It scared her a little.
Chip scared her a little.
“So,” he said, watching the grass fall, “we gonna be friends?”
“That,” said Elly, “is for me to decide.”
Fran started. She hadn’t seen the others coming, and they were ranged now on the slope, Elly in front, the others fanned out raggedly behind her. Elly’s dress, pink buds on white, slipped and swung in the breeze, making it seem as if she were moving when she wasn’t moving at all. Maddy had a chocolate bar, Susan’s hands were in fists, and Kitt was so mad there was a spot of white on each cheek. Fran didn’t get it. Why were they so angry? What did she do now, break another one of their stupid rules? Why didn’t they just leave her alone?
“Go away,” she said.
“Shut up,” Maddy answered around a bite of her candy. “I’ll pound you.”
“Chip,” Elly said, “go away. We’ll talk to Frances and see what we want.”
Chip hugged his knees, looked at Fran, looked at the girls.
He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”
Scowling, Elly took a step up. “You have to.”
Fran grabbed Chip’s arm. “My mother says I don’t have to let anyone pick my friends for me if I don’t want to.”
Susan gasped, and Fran stared at her, puzzled, stared at Elly, whose hands clutched and twisted her skirt She realized then that they weren’t truly angry, just trying to be. What they really were was afraid. Scared to death. And that didn’t make any sense at all.
“Go away,” Elly said to Chip, her voice higher, softer, smaller. “Please go away.”
Chip stood, and they backed off.
Fran pushed herself to her feet as a chill that wouldn’t rub away walked her arms.
“Now look,” Chip said, “I don’t care what you think you did, or what you think you can do, Elly, but you did not pick Zera to be my friend. I did. Like I picked Susan’s sister. You know that.”
Elly shook her head.
Chip laughed. “You’re a dope, you know it? A real dope.” He looked at Fran. “So?”
Fran wanted to run; she wanted to stay; she wanted to laugh, and she wanted to stop the tears she saw filling Maddy’s eyes. They were all acting like he was a ghost or something, and she had touched him, felt his arm, she knew he wasn’t a ghost. He was as alive as they were.
As alive as Zera had been.
The sunlight died, summer died, and they were all in winter shadow in a slow winter wind that pushed at their hair and ruffled their clothes and blew dead leaves down the hill over browning grass. The sky was dark, but there were no stars. The only light left, the light that made them shadow, hid behind the trees and gave the trees sharp edges.
Fever dream.
“You made Zera die,” she whispered.
Chip put his hands in his pockets, bent his head, looked at her sideways.
“You make Susan’s sister die?”
Susan dropped to the ground, hugged her knees, rocked until Maddy dropped beside her and held her and let the tears slip out, one by one.
Winterlight.
“You’re a ghost?”
Looking at him through gauze touched with red glitter, unable to run, unable to breathe except in shallow gulps. Unable to look away.
“I’m not a ghost,” he said at last. “I am, that’s all. I am.” His gaze shifted to Elly when she stamped her foot in annoyance. “I’m a friend. A friend for life. Do you want to be my friend, Elly?”
The girl paled and stepped hastily backward until she bumped into Kitt, who shoved her away as if she had the plague.
Fever.
“Leave her alone,” Fran snapped, and ran to Elly’s side, put an arm around her waist. “Who’d want you for a friend? You’re mean.” She could feel her own tears surge, and subside. “Go away.”
Chip straightened. “I’m there when you want me, and I go away when you don’t. What’s wrong with that?”
“Yeah, but when you go away for good,” Fran said, “we get hurt and die, right?”
He didn’t answer.
“That’s dumb. That’s a really dumb rule.” Her arm slipped away from Elly’s waist, but the girl grabbed her hand. “I think you should just go away and leave us alone.”
The boy’s face reddened. “But I don’t have a friend!”
“Too bad.” She shooed him. “Screw off, Chip, just screw off.” She grinned at the others. “That’s the way we do it in the city.”
And when she looked back, he was gone.
Dream.
Winterlight fading; summerlight returning, and with it the heat and the bees and the sounds of the game down on the field. Fran felt her legs wobble a little, but Elly didn’t release her, and the others quickly surrounded her, chattering, giggling nervously, searching the trees and the shrub until she suggested they go down to a kiosk and get a hot dog or something.
They ran.
Slipping, pushing, yelling all the way down the slope.
Running across the diamond and shrieking happily when the boys cursed and yelled at them.
Plowing through the bushes until they reached the blacktop path, darting around a woman with a baby carriage, kicking a soccer ball out of their way, nearly colliding with the refreshment stand when they reached it, then playfully shoving themselves into line, faces red, eyes shining.
Fran grinned, then laughed when Kitt said her mother was going to skin her alive when she got home tonight.
Elly tugged at her arm. “Do I have to wear a dress?”
“What? Don’t be stupid. You don’t have to wear a dress if you don’t want to. That’s silly.”
Sodas. Hot dogs.
They stood to one side and didn’t care about the mustard dripping onto their chests, deciding that tomorrow, if they could get somebody to drive them, they’d go see the show out at the college.
“Boys!” Maddy cried.
They laughed and started for the exit.
“Thanks,” Elly said when they reached Park Street, the others gone, waving good-bye.
Fran shrugged. “No problem.” She checked the street in both directions. “See you tomorrow.” And ran to the other side.
“Fran!”
She stopped and turned.
Elly stood on the curb. “I’m sorry,” she called. “About all that stuff.”
Fran nodded it’s okay and backed away, ready to run, ready to fly home and tell her parents about the great time she’d had. Not about Chip, though. They’d think she was having another fever or something, lock her away until every doctor in the universe had had a look down her throat.
“Can I be your friend?”
Fran grinned, waved, and called a “Sure!” before she ran.
Ran a half dozen steps before turning around to wave again.
Elly was gone.
Nothing left but sharp edges, and the faint scent of cotton candy.
III: Lost In Amber Light
There was no question that the music didn’t fit the night. It was too fast, too loud, too demanding. The band prancing on the portable stage at the back of the yard wore clothes that were too bright, too much like neon woven through itself, and even when they stood still there were spectral images of them hovering against the backdrop of heavily branched trees and thick shrubs nearly as high as small trees themselves. Speakers five feet tall shrieked. A single guitar note was a siren, an undulating bass too much a throbbing bomb, and the drummer wielded his sticks as if they were muskets crackling in the midst of ferocious battle. And all of it aided by strobe lights in blue and red, white and green, flailing the band and the dancers and the barely visible stars.
It was wrong.
All wrong.
On a night so warm and muggy, a languid breeze lazing through the upper branches, heat lightning now and then flaring on the horizon, crickets in the shadows, it should have been the blues. A saxophone, maybe a muted horn, talking music to the dark, keeping the dancing and the chattering and the movement
slow. People would listen even when they weren’t, feeling it inside where emotions weren’t frantic but not always soothed, feeling melancholy or more tender without really knowing why.
It should have been the blues.
The night was too warm.
Less than an hour after the party had officially begun, Drake emptied a third glass of tepid red punch, threw a perfunctory smile at no one in particular, and wandered away, around the side of a house twice as large as any two on his block, reaching the front with a forced relieved sigh when the brick and wood and veined marble trim sliced the sound level in half, and half again. He didn’t suppose anyone would miss him. There were more than fifty of them back there anyway, half strangers to one another, the rest too immersed in the music to give much of a damn. He stepped between two cars parked on the curving driveway and shoved his hands into his pockets. A glance over his shoulder, at the mansion, at the paving-stone path he had just taken, and he headed slowly for Williamston Pike, trying to figure out why he had bothered to come in the first place. Anita Atherton, after all, wasn’t a close friend, or even a moderate acquaintance, and her cousin, Jill, who had asked him to come, was a royal, expert pain in the ass. Some of the time.
“Check it out,” she had said last week. “You might meet someone you like.”
He had doubted it then, doubted it more when he’d arrived and discovered that he was the only one in a suit, and knew it for sure when Anita, her birthday outfit more like a bikini with pretensions to a two-piece, shook his hand, kissed his cheek, and introduced him to her parents as someone else.
Halfway down the drive his tie was tucked into his jacket pocket, the jacket was slung over a shoulder, and he was working on an excuse to give his mother. Rain was out of the question; after the storms of last week there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, and she wasn’t the kind to buy a miracle without reading the package first. A police drug raid was a little drastic. Food poisoning would freak her, she wouldn’t go for a severe headache, and she definitely wouldn’t believe that he had been bored.
It was hard, sometimes, having a mother who had more ambition than he did.
“Contacts, Drake,” she had told him that morning. “It’s important that a journalist have his contacts. Otherwise, where would he get his stories?”
“Mom.”
An exasperated shrug followed by a patient sigh and a loving pat to his head. “Darling, it isn’t as if you’re a man of the world yet, you know. Something like this could give you the edge.”
The worst part was, it almost made sense, and he hated it when she made sense. That meant he couldn’t argue; and when he couldn’t argue, he felt as though he were being manipulated. Controlled. He was damn near twenty and growing weary of being on a leash no matter how well-meaning, how liberal. He didn’t always feel it, but he knew it was there.
The Pike was dark. Too many trees hid too many streetlamps, and the infrequent rumble of approaching automobiles always seemed to last just long enough to force him to turn around to see what it was. In the leaves blended into the black, night birds shifted, spoke in hushed bursts, sometimes exploded from the foliage and left falling twigs behind. Behind the hedge and stone walls of the estates lining the Pike, house lights flickered in the breeze that hadn’t yet sifted down to his level, giving him the impression that there were men back there following him with lanterns and silent tracking dogs. Peasants after a monster. A posse tracking a killer. A procession of demonic monks looking for their equally demonic Master. It made him walk a little faster, made him wish there were sidewalks instead of just a dirt-and-pebble apron.
By the time he reached Park Street, he felt like a complete jerk for spooking himself.
A block later, he jumped when a tiny cry spun him around, looking for the hideous thing. whatever it was, that was after his blood, his life.
The streets were empty.
As far as he could tell, he was the only human left alive or moving in the world, and it wasn’t even eleven o’clock. The dim glow of shop lights down Centre Street, the illuminated white face of the national bank’s clock seemingly suspended in midair. A single globe of white over the post office entrance on the opposite corner. Everything else was black, in spite of the starlit sky.
The cry again, hollow in the silence that lay over the village, and he frowned, shifted his jacket off his shoulder, and peered at the library’s lawn, looking for an animal of some kind, peered across the Pike looking for a lost child. Then he looked up, into the lower limbs of a spindly new maple growing by the curb, and grinned as much in relief as amusement.
“Well,” he said, “you don’t look so hot, pal.”
Crouched in a wedge of three branches was a cat, larger than a kitten, much smaller than an adult. It cried again, softly, and tried to push into the trunk when he reached up. It hissed. It lashed a small white paw.
“Jungle cat,” Drake said. “I thought you guys knew what you were doing.”
The ears flattened; it hissed again.
He laughed quietly — mighty Simba waiting to pounce on unsuspecting prey. A step closer, and he saw the glint of a rhinestone stud on a leather collar. Mighty Simba got himself good and lost. And stuck.
He reached, and the paw lashed, just missing his thumb. Leaving it here all night, he supposed, wouldn’t be a crime; someone would probably help it in the morning. But there’d be traffic then, too, and he had a feeling that this cat wasn’t yet wise to the ways of dodging speeding wheels.
“All right.” He bunched the jacket in his hands. “Now, don’t go having a cow or anything, pal, I’m only going to help you.” He reckoned a short jump, a throw, a grab, and he’d have it down with no problem. ‘Just don’t get all bent out of shape.”
The cat watched him.
He jumped, threw, grabbed, and the cat wriggled immediately partway out of the jacket’s folds. Drake stumbled backward when he landed, one hand instantly up to protect his face as the animal growled, lashed out, and raked needles across the side of his neck. He yelled and dropped the jacket. The cat landed with a sleeve draped over its head, shook it off, and dashed across the street, a single angry cry left behind. Drake swore at it as he snatched his jacket from the sidewalk, then gingerly tested his flesh for blood, vowing never to help animals again, they were never satisfied, they never even said thanks.
The cat yowled again, down the reach of an endless tunnel.
And quiet.
* * *
He glanced back the way he had come, stamped a heel for welcome noise, cleared his throat and walked on, past the post office, its white-framed windows paned not with glass but with still, black water that gave him no reflection when he looked, and that made him quickly check the pavement to make sure he still had a shadow. It was there. Only barely.
A shudder rolled his shoulders; he snapped his jacket like a whip and didn’t like the sound.
Unlighted houses.
Maybe he should have stayed at the party, given it a second chance. Mingled a bit more, tried to fit in. But he hadn’t even seen Jill, though she had promised to be there. Which, he realized, was typical. Though she had been in a few of his classes out at Hawksted, her attendance had always left something to be desired, forcing her to scramble every time a test was scheduled, a project due. What amazed him was that she passed. Every time. If he didn’t work his head off, he’d be digging ditches for the state for a living, and wouldn’t his mother just love that.
At Devon Street, he turned north and crossed the Pike, and stopped as soon as he had stepped over the curb.
Weak moonlight on the blacktop, on the concrete, but nothing else. Two houses up there should have been a light, an amber bulb over his front door. It was never out after dark. Never. His mother kept half a dozen spares on a shelf over the cellar stairs, and changed it regularly, once every six weeks whether it needed it or not. She switched it off only when she left for work in the morning or when she got up on weekends.
Now his house was as da
rk as the rest of the town, and he couldn’t help feeling he’d made the wrong turn somewhere, right instead of left when he left Anita’s house, or left instead of straight ahead after he’d rescued the young cat. This wasn’t his street. It couldn’t be. There was no light.
No light at all.
And when the feeling passed, he pinched his cheek, hard, to drive off the confusion. Not only was he spooking himself again, he was behaving like a jerk. He knew this was his block because, when he finally moved again, he could see the milk can planters on Mrs. Loodeck’s porch, the redwood glider on Mr. Tarman’s porch across the street, and his own house with its turret on the left rear corner where his mother did her sewing, where his father had once tried to write the novel that would make them all wealthy. The three rosebushes in the front yard Mr. Bethune had planted for them two summers ago. The sagging second porch step. The unholy squeal of the screen door.
It was his block, his house.
Of course it was.
As he opened the inner door, he reached up and snapped a finger against the clear beveled glass that encased the amber bulb. Nothing happened. He snapped it again, harder, and the light flared on.
Sure it was.
And if he still doubted, which some timorous part of him did despite all evidence to the contrary, such doubts were thankfully erased when he paused in the front hall to let his vision adjust to the dark, heard a buzzing in the living room, looked in, and smiled. His mother was asleep on the couch, light blanket pulled to her chin, feet still in her slippers, the television on, sound low, picture nothing but rolling static. He switched it off, winked at the woman who had raised him alone since he was nine, and uttered a quick prayer of guilty gratitude that the inevitable inquisition would be postponed until morning. A can of soda snuck from the refrigerator. A stealthy climb up the staircase that expertly avoided all the ones that would creak betrayal. He undressed in the dark, went into the bathroom and closed the door, turned on the light.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel Page 10
