Totentanz (29 page)

After that he'd begun to think about other
girls he'd known, and Ash had arranged for him to be with a couple
of them. He'd decided then that it would be best to have many girls
rather than just one. They each had something to offer, even the
ones who fought. It would be best to have a lot to choose from. And
if they didn't obey him—well, that's why they'd call him King of
the Dead.

Up ahead there was the sound of a breaking
mirror.

Seven years' bad
luck,
his mind said automatically. Then
there came the sound of another breaking mirror, and a shout. His
mother? He couldn't be sure. He quickened his steps, suddenly
rounded a corner and stepped onto broken glass shards.

"Oh, Pup."

When his mother spoke his name, her voice had
a tone of relief in it that had never been there before. She was
disheveled. Her expensive gown was torn at the shoulder, her hair
pushed out of place. It figured that she would have taken the time
to put on her most elegant things before leaving for the amusement
park. It was just like her to show up everybody else in town. There
was a silk purse on the ground, covered with bits of broken mirror
and powdery sawdust, its contents scattered. One of his mother's
shoes was missing. Her eyeliner was smudged, making her look like a
teary raccoon.

A hate for her greater than he had ever known
welled up within him.

"Pup. I've been so alone in here, and I can't
find my way out."

She limped toward him, whimpering.

"Where's Father'?" Pup asked.

She waved in the opposite direction. Her
voice was affected and breathy. "He went on ahead. I told the
foolish man to stay with me, but you know he never listens." She
held out her hand to him, as if they were at a cocktail party.
"Pup, get me out of here."

Pup brushed past her to listen at the next
turn in the mirrored path.

"How long ago did he leave you?"

She bent down and began to retrieve her
cosmetics, shoveling them back into her handbag. "Ten, fifteen
minutes. We've been in here so long.”

Pup saw only a dark, reflective twisting
ahead.

Behind him, his mother said, "Dreadful place.
It just isn't what I thought it would be, and I doubt that it's
good for Montvale. I came only because I thought I saw your
grandmother, but of course it couldn't have really been her, and
she led us into this mirror place and then abandoned us. I'll have
to recommend that Mayor Poundridge close down this entire
monstrosity." She stood up. In a few short moments she had managed
to rearrange her hair and make herself presentable again. Even her
eyeliner smears were gone. "Pup, take me out of here now," she
said.

A deep hesitation clutched Pup. He hated this
woman with a deeper hate than he ever had—but she was his
mother.

"Pup, are you listening to me, hmm?"

An image was forming in the mirrors around
Pup. Ash smiling knowingly at him, cigarette saluting limply in his
hand as if to say, "I know you can't do it, boy. You don't have the
stuff to be King of the Dead. "

"Pup, do as I say this instant."

There was her face, her huge face, staring
down at him, telling him what to do, and his tiny two-year-old
hands reached up to hit at her, to hit her away, and sudden fire
came into her eyes, and her hand was momentarily on his neck before
she slapped him for the first and last time—

His mother's throat was in Pup's hands before
he knew what he was doing. He knew he had to do it quickly or not
at all. His tie to her was too strong, and even hate, when too
strong, could turn into something else and immobilize him. And then
there were Ash's eyes. He knew they were still in that mirror,
taunting him; he knew that if he looked anywhere, at the mirror or
down at his mother's face, he would not be able to complete what he
had started.

Trying not to feel the weakening pulse
between his tight fingers, he looked up at the ceiling of the House
of Mirrors. To his shock, there were mirrors up there too. The
entire ceiling was silvered, throwing back reflections of the
ground. He did not look at what was in his hands. He saw only
himself, his own straining face. When he looked into his own eyes,
he knew he would be all right. They were the eyes of someone he
knew and trusted, the only person in the whole world he liked:

King of the Dead.

He left his mother in the sawdust, with the
contents of her handbag once more scattered: the compact and
lipsticks and eye shadows that had been her masks against him.

Up ahead someone stumbled in the corridor,
cursing loudly. Pup knew that everything would be all right
now.

His father appeared between two mirrors, the
reflection in the twin silvered glasses turning him into triplets.
He looked at Pup and then down at his wife, lying on the
ground.

He used that same tight-eyed, weighing look
he always used when measuring a situation. When he saw his wife,
his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. But almost at once they
regained their normal dull luster.

"Raymond," he said, using Pup's real first
name. The word held many things at once: command, you'd better
respect me—and, surprisingly, almost a hint of understanding.

Pup said nothing as his father stepped fully
into the room, leaving his mirrored twins behind.

As disheveled as his mother had been, his
father was still neat in appearance. He wore a tie with a small,
sharp red knot at the top of his white collar; his late-summer
sports jacket was properly unwrinkled. Somehow, as always, he
looked recently shaved. His full but firm face was set in his most
businesslike way. Even his shoes, with all of the walking and
scuffling about he must have done, looked newly shined, the black
leather hardly creased behind the toe. A businessman, always a
businessman.

"Something mighty strange going on here," his
father said. This pronouncement seemed at once to include
everything he meant: strange amusement park, strange end for his
wife, strange son standing before him. If he showed any surprise
about any of it, he kept it well hidden.

"Quite strange," he said, moving closer to
Pup and not taking his eyes off him now.

"Why don't you stop?" Pup asked. He tried to
sound casual and was delighted to find that there was no nervous
ring in his voice. It sounded very much like his father's
voice.

"I want you to listen to me carefully,
Raymond," his father said, taking another step forward.

"I said stop!"

His father stopped short. The very fact that
he had done so seemed to both surprise and frighten him, and for
the first time in his life, Pup saw his father unsure of himself.
His father looked in the mirrors, at the multiple, diamond-like
reflections of the scene around them.

"What do you want me to do?" his father
asked.

"Don't move. Don't move a step."

He already knows who I am, Pup thought. He
can sense it, taste it. He thinks he can make a deal with me.

"Can we talk, Pup?" his father asked
coolly.

"You never wanted to talk before."

Red anger flushed around
his father's starched collar, but he kept his control.
The man is marvelous.

"I'm your father."

Pup was silent.

Pup could see the gears
shift in his father's mind.
How to handle
this boy?
he was thinking;
what new tactic to try? What direction to come in
from this time?
It was like the electronic
chess game Pup had. When it was the computer's move, a little red
light stayed on until it had finished working through the
possibilities. The longer the tiny red light stayed on, the better
you knew your own move had been because it meant the machine was
stumped and trying to find a good move in a losing game.

Pup thought,
The machine is stumped.

The little red light in his father's eyes
went out, and he said, "You'll need help." Pup smiled, and the red
light went on again almost immediately; he was wishing he had the
move back, wanting to think some more, because he knew he hadn't
said the right thing.

His father drove ahead, seeing nothing better
to do, trying to twist things around his way as he went along.

"You can't do it by yourself, Pup. You're too
young." He closed his mouth for a moment, a red flush again
crawling over his collar, and took a heavy breath. "I've been at
this game a long time, I can teach you everything I know."

"I already know everything you know. I
watched you."

"There's more, much more. It isn't all on the
outside, you know. There are things you can't learn from
watching—"

"The rest I taught myself, just like you
did."

Before he could stop himself, his father
said, "Do you hate me that much?" The very fact that he was saying
something like this told him that he was losing the game. He nearly
panicked. A new tint came over his features, not of self-anger or
reproach or frustration, but of fear. He was losing.

"I can see where you would hate me," he went
on. He tried to talk himself into some new advantage. He would
talk forever, given the chance, Pup knew. Plenty of times Pup had
seen him take a man he had just cheated out of a big sum of money
and in the course of a few minutes, or maybe over lunch, make the
man think he was in the presence of the best friend he had ever
had. The money meant nothing: he would let Pup's father do it to
him again for the pleasure of it, and often he did. Pup's father
was a usurer of rare talents who enjoyed not so much the money he
made as how he made it, the process of fucking-over his customers.
"I don't see why that hate you have for me can't change, Pup."

A rage was building in Pup, and at the same
time, he wanted to laugh.

"You killed your own mother," his father
blurted out. He pointed with a shaking finger at the sprawled
corpse on the ground. "How could you do such a thing?"

"You've been slowly killing her for years,"
Pup answered. "Not that she didn't deserve it. Do you think you
were good to her?"

"No," his father said
desperately. "I wasn't good to her because I didn't love her. But
she made us stay together, she
made
me stay with her because of you."

The red light blinked on in his eyes again,
instantly going off. He knew he had found a good move.

Something struck at Pup, something way down
inside the layers and layers. For a reeling second of time he was
not the King of the Dead. He was something else. A tiny voice down
there called him an imposter, a liar, a cheat. The voice started to
grow.

His father saw what was
happening. He'd seen it many times before, and he dived into the
tiny opening, threading the needle perfectly with his words.
"However bad it was, she made a home for you, Pup. Even though she
was rotten at them, she did all the things a mother is supposed to
do because she believed that that was the way it was supposed to
be. We even had an agreement that once you went away to college in
a few years, we would get a divorce. But she wouldn't even talk
about it until then.
She loved you,
Pup.
"

The little voice in Pup began to shout
horrible things at him. He looked at a mirror on the wall, a
distorted ceiling-to-floor mirror with a long crack down its
middle. The crack tore right through his face and made it into two
not quite halves. The halves didn't meet in the middle. That was
the way his mind felt now, as though someone were breaking it into
two jagged parts with a hammer.

You're not the King of the Dead. You're a
murderer.

"Even if I didn't love you enough, Pup, she
did."

The two pieces of his head were grinding
against one another, trying to jam themselves back together. Pup
screamed, clutching at his hair, digging his fingers deep into his
scalp. He stumbled toward the broken mirror, hitting it with his
shoulder. The mirror shattered into thin, sharp bits, raining them
down like tinkling bells. Pup fell to the sawdust and began to sob
into his hands.

"You killed her, Pup," his father dug in
relentlessly, close by his ear.

"No!"

"Yes you did. You killed her with your own
hands."

Pup looked through his tears and saw on the
ground before him, reflected in a bright shard of mirror, his
father standing above him with a knife-sharp sliver of glass in his
hand, bringing it down at him.

Pup rolled over, rising to
his knees. His father lunged at the spot where he had been. The
makeshift blade shattered, and he backed away. There was an animal
glow in his eyes, feral-bright points of instinct.
You bastard,
Pup
thought,
you used her dead like you used
her alive.

His father turned and ran off into the maze
of mirrors. He pushed himself away from a large glass that broke as
he hit it, and ran on.

Pup stood up calmly. His eyes caught the
fallen form of his mother, now covered with speckles of mirror.
There was nothing in his heart for her. She had deserved it his
father deserved it more. Even if what his father had said was true,
it changed nothing. She was dead, it was too late to do anything
for her, and his father was the real culprit.

A small grin crept over Pup's face as he
stepped over his mother's still body and into the maze.

He heard his father's rough
breathing up ahead and the occasional sound of breaking glass. Pup
followed resolutely. He didn't need to follow the sawdust on the
ground now; he could have walked this path with his eyes closed if
he had had to. He knew the way to go. In a dimly lit glass ahead of
him, Ash's face appeared, smokily indistinct. The mouth opened and
closed, the blood slit saying something to him. Pup moved past,
unminding, though he thought he heard Ash's laughter.
I'm King of the Dead,
he
thought. Nothing would stop him now.