by Dean Koontz
board up even the cleanest girlie shows, misapply the Health Department codes to shutter all the grab-stands, legally declare the thrill rides hazardous when they were patently safe, quickly and effectively choking the carnival into submission. Jelly intended to prevent just such a catastrophe in Yontsdown.
He was a good man for the job. A patch needed to be charming, amusing, and likable, and Jelly was all those things. A patch had to be a smooth talker, thoroughly ingratiating, able to pay a bribe without making it seem like a bribe. In order to maintain the illusion that the payoff was nothing more than a gift from a friend—and thereby allow the corrupt officials to keep their self-respect and dignity—a patch had to remember details about the police chiefs and sheriffs and mayors and other officials with whom he dealt year after year, so he could ask them specific questions about their wives and could refer to their children by name. He had to be interested in them and appear glad to see them again. Yet he dared not act too friendly; after all, he was only a carny, almost a subhuman species in the eyes of many straight types, and excessive familiarity was sure to be met with cold rejection. Sometimes he had to be tough, as well, diplomatically refusing to meet demands for more sugar than the carnival was willing to pay. Being a patch was akin to performing a high-wire act, without net, over a pit occupied by hungry bears and lions.
As we drove through the Pennsylvania countryside on our mission of genteel corruption, Jelly entertained Luke Bendingo and me with an endless stream of jokes, limericks, puns, and hilarious anecdotes from his years on the road. He told each joke with evident relish and recited every limerick with sly style and gusto. I realized that, to him, wordplay and clever rhymes and surprising punch lines were just more toys, convenient playthings to occupy him when the other toys on his office shelves were not within easy reach. Although he was an effective general manager, overseeing a multimillion-dollar operation, and a tough patch who could handle himself well in tricky situations, he still determinedly indulged a part of himself that had never grown up, a happy child still facing the world with wonderment from beneath forty-five years of rude experience and untold pounds of fat.
I relaxed and tried to enjoy myself, and I did somewhat, but I could not forget the vision of Jelly’s blood-covered face, eyes open in a sightless gaze, which I had seen yesterday. I had once saved my mother from serious injury and perhaps death by convincing her of the reliability of my psychic foresight and persuading her to change from one airliner to another; now, if only I could foresee the exact nature of the danger that Jelly faced, the day and hour when it would come, I might be able to persuade him and save him, as well. I told myself that more detailed visions would come to me in time, that I would be able to protect my newfound friends. Although I did not entirely believe what I told myself, I held fast to enough hope to forestall a steep descent into total despair. I even responded to Jelly’s good humor with a few carny stories I had heard, and he gave them more laughter than they deserved.
From the moment we set out on our journey, Luke, a rangy man of forty with hawklike features, spoke in one-word sentences; yeah and no and oh and Jesus seemed to comprise his entire vocabulary. At first I thought he was moody or downright unfriendly. But he laughed as much as I did, and his manner was otherwise not cold or distant, and when he finally tried to chime in with more than a one-word response, I discovered he was a stutterer and that his reticence was a result of that affliction.
Occasionally, between jokes and limericks, Jelly told us something about Lisle Kelsko, the chief of police in Yontsdown, with whom we would conduct most of our business. He casually parceled out the information as if it were not particularly important or interesting, but gradually he painted a very nasty picture. According to Jelly, Kelsko was an ignorant bastard. But he was not stupid. Kelsko was a toad. But he was proud. Kelsko was a pathological liar, but he was not a sucker for the lies of others, the way most liars were, for he had not lost the ability to perceive the difference between truth and falsehood. He simply had no respect for that difference. Kelsko was vicious, sadistic, arrogant, stubborn, and by far the most difficult man with whom Jelly had to deal in this or any of the other ten states in which the Sombra Brothers outfit played.
“You expecting trouble?” I asked.
“Kelsko takes the sugar, never presses for too much,” Jelly said, “but sometimes he likes to give us a warning.”
“What kind of warning?” I asked.
“Likes to have a few of his men pound on us a little.”
“Are you . . . talking about a beating?” I asked uneasily.
“You absolutely got it, kid.”
“How regular does this happen?”
“We been coming here nine years since Kelsko was made chief of police, and it’s happened six out of the nine.”
Luke Bendingo took one big-knuckled hand from the steering wheel and pointed to an inch-long white scar that curved down from the corner of his right eye.
I said, “You got that in a fight with Kelsko’s men?”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “The rotten b-b-b-bastards.”
“You say they’re warning us?” I asked. “Warning us? What kind of crap is that?”
Jelly said, “Kelsko wants us to understand that he takes our bribes but that he can’t be pushed around.”
“So why doesn’t he just tell us?”
Jelly scowled and shook his head. “Kid, this here is coal-mining country, even though they don’t take much out of the ground anymore, and it always will be coal-mining country because the people who worked the mines are still here, and those people never change. Never. Damned if they do. Mining is a hard and dangerous life, and it breeds hard and dangerous men, sullen and stubborn types. To go down in the mines, you have to be either desperate, stupid, or so damned macho that you got to prove you’re meaner than the mines themselves. Even those who never set foot in a mine shaft . . . well, they got their tough-guy attitudes from their old men. People up in these hills purely love a fight, just for the absolute fun of it. If Kelsko just chewed us out, just gave us a verbal warning, then he’d miss out on his fun.”
It was probably my imagination, fed by fears of billy clubs and weighted saps and rubber hoses, but as we rose into more mountainous country, the day seemed to become less bright, less warm, less promising than it had been when we started out. The trees seemed considerably less beautiful than the pines and firs and spruces that I so well remembered from Oregon, and the ramparts of these Eastern mountains, geologically more ancient than the Siskiyous, gave an impression of dark and graceless age, decadence, malevolence born of weariness. I was aware that I was letting my emotions color what I saw. This part of the world had a beauty unique unto it, as did Oregon. I knew it was irrational to attribute human feelings and intentions to a landscape, yet I could not shake the feeling that the encroaching mountains were watching our passage and meant to swallow us forever.
“But if Kelsko’s men jump us,” I said, “we can’t fight back. Not against cops. Not in a police station, for God’s sake. We’ll wind up in jail on charges of assault and battery.”
From the backseat, Jelly said, “Oh, it ain’t going to happen in the station house. Not anywhere around the courthouse, either, where we got to go to fill the pockets of the county councilmen. Not even within the city limits. Absolutely not. Absolutely guarantee it. And though it’s always Kelsko’s so-called lawmen, they won’t be wearing uniforms. He sends them off duty, in street clothes. They wait for us as we’re coming out of town, block our way on a quiet stretch of road. Three times they even run us off the pavement to make us stop.”
“And fight?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“And you fight back?”
“Damn right,” Jelly said.
Luke said, “One year J-J-Jelly b-broke a g-g-guy’s arm.”
“I shouldn’t’ve done it,” Jelly said. “That was going too far, see. Asking for trouble.”
Turning in my seat and regarding the fat man f
rom a new and more respectful point of view, I said, “But if you’re permitted to fight back, if it’s not just a police beating, then why don’t you bring along some of the really big carnies and crush the bastards? Why guys like me and Luke?”
“Oh,” Jelly said, “they wouldn’t like that. They want to beat on us a little, and they want to take a few licks of their own because that proves it was a real fight, see. They want to prove to themselves that they’re hardheaded, iron-assed, coal-country boys, just like their daddies, but they don’t actually want to risk getting the shit beat out of them. If I come in here with somebody like Barney Quadlow or Deke Feeny, the strong-man in Tom Catshank’s sideshow . . . why, Kelsko’s boys would back off fast, wouldn’t fight at all.”
“What’s wrong with that? You don’t like these fights?”
“Hell, no!” Jelly said, and Luke echoed that sentiment. And Jelly said, “But, see, if they don’t get their fight, if they don’t get to deliver Kelsko’s warning, then they’ll make trouble for us once we get the midway set up.”
“Once you endure the fight,” I said, “then they let you go about your business unhampered.”
“You got it now.”
“It’s like . . . the fight is tribute you got to pay to get in.”
“Sorta, yeah.”
“It’s crazy,” I said.
“Absolutely.”
“Juvenile.”
“Like I told you, this here’s coal country.”
We rode in silence for a minute or two.
I wondered if this was the danger that was bearing down on Jelly. Maybe the fight would get out of hand this year. Maybe one of Kelsko’s men would be a closet psychopath who would not be able to control himself once he started beating on Jelly, and maybe he would be so strong that none of us could pull him off until it was too late.
I was scared.
I breathed deeply and attempted to reach into the stream of psychic energies that always flowed over and through me, seeking confirmation of my worst fears, seeking some indication, no matter how slight, that Jelly Jordan’s rendezvous with Death would be in Yontsdown. I could sense nothing useful; maybe that was good. If this was where Jelly’s crisis would arise, then surely I would pick up at least a hint of it. Surely.
Sighing, I said, “I guess I’m just the kind of bodyguard you need. Big enough to keep myself from being hurt too bad . . . but not so big that I come out of it unbloodied.”
“They got to see some blood,” Jelly agreed. “That’s what satisfies them.”
“Jesus.”
“I warned you yesterday,” Jelly said.
“I know.”
“I told you that you ought to hear what the job was.”
“I know.”
“But you were so grateful for work that you leaped before you looked. Hell, you leaped before you even knew what you was leaping over, and now halfway through the jump you look down and see a Tiger that wants to reach up and bite off your balls!”
Luke Bendingo laughed.
“I guess I’ve learned a valuable lesson here,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Jelly said. “In fact, it’s such a damned valuable lesson, I’m half persuaded that giving you cash pay for this job is just too deplorably generous of me.”
The sky had begun to cloud over.
On both sides of the highway, pine-studded slopes shouldered closer. Mixed among the pines were twisted oaks with gnarled black trunks, some burdened with large, lumpy, cancerous mounds of ligneous fungus.
We passed a long abandoned mine head, set back a hundred yards from the road, and a half-demolished tipple beside a weed-choked railroad spur, both crusted with black grime, and then several houses, gray and peeling, in need of paint. Rusting hulks of automobiles, set up on concrete blocks, were so prevalent that you might have thought they were a preferred lawn decoration, like birdbaths and plaster flamingos in certain other neighborhoods.
“What you ought to do next year,” I said, “is bring Joel Tuck with you and march him right in to Kelsko’s office.”
“Wouldn’t that b-b-be s-something!” Luke said, and slapped the dashboard with one hand.
I said, “You just have Joel stand there beside you, never saying anything, mind you, never making any threats or unfriendly gestures, even smiling, smiling real friendly, just fixing Kelsko with that third eye, that blank orange eye, and I’ll bet nobody would be waiting for you when you left town.”
“Well, of course, they wouldn’t!” Jelly said. “They’d all be back at the station house, cleaning the poop out of their pants.”
We laughed, and some of the tension went out of us, but our spirits did not soar all the way back to where they had been because, a few minutes later, we crossed the city limits of Yontsdown.
In spite of its twentieth-century industry—the steel mill from which gray smoke and white steam plumed up in the distance, the busy rail yards—Yontsdown looked and felt medieval. Under a summer sky that was swiftly plating over with iron-colored clouds, we drove on narrow streets, a couple of which were actually cobblestoned. Even with the empty mountains all around and much land available, the houses were crowded together, each looming over the other, most half mummified with a funereal skin of grayish-yellow dust, at least a third of them in need of paint or new roofs or new floorboards for their sagging front porches. The shops, grocery stores, and offices all had an air of bleakness, and there were few, if any, signs of prosperity. A black, Depression-era iron bridge linked the shores of the muddy river that split the town in two, and the Cadillac’s tires sang a somber, mournful, one-note tune as we drove across that metal-floored span. The few tall buildings were no higher than six or eight stories, brick and granite structures that contributed to the medieval atmosphere because, to me at least, they resembled small-scale castles: blank windows that seemed as defensively narrow as arrow loops; recessed doorways with massive granite lintels of unnecessary size for the modest weight they had to carry, doorways so guarded and unwelcoming in appearance that I would not have been surprised to see the pointed tips of a raised portcullis above one of them; here and there the flat roofs had crenelated brows quite like a castle’s battlements.
I did not like the place.
We passed a rambling, two-story brick building, one wing of which had been gutted by fire. Portions of the slate roof had caved in, and most of the windows had been blown out by the heat, and the brick—long ago discolored by years of accumulated pollutants from the mill, mines, and rail yards—was marked by anthracite fans of soot above each of the gaping windows. Restoration had begun, and construction workers were on the site when we drove by.
“That there’s the only elementary school in town,” Jelly said from the backseat. “Was a big explosion in the heating-oil tank last April, even though it was a warm day and the furnace was turned off. Don’t know if they ever did figure out what went wrong. Terrible thing. I read about it in the papers. It was national news. Seven little kids burned to death, horrible thing, but it would’ve been a whole lot worse if there hadn’t been a couple of heroes among the teachers. It’s an absolute miracle they didn’t lose forty or fifty kids, even a hundred.”
“J-J-J-Jesus, th-that’s awful,” Luke Bendingo said. “Little k-k-kids.” He shook his head. “S-sometimes it’s a hard w-w-w-world.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Jelly said.
I turned to look back at the school after we had passed it. I was getting very bad vibrations from that burned-out structure, and I had the unshakable feeling that more tragedy lay in its future.
We stopped at a red traffic light, beside a coffee shop, in front of which stood a newspaper vending machine. From the car I could read the headline on the Yontsdown Register: BOTULISM KILLS FOUR AT CHURCH PICNIC.
Jelly must have seen the headline, too, for he said, “This sorry, damned town needs a carnival even more than usual.”
We drove two more blocks, parked in the lot behind the municipal building, near several black-and-w
hite patrol cars, and got out of the Cadillac. That four-story pile of sandstone and granite, which housed both the city government and police headquarters, was the most medieval building of them all. Iron bars shielded its narrow, deeply recessed windows. Its flat roof was encircled by a low wall that looked even more like a castle’s battlements than anything I had seen thus far, complete with regularly spaced embrasures and squared-off merlons; the merlons—which were the high segments of the stone crenelations that alternated with the open embrasures—boasted arrow loops and putlog holes, and they were even topped with pointed stone finials.
The Yontsdown Municipal Building was not merely architecturally forbidding; there was, as well, a feeling of malevolent life in the structure. I had the disquieting notion that this agglomeration of stone and mortar and steel had somehow acquired consciousness, that it was watching us as we got out of the car, and that going inside would be like blithely walking between the teeth and into the gaping mouth of a dragon.
I did not know if this somber impression was psychic in nature or whether my imagination was galloping away with me; sometimes it is not easy to be sure which is the case. Perhaps I was experiencing a seizure of paranoia. Perhaps I was seeing danger, pain, and death where they did not really exist. I am subject to spells of paranoia. I admit it. You would be paranoid, too, if you could see the things that I see, the unhuman creatures that walk disguised among us. . . .
“Slim?” Jelly said. “What’s wrong?”
“Uh . . . nothing.”
“You look kinda pasty.”
“I’m okay.”
“They won’t jump us here.”
“I’m not worried about that,” I said.
“I told you . . . there ain’t never any trouble in town.”
“I know. I’m not afraid of the fight. Don’t worry about me. I never ran from a fight in my whole life, and I sure won’t run from this one.”
Frowning, Jelly said, “Didn’t think you would.”
“Let’s go see Kelsko,” I said.
We entered the building through the rear because, on a mission of bribery, you do not walk in the front door, announce yourself to the receptionist, and state your business. Jelly went in first, and Luke was right behind him, and I went last, holding the door and pausing a moment to look back at the yellow Cadillac, which was by far the brightest object in that dreary cityscape. In fact, it was too bright to suit me. I thought of brilliantly colored butterflies that, because of their dazzling finery, attract predatory birds and are devoured in a final flutter of multihued wings; the Caddy suddenly seemed like a symbol of our naïveté, haplessness, and vulnerability.
The rear door opened on a service corridor, and to the right were stairs leading up. Jelly started climbing, and we followed.
It was two minutes past noon, and we had an appointment with Chief Lisle Kelsko for the lunch hour, though not for lunch itself, because we were carnies, and most straight folks preferred not to break bread with the likes of us. Especially straight folks whose pockets we were surreptitiously lining with payoffs.
The jail and the police station itself were on the ground floor in this wing, but Kelsko’s office was a place apart. We went up six flights of concrete steps, through a fire door, into the third-floor hall, all without seeing anyone. The corridor was floored with dark green vinyl tiles, buffed to a high polish, and the air smelled of a mildly unpleasant disinfectant. Three doors down the hall from the rear stairwell, we came to the private office of the chief of police. The top half of the door was opaque glass with his name and title stenciled in black letters, and it was standing open. We went inside.
My palms were damp.
My heart was drumming.
I did not know why.
Regardless of what Jelly said, I was wary of an ambush, but that was not what frightened me now.
Something else. Something . . . elusive . . .
No lamp burned in the outer office, and there was only one barred window by a watercooler. Since the once blue summer sky outside had almost entirely surrendered to the advancing armada of dark clouds, and since the slats of the venetian blinds were tipped halfway between the vertical and the horizontal, the mealy light was barely sufficient to reveal the metal filing cabinets, worktable bearing hot plate and coffeepot, empty coatrack, enormous wall map of the county, and three wooden chairs with their backs against one wall. The secretary’s desk was a shadowy hulk, neatly kept, currently untenanted.
Lisle Kelsko had probably sent his secretary off for an early lunch to eliminate the possibility that she would overhear something.
The door to the inner office was ajar. Beyond it were light and, presumably, life. Unhesitantly Jelly moved across the unlighted room, toward the inner door, and we followed.
Pressure was building in my chest.
My mouth was so dry that I felt as if I had been eating dust.
Jelly rapped lightly on the inner door.
A voice issued through the narrow opening: “Come in, come in.” It was a baritone voice, and even in those four short words it conveyed calm authority and smug superiority.
Jelly went in, and Luke was right behind him, and I heard Jelly saying, “Hello, hello, Chief Kelsko, what a pleasure to see you again,” and when I entered, last of all, I saw a surprisingly simple room—gray walls, white venetian blinds, utilitarian furniture, no photographs or paintings on the walls, almost as drab as a cell—and then I saw Kelsko behind a big metal desk, regarding us with undisguised contempt, and my breath caught in my throat, for the identity of Kelsko was a sham, and within that human form, beyond the human glaze, was the most vicious-looking goblin I had ever seen.
Perhaps I should have suspected that in a place like Yontsdown the authorities might be goblins. But the thought of people living under the malevolent rule of such creatures was so terrible that I had blocked it.
I will never know how I managed to conceal my shock, my disgust, and my awareness of Kelsko’s evil secret. As I stood there stupidly beside Luke, hands fisted at my sides, immobilized but also made spring-tense by fear, I felt as obvious as a cat with its back arched and its ears flattened, and I was certain that Kelsko would see my repulsion and immediately perceive the reason for it. But he did not. He hardly glanced at either me or Luke, his attention fixed on Jelly.