Totentanz (11 page)

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 stepped 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.

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.