Totentanz (2 page)

"I guess so," Pup answered grudgingly, and
then he smiled, holding out his fist. The other two held out their
fists and they made the stack of three, the sacred handshake.

Another awkward silence engulfed them.

"Hey," Pup said, trying to sound nonchalant,
"what do you guys think of Lavinia Crawford? You think she's a
good-looker?"

"
Good-looker
?" Jack tried to sound
sarcastic, but there was an uneasiness in his manner. They had
never really talked, never really thought, about girls before. Not
the three of them, the Three Musketeers.

Pup plunged ahead. "Pretty good-looking,
don't you think?"

"You going to ask her out or something?" Jack
inquired. The smirk on his face was artificial.

The embarrassment was tangible; it had driven
out the tingling chill they had orchestrated among the gravestones
and replaced it with this feeling of . . . well, not of what they
were about.

No one spoke, and then Pup suddenly got to
his feet. "Jesus Christ!" he said. "What is it with you guys? You
going to stay like this forever? Don't you think there's anything
else in the world except scaring the crap out of yourselves and
building model airplanes?" His face was flushed, he was unsure of
himself. "Don't you think there's anything else?"

"Like girls?" Jack smirked.

Pup turned on him. "Yeah, like girls. Don't
you ever think about girls?"

Jack hesitated. "Sure . . .”

"And that's not only it," Pup continued, his
confidence suddenly there. He turned toward Reggie, who had held
his silence. "Who made Reggie boss? Why is he always the one that
tells the stories, tells us what to do, sets up all the plans?” He
turned on Jack again. "You're the jerk who wants to be a Marine
when you get older. Who made Reggie God?"

Jack answered, shrugging, "We've always done
things this way."

"Don't you think maybe we
could take turns or something?" Pup turned on Reggie directly.
"Hell, I
am
fourteen, a year older than you guys."

"Sure, if you want,” Reggie said.

"Is that all you've got to
say?" Pup was pacing around. "What about you, Marine? Don't you
ever want to
do
anything?"

"Like what?" Jack said.

"I don't know, like. . ." Pup faltered, his
emotions getting ahead of his mind. There was obvious rage
building within him. He stopped and faced Reggie again, pointing an
accusatory finger at him.

"Why won't you ever talk about that time you
almost died?" he shouted. "What's the big deal? You carry it around
like a crown—like it's something you don't want anybody else to
know about."

"Pup!" Jack warned, putting a hand on Pup's
shoulder.

Pup pushed the hand away. "Let me finish!
Just because your old man was a hotshot in Vietnam doesn't make you
the leader, either." He looked at Reggie. "It's like you're some
kind of big shot, or martyr. You tell us how much you like all this
scary stuff, but you've been there—you saw what it was like. You
died and then came back. And you won't even tell us—"

He caught himself in the middle of his tirade
and said nothing more.

Quietly, Reggie said, "I don't talk about it
because it bothers me."

Pup's head was down; Jack put his hand on
Pup's shoulder again, and this time Pup let it stay.

"I'm sorry, Reg," Pup said after a moment. He
sat down on the grass and crossed his legs. "I shouldn't have let
my temper blow off like that."

"It's okay," Reggie replied. He bent down and
suddenly jabbed Pup in the ribs, clumsily. "I bet Lavinia Crawford
doesn't like guys with bad tempers, so you'd better watch it."

"Yeah," Pup began, and then he rose to his
feet as a glare of headlights blinded them. "Oh, shit," he said.
"It's Poundridge."

The mayor's long black Chevy pulled up the
rise in front of them. It stopped next to the white picket gate
leading into the churchyard. The bright beams of the headlights
stabbed at the boys, pinning them like bugs against a board.

One long black door opened out. With a light
grunt, a thin figure climbed out and made its way toward them. It
stopped, said "Damn," and walked back to slam the car door shut.
Then he was walking in front of the headlights, advancing slowly
and wagging a finger.

"What in heck are you boys doing up here this
time of night?" The voice was not altogether harsh, though it did
hold a mildly accusatory tone. "Not doing mischief, are you?"

"Just sitting and talking, sir," Reggie
said.

"That the Carson boy there?" Poundridge
inquired, stopping before them. The headlights behind him made his
body seem gaunter than it was. Vaguely, behind the windshield of
the car, they could see his small wife Emma.

"Talking in a graveyard? Sounds a bit strange
to me."

Arrogantly Pup said, "It's the truth. You
don't want to call us liars and mess with my father about it, do
you?"

Poundridge turned his bird's eyes on Pup. "I
wonder what your father would do if he knew you had sneaked out to
sit in a cemetery all night, eh?"

"Not a damn thing," Pup shot back.

"That'll be enough of that bad talk, Pup
Malamut," Poundridge said.

There was a sound from the car, and Emma
Poundridge's voice came crystal clear. "Leave those boys alone,
Jonathan. It's summer, and they're not hurting anybody. Probably
just telling ghost stories or something of the sort—that right,
boys?"

Jack nodded.

Emma Poundridge said, "There, you see,
Jonathan? Pup, Reggie, Jack, why don't you head on home now?
Getting late and there's a storm coming." Her voice was firm and
gentle at the same time, and she turned it on her husband. "You
come back here and leave them alone. Anyway, that television show
of yours will be on soon."

"Well," Poundridge said, scratching his chin,
"that's true enough. You boys head on home." He turned to go.

"Mayor Poundridge?" Jack asked suddenly. "Do
you know anything about that vault back there?"

There was another crack of lightning,
followed by a snap of thunder and the first sharp, hot raindrops of
the arriving storm. Poundridge looked at the small, square
building. Again he scratched his chin, assuming his speech-making
manner.

"Only what my father told me, and that wasn't
much. I got the feeling that his father told him more. Seems it was
built for a fellow named Jeff Scott, a Civil War veteran, but they
never put him in it. His family owned all that land out behind
Barney Bates' place. Farmed it, but my father said this Jeff
Scott's father built a carousel on the property for all the
Montvale kids to use." Poundridge bent down, and a conspiratorial
light came into his small eyes. "If you boys can keep a secret, I
don't mind telling you there's a brand-new carousel coming to that
property—along with all sorts of other things."

"An amusement park?" Pup asked excitedly.
"Here?"

The mayor straightened. "Any day now. Signed
the papers last week. Looks like we'll finally be able to do
something with that land—been fallow a long time. Maybe that'll
keep you boys out of graveyards, eh?"

"Jonathan, come on now, it's getting late!"
Emma called.

The mayor waved a hand at her and then held
it out to feel for rain. "Stopped already. Looks like that storm's
going to miss us after all. You boys go on home now." He walked
back to the car, stopping halfway. "And tell your folks I'll be
making a speech at the opening of that amusement park!"

The car door opened and closed.

The Chevy backed down the hill, away from the
fence, turned and moved slowly off. The boys saw Mrs. Poundridge's
face looking back at them to make sure they left.

"Guess we should go," Jack said, gathering up
the candy wrappers and empty cans they had scattered.

"We could circle around and come back," Pup
said halfheartedly.

"I'm tired anyway," Reggie said. He was
staring at the crypt. "I've had enough for tonight."

Lightning winked high among the clouds, but
there was no thunder. The storm had slipped by. The vault stared at
Reggie in the flash, disappeared, stared at him again. Disappeared.
Reggie's gaze stayed on it in the darkness. He could almost see
those swirling, vaporous hands at the windows, reaching out for
him. . . .

"Come on, Reg!"

He turned and blinked out of his daze. Jack
and Pup were staring at him, their hands filled with empty soda
cans, bottles and candy wrappers. Down the hill below them, Emma
Poundridge's small white face regarded them through the car
window.

"Reg, come on!" Jack said.

"I'm coming."

He felt the thinnest of touches on his
shoulder, the caress of misty fingers. He knew that if he turned,
the hands would be there, guiding him, and that the door would be
open. Those hands would take him, caress him, pull him toward the
doorway and then into the darkness

For a moment the gentle grip on his shoulder
tightened. He almost let it turn him around. But then he took a
step forward, following his friends down the hill, and the hands
fell away into nothingness.

They say that if you die in your dream, you
die for real.

Reggie knew he was in the dream. He always
knew. And in the middle of this dream, he thought of another dream
he had once had that had let him know he was in it. He was in a
long foxhole that wound away to the horizon in both directions. He
had a dark-olive uniform on; there were soldiers all around him. It
was very quiet, just before dawn, and a pale, orange glow was
spreading on the eastern horizon. He could hear the shallow
breathing of the men to either side of him. His heart was pounding.
He looked over the lip of the foxhole and saw nothing but a long
dirt runway. There were pockmarks and a few clumps of close-cropped
brush that stood out like crew cuts in the grayish light. Out
beyond, at about a hundred yards' distance, there was another long
ditch. They all knew what was in there—and they all knew it was
going to rise up and attack them at any time. Reggie held a rifle,
his hands clammy on the wooden stock. He reached up to the barrel.
The metal was cool and damp. The man to his right held a
bazooka.

They waited.

The round edge of the sun rose, and in its
shadow they saw the thing rise. Its long cylindrical body, almost
too burdensome in Earth's gravity, was slowly hauled out of the
ditch by tentacles that reached and curled tens of yards in every
direction. As it advanced, it yowled like a cat in heat—a long,
ponderous, terrifying sound.

"Hold your fire!" someone said close by.
Someone else began to whimper. The thing half-crawled, half-rolled
toward them, and suddenly someone broke, crying out and climbing
backward out of the ditch and making a run for it. An officer
scrambled out to block his way and hit the man square in the face.
The man went down. "Nowhere to run to, soldier," the sergeant said
and carried the man back to the ditch and threw him in.

"Hold your fire!" the captain said again, and
this time he could not hide the tremor in his voice. The creature
was fifty yards from them, sliding over the ground, throwing up
great clumps of mud and dirt in its wake and twirling its tentacles
in the air.

Thirty yards. Abruptly it rolled toward them,
tucking in its long arms and turning over three or four times,
closing the gap to ten yards. They could see the great oily mass of
its body. The sun looked like a huge orange wart on its back.

"Hold," the captain repeated, his voice not
believing what it was saying. Suddenly the knot in Reggie's
stomach loosened and he stood up in the ditch, directly in the path
of the thing that bore down on them.

"Don't worry!" he shouted, holding his hands
up for attention. "This is only a dream! Nothing can happen to you.
This is only a dream!"

And then the thing rolled straight at him,
and he screamed, and he had suddenly awakened.

They say that if you die in your dream, you
die for real.

Here, in this dream, he heard his mother say
goodbye. Her voice was muffled, as from far away, and then he
heard the front door slam, and the screen door behind it.

When he tried to get out of bed, the sheet
pressed him down. He fought against it. It was as if the cloth was
a sheet of metal held down by weights, but finally he threw it off.
It clanged to the floor behind him as he rushed to the window.

The door of the red car was just slamming
shut. He tried to open the window, but it would not lift. He
pounded on it and shouted while the engine gunned into life and the
car slid backward out of the driveway. Try as he might, he could
not move the window.

The scene blurred and shifted. He held a
sneaker in his hand, fumbling with the laces, and then suddenly it
was on his foot. Somehow, he was outside now. His feet were pumping
up and down, up and down, as if he were running. He looked down and
saw that he was on a bicycle. It was his own bike, he knew. But it
was trying to throw him as if it were a bucking horse. He held the
handle grips tight: the back wheel kept bouncing into the air.
"Whoa, boy," he said, and abruptly the bicycle was still. He looked
up and saw his house receding behind him.

The bike made a turn, and he was on
Independence Street, heading toward Main. He was picking up speed.
It was early morning; the air smelled like fresh coffee and wet
grass. The bicycle moved like the wind. When he lifted his feet
from the pedals, the pedals kept turning. He put his feet back, on
them and they turned even faster, making his feet and legs
ache.

The bike banked sharply, making the air rush
by his head, and he was on Main Street. Up ahead he could make out
shops: a gas station, the newspaper store, a doughnut shop. In
front of the doughnut shop, parked at a careless angle, was a
red-and-white car with round red lights at the back and worn
blackwalls. There was a dent from a parking accident on the
driver's side. He knew for sure that it was the right car.