Apocalypse

by Nancy Springer

  The blanket was just like I thought, soft and silky-rich all at once, and I knowed it was going to lay great. Once I get it on Joanie I feel some better about everything, and I start to make it look pretty on her, and I don’t care that the rest of them are all standing around staring at me.

  “Barry,” Mr. Wilmore says to me. “Should we maybe take the deceased home first?”

  Down to Hoadley, he meant. What was left of it. That made me look up at him. “No,” I says. “I think she liked it better up here.” What home she had, I figured this carousel was it. And I didn’t want none of them people looking at her.

  “Did she have a church?”

  “No.” I knowed what he was thinking. “No, not in no graveyard you don’t put her. She wouldn’t like that none.”

  “Where, then?”

  I just kept on pleating at the blanket, and it was coming along pretty good. I liked the way the white flowers was worked right into the stuff. They give it heft.

  After a while Mr. Wilmore says, “Did she have family?”

  “Her ma. Left town. Her pa.” If he was still living. “Probably so pickled he don’t care if she’s dead.” And just thinking about Mr. Musser and what he’d done to Joanie I felt everything all of a sudden go hot and red, and I thought, that’s the next thing for me to do, is kill that fucker. I didn’t care what happened to me. He’d be setting on that rickety front porch of his with a bottle, and I’d walk right up to him and shove it up his nose and kick him till he broke open like a Halloween pumpkin. I wanted to kill him so bad it hurt. And my fists was clenched and my chest huffing, and everybody saying to me, “Barry. Barry, what is it? What’s the matter?”

  And then I think, it don’t matter what I want. It just matters what Joanie would have wanted me to do. Suppose Joanie don’t want him dead no more?

  See, I knowed a couple things about Joanie. I knowed life had hurt her bad. And I knowed she’d changed her mind about a lot of that before she died.

  So I didn’t say nothing to none of them other people, but, “Joanie, help me think,” I says to her out loud. She’s laying there dead, but I still hope she can help me. “Just this one time let me get it right.”

  “Get what right?” Mr. Wilmore wants to know.

  Mrs. Wilmore says to him, “Mark, butt out.”

  So they all set down and waited for me to think. And it took me a while, but I done it right and good. I could feel it, like I could feel the blanket shaping up good under my hands. And then I looked up, and it was Mrs. Wilmore I was looking at. So I tell her.

  “Joanie forgive them all,” I says to her. “All of them. She would’ve saved them if she could. If she lived, she would’ve been the one rode that white horse.”

  “Damn right,” says Mrs. Wilmore, and she sounds like she means it. She knowed it, just like the white horse knowed it. And just looking at her, I knowed I had a friend. She understood about Joanie.

  The sun was up just a little farther in the sky, slanting down through the tops of the trees, all beautiful in the green leaves, and the sky was clear deep blue like the white horse’s eyes on the merry-go-round kept circling and circling close by, and it was all—it was like everything was new again. It was special.

  Mrs. Wilmore says, soft: “So it must have been in the first, spinning place.” And I didn’t understand at first. But later I remembered them words Joanie had wrote down and pinned over the mirrors inside the merry-go-round.

  Mr. Wilmore says, just as quiet, “Barry. You want her buried—here.”

  I didn’t want her buried at all. But she had to be, since she was dead, and I knowed this was the right place. I nodded. Then I stayed with Joanie while him and the others went down Hoadley.

  Trudging back up the hill with the shovels, feeling much stronger and somewhat more her former self, Cally said, “Bet this is the strangest funeral you’ll ever do, Mark.” Slipping back already into the role.

  Mark said, “It’s the last funeral I’ll ever do.”

  She accepted this fact as another petal in the flower of her blossoming happiness, almost as a matter of course. Because Hoadley was all in confusion or in the pit, they had gone as far as Shirley’s stable to find shovels (noting in passing that the fence had returned to normal but the castle had fallen; no longer would Elspeth keep herself cloistered in that makeshift tower) and while there Cally had found to her astonishment that Shirley’s phone was in working order, and had telephoned her mother. The children were well. All symptoms seemed to have disappeared overnight. As soon as they could arrange it, Mark and Cally would go to join and retrieve the youngsters.

  “Oh?” she said to her husband, smiling. “You’re not going to be a funeral director any more?”

  “I’m not going to be a prop for the tottering any more, I’m not going to be a pillar of Hoadley any more, and I’m not going to be a dutiful son or a take-care-of-it husband.” He gave her a grin she remembered from those distant student days when he had been in the habit of secreting a spring-loaded cloth snake in her purse.

  “By damn,” Cally remarked with zest. “What will you be, then?”

  He said, “Alive.” And he turned to her, took her by the shoulders and kissed her. Not a formality, that kiss. Rather, an urgency.

  Shirley said, grinning, “Watch it, youse.” She had brought them most of the way back in the pickup, coming with them to help dig. “Save it for later.”

  Cally said, “I’m hungry.”

  “Aren’t you always?” complained the dark, intense young woman who walked by her side.

  “No, Elspeth, I mean I’m really hungry.”

  Mark the prosaic in cahoots with Shirley the equally pragmatic had brought along a paper bag of food from the latter’s refrigerator. Silently he reached in and handed his wife an apple, a Golden Delicious, pudgy and yellow. They walked to where Barry Beal still knelt, oblivious to them and their concerns, arranging and arranging a kingly cloak in tucks and pleats and folds and gathers over the body of Joan Musser. As they journeyed, Cally ate her apple down to the core.

  EPILOGUE

  The media headlined it as the worst case of mine subsidence in recorded history. Questioning the survivors, reporters met either embarrassed silence or hysteria. The latter, expressed in terms of beasts and burning bears, four horsewomen and human-faced bugs, they dismissed as a manifestation of millennial fever. Such reports would, in any event, have been censored from the public record.

  Within the first day a decision was made, loudly and unanimously, at an al fresco town meeting, to rebuild. It was unthinkable to do otherwise. Friends were in Hoadley. Family was Hoadley. Only the place had to be repaired; the people remained, for the most part. Thirteen had been killed (excluding Bud Zankowski, whose body was not found for months afterward), and Homer Wildasin had been taken away on suspicion of murder when the bodies of Gigi and her horse were found. No one said much about Homer. Quite a few solid citizens had seen the change; they knew who the second beast had been (though not the first), and the less said about it, the better—especially in front of outsiders.

  By nightfall of the first day the dead were buried, lying under the bottommost of what were to be many layers of slag in the pit where they had fallen; it would become their communal grave. Gladys Wildasin’s body did not lie with the others. She had been taken away by the police for forensic autopsy, and she was not missed.

  It was a fine irony, unnoticed by most townspeople other than Elspeth and Cally, that the slag heaps, which had always seemed to shadow Hoadley, shutting out light and air, that those ugly old “bony piles” should become the easy means of healing the town’s greatest wound. The town leveled them to fill the pit. Mark and the remaining horsewomen joined like many other volunteers (including many with strange wine-colored scars on the sides of their faces) in the hard labor, and found that in the absence of Gerald Wozny and Zephyr Zook, and with the shocked and/or prostrated resignation of other borough council members, new leadership emerged. Few survivors look
ed down on anyone any longer, but one person in particular came to be liked and respected by nearly everyone, and was within a year elected to public office: Shirley Danyo.

  Hoadley had always insisted on managing things its own way, and despite an influx of federal officials, Red Cross administrators and various interfering outsiders it continued to do so. Within a respectable length of time the pit was filled, rebuilding begun (including the government-financed construction of Mark Wilmore’s new Home Furnishings and Interior Decorating business), and a suitably ostentatious monument raised in the park near the gazebo, in memory of the victims. On it, of course, were engraved the names of the dead:

  Rev. Ronald R. Berkey

  Beulah G. Coe (Mrs. Elmer Graybill Coe)

  Izetta “Wobbles” Enwright

  Sojourner Faith Hieronymus

  Gustave Delmar Litwack

  Fr. Anatole Leopold

  Rose Zankowski Kondas (Mrs. Ralph H. Kondas)

  Osvaldo “Slug” Pessolano, Jr.

  Jessica Sue Rzeszut

  Luther Wesley Wasserman

  Gladys Gingrich Wildasin

  Gerald Q. Wozny

  Zephyr Angelica Zook (Mrs. Howard B. Zook)

  Near the apex of the obelisk, over the list of names, was engraved an inscription selected by the town’s literary authority and new librarian, Cally Wilmore. Something nice, appropriate, from Donne or Shakespeare or perhaps the Bible. No one knew, for no one except, perhaps, Cally ever really read it to remember it.

  But up on Trolley Park Hill, engraved on a bronze plaque that huddled flush with the ground, lay another inscription remembered by those Hoadley citizens who read it, though it was read seldom, for few of them went up there; nothing was left to take even the bad girls and the eager boys to that hilltop. A scattering of time-tattered shacks still stood, but no carousel building any longer: nothing but a circular pile of debris out of which rose the charred, black hulks of a few wooden horses.

  Barry Beal walked up the trolley right-of-way almost daily, but no one cared about that; everyone knew Barry Beal was simpleminded, and no one gave much thought to his doings. Cally Wilmore rode her new horse up there the white winter day she first brought it home. Other than that, deer hunters went there once an autumn or so. And maybe moonlight strollers in the spring. And from time to summertime, kids camping in Boy Scout tents.

  So it took a while. But after a few years the tale began to be told, how if a person came to that place at dawn, and sat, and kept very still—and if the sunrise was of exceptional sweetness and beauty—the listener could hear in the hush, ethereal, the sound of calliope music in three-four time. And if the person then looked toward the blackened ruins of the carousel (and if the mist was blanketing the earth in the sunrise, lying in folds and billows beneath green locust trees) sometimes a white wild-maned horse could be seen over those dark ashes, circling, circling, white and ethereal as the mist. And other carousel horses could be seen even more faintly, yellow and dun and spotted horses, following the lead horse in its ever rounds, circling, cycling.… And straight and still on the white horse’s back there would be riding a young woman in a dress red as a lover’s heart, a young woman the colors of milk and honey and sublimely beautiful—but fleeting as time. For no sooner would the watcher draw breath than she and her horses were gone like the mist vanishing in the rising sun.

  And if the person blinked and looked down then, he or she might see the new day’s sun glinting off the polished, deeply gleaming plaque set into the ground. Why such a marker in that unlikely place? And who had paid for the expensive thing, and brought it up the trolley trail, and had put it there, and kept the grass clipped around it? And who had chosen the peculiar words with which it was engraved?

  Leaning, with the morning sun warm on the back of the neck, the Hoadley citizen could read them:

  “So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

  In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

  Out of the whinnying green stable

  On to the fields of praise.”

  About the Author

  Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone with novels for adults, young adults, and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magic realism, horror, and mystery—although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan and Nora), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and bird-watching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida Panhandle where the bird-watching is spectacular, and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by Nancy Springer

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-9391-1

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT

  FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

  EBOOKS BY NANCY SPRINGER

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia