8 Darkness at Noon Established on coal fields that were now depleted, sustained by a single steel mill and a regional railroad yard, steadily decaying but not yet quite aware of the inevitability of its decline, the small city of Yontsdown (population 22,450, according to the welcome sign at the edge of the, city limits), in mostly mountainous Yontsdown County, Pennsylvania, was the next stop on the Sombra Brothers tour. When the current engagement was concluded, Saturday night, the midway would be torn down, packed up, and carted a hundred miles across the state, to the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds. The miners, mill workers, and rail-yard employees were accustomed to evenings and weekends structured around either the TV set, local bars, or one of the three Catholic churches that were always holding socials and covered-dish suppers, and they would receive the carnival just as eagerly as the farmers had done at the previous stop. Friday morning I went to Yontsdown with Jelly Jordan and a man named Luke Bendingo, who drove the car. I sat up front with Luke, and our portly boss sat alone in back, neatly dressed in black slacks, a maroon summer-weight shirt, and a herringbone jacket, looking less like a carny than like a well-fed country squire. From the luxury of Jelly's airconditioned yellow Cadillac, we could enjoy the green beauty of the humid August landscape as we drove through farm country, then into the hills. We were going to Yontsdown to grease the rails ahead of the show train, which would be rolling in during the early morning hours on Sunday. The rails we were greasing were not actually those on which the train would run; they were, instead, the rails that led straight into the pockets of Yontsdown's elected officials and civil servants. Jelly was the general manager of the Sombra Brothers Carnival, which was a demanding and important job. But he was also the "patch," and his duties in that capacity could sometimes be more important than anything he did while wearing the mantle of GM. Every carnival employed a man whose job it was to bribe public officials, and they called him the patch because he went ahead of the show and patched things up with cops, city and county councilmen, and certain other key.government employees, "gifting" them with folding money and books of free tickets for their families and friends. If a carnival tried to operate without a patch, without the additional overhead of bribery, the police would raid the midway in a vengeful mood. They would close down the games, even if it was an honest outfit that did not bilk the marks out of their dough. Spiteful, exercising their authority with a gleeful disregard for fairness and propriety, the cops would 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 any 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 mood y 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 any more, 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 from 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 strongman 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 thir d 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 back seat. "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. r 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 be
en 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-white 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 merions-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 multitude wings; the Caddy suddenly seemed like a symbol of our nayvetd, 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. Kelsko was in his early fifties, about five-nine, stocky, forty pounds overweight. He wore a khaki uniform but carried no revolver. Under brush-cut hair the shade of gunmetal, he had a square, hard, rough-looking face. His bushy eyebrows met over eyes bracketed by thick bone, and his mouth was a mean slash. The goblin within Kelsko was no visual treat, either. I have never seen one of the beasts that was less than hideous, although some are slightly less hideous than others. Some have eyes not quite so fierce..Some have teeth less sharp than others. Some have faces a degr ee less predatory than their miscreant brethren. (To me this slight variety in the appearances of the goblins seemed to prove they were real and not just phantoms of a diseased mind; for if I had been imagining them, if they were only figments of a madman's primal fear, they would all look alike. Would they not?) The demonic creature in Kelsko had red eyes that not only burned with hatred but were the very molten essence of hatred, more penetrating than those of any goblin I had encountered prior to this. The beetle-green skin around its eyes was webbed with cracks and thickened with what might have been scar tissue. The obscene fleshiness of its quivering pig-snout was made even more repellent by the addition of wattled skin around its nostrils, pale wrinkled lobes that fluttered (and glistened wetly) when it drew or expelled breath and that might have been the result of extreme age. Indeed the psychic emanations pouring forth from this monster gave an impression of incredibly ancient evil, an evil of such antiquity that by comparison it made the pyramids seem modern; it was a p
oisonous stew of malevolent emotions and wicked intentions, cooked at high heat for ages, until any possibility of a charitable or innocent thought had been boiled away long ago. Jelly played the role of the ingratiating patch with enthusiasm and enormous skill, and Lisle Kelsko pretended to be nothing more than a hopelessly hard-nosed, hard-assed, narrowminded, amoral, authoritarian, coal-country cop. Jelly was convincing, but the thing that impersonated Kelsko deserved an Oscar. At times its performance was so perfect that even to my eyes its human glaze became opaque, the goblin fading until it was just an amorphous shadow within the human flesh, forcing me to strain to bring it back into focus. From my point of view, our situation became even more intolerable when, a minute after we entered Kelsko's office, a uniformed officer came in behind us and closed the door. He, too, was a goblin. This man-shell was about thirty, tall, lean, with thick brown hair combed straight back from a good-looking, Italian face. The goblin at the core was frightening but noticeably less repulsive than the beast in Kelsko. When the door closed behind us with a thump, I jumped. From his chair, out of which he had not deigned to rise upon our entry and from which he dispensed only steely-eyed glares and flat unfriendly responses to Jelly's friendly patter, Chief Lisle Kelsko flicked a glance at me. My expression must have been odd, for Luke Bendingo gave me an odd one of his own, then winked to indicate everything was copacetic. When the young cop went to a corner and stood with his arms crossed on his chest, where I could see him, I relaxed a bit, though not much. I had never before been in a room with two goblins at the same time, let alone two goblins posing as cops and one carrying a loaded side arm. I wanted to lunge at them; I wanted to pound their hateful faces; I wanted to run; I wanted to pull the knife from my boot and plant it in Kelsko's throat; I wanted to scream; I wanted to puke; I wanted to grab the young cop's revolver and blow his head off, pump a few shots into Kelsko's chest as well. But all I could do was stand there beside Luke, keep the fear out of my eyes and off my face, and strive to appear intimidating. The meeting lasted less than ten minutes and was not a fraction as bad as Jelly had led me to believe it would be. Kelsko did not taunt or humiliate or challenge us as much as I had been told he would. He was not as demanding, sarcastic, rude, foulmouthed, quarrelsome, or threatening as the Kelsko in Jelly's colorful stories..He was icy, yes, arrogant, yes, and filled with unconcealed loathing for us. No doubt about that. He was supercharged with violence, like a high-tension power line, and if we cut through his insulation, either by insulting him or talking back or giving the slightest indication that we thought ourselves superior to him, he would deliver a megavolt assault that we would never forget. But we remained docile and subservient and eager to please, and he restrained himself. Jelly put the envelope of money on the desk and passed along booklets of free tickets, all the while telling jokes and inquiring after the chief's family, and in short order we did what we had come to do, and we were dismissed. We returned to the third-floor corridor, went to the rear stairs again, climbed to the fourth floor, which was deserted now that the lunch hour was well begun, and went from one dreary hall to another to another, until we had reached the wing where the mayor had his office. As we walked, our footsteps clicking on the dark vinyl tiles, Jelly looked increasingly worried. At one point, relieved to be out of the goblins' company and remembering what Jelly had told me in the car, I said, "Well, that wasn't so bad." "Yeah. That's what worries me," Jelly said. "Me t-t-too," Luke said. I said, "What do you mean?" "It was too damned easy," Jelly said. "Ain't never been a time since I knew him that Kelsko was that cooperative. Something's wrong." "Like what?" I asked. "I wish I knew," Jelly said. "S-s-something's up." "Something," Jelly agreed. The mayor's office was not as plain as that of the chief of police. The elegant desk was mahogany, and the other pieces of tasteful and expensive furniture-in the English style of a first-rate men's club, upholstered in hunter's-green leather-stood on plush gold carpeting. The walls were festooned with civic awards and photographs of His Honor involved in all manner of charitable activities. Albert Spectorsky, elected occupant of the office, was a tall, florid man, conservatively dressed in a blue suit and white shirt and blue tie, with features formed by indulgence. A fondness for rich food was visible in the moon-round shape of his face and in the plentitude of chins below his ripe mouth. A taste for fine whiskey was evident in the broken blood vessels that gave his cheeks and bulbous nose a ruddy glow. And there was, in everything about him, an undefinable but unmistakable air of promiscuity, sexual perversion, and whore-chasing lust. What made him electable was a marvelously warm laugh, an appealing manner, and an ability to concentrate so intently and sympathetically on what you were saying that he could make you feel as if you were the most important person in the world, at least as far as he was concerned. He was a joke-teller, a backslapper, a hail-fellow-well-met. And it was a sham. Because what he really was, beneath it all, was a goblin. Mayor Spectorsky did not ignore Luke and me, the way Kelsko had done. He even offered us his hand. I shook it. I touched him, and somehow I maintained control of myself, which was not easy, because touching him was worse than touching any of the four goblins that I had killed over the past four months. Touching him was.the way I would imagine it would be if you came face-to-face with Satan and were required to shake his hand; like an outpouring of bile, evil surged from him, gushing into me at the point of contact made by our clasped hands, contaminating me, sickening me; a lightning bolt of unrelenting hatred and a fierce rage exploded from him as well, blasted through me, and kicked my pulse rate to at least a hundred and fifty. "Glad to see ya," he said, smiling broadly. "Glad to see ya. We always look forward to the coming of the carnival!" This goblin's performance was every bit the equal of Chief Lisle Kelsko's superb portrayal of humankind, and like Kelsko, this one was an especially repellent example of its species, snaggletoothed and withered and wart-covered and pockmarked and nearly left postulant by the passage of uncountable years. Its radiant crimson eyes seemed to have taken their color from oceans of human blood that it alone had caused to be spilled, and from uncharted depths of red-hot human agony that it alone had inflicted upon our abused race. Jelly and Luke felt a little better after our meeting with Mayor Spectorsky because he was, they said, the same as always. But I felt worse. Jelly had been right when he had said that they were up to something. A deep, thawless chill had reached into every part of me. Ice hardened in my bones. Something was wrong. Very wrong. God help us. The Yontsdown County Courthouse was across the street from the city municipal building. In the offices adjacent to the courtroom, various county officials conducted their business. In one of these suites of rooms, the president of the county council, Mary Vanaletto, was waiting for us. She was a goblin too. Jelly treated her differently from the way he had treated Kelsko and Spectorsky, not because he sensed that she was a goblin or anything more-or less-than human, but because she was a woman, and attractive as well. She appeared to be about forty, a slim brunette with big eyes and a sensuous mouth, and when Jelly poured on the charm, she reacted so well-blushing, flirting, giggling, eating up the compliments he paid her-that he began to get sincere about it. He clearly thought he was making one hell of an impression on her, but I could see that she was putting on a performance far superior to his. Within the clever human disguise the goblin-not nearly as ancient and decadent as Kelsko and Spectorsky desired nothing more intensely than to kill Jelly, kill all of us. As far as I could tell, that was what every goblin wanted-the pleasure of slaughtering human beings, one after the other, though not in an unrelieved frenzy, not in one long blowbath; they wanted to parcel out the slaughter, kill us one at a time so they could savor the blood and misery. Mary Vanaletto had that same sadistic need, and as I watched Jelly hold her hand and pat her shoulder and generally -make nice with her, I require d all my self-restraint to keep from tearing him away from her and yelling, "Run!" There was something else about Mary Vanaletto, a factor other than her true goblin nature, that made my skin break out in gooseflesh. It was something I had never encountere
d before and, even in my bleakest nightmares, had not imagined. Through the transparent human glaze I saw not one goblin but four: a full-size creature of the sort to which I was accustomed and three small beasts with closed eyes and half formed features. The three seemed to exist.within the large goblin that was pretending to be Mary Vanaletto-specifically, within its abdomen-and they were curled motionlessly in recognizably fetal positions. This frightful, gruesome, abominable monstrosity was pregnant. It had never occurred to me that the goblins could breed. The very fact of their existence was enough to deal with. The prospect of generations of goblins yet unborn, destined to ride herd on us human cattle, was unthinkable. Instead I thought of them as risen from Hell or descended from another world, their numbers on earth limited to whatever they had begun with; in my mind they were all most mysterious and immaculate (though sinister) conceptions. Not any more. As Jelly teased and entertained Mary Vanaletto, as Luke grinningly followed their witticisms from his perch on the chair beside mine, I rebelled at the sickening mental image of a dog-mouthed goblin ramming its vilely deformed penis into the cold and mutant vagina of a red-eyed and pig-snouted bitch, both of them panting and slobbering and grunting, wart-covered tongues lolling, their grotesque bodies convulsed in ecstasy. But as soon as I managed to push that unbearable image out of my mind, a worse picture came to me: newborn goblins, small, the color of grubs, smooth and shiny and moist, mad red eyes glimmering, with sharp little claws and pointed teeth not yet grown into wicked fangs, three of them, slithering and pushing and squirming out of their mother's stinking womb. No. Oh, Jesus, please, no, if I did not put such a thought out of my mind at once, I would reach for the knife in my boot and destroy this Yontsdown County councilwoman in full view of Jelly and Luke, -and then none of us would leave this town alive. Somehow I endured. Somehow I got away from that office with my sanity intact and my knife still in my boot. On our way out of the county building, we passed through the echo-filled foyer, with its marble floor and huge mullioned windows and arched ceiling, off which the main courtroom opened. On impulse I stepped to the massive, brass-handled oak doors, opened one of them a crack, and peered inside. The current case had reached the stage of concluding arguments, so they had not yet recessed for lunch. The judge was a goblin. The prosecuting attorney was a goblin. The two uniformed guards and the court stenographer were fully human, but three members of the jury were goblins. Jelly said, "What're you doing, Slim?" Further shaken by what I had seen in the courtroom, I let the door ease shut, and I rejoined Jelly and Luke. "Nothing. Just curious." Outside, at the corner, we recrossed the street, and I studied the other pedestrians and the drivers of the vehicles halted by the traffic light. Out of about forty people- on that dingy thoroughfare, I saw two goblins, which was twenty times the usual ratio. We were finished making payoffs, so we headed past the municipal building to the parking lot behind it. When we were twenty feet from the yellow Cadillac, I said, ' "Just a minute. I got to take a look at something." I turned and strode back the way we had come. Jelly called after me. "Where you going?" "Just a minute," I said, breaking into a run. Heart hammering, lungs expanding and contracting with all the.flexibility of cast iron, I went past the side of the municipal building, around to the front, up a set of granite steps, through glass doors, into a lobby less grand than the one at the courthouse. Various agencies of the city government had their public offices on the first floor, and police headquarters was to the left. I pushed through a set of walnut-framed, frosted-glass doors, into an antechamber encircled by a wooden railing. The on-duty desk sergeant worked on a platform two feet higher than the rest of the floor. He was a goblin. A ballpoint pen in one hand, he raised his eyes from a file on which he had been working, looked down at me, and said, "Can I help you?" Beyond him was a large open area that held a dozen desks, a score of tall filing cabinets, a photocopier, and other office equipment. A teletype chattered in one corner. Of the eight clerical workers, three were goblins. Of the four men who worked apart from the clerks and appeared to be plainclothes detectives, two were goblins. Three uniformed officers were present at the moment, and all were goblins. In Yontsdown the goblins not only walked among the ordinary citizens, preying upon them at random. Here, the war between our species was well organized-at least on the goblins' side. Here, the subversive masqueraders made the laws and enforced them, and pity the poor bastard who was guilty of even the slightest infraction. "What was it you wanted?" the desk sergeant asked. "Uh . . . I'm looking for the City Department of Health." "Across the hall," he said impatiently. "Yeah," I said, pretending befuddlement. "This must be the police station." "It's sure no ballet school," he said. I left, conscious of his crimson eyes burning into my back, and I returned to the yellow Cadillac, where Jelly Jordan and Luke Bendingo were waiting, curious-and unaware. "What're you up to?" Jelly asked. "Wanted to have a closer look at the front entrance to this building here." "Why?" "I'm a nut about architecture." "Is that so?" "Yeah. "Since when?" "Since I was a kid." "You're still a kid." "And you're not, but you're a nut about toys, which is a whole lot stranger than being a nut about architecture." He stared at me a moment, then smiled and shrugged. "Guess you're right But toys are more fun." As we got in the car I said, "Oh, I don't know. Architecture can be fascinating. And this town's full of terrific examples of Gothic and medieval style." "Medieval?" Jelly said as Luke started the engine. "You mean like the Dark Ages?" "Yeah."' "Well, you're right about that. This burg is straight from the Dark Ages, sure enough." On our way out of town, we approached the burned-out elementary school again, where seven children had died the past April. The first time we had passed the building, I had received precognitive vibrations of more tragedy to come. Now, as I stared at the blasted windows and soot-smeared walls, and as.we drew relentlessly nearer, a wave of clairvoyant impressions flowed off those fire-scorched bricks and swept toward me. To my sixth sense it was a wave every bit as real as an onrushing wall of water, with a weight and force to be reckoned with, a churning mass of possibilities and probabilities and unthinkable tragedies. Such an extraordinary amount of human suffering and anguish was associated with this structure that it was not merely wrapped in an ominous aura but was afloat in a sea of death-energy. The wave was coming with freight-train speed and power, like one of those giant combers rushing toward the beach in every film you have ever seen of Hawaii, but black and ominous, unlike anything I had encountered before, and I was suddenly terrified of it. There was a fine spray of psychic energy flung out in advance of the wave itself, and as these invisible droplets spattered across my receptive mind I "heard" children screaming in pain and terror . . . fire roaring and hissing and making a snick-snap-gabble-crackle sound like sadistic laughter . . . alarm bells clanging a wall collapsing with a thunderous crash . . . shouting . . . distant sirens. . . . I "saw" unspeakable horrors: an apocalyptic conflagration . . . a teacher with her hair aflame..... children stumbling blindly through smothering smoke..... other children desperately and futilely taking refuge beneath schoolroom desks as smoldering slabs of the ceiling slammed down on them. . . . Some of what I was hearing and seeing was from the fire that had already been, the April pyre, but some images were from a fire not yet lit, sights and sounds of a nightmare that lay in the future, and in both cases I perceived that the school's abrupt combustion was neither accidental nor caused by human error nor attributable to machine failure, but was the work of goblins. I was beginning to feel the children's pain, the searing heat, and beginning to experience their terror. The psychic wave bore down on me, towering higher . . . higher, growing darker, a black tsunami so powerful that it surely would crush me, so cold that it would leech all the warmth of life from my flesh. I closed my eyes and refused to look at the half-ruined school as we drew nearer it, and I tried desperately to build the mental equivalent of a lead shield around my sixth sense, to shut out the unwanted clairvoyant radiations that, instead of water, composed the oncoming destructive wave. To turn my mind away from the school, I thought of my mother and sisters,
thought of Oregon, the Siskiyous . . . thought of Rya Raines's exquisitely sculpted face and sun-spangled hair. Memories and fantasies of Rya were what effectively armored me against the onslaught of the psychic tsunami, which now hit me, battered me, and washed through me without breaking me to pieces or carrying me away. I waited half a minute, until I felt nothing paranormal whatsoever, then opened my eyes. The school was behind us. We were approaching the old iron bridge, which looked as if it were constructed from fossilized black bones. Because Jelly was in the back seat again, and because Luke was paying strict attention to his driving (possibly fearing the slightest infraction of the Yontsdown traffic laws would bring one of Kelsko's men down on us with particular fury), neither of them noticed the peculiar seizure that, for a minute, had rendered me as speechless and helplessly rigid as any afflicted, unmedicated epileptic. I was grateful that there was no need to make up an explanation, for I did not trust myself to speak without betraying my turmoil. I was overwhelmed with pity for the human inhabitants of this godforsaken place. With one school fire already seared into the city's history, with a much worse blaze to come, I was quite sure of what I.would discover if I went to the nearest firehouse: goblins. I thought of the headline we had seen in the local paper-BOTULISM KILLS FOUR AT CHURCH PICNic-and I knew what I would find if I paid a visit to the priest at the rectory: a demonic beast in a backwards collar, dispensing blessings and sympathy-just as it must have dispensed the deadly bacterial toxins in the potato salad and baked-bean casserole-while leering gleefully within its remarkable disguise. What a crowd of goblins must have gathered in front of the elementary school that day, the moment the alarm went off, to watch the erupting catastrophe with counterfeit horror, ostentatiously grieving while surreptitiously feeding on the human agony the way we would go to McDonald's for lunch, each child's scream like a bite of a juicy Big Mac, each radiant flash of pain like a crisp French fry. Dressed as city officials, professing shock and a shattering sense of loss, they would have lurked at the city morgue, hungrily observing the fathers who reluctantly came to identify the grisly, charred remains of their beloved offspring. Posing as grief-stricken friends and neighbors, they would have gone to the homes of bereaved parents, offering moral support and comfort, but secretly sucking up the sweet psychic pudding of anguish and misery, just as, months later, they were now hovering about the families of those who had been poisoned at the church picnic. Regardless of the respect and admiration-or lack of it-in which the deceased was held, no funeral in Yontsdown would ever be lightly attended. There was a snake pit full of goblins here, and they would slither off to feed wherever a banquet of suffering was laid out for them. And if fate did not produce enough victims to suit their taste, they would do a little cooking of their own-torch a school, orchestrate a major traffic accident, carefully plan a deadly industrial mishap at the steel mill or down at the rail yards . . . The most frightening aspect of what I had discovered in Yontsdown was not merely the startling concentration of goblins, but their heretofore unseen desire and ability to organize themselves and take control of human institutions. Until this moment I had seen the goblins as roving predators, insinuating themselves throughout society, and more or less choosing their victims at random and on the spur of the moment. But they had plucked up the reins of power in Yontsdown and, with terrifying purposefulness, had transformed the entire town and surrounding county into a private game preserve. And they were breeding here in the Pennsylvania mountains, in this coal-country backwater where the rest of the world seldom cast a glance. Breeding. Jesus. I wondered how many other nests of these vampires existed in other dark corners of the world. And vampires they were, in their own way, for I sensed that they - drew their primary nourishment not from the blood itself but from the radiant auras of pain, anguish, and fear that were produced by human beings in desperate trouble. A meaningless distinction. To cattle destined for the butcher's block, it does not matter which portions of their anatomy are most 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. 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 churc h 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 goblins hundreds of years ago and that from those sightings had sprung the first tales of human metamorphosis into bat-form and lupine horror. Indeed Viad 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, Viad 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-FourHands (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 argain 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 th
e platforms were not only deformed but deaf, or too simple-minded 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: Mi ss 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 also 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 sadness, or what it means, but I am aware of it." "Here's something to think about," he said, then hesitated. "What?" He peered at me with such intensity that I could almost believe he was reading my soul with some psychic power of his own. Then he sighed and said, "Such a stunningly beautiful surface she has, and beauty underneath, as well, we're agreed on that . . . but is it possible that there is another underneath' below the 'underneath' that you can see?" I shook my head. "I don't think she's a deceiving person." "Oh, we all are, my young friend! We all deceive. Some of us deceive the whole world, every single fellow creature we meet. Some of us.deceive only selected people, wives and lovers, or mothers and fathers. And some of us deceive only ourselves. But none of us is totally honest with everyone all the time, in all matters. Hell, the need to deceive is just one more curse that our sorry species has to bear." "What are you trying to tell me about her?" I asked. "Nothing," he said, his tension suddenly flowing away. He leaned back in his chair. "Nothing." "Why are you being so cryptic?" , The?" I "Cryptic. "I wouldn't know how," he said, his mutant face bearing the most enigmatic expression I had ever seen on anyone. The marks reached the twelfth stall, two couples in their early twenties, the girls with heavily lacquered bouffant hair and too much makeup, the guys in checkered slacks and clashing shirts, a quartet of country sophisticates. One of the girls, the porky one, squealed in fright when she saw Joel Tuck. The other girl squealed because her friend had done it, and the men put protective arms around their women, as if there were a real danger that Joel Tuck would bound off his small stage with either rape or cannibalism in mind. While the marks made their comments, Joel Tuck lifted his book and returned to his reading, ignoring them when they asked questions of him, retreating into a dignity so solid that it was almost tangible. In fact, it was a dignity that even the marks could sense and that, in time, intimidated them into respectful silence. More marks arrived, and I stood there for a moment longer, watching Joel, breathing in the odors of sun-heated canvas and sawdust and dust. Then I let my gaze slide to that patch of sawdust-covered earth between the rope and the platform, and again I received images of decomposition and death, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not figure out exactly what these dark v ibrations meant. Except . . . I still had the disquieting feeling this dirt would be turned with a spade to make a grave for me. I knew I would come back. When the midway was closed down. When the freaks were gone. When the tent was deserted. I would sneak back to stare at this portentous plot of dirt, to place my hands against the ground, to attempt to wrench a more explicit warning from the psychic energy that was concentrated here. I had to armor myself against the oncoming danger, and I could not do that until I knew precisely what the danger was. When I left the ten-in-one and returned to the concourse, the twilight sky was the same color as my eyes. Because it was the next to the last night of the engagement, and a Friday, the marks lingered longer, and the midway closed up later than the night before. It was almost one-thirty by the time I had locked away the teddy bears at the high-striker and, laden with coins that jingled with every step I took, went down to the meadow, to Rya's trailer. Thin, wispy clouds were backlit by the moon, which painted their lacy edges purest silver. They filigreed the night sky. Having dealt with her other cashiers already, she was waiting for me, dressed much as she had been the night before: pale green shorts, white T-shirt, no jewelry, no need of jewelry, more radiant in her unadorned beauty than she could have been in any number of diamond necklaces. She was in an uncommunicative mood, speaking only when spoken to, then responding in monosyllables. She took the money, put it away in a closet, and gave me half a day's wages, which I tucked into a pocket of my jeans..As she performed these chores I watched her intently, not merely because she was lovely but because I had not forgotten last night's vision, just outside the trailer, when an apparitional Rya, smeared with blood and bleeding from one corner of her mouth, had shimmered into existence before my eyes and had softly pleaded with me not to let her die. I hoped that, in the presence of the real Rya once more, I'd find my clairvoyance stimulated, that new and more detailed premonitions would come to me, so I could warn her about a specific danger. But all that I got from being close to her again was a renewed sense of the deep sadness in her-and sexually aroused. Once paid, I had no excuse to hang around. I said good night and went to the door. "Tomorrow will be a busy day," she said before I took that first step out. I looked back at her. "Saturdays always are." "And tomorrow night is slough night-we tear it all down. And Sunday we would set up in Yontsdown, but I did not want to think about that. She said, "There's always so much to do on Saturdays that I have trouble sleeping Friday nights." I suspected that, like me, she had trouble sleeping most nights and that, when she did sleep, she often awoke unrested. Awkwardly, I said, "I know what you mean." "Walking helps," she said. "Sometimes, on Friday nights, I go out on the dark midway and walk around and around the promenade, working off excess energy, letting the stillness sort of . . . flow into me. It's peaceful when it's shuttered, when the marks are gone and the lights are out. Even better . . . when we're playing at a place like this, where the fairgrounds are in open country, I walk the nearby fields or even the woods if there's a road through them or a good trail-and if there's a moon." Except for her stern lecture about operating the high-striker, this was the longest speech I had heard her make, and it was the closest she had come to trying to establish rapport with me, but her voice remained as impersonal and businesslike as it was during working hours. In fact, it was even cooler than before because it was without the effervescent excitement of the entrepreneur engaged in hustling a buck. h was a flat voice now, indifferent, as if all purpose and meaning and interest fled her with the closing of the midway and did not return until the next day's show call. Indeed it was such a flat voice, so drab and weary, that without the special insight of my sixth sense I might have been unaware that she was actually reaching out to me, in need of human contact. I knew that she was trying to be casual, even friendly, but that did not come easy to her. "There's a moon tonight," I said. "Yes." "And fields nearby." "Yes." "And woods." She looked down at her bare feet. "I was planning on taking a walk myself," I said. Without meeting my eyes she went to the armchair, in front of which she had left a pair of tennis shoes. She slipped into them and came to me. We walked. We wound through the temporary streets of the trailer town, then into open meadow where the wild grass was black and silver in the night-shadows and moonbeams. It was also knee-high and must have tickled her bare legs, but she did not complain. We walked in silence.for a while, at first because we were too awkward with each other to settle into comfortable conversation, then because conversation began to seem unimportant. At the edge of the meadow, we turned northwest, following the line of trees, and a welcome breeze rose at our backs. The towering ramparts of the post-midnight forest rose with castellated forrnidability, as if they were not serried ranks of pines and maples and birches but, instead, solid black barriers that couldn't be breached, only scaled. Eventually, half a mile behind the midway, we came to a place where a single-lane dirt road split the woods, leading upward into night and strangeness. Without a word to each other we turned onto the road and kept walking, and we went perhaps another two hundred yards before she finally spoke. "Do you dream?" "Sometimes," I said. "About what?" "Goblins," I said truthfully, although I would begin to lie if she pressed me for elucidation. "Nightmares," she said. "Yes." "Are your dreams usually nightmares?" "Yes." Although those
Pennsylvania mountains lacked the vastness and the sense of a primordial age that made the Siskiyous so impressive, there was nonetheless a humbling silence of the sort to be found only in the wilderness, a hush more reverent than that in a cathedral, which encouraged us to speak softly, almost in whispers, though there was no one to overhear. "Mine too," she said. "Nightmares. Not just usually. Always." "Goblins?" I asked. . 'No." She said no more, and I knew she would tell me more only when she chose to. We walked. The forest crowded close on both sides. In the moonlight the dirt road had a gray phosphorescence that made it look like a bed of ash, as if God's chariot had raced through the woods, wheels burning with divine fire, leaving a trail of total combustion. In a while she said, "Graveyards." "In your dreams?" She spoke as softly as the breeze. "Yes. Not always the same graveyard. Sometimes it's on a flat field, stretching to every horizon, one headstone after the other, all of them exactly alike." Her voice became softer still. "And sometimes it's a snowy cemetery on a hill, with leafless trees that have lots of black and spiky branches, and with tombstones terracing down and down, all different kinds of them, marble obelisks and low granite slabs, statues that've been tilted and worn by too many winters . . . and I keep walking toward the bottom of the cemetery, the bottom of the hill . . . toward the road that leads out . . . and I'm sure there's a road down there somewhere . . . but I just can't find it." Her tone was not only soft now but so bleak that I felt a cold line drawn along my spine, as if her voice were an icy blade impressed upon my skin. "At first I move slowly between monuments, afraid of slipping and falling in the snow, but when I go down several levels and still don't see the road below . . . I start moving faster . . . and faster . . . and pretty soon I'm running, stumbling, falling, getting up, running on, dodging between the stones, plunging down the hillside . . . " A pause..A breath. Shallow. Expelled with a faint sigh of dread and with a few more words: "Then you know what I find?" I thought I did. As we reached the crest of a low hill and kept walking, I said, "You see a name on one of the tombstones, and it's yours." She shuddered. "One of them is mine. I sense it in every dream. But I never find it, no. I almost wish I would. I think . . . if I found it . . . found my own grave . . . then I would stop dreaming about these things......... Because you would not wake up, I thought. You would be dead for real. That was what they said happened if you did not wake up before you died in a dream. Die in a dream-and never wake up again. She said, "What I find when I go down the hillside far enough is . . the road I'm looking for . . . except it isn't a road any more. They've buried people and erected headstones right in the asphalt, as if they had so many to plant that they ran out of room in the graveyard and had to put them wherever there was space. Hundreds of stones, four across, row after row, all the way along the road. So . . . you see . . . the road isn't a way out any more. It's just another part of the cemetery now. And below it the dead trees and more monuments just keep shelving down and down, as far as I can see. And the worst thing is . . . somehow, I know that all these people are dead . . . because . "Because what'?" "Because of me," she said miserably. "Because I killed them." "You sound as if you actually feel guilty," I said. "I do." "But it's only a dream." "When I wake up . . . it lingers . . . too real for a dream. It has more meaning than just a dream. It's . . . an omen, maybe. "But you're not a killer." "No." "Then what could it mean?" "I don't know," she said. "Just dreamstuff, nonsense," I insisted. "No." "Then tell me how it makes sense. Tell me what it means. "I can't," she said. But as she s poke, I had the disturbing impression that she knew precisely what the dream meant and that she had now begun to lie to me just as I would have lied if she had pressed for too many details about the goblins of my own nightmares. We had followed the dirt road up and then down a gentle hill, along a quarter-of-a-mile curve, through a burst of oaks where there was less moonlight, perhaps a distance of one mile altogether. Finally we came to the road's end on the shore of a small lake surrounded by forest. The gently sloping bank that led into the water was covered with lush, soft grass. The lake looked like an enormous pool of oil and would have looked like nothing whatsoever if the moon and scattered frost-white stars had not been reflected in its surface, thereby vaguely illuminating a few eddies and ripples. The breeze-ruffled grass, like that in the meadow behind the trailer town, was black with a thin silver edge to each tender blade. She sat down on the grass, and I beside her. She seemed to want silence again. I obliged. Sitting beneath the vault of night, listening to far crickets and the.quiet splash of fish taking insects off the surface of the water, conversation was again quite unnecessary. It was enough for me to be at her side, separated from her by less than the length of an arm. I was struck by the contrast between this place and those in which I had spent the rest of this day. First Yontsdown, with its smokestacks and medieval buildings and omnipresent sense of impending doom, then the midway with its gaudy pleasures and swarms of marks. It was a relief, now, to pass a little time in a place where there was no proof of man's existence other than the dirt road leading in, which we kept at our backs and which I tried to put out of mind. Gregarious by nature, there nevertheless were occasions when I became as weary of the company of other human beings as I was repelled and disgusted by the goblins. And sometimes, when I saw men and women being as cruel to one another as the marks had been in Joel Tuck's sideshow tent that very day, it seemed to me that we deserved the goblins, that we were a tragically flawed race incapable of adequately appreciating the miracle of our existence and that we had earned the vicious attentions of the goblins by our own despicable actions against one another. After all, many of the gods we worshiped were, to one degree or another, judgmental and demanding and capable of heart-stopping cruelty. Who could say that they might not visit a plague of goblins on us and call it just punishment for sins indulged? Here, in the tranquillity of the forest, however, a cleansing energy washed through me, and gradually I began to feel better, in spite of all the talk of graveyards and nightmares with which we had occupied ourselves. Then, after a while, I became aware that Rya was weeping. She made no sound, and her body was not racked with silent sobs. I was alerted to her condition only when I began to receive a psychic impression of that terrible sadness, welling up anew in her. Looking sidewise, I saw a glistening tear tracking down her smooth cheek, another spot of silver in the moonlight. "What's wrong?" I asked. She shook her head. "Don't want to talk?" She shook her head again. Acutely aware that she needed comforting, that she had come to me expressly for comforting, but not knowing how to provide it, I turned my eyes from her and looked out at the oily blackness of the lake. She shorted out my logic circuits, damn it. She was different from anyone I had ever known, with puzzling depths and dark secrets, and it seemed to me that I dared not respond to her as casually and forthrightly as I would have responded to anyone else. I felt as if I were an astronaut making first contact with an alien from another world, overwhelmed by an appreciation for the gulf between us, afraid to proceed lest the initial communication be misunderstood. Therefore I found myself unable to respond at all, unable to act. I told myself that I had been foolish to dream of heating the coolness between us, that I had been an idiot for imagining that a close relationship with her was possible, that I had gotten in over my head with this one, that these waters were too dark and strange, that I would never understand her and -and then she kissed me. She pressed her pliant lips to mine, and her mouth opened to me, and I returned her kiss with a passion I had never experienced before, our tongues seeking and melting together until I could not tell hers from mine. I put both hands in her glorious hair-an auburn-blond mix in daylight but now Argentine-and let it run through my fingers. It felt the way spun moonlight might feel if it could be fashioned into a cool.and silken thread. I touched her face, and the texture of her skin sent a shiver through me. I slid my hands lower, along her neck, holding her by the shoulders as our kisses deepened, then at last cupping her full breasts. From the moment she had leaned against me and had given that first kiss, she had been shaking. I sensed
that these were not tremors of erotic anticipation, but were evidence of an uncertainty, awkwardness, shyness, and fear of rejection not dissimilar to my own state of mind. Now, suddenly, a stronger shiver passed through her. She pulled away from me and said, "Oh, hell." "What?" I asked, breathless. "Why can't . "What?" two people . "What?" Tears streamed down her face now. Her voice quavered: just reach out to each other . . - " "You reached, I reached." ". . . and push aside that barrier . "There's no barrier. Not now." I sensed that sadness in her, a well of loneliness too deep to be plumbed, a grayness, an apartness, and I was afraid that it was going to overwhelm her at the worst possible moment, force upon us the very estrangement that she professed to fear. She said, "It's there..... always there . . . always so hard to make any real contact..... any real "It's easy," I said. "No. , "We're more than halfway." a pit, a gulf . "Shut up," I said as gently and lovingly as I had ever said two words, and I took hold of her again, kissed her again. We kissed and caressed with rapidly increasing fervor but with a determination to savor this first exploration. Although we must have sat there on the grass for no more than five or ten minutes, it seemed that whole days passed unheeded. When she again pulled away from me, I started to protest. But she said, "Hush," in such a way that I knew I should be quiet. She rose to her feet, and with none of the frustrating fumbling with buttons-clasps-zippers that could sometimes bring a chill to ardor, her clothes slipped away from her, and she stood thrillingly revealed. Even at night in this dark woods, she seemed to be the daughter of the sun, for moonglow was nothing more than a reflection of solar light, and now every beam of that secondhand sunshine appeared to find its way to her. The rays of the moon made her skin translucent and accentuated the exquisitely sensuous curves and planes, convexities and concavities, of her faultless body. Eros in a fluid interfolding of black and silver: the frost-silver sphere of firm buttocks, perfectly cleft by darkness; a frostlike film molded to the enticing musculature of one thigh; a few crisp, shiny pubic hairs touched by a glint of silver; the concavity of her belly, curving from the pearly touch of moonlight into a smooth little pocket of shadow, then swelling back into the pearliness again before reaching the darkness beneath the heavy breasts; and-oh, yes-her breasts, uptilted, heart-rendingly contoured, the turgid nipples painted half silver and half black. Milky light, snowy light, platinum light shone upon-and seemingly from within-her elegant, smooth shoulders, traced the delicate line of her throat, and licked along the fragile ridges and folds of one shell-like ear. She descended like some celestial entity, as from a great height, with.slow grace, and lay upon the thick, soft grass. I undressed. I made love to her with hands, with lips, with tongue, and before I even considered entering her, I had brought her twice to climax. I was not a great lover-far from it; my sexual experience was limited to two women at other carnivals before this one. But through my sixth sense I always seemed to know what was wanted, what would please. Then, as she lay sprawled on that bed of black grass, I parted her sleek thighs and moved between them. The initial moment of penetration was the usual and unremarkable anatomical mechanics, but as we joined, the experience ceased to be usual, ceased to be unremarkable, was elevated from mechanics to mysticism, and we became not merely lovers but a simple organism, instinctively and mindlessly pursuing some half-glimpsed, mysterious, but desperately desired apotheosis of both spirit and body. Her responsiveness to me seemed as psychic as mine to her. As she clung to me, she never moved in disruptive opposition, or murmured the wrong word, or in any way disturbed the deeply satisfying and astonishingly complex rhythms of our passion, but matched each flex and counterflex, each thrust and counterthrust, each shuddering pause, each throb and stroke, until we had achieved and then surpassed flawless harmony. The world receded. We were one; we were all; we were the only. In that sublime and almost holy condition, ejaculation seemed like a gross affront, not a natural conclusion to our coupling but a crude intrusion of base biology. But it was inevitable. Indeed it was not only inescapable, but also not long in arriving. I had been within her perhaps four or five minutes when I felt the eruption building and realized, with some embarrassment, that it was uncontainable. I began to withdraw from her, but she clasped me closer, entwining me with her slender legs and arms, her sex tightening heatedly around mine, and I managed to gasp out the impending danger of impregnation, but she said, "It's all right, Slim, it's all right, I can't have babies, anyway, no babies, it's all right, just come in me, honey, please, come in me, fill me," and with the last few words she was shaken by another orgasm, and she arched her body against me, pressed her breasts against my chest, tremors racking her, and suddenly I was unknotted and untied, and long, fluid ribbons of sperm spooled out of me, unraveled within her. . . We were a long time regaining a sense of the world around us and even longer parting. But at last we lay side by side, on our backs in the grass, staring up at the night sky, holding hands. We were silent because, for now, all that needed to be said had already been said without resorting to words. Perhaps five long, warm minutes passed before she said, "Who are you, Slim MacKenzie?" "Just me." "Somebody special." "Are you kidding? Special? I couldn't control myself. Went off like fireworks. Jeer. I promise more control next time. I'm no great lover, no Casanova, that's for sure, but I usually have more endurance than-" "Don't," she said softly. "Don't bring it down like that. Don't pretend it wasn't the most natural, the most exciting . . . the most most you ever knew. Because it was. It was." "But I-" "It lasted long enough. Just long enough. Now shush." I shushed. The filigree of clouds had blown away. The sky was Crystalline. The.moon was a Lalique globe. This extraordinary day of contrasts had encompassed the most appalling ugliness and horror, but it had also been filled with beauty that was almost excruciating in its intensity. The leering goblins in Yontsdown. To compensate for them: Rya Raines. The grim grayness of that miserable city. To balance: this splendid canvas of moon and stars under which I now lay, satiated. The visions of fire and death at the elementary school. On the other hand: the memory of her moonlight-kissed body descending to the grass with a promise of joy. Without Rya it would have been a day of unimaginably stark and unrelieved despair. There on the shore of that dark lake, she seemed, at least in that moment, to be the embodiment of all that had gone right in the divine architect's plans for the universe, and if I could have located God right then, I would have yanked insistently on the hem' of his robe and kicked at his shins and would have made a general nuisance of myself until He agreed that He would reconstruct those vast portions of His creation that He had screwed up the first time, and that during the reconstruction He would use Rya Raines as the supreme example of what was possible if only He would put all his mind and talent behind the project. Joel Tuck was wrong. I was not infatuated with her. I was in love with her. God help me, I was in love with her. And although I did not know it then, the time was rapidly approaching when, because of my love for her, I would desperately need God's help merely to survive. After a while she let go of my hand and sat up, drew her knees up, clasped her arms around her bent legs, and stared out at the lightless lake, in which a fish splashed once and then swam on in silence. I sat up beside her, and still we felt no need to be any more talkative than the swimming fishes. Another distant splash. A rustle of wind-stirred reeds at water's edge. Cricket song. Mournful mating calls of lonely frogs. In time I realized that she was weeping again. I put a hand to her face, moistened a fingertip in a tear. "What?" I asked. She said nothing. "Tell me," I said. "Don't," she said. "Don't what?" "Talk. I was silent. She was silent. Eventually the frogs were silent. When she finally spoke, she said, "The water looks inviting." "Looks wet is all." "Appealing." "Probably covered with algae, and the bottom's mud." "Sometimes," she said, "in Gibtown, Florida, during the off-season, I go out to the beach and take long walks, and sometimes I think how nice it would be to swim out into the sea, out and out, just keep on and never come back." There was a shocking spiritual and emotional weariness in her, a distressing melancholy. I wondered if it had something to d
o with her inability to have children. But mere barrenness seemed insufficient cause for this black despondency. At this moment her voice was that of.a woman whose heart had been corroded by a bitter sadness of such purity and acidic strength that the source of it defied imagination. I could not understand how she could plummet from ecstasy to despondency so quickly. Only minutes ago she had told me that our lovemaking had been the most most. Now she was almost gladly sinking back into despair, into an utterly hopeless, sapping, sunless, private desolation that scared the hell out of me. She said, "Wouldn't it be nice to swim out as far as you could go and then, exhausted, swim even farther, until your arms become like lead and your legs like a diver's weights and-" "No!" I said sharply, grabbing her face in both hands, turning her head, forcing her to look at me. "No, it wouldn't be nice. It wouldn't be nice at all. What are you saying? What's wrong with you? Why are you like this?" There was neither an answer on her lips nor in her eyes, just a bleakness in the latter that was impenetrable even to my sixth sense, a loneliness that seemed ultimately impervious to any assaults I could hope to make on it. Seeing this, my gut clenched with fear, and my heart felt hollow and dead, and tears filled my own eyes. In desperation I pulled her down onto the grass, kissed her, caressed her, and began to make love to her again. At first she was reluctant, but then she began to respond, and soon we were as one, and this time, in spite of the talk of suicide and in spite of the fact that she would not allow me to understand the cause of her despair, we were better together than we had been before. If passion was the only rope that I could find to throw to her, if it was the only thing that could pull her back from the spiritual quicksand that was sucking her under, then it was at least reassuring to know that my passion for her was a lifeline of infinite length. Spent, we lay for a while in each other's arms, and the quality of our mutual silence did not degenerate into funereal gloom, as it had done before. In time we dressed and started back along the forest road, toward the fairgrounds. I was buoyed by the beginning that we had made tonight, and I was filled with a hope for the future that I had not known since the day I had first seen a goblin. I wanted to shout, throw my head back, laugh at the moon, but I did nothing of the sort, for with each step of our return from the wilderness, I was also afraid, deeply frightened that she would once again oscillate from happiness to despair, that this time she would not ever swing back to the light again. And I was afraid, as well, of the not-forgotten vision of her bloody face and what that vision might portend. This was a mad brew. of conflicting emotions and not easily kept below boil, especially not for a seventeen-year-old boy far from home, cut off from his family, and in dire need of some affection, purpose, and stability. Fortunately Rya remained in a good mood all the way back to the door of her Airstream trailer, sparing me the dispiriting sight of a new descent into those melancholy realms and leaving me with some small measure of confidence that eventually I could persuade her to turn away forever from consideration of that suicidal swim into the uncaring embrace of the surging Florida seas. As for the vision . . . well, I would have to find a way to help her avoid the danger ahead. Unlike the past, the future could be changed. At her door we kissed. She said, "I can still feel you within me, your seed, still so hot inside me, burning. I'll take it to bed with me, curl myself around the heat of your seed, and it'll be like a watch fire through the.night, keeping the bad dreams away. No graveyards tonight, Slim. No, not tonight." Then she went in and closed the door behind her. Thanks to the goblins, who fill me with a paranoid tension when I'm awake and who disturb my sleep with nightmares, I am accustomed to insomnia. For years I have lived with little sleep, a few hours most nights, none at all on some nights, and gradually my metabolism has adjusted to the fact that my raveled sleeve of care will never be entirely mended. Tonight, again, I was wide-awake, though it was now four o'clock in the morning, but at least this time the cause of my insomnia was irrepressible joy rather than cold terror. I walked up to the midway. I followed the concourse, preoccupied with thoughts of Rya. Such a torrent of vivid images of Rya filled my mind that I would not have believed there was room for thoughts of a different kind. But in a while I realized that I had stopped walking, that my fists were clenched at my sides, that a chill had taken possession of me, that I was standing in front of Joel Tuck's Shockville, and that I was there with a purpose. I was staring at the Snap Wyatt banners strung across the front of the tent. Those portraits of the freaks were more disturbing now, in the fading moonbeams that barely limned them, than they were in the uncompromising light of day, for it was within the power of the human imagination to conjure up worse atrocities than even God could commit. While my conscious mind had been fixated on Rya, my subconscious had dragged me here for the purpose of investigating that patch of earth in the twelfth stall, from which I had received strong psychic impressions of death. Perhaps my own death. I did not want to go in there. I wanted to walk away. As I stared at-the snugged-down flaps of the tent's entrance, the desire to walk away became an urge to run. But a key to my future lay within. I had to know exactly what psychic magnet had drawn me there yesterday afternoon. To maximize my chances for survival, I had to know why death energies had radiated from the dirt floor in front of Joel Tuck's platform and why I had sensed that very plot of ground might become my own grave. I told myself that there was nothing to fear in the tent. The freaks were, not here but in their trailers, fast asleep. Even if they had still been in the tent, none of them would have harmed me. And the tent itself was not inherently dangerous or evil, just a large canvas structure, haunted (if at all) by nothing worse than the stupidity and thoughtlessness of ten thousand marks. Nevertheless, I was afraid. Afraid, I went to the securely belayed canvas flaps that closed off the entrance. At the flaps I untied one line, trembling. Trembling, I went inside.
Dean Koontz - (1985) Page 5