“What the hell do you want?” he demanded, looking around her to the deserted midway. “It’s closed.”
She waited.
In the rain.
“Where is Estelle?” There were no colors left that he could see; it felt like a graveyard. “Flory, where did everybody go?”
She held out her hand.
He didn’t take it. He had never touched Johnny or Brenda, not even Ronnie though there were times when he wanted to strangle her, or punch her, or give her a good swift kick. No touching. That was some kind of rule.
She held out her hand.
If I go in there, he thought, I’m never coming out.
“No,” he said firmly. “It ain’t gonna rain forever.”
Water dripped from the tips of her fingers.
“Just tell me what the hell’s going on.”
And hating the sound of pleading in his voice, he took the hand after all, and it was cold; he followed her in, and it was cold; yet he didn’t think he was dead, because he could feel the muddy ground, slipped on it a couple of times, once leaned down and brushed a hand over it and it felt gritty and touched with slime.
The concessions were boarded up, pennants sagging, droplets of water racing along the guy wires, streamers of mist beginning to lift off the mud. He watched them, fascinated, remembered with a half-smile how he had done the same when he was a kid, watching the ragged plumes of white rise from the street whenever there was a shower, defiant of the weather that had created them, sometimes merging into small clouds the wind quickly carried into the trees or hedges or into the sky, where they were lost.
“If you’re a ghost,” he said, “why can I feel you?”
He squeezed her hand.
It squeezed back.
“Flory, come on, you’ve got to tell me . . .”
They stepped into the oval, and he saw the black carousel.
He tried to stop; she pulled him on.
He grabbed her hand with both of his and tried to break her grip; she pulled him on.
“No,” was all he could do; all his strength was gone.
“Please,” was all he could do; the mist-feathers rose and took form, the white sliding away from figures and shadows and shapes that began to move toward the carousel as well; “Please,” was all he whispered.
But none climbed aboard.
“Flory.”
“Merry-go-round,” she said, turning to him with that smile. “Get on, Kayman, or I’ll kill you.”
Too shocked to argue, he used a stained brass pole to pull himself up, and leaned against it.
Shapes.
Shadows.
Not one of them had a face.
“Ride,” she said.
The carousel shuddered.
Then Ronnie was there, somewhere in the back; Johnny leaning against the iron rail, his arm around Brenda’s shoulder.
“I’m not dead,” he said.
“Oh no,” Flory answered. “That would be too easy.”
Directly behind him a Bengal tiger. Kayman’s legs were stiff, his hands cramped, but he found a way into the saddle, and gripped the pole with both hands. Afraid to fall. Afraid to move.
Music tin and silver.
The tiger moved, the lights moved, so slowly it was easy for Flory to walk along, keeping pace.
“If I’m not dead,” he said, “then they are?” A nod to the shapes, the shadows, created by the rain. He included her without meaning to, and the realization, the remembering, made him moan.
But she said, “No, Kayman. Not all of them.”
A little faster.
She fell slightly behind.
Of course not, he thought, as if it were the most logical thing in the world, Johnny hadn’t died; he had wanted to move to New York where, he’d claimed, his writing would be better appreciated. They had fought. Not argued or debated. They’d shouted, punched the air, danced around each other the way they’d done when they were kids and in the throes of unreasoning temper. He had left before — the army, traveling, a short-lived job in Texas, but he had always returned. This, however, had been different; this had been an I’ll come back to visit when I can, at a time when Kayman had been alone, left alone, struggling with reasons why, screaming at God, feeling the press of years that gave him increasingly less room to maneuver in, hide in, regroup and rebuild and start again in.
An empty time.
Flory took hold of a post as the carousel picked up speed, and swung herself lightly to the platform.
He should have been afraid. She was dead after all, and she stood beside him. He should have been afraid, and he was — but not of that.
Because she had left him, and she was still here.
The music.
The glittering mirrors spinning in the opposite direction. He watched the rain sheet off the roof, watched the shapes and shadows, caught a glimpse of Brenda dancing with Johnny.
Saw Ronnie beside the ticket booth.
She was smiling.
The next time around she waved to him, and his hand automatically began to respond until he realized what he was doing, yanked it into his lap and noticed a shape behind her, in the rain, and he frowned because, faceless, it was nevertheless familiar.
“You don’t remember,” Flory said.
“No. But —”
“You forgot him.”
She reached over and touched his leg, patted it, stroked it once, and said, “Let them go, Kayman. Let us go,” before jumping off, running to keep from falling, then, as he looked over his shoulder so as not to lose sight of her, standing there.
Standing when he came around again, hands at her sides.
In the rain filled with ghosts he could no longer remember.
As easy as that, then: let them go and the carousel would release him. He couldn’t just jump off. He was too old. He would fall. Break a bone. Break a hip, perhaps, which would eventually kill him. Just let them go.
Let them leave.
And then what, he asked the shapes and Johnny and the shadows and Brenda and the almost familiar and smiling, waving Ronnie; what will happen then?
He stared straight ahead, trying to think, not marking the hours, not seeing the dark until the dark was nearly done.
What would happen?
Nothing.
The carousel would slow down, the music would stop, the lights would switch off one by one, and there would always be Estelle, always, and the ill-tempered Norma Hobbs, and Mayard Chase to help him find a way with his carpentry, and the people he drank with at the Ring and the Crow, and the town itself marking him one of them.
Nothing would happen.
Except, that night, they had all joined the rain.
Estelle stood by Johnny the next time he saw him.
Norma whispered to Ronnie when he saw the ticket booth again.
Let them go.
Let the carousel stop and the music stop and the lights switch off, and go home. And the next time it rained they would be with him on the porch, Johnny teasing Brenda, Ronnie telling him what it was like to be not dead, Estelle rocking with him, forever safe from her children.
The music began to die.
I don’t know, he thought; I don’t know.
The carousel began to slow.
I just don’t know.
Let them go and they vanish, the dead to wherever the dead need to rest, the others perhaps to living, perhaps to join the ghosts.
Either way, in the rain, in the sun, he’d be alone.
The music stopped when the carousel did.
And in the last hour of the dead, he sat on the tiger and watched the rain end.
Nothing left now but mud and cloud and the flapping of a pennant like the snap of a listless whip.
All he” had to say was yes.
But he didn’t know.
Oh god, he didn’t know.
Epilogue
The music subsided when someone turned the volume down, the voices drifted softer, the sounds of frantic
movement gone. The parade of bicycles on the street had stopped long ago. From the backyard there was laughter, but easier, not as forced. Cyd Yarrow came out with a tray in one hand, asking for empty glasses, empty plates, littering would be punished by having to listen to heavy metal without benefit of parole; we obliged instantly, with laughing thanks, and when we were alone again tried to get a fix on the time without looking at our watches, without looking at one another. But time very often means little around here, and no one offered to judge who was right, who was wrong.
Finally Deric scratched the back of one ear and looked at me with no expression and asking questions just the same.
I didn’t answer.
Wes Martin had taken over the police chiefs role when Abe Stockton had . . . died is as good a word as any, I suppose, though I’m the only one who didn’t use it; then, not long after, poor Wes had dropped dead of a heart attack trying to unravel a traffic snarl in the middle of Chancellor Avenue. He was barely into his late forties. Though no one said anything publicly, it was clear from the swift decision of the town council to contact Deric that someone believed that only a Stockton could hold the job.
I didn’t answer that one either.
It wasn’t my place to force or nurture belief I simply told the stories. What he did with them, what anyone did who had ever sat with me and listened, wasn’t my concern. Dismissed as clumsy fables, passed over as bonfire tales, accepted literally or scoffed at — in the long run it didn’t matter except to those whose lives I told.
Nina lit a cigarette with a flourish I feared would bum my house down.
Callum suggested we go inside and join the others in case they thought we were engaged in something illegal and disgusting out here on the steps.
And I watched Deric, charted his confusion, saw behind his eyes him marking what I had said beside what his brother had told him over the years. Deric had never been to Oxrun Station; his only contact with us had been his brother. Perhaps, as the infrequent letters had arrived, he had decided they were the hints and musings of an old man trying to make something of his past, creating a little excitement for a small and unexciting town so it would have all been worthwhile; perhaps, as the infrequent letters had arrived, he had feared for his brother’s mind as it neared eight decades of living and began to lose track; and perhaps, while in bed and listening to the dark around him, he believed every word.
I think he wanted to.
I think he was afraid to.
Which is what made me stand and stretch suddenly and loudly, startling Callum, bringing Nina quickly to her feet and looking around as if searching for some monster crouching in the porch shadows.
“Walk,” I said, smiling the way I imagined a shark did when he saw an innocent, stupid minnow. “I think it’s time for a brisk walk before I get too stiff to move and have to sleep out here tonight” I started across the lawn, “You can come if you want. It wouldn’t kill you, you know.”
“What about the party?” Callum asked.
“It isn’t my party.”
“It’s your house.”
“So? Deric’s the honored guest and he’s out here with us.” I paused on the sidewalk and took a slow deep breath, summer air just a comfortable step away from cool. Deric was with me before I’d gone a dozen paces, Nina a few more, Callum grumbling behind about all the food he had missed because he had to humor the nut I winked at him. He sneered back and wanted to know if Nina feared for her virtue, strolling as she was in the middle of the night with three obviously unrepentant reprobates out to raise a little hell.
“One’s a cop,” she reminded him, grinning at Deric.
Stockton grinned back.
“Swell,” Callum muttered. “The record lady’s a smartass.” He dodged her kick, reached out, and poked my shoulder. “So where are we going?”
“Around.”
He knew me better. “Around where.”
“Armstrong’s farm.”
“Damn. I figured.”
“What’s the matter?” Deric said.
Callum grabbed up a twig, snapped it, threw it into the street. “Nothing,” he said, “that a comet landing on my head wouldn’t cure.”
Once on Chancellor Avenue we headed west, alone on the street, most of the houses dark, leaves talking to themselves over our heads. Footsteps not quite loud, and too loud; words begun, and not completed; hands fluttering and flapping into and out of pockets, into and out of clasps, scratching, smoothing, rubbing, pointing out the well-lighted Chancellor Inn, the direction of the hospital, trying to inscribe a permanent map in the air to show the Station’s relationship to Massachusetts and New York.
I had a feeling we looked pretty damn drunk, and I laughed to myself.
Then Deric said, “What’s Armstrong’s farm?”
“It’s deserted,” Nina told him before I could answer. “On the other side of the highway. Some guy who used to live there a zillion years ago. Nobody knows why he left. There isn’t much left of it now — weeds, stickers, an apple orchard nobody will touch with a ten-foot pole, some fields mostly covered with new forest growth now.” She shrugged. “Not the most exciting place in the world.”
“So why are we going there?”
“Don’t ask me, ask him,” she said. “He’s the guide.”
I put a finger to my lips.
She slapped my arm. “Tell him, dope, before he runs away.”
I shook my head.
Deric’s patience was amazing.
At Mainland Road we paused for a moment, not waiting for traffic, just standing there a while so our vision could adjust to the glow from the sky. Across the way, the ditch was darker black, the high shrubs and thorn bushes more like a stone wall.
“I ain’t going to fly,” Callum grumbled as we crossed.
“There are ways,” I told him, and found a gap and led them through.
And once on the other side, Deric stopped me with a touch.
“Pilgrim’s Travelers was here?”
I nodded.
“I see.”
I knew what he was thinking — though moonlight and starlight weren’t their brightest tonight, it was more than clear, and would have been so in pitch black, that nothing the size of that itinerant carnival could have fit into the open space between the thorns and the orchard, and the trees that flanked them. Not even half. Not even a quarter.
There simply wasn’t any room.
And there were too many rocks, too many boulders, too many saplings and yearlings and old weeds and depressions and burrows and wildflowers. This place hadn’t been used since King George was in charge.
Nina stood close, fumbled for my hand and held it; hers was cool.
Callum followed Deric here and there, answering questions I couldn’t hear, staring at the ground, hunkering down and poking at the earth with a stick or a finger, standing, looking up, finally turning to me and waiting with his hands loose on his hips, looking every inch a cop demanding explanations.
There wasn’t much more I could tell him.
Casey Bethune went on vacation and hasn’t been seen since, his house looking as if it hadn’t been lived in for years; on the other hand, his famed gardens had grown wild in that time, and despite the neglect were amazingly lovely after each summer rain. Especially the roses.
There was speculation among the regulars at the Brass Ring that he’d run off with Norma Hobbs. Few believed it. Tina Elby claimed her friend had been murdered. Few believed that either. Norma, they claimed, was just too damn mean to die. Closer to the truth was the notion that she, at Kayman Kalb’s behest, had taken Estelle someplace west where Estelle’s children couldn’t find her. They’d been back a couple of times — a more obnoxious pair I’d never met — threatening lawsuits and arrest and a government investigation, but old Kayman didn’t seem to care. He just sat on his porch no matter what the weather was. Rocking. Watching the street. Every so often walking over to the Ring or up to the Crow and having a drink. Always alone.
/> He talks to himself a lot. Nobody minds; he’s one of ours.
Sadly, the Lumbairds were forced to move back to Cambridge when Neal lost his already tenuous job.
Rene Saxton, shortly after the mass funeral for her sister and family, took over the insurance office in Harley and was, by all accounts, practically minting her own money. Her son did well at Hawksted College and still worked on occasion at the Station Herald. He was, as they used to say, a good boy, who loved his mother.
“So . . .” Stockton said thoughtfully, a hand turning me around and starting us back.
I nodded. “They’re holding on, Deric. They’re holding on.”
In the middle of the highway Nina stopped, grabbed my arm, and pointed up and west. “Hey!”
We looked.
“Make a wish,” she said quietly.
A shooting star, flaring green in an arc that took it behind the deserted farm.
She pinched me lightly. “So, smarty, where did it land, where can we find it?”
It didn’t, and we can’t.
It flares, and there is no grave.
“Well, that’s all well and good,” Callum said, holding his watch close to his eyes, “but I’m bloody damn thirsty, and if we hurry, we can still make last call at the Inn.”
Nina agreed, urged us on, but Deric and I stopped when we reached the other side.
I wasn’t going to, though; I was hoping he hadn’t heard.
But he had.
It was obvious in the way his face took on a mask of the melancholy that comes only deep into morning, after midnight and before the sun.
He looked at me; he looked back at the field; he shook his head; he walked on.
I joined him a step behind as the night breeze pushed me gently, and my shadow merged with his, and we both ignored the carousel.
Playing music.
Tin and silver.
Slipping away like the shooting star.
Leaving us here.
Holding on.
Other Charles L. Grant Titles
Available From Necon E-Books
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant
Volume I: Nightmare Seasons
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel Page 18
