Carnival of Shadows

by R.J. Ellory

  “Well, for a start, Michael, the law…”

  “What are you planning to do? Call the cops?”

  She laughed, touched his face. “You are too smart for your own good, Michael Travis.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible, Mrs. Faulkner.”

  “Don’t call me that, for God’s sake!”

  “This is what we are doing. I want to do it. I think you want to do it too. Don’t you think half the fun comes from knowing that we are the only two people in the world who will ever know how good this is? Makes it all the more exciting when you know it’s a secret…”

  “To be honest, I don’t know if I was the one who seduced you, or you were the one who seduced me.”

  “We seduced each other, Esther.”

  She reached up her hands, placed one on each side of his face, and kissed him.

  “As long as you understand that this might go horribly wrong,” she said.

  “I am happier than I have ever been. It might be a terrible mistake, it might go wrong, but until that happens, which I doubt it ever will, let’s not wish for it, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and then she shifted sideways and got off the bed. She pulled her robe around herself, stood looking down at him on her bed, and smiled.

  “Who would have thought it…?” she said, almost to herself.

  It was that afternoon, Saturday the eighteenth, that Michael asked her once again if she would go over to the Flatwater house with him.

  “You really want to go?” she asked.

  “Yes, I really want to go,” Michael replied. “I need to go.”

  “Then we shall go tomorrow,” Esther said. “I will call a friend of mine who has a car. He’ll take us.”

  Esther made the call, the friend agreed, and early the following morning, Michael saw a black Studebaker Commander pull up against the curb in front of the house. The man who alighted was sharply dressed, perhaps in his early to mid-fifties, and there was something about his bearing that suggested a military background.

  “That’s Robert Erickson,” Esther said, “an old friend of mine. Was in the army, got himself shot in the leg.”

  As if to highlight the consequence of being shot in the leg, Erickson came around the side of the car with a cane, leaning heavily on it as he made his way up toward the house. The limp was pronounced, and even the few steps to the front door seemed to require a good deal of concentration.

  “Everyone calls him Sarge,” she said.

  Sarge opened the screen and knocked.

  “Come on in!” Esther called.

  Esther greeted him with an enthusiastic hug.

  “So good of you to do this, Sarge. Really, really appreciated.”

  “Nothin’ at all,” Sarge replied.

  Michael appeared in the doorway.

  “This must be your Mr. Travis,” Sarge said. He extended his hand. Michael came forward and they shook.

  “Esther told me a good deal about your trials and tribulations, son, and I must say that my heart goes out to you. Terrible bind to be finding yourself in at such a point in your life.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Michael said.

  “Oh hell, son, just call me Sarge. Everyone does. Now, we’re headed out to Flatwater, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And whoever from the Sheriff’s Department knows we’re coming?”

  “Who?” Michael asked.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” Esther said, and touched his arm. “Seeing as how this is all still going on… with your ma an’ all, well there has to be someone there from the Sheriff’s Department. You know, to make sure that we don’t mess with things that we shouldn’t be messing with.”

  Michael nodded.

  “You sure you wanna go out there, son?” Sarge asked, genuine concern in his tone.

  “I need to go out there,” Michael replied. “It’s just something I have to do.”

  “Well, let’s git, then,” he said.

  Sarge and Esther sat up front, Michael a little cramped in the back. Sarge lit one cigarette after other, and soon the world beyond the windows was obfuscated by a dense fog of smoke.

  “You don’t mind?” he kept asking, and though Esther seemed not to, the smoke bothered Michael tremendously. He did not feel he could say a word in protest, however. He needed to get out to the house, and Sarge seemed to be the only available way to do it.

  The drive was a straight north on 281, a west turn toward Flatwater, a brief stopover to alert Flatwater’s deputy sheriff, Harold Fenton, that they had arrived, and then the last couple of miles out to the house itself was in a two-car convoy behind a black-and-white.

  The house came up into view like something from a dream.

  From a distance, it seemed a mere speck at the side of the road, but as they neared the property, it seemed to grow, not only in real terms, but also in Michael’s mind, as if the significance of what had happened here had now afforded the building itself a greater meaning and potency.

  The black-and-white pulled to a stop, and it was only when the deputy got out that Michael remembered him from the day his father had died.

  This was the man that the sheriff had left behind, the one who had kept an eye on him until the coroner came to take Jimmy Travis away.

  Precisely one year and one month had passed since Michael Travis had last seen this house, and yet at once it seemed both yesterday and a thousand years ago.

  The Michael that had left and the Michael that had returned were very different people.

  Deputy Harold Fenton, all of five seven with an attitude, stood at the foot of the steps leading up the screen and hitched his thumbs through his Sam Browne belt.

  “You can enter the house, but aside from your own room, all other areas are out of bounds—”

  “Lighten up there, Captain,” Sarge interjected. “The kid knows not to touch anything.”

  “I understand that, sir, but I would be remiss in my duties if—”

  Sarge placed a large hand on Fenton’s shoulder and squeezed it firmly. “We’re both institutional men,” he said. “We understand the dos and don’ts just fine, eh, Deputy? Situation such as this affords a touch of humanity, wouldn’t you say? Now, why don’t we just take a moment over here? Let’s have a smoke together. You can tell me some war stories, and we can let the lady and the kid just sort out what needs to be sorted out. There ain’t gonna be no monkey business here. What’s done is done, and nothin’ that the kid might or might not do is gonna change that fact.”

  Harold Fenton looked a little befuddled, a little off guard, but then he nodded and said, “Sure thing.”

  “Good ’nough.” Sarge nodded at Esther and Michael, and then he turned back to Fenton and said, “So tell me, how many bank robberies you get around these parts? I heard these small-town banks are just heaven for the Dillingers and Barrows of this world.”

  “Ha,” Fenton said. “I’ll tell you now, one time we had ourselves a real…”

  His voice faded as Sarge walked him back toward the cars.

  Michael stood there for a time.

  Esther was right beside him, even reached out and took his hand, but he was not aware of it at all.

  After a minute, perhaps two, he just started walking. He crossed the dusty yard and started up the steps. The screen catch was flipped. He unhitched it, opened it with a creak and then pushed the front door. It swung inwards soundlessly, and Michael stood in the dim coolness of the hallway without remembering the steps he’d taken to get there. Esther hung back behind him, right there on the other side of the screen.

  Everything was strange, and yet everything was too familiar. The hat stand, the rug on the wooden floor, the way the banister turned slightly at the bottom as if inviting you to climb the stairs, the light at the end of the hallway that led do
wn to the kitchen.

  To his left was a window that looked out from the side of the house, to his right, the door to the main room of the house. The room where they ate. The room where his father would kick off his shoes, lean back in a chair, listen to a ball game on the wireless. The room from which his voice would echo up the stairs to Michael’s room… Janette, bring me another beer… or Michael, get on down here and tell me what in tarnation this mud is doing on the God-darn floor!

  Michael took a step, knowing even as he did so that he would find him.

  The board creaked beneath his foot.

  He looked back over his shoulder, saw Esther standing there on the steps, her features obscured through the fine mesh of the screen. She said nothing, but he could read her body language.

  Shall I come in? Shall I stay right where I am and leave you to deal with this alone?

  Michael wanted her beside him, wanted to feel her hand in his, but knew that if she was there, he would not hear what he’d come to hear, would not see what he knew would be waiting for him.

  He took another step, and boards that had never creaked now seemed to cry back at him in faint, desperate voices.

  His hands were dry, cold even, but his forehead was varnished with sweat. His heart was like a clenched fist, a knot of dark and shadowed muscle deep within his chest, its beating no more evident than the sound of the breeze beyond the walls and windows, as if it wished to have none of this, as if it wished to be elsewhere.

  Michael reached the door, and before the table came into view, he closed his eyes tight. He blinked several times then, shook his head as if ridding it of cobwebs, dreams, fragments of imagination that might be precipitated by the surroundings.

  Nevertheless, he knew it would do no good.

  Michael took one further step, reached the threshold, his right hand on the doorjamb, his left hand down by his side, the calm and measured beating of his heart like a metronome.

  Hey, son.

  Jimmy Travis sat right where he’d been. That day. That very day. The last day of his life.

  He looked directly back at Michael, his right eye open wide, his left eye a bloody socket with a strange glimmer right in the center. It was only when Jimmy smiled and moved his head that Michael saw the knife that was still embedded in his face. Head on, there was merely that dull, gunmetal glint to remind Michael of what his mother had done.

  You done fucked the quiff, eh, boy? I seen her a coupla times. Cain’t ’member when, but I seen her and figured she’d be good for a party. But you beat me to it, you old dog, and you only sixteen years old. God darn it, boy, you sure as hell is your father’s son.

  Michael wanted to reply, but even as he opened his mouth, he knew that the words would never be forthcoming.

  You just go on thinkin’ whatever you wanna think. I can hear you just fine an’ dandy.

  Michael wondered if he was crazy. He wondered if the trauma of what had happened had turned his mind completely.

  You know your problem, kiddo. You always thunk too darn much. That much thinkin’ ain’t healthy, ’cept maybe for university folks and them that writes books and suchlike. But we ain’t those kinda people, kiddo. We ain’t those kinda people at all. We’s just simple people, the kinda people who can do a fair day’s work for a fair wage, mind their own business, you know? All that thinkin’ is for college professors and whatnot.

  You got what you deserved, Michael thought. It was there, right there at the forefront of his mind and he could not help thinking it.

  Did I, now? Is that what you believe, kiddo? That I got what I deserved? Well, let me tell you a few home truths about your darn mother, saint that she was.

  I don’t want to hear it.

  Is that so? Well, it seems to me that you don’t have much of a choice, ’cause I happen to be in your head, and that’s one thing you ain’t never gonna be able to get away from. I’m in your head and I’m in your blood, boy, and blood is somethin’ you ain’t never gone escape from.

  You were the worst, and you know it. You treated her like shit. She deserved better than you, and you know it.

  Why you—

  Jimmy Travis attempted to move then, gripped the arms of the chair and tried to push himself up. Perhaps there were rules to this game. It seemed that Jimmy could not move, forever consigned to remain there in the moment of his death.

  This simple realization gave Michael the nerve he needed to take another step into the room.

  Everything was at it had been left. He could see the food on the table, now overgrown with mold, cockroaches scurrying back and forth across the cutlery, the sound of their spindly legs on the ceramic as defined as Jimmy’s voice. There was a film of dust covering everything, Jimmy included, and as he moved, that dust lifted and settled, lifted and settled as if the house itself was breathing, and in the vague, tenebrous light from the window behind him, he seemed at once vague and indistinct and then as clear as daylight itself.

  You think your mother would be proud of you? You think she’d be proud of you, kiddo? You done fucked her cousin’s widder. I didn’t do no worse than you’re doing right now. Hell, you are a sick kid, you know that? You think you have the right to judge me? You don’t have the right to even speak to me, let alone judge me, you self-righteous hypocritical son of a bitch! And I’ll tell you now, that ain’t never had more meaning than it does right now. Son of a bitch. You are a son of a bitch. Because she was a bitch, kiddo. She was a fucking nasty fucking bitch, and I hope she burns in hell forever…

  Enough! Michael thought, shouting inside his own head. That’s enough!

  Hell, kiddo, I ain’t even started.

  Well, you’re in hell right now! And even if I can see you, I can only see you here. You’re stuck here forever, you crazy asshole…

  Jimmy started laughing, and as he laughed, his shoulders shook, and the dust that had gathered on his clothes came off in small clouds and floated around his head. The sound of his coarse laughter sent the cockroaches scuttling back beneath the edges of plates and over the table. They dropped to the floor and hurried across the wide pool of dried blood toward the baseboard.

  Got you good, kiddo! Got you good. Got you fooled. You liked my little performance there, eh?

  Jimmy started to rise from the chair.

  Michael watched as his dead father pushed the chair back with his knees and started around the table toward him. He was grinning, and the slack muscles on the left-hand side of his face gave his features the texture of melted wax.

  Come give your old pa a big bear hug, kiddo. You knows we’s just the same inside, don’tcha? You knows you ain’t never gonna get away from your history…?

  Michael stepped back, and as Jimmy Travis came within six feet of him, he let out a frightened sound, a sudden exhalation of horror that sounded like a child lost somewhere in the dark and desperately, terrifyingly alone.

  “No!” he said out loud. “Don’t come anywhere near me!”

  “Michael?”

  He stopped suddenly. He realized his eyes were closed. He took a deep breath and opened them. Esther was standing right there in the hallway, the expression on her face one of the gravest concern.

  “What happened, honey?” she said. She walked forward, reached out her hand and touched the side of his face. “Lord almighty, sweetheart, what happened? I thought I heard you talking to someone? Were you talking to someone? Look at you now… You’re deathly cold, and you’re shaking like a leaf…”

  She held out her arms, and he walked toward her, grateful now for her presence, her warmth.

  He knew she could not see anything, and even as she hugged him, even as she held him ever closer, Michael looked back toward the room where he had seen his father.

  There was the table, the chair, and the wide bloodstain on the wooden floor. There was the window, the ornaments, the rocker in the far c
orner, the wireless on the sill, the lamp, the last newspaper his father had read still there on the mantel, but Jimmy Travis was not there. Even the cockroaches had merely been a figment of his imagination.

  Michael closed his eyes. He wondered again if he was crazy. He wondered if he would now forever be haunted by the ghost of his father.

  I’m in your head and I’m in your blood, boy…

  He started again, as if shocked by an electric pulse.

  “You are just as jumpy as anything,” Esther said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’m thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “R-right,” Michael said.

  “You wanna get anything from your room?”

  “No, it’s okay. I just want to leave,” Michael said.

  “I think that’s best. I don’t like this place one bit.”

  They left together, hand in hand, and when they came through the screen and started down the steps, both Deputy Fenton and Sarge were there to meet them.

  “Little shook up,” Esther explained. “He’ll be okay.”

  Esther led Michael toward Sarge’s Studebaker.

  Sarge shook Fenton’s hand, thanked him for taking the time to come out, said it was a pleasure talking with him.

  Michael paused before he ducked back into the rear seat of the car. He took one more look at the house of his childhood—

  Be seein’ you, kiddo…

  —and then, with an almost imperceptible shudder, he climbed in, pushed himself back into the corner as far as he could, and tugged his jacket around himself.

  He could still hear those scuttling cockroach feet over the porcelain plates. He could still see that dull silvery glint in his father’s left eye. He could still hear the coarse rasp of Jimmy Travis’s voice saying, God darn it, boy, you sure as hell is your father’s son…

  Never, he told himself. Never, never, never.

  But the doubt was there. The seed of doubt was there. He felt it stretching its tentative and fragile roots into the earth of his mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  15