by Al
But he studied the trees.
Suddenly (as in the manner of dreams) he held a spyglass in one hand. He peered through it, and the tops of the trees looked close enough to touch. While still looking through the glass he reached down and did touch the tops of trees, feeling the light brush of healthy leaves vaguely redolent of moisture against his fingers.
And then something rose large as a whale into his vision, and he felt the flat, hard touch of an artificial structure slide under his hand.
When he stood up gasping, and threw the spyglass away, the thing had already disappeared behind him. When he looked back anxiously he saw nothing but the receding tops of trees waving their leaves at him, going away—
“Jesus!”
Schneider opened his eyes. For a moment he was still in the dream, which he needed no interpretation for: he could smell the rushing high air from the gondola, and the faint hot breath of the balloon overhead; he moved his arms and for the briefest second thought they were ridged in feathers.
“Jesus,” he gasped, fully awake now, and jumped out of bed and began to dress quickly, strapping on his shoulder holster.
9
“That’s right: Carlton. C-A-R-L-T-O-N,” Grant said. The voice on the other end of the line said some words, and then Grant answered: “No, the panel truck was empty, but I still think he’s the guy who took the kids. Call it a gut feeling.” More words from the other end, and then Grant once more: “That’s right, he was gone when I went back into the tent.”
The phone receiver pressed tight to his ear, Grant tried to shake another cigarette out of the pack but found it was empty. Grunting in displeasure, he crumpled the pack with his free hand and fumbled in his raincoat for another. He coughed. His hand found the pint bottle but moved impatiently past it. Amongst loose change he located the new pack, and grunted again, this time in pleasure, as he drew it out and expertly opened it, tapping a butt out and lighting it.
While he waited on the phone he turned to regard deputy sheriff Charley Fredricks, who he had grabbed from his post at the entrance to the music tent in Ranier Park and brought to the station with him. The kid was bright and willing, and hadn’t opened his mouth about this not being sheriff’s business. Charley was young, but he had seen his own share of weird shit in Orangefield.
Grant said to him, “Anything on who rented that panel truck?”
A second receiver pressed to his own ear, Charley made a face. “On hold.”
“Dammit. You tell them this is an emergency?”
Charley looked hurt, then gave a sour grin. “Guess that’s why they didn’t just hang up.”
Grant scowled, then pressed his receiver tighter to his ear. “Yes? You sure?” There was a pause. “Well, thanks, Warden.”
He hung up the phone and traded puzzled looks with Charley Fredericks, who was still on hold.
“Jerry Carlton is safe in his cell at Madison State Prison, reading an old copy of National Geographic as we speak,” Grant said.
“Maybe an accomplice?” Charley asked, trying to be helpful. “Someone he worked with who didn’t get caught?”
“Carlton killed five boys, all on his own. He was a loner.” He gave a heavy sigh. “I’ve got to talk to Len Schneider, find out if there was someone else…”
Charley nodded absently, giving sudden interest to his own phone. Grant suspended his own punch-dialing expectantly.
Charley said, “Shit,” and looked at Grant. “They just changed the music, is all.”
Grant shook his head and jabbed in Schneider’s number.
It rang until the answering machine took it.
“Isn’t Schneider off tonight?” Grant said to no one in particular.
Charley Fredericks shrugged, then said, “Yes?” into his receiver and began to nod. His pencil went to work on his notepad.
Behind Bill Grant the voice of Chip Prohman, the night sergeant, fat and laconic and nearly useless, chimed in. “You looking for Schneider? He called in a little while ago. I just sent two black and whites out after him. He sounded out of his head—claimed those two kidnapped kids were out in the woods after all.”
Grant was about to answer when Charley Fredericks hung up and waved his notepad at him. Grant squinted forward to read what it said.
“Holy God.” Grant turned viciously on Prohman and spat: “Where the hell is Schneider?”
The sergeant answered, “Out in the woods—”
“Where?”
Prohman was almost yawning. “Same spot he dug all those holes. You ask me, he’s just plain out of his gourd—”
Grant was already half out the door, with Charley Fredericks, perplexed, studying the name on his notepad as if it was an ancient rune telling him nothing, behind him.
10
Grant could see the roof flashers of the cruisers ahead of him. He felt as if he was in a dream. Charley Fredericks had talked all the tire-screaming way out, but Grant felt as if he was alone in the car.
It all came down to this.
To this: the most horrible thing of all, at least in this world.
For a tiny moment he almost wished it was the other business, weird shit, that he was dealing with.
With a shiver, he let that thought go.
His only hope was that he wasn’t too late.
The car bumped in and out of two successive dirt ruts, and he slammed the brakes behind the first of the lined-up patrol cars.
There wasn’t a cop in sight—but flashlight beams danced in the woods off to the left.
His gun was already out of its holster as he pushed himself out of the car.
“Hey, Bill!” Charley Fredericks shouted behind him, unheard.
Grant pushed through the brush as if it wasn’t there; dried vines and branches slapped at his arms and across his face.
Behind him, Charley, his own flashlight on, made his way carefully along the path into the woods.
Grant heard voices now, one of them loud and irrational:
“Hold those lights on the front of it, dammit!”
Grant broke into the clearing—into a tableau from a nightmare.
Like a nightmare, there was a strangely ethereal beauty to it. Three uniformed police officers stood stock still, holding their flashlight beams on a single spot up in the trees. The gnarled mass of denuded branches there at first showed nothing to the eye, they were so tangled and uniform—and then the eye resolved a section of them pinpointed by the triple beams into a manmade opening, a brown door set neatly into the branches.
In the doorway, frozen in place and looking confused and lost, staring straight into the lights pinning him like a butterfly, was the orange-and-white motley clown Grant had seen in the tent at Ranier Park. His pom-pomed cap was gone, showing a thinning head of light-colored hair; there were rips in his orange and white motley costume and his makeup was smeared, pulling his smile into a high, grotesque grin on one side. The blacking around his eyes, which had been used to line his lashes, had run together.
On the ground in front of the three police officers, Len Schneider, looking disheveled himself, a pajama top peeking between his shirt and pants, stood in a two handed firing position, his eye sighting down the barrel of his .38 police special trained tightly on the figure in the doorway.
Grant, holding his own revolver at his side, but in a tight grip, said, in as reasonable a voice as he could, “Len, put your gun down. It’s all right. He’s Ted Marigold’s father, Lawrence Marigold.”
There were tears streaming down Schneider’s face, but his hands were rock steady on his revolver. “He’s Jerry Carlton!” he screamed. “And this time I got here in time!”
Grant kept his voice level, but slowly brought his handgun up. “Jerry Carlton is in Madison State Prison, Len. I talked to the warden there twenty minutes ago. The man you’re aiming at is Lawrence Marigold, the father of the last kid Carlton killed. Ted’s father. Remember him, Len? The genius biotech engineer? How he went insane after his son was murdered? He escaped f
rom his institution. You couldn’t save Ted, but you can save Ted’s father. Just lower your gun.”
Schneider ignored Grant. “I told you!” he screeched at the figure in the doorway. “Send them down now!”
The clown turned away for a moment, and then a long rope ladder rolled out of the doorway like a red carpet, its end swinging to rest just inches from the ground. The clown stepped aside, and Jody Wendt appeared in the doorway and carefully descended the ladder.
“Jesus,” Charley Fredericks, who had stopped beside Grant and was aiming his own flashlight at the opening, said.
“Now the other one!” Schneider screamed.
The clown moved aside and said something that sounded like a sob. “Ted.”
There was darkness in the doorway and then something else, not a boy but boy-sized, with impossibly thin, bright metal limbs and a head made of a pumpkin, climbed out and began to descend the ladder with practiced ease. Little puffs of steam issued from the cutout holes in its face as it came down, gazing mechanically back and forth.
Charley gasped and said: “Je-sus!”
Grant’s own gun-hand began to tremble, but he steadied it with the realization that what he was looking at was something real, something that had been made by a man.
The Pumpkin Boy stood at the bottom of the tree, next to Jody Wendt. He continued to stare back and forth, with a look almost of fright on his cartoon face. His gaze finally settled on Jody. “I’m ssssssscared…” he said in a horribly distorted, faraway voice.
“Where’s the other boy! Where’s Scotty Daniels!” Len Schneider screamed, his attention still riveted on the doorway in the trees.
“I—” the clown said confusedly, his voice swallowed by the night.
Then he turned back into the doorway and disappeared.
Grant took the opportunity to say, “Len, please listen—”
“Shut up! Shut the hell up!” Schneider wheeled on him for a moment with the gun, his eyes wild. Grant could see the muscles standing out like taut cables in his neck. “If you shoot me in the leg, Grant, to try to stop me, I’ll blow the bastard’s head off!”
There was movement in the tree-house doorway and with an almost animal growl Schneider swung his aim back that way.
“Here…” the clown said.
Charley Fredericks gave a shout of horror: there in the doorway was the body of a young boy, trussed upside-down and suspended from some sort of wheeled rack. On his head was a silver cap with a thick arm of wires leading from it.
“Oh, God, what did he do to that poor kid…” Charley Fredericks said, reaching for his own revolver.
Even Grant hesitated, starting to move the aim of his gun from Len Schneider to the doorway of the tree-house. “Son of a—”
The boy moved. He twitched in his bonds, looking like Houdini trying to make an escape.
“Let him go, Carlton! Now!”
Lawrence Marigold made a confused motion, and then his shoulders sagged. He looked down at the pumpkin-headed robot at the bottom of the rope ladder, who turned his face up to regard him.
Marigold sobbed out, “Do you remember…what I used to say to you when you were a baby, Ted? When it was just you and me and mommy, and I stopped at the store after work and bought you the candy you loved? Do you remember what I always said after you squealed and held your hands out, laughing, when I gave you your candy? Do you remember what I used to say? Uncle Lollipop loves you!”
Still weeping, he disappeared into the opening, then reappeared, reached down and did something to the bundle of wires on the boy’s metal skullcap.
And then something happened which caused even Len Schneider to open his mouth in wonder—
The steam issuing from the Pumpkin Boy’s facial cutouts increased in intensity, until an orange fog engulfed its head. A thin trail of something that resembled fire and smelled like electricity curled out of the cloud, rose up the bole of the tree and snaked into the tree-house opening.
Two flashes of tepid lightning lit up the doorway. Grant could see the edge of another poster inside the hut like the one the clown had mounted in the tent in Ranier Park.
The boy suspended from the rack began to writhe and cry out in pain.
On the ground, the Pumpkin Boy stood mute.
Len Schneider again had his .38 trained on the tree-house doorway.
“Cut him down! Now!”
In another few moments the boy was loose and rubbing his hands and legs.
Lawrence Marigold, his face a nightmare of streaked makeup and tears, stood dumbly as Scotty Daniels climbed slowly down the ladder.
“Get the kids out of here, Charley,” Grant said.
Fredericks nodded. When Scotty reached the ground he herded the two young boys, Jody Wendt limping slightly, away from the Pumpkin Boy and down the path to the cars.
Grant thought, At least they won’t see any of this.
Out loud he said: “Len, you’ve got to put the gun down right now. It’s all over. You did a great job.”
“I won’t make any mistakes this time, Carlton!” Schneider screamed, ignoring him.
“I just borrowed them!” Lawrence Marigold said, throwing his arms out in supplication. “I thought you would let me!”
Grant saw Schneider straighten his aim. “Not this time, Carlton!”
Oh, God, Grant thought, his own finger tightening on the trigger of his police special. In the next split second he thought, Goddammit, Len, don’t make me do it—
Two shots that sounded like the echo of one rang out.
Two bodies crumpled.
Shit!
Grant saw that, by the length of the time he had allowed himself to think, he had been too late to save Lawrence Marigold.
Len Schneider was down, unmoving, and in the doorway of the tree hut Marigold collapsed with a huffing grunt. He sat tilted on the sill of the tree hut for a moment, then fell forward.
He hit the ground a moment later, groaned once and was silent.
Grant walked over and knelt down to study his face.
It had the same lost, mad look on it that it must have held for many months and years, since the night his boy had been taken.
“I’m so sorry,” Grant said.
“Ted…” the clown whispered, staring past Grant at nothing, and then was silent forever.
Grant stood up. Two of the uniforms were working on Len Schneider, but Grant knew it was a waste of time. He hadn’t missed.
He was good at his job.
Hands shaking, he lit a cigarette, coughed, and thought about the bottle he would have to open later.
Another nightmare for the menagerie.
And Jerry Carlton sat snug and warm, reading a magazine in his cell at Madison State Prison.
Idly, Grant wondered if the Warden would let him visit with Carlton, for just those three minutes Len Schneider had so badly wanted.
~ * ~
It wasn’t until much later that Bill Grant discovered that the Pumpkin Boy was missing.
11
The Pumpkin Days Festival came and went.
Halloween came and went.
Newspaper headlines came and went.
Years came and went.
But:
Some nights of some years, out in the fields behind the house where Jody Wendt used to live in Orangefield, when the moon was just rising like a huge sickly white lantern, and the ground was covered with fattening pumpkins, they said you could see something outlined against it in black, like a hand puppet silhouette against a wall:
Something that looked like a pumpkin.
Something that looked like a boy.
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