by Dean Koontz
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.
chapter eleven
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 any unusual . . . familiarity on the midway.”
“God forbid. But we do still get to be unusually familiar 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 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 anymore.”
“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-to-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 b
e 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, jam 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 fun house 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 laboring carnies below, then folding up with a kiss of canvas lips to painted foreheads, their 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 we 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—cancer, 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,
