Dean Koontz - (1985)

by Twilight Eyes(Lit)

  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 ins ide, 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 in
sects 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 enorm ous 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 answeri
ng, 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.