Halloweenland (19 page)

“Great for DVDs, when I can’t stand grading anymore,” Stein commented, as he pushed a button hidden behind a pile of books. There was an uneventful moment and then the screen filled with what looked like a homemade movie, a handheld camera recording a flight down a concrete set of steps in what looked like Central Park.

Stein uncovered his keyboard and tapped some keys. “We filmed part of the teleplay, borrowed some film students,” he said.

The screen went blank, then bright blue, hurting Grant’s eyes. Then a white screen came up with a cursor in the upper left corner.

“What was the name again?” Stein asked.

Harmon told him.

Stein typed it in.

A name came up, followed by rows of information.

“Hey,” Stein said, suddenly wary, partly covering the
screen with his hands, “does Mr. Detective here know about the confidentiality laws?”

Harmon said, sighing, “It’s all right, Dan.”

Stein shrugged and pushed his face close to the screen.

“Oh,” he said.

“What?” Harmon replied.

“It says it’s here. She never finished it, right?”

“Correct,” Harmon said.

“Then all we have to do is find it,” Stein said, sweeping his hands around the room, the endless stacks.

“Jeez, Dan, haven’t you ever heard of organization?” Harmon said, after a half hour of plowing through one stack of old papers. They had each taken a quadrant, leaving the least likely corner of the room (“
Really
old stuff,” Stein had explained) for last.

Stein laughed. “I took a course in Labor Organization once,” he said. “They gave me the choice of dropping out or flunking.”

Grant threw aside a bound thesis titled “Labor Union Strife of the 1960s and Its Long-Term Effect on the American Economy” and picked up another called “The Rembrandt Effect: Labor Law in Seventeenth Century Holland.”

“Don’t you remember anything about Anne Simmons?” Harmon asked Stein.

There was silence, then Stein said, “No. Oh, wait, yes. She was either tall and thin with blond hair, or short and heavy with blond hair.”

“You’re sure she was a blonde?” Harmon said.

“No.”

Grant looked at his watch. “Would you two screenwriters please get back to work?”

“You will promise to let us use you as a consultant, right?” Stein asked.

“If you find what I want, you can pick my brains clean.”

“Cool.”

There was the sound of papers shuffled, riffled, the thump of theses tossed aside.

After another half hour the three of them stood in the midst of a sea of discarded paper staring at the remaining corner of the room.

“How old?” Harmon asked.

“Well, there’s always the chance it was misfiled.”

Grant stepped forward and grabbed the top of the nearest pile, and his two companions dug in beside him.

Twenty minutes later Stein announced, “I’ve got it.”

The two others stopped immediately and looked over the short man’s shoulders. He held in his hand a marooncolored binder with a typed sticker on the cover which read: “The Treatment of the Disabled and Nonconformist in America, a Legal History” and under that “by Anne Simmons.”

“This is important?” Stein laughed, and Grant tore the thesis out of his hand and pulled it open. He quickly thumbed to page seventy-six and moved his index finger down to the footnote number, which was at the end of a long sentence. His heart pounding, he tore his finger back to the beginning: “. . . and Gina, the Otherworldly Little Lady, who, her father claimed, had visited a land beyond the grave and then returned to the land of the living. Managed by her father, she appeared on talk shows before abruptly disappearing into the strange world of the carnival freak. Whether she is catatonic or delusional,
her rights were obviously abused, and as of this writing she is a member of a team of carnival attractions owned by Carperon, Inc., a midwest purveyor of traveling shows, the most recent of which, Halloweenland, owned and operated by a so-called Mr. Dickens, whose real name . . .”

Grant read the name, dropped the thesis and turned toward the door.

“Hey, Detective, you okay?” Stein asked.

Harmon voiced concern and curiosity. “Detective Grant? What does it mean?”

“It means I go back to where I started.”

Behind him, as he ran for the stairs and his car, he heard Stein utter, “Wow! We can use that line in the teleplay!”

For a lingering last moment, Grant stood by the door of his car in the Halloweenland parking lot and smoked a cigarette. There was a Halloween moon up, a thick lopsided smile hovering overhead, and it looked like part of the show. Orange and white Christmas lights were strung in sagging arcs between tall poles around the wide perimeter of the park, swaying slightly in the chill October breeze. More lights, orange only, outlined the ticket booth leading into the attractions. The huge lot was almost full, and families, some with license plates from as far away as Ohio, were pouring out of SUVs and vans. There was a line of charter buses at the far end of the lot, two abreast and ten long. Halloweenland was doing a brisk business.

Grant’s heart was still beating fast, but his cop’s mind was working. He watched the Ferris wheel, which had just started up with a new set of passengers, after coming to a jerking halt every thirty seconds to unload and reload. It was even taller than it had looked from his apartment, and its carnival lights were blinking tonight in
patterns. Its movement was as smooth and silent as a jeweled watch.

There was plenty of other noise, though: the calliope tinkled at full throttle, and Grant realized that the sound was piped into speakers mounted on the same poles that supported the lights. The Tilt-A-Whirl was in full canted flight, its passengers, just glimpsed at the height of the ride’s turn, doing the wave and screaming happily as gravity made the bottoms drop out of their stomachs.

Grant dropped and crushed the cigarette, and lit a new one. “Like I said, Malone, one out of two ain’t bad.” Grant patted the reassuring curve of the flask filled with scotch, as yet untouched, in his jacket pocket. “But the night is young.”

He walked to the ticket booth and bought an entry ticket. The ticket seller was pale and moonfaced, and gave him a slow, eerie smile as he slid Grant’s ticket across to him with long, thin, long-nailed fingers.

“Have a good time, sir,” the ticket taker said in a stentorian voice.

Grant felt the man’s eyes follow him in, and the hair on the nape of his neck prickled.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Here we go, the biggest, weirdest shit of all.”

He walked toward the events tent, passing the expanded kiddie-ride section on the way. Besides the Cups and Saucers, which were in full spin, there was now a Caterpillar, a kind of small, bumped roller on wheels—the attraction was that as the cars went round in round in their small circle, a canvas covering painted to look like a caterpillar moved over the entire length of the contraption, leaving the squealing children in momentary darkness, until the cover retreated again. There was also something Grant hadn’t seen since his own childhood: a
small, steam-powered railroad, with real passenger cars open at the top and only wide enough to fit a few children inside. An engineer sat cramped in the open tender car behind the engine. It moved silently as Grant passed by, which meant that it wasn’t steam after all, but probably filled with electronics and an electric motor.

“It actually runs on magnets—like the new high-speed trains in Europe,” a voice next to Grant said, as a moist hand fell on his and squeezed lightly. “Of course we keep this train at four miles per hour, for the kiddies. Don’t want to scare Mom and Dad, do we?”

Grant turned and looked into the slightly grinning face of Mr. Dickens. But the eyes were anything but merry.

“When I first met you, you never smiled,” Grant said.

“Ah, so you’re still a good detective. Excellent. Walk with me.”

Dickens took Grant’s arm and steered him away from the direction of the attractions tent.

“I want to see Reggie Bright,” Grant said.

“Of course. But first we’ll walk, and I’ll show off my diversion.”

“Is that what Halloweenland is?”

The grin was gone from Dickens’ face, but the grim, hooded eyes remained dark and unreadable.

“Please, Detective, walk with me.”

And then, as he had so many years ago, Thomas Reynolds, Jr. gave a little bow, which looked much more fitting now than it had when Reynolds had been a boy of thirteen, dressed in stiff clothes and with the mannerisms of a mannequin.

“What happened to your mother?” Grant asked, and Reynolds was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “She ended up in an insane asylum in Michigan. And
then the authorities discovered that she was an illegal alien. In these times, there is not so much tolerance for foreigners, and she was a burden to the state besides, so she was deported back to Romania.”

“I thought she was Russian.”

Reynolds shook his head. “She never spoke of it to anyone, and only answered direct questions. My family has a long history in this . . . business, on both sides. The strange was never alien to either my father or my mother. But my mother, in the end, could not abide it, and so gave up. I have not heard from her since. And being involved in what I have been, I have not been able to visit her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Reynold’s looked up at him, and his eyes were small and hard. “So am I, Detective.”

They had come to the waist-high chain fence surrounding the carousel. Reynolds stopped and rested both hands lightly on the chain. A ride was just ending, and the merry-go-round seemed to stop for their pleasure. Grant noticed that there were many carved animals besides horses: a dragon, dark green scaled, with folded wings and carved fire issuing from its fearsome mouth; a gryphon, mythical creature, painted in gray and gold; a pair of stately white unicorns standing abreast a benched seat in deep red. A new herd of children mounted the platform and swarmed to their chosen places, and soon the ride slowly came up to speed. Now Grant saw, in a blur, a few other animals: Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded hell; a winged angel, looking fearsome and resolute, though white; and something that looked a lot like Samhain—a deep black cape topped with a barely glimpsed ashen face and flared open at the bottom to reveal a black-seated bench beneath, which was empty.

“A few of the pieces I had specially made in Germany,”
Reynolds explained. His voice dropped in timber. “Even when I was in Europe there was no time to visit my mother.” His voice became suffused with bitterness. “Even though, once I came within a few miles of the institution where she is kept. There was always the work.”

They left the carrousel, and Reynolds drew them slowly toward the midway. “Perhaps I should explain a bit, Detective,” he said. “When we first met, I offered to let you see the second volume of my father’s
Occult Practices in Orangefield and Chicawa County, NewYork
, which covered the period from 1940 until 2000 or so. Do you remember?”

“Yes. As you suggested, I started to read the first volume, which I borrowed from the library. That was when I had my first visit from Samhain.”

Reynolds’ eyes brightened. “Really? Did he destroy the volume?”

“As a matter of fact he did.”

“Curious, since he must have known there were other copies. I’m sure he was just trying to impress you.”

“He impressed me.”

Reynolds smiled briefly. “If you also remember, during our first conversation I told you that Samhain, for all his fearsomeness and power and supposed dominion over the dead, is merely a servant.”

“Yes, I remember that, too. Samhain calls him the Dark One.”

Reynolds nodded. They were on the midway, now, which was illuminated with more orange bulbs that outlined each canvas booth: shooting galleries with rows of ducks and red and white targets; guess-the-number wheels which clicked as they were spun; softball tosses into angled bushel baskets. There were milling crowds and noise and the yell of barkers urging customers to try their luck, and the tart buttery smell of popcorn in the air.

Reynolds said, “We of course have known him as Satan, or the Devil, or the Evil One, or Uncreator, or one of countless other names. He is basically a destroyer, who wants to negate all life and unmake everything that has been made.

“We know that on the rare occasion throughout history, forces have aligned giving the Dark One the opportunity to enter our world. If he is able to do so, he then will have the ability to destroy all creation. The Earth, the moon, the stars, all life, everything.

“Reggie Bright was involved in such an attempt, of course.” Reynolds paused and gave a slight smile. “You yourself played a part in it, though I doubt you understood the full import of what was happening. This is covered in the third volume of my father’s work, which I have continued.
Occult Practices in Orangefield and Chicawa County, New York
,
2000-Present
. Yes, Detective, I once told you I would write that book, when I was a very formal and very scared thirteen-year-old. Now I’m not quite as formal but still very much scared.