Benji aimed the ray gun at the hub. Fear threatened to overpower him—he had no idea what would happen next—and despite himself, he said, “Zeeko, pray.”
Zeeko laughed an octave higher than normal. “Way ahead of ya, baby.”
The ray gun’s volley vaporized the hub. The Ferris wheel plummeted, its bottom rim colliding with the ground with a jolt like an earthquake. Tumbling into a seat, Benji bit his tongue; he tasted blood. He braced himself, waiting for the Ferris wheel to move again.
But, surreally, all went still. The only noise came from the trembling of the wheel’s steel beams, which sang like a hundred off-pitch tuning forks.
There was the sound of automatic gunfire from the midway.
Benji desperately threw his weight left and right, swinging the carriage, trying to heave the wheel out of inertia.
And then, with ponderous and unimaginable power, like a tremendous boulder that had been perfectly balanced for a century on the edge of a cliff, the Ferris wheel began to move. To whatever minuscule degree Benji had envisioned this moment, he had assumed the liberated wheel would simply tip to one side and crash to the earth. Down would go Benji, carriage and all.
But the wheel began to roll.
Benji’s carriage sailed higher into the air, carried by the revolution as the Ferris wheel rolled like thunder through the ride’s wooden platform, shattering it into a thousand pieces.
The midway was ahead of them now, and downhill all the way. With every inch it traveled the wheel gained velocity, whirling madly faster and faster, like hands on a haunted grandfather clock.
Its rusting skeleton frame shrieking, the wheel barreled past the Cadillac, missing it by inches. Benji’s carriage peaked and then whizzed toward the ground, approaching the bottom of the revolution. He saw several support beams below him bend inward, one of them soaring off like a silver spear. The wheel was coming apart, disintegrating from the weight it had not been designed to carry.
“ZEEKO! WHEN YOUR CAR GETS TO THE BOTTOM, JUMP OFF TO THE SIDE!” Benji bellowed.
The rim of the Ferris wheel began to crimp, its perfect circle collapsing, and so Benji’s carriage took him lower than it should have, striking the ground. But this last time, he refused to fall. Ray gun in hand, he hurled himself out of the carriage and as far away from the wild wheel as possible.
He met the ground still on his feet, the momentum carrying him forward for several steps, and then face-planted. Air rushed out of him with a hoarse rasp. He forced himself to stand, looking back just in time to see Zeeko take his own leap of faith. Zeeko almost crash-landed, but Benji was there to catch him before he fell.
They turned together to watch, with great and terrible awe, as the renegade wheel barreled down the remainder of the midway.
And then the awe became less terrible when Benji saw what was at the end of the midway, straight ahead in the wheel’s path: the second SUV, which began to reverse too late. The Starlight Express struck the SUV head on, crashing into the grille with an earsplitting scream of metal. The wheel rolled up the hood, shattering the windshield and pulverizing the roof, which caved in like tinfoil. As the wheel rolled off the back of the SUV, gravity finally reclaimed the Starlight Express: Like a slain giant, it listed to one side, tipped to the other, and toppled to the earth, smashing down upon the SUV like an apocalyptic hammer.
For a moment, Benji and Zeeko stood there, panting, shaken, staring at the astonishingly fortunate wreck. “All I prayed for,” Zeeko wheezed, “was to not die. But tell ya what, buddy—points for style.”
Benji heard someone behind him.
He whipped round, raising the ray gun. As he did, he saw the person behind him draw their own weapon as well. Benji fired automatically before realizing that he was only seeing his own reflection in the entrance of the mirror mansion.
His bolt of light struck the mirror. Rather than blazing a hole through it, the ray bounced back off the surface of the mirror, rebounding at him like the beam of a flashlight. Benji shoved Zeeko away and jumped to one side, dodging the ricochet, which flew by them and vaporized the head of a skeleton outside the haunted house.
Note to self: Never shoot at a mirror again.
“Benjamin . . .” said a soft voice.
Benji’s heart leaped: It was Papaw. Benji called out, but got no reply. Ray gun raised, he rushed through the blinding snow, afraid of the Voyager attacking him, but wanting, needing, to find his Papaw. Zeeko followed close behind. Benji sidestepped a hole in the ground: the grated metal cover of an entrance to the sewer. He peered into the sewer. All he saw was a series of ladder rungs descending into trickling darkness.
“Benjamin,” he heard again, this time much closer. Benji turned, and as he did, he saw something that sent his heart plummeting: a wet red trail on the snow, scrawled like a violent signature.
He found Papaw propped against the operator’s booth beside the whirling merry-go-round. Benji knew the carnival was still glittering and screaming around him, but all of that faded away. Nothing was quite real except for the thing he did not want to be real: Papaw sitting there, his hands laced on the side of his stomach, where, it seemed, a poison rose was blooming underneath his shirt. . . .
“No. No, no, Papaw, no.” Benji ran to him, kneeled on the ground.
“Benjamin,” Papaw said, tears in his eyes. “Oh God, son, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Blood pulsed between Papaw’s fingers. Beyond Papaw, the carousel horses leaped, careening on their endless wheel of fortune toward the unattainable gold ring. There was something Benji should be doing. Something to help Papaw. What?
Zeeko appeared by Benji’s side. “Mr. Lightman, I need to apply pressure to this. Sound okay?” He didn’t wait for an answer: He took off his letterman jacket, lifted Papaw’s hands, and pressed it onto the wound.
Papaw cried out a wordless reckoning of agony and anger and fear that stabbed something inside Benji. Zeeko swayed slightly but looked Papaw straight in the eye and said gently, “I have to, sir. I’m sorry, but I have to.”
“Benjamin,” Papaw croaked.
“Papaw, you shouldn’t talk. You’re gonna be okay.” He looked at Zeeko, hoping for a confirmation, but Zeeko’s eyes were on Papaw.
“Benjam . . . Benji, she’s alive.” Benji blinked, uncomprehending. “Ellie. I told her to run when I was fighting that Beast. I saw her make it out the front gate, but she can’t have gone far.
“She was out in the middle of the midway,” Papaw said, “right by the sewer. I knew it was a trap, but I had to save that sweet girl. I thought I could be fast enough, like some damn cowboy, shoot the Beast before It shot me, or at least kill It at the same time It killed me. But . . . Oh God, I am an old fool! Damn me to hell, boy, I am so sorry!” He coughed: spittle tinged with blood.
“Mr. Lightman,” Zeeko said, “I need you to stop talking.”
Papaw shook his head. His breath whistled thinly, like something pierced and going flat and dead. No. Please, no.
“It knows now, Benjamin,” Papaw said. “The Beast grabbed me, just to make sure there was nothing useful left inside me. It already knew from Ellie that there had been a map on the ice, but It didn’t know what place the map was showin’. I did. Now It knows where It needs to go next. If those agents hadn’t showed up and started firing at us, It would have killed me right then.”
Only a few minutes ago, nothing had seemed more important than unraveling the Voyager’s plan. Now nothing was less important. “It—it doesn’t matter, Papaw. We’re gonna get you to the hospital.”
With a grimace of effort, Papaw raised his hand; Benji, feeling tears fill his eyes, reached up and held it. Amid the warm blood, there was something cold and solid in his grip. Benji looked down and saw what Papaw had given him: a single car key attached to a leather fob embroidered with thread stitching: The Atomic Bobs.
“Take it, Benjamin. Get in the Cadillac, find Ellie, and drive.”
“I’m not leaving you, Papa
w.”
“This is not a reques—” Papaw began sternly, and Benji would have given anything to hear Papaw’s strong, reprimanding voice. But something in Papaw’s expression cracked, as if he could not summon the strength and certainty that had for so long defined him. He looked exhausted and very old, and frightened and very young.
“Benjamin, please. I tried to pay my debt, and I failed you. I’m sorry with my whole heart. But you have to go. Ellie might still know something you need. You have to find her and go where that Beast is headed.”
“No.”
“Yes, son.”
“Benji,” said Zeeko softly, “I can take your grandpa to the hospital. McKedrick’s SUV is still at the gates. I’m worried more of those agents might show up, and if I don’t take Mr. Lightman now . . .” He trailed off, but the implication was clear: If I don’t do it now, he won’t have a chance.
“Keep pressing my jacket against him, Benji. I’ll go get the SUV.” Without waiting for a response, Zeeko sprinted toward the front gates.
Benji dropped the Cadillac key and pressed the jacket onto Papaw’s wound. Papaw grimaced and closed his eyes against the pain, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Benji couldn’t watch that. He looked at the key in the snow. The key had once been the same brilliant chromium of the Dream Machine itself. Now it was covered in Papaw’s blood. Alongside all his terror and despair, Benji’s heart thudded again with impotent and inarticulate rage at himself. If he and Papaw hadn’t been possessed by the deadly illusions of their dreams, none of this would have happened.
“Papaw, I . . . I can’t fight the Voyager,” he said. “I know you think I’m important somehow, but I’m not. I’m really not.”
Papaw opened his eyes again, and despite it all, a ghost of a smile tugged at the side of his mouth. “You really are. I always thought I’d be the man who would help you fill in the blanks in this world. Everyone needs someone to do that. But it can’t be me, son. It’s going to be your friends. Find that girl. There are secrets you can only open together. I can’t help you.” Again, Papaw’s face crumpled into a heartbreaking self-loathing. “What the hell I ever done to help?”
“Papaw—”
The SUV swung onto the midway, about fifty feet away.
“I’m no damn good, Benjamin, you deserved so much better—”
“Papaw,” Benji said. “I love you, too. Okay? I love you, too.”
Many times this night, he had looked at his grandfather and seen a flash of a time when Papaw had been as young and alive as Benji. But it wasn’t until right now that Benji understood that he’d only seen the shadowy side of Papaw’s youth, the low-lying jungle land of confusion and fear. Now, in the chaotic heart of this carnival, Benji was witness to another kind of time travel: Papaw’s pale face lit up with full-hearted happiness, a teenage joy brighter than the merry-go-round could ever dream, and Benji realized, then, that his own tears had begun to spill, too.
Gingerly, Benji and Zeeko helped Papaw stagger to the SUV. As they put him in the passenger seat, Benji almost said “Good-bye,” but stopped himself.
“I’ll see you soon, Papaw.”
Papaw nodded frailly. “After ’while, crocodile. . . .”
“Benji, c’mon, I’ve gotta go,” Zeeko said. Benji finally tore his gaze away from Papaw and followed Zeeko to the driver’s side.
“I’ll get your Papaw to the hospital as fast as I can.”
“Thank you so much, Zeeko.”
“You can do this. We were meant to do this. All of us were.”
Benji disagreed, but he nodded.
“May God bless you, Benji.”
Benji waited until the SUV had left the midway. Then he turned the key of the Cadillac and gunned the engine, leaving the carnival behind as the flames of the cornfield finally breached the fairgrounds. Over the building inferno, a thin shout of pleasure rippled across the night, as if phantom carnival-goers had come for one last visit before the fantasy of homecoming burned to ash and memory.
But the shout hadn’t come from the carnival, of course.
It had come from the place Papaw had told Benji the Voyager was searching for next.
It had come from the sold-out homecoming crowd at the Bedford Falls High School football stadium.
22
Benji saw Ellie a quarter mile from the fairgrounds, running-limping along the shoulder of the highway. He swung the Cadillac to the roadside behind her and jumped out.
“Ellie, wait!”
She flinched and spun round. She seemed almost miraculously unharmed, physically, just a bruise on her left cheek and thin cuts where the claws had sliced through her jeans at the ankles. But in another way, her condition was nearly as alarming as Papaw’s: Her eyes were green glass orbs, unfocused, catching but not seeing the starlight. She smelled not like cinnamon but like rotting sewage, and she was so pale as to look like a ghost.
“Ellie?” Benji said. “Are you okay?” She blinked, but that was all.
He took her by the arm and led her to the Cadillac. She stumbled along with him like a sleepwalker, then sat in the passenger seat.
“Ellie, I need you to talk to me,” Benji said as the Cadillac roared back onto the highway. The Cadillac was roofless (they’d left the convertible’s soft-top at the gates on the way into the carnival) and the cruel night wind bit into him. As they sped, he thought he heard Ellie say something, as if reinvigorated by the air.
“Ellie!”
Ellie twitched again. Her lips moved.
“Ellie, what did you sa—?”
He saw a curve coming out of the corner of his eye. He heaved the wheel. The Cadillac was like a reluctant boat: He had to turn the wheel far more than he would in any modern car. It was kind of ridiculous. The whitewall tires kissed the edge of the paved road and sprayed gravel as the Cadillac sped past a sign that read BEDFORD FALLS—3 MILES.
He didn’t look at Ellie again until they were safely back on a straightaway. Though she still didn’t seem completely alert, she slowly pushed herself up in her seat, blinking, like someone swimming up from a deep sleep.
“Ellie, can you hear me?”
She looked at him, squinted. And then, quite suddenly, began to scream.
The sound was earsplitting, even over the wind. She kicked back in her seat, clawed at her door handle. Her door began to open. One hand still steering, Benji lunged, grabbing her arm, wrenching her away from her door. She flailed, fighting him.
“Ellie, that Thing doesn’t have you anymore! Everything is okay!” he lied.
It took several seconds for her to calm down, and in every one of those seconds, the Cadillac boated crazily in both lanes of the lonesome highway. Benji let go when she stopped screaming. She slid down in her seat, panting as the wind hauled her hair in all directions.
A sign flashed by: BEDFORD FALLS—2 MILES.
“I need your help, Ellie,” Benji shouted. “There isn’t much time and I need you to talk to me. Okay?”
Dimly, still looking shell-shocked, Ellie nodded.
“Good! What did you see when the Voyager touched you? Did It make you remember anything?”
Softly, like a little girl reduced to tears, Ellie said, “The shapes. On the ice. It knew the memory card was at the carnival. And It knew you would come for me. It . . . It wanted you, too.”
Why? “That’s all you saw?”
“Yeah. Well, the only memories.”
“Did It take you anywhere?”
She closed her eyes, as if trying to remember. “The quarry. I didn’t really understand why, because I don’t think It really understood why. There was something . . . something buried at the bottom of the lake.”
“What was down there?”
“It was a . . . some kind of an engine. This glowing engine. It was small, but you could feel how powerful it is.”
“An engine for what?”
“A machine, but I don’t . . . I don’t really know what kind of machine. The Voyager doesn’t know what kind. Its min
d felt like it was breaking down, like It’s losing control of Itself. But I think It’s almost pieced everything together. Once It blasted to the bottom of the lake—like, pew-pew—It remembered It buried the engine there a long time ago. And It knows the machine is somewhere else. It buried them apart from each other, in case anybody ever found one of them.”
“God,” Benji said, gooseflesh spreading across his body. “The machine is under the football field, Ellie.”
Decades ago, Papaw had seen the Voyager burying something. Could that have happened at the football field? Yet that didn’t make sense. Papaw had been outside of Bedford Falls, then, and the football field was in town. How many more pieces remained of the Voyager’s plan?
If It’s going to the field, It might try to grab CR and find out what he knows, too.
23
The Dream Machine rocketed into the football field parking lot.
“The pass by Bedford Falls is ruled incomplete,” boomed the referee’s amplified voice over the stadium speakers, eliciting shouts of disapproval and joy. “The clock will be reset at seven seconds. Fourth down and twelve for Bedford Falls. Ball is on their forty-yard line.”
Benji stomped the brakes and skidded to a stop beside the stadium entrance. Security guards weren’t stationed here, as they normally would be: They stood on the other side of the turnstiles, faces angled toward the light of the field, hypnotized by the gridiron clash.
“Stay with the car, Ellie, don’t let anyone move it.”
She tried to stand, but couldn’t quite do it. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
Benji said the honest thing. “I’ve got no idea.”
He hid the ray gun inside his tuxedo and hurdled the turnstiles into Bedford Falls High School football field.
To him, everything inside the stadium looked like a highly colored movie dream, a reality drenched in rainbow.
The Jumbotron: a live, video-feed close-up of CR shouting bright steam at the line of scrimmage, about to begin the play, the red numbers displaying the time clock glowing like sticks of fire.
Mr. Fahrenheit Page 23