Far below, lights blinked out along the midway. Threading her fingers through the safety cage, she leaned forward. The cab tilted, giving us a better view of the carnival grounds.
“Guess travelling doesn’t impress you boys. You’ve probably been most everywhere. It must be exciting, seeing so many different places.”
“Not really,” Larry said. “The midway looks the same everywhere.”
I agreed. “We get tired of the carnival just like you get tired of Fiddler. To us, the Castle of Horrors is that church you’re sick of going to every Sunday, and the Death Car is that old clunker you’re tired of driving.”
“You boys drive the Death Car?” She gasped, missing my point entirely.
Larry clapped his hands. “Do we drive the D.C.? Honey, we’ve turned that baby’s odometer. When our daddy dies we’ll be the sole owners of that miserable Nash.”
Suddenly she was as interested as the most persistent gawker. “But isn’t it haunted? Aren’t the seat covers made of human skin, and isn’t it painted with blood, and— ”
The cab rocked with Larry’s laughter.
She straightened indignantly. “Well, that’s what people say.” Her voice sounded small and wounded.
I explained that the wild stories about Hank Caul’s car increased our business. I told her what a boring bucket of bolts the Nash had been when Pa bought it at public auction, how we’d added the sand-colored upholstery and painted the body red, and how we’d started the stories about the car being haunted, and somehow alive. “Really, Hank Caul was just a sick little guy who had a thing about hunting knives,” I said. “His car was just as boring as he was. Nobody’s going to pay six bits to hear that, though, so we had to help things along. Luckily, Pa and I are born storytellers.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she began, “but you just don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s pure fact that Hank Caul skinned his daddy’s corpse. And it’s a fact that his mama was a witch, and slept with her own son, and made Hank wear his daddy’s skin when they did it. That’s why he killed all those people. Even my daddy says it’s true.”
Larry smirked. “The undertaker believes in witches?”
“And a lot more than that,” she said. “Daddy says that people still see Hank Caul’s ghost out on the back roads looking for his skin.”
“His what?”
“His skin!” She sighed. “Don’t you two know anything? Hank Caul skinned himself alive before cuttin’ his own throat! It’s a well-known fact! Why just the other day I heard my daddy talking about it!”
Larry tickled her belly. “I’m glad Hank didn’t get your pretty skin.”
Color rose in her cheeks. Her fingers drifted over Larry’s chest. She’d heard enough, said enough. She wasn’t here for any of that.
We got back to what she was here for.
We rocked back and forth, listening to the rusty complaints of the cab. I noticed tiny scratches on her legs. Red skin. Razor burn. She’d been nervous or overeager about a big night out on the town. She wasn’t beautiful and she wasn’t young. I wondered how long she’d been waiting. In a place like Fiddler, she’d have to be very careful. She couldn’t do it with just anyone, not if she wanted to keep her daddy happy.
I expect that I’d nearly ruined things for her. She didn’t want to know about the carnival—the gawkers never do. No, she wanted to believe the lies, wanted to lay two tough roustabouts who’d fucked with the local big shots.
Larry nuzzled her furry shoulder, making love to a coat, not even realizing what he was doing. The way he was going at it, I figured the least he could do was pay her six bits. Disgust churned in my belly, and then she was kissing me. She put a finger to my lips and promised that good things come to those who wait.
I stared through the safety cage, up at the stars, promising myself that I wouldn’t think anymore. I’d be like her, like Larry. Like all the others who believed in stories. I’d believe too, and then she’d be a lady in mink, an angel out of nowhere . . .
After awhile she undid my belt. Her lips closed around me. Then I heard Pa laugh. I looked through the mesh of the safety cage and saw him exchange handshakes with two men in front of the Death Car tent. One of the men—a skinny guy wearing a black suit—held Fort Knox. Pa held a black suitcase crisscrossed with white leather straps.
Then the cab rocked, and the stars came into full view, and I closed my eyes and squeezed a handful of mink.
The trailer door banged open. Pa came down the narrow hallway, the black suitcase in his hand bumping against the pine wallboard. I pulled a blanket over my head and pretended to snore.
Pa pulled back the blanket. “Hey, Sleepin’ Beauties, I got somethin’ to show— ”
I squinted up at him. His good eye darted toward the empty bathroom, then back to me.
“Where’s your brother?”
A chill ran over me, and not because I was missing the blanket. The other half of the bed was indeed empty. I thought back to The Hammer and the woman, half remembering Bud Ezell getting us down long after the night air had turned cold. Then an argument—Larry volunteering to take the mink lady for a ride in the Death Car, me saying she could get home on her own. Had he whispered something about wanting more? I couldn’t recall.
“Hey, I asked you a question,” Pa said.
“I don’t know. He could be just about anywhere, I guess.”
For once, Pa didn’t seem to mind a less-than-straightforward answer. “We’ll just have to celebrate twice, then,” he said, setting the suitcase on the bed. “I got somethin’ here that’ll sure enough put us back in business.”
I stretched. “Unless you’ve got Hank Caul’s bones in there, I don’t think— ”
Pa’s laughter cut me off. “Better’n that. Last night I bought the motherfucker’s skin.”
A self-satisfied grin spread across the old man’s face. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Pa’s grin, more than the thought of the contents of the suitcase, made my skin crawl.
Pa unfastened the scuffed leather straps that criss-crossed the suitcase, keyed the lock, and opened it. I saw a hand, fleshy-brown and twisted like an old leather work-glove, and then a foot. A face, sagging and empty, scarred. A neck dotted with a silver bolt.
Pa gasped. “Goddamn! This ain’t what they showed me last night. I swear it ain’t!”
I slipped the Frankenstein mask over my fingers and let it rest there. I remembered the mink lady’s lips, Pa and the men standing below The Hammer. I remembered closing my eyes.
“Pa, how much did you pay them? Where’s Fort Knox?”
Tears welled in the old man’s eyes. “They got the whole damn stake!”
The trailer door banged open again. A werewolf shouldered down the hallway.
“Larry, where the hell have you been?” Pa asked.
The werewolf pulled off his mask. Bud Ezell stood before us, sweaty and panting. “It’s only me, Mr McSwain. I ran all the way over here . . .”
“What is it, boy? Spit it out!”
“The Death Car,” he said. “It’s gone!”
I drove into Fiddler behind the wheel of Bud’s piece-of-shit truck, just another farmhand passing through. Not that anyone would have noticed me even if I’d been driving the Death Car and wearing Hank Caul’s skin—the valley fog that swam in the streets was that thick.
I passed the mortuary, a brick building cloaked in fog, then turned down a narrow access road that led to a ranch-style house hidden behind it. A black Cadillac was parked in a driveway lined with freshly planted bare-root roses, now little more than naked stems jutting from the dark soil like so many tiny bones. There was no sign of the Death Car.
Damn. This wasn’t going to be easy. Larry wasn’t inside sleeping it off, and I was sure that I’d have seen him if he’d been heading back to the carnival. Even in the fog, I wouldn’t have missed the Death Car.
Leave it to Larry to put what remained of our business in danger. I didn’t know which I should look for firs
t, my brother or the Death Car.
Bud’s truck coughed and complained as I down-shifted and pulled to the shoulder. Family first, I told myself, repeating another of Pa’s favourite sayings. First Larry, then the car. And then we’d figure out what to do about Fort Knox.
I climbed out, stretched, and took a quick look around. No neighboring houses, and no one out for a morning stroll. I sauntered up the driveway, pausing only to touch the Caddy’s hood. It was cold, still beaded with moisture. The Caddy hadn’t been moved today.
No one answered my knock. A spade was planted nearby in the flower bed—apparently the house’s owner hadn’t considered the black chuckles such an obvious symbol might elicit from people who knew his profession. Hiding in the porch shadows, I tromped the flimsy blade flat. Then I angled the tool against the front door molding and set to work.
The house was empty. No people, not much stuff. The first bedroom I came across belonged to a man who favored black suits and white shirts. A yellow notebook lay open on his mahogany desk, page after page filled with scribbles analyzing the wholesale prices of silk and velvet, charts that recorded seasonal flower prices, and notes about the best way to close a sale—the usual things you might expect a businessman to fret over.
The second bedroom—the master bedroom—belonged to a woman.
No one had slept in the mink lady’s bed. I opened her closet. Satin dresses, lacy nightgowns, but no mink coat.
Silk blouses tickled my hand as I reached deeper, and then my fingers brushed something rough and heavy—a green coat with red leather sleeves. A Greek soldier, sword in hand, sneered at me from the back of the coat. Above him, large furry letters spelled FIDDLER SPARTANS.
I slipped the coat off its hanger. A name was stitched over the breast.
PERRY.
I stared down at the corpse. A farm woman, her skin wrinkled, her hands soft with powder, as if she’d been making biscuits when she keeled over and no one had bothered to dust the flour off her hard, plump fingers.
He approached me quietly, but not so quietly that I didn’t hear his expensive Italian shoes whispering over the wool carpet. He stopped at arms length, just outside my field of vision, no doubt trying to decide why a mourner had appeared in work clothes and muddy boots.
I turned quickly and caught him shaking his head over the soiled carpet. His jaw dropped a bit in surprise—mine did too, in recognition—but he caught himself and smiled benignly, the way undertakers do.
“It’s a shame,” I said, remembering The Hammer and the skinny, black-suited man I’d seen holding Fort Knox.
“Yes,” he agreed. “She was a fine woman.”
He wiped away a tear.
God, I stared at that tear like a gawker with a hardon for the Death Car. The power to do that on cue. Amazing. Unnatural. Like slicing a monster mask and getting blood. Suddenly, a jolt of fear shot through my legs.
Maybe he knew. Of course he did. He’d have to know. After all, funerals were designed for gawkers, and to be in the funeral business you’d have to understand how their minds worked. You’d almost have to know, or else you couldn’t make them happy.
The undertaker smeared the tear across his cheek. He blinked, and a drop of milky discharge oozed at the corner of his left eye. The bottom lid hung loose, away from the eyeball, and looking down at him I saw the rosy-pink rim of his inner flesh. I trembled with excitement, staring at tiny veins rimmed with old, rubbery flesh; but then he daubed his swollen eyelid with a soiled handkerchief and disappointment washed over me.
“Just an infection,” he said. “Nothing to worry about . . . nothing contagious.” And then, “Did you know Mrs Fleming? Are you a relative?”
“Where is your daughter?”
“Why, she’s . . . I mean, she’s not here. Do you know . . . my daughter?”
I grinned Larry’s grin; it was as if the old bastard couldn’t remember her name either. I grabbed his tie and pulled him close, staring into his red, basset-hound eye. “I fucked your daughter last night. At the carnival. Up on the Ferris Wheel. And I saw some things going on down below.”
A look of recognition bloomed on the undertaker’s face as he detected something of Pa in mine. “It wasn’t my idea. Willie—Sheriff Martin—he has the money. He said it was money made from Fiddler’s grief, from us . . .”
I didn’t want him to get started on excuses. I shook him and asked, “Where’s Hank Caul’s skin?”
“There isn’t any such thing. I mean, of course there is but it’s buried, it’s on his corpse up in Fiddler cemetery in an unmarked grave. The business about his skin has been blown out of proportion over the years, just like all the other stories about Hank. It’s an old wives’ tale, like the stories about bloody footprints and hitchhiking ghosts.” He wiped at his infected eye. “And Willie said that if we could get your father to believe a story like that . . . Look, if you don’t hurt me I’ll pay you what I can. I’m quite well-fixed for cash.”
I pictured Pa salivating over a shadowy heap of rubber, Pa exhaling like a stunned gawker . . .
I slapped the undertaker, hard.
A tear spilled from his healthy eye. “God, you don’t have my daughter, do you? I mean, you haven’t hurt her, have you?”
I wiped his tear away, rubbed it into my thumb. I couldn’t help asking. I had to know. “Did you know that your daughter fucks little boys?”
“Wait, now, there’s no call— ”
I slapped him again; his bad eye oozed. “Did you know that your daughter fucks Perry Martin?”
Whatever steel was left in the old man boiled up. “You lying sonofabitch. My daughter wouldn’t touch that little bastard.”
He’d gone all white. He wasn’t lying. He knew nothing about his daughter and Perry Martin. And he knew nothing about his daughter’s whereabouts. That, along with the simple fact that he hadn’t recognized me immediately, meant that he knew nothing about my twin brother, either.
“Your daughter is a very careful girl,” I said. “I expect that there’s a lot you don’t know about her. But I’m not lying when I tell you that she’s Perry Martin’s tool.” I grinned. “You should understand that. I believe you have the same relationship with Perry’s father.”
His head dropped. He didn’t even squirm.
I took hold of the undertaker’s drooping eyelid. It felt slick, like oily rubber, the way a monster mask feels when it’s brand-spanking-new.
“Old man,” I said, “you’ve disappointed me.”
And then I pulled.
I found the mink lady’s address book in her bedroom, right next to a cute little princess phone. Both the phone and the address book were pink. There wasn’t a listing for an Ellie, but there was an Ellen Baker. I dialed her number, knowing that she was the weakest link.
She answered on the fifth ring, laughing a laugh that I remembered. “This better be good,” she said. “I’m washing my hair.”
I wanted to ask her if she was getting the blood out, but I resisted the temptation. “Ellie, are you alone?”
“Of course I am, Perry. You know that Mom and Dad are— ”
“Look out at the fog, Ellie. What do you see in the fog?”
“Hey, you’re not Perry— ”
“Hank Caul’s out in the fog, Ellie.”
Silence.
“Hank is looking for you. He wants your skin.”
A pause. She was fighting the gawker inside her. “You’re the guy from the carnival, aren’t you?”
“Don’t say that. Don’t even remember that you were at the carnival. That’s my advice, Ellie.”
The telephone hummed. The gawker was taking hold.
“Ellie, I think that I can stop Hank. Keep him away from you. See, he’s inside me. I guess I spent too much time driving his car. God, it’s so hard to explain . . .”
I paused. Now that was a good story, and it had come bubbling out of nowhere. I let it sink in.
“That damned car,” she whispered, giving in so easily.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Ellie, but Hank does. Maybe if you help me I can make him leave you alone.”
“I don’t want to be hurt! Don’t let him— ”
“I can’t promise anything, Ellie . . . but I’ll try. I really will.”
“They’re up at Hank Caul’s place. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? They’re going to bury your brother in Caul’s old orange grove. After what your brother did to him Perry got so crazy. And then when he told her about it . . . Mister, believe me, I didn’t have anything to do with it. I didn’t even want to watch. But Perry made me, and Mel— ”
I hung up before she could finish saying the mink lady’s name.
Melody. Melissa. Melinda. Melanie.
Nothing special there.
The Mink Lady.
That was a name the gawkers would appreciate.
I threw the address book into the closet, suddenly afraid that I’d see the Mink Lady’s real name written inside.
There was no need to ruin a good story.
The suit was too tight in the shoulders, and the Caddy made nothing but wide turns. Those were my only real complaints.
Lights off, I edged the black car against the side of the weather-beaten farmhouse. I got out and circled the property, telling myself that if just one house on earth was haunted, this would be the one. But I saw no sign of Hank Caul’s ghost, heard no spectral whispers in the fog. And the only smell was the thick odor of moss and rot.
All I saw was an abandoned house. I couldn’t make the gawker’s leap of faith. I was incapable of such an act. The Death Car had taught me too much about mythology, not the kind you find in books, but the kind that’s worth six bits. Hank Caul’s house only brought Pa-thoughts surging through my brain—buy this place real cheap . . . fix it up . . . one hell of a tourist trap.
Ghosts weren’t real. Neither was fear. The cold truth was that they were things to be sold. Commodities. Only the gawkers believed otherwise.
I kicked in the back door and explored the house. It hadn’t changed much in the five years since we’d bought the Death Car at public auction. Even then, the gawkers had been frightened by ghost stories. How else could you explain the fact that no one bid on the house that day, even though the hillside location of the Caul property offered one of the best views in the county?
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