The devil says, “He was your dream of the way your lover should look, and you are your dream of the way you should look, and now look at your dreams!” And he laughed some more.
Joanie says, “So my dreams are melting. So what else is new? Listen to me! I want you to stop what is happening in Hoadley.”
“But I have nothing to do with that!” He’s still laughing, and Joanie gets mad and yells at him.
“You make it stop!”
There’s a sort of angry rustling, like fire in a dry woods, and Joanie shuts up. We was all quiet for a little.
Then the devil says, “Ill-mannered twerp, I will tolerate no more insolence from you. I have done nothing but what is expected of me. You called me here to put flesh on your dreams, and I have done what you wanted. You invited me into Hoadley, and once there I listened. All I have done is what Hoadley people said. What they wanted of me. I have fulfilled their expectations.” He snapped his fingers, the sound popped and hissed and crackled like a green log in a fire. “What makes you think I can leave just like that? People are making use of me.”
Joanie whispers, “You are hideous.”
“Me! Don’t you see? It’s all up to them, not to me.”
Down in Hoadley, the water tower teetered like a huge, stilt-legged, swollen-bellied spider at the edge of the cave-in. From somewhere down in the blackness a broken water main was spraying up a fountain as artistic as that which had once graced the immaculate lawn of the Perfect Rest Funeral Home. But that lawn and fountain were gone, along with half of that Victorian edifice. Rose Room and Peach Parlor, broken open, sent down pale, chaste statuary, lurid amid shards of chandelier. Blue Room and basement storage dropped darkly shining, blimp-shaped caskets like bombs, like overlarge Easter eggs to crack open and spill their contents against some still-unseen bottom. And from the remains of the Homer and Gladys Wildasin yard and all-too-fertile gardens, the long-dead fetuses continued to sift down. Watching them, watching the coffins fall, knowing what Easter-morning treasure might be in them, the crowd swerved from panic to a deeper desperation. Only Gigi was happy.
“I am Death!”
Staring at her, dumbfounded, Cally thought she had never seen the heartless old ever-dying woman so alive, so vital.
“I am Death, and I’ve got you all in my pocket. You all come to me in the end.” Sitting on her pale horse and looking across a small space at Pestilence, Gigi grinned the tough little grin Cally had once loved. “Right, Shirley?”
Paler than Death’s horse, her skin appaloosa-spotted with raisin-colored sarcomas, Shirley did not answer. She seemed not to have heard, not to be aware of much around her; blue-eyed and blank, she stared at the dead things falling, falling, falling into the pit. But Elspeth sucked in a sharp breath, nudged Warrior forward and fingered the hilt of her sword.
“Let Shirley go,” she told Gigi.
Grinning, the old woman said, “Why, I haven’t done anything to her. She did it to herself.”
“Let her go!”
“Why, what do you care?” Gigi curled her upper lip; grin turned to a sneer. “She was a man, remember? She lied to you.”
“You old hag.” Elspeth’s hand tightened on her sword hilt. “I don’t care what she is, I don’t care what she’s done. You know I love her.”
Shirley’s staring blue eyes widened; she turned to look at Elspeth. But Elspeth’s fierce, dark scowl was bent on Gigi.
“Let her live.” A small, tea-tan hand, the delicate hand of an artist, gripped the sword hilt. “Or shall we see if Death can die?”
Gigi threw back her iron-gray head and crowed with laughter. “You sneaking jig! Poor excuse of a War. I’ve never known you to draw that sword against anything except blackberries!”
“Wrong, Gladys.” Shirley spoke, and not to quell the altercation; her voice was weary but her eyes were shining. “When I’m in danger …”
Elspeth reached out briefly to touch her lover, then drew the sword with a long swish of metal against metal. Gigi’s grin widened; her old eyes lit as if with fire, for one is never so alive as when one is dying.…
And under Cally’s gawking person, black, tempestuous Devil rocketed suddenly out of control.
Cally felt the horse leap, felt the reins snatched from her famished hands by that leap, grabbed for mane, and only then realized that there was a crowd of people all around her and the others; the horse had noticed them before she did. Uplifted hands pulled at her clothing, her legs, trying to unseat her. The mob wanted the horses. The good citizens of Hoadley attacked each other as well as the horsewomen for the mounts that could carry them away from destruction. Something, perhaps a rock or a brick, struck Cally painfully on her thin, stooped shoulder; she ducked her head and kicked hard, not at Devil but at the people clinging to her boots. Devil was fighting like a hell-horse already. He reared—Cally gripped with hands and knees, flat against his neck. She saw bodies go down in front of his striking forehooves, saw blood, shockingly red, saw a vaguely familiar face shout something then turn pale and topple into the abyss—Wozny? The borough council president? It didn’t matter; it was war, there was blood brighter than Zephyr Zook’s fingernails. Cally saw the flash of Elspeth’s sword; Elspeth stayed close by Shirley and slashed at the people menacing them both as if she cut down briar bushes. What became of Gigi, Cally did not see or care. She and Devil had kicked themselves free, and the black horse thundered away, choosing his own path, out of Hoadley.
Cally was aware of the things they passed in flashes, unbearably acute, dazzling as the light shattering from Elspeth’s sword. A flash: the park gazebo, still with multicolored Christmas bulbs decorating its posts and eaves, still standing like an island in the midst of pit and devastation (although the pigeon-chested bronze general on horseback who had once reared near it had gone down without striking a blow); on it and around it the six-hundred-sixty-six, all those misfits of Hoadley who wore Ahira’s mark, stood stolidly waiting for her, quite safe in their expectation that she would save them. Then a span of pounding hooves, and in a flash again the place Cally remembered from another wild, runaway ride: the abandoned cemetery (never say “graveyard”) where white violets languished in the rank grass. Devil had carried her to the hill above Hoadley. From behind her and below her, rising on the updrafts of inferno, came faintly the odors and clamors of extremity. She could have looked back and seen the town, or what remained of it, and seen down into the pit, perhaps. But she did not, for her hypersensitive stare was caught on the cemetery, horrified: the graves were opening. Under the weathered white marble shafts, under the crude fieldstone blocks carved with tulips and hex circles, under the more recent gray granite markers inset with sepia-tone oval portraits of the deceased, under them all the unshorn grass was parting, the violets fainting, six feet of moist violated earth opening, dark as the fundament of Hoadley.
Cally hid her assaulted eyes; Devil carried her on.
But just beyond the cemetery the black horse stopped short, nearly sending his featherweight rider over his shoulder; a different roar in the clamor rising from Hoadley, a different fetor in the updraft’s stench, turned him in his tracks. He stood with spraddled forelegs, with pricked, trembling ears, looking. Cally looked as well, over his black crest.
So painfully vivid was everything to her starved eyes that she had to nearly close them in order to see.… She saw. On the water tower. It had toppled but still clung with its metal feet; it hung over the edge of the chasm on its long spidery legs, bulbous body dangling in the darkness. And climbing up that attenuated metal carcass, that arachnid, feeling its way up and out over the lip of the abyss, out into Hoadley, came something as big as its bloated belly and black as the pit. And it seemed to Cally, watching, that the whole day turned storm-lurid-dark; something more than smoke had blotted out the sun.
From the locust trees brushing Cally’s neck with long-fingered leaves, black-faced hungerbabies cried, “The beast! The beast! The beast!”
Devil vented a sno
rt of terror, whirled and sprang into a flat-out gallop again, up the graveled trolley line. Though she had caught hold of the reins again, Cally let herself be swept along, caught up in the black tempestuous horse’s assault of the hill, in his fateful momentum, in the headlong curving sweep of his leap as he challenged the fallen treetrunk. She rode with her frail body hovering airily above the horse’s withers, her shoulder blades jutting from her fleshless back like inchoate wings.
At the hilltop trolley park, as before, Devil slowed and stopped of his own will, though he did not graze. On what must once have been the barker’s strip he stood puffing, nostrils flaring; the smell of sulphur hung in the air. Then his ears swooped forward and he spooked. Two people were coming out of the carousel building, arms around each other. Lovers? Perhaps—but peering between her horse’s black, pricked ears, Cally saw that their mood seemed more desperate than loving. Their embrace was to keep one another from falling. They were stumbling. Barry Beal and—and that Ahira woman.…
With a horse-snort sound a lick of flame sprang from the peak of the carousel house and wavered there like an ethereal pennant. Devil spooked again, springing backward, but Cally did not go with him. Half dismounting, half falling, she left the horse and staggered toward Ahira on stiffened legs. She stared; the stranger woman’s long hair, once a honey-sleek flow, now hung lank, ropy, around a face ugly with cuts and bruises. With drooping head Ahira sank to a seat on the ground, and Barry Beal sat beside her, his arm still around her, protective, loving.…
Cally had not heard Barry Beal mention Joan Musser’s name since he had met Ahira. And she knew it would have been reasonable to suppose he had forgotten his Joanie and fallen in love with Ahira like the rest of the misfits. Reasonable, but … in that moment, starved for love even more than for food, and with the heightened perceptions of a fasting visionary—or of a person soon to die … Gazing, Cally knew the unreasonable truth.
“Joan,” she said, standing in front of her. “Joan Musser.”
The woman lifted her head. Looking into her green eyes, Cally perceived the mud-and-algae pop-eyes of the woman Hoadley had called Frog Face. Looking into her exquisite, injured face, Cally saw Joanie’s bent and hating face.
Cally nodded and said without passion, “So you are the witch.”
Barry Beal said, “Hi, Mrs. Wilmore. I’m sorry I didn’t make it to work this morning. There was things I had to do.” His arm tightened around the drooping woman at his side, and she leaned against him, but neither she nor Cally looked at him.
“You are worse,” said Ahira to Cally. “You are Apocalypse.”
Cally stared at her; how could she have known the name? Out of beautiful, blackened eyes Joan Musser stared back. “What the devil knows, I know,” she said.
And the fire flared brighter on the roof of the carousel building. Cally’s gaze shifted there. “Burning this down?” she complained. “Why?” As if watching a play from an excellent box seat she felt righteously, abstractly incensed; the destruction of Hoadley seemed a mere spectacle to her, but the destruction of such a beautiful thing, the carousel, had to be ontologically evil.
Joan twisted herself to look back and up at the blaze. “The hub,” she muttered. “The whole—the whole macrocosm will go next, the whole world.”
At the same time Barry Beal said earnestly. “It wasn’t her, Mrs. Wilmore. It was him, Satan. He set it on fire.”
Cally half heard him, half heard Joan Musser, and understood hub, Satan, whole world, and knew that her children would not live to survive her, and felt her theatre seat drop her back to Hoadley earth, hard and obdurately real, with a jarring pain. For a moment, as if she had physically fallen, she couldn’t move. Then,
“My kids!”
She strode toward the carousel.
“Yo! Mrs. Wilmore!” Barry Beal yelled after her. “What you doing?”
She did not hear or answer. With temerity worthy of Gigi she intended to tell the devil to let her children alone, to make him let them alone, somehow. She speeded her stride to a run, passed into the shattered mouthway of the place, leaped onto the platform.
The hub of the carousel stood like a giant, ornate candle with flame at its top, and small orange snakes of flame lazed along the spokes of the ceiling as if venturing out from a nest at its center, and above the wheel-like carousel frame the peaked roof and rafters of the housing had begun to burn, making a spider-web of fire. Under the flames the wooden horses flung up their heads, eyes rolling, manes wild, mouths agape and teeth bared in silent screams, like horses trapped in a barn fire, and like them they did not move; panic froze them to their places, their poles. The bright paint of their trappings and curved necks and deep-cantled saddles glinted all the candy colors in the gaudy light, but the world over them was only orange and black, orange and black, fire and shadow. Cally saw nothing resembling a devil. Of course the old bastard was gone. Barry and his girlfriend wouldn’t have been limping around talking with her otherwise. Stupid.
Nevertheless, Cally stood looking, seeing fire flicker, remembering fireflies over a wheeling uncanny carousel at night.… And the gazebo in the park, turning, turning with blinking bulbs.… And the great, doomed, spinning, starlit world.…
“Joan!” she yelled with such fierce authority that the woman who called herself Ahira came to her, into the shadows of the carousel house, under the burning roof, with Barry Beal following like a dog at her bare heels.
“What spell have you put on this place?”
Joan looked back at her dully, too soul-tired to care much about Cally’s misconception. “It’s the hub.… It’s the center of the universe.”
“And of time?” There had once been a song or a poem or a book called Carousel of Time, and Cally’s mind was leaping, leaping, like a strong horse over all the barriers on the uphill way. Joan did not answer. Her answer did not matter. Cally’s eyes glittered with feverish vivacity in her gaunt head; she turned to Barry. “Can you make it go backwards?”
“Huh?” Barry could not follow such a logic-leaping path, and Cally showed none of her former patience with him.
“Barry, we’ve got to make the carousel go backwards! Get a move on!”
“Oh,” Joan breathed, her great, shadowed eyes coming alive in her still-lovely face. She understood. “Bar, she wants us to make time go backwards! Far enough so none of this ever happened.”
“To hell with all that! I just want my kids back.” Cally’s voice started to shake, and she toughened it. “Barry! Get busy!” The moron, he was good with cars and things, what was his problem?
In the splotched side of his face the white of his eye showed wide, frightened, lurid in the flamelight. He could barely talk, but managed, rapidly, stammering. “M-Mrs. Wilmore, the-there ain’t no motor in this thing no more! And even if there was, the gears—” He broke off, scared. Cally did not know that she was the horror confronting him, that all the too-plainly-visible muscles in her face were moving, jerking, red in the firelight and shining with her tears, as if they had no skin.
“Then push,” she said, and she put her frail shoulder against the sturdy wooden shoulder of the nearest carousel horse, a bay. She planted her feet just outside the platform and strained every starved muscle of her body—what little body she had left herself. Strained to move the great, inert wheel.
“Wait a minute!” Barry hurried to the horse behind Cally and began pushing; it was either that or watch Cally break herself in half. After a moment Ahira bent her shoulder to the next horse and did likewise.
The carousel had not moved for a long time—since 1955, in fact. It did not take kindly to being aroused from its long slumber. Cally strained far beyond what should have been her endurance; Ahira pushed until salty sweat stung her cut face instead of salty tears. Barry Beal started to pant curses, stood up suddenly, shouted, “Fucker!” and kicked the platform.
With a groan and an angry screech it started to turn. Slowly, slowly, but Barry said in surprised tones, “Son of a bitch
!” and bent to work again, pushing against the white shoulder of the richly caparisoned lead horse, the one with the brass number plate etched “666” on its bridle. A little faster. Painted ponies spinning tail first into time. Ahead of him Cally made a hoarse noise she meant to be a cheer; even to her ears it came out more like a death gasp. Overhead, the fire had spread and grown hotter. Burning embers were falling. One of them sizzled on Cally’s thin arm; she noticed the noise and shook it off, but did not feel it.
Yet the next moment she let out a startled squeak as something touched her shoulder, something alive.
She jumped back—the carousel moved on without her, faster, faster, speeding up, but she saw clearly enough the snake oozing out of the carousel horse’s ever-gaping mouth. Thick as a horse’s tongue, blunt-headed, phalluslike, it was orange-bellied and black of back, with orange eyes. They met hers as its head wheeled past her head, and Cally screamed.
There were snakes coiling out of the mouths of every horse on the carousel. Cally caught at Barry’s arm as he trotted past her, pulled him away from the white lead horse he was pushing, and he stood dumbfounded, for the carved animal had a thick serpent hanging down from between its teeth, down to its knees, and it was changing as he stared into something not white and not carousel horse at all—
Black and orange, orange and black, it was a cicada as tall as Cally, its translucent wings rattling—but it had the tail of a scorpion. And its face, human, all too alive, looked down as it swung by, a face deeply lined, arrogant and cold of eye under a golden crown. Gigi’s face! Yet, the face of an ancient king. And the snake still hung from its mouth.
“Oh, Jesus!” Barry shouted, bursting out of astonishment. “Joanie!”
She had jogged past him and Cally, head down, pushing at her horse—it was still a horse, though its eyes blazed fire, yellow smoke puffed from its nostrils, a serpent extruded from its mouth and its tail had turned to a cluster of snakes that lashed angrily against its back legs. Ahead, Cally’s bay carousel horse had changed into a red dragon. All over the platform she saw grotesque beasts instead of the pretty painted ponies. She saw something with the body of a leopard, the feet of a bear, the head of a lion—the fanged mouth gaped wide open, serpent-tongued. She saw an ox with three sets of wings. She saw an eagle with hundreds of eyes covering its body like smallpox. She saw a black angel sitting stolidly in place of a chariot. She saw an armored horse galloping with a breastplate of fire. And overhead, fire, fire, the whirling of the carousel fanning it so that it lifted a thousand orange-maned heads and roared like a lion.
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