Totentanz (6 page)

"I just don't get it, Barney," the mayor
said. He felt suddenly chilled again.

"You're damn right you don't get it," Barney
said, "and I don't get it neither. Can they build like that, with
all that stuff right outside my back window?"

For a moment Mayor Poundridge didn't hear
him. He was remembering his grandmother telling him about a
carousel like that a long time ago. . . .

"I don't know, Barney."

"Dammit,
Mayor—
do
something about it!"

Mayor Poundridge had the oddest feeling that
someone was watching him from the top of that roller-coaster loop,
that there were eyes, huge disembodied eyes, boring into him. It
was only with great effort that he was able to look away.

"I suppose," he said, his
voice low and thoughtful, "that we'll
have
to do something about
it."

The Three Musketeers rose early. Something
called them together, some magnetic change in the atmosphere that
told them it was time for a meeting. The sun was barely up.
Sleepily they crept from their beds, all three, dressed and went
yawning into the morning air.

"I had a nightmare," Pup said when the others
met him by his garage. "I dreamed there were reptiles all over me,
and big laughing mouths with nothing attached to them."

"I had nightmares too," Jack said. His eyes
were half-closed, his words barely yawns. "There were fish, fish
attacking me, and I was underwater." Reggie only nodded quietly,
"Me too."

The air was heavy. It was as though the sun
was fighting its way up the sky this morning, and there was no blue
to blanket it but only a slate-gray slab that made' it look as
though it would either drop below the horizon in shame or hurry
across to the other side. The day might grow warm later, but now
there was a chill in it.

Pup shivered. Even Sprinkles, his dog, who
had followed him out, looked as though he wanted to crawl off to
someplace warm, a winter fireplace or the south side of a stove.
Pup absently scratched him behind the ears as he whimpered.

"What are we doing here?" Pup asked
peevishly. "It . . . just seemed right," Jack said.

Reggie's thoughts were elsewhere, far
away.

Pup's mother appeared at the back porch: a
small, nervous woman with graying hair and distracted concern in
her voice.

"Pup, are you warm enough?" she asked. "Do
you want me to get your jacket?"

Pup's father came out behind her, his
briefcase under an arm. Impeccably dressed, he looked at none of
them but walked with deliberate, precise steps around to the front
of the house.

"Jerks," Pup muttered, ignoring his mother,
who still stood on the porch, rubbing her hands. "Let's go inside,"
he said to his friends, turning to the garage as his mother went
back into the house.

They drew open the doors to
their treasure house. The garage was huge, a three-car port that
Pup's parents never used because he had insisted he needed it all.
And it was filled. Along one wall stood a solid block of bookcases,
packed with every horror paperback and hardcover book Pup could lay
his hands on, each in its proper place, each meticulously cataloged
and stamped: THREE MUSKETEERS ONLY. Two other walls were tacked up
with pictures and photos: twenty Lon Chaneys, a half-wall of
Vincent Prices, group portraits of wolfmen and Frankensteins and
mummies. There was a prize picture of Stephen King holding a copy
of
The Shining
.
There were other pictures, movie stills and posters, filling every
avail-able space. The fourth wall was lined with shelves bulging
with boxes. There were crates of fangs and capes and bulbous heads
and wigs; outer space faces, Spock ears and Abominable Snowman
feet. There were hundreds of costumes and parts of costumes, enough
to assemble any monster. Each was labeled and stored neatly. One
area was buttressed by benches and workplaces, half-finished models
in neat rows, stacks of day-glow paints and jars of brushes side by
side with tubes of fresh glue and display cases. A hundred models
were already finished: a hunchback on his pedestal, crying
"Sanctuary!" Bela Lugosi stepping forward, his cape held at nose
height to show his eyes to best hypnotic advantage. Other models
lay half-finished in sculpted pieces. The rest of the garage was
filled with everything left over: life-sized mannequins covered
with mummy tape; a torture rack in pine; a few bicycle parts ready
to be made into who knows what.

They drew open the doors slowly, waiting for
the magic to hit them as it always did—and nothing happened.

The garage was cold. Pup switched on the
lights. Bank on bank of neons flickered into gas life over-head,
and still the room was cold. It did nothing for them. The magic had
disappeared, leaked out of the corners like damp rainwater and
siphoned off into the ground. Their clubhouse was suddenly just a
big damp room filled with junk.

Pup shuddered; he was reluctant to enter.
None of them wanted to enter. It was suddenly different, all of
this, childish and merely play. If they entered, someone might
start laughing at them for being little boys.

Quickly Pup turned off the lights, and they
watched the banks blink off, one after the other, leaving the
garage in gray daylight again.

Slowly they swung the doors closed.

Reggie felt colder than the garage. There was
a sullen weight on him, heavier than sleep, like wet gray slush
hanging around his neck by a cord. Beneath his skin, his bones felt
cold. He kept catching the scent of something in the air, something
just out of reach and recognition. It teased him. It was a cold,
unpleasant smell. Something had been changed, altered. The
lightness had been removed from the air. Dread and fear grew inside
him.

"What do we do?" Pup asked. He sounded as
irritated as troubled. He waited for the other two to say
something, and when they didn't, he opened his mouth to speak
again

Something sounded above them. Something that
should have been summer but wasn't. It was like a sound an
ice-cream truck makes, like sweet clinky bells, only wheezy,
without the sugar and with only the ice in common with ice cream.
It was a sound they had heard before—long ago on summer vacations
far away in other, larger towns. It ran up and down, bright and
organ-like; the song it played was tinkly and ominous. Threatening.
They all knew it.

"That's a calliope," Jack said.

Speedily they lifted the tall ladder out of
the side of the garage and snapped its aluminum sections into place
as if it were an erector set. They tilted it against gravity and
then up onto the side of the garage. Jack, quick as a rabbit,
leaped upon it, forcing the others to hold it steady lest he come
down on top of them, ladder in tow. They waited, impatient, as he
disentangled his sneaker from a rung halfway up. Finally he was on
the roof, holding on to the television antenna mast like a pirate,
peering out into the void at the edge of town.

"Holy cats!" he breathed. Though it should
have been a yelp, it came out subdued, and it only sent further
chills through all three of them.

He climbed down carefully, and then the other
two in turn climbed up, said something similar and climbed down
again.

"What do we do?" Jack asked, feeling as
though he had said nothing else all morning.

"We go look," Pup said decisively.

There was silence from his companions. They
all knew what it was: The cold, the chill that was in the air, blew
from the direction of the amusement park. They each felt it, the
presence of whatever it was, but Pup was adamant.

"Come
on
," he insisted. "We'll just go
look."

Reggie nodded reluctantly, and they set
off.

The calliope had sent a spell over the town.
It was as though a million sleepwalkers had been set loose at once
upon the world. Doorways stood open, and Montvale citizens, most of
them in robes or hurriedly donned jeans and shirts, stood with ears
cocked toward the amusement park. No one made a move to go farther.
The sound alone captivated them. Even Crazy Frances, the town
eccentric who lived in front of the barber shop, seemed to come out
of her perpetual stupor and stood with her one good ear toward the
sound of the calliope. There was a mixture of horror and rapture on
Frances' face, and she was so intent upon her listening that she
didn't even stop to shout, "He is the resurrection and the life!"
at the passing boys as she usually did. Even the dogs in Montvale
were alert, sitting with their ears up stiff.

Above it all, the calliope
played leisurely. It played as if at a funeral, slow
tink
after slower
tee-dee-dee
in a kind of
mock dirge that wove like smoke around the town.

Over the last row of buildings in Montvale,
the Ferris wheel loomed.

The boys stopped. Something was speaking to
them. "Go home," it said. "Wait for the right time. Go home." Their
feet moved forward, hesitated.

"Come on," Pup said impatiently but found
that his feet were welded to the spot he stood on.

Reggie suddenly broke free
of the spell, and they followed. The town peeled away behind them,
and suddenly there
it
was.

Not as wide and big as they
would have thought. In fact, there was something
old
about it. Or rather,
antique, because everything was spanking new, coated with fresh
candy paint. They could smell it drying, the colors of blue and
brown and green and red and yellow, just as they saw a slice of the
newly swept midway, the clumps of rides, the Ferris wheel—wrought
iron it looked like, and painted Christmas-tree colors—and in front
of it, dominating everything, the merry-go-round. This
was
an antique, the
horses real-looking, snarling red lips baring gleaming,
yellow-white teeth, smooth flanks of red or yellow, saddles of
wet-looking brown leather with real stirrups.

"I've got to be first inside here," Pup
muttered, staring up in fascination at the Ferris wheel. "I've got
to be."

There was a fence around it
all; even if it hadn't been there, they would have felt one anyway,
one of electricity or another thing equally invisible and equally
repulsive. But there was a real fence, black iron, thick, with the
top curling over into the park. The big double gates were closed,
bolted. Not now, the place said.
Not yet.
Soon.
It looked deserted within the fence,
with thin new rolls of dust bumping down the walkways and between
the tarped rides.

Go away. Not yet.

Without warning, Reggie felt as if he wanted
badly to be home. His feet began to turn around, scuffling in the
dirt on their own. He wanted to be in front of the TV, in his own
room with his mother close by. The calliope hooted mournfully, its
workings invisible, and somehow the music wove a voice around them
that nudged them homeward. Reggie knew that the music was doing
this to him, and he knew that this was not the time to fight
it.

"I think we should go," he said.

Jack concurred, but Pup stood his ground.
"Let's sneak in."

He knew he wasn't serious even before the
words found their way out of his mouth, but once he had said them,
he felt compelled to repeat them. "Let's be first in, just so we
can say we were."

"I have to get home," Jack said.

Reggie said nothing.

Nervously Pup toed the ground, and then he
burst out: "What's wrong with you guys? Don't you ever want to do
anything new? Are you going to be babies your whole life, wearing
monster masks when you're fifty?"

Reggie and Jack were silent.

"Can't we ever do what I say?"

The calliope
doop-deep-deeped
over
them. Pup, too, had turned around unconsciously and was facing back
toward Montvale. As Reggie and Jack began to walk away, he turned
defiantly to the gate. "I tell you I want to be first in! Dammit!
Come with me!"

"I think we should go," Reggie said
quietly.

"Damn the two of you!" Pup yelled. He glared
at the wrought iron, his eyes fierce. Reggie and Jack were pulling
away from him, leaving him behind.

Go home. Soon.

Groaning in frustration,
Pup put a foot out to test the climbing strength of the metal, but
before his foot touched it, he pulled it back. "
Dammit
," he muttered under his
breath. The sound of the calliope ran through his ears, down
inside. He turned away.

"Dammit."

Soon.

He gave a final malignant glance at the
amusement park through the tall, silent gates, and then his feet
kicked dust and ran him home.

Spinning, spinning, round and round. Dust to
dust, dust against dust. Bone against bone, flesh against
flesh.

Lucius
.

Blood from ashes, spittle from wood and
stone. A tongue from salt, feet from earth clay, fingers of worms
and crawling things.

Lucius, Lucius, wake up. . . .

Spinning, spinning, round and round and up
out of darkness.

"Ohhhhhhhhhh."

A hundred-year wail descended into darkness,
replaced by—the sound of birds.

Lucius Boforth, as stiff and old as the pines
in the forest, gradually lifted his hurting eyes. He looked from
the earth below him, churned as though by a plough blade, up to his
knees and then, in degrees, with a hundred-year creak, to the blue
sky overhead, where a fat blackbird was dipping to look at him, its
eyes huge in its small black face, peering down into him before it
banked abruptly and shot away.