The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel

by Charles L. Grant

  Ride it out, then; wait for the joke to end.

  Rising.

  Falling.

  Wait. All you have to do is wait. They won’t leave you here to starve or die of thirst. Sooner or later they’ll shut down, have their laugh, and you can go home. Tend the gardens. Repaint the house. Fix the gutter. Give Tina a call and take her to dinner. Maybe — he smiled weakly — you could apologize to Norma for wanting to kill her.

  Rising.

  It won’t be long.

  Falling.

  It can’t be long.

  Close your eyes, he suggested, and pretend it’s all a dream, just like in the movies.

  The carousel turned.

  His eyes wouldn’t close. He had to look — ahead and behind, in case they were hiding someplace; out in the field, in case someone turned on the lights. He had to listen-to the music, to know when it began to slow down, when the bears stopped playing that same goddamn tune.

  Oh god, Casey thought; dear God, he prayed.

  “Oh god!” Casey screamed as the animals charged and fled, as the mirrors winked and darkened, as the stars never changed, as the night didn’t lighten, as he heard above the thunder of the carousel as it turned the soft quiet sound of a young woman, laughing.

  He rode through the night without the strawberry blonde.

  And the band played on.

  II: Will You Be Mine?

  The world changed when the cartons were all emptied, crushed, dragged out to the curb for the garbage truck to take away. Before, when dishes were still being unwrapped, when the toys were still jumbled in their boxes, when all the good clothes were still crammed into their hanging bags with the stuck zippers and probably forever wrinkled, there had still been a chance her parents would change their minds. They would see that this house wasn’t as nice as their real home, that the town was too small for anything to happen worth getting up for, that the people just weren’t the same as the ones she had left behind. They would see that, they would understand, they would say oops, sorry, Fran, we blew it, get into the car and drive away without looking back.

  Still a chance.

  Even when the moving van had backed out of the driveway and pulled away, coughing smoke and grinding gears, swaying as it rounded the corner and disappeared.

  Even when Daddy had carried Mom kicking and giggling over the threshold.

  Still a chance.

  Until the cartons were empty.

  The worst day of her life.

  A warm day, with flowers and bees and bluejays and cars with their windows rolled down, trailing music behind them; a T-shirt and jeans and sneakers and dark hair like her father’s, just long enough to poke at her eyes when the breeze snuck up on her from around the side of the house.

  She sat on the front porch on an upturned orange crate and propped her elbows on the railing that needed a coat of paint, her cheeks in her palms, glaring at the street half in sunlight, half in shade. All those trees. All those houses. All those hedges taller than she was. Old. Everything was old and big and she supposed it was nice enough for the people who had to live here, but it wasn’t home. And it wasn’t ever going to be.

  She sighed. Loudly. Mournfully. With just a hint of a false sob.

  No one heard her; they were too busy unpacking.

  She sighed again, this time to herself.

  When the breeze blew and things shifted just beyond the range of clear vision, she felt like she was trapped in one of those crazy dreams she got whenever she had a fever. A dream where things had sharp edges, even the pillows, yet nothing ever cut her and she never quite bled and nothing was ever quite in focus. A dream like looking through glitter-laced gauze, where every footstep was a gunshot and every whisper a shout and every color hurt her eyes but didn’t make her turn away. Nothing ever made sense in a fever dream — she could fly, she could die, she could carry a tune — and nothing made sense now.

  She scratched her cheeks without moving her hands.

  Nothing made sense, but this wasn’t a dream.

  Behind her, she could hear her mother singing something that had no words as she sorted out the stuff that had to hang in the living room, the dining room, the foyer, the hall to the kitchen, while her father carted armfuls of junk upstairs where, in a little while, more sorting would take place. He wasn’t singing. He made fun of her mother instead, laughing fun that had them both giggling.

  Fran rolled her eyes.

  This was nuts.

  They were actually glad to be here. They actually thought she was glad to be here. They actually really and truly believed that this was going to be the greatest thing that ever happened to them in the whole world. She had no idea grown-ups could be so amazingly stupid.

  No chance at all.

  She didn’t bother to sigh; it wouldn’t do any good, even when her father joined her, lighting a cigarette, flicking the match to the yard, blowing smoke rings that didn’t, this time, make her smile.

  “Well!” He leaned against the post, looking down at her.

  His sleeves were rolled up, pale hairy arms; his shirt was unbuttoned, a pale hairy chest made worse by an uneven V of brown at the hollow of his throat. His hair, black without a shine, clung to the sweat on his forehead. His face, round save for a hooknose Fran prayed she wouldn’t get when she got that old, was slightly red. A good red. A working red. “Man, this sure beats that cramped old apartment, doesn’t it? Like moving to a palace.”

  Not quite, she thought sourly, grunted, and squeezed her cheeks more tightly, the tips of her fingers pressing the flesh against her teeth.

  He waved an arm toward the lawn. “Look, Fran — real grass, real bushes, real trees that aren’t choked by fumes. Y’know, I could hang a swing from that one by the driveway if you want. You know, a tire on a rope.” He blew smoke, smiled. “When I was kid — no wisecracks, please — I used to have a tire swing my dad rigged up, even though my mother thought I’d get killed or hanged or something on it. It was a huge tire, from a truck. It was great. Damn, it was great. Your hands got all black, your bottom got creases —” He laughed. “Great stuff, kiddo, great stuff.”

  “Sure, Daddy,” she muttered.

  So what was so great about getting dirty? Every time she did back home, her mother always scolded her. A tire swing would put her into orbit.

  The air was still. Warmer. Insects whispered in the shrubs and trees. The smoke from his cigarette hung too long before drifting away.

  She didn’t make room when he straddled the railing; his right knee touched her left elbow, and felt hot. She didn’t look at him, but she could smell him. The Daddy smell — cigarette smoke and hot jeans and sweat and something else that made him only him, no one else. In the dark she knew it was him; from a zillion miles away in a strong wind she knew. Most of the time it was a comforting thing; today it was annoying.

  “You don’t like it here, huh,” he said softly.

  She shook her head.

  “Scary, right?”

  A slight tilt of her head so she could look sideways at his face, show him her scorn. “C’mon, Daddy, it’s not scary here.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  They had been through this before, more times than she could count:

  i know how it is, fran, honest to god, i do — a new house, new school, meeting new friends, it isn’t easy, it’s really kind of scary.

  i don’t want to go.

  wish i could help you.

  i could stay by myself.

  you’re only twelve.

  that’s big enough.

  not quite, honey, not quite.

  “Well,” she insisted quietly, “I’m not scared”

  “Okay.” He swung his leg back over and stood, puffed on the cigarette and crushed it out against the railing. “You want to give your mother a hand? I’d like to get this over with before you graduate from college.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes, you have to. The sooner we get this done, the sooner you
’ll be able to settle in.”

  “I’ll be grumpy,” she warned.

  He laughed, and suddenly grabbed her under the arms and swung her off the crate. High, to the porch roof, low, between his legs; high again and spinning slowly, and despite the scowl she made sure he saw so he’d know he wasn’t getting away with it, she couldn’t hold it — it slipped into a reluctant smile she shook away as soon as he put her down and planted a loud wet kiss on her brow.

  “Go,” he said, swatted her bottom, and she went

  Turning off her brain for the rest of the morning, not thinking about how ugly and permanent everything looked already, just putting stuff where it was supposed to belong, even though it didn’t belong here at all but back in Cambridge. Then Daddy called for lunch, crawling on hands and knees into the kitchen and begging for food, so they had cheese sandwiches on the back porch, sitting on folding chairs around a rickety card table with paint splatters on it watching some birds fighting, or playing, in the overgrown yard. A large yard. A huge yard.

  “That,” her father declared, “is going to take a year to clean out. Even if I hired a gardener.”

  “You’ll love it, Neal. It’ll give you something to do in your spare time.”

  “Oh, right,” he grumbled.

  Her mother winked at Fran and pointed with half a pickle. “It really won’t be all that bad, will it? It’ll just take a little planning. We can put the new roses over there, see? and transplant some of that lilac to the side of the house, maybe —”

  “What did I tell you,” he said to Fran. “A year, at least.”

  She didn’t care and wished he’d stop acting as if she did. Roses and lilacs didn’t mean a thing. All she saw was a jungle that would probably eat her alive before the summer was over. Prickly old bushes crawling all over a wood fence that looked like a sneeze would bring it down, a couple of big old trees with hardly any leaves, and grass that even from here she could tell would reach up to her knees. With bugs in it. Tons of them. She could see them flying around — gnats and bees and probably monster spiders hiding down by the ground that would gobble her up without bothering to spin a web.

  “Lanette, I think our child is plotting an escape.”

  Fran gaped at him.

  Her mother laughed quietly, touched her bare arm.

  “You’ve done enough for one day, I think. You want to go exploring?”

  She didn’t. But she nodded anyway because she didn’t want to work either, and stood patiently by her chair while her mother gently wiped her mouth with a napkin.

  “Not far, honey. You don’t know all the streets yet.”

  “I know,” she said, and ran through the house, down the front steps, and stopped at the foot of the walk, whose concrete had been shoved up and cracked and split by last winter; something else, her father had said, he’d have to take care of pretty soon, before somebody tripped and broke a leg and sued him to death. Like the bushes along the front, nearly as high as she was and tangled together almost like a hedge. Large leaves and bright berries mixed with tiny leaves on long branches with tiny yellow flowers. It was ugly; it was all ugly and horrible, and before her parents changed their minds, she raced up the street, not looking at the other houses, not looking at the other yards, not looking at anything until she reached the corner.

  When she looked back, the new house was gone.

  The block twice as long as any she’d ever known had swallowed it in every shade of green she had ever seen in her life.

  She grinned, snapped her fingers and whispered, “Yeah!”

  She crossed the street and walked this time, picked up a long whip of a branch and lashed viciously at her shadow, at bugs that flew too near, at every bole she passed. She paid no attention to the numbers on the doors or the street signs; she wasn’t curious about the voices she heard, either way off in the distance where Daddy said there was a park, or behind some house that looked like the one where the witch caught Hansel and Gretel, only bigger. She turned. She walked. She turned again. Patiently, not bothering to worry about the time. Because sooner or later a policeman would stop her, ask her her name, and when she had to give her address she would give him the one in Cambridge and get all weepy and tell him she was lost and missed her mommy. The policeman would take her home. Not here. There. She would drive all the way across Connecticut in a police car and pull up in front of her apartment building to the cheers of her friends. Her parents would worry for a while, but it wouldn’t be long before they’d figure it out. They would follow, they would find her sitting on the steps, waiting, and they would know that they had made the worst mistake in their lives.

  She whipped her shadow again, caught herself on the shin, and yelped.

  It would never happen.

  There wasn’t a policeman that dumb in the whole world. Maybe there was a bus she could take. God, this place had to have a bus, didn’t it? She searched her pockets and found nothing but lint.

  She was stuck.

  No chance at all.

  At last the first tear — the one she had beaten back a dozen times since getting out of the motel bed that morning — made its way to her cheek. And once it had been freed, the others followed before she could stop them. She walked, crying without a sound, not wiping her face, just letting the tears drip from her jaw, the tip of her chin, letting her nose run, letting whatever clung to her chest cling tighter, harder, with barbs like thorns, until she sagged against a tree in the middle of a block and covered her face with her arms. The whip dangled between her fingers. The bark scratched her spine. Her legs bent until she settled on a great knee of a root, pulled her own knees up and pressed her eyes into them until there were sparks and pinwheels and a muffled, lonely sobbing.

  Forever.

  Nothing else.

  “You hurt?”

  Her head snapped up so sharply she yanked the muscles in her neck, and that made her angry. “No!” she said, rubbing her nape, burying a wince with a frown.

  The girl in front of her leaned over, hands on her knees, blond pigtails — oh god, pigtails — flapping over her shoulders. “So how come you’re crying?”

  “I’m not,” she insisted, getting the backs of her hands to work across her eyes, under her nose. “I got allergies, okay? That all right with you?”

  The girl shrugged. T-shirt and shorts and sneakers without socks. “I don’t care. I just thought you were hurt, that’s all.” She looked up and down the street. “So, you visiting or what?”

  “I live here.”

  “No kidding?” Another look, this time searching. “Where?”

  Fran waved her right hand. “That way, I think. I don’t know. Someplace.”

  The girl seemed puzzled.

  Fran didn’t feel like helping.

  “Oh. You’re lost, huh. My name is Kitt.”

  Fran’s disgusted look took care of the lost question but, as she pushed herself to her feet, she said, “Kitt?”

  “Yeah. Kirt Weatherall. Kitt’s short for kitten. That’s what my father calls me.” She glanced hopelessly at the sky. “Now everybody calls me that.”

  “Kitten?”

  “No! Kitt. I don’t want to be called kitten all my life. God.” A final swipe across her face. “My father calls me ‘pal’ sometimes.”

  “Ugh,” Kitt said. “Like you were a boy or something.”

  “Yeah. Ugh.”

  They walked, and the day’s heat cooled in the shifting speckled shade.

  “So you’re new?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “You going in sixth grade?”

  Fran nodded.

  “Me too.”

  They both aimed for a spider scurrying over the pavement, nearly stepped on each other’s foot, and giggled.

  “You got any brothers or anything?”

  Fran used her whip to decapitate a low weed. “Nope.”

  “Me neither. If I had a brother, I’d probably kill him.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

&nb
sp; They reached a broad street, a large church on the corner, its greystone walls stained with faint green age. A steeple that didn’t impress her with its height. A signboard in the shape of a crest near the entrance proclaimed it to be Anglican; Fran wasn’t sure what that meant but didn’t want to ask.

  Kitt pointed to the left. “That way’s Mainland Road. It’s the only road to get here from wherever unless you take the train.” To the right. “Up the Pike — this is Williamston Pike — there are some really neat houses. Monsters. I mean, people live out there who are richer than God.”

  Fran stared down toward the Road. She could see a blinking amber light and not much traffic. The only way out. What kind of a place was this that only had one way out?

  She wasn’t stuck; she was trapped.

  “Hey,” said Kitt, a quick touch, a drop of the hand. “It isn’t that bad.”

  Fran shook her head quickly.

  “No, really. I mean, it’s not like we’ve got a zoo or Disneyland or anything, but there’s the park and the pond, a whole bunch of ducks live there all summer, and we can ride horses out in the valley sometimes, and the woods and all and . . .” She wrinkled her face until Fran thought it would disappear. “And the Pilgrim’s Travelers are here.” She gestured vaguely. “On the other side of the Road.”

  “Travelers? What’s that.”

  “It’s a carnival thing, like a circus kind of. You know, rides and food and stuff. Sometimes they stay just for a little while, sometimes it’s like they’re around for practically the whole summer.”

  “Oh.” No excitement, no anticipation. She could just imagine what a circus would be like in a dump like this, especially one that had no place else to go. “So that’s it?”

  Kitt shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But it’s better than living in the city, that’s for sure.”

  “How would you know?” She felt heat in her cheeks and the heated tears gathering for another charge. “I lived in Cambridge. That’s pretty neat.”

  Kitt wasn’t impressed. “I used to live in New York, when I was a kid.”

  Fran glanced at the church again and thought about how old it must be to look that old. Like the fence in her backyard, it looked old enough to fall down any minute, yet the stones it was made of looked thick and big enough to last forever. She frowned. That wasn’t right. How could something look weak and strong at the same time? That was dumb. She was dumb. This whole place was dumb.