Totentanz (25 page)

The movement of the upside-down waves was a
scant five feet above him when the girl's grip turned to sudden
metal, seeming to tear through his skin to the blood and bone
beneath. He stopped dead. The thing that had held her had followed
them. He strained upward: the surface was just above him, the
green, oily breakers mere inches from his hungry mouth. He could
almost taste the air, could feel it up there, moving in slow
currents yet an eternity away. He clawed like a wild man at the
girl's arm, thrashing in the water, trying to make her let go, but
her hand was an iron vise. Her face was turned away from him. He
thought he saw something black behind her, something huge flowing
like a manta ray, with small red eyes in a white face—

And then his lungs exploded. The girl turned
to him, turned her face slowly toward him as if it were on a
revolving turntable. He looked into it as she let go of him. She
was smiling, breathing in and out, gulping water like a fish. It
was Pup's face on the girl's body, long, dirty-blonde hair flowing
away from his scalp.

Jack's lungs burst. He heard Pup say, "Never
be a Marine now, Jack." He was dying, but he heard Pup continue:
“You just weren't cut out for it. Remember that McMasters girl?
Don't worry, she's still down there in that ship. Just wanted you
to know you didn't save her after all. I hated that girl because of
what you did for her. You saved her that day, and you got all the
attention, not me. Just because you thought you wanted to be a
Marine, you moved faster than your head told you to. Just because
you didn't think. Well, I thought, and I pulled you out of that
ice, but they only wanted to worry about you and say what a fine
boy you were.

"I wanted to push that McMasters girl back
into that hole and close it over with snow and ice and watch her
beat on the bottom of the ice, looking up at me, looking for air
pockets, for a way to get out. I couldn't do that then, but I'm
doing it now, Marine."

There was a vicious hatred in Pup's voice:
deep, mad, visceral hatred.

"Good-bye, Jack," Pup went on, although Jack
could no longer hear him. There was triumph and rage in Pup's
voice. "You'll never be a Marine now."

Pup looked up at the stiff, silent faces of
Jack's mother and sister and then down at the drowned, bloated body
that lay slumped against the fence of the amusement park.

"Say good-bye to everybody, Jack," he said.
His eyes wandered up over the lights toward the spot where the
church tower next to the cemetery vied for prominence with the
height of the Ferris wheel and lost. "Say good-bye to the Three
Musketeers."

As Reggie stumbled through the phalanx of
trees at the edge of the churchyard, something melted out of the
night in front of him.

A hooded shape appeared off to one side,
close against a tree, hunched over as if trying to become part of
the tree itself. As Reggie got closer, he saw that that figure was
not hunched over at all but was rising out of the ground by the
base of the tree. He stopped. He tasted something strong and
bitter, and a bolt of fear went through him. The black shape drew
itself out of the ground and stood silent beside the tree. It took
a step toward him.

Reggie broke into a run,
trying to throw himself past it.
No,
he thought,
no!
His mind was a jumble of
mindless despair; the amusement park still called to
him—
Come to me! Come to
me!
—and he sought to follow its
pull.

The shape, all arms and huge hands, leaped at
him.

Reggie felt its fingers, cold and hard,
tighten around him. He was pulled to the ground. He closed his
eyes, willing himself not to look at the specter. No! He thrashed
out with his arms and legs, trying to kick the thing away, and felt
his hands pummel something soft and hollow, not a human breast but
something cool and pliable, as if the skin was loosely wrapped on a
rattling frame. The shape grunted at his blows but held firmly.

Slowly Reggie was dragged toward the tree. He
tried to scrabble away, digging his fingers into the closely
cropped grass at the curb of the cemetery drive, but the earth gave
way in soft clumps. He looked beyond his captor, which had its head
bowed against its chest as it tugged backward, and he saw a yawning
pit, roughly dug, at the base of the tree.

With a weak grunt, the figure dropped over
the edge of the freshly dug grave, carrying Reggie with him. Reggie
cried out and began to rain blows upon it with his fists. Their
battle was a quiet, desperate one: the figure, crablike, pulling
him inch by inch into the hole and Reggie seeking to haul himself
out. When he saw the lip of the hole disappear above him, he put
his knee into the thing's groin, but this had no effect. Its arms
were locked around him, its face buried against him. Reggie gouged
at its head, trying to make it let go. His fingers sank into cool,
dry flesh, down to smoothness that felt like bone.

"Oh. Jesus!" Reggie cried out, realizing that
it was bone, a glossy length of it along an eye socket, that he was
feeling.

Without warning, the figure released him and
fell lengthwise into the hole.

Reggie levered himself over the top of the
hole with his elbows. The thing grabbed at his legs, locking its
arms around them and trying to pull him back. Reggie kicked free
but lost his hold on the soft dirt around the grave and slipped
down. The cold, papery thing was on him like a spider. Reggie
pushed him-self up from its chest and tried to get to his feet, but
the figure clutched him around the shoulders and the neck and
pulled him down yet again. Reggie beat at it fiercely, trying to
make it let go for good. The thing was gradually pulling his face
close to its own inch by inch. Reggie noticed a dry, rotting smell,
with a clean bone odor underneath it, like ammonia.

He yelled desperately. The thing answered him
with a grunt of stale air.

Reggie shifted position, jamming his face
against the parchment-like skin of the creature as he reached
around to force the other's hands from his neck. He squirmed
violently, pulling at the creature's wrists, and with a great
effort, he made it let go. He threw himself to his knees, and then
heaved himself to his feet as the other, in a final attempt,
whipped itself up and grabbed him, folding its arms tightly around
his neck in a strangling embrace.

"I don't want to die!" Reggie screamed,
remembering the thing in the tunnel, the dark, cold fall over the
precipice. He felt the cold thud of a clod of earth on his back and
knew that the hole was being filled with dirt.

"Cover me," the figure panted hoarsely in his
ear.

"Let me go! Oh, God!" Reggie's palms beat
uselessly at the thing that held him.

The creature shivered.

"Co . . . ver . . . me," it gasped again. All
at once it lost its strength. Its arms became loose around Reggie's
neck and then fell away limply.

For a moment Reggie could not move. Then,
breathing heavily, he pulled himself off the thing, which lay
helplessly under him.

A sprinkle of earth fell from his back. The
hole was not being filled as he had feared: some dirt had merely
been loosened in the struggle and fallen on top of them.

". . . cover . . .” the specter panted.

Now Reggie looked at the thing's face and saw
that it was one he knew: the black zombie he had seen outside his
window.

The man in the hole reached up to Reggie, but
his hand fell impotently to strike the ground. There was a horrible
gash in his face, around the left eye an open tear that should have
been bleeding but was not. With a shudder Reggie recalled the feel
of bone on his fingers.

The man opened his mouth and wailed. His
entire frame wracked with the force of his lament. He tried to
cover his face and curl up into a ball.

"Cover me! Cover me!"

Reggie stood up.

"Please cover me! Let me go back!"

The figure stopped bucking and lay silent. It
moaned dryly, pressing its hands to its face. It again reached for
Reggie, trying to grab his legs, but just as quickly, the arms fell
back.

Reggie thought the man was dead, but then he
moved, lifted his hands and slowly sat up. Reggie climbed out of
the hole, putting a couple of yards between himself and the dark
shape.

"You're not him," the man said in a flat,
hollow voice. He stood up in the grave and regarded Reggie with an
even, sad look. As he spoke, he seemed to change into something
more erect and human; the trembling creature with spider hands was
gone, and in its place stood a tall man with a calm, troubled gaze.
His eyes looked half at this world and half at some other place,
some terrible plane of existence that wanted to turn him into the
crawling, scraping, begging thing again. Now he looked much more
like the man Reggie had first seen at his bedroom window, though
without the startled, desperate look he had worn then.

"You aren't him," the man said, coming close
to Reggie and placing his hands on Reggie's shoulders. Reggie
backed away.

"Tell me who you are," Reggie said to the
black man, no longer terrified of him. In the back of his mind, the
calliope still beckoned. . . .

"I've waited," the man said, ignoring
Reggie's question. "I dug this hole with my own hands and waited."
He held up his hands to the light from the amusement park, and
Reggie saw not bloody stumps, but rounded, stunted fingers ending
in frayed rags of flesh and knobs of white bone. "I waited, but he
wouldn't stop for me."

When Reggie opened his mouth to speak, the
specter cut him off.

"I pleaded with him to stop!" He backed up a
few stumbling steps, landing with a thud in the grave and
collapsing into a sitting position, wrapping his arms around his
knees; he shook like a leaf in a cold, wet wind. "I put dirt in my
mouth, I tried to drown myself in a rain pond, I ran in front of a
machine"—he threw one hand out and laced it from one side to the
other, stopping it in an abrupt fist as if it had hit
something—"but he would not take me!" The man waved his arms,
indicating the open cavities around him. "Every one of these graves
I lay in, and I waited, but nothing came for me."

Once again he climbed out of the hole. His
voice was soft, full of weariness. "Jeff Scott told me I would grow
used to this, but I cannot. He was my friend, a true friend. But
Jeff Scott was consumed by hate and is not the same man, and this
is not the same time. This isn't any time at all. We didn't have
machines where I came from, and here they have machines for
everything. Jeff Scott seems used to all the machines. This is the
judgment day, if ever there will be one. Flames. . ." He looked
down at Reggie, peering closely into the boy's face until sudden
awe filled his voice. The boy in my dream. I saw you through a
window, in a house filled with machines. You're—"

"Reggie Carson."

"Lord. . . ." The man threw his tattered
hands to his head and stood motionless. He looked as though he were
reaching for something far away. After a while he brought his hands
down to his sides.

"I am your great-grandfather, boy."

Lucius walked away from the hole, out into
the middle of the roadway. All vestiges of his mad behavior were
gone. His ghoulish face had taken on expression, almost life, and
his eyes were filled with something that looked like bright
excitement.

"Why did you come here'?" he asked.

Reggie didn't answer. He
thought of the short black ledge, the screaming fall into
nothingness and death, he thought of dim and half-forgotten stories
told to him on his father's knee or while under warm blankets,
stories of his family fleeing from some untold thing, returning
years later with a new name to the town that had changed, hoping to
forget; he thought of the man standing before him, the rotting man
who claimed to be part of those stories and claimed to want more
than anything to fall back over that ledge into that horrid,
bottomless pit, to
kiss
the shadow man and be brought to cold
annihilation and death; he thought of his mother, his friends, of
that whistling secret machine that called him inevitably to other
meetings, pulling him from the front, pushing him from behind, and
of things he could not now avoid. . . .

"We must go to Jeff Scott," the old man said.
"You're the one who can save him." A tremor passed through him, a
tremor that Reggie felt too. A cold hand on his shoulder, a whisper
in his ear.

"We must go now." Stiffly, Lucius walked.

Reggie looked back at the soft slope of the
churchyard, at the wide-open mouth of the Tomb of the Unknown Man,
at the empty dirt mouths in the ground.

Come to me, come to me, kiss me. . . .

The old man was far ahead of him now,
outlined against the artificial lights in front of him, a tall
stick figure rattling like a bag of ivory bones. And then Reggie
was beside him.

In his wooden cabin, Jeff
Scott raged and flailed, weeping and beating at the walls.
Frankenstein's monster
,
he thought,
in the pit of fire.
His body was both hot and cold, one side burning
flesh, the other side cold, hard bone. He jammed his hands, one
skeletal, the other flesh, to his ears, but could not block out the
screaming outside the trailer. Jeff Scott was two men now, melded
at an invisible line down his middle. And as his body was divided,
so was his mind—one part cool, rational and cynical, the other
shrieking in red, growing rage. Ash had laughed at him because he
knew the truth. Jeff had been a fool all along; he had spent all
these long years avoiding the truth, burying it so deep inside that
it took this moment to make him face it squarely.