The Mammoth Book of Terror (64 page)

I turned left, slowly, though there was no traffic. Neither tourists nor sailors had any use for this road anymore, apparently. “It’s been a long time since you mentioned your
dad.” In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time. She talked about her school commissioner mother – stable, stubborn, fiercely loyal, nasty Scrabble player. Also her recovered
junkie sister. But her father . . .

“I’ve never heard you mention him,” Ash said, detached as ever, just noting.

The frontage road, at least, did not look like new downtown Long Beach or Third Street, or Downtown Disney. To our left, the scaffolded buildings loomed, lightless as pilings for some gigantic
pier lost long ago to the tide. To our right lay the ocean, without even a whitecap to brighten its surface. Few other stretches in the LosAnDiego megalopolis were still allowed to get this dark.
We’d gone no more than a few hundred yards when Rebecca sat up in her seat and pointed.

“Right here. See?”

I punched the brakes again and brought the car to a stop. Just behind us, a signless, potholed drive snaked between the black iron posts of what must once have been a gate. Beyond that, a
parking lot, then the old pier, lit by too-dim streetlights on either side. And beyond those, right at the end of the pier . . .

“What is that?” Ash said.

It seemed to hover above the ocean, a dark, metallic, upside-down funnel, like a giant magician’s hat. Beneath it, dim and scattered lights flickered. If there were ocean rather than pier
beneath it, I would have assumed we were looking at biolumi-nescent fish.

I glanced toward Rebecca, whose smile was the wistful one I’d gotten used to over the past year or so. When I reached over and squeezed her hand, she squeezed back, but absently.

“What’s the smile for?” I said, and turned us into the drive. Past the gateposts, we emerged into a startlingly large parking lot that sprawled in both directions. A handful of
older cars – an orange Dodge pickup, a ‘60s-vintage Volkswagon van, a U-haul trailer with no lead-vehicle attached to it – clustered like barnacle shells near the foot of the
wooden steps that led up to the pier. Otherwise, there were only empty spaces, their white dividing lines obscured but still visible, rusted parking meters planted sideways at their heads like
markers on anonymous graves.

“There used to be a billboard right next to that gate,” Rebecca said, staring around her. “A girl dressed in one of those St Pauli Girl waitress uniforms, you know what
I’m talking about? Breasts like boulders, you felt like they were just going to pop loose and roll right off the sign and smash you when you drove under them. She was riding one of the
merry-go-round horses and holding a big beer stein. Her uniform said LITE-YOUR-LINE on it, and in huge red letters over her head, the sign read, LONG BEACH PIER. GET LIT.”

Ash laughed quietly as I pulled into a spot a few rows from the van and pick-up, and Rebecca got out fast and stood into a surprising sea wind. Ash and I joined her, and I had a brief but
powerful desire to ditch our friend, never mind how good it was to see him, take my wife by the elbow and steer her to the dark, disused stretch of beach fifty yards ahead of us. There we’d
stand, let the planet’s breath beat against our skin until it woke us. The whole last year, it seemed to me, we’d been sleeping. Or I’d been sleeping, and Rebecca had been
mourning, and something else, too. Retreating, maybe, from everything but her child. Shaking free of something old, because she had
not
been sleeping, even before our daughter was born.

“I think this is the only place I remember coming with him,” Rebecca said. “For fun, anyway.” She moved off toward the steps. We followed. Ash’s vest left little
purple trails of reflected streetlight behind him. His gaze was aimed straight up the steps. Rebecca had a deeper hunger for these spots, I thought, these night-places where people washed up or
swept in like sharks from the deep sea. But Ash could smell them.

“You came here a lot?” I asked. I considered taking Rebecca’s hand again, but thought that would be crowding her, somehow.

“More than you’d think.” She mounted the stairs. “Some days, he hadn’t even started drinking, yet. He’d wait until we got here. Buy my sister and me three
dollars each worth of tickets – that was like fifteen rides – and plop us on the merry-go-round while he—”

The hands closed around us so fast, from both sides, that we didn’t even have time to cry out. One second we were alone at the top of the leaning staircase and the next there were filthy
fingers clamped on all of our wrists and red, bearded faces leering into ours. The fingers began dragging us around in a sickening circle.

“
Ring around the funny,
” the face nearest to me half-sang, his breath overwhelming, equal parts bad gin and sea salt and sand. “
Pockets full of money. Give it. Give
it. Give it
now/”

Then, as suddenly as they had grabbed us, they let go, a hand or two at a time, fell back a step, and we got our first good look. If we hadn’t been on a glorified dock at the edge of the
Pacific, a hundred yards that felt like fifty miles from anywhere I knew, I think I might have laughed, or wept.

They stood before us in a clump, five decrepit men in ruined pea-coats with their noses running and their beards wild and their skin mottled with sores red and raised like octopus suckers.
Probably, I thought, Long Beach – like the former People’s Republic of Santa Monica, and every other Southern California town I knew – had passed and enforced a new set of
vagrancy laws to keep all that fresh sidewalk pavement free of debris. And this particular quintet had scuttled down here to hide under the great steel magician’s hat and sleep with the
fishes and pounce on whatever drifted out to them like marine snow.

“Here,” Ash started, sliding a hand into the pocket of his vest, just as Rebecca stuck an arm across his chest.

“Don’t,” she said.

It shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d watched her do this before. Rebecca had worked with the homeless most of her adult life, and felt she knew what they needed, or at least what
might be most likely to help. But I was always startled by the confidence of her convictions.

“Nearest shelter’s on La Amatista,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder toward the frontage road, town. “Five, maybe six blocks. They have food.”

“Don’t want food,” one of the men snarled, but his snarl became a whine before he’d finished the sentence. “We want change.”

“You won’t get ours.”

“
Change.
” The five of them knotted together – coiled, I thought, and my shoulders tensed, and I could feel the streaky wetness they’d left on my wrists and their
breath in my mouth – and then, just like that, they were gone, bumping past us down the steps to disappear under the dock.

For a good minute, maybe more, the three of us stood in our own little clump, and there were unsettled feelings seeping up through my stomach, and I could neither place them nor get them quiet.
Finally, Rebecca said, “The most amazing merry-go-round,” as though nothing whatsoever had occurred.

I glanced down the pier toward the magician’s hat, which was actually the roof of an otherwise open pavilion. There were lights clustered beneath it, yellow and green and red, but they
seemed to waver above the water, connected to nothing, until I realized I was looking through some sort of threadbare canvas drapery suspended from the rim of the overhang like a giant spider web,
generations in the making. Between us and the pavilion lay maybe fifty yards of moldy wooden planking. Shadows of indeterminate shape slid over the planks or sank into them, and on either side of
the streetlights, solitary figures sat at the railing-less edges and dangled their legs over the dark and fished.

“Is this safe, Rebecca?” I asked.

She’d seemed lost in thought, staring after our would-be muggers, but now she brightened again, so fast I felt myself get dizzy. “We’ll let Ash go first. Drive everyone back
with the vest.” She flicked his front with her fingers, and I felt a flicker of jealousy, couldn’t believe I was feeling it, and made myself ignore it.

Of course, Ash did go first. The lights and the pavilion and the curtain floating on the wind drew him. Me, too, but not in the same way. Rebecca waited for me to return her smile, then shrugged
and stepped off behind our friend. I followed.

“They used to sell T-shirts from a stand right there,” she said as we walked, gesturing at the empty space to her left. “Army camouflage. American flag prints. They sold candy
popcorn, too. My dad always bought us the Patriotic Bag. Red cherry, blue raspberry, vanilla.”

“Are there such things as blue raspberries?” Ash asked, but Rebecca ignored him.

“Lot of patriotic stuff, come to think of it. I wonder why. Bicentennial, maybe?”

If she was asking me, I had no answer. Periodically, one of the streetlamps buzzed or flickered. No moon. Our footsteps echoed strangely on the wet wood, sounding somehow lighter than they
should have. Not one of the fishermen glanced our way, though one twitched as we drew abreast, hunched forward to work furiously at his reel, and yanked a small ray right up into the air in front
of him. It hung there streaming, maybe a foot across, its underside impossibly white, silently flapping. Like the ripped-out soul of a bird, I thought, and shuddered while the fisherman drew the
ray toward him and laid it, gently across his lap. It went on flapping there until it died.

We’d all stopped in our tracks at the fisherman’s first movements, and we stayed there quite a while. Eventually, Ash turned to us and nodded his head. “I have missed you,
Rebecca,” he said. “You, too, Elliot.” But he meant Rebecca. He’d always meant Rebecca, and had told me so once, the night before graduation, on one the rare occasions when
he got high, just to see. “Count on you,” he’d told me. “Worship her.”

Tonight, Rebecca didn’t respond, and eventually Ash started toward the pavilion and the lights beneath it. We followed. I walked beside my wife, close enough for elbow contact but not
manufacturing any. Something about the flapping ray reminded me of our daughter, squirming and jerking as she scrabbled for a hold in the world, and I wanted to be back at our house. In spite of
the calmer, sadder way Rebecca had been this past year – maybe even because of it, though I hated thinking that – I loved our home.

“What made the merry-go-round so amazing?” I asked.

“The guy who designed it – Rooff, I think? – he’s like the most famous American carousel builder. Or one of. He did this one in Rhode Island or Vermont, when they broke
it up and sold off the horses, they went on eBay for $25,000 a piece. But this one . . .”

In the quiet of the next few seconds, I became aware, for the first time since we’d reached the pier, of the sounds. That wind, first of all, sighing out of the blackness to crash against
the fortified city and then roll back. The ocean, shushing and muttering. The boards creaking as fishermen shifted or cast and seagulls dropped out of the dark to perch on the ruined railings. And,
from straight ahead, under that darkly gleaming steel hat, an incongruous and unidentifiable tinkling, almost musical, barely audible, like an ice cream truck from blocks away.

“You should have seen their faces, Elliot. You would have loved them.”

I blinked, still seeing the ray. “Really?”

“Rooff – the designer – he made them after his business partner died. His best friend, I guess. To keep him company, or something. I met this older man from the Carousel
Preservation Assemblage who—”

“The Carousel what?” I said, and smiled. It really was astonishing, the people Rebecca knew.

“I met him at that open city planning meeting down here a couple years ago. The one about the development of the rest of downtown? The one I came home so upset from?”

“That would be every city planning meeting,” I said. My smile faded, and the musical tinkling from the end of the pier got just a little louder.

“Anyway. These horses, Elliot. They were just . . .
the friendliest
horses I’ve ever seen. They all had huge dopey smiles on their faces. Their teeth either pointed out
sideways, or else they were perfect and glowing. Their sides were shiny brown or black or pink or blue. Their manes all had painted glass rubies and sapphires sticking out of them, and the saddles
had these ridiculously elaborate roses and violets carved into the seats. Hooves flying, like they just couldn’t stand to come down, you know? Like it was too much fun just sailing around in
a circle forever. The Preservation guy said Rooff installed every single one of them, and every cog of every machine down here, by himself, at night, by candlelight. As some kind of tribute to his
friend or something. Said he was a total raving loon, too. Got involved in all kinds of seances trying to contact his friend after he died. Wound up getting publicly ridiculed by Harry Hou-dini,
who broke up one of his little soirees, apparently. Died brokenhearted and penniless.”

“Your kind of guy,” I said. And I thought I understood, suddenly and for the first time, just how badly Rebecca’s father had hurt her. Because he’d been her kind of guy,
too.

Unlike me.

“Yep,” said Rebecca, and her face darkened again. Her mood seemed to change with every breath now, like the pattern of shadows on the pier around us. “Anyway, this is where we
came. My dad’d plop us on the merry-go-round, hand the operator a fistful of tickets, and there we’d stay while he went and . . . well. I’m not going to tell you.”

Ahead, Ash reached the hanging drapes, which, up close, were stained and ratty and riddled with runs. Without turning around or pausing, he slipped inside them. Instantly, his form seemed to
waver, too, just like the lights, as though he’d dived into a pool. I stopped, closed my eyes, felt the salt on my skin and smelled fish and Whitewater. And smog, of course. Even here.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“Because I’m pretty sure you’re going to get to see.” She passed through the drapes, and I followed.

I don’t know what I was expecting under the hat, but whatever it was, I was disappointed. The space under there was cavernous, stretching another thirty yards or so out to sea, but most of
it was empty, just wood planking and the surrounding shroud flapping in the wind like the clipped and tattered wings of some giant ocean bird. Albatross, maybe. At the far end of the space, another
white curtain, this one heavier and opaque, dropped from rafters to dock, effectively walling off what had to be the last few feet of pier and giving me uneasy thoughts about the Wizard of Oz
behind his screen. A mirror-ball dangled overhead, gobbling up the light from the fixture-less hanging bulbs suspended from the rafters and shooting off the red and green and blue sparks I’d
seen from down the pier.