Bag of Bones (56 page)

“Are we home yet?” Ki almost moaned. “I want to go home, Mike, please take me home to my mommy.”

“I will,” I said. “Everything's going to be all right.”

We were passing the Test Your Strength pole, where the young man with the red hair was putting his shirt back on. He looked at me with stolid dislike—the instinctive mistrust of a native for an interloper, perhaps—and I realized I knew him, too. He'd have a grandson named Dickie who would, toward the end of the century to which this fair had been
dedicated, own the All-Purpose Garage on Route 68.

A woman coming out of the quilting booth stopped and pointed at me. At the same moment her upper lip lifted in a dog's snarl. I knew that face, too. From where? Somewhere around town. It didn't matter, and I didn't want to know even if it did.

“We never should have come here,” Ki moaned.

“I know how you feel,” I said. “But I don't think we had any choice, hon. We—”

They came out of Freak Alley, perhaps twenty yards ahead. I saw them and stopped. There were seven in all, long-striding men dressed in cutters' clothes, but four didn't matter—those four looked faded and white and ghostly. They were sick fellows, maybe dead fellows, and no more dangerous than daguerreotypes. The other three, though, were real. As real as the rest of this place, anyway. The leader was an old man wearing a faded blue Union Army cap. He looked at me with eyes I knew. Eyes I had seen measuring me over the top of an oxygen mask.

“Mike? Why we stoppin?”

“It's all right, Ki. Just keep your head down. This is all a dream. You'll wake up tomorrow morning in your own bed.”

“'Kay.”

The jacks spread across the midway hand to hand and boot to boot, blocking our way back to the arch and The Street. Old Blue-Cap was in the middle. The ones on either side of him were much younger, some by maybe as much as half a century. Two of the pale ones, the almost-not-there ones, were standing side-by-side to the old man's right, and I wondered if I could burst through that part of their line. I thought
they were no more flesh than the thing which had thumped the insulation of the cellar wall . . . but what if I was wrong?

“Give her over, son,” the old man said. His voice was reedy and implacable. He held out his hands. It was Max Devore, he had come back, even in death he was seeking custody. Yet it
wasn't
him. I knew it wasn't. The planes of this man's face were subtly different, the cheeks gaunter, the eyes a brighter blue.

“Where am
I
?” I called to him, accenting the last word heavily, and in front of Angelina's booth, the man in the turban (a Hindu who perhaps hailed from Sandusky, Ohio) put down his flute and simply watched. The snake-girls stopped dancing and watched, too, slipping their arms around each other and drawing together for comfort. “Where am
I,
Devore? If our great-grandfathers shit in the same pit, then where am
I
?”

“Ain't here to answer your questions. Give her over.”

“I'll take her, Jared,” one of the younger men—one of those who were really
there
—said. He looked at Devore with a kind of fawning eagerness that sickened me, mostly because I knew who he was: Bill Dean's father. A man who had grown up to be one of the most respected elders in Castle County was all but licking Devore's boots.

Don't think too badly of him,
Jo whispered.
Don't think too badly of any of them. They were very young.

“You don't need to do nothing,” Devore said. His reedy voice was irritated; Fred Dean looked abashed. “He's going to hand her over on his own. And if he don't, we'll take her together.”

I looked at the man on the far left, the third of those that seemed totally real, totally there. Was this me? It didn't look like me. There was something in the face that seemed familiar but—

“Hand her over, Irish,” Devore said. “Last chance.”

“No.”

Devore nodded as if this was exactly what he had expected. “Then we'll take her. This has got to end. Come on, boys.”

They started toward me and as they did I realized who the one on the end—the one in the caulked tree-walker boots and flannel loggers' pants—reminded me of: Kenny Auster, whose wolfhound would eat cake 'til it busted. Kenny Auster, whose baby brother had been drowned under the pump by Kenny's father.

I looked behind me. The Red-Tops were still playing, Sara was still laughing, shaking her hips with her hands in the sky, and the crowd was still plugging the east end of the midway. That way was no good, anyway. If I went that way, I'd end up raising a little girl in the early years of the twentieth century, trying to make a living by writing penny dreadfuls and dime novels. That might not be so bad . . . but there was a lonely young woman miles and years from here who would miss her. Who might even miss us both.

I turned back and saw the jackboys were almost on me. Some of them more here than others, more vital, but all of them dead. All of them damned. I looked at the towhead whose descendants would include Kenny Auster and asked him, “What did you do? What in Christ's name did you men do?”

He held out his hands. “Give her over, Irish. That's
all
you
have to do. You and the woman can have more. All the more you want. She's young, she'll pop em out like watermelon seeds.”

I was hypnotized, and they would have taken us if not for Kyra. “What's happening?” she screamed against my shirt. “Something smells! Something smells
so bad! Oh Mike, make it stop!
”

And I realized I could smell it, too. Spoiled meat and swampgas. Burst tissue and simmering guts. Devore was the most alive of all of them, generating the same crude but powerful magnetism I had felt around his great-grandson, but he was as dead as the rest of them, too: as he neared I could see the tiny bugs which were feeding in his nostrils and the pink corners of his eyes.
Everything down here is death,
I thought.
Didn't my own wife tell me so?

They reached out their tenebrous hands, first to touch Ki and then to take her. I backed up a step, looked to my right, and saw more ghosts—some coming out of busted windows, some slipping from redbrick chimneys. Holding Kyra in my arms, I ran for the Ghost House.

“Get him!” Jared Devore yelled, startled. “Get him, boys! Get that punk! Goddammit!”

I sprinted up the wooden steps, vaguely aware of something soft rubbing against my cheek—Ki's little stuffed dog, still clutched in one of her hands. I wanted to look back and see how close they were getting, but I didn't dare. If I stumbled—

“Hey!” the woman in the ticket booth cawed. She had clouds of gingery hair, makeup that appeared to have been applied with a garden-trowel, and mercifully resembled no one I knew. She was just a carny,
just passing through this benighted place. Lucky her. “Hey, mister, you gotta buy a ticket!”

No time, lady, no time.

“Stop him!” Devore shouted. “He's a goddam punk thief! That ain't his young 'un he's got! Stop him!” But no one did and I rushed into the darkness of the Ghost House with Ki in my arms.

*   *   *

Beyond the entry was a passage so narrow I had to turn sideways to get down it. Phosphorescent eyes glared at us in the gloom. Up ahead was a growing wooden rumble, a loose sound with a clacking chain beneath it. Behind us came the clumsy thunder of caulk-equipped loggers' boots rushing up the stairs outside. The ginger-haired carny was hollering at them now, she was telling them that if they broke anything inside they'd have to give up the goods. “You mind me, you damned rubes!” she shouted. “That place is for kids, not th' likes of you!”

The rumble was directly ahead of us. Something was turning. At first I couldn't make out what it was.

“Put me down, Mike!” Kyra sounded excited. “I want to go through by myself!”

I set her on her feet, then looked nervously back over my shoulder. The bright light at the entryway was blocked out as they tried to cram in.

“You asses!” Devore yelled. “Not all at the same time! Sweet weeping Jesus!” There was a smack and someone cried out. I faced front just in time to see Kyra dart through the rolling barrel, holding her hands out for balance. Incredibly, she was laughing.

I followed, got halfway across, then went down with a thump.

“Ooops!” Kyra called from the far side, then giggled as I tried to get up, fell again, and was tumbled all the way over. The bandanna fell out of my bib pocket. A bag of horehound candy dropped from another pocket. I tried to look back, to see if they had got themselves sorted out and were coming. When I did, the barrel hurled me through another inadvertent somersault. Now I knew how clothes felt in a dryer.

I crawled to the end of the barrel, got up, took Ki's hand, and let her lead us deeper into the Ghost House. We got perhaps ten paces before white bloomed around her like a lily and she screamed. Some animal—something that sounded like a huge cat—hissed heavily. Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream and I was about to jerk her backward into my arms again when the hiss came once more. I felt hot air on my ankles, and Ki's dress made that bell-shape around her legs again. This time she laughed instead of screaming.

“Go, Ki!” I whispered. “Fast.”

We went on, leaving the steam-vent behind. There was a mirrored corridor where we were reflected first as squat dwarves and then as scrawny ectomorphs with long white vampire features. I had to urge Kyra on again; she wanted to make faces at herself. Behind us, I heard cursing lumberjacks trying to negotiate the barrel. I could hear Devore cursing, too, but he no longer seemed so . . . well, so
eminent.

There was a sliding-pole that landed us on a big canvas pillow. This made a loud farting noise when we hit it, and Ki laughed until fresh tears spilled down her cheeks, rolling around and kicking her feet
in glee. I got my hands under her arms and yanked her up.

“Don't taggle yer own quartermack,” she said, then laughed again. Her fear seemed to have entirely departed.

We went down another narrow corridor. It smelled of the fragrant pine from which it had been constructed. Behind one of these walls, two “ghosts” were clanking chains as mechanically as men working on a shoe-factory assembly line, talking about where they were going to take their girls tonight and who was going to bring some “red-eye engine,” whatever that was. I could no longer hear anyone behind us. Kyra led the way confidently, one of her little hands holding one of my big ones, pulling me along. When we came to a door painted with glowing flames and marked
THIS WAY TO HADES
, she pushed through it with no hesitation at all. Here red isinglass topped the passage like a tinted skylight, imparting a rosy glow I thought far too pleasant for Hades.

We went on for what felt like a very long time, and I realized I could no longer hear the calliope, the hearty
bong!
of the Test Your Strength bell, or Sara and the Red-Tops. Nor was that exactly surprising. We must have walked a quarter of a mile. How could any county fair Ghost House be so big?

We came to three doors then, one on the left, one on the right, and one set into the end of the corridor. On one a little red tricycle was painted. On the door facing it was my green IBM typewriter. The picture on the door at the end looked older, somehow—faded and dowdy. It showed a child's sled.
That's
Scooter Larribee's,
I thought.
That's the one Devore stole.
A rash of gooseflesh broke out on my arms and back.

“Well,” Kyra said brightly, “here are our toys.” She lifted Strickland, presumably so he could see the red trike.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“Thank you for taking me away,” she said. “Those were scary men but the spookyhouse was fun. Nighty-night. Stricken says nighty-night, too.” It still came out sounding exotic—
tiu
—like the Vietnamese word for sublime happiness.

Before I could say another word, she had pushed open the door with the trike on it and stepped through. It snapped shut behind her, and as it did I saw the ribbon from her hat. It was hanging out of the bib pocket of the overalls I was wearing. I looked at it a moment, then tried the knob of the door she had just gone through. It wouldn't turn, and when I slapped my hand against the wood it was like slapping some hard and fabulously dense metal. I stepped back, then cocked my head in the direction from which we'd come. There was nothing. Total silence.

This is the between-time,
I thought.
When people talk about “slipping through the cracks,” this is what they really mean. This is the place where they really go.

You better get going yourself,
Jo told me.
If you don't want to find yourself trapped here, maybe forever, you better get going yourself.

I tried the knob of the door with the typewriter painted on it. It turned easily. Behind it was another narrow corridor—more wooden walls and the sweet smell of pine. I didn't want to go in there, something about it made me think of a long coffin, but there was
nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I went, and the door slammed shut behind me.

Christ,
I thought.
I'm in the dark, in a closed-in place . . . it's time for one of Michael Noonan's world-famous panic attacks.

But no bands clamped themselves over my chest, and although my heart-rate was high and my muscles were still jacked on adrenaline, I was under control. Also, I realized, it wasn't entirely dark. I could only see a little, but enough to make out the walls and the plank floor. I wrapped the dark blue ribbon from Ki's hat around my wrist, tucking one end underneath so it wouldn't come loose. Then I began to move forward.

I went on for a long time, the corridor turning this way and that, seemingly at random. I felt like a microbe slipping through an intestine. At last I came to a pair of wooden arched doorways. I stood before them, wondering which was the correct choice, and realized I could hear Bunter's bell faintly through the one to my left. I went that way and as I walked, the bell grew steadily louder. At some point the sound of the bell was joined by the mutter of thunder. The autumn cool had left the air and it was hot again—stifling. I looked down and saw that the biballs and clodhopper shoes were gone. I was wearing thermal underwear and itchy socks.