Totentanz

by Al Sarrantonio

  A battle raged within Reggie. He felt a smooth, long curtain drop over his eyes, a curtain that would turn this thin, shivering thing into the father he had once known. Even as he watched, his father's face filled out; his uniform became sharply creased and spanking clean; his face widened into the happy, fulfilled expression he had always worn for Reggie. His hands were smooth and sure-gripped, his shoes polished to a shine. His eyes said, "Yes, this is me, here I am, enjoy me and forget about everything else. . . ."

  "That's not what you are!"

  Reggie drove the curtain away and it dissolved, leaving a quivering thin bit of flesh stretched over crumbling bones with his father's face, his father's sad, dead, animated body.

  "That day when I rode my bicycle—"

  "I know," his father said painfully.

  "I only wanted to say good-bye."

  His father nodded, a torturous act. "Your mother—" he began.

  Suddenly his father's corpse seemed possessed by demons. Something had entered the room, a presence that was not physical but hung in the air, in the corners, coldly.

  "Oh, God, please help me!" his father shouted. He held a shaking hand out. "I only want to go back!"

  Reggie saw that Lucius, too, had reverted to the wailing, begging thing he had seen first in the church-yard and had fallen to the floor.

  Reggie's father pleaded, "Don't let him deceive you, Reggie. Oh, God, just let me go back!" Once again the curtain sought to drop across

  Reggie's vision, making his father's face burst into a false, filling smile, his begging hand become caressing.

  Reggie fought it, and once more his father was a decaying, crying thing begging for acquittal.

  Reggie's mind was a battleground. He felt two powers fighting within him, one cool and rational, calmly assessing what was happening around him, draining him of the cringing fear that had possessed him in the churchyard; the other insidious, seeking to fog his mind and eyesight, a pouncing terror that would lull him with hallucination and then push him over the ledge into the abyss. He knew now who this second power was—the abyss, the Dark Thing itself—but the first remained a mystery to him, although he drew deeply from it now, filling his mind with the clarity it promised and the calmness of spirit it produced.

  Close by, Reggie heard a sibilance of rage. Go then. His father screamed once, in relief as much as in terror, and his face began to melt away. In the dimming eyes, for the last second of existence, there was the barest hint of love. "Good-bye," Reggie whispered, and the mouth, rapidly falling away, formed for the briefest time the same word in answer before the face was gone.

  The mass of skin flaked away. This was not Reggie's father any longer. The head fell powerless onto the breast, and there Reggie thought it would stay, but it suddenly raised itself again.

  The face was transformed. Patches of skull shone through, and the eyes were liquid masses of jelly. One eyelid curled up all the way over an eye, revealing it as perfectly round; then the eyes disintegrated, and something long and gray dropped out.

  This is what I am, the hissing voice spoke behind Reggie. This is what you fight.

  That other, second power assaulted Reggie, sought to throw his mind into turmoil and reeling panic.

  Since you care so much for the dead, let me show you what will happen to your body when I have you.

  The other eye of the thing in the chair snapped open, and a long, gray worm dropped out, followed by another, and another. The front of the thing's chest was quickly covered with worms. The segmented monsters began to fall to the floor, sliding toward Reggie. The mouth of the sitting creature opened in a slit grin, revealing no teeth behind the thin lips; the jaw dropped down, and more worms, larger, oozed out. The figure's arms came up, and the ends of the hands, the fingers, became worms that quickly fell to the floor.

  The thing's face turned toward Reggie, and the smile widened. The remaining skin was paper-thin, revealing the outline of the skull beneath.

  "Reggie Carson," the thing rasped, its voice the same angry hiss Reggie had heard in the air close by his ear, the sound a baseball card makes against the spokes, of a bicycle. "This will be you, Reggie Carson."

  The figure stood unsteadily. The mass of worms now reached, roiling, up to its ankles. It took a stumbling step toward Reggie and pointed a long, skeletal finger at him. "I'll have you soon." It threw back its head and screamed, a long, soulless screech. The head snapped down, the hollow eye sockets boring into Reggie, and once again it smiled.

  "Let me show you what waits for the living."

  The world darkened before Reggie, and then before him hung a face, moving too fast to see clearly. The picture enlarged to show figures speeding by. The image slowed and Reggie saw that it was the visage of a horse on the merry-go-round. Its head was tossed back, lips pulled away from its huge teeth, eyes staring wildly, ears against the skull in an attitude of fury. Its front legs were half-lifted; its back legs dug into the gray wooden platform of the carousel, almost sinking into it. Strapped to the horse's red saddle was Reggie's mother. She was sobbing, her dress torn down nearly to her waist. The leather of the horse's restraining strap was pulled into a bleeding cinch around her middle.

  The horse reeled toward Reggie, and his mother saw him and began to call out, reaching her hands to him. As Reggie watched helplessly, the horse came to life, its wild head rearing up with a howl of frenzy that drowned his mother's screams. The head rotated, burying itself in his mother's breast. She let out a horrified cry and tried to push away from the animal. Foam flew from its nostrils as it bit at her wildly.

  See what happens to the dead.

  The carousel wheeled, carrying his mother away, and the vision disintegrated. Reggie saw that the thing in the chair was gone, and now Lucius was whimpering behind him.

  "Oh, Jeff Scott."

  Reggie blinked, and the room came into focus.

  In the center of the ceiling, running into the room through the roof, was a thick hemp rope. At the end of the rope hung a body. It was not dead. It was half-man, half-skeleton. The horrible choking sound it gave off made Reggie's stomach heave. It rotated slowly, and though the knot was tight around its neck and its hands and feet were bound, it did not cease to struggle.

  "Oh, God," Lucius moaned, "Oh, God, he'll die forever now." He broke off into a series of low, choking sobs.

  Jeff Scott twisted, gasping piteously for breath.

  "We'll cut him down," Reggie said. He went to the chair and brought it over below the body. Jeff Scott kicked his feet feebly; the fleshy side of his face was purple; his tongue thrust out, trying to lick at the air and bring it into his lungs.

  Reggie stood up on the chair, but as he reached up, it was pulled out from under him.

  "Oh, God," Lucius cried. "It's too late for you to save him."

  Reggie tried to set the chair up again, but once more it was knocked aside by an unseen hand. He turned to Lucius in rage. "Help me!"

  Lucius stood immobile.

  "Dammit, why don't you help me?"

  "Because he owns me too!" Lucius sobbed. "And he owns Jeff Scott. My dream was false—"

  Lucius screamed at the air, at the walls: "Please take me! Let me rest, please let it stop!"

  From somewhere indefinite came laughter. All right, a voice said, amused. Lucius howled, falling to the floor and trying to claw his way through the wooden planks to the earth below.

  As Reggie watched, Lucius' heaving body turned to bones, the flesh falling away like dust; his eyes turned to ashes in their sockets, sprinkling out as his hair flaked away.

  The skeleton that remained, thin and bleached-white, stood up and pointed shakily at Reggie.

  "He'll have you," it said in Lucius' terrified voice. "He'll play with you until he's tired, then he'll take you. There's no hope for anyone."

  It tilted its grinning skull back and shrieked. It beat its fists against the side of its head, and then began to pull at the bones of its chest, its arms, its legs, trying to knoc
k itself to pieces.

  "Take me!"

  A gust of wind blew into the trailer. Lucius' bones, howling with want, crumbled into powder. His cry faded, leaving only ashes that drifted away into the corners and were gone.

  Filled with rage, Reggie set the chair under Jeff Scott once again—but as he climbed onto it, as his hands nearly touched the hanging man, the chair shattered beneath him and flew into sawdust.

  Reggie heard a low, clicking laugh somewhere in the room.

  "Is this boy the one you think I'm afraid of, Jeff Scott?" the amused, untroubled voice asked the swinging corpse. "I think that with Frances' help, we'll let Reggie Carson see a world of his own."

  Reggie turned to see Crazy Frances, the woman who lived in front of the Montvale barbershop and shouted Scripture at anyone who passed. She filled the doorway, a thin, haggard figure; only her eyes were terribly alive, two bright fires in her dead, white face.

  "And thou, Capernaum,” she said, "which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell."

  The walls of the trailer disappeared. Reggie screwed his hands into his eyes, shielding them from an in-tense and bitter light. There was a roaring in his ears; the earth moved beneath him as if it were liquid and then hardened again. The world spun. Through all this Reggie heard the horrible gasps of Jeff Scott, hanging in eternity above him.

  The world quieted, became whole.

  Reggie rose. Above him, high in the red-black sky, hung from the spokes of a turning wagon wheel on a tall, thin pole, was Jeff Scott. His choking cries echoed hollowly in the hot air. Montvale's amusement park was gone; in its place was a fiercer place, a world that Reggie already knew. Below the slowly rotating wheel that imprisoned Jeff Scott there was a ruined, red-filtered landscape covered with smoke and blackness and reverberating with the screams of the desperate and dying. Jagged cliffs gave way to abrupt pits of steaming lava, and towers rose like black hands through the thick mist. The sky was a sick yellow-red. Fires burned everywhere; there was a sharp smell of roasting meat. Faint calls from a sinking ship could be heard off a none-too-distant coastline.

  To Reggie's left, bones were laid out in a neat line. To his right, an open casket bearing a shrouded body slowly rolled by on wheels, bumping roughly over a torso on the ground. Reggie vaguely recognized the face on the body being overrun. Someone from Montvale. The rolling casket was drawn by two cowled figures, one in red, one in black. One of them turned sideways, and Reggie saw the silhouette of a skull. The figures, along with their burden, disappeared into the closing fog.

  Reggie turned to his right and nearly tripped over a bony figure kneeling on the ground. It looked up at him, the eyeless sockets of its polished skull staring at him, and then bent to its task again. Before Reggie could interfere, it deftly slit the throat of a man stretched out beneath it. It was Mr. Griffin, the mailman. Griffin gurgled, his eyes wide with terror—but the skeleton held him down while the life drained from the new mouth in his neck.

  Reggie tried to kick the skeleton away, but it looked up at him impassively, ignoring the blow. It turned to grin down at its victim, whose head now lolled to one side.

  There was more scuffling in the mist ahead. Reggie stumbled into a group of skeletons battling humans. He passed through them unmolested; some of the people's faces also looked familiar, like neighbors from Montvale, but he could not name them.

  A terrible clarity possessed him. He knew now what he had to do. Neither the cries of those around him nor the knowledge that his mother stood somewhere on this battlefield, possibly alone, could dissuade him. That other power, the one that had fought so true a crusade within him against the dark man, the power that was a mystery to him, had taken firm hold and flowered within him. He was no longer afraid. Now he looked on his former dread as if it had been another's, as if he had watched its bizarre antics from a great distance. He had grown. He understood little of what had happened to him, but he knew that it had occurred and that he was a different Reggie Carson. He felt possessed by what had once been a small part of himself, now bloomed to become all of himself.

  As if in confirmation of these thoughts, the two enormous eyes, soft limpid globes, appeared before him. He knew now that he had been wrong about them, that his rejection of them had been a wrong act, wrongly conceived. They had done things to him, but there had been a reason for all of it. There still was. He felt a great relief wash over him.

  I am with you, the eyes told him.

  "I know," he said to them.

  In a little while you will have your answers, but for now, you know what you must do.

  "Yes, I know," Reggie said.

  I am with you, the eyes said again, and Reggie felt a radiance wash over him, bathe him, fill him.

  Long ago Reggie had mastered in his mind each detail he now saw before him. He knew that if he walked on, he would come to a round table covered with a white tablecloth on which he would find remnants of a ruined meal; and in front of that table there would be a lone man with a drawn sword—the figure he had so often imagined himself to be, the single soldier with a weak yet defiant blade trying to hold out against death itself.

  Off in the foggy distance a low bell tolled ponderously, once, twice, again. It was the slowest, most mournful sound he had ever heard. He knew from Breughel's picture where the bell was, knew that two figures, with bones for bodies, were tolling it.

  The triumph of death.

  He could make his way toward that bell, but the one he sought would not be there. That bell would not toll from his battlement. He felt sure of that. There were many places he might be, but this didn't worry him because, somehow, he knew that he would be led where he must go.

  The breeze shifted. An evil, sulfur-smelling wind blew at him. The mist parted before him, and Reggie moved forward.

  Somewhere close by, up in the sulfurous clouds, he heard Jeff Scott give a long, guttural gasp, and then the choking sounds were behind him.

  He was heading the right way.

  NINETEEN

  He would be King of the Dead

  Pup Malamut let the sound of the phrase roll around his mind on velvet casters. King of the Dead. It was a nice thought, a substantial thought, the kind that once he might have dreamed only at night but now could take out in the cold sun and look at without shrinking. How fast things could change. One day an ineffectual little fat boy, taking orders from everyone, from his parents to his teachers to the two younger boys he hung out with, and the next day—King of the Dead.

  Ash had said it in so many words and Pup believed him. He had studied Ash, had seen how insubstantial he was and how there was something the shadow man was holding back on. Ash acted tough when he was around people who were afraid of him, but there was something, some secret thing, that scared the boogeyman senseless. Pup had seen it in Ash's eyes when he'd taken care of that Civil War relic, Jeff Scott. A couple of Scott's comments had hit home. But what was it that frightened Ash so badly? Pup didn't know, but he was determined to find out. And when he did—well, then he'd deal with Ash.

  The killing of Jack Gantry had not disturbed him as he had thought it would. All he had to do was to let the feelings he'd always kept deep down come out in the open. The rest was easy. Jack had been his friend, but he had also been his better, so he thought. Stupid Marine. So Pup just thought of it that way and let the juices flow. After Jack were others Ash had let him in on: his math teacher, Mrs. Groton; a guy named Fred Horter, who'd once called him "fat boy" in the schoolyard; a couple of others. It had actually been easy after a while. Ash had told him to just remember the hate; and when he did, everything came naturally. After all, he was just getting even. Anyone would do that, given the chance. In regular life he probably would never have had a chance to get back, and here it was on a silver platter, so why not?

  His parents, though, had not been so easy. Ash's eyes had sparkled when he told Pup he wanted him to take care of his parents. And for the first time, Pup had hesitated.

  "What's w
rong?" Ash cooed. Pup felt his perfect admiration for Ash slipping into something else. A momentary burn of pure anger rose in him.

  I'll take care of you later, he thought.

  He answered, "Nothing's wrong," liking his own bravado.

  "They're by the House of Mirrors," Ash said evenly. "Make it quick."

  Pup put a smile on, but he couldn't help feeling as he walked out that Ash knew. He knows I'm chicken. Once again a flow of clean hatred coursed through him. He wanted more than anything in the world to hold Ash's thin neck between his hands, to crush the white face and pummel the smug grin away. Ash thought he knew it all. But if everything went as planned, he would soon be terrified of Pup Malamut. Ash could be handled. Just like his father handled all those assholes who came to him at the bank for business loans. There was always a way to handle things.

  He made his way out onto the midway. Still he felt Ash's eyes on him. He glanced back, expecting to see nothing but the closed flap of the tent; he was shocked to see Ash standing there in the opening, calmly watching him. That slight grin was on his face; he blew a smoke ring and waved faintly at Pup with his lit cigarette.

  Just wait, bastard; soon I'll shove that fucking thing down your throat till you choke on it.

  He turned, marching resolutely toward the House of Mirrors.

  His nerve failed again when he got there. Were they really inside? Maybe they weren't, and he wouldn't have to go through with it. How would Ash know? And even if he did, so what? He hesitated at the entrance, listening for sounds. Nothing. Maybe it was a trap? Ash wouldn't dare; he needed him, he had told him so. Anyway, he had promised.

  "Pup, you'll be King of the Dead."

  He entered the House of Mirrors.

  He kept his eyes on the floor, following the twists and turns of the labyrinth. He'd learned this trick long ago at a local carnival with Reggie. Once inside, he looked up and immediately felt a sense of dislocation. Staring at him were six young men with uncombed hair and set mouths. He hadn't looked at himself in a long time and was startled. He seemed older and leaner. There was a tautness around his eyes and face that hadn't been there before. He liked what he saw.