said softly, holding her closer, tighter. "I know. I
know."
22
students of the Devil's Work
The next morning, Friday, we rented a house on Apple Lane, in a rural
district at the very fringes of the city, in the drab foothills of the
ancient eastern mountains, not far from the county's major coal mines.
It was set back more than two hundred feet from the lane at the end of
a gravel driveway crusted with ice and choked with snow. The
real-estate agent advised us to get chains on our tires, as he had on
his.
Trees-mostly pine and spruce, but more than a few winter-stripped
maples and birches and laurels-came down from the steep slopes above,
closing around three sides of the white-mantled yard. On that somber,
gray day there was no direct sunlight to pry into the perimeter of the
forest; therefore a disquietingly deep darkness began immediately
beyond the line of trees and filled the woods wherever I looked, as if
night itself, condensed, had taken refuge there with dawn ascendant.
The house, which came furnished, had three small bedrooms, one bath, a
living room, dining room, and a kitchen inside a two-story clapboard
shell, under an asphalt-shingle roof-and above a shadowy, damp,
low-ceilinged basement in which stood an oil-fired furnace.
Unspeakable atrocities had occurred in that subterranean chamber. With
my sixth sense I perceived a psychic residue of torture, pain, murder,
insanity, and savagery the moment that the real-estate agent, Jim
Garwood, opened the door at the head of the cellar steps. Evil welled
up, throbbing and dark, as blood from a wound. I did not care to
descend into that loathsome place.
But Jim Garwood, a soft-spoken and earnest middle-aged man with a
sallow complexion, wanted us to have a close look at the furnace and
receive instruction in its operation, and I could think of no way to
refuse without arousing his curiosity. Reluctantly I followed him and
Rya down into that pit of human suffering, holding fast to the rickety
stair railing, trying hard not to gag on the stench of blood and bile
and burning flesh that only I could smell, seething odors of another
time. At the bottom of the steps I walked with a conscious
flat-footedness in order to keep from reeling in horror at the long-ago
events that, for me at least, almost seemed to be transpiring now.
Gesturing at the cupboards and shelves that lined one wall of the room,
not aware of the death stench that I perceived and not even mentioning
the current unpleasant odors-black mildew, fungus, mold--Garwood said,
"Plenty of storage space down here."
"I see," Rya said.
What I saw was a bleeding and terrified woman, naked and chained to a.coal-fired furnace that had stood on the same concrete pad where the
new oil-fired version was now anchored. Her body was covered with
lacerations and contusions. One of her eyes was blackened and swollen
shut. I perceived that her name was Dora Penfield and that she was
afraid her sister-in-law's husband, Klaus Orkenwold, was going to
dismember her and feed her body piece by piece into the flames of the
furnace while her children looked on in terror. Indeed, that was what
had happened to her, although I strained desperately and successfully
to block out the clairvoyant images of her actual death.
Thomson Oil Company makes fuel deliveries once every three weeks during
the winter," Garwood explained, "and less often in the autumn."
"How much does it cost to fill the tank?" Rya asked, expertly playing
the role of a budget-conscious young wife.
I saw a six-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl in various stages of
cruel abuse-battered, broken. Though these heartbreakingly defenseless
victims were long dead, their whimpers, cries of pain, and pitiful
pleading for mercy echoed to me along the corridors of time, piercing
splinters of painful sound. I had to repress the urge to weep for
them.
I also saw a particularly vicious-looking goblin-Klaus Orkenwold
himself-wielding a leather strap, a cattle prod, then other wicked
instruments of torture. As though he were half demon and half Gestapo
butcher, he strode back and forth through his makeshift dungeon, now in
his human guise, now completely transformed for the added terror of his
victims, his features limned by the flickering orange firelight that
streamed from the open furnace door.
Somehow I kept smiling and nodding at Jim Garwood.
Somehow I even managed to ask a question or two. Somehow I got out of
the cellar without revealing my extreme distress, though I will never
know quite how I managed to project a convincing image of equanimity
while assaulted by those dark emanations.
Upstairs again, with the cellar door tightly shut, I sensed none of the
murderous history of the dank lower chamber.
With each long exhalation I purged my lungs of the bloodrank,
bile-pungent air of those long-ago atrocities. As the house was
perfectly located for our needs and provided adequate comfort and
anonymity, I decided that we would take it and that I'd simply never
venture down the basement steps again.
We had given Garwood phony names-Bob and Helen Barnwell of
Philadelphia. To explain our lack of local employment we had a
carefully prepared story about being geology students who, after
receiving our bachelor's and master's degrees, were engaged upon six
months of field research for our doctoral theses, which would deal with
certain peculiarities of rock strata in the Appalachians. This cover
was designed to explain any treks we might have to take into the
mountains to reconnoiter the mine heads and work yards of the Lightning
Coal Company.
I was nearly eighteen and more experienced than many men twice my age,
but of course I was not old enough to have earned two degrees and to be
halfway through my doctoral studies. However, I looked years older
than I really was: you know the reasons.
Rya, older than I, seemed mature enough to be what she claimed. Her
uncommon beauty and powerful sexuality, even with the surgical
alterations in her face and the change in her hair color from blond to
raven-black, lent her a sophistication that made her seem older than
she was. Furthermore her difficult life, darkened by much tragedy,
gave her an air of world-weariness and street wisdom far in advance of.her years.
Jim Garwood showed no suspicion of us, The previous Tuesday, back in
Gibtown, Slick Eddy had provided false driver's licenses and other
forged documentation that would support the Barnwell identities,
although not our claimed connection with Temple University in
Philadelphia. We figured Garwood would not run much of a check on
us-if any-for we were only taking a six-month lease on the Apple Lane
house. Besides, we were paying the entire value of the lease in
advance, including a stiff security deposit and all in cash, which made
us attractive and relatively safe tenants.
These days, with computers in every office, when a TRW credit report
can be obtained in hours and can reveal everything from your place of
employment to your toilet habits, verification of our story would be
virtually automatic. But back then, in 1964, the microchip revolution
was still in the future; the information industry was still in its
infancy, and people more often were taken at their face value and at
their word.
Thank God, Garwood knew nothing of geology and was not able to ask
telling questions.
Back at his office we signed the lease, gave him the money, and
accepted the keys.
We now had a base of operations.
We moved our things into the Apple Lane place. Though the house had
seemed suitable only a short while ago, I found it unsettling when we
returned as the rightful tenants. I had the feeling it was somehow
aware of us, that a thoroughly hostile intelligence stirred within its
walls, that its lighting fixtures were omnipresent eyes, that it was
welcoming us, and that in its welcome there was no goodwill, only a
terrible hunger.
Then we drove back into town to do some research.
The county library was an imposing Gothic structure adjacent to the
courthouse. The granite walls were darkened and mottled and slightly
pitted by years of steel-mill effluvia, rail yard dust, and the foul
breath of coal mines. A crenelated roofline, narrow barred windows, a
deeply recessed entrance, and a heavy wooden door gave the impression
that the building was a vault entrusted with something of considerably
greater financial value than books.
Inside, there were plain, solidly constructed oak tables and chairs
where visitors could read-though not in comfort.
Behind the tables were the stacks: eight-foot-high oak shelves
bracketing aisles lit by amber bulbs dangling under wide cone-shaped,
blue-enameled tin shades. The aisles were narrow and quite long, with
angles in them, creating a maze. For some reason I thought of ancient
Egyptian tombs deep under pyramidal piles of stone, breached by
twentieth-century man bearing electric illumination where only oil
lamps and tallow candles had burned before.
Rya and I traveled those book-walled corridors, bathed in the odor of
yellowing paper and musty cloth bindings. I felt as if the London of
Dickens and the Arab world of Burton and a thousand other worlds of a
thousand other writers were here to be breathed in and assimilated
almost without the necessity of reading, as if they were mushrooms that
had thrown off pungent clouds of pollen which, on inhalation,
fertilized the mind and the imagination. I longed to pluck a volume
off a shelf and escape into its pages, for even the nightmare worlds of
Lovecraft, Poe, or Bram Stoker would be more appealing than the real
world in which we had to live.
However, we'd come primarily to peruse the Yontsdown Register, copies.of which were at the back of the enormous main room, beyond the stacks.
Recent issues of the newspaper were stored in large file drawers
according to their dates of publication, while older issues were on
spools of microfilm.
We spent a couple of hours catching up on the events of the past seven
months, and we learned a lot.
The decapitated bodies of Chief Lisle Kelsko and his deputy had been
found in the patrol car where Joel Tuck and Luke Bendingo had abandoned
it on that violent night last summer. I had expected the police to
attribute the murders to a transient, which in fact they had done. But
to my shock and dismay I learned that they had made an arrest-. a
young drifter named Walter Dembrow, who had supposedly committed
suicide in his jail cell two days after making a confession and being
charged with two counts of homicide. Hung himself.
With a rope fashioned of his own torn shirt.
Spiders of guilt scurried up my spine and settled in my heart to feed
upon me.
Simultaneously Rya and I looked away from the screen of the microfilm
reader and met each other's eyes.
For a moment neither of us could speak, cared to speak, dared to speak.
Then: "Dear God," she whispered, though there was no one near enough to
overhear us.
I felt sick. I was glad I was sitting down, for I was suddenly weak.
"He didn't hang himself," I said.
"No. They saved him the trouble by doing it for him."
"After God knows what torture."
She bit her lip and said nothing.
Far off in the stacks, people murmured. Soft footsteps receded in the
pulp-perfumed maze.
I shuddered. "In a way . . . I killed Dembrow. He died for me."
She shook her head. "No."
"Yes. By killing Kelsko and his deputy, by giving the goblins an
excuse to persecute Dembrow-" "He was a drifter, Slim," she said
sharply. She took my hand. "Do you think many drifters get through
this town alive? These creatures thrive on our pain and suffering.
They eagerly seek out victims. And the easiest victims are
drifters-hoboes, beatnik types in search of enlightenment or whatever
the hell beatniks are in search of, young kids who take to the roads to
find themselves. Snatch one of them off the highway, beat and torture
and murder him, bury the body quietly, and no one will ever know what
happened to him-or care.
From the goblins' point of view it's safer than killing locals, and
every bit as satisfying, so I doubt very much if they ever pass up the
chance to torment and slaughter a drifter. If you hadn't killed Kelsko
and his deputy, this Dembrow most likely would have vanished on his way
through Yontsdown, and the end he'd have met would have been pretty
much the same. The only difference is that he was used as a scapegoat,
a convenient body to help the cops close the file on a case they found
unsolvable. You aren't responsible."
"If not me, who?" I said miserably.
"The goblins," she said. "The detmnkind. And, by God, we'll make them
pay for Dembrow along with everything else.
Her words and conviction made me feel somewhat (though not much)
better.
The dryness of books-which was called to mind by the crisp sound of
some unseen browser turning brittle pages in a hidden aisle-was
transmitted to me. As I thought of Walter Dembrow dying for my sins,.my heart seemed to wither within me. I felt hot and parched, and when
I cleared my throat, I made a raspy noise.
Reading further, we discovered that Kelsko had been replaced by a new
police chief whose name was shockingly familiar: Orkenwold, Klaus
Orkenwold. He was the goblin who had once visited the very house we
were now renting on Apple Lane, where his sister-in-law had lived.
Just for the thrill of it, he'd tortured and dismembered her, had fed
her to the furnace-then her two children after her. I had seen those
bloody crimes with my sixth sense when Jim Garwood had insisted on
taking us into the mildew-scented cellar; later, in the car, I had told
Rya of my unsettling visions. Now we stared at each other with
surprise and apprehension, wondering about the meaning of this
coincidence.
As I have mentioned, I suffer bleak moods during which I believe the
world must be a meaningless place of random actions and reactions,
where there is no worthwhile purpose to life, where all is emptiness
and ashes and pointless cruelty.
In that mood I am an intellectual brother of the grim-minded author of
Ecclesiastes.
This was not one of those times.
On other occasions, when I am in a more spiritual-if not exactly
better-mood, I see strange and entrancing patterns to our existence
that I cannot understand, encouraging glimpses of a carefully ordered
universe in which nothing whatsoever occurs by chance. With Twilight
Eyes, I vaguely perceive a guiding force, a higher order of intellect
that has some use for us-perhaps an important purpose. I sense a
design, although the precise nature of it and the meaning remain a
profound mystery to me.
This was such an occasion.
We had not merely returned to Yontsdown by our own choice. We had been
meant to return to deal with Orkenwold-or with the system that he
represented.
In an admiring profile of Orkenwold, a Register reporter wrote of the
policeman's courage in overcoming several personal tragedies. He had
married a widow with three kids
Maggie Walsh, nee Penfield-and after two years of what was widely
perceived as a blissfully happy marriage, he had lost his wife and
adopted children in a flash fire that had swept his house one night
while he had been away on duty.
The fire had been so intense that only bones remained.
Neither Rya nor I bothered to voice the opinion that the fire had been
no accident and that if the bodies had not been destroyed by the blaze,
an honest coroner would have found evidence of brutal injuries
unrelated to the flames.
A month after that tragedy, another struck. Orkenwold's patrol-car
partner and brother-in-law, Tim Penfield, had-been shot and killed by a
warehouse burglar who was, immediately thereafter, conveniently shot
dead by Klaus.
Neither Rya nor I mentioned the obvious: that Klaus Orkenwold's
brother-in-law had not been a goblin and for some reason had begun to
suspect Orkenwold of the murder of Maggie and her three children,
whereupon Orkenwold had conspired to kill him.
The Register quoted Orkenwold as having said, at the time, "I really
don't know if I can go on with policework. He wasn't just my
brother-in-law. He was my partner, my best friend, the best friend
I've ever had, and I only wish it was me who'd been shot and killed.".It was a splendid performance, considering that Orkenwold surely had
blown away both his partner and some innocent on whom he'd cleverly
placed the blame. His predictably swift return to duty was viewed as
yet another sign of his courage and sense of responsibility.
Hunched in front of the microfilm reader, Rya hugged herself and
shivered.
I did not have to ask the cause of her chill.
I rubbed my frigid hands together.
A lion-voiced winter wind roared and cat-shrieked against the library's
high, narrow, opaque windows, but the sound of it could not make us
colder than we already were.
I felt as if we were not reading an ordinary newspaper account but were
deep into the forbidden Book of the Damned, in which the savage
activities of the demonkind had been meticulously recorded by some
Hell-born scribe.
For sixteen months Klaus Orkenwold provided financially for his widowed
sister-in-law, Dora Penfield, and her two children. But he was
stricken by another tragedy when the den of them disappeared without a
trace.
I knew what had happened to them. I had seen-and heard and felt-their
horrible suffering in the ghost-ridden cellar of the clapboard house on
Apple Lane.
After marrying Tim Penfield's sister, then terrorizing and killing her
and her children, after killing Tim Penfield and blaming it on a
burglar, Orkenwold had proceeded to wipe out the last remaining members
of the Penfield line.
The goblins are the hunters.
We are the prey.
They stalk us relentlessly in a world that is, to them, nothing but an
enormous game preserve.
I did not have to read any further. But I went on, anyway-as if by
reading the Register's lies I was bearing silent witness to the truth
of the Penfields' deaths and was, in some manner I could not entirely
understand or explain, accepting a sacred duty to exact their
retribution for them.
Upon the disappearance of Dora and her children, a two-month-long
investigation was launched, until blame was finally (unjustly) laid on
Winston Yarbridge, a bachelor coal-mine foreman who lived alone in a
house half a mile farther along Apple Lane from the one in which Dora
had resided . Yarbridge vociferously insisted upon his innocence, and
his reputation as a quiet churchgoing man seemed to support him.
Ultimately, however, the poor man was convicted on the massive weight
of evidence that had been collected, evidence that purported to show
how, in a fit of sexual psychopathy, he had stolen into the Penfield
house, had abused the woman and both children, had cold-bloodedly
hacked them to pieces, and then had disposed of their remains in a
superheated furnace fueled by oil-soaked coal. Bloodstained underwear
belonging to the children and to Mrs. Penfield were discovered in
Winston Yarbridge's house, stashed in a steamer trunk at the back of a
closet. As might be expected of a homicidal maniac, he was found to
have saved one severed finger from each of his victims, each grisly
digit submerged in a small jar of alcohol and labeled with the victim's
name. He had the murder weapons, too, plus a collection of
pornographic magazines that pandered to bondage enthusiasts and adists.
He claimed that these damning items had been planted in his house-as,
of course, they had been. When two of his fingerprints were discovered
on the furnace in the Penfield basement, he said the police must be.lying about where they had lifted those prints-as. of course, they
were. The police claimed that their case was solid and that the
villainous Yarbridge, in those days of frequent capital punishment,
would surely die in the electric chair-as, of course, he did.
Orkenwold himself had helped crack the infamous Yarbridge case, and
according to the Register he had subsequently built a dazzling
law-enforcement career with an unprecedented number of arrests and
convictions. The general feeling was that Orkenwold richly deserved
promotion to the highest office in the department. His suitability for
the job was only confirmed by the swiftness with which he had brought
the drifter, Walter Dembrow, to justice for the assassination of his
predecessor.
Although I had killed Chief Lisle Kelsko, I had not given the
long-suffering people of Yontsdown any respite by that act. Indeed the
nightmarish political machine of goblin power had functioned smoothly,
elevating another torture-master from the ranks to replace the fallen
chief.
Rya turned away from the microfilm for a moment and stared up at one of
the library's high windows. Only pallid light as weak as moonbeams
managed to pierce the frosted glass, and the glow from the microfilm
machine did more to illuminate her troubled face. At last she said,
"You'd think that, somewhere along the line, someone would have begun
to suspect Orkenwold of having a hand in the endless so-called
tragedies that took place around him."
"Maybe," I said. "And in an ordinary town perhaps another cop or a
newspaper reporter or someone else of authority would decide to take a
careful look at him. But here, his kind rule. They are the police.
They control the courts, the city council, the mayor's office. Very
likely they own the newspaper as well. They have a tight rein on every
institution that might be used as a vehicle for getting at the truth,
so truth remains forever suppressed."
Returning to the spools of microfilm and also to the hardcopy issues of
the daily Register, we continued our research.
Among other things, we learned that Klaus Orkenwold's brother, Jensen
Orkenwold, owned one-third of the Lightning Coal Company. The other
partners, each one-third owners, were a man named Anson Corday, who was
also the publisher and editor of the city's only newspaper, and Mayor
Albert Spectorsky, the florid-faced politician I had met last summer
when I had come to town with Jelly Jordan on his mission as carnival
patch. The web of goblin power was clear; and as I had suspected, the
center of the web seemed to be the Lightning Coal Company.
When we were finally finished with our research in the library, we
risked a visit to the Registrar of Deeds in the basement of the county
courthouse next door. The place was crawling with goblins, though the
clerks in the registrar's office, occupying positions of no real power,
were ordinary human beings. There we went through the big land-record
books and, more to satisfy our curiosity than for any other reason, we
confirmed what we had suspected: the house on Apple Lane, in which the
Penfields had died and in which we were now ensconced, belonged to
Klaus Orkenwold, Yontsdown's new chief of police. He had inherited the
property from Dora Penfield . . . after murdering her and her
children.
Our landlord, in whose house we were plotting revolution against the
demonkind, was one of them.
Here again was that glimpse of a mysterious fate s if there was such a
thing as destiny, and as if our inescapable destiny included deep and
perhaps deadly involvement with Yontsdown and its goblin elite..We ate an early dinner in the city, bought a few groceries, and headed
for Apple Lane shortly after nightfall, with Rya driving.
Over dinner, we had debated the wisdom of finding new quarters not
owned by a goblin. But we had decided that we would call more
attention to ourselves by abandoning the house after paying the rent in
advance than we would by remaining there. Living in such a tainted
place would perhaps require greater diligence and caution, but we
believed we would be safe-as safe as we would be anywhere else in this
city.
I still remembered the uneasiness that had filled me on our most recent
visit to the house, but I attributed my qualms to frayed nerves and
adrenaline exhaustion. Although the place disturbed me, I did not have
any premonition that we would be putting ourselves in jeopardy by
taking up residence there.
We were on East Duncannon Road, two miles from the turnoff to Apple
Lane, when we passed through a green traffic signal and saw a Yontsdown
police cruiser stopped at the red signal on our right. A mercury-vapor
street lamp shed slightly purple beams through that car's dirty
windshield, providing just enough light for me to see that the cop
behind the wheel was a goblin. The hateful, demonic face was vaguely
visible beneath the human disguise.
However, with my special vision I saw something else, as well, and for
a moment I was breathless. Rya had driven almost half a block before I
was able to speak: "Pull over!"
"What?"
"Quickly ' Pull to the curb. Stop. Put out the headlights."
She did as I demanded. "What's wrong?"
My heart seemed to sprout wings, beat them, and swoop frantically
within my chest.
"That cop at the intersection," I said.
"I noticed him," Rya said. "A goblin."
I turned the rearview mirror so I could use it, and I saw that the
traffic signal behind us had not yet changed. The police car was still
waiting at the corner.
I said, "We've got to stop him."
"The cop?"
"Yes."
"Stop him . . . from doing what?"
"From killing," I said. "He's going to kill someone."
"They're all going to kill someone," she said. "That's what they do."
"No, I mean . . . tonight. He's going to kill someone tonight.
"You're sure?"
"Soon. Very soon."
"Who?" I "I don't know. I don't think he knows yet. But before long,
within an hour or less, he'll come upon . . . an opportunity. And
he'll seize it."
Behind us, the traffic light winked yellow, blinked red. At the same
time it changed to green in the other direction, so the police cruiser
turned the corner, heading our way.
"Follow him,", I told Rya. "But for God's sake, not too close. We
mustn't let him realize he's under surveillance."
"Slim, we're here on a bigger mission than saving one life.
We can't risk it all just because-" "We have to. If we let him drive
away, knowing he's going to kill an innocent person tonight . . . "
The cruiser passed us, eastbound on Duncannon.
Refusing to follow that car, Rya said, "Listen, stopping one murder is
like trying to plug a huge hole in a dam with a piece of chewing gum..We're better off laying low and doing our research, finding out how we
can strike at the entire goblin network here-" "Kitty Genovese," I
said.
Rya stared at me.
"Remember Kitty Genovese," I said.
She blinked. She shivered. She sighed. She put the car in gear and
reluctantly followed the cop.
23
Abattoir
He cruised through an outlying neighborhood of decrepit houses:
ruptured sidewalks, swaybacked steps, broken porch railings, aged and
weathered walls. If possessed of voices, they were structures that
would groan, sigh bitterly, wheeze, cough, and feebly complain of
time's injustice.
We followed discreetly.
Earlier in the day, after signing the lease, we had bought tire chains
at a Gulf station. The steel links clinked and clattered and, at
higher speeds, sang shrilly. Now and then, the residue of winter
crunched under our fortified tread.
The cop drove slowly past several closed businesses-a muffler shop, a
tire store, an abandoned service station, a used bookstore-and shone
the patrol car's high-intensity spotlight along the darkened flanks of
the buildings, searching for would-be burglars, no doubt, but scaring
up nothing more than dervish shadows that whirled and leapt and were
extinguished in the dazzling beam.
We stayed at least a block behind him, letting him turn corners and
disappear from sight for long seconds, so he would not notice that it
was always the same car following.
In time his path crossed that of a stranded motorist parked on the
berm, against a snowbanks near the junction of East Duncannon Road and
Apple Avenue. The broken-down car was a four-year-old green Pontiac
wearing a skirt of road grime, with short, blunt, muddy icicles hanging
from sections of its rear bumper.
It had New York State license plates, a detail which confirmed my
feeling that this was where the cop would find his victim. After all,
a far-traveler passing through Yontsdown would make safe and easy prey
because no one could prove that he had disappeared in that city rather
than elsewhere along his route.
The patrol car pulled onto the berm and stopped behind the disabled
Pontiac.
"Drive past," I told Rya.
An attractive redhead, about thirty years old, wearing knee-high boots
and jeans and a thigh-length gray plaid coat, was standing in front of
the Pontiac, her breath pluming frostily in the freezing air. Having
raised the hood, she was peering quizzically into the engine
compartment. Although she had removed one of her gloves, she did not
seem to know what to do with the pale hand that she had bared; she
reached hesitantly toward something under the hood, then drew back in
confusion.
Clearly hoping for assistance, she glanced at us as we slowed for the
intersection.
Just for a fraction of a second I saw an eyeless skull where her face
should have been. Its bony sockets seemed of great depth, bottomless.
I blinked..To my Twilight Eyes, her mouth and nostrils appeared to be teeming with
maggots.
I blinked again.
The vision passed, and so did we.
She would die tonight-unless we did something to help her.
A restaurant-bar occupied the corner of the next block, and it was the
last lighted place before Duncannon Road rose into the coal-dark,
tree-shrouded foothills that ringed three sides of Yontsdown. Rya
swung our station wagon into the parking lot, tucked it beside a pickup
truck with a camper shell, and cut the headlights. From that position,
looking westward beneath the lowest bristly branches of a massive fir
that marked the corner of the restaurant property, we had a view of the
intersection of Duncannon and Apple Lane, a block back. There, the
goblin patrolman was standing at the front of
It
the Pontiac, beside the redhead in the plaid coat, by all outward signs
a champion of the lady in distress.
"We left the guns at the house," Rya said.
"We didn't think the war had started already. But after tonight
neither of us goes anywhere without a pistol," I said shakily, still
unnerved by the image of the maggot-riddled skull.
"But right now," she said, we don't have weapons."
"I have my knife," I replied, patting my boot where the blade was
concealed.
"Not much."
"Enough.
"Maybe." At the intersection the redhead was getting into the patrol
car, no doubt relieved to have the assistance of a smiling and
courteous officer of the law.
A few cars had passed, headlights glinting off patches of snow, bits of
ice, and crystals of road salt on the pavement.
For the most part, however, Duncannon was little traveled at this rural
end of town and at this hour, for traffic to and from the upland mines
had virtually ceased for the day. And now, except for the patrol car
that pulled out from the berm and came in our direction, the highway
was deserted.
"Get ready to follow him again," I told Rya.
She shifted the car into gear but did not yet switch on the lights.
We slumped far down in the seat, our heads barely above the dashboard.
We watched the cop as if we were a pair of cautious Florida sand crabs
with eyestalks barely poking above the surface of the beach.
As the patrol car passed us, accompanied by the keening and rhythmic
ticking of its own tire chains, we saw the uniformed goblin driving.
There was no sign of the redhead.
She had gotten into the front passenger seat; we had observed that
much. But she, was not to be seen there now.
"Where is she?" Rya wondered.
"Just after she got into the car, the last traffic on Duncannon passed
them. They were unobserved, so I'll bet the bastard saw his chance and
took it. He probably slapped handcuffs on her, forced her down onto
the seat. Maybe he even clubbed her, knocked her out."
"She could already be dead, Rya suggested.
"No," I said. "Go on. Follow them. He wouldn't have killed her that
easily, not when he could take her somewhere private and kill her
slowly. That's what they enjoy if they can arrange it-leisurely death.rather than the sudden kind."
The patrol car had almost disappeared along Duncannon by the time Rya
swung the station wagon out of the restaurant lot. Far ahead, the red
taillights rose, rose, rose, and for a moment seemed suspended in
darkest midair high above us then vanished over the brow of a hill. No
traffic followed in our wake . With a brief, hard stutter of chains
biting mac adam, Rya accelerated, and we pursued the patrol car at all
possible speed, while Duncannon narrowed from a three-lane street to a
two-lane county road.
As we followed the rising land, half glimpsed pines and
spruce-apparitional, somehow threatening, cloaked in their robes and
cowls of evergreen needles-loomed close on both sides.
Although we soon closed to within less than a quarter-mile of the
patrol car, we were not worried that the goblin policeman would spot
us. In those foothills the county road followed a serpentine course,
so we seldom had him in our sight for more than a few seconds at a
time, which meant we were only a distant pair of headlights to him and
unlikely to be perceived as a danger. In each mile, perhaps half a
dozen driveways-mostly dirt, a few graveled, fewer still paved with
macadam-led away through ice-encrusted trees, presumably to houses
unseen because there was usually a mailbox on a post at the turnoff.
When we had gone four or five miles, we topped a steep rise and saw the
patrol car below us, nearly drawn to a complete stop as it swung right
into another of those driveways. Without reducing our speed,
pretending indifference, we passed the turnoff, where the stenciled
name on the gray mailbox was HAVENDAHL. When I peered past the box,
into the tunnel of evergreens, I saw the taillights rapidly dwindling
in a sheltered darkness so perfect and deep that for a moment my senses
of distance and spacial relationships (and my equilibrium) were jolted,
confused: it actually seemed as if I was hanging in the air while the
cop's cruiser was moving not along the surface of the earth but
straight down into the ground below me, boring toward the planet's
core.
Rya parked along the road two hundred yards beyond the private drive,
at a place where the highway department's plows had pushed the huge
banks of snow entirely clear of the berm to provide a turnabout.
When we got out of the car, we discovered that the night had grown
colder since we had left the supermarket in town.
A damp wind swept down from higher reaches of the Appalachians but felt
as if it came from a more northerly clime, from bleak Canadian tundra,
from fields of Arctic ice; it had a sharp, clean, ozone smell of polar
origins. We were both wearing suede coats with imitation fur lining,
gloves, and insulated boots. We were still cold.
Rya opened the tailgate of the wagon. She lifted the floor panel that
concealed the spare-tire well and took out a poker-shaped iron tool
that was a crowbar on one end and a lug wrench on the other. She
hefted it, testing its weight and balance. When she saw me staring,
she said, "Well, you have your knife, and now I have this."
We walked to the driveway into which the patrol car had turned. That
tunnel, formed by overhanging trees, was as black and forbidding as any
passage in a carnival fun house.
Hoping my eyes would soon adjust to the deeper gloom under the trees,
cautious because of the enormous potential for an ambush, I followed
the narrow dirt lane with Rya close at my side.
Lumps of frozen earth and small chunks of rotten ice crunched under our
boots.
The wind whined in the higher branches of the trees. The lower.branches rustled, scraped, and softly creaked. The dead woods seemed
to be doing an imitation of life.
I could not hear the sound of the black-and-white's engine.
Evidently it had stopped somewhere ahead, When we'd gone about a
quarter of a mile, I began to walk faster, then broke into a run, not
because I could see somewhat better-which I could-but because I
suddenly had the feeling that the young redhead did not have much time
left.
Rya asked no questions but increased her own pace and ran at my side.
The driveway must have been half a mile long, and when we came out of
the shrouding trees into a snow-covered clearing, where the night was
marginally brighter, we were fifty yards from a two-story white frame
house. Lights glowed beyond most of the first-floor windows. At
night, anyway, it seemed to be a well-kept place. The front-porch
light was on, as well, revealing an ornamental-almost rococo-railing
with carved balusters. Neat, dark shutters flanked the windows. A
plume of smoke rose from the brick chimney, harried westward by the
wind.
The patrol car was parked in front of the house.
I saw no sign of the cop or the redhead.
Panting, we stopped just inside the clearing where the sable backdrop
of the lightless woods still provided concealment, making us invisible
to anyone who glanced out of a window.
Sixty or seventy yards to the right of the house was a big barn with a
curling brim of luminescent snow bent around the bottom edges of its
peaked roof. It seemed out of place here in the foothills, for the
land was surely too steep and rocky for profitable farming. Then, in
the dimness, I saw a sign painted above the large double doors: KELLY'S
CIDER MILL. And on the rising land behind the house, all the trees
were ordered like soldiers on a parade field, martial processions
barely visible on the snow-covered hillside: an orchard.
I crouched and withdrew the knife from my boot.
"Maybe you should wait here," I told Rya.
"Bullshit."
I knew that would be her response, and I was heartened by her
predictable courage and by her desire to stay at my side even in
moments of danger.
Mouse-silent, mouse-quick, we scurried along the edge of the plowed
driveway, crouching to take advantage of the banks of old and dirty
snow, and in seconds we reached the house. As we stepped onto the lawn
we were forced to move slower. The snow had a crust that cracked
underfoot with a dismaying amount of noise; but if we put our feet down
firmly and slowly, we could reduce the racket to a muffled
snap-crunch-crackle that would probably not be audible to those inside
the house. Now the bitter wind-hooting and gibbering and snuffling in
the eaves-was more an ally than adversary.
We eased along the wall.
At the first window, through sheer curtains that filled the space
between heavier drapes, I saw a living room: used-brick fireplace, a
mantel and mantel clock, Colonial furniture, polished pine floor, rag
rugs, Grandma Moses prints hanging on pale, striped wallpaper.
The next window also looked into the living room.
I saw no one.
Heard no one. Just the many-voiced wind.
The third window was the dining room. Deserted.
We sidestepped through the crusted snow.
Inside the house, a woman screamed..Something thumped, crashed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rya raise her iron weapon.
The fourth and last window on that side of the house looked into a
curiously bare chamber about twelve feet by twelve: only one piece of
furniture; no decorations, no paintings; the beige walls and beige
ceiling were streaked and spotted with rust-brown stains; the speckled
gray linoleum floor was even more discolored than the walls. It did
not seem to belong in the same house with the clean and ordered living
and dining rooms.
This window, frost-limed around the edges, was more completely covered
by drapes than the others, so I was given only a narrow crack by which
to study the room beyond.
Pressing my face to the glass and making full use of the chink between
the brocade panels, I was able, nevertheless, to see about seventy
percent of the chamber-including the redhead.
Rescued from her stranded automobile, stripped naked, she was now
sitting in a cushionless rail-back pine chair, her wrists handcuffed
behind the rails. She was near enough for me to see the tracery of
blue veins in her pallid skin-and the pebbly texture of gooseflesh.
Her eyes, focused on something beyond my line of vision, were wide and
wild and terrified.
Another thump. The wall of the house trembled as if something heavy
had been flung against the inside of it.
An eerie shriek. Not the wind this time. I recognized it at once-the
shrill cry of an enraged goblin.
Rya clearly recognized it, too, for she let out a soft hiss of disgust.
In the unfurnished room one of the demonkind flashed into view, darting
out of the hidden corner. It had undergone metamorphosis and was no
longer concealed in its human costume, but I knew it Was the policeman
we had followed.
Down on all fours, it moved with that typically unnerving grace of the
goblins, of which its rough arms and shoulders and hips-knotted as they
were with malformed bone-seemed incapable. The evil canine head was
held low. It bared needlesharp, reptilian fangs. Its forked and
mottled tongue slithered obscenely in-out-in over pebbled-black lips.
The piggish eyes, red and luminous and hateful, were at all times fixed
upon the helpless woman who, judging by the look of her, was teetering
on the thin edge of madness.
Suddenly the goblin whirled from her and raced across the room, still
on all fours, as if intending to crash headlong into the wall. To my
astonishment it climbed the wall instead, skittered the length of the
room just below the ceiling, cockroach-quick, turned the corner onto
the next wall, crossed half the length of that partition, and descended
to the linoleum once, more, finally halting in front of the bound woman
and rising up on its hind feet.
Winter reached inside me and stole the heat from my blood.
I knew the goblins were quicker and more agile than most human
beings-at least those human beings lacking my paranormal abilities-but
I had never witnessed a performance like this. Perhaps that was
because I'd seldom seen the beasts in the privacy of their dwellings,
where they might climb walls regularly, for all I knew. And on those
occasions when I killed their kind, I usually killed swiftly, giving
them no opportunity to escape across the walls and ceilings beyond my
reach.
I had thought I knew all about them, but now I had been surprised
again. That made me nervous and depressed me, for I could not help but
wonder what other hidden talents they might have. Another such.surprise, sprung on me at the wrong moment, might be the death of me.
I was thoroughly, profoundly scared.
But I was scared not merely by the goblin's startling ability to
wall-climb like a lizard: I was frightened, as well, for the woman
handcuffed in the rail-back chair. On coming down from the wall and
rising onto its hind feet, the goblin revealed something else that I
had never seen: a hideous phallus about a foot long, thrust forward
from a scaly, drooping pouch in which it was normally concealed in
detumescent state; it was curved like a saber, thick, and wickedly
ridged.
The creature meant to rape her before slashing her to ribbons with its
claws and teeth. It evidently chose to force itself upon her in its
monstrous state rather than in human disguise because her terror would
be richer, her utter helplessness deliciously emphasized. Impregnation
could not be the motive, for that alien seed would never thrive within
a human womb.
Besides, brutal murder was both certain and obvious. With a sick
sinking feeling, I suddenly understood why the room held no furniture,
why it was so different from the rest of the house, and why layer upon
layer of rust-brown stains marked the walls and floor. This was an
abattoir. a place of butchering. Other women had been brought here,
had been taunted and terrified and humiliated and, at last, torn to
pieces for the sport of it.
Not just women. Men too. And children.
Abruptly, I received repulsive psychic impressions of previous
bloodletting. Clairvoyant images radiated off the gore-splattered
walls and seemed to project themselves on the glass in front of me, as
if the window were a movie screen.
With tremendous effort I forced those emanations out of my mind, off
the glass, and back into the walls of the abattoir. I could not let
myself be overwhelmed. If hammered by the visions, I would be weakened
and unable to help the woman inside.
Turning from the window, I sidled quietly to the corner of the house.
confident that Rya would follow me. As I moved, I stripped off my
gloves and stuffed them into my coat pockets, so I would be able to
handle the knife with my usual skill.
At the back of the house, the wind hit us harder, for it was rolling
straight down from the mountain above, an avalanche of wind, raw and
piercing. In seconds I felt my hands turning cold, and I knew I must
get into the warm house quickly or lose some of the dexterity that I
needed in order to throw the knife accurately.
The rear porch steps were frozen; ice mortared the seams and joints.
They cracked and creaked as we ascended.
Icicles hung from the balustrade.
The porch floor also protested under our tread.
The rear entrance was to the left side of the house. I eased open the
glass and aluminum storm door. Its spring-fitted hinges twanged once.
Beyond the storm door, the back door of the house was unlocked as well.
The goblins have little use for locks because they were genetically
engineered with only a limited capacity for fear and because they have
almost no fear at all of us. The hunter does not fear the rabbit.
Rya and I stepped into a perfectly ordinary kitchen. straight out of
Good Housekeeping, where the warm air was redolent with the odor of
chocolate and baked apples and cinnamon.
Somehow the very ordinariness of the kitchen only made it more
frightening.
On a Formica counter to the right of the entrance, a homemade pie stood.on a wire rack, and beside it was a tray heaped with tollhouse cookies.
Countless times I had seen goblins-in human masquerade-eating in
restaurants. I knew they had to feed themselves as did any living
creature, but I had never thought of them performing mundane domestic
chores such as cookie baking and pie making. After all, they were
psychic vampires that fed on our physical and mental and emotional
pain, and considering the wickedly rich diet of human agony in which
they regularly indulged, other food seemed superfluous. I certainly
had never imagined them sitting down to cozy dinners in their own
homes, relaxing after a day of blood and torture and secret terrorism;
the thought of it turned my stomach.
From the unfurnished room, which shared a wall with the kitchen, rose a
series of thuds and thumps and scraping noises.
The unlucky woman was evidently beyond screaming, for now I heard her
praying in an urgent and tremulous voice.
I unzipped my coat, quickly slipped my arms out of the sleeves, and let
the garment fall softly to the floor. Its bulkiness would have
inhibited my throwing arm.
An open archway and three closed doors-in addition to the outside door
to the porch-led off the large kitchen.
Through the archway I could see the downstairs hall that served the
entire house. Of the three doors, one probably opened on the basement
stairs, one on a pantry. The other might have been an entrance to the
room in which we had seen the demon and the handcuffed woman. However,
I did not want to start opening doors and making a lot of noise unless
I was absolutely sure that on the first try I would find the right room
beyond. Therefore we went silently across the kitchen, through the
archway, into the hall, where the first door on the left, standing half
open, was the door to the abattoir.
I was worried that the woman would see me if I eased into the doorway
to reconnoiter and that her reaction would alert the goblin, so I
plunged into the room without knowing where my target would be. The
door crashed back against the wall as I flung it aside.
The goblin, looming over the woman, whirled to face me, letting out a
fetid hiss in surprise.
With astounding suddenness its rampant phallus collapsed and withdrew
into the scaly pouch, which itself seemed to lift into a protective
body cavity.
Gripping the knife by the point of the weighted blade, I drew it back
behind my head.
Still hissing, the goblin leapt toward file.
Simultaneously, my arm flicked forward. The knife flew.
In mid-leap, the goblin was hit in the throat. The blade sank deep,
although it was not as well placed as I would have liked. The beast's
glistening, quivering, hoglike nostrils fluttered with a snort of shock
and rage, and hot blood streamed out of its snout It kept coming. It
crashed into me. Hard.
We staggered, slammed thunderously into the wall. My back was pressed
to the dried blood of God-knows-how-many innocents, and for an instant
(before determinedly blocking it out of my mind) I could feel the pain
and horror that had radiated from, the victims in their death throes
and had adhered to the paint and plaster of this place.
Our faces were only inches apart. The creature's breath stank of
blood, dead meat, rotten flesh-as if feeding on the woman's terror had
given it a carnivore's halitosis.
Teeth, huge teeth, hooked and gnashing, dripping saliva, flashed an
inch from my eyes, an enameled promise of pain and death..The dark, oily, demonic tongue curled toward me as if it were a
questing snake.
I felt the goblin's gnarled arms curl around me, as if it would try to
crush me against its chest. Or, at the extremity of the embrace,
perhaps it would dig its terrible claws deep into my sides.
My hammering heart broke a latch bolt on the storage vault of
adrenaline within me, and I was abruptly home up on a chemical flood
that made me feel like a go"enough, admittedly, a frightened god.
My arms were more or less pinned across my breast, so I made fists of
my hands and rammed my elbows outward with all my might, into the
goblin's strong arms, breaking the hold it was trying to put on me. I
felt its claws snag for an instant in my shirt as its grip was broken,
and then I heard its bony knuckles stutter against the wall behind me
as one of its arms flew up.
It screamed with rage, a strange cry made even stranger because the
sound waves, rushing from voice box to lips, vibrated against the blade
of the knife that pierced its throat, acquiring a metallic tone before
expulsion. With the goblin's squeal came a spray of blood that
spattered my face; a few drops flew into my mouth.
Empowered now by disgust as well as by fear and fury, I thrust away
from the wall, heaving the beast backward. We stumbled and fell, and I
landed atop the thing, where at once I seized the handle of the knife
protruding from its throat, twisted the blade brutally, jerked it free,
stabbed down again, again, again, unable to stop myself even though the
vermilion luminosity of its eyes was swiftly fading to a muddy red.
Its heels drummed weakly on the floor, making a cold clackclack-clack
against the linoleum. Its arms flopped uselessly, and its long, horny
claws tapped out meaningless codes on the slaughterhouse floor.
Finally I drew the razored edge from left to right across the throat,
severing muscle, veins, and arteries. Then I was done-and so was it.
Gasping, gagging, spitting copiously to expel every trace of demonic
blood from my mouth, I rose onto my knees, straddling the dying goblin.
Beneath me, with much quicksilver rippling and shimmering, it underwent
a final convulsive transformation, expending its meager remaining life
energy to return to the human form, as its kind had been genetically
programmed to do in the lost era of their creation. Bones crunched,
bones popped, bones snapped, bones melted and bubbled and resolidified
in frenzied reformation; tendons and cartilage tore but immediately
reknit in different patterns of warp and woof-, the softer tissues made
a wet sucking-spluttering-oozing sound as they frantically sought and
found new configurations.
The handcuffed woman, Rya, and I were so transfixed by the lycanthropic
reversion that we were not aware of the second goblin until it exploded
into the room, taking us by surprise just as we had taken the first
beast.
Perhaps at that moment Rya's own-and lesser-psychic ability was
functioning better than mine, for as I whipped my head up and saw the
oncoming goblin, Rya was already swinging the tire iron that she had
brought with her. The blow was so furiously swung and so solidly
placed that I could see
Rya was having difficulty holding on to the weapon with hands numbed by
the impact; the powerful shock nearly wrenched the iron from her hands.
The lantern-eyed attacker pitched backward with a howl of pain, surely
damaged but not sufficiently injured to go down.
It screeched and spat as if its spittle were acutely poisonous to us.
Rebounding from the blow even as Rya was still struggling to keep a.firm grip on the tire iron, it rushed her with terrifying speed and
agility. Seized her with both its huge hands. All ten talons. Got
mostly her heavy winter coat.
Thank God. Mostly her coat.
Before it could tear one hand free from the coat to slash off her face,
I was up. Moving. Two steps, a jump. I was on its scaly back.
Sandwiched it between Rya and me. Drove the knife down. Hard. Rammed
it down. Down between the bony and malformed shoulders. Hilt-deep.
Deep into gristle. I couldn't wrench it loose.
Suddenly the beast shrugged with inhuman power. Like a rodeo horse.
Flung me away. I crashed to the floor. Pain shot up my spine. My
head hit the wall.
Things blurred. Then cleared.
But for a moment I was too stunned to get up.
I saw my knife still protruding from the goblin's back.
Rya had been flung away from the monster, too, but now it went after
her again. However, she had used the moment to regroup, and having
devised a plan, she stepped into her assailant instead of away from it,
using the tire iron once more, not as a club this time, and not the
lug-wrench end, either, but the crowbar end, wielding it as if it was a
spear, thrusting it forward as the enemy leapt toward her, driving the
thick iron tool into the goblin's belly, eliciting no howl this time
but rather a horrid rattling wheeze of shock and pain.
The beast clasped both of its large four-knuckled hands around the
spear that had pierced its middle, and Rya let go.
As the goblin staggered backward and collided with the wall, trying to
wrench the shaft out of its guts, I recovered enough to get to my feet.
I went after the hateful thing.
I put both hands on the gore-slicked lug-wrench end of the bar. The
ancient adversary looked its age now as blood gushed from it in
torrents. It raised murderous but dimming eyes to me and tried to
slash at my hands with its well-honed claws. I tore the crowbar end
loose before it could cut me, stepped back, and began methodically to
club the creature into submission. I hammered it until it went to its
knees, hammered some more until it collapsed facedown on the floor. I
did not stop even then, but pounded and pounded until its skull
crumpled, until its shoulders were pulverized, until its elbows were
smashed, until its hips and knees were broken, until I was pouring
sweat that washed the blood off my face and hands, and until I could
not lift the tire iron to deliver one more blow.
My stentorian breathing echoed off the walls.
With a couple of Kleenex, Rya was trying to wipe the goblin blood off
her hands.
The first beast-now dead-had regained its naked, battered human form
even as the battle with the second had begun. Now I saw that it was,
in fact, the cop that we had seen earlier.
The second goblin, transformed, was a woman of approximately the same
age as the cop.
Perhaps his wife. Or mate.
Did they really think in terms of husbands and wives-or even mates?
How did they perceive each other when at night they thrashed in cold,
reptilian passion? And did they usually go two-by-two in the world-and
was that arrangement by preference, as it was with most of our kind?
Or was pairbonding only a convenient cover that assisted them in their
efforts to pass for ordinary men and women?
Rya retched, seemed in danger of vomiting, but choked down the urge and
threw aside the blood-soaked tissues..I planted both feet on the back of the second dead beast, gripped my
knife with both hands, and worked it free of the creature's gristly
shoulders.
I wiped the blade on my jeans The naked woman in the chair was
trembling violently. Her eyes were full of horror, confusion, and
fear-fear not only of the dead goblins but of me and Rya.
Understandable.
"Friends," I rasped. "We're not . . . like them."
She stared at me and could not speak.
"Take care . . . of her," I told Rya.
I turned toward the door.
Rya said, "Where-" "to see if there're any more of them."
There aren't. They'd be here by now."
Still have to look."
I left the room, hoping Rya would understand that I wanted her to calm
and dress the redhead during my absence. I wanted the woman to regain
at least some of her wits, strength, dignity, and self-respect before I
returned to explain to her about the goblins.
In the dining room, wind alternately whispered conspiratorially and
moaned mournfully at the window.
In the living room the mantel clock ticked hollowly.
Upstairs, I found three bedrooms 'and a bath. In each I could hear the
arthritic creaking of the attic rafters as the wind pushed at the
gables and pounded on the roof and pried at the eaves.
No more goblins.
In the chilly bathroom I stripped off my blood-soaked clothes and
washed quickly at the sink. I did not look in the mirror above the
basin; I did not dare. Killing goblins was justified. I had no doubt
about the sinlessness of it, and I did not avoid my reflection out of
any fear of seeing guilt in my eyes. However, each time I slaughtered
the demonkind, it seemed as if they were harder to kill; more was
required of me, worse violence than before, greater savagery. So after
every bloody session there seemed to be a new coldness in my gaze, a
steeliness that disconcerted and dismayed me.
The cop had been about my size, and in the master bedroom closet I
selected one of his shirts and a pair of his Levi's. They fit as well
as my own.
I went downstairs and found Rya and the redhead waiting for me in the
living room. They were by the front windows in comfortable-looking
armchairs, looking thoroughly uncomfortable. From their position they
could see the driveway and could give an alarm at the first sign of an
approaching car.
Outside, wind-driven ghosts of snow rose up from the ground and hurried
away into the darkness, vague phosphorescent forms that seemed to have
been dispatched on mysterious missions.
The woman was dressed. Her experience had not left her deranged,
though she sat with her shoulders hunched and her pale hands working
nervously in her lap.
I pulled up a smaller chair with a needlepoint cushion and sat beside
Rya, taking her hand. She was trembling.
"What have you told her?" I asked Rya.
"Some of it . . . about the goblins . . . what they are, where they
came from. But she doesn't know who we are or how we can see them when
she can't. I've left that for you."
The redhead's name was Cathy Osborn. She was thirty-one, an associate
professor of literature at Barnard in New York City. She had been
raised in a small Pennsylvania town eighty miles west of Yontsdown..Recently, her father had been admitted to the hospital, suffering from
a moderate heart attack, and Cathy had taken time from her duties at
Barnard to be with him. He was recovering well, and now she was
returning to New York. Considering the dreadful condition of some
mountain roads in winter, she'd been making excellent time-until she
reached the eastern edge of Yontsdown. As a student and teacher and
lover of literature, she was (she said) an imaginative person, an
open-minded person, and she even had a taste for the outrageous in
fiction, had read her share of fantasy and horror-"Dracula,
Frankenstein, some Algernon Blackwood, a little bit of H. P. Lovecraft,
a story by someone named Sturgeon about a teddy bear that sucked
blood"-so she was not, she said, entirely unprepared for the fantastic
or macabre.
Nevertheless, in spite of her taste for fantasy and in spite of the
nightmare creatures she had seen, she had to struggle valiantly to
assimilate what Rya had told her about these genetically engineered
soldiers from an era lost to history. She said, "I know I'm not mad,
yet I keep wondering if I am, and I know I saw those hideous things
change from human form and then back again, but I keep wondering if I
imagined it or hallucinated the whole thing, even though I'm quite sure
I didn't, and all this stuff about a previous civilization destroyed in
a great war . . . it's too much, just too much, and now I'm
babbling-aren't I?-yes, I know I am, but I feel as if I'm on the edge
of brain burnout, you know?"
I did not make it easier for her. I told her about Twilight Eyes,
about Rya's lesser psychic abilities, and a little about the quiet war
(thus far, quiet) that we were waging.
Her green eyes glazed over, though not because she was tuning me out or
going into information overload. Instead she had reached that state in
which her uncomplicated, rational view of the world had been turned so
completely upside down and inside out-and with such force-that her
resistance to a belief in "impossible" things was virtually destroyed.
She was stunned into receptivity. The glazed eyes were merely a sign
of how furiously her well-educated mind was working to fit all these
new pieces into her drastically revised comprehension of reality.
When I finished, she blinked and shook her head wonderingly and said,
"But now .
"What?" I asked.
"How do I just go back to teaching literature? Now that I know of
these things, how do I possibly lead an ordinary life?"
I looked at Rya wondering if she had an answer to that one, and she
said "It probably won't be possible." Cathy frowned and started to
speak, but a strange sound cut her off. A sudden, shrill cry-partly an
infantile whine, partly a piggish screech, partly an insectile
trilling-disturbed the peace of the studiedly Colonial living room. It
was not a sound I associated with goblins, but it was certainly neither
human in origin nor the cry of any animal I had ever encountered.
I knew this keening could not be related to the pair of goblins that we
had just killed. They were unquestionably dead-at least for now.
Perhaps, left with their heads attached to their shoulders, they would
find their way back to the land of the living but not for days or weeks
or months.
Rya rose from her chair in a wink, groping for something that was not
at her side-the tire iron, I suppose. "What's that noise?"
I was on my feet, as well, knife in hand.
The weird, ululating cry, as of many voices, had an alchemizing power
to transmute blood into ice water. If Evil personified walked the.earth either in the form of Satan or some Other singular devil, this
was surely its voice, wordless but malevolent, the voice of all that
was not good and was not right. It was coming from another room,
though I could not immediately decide if the source was on this floor
or upstairs.
Cathy Osborn was slower to rise, as if reluctant to deal with yet
another terror. She said, "I . . . I've heard that very sound before,
when I was handcuffed in that room, when they first started to torment
me. But so much happened so fast that . . . I forgot about it."
Rya looked at the floor in front of her.
I also looked down, for I realized that the shrill noise-almost like an
oscillating electronic wail, though ever so much stranger-was coming
from the cellar.
24
The Cage and the Altar The cop, now lying dead in his own bloodstained
abattoir, had carried a regulation service revolvers Smith & Wesson
.357 Magnum. I armed myself with it before going into the kitchen and
opening the door at the head of the cellar steps.
The eerie warbling pule echoed up from that shadowy hole, and in a
crude way it conveyed meaning: urgency, anger-hunger. That sound was
so vile that it seemed to possess a tactile quality; I imagined I could
feel the cry itself, like damp spectral hands, sliding over my face and
body, a cool and clammy sensation.
The subterranean chamber was not entirely dark. Soft, lambent light,
perhaps that of candles, flickered in an unseen corner. Rya Cathy
Osborn and Rya insisted on accompanying me would not, of course, allow
me to face the unknown threat alone, and Cathy was afraid to remain in
the living room by herself.
Just inside the door, I found the switch. Clicked it. Below, amber
light appeared, brighter and steadier than the candleglow.
The yowling stopped.
Remembering the psychic vapor of long-ago human suffering that still
steamed off the cellar walls of the house that we had rented on Apple
Lane, I reached out with my sixth sense as best I could, seeking
similar foul emanations in this place.
Though I did indeed perceive images and feelings of a clairvoyant
nature, they were not what I had expected-and were unlike anything I
had previously encountered. I could not make sense of them: half-seen,
bizarre, shadowy forms that I was unable to identify, all in black and
white and shades of gray, now leaping in harsh and frantic rhythms-but
now undulating with a slow, sickening, serpentine motion; and sudden
bursts of colored light in ominous hues, without apparent meaning or
source.
I was aware of unusually strong emotions pouring from a deeply troubled
mind, like sewage from a broken pipe. They were not human emotions but
were more twisted and dark than the aberrant dreams and desires of even
the worst of men. Yet it was not precisely Re the aura of a goblin,
either.
This was the emotional equivalent of postulant, gangrenous flesh; I
perceived that I was wading into the cesspool of a homicidal lunatic's
chaotic inner world. The insanity-and underlying blood lust-was so
repulsive that I had to withdraw from it and try quickly to shutter my
sixth sense as much as possible to protect myself from the unwelcome
radiation.
I must have swayed a bit on the landing because, from behind me, Rya.put a hand on my shoulder and whispered, "Are you all right?"
"Yes."The single flight of stairs was steep. Most of the cellar lay
out of sight to the left, and I could see only a small, bare patch of
the gray concrete floor.
Cautiously I descended.
Rya and Cathy followed me, and our boots made a hollow tonk-tonk-tonk
on the wooden steps.
A thin but noxious odor increased as we went down. Urine, feces, stale
sweat.
At the bottom we found a large basement devoid of all the things one
might ordinarily expect in such a place-no tools, no lumber for the
husband's current carpentry project, no containers of varnish or paint
or stain, no home-canned fruits or vegetables. Instead part of the
space was used for an altar and part of it was occupied by a large,
sturdy cage made of iron bars set five inches apart and running from
floor to ceiling.
Though silent and staring now, the hideous occupants of the cage were
undoubtedly the source of the caterwauling that had brought us down
into this godforsaken hole. Three of them. Each a little more than
four feet tall. Young goblins.
Pre-adolescent. They were clearly members of that demonic species-yet
different. Unclothed, striped with shadow and smoky amber light, they
peered from between the bars, and as they peered, their bodies and
faces underwent slow, continuous changes. Initially I sensed the
difference in them without understanding what it was, but then I
quickly realized that their metwnorphic talent was running out of
control.
They seemed to be permanently trapped in a twilight state of endless
flux, their bodies half goblin and half human, bones and flesh
transforming again and again, ceaselessly, in what seemed to be a
random pattern. They could not lock themselves into one form or the
other. One of them had a human foot at the end of a mostly goblinlike
leg, and hands on which some fingers were those of a goblin and some
those of a human child. Even as I watched, a couple of the Homo sapien
fingers began to change into four-knuckled digits with vicious claws
while some of the goblin fingers began to melt into a more human
design. One of the two other creatures blinked at us with hard, mean,
but entirely human eyes in a countenance that was otherwise monstrous;
however, as I stared in disgust at that unnerving combination, the face
began to seek another form that combined human and goblin features in a
new-and even more horrendous-way.
"What are they?" Rya asked, and shuddered.
"I think they're . . . deformed offspring," I said, moving closer to
the cage, though not close enough for one of the occupants to reach
through the bars and snag me.
The creatures remained silent, tense, watchful.
"Freaks. Genetic breakdowns," I said. "All the goblins have a
metamorphic gene that allows them to switch at will from man to goblin
and back again. But these damn things . . they were probably born
with imperfect metamorphic genes, an entire litter of freaks. They
can't control their form.
Their tissues are always in a state of flux. So their parents locked
them away down here, just like people in other centuries used to hide
their idiot children in cellars and attics."
Behind the bars, one of the gnarly miscreations hissed at me, and the
other two took it up at once and with enthusiasms low, sibilant,
threatening sound.."Dear God," Cathy Osborn said.
"It's not just physical deformity," I said. "They're completely
insane, as well-insane by either human or goblin standards. Insane and
very, very dangerous."
"You sense this . . . psychically?" Rya asked.
I nodded.
Just speaking of their madness, I had made myself vulnerable to the
psychic outpouring of their deranged minds, which I had first
apprehended upstairs, at the' open cellar door. I sensed desires and
urges in them that , although too strange for me to understand, were
nevertheless comprehendably perverse, bloody-minded, and repulsive.
Twisted lusts, dark and demented needs, disgusting and hightening
hungers . . . Again, as best I could, I damped my sixth sense in much
the way that I might have cut off the draft to a furnace or fireplace,
and the furious blaze of psychotic emanations slowly subsided to a
barely tolerable little fire.
They stopped hissing.
With a crisp, crackling noise their human eyes blistered, flared
red-hot, became the luminous eyes of goblins.
A piggish snout began to push out of an otherwise normal human face,
accompanied by the squishing-crunching sounds Of reformation-but halted
halfway through its development, then shrank back into the human
visage.
One of them made a thick, mucus-wet, hacking noise in the back of its
throat, and I suspected this was laughter of a sort, vicious and
chilling but laughter nonetheless.
Here, fangs sprang out of human mouths.
There, a canine jawline began to build up, heavy and savage.
And here, a perfect human thumb abruptly blossomed into a four-knuckled
stiletto.
Ceaseless lycanthropic activity. The purpose of the changes was never
fully achieved, so the very act of transformation became its own
purpose and meaning. Genetic madness.
One of the nightmarish triplets snaked its grotesquely knotted arm
between the iron bars, reaching out as far as it could manage. In the
hand a closed nest of fingers-some human, some not@pened. They began
to stroke the reeking air, somewhat in the manner of a caress though
mostly as if the beast were trying to wring something out of the ether.
The spider-quick fingers alternately curled and poked and wriggled:
strange gesticulations without meaning.
The other two demon spawn began moving rapidly through their big cage,
dashing left, darting right, climbing the bars, dropping to the filthy
floor again, as if they were frantic monkeys careening around just for
the hell of it, though with none of the joy you see in the acrobatic
antics of monkeys.
Due to their inability to achieve full goblin status, they were not as
agile as the demonkind that we had killed in the abattoir upstairs.
"They give me the creeps," Rya said. "Do you think this happens
often-litters of freaks like this? Is it a problem for the goblins?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
"I mean, their genetic makeup might be deteriorating generation by
generation. Maybe every new generation brings a greater number of
births like these. After all, they weren't originally designed to
reproduce; if what we know of their origins is true, fertility was a
long-shot mutation. So maybe now they're losing the ability to
procreate . . . losing it through mutation, as they gained it in the
first place. Is it possible? Or is what we see here just a rarity?"."I don't know," I repeated. "You may be right. It'd sure be nice to
think they're dying out and that in time, maybe a couple of hundred
years, they'll have dwindled to just a handful."
"A couple of hundred years won't do me and you any good, will it?"
Cathy Osborn said miserably.
"There's the problem," I agreed. "It would take hundreds of years for
them to cease to exist. And I don't think they'll just resign
themselves to fading away. With that much time to make plans, they'll
find a means of taking all of humanity down into the grave with them."
Suddenly, the boldest of the freaks snatched its arm back into the cage
and, with its misbegotten companions, began to wail as we had heard
them wailing when we were upstairs.
The shrill ululation rebounded from the concrete-block walls, two-note
music suitable for nightmares, a monotonous song of insane desires that
one might have expected to hear echoing along the halls of Bedlam.
That noise, combined with the odors of urine and feces, made the cellar
almost intolerable. But I was not going to leave until I had
investigated the other matter of interest: the altar.
I had no way of knowing for sure that it was, in fact, an altar, but
that was precisely what it appeared to be. In the corner of the
basement farthest from the stairs, and from the cage of miscreations,
stood a sturdy table draped with a blue velvet cloth.
Two unusual oil lamps-copper-tinted glass spheres filled with liquid
fuel and floating wicks-flanked what appeared to be a venerated icon
that was elevated above the table on a three-inch-high,
one-foot-square, polished stone tablet. The icon was ceramic-a
rectangle measuring approximately eight inches high, six inches wide,
four inches thick, rather like an odd-sized brick-with a lustrous glaze
that imparted considerable depth (and a mysterious quality) to its
midnight-dark sheen. In the center of the black rectangle was a white
ceramic circle about four inches in diameter, and the circle was
bisected by a highly stylized bolt of black lightning.
It was the insignia of the Lightning Coal Company that we had seen on
the truck yesterday. But its appearance here, elevated as if for
veneration, illuminated by votive lamps, with the airs and trappings of
a sacred symbol, indicated that it was something more meaningful and
important than merely a corporate logo.
White sky, dark lightning.
What did it symbolize?
White sky, dark lightning.
The squalling of the mutants in the cage was as loud as ever, but my
attention was totally held by the altar and by the central object upon
it, and for a moment their piercing cries did not bother me.
I could not figure how a species like the goblin-created by man rather
than by God, hating their creator while also having no respect for him
could develop religion. If this was, indeed, an altar, what did they
worship here? To what strange gods did they pay tribute? And how?
And why?
Rya reached past me to touch the icon.
I stopped her before she made contact with the ceramic rectangle.
"Don't," I said.
"Why not?"
"I don't know. Just . . . don't.
White sky, dark lightning.
Oddly enough, there was something surprisingly pitiable and even
touching in the goblins' need for gods and for the altars and icons
that gave concrete representation to spiritual beliefs. The very.existence of a religion implied doubt, humility, a perception of right
and wrong, a longing for values, an admirable hunger for meaning and
purpose. This was the first thing I had ever seen that implied the
possibility of common ground between humankind and the goblins, a
shared emotion, a shared need.
But, damn it, I knew from brutal experience that the demonkind had no
doubt, no humility. Their perception of right and wrong was too simple
to require a philosophical base: right was anything that benefited them
or harmed us; wrong was anything that harmed them or helped us. Their
values were those of the shark. Their meaning and purpose was our
destruction, for which they did not require a complex theological
doctrine or divine justification.
White sky, dark lightning.
As I stared at that symbol I gradually became convinced that their
religion-if such it was-did not, in fact, serve to make them more
sympathetic or less alien than I had always viewed them. Because I
sensed there was something monstrously evil about their unknown faith,
something so unspeakably vile about the god they venerated that their
religion would make Satanism-with its human sacrifices and
disembowelment of babies-seem by comparison as benign as the Holy Roman
Catholic Church.
With my Twilight Eyes, I saw the black ceramic lightning bolt flicker
darkly on the white ceramic circle, and I was aware of waves of
death-energy radiating from that ominous symbol. Whatever else the
goblins worshiped, they clearly venerated destruction, pain, and death.
I remembered the vast, cold, lightless void that I had perceived when I
had first seen the Lightning Coal Company truck, and now I saw the same
thing again when I stared at the icon on the basement altar. Infinite
darkness. Infinite silence. Immeasurable cold. Infinite emptiness.
Nothingness.
What was this void? What did it mean?
The flames in the oil lamps throbbed.
In the cage the insane abominations screeched a song of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.
The stench in the air grew worse by the second.
The ceramic icon, which had first been an object of curiosity and then
of amazement and then of speculation, suddenly became an object of
unadulterated fear. Staring at it, half mesmerized, I sensed that it
held the secret to the heavy goblin presence in Yontsdown. But I also
perceived that humanity's destiny was hostage to the philosophy,
forces, and schemes that the icon represented.
"Let's get out of here," Cathy Osborn said.
"Yes," Rya said. "Let's go, Slim. Let's go."
White sky.
Dark lightning.
Rya and Cathy went out to the nearby barn in search of a couple of
buckets and a length of rubber tubing-items that ought to be at hand in
a cider mill, even now, long after the cider season. If they found
what they needed, they would siphon two bucketsful of gasoline out of
the police cruiser and bring them into the house.
Cathy Osborn was shaky and looked as if she might be violently ill at
any moment, but she gritted her teeth (her jaw muscles popped out with
the effort of resisting the urge to vomit) and did what was asked of
her. She exhibited a lot more spunk, greater adaptability, and more
tough-mindedness than I would have expected from someone who had spent
her entire life beyond the real world and within the sheltered enclaves
of academe..Meanwhile, for me, it was Grand Guignol time once more.
Trying not to look too much at my savaged victims or at the queer and
disturbing shadow that I cast while hunched like Quasimodo in the
performance of my gruesome task, I dragged the two dead goblins Out of
the first-floor abattoir, one at a time. I hauled them through the
kitchen, which still smelled of fresh-baked pie, and tumbled them down
the cellar stairs. Descending after them, I pulled both naked corpses
into the middle of the basement floor.
In the cage the ghastly triplets fell silent again. Six mad eyes, some
human and some glowing with demonic scarlet light, watched with
interest. They showed no grief at the sight of their murdered parents;
they were evidently incapable of grief or of understanding what those
deaths meant to them.
They were not angry, either, nor yet afraid, but simply curious in the
manner of inquisitive apes.
I would have to deal with them in a moment.
Not yet. I had to work up to it. I had to shut down my sixth sense as
much as possible, harden myself to the unpleasant business of
merciless. execution.
Leaning over the open top of one of the spherical glass lamps on the
altar, I blew out the flame on the floating wick.
I carried the lamp to the dead goblins and emptied its flammable
contents onto the bodies.
The clear oil made their pale skin glisten.
Their hair darkened as the fuel soaked into it.
Beads of oil trembled on their eyelashes.
The nauseating odor of urine and feces was overlaid with the sharper
scent of the combustible fluid.
Still the caged observers were silent, almost breathless.
I could delay no longer. I had tucked the .357 Magnum into my belt.
Now I drew it.
When I turned to them and approached the cage, their gazes shifted from
the bodies on the floor to the gun. They were precisely as curious
about it as they had been about the motionless condition of their
parents-wary, perhaps, but not afraid.
I shot the first one in the head.
The two remaining freaks flung themselves back from the bars and flew
frenziedly this way and that, shrieking with considerably more volume
and emotion than they had shrieked before, seeking a place to hide.
Moronic children they might be-even worse than morons: idiots living in
a dim world where cause and effect did not exist-but they were smart
enough to understand death.
I required four more shots to finish them, though it was easy. Too
easy. Usually I took pleasure in killing goblins, but I did not have a
taste for this slaughter. They were pathetic creatures-no doubt deadly
but stupid and not a match for me. Besides, shooting caged adversaries
who could not fight back . . . well, it seemed like something a goblin
would do and was an act unworthy of a man.
Bundled in their coats, scarves, and boots, Rya and Cathy Osborn
returned. Each carried a galvanized bucket that was two-thirds full of
gasoline, and they descended the cellar steps with exaggerated care,
trying not to spill any of the contents on themselves.
They glanced at the three dead freaks in the cage-and quickly looked
away.
Abruptly I was overcome by the urgent feeling that we had stayed in the
house too long and that every passing minute brought us closer to
discovery by other goblins.."Let's get it done with," Rya whispered, and by that whisper-for which
there was no apparent need-she clearly indicated that her apprehension
was growing as well.
I took Cathy's bucket and threw the contents into the cell, liberally
splashing the corpses.
As Rya and Cathy retreated to the first floor, taking with them the
still-burning oil lamp that had rested on the altar, I poured the
second bucketful of gasoline across the cellar floor. Gasping for
breath and getting only fumes, I went upstairs, where the women were
waiting for me in the kitchen.
Rya held the oil lamp toward me.
"I've got gasoline on my hands," I said, hurrying to the kitchen sink
to wash.
Less than a minute later, having scrubbed away the danger of instant
self-immolation but acutely aware that we were standing atop a bomb, I
accepted the lamp and returned to the cellar steps. Fumes rose in
suffocating waves. Afraid that the high concentration of vapors was
nearly rich enough to explode when exposed to the flame, I did not
hesitate but pitched the glass lamp to the bottom of the stairs.
The copper-tinted sphere struck the concrete and shattered.
The flaming wick set fire to the spilled and spreading oil, which gave
up a peacock-blue flame, and the burning oil ignited the gasoline. A
terrible blaze roared to life below. A blast of heat swept up the
stairs, so fierce that for a moment I thought it must have set my hair
afire as I staggered backward into the kitchen.
Rya and Cathy had already retreated to the back porch. I swiftly
followed them. We ran around the house, past the patrol car that was
parked near the front porch, and down the half-mile-long driveway.
Even before we reached the perimeter of the forest that encircled the
property, we saw firelight reflected on the snow around us. When we
looked back, flames had already erupted out of the cellar, through the
floor, into the downstairs. The windows glimmered like the orange eyes
in a jack-o'-lantern.
Then the panes of glass exploded with sharp sounds that carried well on
the cold night air.
Now the wind would quickly whip the flames to every gable, to the peak
of the roof. The blaze would be so intense that the bodies in the
basement would be reduced to ashes and bones. With a little luck, the
authorities-goblins every one-night think the fire had been accidental.
They might forgo an in-depth investigation that would turn up
bullet-shattered bones and other proof of foul play. Even if they were
suspicious and found what they looked for, we would have a day or two
before the search for goblin killers began.
Nearer the house, the sparkling snow appeared to be stained with blood.
Farther away, yellow-orange light and enormous strange shadows writhed,
curled, leapt, squirmed, and shimmered across winter's calcimine
mantle.
The first battle of the new war. And we had won.
We turned away from the house and hurried along the drive, into the
tunnel formed by overhanging evergreen boughs.
the firelight did not reach that far, but though darkness closed in
with a vengeance and reduced visibility nearly to zero, we slowed only
slightly. From our journey in to the house, we knew there were no
major obstacles along the way. Although we ran blindly, we enjoyed at
least a small measure of confidence that we would not break our legs in
unexpected ditches or be knocked flat by barrier chains meant to keep
out intruders..Shortly we reached the main road and, turning north, soon came to the
station wagon. Rya drove. Cathy sat up front. I sat in back with the
police revolver in my lap, half expecting goblins to appear and stop
us, fully prepared to blow them away if they did.
Miles later I could still hear (in memory) the eerie oscillating cries
of the three misbegotten goblin children.
We took Cathy to a gas station and accompanied her and the serviceman
back to her car. He quickly determined that her battery was dead, a
situation for which he had come prepared. He'd put a suitable new
battery in his Dodge truck before leaving the station. He was able to
install it right there at the side of the highway, in the more than
adequate light of a portable work lamp that plugged into the cigarette
lighter of his truck.
When Cathy's Pontiac was running again, when the serviceman had been
paid and had gone, she glanced at Rya and me, then lowered her haunted
gaze to the frozen earth at her feet. Pushed by the bitter wind, white
clouds of exhaust vapor billowed toward the front of the car. "What
the hell happens now?" she said shakily.
"You were on your way to New York," I said.
She laughed without humor. "I might as well have been on my way to the
moon." A pickup and a gleaming new Cadillac passed by. The drivers
glanced at us.
"Let's get in the car," Rya said, shivering. "We'll be warm in there."
We would also be less conspicuous.
Cathy got behind the wheel, turned sideways so I could see her profile
from the backseat. Rya sat up front with her.
"I can't just go on with my life as if nothing had happened," Cathy
said.
"But you must," Rya said gently yet forcefully. "'That's really what
life's about-going on as if nothing has happened. And you certainly
can't appoint yourself savior of the world, can't go around with a
megaphone shouting that demons are passing for ordinary people and are
walking among us. Everyone would think you'd just gone crazy.
Everyone except the goblins."
"And they'd deal with you damn quick," I said.
Cathy nodded. "I know . . . I know." She was silent for a moment,
then said plaintively, "But . . . how can I go back to New York, back
to Barnard, not knowing which ones are goblins? How can I trust anyone
ever again? How can I dare to marry anyone, not really knowing what he
is? Maybe he'll want to many me just to torture me, to have his own
private plaything. You know what I mean, Slim-the way your uncle
married your aunt and then brought grief to your whole family. How can
I have friends, real friends, with whom I can be open, direct, and
truthful? Do you see? It's worse for me than for you, because I don't
have your ability to see the goblins. I can't tell the difference
between them and us, so I have to assume everyone's a goblin; that's
the only safe thing to do . You can see them, separate them from our
kind, so you aren't alone; but I'll have to be alone, always alone,
totally alone, utterly and forever alone, because trusting in anyone
could be the end of me. Alone . . . What kind of life will that be?"
When she outlined her plight, it seemed obvious, yet until now I had
not realized what a terrible box she was in. And no way out of that
box, as far as I could see.
Rya looked at me from the front seat.
I shrugged, not casually but with frustration and a certain amount of
misery.
Cathy Osborn sighed and shuddered, torn between despair and terror-two.emotions that were difficult to contain simultaneously, since the
latter presupposes hope while the former denies it.
After a moment more of silence Cathy said, "I might as well pick up a
megaphone and start trying to save the world, even if they do put me in
a madhouse, because I'll wind up there, anyway. I mean . . . day
after day, wondering who around me is one of them, always needing to be
suspicious-in time that'll take a toll. And not a lot of time, either.
I'll crack fast, 'cause I'm an extrovert by nature; I need contact with
people. So before long I really will be a raving paranoid, ready for
the asylum. Then they'll lock me up. And don't you figure there're
bound to be a lot of goblins on the staff of any institution like that,
where people are locked up and helpless and easy game?"
"Yes," Rya said, evidently thinking of the orphanage she had endured.
"Yes."
"I can't go back. I can't live like I'd have to live."
"There is a way," I said.
Cathy turned her head and looked at me, more with disbelief than with
hope.
"There is a place," I said.
"Of course," Rya said.
"Sombra Brothers," I said.
And Rya explained: "The carnival."
"Become a carny?" Cathy asked, amazed.
Her voice betrayed a mild distaste at which I took no offense-and
which, I knew, Rya also understood. The straight world is always
anxious to affirm the illusion that its society is the only right one;
therefore it labels those in the carnival as drifters, social outcasts,
misfits, and probably thieves, every one of them. We, like real
Gypsies-with Romany blood, are held in universally low esteem. One
simply does not acquire two or three prestigious university degrees, a
deep knowledge of the arts, only to blithely throw over a thriving
academic career in favor of the carnival life.
I did not gild the future that such a decision would assure for Cathy
Osborn. I put it bluntly, wanting her to have all the facts before
making up her mind: "You'd have to give up the teaching you love, the
academic life, the career you've worked so hard to build. You'd have
to come into a world almost as alien to yours as ancient China. You'd
keep finding yourself acting like a straight, talking like a mark, so
the other carnies would be suspicious of you, and you'd need a year or
more to win their complete confidence. Your friends and relatives
wouldn't understand, not ever. You'd become a black sheep, an object
of pity and scorn and endless speculation. You might even break your
parents' hearts."
"Yeah," Rya said, "but you can join Sombra Brothers and be sure that
there are no goblins among your neighbors and your friends. Too many
of us in the carnival are outcasts because we can see the goblins and
therefore need a refuge.
When one of them comes among us, other than as a mark spending money,
we deal with it quickly and quietly. So you'd be safe."
"As safe as anyone ever is in this life," I said.
"And you could earn your way, working for Slim and me to start."
I said, "Eventually you could put aside enough money to have a couple
of concessions of your own."
" Yeah," Rya said. "You'd make bigger bucks than teaching; that's for
sure. And in time . . . well, you'll pretty much forget the straight
world you came from. It'll begin to seem like a very long-ago place,
even like a dream, and a bad dream." She reached out and put a hand on.Cathy's arm, reassuring her, woman-to-woman. "I promise you, when
you've become a real carny, the outside will seem awful bleak to you,
and you'll wonder how you ever got along out there and why you ever
thought it was preferable to the world of the road show."
Cathy bit her lower lip. She said, "Oh, God .
We could not give her old life back to her so we gave her the only
thing we could give just then: time. Time to think.
Time to adapt.
A few cars passed us. Not many. It was late. The night was deep-and
cold. Most people were home by their fires or in bed.
"God, I just don't know," Cathy said tremulously, wearily,
indecisively.
The crystallized exhaust vapors plumed along the window.
For a moment as I looked through the glass, I could see only those
swirling mists, silvery and swift, in which spectral faces seemed
continuously to form and dissolve and quickly rrform, peering hungrily
at me.
At that moment, Gibtown, Joel and Laura Tuck, and my Other carny
friends seemed far away, farther than Florida, -or than the dark side
of the moon.
"I'm lost, confused, afraid," Cathy said. "I don't know what to do. I
just don't know."
Considering the terrifying ordeal she had endured that evening,
considering that she had not gone entirely to pieces as most people
would have done, considering that she had in fact quickly recovered
from her shock once Rya and I had dispatched the goblins that were
tormenting her, I figured she was someone who ought to be on our side,
in the carnival with us. She was no meek professor; she possessed
unusual strength, uncommon courage, and we could always use more people
of strong mind and heart-especially if we eventually continued and
widened the war against the goblins. I sensed that Rya felt the same
way as I did and that she was praying that Cathy Osborn would join us.
"I just . . . don't know.
Two of the three bedrooms in our rented house were furnished, and Cathy
stayed the night in one of them. She could not bear either to drive on
to New York City or to abandon her career and her current life on such
short notice, regardless of the compelling reasons for doing exactly
that. "By morning I'll make up my mind," she promised.
Her room was farther along the second-floor hallway from ours. She
insisted that we leave the doors open on both chambers, so we would be
able to hear one another in the night if one of us called for help.
I assured her that the goblins did not know we were among them.
"They have no reason to come here tonight," Rya said soothingly.
We did not tell her that this house was owned by Klaus Orkenwold, or
that he was the new sheriff in Yontsdown, or that he was a goblin, or
that he had tortured and slaughtered three people in the basement.
Nevertheless, in spite of what we told her and chose not to tell her,
Cathy remained worried, edgy. She insisted on a night-light, which we
rigged for her by draping one of her dark blouses over the shade of a
nightstand lamp.
When we left her, I felt really bad, inadequate-as if we were
abandoning a child to the mercy of the thing that lived under the bed
or the monster that hid in the closet.
Eventually Rya slept.
I could not. At least not for a long while.
Dark lightning.
I kept thinking about that black lightning bolt, trying to figure out.what it could mean.
And now and then, as if it were the stench of dead men buried under the
house, a vague wave of psychic radiation passed up from the cellar
below, where Orkenwold had killed a woman and two children.
Again I felt certain that I had unconsciously led us to this place,
that my clairvoyant power had somehow chosen this house of all the
houses that might have been available, because I wanted-or was
destined-to deal with Klaus Orkenwold as I had dealt with Lisle Kelsko
before him.
In the ceaseless moaning of the wind, I could hear something of the
shrill cries of the goblin freaks in that cage before I had shot and
then incinerated them. I could almost believe they had dragged their
bullet-riddled corpses, their fire-scorched bones, from the smoking
ruins of that house and were crying out to me now as they crept and
hitched and scuttled through the night, moving unerringly in my
direction as hellhounds might relentlessly sniff out the damned and
rotting souls of their prey.
At times, in the creaking and popping of the house (which was only its
natural response to the fierce cold and the insistent wind), I thought
I heard flames springing up beneath us and devouring the lower floor, a
blaze perhaps lit by the things I had burned in the iron cage. Each
time the forced-air furnace came on with a soft roar, I twitched with
surprise and fear.
Beside me, Rya groaned, dreaming. That dream, no doubt.
Gibtown, Joel and Laura Tuck, and my other carny friends seemed far
away then-and I longed for them. I thought of them, pictured each
friend's face and dwelt on it for a time before calling up another, and
just thinking about them made me feel a little better.
Then I realized that I was longing for them and taking courage from
their love, as I had once longed for and taken courage from the love of
my mother and sisters out at the far edge of the continent. Which
probably meant that- my old world, the world of the Stanfeuss family,
was gone, gone forever beyond my reach. On a subconscious level I had
evidently absorbed that terrible fact, but until now I had not accepted
it consciously. The carnival had become my family, and it was a good
family, the best, but there was great sadness in the realization that
most likely I would never go home again and that the sisters and mother
I had loved in my youth were, though still living, dead to me.
25
Before the Storm
On Saturday morning the clouds were a more ominous gray than they had
been on Friday. As if the darker shade indicated greater weight, the
sky settled closer to the earth, too heavy to maintain a higher
position.
The huffing-gasping-wheezing wind of the previous night had gone
breathless, but there was not a good feeling to the resultant calm. A
strange, expectant quality, an eerie tension, seemed to be a part of,
the snow-covered landscape. The evergreens, silhouetted against the
slate-colored sky, might have been sentinels standing in dread
anticipation of the advance of powerful armies. The other trees,
stripped of their leaves, had a foretokening air, as if they had raised
their black, skeletal arms to warn of approaching danger.
After breakfast Cathy Osborn put her luggage back into her car with the
intention of continuing her drive to New York..She would remain in the city only three days: just long enough to
settle her apartment lease, deliver her letter of resignation to
Barnard (she would claim a health crisis, thin as that excuse might
be), pack up her book collection and other belongings, and say good-bye
to a few friends. The good-byes would be tough, because she would
truly miss those people she cared about and because they would think
she'd taken leave of her senses and would make well-meaning though
frustrating, attempts to change her mind, but also because she could
not be sure that they were really the ordinary men and women they
appeared to be.
Rya and I stood by her car in the still but penetratingly cold morning
air, wishing her well, worried but trying not to reveal how deeply we
feared for her. Each of us hugged her very tightly, and suddenly the
three of us embraced together, for we were no longer three strangers
but were inextricably linked to one another by the bizarre and bloody
events of the previous night, bound by a bond of terrible truth.
For those of us who have discovered their existence, the goblins aren't
merely a threat but are also a catalyst for unity.
Ironically they engender a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood between
men and women, a sense of purpose and responsibility and shared destiny
that we might lack without them; and if we ever manage to eradicate
them from the face of earth, it will be because their very presence has
united us.
"By Sunday morning," I told Cathy, "I'll have called Joel Tuck down
there in Gibtown. He'll be expecting you, and he and Laura will make a
place for you."
We had already described Joel to her so she might be appalled but not
shocked by his deformities.
Rya said, "Joel's a book lover, a voracious reader, so you might have
more in common with him than you'd think. And Laura's a dear, she
really is."
As we talked, we sounded flat and iron-hard in the perfectly still,
glacial morning air. Each word we spoke was expelled with a white puff
of frosted breath, as if it had been chiseled from a chunk of Dry Ice
and released to convey its meaning as much by the pattern of its vapor
as by the sound of it.
Cathy's fear was nearly as visible as her crystallized breath.
Not merely a fear of goblins but of the new life she was about to
embrace. And a fear of losing her old and comfortable life.
"See you soon," she said shakily.
"Florida," Rya said. "In the sun."
At last Cathy Osborn got in her car and left. We watched her until she
had reached the end of the driveway, had turned onto Apple Lane, and
had disappeared beyond a bend in the road.
Thus professors of literature become carnies, and belief in a benign
universe gives way to darker realizations.
His name was Horton Bluett. By his own description he was an old
codger. He was a big, bony man whose angularity was apparent even when
he was dressed in a heavy, then-nalquilted woodsman's coat, which was
how we first saw him.
He seemed strong, and he was spry, and the only thing about his
movements that betrayed his age was a slight rounding of his shoulders,
as if they had been bent by a considerable weight of years. His broad
face was weathered more by a life lived largely out-of-doors than by
time itself: deeply seamed in places, with fine webs of lines around
the eyes. He had a large and somewhat reddened nose, a strong chin,
and a wide mouth that took easily to a smile. His dark eyes were.watchful but not unfriendly, and as clear as those of a youth. He was
wearing a red hunting cap with the ear flaps pulled down and the strap
snapped under his chin, but bristling bunches of iron-gray hair had
escaped confinement and stuck down over his forehead in a couple of
places.
We were driving along Apple Lane when we saw him. The previous night's
high winds had drifted several inches of powdery snow across his
driveway, and he was wielding a shovel without regard for the latest
heart-attack statistics. His house was set closer to the road than
ours, and his driveway was therefore shorter, but the task he had
undertaken was nevertheless formidable.
It was our intention to gather information about the Lightning Coal
Company not only from newspapers and other official sources but from
locals who might provide more reliable and more interesting details
than the goblin-controlled media. To a journalists gossip and rumor
may be anathema, but they can sometimes contain a bigger slice of the
truth than the official story. Therefore we pulled into his driveway,
stopped, got out of the car, and introduced ourselves as the new
neighbors renting the Orkenwold place.
Initially he was cordial but not markedly outgoing, watchful and mildly
suspicious, as country folk often are when encountering newcomers.
Looking for a way to break the ice, I let my instincts dictate my
actions, and I did what a man would do back in Oregon if he came upon a
neighbor engaged in a difficult task: I offered to help. He politely
declined my offer, but I insisted.
"Shucks," I said, "if a man doesn't have the strength to lend a hand
with a shovel, how's he going to find the energy to fly up to Heaven
come the Judgment Day?"
That appealed to Horton Bluett, and he allowed as how he had a second
shovel. I fetched it from his garage, and we worked our way steadily
along the drive, with Rya spelling me for a couple of minutes once in a
while, then spelling Mr. Bluett.
We talked weather, and we talked winter clothing. It was Horton
Bluett's opinion that old-fashioned fleece-lined coats were a hundred
percent warmer than the space-age, quilted, insulated garments that had
come on the market in the past decade, such as the coat he was wearing.
If you don't think we could spend better than ten minutes discussing
the merits of fleece, then you neither understand the pace of country
life nor comprehend the appeal that can be found in such mundane
conversation.
During the first few minutes of our visit I noticed that Horton Bluett
sniffed noisily and a lot, wiping at his largish nose with the back of
his gloved hand. Though he didn't blow it once, I figured he had a
slight cold or that the bitter air had affected his sinuses. Then he
stopped, and only much later did I discover there had been a secret
purpose in all that sniffing and snuffling.
Soon the shoveling was finished. Rya and I said we would get out of
his way, but he insisted we come inside for some hot coffee and
homemade walnut cake.
His single-story house was smaller than the one we were renting, but it
was in better repair, almost obsessively well maintained.
Everywhere you looked you had the feeling that new paint or varnish or
wax had been applied only an hour ago. Horton was cozily battened down
for the winter, having installed snugly fitted storm windows and storm
doors and having provided a huge supply of wood for the stone fireplace
in the living room, which supplemented a coal-fired furnace.
We learned that he had been a widower for almost thirty years and had.honed his domestic skills to a fine edge. He seemed especially proud
of his cooking, and both his rich coffee and his marvelous cake-crisp
plump halves of black walnuts thickly distributed through buttery
batter and a semisweet chocolate frosting-indicated a mastery of solid,
downhome, country-style cuisine.
He had retired from the rail yards nine years ago, he said.
And although he had sorely missed Etta, his late wife, ever since she'd
passed away in 1934, the hole she'd left in his life had seemed much
larger after he retired in '55, for then he had begun to spend much
more time in this house they had built together way back before the
First World War. He was seventy-four, but he could have passed for a
well-seasoned fifty-four. The only things that pegged him as an aged
retiree were his work-gnarled, leathery, slightly arthritic, somehow
ancient hands . . . and that ineffable air of loneliness that always
surrounded a man whose social life had been entirely related to the job
that he no longer held."
Halfway through my piece of cake I said, as if out of idle curiosity,
"I'm surprised to see there's so much coal mining still going on in
these hills."
He said, "Oh, yessir, they go down deep and haul it out cause I guess
there's a powerful number of folks who just can't afford to switch to
oil."
"I don't know . . . I figured the coal deposits in this part of the
state had been pretty much exhausted. Besides, a lot of coal mining
these days is done in flatter terrain, especially out west, where they
strip it out instead of digging tunnels.
Cheaper to strip it."
"They still tunnel here," Horton said.
"Must be pretty well managed," Rya said. "They must somehow keep their
overhead low. I mean, we noticed how new the coal company trucks
look."
"Those Lightning Company trucks," I said. "Peterbilts.
Real spiffy and brand-new."
"Yessir, that's the only mine in these parts any more, so I suppose
they do well 'cause there ain't no competition nearabouts." Talking
about the coal company seemed to make him nervous. Or maybe I was just
imagining his uneasiness, transferring my own anxiety to him.
I was about to press the subject further, but Horton called his
dog-Growler was its name-over from the corner to give it a piece of the
walnut cake, and the subject changed to the virtues of mongrels versus
purebred canines. Growler was a mongrel, a medium-sized black dog with
brown markings along his flanks and around both eyes, of complicated
and unguessable heritage. He was called Growler because he was an
unusually well behaved and silent dog, loath to bark; he expressed
anger or wariness with a low, menacing growl, and pleasure with a much
softer growl accompanied by a lot of tail wagging.
Growler had given Rya and me a close and extended inspection when we'd
first entered, and at last he had deemed us acceptable. That was
relatively ordinary doggie behavior.
But what was extraordinary was the way Horton Bluett surreptitiously
studied the dog as it studied us; he seemed to place considerable
importance on Growler's opinion, as if we would not be fully trusted
and welcome until we had received the clown-faced mongrel's approval.
Now Growler finished his piece of cake and, licking his chops, went to
Rya for some petting, then came to me. He seemed to know that the
conversation was about him and that in everyone's opinion he was far
superior to all those fancier breeds with their American Kennel Club.papers.
Later an opportunity arose for me to turn the subject back to the
Lightning Coal Company, and I commented on the oddness of the corporate
name and logo.
"Odd?" Horton said, frowning. "Don't seem odd to me.
Both coal and lightning are forms of energy, you see. And coal's
black-sort of black lightning. Makes sense, don't it?"
I had not thought of it in that way, and it did make sense.
However, I knew the symbol-white sky, dark lightning had a deeper
significance than that, for I had seen it as the focal point of an
altar. To the demonkind it was an object of reverence and a sign of
profound importance, mystical and powerful, though, of course, I could
not expect Horton to know that it was more than just a corporate logo.
Again I sensed that the subject of the Lightning Coal Company made him
nervous. He quickly turned the conversation in an entirely new
direction, as if to forestall further questions in that sensitive area.
For a moment, as he raised his coffee to his lips, his hands shook, and
the brew slopped over the edge of the cup. Maybe it was only a brief
attack of palsy or another infirmity related to his age. Maybe that
tremble meant nothing. Maybe.
Half an hour later, as Rya and I drove away from the Bluett house, with
Horton and Growler watching us from the porch, she said, "He's a nice
man."
"Yes."
"A good man."
" Yes.
"But .
"Yes?"
"He's got secrets."
"What sort of secrets?" I asked.
"I don't know. But even when he appears to be just a straight@g,
hospitable country elder, he's hiding something. And ...
well, I think he's afraid of the Lightning Coal Company."
Ghosts.
We were as ghosts, haunting the Mountainside, striving to be as silent
as spirits. Our ghostly raiments included insulated white ski pants,
white ski jackets with hoods, and white gloves. We struggled through
knee-deep snow across open hills as if making arduous passage out of
the land of the dead, walked phantomlike along a narrow ravine that
marked the course of a frozen stream, glided stealthily through the
cold shadows of the forest. Willing ourselves to be incorporeal, we
nevertheless left footprints in the snow and occasionally brushed
against the evergreen branches, sending a brittle, bristly sound
echoing through the endless corridors of trees.
We had parked the car along the county road and had gone nearly three
miles overland before, by a roundabout route, we had come to the
formidable fence that defined the perimeter of the Lightning Coal
Company's property. That afternoon we intended only to
reconnoiter-study the main administration buildings, get an idea of the
amount of traffic coming and going from the mine, and find a breach in
the fence through which we could easily enter on the following day.
However, upon encountering the fence atop a wide ridge called Old
broad-top, I wondered if it could be breached at all, let alone easily.
That eight-foot-high bulwark was constructed of ten-foot-long sections
of sturdy chain link strung between iron posts that had been solidly
sunk in concrete.
The top was crowned with spirals of the nastiest barbed wire I had ever.seen; although ice sheathed some of the cutting edges, anyone
attempting to cross would be snared in a hundred places and, in tearing
loose, would leave behind pieces of himself. Tree limbs had been sawn
off, so none overhung the chain link. At this time of year you could
not dig under the fence, either, for the ground was frozen rockhard;
and I suspected that, even in warmer months, digging would be hampered
by some unseen barrier that extended into the ground for at least a few
feet.
"this isn't just a property-line fence," Rya whispered.
"This is a full-fledged defensive barrier, a damned ramparts " "Yeah."
I spoke as softly as she had spoken. "If it encircles the thousands of
acres the company owns, the fence must be at least several miles long.
A thing like this . . . hell, it'd cost a fortune."
"No point erecting it just to keep occasional trespassers off mining
land."
"No. "They've got something else in there, something they're
determined to protect."
We had approached the fence from the woods, but a clearing lay on the
far side of it. In the snow blanketing that open, sloped field we saw
many footprints paralleling the barrier.
Pointing to the tracks, I lowered my voice further and said, "Looks
like they even run regular patrols along the perimeter.
And I wouldn't doubt the guards are armed. We'll have to be careful,
keep our eyes and ears open."
We drew the cloaks of ghosthood around ourselves again and stole
southward to haunt other parts of the forest, staying within sight of
the fence but far enough back to avoid being seen by guards before we
spotted them. We were heading for the southern quarter of Old
broad-top because from there we ought to be able to look down on the
mining company's headquarters. We had puzzled out the path we needed
to take, using a detailed terrain map of the county that we had bought
at a sporting-goods store that catered to weekend hikers and campers.
Earlier, on the county route, driving past the strangely secluded
entrance to Lightning Coal, we had seen nothing of the offices. Hills
and trees and distance hid the buildings.
From the road nothing was visible except a gate and a little
guardhouse, where all approaching vehicles were required to stop and
submit to inspection before being permitted to proceed. The security
seemed ridiculously stringent for a coal mining operation, and I
wondered what explanations they gave for so completely walling out the
rest of the world.
We had seen two cars at the gate, and both had been occupied by
goblins. The guard was a goblin, as well.
Now, as we trekked southward along the ridge top, the forest became a
greater obstacle than it had been theretofore.
In these heights, the deciduous trees-hardwoods such as oaks and
maples-had given way to evergreens. The farther we walked, the more
spruce we saw, and pines of many varieties; they grew closer together
than before, as if we were witnessing the forest receding toward a
primeval state. The boughs were often interlaced and grown so low that
we had to stoop or even-in several places-crawl on our hands and knees
beneath living, needled portcullises that were lowered nearly to the
ground.
Underfoot, dead and broken branches thrust up like spikes, requiring
caution and promising impalement. In many places there was little
underbrush because there was inadequate light to nurture it, but where
enough light reached through the evergreen canopy, the lower growth.seemed half comprised of brambles and briars bristling with thorns as
sharp-edged as razors and as thick as the tips of stilettos.
In time, when the top of the ridge narrowed dramatically near its
southernmost point, we approached the fence again.
Crouched against the chain link, we were able to look down into a small
valley about four hundred yards wide and-we knew from our terrain map-a
mile and a half long. Below, there were none of the evergreens that
commanded the heights.
Instead stripped-bare hardwoods reached skyward in spiky black
profusion like thousands of immense fossilized spiders lying on their
backs with petrified legs poking up every which way. From the county
route and the main gate that lay half a mile to the south, a two-lane
company road came out of the trees into a large clearing that had been
carved out to accommodate the administration buildings, equipment
garages, and repair shops of the Lightning Coal Company. The road
continued on the other side of the clearing, disappearing into the
trees again, leading toward the mine head that lay a mile away, at the
northern end of the valley.
The nineteenth-century one- and two-story buildings were all of stone
that had been darkened by the years, by coal dust blown off passing
trucks, and by the exhaust fumes of machinery. Now, at fast glance,
they almost appeared to have been constructed of coal. The windows
were narrow, and some were barred, and the glow of fluorescent lights
beyond the dirty glass lent no warmth to those mean panes. The slate
roof and the exaggeratedly heavy lintels over the windows and
doorway-even over the larger spans of the garage door-gave the
structures a beetle-browed and scowling demeanor.
Side by side, our smoking breath combining in the preternaturally still
air, Rya and I stared down at the coal-company employees with growing
uneasiness. Men and women entered and exited the garages and machine
shops from which came the ceaseless clanging-clattering-grinding noises
of mechanics and craftsmen at work. They all moved briskly, as if
filled with energy and purpose, as if they were, to a man, reluctant to
give their employers less than a hundred and ten percent in return for
their salaries. There were no loiterers, no dawdlers, no one lingering
in the crisp air to enjoy a cigarette before returning to his labors
inside. Even the men in suits and ties-presumably executives and other
white-collar workers who might ordinarily be expected to proceed more
slowly, secure in their higher positions-moved between their cars and
the gloomy administration buildings without delay, apparently eager to
get on with their duties.
Every one of them was a goblin. Even at that distance I had no doubt
of their membership in that demonic fraternity.
Rya also perceived their true nature. Soffly: "If Yontsdown's a
nesting place for them, then this is the nest within the nest."
"A damned hive," I said. "All of them buzzing around like so many
industrious bees."
Once in a while a truck laden with coal growled down from the north,
through the leafless trees of the valley, along the road that bisected
the clearing, into the other arm of the forest, heading for the front
gate. Empty trucks came the other way, going to the mine to be
reloaded. The drivers and their partners were all goblins.
"What're they doing here?" Rya wondered.
"Something important .
"But what?"
"Something that's no damn good at all for us and our kind.
And I don't think the focus of it is in those buildings."."Then where? The mine itself?"
"Yeah.
The somber, cloud-filtered light was waning swiftly toward an early
winter dusk.
The wind, absent all day, returned full of vigor, evidently refreshed
by its vacation, whistling through the chain-link fence and humming in
the evergreens.
I said, "We're going to have to come back early tomorrow and go farther
north along the fence, until we get a look at the mine head."
"And you know what follows that," Rya said bleakly.
"Yes."
"We won't see enough, so we'll have to go inside "Probably.
"Underground."
"I suppose so."
"Into the tunnels."
"Well . . ."
"Like the dream."
I said nothing.
She said, "And like the dream, they'll discover we're in there, and
they'll come after us."
Before nightfall could trap us on the ridge, we left the fence and
headed back down toward the county road where we had parked the station
wagon. Darkness seemed to well up from the forest floor, to drip like
sap out of the heavy boughs of spruce and pine, to seep forth from
every tangled clump of brush. By the time we reached open fields and
slopes, the luminescent blanket of snow was brighter than the sky. We
saw our old footprints, which appeared to be wounds in that alabaster
skin.
When we reached the car, snow began to fall. Only flurries now. They
spiraled down out of the steadily darkening heavens, like bits of ash
shaken from charred ceiling beams that had been burned in a long
forgotten, long cooled fire. However, in the extreme heaviness of the
air and in the numbing cold, there was an indescribable but undeniable
omen of storm to come.
During the drive to the house on Apple Lane, the flurries fell
ceaselessly. They were big flakes carried on the erratic currents of a
wind not yet working at full power. On the pavement they formed opaque
veils, and I could almost believe that the black macadam was actually a
hick sheet of glass, that the veils of snow were sheer curtains, and
that we were driving across an immense window, crushing the curtains
under our tires, straining the glass even though it was thick. It was
a window that perhaps separated this world from the next.
At any moment, breaking, it might cast us down into Gehenna.
We parked in the garage and entered the house by the kitchen door. All
was dark and quiet. We switched on lights as we passed through the
rooms, heading upstairs to change clothes, after which we intended to
prepare an early dinner.
But in the master bedroom, sitting in a chair that he had drawn into a
deeply shadowed corner, Horton Bluett was waiting for us.
Growler was with him. I saw the dog's shining eyes a fraction of a
second before I clicked on the lights, too late to stay my hand from
the switch.
Rya gasped.
She and I were both carrying silencer-equipped pistols in our insulated
ski jackets, and I had my knife, but any attempt to use those weapons
would have resulted in instant death for US.
Horton was holding the shotgun that I had bought from Slick Eddy in.Gibtown a few days ago. It was aimed at us, and the spread pattern of
that weapon could take us both out with a single blast, two shots at
most.
Horton had found most of the other things that we had carefully hidden,
which indicated that he had been searching the house most of the
afternoon, while we had been on Old broad-top. Spread on the floor
around him were various items that Slick Eddy had obtained for me: the
automatic rifle, boxes of ammunition, eighty paper-wrapped kilos of
plastic explosive, detonators, vials of sodium pentothal, and the
hypodermic syringes.
Horton's face looked older than it had when we had first seen him
earlier in the day, closer to his own age. He said, "Just who in the
hell are you people?"
26
A Lifetime in Camouflage
At seventy-four, Horton Bluett was not humbled by age and did not fear
the proximity of the grave, so he appeared formidable as he sat there
in the corner with his faithful dog beside him. He was tough and
resilient, a man who dealt uncomplainingly with adversities, who ate
everything life threw at him, spit out what he did not like, and used
the rest to make himself stronger. His voice did not tremble, and his
hand did not shake on the stock or on the trigger guard of the shotgun,
and his eyes did not waver from us. I would have preferred to deal
with almost any man fifty years Horton's junior rather than with him.
"Who?" he repeated. "Who are you folks? Not a couple geology
students working for doctorates. That's goose poop for sure. Who are
you, really, and what're you doing here?
Sit down on the edge of the bed, both of you; sit there facing me, and
keep your hands in your laps, folded in your laps.
That's right. That's good. Don't make no sudden moves, you hear? Now
tell me everything you got to tell."
In spite of the evidently powerful suspicion that had driven him to the
extraordinary step of forced entry, in spite of what he had found
secreted in the house, Horton still liked us. He was extremely wary,
intensely curious about our motives, but he did not feel that a
friendly relationship was yet ruled out by what he had uncovered. I
sensed that much, and considering the circumstances, I was surprised by
the relatively benign state of mind that I perceived in him. What I
sensed was confirmed by the attitude of the dog, Growler, who sat at
attention, alert but not overtly hostile, ungrowling. Horton would
shoot us, yes, if we made a move against him. But he did not want to
do it.
Rya and I told him virtually everything about ourselves and our reasons
for coming to Yontsdown. When we spoke of goblins hiding behind human
masks, genetically engineered soldiers from a lost age, Horton Bluett
blinked and repeatedly said, "By God." Nearly as often he said, "Well,
I'll be a monkey's uncle." He asked pointed questions about some of
the most outlandish parts of our tale-but he never once seemed to doubt
our veracity or to think us mad.
In light of our outrageous story, his imperturbability was rather
unnerving. Country people often pride themselves on a calm, collected
manner, so unlike most city folk. But this was rural unflappability
carried to an extreme.
An hour later, when we had nothing more to reveal, Horton sighed and.put the shotgun on the floor next to -his chair.
Taking his cue from his master, Growler let down his guard too.
Rya and I also relaxed. She had been more tense than I, perhaps
because she could not detect the aura of good intentions and goodwill
that surrounded Horton Bluett. Guarded and cautious goodwill but
goodwill nonetheless.
Horton said, "I could tell you was different from the moment you walked
into my driveway and offered to help with the shoveling."
"How?" Rya asked.
"Smelled it," he said.
I knew at once that he was not speaking figuratively, that he had
indeed smelled a difference in us. I recalled how, when he had first
met us, he'd sniffed and snuffled as if suffering from a cold but had
not blown his nose.
"I can't see 'em clear and easy the way you two see 'em," Horton said,
"but from the time I was a tot, there've been people who smelled wrong
to me. Can't explain it exactly ' It's a little bit like the smell of
very, very old things , ancient things: you know . . . like dust
that's been gathering for hundreds and hundreds of years, undisturbed
in some deep tomb . . . but not actually quite dust. Like staleness
but not quite staleness." He frowned, struggling to find words that
would help us understand. "And there's a bitterness to the smell of
them that's not like the sourness of sweat or any other body odor
you've ever whiffed. Maybe a little like vinegar but not really.
Maybe just a touch like ammonia . . . but, no, not that, either. Some
of them have a subtle odor, just tickles the nostrils, teases-but
others reek. And what that odor says to me-what it's always said to me
ever since I was a tyke-is something like: 'Stay away from this one,
Horton, he's a bad one, a real no-good, watch him, be careful now,
beware, beware."
"Incredible," Rya said.
"It's true," Horton said.
"I believe it," she said.
Now I knew why he had not thought us mad and why he had been able to
accept our story so readily. Our eyes told us the very thing that his
nose told him, so on every fundamental level our story rang true to
him.
I said, "Sounds like you've got some sort of olfactory version of
psychic ability."
Growler said, "Whuff," as if in agreement, then lay down and put his
head on his paws.
"Don't know what you'd call it," Horton said. "All I know is I've had
it my entire life. And early on, I knew I could rely on my smeller
when it told me someone was a nasty bugger. Because no matter how nice
they looked and acted, I could see that most of the people around
them-neighbors, husbands, wives, kids, friends-always seemed to have a
lot tougher time of life than was reasonable. I mean, these ones that
smelled bad . . . shoot, they carried misery with them somehow, not
their own misery but misery for other folks. And a powerful lot of
their friends and relatives died off too young and in violent ways.
Though, of course, you could never point a finger at them and say they
was to be held responsible.
Taking it for granted that she was free to move now, Rya zipped open
her ski jacket and slipped it off.
She said, "But you told us you got a whiff of something different about
us, so you're able to detect more than just goblins." Horton shook his
grizzled head. "Never did until I met you two. Right away I picked up.a peculiar scent about you, something I'd never smelled before,
something almost as strange as when I'm around those ones you call
goblins . . . but different. Hard to describe. Just a bit like the
sharp, pure smell of ozone. You know what I mean . . . ozone, like
after a big thunderstorm, after the lightning, that crisp odor that's
not unpleasant at all. Fresh. A fresh odor that gives you the feeling
there's unseen electricity still in the air and that it's crackling
right clean through you, energizing you, purging all the weariness and
sludge out of you."
Unzipping my own jacket, I said, "Do you get the same scent now as when
you first met us?"
"Sure do." He slowly rubbed his reddish nose with the thumb and
forefinger of one hand. "Fact is, I got it the very moment you opened
the door downstairs and stepped into the house." He grinned suddenly,
proud of his peculiar ability.
"And right away, smelling you, I said to myself, 'Horton, these kids is
different from other folks, but it's not a bad difference." The nose
knows."
On the floor beside Horton's chair, Growler made a grumbling sound deep
in his throat, and his tail swished back and forth across the carpet.
I realized that the unusual affinity of this man for his dog and of the
dog for him-might be related to the fact that in both of them the most
powerful and reliable of the five senses was smell. Strange. Even as
that thought occurred to me, I saw the man move his hand from the arm
of the chair in order to reach down and stroke the dog, and the dog
simultaneously raised its burly head to be petted, at the very instant
the hand began to move. It was as if the dog's need for affection, and
the man's intention of providing same, somehow produced vague odors
that each detected and to which each responded.
Between them existed a sophisticated form of telepathy based not on
thought transferal but upon the production and swift apprehension of
complex scents.
"Your scent," Horton said to Rya and me, "didn't seem to be a sign of
evil, as is the case with the stink of those . . . goblins. But it
worried me 'cause it was different from anything I'd ever smelled
before. Then you started nosing around, prying at me for information
but trying to act casual, asking questions about the Lightning Coal
Company, and that spooked me for sure."
"Why?" Rya asked.
"Because," Horton said, "since the mid-fifties when the old mine owners
were bought out and the name of the place was changed, all the new
Lightning employees I've ever met every 'man-jack-one of them-stinks to
high heaven!
For the past seven or eight years, I figured that was a bad place-that
company, those mines-and I wondered what in tarnation was going on up
there."
"We wonder too," Rya said.
"And we're going to find out," I said.
"Anyway," he said, "I worried that you might be a threat to me, that
you had something nasty in mind for me, so coming here and nosing in
your business was purely self-defense."
Downstairs, we prepared dinner together, using the few groceries we'd
laid in: scrambled eggs, sausages, home fries, whole-wheat toast.
Rya worried about what to feed Growler, who was licking his chops as
the kitchen filled with delicious fragrances.
But Horton said, "Oh, we'll just fix him up a fourth plate, same stuff
as we're having. They say it isn't healthy for a dog to feed him the.same as people get fed. But that's the way I always treated him, and
it don't seem to have done him great harm. Look at him-he could take
on a bobcat and win. Just give him eggs, sausages, home fries-but no
toast. Toast's too dry for him. He likes blackberry or apple or
especially blueberry muffins, though, if they've got plenty of fruit in
em and they're real moist."
"Sorry," Rya said, clearly amused. "No muffins in the pantry."
"Then he'll make do with the other stuff, and I'll treat him to an
oatmeal cookie or something when I take him home."
We put Growler's plate in the corner by the back door, and the rest of
us ate at the kitchen table.
Snow-still flurrying in fluffy flakes that accumulated at only a 'small
fraction of an inch per hour-looped out of the darkness and slid along
the windows. Though the snow was light, the wind was strong, imitating
wolves and trains and cannons in the night.
Over dinner we learned more about Horton Bluett. Because of his
bizarre talent for smelling out the goblins-albeit olfactopathy"-he had
led a relatively safe life, avoiding the demonkind whenever he could,
treating them with great caution when avoidance was impossible. His
wife, Etta, had died in 1934, not at the hands of goblins but from
cancer.
Although she was forty when she passed away and Horton was forty-four,
their marriage had produced no children. His fault, he said, for he
was infertile. His years with his wife had been so good, their
relationship so perfectly intimate, that he never found another woman
who measured up or for whom he was willing to dim his shining memory of
Etta. In the subsequent three decades he had shared his life primarily
with three dogs, of which Growler was the latest.
Looking fondly at the mongrel where it stood licking its plate clean,
Horton said, "On the one hand, I hope my sorry bones give out before
his, 'cause it's going to be hard on me to bury him if it comes to
that. It was terrible hard with the other two-Jeepers and Romper-but
it's going to be even worse with Growler 'cause he's been the best dog
there ever was." Growler looked up from his plate and cocked his head
at his master, as if he knew he had just been complimented.
"On the other hand, I'd hate to die afore him and leave him to the
mercy of the world. He deserves to be kept comfy all his days."
As Horton stared affectionately at his dog, Rya looked at me and I at
her, and I knew she was thinking much the same thing that I was: Horton
Bluett was not merely sweet but also uncommonly resilient and
self-reliant. All his long life he had been aware that the world was
full of people bent on doing harm to others, had realized that Evil
with a capital E stalked the world in very real and fleshy forms, yet
he had not grown paranoid and had not become a humorless recluse. The
cruelest trick of nature had stolen his beloved wife from him, yet he
had not grown bitter. For the last thirty years, he'd been alone but
for his dogs, yet he had not become eccentric as did most people whose
primary relationships were with their pets.
He was a heartening example of the strength and determination and sheer
granite durability of humanity. In spite of thousands of years of
suffering at the hands of the goblins, our kind could still produce
individuals as admirable as Mr. Horton Bluett. Such people were a
good argument for our value as a species.
"So," he said, turning his attention from Growler to us, "Tomorrow,"
Rya said, "we'll go back into the hills and follow the Lightning Coal
Company's fence until we find a place from which we can see the mine
entrance, see what's happening there." what will your next step be?"."Sorry to tell you no such vantage point exists," Horton said as he
mopped up a final puddle of egg yolk with his last wedge of toast.
"Not along the perimeter, anyway. I think maybe that's no accident,
either. I think maybe they made sure no one could see the entrances to
the mine from off their property.
"You Sound as if you've gone looking," I said.
"I have," he said.
"When was that?"
"Oh, I guess it was about a year and a half after the new owners-the
goblins, as you call 'em-took over the company, changed its name, then
went and put up that crazy damn fence. By then I'd begun to notice
that a lot of good people who'd worked there all their lives were
gradually being put to pasture ahead of their time, pensioned off
early.
Real generous pensions, though, so as not to upset the unions.
And everyone being hired on, down to the lowliest worker, seemed to be
the kind who have the stink about them. That was a startlement to me
because, of course, it seemed to mean their kind could recognize one
another, that they knew they was very different from my kind of people,
and that they sometimes got together in groups to plan their devilment.
Naturally, living here, I wanted to know what devilment they was
planning at the Lightning Coal Company. So I went up to have a look,
walked the whole length of that damn fence. in the end I couldn't see
nothing, and I didn't want to risk going over the fence to poke around
on the other side. Like I told you, I always been wary of them, eager
to keep my distance.
Never did think it was wise to associate with them, so it sure as the
dickens wouldn't be wise to climb over their fence."
Rya seemed amazed. She put down her fork and said, "So what'd you do?
Just put your curiosity on hold?"
'Yep.
"That easy?"
"Wasn't easy," Horton said. "But we've all heard what killed the cat,
haven't we?"
"Turning your back on such a mystery . . . that took willpower," I
said.
"No such a thing," he said. "Fear is all it took. I was scared off.
Just plain scared off."
"You aren't a man who scares easily or often," I said.
"Don't go romanticizing me, young fella. I'm no glamorous old mountain
man. I told you true-all my life I been leary of them, scared of them.
So I've tucked my head down and done my best to keep them from taking
notice of me.
You might say I've lived a lifetime in camouflage, trying to be
invisible, so I'm not suddenly going to put on bright red pants and
start waving my arms for attention. I'm cautious, which is why I've
lived to be a grumpy old codger with my own teeth and all my wits about
me."
Growler had curled up on his side in the corner after licking his plate
clean, and he had seemed to be settling in for a nap. However, he
suddenly rose and padded to a window.
He put his forepaws up on the sill and pressed his black nose to the
cold glass, staring out. Maybe he was only weighing the advantages and
disadvantages of going into that bitter night to relieve his bladder.
Or maybe something out there had attracted his attention.
Though I had no sense of imminent danger, I decided it would be prudent
to be alert for sounds other than those caused by the wind-and to be.prepared to move fast.
Rya pushed her plate aside, picked up her bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon,
took a swallow, and said, "Horton, how on earth did the new owners of
the mine explain the fence and the other security measures they
installed?"
He folded his big-knuckled, work-scarred hands around his own bottle of
beer. "Well, before the original owners had to put the company up for
sale, there was three deaths on that land in a single year. Thousands
of acres belong to the company, and some of it's been over-mined too
near the surface. Which causes certain problems. Like sinkholes,
which is where the upper levels of the earth slowly-or sometimes
quickly-settle into the cavity the mines left far down below.
And there's some old shafts, gone rotten, that can cave in under a
man's feet and just swallow him up. The ground opens-gulp-like a trout
taking a fly."
Growler finally got down from the window and padded back to the corner,
where he curled up again.
The wind sang at the windows, whistled in the eaves, and did a dance on
the roof. Nothing threatening in any of that.
But I remained alert for unusual sounds.
Shifting his large, bony frame in the kitchen chair, Horton continued:
"Anyway, a guy named MacFarland, deer hunting on mining-company land,
was unlucky enough to fall through the roof of an old abandoned tunnel.
Broke both his legs, they said later. Called for help, must've
screamed his head off, but nobody heard him. By the time the search
party found him, he was two or three days dead. Few months before
that, two local boys, both about fourteen, went up there exploring, as
boys'll do, and the same damn thing happened to them. Fell through the
roof of an old tunnel. One broke an arm, the other an ankle, and
though they evidently tried hard to scrabble back up to the surface,
they never made it, never even come close. Searchers found them dead.
So then the hunter's wife and the boys' parents sued the mining
company, and there was no question they was going to win and win big.
The owners decided to make out-of-court settlements, which they did,
though to come up with the money, they had to sell off their holdings."
Rya said, "And they sold out to a partnership comprised of Jensen
Orkenwold, Anson Corday-who owns the newspaper and Mayor Spectorsky."
"Well, he wasn't mayor then, though that's what he become, sure
enough," Horton said. "And all three of those you named have the
goblin stink about them."
"Which the original owners did not," I ventured.
"Right you are," Horton said. "The original owners-well, they was men,
nothing else, neither worse nor better than most, certainly not the
stinking kind. But my point i"at's why the fence was put up. The new
owners said they didn't want to risk those kind of lawsuits. And
though some think they went totally overboard on that fence, most folks
see it as a welcome sign of social responsibility."
Rya looked at me, and her blue eyes were shaded by both anger and pity.
"The hunter . . . the two boys . . . not accidents."
"Not likely," I said.
"Murdered," she continued. "Part of a scheme to break the owners of
the mine and force them to sell, so the goblins could have it for . .
. for whatever they're planning.
"Very likely," I said.
Horton Bluett blinked at Rya, at me, at Growler, at the bottle of beer
in his hands, and then he shuddered as if all that blinking had
triggered a sympathetic shivering in his muscles and bones. "I never.thought the boys, the hunter . . . Well, hell's bells, the hunter was
Frank Tyner, and I knew him, and it never occurred to me that maybe he
was murdered. Not even later, after the out-of-court settlements, when
I noticed that the people who took over the mines was all of the bad
sort. Now that you lay it out, it makes perfect sense. Why didn't I
see it before? Am I getting dim-witted in my golden years?"
"No," Rya assured him. "Not dim-witted in the least.
You just didn't see it because you've made yourself into an extremely
cautious man, yet also a moral man, so if you'd suspected murder, you'd
have felt obligated to do something about it. Actually you probably
did suspect the truth, but on a deep subconscious level, and never
allowed the thought to percolate into your conscious mind because then
you'd have to act on it. And acting on it would have done nothing to
help the dead-while insuring your own murder."
I said, "Or maybe you didn't suspect anything because, after all,
Horton, you can't see the evil of these creatures, as we can. Their
alienness is apparent to you but less emphatic than it is to us. And
without our special sight you couldn't see how organized they are, how
purposeful and relentless."
"Still," he said, "I think I should've suspected. Makes me jumpy-cat
nervous that I didn't."
I got fresh beers from the refrigerator, popped the caps off, and put
the bottles on the table. Although snow flurries softly brushed the
windows, and although the fluting wind played a chilling medley, we
were all grateful for the cold Pabst.
For a while no one spoke.
Each of us communed with his own thoughts.
Growler sneezed and shook himself, jangling the tags on his collar, and
put his head down again.
I thought the dog had been dozing, but though resting, he was still
alert.
In time Horton Bluett said, "You're determined to have a close look at
the mine."
"Yes," I said, and Rya said, "Yes."
"Can't be talked out of it?" Horton said.
"No," Rya said, and I said, "No."
"Can't be taught caution at your age," he said.
We agreed that we were infected with the 'foolishness of youth.
"Well, then," Horton said, "I guess I can help a bit.
Guess I should better, or otherwise they'll just catch you blundering
around inside the fence and have sport with you."
"Help?" I said. "How?"
He took a deep breath, and his clear, dark eyes appeared to grow even
clearer with his resolution. "You don't have to bother trying to get a
peek at the mine entrance or at the equipment-forget that stuff.
Probably wouldn't see anything, worthwhile, anyway. I figure the
important thing-whatever they're hiding up there-are deep inside the
mines, underground."
"I figure too," I said, "but-" Raising one hand to cut me off, he said,
"I can show you a way to sneak into the place, through all their
security, into the heart of the Lightning Company's main working
shafts. You can see firsthand, up close, what they're doing. I don't
advise it any more than I'd advise putting your bare hands against a
buzzsaw. I think you're both too damn spunky for your own good, too
caught up in the romance of what you believe to be a noble cause, too
quick to decide you can't live with yourselves if you back off, too
crazy-eager to override those little engines of self-preservation.ticking over inside you." Rya and I started to speak at once.
Again he silenced us by raising one of his big, leathery hands. "Don't
get me wrong. I admire you for it. Sort of the way you might admire a
damn fool who goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel. You know he's going
to have no effect whatsoever on the Falls, while it's real likely to
have a drastic effect on him, but he does it 'cause he sees a
challenge.
Which is one of the things that makes us different from the lower
animals: our interest in meeting challenges, beating the odds, even if
the odds are so high we can't beat 'em, and even if beating them don't
accomplish anything. It's like raising a fist and shaking it at the
sky and threatening God if He doesn't soon make some changes in
creation and give us a better break. Stupid maybe, and maybe
pointless-but brave and somehow satisfying."
While we finished our second beers, Horton refused to tell us how he
would get us into the Lightning Coal Company. He said it was a waste
of time to lay it all out for us now because in the morning he would
have to show us, anyway. He would only say that we should be ready to
move out at dawn, when he would return for us.
"Listen," I said, "we don't want to get you involved so deep that
you're sucked down with us."
"Sounds like you're positive of being sucked down."
"Well, if we are, I don't want to be responsible for getting you caught
in the whirlpool."
"Don't worry, Slim," he said. "How often I got to tell you? I wear
caution like a suit of clothes."
At nine-forty he left, declining our repeated offer of a ride home. He
had walked to our rented house so he would not have a car to hide when
he arrived. Now he'd walk home.
And he steadfastly insisted that he was looking forward to that "little
stroll."
"It's more than a stroll," I said. "It's a fair piece to go, and at
night, in this cold-" "But Growler's looking forward to it," Horton
said, "and I just wouldn't want to disappoint him."
Indeed the dog seemed eager to get out into the cold night.
He had gotten up and hurried to the door as soon as Horton had risen
from the chair. He wagged his tail and growled with pleasure. Perhaps
it was not the brisk night or the walk that he anticipated with so much
delight; perhaps, after sharing his beloved master with us for an
evening, he was pleased by the prospect of having Horton to himself.
Standing in the open door, pulling on his gloves while Rya and I
huddled together in the chilly draft that swept in past him, Horton
peered out at the lazily swirling snowflakes and said, "Sky's like a
boil straining to bust itself. You can feel the pressure in the air.
When it lets go, there'll be a true blizzard, sure enough. Late in the
year, last snow of the season-but a doozy."
"When?" I asked.
He hesitated as if consulting his aged joints for their best
meteorological opinion. "Soon but not real soon. It'll flurry off and
on all night and not put down half an inch by daybreak. After that .
. . it'll come, a big storm, sometime before noon tomorrow."
He thanked us for dinner and for the beer, as if we'd had an ordinary
neighborly evening together. Then he took Growler with him into the
prestorm darkness. In seconds he was gone from sight.
As I closed the door, Rya said, "He's something, huh?"
"Something," I agreed.
Later, in bed with the lights off, she said, "It's coming true, you.know. The dream."
"Yeah."
"We're going into the mines tomorrow."
"You want to cancel?" I asked. "We can just go home to Gibtown.
"Is that what you want?" she asked.
I hesitated. Then: "No."
"Me neither."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure. Just . . . hold me," she said.
I held her.
She held me.
Destiny held us both. Its grip was firm-.
27
The Doorway to Hell In the morning, just before dawn, snow flurries
still fell in fits and starts, and the pending storm seemed to be
clogged in the lowering sky.
Daybreak came with reluctance too. A feeble thread of wan gray light
appeared along the irregularly crenelated mountains that formed high
ramparts to the east. Slowly other dull threads were added by the loom
of dawn, barely brighter than the blackness across which they were
being woven. By the time Horton Bluett arrived in his four-wheel-drive
Dodge pickup; the fragile fabric of the new day was still so delicate
that it seemed as if it might tear apart and blow away in the wind,
leaving the world in perpetual darkness.
He did not bring Growler with him. I missed the dog. So did Horton.
Without Growler the old man seemed somehow . . .incomplete.
All three of us fit comfortably in the cab of the truck, Rya between
Horton and me. We had room at our feet for the two backpacks that were
crammed full of gear, including forty of the eighty kilos of plastic
explosives. There was room, as well, for our guns.
I did not know if we would actually gain entrance to the mines, as
Horton assured us we would. And even if we did get inside, we would
most likely find things in there that would require a secret exit,
stealthy withdrawal to give us time to assimilate discoveries and plan
our next step. The chances of our needing the explosives today did not
seem great. However, based on past experience with the goblins, I
intended to be prepared for the worst.
The pickup's headlights tunneled through the coal-black flesh of the
recalcitrant night. We followed one county route, then another, up
into narrow mountain valleys, where the equivocating dawn had not yet
reached even one dim, glimmering finger.
Snowflakes as big as half-dollars spun through the headlights. Only
flurries. Modest treasures of them stirred across the pavement like
coins sliding across a table.
"Man and boy and baby," Horton said as he drove, "I've lived here all
my life, birthed by a midwife in my folks' little house right up here
in these hills. That was back in 1890, which probably seems so long
ago to you that you're wondering if there was still dinosaurs in them
days. Anyway, I grew up here, learned this land, got to know the
hills, fields, woods, ridges, and ravines as well as I've ever known my
own face in a mirror. They been mining these mountains since back in
the 1830s, and there's abandoned shafts, some sealed up and some not,
all over the place. Fact is, some mines connect up with others, and
underground there's something of a maze. As a boy, I was a great
spelunker. Loved caves, old mines. Intrepid, I was. Maybe I was.intrepid about exploring caves because I'd already smelled out all the
bad people-the goblins-around about, had already learned that I had to
be cautious out in the wide world, cautious in the rest of my life, so
I was more or less forced to satisfy the usual boyish urge for
adventure in solitary pursuits, where I didn't have to trust anybody
but myself.
Now of course it's downright dumb to go cave haunting alone. Too much
can go wrong. It's a buddy sport if there ever was one. But I never
laid a claim to genius, and as a kid I didn't even have my full share
of common sense, so I went underground all the time, became a regular
mine rat. Now maybe it all comes in handy.
I can point you a way into the mountain through abandoned mines dug in
the 1840s, which connect up with mines from the early part of this
century, which in turn eventually snake all the way into some of the
narrower side tunnels of the Lightning digs. Dangerous as hell, you
understand. Reckless.
Nothing I'd recommend for sane folks, but then, you're mad.
Mad for revenge, mad for justice, mad just to do something." Horton
swung the truck off the second county road, onto a dirt lane that was
plowed although occasionally obstructed by new drifts. From there we
turned onto a less well cleared but still passable lane, then drove
overland across an up-sloping field that would not have been negotiable
even to a four-wheel-drive vehicle if the wind had not conspired to
sweep most of the snow away and pile it up at the line of trees.
He parked at the top of the hill, as close to the trees as he could
get. "We go on foot from here."
I took the heaviest backpack, and Rya took the other, which was not
exactly light. We each carried a loaded revolver and a
silencer-equipped pistol; the former were worn in shoulder holsters
under our ski jackets, while the latter were kept in deep, open pockets
in our white, quilted, insulated pants. I also carried the shotgun,
and Rya carried the automatic rifle.
Though decidedly well armed, I still felt like David carrying a
pathetic little slingshot and scurrying nervously forward into
Goliath's shadow.
Night had finally relented, and dawn had found the courage to exert
itself. Shadows were everywhere still deep, lingering, and the
storm-choked sky of day was not dramatically brighter than it had been
at night; nevertheless, Sunday was fully upon us at last.
Suddenly I remembered that I had not yet telephoned Joel Tuck to-tell
him that Cathy Osborn, ex-professor of literature at Barnard, would be
arriving on his doorstep, seeking shelter and friendship and guidance,
perhaps as early as Tuesday or Wednesday. I was annoyed with myself
but only briefly. I still had plenty of time to call Joel before Cathy
rang his door bell-as long as nothing happened to us in the mines.
Horton Bluett had brought a canvas duffel bag with a drawstring top.
He hefted it out of the bed of the pickup and dragged it after himself
as he kicked through the drifted snow at the edge of the woods.
Something clattered softly inside the canvas. Stopping just beyond the
perimeter of the forest, he slipped one arm into the bag. He withdrew
a spool of red ribbon, cut a length of it with a very sharp penknife,
and tied it around a tree at eye level. "So you can find your way back
on your own, " he said. He quickly led us onto a winding deer trail
where no underbrush and only a few tree branches interfered with our
progress. Every thirty or forty yards he stopped to tie another length
of red ribbon around another tree, and I noticed that you could stand
at any marker and see the one that he had left before it..We went downward on the deer trail to a long abandoned dirt road that
cut through the low-lying part of forest, and we followed that for a
while. Forty minutes' after we had set out, at the bottom of a broad
ravine, Horton led us to a long, treeless area for the service of which
the road had apparently been constructed. There the land was badly
scarred. Part of the face of the ravine wall had been sheared off, and
other parts of it looked chewed. A large, horizontal mine bore pierced
the heart of the looming ridge. The entrance was only half hidden by
an avalanche that had come down so long ago that silt had filled in the
spaces between the stones; good sized trees had grown up with their
roots webbed through the jumbled rockfalls Having stepped around
strangely bent and gnarled trees, around the wing of fallen rock, and
into the horizontal shaft, Horton paused and withdrew three
high-powered flashlights from the duffel bag. He kept one, gave the
others to Rya and me. He shone the beam of his light over the ceiling,
walls, and floor of the tunnel into which we had come.
The ceiling was only a foot above my head, and I had the crazy notion
that the uneven walls of rock-arduously carved out with picks and
chisels and shovels and blasting powder and oceans of sweat in another
century-were slowly closing in. They were lightly veined with coal and
with what might have been milk-pale quartz. Massive, tar-coated
support timhers were evenly spaced along both walls and across the
ceiling as if they were the ribs inside the carcass of a whale.
Though massive, they were in poor condition, cracked and sagging,
splintered, crusted in some places with fungus, probably half hollowed
out by rot, and some of the angle braces were missing. I had the
feeling that if I leaned against the wrong beam, the roof would come
down on me in an instant.
"This here was probably one of the first mines in the county," Horton
said. "They worked it by hand for the most part and hauled out the
coal cars with mules. The iron rails were removed to some other shaft
when this one played out, but here and there you'll stumble across
what's left of some of the ties sunk halfway in the floor."
Looking up at the moldering timbers, Rya said, "Is this safe ?
"Is anything?" Horton asked. He squinted at the rotting wood and at
the moist, seeping walls, and he said, "Actually this here's as bad as
it gets because you'll be moving from older to newer mines as you go,
though if you're wise, you'll step careful all the way and not rest no
weight on any of the supports. Even in the newer shafts-say, those
that're only a decade or two old-well . . . a mine's just a void,
really, and you know what they say about nature's tendency to want to
fill a void."
From his duffel bag he brought forth two hard hats and gave them to us
with the admonition that they must be worn at all times.
"What about you?" I asked as I slipped the hood of my jacket off my
head and put on the metal helmet.
"I could only lay my hands on two," he said. "And since I'm just going
a short ways with you, I'll be fine without.
Come along."
We followed him deeper into the earth.
In the first few yards of the shaft, piles of leaves had blown in on
dry autumn days and had drifted against the walls where they had been
slowly saturated by seepage and had compacted into dense masses under
their own wet weight. Near the entrance, where winter's chilly touch
still reached, the moldering leaves and the fungi on the old timbers
were frozen and odorless. Farther back, however, the temperature
climbed well above freezing, and a foul odor repeatedly rose and.subsided as we advanced.
Horton led us around a corner, into an intersecting tunnel that was
much roomier than the first, its width in part dictated by the rich
vein of coal that had occupied the space. He stopped at once and took
an aerosol can of paint from his canvas bag. He shook the can
vigorously; the hard rattle of the ball-type agitator echoed off the
walls. He sprayed a white arrow on the rock, pointing toward the
direction from which we'd come, though we were only one turn away from
the exit and could not possibly get lost here.
He was a careful man.
Impressed by his caution and emulating it, Rya and I followed him a
hundred yards along that tunnel (two more white arrows), turned into a
shorter but even wider corridor
(fourth arrow), and went fifty yards farther, where we finally stopped
at a vertical shaft (fifth arrow) that led down into the lower bowels
of the mountain. That hole was just a black square of a subtly
different shade than the black floor of the tunnel and was virtually
invisible until Horton stopped at the edge and shone his light down.
Without him, I might have blundered straight into the shaft, dropping
to the chamber below and breaking my neck in the fall."
Raising his flashlight from the vertical shaft, he directed the beam
toward the end of the tunnel in which we stood. The corridor appeared
to open into a man-made room of considerable size. "That's where the
vein of coal just petered out, but I guess they had reason to suspect
it turned downward and that a wide swath of it could be profitably dug
on a lower level. Anyway, they sank this vertical shaft about forty
feet, then went horizontal again. Not much farther now before I set
you loose, all on your own."
After warning us that the iron ladder rungs embedded in the wall of the
vertical shaft were old and untrustworthy, he switched off his
flashlight and descended into the gloom. Rya slung the shotgun over
her shoulder and went where Horton had gone. I brought up the rear.
Downward bound, with the ancient rungs wobbling in their sockets as I
put my weight on them, I began to receive clairvoyant images from the
long abandoned mine. Two or possibly three men had died here before
the middle of the past century, and their deaths had not been painless.
However, I sensed only ordinary mining accidents, nothing sinister.
This had not been a locus of goblin-engineered suffering.
Four stories below the first level I entered another horizontal tunnel.
Horton and Rya were waiting for me, eerily illuminated by the beams of
their flashlights, which lay on the floor.
In these lower reaches of the mine the heavy tar-coated support timbers
were virtually as old as those on the previous level, but they were in
somewhat better shape. Not good. Not reassuring. But at least the
walls weren't as damp as those in the higher tunnels, and the wood was
not crusted with mold and fungus.
I was suddenly struck by how quiet it was in this deep vault. The
silence was so heavy that it had weight; I could feel the cool,
insistent pressure of it against my face and against the bared skin of
my hands. Church-quiet. Graveyardquiet. Tomb-quiet.
Breaking that silence, Horton revealed the contents of the big duffel
bag, which he was turning over to us. In addition to the red ribbon
that we no longer required, there were two cans of white spray paint, a
fourth flashlight, plastic-wrapped packs of spare batteries, a couple
of candles, and two boxes of weatherproof matches.
"If you ever want to find your way back out of this dismal hole," he.said, "you'll use the spray paint just like I showed you." He employed
one can now to draw an arrow on the wall; it pointed up to the vertical
shaft over our heads.
Rya took the paint when he offered it. "That'll be my job.
Horton said, "Maybe you think the candles are here in case the
flashlights give out, but they're not. You got enough spare batteries
to cover that. What the candles are for is if maybe you get lost or if
there's-God forbid-a cave-in behind you, cutting off the way out. What
you do then is you light a candle and really study the bend in the
flame, watch where the smoke goes. If there's a draft, the flame and
the smoke will seek it, and if there's a draft, that means there's
bound to be an outlet to the surface, which may just be big enough for
you to squirm through. Got it?"
"Got it," I said.
He had also brought food for us: two thermos bottles full of orange
juice, several sandwiches, and half a dozen candy bars.
"You got a full day of spelunking ahead of you, even if you just work
into the Lightning Company shafts and take a quick peek and head
straight back the way you come. Of course, I suspect you'll do more
than that. So it's likely, even if all goes well, that you won't be
coming out until sometime tomorrow. You'll need to eat."
"You're a sweetheart," Rya said sincerely. "You put all this stuff
together last night . . . and I bet that didn't leave much time for
sleep."
"When you get to be seventy-four," he, said, "you don't sleep much,
anyway, 'cause it seems like such a waste of what time you got left."
He was embarrassed by the loving tone of Rya's voice. "Heck, I'll be
up and out of here and all the way home in an hour, so I can nap then
if I've a mind to.
I said, "You told us to use the candles in case there's a cave-in or we
get lost. But without you to guide us, we'll be lost in about one
minute flat."
"Not with this, you won't," he said, producing a map from one of his
coat pockets. "Drawed it from memory, but I got a memory like a steel
trap, so I don't suspect there's any wrongness in it."
He hunkered down, and we did the same, and he spread the map out on the
floor between us, picking up a flashlight and tilting the beam down on
his handiwork. It looked like one of those maze puzzles in the Sunday
newspaper's comics pages.
Worse, it was continued on the other side of the paper where the rest
of the maze was, if anything, even more complex.
"At least half the way," Horton said, "you can talk like we're talking
now, with no fear of it carrying into shafts where the goblins might be
working. But this here red mark . .. that's the spot where I think
maybe you'd better go quiet, whisper to each other and only when you
have to.
Sounds do carry a fair piece along these tunnels."
Looking at the twists and turns of the maze, I said, "One thing's for
sure-we'll need both cans of paint."
Rya said, "Horton, are you certain about all the details of what you've
drawn here?"
"Yep."
"I mean, well, maybe you did spend most of your boyhood exploring these
old shafts, but that was a long time ago.
What-sixty years?"
He cleared his throat and seemed to be embarrassed again.
"Oh, well, wasn't all that long ago." He kept his eyes focused on the.map. "See, after my Etta died of cancer, I was sort of adrift, lost,
and I was full of all this terrible tension, the tension of loneliness
and of not knowing where my life was going. I didn't see how to work
it off, how to ease my mind and spirit, and still the tension built and
built, and I said to myself, 'Horton, by God, if you don't soon find
something to fill the hours, you're going to wind up in a rubber room,'
and that was when I remembered how much peace and solace I'd gotten out
of spelunking when I was a kid. So I took it up again. That was back
in '34, and I prowled these here mines and a lot of natural caves every
weekend for the better part of eighteen months. And just nine years
ago, when I reached mandatory retirement age, I was faced with a
similar situation, so I went spelunking again. Crazy thing for a man
my age, but I kept it up for almost a year and a half before I finally
decided I didn't need it no more. Anyway, what I'm saying is that this
here map is based on memories only about seven years old."
Rya put a hand on his arm.
He finally looked at her.
She smiled and he smiled, and he put his hand over hers and lightly
squeezed it.
Even for those of us fortunate enough to avoid the goblins, life is not
entirely smooth and easy. But the myriad methods we employ to get
ourselves across patches of rough ground are a testament to our great
will to survive and to get on with the act of living.
"Well," Horton said, "if you don't soon pick up your boots and head on,
you'll be old codgers like me before, you get out of here."
He was right, but I did not want him to leave. There was a chance that
we would never see him again. We had known him less than a single day,
and the potential of our friendship had been barely explored.
Life, as I might have said before, is a long train ride during which
friends and loved ones disembark unexpectedly, leaving us to continue
our travels in ever-increasing loneliness.
Here was another station on the line.
Horton left the canvas duffel bag and its contents, taking only a
flashlight. He climbed the vertical shaft down which he had recently
led us, and the rusted iron rungs rattled and creaked. At the top he
grunted as he heaved himself out onto the floor of the tunnel. Once he
had gotten to his feet, he paused, peering down at us. He seemed to
want to say a great many things, but finally he merely called softly to
us: "Go with God."
We stood at the bottom of the dark shaft, staring up.
Horton's flashlight faded as he moved away.
Then it was dark up there.
His footsteps grew softer, softer.
He was gone.
In thoughtful silence we gathered up the'flashlights, batteries,
candles, food, and other items, packing them carefully in the canvas
duffel bag.
Carrying our backbacks, with the larger weapons slung over our arms,
dragging the duffel bag, carving the darkness with flashlights,
consulting the map, we moved out, heading farther into the earth.
I perceived no immediate threat, yet my heart pounded as we followed
the tunnel toward the first of many turns. Although I was determined
not to retreat, I felt as if we had stepped through the doorway to
Hell.
28.tourney to Abaddon
Descending . . .
Somewhere far above, a sullen sky roofed the world, and blackbirds
swooped through a sea of air, and somewhere wind rustled trees, and
snow blanketed the ground and new flurries fell, but that life of color
and motion existed overhead, beyond so many meters of solid rock that
it increasingly seemed to be not real but a fantasy life, an imaginary
kingdom. The only thing that seemed real was stone-a mountainweight of
stone-dust, occasional shallow pools of stagnant water, crumbling
timbers, with rusted iron braces, coal, and darkness.
We disturbed coal dust as fine as talcum powder. Nuggets and a few big
chunks of coal lay along the walls, and small islands of coal formed
archipelagos through the puddles of scum-coated water, and in the walls
the sheered edges of nearly exhausted veins of coal caught the
frost-white flashlight beams and gleamed like black jewels.
Some subterranean passages were nearly as wide as highways, some
narrower than the hallways of a house, for they were a mix of actual
mining shafts and exploration tunnels.
Ceilings soared to twice and thrice our height, then dropped so low
that we had to hunch down in order to proceed. In places the walls had
been carved with such precision that they almost seemed poured of
concrete, while in other places they were deeply scored and peaked.
Several times we found partial cave-ins, where one wall and sometimes
part of the ceiling had come down, cutting the tunnel in half or even
forcing us to crawl through the remaining space.
Mild claustrophobia had taken hold of me when we'd first entered the
mines, and as we proceeded deeper into the labyrinth, that fear gripped
me tighter. However, I successfully resisted it by thinking of that
world of soaring birds and wind-stilled trees far above-and by
constantly reminding myself that Rya was with me, for I always drew
strength from her presence.
We saw strange things in the silent bosom of the earth, even before we
got close to the goblin territory that was our destination. Three
times we came upon heaps of broken and abandoned equipment, random yet
queerly artful piles of metal tools and other artifacts designed for
specialized mining tasks that were as arcane to us as the laboratory
devices of an alchemist. Welded together by rust and corrosion, those
items rose in angular agglomerations that were not merely chaotic, as
if the mountain were an artist working with the detritus of those who
had invaded it, creating sculpture from their trash to mock their
ephemeral nature and as if intending to construct monuments to its own
endurance. One of the sculptures resembled a large figure, less than
half human, with a demonic aspect, a creature bedecked with spurs,
razored barbs, and a bladed spine. Irrationally but with disturbing
certainty, I expected it to move with a rattle and clatter of metal
bones, open a now hidden eye formed by the fractured pane of an ancient
oil lamp used by miners in another century, and crack an iron mouth in
which bent screws would protrude like rotten teeth. We also saw mold
and fungus in a panoply of colors-yellow, bile green, poisonous red,
brown, black-but mostly in dirty shades of white. Some were
exceedingly dry, and they burst when touched, spewing clouds of
dust-perhaps spores-from the ruins. Others were moist.
The worst forms glistened repulsively and looked like the things a
surgeon, on an exploration of another world, might find within the
carcass of an alien life-form. Some walls were crusted with
crystallized accretions of unknown substances secreted by the rock, and.once, we saw our own distorted images moving across those millions of
dark, polished facets.
Abyss-deep, more than halfway to Hades, in a sepulchral hush, we found
the gleaming white skeleton of what might have been a large dog. The
skull lay in a half-inch-deep puddle of black water, jaws agape. As we
stood over it, our flashlight beams were mirrored by the underlying
puddle, so an eerily reflected light shone out from the empty eye
sockets. How a dog could have gotten to these depths, what it had been
seeking, why it had been driven to such a strange pursuit, and how it
had died-those were all mysteries that could never be solved. But
there was such a strong element of inappropriateness to the existence
of this skeleton in this place that we could not help but feel it was
an omen, though we didn't wish to dwell on its message.
At noon, nearly six hours after entering the first mine with Horton
Bluett, we paused to share one of the sandwiches he had left with us
and to drink a little of the juice from one of the thermos bottles. We
did not speak over our meager and uncomfortable lunch, for we were
close enough to the Lightning Coal Company's operations that our voices
might have carried to the goblins working in those shafts-though we
heard nothing of them.
After lunch we had proceeded a considerable distance before, at twenty
minutes past one o'clock, we turned a corner and saw light ahead.
Mustard-yellow light. Somewhat murky.
Ominous. Like the light in our shared nightmare.
We crept along the narrow, dank, crumbling, lightless tunnel that led
toward the intersection with the illuminated shaft. Although we moved
with exaggerated caution, each footstep seemed thunderous and each
breath like the exhalation of a giant bellows..
At the tunnel junction I stopped and put my back to the wall.
Listened.
Waited.
If a minotaur inhabited this labyrinth, it was evidently wearing
crepe-soled shoes as it prowled the passageways, for the silence was as
deep as the locale. But for the light, we seemed to be as alone as we
had been for the past seven hours.
I leaned forward. Looked into the illuminated tunnel, first left, then
right. No goblins were in sight.
We stepped out of concealment, into a fall of yellowish light that lent
a jaundiced waxiness to our faces and eyes.
To the right the tunnel continued only twenty feet, narrowing
dramatically and terminating in a blank wall of rock. To the left it
was more than twenty feet wide and ran on for about a hundred and fifty
feet, growing wider as it went, until it must have been sixty feet
across. At its widest point it appeared to intersect another
horizontal shaft. The electric lamps, strung on a cable fixed to the
center of the ceiling, were spaced about thirty feet apart; conical
shades over medium-wattage bulbs directed light down in tightly defined
cones, so there was a stretch of ten or twelve feet of deep shadows
between each pool of brightness.
Just as in the dream.
The only appreciable differences between reality and nightmare were
that the lamps did not flicker and that we were not, as yet, pursued.
Here Horton Bluett's map ended. We were entirely on our own.
I looked at Rya. I suddenly wished I had not brought her down into
this place. But there was no going back.
I gestured toward the far end of the tunnel.
She nodded..We drew our silencer-equipped pistols from the deep pockets of our
insulated pants. We switched off the safeties. We jacked bullets into
the chambers, and the muted snick-snick of well-oiled metal against
metal whispered along the coal-veined rock walls.
Side by side we advanced as noiselessly as possible toward the wide end
of the shaft, passing through light and shadow, light and shadow.
At the intersection of horizontal shafts I again put my back to the
wall and eased forward, cautiously peering into the connecting tunnel
before proceeding. It was also about sixty feet wide, but it was two
hundred feet long, three quarters of its length lying to our right.
The timbers were old but still newer than any - we had seen heretofore.
Considering the width, this was more an immense room than just another
tunnel. There were not one but two rows of amber electric bulbs hung
parallel under metal hoods, which created a checkerboard pattern of
light and darkness on the floor.
I thought that chamber was deserted, and I was about to step forth when
I heard a scrape and a click and another scrape. I studied the
checkerboard of light with greater care.
To the right, eighty feet away, a goblin emerged from one of the blocks
of shadow. It was unclothed in every sense:
draped in neither garments nor a human disguise. It carried two
instruments that I did not recognize. It repeatedly raised one of
these, then the other, to its eyes, sighting up and down at ceiling and
floor, then along the walls, as if taking measurements; or perhaps it
was studying the composition of the walls.
Turning to look at Rya, who stood against the wall behind me in the
secondary tunnel, I raised a finger to my lips.
Her blue eyes were very wide, and the whites of them were tinted the
same muddy yellow as was her skin. The queer light of the tunnel also
stained her white ski suit and gleamed on her hard hat, so she appeared
to be a golden idol, the image of a helmeted and incredibly beautiful
goddess of war with eyes of sacred, precious sapphires.
With thumb and first two fingers I repeatedly imitated the motion of
depressing a hypodermic syringe.
She nodded, opened her jacket very slowly in order to make no sound
with the zipper, and reached to an inside pocket where she had stashed
a plastic-wrapped hypodermic and one of the vials of sodium pentothal.
Sneaking another look around the corner, I discovered that the goblin,
preoccupied with its odd measuring instruments, had its back to me.
Standing erect but bent somewhat forward, it was peering through a lens
at the floor near its feet. It was either murmuring rhythmically to
itself or humming a singularly peculiar tune, but in either case it was
creating enough noise to mask my stealthy approach.
I slipped out of the secondary tunnel, leaving Rya behind, and eased
toward my prey, striving to be both quick and silent. If I drew the
beast's attention, it would surely let loose a cry, alerting others of
its kind to my presence. I did not want to have to flee back through
the subterranean maze with no head start, with a pack of those demons
at our heels, and with nothing gained from our risky intrusion into the
heart of the mountain.
From shadow to light to shadow I went.
The goblin continued to warble to itself.
Eighty feet.
Seventy.
My pounding heart made a sound that, to my ears, seemed as loud as the
drills and pneumatic hammers that had once worked the coal veins of.this mine.
Sixty.
Shadow, light, shadow . . .
Although I carried the pistol at the ready, my intention was to avoid
shooting my enemy, to spring upon it in complete surprise, to get a
grip around its neck, and to hold it still for ten or twenty seconds,
until Rya could rush in with the pentothal. Thereafter we could
question it, administering more of the drug as required, for though
sodium pentothal was primarily a sedative, it was also sometimes
referred to as a "truth serum" because under its influence one could
not easily lie.
Fifty feet.
I was not certain pentothal would affect the-goblins precisely as it
did men. However, the chances seemed good because (except for their
metamorphic talent) their metabolism was apparently similar to that of
human beings.
Forty feet.
I do not think the creature heard me. I do not think it smelled or
otherwise sensed me, either. But it stopped its curious warbling and
turned, lowering the unknown instrument from its eyes, raising its
hideous head. It saw me at once, for I was at that moment passing
through one of the checkerboard's lighter squares.
Its luminous scarlet eyes blazed brighter at the sight of me.
Though I was within less than thirty feet of the beast, I could not
cross the remaining ground in a great leap and come down upon it before
it sounded an alarm. I took the only option remaining: I squeezed off
two shots from the silencer-equipped pistol. Bullets left the muzzle
with soft sounds like the spitting of an angry cat. The goblin pitched
backward into a square of shadows, where it fell dead, the first hole
in its throat, the second between its eyes.
The ejected brass cartridges went tink-clink-tink across the rock
floor, startling me. Because they were evidence of our presence, I
pursued them, snatched up one, then the other, before they could roll
away into the shadows.
Rya was already kneeling at the dead goblin when I got to it, checking
for a pulse but finding none. The transmutable creature had nearly
concluded its reversion to human form.
As the last of its demonic features faded, I saw that its disguise was
that of a young man in his late twenties.
Because death had been sudden, the heart had ceased pumping within a
second or two of the infliction of the wounds, so only a few spoonsful
of blood had leaked onto the tunnel floor. I hastily mopped up these
traces with a handkerchief.
Rya took hold of the goblin's feet, and I seized it by the arms, and we
carried it to the far end of the chamber. There, twenty feet of
darkness lay between the last of the lights and the back wall. We hid
the corpse, the peculiar instruments it had been using, and the
bloodstained cloth in the deepest part of that black cul-de-sac.
Would the demon be missed by its kind? If so, how soon?
On realizing that it was missing, what would they do?
Search the mines? How thoroughly? How soon?
Standing on the borderline between a block of shadows and a block of
light, leaning close to each other, Rya and I conversed in voices so
low that hearing was less important than lipreading.
"Now?" she asked.
"We've started a clock ticking."
"Yeah, I hear it.."If he's missed .
"Probably not for an hour or two."
"Probably not," I agreed.
"Maybe longer."
"If they find him .
"That'll take longer still."
"Then we go on."
"At least a little farther."
Retracing our steps, passing the spot where the goblin had died, we
ventured to the other end of that wide corridor. It opened into an
immense underground chamber, a circular vault at least two hundred feet
in diameter, with a domed ceiling thirty feet high at the center.
Banks of fluorescent lights were suspended from the ceiling on metal
scaffolding; they cast a wintry glare over everything below. In more
square feet of floor space than was occupied by a football field, the
goblins had assembled a bewildering array of equipment: steel-jawed
machines big as bulldozers, obviously designed to chew rock and spit
out pebbles; huge drills, smaller drills; ranks of electrically powered
conveyer belts that, lined up one after another, could carry off the
excretions of the rock-consuming machines; a dozen forklifts; half a
dozen Bobcats. In the other half of the room were huge piles of
supplies: stacks of lumber; carefully arranged pyramids of short steel
beams; hundreds of bristling bundles of steel rein forcing rods;
hundreds-maybe thousands-of sacks of concrete; several big piles of
sand and gravel; car-sized spools of thick electrical cable, smaller
spools of insulated copper wire; at least a mile of aluminum
ventilation duct; and more, much more.
The equipment and supplies were arranged in evenly spaced rows with
aisles between. As we slowly eased twenty yards around the
circumference, looking into three of those avenues, we were able to
determine that the place was deserted.
We saw no goblins, heard no movement other than the ghostly whispers of
our own cautious progress.
The gleaming condition of the equipment, plus the smell of fresh oil
and grease, led to the conclusion that these machines had been recently
washed and serviced, then lowered into this pit for a new project that
had not yet begun but which had a start date in the near future.
Evidently the goblin I'd just shot had been engaged in some final
calculations required before the heavy work began.
Putting a hand on Rya's shoulder, pulling her close enough to put my
lips to her ear, I breathed: "Wait. Let's go back to where we came
in."
Returning to the mouth of the wide corridor in which I had killed the
goblin, I shrugged out of my cumbersome backpack, unsnapped the canvas
flap, and withdrew two kilos of plastic explosive and a pair of
detonators. I unwrapped the plastique and molded one block into a
niche high in the wall, just a few feet back from the point at which
that shaft opened into the domed chamber. I put the charge above head
level, in shadow, where it was not likely to be seen even by search
parties looking for the missing demon. I shaped the second kilo into
another dark niche high in the opposite wall, so the two blasts might
bring down enough of the walls and ceiling to close off the passage.
The detonators were battery-powered, and each had a one-hour clock. I
plugged one into each of the plastic masses, but I did not set the
timer on either of them. I would do so only if we came this way again,
with our enemies in hot pursuit.
We returned to the domed chamber and quietly crossed, taking a closer.look at the machines and supplies, trying to extrapolate the nature of
the pending project from the equipment the goblins had stockpiled. At
the far end of the giant room, having learned little of consequence, we
arrived at a set of three elevators, two of which were cages designed
to convey small groups of goblins up through a big shaft in the rock.
The third was a large steel platform slung from four cables, each as
thick as my wrist; it was of sufficient size to raise or lower the
largest pieces of equipment we had seen.
I stood for a moment, thinking. Then, with Rya's help, I carried eight
two-by-fours from the nearest stack of supplies and laid them on the
floor, crossed like Lincoln Logs, to form a step stool of sorts.
Next I took two kilos of plastique from Rya's pack and separated them
into three charges. Climbing the makeshift step stool, I molded the
plastique into depressions in the roughly hewn rock directly above each
of the elevator openings. There, the shadows were not deep, and though
the plastic explosive resembled the rock enough to virtually vanish
against it, the detonators were still visible. However, I figured this
level of the mine was not much traveled at the moment; and even those
goblins that passed this way were not likely to look up and study the
stone above the elevators closely.
I did not set those detonators, either.
Rya and I returned the two-by-fours to the stack from which we had
taken them.
"Now?" she inquired. Though we knew we were alone on this level, she
still whispered, for we could not be sure how well our voices would
carry up the elevator shafts. "Up? Is that what you have in mind?"
"Yes," I said.
"Won't they hear the elevator moving?"
"Yes. But they'll probably think it's him, the one we killed.
"And if we run into them upstairs, just as we're stepping out of the
cage?"
"We put these pistols away, go up there armed with the shotgun and the
automatic rifle," I said. "That'll give us enough firepower to blow
away any number of them that might be gathered around the damn
elevators. Then we step right back into the cage, drop down here, and
leave as we came in, setting the detonators as we go. But if we don't
run into anyone up there, then we slip farther into the mine to see
what we can see."
"What do you think so far?"
"I don't know," I said wontedly. "Except . . . well, they're sure as
hell not just mining coal in this place. The equipment on this level
hasn't been assembled to dig coal."
"Looks like they're building a fortress," she said.
"Looks like," I agreed.
We had reached Abaddon, the deepest level of Hell. Now we were
required to ascend through a few higher rings of Inferno, desperately
hoping to meet neither Lucifer himself nor any of his demonic minions.
29
Doomsday The elevator motor hummed loudly. With an unnerving amount of
creaking and rattling, the open-fronted cage ascended.
Although it was difficult to gauge the distance, I calculated that we
climbed roughly seventy or eighty feet before coming to a stop at the
next level of the . . . installation.
I no longer saw any point in referring to that huge subterranean
complex as a mine. The Lightning Coal Company evidently extracted.large quantities of coal from other parts of the mountain, though not
from here. Here they were engaged in something altogether different,
for which their mining operation merely served as camouflage.
When Rya and I came out of the elevator, we were at one end of a
deserted two-hundred-foot-long tunnel with smooth concrete walls. It
was twenty feet wide, twelve feet high at the center. Fluorescent
lights were recessed in the rounded ceiling. Warm, dry air wafted from
ventilator grilles high in the curved walls, while one-yard-square
return vents, near the floor, gently pulled cooler air out of the
passageway. Big red fire extinguishers were mounted alongside sets of
burnished steel doors that were spaced approximately fifty feet apart
on both sides of the corridor. What appeared to be intercom units were
hung next to the extinguishers. An air of unparalleled efficiency
ominous, enigmatic purpose filled the place.
I felt a rhythmic throbbing in the stone floor, as if gargantuan
machines were laboring at mighty tasks in distant vaults.
Directly opposite the elevators, that familiar but nonetheless
mysterious symbol was on the wall: a black ceramic rectangle four feet
tall and three feet wide was mortared into the concrete; centered in
it-a white ceramic circle two feet in diameter; spearing jaggedly
through the white circle-a bolt of black lightning.
Suddenly, through the symbol I saw that strange, immense, cold,
frightening void that I had sensed when I'd first glimpsed a Lightning
Coal truck a couple of days ago. An eternal silent nothingness, the
depth and power of which I cannot adequately convey. It seemed to draw
me as if it were a magnet and I were an iron shaving. I felt as if I
would fall into that hideous vacuum, siphoned down and away as if into
a whirlpool, and I was forced to avert my eyes and turn from the dark
eramic lightning.
Rather than follow the tunnel to its end and explore the next
horizontal shaft, which might offer nothing more than this one, I went
to the first set of steel doors on the left. No knob, no handle. I
pushed the white button in the frame, and the halves of the heavy
portal instantly slid open with a whoosh of compressed air.
Rya and I went through fast, prepared to use the shotgun and the
automatic rifle, but the chamber was dark and apparently unoccupied. I
fumbled for a switch inside the door, found it, and brought banks of
fluorescent lights flickering to life. It was a huge storeroom filled
with wooden crates stacked nearly to the ceiling and arranged in
orderly rows. Each bore the manufacturer's shipping label, so in a few
minutes, quietly prowling the aisles, we established that this place
was filled with spare parts for everything from lathes to milling
machines to forklifts to transistor radios.
Extinguishing lights and closing doors behind us, we went along the
tunnel silently from one room to the next.
In every chamber we found more caches of supplies: thousands of
incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs in stacks of sturdy cardboard
cartons; hundreds of crates holding thousands of small boxes that in
turn contained millions of screws and nails in every size and weight;
hundreds of hammers in all designs, wrenches, socket wrenches,
screwdrivers, pliers, electric drills, saws, other tools. One
cathedral-sized room, paneled in moth-repellent cedar that somewhat
took our breath away, contained her upon her of huge bolts of
cloth-silk, cotton, wool, linen-spooled on storage racks that towered
fifteen feet above our heads. Another vault contained medical supplies
and equipment: X-ray machines snug in plastic sheeting; ranks of EKG
and EEG monitors, also tightly covered; cases of hypodermic syringes,.bandages, antiseptics, antibiotics, anesthetics; and much more. From
that tunnel we entered another like it, equally deserted and well
maintained, where additional rooms were filled with more supplies.
There were barrels of whole grain-wheat, rice, oats, rye. According to
the labels, the contents were freeze-dried and then vacuum-sealed in a
nitrogen atmosphere to insure freshness for at least thirty years.
Hundreds-no, thousands-of similarly sealed barrels of flour, sugar,
powdered eggs, powdered milk, vitamin and mineral tablets, plus smaller
drums of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, oregano, and bay leaf, had
been provisioned.
The vast facility seemed like a Pharaoh's tomb, the very grandest tomb
in all the world, fully stocked with everything the king and his
servants would require to insure his perfect comfort in the afterlife.
Somewhere in hushed chambers as yet unexplored, there must be temple
dogs and sacred cats that had been mercifully killed and lovingly
wrapped in tanninsoaked bandages to make the journey into death with
their royal master, and somewhere treasures of gold and jewels, and
somewhere a handmaiden or two preserved for sexual joy in the world to
come-and somewhere, of course, the Pharaoh himself, mummified and
reposing atop a solid-gold catafalque.
We stepped into an immense armory stocked with firearms: sealed crates
full of pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns
packed in grease, enough weapons to outfit several platoons. I saw no
ammunition, but I was quite sure that millions of rounds were stored
elsewhere in the facility.
And I would have bet there were rooms stocked with deadlier instruments
of violence and war.
A library, consisting of at least fifty thousand volumes, was housed in
the last room off that second tunnel, just before the second junction
on that level. This was also deserted. As we moved along the shelves
of books I was reminded of the Yontsdown County Library, for the two
places were like islands of normality in a sea of infinite strangeness.
They shared an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity-albeit an uneasy
peace and a fragile tranquillity-and the air had a not unpleasant smell
of paper and binding cloth.
However, the collection of volumes in this library differed from that
in town. Rya noticed that there was no fiction here: gone were
Dickens, Dostoyevski, Stevenson, and Poe. I could not find a history
section, either: banished were Gibbon, Herodotus, Plutarch. We were
likewise unable to spot even a single biography of any famous man or
woman; neither could we find poetry nor humor nor travel writings nor
theology nor philosophy. Shelf after groaning shelf held dry texts
solemnly devoted to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, geology,
biology, physiology, astronomy, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry,
electronics, agriculture, animal husbandry, soil conservation,
engineering, metallurgy, the principles of architecture. . . .
With only this library, a quick mind, and occasional assistance from a
learned instructor, you could learn to establish and manage a bountiful
farm, repair an automobile or even build one from the ground up (or a
jet aircraft or a television set), design and erect a bridge or a
hydroelectric power plant, construct a blast furnace and foundry and
mill for the production of high-grade steel rods and beams, design
machinery and 'factories to produce transistors. . . . Here was a
library specifically assembled to teach everything needed for the
successful maintenance of every physical aspect of modern civilization
but which had nothing to teach about important emotional and spiritual
values upon which that civilization rested: nothing here of love,.faith, courage, hope, brotherhood, truth, or the meaning of life.
Midway through the stacks of books Rya whispered, "Thorough
collection." What she meant was "hightening."
I echoed, "Thorough," but what I meant was "terrifying."
Although we were swiftly arriving at an understanding of the dark
purpose to which this entire underground installation was dedicated,
neither of us was willing to put that understanding into words. Some
primitive tribes, though having a name for the devil, refuse to speak
that name in the belief that giving voice to it will instantly call
forth the beast. Likewise, Rya and I were reluctant to discuss the
goblins' purpose in this elaborate pit, afraid that doing so would
somehow transform their hateful intentions into immutable fate.
From the second tunnel we cautiously entered a third, where the
contents of additional rooms confirmed our worst suspicions. In three
immense chambers, under banks of specially designed lights that were
surely meant to promote photosynthesis and rapid growth, we discovered
large stores of fruit and vegetable seeds. There were big steel tanks
holding liquid fertilizers. Neatly labeled drums were filled with all
the chemicals and minerals required for hydroponic farming. Rows of
large, shallow troughs, empty now, waited to be filled with water,
nutrients, and seedlings, whereupon they would become the hydroponic
equivalent of bountiful fields. Considering their enormous stores of
freeze-dried vacuum-packed foodstuffs, and considering their plans for
chemical farming, and considering that most likely we had seen only a
fraction of their agricultural preparations, I felt safe in assuming
that they were prepared to feed thousands of their kind for decades if,
come Armageddon, they were required to take shelter down here for a
long, long time.
As we progressed from room to room and from tunnel to tunnel, we
frequently saw their sacred symbol: white sky, dark lightning. I had
to look away from it, for on each encounter I was ever more forcefully
assaulted by clairvoyant images of the cold, silent, and eternal night
that it represented. I had the urge to attach a charge of plastique to
those ceramic images and blast them-and all they represented-to pieces,
to dust; but I did not waste the explosives that way.
From time to time we also saw pipes appearing out of holes in the
concrete walls, traversing portions of a room or corridor, then
disappearing into holes in other walls. Sometimes there was a single
pipe, sometimes sheaves of six running parallel to one another, of
various diameters. All were white, but symbols were stenciled on them
for the benefit of maintenance crews, and each symbol was quite easily
translated: water, electrical conduit, communications conduit, steam,
gas.
These were points of vulnerability in the heart of the fortress.
Four times I lifted Rya while she hastily molded a charge of plastique
between the pipes and plugged a detonator into it.
As with previous charges we'd placed, we did not set the detonator,
intending to start it ticking only on our way out.
We turned the corner into the fourth tunnel on that level and went only
twenty or thirty feet when, immediately ahead of us, a set of doors
whooshed open with a hiss of compressed air, and a goblin stepped out,
five or six feet from us.
Even as its piggish eyes widened, even as its wet, fleshy nostrils
fluttered and as it gasped in surprise, I stepped for ward and swung
the, automatic rifle, slammed the barrel across the side of its skull.
It dropped hard. As the beast was falling, I reversed my grip on the
rifle and brought the heavier butt straight down against the demonic.forehead, which should have shattered but did not. I was going to
strike again, hammer its head to bloody pulp, when Rya seized my arm to
stop me. The goblin's luminous eyes had dimmed and rolled back in its
head, and with that familiar sickening crunch-crackle-snap of bones and
with the mucous-wet surging of soft tissues, it had begun to
metamorphose into human form, which meant it was either dead or
unconscious.
Rya eased forward, pushed the button on the door frame.
The steel portal hissed shut behind the crumpled form of our adversary.
If there were other goblins in the room beyond, they evidently had not
seen what had happened to this one on the floor before me, for they did
not rush out in its defense or set off an alarm.
"Quickly," Rya said.
I knew what she meant. This was perhaps the opportunity that we had
been hoping for, and we might not get another like it.
I stung the rifle over my arm, gripped the goblin by the feet, and
dragged it backward into the tunnel we had just left.
Rya opened a door, and I hauled our victim into one of the chambers
fitted out with equipment for hydroponic farming.
I felt for a pulse. "It's alive," I whispered.
The creature was cloaked entirely in the pudgy body of a middle-aged
man with a bulbous nose and close-set eyes and a wispy mustache, but of
course I could see its true nature through that disguise. It was
naked, which seemed to be the fashion here in Hades.
Its eyelids fluttered. It twitched.
Rya produced the hypodermic needle with the syringe full of sodium
pentothal that she had prepared earlier. Using a length of elastic
tubing of the sort nurses employed in hospitals for the same purpose,
Rya tied off the captive's arm, forcing a vein to pop up just above the
crook of the elbow.
In the brassy light of the imitation suns that hung above the empty
hydroponic tanks, our captive's eyes opened, and although they were
still dim and unfocused, the beast was coming around fast.
"Hurry," I said.
Rya squirted a few drops of the drug onto the floor to insure that no
air remained in the needle. (We couldn't question the creature if it
died of an embolism seconds after injection.) She administered the rest
of the dose.
Seconds after the drug was administered, our captive went rigid, every
joint locking tight, every muscle taut. Its eyes popped open wide.
Its lips skinned back from its teeth in a grimace. All of this
dismayed me and confirmed my doubts about the effect of pentothal on
goblins.
Nevertheless I leaned forward, staring into the enemy's eyes-which
seemed to peer through me-and I attempted to interrogate it.
"Can you hear me?"
A hiss that might have been yes.
"What is your name?"
The goblin gazed unblinkingly and made a gargling, grudging noise
through clenched teeth.
"What is your name?" I repeated.
This time its tongue came untied, and its mouth slipped open, and a
meaningless knot of sounds unraveled from it.
"What is your name?" I asked.
More meaningless sounds.
"What is your name?"
Again it produced only a queer noise, but I realized this was precisely.the same reply with which it had responded to the question before: not
random sound but a multisyllabic word. I sensed that this was its
name, not the name by which it was known in the world of ordinary men
but that by which it was known in the secret world of its own species.
"What is your human name?" I asked.
"Tom Tarkenson," it said.
"Where do you live?"
"Eighth Avenue."
"In Yontsdown?"
'Yes.
The drug did not sedate their kind quite as it would one of us.
However, the pentothal produced this rigid, mesmeric state and appeared
to encourage truthful responses far more effectively than it would have
done in a human being. A hypnotic glaze clouded the goblin's eyes,
whereas. a man would have slept and would have spoken thickly and
ramblingly in response to any inquiry put to him-if responding at all.
"Where do you work, Tom Tarkenson?"
"The Lightning Coal Company."
"What is your job there?"
"Mine engineer."
"But that's not really the work you do."
"No."
"What work are you really engaged in?"
A hesitation. Then: "Planning .
"Planning what?"
"Planning . . . your death," it said, and for an instant its eyes
cleared and focused on mine, but then the trance recaptured it.
I shivered. "What is the purpose of this place?"
It did not respond.
"What is the purpose of this place?" I repeated.
It emitted another, longer chain of strange sounds that fell on my ear
with no meaning whatsoever but with complex patterns that indicated
meaning.
I had never imagined that the goblins might have a language of their
own, which they used when there was no danger of our kind overhearing
them. But that discovery did not surprise me. It was almost certainly
a human language that had been spoken in that lost world of the earlier
age, before civilization had succumbed to an apocalyptic war. The few
human beings who had survived that long-ago Armageddon had reverted to
savagery and had forgotten their language along with so much else, but
the larger handful of surviving goblins had evidently remembered it and
had kept the ancient tongue alive as their own.
Given their instinct to eradicate us, it was ironic that they should
preserve anything of human origin other than themselves.
"What is the purpose of this installation?" I persisted.
. . . haven .
"Haven from what?"
. . . the dark . . . " A haven from the dark?"
. . from the dark lightning .
Before I could pose the next-and obvious-question, the goblin suddenly
drummed its heels against the stone floor, twitched, blinked, hissed.
It tried to reach for me with one hand. Though its joints were no
longer locked, they were still uncooperative. Its arm fell back to the
floor; its fingers trembled spastically, as if electric current was
coursing through them. The sodium pentothal was quickly wearing off.
Rya had prepared another syringe while I questioned our captive. Now
she slipped that needle into a vein and squirted more of the drug into.the beast. In the human body pentothal was relatively quickly
metabolized, requiring a slow, steady drip to maintain sedation.
Apparently, in spite of the somewhat different response from man and
goblin, the duration of the drug's effectiveness was approximately the
same in both species. The second dose took hold of the creature almost
at once; its eyes clouded again, and its body went rigid.
"You say this is a haven?" I inquired.
" yes." "A haven from the dark lightning?"
"Yes.
"What is the dark lightning?"
It emitted an eerie keening, and it shuddered.
Something in that disconcerting sound gave the impression of pleasure,
as if merely contemplating the dark lightning sent delicious thrills
through our captive.
I shuddered, too, but with dread.
"What is the dark lightning?" I repeated.
Staring through me at a vision of unimaginable destruction, the goblin
spoke in a voice thick with malevolence, hushed with awe: "The
white-white sky is a sky bleached by ten thousand huge explosions, a
single blinding flash from horizon to horizon. The dark lightning is
the black energy of death, nuclear death, crashing down from the
heavens to annihilate mankind.
I looked at Rya.
She was looking at me.
That which we had suspected-and that of which we had dared not
speak-was proven true. The Lightning Coal Company was preparing a
redoubt in which the goblinkind could take shelter and hope to survive
another world-destroying war of the sort they had launched in that
forgotten age.
To our captive I said, "When will the war occur?"
"Perhaps . . . ten years .
"Ten years from now?"
". . . perhaps . . . " "Perhaps? You're saying in 1973?"
". . . or twenty years .
"Twenty?" or thirty . . ."
"When, damn you? When?"
Beyond the human eyes, the radiant eyes of the goblin flickered
brighter, and in that flickering was an insane hatred and an even more
insane hunger. "There is no certain date," it said. "Time . . . time
is needed . . . time for the arsenals to be built..... time for the
rockets to become more sophisticated..... more accurate. . . . The
destructive power must be so tremendous that, when unleashed, it will
leave not one spawn of humanity alive. No seed must escape the burning
this time. They must be purged . . . the earth scoured clean of them
and all they've built . . . clean of them and of all their
excrescences. . . . " It laughed deep in its throat, a chilling cackle
of pure, dark delight, and its pleasure in the promised Armageddon was
so intense that for a moment it overcame the rigidifying grip of the
drug. It writhed almost sensuously, twitched, arched its back until
only its heels and head were touching the floor, and it spoke rapidly
in its ancient tongue.
I was stricken by a shiver so unremitting that it seemed as if every
fiber of bone and muscle was engaged. My teeth chattered.
The goblin's involvement with its religious vision of doomsday became
more intense, yet the effects of the drug prevented it from
surrendering itself entirely to the passions that it was driven to
express. Suddenly, as if a dam of emotion had burst within it, the.creature released a shuddery sigh, "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh," and loosed its
bladder. The flood and stench of urine seemed to flush out not only
some of the beast's fervor for destruction but some of the pentothal's
grip as well.
Rya had prepared a third syringe of the sedative. Two empty vials, two
disposable needles, and some plastic wrapping lay on the floor beside
her.
I held the creature down.
She inserted the needle into the twice-punctured vein and started to
depress the plunger on the syringe.
"Not all at once!" I said, trying not to retch on the acrid stink of
urine.
"Why?"
"We don't want to overdose it, kill it. I've got more questions to
ask."
"I'll let the stuff out slowly," she said.
She squeezed only about one fourth of the dose into our captive, enough
to make it go rigid again. She kept the needle in the vein, ready to
squirt more dope into the goblin when it showed signs of emerging from
its mesmerized state.
To the captive I said, "Long ago, in the era that men have forgotten
about, in the era during which your species was created, there was
another war.........
"The War," it said softly, reverently, as if speaking of a most holy
event. "The War . . . the War .
"In that war," I said, "did your kind build deep shelters like this
one?"
"No. We died . . . died with the men because we were creations of the
men and therefore deserved to die."
"Then why build shelters this time?"
"Because . . . we failed . . . failed . . . we failed . It blinked
and tried to rise up. "Failed .
I nodded at Rya.
She squeezed a little more of the drug into the beast.
"How did you fail?" I asked.
. . . failed to wipe out the human race . . . and then . . .
after the War . . . there were just too few of us left alive to hunt
down all human survivors. But this time . . . oh, this time, when the
war is over, when the fires have burned out, when the skies have
disgorged all the cold ashes, when the storms of bitter rain and acid
snow have faded away, when the radiation has grown tolerable .
"Yes?" I urged.
"Then," it continued in a whisper that was ripe with the reverent tones
of a religious fanatic recounting a miraculous prophecy, "from our
havens, hunting parties will go above ground from time to time . . .
and they will track down every man and every woman and every child who
remains . . .
exterminate whatever humans are left. Our hunters will keep searching
and killing . . . and killing until their food and water runs out or
until residual radiation brings about their own death. We will not
fail this time. We'll have enough survivors to keep extermination
teams in the field for a hundred years, for two hundred, and when the
earth is unquestionably barren, when there's only perfect silence from
pole to pole and no smallest hope of human life reborn, we will then
eradicate man's only remaining work-ourselves. Then everything will be
dark, very dark, and cold and silent, and the perfect purity of
Nothingness will reign eternally.".I could no longer pretend to be mystified by the pitiless void that I
perceived clairvoyantly when I looked at the symbol of dark lightning.
I did indeed understand the awful meaning of it. In that sign I saw
the brutal end of all human life, the death of a world, hopelessness,
extinction.
To the captive I said, "But don't you realize what you're saying?
You're telling me that the ultimate purpose of your species is its
self-destruction."
"Yes. After yours."
"But that's senseless."
"That's destiny."
I said, "Hatred carried to such an extreme is purposeless.
It's madness, chaos."
"Your madness," it said to me, grinning suddenly. "You built it into
us, didn't you? Your chaos: you engineered it."
Rya injected more of the drug.
The grin faded from the creature's face both on the human and goblin
level, but it said, "You . . . your kind . . . you are the unequaled
masters of hatred, connoisseurs of destruction . . . emperors of
chaos. We are only what you made us.
We possess no potential that your kind could not have foreseen. In
fact we possess no potential that your kind did not approve.
As if I were, in fact, in the bowels of Hell, confronted by a demon
that held the future of humanity in its taloned hands and would
consider mercy if properly persuaded, I found myself driven to argue
the value of the human race. "Not all of us are masters of hatred, as
you say.
"All," it insisted.
"Some of us are good-" "None."
"Most of us are good."
"Pretense," the demon said with that unshakable confidence that is (so
the Bible tells us) a mark of the Evil Ones and is an instrument with
which doubt can be implanted in the minds of mortals.
I said, "Some of us love."
"There is no love," the demon said.
"You're wrong. It exists."
"It is an illusion."
"Some of us love," I insisted.
"You lie."
"Some of us care."
"All lies."
"We have courage, and we are capable of self-sacrifice for the sake of
others. We love peace and hate war. We heal the sick and morn the
dead. We are not monsters, damn you.
We nurture children and seek a better world for them."
"You're a loathsome breed."
"No, we-" "Lies." It hissed, a sound that betrayed the inhuman reality
beneath the human disguise. "Lies and self-delusions."
Rya said, "Slim, please, there's no point in this. You can't convince
them. Not them. What they believe of us is not just an opinion. What
they believe about us is coded into their genes. You can't change it.
No one can change it."
She was right, of course.
I sighed. I nodded.
"We love," I said stubbornly, though I knew there was no point in
arguing.
As Rya slowly administered more pentothal, I went on with the.interrogation. I learned there were five levels to this pit in which
the goblins hoped to survive doomsday; each level extended only halfway
over the one below it, so they formed a sort of staircase through the
heart of the mountain. There were, the demon said, sixty-four chambers
completed and provisioned, a figure that astonished me but was not
unbelievable. They were industrious, a hive society that was
unhindered by the determined individuality that was a glorious-if
sometimes frustrating-element of the human species. One purpose, one
method, one overriding goal. Never a disagreement. No heretics or
_splinter factions. No debates. They marched inexorably toward their
dream of an eternally silent, barren, darkened earth. According to our
captive, they would add at least another hundred chambers to this haven
before the day came to send the missiles flying above ground, and many
thousands of their kind would trickle in during the months prior to the
start of the war, arriving from all over Pennsylvania and from a few
other Eastern states.
"And there are more nests like Yontsdown," the demon said with relish,
"where shelters like this are secretly under construction. "
Horrified, I pressed hard to learn where those pits were, but our
captive did not know the locations.
Their plan was to complete shelters on every continent at the same time
that the engines of nuclear destruction reached a level of perfection
equivalent to those in the lost age that had ended in the War. Then
the goblins would act, pushing the buttons of cataclysm.
Listening to this madness, I had broken out in a cold, sour sweat. I
unzipped my ski jacket to let in some cooling air, and I smelled the
stench of fear and despair rolling off my own body.
Remembering the malformed goblin offspring caged in the cellar of the
Havendahl house, I inquired about the frequency of birth defects in
their broods, and I discovered that our suspicions were correct. The
goblins, engineered as sterile creatures, had acquired the ability to
reproduce by a freak mutation, but the mutagenic process was
continuing, and during the past few decades it seemed to be
accelerating; as a result, more and more goblins were born in the
condition of those pitiable beasts in the cage, and fickle chance was
stealing back the gift of viable reproduction. Indeed the worldwide
population of goblins had been declining for a long time. The
birthrate of healthy offspring was too low to replace those elders
whose incredibly long lives finally ended and those who were killed in
accidents or who died at the hands. Of men like me. For this reason,
having glimpsed their own certain-if gradual-extinction, they were
determined to prepare for and launch the next war before the turn of
the century. After that their declining numbers would make it
increasingly difficult to patrol the rubble of the post-holocaust world
and exterminate the few human survivors living in the ruins.
Rya had another vial of pentothai. She held it up, raising her
eyebrows inquiringly.
I shook my head. There was nothing more to learn. We had learned too
much already.
She put the vial away. Her hands were shaking.
Despair hung about me like a shroud.
Rya's pale appearance was a mirror of my feelings.
"We love," I told the demon, who began to twitch and flop weakly on the
floor. "We love, damn you, we love."
Then I drew my knife and slit its throat.
There was blood.
I took no pleasure from the sight of blood. Grim satisfaction,.perhaps, but no real pleasure.
Since the goblin was already in its human state, no metamorphosis was
required. The human eyes glazed over with an icing of death, and
within the costume of malleable flesh, the potential goblin eyes went
dim, then dark.
When I rose from the corpse, an alarm sounded, booming off the cold
concrete walls: whoop-whoop-whooooop!
As in the nightmare.
"Slim!"
"Oh, shit," I said, and my heart stuttered.
Had they found the dead goblin on the lowest le el of the haven in its
inadequate grave of shadows? Or had they missed the one whose throat I
had just slit and, missing him, grown suspicious?
We hurried toward the door. But when we reached it, we heard goblins
shouting in that ancient language and running in the tunnel beyond.
We knew now that the shelter contained sixty-four rooms on five levels.
The enemy had no way of knowing how deeply we had penetrated or where
we were, so they were not likely to check this chamber first. We had a
few minutes to take evasive action. Not long, but surely a few
precious minutes.
The siren wailed, and the harsh sound crashed over Rya and me as if it
were powerful waves of water.
We ran around the perimeter of the room, looking for a place to hide,
not sure what we hoped to find, finding nothing until I spotted one of
the ventilation system's large intake grilles set in the wall at floor
level. It was more than one yard square and was fastened in place not
with screws, as I feared, but with a simple pressure clamp. When I
pulled on the clamp, the grille swung outward on hinges. The
metal-walled passage beyond was one yard square, and the indrawn air
coursed along the duct with a soft hollow susurration and an even
softer thrumming.
Putting my lips to Rya's ear to be heard above the siren, I said, "Take
off your backpack and push it ahead of you.
Same with the shotgun. Until the sirens cut off, don't worry about how
much noise you're making. But when we don't have that cover, we'll
have to be a lot more quiet."
"It's dark in there. Can we use the flashlights?"
"Yeah. But when you see the incoming light from another intake ahead
of you, douse the flash. We can't risk the beams being seen through
the grille from out in the corridors."
She entered the duct ahead of me, squirming along on her belly, pushing
the gun and the backpack ahead of her. Because she filled more than
half the space, little of the light from her own flash was reflected
back past her, and she gradually disappeared into the gloom.
I pushed my pack into the duct, nudged it even farther ahead with the
barrel of the rifle, then entered on my stomach. I had to wrench
myself around painfully to reach behind in that narrow space and pull
the vent grille shut with sufficient force to snap the pressure clamp
in place.
The whoop-whoop-whoooooop of the alarm came through every grille in the
intake half of the ventilation system, and it rebounded from the metal
walls of the ductwork even more shrilly than it had echoed off the
concrete in the room we had just departed.
The claustrophobia that I had felt on entering the nineteenth-century
mine shafts with Horton Bluett recurred with a vengeance. I was more
than half convinced that I would get stuck in there and suffocate. My
chest wall was Pinned between my fiercely slamming heart and the cold.metal floor of the duct. I felt a scream building in the back of my
throat, but I choked it down. I wanted to turn back, but I went on.
There was nothing to do but go on. Certain death lay behind us, and if
the likelihood of encountering death ahead was only marginally less
certain, I nevertheless was obliged to go forward where the odds were
better.
We were getting a different view of Hell than that enjoyed by the
demons: a rat's view from within the walls.
30
Far From the Carnival
The insistent shrieking siren reminded me of the come-on at the Wall of
Death motorcycle act on the Sombra Brothers' midway, which used a
similar sound to electrify the tip. The dark maze of the ventilation
system seemed like a fun house.
Indeed the secret society of the goblins, in which all was different
from the straight world, was in some ways a darker version of the
closed society of carnies. As Rya and I wriggled through the ducts, I
felt somewhat as a young mark might feel if, on a dare, he had ventured
onto a carnival midway after it had closed for the night, intending to
test his courage by sneaking into the freak-show tent when all the
lights were off and when none of his own kind was near enough to hear
his screams.
Rya came to a vertical duct that opened in the ceiling of our
horizontal channel, and she shone her flashlight up into it.
I was surprised when she went that way, pulling her backpack after her
by its straps. But when I followed, I discovered that one wall of the
shaft had shallow rungs to make maintenance of the system easier; they
were little more than toeholds and fingerholds, but they made it
possible to ascend without struggle. Even the goblins, who were
capable of walking on walls and ceilings, would find it difficult to
scramble up the smooth metal surfaces of a vertical duct without this
sort of assistance.
As I climbed, it seemed a good idea to flee the level of the
installation on which we had left the second dead goblin, because when
the corpse was discovered, the search for us would most likely be
concentrated in that area. Approximately fifty or sixty feet above our
starting point, we came out of the shaft into another horizontal-duct
on the next floor, and Rya led us through a series of connecting
passageways on that level.
The siren finally died.
My ears continued ringing long after the alarm fell silent.
At each air intake Rya paused to peer through the grille into the room
beyond. When she moved forward again, I came after her and put my eyes
to the metal slats as well.
Some rooms were deserted, dark, and still. But in most chambers armed
goblins were hunting for us. Sometimes I could see little more than
their feet and legs because the grilles provided only low vantage
points; nevertheless, judging by the urgency of their shrill voices and
by their cautious yet hasty movements, I knew they were engaged in a
search.
Since we had taken the elevator up from the unfinished level of the
facility to the fifth level and had begun to poke around, we had been
aware of vibrations in the floors and walls of the tunnels and rooms
through which we passed. It sounded like massive machinery grinding.boulders into pebbles in a far place, and the assumption was that this
was the sound of heavy mining equipment in those distant shafts where
coal actually was being extracted from the earth. When the siren cut
off and my ears stopped ringing, I realized the rumble noted elsewhere
was also discernible inside the ventilation system. Indeed, as we went
farther into the fourth level, the noise became louder, escalating from
a grumble to a dull roar. The vibrations also grew more noticeable,
passing through the walls of the duct and all the way into my bones.
Near the end of the fourth-floor ductwork, we reached an intake through
which Rya saw something that interested her.
More flexible than I, she managed to turn around in those cramped
quarters without much thumping or clanging, so we came face-to-face at
the grille.
I did not need to look out to know that the source of the deep and
continuous rumble was in the chamber beyond, for both the noise and the
vibration had peaked. When I did peer through the narrow spaces
between the bars of the grille, I saw the cast-iron bases of what
appeared to be huge machine housings, although I could not see enough
to figure out what they were.
I also had an opportunity to study the well-clawed feet of many goblins
close up. Too close. Others were far enough away for me to see that
they were carrying weapons and were searching between the enormous
machines.
Whatever the source of the noise and vibration, it was not coal mining,
as we had thought, for there was no smell of coal here, no dust.
Furthermore, there were no grinding or drilling sounds. The quality of
the rumble was essentially the same close up as it had been at a
distance, though much louder.
I did not know why Rya had stopped there. However, she was very clever
and quick-witted, and I knew her well enough to sense that she had not
paused out of mere curiosity. She had an idea, maybe even a plan. I
was ready to follow her lead because her plan was certainly better than
mine. Had to be better. I didn't have a plan.
In a few minutes the search party had probed into every obvious hiding
place in the room beyond the grille. The goblins moved on; their
disagreeable voices faded.
They had not thought to look into the ventilation ducts.
Soon, however, they would correct that oversight.
In fact, goblins might already be inside the intake half of the system,
slithering from shaft to shaft in search of us close behind.
the same thought must have occurred to Rya, for she clearly had decided
that the time had come to escape from the ductwork. She put her
shoulder to the grille and pressed outward. The pressure-clamp latch
popped open, and the grille swung on its hinges.
It was a risky move. If a single member of the search party had
lingered, or if there were goblin workmen in the chamber, the enemy
might be near enough to see us creeping out of the wall.
We were lucky. We exited the duct, pulling backpacks and guns and the
duffel bag after us, and closed the grille without being seen.
Because we would have had to raise our voices to be heard above the din
of the laboring machinery, we had not debated Rya's decision to depart
the ventilation system. Now we continued to act without consulting
each other. In spite of this lack of communation, we moved in concert,
scurrying toward the cover of a huge machine.
We had not gone far before I realized where we were. This was the
powerhouse of the complex, where the electricity was generated. In
part, the rumbling was the sound of scores of enormous turbines turning.under the influence of water or perhaps steam.
The cavernous chamber was impressive, more than five hundred feet long
and at least two hundred feet wide, with a ceiling that must have
soared six or eight stories. Encased in cast-iron housings that had
been painted battleship-gray, five generators as big as two-story
houses were lined up one after the other down the center of the room.
Attendant equipment, most of it on a similarly gigantic scale, was
clustered around the bases of the generators.
Always seeking the concealment of shadows, we made our way across the
room by dodging from one large piece of machinery to the next, from
crates full of spare parts to a row of electric carts that the workers
evidently used to get around the facility.
High along both walls and directly overhead, steel catwalks were
provided for maintenance and inspection.
Also overhead, a mammoth red crane was suspended from rails that were
embedded in the ceiling; it looked capable of moving from one end of
the chamber to the other, providing service to any of the five
generators that required heavy repairwork. It was not in use now.
As Rya and I dashed from one bit of cover to the next, we not only
studied the lower reaches of the powerhouse but frequently looked
closely at the catwalks. We saw a goblin worker, then a pair of them,
on the floor. Both times they were a couple of hundred feet away,
absorbed by their jobs, monitoring the plant, and they never noticed us
as we scurried rat-quick from shadow to shadow. Fortunately we saw
none of the enemy on the overhead walkways; from up there they would
have spotted us more easily than from the floor, for down at our level
the plentitude of equipment and supplies made a long view difficult.
Near the middle of the chamber, we came to a thirty-footdeep,
thirty-foot-wide channel that ran next to the generators, spanning the
entire length of the room. It was bordered by safety railings. Laid
in the channel was a pipe approximately twenty-four feet in diameter,
large enough to drive trucks through; in fact, the noise rising from
the pipe seemed to indicate that entire convoys of Peterbilts and Macks
and other eighteen-wheelers were roaring past right now.
For a moment I was puzzled, but then I realized that the electric power
for the entire complex was generated by an underground river that had
been channeled through this pipe and harnessed to turn a series of
massive turbines. We were hearing millions of gallons of water rushing
downstream on a course that evidently went even deeper into the
mountain.
Looking along the line of house-sized generators with newfound respect,
I suddenly wondered why the goblins needed so much power. They were
generating sufficient electricity to supply a city a hundred times
larger than the one they were building.
Bridges spanned the channel. One of them was only ten yards from us.
However, I thought we'd be terribly exposed and vulnerable while
crossing. Rya must have agreed, for as one we turned away from the
channel and gingerly made our way down the center of the powerhouse,
alert for goblins and for anything we could use to our advantage.
What we found was an acceptable hiding place.
The only way we were going to get out of this so-called haven was to
lay low for so long that the enemy would think we had already escaped.
Then they would stop looking for us here, would turn their -attention
toward the world above ground in search of us, and would concentrate on
preventive measures to assure that no one else got into the facility as
we had done.
That hiding place: The concrete floor was very gently contoured toward.three-foot-round drains widely spaced across the chamber. They
probably cleaned the floor by hosing it down from time to time, and the
dirty water gravitated toward those outlets. The drain cover that we
found was a shiny steel grid in a sheltered space between machines.
There was no nearby light to pierce the gloom below it, so I switched
on my flashlight and directed the beam through the drain cover.
The grid's crosshatched shadows, which twisted and jumped each time I
shifted my light, made my inspection difficult, but I saw that the
vertical length of pipe went down about six feet, where the drain split
into two opposing horizontal pipelines, each only slightly smaller than
the vertical line that fed them.
Good enough.
I had the feeling we were running out of time. A search party had left
this room not long ago, but there was no guarantee that it would not
return for another look-especially if we had unwittingly left tracks of
any kind in the ventilation shafts to mark our journey to this place.
If searchers didn't return, then one of the powerhouse workers was
likely to blunder across us sooner or later, regardless of the caution
we exercised.
Together we lifted the steel grid out of the drain opening and quietly
laid it to one side, making only a brief metallic scraping sound that,
considering the roar of the nearby river and the din of the laboring
machines, could not have carried far. We left about one third of the
cover protruding over the opening so it could be gripped and maneuvered
from under neath.
We lowered our gear into the hole Rya dropped down and quickly shoved
one of our backpacks into each branching horizontal drain at the foot
of the vertical feeder line. She put the shotgun in one and the
automatic rifle in the other. Finally she slid backward into the
branch on the right and dragged the duffel bag in with her.
I jumped down into the now empty feeder line, reached up, gripped the
edge of the drain cover, and tried to lift it into place without a
sound. I failed. At the last moment it slipped in my hands and
clattered into place with a hard metallic ring that surely had been
heard throughout the chamber above. I just hoped each of the goblin
workers thought the sound had been caused by one of the others.
I slipped backward into the branching drain on the left and discovered
that it was not perfectly horizontal but slightly sloped to facilitate
the flow of water. It was dry now. They had not hosed the powerhouse
floor recently.
I was facing Rya across the three-foot-wide vertical feeder drain, but
the darkness was so complete that I could not see her. It was enough
to know she was there.
A few minutes passed uneventfully. If the clatter of the drain cover
had been heard, it evidently had not created much interest.
The noise of the generators overhead and the incessant rumble of the
underground river somewhere beyond Rya were transmitted through the
floor in which the drains were set, and therefore into the drains
themselves, making conversation impossible. We would have had to shout
to hear each other, and of course we could take no such risk.
Abruptly I had the feeling that I should reach out to Rya.
Upon succumbing to the urge, I found she was reaching out for me,
holding forth a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich and a thermos of juice. She
did not seem surprised when my questing hand found hers in the
darkness. Effectively blind and deaf and mute, nevertheless we were
able to communicate by virtue of the intense closeness that grew from
the love we shared; there was an almost clairvoyant link between us,.and from it we both drew what comfort and reassurance we could.
The luminous dial of my wristwatch showed that it was a few minutes
past five o'clock, Sunday afternoon.
Darkness and waiting.
I let my mind wander to Oregon. But the loss of family was too
depressing.
So I thought about Rya. About laughing with her in better times, about
loving her, needing her, wanting her. But soon all thoughts of Rya led
to a tumescence that was uncomfortable in my current awkward position.
So I called up memories of the carnival and of my many friends there.
The Sombra Brothers outfit was my haven, my family, my home. But, damn
it, we were far from the carnival, with little hope of -returning to
it, which was even more depressing than considerations of what I'd lost
in Oregon.
So I slept.
Having slept little during the past several nights, exhausted by the
day's explorations, I did not wake for nine hours. At two in the
morning I tore myself violently out of a dream, coming fully awake in
an instant.
For a fraction of a second I believed the nightmare had awakened me.
Then I realized there were several voices filtering down through the
grate at the top of the drain: goblin voices, speaking animatedly in
that ancient tongue.
I reached out from my burrow and, in the darkness, found Rya's hand as
it was reaching for mine. We held tight, listening.
Above, the voices moved away.
Out in the cavernous powerhouse there were sounds I had not heard
before: much thumping, much clanging of metal.
Not quite clairvoyantly I sensed that another search of the powerhouse
was under way. During the past nine hours they had gone through the
complex from one end to the other, leaving no passageway unexplored.
They had discovered the dead goblin we had interrogated. "They had
found the empty vials of pentothal and the used needles next to the
corpse.
Perhaps they had even uncovered traces of our journey through the
ventilation ducts and knew we had left those channels in the
powerhouse. Having found us nowhere else, they were giving this
chamber one more toss.
Forty minutes passed. The sounds overhead did not diminish.
Several times Rya and I let go of each other, only to reach out again a
minute or two later.
To my dismay I heard footsteps approaching the mouth of the drain.
Again, several goblins gathered around that steel grid.
A flashlight beam stabbed down through the grate.
Rya and I instantly snatched our hands apart, and like turtles
retreating into their shells, we drew silently back into the branch
drains.
in front of me, slats of light revealed strips of the floor in the
vertical pipe, the junction where it met the horizontal pipes in which
we cowered. Not much could be seen because the crosshatched ribs of
the grate cast a confusion of shadows.
The light clicked off.
Breath had gone stagnant in me. I quietly blew it out, sucked in clean
air.
The voices did not fade.
A moment later there came a screech, clatter, and thump, then a
scraping noise as they lifted the grate out of the mouth of the drain.and slid it aside.
The flashlight winked on again. It seemed as bright as a spotlight on
a stage.
Directly in front of me, only inches away, beyond the opening of the
horizontal pipe in which I lay, the flashlight illuminated the floor of
the vertical feeder line in almost supernatural detail. The beam
seemed hot; if there had been any moisture in the pipe, I would not
have been surprised to see it sizzle and vaporize in the glare. Every
scratch and discoloration in the drain's surface was vividly exposed.
I followed the probing light with breathless expectation, afraid that
it would fix upon something that either Rya or I had dropped when we
had reached across the darkness toward each other. Perhaps a crumb of
bread from the sandwich that she had passed to me. A single white
crumb, contrasted against the mottled grays of the pipe, would be our
undoing.
Beyond the slowly moving beam, in the horizontal drain opposite mine, I
glimpsed Rya's face, vaguely limned by the black splash of the light.
She glanced at me too; but like me, she was unable to turn her gaze
away from the probing beam for more than a second, afraid of what at
any moment might be revealed.
Suddenly the luminous lance stopped moving.
I strained to see what discovery had stayed the hand of the goblin with
the flashlight, but I spotted nothing that could have attracted its
attention or excited its suspicion.
the beam still did not move.
Overhead the goblins spoke louder, faster.
I wished I could understand their language.
Still, I thought I knew what they were discussing: They were going to
come down- to have a look in the branch pipes.
Some anomaly had caught their attention, some wrongness, and they were
going to descend to take a closer look.
A harp-string glissando of fear rippled through me, each note colder
than the one before it.
I could envision myself retreating desperately and laboriously backward
through the drain, too cramped to be able to fight, while one of the
goblins slithered in headfirst to pursue me. Quick as the demons were,
the beast would be able to reach out with wickedly clawed hands and
tear my face away-or gouge my eyes from their sockets or rip open my
throat-even as I was pulling the trigger of my gun. I'd almost surely
kill it, but I would die horribly, even as I squeezed off the shot that
finished my enemy.
Once it saw me, the certainty of its own death would prevent the goblin
from entering the pipe. I had seen hivelike nature of their secret
society. I knew that for the good of the community one of them would
no more hesitate to sacrifice itself than an ant would hesitate to die
in defense of the hill. And if I managed to shoot one or five or ten
of them, they would keep coming, forcing me deeper into the drain until
my gun jammed or until I took too long to reload, and then the last of
them would destroy me.
The beam of the flashlight moved again. It swept slowly around the
bottom of the vertical drain. Then around once more.
It froze again.
Dust motes drifted lazily in the luminous shaft.
Come on, you bastards, I thought. Come on, come on, let's get it over
with.
The light clicked off.
I tensed..Would they come in darkness? Why?
Surprisingly they wrestled the grate back into place at the top of the
drain.
"They were not coming down, after all. They were going away, satisfied
that we were not here.
I could hardly believe it. I lay in astonishment, as breathless with
amazement as I had been with fear.
In the blackness I eased forward and reached out for Rya.
She was reaching for me. Our hands gripped in the middle of the now
dark vertical pipe, where the flashlight beam had probed so
inquisitively only moments ago. Her hand was ice-cold, but it slowly
grew warm as I held it.
I was exhilarated. Remaining quiet was difficult, for I wanted to
laugh, whoop, and sing. For the first time since leaving Gibtown I
felt the fog of despair lifting a little, and I sensed hope shining
somewhere above.
They had searched their haven twice and had not found us.
Now they probably would never find us because they would be convinced
that we had escaped, and they would turn their attention elsewhere. In
several hours, after giving them more time to confirm their belief that
we'd fled, we could slip out of the drain and away, setting the
detonators on the charges we had planted on our way in.
We were going to get out of Yontsdown after having accomplished
virtually everything we had come to do. We had learned the reason for
the nest that existed here. And we had done something about it-maybe
not enough but something.
I knew we were going to get out unharmed, whole, and safe.
I knew, I knew. I just knew.
Sometimes my clairvoyance fails me. Sometimes there is a danger
looming, a darkness descending, that I cannot see regardless of how
hard I look.
31
The Deaths of Those We Love
The goblins had replaced the grate over the mouth of the drain and had
gone away at 2:09 Monday morning. I figured that Rya and I ought to
lay low for another four hours, anyway, which would mean that we would
make our way back out of the mountain twenty-four hours after we had
entered it under the guidance of Horton Bluett.
I wondered if the threatened snowstorm had come and if the world above
ground was white and clean.
I wondered if Horton Bluett and Growler were at that moment asleep in
their smidl, neat house on Apple Lane-or if they were awake, one or
both of them, wondering about Rya and me.
With higher spirits than I had known in days, I found that my usual
insomnia had departed me. In spite of the nine hours of solid sleep
I'd already enjoyed, I dozed on and off, sometimes sleeping deeply, as
if years of restless nights had suddenly caught up with me.
I did not dream. I took that as proof of a change for the better in
our fortunes. I was uncharacteristically optimistic.
That was part of my delusion.
When the call of nature had overwhelmed me, I had wriggled far back in
the drain, around a turn, where I had done what was necessary. Most of
the stench of urine was carried off, for a slight draft came down
through the pipe and followed the course that water would follow as it.sought the end of the drainage system. But even though a thin trace of
the unpleasant odor rose to me, I did not mind it, for I was in such a
good state of mind that only disaster on a cataclysmic scale could have
daunted me.
Content to doze dreamlessly and, in moments of fuzzy wakefulness, to
reach out and touch Rya, I did not come fully awake until seven-thirty
Monday morning, an hour and a half after I intended to leave our hiding
place. Then I lay for another half hour, listening to the powerhouse
overhead for indications that another search was under way.
I heard nothing alarming.
At eight o'clock I reached for Rya, found her hand, squeezed it, then
squirmed forward from the horizontal drain into the bottom of the
six-foot-high vertical line. I squatted there long enough to explore
my silencer-fitted pistol in the dark and release its safety catches.
I thought Rya whispered, "Careful, Slim," but the roar of the
underground river and the rumbling powerhouse were too loud for me to
be certain she had spoken. Perhaps I'd heard the thought in her
mind-Careful, Slim. By then we'd been through so much together,
growing steadily closer with each shared danger and adventure, that a
little mind reading-more instinct than telepathy, really-would not have
surprised me.
Standing, I put my face to the underside of the steel grate and
squinted through the small gaps in the grid. I could see only a very
tightly proscribed circle. If crouching goblins had ringed the hole,
only one foot back from the edge of it, I would not have been able to
spot them. But I sensed that the way was clear. Trusting in my
hunches, I put the pistol in the deep pocket of my ski suit and, with
both hands, lifted the grate up and to one side, making less noise than
when I had muscled it the other way fifteen hours ago.
Gripping the edges of the drain mouth, I pulled myself up, rolled out
onto the powerhouse floor. I was in a shadowy area between big
machines, and no goblins were to be seen.
Rya passed our gear up to me. I helped her out of the drain.
We hugged tightly, then quickly shrugged into the backpacks and picked
up the shotgun and the rifle. We put on our hard hats again. Since it
seemed that we had no further use for anything in the duffel bag except
the candles, the matches, and one thermos of juice (which we kept), I
lowered it back into the drain before replacing the grate.
We still had thirty-two kilos of plastic explosive, and we were
unlikely to find a better place to use them than here, in the heart of
the facility. Scurrying from shadow to shadow, not yet having given
our final performance as rats, we went half the length of the enormous
chamber, successfully dodging the few powerhouse workers. As 'we went,
we quickly planted charges of plastique. Nasty rats, we were. The
kind that might eat holes in a ship's hull, then flee the sinking hulk.
Except that no rat could ever take such intense pleasure from
destructive labor as we took. We found service doors in the bottom of
the iron housings of the two-story generators, and we slipped inside to
leave small gifts of death. We planted other charges under some
electric carts used by the powerhouse workers, put still others in
whatever machinery we passed.
We activated the timer on each detonator before plugging it into the
plastique. We set the first one for an hour, the next for fifty-nine
minutes, the next two for fifty-eight minutes, the next one for
fifty-six because it took us longer to find a place to stash it. We
were trying to assure that the first blast would occur simultaneously
with-or at least would be followed swiftly by-other explosions..In twenty-five minutes we placed twenty-eight one-kilo charges and set
the clocks ticking on them. Then, with only four kilos left, we
entered the intake ventilation duct where we had sneaked out the
previous evening. We pulled the hinged grille shut behind us, and with
the aid of flashlights we retraced the route by which we had arrived at
the powerhouse.
We had just thirty-five minutes to get down to the fifth floor, locate
the four charges we had planted yesterday, plug detonators into them,
take an elevator to the level at which we had first entered, put
detonators in the charges we'd left on that unfinished floor, and
follow the white arrows that we had painted on the walls of the old
mines until we'd gotten far enough away to escape the worst of the
chain-reaction caveins that might be triggered by the blasts within the
goblins' haven. We had to move silently and cautiously-and fast. It
was going to be a near thing, but I thought we could make it.
The journey through the ventilation ducts was easier and quicker than
when we had been coming from the other direction, for we knew the
system now and had no doubt about our destination. In six minutes we
reached the vertical duct that was fitted with rungs, and we climbed
down fifty feet to the fifth level. Four minutes later we came to the
intake grille in the room that housed a lot of hydroponic farming
equipment, where we had interrogated--and killed the goblin whose human
name was Tom Tarkenson.
That chamber was dark and deserted.
The corpse we'd left had been removed.
I felt horribly conspicuous behind the beam of the flashlight, as if I
were making a target of myself. I kept expecting a goblin to rise up
from between the empty hydroponic tanks and order us to halt. But the
expectation went unfulfilled.
We ran to the door.
In twenty-five minutes the explosions would begin.
Evidently our long wait in the powerhouse drain had convinced the
demonkind that we were no longer among them, that somehow we had
slipped out undetected, for they seemed not to be looking for us any
more. At least not underground.
(They must be frantic, wondering who the hell we were, why we had come,
and how far we would spread the details of what we had seen and
learned.) The corridors on the fifth floor were as deserted now as they
had been when we'd entered the complex the previous day; this level
was, after all, nothing more than a warehouse, already fully stocked
and requiring little attention from maintenance crews.
We hurried from one long tunnel to the next, the shotgun and the
automatic rifle held at the ready. We paused only to plug detonators
into the four kilos of plastique that we had previously molded around
sheaves of water, gas, and other pipes that crossed or paralleled some
portions of the tunnels.
Each time we stopped, we had to put down our weapons so I could boost
Rya up and so she could fit the detonator in place, and I felt
terrifyingly vulnerable, certain that guards would come upon us at just
such a moment.
None did.
Though they knew intruders had breached their haven, the goblins
evidently did not suspect sabotage. They would have had to undertake a
painstaking search for explosives in order to find the charges we had
planted, but it could have been done. Their failure to take that
precaution indicated that in spite of our intrusion, they felt secure
against a meaningful attack. For thousands of years they have had.every reason to feel smug and superior toward us. Their attitudes
regarding humankind are deeply ingrained; they see us as game animals,
pathetic fools, and worse. Their certainty that we are easy prey . .
. well, that was one of our advantages in the war with them.
We reached the elevators with nineteen minutes remaining until zero
hour. Just eleven hundred and forty seconds, each of which my heart
counted off with a double beat.
Though everything had gone smoothly to that point, I was afraid that we
could not take the elevator to the unfinished floor below without
drawing unwanted attention. It seemed too much to wish for. But
because the old mines beneath us had not yet been converted into
another wing of the goblins' shelter, there was no ventilation duct
leading down to them, and the elevators provided the only access.
We stepped into the cage, and with great trepidation I shoved the lever
forward. A frightful creaking and grinding and grumbling marked our
descent through the shaft of rock.
If any goblins were in the chamber below, they would be alerted.
Our luck held. None of the enemy was waiting for us when we arrived in
the huge domed chamber where construction supplies and equipment had
been provisioned for the next phase of the shelter's development.
Again, I put down the rifle and boosted Rya. With a swiftness that
would have done credit to a demolitions expert, she plugged detonators
into each of the three charges that I had shaped into depressions in
the rock wall above the three elevators.
Seventeen minutes. One thousand and twenty seconds. Two thousand and
forty heartbeats.
We crossed the domed chamber, pausing four times to deposit the last
four kilos of plastique among the machinery.
Fourteen minutes. Eight hundred and forty seconds.
We reached the tunnel where the double row of ceiling lamps, burning
under conical shades, threw a checkerboard pattern of light and shadow
on the stone floor, the place where I had shot a goblin. Them I had
left one-kilo charges on both sides of the tunnel, near the entrance to
the large room. With growing confidence we paused to set clocks
ticking in those final bombs.
The next tunnel was the last with lighting. We raced to the end of it
and turned right, into the first mine shaft on Horton's map (if you
read it backward, as we were now doing).
Our flashlights were not as bright as they had been, and the intensity
of the beams fluctuated, a bit weak from all the use we'd put them to
but not weak enough to worry us. Besides, we had spare batteries in
our pockets-and candles, if it came to that.
I unstrapped my backpack and abandoned it. Rya did the same. From
here on, what few supplies the packs contained were unimportant. All
that mattered was speed.
I slung the rifle over my shoulder by its strap, and Rya did the same
with the shotgun. We stashed the pistols in the holster-deep pockets
in our pants. Carrying only flashlights and Horton's map and a thermos
of orange juice, we tried to put as much distance between ourselves and
the Lightning Coal Company's property as we possibly could before all
hell broke loose.
Nine and a half minutes.
I felt as if we had broken into a castle occupied by vampires, had
crept into the dungeons where the undying slept in I earth-filled
coffins, had managed to drive stakes through the hearts of only a few
of them, and now had to flee for our lives as sunset arrived and
brought the first stirrings of life to the blood-hungry multitudes.behind us. In fact, given the goblins' consuming need to feed on our
pain, the analogy was closer to the truth than I liked to consider.
From the meticulously designed and constructed and maintained
underworld of the goblins, we advanced into the chaos of man and
nature, into - the old mines that man had bored and that nature was
sullenly determined to refill piece by piece. I Following the white
arrows we had painted during our inward journey, we ran along musty
tunnels. We crawled through narrow passageways where walls had
partially caved in. We clambered up a cramped vertical shaft where a
couple of corroded iron rungs snapped under our feet.
A repulsive light-shunning fungus grew on one wall. It burst as we
brushed against it, spewing a stench like rotten eggs, smearing our ski
suits with slime.
Three minutes.
With our flashlight beams fading, we rushed down another musty tunnel,
turned right at the marked intersection, and splashed through a puddle
of scum-filmed water.
Two minutes. About three hundred and forty heartbeats at the current
rate of exchange.
The journey in had taken seven hours, so most of the return trip would
still lie ahead of us after the last charge of plastique blew, but
every foot we put between us and the goblins' haven improved-I
hoped-our chances of escaping the zone of associated cave-ins. We were
not equipped to dig our way back to the surface.
The steadily weakening flashlights, bobbling wildly in our hands as we
ran, threw leaping dervish shadows along the walls and ceiling-a herd
of ghosts, a pride of spirits, a pack of frenzied specters that pursued
us, now chased at our sides, now flew ahead, now fell back once more to
nip at our heels.
Maybe a minute and a half.
Menacing black-cloaked figures, some bigger than men, appeared to be
springing up from the floor in front of us, though none reached out to
seize us; we flashed through some of them as through columns of smoke,
and others melted back as we raced at them, and still others shrank and
flew up to the ceiling as if they had changed into bats.
One minute.
The usual sepulchral silence of the earth had been filled @ a multitude
of rhythmic sounds: our slamming footsteps; Rya's hard-drawn breath; my
raging breath, even louder than hers; echoes of all those bouncing back
and forth between the rock walls; a cacophony of syncopation.
I thought we had the better part of a minute left, but the first
explosion put an early end to my countdown. It was distant, a solid
thump that I felt more than heard, but I had no doubt what it was.
We came to another vertical shaft. Rya tucked her flashlight into her
waistband, the beam pointing up, and climbed into the dark bore. I
followed.
Another thump, immediately followed by a third.
In the shaft one of the badly rusted iron rungs broke in my hand. I
slipped and fell twelve or fourteen feet, back into the tunnel below.
"Slim!"
"I'm all right," I said, though I had landed on my tailbone, jarring my
spine. The pain came and went in a flash, leaving only a dull
throbbing.
I was lucky that one of my legs hadn't twisted under me as I'd fallen.
It would have broken.
Climbing into the shaft again, I scrambled up with the sureness and
quickness of a monkey, which wasn't easy given the throbbing in my.back. But I didn't want Rya to worry about me, about anything, except
getting out of those tunnels.
Fourth, fifth, and sixth explosions shook the subterranean installation
that we had recently departed, and the sixth was much louder and more
powerful than those before it. The walls of the mine shook around us,
and the floor leapt twice, nearly pitching us off our feet. Dust, bits
of earth, and a veritable rain of stone chips fell around us.
My flashlight had virtually given out. I did not want to stop to
replace the batteries, not yet. I swapped lights with Rya and led the
way with her fading flash as a chain of explosions-six or eight more,
at least-rocked the labyrinth.
Overhead, I saw a crack open in an ancient ceiling beam, and I no
sooner hurried under it than it crashed to the floor behind me. A cry
of terror and dread flew from me, and I whirled around in expectation
of the worst, but Rya had also gotten through unharmed. My hunch that
our luck would hold grew stronger, and I knew we were going to make it
without getting seriously hurt. Though I had once been acutely aware
that it was always brightest just before the dark, I had for a moment
forgotten that truism and would, in a moment more, regret my
forgetfulness.
A ton of rock had come down atop the falling beam. More was going to
give way in a moment-the rock face was buckling as if it were soft
earth wet with rain-so we ran again, side by side because the tunnel
was wide. Behind us the sounds of the cave-in grew louder, louder,
until I was afraid the entire corridor was going to collapse.
The remaining charges of plastique were detonating in a single
tremendous barrage, of which we heard steadily less even as we felt
more. Damn, the whole mountain seemed to be quaking, its foundations
shaken by massively violent tremors that could not have been induced by
the plastique alone.
Of course, half the mountain was honeycombed by more than a century of
industrious coal mining and was therefore weakened. And maybe the
plastique had triggered other explosions of fuel oil and gas within the
goblins' haven. Nevertheless it seemed as if Armageddon had befallen
us ahead of schedule, and my confidence was shaken with each massive
shock wave that passed through the rock.
We were coughing now because the air was filled with choking dust.
Some of it sifted down from overhead, but most of it burst upon us in
thick, rolling clouds carried on gusts of air from cave-ins to our
rear. If we could not soon escape the ring of influence of the
collapsing subterranean city, if we could not get to unshaken tunnels
and clean air in the next minute or two, we would suffocate in the
dust, a death that was not among the many that I had contemplated.
Furthermore, the waning flashlight-beam was less able to pierce the
dust mist. The yellow light was reflected and refracted by the fog of
particles. More than once I became disoriented and nearly ran head-on
into a wall.
The last of the explosions passed, but a dynamic process had been set
in motion, and the Mountainside was seeking a new order that would
release long accumulated tensions and pressures, that would fill all
unnatural cavities. On both sides and overhead, the mighty rock began
to crack and pop in the most astonishing manner, not with the one-note
rumble that you might expect but with an unharmonious symphony of queer
sounds like balloons being punctured and walnuts cracked and heavy
pottery smashed and bones splintered and skulls fractured; it thudded
and clattered like bowling pins scattered by a ball, crackled like
cellophane, clanged and crashed and boomed like a hundred husky.blacksmiths wielding a hundred big hammers against a hundred iron
anvils-and frequently there was even a pure, sweet ringing sound
followed by an almost musical tinkling reminiscent of fine crystal
being struck, being shattered.
Flakes of stone, then chips, then pebbles began raining over our heads
and shoulders. Rya was screaming. I grabbed her hand, pulled her
after me through the stone sleet.
Larger chunks of the treacherous ceiling began to fall, some as big as
baseballs, clattering onto the floor around us.
A fist-sized rock hit my right shoulder, and another hit my right arm,
and I nearly dropped the flashlight. A couple of sizable missiles hit
Rya too. They hurt, all right, but we kept going; we could do nothing
else. I blessed Horton Bluett for having provided us with hard hats,
though that protection would be insufficient if the whole place fell in
on our heads.
The mountain was imploding Re a Krakatoa in reverse, but at least most
of it was falling in our wake.
Suddenly the tremors subsided, which was such a welcome change that at
first I thought I was imagining it. But in another ten steps it was
clear that the worst was past us.
We reached the leading edge of the dust cloud and ran out into
relatively clean air, spluttering and wheezing to clear our lungs.
My eyes were watering from the dust, and I slowed a little to blink
them clear. The yellow beam of the flash pulsed and flickered
constantly as the last power in the batteries was sucked away, but I
saw one of our white arrows ahead.
With Rya running at my side again, we followed the sign we had left for
ourselves, turned a corner into a new tunnel-where one of the demonkind
leapt off the wall to which it had been clinging, and took Rya down
onto the floor with a shrill cry of triumph and a murderous slashing of
claws.
I dropped the fading flashlight, which blinked but did not go out, and
I threw myself at Rya's attacker, instinctively drawing my knife rather
than my pistol as I fell upon the creature. I put the blade deep into
the small of its back and dragged it off her as it shrieked in agony
and anger.
It reached back for me and sank the claws of one hand through the leg
of my ski suit, shredding the insulated fabric.
Hot pain blazed up my right calf. I knew that it had torn my flesh as
well as the pants.
I slipped one arm around its neck, pulled up on its chin, ripped my
blade out of its back, and slashed its throat-a series of swift actions
that seemed like ballet movements and could have occupied no more than
two seconds.
As blood spurted from the savaged throat of my enemy and as the thing
began to seek its human form, I sensed, rather than heard, another
goblin coming off a wall or ceiling behind me. I rolled away from the
bleeding demon even as I withdrew my knife from it, and the second
attacker crashed down on top of its dying companion instead of on me.
The pistol had fallen out of the pocket in which I'd holstered it, but
it was beyond arm's reach, between me and the demon that had just leapt
off the wall.
That creature swung to face me, all blazing eyes and teeth and claws
and prehistoric fury. I saw its powerful haunches flex, and I barely
had time to throw the knife as it launched itself at me. The blade
tumbled just twice and sank into its throat. Spitting blood, blowing
thick clots of blood out of its piglike snout, it fell upon me..Although the impact of the fall drove the knife all the way through its
throat, the goblin managed to sink its claws through my insulated
jacket and into my sides just above my hips, not deep but more than
deep enough.
I heaved the dying beast off me, unable to stifle a cry of pain as its
claws tore free of my flesh.
The flashlight was almost dead, but in the moon-pale glow that
remained, I saw a third goblin rushing me on all fours, providing as
low a profile and as narrow a target as it could manage. It had been
farther away, perhaps almost at the end of this tunnel, which gave me
just enough time, in spite of its speed, to dive for the pistol, raise
the gun, and fire twice. The first shot missed. The second smashed
into the hateful porcine face, blasting out one of its scarlet eyes.
It pitched to one side, slammed against the wall, and was convulsed by
death tremors.
Just when the flashlight throbbed and winked out, I thought I saw a
fourth goblin creeping roachlike along the far wall.
Before I could be sure of what I'd seen, we were cast into perfect
blackness.
With pain bubbling like an acid in my slashed leg and burning in my
punctured sides, I could not move gracefully. I dared not remain where
I had been when the light had gone out, for if there was a fourth
goblin, it would be moving stealthily toward the place where it had
seen me last.
I eased over one corpse, then climbed across another, until I found
Rya.
She lay facedown on the floor. Very still.
As far as I was aware, she had not moved or made a sound since the
goblin had exploded off the wall and driven her to the floor. I wanted
to turn her gently onto her back and feel for a pulse, speak her name,
hear her respond.
I could do none of that until I was sure about the fourth goblin.
Crouching protectively over Rya, I faced out into the lightless tunnel,
cocked my head, and listened.
The mountain had grown quiet and seemed, at least temporarily, to be
finished closing up its wounds. If portions of tunnel ceilings and
walls were still falling back where we had come from, they were small
failures that did not produce enough noise to reach us.
The darkness was deeper than that you see behind your closed eyelids.
Smooth, featureless, unrelieved.
I entered into an unwanted dialogue with myself, pessimist confronting
optimist:
-Is she dead?
-Don't even think it.
-Do you hear her breathing?
-Christ, if she's unconscious, her breathing would be shallow. She
could be fine, just unconscious, breathing so shallowly that it can't
be heard. All right? All right?
-Is she dead?
-Concentrate on the enemy, damn it.
If another goblin existed, it might come from any direction.
With its talent for walking on walls, it had a big advantage. It could
even drop on me from the ceiling, straight down on my head and
shoulders.
-Is she dead?
-Shut up!.-Because if she's dead, what does it matter whether you kill the fourth
goblin? What does it matter if you ever get out of here?
-We're both going to get out of here.
-If you've got to go home alone, what's the point in going home at all?
If this is her grave, then it might as well be yours too.
quiet. Listen, listen ...
Silence.
The darkness was so perfect, so thick, so heavy that it seemed to have
substance. I felt as if I could reach out and seize damp handsful of
darkness, wring the blackness out of the air until light was able to
shine through from somewhere.
As I listened for the soft click and scrape of demon talons on stone, I
wondered what the goblins had been doing when we blundered into them.
Maybe they were following our white arrows to see how we had entered
their haven. Until now I hadn't realized that our signposts were as
handy for them as for us. Yes, of course, they had searched every inch
of their haven more than once, and after concluding that we had
escaped, they had probably turned their attention, in part, to learning
how we had escaped. Maybe these searchers had traced our route all the
way out of the mountain and were returning when we encountered them.
Or perhaps they had only set out to follow that trail shortly before we
came rushing along behind them. Although they had taken us by
surprise, they appeared to have had just a few seconds of warning that
we were approaching. With more time to prepare for us, they would have
killed us both-or taken us captive.
-Is she dead?
-No.
she's so silent.
-Unconscious.
-So still.
-Shut up.
There. A scrape, a click.
I craned my neck, turned my head.
Nothing more.
Imagination?
I tried to remember how many cartridges were in the pistol's clip. It
held ten rounds when fully loaded. I'd used two on the goblin that I'd
shot on Sunday in the tunnel with the checkerboard lighting. Two more
on the one I'd shot here. Six left. That would be plenty. Maybe I
wouldn't kill the remaining enemy-if there was another one-with six
shots, but that surely would be the most I'd have a chance to fire
before the damn thing was all over me.
A soft slithering sound.
Straining my eyes was pointless. I strained them, anyway.
Blackness as deep as that in the bottom of God's boot.
Silence.
But . . . there. Another click.
And an odd smell. The sour smell of goblin breath.
Tick.
Where?
Tick.
Overhead.
I fell onto my back, atop Rya, squeezed off three shots into the
ceiling, heard one ricochet off stone, heard an inhuman scream, and did
not have time to fire the final three rounds because the badly wounded
goblin crashed to the floor beside me. Sensing me, it howled and
lashed out, got one of its strangely jointed but monstrously strong.arms around my head, pulled me against it, and sank its teeth into my
shoulder. It probably thought it was going for my neck, for a quick
kill, but the darkness and its own pain had disoriented it. As it tore
its teeth free of me, taking some meat with it, I had just enough
strength and presence of mind remaining to thrust the pistol under its
chin, tight against the base of its throat, and pull off the last three
shots in the pistol, blowing its brains out the top of its skull.
The dark tunnel began to spin.
I was going to pass out.
That was no good. There might be a fifth goblin. If I passed out, I
might never wake up again.
And I had to tend to Rya. She was hurt. She needed me.
I shook my head.
I bit my tongue.
I took deep, cleansing breaths, and I squeezed my eyes shut very hard
to make the tunnel stop spinning.
I said aloud, "I will not pass out."
Then I passed out.
Though I'd not had the leisure to consult my watch at the precise
moment that I'd fainted and therefore had to rely on instinct, I did
not think I had been out cold for very long. A minute or two at most.
When I regained consciousness, I lay for a moment, listening for the
dry-leaf-windblown scuttle of a goblin. Then I realized that even a
minute in a faint would have been the end of me if another of the
demonkind had been in the tunnel.
I crawled across the stone floor, making my way around the dead
shape-changers, feeling blindly with both hands searching for one of
the flashlights but finding only a lot of vaguely warm blood.
A power failure in Hell is an especially nasty business, I thought
crazily.
I almost laughed at that. But it would have been a strange shrill
laugh, too strange, so I choked it down.
Then I remembered the candles and matches in one of my inner jacket
pockets. I brought them forth with trembling hands.
The sputtering tongue of candle flame licked back the darkness, though
not enough to allow me to examine Rya as closely as I needed to do.
With the candle, however, I located both flashlights, popped the
batteries out of them, and inserted fresh ones.
After blowing out the candle and pocketing it, I went to Rya and knelt
beside her. I put the flashlights on the floor, aiming their bright
beams so they crossed over her.
"Rya?" She did not answer me.
"Please, Rya." Still. She lay very still.
The word pale had been coined for her condition.
Her face felt cold. Too cold.
I saw a just darkening bruise that covered the right half of her
forehead and followed the curve of her temple and went all the way down
past her cheekbone. Blood glistened at the corner of her mouth.
Weeping, I peeled back one of her eyelids, but I did not know what the
hell I was looking for, so I tried to feel her breath with a hand
against her nostrils, but my hand was shaking so badly that I could not
tell if breath escaped her.
Finally I did what I was loath to do: I took hold of one of her hands
and lifted it, slipped two fingers under her wrist, feeling for her
pulse, which I could not find, could not find, dear God, could not
find. Then I realized that I could see her pulse, that it was beating
weakly in her temples, a barely perceptible throb but beating, and when.I carefully turned her head to one side, I saw the pulse in her throat
as well. Alive.
Maybe not by much. Maybe not for long. But alive.
With renewed hope I examined her, looking for wounds.
Her ski suit was slashed, and the goblin's claws had penetrated to her
left hip, drawing some blood, though not much.
I was afraid to check for the source of the blood at the corner of her
lips, for it might be from internal bleeding; her mouth might be full
of blood. But it wasn't. Her lip was cut; nothing worse. In fact,
except for the bruises on her forehead and face, she seemed unharmed.
"Rya?" Nothing.
I had to get her out of the mines, above ground, before another series
of cave-ins began or before another party of goblins came looking for
us-or before she died for want of medical treatment.
I switched one flashlight off and slipped it into the deep utility
pocket in my pant leg, where I had previously kept the pistol. I would
not be needing the weapon anymore, for if I was confronted by goblins
again, I would surely be brought down before I could destroy all of
them, regardless of how many guns I possessed.
Since she could not walk, I carried her. My right calf bore three
gouge marks from a goblin's claws. Five punctures in my side-three on
the left, two on the right-red blood. I was battered, skinned, host to
a hundred aches and pains, but somehow I carried Rya.
We do not always gain strength and courage from adversity; sometimes we
are destroyed by it. We do not always experience an adrenaline surge
and superhuman powers in times of crisis, either, but it happens often
enough to have become a part of our folklore.
In those subterranean corridors it happened to me. It wasn't a sudden
adrenaline flood of the sort that enables a husband to lift an entire
wrecked automobile off his pinned wife as if hefting nothing more than
a suitcase, not the storm of adrenaline that gives a mother the power
to tear a locked door off its hinges and walk through a burning room to
rescue her child without feeling the heat. Instead I guess it was
something like a steady drip-drip-drip of adrenaline, an amazingly
prolonged flow in precisely the amount that I required to keep going.
All things considered, when the human heart is fully explored and basic
motivations understood, it is not the prospect of your own death that
scares you most, that fills you to bursting with fear. Really, it's
not. Think about it. What frightens us more, what reduces us to
blubbering terror, are the deaths of those we love. The prospect of
your own death, while not welcome, can be home, for there is no
suffering and pain once death has come. But when you lose the ones you
love, your suffering lives on until you descend into your own grave.
Mothers, fathers, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, friends-they
are taken from you all your life, and the pain of loss and loneliness
that their passing leaves within you is a more profound suffering than
the brief flare of pain and the fear of the unknown that accompanies
your own death.
Fear of losing Rya drove me through those tunnels with greater
determination than I would have possessed if I had been concerned only
about my own survival. For the next few hours I ceased to be aware of
pain, sore muscles, and exhaustion. Although my mind and heart blazed
with emotions, my body was a cool machine, moving tirelessly forward,
sometimes humming along in well-oiled precision, sometimes clanking and
thumping and grinding forward, but always moving without complaint,
without feeling. I carried her in my arms as I might have carried a
small child, and her weight seemed less than that of the child's doll..When I came to a vertical shaft, I wasted no time pondering how to
raise her to the next level of the maze. I simply stripped off my ski
jacket and hers; then, with a strength that would have tested a real
machine, I tore those sturdy garments along all their tightly sewn
seams, tore them even where they did not have seams, until I had
reduced them to strips of tough, quilted fabric.
Knotting those strips together, I fashioned a sling that fitted under
her arms and through her crotch,-plus a double-strand
fourteen-foot-long towline looped at the upper end. As I climbed the
shaft I hauled her after me. I ascended at a slant, my feet against
the rungs on one side, my back against the opposite wall. The loop of
the double towline was over my chest, and my arms were straight down,
with one hand pulling on each of the lines to keep from taking all the
weight of her on my breastbone. I was careful not to bump her head
against the walls or against the corrupted iron rungs, gentling her
along, easy, easy. that was a feat of strength, balance, and
coordination that later seemed phenomenal but, at the time, was
achieved with no thought of its difficulty.
We had taken seven hours to make the journey into the mines, but that
had been when we were both fit. Going back out was certain to require
a day or more, perhaps two days.
We had no food, but that would be okay. We could live a day or two
without eating.
(I did not give a single thought to how my energy level would be
sustained without food. My lack of concern did not arise from a
conviction that my adrenaline-pumped body would not fail me. No, I
simply was unable to think of such things, for my mind was churning
with emotions-fear, love and had no time for practicalities. The
practicalities were being taken care of by the machine-body, which was
programmed, an automaton, and which required no thinking to perform its
duties.) However, in time I did think about water, for the body cannot
function without water as easily as without food.
Water is the oil of the human machine, and without it, breakdowns
quickly ensue. The thermos of orange juice had fallen from Rya's grasp
when the goblin had leapt on her from the wall of the mine, and later I
had shaken it to see if it had broken; the rattling of the shattered
glass liner had made it unnecessary for me to open the container and
look inside.
Now all we had to drink was the water puddled shallowly in some of the
tunnels. It was often scum-covered, and it probably tasted of coal and
mold and worse, but I could no more taste it than I could feel pain.
From time to time I put Rya down long enough to crouch at some stagnant
pool, skim the slime off the surface, and scoop up a drink with my
hands.
Sometimes I held Rya, pulled her mouth open, and fed her water out of
one cupped hand. She did not stir, but as the water trickled down her
throat I was encouraged to see those muscles contract and relax again
with involuntary swallowing.
A miracle is an event measured in moments: a fleeting glimpse of God
manifested in some mundane aspect of the physical world, a brief flow
of blood from the stigmata of a statue of Christ, a tear or three
spilling from the sightless eyes of an image of the Virgin Mary, the
whirling sky at Fatima.
My miracle of strength endured for hours, but it could not last
forever. I remember falling to my knees, getting up, going on, falling
again, nearly dropping Rya that time, deciding I should take a rest for
her sake if not my own, just a short rest to gather my strength-and.then I slept.
When I awoke, I was feverish.
And Rya was as motionless and silent as before.
The tide of her breath still ebbed and flowed. Her heart still beat,
though I thought her pulse seemed weaker than it had been.
I had left the flashlight on when I had dozed off. Now it was dim,
dying.
Cursing my stupidity, I withdrew the spare light from the long utility
pocket in my pant leg, switched it on, and put the dead flash in the
pocket.
According to my wristwatch, it was seven o'clock, and I assumed that
was seven o'clock Monday night. However, for all I knew, it might have
been Tuesday morning. I had no way of judging how long I had struggled
through the mines with Rya or how long I had slept.
I found water for us.
I picked her up again. After that intermission I willed the miracle to
continue, and it did. However, the power that flowed into me was so
much less than before that I thought God had gone elsewhere, leaving my
support to one of His lesser angels whose sinews were not nearly as
impressive as those of his Master. My ability to block out pain and
weariness was diminished. I lumbered along in an admirably robotic
indifference for considerable distance, but from time to time I became
aware of pains so severe that I made a thin whining sound and even, on
a couple of occasions, screamed. Now and then, the aching in my
tortured muscles and bones became apparent to me, and I had to block
that awareness. Rya no longer always seemed as light as a doll, and
sometimes I could have sworn she weighed a thousand pounds.
I passed the skeleton of the dog. I kept looking back at it uneasily
because my fevered mind was filled with images of being pursued by that
pile of canine bones.
Phasing in and out of consciousness as if I were a moth darting from
flame to darkness to flame again, I frequently found myself in
conditions and positions that scared the hell out of me. More than
once I rose out of my inner blackness and discovered that I was
kneeling over Rya, weeping uncontrollably. Each time I thought her
dead, but each time I found a pulse-thready, perhaps, but a pulse.
Spluttering and choking, I awoke facedown in a puddle of water from
which I had been drinking. Sometimes I returned to awareness and found
that I had kept walking with her in my arms but had gone past one of
the white arrows, a couple of hundred feet or more into the wrong
passageway; whereupon, I had to turn and find my way back to the
correct path in the maze.
I was hot. Burning up. It was a dry, parching heat, and I felt the
way Slick Eddy had looked back in Gibtown: like ancient parchment, like
Egyptian sands, crisp and juiceless.
For a while I looked at my watch regularly, but eventually I did not
bother with it anymore. It was of no use and no comfort to me. I
could not tell what portion of the day the watch referred to; I didn't
know if it was morning or evening, night or perhaps midafternoon. I
didn't know which day it was, either, although I assumed it must be
late Monday or early Tuesday.
I staggered past the rust-welded heap of long abandoned mining
equipment that, by chance, formed a crude, alien figure with homed
head, spiked chest, and bladed spine. I was more than half convinced
that its corroded head had turned as I moved by, that its iron mouth
had slipped open farther, that one hand had moved. Much later, in
other tunnels, I imagined I could hear it coming after me, clanking and.scraping along with great patience, not able to match my pace but
convinced that it would catch me by sheer perseverance, which it
probably would because my own pace was declining steadily.
I was not always sure when I was awake and when I was dreaming.
Sometimes, carrying or lifting or cautiously pulling Rya along the
crumbling passageways, I thought I was in a nightmare and that all
would be well in a moment when I woke. But, of course, I was already
awake and living the nightmare.
From the flame of consciousness to the darkness of insensibility,
swooping mothlike between the two, I grew inexorably weaker,
fuzzy-headed, and very much hotter. I woke and was sitting against the
rock wall of a tunnel, holding Rya in my arms, soaked with sweat. My
hair was plastered to my head, and my eyes stung from the salty
rivulets that streamed off my forehead and temples. Perspiration
dripped from my brow, from my nos&, ears, chin, and jawline. I seemed
to have gone for a swim in my clothes. I was hotter than I'd ever been
while lying on the beach in Florida, yet the heat came entirely from
within me; I had a furnace in me, a blazing sun trapped within my rib
cage.
When next I regained consciousness, I was still hot, fiercely hot, yet
I was shivering uncontrollably, hot and cold at the same time. The
sweat was near the boiling point when it burst from me, but then it
seemed instantly to freeze on my skin.
I @ to turn my mind away from my own misery, @ to focus on Rya and
regain the miraculous strength and stamina that I had lost. Examining
her, I could no longer find a pulse in her temples, throat, or wrist.
Her skin seemed colder than before. When I frantically lifted one of
her eyelids, I thought something was different about the eye beneath, a
terrible emptiness. "Oh no," I said, and I felt for the pulse
again-"No, no, Rya, please, no"-but still I could not find any
heartbeat. "Goddamn it, no!" I held her against me, held her tighter,
as if I could prevent Death from prying her out of my embrace. I
rocked her like a baby, and I crooned to her, and I told her she would
be fine, just fine, that we would lie on beaches again, that we would
make love again and laugh, that we would be together for a long, long
time.
I thought of my mother's subtle but paranormal ability to blend various
herbs into healing brews and poultices. The same herbs had no
medicinal value when others blended them. The healing power was in my
mom, not in the powdered leaves and bark and berries and roots and
flowers with which she worked. All of us in the Stanfeuss family had
some special gift, some chromosomes welded here and there in the
genetic chain. If my mother could heal, why couldn't I, damn it? Why
was I cursed with Twilight Eyes when God could have blessed me as
easily with healing hands? Why was I doomed only to see goblins and
oncoming disaster, visions of death and disaster? If my mother could
heal, why couldn't I? And since I was unquestionably the most gifted
of anyone in the Stanfeuss family, why couldn't I heal the sick even
better than my mom could?
Holding Rya's body tightly, rocking her as one might rock a baby, I
willed her to live. I insisted that Death depart. I argued with that
dark specter, tried humoring him, cajoling him, then did my best with
reason and logic, then begged, but begging soon turned to bitter
argument; finally I was threatening him, as if there was anything with
which Death could be threatened. Crazy. I was crazy. Out of my mind
with fever, yes, but also insane with grief. Through my hands and arms
I attempted to convey the life within me into her, strove to pour it.out of me and into her as I might pour water from a pitcher to a glass.
In my mind I formed an image of her alive and smiling, then gritted my
teeth and clenched my jaws and held my breath and willed that mental
image to become a reality, strained so hard at the bizarre task that I
passed out again.
Thereafter, fever and grief and exhaustion conspired to carry me deeper
into the kingdom of incoherence where I reigned. Sometimes I found
myself trying to heal her, and sometimes I was singing softly to
her-mostly old Buddy Holly tunes, the lyrics strangely twisted by
delirium. Sometimes I babbled out lines of dialogue from the old Thin
Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy, which we both liked so
much, and sometimes the dialogue was remembered bits and pieces of
things we had said to each other in moments of tenderness, in love. I
alternately raged at God- and blessed Him, bitterly accused Him of
cosmic sadism one moment and, seconds later, weepingly reminded Him of
His reputation for mercy. I ranted and raved, keened and cooed, prayed
and cursed, sweated and shivered, but mostly I wept. I recall thinking
that my tears might heal her and bring her back. Madness.
Considering the copious flow of tears and sweat, it seemed only a
matter of time until I shriveled up, turned to dust, and blew away.
But at that moment such an end was immensely appealing. Just turn to
dust and blow away, disperse, as if I had never existed.
I was unable to get up and move any farther, though I traveled in the
many dreams that came to me when I dozed.
In Oregon I sat in the kitchen of the Stanfeuss house and ate a slice
of my mother's home-baked apple pie while she smiled down at me and
while my sisters told me how good it was to have me back and how happy
I would be to see my father again when-very soon now-I joined him in
the peace of the hereafter. On a carnival midway, under a blue sky, I
went to the high-striker to introduce myself to Miss Rya Raines and ask
for a job, but the woman who owned the high-striker was someone else,
someone I had never seen before, and she said she had never heard of
Rya Raines, that such a person as Rya Raines had never existed, that I
must be confused, and in fear and panic I hunted around the carnival
from one concession to another, looking for Rya, but no one had ever
heard of her, no one, no one. And in Gibtown I sat in a kitchen,
drinking beer with Joel and Laura Tuck, and there were other carnies
crowded around, including Jelly Jordan, who was no longer dead, and
when I leapt up and put my arms around him and hugged him with sheer
joy, the fat man told me that I should not be surprised, that dying was
not the end, that I should look over there by the sink, and when I
looked I saw my father and my cousin Kerry sipping apple cider and
grinning at me, and they both said, "Hello, Carl, you're looking good,
kid," and Joel Tuck said "Good Christ, boy, how did you even get this
far? Look at that shoulder wound."
"Looks like a bite," Horton Bluett said, leaning in close with a
flashlight.
"Blood on his sides here," Joel Tuck said worriedly.
And Horton said, "This here leg of his pants is soaked with blood too."
Somehow the dream had shifted to the mine shaft in which I sat, Rya in
my arms. All the other dream people had vanished except for Joel and
Horton.
And Luke Bendingo. He appeared between Joel and Horton.
"H-Hang on, S-S-Slim. We'll g-g-get you home. Just you hang in
th-th-there."
They tried to take Rya out of my arms, and that was intolerable even if
it was just a dream, so I fought them. But I did not have much.strength and could not resist them for long. They took her from me.
With the sweet burden of her removed, I was without purpose, and I
slumped, rag-limp, weeping.
"It's okay, Slim," Horton said. "We'll take over now.
You just lay back and let us do what we need to do."
"Fuck you," I said.
Joel Tuck laughed and said, "That's the spirit, boy. That's the
survivor spirit."
I don't remember much more. Fragments. I recall being carried through
dark tunnels where flashlight beams swept back and forth and were, in
my delirium, sometimes transformed into searchlights carving slices out
of a night sky. The final vertical shaft. The last two tunnels.
Someone lifting my eyelid . . . Joel Tuck looking at me with concern .
. . his nightmare face as welcome as anything I had ever seen.
Then I was outside, in the open air, where the hard, gray clouds that
seemed always to hang over Yontsdown County were hanging again, clotted
and dark. There was a great deal of new snow on the ground, perhaps
two feet of it or more. I thought back to the storm that had been
pending on Sunday morning, when Horton had taken us into the mines, and
that was when I began to realize I was not dreaming. The storm had
come and gone, and the mountains were buried under a blanket of fresh
snow.
Sleds. They had two long bobsleds, the kind with wide, ski-type
runners and a seat with a back on it. And blankets.
Lots and lots of blankets. They strapped me into one sled and wrapped
me up in a couple of warm wool covers. They put Rya's body on the
other sled.
Joel crouched beside me. "I don't think you're altogether with us,
Carl Slim, but I hope some of what I say will sink into you. We came
here overland, by a roundabout route, cause the goblins have been
keeping a tight watch on all the mountain roads and trails ever since
you blew the hell out of the Lightning Coal Company. We've got a long,
hard way to go, and we've got to go it as quiet as we can. Do you read
me?"
"I saw a dog's bones down in Hell," I told him, amazed to hear those
words coming out of me, "and I think Lucifer probably wants to grow
hydroponic tomatoes because then he can fry up souls and have club
sandwiches."
"Delirious," Horton Bluett said.
Joel put a hand on my face, as if by that touch he could focus my
fragmented attention for a moment. "Listen good and hard, my young
friend. If you start wailing like you were wailing down there in the
ground, if you start babbling or sobbing, we'll have to put a gag on
you, which I sure don't want to do because you're having some trouble
getting your breath now and then. But we can't risk drawing attention
to ourselves. Do you hear me?"
"We'll play the rat game again," I said, "like in the powerhouse, all
quick and silent, creeping down the drains."
That must have sounded like more nonsense to him, but it was as close
as I seemed able to come to expressing an understanding of what he was
telling me.
Fragments. I recall being hauled on the bobsled by Joel.
Luke Bendingo pulled Rya's body. Now and then, for short spells, the
indomitable Horton Bluett relieved Luke and Joel, bull-strong in spite
of his age. Deer paths in the forest.
Overhanging evergreens forming a canopy-green needles, some sheathed in
ice. A frozen stream used for a highway..An open field. Staying close to the gloom of the forest's edge.
A rest stop. Hot broth poured into me from a thermos bottle.
A darkening sky. Wind. Night.
By nightfall I knew I would live. I was going home. But home would
not be home without Rya. And what was the point of living if I had to
live without her?
32
Second Epilogue
Dreams.
Dreams of death and loneliness.
Dreams of loss and sorrow.
I slept more than not. And when my sleep was interrupted, the culprit
was usually Doc Pennington, the reformed alcoholic who served as the
much-loved carnival physician for the Sombra Brothers and who had
nursed me back to health once before, when I had been hiding out in
Gloria Neames's trailer after killing Lisle Kelsko and his deputy. Doc
diligently applied ice packs to my head, gave me injections, kept a
close watch on my pulse, and encouraged me to drink as much water
and-later-as much juice as I was able.
I was in a strange place: a small room with rough board walls that, on
two sides, did not reach all the way to the wooden ceiling. Dirt
floor. The top half of the wooden door was missing, as if it was a
Dutch door that the carpenters had not finished installing. An old
iron bed. A single lamp standing on an apple crate. A chair in which
Doc Pennington sat or in which the others rested when they came to
visit me. A portable electric space heater stood in one corner, its
coils glowing red.
"Terribly dry heat," Doc Pennington said. "Not good.
Not good at all. But it's the best we can do right now. We don't want
you in Horton's house. None of us can hang around there.
Neighbors would notice a lot of guests, talk about it. Back here, we
stay low. The windows are even blacked out, so light won't show
through. After what happened up at Lightning Coal, the goblins are
busting their butts looking for newcomers, outsiders. Wouldn't do to
call attention to ourselves. 'Fraid you'll just have to endure the dry
heat even though it isn't much help to your condition.
Gradually the delirium passed.
Even when I grew clearheaded enough to talk rationally, I was too weak
to form the words, and when the weakness passed, I was, for a while,
too depressed to speak. In time, however, curiosity overcame me, and
in a hoarse whisper I said, "Where am I?"
Doc Pennington said, "Out behind Horton's house, at the end of his
property. Stables. His late wife . . . she loved horses. They had
horses once, way back before she died. This is a three-stall stable
and big tack room, and you're in one of the stalls."
"I saw you," I said, "and I wondered if I was back in Florida. You
came all the way up here?"
"Joel figured there might be need of a doctor who could keep his mouth
shut, which meant a carny, which meant me.
"How many of you came?"
"Just Joel and Luke and me."
I started to tell him that I was grateful for all the effort they had
expended and for all the risks they had taken, and I started to say
that I would, however, just like to be left alone to die, to join Rya.where she had gone. But my mind fogged up again, and I drifted off to
sleep.
Perchance to dream.
Bet on it.
When I woke, wind was howling beyond the stable walls.
In the chair by my bed, Joel Tuck sat watching me. Big as he was, with
that face and that third eye and that steamshovel jaw, it seemed as if
he was an apparition, a specter of elemental power, the very thing
about which the wind was howling.
"How you feeling?" he asked.
"Poorly," I whispered hoarsely.
"Your mind clear?"
"Too clear."
"I'll tell you some of what happened, then. The Lightning Coal Company
had a big disaster at their mine. As many as five hundred were killed.
Maybe more. Maybe the worst mining disaster in history. Mine
inspectors and safety officials from both the state and federal
government have flown in, and rescue teams are still at work, but it
doesn't look good." He grinned. "Of course, the inspectors and the
safety officials and all the rescue workers are goblins; they've been
careful about that. They'll keep their secret about what they were
really doing up there. I suppose, when you've gotten your voice and
strength back, you'll tell me just what it was they were doing."
I nodded.
"Good," he said. "That'll make for a long, beery evening's tale down
in Gibtown." Joel told me more. Last Monday morning, immediately
after the explosions at the mine, Horton Bluett had gone to the house
on Apple Lane and had removed all of Rya's and my things, including the
kilos of plastique that we had not been able to carry into the mines.
He figured something might have gone wrong and that we might be awhile
getting out of the mountain. Soon, searching for the saboteurs who had
hit the Lightning Coal Company, the goblin cops would be taking a close
look at all newcomers and visitors in town, including Chief Klaus
Orkenwold's current tenants. Horton had thought it would be better if
the house on Apple Lane was clean as a whistle, all trace of us whisked
away, by the time the authorities decided to look there. Not being
able to find the young geology students who had rented the place,
Orkenwold would try to contact them through the university with which
they were supposedly associated; he would discover that the story
they'd told the real-estate agent was phony, and he would decide that
they had been the saboteurs and, more importantly, that they were gone
from Yontsdown County to points unknown.
"Then," Joel said, "the heat will be off, or at least turned way down,
and it'll be safer for us to slip out and head back to Gibtown."
"How did you-" My voice cracked; I coughed. "How could you . . . "
"Are you trying to ask me how I knew you needed my help?"
I nodded.
"that professor, Cathy Osborn, called me from New York," he said.
"That was early Monday morning. She was planning to arrive in Gibtown
late Tuesday, she told me, except I'd never heard of her. She said you
were supposed to call me on Sunday and explain the whole thing, but you
hadn't called, so I knew something was wrong."
Rya and I had set out for the mines with Horton Bluett so early on
Sunday morning that I had forgotten to make that phone call. "I told
Cathy to come on ahead, that Laura would take care of her when she
arrived, and then I told Doc and Luke that you and Rya must be in need
of carnies. Didn't seem to be time to drive all the way up from.Florida, so we went to Arturo Sombra himself. You see, he has a
pilot's license and owns a plane. He flew us into Altoona. There we
rented a van and drove to Yontsdown, Luke and Doc up front, me in back
because of my face-which, in case you hadn't noticed, is apt to be too
attention-getting. Mr. Sombra wanted to come with us, but he's a
pretty striking figure himself, and we thought it would be easier to
keep a low profile without him. He's in Martinsburg, near Altoona,
waiting with the plane. He'll take us home when we're ready."
Cathy Osborn (Joel explained) had told him where Rya and I had rented a
place, and on arrival in Yontsdown, Monday evening, he and Doc and Luke
had gone directly to Apple Lane and had found a deserted house, swept
clean by Horton Bluett. Having heard of the explosion at the Lightning
Coal Company that morning, and having learned from Cathy that Rya and I
believed the goblin nest to be centered there, Joel knew we were to
blame for the catastrophe. But he did not know then that all newcomers
and out-of-towners were being hunted, watched, frequently questioned;
he and Luke and Doc had been damned fortunate to drive across town to
Apple Lane without attracting the attention and suspicion of the
goblin-controlled police department.
"So," Joel continued, "in our innocence we decided the only way to get
a line on you and Rya was to stop at other houses along Apple Lane and
talk to your neighbors. We figured you would have made contact with
them as part of your information gathering. And, of course, we met up
with Horton Bluett. I stayed in the van while Doc Pennington and Luke
went in to talk to Horton. Then Doc came out after a time and said he
thought Bluett knew something, that he might talk if he knew we really
were friends of yours, and that the only way to convince him we were
friends was to convince him we were carnies. Now there's definitely
nothing more convincing than this misshapen head and face of I'm'the;
what else could I be but a carny? And isn't Horton something, though?
You know what he said when he got a good long look at me? Of all the
things he -might have said, you know what it was?"
I shook my head weakly.
Grinning, Joel said, "Horton looks at me, and he just says, 'Well, I
guess you have a hard time buying hats that fit."
Then he offers me some coffee."
Joel laughed with delight, but I could not even summon a smile.
Nothing would ever seem amusing to me again.
Seeing my state of mind, Joel said, "Am I tiring you?"
"No."
"I could go, let you rest, come back later."
"Stay," I said, because suddenly I could not bear to be alone.
The stable roof shook in a violent gust of wind.
The space heater clicked on again, and the dark coils glowed orange,
then red, and the fan hummed.
"Stay," I repeated.
Joel put a hand on my arm. "Okay. Just you rest easy and listen. So
. . . once Horton accepted us, he told us everything about how he'd
shown you the way into the mountain. We considered going up there
after you that night, but there'd been a big snowstorm on Sunday, and a
new one was moving in that Monday night, and Horton insisted we'd be
signing our own death warrants by going up in the mountains in that
weather. 'Wait till it clears,' he said. 'That's probably why Slim
and Rya haven't got back by now. They're probably out of the mountain
and just waiting for better weather to make their way down here." It
sounded reasonable enough. That night we got the old stable fit for
us, blacked out the windows, pulled our van in there-where it is right.now, in fact, just outside this stall door-and settled down to wait."
(By then, of course, I had been carrying and hoisting Rya through the
labyrinth for many hours and had most likely reached the limits of that
initial adrenaline-induced miracle of endurance.) The second major
storm had struck Monday night, laying another fourteen inches of snow
down on top of the foot that had piled up on Sunday, and by late
Tuesday morning the front had passed to the east. Both Horton's truck
and Joel's rented van had four-wheel-drive, so they decided to head
into the mountains in search of us. But Horton went first to
reconnoiter quickly, then returned with the bad news that the mountain
roads within miles of the Lightning Coal Company were crawling with
"the stinking kind" in Jeeps and pickups.
"We didn't know what to do," Joel said, "so we chewed over the
situation for a couple of hours and then, about one o'clock Tuesday
afternoon, we decided the only way to slip in there and out again was
overland, on foot. Horton suggested we take bobsleds, in case you were
hurt-as, in fact, you were. Took a few hours to get everything
together, so we didn't head out until Tuesday midnight. Had to swing
way the hell around any roads or houses, miles and miles. Didn't make
it up to that old tumbling-down mine entrance till midnight Wednesday.
Then, being a cautious man, Horton insisted we hang back and watch the
mine until dawn, to be sure there weren't goblins around."
I shook my head in disbelief. "Wait. Are you . . . telling me . . .
that it was Thursday morning . . . when you found me?"
"That's right."
I was astounded. I'd figured it for Tuesday, at the latest, when they
had arrived, as if stepping out of a fever dream.
Instead I had been hauling Rya from tunnel to tunnel and worriedly
monitoring her pulse for three full days before I had been rescued.
And how long had she lain dead in my arms?
One day, at least.
Realizing how long I'd been delirious, I felt suddenly wearier and full
of despair. "What day . . . is it now?" My voice had grown even
softer than a whisper, hardly louder than an exhalation.
"We got you back here just before dawn on Friday. It's Sunday night
right now. You've been pretty much unconscious for the three days
you've been here, but you're coming around. Weak and weary, but you'll
make it. By God, Carl Slim, I was wrong to tell you not to come.
You've babbled some in your sleep, so I know a little about what you
found in the mountain. It was something that could not be allowed to
go on, wasn't it? Something that would've been the death of all of us?
You did well. You can be proud. You did damn well." I had thought
I'd used up the tears allotted for one lifetime, but suddenly I was
crying again. "How can you . . . say that? You were . . . right so
right. We shouldn't have come." He looked startled, puzzled.
"I was . . . a fool," I said bitterly. "Taking the world.....
on my shoulders. No matter how many goblins I killed..... no matter
how badly I wrecked their haven..... none of it's worth losing Rya."
"Losing Rya?"
"I'd let the goblins have the world... if only I could have Rya alive
again."
The most amazing expression descended upon that broken face. "But,
dear boy, she is alive," Joel said. "Somehow, hurt as you were,
delirious, you carried her ninety percent of the way out of those
mines, and you evidently made her drink enough water, and you kept her
alive until we found the two of you. She was unconscious until late
yesterday. She's not well, and she'll need a month to recuperate, but.she's not dead, and she's not going to die. She's at the other end of
these stables, in a bed just two stalls away from this one!"
I swore I could walk that far. The length of a stable. That was
nothing. I had walked back from Hell. I struggled to get out of bed,
and I batted Joel's hands away when he attempted to restrain me. But
when I tried to stand, I fell on my side, and at last I allowed Joel to
carry me as I had carried Rya.
Doc Pennington was with her. He hopped up from his chair so Joel could
lower me into it.
Rya was in worse shape than I was. The bruise on her forehead, temple,
and cheek had darkened and grown even uglier than when I had last seen
it. Her right eye was blackened and badly bloodshot. Both eyes seemed
to have sunk back into her skull. Where her skin was not discolored,
it was milkwhite and waxy. A fine dew of perspiration filmed her brow.
But she was alive, and she recognized me, and she smiled.
She smiled.
Sobbing, I reached out and took her hand.
I was so weak that Joel had to hold my shoulders to keep me from
tumbling out of the chair.
Rya's skin was warm and soft and wonderful. She gave my hand a barely
perceptible squeeze.
We had come back from Hell, both of us, but Rya had come back from an
even more distant place.
That night, in the bed in my own stall, I woke to the sound of wind in
the stable eaves, and I wondered if she had been dead. I had been so
sure of it. No pulse. No breath. Down there in the mines I had
thought of my mother's ability to heal with herbal remedies, and I had
raged at God because my gift, Twilight Eyes, was of no use to Rya in
her time of need.
I had demanded that God tell me why I could not heal as well or better
than my mother had healed. Horrified by the thought of life without
Rya, I had clutched her to my chest and had willed life into her, had
poured some of my life energy into her as I might have poured water
from a pitcher into a glass.
Crazed, mad with grief, I had summoned up all my psychic ability and
had tried to perform magic, the greatest magic of all, the magic
heretofore reserved for God: striking the spark of life. Had it
worked? Had God listened-and answered? I probably would never know
for sure. But in my heart I believed I had brought her back. Because
it was not just magic I had going for me. No, no. There was also
love. A great sea of love. And maybe magic and love, together, can
achieve what magic alone cannot.
Tuesday night, more than nine days after we went into the mines, the
time had come to go home.
I was still stiff and sore where I'd been clawed and bitten, and my
strength was half what I was used to. But I could walk with the help
of a cane, and my voice had improved enough so I could talk for hours
to Rya.
She had brief dizzy spells. Otherwise her recovery had begun to
progress faster than mine. She walked better than I did, and her
energy level was almost normal.
"The beach," she said. "I want to lie on the warm beach and let the
sun bake all this winter out of me. I want to watch the sandpipers
working the surf for their lunch."
Horton Bluett and Growler came to the stable to say goodbye. He had
been invited to come with us to Gibtown and join the carnival, as Cathy
Osborn had by now done, but he had declined. He was, he said, an old.codger set in his ways, and although lonely at times, he had adjusted
to loneliness.
He still worried about what would happen to Growler if he died before
the mutt, so he was going to rewrite his will to leave the dog to Rya
and me, along with whatever money could be realized from his estate.
"You'll need it," Horton said, "because this fur-faced behemoth will
eat you out of house and home."
Growler growled agreement.
"We'll take Growler," Rya said, "but we don't want your money, Horton.
" "If you don't get it," he said, "it'll wind up in the hands of the
government, and a whole lot of the government everywhere is most likely
run by goblins."
""They'll take the money," Joel said. "But the whole discussion is
moot, you know. You're not going to die until you've outlived two more
Growlers and probably the rest of us."
Horton wished us luck in our secret war with the goblinkind, but I
swore that I'd had enough of battle.
"I've done my part," I said. "I can't do any more. It's too big for
me, anyway. Maybe it's too big for anyone. All I want is peace in my
own life, the haven of the carnival-and Rya.
Horton shook my hand, kissed Rya.
Saying good-bye was not easy. It never is.
On the way out of town I saw a Lightning Coal Company truck with that
hateful insignia.
White sky.
Dark lightning.
When I looked at the symbol, I clairvoyantly perceived the void that I
had seen before: the silent, dark, cold emptiness of a postnuclear
world.
This time, however, the void was not quite silent, not entirely dark
but speckled with distant lights, not nearly as cold, and not perfectly
empty. Evidently, by the destruction we had wrought in the goblins'
haven, we had changed the future somewhat-and had postponed doomsday.
We had not canceled it completely. The threat remained. But it was
more distant than it had been.
Hope is not foolish. Hope is the dream of a waking man.
Ten blocks farther, we drove past the elementary school where I had
foreseen the deaths of scores of children in a great fire set by
goblins. I leaned forward from the back of the rented van, poking my
head over the front seat to get a good look at that building. No
devastating wavy roads or houses, miles and miles. Didn't make it up
to that old tumbling-down mine entrance till midnight Wednesday.
Then, being a cautious man, Horton insisted we hang back and watch the
mine until dawn, to be sure there weren't goblins around."
I shook my head in disbelief. "Wait. Are you . . . telling me . . .
that it was Thursday morning . . . when you found me?"
"That's right."
I was astounded. I'd figured it for Tuesday, at the latest, when they
had arrived, as if stepping out of a fever dream.
Instead I had been hauling Rya from tunnel to tunnel and worriedly
monitoring her pulse for three full days before I had been rescued.
And how long had she lain dead in my arms?
One day, at least.
Realizing how long I'd been delirious, I felt suddenly wearier and full
of despair. "What day . . . is it now?" My voice had grown even
softer than a whisper, hardly louder than an exhalation.
"We got you back here just before dawn on Friday. It's Sunday night.right now. You've been pretty much unconscious for the three days
you've been here, but you're coming around. Weak and weary, but you'll
make it. By God, Carl Slim, I was wrong to tell you not to come.
You've babbled some in your sleep, so I know a little about what you
found in the mountain. It was something that could not be allowed to
go on, wasn't it? Something that would've been the death of all of us?
You did well. You can be proud. You did damn well." I had thought
I'd used up the tears allotted for one lifetime, but suddenly I was
crying again. "How can you . . . say that? You were . . . right so
right. We shouldn't have come." He looked startled, puzzled.
"I was . . . a fool," I said bitterly. "Taking the world.....
on my shoulders. No matter how many goblins I killed..... no matter
how badly I wrecked their haven..... none of it's worth losing Rya."
"Losing Rya?"
"I'd let the goblins have the world... if only I could have Rya alive
again."
The most amazing expression descended upon that broken face. "But,
dear boy, she is alive," Joel said. "Somehow, hurt as you were,
delirious, you carried her ninety percent of the way out of those
mines, and you evidently made her drink enough water, and you kept her
alive until we found the two of you. She was unconscious until late
yesterday. She's not well, and she'll need a month to recuperate, but
she's not dead, and she's not going to die. She's at the other end of
these stables, in a bed just two stalls away from this one!"
I swore I could walk that far. The length of a stable. That was
nothing. I had walked back from Hell. I struggled to get out of bed,
and I batted Joel's hands away when he attempted to restrain me. But
when I tried to stand, I fell on my side, and at last I allowed Joel to
carry me as I had carried Rya.
Doc Pennington was with her. He hopped up from his chair so Joel could
lower me into it.
Rya was in worse shape than I was. The bruise on her forehead, temple,
and cheek had darkened and grown even uglier than when I had last seen
it. Her right eye was blackened and badly bloodshot. Both eyes seemed
to have sunk back into her skull. Where her skin was not discolored,
it was milkwhite and waxy. A fine dew of perspiration filmed her brow.
But she was alive, and she recognized me, and she smiled.
She smiled.
Sobbing, I reached out and took her hand.
I was so weak that Joel had to hold my shoulders to keep me from
tumbling out of the chair.
Rya's skin was warm and soft and wonderful. She gave my hand a barely
perceptible squeeze.
We had come back from Hell, both of us, but Rya had come back from an
even more distant place.
That night, in the bed in my own stall, I woke to the sound of wind in
the stable eaves, and I wondered if she had been dead. I had been so
sure of it. No pulse. No breath. Down there in the mines I had
thought of my mother's ability to heal with herbal remedies, and I had
raged at God because my gift, Twilight Eyes, was of no use to Rya in
her time of need.
I had demanded that God tell me why I could not heal as well or better
than my mother had healed. Horrified by the thought of life without
Rya, I had clutched her to my chest and had willed life into her, had
poured some of my life energy into her as I might have poured water
from a pitcher into a glass.
Crazed, mad with grief, I had summoned up all my psychic ability and.had tried to perform magic, the greatest magic of all, the magic
heretofore reserved for God: striking the spark of life. Had it
worked? Had God listened-and answered? I probably would never know
for sure. But in my heart I believed I had brought her back. Because
it was not just magic I had going for me. No, no. There was also
love. A great sea of love. And maybe magic and love, together, can
achieve what magic alone cannot.
Tuesday night, more than nine days after we went into the mines, the
time had come to go home.
I was still stiff and sore where I'd been clawed and bitten, and my
strength was half what I was used to. But I could walk with the help
of a cane, and my voice had improved enough so I could talk for hours
to Rya.
She had brief dizzy spells. Otherwise her recovery had begun to
progress faster than mine. She walked better than I did, and her
energy level was almost normal.
"The beach," she said. "I want to lie on the warm beach and let the
sun bake all this winter out of me. I want to watch the sandpipers
working the surf for their lunch."
Horton Bluett and Growler came to the stable to say goodbye. He had
been invited to come with us to Gibtown and join the carnival, as Cathy
Osborn had by now done, but he had declined. He was, he said, an old
codger set in his ways, and although lonely at times, he had adjusted
to loneliness.
He still worried about what would happen to Growler if he died before
the mutt, so he was going to rewrite his will to leave the dog to Rya
and me, along with whatever money could be realized from his estate.
"You'll need it," Horton said, "because this fur-faced behemoth will
eat you out of house and home."
Growler growled agreement.
"We'll take Growler," Rya said, "but we don't want your money, Horton.
" "If you don't get it," he said, "it'll wind up in the hands of the
government, and a whole lot of the government everywhere is most likely
run by goblins."
""They'll take the money," Joel said. "But the whole discussion is
moot, you know. You're not going to die until you've outlived two more
Growlers and probably the rest of us."
Horton wished us luck in our secret war with the goblinkind, but I
swore that I'd had enough of battle.
"I've done my part," I said. "I can't do any more. It's too big for
me, anyway. Maybe it's too big for anyone. All I want is peace in my
own life, the haven of the carnival-and Rya.
Horton shook my hand, kissed Rya.
Saying good-bye was not easy. It never is.
On the way out of town I saw a Lightning Coal Company truck with that
hateful insignia.
White sky.
Dark lightning.
When I looked at the symbol, I clairvoyantly perceived the void that I
had seen before: the silent, dark, cold emptiness of a postnuclear
world.
This time, however, the void was not quite silent, not entirely dark
but speckled with distant lights, not nearly as cold, and not perfectly
empty. Evidently, by the destruction we had wrought in the goblins'
haven, we had changed the future somewhat-and had postponed doomsday.
We had not canceled it completely. The threat remained. But it was
more distant than it had been..Hope is not foolish. Hope is the dream of a waking man.
Ten blocks farther, we drove past the elementary school where I had
foreseen the deaths of scores of children in a great fire set by
goblins. I leaned forward from the back of the rented van, poking my
head over the front seat to get a good look at that building. No
devastating wave of death-energy poured off the place. I saw no fire
to come. Instead the only flames I perceived were those from the first
blaze, which had already transpired. In changing the future of the
Lightning Coal Company, we had somehow changed the future of Yontsdown
as well. The children might die in other ways, in other goblin
schemes, but they would not burn to death in their classrooms.
In Altoona we turned in the rented van and sold Rya's station wagon to
a used-car dealer. From the nearest airport, in Martinsburg, Arturo
Sombra flew us back to Florida on Wednesday.
The world looked fresh and serene from the sky.
On the way home we did not talk much of goblins. It did not seem like
the time for such a depressing subject. Instead we talked about the
upcoming season. The carnival's first date of the spring was in
Orlando in just three weeks.
Mr. Sombra told us that he had let the contract with Yontsdown County
lapse and that another outfit would be taking the date from us next
summer and every summer thereafter.
"Prudent," Joel Tuck said, and everyone laughed.
Thursday, on the beach, as sandpipers worked the foaming edge of the
surf for their lunch, Rya said, "Did you mean it?"
"What?"
"What you told Horton about giving up the battle.
"Yes. I won't risk losing you again. From here on, we keep our heads
down. Our world is just us, you and me, and our friends here in
Gibtown. It can be a good world. Narrow but good."
The sky was high and blue.
The sun was hot.
The breeze off the Gulf was refreshing.
In time she said, "What about Kitty Genovese back there in New York
with no one to help her?"
Without hesitation I said coldly, "Kitty Genovese is dead.
I did not like the sound of those words or the resignation that they
implied, but I did not recant them.
Far out on the sea a tanker was headed north.
Palm trees rustled behind us.
Two young boys in swimsuits raced past, laughing.
Later, though Rya did not pursue that line of conversation, I repeated
what I had said, "Kitty Genovese is dead."
That night, sleepless beside Rya in our own bed, I thought about some
things that made no sense to-me.
For one thing: the goblin freaks in the basement cage of the Havendahl
house.
Why did the goblins keep their deformed children alive?
Given their kind's hivelike behavior and their inclination for brutally
violent solutions, it would have been natural for them to kill their
malformed young at birth. Indeed they had been engineered to have no
emotions other than hate and sufficient fear to support a survival
instinct. And, damn it, their maker-mankind-had not given them the
capacity for love or compassion or parental responsibility. Their
effort to keep their mutant offspring alive, even in the squalid
conditions of that cage, was inexplicable.
For another thing: why was the powerhouse in that underground.installation so large, producing a hundred times more energy than they
would ever require?
When we had interrogated the goblin with pentothal, perhaps it had not
told us the entire truth about the purpose of the haven and had not
divulged the true long-range plans of the demons. Certainly they were
stockpiling everything they would need to survive a nuclear war. But
maybe they didn't intend merely to stalk the post-holocaust ruins,
obliterate surviving humans, and then kill themselves. Maybe they
dared to dream of eradicating us, thereafter taking possession of the
earth, supplanting their creators. Or their intentions might be too
strange for me to grasp, as alien in scope and purpose as their thought
processes were alien to ours.
All night I wrestled with the sheets.
Two days later, basking on the beach again, we heard the usual array of
bad-news stories between the rock and roll. In Zanzibar the new
Communist government was claiming it had not tortured and killed over a
thousand political prisoners but had, in fact, turned them loose and
told them they were free to go; somehow all one thousand seemed to have
gotten lost on their way home. The crisis in Vietnam was growing
worse, and some were mumbling about the need to send U.S. troops to
stabilize the situation. Somewhere in Iowa a man had shot his wife,
three kids, two neighbors; police were looking for him throughout the
Midwest. In. New York there had been another gangland slaying. In
Philadelphia (or maybe Baltimore) twelve had died in a tenement fire.
Finally the news ended and the radio brought us the Beatles, the
Supremes, the Beach Boys, Mary Wells, Roy Orbison, the Dixie Cups, J.
Frank Wilson, Inez Fox, Elvis, Jan and Dean, the Ronettes, the
Shirelles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Ball the right stuff, all the real
stuff, the magic. But somehow I could not get into the music as I
usually did. In my mind, laid under the tunes, was the voice of the
newscaster reciting a litany of murder and mayhem and disaster and war,
sort of like that version of "Silent Night" that Simon and Garfunkel
would record a few years later.
The sky was as blue as it had ever been. Neither had the sun ever been
warmer nor the Gulf breeze sweeter. Yet I could not squeeze any joy
from the pleasures of the day.
That damn newscaster's voice kept echoing in my mind. I could not find
a knob to click it off.
We had dinner that night in a great little Italian said the food was
wonderful. We drank too much good wine.
Later, in bed, we made love. We climaxed. It should have been
fulfilling.
In the morning the sky was blue again, the sun warm, the breeze
sweet-and again it was somehow all flat, without a pleasing texture.
Over a picnic lunch on the beach I said, "She may be dead, but she
shouldn't be forgotten."
Playing innocent, Rya looked up from a small bag of potato chips and
said, "Who?"
"You know who."
'Kitty Genovese," she said.
"Damn," I said. "I really just want to pull my horns in, to wrap us in
the safety of the carnival and live out our lives together."
"But we can't?"
I shook my head and sighed. "We're a funny breed, you know. Not
admirable most of the time. Not half what God hoped we'd be when He
dipped His hands in the mud and started to sculpt us. But we have two
great virtues. Love, of t. Rya course. Love. Which includes.compassion and empathy. But, damn it, the second virtue is as much a
curse as it is a blessing. Call it conscience."
Rya smiled, leaned over our picnic lunch, and kissed me.
"I love you, Slim."
"I love you too."
The sun felt good.
That was the year the incomparable Mr. Louis Armstrong recorded
"Hello, Dolly." The number-one song of the year was the Beatles' "I
Want to Hold Your Hand," and Barbra Streisand opened in Funny Girl on
Broadway. Thomas Berger published Little Big Man, while Audrey Hepburn
and Rex Harrison starred in My Fair Lady on the silver screen. Martin
Luther King, Jr and the civil-rights movement were big news. A San
Francisco bar introduced the first topless dancer.
That was the year they arrested the Boston Strangler, the year
Kellogg's introduced Pop-Tart pastries for your toaster, and the year
the Ford Motor Company sold the first Mustang.
That was the year the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series from
the Yankees, and it was the year that Colonel Sanders sold his
restaurant chain, but it was not the year that our secret war with the
goblins ended.