Totentanz Page 18

  He became aware of a hunger for air, a sign that he would have to surface soon. He pushed forward, off the lopsided wall, and made a grab for the girl's foot as she disappeared into the other room. The tips of his fingers caught at her heel and then let go. At that moment, as her movement carried her away from him, she looked back, and he was able to see her face. With a shock he realized that it was the McMasters girl, the one he had saved in the pond. She was a few years older but still the little girl he remembered. The look of pleading and recognition on her face seemed all too familiar.

  Her mouth formed the word, "Help."

  Maybe I'll be a Marine yet.

  There was a burning ache beginning in his chest; he ignored it and pulled himself into the room after the girl. It was even darker in here; his arm hit something as he entered and he pushed himself away from a chest of some kind that was floating free by the doorway. He could not see the girl. He looked around wildly, an insistent hot hunger in his lungs now, but saw her nowhere. Then, in the far corner, there was a flash of blonde in the darkness, and a small hand came into view, held out to him. He snatched at her arm, knowing that if he did not do this quickly, both of them would be lost. He held onto it, but as he pulled her toward him, there was a horrifying pull at her from the other side, as if some huge sea creature had attached itself to her. Before Jack knew what was happening, he was following her through a hole in what had once been the floor. He felt the girl's hand clutch at him in panic, her small nails digging into his arm, preventing him from letting go.

  His chest felt as if it was on fire; he was surrounded by cold water, but he was burning up. His eyes ached. He and the girl went down and down. Things he could barely see passed him: a lamp, floating like a strange industrial fish; a pair of shoes, laces tied; a large envelope with the words "First Class" on it in big red letters, the gummed ends coming apart in the water. He tried to pull free, but the girl's grip was too strong.

  As they passed through another doorway, Jack threw himself sideways, jamming his legs painfully against the door, and the downward pull stopped. He battled for the girl: the thing on the other side of her pulled with equal strength, but he held his ground. There was lava in his lungs, and he knew that in a few moments he would breathe water and die.

  He gave a mighty pull on the girl's arm, and the thing on the other end let go. Immediately Jack turned and began to swim upward wildly. The same objects, in slightly different positions, went by: the envelope breaking apart, the shoes, the lamp settling against a wall and bobbing slightly—and then he was into the top room, then past the hold and onto the deck. The girl's clutch on him was tighter than ever, which told him that she was still alive.

  He could make out the surface above him. The ship had submerged completely, and he judged he had about forty feet to go to reach the waterline. He kicked out furiously, disregarding the pain that had spread from his chest to his entire torso, filling him with lead.

  The movement of the upside-down waves was a scant five feet above him when the girl's grip turned to sudden metal, seeming to tear through his skin to the blood and bone beneath. He stopped dead. The thing that had held her had followed them. He strained upward: the surface was just above him, the green, oily breakers mere inches from his hungry mouth. He could almost taste the air, could feel it up there, moving in slow currents yet an eternity away. He clawed like a wild man at the girl's arm, thrashing in the water, trying to make her let go, but her hand was an iron vise. Her face was turned away from him. He thought he saw something black behind her, something huge flowing like a manta ray, with small red eyes in a white face—

  And then his lungs exploded. The girl turned to him, turned her face slowly toward him as if it were on a revolving turntable. He looked into it as she let go of him. She was smiling, breathing in and out, gulping water like a fish. It was Pup's face on the girl's body, long, dirty-blonde hair flowing away from his scalp.

  Jack's lungs burst. He heard Pup say, "Never be a Marine now, Jack." He was dying, but he heard Pup continue: “You just weren't cut out for it. Remember that McMasters girl? Don't worry, she's still down there in that ship. Just wanted you to know you didn't save her after all. I hated that girl because of what you did for her. You saved her that day, and you got all the attention, not me. Just because you thought you wanted to be a Marine, you moved faster than your head told you to. Just because you didn't think. Well, I thought, and I pulled you out of that ice, but they only wanted to worry about you and say what a fine boy you were.

  "I wanted to push that McMasters girl back into that hole and close it over with snow and ice and watch her beat on the bottom of the ice, looking up at me, looking for air pockets, for a way to get out. I couldn't do that then, but I'm doing it now, Marine."

  There was a vicious hatred in Pup's voice: deep, mad, visceral hatred.

  "Good-bye, Jack," Pup went on, although Jack could no longer hear him. There was triumph and rage in Pup's voice. "You'll never be a Marine now."

  Pup looked up at the stiff, silent faces of Jack's mother and sister and then down at the drowned, bloated body that lay slumped against the fence of the amusement park.

  "Say good-bye to everybody, Jack," he said. His eyes wandered up over the lights toward the spot where the church tower next to the cemetery vied for prominence with the height of the Ferris wheel and lost. "Say good-bye to the Three Musketeers."

  SIXTEEN

  As Reggie stumbled through the phalanx of trees at the edge of the churchyard, something melted out of the night in front of him.

  A hooded shape appeared off to one side, close against a tree, hunched over as if trying to become part of the tree itself. As Reggie got closer, he saw that that figure was not hunched over at all but was rising out of the ground by the base of the tree. He stopped. He tasted something strong and bitter, and a bolt of fear went through him. The black shape drew itself out of the ground and stood silent beside the tree. It took a step toward him.

  Reggie broke into a run, trying to throw himself past it. No, he thought, no! His mind was a jumble of mindless despair; the amusement park still called to him—Come to me! Come to me!—and he sought to follow its pull.

  The shape, all arms and huge hands, leaped at him.

  Reggie felt its fingers, cold and hard, tighten around him. He was pulled to the ground. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to look at the specter. No! He thrashed out with his arms and legs, trying to kick the thing away, and felt his hands pummel something soft and hollow, not a human breast but something cool and pliable, as if the skin was loosely wrapped on a rattling frame. The shape grunted at his blows but held firmly.

  Slowly Reggie was dragged toward the tree. He tried to scrabble away, digging his fingers into the closely cropped grass at the curb of the cemetery drive, but the earth gave way in soft clumps. He looked beyond his captor, which had its head bowed against its chest as it tugged backward, and he saw a yawning pit, roughly dug, at the base of the tree.

  With a weak grunt, the figure dropped over the edge of the freshly dug grave, carrying Reggie with him. Reggie cried out and began to rain blows upon it with his fists. Their battle was a quiet, desperate one: the figure, crablike, pulling him inch by inch into the hole and Reggie seeking to haul himself out. When he saw the lip of the hole disappear above him, he put his knee into the thing's groin, but this had no effect. Its arms were locked around him, its face buried against him. Reggie gouged at its head, trying to make it let go. His fingers sank into cool, dry flesh, down to smoothness that felt like bone.

  "Oh. Jesus!" Reggie cried out, realizing that it was bone, a glossy length of it along an eye socket, that he was feeling.

  Without warning, the figure released him and fell lengthwise into the hole.

  Reggie levered himself over the top of the hole with his elbows. The thing grabbed at his legs, locking its arms around them and trying to pull him back. Reggie kicked free but lost his hold on the soft dirt around the grave and slipped down. The
cold, papery thing was on him like a spider. Reggie pushed him-self up from its chest and tried to get to his feet, but the figure clutched him around the shoulders and the neck and pulled him down yet again. Reggie beat at it fiercely, trying to make it let go for good. The thing was gradually pulling his face close to its own inch by inch. Reggie noticed a dry, rotting smell, with a clean bone odor underneath it, like ammonia.

  He yelled desperately. The thing answered him with a grunt of stale air.

  Reggie shifted position, jamming his face against the parchment-like skin of the creature as he reached around to force the other's hands from his neck. He squirmed violently, pulling at the creature's wrists, and with a great effort, he made it let go. He threw himself to his knees, and then heaved himself to his feet as the other, in a final attempt, whipped itself up and grabbed him, folding its arms tightly around his neck in a strangling embrace.

  "I don't want to die!" Reggie screamed, remembering the thing in the tunnel, the dark, cold fall over the precipice. He felt the cold thud of a clod of earth on his back and knew that the hole was being filled with dirt.

  "Cover me," the figure panted hoarsely in his ear.

  "Let me go! Oh, God!" Reggie's palms beat uselessly at the thing that held him.

  The creature shivered.

  "Co . . . ver . . . me," it gasped again. All at once it lost its strength. Its arms became loose around Reggie's neck and then fell away limply.

  For a moment Reggie could not move. Then, breathing heavily, he pulled himself off the thing, which lay helplessly under him.

  A sprinkle of earth fell from his back. The hole was not being filled as he had feared: some dirt had merely been loosened in the struggle and fallen on top of them.

  ". . . cover . . .” the specter panted.

  Now Reggie looked at the thing's face and saw that it was one he knew: the black zombie he had seen outside his window.

  The man in the hole reached up to Reggie, but his hand fell impotently to strike the ground. There was a horrible gash in his face, around the left eye an open tear that should have been bleeding but was not. With a shudder Reggie recalled the feel of bone on his fingers.

  The man opened his mouth and wailed. His entire frame wracked with the force of his lament. He tried to cover his face and curl up into a ball.

  "Cover me! Cover me!"

  Reggie stood up.

  "Please cover me! Let me go back!"

  The figure stopped bucking and lay silent. It moaned dryly, pressing its hands to its face. It again reached for Reggie, trying to grab his legs, but just as quickly, the arms fell back.

  Reggie thought the man was dead, but then he moved, lifted his hands and slowly sat up. Reggie climbed out of the hole, putting a couple of yards between himself and the dark shape.

  "You're not him," the man said in a flat, hollow voice. He stood up in the grave and regarded Reggie with an even, sad look. As he spoke, he seemed to change into something more erect and human; the trembling creature with spider hands was gone, and in its place stood a tall man with a calm, troubled gaze. His eyes looked half at this world and half at some other place, some terrible plane of existence that wanted to turn him into the crawling, scraping, begging thing again. Now he looked much more like the man Reggie had first seen at his bedroom window, though without the startled, desperate look he had worn then.

  "You aren't him," the man said, coming close to Reggie and placing his hands on Reggie's shoulders. Reggie backed away.

  "Tell me who you are," Reggie said to the black man, no longer terrified of him. In the back of his mind, the calliope still beckoned. . . .

  "I've waited," the man said, ignoring Reggie's question. "I dug this hole with my own hands and waited." He held up his hands to the light from the amusement park, and Reggie saw not bloody stumps, but rounded, stunted fingers ending in frayed rags of flesh and knobs of white bone. "I waited, but he wouldn't stop for me."

  When Reggie opened his mouth to speak, the specter cut him off.

  "I pleaded with him to stop!" He backed up a few stumbling steps, landing with a thud in the grave and collapsing into a sitting position, wrapping his arms around his knees; he shook like a leaf in a cold, wet wind. "I put dirt in my mouth, I tried to drown myself in a rain pond, I ran in front of a machine"—he threw one hand out and laced it from one side to the other, stopping it in an abrupt fist as if it had hit something—"but he would not take me!" The man waved his arms, indicating the open cavities around him. "Every one of these graves I lay in, and I waited, but nothing came for me."

  Once again he climbed out of the hole. His voice was soft, full of weariness. "Jeff Scott told me I would grow used to this, but I cannot. He was my friend, a true friend. But Jeff Scott was consumed by hate and is not the same man, and this is not the same time. This isn't any time at all. We didn't have machines where I came from, and here they have machines for everything. Jeff Scott seems used to all the machines. This is the judgment day, if ever there will be one. Flames. . ." He looked down at Reggie, peering closely into the boy's face until sudden awe filled his voice. The boy in my dream. I saw you through a window, in a house filled with machines. You're—"

  "Reggie Carson."

  "Lord. . . ." The man threw his tattered hands to his head and stood motionless. He looked as though he were reaching for something far away. After a while he brought his hands down to his sides.

  "I am your great-grandfather, boy."

  Lucius walked away from the hole, out into the middle of the roadway. All vestiges of his mad behavior were gone. His ghoulish face had taken on expression, almost life, and his eyes were filled with something that looked like bright excitement.

  "Why did you come here'?" he asked.

  Reggie didn't answer. He thought of the short black ledge, the screaming fall into nothingness and death, he thought of dim and half-forgotten stories told to him on his father's knee or while under warm blankets, stories of his family fleeing from some untold thing, returning years later with a new name to the town that had changed, hoping to forget; he thought of the man standing before him, the rotting man who claimed to be part of those stories and claimed to want more than anything to fall back over that ledge into that horrid, bottomless pit, to kiss the shadow man and be brought to cold annihilation and death; he thought of his mother, his friends, of that whistling secret machine that called him inevitably to other meetings, pulling him from the front, pushing him from behind, and of things he could not now avoid. . . .

  "We must go to Jeff Scott," the old man said. "You're the one who can save him." A tremor passed through him, a tremor that Reggie felt too. A cold hand on his shoulder, a whisper in his ear.

  "We must go now." Stiffly, Lucius walked.

  Reggie looked back at the soft slope of the churchyard, at the wide-open mouth of the Tomb of the Unknown Man, at the empty dirt mouths in the ground.

  Come to me, come to me, kiss me. . . .

  The old man was far ahead of him now, outlined against the artificial lights in front of him, a tall stick figure rattling like a bag of ivory bones. And then Reggie was beside him.

  SEVENTEEN

  In his wooden cabin, Jeff Scott raged and flailed, weeping and beating at the walls. Frankenstein's monster, he thought, in the pit of fire. His body was both hot and cold, one side burning flesh, the other side cold, hard bone. He jammed his hands, one skeletal, the other flesh, to his ears, but could not block out the screaming outside the trailer. Jeff Scott was two men now, melded at an invisible line down his middle. And as his body was divided, so was his mind—one part cool, rational and cynical, the other shrieking in red, growing rage. Ash had laughed at him because he knew the truth. Jeff had been a fool all along; he had spent all these long years avoiding the truth, burying it so deep inside that it took this moment to make him face it squarely.

  Did I really hate that much? he asked himself.

  He knew that he had, because the hate, screwed so deep into him, had finally, fully
, wormed its way to the surface and burst. He felt it again as he had at that moment when the rope went taut around his neck, when the knot at the back tightened like the grip of a hand, in an instant cutting the life from his body. It all came back to him, and though he fought it, he knew it was winning. He was turning into a raging animal, wanting life, wanting revenge.

  You'll all die! his mind had screamed. I'll kill all of you.

  The moment of Poundridge's death had brought it back. When the sad, thin, pleading man had dropped through the floor of the gallows—his feet kicking in bursts at the emptiness around him, looking for a place to set down but finding none: his arms, tied behind, slapping viciously against his back; his body desperate to break free and find his lungs the air they needed—at that instant it had all rushed back at him. The face then had been that other Poundridge's face, grinning up at him, fat, confident—and here was this same man, with his hands against his will on the lever, pulling it and hanging his own great-great-great grandson.

  Jeff Scott had wanted to cry at that moment, to throw himself on the ground and beg whoever there might be for forgiveness, to forgive him for wanting this, but that hadn't happened. Instead, the hate, the red raw hate, had roiled up, and to his horror, he had started to laugh. Poundridge was still thrashing on the end of the cord, gagging and wetting himself, his face red and wild and, through all the choking and kicking, still pleading, and Jeff Scott had laughed. He had turned to see Ash regarding him in the artificial light; Ash's mouth was spread like a sickle, his dull, dark eyes crinkled at the corners. Then Ash suddenly turned toward Poundridge, and at that moment, as Poundridge stopped struggling, when his body went tight and then loosened, there was an audible "Ah" from Ash that was more ghastly than anything Jeff Scott had yet heard. Ash's frame went taut and then relaxed in an almost sexual release. He began to laugh, wracking with it, great hoarse cries coming from that slit of a mouth, and then Jeff Scott was able to fall to the ground, beating his fists upon it, his fist of flesh and his fist of bone, trying to stop himself from laughing, turning his laughter into sobs.