The fence poked a few holes in my armor and tested the limits of my flexibility, but I barely noticed. It was 7:11, and the Incinerator was nothing if not punctual.
There must have been five thousand people enjoying themselves in the hollow below me. As I worked my way down the dry brush of the hill at an angle, I saw that most of them were in contemporary clothing; the medieval motley was apparently reserved for employees and nostalgic party animals. An edge of shadow was moving across the bottom of the large bowl that held the Chivalry Faire, and historically incorrect colored lights were blinking on here and there. With the night would come the Master of the Revels, in his cap and bells and black rubber trench coat.
But where was he? It was almost quarter after, and nothing seemed to be amiss. I didn't want to blunder into the crowd without having any idea where to find him, so I sat down next to a large, desiccated clump of sage and surveyed the scene.
The parking lot beyond the Faire, on the other side of the hollow, was already plunged into shadow. Between it and me were the main gates, through which people were still arriving, and the tall castles and ye quainte village. Studded here and there among the medieval set pieces, like walnuts in the crown jewels, were artifacts of the twentieth century: trailers that served as dressing rooms for the costumed help, Porta potties, ticket booth, a large catering truck, electrical generators. At the near periphery of the village was an area reserved for food booths, and on the far side was a concentration of carnival rides that had been gussied up with Arthurian trappings for the occasion. People squealed as they rode a small roller coaster painted to look like a dragon or whirled in cups that, for the moment, were supposed to be wine barrels. The largest of the rides was a haunted house bristling with cardboard turrets to turn it into a haunted castle, and the smallest was a six-foot pyramid made of rubber sheeting stretched over a padded metal frame, up which eight or ten very small children were trying to climb. As they bounced back down, their shrill squeals of laughter cut through the deeper noise of the crowd. Looking around, I suddenly saw children everywhere.
Above the Faire, the sloping hillsides that formed the hollow were packed with dry, explosive brush, the perfect fuel. My best guess was that Hoxley intended to crisp all five thousand revelers, children included.
A sharp smell overrode the acrid scent of the sage, and I recognized it as me. I tried to tell myself that it was just sweat, but any pack of dogs, smelling the fear on me, would have torn me to pieces, plastic and all.
Seven-eighteen.
Where was he!
Something was nagging at me, some detail I'd seen and had filed away in a part of my brain that had either shut down or gone to the end of the oxygen line so the areas needed to keep me alive could function without interference. I felt as I had when I'd seen Hoxley's face in my mind's eye on Caputo's show, and now, as then, I couldn't get whatever it was back again. The only thing to do was disregard it and trust some obscure little glop of gray matter to deal it faceup when it was needed.
I stood and stretched, yawning from sheer nerves. Originally, I'd planned to go in through the main entrance, figuring that Hoxley would be watching it from wherever he was, but when I'd blundered up against the fence I'd decided to improvise and see if I could see him before he saw me. Well, I couldn't see him, and the time had probably come to go back to Plan A. For all I knew, he was delaying the show, waiting for me.
Feeling broader than a billboard, I walked straight down the hillside, making no attempt to conceal myself. I was frantically fishing my memory, a dangerous diversion for someone walking downhill wrapped in twenty pounds of wet towels. What had I seen, and when had I seen it? From the top of the hill or sitting next to the sage? The thought nagged at me and distracted me, and I hoped that whatever Hoxley did to announce himself wouldn't be too subtle.
By now I was at the edge of the crowd, and folks were glancing at me in a way that informed me that I looked very odd indeed. In fact, people parted to let me through. Children pointed at me. I smiled reassuringly at a five-year-old girl, and she broke into tears. Weary, sweating, scared half out of my wits, I envied her the luxury.
The smell of food slapped me in the face. A guy in a leather apron was flipping unrecognizable pieces of mud that a sign identified as Joustburgers. Next to him, a fat man in a leather apron was carving thick slices off Ye Kinge's Jointe, which I thought was pretty rude. All around me people stopped chewing and making change to gawk at me. I waved harmlessly, like some ogre on a parade float, and grinned at everyone. I'd never smelled so much food in my life.
Food. I stopped dead. A man behind me bumped up against me and, as I turned around, gave me a startled glance, apologized profusely, and melted into the crowd. I barely saw him. I knew how Wilton had gotten Mommy and Daddy out.
I'd seen it from my first vantage point. It sat over to the right, behind the crooked turrets of the haunted castle, and I looked above the plywood roofs of the medieval town to find the right turret. One turret looks pretty much like another to me, but the haunted castle had a distinctively striking tackiness that made it easy to spot. The turrets seemed to be made out of papier-mache and spray-painted, and one had a pronounced leftward tilt. Even by the relaxed standards of the Faire, it was an amateurish job.
A steeplechase, in the nineteenth century, was precisely that: a bunch of beefy so-called gentlemen on horseback, racing cross-country toward a church steeple several miles away, jumping, fording, or riding over anything in their path. I headed for that crooked turret with the same single-mindedness, bulling my way through people patiently waiting in line and shouldering through archways, and the crowd obediently let the lunatic in the wet jogging clothes and transparent plastic raincoat get by. Once past the turret, it would only be twenty or thirty yards to the catering truck, maybe the same catering truck that had been ministering to the workmen at the Lewises' house, the truck he'd taken them out in, and—I was willing to bet—the truck he'd been living in for the past few days.
But I didn't make it to the catering truck.
I'd barely hit the stretch of open ground between the medieval town and the rides when a burst of fireworks erupted from the turret of the haunted castle. Balls of fire hurtled into the darkening sky to explode into magnesium chrysanthemums, spiral whistlers shrilly corkscrewed themselves into space, and rockets sailed high above us and burst with a flat whump, like a slapstick hitting a wooden leg. The crowd around me erupted into applause and cheers.
A line waited in front of the haunted castle, but no one protested as I elbowed my way through it. My costume appeared to set urban-survival mechanisms on red alert. At the head of the line was a closed gate set into a rectangular metal frame, with a waist-high fence running from either side of the frame to the castle. On the other side of the fence was a narrow-gauge railroad track that connected the door on the left with the fake iron gate on the right.
“Anybody in there?” I asked the man in Bermuda shorts at the front of the line, a triumph of will over gravity, his potbelly and four chins somehow held erect on legs that were thinner than his arms.
“Got me,” he said, taking me in and stepping protectively in front of a woman who was probably his wife.
“How long have you been here?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“No one's gone in or out?”
His answer was drowned out by blare of trumpets, and the gates at the left of the castle opened. A rickety little chain of four cars rattled out on the tracks and stopped in front of the gate.
“About time,” Spindle Legs said to his putative wife.
At the moment I smelled it, Wifey screamed. The second car wasn't empty. Its occupant was lying on his side, wrapped tightly in a heavy net. He was naked, but the woman wasn't screaming out of prudery.
He'd been roasted. The skin on his back was black and charred and creviced and fissured, like crackling on an overcooked suckling pig. His head was contorted backward against the pain, against the prison of t
he net, and on his fat, unburned throat, the tendons stretched taut as guitar strings. The fingers of his left hand splayed through the net, spread wide, as though he'd tried to grab coolness and wet and safety, and splash himself with it. The back of the hand was singed, its black hairs turned to ash above the porky crackling.
A brilliant rocket blossomed above us, bringing the obscene mess into bright, hard relief. There was something protruding from the center of Eddie Lewis's back, something that went straight through him. It was metallic and thin, and the end that came out through his spine was pointed. He'd been skewered on a sword or rapier of some kind, like a shish kebab.
Stuck onto the metal point that had insinuated its way between his charred vertebrae was a piece of cardboard. On it, in carefully squared letters that betrayed no hint of urgency, were the words IT'S ABOUT TIME.
People were in motion now, milling dangerously, the people up front trying to get back, the people behind jockeying for a better look. I let the automatic slip into my right hand, jumped the little fence, and moved, fast and bent low, to the right gate of the haunted castle.
It opened with a gentle push. It opened inward, and it opened almost soundlessly: no creaking Inner Sanctum hinges, no response of gibbering laughter. It was, altogether, too much to hope for.
Wilton Hoxley was not standing behind it.
The gate closed behind me, and I stopped counting my blessings. The haunted castle was darker inside than Charlemagne's tomb. I was standing on a track that moved upward at a gentle angle, and I could feel no walls on either side of me, even at full arm's length. As my fingers grasped for what wasn't there, I thought I heard someone sigh contentedly.
The sigh had been in front of me, not to the side. The railway was only about two feet wide, and I found that I could spread my feet until the inner edges of the rails touched the outside of my shoes, and that I could move relatively easily in that stance. And noisily. My wet sneakers squealed against the rails, and the plastic slicker hissed and crackled with every step.
I' d gone forward maybe six or eight feet when the whole place started to glow. At first I thought my eyes were getting used to the darkness, but the glow grew stronger until I found myself in a twisting corridor with walls of painted stone and electrical sconces set here and there to resemble torches. Their little pink filaments flickered faintly.
There were three open doorways ahead of me. The track went past two of them, and then turned left into the third, and the corridor I was in faded off beyond the turn to the left in a trick of painted perspective.
I had one comfort: Now that I could see, I didn't need the feel of the tracks to guide me. The first of the openings was to my right, and I put my back against the wall on that side of the corridor and edged slowly toward the doorway. When I reached the corner of the doorway, I counted three, pivoted on my right ankle, and whirled into the doorway, the gun extended in both hands. Ghosts attacked me.
When they flew at me, I shot both of them. They rushed me from the end of the tunnel, coming fast, weightless and fluttering, the ragged tatters of their robes barely brushing the ground. The bullets didn't even slow them. In less time than it took me to inhale they were brushing my face, and I listened to the echoing spang of the gunshots and smelled dusty muslin and felt wire stiffeners, and then the ghosts slid away from me as quickly as they'd come, back up into their waiting post at the end of the little tunnel.
I'd wasted two bullets. By firing, I'd told Hoxley I was armed, although I didn't figure that counted for much. On the other hand, I'd been made a fool of, which counted with me.
“That was pretty good,” I said out loud. “What's next?”
What was next was the second opening, to the left this time. I approached it from the center of the tracks, not particularly eager to catch another face full of anything, and as I positioned myself in front of it, a light came on, and the medieval figure of Death, the image that has come down to us in the twentieth century as the Grim Reaper, black-hooded, with a scythe over its shoulder, and with a skull for a face, began to move toward me on some sort of rollers. It lifted its scythe.
“Too Ingmar Bergman for me,” I said, and then about twelve things happened at once. The tracks shook, the doors behind me burst open, music erupted, cold air struck my neck, I tried to dodge, and the little train hit me on the back of the thighs. I tumbled backward into it, and the last thing I saw before it trundled me away was Death winking at me.
“Drive carefully,” Death said.
21
Eddie's Ride
A second after the toy railroad landed me outside again, I was out of the car and running through dusk as though hell had opened behind me, toward the pair of doors I'd gone through the first time. Then I stopped and reversed field.
The doors to the left opened out, as quietly as the ones to the right had opened in. All I had to do was slip my fingers into the crack between the doors and tug. Maybe, just maybe, Wilton Hoxley's death's-head was still facing in the other direction.
Maybe he was expecting me to come back the way I'd come before. Maybe I could feel my way through the dark until I came up behind him, aimed, and pulled the trigger four or five times. Maybe the green cheese the moon is supposed to be made of can be bought at discount at Trader Joe's. Maybe, one of these days, it'll finally rain up.
The ragged sound like ripping paper that followed me into the blackness inside the castle was my own breathing. I put the automatic against my cheek and felt its reassuring cool as I willed my lungs to slow down. Water, my own water, was pouring down my sides, saturating the towels.
It was as dark as it had been before the lights went on. Once again my feet told me that I was going uphill. It made sense to whatever part of my brain was still trying to make sense: The train went up through the mild, programmed horrors of the Haunted Castle, and then it went down again. Simple amusement-park physics. Let the suckers get comfortable going uphill, scare the bejeezus out of them at the top, and then throw the whole phone book at them as the train accelerates out of control—downhill. Screw with their sense of gravity, the first thing a kid learns, so primal that we take it for granted.
At this point, there wasn't anything I was willing to take for granted.
Up and down, I thought. Very simple, dark or no dark. The rails went up, peaked, and went down again. Pseudo-ectoplasmic interruptions and living homicidal maniacs notwithstanding, I had a simple mental map.
I slid one dripping ankle uphill to find a tie. It had finally occurred to me that all sets of rails have ties between them. If I could measure the distance between the ties and hit them with every step, I could walk without the musical accompaniment of my sneakers squealing against the steel. All I had to do was walk along the right-hand edge of the ties, taking steps of exactly the right length and keeping my right hand extended, brushing the wall to follow the curves. Simple.
Except for the gun. If I wanted to follow the right-hand wall without making noise, I'd have to transfer the gun to my left hand. Skin is quieter than metal. I'd been born left-handed and trained to write with my right, and the training had stuck. I transferred the gun to my more or less useless left hand. It had fit into the right with a comfortingly familiar weight; in the left, it felt fat and cold and greasy.
Still, it was a gun. Did Hoxley have a gun? No way, I comforted myself, as I took the first steps. A gun would have been an affront against Ahura Mazda. The Fire was All. Fire was Beginning and End, and a gun would have been technological irritation.
The track and the walls began to bend to the right. I knew someone must have gone to call the police, but no sound from outside signaled the arrival of a SWAT team to quell the castle's resident lunatic. Listening as I climbed, I caught the sawtoothed sound of my breath again, and chewed down on my lip to silence it.
Then my right hand hit nothing. My fingers extended themselves without my permission, five little soldiers hopelessly assigned to the last patrol, and felt nothing whatsoever, just cool air
against a perspiring palm. Another corridor, inhabited by mechanical spooks programmed to go woo-woo at the right moment to give the suckers their last fifty-cent thrill on the way out.
Stepping over the right-hand track, I backed into the corridor and stretched out my arms to feel its width. By extending my arms fully, I could just touch both of the corridor's walls. I couldn't hear anything at all, if I discounted muffled music that had to be coming from outside. Somewhere ahead of me, the Grim Reaper was waiting, counting down toward ignition with his squirt bottle and his kitchen matches. Some part of him was probably shrilling gleefully, but he was keeping still. He'd had practice. He'd made it through childhood and adolescence by keeping still, by not letting anyone hear the earsplitting screaming of his soul. He'd learned to muffle it in a pale ordinariness. Wilton Hoxley was an expert at stillness.
The walls of the corridor felt reassuringly solid. I stretched my arms out for support and sagged. I'd never needed a good sag quite so badly. Relaxing into my sag, I began, for the first time in four or five minutes, to think about where I was, rather than letting my mind bathe me in soothing, irrelevant data about where I'd rather be. The Crab Nebula, for example.
But I was here and Hoxley was ahead of me, waiting to shrill and squirt. My armor, so solid-seeming when I'd imagined it all those endless subjective years ago, felt as permeable as a wind sock. Then the walls on either side of my hands trembled, I heard a sound like a ratchet wrench, and then a bang. The trembling increased, and I stepped back and bit my tongue as the sound grew louder and a ghost's hand passed over my face. Air, just air. The little train had carried poor Eddie through his last ride again, a new and improved vision of hell: burn to death and then revisit the scenery.
The train was a probe sent to root me out, to push me noisily off the tracks. Hoxley was still in front of me, waiting. Whatever I meant to him, it was enough to keep him where he was, in the center of a web where he knew he might soon be discovered.
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