by Dean Koontz
esteemed at the dinner table.
We drove out of town with considerably less conversation than had marked our trip in. Jelly and Luke were dreading the ambush by Kelsko’s men, and I was still rendered speechless by all that I had seen and by the bleak future of the children at Yontsdown Elementary School.
We crossed the city limits.
We passed the stand of black, gnarled oaks burdened with strange fungus.
No one stopped us.
No one tried to run us off the road.
“Soon,” Jelly said.
One mile out of the city.
We passed the outlying houses that were in need of paint and new roofs, where the rusting hulks of automobiles stood on concrete blocks in the front yards.
Nothing.
Jelly and Luke grew more tense.
“He let us off too easy,” Jelly said, meaning Kelsko. “Somewhere in the next half mile...”
A mile and a half out of the city.
“He wanted to give us a false sense of security,” Jelly said, “then hit us like a ton of bricks. That’s what he was up to. And now they’ll smash us. These coal-country boys got to have their fun.”
Two miles.
“Wouldn’t be like them to miss out on their fun. Any second they’ll come at us....”
Two and a half miles.
Now Jelly said that the trouble would come at the abandoned mine, where the ruins of the railroad tipple and other structures poked jagged, toothlike timbers and metal fragments at the lowering gray sky.
But those monuments to vanished industry appeared, and we passed them by without incident.
Three miles.
Four.
Ten miles beyond the city limits Jelly finally sighed and relaxed. “They’re going to let us off this time.”
“Why?” Luke asked suspiciously.
“It ain’t exactly unprecedented. There’ve been a couple other years they didn’t pick a fight,” Jelly said. “Never gave us a reason. This year . . . well . . . maybe it’s because of the school fire and the tragedy at that church picnic yesterday. Maybe even Lisle Kelsko’s seen enough nastiness this year and doesn’t want to risk scaring us off. Like I said, seems like these poor damned people need a carnival this year more than ever.”
As we headed back across Pennsylvania, planning to stop along the way for a late lunch, aiming to arrive at the Sombra Brothers Carnival by early evening, Jelly and Luke’s spirits began to rise, but mine did not. I knew why Kelsko had spared us the usual brawl. It was because he had something worse in mind for next week, when we were all set up on the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds. The Ferris wheel. I did not know exactly when it would happen, and I did not know exactly what they had in mind, but I knew that the goblins would sabotage the Ferris wheel and that my disquieting visions of blood on the midway would, like evil buds, soon blossom into dark reality.
chapter nine
CONTRASTS
After a late lunch, after we got back on the highway for the last hour and a half of the return trip, memories of Yontsdown were still weighing heavily on me, and I could no longer tolerate the strain of having to participate in the conversation and laugh at Jelly’s jokes, even though some of them were quite funny. To escape, I pretended to nap, slumped in my seat, head lolling to one side.
Fevered thoughts buzzed through my mind. . . .
What are the goblins? Where do they come from?
Is each goblin a puppet master, a parasite, seeding itself deep in human flesh, then taking control of its host’s mind, operating the stolen body as if the corpus were its own? Or are the bodies merely imitation humans, vat-grown costumes that they don as easily as we slip into a new suit?
Countless times over the years I had considered these questions and a thousand others. The problem was that there were too damned many answers, any of which might have been true, but none of which I could scientifically verify—or with which I could even feel comfortable.
I had seen my share of flying-saucer movies, so I was not without a pool of fanciful ideas in which to dip my bucket. And after seeing my first goblin, I had become an avid science-fiction reader, hoping that some novelist had already conceived of this situation and had come up with an explanation that would serve as well for me as it did for his fictional characters. From those often flamboyant tales, I acquired many theories for consideration: The goblins might be aliens from a distant world who crashed here by accident, or landed with the intention of conquering us, or came to test our suitability for full partnership in the galactic government, or wanted only to steal all of our uranium for use in their hyperdrive spaceship engines, or simply wanted to package us in plastic tubes to provide tasty snacks during extended and boring journeys along the spiral arms of the galaxy. I considered those possibilities and more, did not reject anything, no matter how crazy—or silly—it seemed, but remained dubious of every explanation those science-fiction novels had for me. For one thing, I had difficulty believing that a race capable of cruising across the light-years would come that momentous distance merely to crash their ship while trying to put it down; their machines would be flawless; their computers would make no mistakes. And if such an advanced race wanted to conquer us, the war would be over in a single afternoon. So, while those books provided hundreds of hours of wonderful entertainment, they gave me no raft to which I could cling during the bad times, no understanding of the goblins, and certainly no hint as to what I should do about them and how I might defeat them.
The other obvious theory was that they were demons that had climbed straight up from Hell with a Satan-given ability to cloud men’s minds, so we saw only other men when we looked at them. I believed in God (or told myself that I did), and my relationship with Him was at times so strongly adversarial (on my part, anyway) that I had no difficulty believing He would permit the existence of a place as foul as Hell. My folks were Lutherans. They had taken me and Sarah and Jenny to church nearly every Sunday, and sometimes I had wanted to stand up on my pew and rail at the minister: “If God is good, then why does He let people die? Why did he give cancer to that nice Mrs. Hurley down the road from us? If He’s so good, then why did He let the Thompsons’ boy die over there in Korea?” Although the faith rubbed off on me a little bit, it did not interfere with my ability to reason, and I was never able to come to terms with the contradiction between the doctrine of God’s infinite mercy and the cruelty of the cosmos that He had created for us. Therefore Hell and eternal damnation and demons were not merely conceivable; they seemed almost an essential bit of design in a universe built by a divine architect as seemingly perverse as He who had drawn up the plans for ours.
Yet believing in Hell and demons, I still could not believe that the goblins could be explained by the application of that mythology. If they had risen from Hell, there would have been something . . . well, something cosmic about them—an awesome sense of deific forces at work, of ultimate knowledge and purpose in their manner and activity, but I felt none of that in the meager psychic static that radiated from them. Furthermore Lucifer’s lieutenants would possess unlimited power, but these goblins were actually in many ways less powerful than I, with none of my extraordinary gifts or insights. For demons they were too easily dispatched. No ax or knife or gun would bring down one of Satan’s henchmen.
If they had looked more like dogs and less like pigs, I would have been half convinced that they were werewolves, in spite of the fact that they prowled all the time rather than only when the moon was full. Like the fabled werewolf, they seemed to be shape-changers, imitating human form with uncanny skill but capable of reverting to their true hideous appearance if that was required, as in the Dodgem Car pavilion. And if they had fed on blood in a literal sense, I would have settled for the vampire legend, would have changed my name to Dr. van Helsing, and would have (long ago and happily) begun to sharpen a virtual forest of wooden stakes. But neither of those explanations seemed to fit, although I was sure that other psychics had seen these go
blins hundreds of years ago and that from those sightings had sprung the first tales of human metamorphosis into bat-form and lupine horror. Indeed Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Transylvanian monarch whose bloodthirsty interest in imaginative mass executions had inspired the fictional character of Dracula, had very likely been a goblin; after all, Vlad was a man who seemed to revel in human suffering, which is the basic trait of all goblins that it has been my misfortune to observe.
So, that afternoon in the yellow Cadillac, on the way back from Yontsdown, I asked myself the familiar questions and stretched my mind to find and encompass some understanding, but I remained utterly unenlightened. I could have saved myself all that effort if I could have looked into the future only several days ahead, for I was that close to learning the truth about the goblins. I was not aware that revelations impended, but I would learn the truth on the next to the last night of the carnival’s engagement in Yontsdown. And when, at last, I discovered the origins and motivations of the hateful goblins, it would make perfect sense—immediate and terrible sense—and I would wish, with a fervor equal to Adam’s when the garden gate closed behind him, that I had never acquired such knowledge. But now I feigned sleep, mouth open, letting my body move loosely with the surge and sway of the Cadillac, and I strained toward understanding, longed for explanations.
We returned to the Sombra Brothers Carnival at five-thirty Friday afternoon. The midway, still bathed in summer sun but with all its lights ablaze as well, was crowded with marks. I went directly to the high-striker, took over from Marco, who had been filling in for me, and set to work relieving the passersby of the coins and folding money that burdened their pockets.
Throughout the long evening not a single goblin appeared on the concourse, but that did not cheer me. There would be plenty of goblins on the midway in Yontsdown, next week; the lot would be crawling with them, especially around the Ferris wheel, where their faces would be greasy-bright with sadistic anticipation.
Marco returned to take my place at eight o’clock, giving me an hour for dinner. Not particularly hungry, I wandered around the concourse instead of heading for a grab-stand, and in a few minutes I was standing in front of Shockville, the ten-in-one owned by Joel Tuck.
A luridly illustrated banner stretched all the way across the front of the attraction: HUMAN ODDITIES FROM EVERY CORNER OF THE WORLD. The bold and colorful depictions of Jack-Four-Hands (an Indian with an extra pair of arms), Lila the Tattooed Lady, 750-pound Gloria Neames (“the fattest woman in the world”), and other genuine and self-made freaks were unmistakably the work of David C. “Snap” Wyatt, the last of the great circus and carnival artists, whose banners decorated the tents of every sideshow operator who could afford them. Judging from the human oddities promised within this ten-in-one, Joel Tuck could not only afford Wyatt but had assembled a lineup to which only Wyatt’s bizarre talents could have done justice.
As twilight approached, a large tip had gathered in front of Shockville, gawking up at Mr. Wyatt’s imaginatively monstrous images, listening to the pitchman’s ballyhoo. Although they showed some reluctance and occasionally spoke of the indignity of putting poor cripples on display, most of the guys clearly wanted to go into the tent. Some of the women were squeamish and wanted to be teased and prodded into such a daring expedition, but most of them, men and women, were gradually moving toward the ticket booth.
Something pulled me too.
Not the morbid curiosity that gripped the marks.
Something . . . darker. Something within the tent wanted me to come see it . . . something that, I sensed, I must know about if I were to survive the next week and make the Sombra Brothers Carnival my home.
Like a bat sucking blood, a chilly premonition lay on the back of my neck, drawing all the warmth out of me.
Although I could have been admitted free, I bought a ticket for two bucks, a steep price in those days, and I went inside.
The tent was partitioned into four long chambers, with a roped-off walkway that serpentined through all the rooms. In each chamber were three stalls, in each stall a platform, on each platform a chair, and on each chair a human oddity. Joel Tuck’s ten-in-one was a rare bargain for the marks—two extra attractions to gawk at, two additional reasons to doubt the benign intentions of God. Behind each freak, extending the length of the stall, a large and colorfully illustrated sign outlined the history and explained the medical nature of the deformity that made each living exhibit worthy of a featured spot in Shockville.
The contrast between the marks’ behavior outside and in here was startling. On the concourse they had seemed morally opposed to the concept of a freak show, or at least mildly repulsed, even while being irresistibly drawn by curiosity. But in the tent those civilized attitudes were not in evidence. Perhaps they had not been convictions but merely hollow platitudes, disguises beneath which true, savage human nature hid itself. Now they pointed and laughed and gasped at the twisted people they had paid to see, as if those upon the platforms were not only deformed but deaf, or too simpleminded to understand the abuse directed at them. Some marks made tasteless jokes; even the best of them were only decent enough to remain silent, none decent enough to tell their crude companions to shut up. To me the “exhibits” in the ten-in-one demanded the same reverence as one might bring to the paintings of old masters in a museum, for they surely illuminate the meaning of life as well as the work of Rembrandt or Matisse or van Gogh. Like great art, these freaks can touch the heart, remind us of our primal fears, induce in us a humble appreciation for our own condition and existence, and embody the rage we usually feel when we are forced to consider the cold indifference of this imperfect universe. I saw none of those perceptions in the marks, though I might have been too hard on them. Nevertheless, before I had been in the tent more than two minutes, it seemed as if the real freaks were those who had paid to take this macabre tour.
Anyway, they got their money’s worth. In the first stall Jack-Four-Hands was sitting, shirtless, revealing an extra pair of arms—stunted and withered but functional—growing out of his sides, just a couple of inches below and slightly behind a pair of ordinary, healthy arms. The lower appendages were somewhat deformed and obviously weak, but he was clasping a newspaper with them, while he used his regular hands to hold a cold drink and eat peanuts. In the next stall was Lila the Tattooed Lady, a self-made freak. After Lila came Flippo the Seal Boy, Mr. Six (six toes on each foot, six fingers on each hand), the Alligator Man, Roberta the Rubber Woman, an albino simply called Ghost, and others presented for the “education and amazement of those who possess an inquiring mind and a healthy curiosity about the mysteries of life,” as the pitchman outside had put it.
I moved slowly from stall to stall, one of the silent ones. At each exhibit I paused just long enough to determine whether or not this was the source of the psychic magnetism that I had felt pulling at me when I had been out on the concourse.
I still felt it tugging. . . .
I went deeper into Shockville.
The next human oddity was more well received by the marks than any other: Miss Gloria Neames, the 750-pound woman, who was supposed to be the fattest fat lady on earth. It was a claim I would not have considered disputing, neither the part about her size nor the part about her being a lady, for as gargantuan as she was, I nevertheless sensed in her a demure manner and sensitivity that were very appealing. She was seated on a specially built, sturdy chair. Getting up must have been difficult for her, and walking must have been nearly impossible without assistance; even breathing was an ordeal, judging by the sound of her. She was a mountain of a woman in a red muumuu, with an enormous belly rolling up to an overhanging shelf of bosoms so immense that they ceased to have any recognizable anatomical purpose. Her arms looked unreal, like half-comic and half-heroic sculptures of arms rendered from mounds of mottled lard, and her multiple chins drooped so far down her neck that they almost touched her breastbone. Her moon-round face was startling, serene like the face of a Buddha, but al
so unexpectedly beautiful; within that bloated countenance, like an image superimposed on another photograph, was the arresting and moving promise of the thin and gorgeous Gloria Neames that might have been.
Some of the marks liked Gloria because she gave them an opportunity to tease their girlfriends and wives—“You ever get that fat, baby, you better look for a freak-show job of your own, ’cause you sure aren’t staying with me!”—pretending to be joking but getting across an earnest message. And the wives and girlfriends, especially those at whom the message was aimed, those who were a little overweight themselves, liked Gloria because in her presence they felt positively svelte and stylish by comparison. Hell, beside her, Jelly would have looked like one of those starving Asian children in a magazine ad for CARE. And nearly everyone liked the fact that Gloria talked to them, which many of the freaks did not. She answered their questions and gracefully turned aside impertinent and too personal inquiries without embarrassing either herself or the jackasses who asked.
Standing at the fat lady’s stall, I had the psychic impression that she would play an important role in my life, but I knew it was not Gloria who had drawn me into Shockville. That ominous and irresistible magnetism continued to tug at me, and I drifted toward the source, deeper into the sideshow tent.
The last stall, the twelfth, was occupied by Joel Tuck, he of the cabbage ears, he of the steam-shovel mouth and bile-yellow teeth, he of the Frankensteinian brow, he of the third eye, giant and freak and businessman and philosopher. He was reading a book, oblivious of his surroundings—and of me—but positioned so the marks could look up into his face and see every grim detail.
This was what had drawn me. At first I thought the adducent power that I felt was originating in Joel Tuck himself, and perhaps a measure of it was, but not all of it; part of the magnetism came from the place, from the earthen floor of the stall. Beyond the rope and stanchions that delineated the limits of the public area, there was an open space, about six feet wide, between that line of demarcation and the edge of the wooden platform on which Joel Tuck sat. My eyes were drawn to that dusty, sawdust-covered patch of ground, and as I stared at it a dark heat rose from the earth, a disturbing warmth totally separate from the cloying August heat that stuck to every square foot of the midway; this was a heat that only I could have felt. It had no smell, yet it was like the odorous steam rising off a bed of manure on the farm. It made me think of death, of the heat that is the product of decomposition and rises from a rotting body. I could not grasp what it signified, though I wondered if what I sensed was that this spot would become a secret grave, perhaps even my own. And, indeed, as I dwelt on that shuddery possibility, I became increasingly certain that I stood at the brink of a grave that would be opened in the near future and that some bloody corpse would be stashed there in the deepest hours of the night, and that—
“Why, if it isn’t Carl Slim,” Joel said, finally noticing me. “Oh, no, wait, sorry. Just Slim, wasn’t it? Slim MacKenzie.”
He was poking fun at me, and I smiled, and the occult emanations rising from the ground faded quickly: dim, dimmer, gone.
The river of marks had ceased to flow for a moment, and I was temporarily alone with Joel. I said, “How’s business?”
“Good. It’s almost always good,” he said in that mellow-rich timbre, like the announcer on an FM station that played only classical music. “And what of you? Are you getting what you wanted from the carnival?”
“A place to sleep, three square meals a day, better than just pocket money—yeah, I’m doing all right.”
“Anonymity?” he asked.
“That, too, I guess.”
“Sanctuary?”
“So far.”
As before, I sensed in this strange man a fatherliness, an ability and willingness to provide comfort, friendship, guidance. But I also sensed, as I had before, danger in him, an indefinable threat, and I could not understand how he could encompass both potentials in regard to me. He might be mentor or enemy, one or the other but surely not both, yet I felt those conflicting possibilities in him, so I did not open myself to him as I might otherwise have done.
“What do you think of the girl?” he asked from his seat upon the platform.
“What girl?”
“Is there any other?”
“You mean . . . Rya Raines?”
“Do you like her?”
“Sure. She’s all right.”
“Is that all?”
“What else?”
“Ask nearly any other man on this midway what he thinks of Miss Rya Raines, and he’ll rhapsodize for half an hour about her face and body—and gripe for another half hour about her personality, and then he’ll rhapsodize some more, but he’ll never just say, ‘She’s all right’ and be done with it.”
“She’s nice.”
“You’re infatuated,” he said, his bony jaws working laboriously, his yellow teeth clacking together when he stressed the harder consonants.
“Oh . . . no. No. Not me,” I said.
“Bullshit.”
I shrugged.
His orange eye fixing me with a blind yet penetrating stare, his other two eyes rolling with mock impatience, he said, “Oh, come, come, of course you are. Infatuated. Maybe worse. Maybe falling in love.”
“Well, really, she’s older than me,” I said uncomfortably.
“Only a few years.”
“But still older.”
“And in terms of experience and wit and intelligence, you’re older than your years, at least as old as she is. Stop fencing with me, Slim MacKenzie. You’re infatuated. Admit it.”
“Well, she’s very beautiful.”
“And beneath?”
“Huh?”
“Beneath?” he repeated.
“Are you asking if her beauty is more than skin deep?”
“Is it?” he asked.
Surprised at how successfully he was drawing me out, I said, “Well, she likes you to think she’s hard-bitten . . . but inside . . . well, I see some qualities every bit as attractive as her face.”
He nodded. “I would agree.”
Farther back in the tent, a group of laughing marks approached.
Talking faster, leaning forward in his chair to take advantage of our last moments of privacy, Joel said, “But you know . . . there’s sadness in her too.”
I thought of the bleak mood in which I had left her last night, the clutching loneliness and despair that seemed to be dragging her down into some dark, private pit. “Yes, I’m aware of it. I don’t know where it comes from, that