Twilight Eyes (35 page)

My right hand was damp with perspiration. I scrubbed it vigorously on my jeans, then gripped my throwing knife by the point. My arms ached from the beating I had taken, but I was pretty sure that I could still put a blade where I wished. I quickly whispered my intent to Joel, and when the goblin turned away from me to survey the shadows in the other direction for its demonic compatriots, I stood up, took several quick steps, froze as it began to look in my direction once more, and loosed the knife with all the force and quickness and calculation of which I was capable.

I had thrown a second too soon and too low. Before the creature could complete its turn in my direction, the blade sank deep into its shoulder instead of piercing the tender center of its throat. The demon staggered backward and collided with the ticket booth. I ran toward it, stumbled, fell over a cable, and hit the ground hard.

By the time Joel reached the beast, it had pulled the knife from its shoulder and was reeling, though still on its feet. With a snarl and a snake-like hiss that definitely were not human, it slashed at Joel, but he was agile for his size, and he knocked the knife from its hand, shoved it hard, and dropped atop it when it crashed to the ground. He strangled it.

I retrieved my knife, wiped the blade on the leg of my pants, and returned it to the sheath in my boot.

Even if I had been able to dispatch all six goblins without Joel’s help, I would not have had the strength to bury them by myself. As huge and well muscled as he was, he could drag two bodies at a time, while I could handle only one. I would have had to make six trips to the woods behind the fairgrounds if I had been alone, but the two of us needed to make the trek just twice.

Furthermore, because of Joel, digging graves was not required. We dragged the bodies to a spot only twenty feet in from the perimeter of the forest. There, in a small glade surrounded by trees like black-frocked priests of a pagan religion, a limestone sinkhole waited to accept the dead.

As I knelt beside the hole, directing the beam of Joel’s flashlight into its apparently depthless reaches, I said, “How did you know this was here?”

“I always scout the territory when we set up at a new stand. If you can find something like this, it puts your mind at rest a little to know it’s available if you need it.”

“You’re at war, too,” I said.

“No. Not the way you seem to be. I only kill them when I have no other choice, when they’re going to murder carnies or when they intend to hurt marks on the lot and let us take the blame for it. I can’t do anything about the misery they inflict on the marks out in the straight world. It’s not that I don’t care about the marks, you know. I do. But I’m only one man, and I can only do so much, and the best I can hope to do is protect my own.”

The trees around us rustled their leafy cassocks.

A sepulchral odor wafted out of the sinkhole.

“Have you dropped other goblins in here?” I asked.

“Only two. They usually let us alone in Yontsdown because they’re so busy planning school fires and poisoning folks at church picnics and that sort of thing.”

“You
know
what a breeding ground this is!”

“Yes.”

“When did you bury the others here?” I asked, again peering down into the bottomless limestone shaft.

“Two years ago. A couple of them came on the lot the next to last night of the engagement, intending to start a fire that’d sweep through the whole midway and wipe us out. Much to their surprise, I interfered with their plans.”

Hunched over, hair wild, his malformed face looking even stranger than usual in the back splash of the flashlight, the freak pulled the first corpse to the lip of the sinkhole, as if he were Grendel storing meat against the privations of winter.

I said, “No. First... we’ve got to cut off their heads. The bodies can go in the shaft, but the heads have to be buried separately . . . just in case.”

“Huh? In case what?”

I told him about my experience with the goblin that he had buried under the floor of Shockville last week.

“I’ve never cut off their heads before,” he said.

“Then there’s a chance that maybe a couple of them came back.”

He let go of the body and stood in silence for a moment, thinking about that unsettling bit of news. Considering his size and the blood-freezing juxtaposition of his gnarly features, you might have thought that he could easily instill terror but never know fear himself. Yet even in that inadequate light I could see the anxiety in his face and in his two good eyes, and when he spoke, it was in his voice as well. “You mean there could be a couple of them out there, somewhere, who know that
I
know about them . . . and maybe they’re looking for me . . .
been
looking for me a long time and are maybe getting closer?”

“Could be,” I said. “I suspect most of them stay dead once you kill them. Probably only a few retain a strong enough spark of life to rebuild their bodies and eventually reanimate themselves.”

“Even a few is too many,” he said uneasily.

I was now holding the flashlight in such a way that the beam sprayed across the top of the sinkhole, parallel with the ground, and painted the trunks of a couple of trees at the far side of the clearing. Joel Tuck looked down through the widening fan of light, at the yawning mouth of the shaft, as if he expected to see goblin hands reach out of that darkness, as if he thought his victims had come back to life long ago but had remained down there where he had put them, just waiting for him to return.

He said, “I don’t think the two I dropped in here would’ve come back. I didn’t behead them, but I made a damned good job of them, and even if a spark of life remained in them when I brought them here, the fall down that hole would surely have finished them for good. Besides, if they had come back, they would have warned others in Yontsdown, and the group who came to sabotage the Ferris wheel would’ve been a hell of a lot more careful than they were.”

Though the sinkhole seemed very deep, though he was most likely right about the inability of any goblin to come back from that cold, bottomless grave, we nevertheless decapitated all six of the demons that we had slain that night. We consigned their bodies to the hole but buried their heads in a common grave much farther back in the woods.

On the way back to the carnival, along the forest path, as we pushed through brambles and weeds, I was so weary that I felt as if my bones were on the verge of coming unhinged. Joel Tuck seemed exhausted, too, and we did not have the energy or clarity of mind to ask each other all the questions for which we needed answers. I did, however, want to know why he had played dumb on Wednesday morning, when I had interrupted him while he was pounding tent pegs and had confronted him with the fact that at our previous engagement he had buried the goblin for me.

Paraphrasing the question that he had asked me about Rya almost a week ago, making an answer of it, he said, “Well, Carl Slim, at that time I wasn’t certain I had seen the underneath below your underneath. I knew there was a goblin killer in you, but I didn’t know if that was your deepest secret. You seemed to be a friend.
Any
killer of goblins would seem to have the right stuff. Lord, yes! But I’m cautious. As a young child, I was not cautious about people, you see, but I learned. Oh, I learned! As a little boy, I was desperate to be loved, made desperate by this nightmare face of mine, in such need of affection and acceptance that I became attached to anyone who had a kind word for me. But one by one they all betrayed me. I heard some of them laughing at me behind my back, and in others I eventually detected a nauseating pity. Some trusted friends and guardians won my confidence, only to prove themselves unworthy of it when they tried to have me permanently institutionalized
for my own good
! By then I was eleven years old, and I knew that people had as many layers to them as onions, and that before you made friends with someone you had better be sure that every layer of him was as clean and good as the top skin. You see?”

“I see. But what possible secret did you think I could be concealing
under
the secret of my goblin killing?”

“I didn’t know. Could’ve been anything. So I’ve kept tabs on you. And tonight, when it looked like that bastard was going to do you in with the two-by-four, I hadn’t yet made up my mind about you.”

“Good heavens!”

“But I realized that if I didn’t act, I might be losing a friend and ally. And in this world, friends and allies of your sort are not easily acquired.”

In the meadow between the forest and the midway, with the moon now gone, with the black arms of the night draped conspiratorially around our shoulders, we trudged in weary companionship, tall grass whispering around our legs. Fireflies flickered on all sides of us and flitted by on lantern-lit missions beyond our understanding. Our passage brought a temporary halt to cricket songs and to the cries of field toads, but the chorus swelled again in our wake.

As we neared the back of the big tent that housed Sabrina’s Mysteries of the Nile, a girlie show with an Egyptian gimmick, Joel stopped and put a big hand on my shoulder, stopping me as well. “There might be trouble tonight when those six don’t show up back in Yontsdown, as expected. Maybe you’d better sleep at my trailer. The wife won’t mind. There’s an extra bedroom.”

That was the first I knew he was married, and although I prided myself on having a carny’s blasé attitude toward freaks and such, I was chagrined to discover that I was startled by the thought of someone married to Joel Tuck.

“What do you say?” he asked.

“I doubt there’ll be any more trouble tonight. Besides, if there is, my place is with Rya.”

He was silent a moment. Then: “I was right, wasn’t I?”

“About what?”

“Your infatuation.”

“It’s more than that.”

“You . . . love her?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And are you sure you know the difference between love and infatuation?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?” I demanded, not really angry with him, just frustrated, as I detected the resurgence of that enigmatic streak in him.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re not an ordinary seventeen-year-old. You’re not a boy. No boy has learned and seen and done the things that you have, and I shouldn’t forget that. You know what love is, I guess. You’re a man.”

“I’m ancient,” I said tiredly.

“Does she love you?”

“Yes.”

He was silent for a long time, but he kept his hand on my shoulder, staying me, as if he were diligently searching for words to convey an important message that defied even his formidable vocabulary.

I said, “What is it? What’s troubling you?”

“I guess, when you say that she loves you . . . this is something you know not just from what she says but from . . . but also by the application of whatever special talents and perceptions you possess.”

“That’s right,” I said, wondering why my relationship with Rya should cause him such concern. His questioning in such a delicate area seemed almost like common nosiness, but I vaguely sensed that there was more to it, and besides, he had saved my life, so I stifled the first glimmer of irritation and said, “Clairvoyantly, psychically, I sense that she loves me. Does that satisfy you? But even if I didn’t have the advantage of my sixth sense, I would know how she felt.”

“If you’re sure—”

“I just said I was.”

He sighed. “Again I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . I have always been aware of a . . . a
difference
in Rya Raines. I’ve had the feeling that the underneath below her underneath is . . . not good.”

“She has a grim secret,” I told him. “But it’s not something that she’s done. It’s something that was done
to
her.”

“She’s told you all?”

“Yes.”

He nodded his shaggy head and worked his steam-shovel jaw. “Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’ve always sensed the good, worthy part of Rya, but there’s been this other thing, this unknown thing, that has aroused suspicion. . . .”