3 The Wandering Dead Sometimes I feel that all things in this life are subjective, that nothing in the universe can be objectively quantified-qualifieddefined, that physicists and carpenters alike are made fools by the assumption that they can weigh and measure the tools and materials with which they work and can arrive at real figures that mean something. Granted, when that philosophy possesses me, I'm usually in a bleak mood that precludes rational thought, fit for nothing but getting drunk or going to bed. Still, as shaky proof of the concept, I offer my perceptions of the carnival that night as I ran from the Dodgem Car pavilion, through the equipment-strewn and cable-tangled center of the midway, trying to beat the Sombra Brothers' security men to the Ferris wheel. Before that race began, the night had seemed only dimly illuminated by the moon. Now the lunar light was not soft but harsh, not ash-pearl but white, intense. Minutes ago the deserted midway was shadow-swathed and mostly undivulged, but now it was like a prison yard bathed in the merciless glare of a dozen giant arc lamps that melted all the shadows and evaporated every sheltering pocket of darkness. With each panicked stride I was sure I would be spotted, and I cursed the moon. Likewise, although the wide center of the midway had been crammed with trucks and equipment that had provided hundreds of points of cover when I'd followed the goblin to the Dodgem Car pavilion, it was now as open and inhospitable as the aforementioned prison yard. I felt unmasked, uncloaked, conspicuous, naked. Between the trucks and generators and amusement rides and hanky-panks, I caught glimpses of the patrol car as it moved slowly toward the back end of the lot, and I was sure the guards must be getting glimpses of me, too, even though my position was not revealed by a laboring engine and blazing headlights. Amazingly I reached the Ferris wheel ahead of the security men. "They had driven the length of the first long concourse and had turned right, into the shorter curved promenade along the rear of the midway, where.all the kootch shows were set up. They were rolling toward the next turn, where they would swing right again and enter the second of the two long concourses. The Ferris wheel was only ten yards from that second turn, and I would be spotted the moment they rounded the bend. I clambered over the pipe fence that encircled the giant wheel, tripped on a cable, went down in the dust hard enough to knock the wind out of me, and crawled frantically toward the backpack and sleeping bag with all the grace of a crippled crab. I scooped up my gear in two seconds flat and took three steps toward the low fence, but a couple of items fell out of the open backpack, and I had to return for them. I saw the Ford beginning its turn into the second concourse, and as it swung around the bend its headlights swept toward me, dispelling any thought of retreating into the center of the midway. They would spot me as I went over the pipe fence, and the chase would be on. Indecisive, I stood there like the biggest dope ever born, immobilized by chains of guilt. Then I scrambled-leapt-dived for the Ferris wheel's ticket booth. It was closer than the fence, much closer than the dubious cover that lay beyond the fence, but, sweet Jesus, it was tiny. Just a one-person cubicle, hardly more than four feet on a side, with a pagoda-style roof. I crouched against one wall of that ticket booth, my backpack and bunched-up sleeping bag clutched against me, pinned by the searchlight moon, convinced that a foot or knee or hip was exposed. As the Ford cruised past the Ferris wheel, I moved around the booth, always keeping it between me and the guards. Their spotlight probed around me, past me . . . then they departed without raising an alarm. I hunkered in the moon shadow cast by one edge of the pagoda-style roof, and I watched them drive all the way down the concourse. They continued at a sedate pace and stopped three times to shine the spotlight over one thing or another, taking five minutes to reach the end of the promenade. I was afraid they would turn right at the front end of the midway, which would mean they were heading back toward the first concourse and were going to make another circuit. But they went left instead, off toward the grandstand and the mile-long racetrack, ultimately to the barns and stables where the livestock shows and competitions were held. In spite of the August heat, my teeth were chattering. My heart hammered so hard and loud that I was surprised they hadn't heard it above the rumble of their sedan's engine. My breathing was as noisy as a bellows. I was a regular one-man band, specializing in rhythm unsullied by melody. I slumped back against the booth, until the shakes passed, until I trusted myself to deal with the corpse I had left in the Dodgem Car pavilion. Disposing of the body would require steady nerves, calm, and the caution of a mouse at a cat show. Eventually, when in control of myself once more, I rolled up my sleeping bag, cinched it into a tight bundle, and carried both it and the backpack into the deep shadows by the Tilt-aWhirl. I left everything where I could find it again but where it could not be seen from the concourse. I returned to the Dodgem Cars. All was still. The gate creaked slightly when I pushed it open. Each step I took echoed under the wooden floor. I didn't care. This time I was not sneaking up on anyone. Moonlight shimmered beyond the open sides of the pavilion. The glossy paint on the balustrade seemed to glow..Here under the roof, thick shadows clustered. Shadows and moist heat. The miniature cars huddled like sheep in a dark pasture. The body was gone. My first thought was that I had forgotten exactly where I had left the corpse: Perhaps it was beyond that other pair of Dodgem Cars, or over there in that other sable pool beyond the moonlight's reach. Then it occurred to me that the goblin might not have been dead when I left it. Dying, yes, it had definitely been mortally injured, but perhaps not actually dead, and maybe it had managed to drag itself to another corner of the building before expiring. I began searching back and forth, through and between the cars, gingerly poking into every lake and puddle of blackness, with no success but with increasing agitation. I stopped. I listened. Silence. I made myself receptive to psychic vibrations. Nothing. I thought I renumbered under which car the flashlight had rolled when it had been knocked off the bumper. I looked and found it-and was reassured that I had not dreamed the entire battle with the goblin, When I clicked the switch, the Eveready came on. Hooding the beam with one hand, I swept the floor with light and saw other proof that the violent encounter I remembered had not been the events of a nightmare. Blood. Plenty of blood. It was thickening and soaking into the wood, deepening to a shade between crimson and maroon, with a look Of rust around the edges, drying up, but it was undeniably blood, and from the sprays and streaks and pools of gore, I could recreate the fight as I recalled it. I found my knife, too, and it was spotted with dried blood. I started to return it to the sheath inside my boot, then looked warily at the night around me and decided to keep the weapon ready. The blood, the knife . . . But the body was gone. And the tool Pouch was missing as well. I wanted to run, get the hell out of there, without even delaying long enough to return to the Tilt-a-whirl for my gear, just bolt down the concourse, kicking up clouds of sawdust, to the front gate of the county fairgrounds, climb over that, and run some more, Jesus, run without stopping for hours and hours, on into the morning, on through the Pennsylvania mountains, into the wilderness, until I found a stream where I could wash off the blood and the stink of my enemy, where I could find a mossy bed and lie down in the concealment of ferns, where I could sleep in peace without fear of being seen by anyone-any thing. I was only a seventeen-year-old boy. But during the past few months my fantastic and terrifying experiences had hardened me and forced me to grow up fast. Survival demanded that this boy conduct himself like a man, and not just any man but one with nerves of steel and a will of iron. Instead of running, I went outside and walked around the building, studying the dusty earth in the flashlight beam. I could find no trail of blood, which there would surely have been if the goblin had retained enough strength to crawl away. I knew from experience that these creatures were no more immune to death than I was; they could not miraculously heal themselves, rise up, and come back from the grave. Uncle Denton had not been invincible; once dead, he stayed dead. This one too: He had been dead on the pavilion floor, indisputably dead; he still was dead; somewhere, dead..Which left only one other explanation for hi
s disappearance: Someone had found his body and had carried it away. Why? Why not call the police? Whoever found the corpse could not know that it had once been animated by a demonic creature with a face suitable for the galleries of Hell. My unknown conspirator would have seen a dead man, nothing more. Why would he help a stranger conceal a murder? I suspected that I was being watched. The shakes came back. With an effort I got rid of them. I had work to do. Inside the pavilion again, I returned to the Dodgem Car on which the goblin had been working when I surprised him. At the rear of it, the lid was ' raised, exposing the motor and the power connection between the temiinus of the grid-tapping pole and the alternator. I peered at those mechanical guts for a minute or so, but I could not see what he had been doing, could not even tell whether he had tinkered with anything before I had interrupted him. The ticket booth for the Dodgem Cars was not locked, and in one corner of that tiny enclosure I found a broom, a dustpan, and a bucket containing a few soiled rags. With the rags I wiped up what blood had not already dried on the wooden floor. I brought handfuls of powdery, summer-bleached dirt into the building, sifted it over the moist, reddish splotches wherever I found them, ground it in with my boots, then swept up. The bloodstains remained, but the character of them was changed, so they looked no more recent than-or different from-the countless grease and oil spots that overlaid one another along the entire length of the platform. I replaced the broom and dustpan in the booth but threw the bloody rags into a trash barrel along the concourse, burying them under empty popcorn boxes and crumpled snow-cone papers and other garbage, where I also deposited the dead man's flashlight. I still sensed that I was being watched. It gave me the creeps. Standing in the center of the concourse, I slowly turned in a circle, surveying the carnival around,me, where the pennants still hung like sleeping bats, where the shuttered hankypanks and grab-joints were tomb-black, tomb-silent, and I perceived no sign of life. The setting moon, now balanced on the mountainous skyline, silhouetted the far-off Ferris wheel and the Dive Bomber and the Tip Top, which somehow brought to mind the colossal futuristic Martian fighting machines in H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. I was not alone. No doubt of it now. I sensed someone out there, but I could not perceive his identity, understand his intentions, or pinpoint his location. Unknown eyes watched. Unknown ears listened. And abruptly the midway was once more different from what it had been, no longer like a barren prison yard where I stood helplessly and hopelessly exposed in the accusatory glare Of arc lamps. In fact, the night was suddenly not bright enough to suit me, not by half, rapidly growing darker, bringing gloom of a depth and menace never before seen or imagined. I cursed the betrayal represented by the setting moon. The feel ing of exposure did not recede with the moon, and now it was aggravated by a growing claustrophobia. The midway became a place of unlit and alien forms, as Profoundly disturbing as a collection of weirdly shaped gravestones carved and erected by an inscrutable race on another world. All familiarity fled; every structure, every machine, every article was strange. I felt.crowded, closed in, trapped, and for a moment I was afraid to move, certain that, no matter where I turned, I would be walking into open jaws, into the grip of something hostile. "Who's there?" I asked. No answer. "Where have you taken the body?" The dark carnival was a perfect acoustic sponge; it abSOrbed my voice, and the silence was undisturbed, as if I had never spoken. "What do you want from me?" I demanded of the unknown watcher. "Are you friend or enemy?" Perhaps he did not know which he was, for he did not answer, though I sensed that a time would come when he would reveal himself and make his intentions clear. That was the moment when I knew, with clairvoyant certainty, that I couldn't have run away from the Sombra Brothers' midway even if I had tried. It was neither whim nor a fugitive's desperation that had brought me there. Something important was meant to happen to me in that carnival. Destiny had been my guide, and when I had enacted the role required of me, then and only then would destiny release me to a future of my own choosing.
Dean Koontz - (1985) Page 2