Apocalypse (33 page)

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.

“Joanie!” Barry cried, his voice cracking, like an adolescent's, into a scream.

She had seen, but too late, what was happening. As she raised her head the cicada with a tyrant's stony face had lumbered from its place on the carousel. With black, clawed forelegs it reached over the back of her carousel horse; the animal shied and whickered aloud in terror, and Joan tried to stop, let go, stumble away—but there was a clack of harsh wings, and the cicada caught her in its narrow grasp. It spraddled its two pairs of hind legs, pulling back, and tugged her past lashing serpents onto the carousel platform. She screamed—Barry Beal was running toward her, shouting; his shouts and the sound of his thudding feet and even the roaring of the fire above were drowned in the sound of her screaming.

Cally saw the cicada drop its victim to the merry-go-round's floor as if she were something not good to eat. Then the carousel whirled her out of sight beyond the fiery column on which it turned—turned now faster than Barry could run, and Joan's cry wailed away.

“No! Oh, no. No.…”

She spun into view again from behind the blazing hub. Sprawled flat, clinging to a pole at the platform's edge by the fire-eyed horse's skittish heels and venomous tail, her head down so that her long hair trailed, her face hidden—Cally could not at first comprehend what had happened, except that Joan's dress had turned blood red. Then the cicada laughed out of its tight-lipped human mouth, a laugh like the creaking of insects in the night.

“Welcome, Whore of Babylon,” it said in the same creaking voice, the king of death said, looking down at the one who lay at his feet beneath the orange flames.

Joan lifted her head like someone drowning in fire. “Stop this thing!” she cried out. “Make it stop!” In a flash piercing as swordlight Cally saw her face, saw how it had changed, and felt as if she could not breathe; she felt faint, and the blaze overhead seemed to take all the air.

“Where are your babies, Whore of Babylon?” the king taunted.

“Please …” Joan passed and was snatched away again by the carousel careening backward into doom.

Embers fell, stinging worse than betrayal, and Cally did not feel them or move, and at a small distance from her Barry stood as stupefied as Cally. It was not they who stopped the carousel's tailward turning, but the fire above them. For with a rain of burning coals and a noise worthy of a hundred uncouth beasts the roof began to fall, and the first timber jammed the spinning platform like a sprag.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When Elspeth first swung her sword the shock as it struck through flesh to bone reverberated up her dark-skinned arm and shook her soul. A person, a man with sunburned ears and a balding head, was cut down, dead by her doing; how could that be? How could any of this day be happening? It felt unbelievable, unreal, like a mad dream, as bizarre and floating as a certain carousel night.… Only one thing was real: Shirley. And Hoadley was trying to destroy that large golden verity, the mob was pulling, pounding at Shirley to drag her down, and Elspeth struck with the sword, and again, and again, clearing a way to take her to the big, blond woman's side, where she and Berrysmiter and her plunging horse could clear away the people who attacked—

Her beloved.

Elspeth lifted her sword again, needlessly. The crowd around Shirley wanted a horse, a means of escape, not a swordfight; though they felt desperate enough to risk the slow death of AIDS, they did not care to be killed on the spot. They pulled back at the first sight of the long, bloodied steel blade. But in that moment Elspeth was no longer a butterfly floating in a nightmare. Her sword grew tangible in her hand, her arm bone-hard and strong-muscled to her unquaking soul, and she hated them, hated them all who had ever hurt Shirley or despised Peter Wertz; she was no longer merely Elspeth, her more proper name was War, and she would kill, kill them all. Warrior felt her mood and shrilled, reared, mane and tail flying. Mount and swordswoman lunged, and the erstwhile mob, helplessly pressed together, shrieked and scrambled to escape War's sword.

“Yo!” Astonished, aghast, Shirley exclaimed, “Elspeth!” The easy-going woman, strapping-strong from her farm labors, had not much minded being mauled by the crowd, not enough to kill for it. She had been holding off her attackers absentmindedly and watching Devil carry Cally away when War swept down, a vengeance. “Elspeth!”

Her general called and must be obeyed. Sighing, War turned away from the scene of carnage before she had struck down more than three of the enemy. Dripping sword held low, she trotted smartly to the one who awaited her on the tall gray horse.

“Come on,” said Shirley, “let's get out of here. Where's Gigi?”

The general was not her general after all, but her captain and comrade in arms, and Gigi was the traitor who had called her a jig. War didn't know or care where she was. “Gigi can go to hell,” she said.