Apocalypse (38 page)

Authors: Nancy Springer

By nightfall of the first day the dead were buried, lying under the bottommost of what were to be many layers of slag in the pit where they had fallen; it would become their communal grave. Gladys Wildasin's body did not lie with the others. She had been taken away by the police for forensic autopsy, and she was not missed.

It was a fine irony, unnoticed by most townspeople other than Elspeth and Cally, that the slag heaps, which had always seemed to shadow Hoadley, shutting out light and air, that those ugly old “bony piles” should become the easy means of healing the town's greatest wound. The town leveled them to fill the pit. Mark and the remaining horsewomen joined like many other volunteers (including many with strange wine-colored scars on the sides of their faces) in the hard labor, and found that in the absence of Gerald Wozny and Zephyr Zook, and with the shocked and/or prostrated resignation of other borough council members, new leadership emerged. Few survivors looked down on anyone any longer, but one person in particular came to be liked and respected by nearly everyone, and was within a year elected to public office: Shirley Danyo.

Hoadley had always insisted on managing things its own way, and despite an influx of federal officials, Red Cross administrators and various interfering outsiders it continued to do so. Within a respectable length of time the pit was filled, rebuilding begun (including the government-financed construction of Mark Wilmore's new Home Furnishings and Interior Decorating business), and a suitably ostentatious monument raised in the park near the gazebo, in memory of the victims. On it, of course, were engraved the names of the dead:

Rev. Ronald R. Berkey

Beulah G. Coe (Mrs. Elmer Graybill Coe)

Izetta “Wobbles” Enwright

Sojourner Faith Hieronymus

Gustave Delmar Litwack

Fr. Anatole Leopold

Rose Zankowski Kondas (Mrs. Ralph H. Kondas)

Osvaldo “Slug” Pessolano, Jr.

Jessica Sue Rzeszut

Luther Wesley Wasserman

Gladys Gingrich Wildasin

Gerald Q. Wozny

Zephyr Angelica Zook (Mrs. Howard B. Zook)

Near the apex of the obelisk, over the list of names, was engraved an inscription selected by the town's literary authority and new librarian, Cally Wilmore. Something nice, appropriate, from Donne or Shakespeare or perhaps the Bible. No one knew, for no one except, perhaps, Cally ever really read it to remember it.

But up on Trolley Park Hill, engraved on a bronze plaque that huddled flush with the ground, lay another inscription remembered by those Hoadley citizens who read it, though it was read seldom, for few of them went up there; nothing was left to take even the bad girls and the eager boys to that hilltop. A scattering of time-tattered shacks still stood, but no carousel building any longer: nothing but a circular pile of debris out of which rose the charred, black hulks of a few wooden horses.

Barry Beal walked up the trolley right-of-way almost daily, but no one cared about that; everyone knew Barry Beal was simpleminded, and no one gave much thought to his doings. Cally Wilmore rode her new horse up there the white winter day she first brought it home. Other than that, deer hunters went there once an autumn or so. And maybe moonlight strollers in the spring. And from time to summertime, kids camping in Boy Scout tents.

So it took a while. But after a few years the tale began to be told, how if a person came to that place at dawn, and sat, and kept very stillâand if the sunrise was of exceptional sweetness and beautyâthe listener could hear in the hush, ethereal, the sound of calliope music in three-four time. And if the person then looked toward the blackened ruins of the carousel (and if the mist was blanketing the earth in the sunrise, lying in folds and billows beneath green locust trees) sometimes a white wild-maned horse could be seen over those dark ashes, circling, circling, white and ethereal as the mist. And other carousel horses could be seen even more faintly, yellow and dun and spotted horses, following the lead horse in its ever rounds, circling, cycling.â¦ And straight and still on the white horse's back there would be riding a young woman in a dress red as a lover's heart, a young woman the colors of milk and honey and sublimely beautifulâbut fleeting as time. For no sooner would the watcher draw breath than she and her horses were gone like the mist vanishing in the rising sun.

And if the person blinked and looked down then, he or she might see the new day's sun glinting off the polished, deeply gleaming plaque set into the ground. Why such a marker in that unlikely place? And who had paid for the expensive thing, and brought it up the trolley trail, and had put it there, and kept the grass clipped around it? And who had chosen the peculiar words with which it was engraved?

Leaning, with the morning sun warm on the back of the neck, the Hoadley citizen could read them:

“So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.”

About the Author

Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone with novels for adults, young adults, and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magic realism, horror, and mysteryâalthough she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan and Nora), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and bird-watching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida Panhandle where the bird-watching is spectacular, and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

ISBN: 978-1-4532-9391-1

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

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