Totentanz

by Al Sarrantonio

  King of the Dead.

  He dropped his gaze and followed the sawdust-covered maze of mirrors.

  His mind began to wander. He thought of what it would be like when he was the leader of everything. He would have all the food he wanted and no one to tell him what to eat or when. And there would be girls. Not like Lavinia Crawford; after Ash had presented him with the real Lavinia Crawford, he had quickly tired of her, and after the second time, he'd discovered that with her it was not all he had dreamed it would be. She was, it turned out, as stupid as a cow, and after hearing Ash talking with him about what he would have in the future, she had demanded that she be part of it too. He'd been almost relieved when he got rid of her, though he had felt a bit of revulsion about it. After all, she had been the first girl he'd ever done it with, and, well, it had felt as if she had taken a part of him with her.

  After that he'd begun to think about other girls he'd known, and Ash had arranged for him to be with a couple of them. He'd decided then that it would be best to have many girls rather than just one. They each had something to offer, even the ones who fought. It would be best to have a lot to choose from. And if they didn't obey him—well, that's why they'd call him King of the Dead.

  Up ahead there was the sound of a breaking mirror.

  Seven years' bad luck, his mind said automatically. Then there came the sound of another breaking mirror, and a shout. His mother? He couldn't be sure. He quickened his steps, suddenly rounded a corner and stepped onto broken glass shards.

  "Oh, Pup."

  When his mother spoke his name, her voice had a tone of relief in it that had never been there before. She was disheveled. Her expensive gown was torn at the shoulder, her hair pushed out of place. It figured that she would have taken the time to put on her most elegant things before leaving for the amusement park. It was just like her to show up everybody else in town. There was a silk purse on the ground, covered with bits of broken mirror and powdery sawdust, its contents scattered. One of his mother's shoes was missing. Her eyeliner was smudged, making her look like a teary raccoon.

  A hate for her greater than he had ever known welled up within him.

  "Pup. I've been so alone in here, and I can't find my way out."

  She limped toward him, whimpering.

  "Where's Father'?" Pup asked.

  She waved in the opposite direction. Her voice was affected and breathy. "He went on ahead. I told the foolish man to stay with me, but you know he never listens." She held out her hand to him, as if they were at a cocktail party. "Pup, get me out of here."

  Pup brushed past her to listen at the next turn in the mirrored path.

  "How long ago did he leave you?"

  She bent down and began to retrieve her cosmetics, shoveling them back into her handbag. "Ten, fifteen minutes. We've been in here so long.”

  Pup saw only a dark, reflective twisting ahead.

  Behind him, his mother said, "Dreadful place. It just isn't what I thought it would be, and I doubt that it's good for Montvale. I came only because I thought I saw your grandmother, but of course it couldn't have really been her, and she led us into this mirror place and then abandoned us. I'll have to recommend that Mayor Poundridge close down this entire monstrosity." She stood up. In a few short moments she had managed to rearrange her hair and make herself presentable again. Even her eyeliner smears were gone. "Pup, take me out of here now," she said.

  A deep hesitation clutched Pup. He hated this woman with a deeper hate than he ever had—but she was his mother.

  "Pup, are you listening to me, hmm?"

  An image was forming in the mirrors around Pup. Ash smiling knowingly at him, cigarette saluting limply in his hand as if to say, "I know you can't do it, boy. You don't have the stuff to be King of the Dead. "

  "Pup, do as I say this instant."

  There was her face, her huge face, staring down at him, telling him what to do, and his tiny two-year-old hands reached up to hit at her, to hit her away, and sudden fire came into her eyes, and her hand was momentarily on his neck before she slapped him for the first and last time—

  His mother's throat was in Pup's hands before he knew what he was doing. He knew he had to do it quickly or not at all. His tie to her was too strong, and even hate, when too strong, could turn into something else and immobilize him. And then there were Ash's eyes. He knew they were still in that mirror, taunting him; he knew that if he looked anywhere, at the mirror or down at his mother's face, he would not be able to complete what he had started.

  Trying not to feel the weakening pulse between his tight fingers, he looked up at the ceiling of the House of Mirrors. To his shock, there were mirrors up there too. The entire ceiling was silvered, throwing back reflections of the ground. He did not look at what was in his hands. He saw only himself, his own straining face. When he looked into his own eyes, he knew he would be all right. They were the eyes of someone he knew and trusted, the only person in the whole world he liked:

  King of the Dead.

  He left his mother in the sawdust, with the contents of her handbag once more scattered: the compact and lipsticks and eye shadows that had been her masks against him.

  Up ahead someone stumbled in the corridor, cursing loudly. Pup knew that everything would be all right now.

  His father appeared between two mirrors, the reflection in the twin silvered glasses turning him into triplets. He looked at Pup and then down at his wife, lying on the ground.

  He used that same tight-eyed, weighing look he always used when measuring a situation. When he saw his wife, his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. But almost at once they regained their normal dull luster.

  "Raymond," he said, using Pup's real first name. The word held many things at once: command, you'd better respect me—and, surprisingly, almost a hint of understanding.

  Pup said nothing as his father stepped fully into the room, leaving his mirrored twins behind.

  As disheveled as his mother had been, his father was still neat in appearance. He wore a tie with a small, sharp red knot at the top of his white collar; his late-summer sports jacket was properly unwrinkled. Somehow, as always, he looked recently shaved. His full but firm face was set in his most businesslike way. Even his shoes, with all of the walking and scuffling about he must have done, looked newly shined, the black leather hardly creased behind the toe. A businessman, always a businessman.

  "Something mighty strange going on here," his father said. This pronouncement seemed at once to include everything he meant: strange amusement park, strange end for his wife, strange son standing before him. If he showed any surprise about any of it, he kept it well hidden.

  "Quite strange," he said, moving closer to Pup and not taking his eyes off him now.

  "Why don't you stop?" Pup asked. He tried to sound casual and was delighted to find that there was no nervous ring in his voice. It sounded very much like his father's voice.

  "I want you to listen to me carefully, Raymond," his father said, taking another step forward.

  "I said stop!"

  His father stopped short. The very fact that he had done so seemed to both surprise and frighten him, and for the first time in his life, Pup saw his father unsure of himself. His father looked in the mirrors, at the multiple, diamond-like reflections of the scene around them.

  "What do you want me to do?" his father asked.

  "Don't move. Don't move a step."

  He already knows who I am, Pup thought. He can sense it, taste it. He thinks he can make a deal with me.

  "Can we talk, Pup?" his father asked coolly.

  "You never wanted to talk before."

  Red anger flushed around his father's starched collar, but he kept his control. The man is marvelous.

  "I'm your father."

  Pup was silent.

  Pup could see the gears shift in his father's mind. How to handle this boy? he was thinking; what new tactic to try? What direction to come in from this time? It was like the electronic chess
game Pup had. When it was the computer's move, a little red light stayed on until it had finished working through the possibilities. The longer the tiny red light stayed on, the better you knew your own move had been because it meant the machine was stumped and trying to find a good move in a losing game.

  Pup thought, The machine is stumped.

  The little red light in his father's eyes went out, and he said, "You'll need help." Pup smiled, and the red light went on again almost immediately; he was wishing he had the move back, wanting to think some more, because he knew he hadn't said the right thing.

  His father drove ahead, seeing nothing better to do, trying to twist things around his way as he went along.

  "You can't do it by yourself, Pup. You're too young." He closed his mouth for a moment, a red flush again crawling over his collar, and took a heavy breath. "I've been at this game a long time, I can teach you everything I know."

  "I already know everything you know. I watched you."

  "There's more, much more. It isn't all on the outside, you know. There are things you can't learn from watching—"

  "The rest I taught myself, just like you did."

  Before he could stop himself, his father said, "Do you hate me that much?" The very fact that he was saying something like this told him that he was losing the game. He nearly panicked. A new tint came over his features, not of self-anger or reproach or frustration, but of fear. He was losing.

  "I can see where you would hate me," he went on. He tried to talk himself into some new advantage. He would talk forever, given the chance, Pup knew. Plenty of times Pup had seen him take a man he had just cheated out of a big sum of money and in the course of a few minutes, or maybe over lunch, make the man think he was in the presence of the best friend he had ever had. The money meant nothing: he would let Pup's father do it to him again for the pleasure of it, and often he did. Pup's father was a usurer of rare talents who enjoyed not so much the money he made as how he made it, the process of fucking-over his customers. "I don't see why that hate you have for me can't change, Pup."

  A rage was building in Pup, and at the same time, he wanted to laugh.

  "You killed your own mother," his father blurted out. He pointed with a shaking finger at the sprawled corpse on the ground. "How could you do such a thing?"

  "You've been slowly killing her for years," Pup answered. "Not that she didn't deserve it. Do you think you were good to her?"

  "No," his father said desperately. "I wasn't good to her because I didn't love her. But she made us stay together, she made me stay with her because of you."

  The red light blinked on in his eyes again, instantly going off. He knew he had found a good move.

  Something struck at Pup, something way down inside the layers and layers. For a reeling second of time he was not the King of the Dead. He was something else. A tiny voice down there called him an imposter, a liar, a cheat. The voice started to grow.

  His father saw what was happening. He'd seen it many times before, and he dived into the tiny opening, threading the needle perfectly with his words. "However bad it was, she made a home for you, Pup. Even though she was rotten at them, she did all the things a mother is supposed to do because she believed that that was the way it was supposed to be. We even had an agreement that once you went away to college in a few years, we would get a divorce. But she wouldn't even talk about it until then. She loved you, Pup."

  The little voice in Pup began to shout horrible things at him. He looked at a mirror on the wall, a distorted ceiling-to-floor mirror with a long crack down its middle. The crack tore right through his face and made it into two not quite halves. The halves didn't meet in the middle. That was the way his mind felt now, as though someone were breaking it into two jagged parts with a hammer.

  You're not the King of the Dead. You're a murderer.

  "Even if I didn't love you enough, Pup, she did."

  The two pieces of his head were grinding against one another, trying to jam themselves back together. Pup screamed, clutching at his hair, digging his fingers deep into his scalp. He stumbled toward the broken mirror, hitting it with his shoulder. The mirror shattered into thin, sharp bits, raining them down like tinkling bells. Pup fell to the sawdust and began to sob into his hands.

  "You killed her, Pup," his father dug in relentlessly, close by his ear.

  "No!"

  "Yes you did. You killed her with your own hands."

  Pup looked through his tears and saw on the ground before him, reflected in a bright shard of mirror, his father standing above him with a knife-sharp sliver of glass in his hand, bringing it down at him.

  Pup rolled over, rising to his knees. His father lunged at the spot where he had been. The makeshift blade shattered, and he backed away. There was an animal glow in his eyes, feral-bright points of instinct. You bastard, Pup thought, you used her dead like you used her alive.

  His father turned and ran off into the maze of mirrors. He pushed himself away from a large glass that broke as he hit it, and ran on.

  Pup stood up calmly. His eyes caught the fallen form of his mother, now covered with speckles of mirror. There was nothing in his heart for her. She had deserved it his father deserved it more. Even if what his father had said was true, it changed nothing. She was dead, it was too late to do anything for her, and his father was the real culprit.

  A small grin crept over Pup's face as he stepped over his mother's still body and into the maze.

  He heard his father's rough breathing up ahead and the occasional sound of breaking glass. Pup followed resolutely. He didn't need to follow the sawdust on the ground now; he could have walked this path with his eyes closed if he had had to. He knew the way to go. In a dimly lit glass ahead of him, Ash's face appeared, smokily indistinct. The mouth opened and closed, the blood slit saying something to him. Pup moved past, unminding, though he thought he heard Ash's laughter. I'm King of the Dead, he thought. Nothing would stop him now.

  There was a shout and then a strong intake of breath from ahead, and he heard another crash of flesh against glass. Soon there appeared in the sawdust a few drops of blood and then one of his father's shoes. A pile of slivers came into view, revealing a broken three-sided cusp of mirrors. Blood was spattered everywhere. Close by he heard labored breath, and then, from around a corner, his father appeared. He was limping. One trouser leg was nearly torn off, held only by a few threads.

  When he saw Pup, he turned and hobbled away, holding his leg with both hands.

  "Stop," Pup commanded, and his father came to an abrupt halt. He fell in a heap, whimpering. "Please, son," he wheezed. "Please."

  Pup calmly approached.

  "Son?" he mocked. "Did you call me 'son'? You never called me that before. Do you really want to admit, after all this time, that I am your son—fat and slow and seemingly stupid as I am?"

  "Yes! You're my son," his father wept. "You've always been my son." He held his trembling hands together. "I've always loved you."

  "Call me King of the Dead."

  His father stared at him. All at once the old animal look crawled onto his features. Then something, some buried relay switch, snapped on, and he changed his mind.

  "You're my son!" he pleaded.

  "Call me King of the Dead."

  "Isn't it enough for you to be my son?"

  You can do it, Ash's voice said to Pup from somewhere close by.

  "My third birthday," Pup said.

  It was his third birthday. It was the first birthday he remembered, and he was surrounded by presents. There was a rocking horse on springs, a huge expensive thing of plastic and real mane hair, and a pile of other toys: books, a tricycle, a stuffed monkey, windup soldiers. Thirty relatives and children from his pre-school class were there. The cake was as big as Pup himself. He sat at the head of the dining-room table, the place of honor, his father's place.

  "Where's Daddy?" he asked when his mother leaned over him to cut the cake. His father was the only one in his universe
not there. All afternoon he had wondered where his daddy was. Now he had been made to sit in his father's spot at the table, and he wanted to know where he was.

  "He had to go to work today, Puppy," his mother said. Though her face kept its smile, something that was obvious to him then, even at that age, changed in her eyes. "But he sent you all these presents. He really wanted to be here, but he just had to work today."

  "I want Daddy here!" Pup said petulantly, striking the edge of the table with his small fist.

  "He'll be home soon," she said, beginning to grow nervous.

  Pup knew she was lying, and he became even more hysterical. "I want Daddy!"

  "Pup," his mother soothed, "I said he'll be home soon!"

  "Daddy! Daddy!"

  Pup struck at the table with both hands. His mother, embarrassed, tried to lift him from his chair. He resisted, throwing out his fingers at her face. She stumbled back from him. He pushed the birthday cake aside and sank his fists into it. His face was red and he was crying explosively. "Daddy!"

  He threw the cake from the table. It landed with a collapsing thud on the floor. One of his aunts got out of her chair and moved toward him. He screamed in rage and kicked at the fallen cake, sending soft pieces flying around the room. He ran into the living room, where his presents were stacked neatly after the opening ceremony; he lifted them, one after another, over his head and hurled them as far as he could. Hands reached down at him then, and he looked up into his mother's horrified face and screamed at her: "Get away!" She pulled her hands back, and he threw himself at the horse his father had bought him, tearing at the mane with his hands, trying to pull it from its springs. He climbed onto it. The horse tilted ominously, but he didn't notice. He held on tight and kicked furiously, trying to break it. He pulled a great handful of hair from the mane. The hair's coming loose threw him off balance. He dug in with his shoes to the side of the horse, and his momentum threw the toy animal over sideways. He saw the ground looming up, heard the squeak of springs. The wooden floor rushed up at him, and then there was night. . . .