The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (2 page)

Nina said nothing. Though she hadn’t lived here
very long, she had picked up on things almost at once, had come to
terms with them, and accepted them.

Callum knew far more, and though he often fought
— with me, with himself, with anyone who would listen — he hadn’t
run either. He couldn’t. Those of us who loved movies new and old
wouldn’t let him. He ran the Regency Theater, on Centre Street,
elegant home for all our fantasies, the raft we sometimes used to
get away from the terrors that lurked around us on the shore.

“I think,” he said a few minutes later, “he’ll
be all right. He was Abe’s kid brother, after all, and Abe must
have told him something.”

“I guess.”

Nina looked at the house. “And if he didn’t, you
will.”

“What?”

I saw it then, the look between them, and I felt
like a complete jerk for not catching on the minute I had been
asked to open my house tonight. Of course.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

Deric Stockton came to the door, came out, and
saw us. “Who better?” Callum wanted to know.

“Nat Clayton,” I answered instantly. “Librarians
know everything; Nat knows even more. Or Marc — newspaper editors
are notoriously nosy and gabby. And being Nat’s husband, he’s worse
than most.” I held up a hand, touched a finger. “Cyd Yarrow’s back
in town — god knows she could tell him a thing or two. You want
more? No problem. What about old Fred Borg, retired but not
forgotten, from that selfsame police force? Not to mention a couple
of teachers I could —”

“All right, all right,” Callum said sourly.
“Jesus, you’re touchy.”

“Moody,” Nina corrected. I almost laughed.

Stockton came down the steps, dearly
uncomfortable in his dark blue suit, his still-fair hair slicked
back but making a determined effort to cut loose, like his
handlebar mustache. Although the light behind him put his face in
shadow, it was evident he was Abe’s brother — every line carved
deep, every angle sharp and ridged, eyes deep set and much too old
for the man who used them.

“Evening,” he said.

We nodded, listened to the crickets, listened to
the music, listened to the way time slowed on summer evenings.
Comfortable. A few words about the season, the entertainments at
the college, bits of gossip Davidson doled out without having to be
told, or scolded about, a shifting of positions until Nina was with
me at the tree, and the two men faced us, glancing up at the night
birds fussing in the leaves.

“I’m going to like it here,” Deric allowed into
a silence that cut us off from the Station. He nodded, scratched
the side of his nose. “Figure I’ll get along.”

A round of nods and grunts and shifting of
feet.

He looked straight at me then. “I’m told you can
help me.” I didn’t answer.

Nina poked me, the disapproving kind that made
me feel like a kid who’d forgotten to say thank you.

“Abe wrote, you know.”

I could hear it then
— you loved that old man
and so did I
,
he said I should listen . . . so I’m
listening.

Right.

Some kids rode past on their bicycles, balloons
tied to the handlebars, playing cards snapping against the spokes.
A party somewhere, something doing at the grade school or at a
church; a few seconds later another group sped by, faster, louder,
voices echoing off the houses and swallowed by the dark. I put my
hands in my pockets and walked down to the sidewalk, watching the
reflectors catch the streetlamps until they were little more than
red sparks that winked out when a breeze came at me from around the
corner.

Sparks.

Flares.

I turned around.

“You ever hear of Pilgrim’s Travelers?”

Callum cleared his throat noisily. “I’m not sure
—”

“Well?” I asked, pointedly ignoring him.

Deric shook his head, slowly. “Don’t think
so.”

Nina said, “Me neither.”

Callum questioned me without saying a word, and
when I nodded, he offered to refresh all our drinks. We accepted,
and he made me promise not to begin until he returned. An easy
promise, because if Deric wanted to know about the Station, wanted
to hear it from a source besides a brother’s letter, I was going to
need fortification.

Not in the liquor.

The company.

I looked up at the stars I could see above the
house, thought of those kids and their bikes and how they had
reminded me of parties, and how the parties had reminded me of
carnivals and fairs. Flares themselves, but blinding for a night or
a weekend and just as swiftly gone, leaving behind nothing but an
empty field, a blowing wind, tracks in the earth, and the smell not
of cotton candy and candied apples, not of greasepaint and grease,
but of a slow smiling dying.

The way a carousel sounds when the last tune’s
been played and the animals stop spinning.

I led Nina and Deric to the steps, and we sat,
took our glasses when Callum joined us, and I plucked with some
trouble an ice cube from my drink.

“Imagine,” I said, “what it must be like when
all the ice melts and there’s nothing left to hold but the cold air
left behind.”

“Hey,” Nina said softly, and placed a light hand
on my knee.

This time I did smile.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m not the one who’s
dying. Tonight.” She squeezed; I covered her fingers. I looked to
Deric and said, “Abe ever tell you about a guy called Casey? A
carpenter named Kayman? People like that?”

He shook his head. “Are they . . . what did you
call them, Pilgrim’s Travelers?”

“No,” I answered, dropping what was left of the
ice cube back into the glass. “No, but they were there. Holding
on.”

A wagon’s broad painted wheels rattled and
slipped over the cobblestones that night, its team of old black
geldings snorting in their traces, the driver’s voice carrying
through the early morning fog, urging the horses on in a practiced
monotone.

The sound of a lazy whip.

The rattling of a harness.

Hooves clattering on stone, striking sparks,
moving on. Another wagon, much heavier, a caravan that carried with
it the tuneless, oddly melodic jangle of a dozen tin bells hanging
from a brace above the locked doors in back.

A third to make it a procession, and the soft
quiet sound of a young woman laughing.

“There’s nothing to it,” said Casey Bethune from
his customary place at the door end of the bar. “The damn things
are weighted.”

“So if there’s nothing to it, what’s the
trick?”

Casey looked in wonder at the other men and
women on the stools down toward the other end and not paying
attention, looked in comic disbelief at the big man seated at his
left hand, immediately around the bar’s squared comer. “The trick?
That’s easy — you don’t even try.”

Mayard Chase stared.

“Think,” Casey urged gently and with a
smile.

Chase wrinkled his face, put a finger to his
temple, closed his eyes.

From behind the bar Molly Burgess stopped
washing glasses and looked at Casey. “What’s Yard doing?”

“Thinking.”

“Quiet,” Chase demanded. “I’m thinking.”

“Drunk,” Molly said with a knowing nod.

“Thinking,” Casey insisted. “I’ve told him a
kind of joke and he still doesn’t get it”

“Oh God save us,” she said. “We’ll be here all
night”

“Hush,” Chase commanded, opened one eye, closed
it again. “There’s got to be a trick to the trick, you see. Casey
wouldn’t know straight if he was whacked with a ruler.”

Molly groaned and walked away; Casey grinned
after her and took a careful sip of his drink, a small Scotch and
soda, only his second that night and probably his last. He was
going to Pilgrim’s Travelers later on, and he wanted his head
clear, his eye keen, his arm steady. He was going to win a stuffed
panda if it killed him.

Another sip, and he looked around him, not
seeing much because all of it was as familiar as the lumps in his
mattress.

The Brass Ring was long and narrow, bar on the
right and small round tables on the left; the aisle between, bare
hardwood and comfortably scuffed; beyond, more tables in two rows,
and beyond them an open space for those who attacked the three
dartboards each night, making more noise than an army in full rout
Gleaming brass horse braces on the grey-wood walls, brass rail top
and bottom around the bar, electric lanterns anchored on thick
shelves just wide enough to hold them kept twilight inside no
matter where the sun was. The only window faced Centre Street, and
its lower half was veiled by a burgundy curtain hung from brass
rings on a brass rod; the outside wall, along Steuben, had been
painted by the owner to resemble three arched, frosted windows so
realistically done that more than one evening pedestrian had paused
to peer through the painted panes and abruptly walked away as if
nothing had happened.

No food was served here, just pretzels and
salted peanuts.

Casey loved it.

The Mariner Lounge and the Chancellor Inn made
him uncomfortable; the Cock’s Crow, while more his style, was
sometimes just too far away, and too often too crowded. The Brass
Ring, then, was a godsend. It had opened three months ago on the
same site as its namesake, which had shut its doors in 1897 after
less than five years’ operation. This one, he thought as he waited
for Yard, was bound to last much longer. The atmosphere was amiable
without forcing anyone to be friendly when they weren’t in the
mood, the liquor and beer inexpensive, and Nigel Oxley, the owner
and sometimes dart player, didn’t insist on his customers drinking
just as long as they bought something during their stay.

Yard relaxed with a sharp sigh. “I give up.”

“You give up.”

“That’s what I said. I give up. What’s the
trick?”

Casey massaged the side of his neck, the backs
of his hands.

“Yard, pay attention, boy — the bottles are
weighted, you see — only a Goliath could knock them over with the
spongy softballs they give you, so . . . you . . .” He waited
expectantly.

Chase nodded. Waiting.

“Jesus,” Casey said. “Damnit, man, it’s all
rigged against you so you don’t even try!”

“Ah.”

“Right” He grabbed a handful of peanuts from a
chipped wood bowl, dropped one into his mouth. “Yard, how the hell
do you make a living with that store, huh? Seems to me you’d get
robbed blind in three days.”

“Two,” said Yard. “But I’m independently
wealthy.”

Grinning, Casey shook his head, looked down at
his glass, at the polished wood. His face was there in dark
reflection, but he couldn’t see it clearly. Lean and leathered like
the rest of him, eyes in a constant partial squint, lips in a
perpetual lopsided smile, topped by a mass of combed-back hair that
had begun to turn white while he was still in high school, finished
its turning before he’d graduated from college. A number of dyes
and colorings had been tried before he gave up — they only made him
look foolish, unnatural, made him look like a stranger had claimed
squatter’s rights in his bathroom mirror.

Mayard Chase, on the other hand, was high and
wide, with a carpenter’s hands and a bricklayer’s muscles, and
virtually no hair at all above a face round and fleshy. The owner
of the hardware store had tried, only once, a toupee. Two summers
ago, to keep his pate from burning and peeling. Neither his
children nor his wife had had the nerve to tell him what he looked
like; not so his friends. The rug was gone in a week.

A cry of victory from a dart game, applause and
a call for a round of drinks on the losers for those at the back
tables.

The door opened to admit three men and a woman;
they hesitated for a moment, listened to the noise, and left.

Your loss, he thought, sipped, looked around
again, and nodded to the two women seated at the first table by the
door. Both wore their hair short and brushed back over their ears,
both wore T-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes without socks. The
older was near his age, a teacher at the high school; the other was
a decade less, though her sharp-angled face erased the difference
until she smiled. Ordinarily he wouldn’t speak to them other than a
polite greeting, a polite farewell; tonight, however, Yard’s
feigned obtuseness had put him in good humor.

“You ladies going to the fair?” he asked, though
he was careful to make it clear the question was no invitation.

The teacher shook her head. “Not tonight. Summer
school tomorrow. Probably Friday, if I bother.”

Her companion didn’t answer.

Yard swiveled around on his stool, leaned back
on one elbow, paunch separating the buttons of his checkered shirt
“Better watch it there, Tina. Casey’s on vacation these days, and
when he’s not making love to his damn flowers, he’s hunting for
human action.”

Tina Elby raised a thick eyebrow. “Casey?”

Casey’s smile felt strained, and he looked back
to his glass.

He wasn’t in the mood for any of Yard’s teasing,
but it was his own fault for opening his big mouth in the first
place.

“It’s his job, you see,” Yard continued,
deepening his voice. “He sees all you beautiful women on his rounds
every morning, he saves it all up for his free days.”

“Yard,” he said quietly, “knock it off.”

Chase ignored him. “You don’t know him the way I
do. We all know him as a superior postman, a gardener without peer,
a man who paints his whole house every time it gets a spot of mud.
But beneath that innocent white hair lies the cunning brain of a
lustful, debauched, and I might say extraordinarily experienced,
man of the world.”

“Yard.”

A sideways glance at the table caught Tina
grinning, and at the same time the grin told him she knew what Yard
was doing. It should have made him feel better. It didn’t. It only
stirred a blush somewhere beneath his chin, a blush that would
eventually darken his cheeks and made his hair seem all the lighter
if his friend didn’t soon shut his mouth.