Gagging, swallowing some dirt, spitting some out, I flopped onto my back just as the brain-damaged goblin clumped and heaved its broken-machine body to the edge of the grave. It glared down. Eyes of frost and fire. Its inconstant shadow swung back and forth across me as the light above dipped in the draft.
There was not sufficient distance between us for me to throw the knife successfully. However, suddenly sensing the dead thing's intention, I gripped the haft with both hands, held the weapon straight up, and locked my shoulders and elbows and wrists, pointing the blade at the creature in the same instant that it spread its arms and, grinning witlessly, fell toward me. It impaled itself upon the knife, and my arms buckled under its weight. It collapsed on top of me, knocking my breath out.
Though the knife was buried to the hilt in its unbeating heart, it would not yet be still, its chin lay on my shoulder, and it pressed one cold and greasy cheek to mine. It muttered senselessly in my ear, in a tone disconcertingly like that of one in the throes of passion. Its arms and legs twitched spider-quick though without purpose, and its hands quivered and jerked.
Empowered by overwhelming disgust and unadulterated terror, I pushed, squirmed, hit, kicked, bucked, shoved, twisted, clawed, and pulled my way out from under the creature, until our positions were reversed, with me atop it, one knee on its groin, the other in the dirt beside it, I sputtered curses comprised of half words and nonwords that were every bit as meaningless as the gibberish that passed from my dead adversary's still moving lips, and I wrenched the knife out of its heart and stabbed it again, again, once more, in throat and chest and belly, again, and once more. Lacking aim and enthusiasm, it swung brick-size fists at me, but even in my mindless frenzy I dodged most blows with little difficulty, though the few that landed on my arms and shoulders were effective. Eventually my knife produced the desired result, cutting out the throbbing cancer of unnatural life that animated the cold flesh, excising it bit by bit, until the dead thing's spasming legs grew still, until its arms moved even more slowly and erratically, until it began to bite its own tongue. Its arms at last dropped, limp at its sides, and its mouth fell slack, and the faint crimson light of goblin intelligence went out of its eyes.
I had killed it.
Again.
But killing was not enough. I had to make sure the thing
stayed
dead. I could now see that indeed the mortal wound in its throat had partially healed since the Dodgem Car pavilion. Until tonight I had not realized that goblins, like the vampires of European folklore, could sometimes resurrect themselves if they had not been dispatched with sufficient thoroughness. Now that I knew the grim truth, I would take no chances. While a flood tide of adrenaline was still sluicing through me, before I came crashing down into enervating despair and nausea, I cut off the creature's head. It was not easy work, but my knife was sharp, the blade of tempered steel, and I still had the strength of terror and fury. At least the butchery was bloodless, for I had already drained this corpse two nights ago.
Outside, with much moaning and hissing, hot summer wind gusted across the tent. The billowing canvas strained at the anchor ropes and pegs, crackling, thrumming, flapping, like the wings of a great, dark bird seeking flight but chained to an earthly perch.
Large, blackish witch-moths darted around the swaying bulbs and added their swooping shadows to the whirl of light and weird adumbrated forms. Viewed with eyes that were focused through a lens of panic and blurred by stinging sweat, that constant phantom movement was maddening and only worsened the unsettling waves of dizziness that already swept through me.
When at last I completed the decapitation, I considered putting the thing's head between its legs, then filling the grave, but that seemed to be a dangerously incomplete scattering of the remains. I could easily imagine the corpse, again interred, gradually moving its hands beneath the earth, reaching down for its severed pate, reassembling itself, its torn neck knitting up, the pieces of its broken spine fusing together, crimson light returning to its strange eyes. . . . Therefore I put the head aside and reburied only the body. I stamped on the plot, packing the dirt down as well as I could, then spread sawdust over it again.
Carrying the head by its hair, feeling savage and wild and not liking that feeling one damned bit, I hurried back to the entrance to Shockville and switched off the lights.
The flap that I had untied was snapping in the blustery night. I cautiously looked out at the midway where there was no movement in the waning light of the setting moon, except for the spectral shapes of gliding dust-ghosts that the seance wind had conjured up.
I slipped outside, put the head down, retied the canvas at the entrance, picked the head up again, and hurried stealthily along the concourse to the back end of the lot, between two chastely darkened girlie shows, through a cluster of trucks that stood like slumbering elephants, past generators and huge, empty wooden grates, across a deserted field, into the nearest arm of the forest that embraced three sides of the fairgrounds. With each step I was increasingly afraid that the head, dangling from its handle of hair, was coming alive againâa new glow dawning in its eyes, lips writhing, teeth gnashingâand I held it out to one side, at arm's length, so I would not accidentally bump it against my leg and give it a chance to sink its teeth deep into my thigh.
Of course, it was dead, all the life gone from it forever. The grinding and clacking of its teeth, its thick mutterings of hatred and anger, were merely my own fevered fantasies. My imagination not only ran away with me but galloped, raced,
stampeded
across a nightmare landscape of horrendous possibilities. When at last I thrashed through the underbrush beneath the trees, found a small clearing beside a brook, and put the severed head upon a convenient rock table, even the wan and eldritch moonbeams provided adequate light to prove that my fears were groundless and that the object of my terror remained without life, natural or otherwise.
The earth near the stream was a soft, moist loam, easily dug with bare hands. The trees, their night-black boughs like witch skirts and warlock robes, stood sentinel at the perimeter of the clearing while I scooped a hole, buried the head, tamped down the earth, and concealed my labors with a scattering of dead leaves and pine needles.
Now, to effect a Lazarean rebirth, the headless corpse would first have to tear out of its pit in the midway, crawl or stagger sightlessly to the forest, locate this clearing, and exhume its own head from this second grave. Although the events of the past hour had instilled in me an even greater respect for the evil powers of the goblin race, I was quite certain that they could not overcome such formidable obstacles to resurrection as these. The beast was dead, and it would remain dead.
The trip from the sideshow to the forest, the digging of the hole, and the burial of the head had all been accomplished in a near panic. So I stood in the clearing for a moment, arms hanging limply, and tried to calm down. It was not easy.
I kept thinking about Uncle Denton, back in Oregon. Had his badly hacked corpse healed in the privacy of his coffin and had he smashed his way out of the tomb a few weeks after I had gone on the run from the law? Had he paid a visit to the farmhouse where my mother and sisters still lived, to take vengeance on the Stanfeuss family, and had they become a goblin's victims because of me? No. That was unthinkable. I could not live under the smothering weight of that guilt. Denton had not come back. For one thing, that bloody day I had gone after him, he had fought with such ferocity that my rage had grown into a state not unlike a psychotic frenzy, and I had inflicted horrible damage with the ax, wielding it with mad abandon even after I had known he was dead; he had been too smashed and thoroughly dismembered to have knitted himself together again. Furthermore, even if he achieved resurrection, surely he would not return to the Stanfeuss house or to anyplace in the Siskiyou valleys where he was known, for the miracle of his return from the grave would have shocked the world and focused relentless attention upon him. I was sure he was still in his coffin, decomposingâbut if he was
not
in his grave, then he was far from Oregon, living under a new name, tormenting other innocents, not my folks.
I turned from the clearing, pressed through the brush, and found my way back to the open field where the night was redolent with the scent of goldenrod. I had covered only half the distance to the midway when I realized that there was still a taste of dirt in my mouth, from the bite of earth I had unwillingly taken when thrown into the goblin's grave. That vile taste recalled every detail of the horrors of the past hour, somehow broke through the guardian numbness that had protected me from collapse while I had done what had to be done. Nausea overwhelmed me. I fell to my hands and knees, hung my head, and vomited in the grass and goldenrod.
When the nausea passed, I crawled a few feet away and flopped onto my back, blinking at the stars, catching my breath, trying to find the strength to go on.
It was four-fifty in the morning. The orange sun of dawn was no more than an hour away.
That thought brought to mind the sightless orange eye in Joel Tuck's forehead. Joel Tuck . . . he had spirited the body out of the Dodgem Car pavilion and had buried it, which might have been the act of someone who knew the goblins for what they were and wanted to help me. Almost certainly Joel Tuck also had been the one who had come into the trailer where I was sleeping the previous night and had left the two passesâone to the Dodgem Cars and one to the Ferris wheelâon my folded jeans. He had been trying to tell me that he knew what had happened at the Dodgem Cars and that he also knew, as I did, that something was going to happen at the Ferris wheel. He saw the goblins, and to some extent he sensed the malignant energies around the Ferris wheel, though his own psychic talent was probably not as strong as mine.
This was the first time I had ever encountered anyone with
any
genuine psychic abilities, and it was certainly the first time I had come across anyone who saw the goblins for what they truly were. For a moment I was overcome with a sense of brotherhood, a kinship so poignant and so desperately desired that it brought tears to my eyes. I was not alone.
But why did Joel resort to indirection? Why was he reluctant to let me know about the brotherhood we shared? Obviously it was because he did not want me to know who he was. But why not? Because . . . he was not a friend. It suddenly occurred to me that Joel Tuck might consider himself neutral in the battle between mankind and the goblin race. After all, he had been treated worse by ordinary humankind than he had by goblins, if only because he had encounters with human beings every day and with goblins only on occasion. An outcast, rejected and even reviled by society at large, allowed no dignity except within the sanctuary of the carnival, he might well feel that he had no reason to oppose the goblins' war against marks. If that was the case, he had assisted me with the dead body and had pointed me toward the oncoming danger at the Ferris wheel solely because
those
goblin schemes directly affected carnies, the only people to whom he
did
owe allegiance in this secret war. He did not want to approach me openly because he sensed that
my
vendetta against the demons was not restricted by the boundaries of the carnival, and he did not want to be drawn into a wider conflict; he was willing to fight the war only when it came to him.
He had helped me once, but he would not always help me.
When you came right down to it, I was still pretty much alone.
The moon had set. The night was very dark.
Exhausted, I got up from the grass and goldenrod and returned to the locker room beneath the grandstand, where I scrubbed my hands, spent fifteen minutes digging the dirt out from beneath my fingernails, and showered. Then I went down to the trailer in the meadow where I had been assigned quarters.
My roommate, Barney Quadlow, was snoring loudly.
I undressed and got into bed. I felt physically and mentally numb.
The comfort I had takenâand givenâwith Rya Raines was only a dim memory, though we had been together less than two hours ago; the recent horror was more vivid, and like a newer coat of paint it overlaid the joy that had been. Now, of my time with Rya, I more clearly recalled her moodiness, her deep and inexplicable sadness, because I knew
that
Rya would sooner or later be the cause of another crisis with which I would have to deal.
So much on my shoulders.
Too much.
I was only seventeen.
I wept quietly for Oregon, for lost sisters and a mother's love too far removed.
I longed for sleep.
I desperately needed to get
some
rest.
Yontsdown was less than two days away.
chapter eleven
SLOUGH NIGHT
At eight-thirty Saturday morning, after little more than two hours of sleep, I woke from a nightmare unlike any that I had ever known before.
In the dream I was in a vast graveyard that sloped down a long and apparently endless series of hills, a place crowded with granite and marble monuments of all sizes and shapes, some cracked and many canted, in rows without end, in numbers beyond counting, the very cemetery of Rya's own dreams. Rya was there, too, running away from me, through the snow, under the black branches of barren trees. I was chasing her, and the weird thing was that I felt both love and loathing for her, and I did not know exactly what I was going to do when I caught her. A part of me wanted to cover her face with kisses and make love to her, but another part of me wanted to throttle her until her eyes bulged and her face turned black and her lovely blue eyes clouded with death. This savage fury, directed toward someone I loved, scared the hell out of me, and more than once I stopped. But each time that I halted, she halted, too, waiting for me among the tombstones on the slope below, as if she wanted me to catch her. I tried to warn her that this was not a lover's game, that something was
wrong
with me, that I might lose control of myself when I caught her, but I could not will my lips and tongue to form the words. Each time I stopped, she waved me on, and I found myself pursuing her once more. And then I knew what must be wrong with me. There must be a goblin in me! One of the demonkind had entered me, had taken control of me, destroying my mind and soul, leaving nothing but my flesh, which was now
its
flesh, but Rya was not aware of this; she still saw only Slim, just her loving Slim MacKenzie; she did not realize what terrible danger she was in, did not understand that Slim was dead and gone, that his living body served an unhuman creature now, and if that creature caught her, it would choke the life out of her, and now it was gaining on her, and she glanced back at it-me, laughingâshe looked so beautiful, beautiful and doomedâand now it-me was within ten feet of her, eight, six, four, and then I grabbed hold of her, swung her aroundâ