Pox…the drugs…God! he turned and saw his gym bag still on the bench where he’d been sitting–abandoned. A couple with three small children were already taking his place, one of the children reaching for the handles of the bag to pull it toward him for inspection.
“Ah, hey, excuse me…excuse me.” Bern almost stumbled in his haste to get back. “That’s my bag, thanks.”
“Can ya prove it?” said the boy, dragging the bag close.
“Ben!” his mother scolded, wrenching the bag from him. “Sorry.”
“No problem–thank you.” Bern accepted his bag. Man, that was close! But despite the acceleration of his heartbeat his good spirits hadn’t much faltered, and he turned back toward the Lobu with a grin.
The agate-skinned, willowy Lobu was still coyly smiling at him, but the Torgessi standing a bit behind her wasn’t–it glared, actually, making for an interesting yin and yang composition.
“Ohh–man,” Bern groaned, then spinning away to flee. He met the eyes of the mother who had given him back his gym bag. “Help–get a security guard–someone’s trying to kill me!”
“You’d better run,” said the little boy who’d found his bag.
Bern looked. Here it came. The Lobu female had ceased to exist to him; he didn’t even see her. Just the skull-visaged Torgessi, big and getting bigger. His gym bag tucked to him like a football, he took the boy’s advice.
“Look out, look out, look out!” Bern plunged through a flock of girls in their early teens. He collided with one and the both of them fell, him heavily atop her. She screamed. Her friends yelled at him. He scrambled to his feet. His partner in collision kicked upwards at him. Her heel caught him in the crotch. He gasped, stumbled away from her and fell again on hands and knees. “Ahh…God…you fish!” he choked.
“Pollinate me, you gagger skiz!” the girl screeched, rising to give him a sharp kick in the rear.
Bern reared up, swung his bag in an arc, caught the girl in the head with it. She went down. The Torgessi was there where she had been. Hands. His shirt was snagged a moment in fingers but he was hurtling through, the one on the ground screeching in a near alien language.
The beers were a stew in his belly, the fear and the kick in his groin were the added meat and vegetables, and it sloshed sickeningly inside him. He would rather fall on his knees and vomit than run, but he didn’t have that option. He wove in and out of people, his frantic eyes searching for a guard, a protector, a shelter, an escape. Ahead was a ride, beyond that a dilapidated house with people lined up at the front. Bern made for the ride, not daring to look back to see how near his pursuer was.
He vaulted the low metal railing surrounding the ride but his ankle hit the top bar and he fell, rolled. “Hey!” someone barked, but he didn’t look. On hands and knees he scrambled madly under the whirling ride, dragging his bag. The whooshing above him scattered his moussed coiffure.
Crouching low as if disembarking from a helicopter, he cleared the ride, reached the opposite fence and swung himself awkwardly over it. Still he didn’t look back. He ran at the dilapidated house. It looked fake, its deterioration up close crudely rendered, a prop for a low budget movie. He plowed into the line, climbed through it like a ladder of bodies. Bounded up onto the mock rickety porch. “Hey!” the ticket collector, a teenage girl dressed as a vampire, exclaimed. The door was closed.
“How much? How much?” he panted, now risking a look behind him. He didn’t see it. But it was around here somewhere.
“Three green tickets.”
“Hey, blaster!” someone in line yelled up at him.
“Here!” Bern slapped a ten munit bill into the girl’s hand, reached for the door.
“You have to wait until the last group is out–hey!”
Enough heys. Bern let himself into the house, slamming the door after him.
Black, but a purplish light ahead. He plunged toward it.
As he turned a corner a figure stepped out in front of him. A teenage Choom boy with black skeletal eye sockets and cheeks, but these hollows too neatly delineated. A meat cleaver half buried in his head, blood splashed across his shirt. Bern winced, pushed past him.
The walls, floor, ceiling of this narrow-halled, twisty maze were black, with occasional purple lights and signs with cryptic warnings that glowed fluorescent in the light. A room opened on his left. Green light. Papier-mâché gravestones, a skeleton in rags hanging from a gibbet. Another corner, and a yellow-lit room from a funeral parlor, folding metal chairs and flowers around a coffin on a draped table. Bern heard girls screaming somewhere in the labyrinth ahead. The lid of the coffin was flung open and a red-haired teenager sat up in the box screaming. Unnerved, Bern pressed crazily on.
A door opened. A figure leaned out, the hands grasping at him. He cried out as the fingers snagged his shirt for a moment. The face, however hideous and glowing in the purple light, was not the cattle head skull he at first thought it was. He escaped it. His skin glowed a radioactive purple against his blending black clothing, as if he were one of the denizens here.
Another open room on his right. Red light. It was an evil miniature church altar. There was a podium with an upside-down cross on its front and an open book atop it, no doubt some musty encyclopedia meant to represent a blasphemous, ancient ritual book. A pipe organ had been cleverly constructed out of crude materials and a sheeted dummy sat at it with immobile claws on the keys, recorded organ music playing over the howling wind, ghostly moans, rattling chains (and shrieking teenage girls) that had been present all along. Bern climbed over the wooden railing that was there to dissuade people from entering the exhibits, having seen no living beings around, though he kept an eye on that seated figure for movement. He ducked behind the organ.
Here he found a speaker, out of which the loud organ music issued. Not only that, but he saw that there was a trapdoor. He hauled it open. Without hesitation he took advantage of this act of providence. He pulled the hatch closed after him.
It was a sub level, just high enough to crawl through on hands and knees. Wires were taped to the walls, and here and there he saw red letters in luminous paint glowing on the walls, the one directly beside him being 4. The hatches. No doubt the ghouls and ghosts used this sub level as a means by which to pop up unexpectedly from exhibit to exhibit. Also, ahead, tiny green and red lights glowed, obviously from some machine either having to do with the sounds or lights. Though much of the sub level stretched off into inky uncertain depths, Bern felt that he was currently alone down here. Nevertheless, he wanted to find an area in which to hide where the ghosts wouldn’t see him, where he could lie and rest, wait for the carnival to close…the Torgessi to leave.
There were support beams, but they weren’t enough to shelter him. He crawled on, now sure he was safe from the real monster but afraid to be expelled by the teenage phantoms who had made this haunted house out of the shell provided them. Bern chanced across signs of previous activity down here: buckets of fluorescent paint, a rotting pumpkin, a girl’s white gym sock. Here and there a little purple light bled down from cracks above, but it was into greater darkness that Bern decided to head.
He was rewarded. Against a far wall he found that some of the boards were just propped on the other side, not nailed in place. Taking the chance that this might lead him outside, or directly into the headquarters of the ghosts, he pushed the boards away. Blackness. He squeezed through and replaced the boards gropingly. There. Let it find him here! He didn’t know if a Torgessi’s sense of smell was sharp, but outside of that and telepathic ability, both of which he doubted they possessed, it could hardly track him down now! Just a couple more hours at the most, and the place would start shutting down, and he’d have beaten that blasting lizard and he would kiss his shoes and buy two more pairs if he ever got the chance, just to spite it.
Bern found he could stand here, and did. It was a space between inner and outer wall. Moving along a bit, he saw some outside light ahead near the floor, coming through a cr
ack. Loud music, carnival sounds also seeped in, drowning out the banshee moans from inside. Bern edged closer to the light. Now the area he was in opened up according to the maze scheme of the inner network of haunted rooms, and Bern was grateful for a space in which to stretch out, to actually lie down while his nerves and stomach, a clamoring carnival inside him, wound down...the departing crowds of adrenaline filing out of his veins.
But it soon became apparent that in this open, dimly lit room between the walls he was not alone.
They had drawn up against the walls, had been listening to him approach and enter their dwelling. Their emaciated, cadaverous naked bodies naturally glowed a faint fungoid blue. Some had reared up flat against the wall on two legs, most were on four. They looked like starved dogs. The ghosts of starved dogs. Their waiting eyes glinted.
Though he wouldn’t be able to share the information, Bern Glandston had chanced upon the nest of the ghastly canine scavengers called snipes, the existence of which Del and others had speculated on. He stood paralyzed with the import of this information. His bag full of gold-dust was of no bargaining value here, and was hardly a weapon...but he swung it anyway as the first ghost sprang.
Had he had distant sight of them when he emerged from the building, Hector might very well have pursued the Bedbugs himself, but he didn’t. Even so, for a few moments as he jogged for the nearest telephone he could think of, the one on the outside wall of the lavatory shed, he was torn between calling the police and then the government-operated headquarters of the Theta research group, or seeking out the floating giant leg personally. The plasma bullets in his gun were much more corrosive than those legally available to the public, but would they work? And even then, it had at least two hundred and forty-two more such limbs. Instead of withdrawing, what if–enraged–it came through more quickly? For two years it had been slowly inching into this dimension, but if it were to come through tonight as the tormented man back there had warned, then it must be capable of more rapid locomotion. These questions and considerations were what kept him on his course for the telephone.
Panting, he found it unoccupied, and tapped out the three digit emergency code for the police. The vid plate remained a mad blizzard of colored static, like a window into a horrid other dimension. An emotionless voice, perhaps a robot’s, responded, “Paxton Police Precinct 54–can we help you?” The phone had put him through naturally to the nearest station.
“I’m at the Paxton Fair…I need help immediately…something terrible is happening…”
“Have you contacted the security forces at the fair, sir?”
“No, I haven’t…I will do that, but…”
“I suggest that you first contact the fair’s security forces, sir, and see if…”
The blow to the back of his head prevented him from spinning to face whatever it was he had sensed floating up behind him. The force drove his forehead against the vid plate. He grunted. His collar was seized, and his arms. All three of them had their tentacles on him.
He was dragged quickly backwards around to the rear of the lavatory shed, and two twelve-year-old boys there smoking a joint bolted. Hector was spun and slammed up against the wall to face his attackers.
The leader’s name was Saturnino Azusa–to his friends, Saturn Boy. The ones who had pinned his arms were Angel Cajones and Jesus DeJesus. The other two boys present were Manuel Santos and Miquel Santiesteban. It wasn’t their faces that Hector recognized, so much, but their white leather jackets, the girls’ panties hanging down their chests like ties. Crucifixes, religious pins were affixed to their lapels. Saturn Boy was the one, he began to realize, that he had prevented from assaulting that alien couple. Then he had held a knife. Now it was a small silvery revolver the boy pointed at his face while Angel and Jesus held him tight.
“Why were you calling the police, Officer Bato, when you said that you are the police? Hmm?”
“Look…please…we’re all in terrible dan– “
The kick to his genitals made him jack-knife as far as his secured arms would allow. In coming down, his forehead cracked against the barrel sight of Saturn Boy’s pistol. Saturn Boy tucked the gun in his rear waistband and reached into Hector’s jacket.
“Yeah...here is that beautiful gun of yours, amigo. I like this–want to trade? What? I can just have it? Hey, man, many thanks!”
The gang’s girlfriends, all dyed blondes (but for one dark Hispanic girl) between eleven and fourteen, giggled and tittered.
“Look at this beauty, huh?” Saturn Boy weighed the weapon in his hand, then dug some more into Hector’s pockets, coming up with his wallet. He took his remaining money. “I don’t see no badge, officer.” Saturn Boy flicked the wallet away, held something under Hector’s nose. “Hey, what is this, man? Your birth control pills?”
The others laughed. Struggling not to vomit, through the colored blizzard of his mind’s static Hector recognized one of his six pill dispensers. Oh no–God no. “Don’t,” he wheezed.
Saturn Boy pocketed it, dug some more. “Dung–look at this, huh? You stinking old junkie.” One dispenser after another was discovered like Easter eggs. The others hooted, whistled. One by one Saturn Boy transferred them to his own pockets.
“Please, they’re no good to you…they’re just anti-sleep drugs.”
“I don’t care what they are, amigo–I’ll find some use for them, right?”
“Please…don’t. Look, I’m a Latino like you…”
Saturn Boy laughed uproariously. “Yeah? So what the blast do I care, man? Anyway, you don’t look Hisp to me, man…you look like a blasting Anglo pretending to be a Hisp. You know?”
“Come on, everybody is in fucking danger, man!”
“You’re the one in danger, lily-man.” And Saturn Boy kicked Hector in the stomach with a great deal of force. He followed that up with a swing of his new gun, its barrel gashing the top of Hector’s head. Hector vomited and his arms were released. On hands and knees. Other feet swung up into his mid-section now. A foot swung up into his face. He heard the cartilage in his nose crunch. He rolled onto one side, curled fetus-like.
“Please…please,” he sobbed, as the kicks went on. He saw that one of the kickers above him was a grinning blonde girl. She actually jumped up and down on his ankles now, laughing. A black gulf was opening to him like the jaws of some immense hideous creature, yawning to swallow him. Panic was a landed eel flopping helplessly inside him but muffled through layer after layer of cotton. “Please…don’t kill me!” The black maw. The laughing girl. The glinting crucifix pins, mockingly winking. The Gatherers…
“Please don’t kill me!” he moaned hopelessly one last time before the vast black maw closed around him.
“I’m seeing some of the encephalic abnormalities associated with certain types of clairvoyants.” The chief of the carnival’s medical unit was a Choom woman named Regina Brass, youngish and small and thin and sharp. A walking, talking scalpel. Before her and Del Kahn and Dingo Rubydawn lay the naked corpse of Sneezy Tightrope, his head split as if from a great fall. His mouth was open, lids half closed over somewhat crossed eyes; he looked like a cat struck by a car. Mitch, so fond of touring Del through the morgue like a museum curator presenting his recent acquisitions, would have been very interested in this particular specimen but hadn’t returned. And Sophi knew of this development but was still occupied with Mrs. Horowitz, her lawyer, and now people connected with Heather Buffatoni, Bonnie Gross and Moussa Habash. No one had been discovered to weep over Fen Colon or Wes Sundry. Luckily Sophi’s lawyer Max Schenkel was here now.
A blue light passed over Sneezy’s pot-bellied, unevenly tanned body, according to Regina’s directions. Monitor screens presented findings in a series of codes easily familiar to her but as incomprehensible as hieroglyphics to Del, who watched them intently nonetheless. “So how’d it happen?”
“I’m not sure yet. It’s very strange. It certainly doesn’t seem to be the result of a tumor or growth…I can’t trace a somatic
origin.”
“Well it sure wasn’t psychosomatic,” said Dingo.
“Drugs?” offered Del. “A bad mixture? I can assure you, this guy was into drugs.”
“Oh, I can see that.” Brass touched key pads. New columns of cryptic characters. “I can see iodine, gold-dust, purple vortex, red shockers, buttons, beans, kaleidoscopes, even a little fish…from a longer while back. I could pretty well tell you how much of what he’s taken over the past month, and a fair idea of his drug behavior over the past year, and even throughout his life, based on the condition of his organs and brain. What’s left of that.”
“Kaleidoscopes and red shockers,” said Del, looking up at Dingo.
“Common drugs,” Dingo warned him, but one could see the interest in the Choom’s eyes as well. “Has he taken any shockers or kaleidoscopes tonight, Gina?”
“Ahh.” Dancing fingers, one-handed. “I’d say yes to a few shockers…nnno to kaleidoscopes. Not today. But not distant.”
“Could he have been murdered?” Del asked.
“Anything’s possible. Lots of ways to murder people. I’ve never seen this way before, though, I’d say.”
The old woman who had called for an ambulance had given a description of a man she saw kneeling by Sneezy. The man mustn’t be a suspect, since he had asked her to call for the ambulance, but he might know something. Vague description, though–could have been anybody. What Dingo had, he had passed on to the KeeZees, in case they chanced across a person who matched the information. Dark-haired Earther, mustache, black plastic jacket.
Everybody Scream! Page 28