The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (9 page)

“Yeah, but I never said stuff like that.” A
half-trembling smile. “I ever said something like that, god, my
mother would wash my mouth out with soap, I’d be grounded for a
year.”

“Yeah, well —”

A faint whirring startled her. A brief metallic
sputtering, and suddenly bells in the steeple clanged tunelessly,
and so rapidly she didn’t think to count them until Kitt said,
“Nuts, it’s five already.”

Fran didn’t believe it. It couldn’t be. That
meant she’d been walking all afternoon, walking all over and not
once leaving town.

“Hey,” said Kitt, “I gotta go. Maybe I’ll see
you tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Fran said, still staring at the church,
at the dark rectangles in the stone tower the bells hid behind.

Five o’clock?

Then Kitt faced her toward Mainland Road,
gently. “Two blocks down that way, turn left, two blocks more. I
know you’re not lost, but that’s where you live anyway.” A grin
that exposed a missing tooth on the bottom. “See you.” And she ran
in the opposite direction, dragging her shadow behind her until she
rounded a corner and disappeared.

I don’t like this place, Fran decided as she
headed for the place where she lived now, it wasn’t home; I don’t
like a place where people know where you live when you didn’t even
tell them.

But by the time she reached her front walk, she
hated herself for already recognizing a few of the houses, for
thinking they weren’t all that bad, not really, some of them were
actually kind of pretty in a weird sort of way. Different colors on
one place. Red and cream; dark blue and white; grey and maroon.
They were big enough that it kind of looked good. Not old, not like
she first thought; at least not falling-down old.

Even the house where she lived now — two stories
and lots of that stuff her mother called gingerbread, fresh white
and dark green, and her room right over the front-porch roof on the
left, she could tell from the curtains her mother had hung in the
open window. They waved at her. Slowly. Reaching out and sighing,
sliding back in. Suddenly she was mad enough to want to run in and
tear them down from their rods, stamp all over them, drag them
through mud and dirt and leave them in the street where cars would
run over them; and just as suddenly it left her, and left her
puffing as if she had run a million miles, making her so tired that
she nearly had to crawl to the steps, sit down, elbows on knees,
cheeks in palms.

Trapped.

“Fran?” Her mother calling from inside. “Fran,
we’re going to eat in a few minutes.”

“Yeah, okay.” She hunched her shoulders, made
herself small, like the small brown bird with the touch of yellow
on his head that sauntered across the grass like he owned it. He
stabbed at something on the walk and moved on, popping into the
bushes that separated her house from the one next door.

When she looked back to the street, someone was
standing on the sidewalk.

She sat up abruptly; it was a boy. He wore a
baseball shirt with the sleeves rolled up, baseball pants, and
sneakers that had a black band around the edge. His hair was thick
and brown, and streaked with light, as if he spent most of his day
in the hot sun.

“Hi,” he said, not shy at all.

She sort of smiled, keeping most of it in
because she didn’t want to act like a jerk, because he was, after
all, only a boy even if he was cute.

He looked the house over. “You just moved in, I
bet.”

She nodded.

He kept one hand in a hip pocket. Any minute now
she expected him to start chewing tobacco.

“Fran, supper!”

She grimaced.

“Fran.” The boy worked his mouth around it like
something he hadn’t ever eaten before and wasn’t sure how it
tasted.

“Short for Frances,” she told him brusquely,
blinking rapidly because she didn’t know she still had a voice, or
could use it. “I hate Frances. I hate Fran too, but it’s better
than nothing.”

He grinned, his cheeks fat like a chipmunk after
a full meal. Then, to her embarrassment, he pointed at his cheeks,
poked at them. “I’m Chip,” he told her. “Because I look like a
chipmunk.”

“Who says that?”

“Everybody. You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know, turn around, I’ll see if you have
a stripe and a tail.”

He laughed. “All right, Fran! Hey, you got a
last name?”

Suspicious, she frowned. “What for?”

“So I can look you up in the phone book, dope,
and call you sometime.”

Maybe, she thought at him, I don’t want you to
call me, you ever think of that? Why would I want anyone called
Chip to call me? Especially a boy.

“Lumbaird,” she answered.

He nodded. “Okay. Mine’s Clelland.”

She shrugged
so?

He straightened, his face without expression,
and she wanted to fall under the steps, under the porch, hide there
until the spiders got her.

“Fran?”

She turned quickly. “Mom, c’mon, just a few more
minutes, okay?”

“It’s ready,” her mother said sternly from the
other side of the screen door. Hardly seen. Only a pale glow from
the skin on her arms and face. “And it’s getting cold.”

“Oh . . . all right.”

She looked back to tell Chip . . . something,
she didn’t know what . . . but the sidewalk was empty. She
scrambled to her feet and looked up and down the block, but no one
was there. No one. He was gone. Only the trees. Still frowning, she
wanted to run down the walk and check behind the bushes there
because that’s where he had to be. Hiding. He couldn’t have run
that far that fast just when she was talking to her mother.

“Frances. Now.”

She stared; she couldn’t see him.

She heard the door open and took the steps
slowly.

Her mother guided her into the kitchen, to the
sink and the soap. “Did you have a good walk, honey? Did you meet
anyone?”

She told her about Kitt, about how the girl knew
where she lived.

“Honey, in a town this small everyone knows
everyone and where everyone lives.”

Great.

“And I met a boy named Chip,” she added as she
dried her hands on paper towels.

“Oh, really?”

“Yep.” She looked up at her mother and ignited
her best smile. “I think he’s a ghost.”

* * *

The storm woke her.

She had been listening to it all day, grumbling
like an old man off in the distance, stomping around the hills as
if he couldn’t make up his mind which way to go. Dark clouds and
once in a while a gust of wind that picked up dust and blew it into
the house, snapped the shades, snapped the curtains, fluttered the
fringe on the living room carpet. Then calm. Not quiet, just still.
The old man, out of breath, waiting for his strength to return. A
peculiar smell that Daddy said meant rain was on the way. A
tickling along her arms once in a while that Mom told her was
lightning getting ready to strike.

They had been working for what felt like
forever, putting the last things away, cleaning floors and windows,
moving furniture to get the rugs down, moving the furniture back,
taking breaks to get into the car and drive around the Station.
Exploring. Finding a park that was huge, almost like another
country even though they only stayed on the paths; eating in places
called the Inn and the Cove and the Cock’s Crow; seeing the movie
theater that didn’t look like one she ever saw but at least it gave
her hope; looking at her new school on High Street that made her
depressed because it was stone and something else old even though
it was right near the park entrance; seeing the library, a sort of
modern building that she knew right away just didn’t belong. Once,
driving across the railroad tracks and into the valley where she
saw the farms and a quarry and Pilgrim Creek and she wanted to
scream because there wasn’t anything out there but grass and crops
and a couple of cows that didn’t even bother to look up when they
drove by.

Then working again, and eating, and sleeping,
and working because her parents said they wanted it all out of the
way before the real summer began and it was too hot.

The storm woke her.

She hadn’t even had time to find Kitt or Chip,
and neither of them had stopped by, though a couple of other kids
had — Elly Gulsing and Susan Dumont, who looked like sisters but
weren’t, and who spent that first hour telling her about the school
and the teachers and the boys and stuff. Elly, who for god’s sake
wore a dress and sounded like she owned everything but the
churches, said there was always something going on at the park
pond, Fran ought to come over as soon as she was allowed; Susan,
who dressed normally and had enormous dimples and was heavier but
not really fat, said you can get ice cream and stuff at stands in
the park, sometimes they spend all day there if they have enough
money for a hot dog lunch. Fran said it sounded great, but she
couldn’t imagine spending a whole day, wasting all that daylight,
sitting around watching ducks and talking and making plans to take
over the world. Boring. It sounded boring.

They came by a couple of times, alone or
together, talked, left, and left behind bits of themselves that
Fran passed on to her parents — like Elly’s father being some sort
of banker in Boston, like Susan being a twin but her sister had
died of cancer two years ago, like Kitt’s father owning the
delicatessen on High Street and letting his daughter’s friends
swipe some summer fruit now and then.

The storm woke her.

Then a man came by, Mr. Chase from the hardware
store, with a station wagon filled with kids. He knew Daddy and
wanted to know if they wanted to go to the Travelers with him. Mom
didn’t think so, Daddy said there was still a ton of things to do
around the house, but before Fran could protest, they made a
miracle happen — they let her go without them, with a promise to
listen to Mr. Chase and not go off on her own.

A miracle.

She almost cried.

And before she could think, the air smelled of
sawdust and spun sugar, mustard and hamburgers, grease and
machines. Elly was there, and Susan, and Kitt, and time passed in a
gulp of soda, a smear of mustard licked off her thumb, and suddenly
Mr. Chase said time for one more ride.

She picked the carousel, picked an ostrich, and
prayed that the bird would jump off the platform and run her home.
A hundred times in a circle, a million times, laughing, almost
forgetting how miserable she was when she saw Chip on a stallion a
few rows ahead. She called. He didn’t hear her. He was talking to a
skinny girl with straight hair riding beside him. Fran called
again. He looked over his shoulder, stared, grinned recognition,
waved, but the music was too loud for her to hear what he said when
he tried to call back.

After the ride, feeling dizzy, she tried to find
him, but Mr. Chase was waiting at the exit to take them all
home.

The storm woke her.

A sound like slow-ripping metal sat her up
abruptly, clutching the sheet to her chest; an enormous explosion
of thunder and the storm wasn’t an old man anymore, it was a bull
running wild. At first she was scared. Cambridge didn’t have storms
like this. Not with lightning that lasted forever and seared
shadows into the walls; not with thunder that lasted forever,
crashing, then echoing, and echoing again, the bull running away
and turning around to charge one more time.

Kicking up pebbles of rain that bounced off the
porch roof and smashed against her window.

But as it settled in, the thunder constant but
not as loud, the lightning fierce but not as hot, the house no
longer vibrating, she scolded herself for acting like a baby. A
calming count to seven. She left her bed, padded to the window,
squinting against the bright flares, scratching her sides, through
her hair, leaning dose enough to the pane for her breath to make a
cloud she wiped away with the heel of her hand.

Lightning, this time silent, and the houses
across the street were without color; lightning, silent, and the
rain in the street was silver fire and silver sparks; lightning,
and someone stood under the branches of the tree at the foot of her
new driveway.

She almost didn’t see him.

A dark figure that blended in with the bole, and
it took two more strikes before she knew he was really there.

Chip?

No; it must be after midnight.

It was too dark in spite of all the light, and
he was too far away from the nearest streetlamp to be seen without
the lightning. But he stood there nevertheless, a shadow beside a
shadow, not moving even though the wind slanted the rain and turned
the street to a river of deep black ice.

He stood there; she could see him.

What a jerk, she thought; she wasn’t afraid,
just curious why his parents would let him out so late. Unless, she
thought with a grin, he had snuck out. In the storm. Which
instantly made her want to know why.

To see you, stupid.

Oh sure, tell me another one.

Really, I’m not kidding.

Quickly she grabbed up her bathrobe and ran out
of the room, keeping on her toes even though the wind had found a
voice to howl with and moan. This afternoon the stairs had been
carpeted, the last thing done before Mom declared the moving
officially over, and she hurried down, not really sure she wouldn’t
slip in the soft pile, ran into the living room and pulled aside
the drapery, and the shade.

Waited.

Only a few droplets quivered on the glass here,
the porch roof keeping most of the rain away, and when the
lightning came again, distant, wan, almost weary of the game, she
pressed her forehead against the cold pane and couldn’t see him no
matter how hard she stared. She bit down on her lower lip gently,
pulled at it with her teeth. Another bolt, and she couldn’t be
sure.

“Damn,” she whispered, moved into the foyer and
checked the staircase to be sure no one else was awake and prowling
around. Then she opened the front door, and shivered as cold and
damp swirled hungrily around her ankles, burrowed into the skin on
calf and shin, tightened the planes of her stomach and
buttocks.