Totentanz (28 page)

"Oh, Jeff Scott."

Reggie blinked, and the room came into
focus.

In the center of the ceiling, running into
the room through the roof, was a thick hemp rope. At the end of the
rope hung a body. It was not dead. It was half-man, half-skeleton.
The horrible choking sound it gave off made Reggie's stomach heave.
It rotated slowly, and though the knot was tight around its neck
and its hands and feet were bound, it did not cease to
struggle.

"Oh, God," Lucius moaned, "Oh, God, he'll die
forever now." He broke off into a series of low, choking sobs.

Jeff Scott twisted, gasping piteously for
breath.

"We'll cut him down," Reggie said. He went to
the chair and brought it over below the body. Jeff Scott kicked his
feet feebly; the fleshy side of his face was purple; his tongue
thrust out, trying to lick at the air and bring it into his
lungs.

Reggie stood up on the chair, but as he
reached up, it was pulled out from under him.

"Oh, God," Lucius cried. "It's too late for
you to save him."

Reggie tried to set the chair up again, but
once more it was knocked aside by an unseen hand. He turned to
Lucius in rage. "Help me!"

Lucius stood immobile.

"Dammit, why don't you help me?"

"Because he owns me too!" Lucius sobbed. "And
he owns Jeff Scott. My dream was false—"

Lucius screamed at the air, at the walls:
"Please take me! Let me rest, please let it stop!"

From somewhere indefinite came laughter. All
right, a voice said, amused. Lucius howled, falling to the floor
and trying to claw his way through the wooden planks to the earth
below.

As Reggie watched, Lucius' heaving body
turned to bones, the flesh falling away like dust; his eyes turned
to ashes in their sockets, sprinkling out as his hair flaked
away.

The skeleton that remained, thin and
bleached-white, stood up and pointed shakily at Reggie.

"He'll have you," it said in Lucius'
terrified voice. "He'll play with you until he's tired, then he'll
take you. There's no hope for anyone."

It tilted its grinning skull back and
shrieked. It beat its fists against the side of its head, and then
began to pull at the bones of its chest, its arms, its legs, trying
to knock itself to pieces.

"Take me!"

A gust of wind blew into the trailer. Lucius'
bones, howling with want, crumbled into powder. His cry faded,
leaving only ashes that drifted away into the corners and were
gone.

Filled with rage, Reggie set the chair under
Jeff Scott once again—but as he climbed onto it, as his hands
nearly touched the hanging man, the chair shattered beneath him and
flew into sawdust.

Reggie heard a low, clicking laugh somewhere
in the room.

"Is this boy the one you think I'm afraid of,
Jeff Scott?" the amused, untroubled voice asked the swinging
corpse. "I think that with Frances' help, we'll let Reggie Carson
see a world of his own."

Reggie turned to see Crazy Frances, the woman
who lived in front of the Montvale barbershop and shouted Scripture
at anyone who passed. She filled the doorway, a thin, haggard
figure; only her eyes were terribly alive, two bright fires in her
dead, white face.

"And thou, Capernaum,” she said, "which art
exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell."

The walls of the trailer disappeared. Reggie
screwed his hands into his eyes, shielding them from an in-tense
and bitter light. There was a roaring in his ears; the earth moved
beneath him as if it were liquid and then hardened again. The world
spun. Through all this Reggie heard the horrible gasps of Jeff
Scott, hanging in eternity above him.

The world quieted, became whole.

Reggie rose. Above him, high in the red-black
sky, hung from the spokes of a turning wagon wheel on a tall, thin
pole, was Jeff Scott. His choking cries echoed hollowly in the hot
air. Montvale's amusement park was gone; in its place was a fiercer
place, a world that Reggie already knew. Below the slowly rotating
wheel that imprisoned Jeff Scott there was a ruined, red-filtered
landscape covered with smoke and blackness and reverberating with
the screams of the desperate and dying. Jagged cliffs gave way to
abrupt pits of steaming lava, and towers rose like black hands
through the thick mist. The sky was a sick yellow-red. Fires burned
everywhere; there was a sharp smell of roasting meat. Faint calls
from a sinking ship could be heard off a none-too-distant
coastline.

To Reggie's left, bones were laid out in a
neat line. To his right, an open casket bearing a shrouded body
slowly rolled by on wheels, bumping roughly over a torso on the
ground. Reggie vaguely recognized the face on the body being
overrun. Someone from Montvale. The rolling casket was drawn by two
cowled figures, one in red, one in black. One of them turned
sideways, and Reggie saw the silhouette of a skull. The figures,
along with their burden, disappeared into the closing fog.

Reggie turned to his right and nearly tripped
over a bony figure kneeling on the ground. It looked up at him, the
eyeless sockets of its polished skull staring at him, and then bent
to its task again. Before Reggie could interfere, it deftly slit
the throat of a man stretched out beneath it. It was Mr. Griffin,
the mailman. Griffin gurgled, his eyes wide with terror—but the
skeleton held him down while the life drained from the new mouth in
his neck.

Reggie tried to kick the skeleton away, but
it looked up at him impassively, ignoring the blow. It turned to
grin down at its victim, whose head now lolled to one side.

There was more scuffling in the mist ahead.
Reggie stumbled into a group of skeletons battling humans. He
passed through them unmolested; some of the people's faces also
looked familiar, like neighbors from Montvale, but he could not
name them.

A terrible clarity possessed him. He knew now
what he had to do. Neither the cries of those around him nor the
knowledge that his mother stood somewhere on this battlefield,
possibly alone, could dissuade him. That other power, the one that
had fought so true a crusade within him against the dark man, the
power that was a mystery to him, had taken firm hold and flowered
within him. He was no longer afraid. Now he looked on his former
dread as if it had been another's, as if he had watched its bizarre
antics from a great distance. He had grown. He understood little of
what had happened to him, but he knew that it had occurred and that
he was a different Reggie Carson. He felt possessed by what had
once been a small part of himself, now bloomed to become all of
himself.

As if in confirmation of these thoughts, the
two enormous eyes, soft limpid globes, appeared before him. He knew
now that he had been wrong about them, that his rejection of them
had been a wrong act, wrongly conceived. They had done things to
him, but there had been a reason for all of it. There still was. He
felt a great relief wash over him.

I am with you,
the eyes told him.

"I know," he said to them.

In a little while you will have your
answers, but for now, you know what you must do.

"Yes, I know," Reggie said.

I am with you,
the eyes said again, and Reggie felt a radiance
wash over him, bathe him, fill him.

Long ago Reggie had mastered in his mind each
detail he now saw before him. He knew that if he walked on, he
would come to a round table covered with a white tablecloth on
which he would find remnants of a ruined meal; and in front of
that table there would be a lone man with a drawn sword—the figure
he had so often imagined himself to be, the single soldier with a
weak yet defiant blade trying to hold out against death itself.

Off in the foggy distance a low bell tolled
ponderously, once, twice, again. It was the slowest, most mournful
sound he had ever heard. He knew from Breughel's picture where the
bell was, knew that two figures, with bones for bodies, were
tolling it.

The triumph of death.

He could make his way toward that bell, but
the one he sought would not be there. That bell would not toll from
his battlement. He felt sure of that. There were many places he
might be, but this didn't worry him because, somehow, he knew that
he would be led where he must go.

The breeze shifted. An evil, sulfur-smelling
wind blew at him. The mist parted before him, and Reggie moved
forward.

Somewhere close by, up in the sulfurous
clouds, he heard Jeff Scott give a long, guttural gasp, and then
the choking sounds were behind him.

He was heading the right way.

He would be King of the Dead

Pup Malamut let the sound
of the phrase roll around his mind on velvet casters.
King of the Dead.
It was
a nice thought, a substantial thought, the kind that once he might
have dreamed only at night but now could take out in the cold sun
and look at without shrinking. How fast things could change. One
day an ineffectual little fat boy, taking orders from everyone,
from his parents to his teachers to the two younger boys he hung
out with, and the next day—King of the Dead.

Ash had said it in so many words and Pup
believed him. He had studied Ash, had seen how insubstantial he was
and how there was something the shadow man was holding back on. Ash
acted tough when he was around people who were afraid of him, but
there was something, some secret thing, that scared the boogeyman
senseless. Pup had seen it in Ash's eyes when he'd taken care of
that Civil War relic, Jeff Scott. A couple of Scott's comments had
hit home. But what was it that frightened Ash so badly? Pup didn't
know, but he was determined to find out. And when he did—well, then
he'd deal with Ash.

The killing of Jack Gantry had not disturbed
him as he had thought it would. All he had to do was to let the
feelings he'd always kept deep down come out in the open. The rest
was easy. Jack had been his friend, but he had also been his
better, so he thought. Stupid Marine. So Pup just thought of it
that way and let the juices flow. After Jack were others Ash had
let him in on: his math teacher, Mrs. Groton; a guy named Fred
Horter, who'd once called him "fat boy" in the schoolyard; a couple
of others. It had actually been easy after a while. Ash had told
him to just remember the hate; and when he did, everything came
naturally. After all, he was just getting even. Anyone would do
that, given the chance. In regular life he probably would never
have had a chance to get back, and here it was on a silver platter,
so why not?

His parents, though, had not been so easy.
Ash's eyes had sparkled when he told Pup he wanted him to take care
of his parents. And for the first time, Pup had hesitated.

"What's wrong?" Ash cooed. Pup felt his
perfect admiration for Ash slipping into something else. A
momentary burn of pure anger rose in him.

I'll take care of you
later,
he thought.

He answered, "Nothing's wrong," liking his
own bravado.

"They're by the House of Mirrors," Ash said
evenly. "Make it quick."

Pup put a smile on, but he couldn't help
feeling as he walked out that Ash knew. He knows I'm chicken. Once
again a flow of clean hatred coursed through him. He wanted more
than anything in the world to hold Ash's thin neck between his
hands, to crush the white face and pummel the smug grin away. Ash
thought he knew it all. But if everything went as planned, he would
soon be terrified of Pup Malamut. Ash could be handled. Just like
his father handled all those assholes who came to him at the bank
for business loans. There was always a way to handle things.

He made his way out onto the midway. Still he
felt Ash's eyes on him. He glanced back, expecting to see nothing
but the closed flap of the tent; he was shocked to see Ash standing
there in the opening, calmly watching him. That slight grin was on
his face; he blew a smoke ring and waved faintly at Pup with his
lit cigarette.

Just wait, bastard; soon I'll shove that
fucking thing down your throat till you choke on it.

He turned, marching resolutely toward the
House of Mirrors.

His nerve failed again when he got there.
Were they really inside? Maybe they weren't, and he wouldn't have
to go through with it. How would Ash know? And even if he did, so
what? He hesitated at the entrance, listening for sounds. Nothing.
Maybe it was a trap? Ash wouldn't dare; he needed him, he had told
him so. Anyway, he had promised.

"Pup, you'll be King of the Dead."

He entered the House of Mirrors.

He kept his eyes on the floor, following the
twists and turns of the labyrinth. He'd learned this trick long ago
at a local carnival with Reggie. Once inside, he looked up and
immediately felt a sense of dislocation. Staring at him were six
young men with uncombed hair and set mouths. He hadn't looked at
himself in a long time and was startled. He seemed older and
leaner. There was a tautness around his eyes and face that hadn't
been there before. He liked what he saw.

King of the Dead.

He dropped his gaze and followed the
sawdust-covered maze of mirrors.

His mind began to wander. He thought of what
it would be like when he was the leader of everything. He would
have all the food he wanted and no one to tell him what to eat or
when. And there would be girls. Not like Lavinia Crawford; after
Ash had presented him with the real Lavinia Crawford, he had
quickly tired of her, and after the second time, he'd discovered
that with her it was not all he had dreamed it would be. She was,
it turned out, as stupid as a cow, and after hearing Ash talking
with him about what he would have in the future, she had demanded
that she be part of it too. He'd been almost relieved when he got
rid of her, though he had felt a bit of revulsion about it. After
all, she had been the first girl he'd ever done it with, and, well,
it had felt as if she had taken a part of him with her.