Totentanz Page 8

  Part of Pup wanted to do a little snooping, but another part wanted to get right to the Ferris wheel and see if Lavinia Crawford was really there. And then there was a third part that made him feel uneasy just to be in the place.

  Soon the third part grew stronger. Every step Pup took magnified his fear. Before long he was moving as though someone were pushing him from behind. He had the feeling that he was being watched through a telescope.

  Sprinkles felt it too. The dog was glued to Pup's side, making angry noises in its throat and looking around furtively. The hair on its back stood nearly straight up. Every time Pup tried to brush the dog away, it pushed right back to his leg.

  And then Pup was at the base of the Ferris wheel. It loomed above, bigger even than the one in the park he'd made his father take him to once when he was younger, a park that had boasted the largest Ferris wheel within three hundred miles.

  And there, at the top, gently swaying still, was the red car that held Lavinia Crawford.

  Vaguely Pup wondered about how she had gotten up there, and why. But these thoughts were pushed aside by his mounting excitement. There was a warm feeling spreading under his belt. Who cared how she got there? If she really wanted him, she could have him. He had read enough and seen enough of the books his father kept hidden under the storage shelves in the basement to know what he had to do.

  "Lavinia?" he called tentatively in an embarrassed whisper.

  The car stopped rocking. A thin, naked figure stood up and looked down at him. He wished he had his binoculars with him, but he could have sworn she had blown him a kiss. She leaned over, her breasts clearly visible, and then she stepped back and was lost to view.

  A hidden engine whirred into motion, and the Ferris wheel began, ponderously, to turn. The car with Lavinia in it crawled down toward him.

  Sprinkles reared back on his haunches, growling, but Pup ignored him. His eyes were transfixed on the red carriage arcing inevitably toward him. The warmth below his belt became a tight, hard excitement.

  Reggie and Jack, you don't know what you're missing.

  A shiver passed across the back of Pup's neck. It was as though a hand had touched him lightly, a hand that had been held in ice water. He was filled with wild panic. What am I doing here? For the briefest time, reality returned to him. There was no logic in all this. That couldn't be Lavinia Crawford in the red car—Lavinia might be a cock-tease, but basically she was a scatterbrain. She almost never went anywhere without one of her plain-faced girlfriends, carefully chosen so that she would look better next to them, and also for "protection." Pup had once heard from a high-school senior that Lavinia liked to show off but that she never gave anything out—that all that talk about her being loose was baloney—and now that Pup thought about it, she had undressed only that once in front of the window. She left the shade up for him but never did anything in front of it.

  Actually, now that a cold rationality gripped him, there was no way that Lavinia Crawford could be on this Ferris wheel.

  That icy tingle touched his back again, and Pup whirled around. There was no one behind him, but he knew someone had touched him. The same someone who was watching him through a telescope. Pup was a jerk and he knew it—he had come alone to a place that gave everyone the creeps, with only an old, scared and useless dog for protection. This place, he saw now, was as creepy as any of the stories Reggie told in the churchyard or that he had in those treasured comics he kept locked in his closet.

  Sprinkles whined loudly.

  "Be quiet!" Pup said, and then he turned back to the Ferris wheel.

  The red car was more than halfway down. A slim hand trailed over the railing, then was gone. Pup's excitement overtook his reason. Maybe it wasn't Lavinia Crawford in there, but it was a naked girl anyway. Then cold panic, as if switched back on, took hold of him again, and he decided not to wait to see what happened. He backed away briskly, moving toward the distant iron fence.

  He was fifty yards from the Ferris wheel when he realized that Sprinkles was not with him. The fool dog was lagging behind again. He called sharply, but there was no answer, and when he looked back, the dog seemed to have disappeared. "Damn," he muttered, and began to make his way back.

  He tried not to look at the Ferris wheel. Something was building here, something greater than the electricity in the air when his parents had one of their frequent fights over him, blaming each other for the way he was. That same kind of crackle was here. Maybe that was what he had felt on the back of his neck.

  "Sprinkles!" he called, but there was no reply. Usually the dog at least answered him with a tepid bark. Maybe he had to take a leak; that seemed to be about all he did anymore, and he would look for a proper place to do it.

  Pup thought he spied the dog inside the low retaining wall housing the Ferris wheel, his leg lifted next to the control box. But when Pup got close, he saw that what he had seen was only a painted cutout of a rabbit, part of the control box itself. The rabbit had a happy look on its face, but the eyes weren't painted right. They were too large. The rabbit was smiling cutely, like the rabbits painted on Easter-egg boxes, but the eyes looked five times too big.

  Pup tried to turn away to look for Sprinkles elsewhere, but he was unable to take his eyes off the rabbit. The eyes were looking at him intelligently. Now they were even bigger. Were these the eyes that he had felt were watching him through a telescope? He didn't know. Then the huge eyes were gone, and there was only the sweetly smiling face of an Easter bunny looking at him flatly.'

  "Hello. Pup," someone said from a place to his right. Pup couldn't think. His vision blurred. A small part of his foggy mind almost laughed because he was seeing like one of those movie lenses that they smear with Vaseline: the outer edges fuzzy and the inner part sharper, though still indistinct. He couldn't remember: had he been looking at the sun? In science class, Mr. Weiss had once yelled at them not to look at the sun during an upcoming eclipse: they could focus the eclipse on white paper, but they shouldn't look at the sun directly because it would burn out their retinas.

  Had he looked at the sun and burned out his retinas? No, he hadn't looked at the sun. He had been looking at the rabbit. If he remembered correctly, he thought that burning out your retinas meant that you would be blind in the center of your eyes but could still see things around the edges. That warning had scared the whole class into not looking at the sun during the eclipse and had convinced Pup not to bother with the eclipse at all. He had gotten Jack to help him with his report, and since Jack had had his telescope taking pictures of the thing, Pup was able to wheedle one of the pictures out of him and had gotten an A.

  But where was the rabbit he had been looking at? And where was Sprinkles? Everything was fuzzy. The rabbit was gone. Should he call the rabbit? Should he call Sprinkles?

  "Sprinkles," he tried to say, and he found that his mouth wasn't working very well either. It came out sounding like "Spin-key." Was that him who had said, "Hello, Pup"? Why would he say his own name? There was really something wrong with him. That wasn't his voice, was it?

  "Pup," the voice said again, and now he knew he hadn't said it. It was a smooth kind of voice, low and almost sexy. When it said "Pup," it sounded as though it was drawing the word out with its tongue and wrapping it around him. Was it a woman's voice? Wouldn't a sexy woman's voice make his name sound like that? Like the voices you imagined telling you all those things about themselves in Penthouse?

  He yanked his head from the rabbit to the place he thought the voice was coming from. His head lifted too high, and he saw a slate-gray patch of lowering sky and some fluttering red-and-white pennants on poles and a rounded pie-piece slice of the Ferris wheel, and suddenly there was the open red car, stopped on the bottom platform, its door swinging open languidly and the car itself still swaying back and forth, and there, standing on the platform in front of it, the smiling, nude form of Lavinia Crawford.

  "Oh, Pup," she said, her voice low and gravelly, like a sexy woman dee-jay. She st
epped toward him, down off the platform. Pup watched her bare foot as she did this small liquid act, and then his eyes swung up to her smiling face again and down to her perfectly round breasts and the move of her hips.

  "Lavinia?" he asked, but it came out. "Lars? Vina?"

  "Yes, Pup," she answered, moving closer to him.

  He wished he could think straight. There was something horribly right and horribly wrong about this: this must be Lavinia Crawford because it looked like her—at least the face looked like hers, and the body looked like hers had that time he'd seen her in her window through the telescope. But how could it be? How did she get here? How did she know he would come to her? Did she really want his ugly body? She was no slut. Was it because he had seen her that time and she knew it? That happened in the books his father kept hidden, so it must happen in real life. But could it happen to him? Why not?

  She was so close now that he could smell her odor. And then, even in his confusion, a terror seized him again. Why didn't she smell good? He thought she should smell like perfume, or at least clean like his mother did. His mother always smelled like rose water. Not like this. This was the worst body odor he had ever encountered. Like sewage. And he couldn't see her face now: it was as though someone had rubbed Vaseline all over the lenses of his eyes.

  "I want you," Lavinia purred, and Pup stumbled away from her. This wasn't right. She smelled wrong. He turned and tried to run.

  He was half blind. He tried to rub at his eyes, to get the Vaseline off, but he suddenly didn't know where his hands were. He couldn't feel them. Someone else's hands were on him now. He strained his eyes desperately and saw the inflated face of Lavinia only inches from his face. The disgusting odor swept over him again. He felt her hard nipples rub against his jacket, and her voice was in his ear:

  "I want you, Pup. Lie on me." She was groping at him, at his pants. He kicked wildly, trying to escape her smell, and then he had power over his hands again. He used them to push her off. She drifted away from him, and he heard the click of the door to the Ferris-wheel car. He rubbed at his eyes. As though he were rubbing Vaseline away, they began to clear, and then his head cleared and he was standing at the entrance gate to the Ferris wheel, facing the wooden platform and watching the hypnotically swaying red car. There was still an unreleased tightness in his pants.

  "Don't like the smell of sex, Pup?" someone said behind him. It wasn't Lavinia's voice. It was low and smooth, and it held no question in it. It was the voice darkness would have.

  Pup turned and saw a figure, more the essence of a shadow than a solid form, a shadow separated from what it reflects, leaving only the darkness that it represents. A shadow by itself would be a frightening thing, an unbalanced and spectral monstrosity, a hole outside of nature with only nature, in its continual balance, to define and outline it. But this thing was more; it had a mouth and eyes, and two hands, and a smile that was the inverse of a smile. In one hand it held a cigarette, a long black thing, itself made of seeming shadow; and when it lifted this to its lips, it blew black smoke that subtracted from the air rather than added to it. In its other hand the shadow held Sprinkles by the neck in something more than a nape hold, painfully, as though the dog were only a feather.

  Pup was mesmerized. With a fluid motion, the shadow threw down its cigarette, at the same time blowing out its last smoke. It reached under its short coat and drew out something with a smooth black handle and a long gemlike blade. It resembled an elongated diamond, too sharp to hold.

  There came a noise from the Ferris wheel. Pup looked to see the door to the red car swing open as a weight from the inside pushed it out. There was a hand there, made of white bone, and as it spilled out, it was followed by a skeleton arm and then a skull and the rest of a bony body that fell into a broken heap on the wooden platform. Inside the car, Pup saw stains, red and gray and white, and there was a puddle of something on the floor of the car that looked as though it might tilt also out onto the platform.

  “Not to worry, Pup," the shadow man said. That wasn't the real Lavinia Crawford." And as if on cue, the pile of bones, the stains in the car, all of them, melted into nothingness, disappeared. "You can have the real Lavinia later if you want. But isn't there something better than sex, Pup? Isn't there something you always knew was better than sex?"

  The shadow's grip tightened on the dog. Sprinkles whined sorrowfully, way back in his throat, and his brown eyes, through a hollow haze of pain, beseeched Pup, as if he knew what was about to happen.

  "No!" Pup said, but the word stopped in his mouth even before the shadow's free hand started a long sweep up and then down, carrying the long white blade across Sprinkles' throat. The dog howled once, an empty sound that broke into a shallow, wheezing gurgle. He went stiff and straight and then, after a moment, slack, and as the pool of the deepest red Pup had ever seen gathered below the dog, the shadow man dropped Sprinkles into it.

  "Isn't there something better'?" the dark man said, and Pup, as though a door had opened for him with the man's words, a huge door leading into an infinitely long corridor, pitch black as night and angling always down, felt the long tension below his belt break and a spreading wetness. And something like peace came over him, something like the blissful calm after a long and mightily fought storm, as the dark man turned away and he followed.

  NINE

  Frances' day dawned. For years and years, the veil had been over her eyes. Had she lived in other places? Yes, she knew she had. Did she remember them? Barely. There had been a house once, she knew that, but whenever she thought of the house, the pain came that made her want to forget. There had been a house, a large yellow one, with a big lawn in the front and a bigger lawn in the back, and a barn with a silo and a lawn on each side. That had been in another place, not here. In the summer, all summer long, the lawns had stayed green. Why? She didn't know, but then did it matter? Of course not. Nothing mattered but the three Hims—him I mourn, him who saves me, him whom I push away.

  Where am I? She looked up and saw the Pole. But now the Pole was different. It was not the Northern Star, not the spinning heavens, not the red and white of His death and resurrection, the moving yet constant symbol of His salvation. I am the resurrection, and the life, he that believed in me, though he were dead, vet shall live, and whosoever liveth and believed, in me shall never die. It was something else now. It was . . . almost clear. She did not think she liked what was happening. Someone was drawing the veil back from her eyes. Now, dimly, it came to her what this meant. The veil had been there because she had prayed to Him for it, and now it was being lifted, but by whom?

  She thought of the house again, and her eyes hurt.

  Why wouldn't that pain leave her? She sometimes saw children who lived in other houses, saw their perfectly formed bodies, bursting with His life, as they ran past her. She cried for them because they had no notion of the fullness of Him, of the life He gave to them and to all things, did not know of His Book, although they sometimes threw verses of it at her. "He is the resurrection and the life!" they sometimes sang at her, mimicking her own pure words, which made her weep all the more for their ignorance of the precious gift He gave them. Life! They skipped as they sang or stood with their hands on their knees—some of the girls with their hands on their bare knees. Filled with life. They wore skirts, or shorts, or pants, all of the same color, faded blue, with sneakers and tee shirts. Through the tee shirts Frances could almost see their forming breasts, nurturing vessels for future life—all made possible by Him. Him who saves me.

  What was that? She doubled over in pain, straightening slowly. The sidewalk under her seemed covered with colors, wet to the touch. When she reached down, the colors were gone, in their place a . . . house. It was like looking into a clear pool on a day when the bright of the sky made the water reflect like a mirror. There was the yellow house, with the green lawn all around it. Painfully she looked away from the vision, straining her neck up toward the sky. It was not bright and blue; it was dark and gray
and heading for twilight, the kind of half-light that promised cold thunder to come. Her eye passed down and rested on the Pole for a moment, and suddenly it became to her only a white-and-red-striped barber pole bolted to the dull stucco wall outside a barber shop. Where was she? Where had she been? The veil was pulled partly away, the sustaining, comforting veil, and her mind was cleared. She was suddenly afraid. What was she doing here? Shouldn't she be in—

  "Please, no!" she cried, clutching at her middle and doubling over. Her dropping gaze had passed over her hand, and the sight of the aging, wrinkled thing where her own beautiful young hand should be terrified her more than anything. Could she be this old? Could this much time have passed?

  The house. Him I mourn.

  Her eyes lowered, more of their own volition than by an act of will, and the crystal pool on the sidewalk was still there. It seemed lit from within, throwing out a soft web of luminescence like a just-abandoned dream. Was that what it was, a dream?

  Cows.

  There were cows by the house. Off to the right there were two—no, three—white-and-black heifers cudding silently at the green grass. They were fenced in by a thin, waist-high wire attached to slender poles, looping away from the house in a lazy circle. Electricity, she knew, ran through the wire.

  How did she know that? Frances tried to pull her eyes from the pool but was unable to. She heard sounds now, the faint clucks of chickens in the coop behind the house, the grind of a tractor off somewhere in the distance, moving steadily against the earth. The tractor hesitated, and then went on. Another sound came, louder and clearer and very close. As if she were looking through the lens of a camera, someone passed into her vision from the right, nearly blocking out the entire front of the house. The dark outline of a man crossed her vision and went out of sight to the left, leaving a thin trail of dark smoke behind. A screen door creaked open and then whacked shut. Frances saw someone on the porch of the yellow house.