The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  “Is that what they are crying for — the loss of their bodies?”

  Reynolds turned away and said, simply, “No.”

  They had almost reached the entrance to the tent. Reynolds consulted his bulbous watch and quickened his pace. They passed two attractions, THE MAN FROM SIAM, consisting of a full human skeleton walled off in a brightly lit room with a glass front; the skeleton was posed sitting in a simple chair, apparently asleep, its head dropping upon its ribbed breast, with a small table by its side upon which lay on open book.

  As Grant passed by the skeleton suddenly roused and stretched, then took the book in its bony-fingered hands and began to read: “Break, break, break …”

  Beside that was a similar space, this one square and again brightly lit from the inside, which was empty. Reynolds hurried on but Grant stopped as the space abruptly filled with colored blank masks trailing multicolored streamers. There must have been thirty of them. Not one interfered with another, and yet they flew at a faster and faster pace, seeming to fill the entire space with a blur of multicolored motion.

  And then as suddenly as they had appeared they were gone, as if a flame had been snuffed.

  “Please, we must hurry along,” Reynolds said, returning to retrieve Grant. He stopped for a moment to stare into the lit box which was again empty.

  “Emma,” he whispered, his face filled with loss and sadness.

  “Who—”

  “Another time,” Reynolds said, shaking himself from his reverie.

  They strode past the attractions near the entrance, fish tanks which gave off a faint formaldehyde odor filled with two-headed calf fetuses and three-tailed kittens. There were shelves arranged with huge dinosaur bones and tiny skeletal things that appeared half fish, half animal. Patrons were two deep, ogling in wonder.

  Reynolds waved a hand in dismissal. “Mostly fakes. They expect it, so I provide it.” He added as afterthought, “Their gullibility makes me ill.”

  They stopped at the very first attraction, what Grant assumed to be a moldy-looking recreation of a long-dead Pharaoh’s burial chamber. There was broken pottery and a few trinkets and, in the center of the chamber, up on a shelf, what looked to be a mummy. It was in a decrepit state, brown bandages falling from the half-rotting corpse, hands clasped across the body, eyes staring heavenward in a frozen rictus of pain.

  “Fake?” Grant asked, as Reynolds lingered momentarily.

  “Oh, no,” Reynolds answered. “And he was not dead when we found him.”

  Reynolds gave a short bow to the corpse, and then drew Grant away and to the opening to the attraction tent. He looked again at his watch and briefly consulted the attendant there, who nodded and whispered into Reynolds’ ear.

  Reynolds hurried back to Grant. “We haven’t much time,” he said. “She’s arrived, just now. Her black Lincoln has just entered the gate and parked.”

  Grant stiffened, and reflexively reached for his .38.

  Reynolds’ hand stayed him; he shook his head and said, “Come.”

  They walked to the other side of the tent, and stopped before what was actually the last attraction. It was a furnished room, a larger box then the others and without glass to protect it. The lighting was mellower here. The room itself was furnished like a real sitting room, in the style of the Victorian period, with billowy curtains framing a faux window against the back wall. The window was backlit with a soft glow to look as though the sun was either rising or setting. To one side of the window was a bookcase filled with leather volumes; to the other side was an ancient Victrola, its curved black horn pointed into the center of the room. A tune played, something soft and barely distinguishable as “Goodnight, Irene.”

  There was a Sheridan couch (Grant hated Sheridan couches) — which, Grant realized with a start, was the same one that had been in Thomas Reynolds, Jr.’s house when Grant had visited him there. It was upholstered in a very dark fabric, black or the deepest navy blue. The ebony coffee table from the house was there also, stationed in front of the couch. And one of the two red damask chairs that Grant remembered, in the center of the room, in which sat a woman dressed in a long Victorian dress, with buttoned black shoes.

  “Regina Bright,” Reynolds announced firmly.

  Her hair was as white as flour, pulled back in a severe bun. She looked thirty years older than her age, not a teen but a middle-aged woman, her face lined with the beginnings of old age. Her skin was nearly as pale as her hair.

  Grant would have thought her an albino except for the eyes, which were open and piercing. But they did not seem to register the world around her. Though they stared unblinking, Grant had the feeling that they were completely turned inward.

  Reynolds said to the gathered crowd behind them, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but this attraction is closed.”

  There were groans but he ignored them.

  He pulled at ropes to either side of the boxy room, and a canvas flap fell down over the front of the room, hiding it.

  Reynolds motioned Grant to follow him, and they went to the left side of the room where there was a door. Reynolds produced a key from his pocket and opened the door. They entered.

  “Gina, I’ve brought an old friend,” Reynolds said softly.

  Regina Bright made no movement; it was as if she were a statue.

  “It’s Detective Grant, who helped you once before. Do you remember?”

  Still no sign of life; her hands rested in her lap, her eyes stared straight ahead.

  “Gina—”

  “The Dark One is close by,” Regina’s mouth said. Grant swore the lips hadn’t moved, and the voice was unearthly, faraway, little louder than a powdery whisper.

  “Yes,” Reynolds said. “It’s true.”

  “And it is Halloween, and nearing midnight.”

  “Yes,” Reynolds repeated.

  There was silence in the room, and Grant became very uneasy. The very atmosphere was strange, as if all of the oxygen had been sucked out. He was finding it hard to concentrate, or breathe.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Reynolds.

  “I don’t know.” The impresario had sat down on the Sheridan sofa, and looked pale and ill. He was blinking his eyes furiously.

  “Gina, what’s going on?” he gasped. “Where’s Samhain?”

  She said nothing, only stared.

  Grant drew out his .38 and turned toward the door. “I’ll take care of this. I’ll go out and find the girl and end it.”

  “No.”

  Regina Bright’s voice was loud in the room, a booming command, and Grant stopped in his tracks and looked back at her. He could not move.

  “Let me go!” he shouted.

  “It will not work.” There was silence and then she said, “Nothing we can do by ourselves will work. And Samhain is not here.”

  “What!” Reynolds said. “Gina! All these years, all this time! You can’t tell me —”

  “We have failed.” The whisper-voice was resigned, and suffused with what sounded like fear. “There is nothing we can do to stop her …”

  “I won’t accept that!” Reynolds shouted.

  “Then look with me …”

  The room clouded, was filled with a gray mist that boiled all at once from the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Grant felt himself being pulled toward Regina Bright. Her eyes widened, became huge, kept growing until they were the only thing in the room. And then there was one eye only, gigantic, and Grant and Reynolds were drawn into it. Grant burst through her cornea, which shattered like glass, and was pulled into a blue darkness filled with what looked like approaching stars.

  And then he screamed and saw no more.

  Chapter Fifty

  The child that was the Dark One moved with a reptilian grace unknown to any other five year old girl. She was dressed in pink, had picked the outfit out herself that morning in the house filled with the bodies of the family she had murdered with her touch just outside Montreal, close to the New York border. A touch, a look;
she had rang the doorbell, the black Lincoln at the curb, and when the woman had answered she had merely held her hands up and smiled. When the woman had laughed and picked her up she had merely looked into the human eyes, touched her lightly with her little finger and the woman was dead.

  And then the rest, the dog, the cat, the man in his study and the children, including the five year old girl in the pink dress.

  “Do you like it?” she said sweetly, at the ticket booth, to the teenaged boy in front of her with the mullet haircut and leather jacket.

  He turned and looked down on her with a sneer on his acned face. “Get lost.”

  She looked up at him with her gray eyes and touched his ripped jeans.

  He gave a short cry and fell dead to the ground.

  “You get lost,” she said, the voice no longer phony-sweet, but hard and raw and deep as a cold well.

  She touched and looked, touched and looked, and the line melted in front of her.

  The ticket booth was empty now, and she walked unimpeded into Halloweenland.

  She looked up at the moon overhead, and smiled. “Last night for you, too,” she said.

  By now there was a commotion by the ticket booth, shouts of alarm, so she quickened her steps and went to the Ferris wheel. She stood looking up at it curiously, as she had so many things on this strange Earth. It was round and perfect and she hated it. In a little while it would no longer exist.

  “Are you lost, little girl?” a man said to her. He was holding the hand of a boy of about her age. “Where are your parents?”

  Touch and look, touch and look.

  She was alone again, with two crumpled bodies at her feet.

  She stared at the Ferris wheel for another moment, then wandered on, studying the carousel. Some of the carved horses looked to be in pain, and she liked that, but there was too much happiness, and the calliope annoyed her. Touch and look, touch and look, and now the humans were taking note of her. The carousel came to a gradual stop and now the humans were screaming, making way.

  One stood in her way, a fat man in bib overalls with a long iron bar in his hand; he had been running the merry-go-round and now stepped out of the center, where the mechanisms were, and stood before her.

  “Is this some kind of Halloween trick?” he asked, his pig eyes narrowed. “If it is—”

  Touch and look, and he was gone from her sight, on the floor of the platform, his head coming to rest next to the hoof of a froth-mouthed screaming blue and white steed.

  There was shouting behind her, and she slowly turned, looking at the crowed which had formed, which was staring at her in horror.

  “Boo!” she said, and laughed, not hiding her true voice, the deepest, richest, most frightening one, and held her hands up. “Attention! You’ll all be dust in an hour! Poof! Gone! Dead! Go home and say good-bye to EVERYTHING!”

  From somewhere to her right there was a whizzing sound, and she turned in time to see a stone making its way toward her.

  Look, and it flew to pieces, the pieces to dust, and settled to the ground.

  Another stone, and another, and she did the same.

  Some of the crowd began to peel off, move away, run.

  She laughed again and screamed, “There’s nowhere to go! After tonight there will be nothing! Not even death will help you!”

  The crack of a rifle shot from the left.

  Look, and the sound was swallowed by the night.

  She jumped down from the carousel, a five year old little girl with eyes as old as time, and after the bravest of them came at her in a rush, look, touch, look, touch, look, touch, soon she was all alone.

  The light in Halloweenland blinked, went out, came back on and went out again. The moon was lowering toward the west, its smile now a sickly frown. The night air was colder, and the breeze had built to a whistling wind, which whipped the strings of lights and made wires bang against their poles. The calliope music was gone; the roar of the last of the cars and buses screeching away died to silence, leaving only the tapping of empty soda cups across the empty parking lot. Signs on their hinges at the entrance to stopped rides creaked.

  A little girl whistled.

  “Where are you? Where are you?” she called in her little girl voice. This was the night she had waited for forever. This was the evening — the last evening — when all the thousands of years of creation, the millions of years of life, were snuffed into nothingness. This was the night — finally! — when it all went away.

  She whistled, and lingered for a moment on the midway, at a game where ping pong balls were tossed into little goldfish bowls. She amused herself by putting her finger in each bowl, watching each tiny reddish fish — touch, look, touch, look — stiffen and die.

  Tent flaps flapped around her, and the night grew even colder.

  “Where are you?” she called sweetly, walking on, toward the Big Tent.

  She wished this night, this moment, could last forever.

  “Ready or not, here I come!” she shouted, walking through the abandoned opening.

  The canvas walls rattled around her, and the huge tent poles down the center aisle swayed and creaked, strained by the building cold outside wind.

  She walked slowly, dispassionately taking in the attractions — the mummy, the glass vases with their screaming heads — look, touch, three times, bringing silence — the curious fox-headed thing, and then, after making the turn at the far end, walking past the rest — the Wide Woman (look, touch), the Amazing Mice (look, touch), the flaming hand (a fake, fed by a propane tank hidden behind), she stood at last in front of GINA THE OTHERWORLDLY LITTLE LADY: ASK HER ANYTHING ABOUT DEATH AND SHE WILL ANSWER.

  She stared for a moment at the dropped flap hiding the contents from her eyes.

  Then she walked slowly to the door on the left, and opened it with her five year old fingers.

  The room inside was dark.

  Empty.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “We cannot stay here long,” Gina said.

  “Where are we?” Grant replied. He and Reynolds and the girl were on an obsidian plane that stretched to the four horizons. The sky was blue-black and untouched by clouds. There was a faint hiss in the air, like air escaping from a tire.

  Grant bent down and touched the floor. It felt like glass, cold and smooth. He could almost see his reflection.

  Gina said, “This is an in-between place. Not living and not death. It used to be called limbo.”

  Reynolds said, “I take it we’re safe from the Dark One here?”

  “For a time,” Gina said. She still spoke without moving her lips. “She will find us, eventually. And, like I said, we cannot beat her.”

  She sat on the ground cross-legged, and Grant noted how worn and tired she looked.

  “At midnight,” she said, “it will all be over.”

  “For a time,” she continued, “I thought she could be overcome. Ever since I returned to Earth from the Land of the Dead I knew this day would come, and have prepared for it. But she is too strong.”

  Grant noticed a change in the west, a dark outline that drew nearer.

  “Is that her?” Grant said, and Gina and Reynolds turned to look.

  “No,” Gina said, and now Grant discerned the figure of Samhain making his way toward them.

  He drew up close and hovered in place, his cape swirling, his bone-white face impassive.

  “Have you come to gloat?” Grant asked.

  Samhain turned his face slowly toward the detective. His empty black eyes were unreadable, his red slash of mouth silent. He looked at all three in turn, and then turned his attention to Gina.

  “I’m here to help you,” he said. His voice was filled with sorrow. “As you know, there is only one way to stop her, and you must do exactly as I say.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Three minutes.

  Anna was amusing herself with the sky. There were big holes ripped in it, showing dead nothingness beyond. She had cut the Moon into qua
rters, and moved it from high overhead to the western horizon, where the four pieces twirled like tops.

  Somewhere in the distance a siren was wailing, and she thought she heard screams and moans. Around her the wind had picked up even more, nearly to a gale, and it was much colder. Already she had destroyed much of Halloweenland — rides overturned, the light poles yanked from the ground and tossed aside like matchsticks, the Big Tent punched in and collapsed on itself like a deflated balloon.

  She stared at the Ferris wheel now. It began to turn, slowly at first and then faster and faster. She blinked the lights on, and they made the Ferris a circle of blurred lights.

  Then she raised a finger, and with a grinding snap the wheel flew from its hub into the sky, still whirling madly, up and up, half as high as the scudding clouds — until it stopped suddenly, and came flying back down to Earth, crashing in a nearby field. The ground shook, and there was a mighty grating of metal against metal.

  And then: only the wail of the October wind, and far-off cries.

  Two minutes.

  Like a conductor Anna moved her hands, her head, and things flew apart and into the air and crashed against other things. The ticket booth flew to pieces as if a bomb had gone off. Great rents appeared in the parking lot.

  In her head, the time ticked down toward midnight. And every moment she grew stronger. More sirens wailed, distantly. Blurts of steam rose from the cracks in the parking lot and, with a wave of her hand, Anna turned the entire area molten and then into a lake of fire.

  Overhead, the stars began to disappear.

  One minute!

  “Hello,” a voice said behind her.

  She turned like a snake snapping its head around, and then she smiled.

  “You!”

  “Yes,” Gina said, and now when she spoke her lips moved.

  “I looked for you in your little side show,” Anna said, and laughed. “I imagine you went to your little hideaway. Limbo. I would have come to get you soon, after I was through here.”

  Gina stood motionless.

  “Where are the other two? The policeman and the impresario of all this?” She waved her hands, indicating the remains of the amusement park around her.