Totentanz (21 page)

Then the face vaporized, and Poundridge
kicked the ball into the shadows ahead. The lights had gone out. He
was standing under the only light to be seen. There was a glow of
luminosity to his right, from between the two tents, but as he
watched, it faded. Above him there was a single dim bulb taped to a
tall pole, along with a speaker horn. The calliope music he heard
was coming tinnily from the horn.

Someone lit a match very close in front of
him. As quickly as it flared, it went out.

"You'd like to go back?" a disembodied voice
said.

Poundridge turned to flee. Immediately he
collided with something solid in the dark, banging his face and
shoulder against it. He staggered back, holding his bleeding nose.
The voice behind him laughed, and he reached out to see what he had
hit.

It was solid, a wooden beam connected to
wooden struts. He could not see it but he traced the outline of the
structure with his hands, frantically trying to feel his way around
it. The laugh, low and coarse, came again. He found a step at the
far right of the structure; since there was no way to get beyond
that, he felt upward another step, and then another, until his hand
chanced upon something not made of wood—a leg, as cold as ice, with
a smooth shoe on the foot. He pulled back with a start.

"What's happening here?" he called out in a
tremulous voice. His fear did not allow him to project the
authority he wanted.

The bulb overhead brightened, the filament
inside glowing hotter and hotter as though turned up by a dimmer
switch. Now light filled the entire space in front of him,
revealing the sharp outline of timbers and struts leading upward
into the dark.

Poundridge looked up at the figure attached
to the leg he had felt on the stairway.

"Hello, son," the figure said.

"Father?"

Poundridge gazed into the
face of his father. He blinked fiercely, not believing his eyes. So
it was true. Momentary joy welled up within him, but instantly it
was gone. When he had seen his father through the gates of the
amusement park, it had
seemed
right. It was impossible, but it had been all
right. Now he knew it wasn't right—that something was horribly not
right. A curtain had been lifted from his mind, and what had seemed
before a joyful reunion was now, in cold, clear logic, a terrible
event.

On the step above the one on which his father
stood was another figure; it resembled his father but was a bit
stouter. On the step above that was another figure, and another up
into the darkness. Mayor Poundridge stood staring into a dim,
silent line of faces, each like his own, each fuller and fatter
than the one below.

"I'm losing my mind," he muttered, trying to
blink away the phantoms before him.

"No," said that cold, disembodied, slightly
amused voice behind him. Jonathan Poundridge whirled around but saw
nothing except darkness. Turning back, he fully expected the silent
line of clones to be gone, but it was not.

Poundridge's father said, “This is my father
behind me, and his father behind him. All your ancestors stand
before you. Jonathan."

"You're all
dead
,” the mayor said to
them, still hoping they might vanish like smoke, drift away like
ghosts, along with the darkness and the wooden structure, and that
he would find himself back at the entrance to the amusement park,
bidding all of Montvale to have a good time, and Emily by his
side.

"Emily," he said, feeling very alone without
her.

From higher up on the wooden structure, above
the cone of light, someone sniggered. Another bright bulb flashed
on, and Poundridge saw who it was.

"You. . .”

Pup Malamut grinned down at him, an odd,
triumphant smile on his face, his tee shirt askew, half-pulled out
of his pants.

"Yes.” Pup said. "Mad at me, aren't you?"

Poundridge's anger returned. But it melted
like butter at the sound of the other voice, the voice in
darkness.

"Go ahead.” the voice laughed.

Pup Malamut clattered down
the wooden steps, making them creak with his weight, and ran off
sniggering into the night. Poundridge wanted to go after him but
found that he was unable to move. It occurred to him that this
entire episode, this black-and-white scene, black of night with
white light from the bulbs on the pole, looked exactly like one of
those old television shows from the nineteen sixties. Like a scene
from
Gunsmoke
or
that strange show he had watched once but never again, making Emily
turn it off when he didn't understand it:
The Outer Limits.

"Get on with it," the voice behind him said.
It sounded bored, yet tinged with anticipation.

Jonathan Poundridge went limp in the knees. A
terror gripped him by the back and paralyzed him. The curtain that
had been drawn over his mind was yanked away, and he knew that
something horrible was going to happen to him. This was no stunt,
no amusement-park ride or crazy dream he had wandered into.
Something bad was going to happen to him, and there would be no
Emily there to help him or tell him what to do.

"Pup Malamut!" he called desperately. "Come
back and help me. I promise nothing will happen to you—1 won't even
tell your father!"

His own father's dead face, dead voice,
seemed almost to be pleading with him now, for understanding, for
. . . forgiveness?

"We . . . must. . . ."

The light beam traveled slowly up the steps
to stop at a platform at the top. Poundridge looked up at the
silent white faces of his ancestors.

The voice behind him grew hard and
commanding. "Walk."

Poundridge tried to resist but could not. He
began to whimper. His foot, in spite of his efforts to keep it
where it was, moved forward a hesitating step, and then the other
foot followed. He was on the first step with his father.

"Keep going," the voice commanded.

His feet lifted, set down, lifted, set down.
Step by step he passed first his grandfather (a vague memory,
smelling of strong tobacco and old war stories), then a succession
of ghosts, each vaguer and fuller of body than the one before. It
was as though something corporeal, something of the flesh, had been
bled out of each succeeding generation of Poundridges, leaving his
own lean body to answer to the ages. Each ancestor wore a different
kind of clothing, and it was, as he passed, like watching the same
man slowly gain weight and move through a succession of time shifts
into the past.

He was on the top step.

His feet stopped. There was something before
him on the platform that he did not want to see. The light ceased,
knife-sharp, a few feet in front of him, and he felt out there in
the darkness a presence that made his stomach turn over.

"Emily!" he called, but he heard the word as
it left his mouth swallowed, as if his face had been muffled by a
pillow.

He heard a slow tread on the steps and knew
it was the voice in the dark.

"Oh, God," he whimpered.

"Move," the voice said from directly behind
him.

He advanced, a reluctant puppet. He saw and
then felt hands reach out of the darkness, hands and arms that
seemed to come out of a solid wall of black. They took hold of him
and propelled him forward; at the same time, something was quickly
wrapped around his neck and pulled tight.

Illumination blossomed all around him, making
night into day again, revealing the platform and the tall, straight
length of timber that rose behind him and elbowed over his head to
hold the thick hemp rope that was knotted around his thin, sweating
neck.

A dark man stood there. "Ever hear of 'the
sins of the fathers,' Mr. Mayor?" the mouth in the white, sack-like
face said.

"Tell me what's happening here," Poundridge
wept; once again he tried desperately to put authority into his
words but failed.

"Let's get on with it," the other said,
ignoring him.

A solid terror started in
Mayor Poundridge's stomach and immediately reached to the ends of
his body.
I'm going to die,
he thought, amazed that he was even taking the
time to think such a thing;
I really
am.
With further illogic he
thought,
This is what men in war feel
like.
There had been only one other time
when he had perceived anything like this. He had been watching a
movie on television called
Paths of
Glory.
Kirk Douglas was in it. He had
tuned in because he thought it would be a good war picture and he
had always liked war pictures. But this was something different.
Kirk Douglas was defending three French soldiers who had been
accused of not following orders during World War 1; they had been
told to go over the top and had refused. They were to be
court-martialed and shot. His uneasiness had begun when he realized
that
everyone
in
the men's regiment had disobeyed the orders and that these three
had been picked at random as examples. It was obvious that despite
Kirk Douglas, they would be shot at the end of the movie.
Poundridge had watched with mounting fascination and horror as the
film zeroed in on the three soldiers and made them into real
characters. They were just men. The order to go over the top had
been insane, and they were just unlucky enough to get picked to
take the punishment.

Poundridge had wanted to turn the movie off
but found that he couldn't. Inevitably the men were led out to
execution, and he saw them actually tremble as they realized that
this would be it; they were going to die; the rifles of the firing
squad would be aiming at their hearts and then pumping little slugs
of lead into them, and in a minute, five minutes from now, three
minutes from now, whenever, they would be dead. As the firing squad
took aim after the blindfolds had been put in place, one of the men
began to whimper, to cry, and Poundridge had suddenly leaped from
the sofa and hit the "Off" knob on the television. He had stood
there, shaken, for a few minutes, and then had gone to bed without
watching the news or anything else. The next morning Emily had
mentioned to him that he hadn't touched the potato chips she'd put
out for him the night before, or the soda, and was there something
the matter with him?

And now it was going to
happen to him. Here he was, with this thick rope tight against his
neck, tighter than any collar he had ever worn, so tight he could
feel individual gnarled strands against the flesh of his neck,
could feel the tautness of the rope if he moved his head from side
to side—and in a few moments, in three minutes or five, the wooden
planking beneath his feet would give way and there would be
nothing for him to stand upon. Either his neck would break or he
would gulp for air that wasn't there, and he would
die
. He would be
dead
. Every cell in his
body knew that, every cell fought against it, but there was nothing
any of them could do. In five minutes at most, he would no longer
be here; he would be dead. Gone.

"Oh, God, please," he began to whimper.

The man on the platform next to him, a fat,
nameless copy of himself with averted eyes and trembling hands,
put his fingers on the straight piece of wood that would release
the trap door beneath Jonathan Poundridge.

"Please, no," Poundridge whimpered, but the
fat man would not look at him.

"I've changed my mind, Ash," a quiet voice
said from below.

The fat man paused with his fingers on the
lever. The light softened; the stark black and white of the scene
(that was the way Paths of Glory had looked) shifted to a more
natural shade of night. The clench in Poundridge's stomach, the
rock-hard fist, loosened a fraction.

For the slightest moment, Ash seemed to
shrink down into his clothes. But this passed so quickly that
Poundridge could not swear it had happened. With slow, deliberate
steps, Ash dismounted the gallows until he stood on the black
tarmac at the bottom, facing Jeff Scott. Miraculously, Poundridge
discovered he was able to move, and he leaned forward, the rope
pulling taut at the back of his neck, to watch what went on
below.

"You've changed your mind?" Ash asked calmly
but with a tinge of ominousness slithering beneath. "Yes," Jeff
Scott answered.

"What do you think happens now?" Ash
questioned. His words rose to a shrill shout. Jeff Scott flinched.
"Do I walk away? Do you? What happens, you fool?"

Jeff Scott answered, "You tell me, Ash." Then
he said, "I think you're afraid of me."

Ash's arms rose; for a moment they seemed as
high as the top of the platform—two long, horrid spider legs, as
thin and taut as piano wire, with horrible claws at the tips. But
then they were only long, thin arms again.

"Do you think this is all
for
you
?" Ash
screamed.

Jeff Scott fell to his
knees. "Do you think this whole stinking world was created for your
indulgence? I've watched you. From the very beginning, I've watched
your introspection with amusement. Trying to come to terms with
yourself. Trying to understand your hate. Trying to figure out why
you found yourself on this stinking earth again, a walking corpse
with feelings and emotions." Ash mocked in a falsetto: "Oh. Lord,
why am I here? What is my mission? Why have I been brought back?"
He raised a hand to strike. "You fool! Haven't you figured out by
this time that you're one of the walking dead?
That's all you are!
There isn't
any
hope
for you,
no reason for you to try to puzzle out your predicament. Right now,
at this moment, as you walk and seemingly breathe and push at the
world with your little hands and try to figure out the
universe,
you are dead.
'' Ash raised his hand even higher and brought it down in a
long, scythe-like arc. Jeff Scott screamed as half his face was
torn away. In its place was a half-exposed skull with bits of
muscle and tissue attached to it. He shrieked, throwing his hands
up to his face, but though the pain diminished, the wound was still
there, open and alive.