Totentanz (13 page)

Ash laughed. "Do you really think she has a
choice?"

"She should be able to make up her own mind!"
Jeb shouted. Abruptly his voice lowered. "Like I did."

Frances pulled her eyes
from the pool of visions again. She had remembered something,
something terrible, and in the very act of remembrance, she had
forgotten it again. But there was a feeling upon her of such deep
dread that she wanted to cry out, to make it lift from her by
bodily pushing it away. She looked at the barber pole again, and
suddenly she remembered the three Hims—
him
I mourn, him who saves me, him whom I push away.
The pole was the Northern Star again, the
spinning heavens, the red and white of His death and resurrection,
the moving yet always constant symbol of His salvation.

But there was no succor left in His arms. He
was cold and distant, and she realized now that His distance was
of her making. He was not with her because she had thrust Him
away. Had He never been with her? She wasn't sure. But He was not
there now. And she knew why. A memory crossed her mind: a body
peeled dry of skin and blood, with arms stretched toward her before
it collapsed into a heap of dry, white bones. Was it His body? No.
Then the memory faded to mist, and she turned back to the pool,
dreading what she would see, yet knowing that she must see it.

Each face in the loft was outlined in shadow.
She could feel the sour dampness of Ash's breath when he spoke.

"Why don't you tell, her about your
paintings, Jeb?"

"Can't we just get it done with and leave her
out of it?"

Ash made a clucking noise. "Tell her about
the paintings. I'll tell, if you like." His smile returned, a
mockery of a human grin.

"Jeb was a wonderful painter," Ash said.
"Everyone agreed that he was wonderful. He painted landscapes and
pictures of beautiful women—especially older women—and everyone
thought he had much talent. His paintings then were nothing like
they are now, nothing like these obscene shapes and black hollows
and straight red lines.

"Jeb was going to go away to Philadelphia, to
painting school. Even his father, who balked for years at what he
thought was the boy's hobby, came to realize the talent that was
there. He had wanted Jeb to farm, but his mother wasn't the kind of
woman to make her boy do what he didn't have in his heart. So she
had secretly put money aside at each harvest until there was enough
to send him to school.

"One night she announced this at the supper
table, and his father got furious. He pounded on the table with his
fist and stood up screaming that the boy and his mother had
conspired against him, that she had stolen money from him. His wife
screamed back, and the boy, only eighteen years old and confused,
sat mute while they shouted at each other until his father suddenly
fell over dead.

"They buried him, and then they found that he
had been stealing money himself. He had run up gambling debts that
were monstrous. Jeb and his mother owed half the people in town
money, and although everyone thought Jeb a wonderful painter, they
wanted their money and didn't give a damn if he went to school or
not.

"So Jeb found himself running the farm,
trying to keep his mother from having to give up the only home she
had ever lived in. The money was gone, all of it, and soon they
were barely able to make their way. Jeb's mother had never been
very close to his father, but she had always worshiped Jeb, and
soon they became closer than ever—"

Jeb interrupted Ash with a shout. He threw
his hands to his face. The girl had never seen him shed tears. He
stood sobbing dryly, clutching at his face as though he wanted to
bury his thin white hands inside his head. "That's enough," he said
through clenched teeth.

"She has to know," Ash
replied. "There really is no choice in this, my friend." With a
leering gusto, he resumed his story. "What your kin doesn't want to
tell you is that his mother began to sleep with him." He paused to
light another of his noxious cigarettes. "It was all very
innocent—wasn't it, Jeb?— but it
was
incest." He relished the word.
"An abomination if ever there was one. Then, of course, came the
greatest abomination of all."

The girl stood silent as Ash favored her with
his level gaze.

"A double kin," Ash said,
barely keeping laughter out of his tone. "Jeb is both your brother
and your father. An
abomination
, that's what you are.
But the best is yet to come. Isn't it, Jeb?"

Jeb looked like white marble, a rigid statue.
"Matricide!" Ash hooted gleefully.

"No!" Jeb shouted. He went on, his voice
barely audible. "She died in childbirth."

"True!" said Ash. "Oh, the town found out
about the pregnancy, naturally. Long before the birth date. Jeb and
your mother were treated accordingly. Some said later, clacking
their tongues, that it was the town that drove her to her
death—that their words had started things off in Jeb's mind. Some
said that Jeb was going to run away after the birthing, that he
would go to New York and get a job and put himself through art
school. That he would leave his mother, who loved him more than
anything, because shame could not contain itself and would spill
over. Those plans, naturally, were ruined when she died."

Jeb held his hands over his ears, his teeth
bared in pain as Ash continued.

"Can you imagine the
guilt
? Oh, it must have
been truly great. And hatred. If anything, the hatred was greater.
It usually is when guilt can't contain itself. The hate he felt for
those he saw as driving him to the decision, which, in his mind,
had helped to kill his loving mother, was awesome. Here he was,
trapped with a loathsome little baby, unnaturally conceived—and
what was he to do?"

"He raised me as best he could," the girl
said.

Ash's laugh was loud; it filled the barn and
lasted a long time. His coat snapped in the air, and the girl saw
that when Ash did not use his hands to bring his cigarette to his
mouth, they seemed lost in his coat, invisible.

"Oh, this is truly wonderful," Ash said at
last. His unearthly laughter seemed barely contained. "As best he
could? Don't you know what he did?"

The girl glared at him, tears filling her
eyes.

Ash turned to Jeb, then back to the girl.

"He killed himself, Jeb did. He put the
barrel end of a clean shotgun into his mouth and blew his head off
his neck."

Looking at this vision, Frances tried to
scream. She found that she could not pull away. The girl's face was
lost to her completely; Frances herself was in the barn. When the
girl's voice spoke, it came from her own mouth. She knew what this
meant and tried to scream again.

"
He raised me
," she said
hysterically. "
He was
there!
"

"Oh, he was there," Ash replied. "At the
moment he pulled that thick trigger he could not get out of his
mind what this town had done to him. He was filled with hate for
what this town had forced him to become. There was great guilt
there, also—guilt that he was leaving you behind. But mostly raw,
red hate. And he vowed vengeance! And lo—" Theatrically Ash pointed
to Jeb.

The girl, Frances, had backed to the edge of
the loft and glanced behind to see where she would land if she
jumped; but in that second of hesitation, Ash was on her. A cold
hand clamped on her bad ear.

"It's true," Ash hissed delightedly.

He twisted on the ear, and Frances jumped
backward, landing with a scream on a hard spot below; she lay in
pain as Ash laughed above.

Frances' eyes raised to Jeb, who stared down
at her. His face was the face of a corpse: dry and white and
filled, just below the surface, with crawling, wet things. His
bones might be liquid; they might be gas; they might even be solid
of a sort, but they were not living bones in a living man.

The pool of visions abruptly contracted, like
water pulled down through a drain. Frances was looking at a patch
of sidewalk under a bleak and dirty-yellow street lamp, with the
otherworldly silence of a slowly rotating red-and-white barber pole
above her. She watched the red stripe start at the bottom and climb
languorously to the top and disappear into another, invisible
place.

"Hello, Frances," she heard someone say. It
was Ash's voice.

"Yes?" she said wearily, knowing that the
veil had been lifted completely, that the third him, the him she
had sought to push away, had found her. Vaguely, in her tired mind,
she wondered why He had not saved her from this, had not allowed
the veil to stay over her eyes forever.

"Frances," Ash said, his voice filled with
soothing and comfort. It was a mother speaking to a child—a
whispered promise of safe passage in a black night. "Frances, it's
been a long time. I have something for you." She felt an icy touch
against her palm and looked down to see a hard, dried thing, like a
shriveled mushroom.

"I'm here for you now," Ash said, his voice
still soothing but unable to hide a faint trace of amusement. "I'm
'him who saves you.' Will you watch me again, Frances?"

"Yes," Frances answered in a whisper, her
body beginning to quake as a horrible, fearful idea crept over
her.

And then Ash's laughter began, and the change
in his voice was complete, and Frances saw the great light behind
her, outlining the stark white-and-red barber pole in knifelike
edges against the building, and her own shadow beside it, black,
and shivering like a leaf against the coldest wind. She turned to
see the lights of the town, this town, and fell sobbing to the
sidewalk, bathed in Ash's merciless laughter as realization spread
over her once again that the veil, His veil, had somehow been
pulled aside and that only Ash was with her now.

Reggie heard the calliope start up as night
gave way to day. One moment there was light-bulb darkness in the
house; the next moment it was blown away, the light bulbs eaten as
a new sun dawned. It was a neon sun, fluorescent and bright and
stark; it gave no warmth, but rather a cold literalness to all it
touched. And it touched all. There was white and there was black;
there was no gray or creamy white to give meaning to the
shadows.

Come to me, come to
me,
the calliope tinkled, growing
louder.

"Mom?" Reggie called. He
sounded like a little boy again. He was a baby calling for his
mother, asking her with a tremor in his voice to be there and to
tell him what was happening. But he feared he already knew. All of
it—the change that had come over Montvale since the amusement park
had been erected, the fierce sharpness of his recurring dream, the
vision of the dark man reaching out to him from the poster over his
bed, the warnings of the zombie man outside his window—all of this
told him what was happening. But he didn't want to believe it. He
wanted it to be only play—play like the monster comics, the models,
the horror movies and masks that had been his way of distancing
himself from it, of dealing with it—of even
appearing
serious about it. Jack and
Pup had always thought he was too serious about their club
activities; they thought this was because he was thoughtful about
how he had nearly died once, but Reggie knew that this was his way
of not thinking about it, of covering it over with plastic and
paint and glow-in-the-dark skeleton masks that could be taken off
at any time.

The only other time he had come face-to-face
with the reality of it, had admitted it to himself, was in Social
Studies class when they had talked about nuclear war. There were a
lot of nuke jokes that week, a lot of giggling about the pictures
of the bomb shelters and people with old-fashioned clothes on,
stocking concrete bunkers with canned peaches and plastic jugs of
water. Reggie had gone on a binge, begging his mother to rent every
available video cassette of the monster movies of the fifties. All
of them had horrible things escaping from the ice or growing up out
of the radioactive sea or in the desert at bomb-test sites after
atomic explosions: jellylike creatures or things with too many eyes
or arms or legs that either sucked you into themselves or made you
burn black when they touched you. Mad scientists got X-ray eyes or
atomic brains or turned into pulsating vegetables in these
pictures, and Reggie loved every one of them—until he came to one
he thought was just another science-fiction movie but proved to be
something more. It was a documentary, and it showed what happened
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs had been dropped
on them at the end of the Second World War. After that, Reggie
didn't want to see any more atomic-monster movies for a while. The
skin falling off living Japanese bodies like pats of butter had
been too real, the shadows of vaporized human beings on cement
block walls too scary. It was easy to like monster movies because
they weren't for real—but this was for real.

And now he had that feeling
again, and with it, an awful knowing that something
real
was going to happen
in Montvale. The huge eyes and the other dark thing he had felt
touch him, heard whisper in his ear, when he was in the dark
tunnel, they were here and he was afraid.

Come to me, come to
me,
the calliope insisted. What had the
zombie, the old man outside his window, screamed at him?
"
Flames
!"

"Mom?" he called again, louder. His mother
had been running her sewing machine, and now the machine had
stopped. There was nothing wrong with the electricity in the house;
the TV was still on, and all the lights were on, though they
weren't needed anymore against the blinding light from the
amusement park.