The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel

Necon Classic Horror #24

Published at Smashwords by Necon E-Books

©2013 The Estate of Charles L. Grant

Introduction ©2013 Hank Wagner

Cover Art ©2013 Matt Bechtel

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of this author.

I was dipping into my extremely battered copy of
Doug Winter’s
Faces of Fear
a couple of months ago when I
came across this quote from the always insightful David
Morrell:

“Stephen King and Peter Straub are like the
luxury liners of the horror field. They’re always visible on the
horizon when you look over these deep, dark waters. But Charlie
Grant — he’s the unseen power, like the great white shark, just
below the surface.”

Besides creating a great mental picture, the
quote is notable for the accurate portrayal of Charlie acting as a
secret master of the genre, subtly exerting profound influence on
all those in his orbit. He led by example, publishing the best
prose he could craft, and by educating the rest of us through the
numerous anthologies he edited, announcing by their inclusion in
same that certain writers had arrived, and that these stories were
worthy of our attention.

And believe you me, folks noticed. He was twice
nominated for the Nebula and Bram Stoker Awards, and received
twenty-two nominations in various categories of the World Fantasy
Awards. He won two Nebulas: in 1976, he picked one up for his short
story “A Crowd of Shadows” and in 1978, he won in the Best
Novelette category with “A Glow of Candles, A Unicorn’s Eye”. In
1979,
Shadows
won the World Fantasy Award for Best
Anthology/Collection. Charlie took home two more World Fantasy
Awards in 1983 for “Confess the Seasons” (Best Novella) and
Nightmare Seasons
(Best Anthology/Collection). He was also
honored with awards for lifetime achievement from the Horror
Writers of America, the World Horror Convention, The British
Fantasy Society and the International Horror Guild.

* * *

Although many had explored the subject of small
town horror before Charlie created Oxrun Station (Shirley Jackson’s
classic short story “The Lottery” (1948), Thomas Tyron’s novel
Harvest Home
(1973), and Stephen King’s
Salem’s Lot
(1975) spring to mind), few have done it as well, or as long, or in
as many and varied ways, as he did. Starting with
The Hour of
the Oxrun Dead
in 1979, Charlie went on to write a total of
eight novels and a series of four collections of novellas set in
the secluded Connecticut hamlet over the next sixteen years, ending
in 1995 with the collection you are now getting set to read,
The
Black Carousel.

As a set, the Oxrun books represent a grand,
wildly successful experiment in horror, as Charlie effectively
explored dread and disquiet in many forms, whether it be the threat
of harm from satanic cults, classic monsters like vampires,
werewolves or mummies, the pain of loneliness, or the confusion of
and despair caused by mental illness. Individually, many of these
stories are classics of the genre, expertly evoking fear, terror,
and, yes, horror, providing readers with fleeting, disturbing but
memorable glimpses of what lurks in the shadows.

The Black Carousel
follows the pattern of
the previous Oxrun collections,
Nightmare Seasons
,
The
Orchard,
and
Dialing the Wind
, in that it features a
series of interlocking novellas set in Oxrun. Grant sets the tone
in his prologue, in which the unnamed narrator starts to tell the
new sheriff, Deric Stockton (he’s replacing his brother Abe, now
deceased), stories about the town, about a handful of its denizens
who passed through the Pilgrim’s Travelers carnival (comparisons to
Something Wicked This Way Comes’
Cooger and Dark’s
Pandemonium Shadow Show are inevitable and apt) the last time it
visited. The stories are told in the hopes that they will help the
sheriff to understand the town, and to give him a sense of what he
might be getting into.

“Abe ever tell you about a guy named Casey? A
carpenter named Kayman? People like that?” says the narrator.
Receiving a negative response, he proceeds to relate four
tales.

"Penny Tunes for a Gold Lion," tells the
story of the aforementioned Casey Bethune, a mailman by trade, a
gardener by inclination, and a loner by nature. Like all these
stories, it deals with human relationships, or, as in Casey’s case,
the lack thereof. Casey keeps everyone at a distance, and wonders
why he is so lonely. When the town itself begins to excise him like
an infection, he still wonders why.

"Will You Be Mine?" tells the tale of Fran
Lumbaird, the new girl in town. Another tale of loneliness, dealing
with the despair of the newcomer, the outsider. This time, the town
responds by sending out special emissaries.

"Lost in Amber Light," is all about family,
about mothers, and aunts and uncles, and cousins. Dreading the
arrival of some annoying relatives, Drake Saxton decides to kill
some time by visiting Pilgrim’s Travelers. His experiences there
leave him shattered, unable to cope any longer with his domineering
mother, or the bad news she’s about to deliver.

Finally, "The Rain is Filled with Ghosts
Tonight, " puts the listeners squarely inside the addled mind of
the carpenter Kayman Kalb, teaching them the painful lesson that
dementia is not only about forgetting, it’s about remembering.

In the epilogue to this collection, we learn
the ultimate fates of Charlie’s protagonists, as the narrator takes
the Sherriff to visit the now abandoned, and impossibly small,
field on the outskirts of town where the Pilgrims Travelers
carnival sat when last in the area. They’re all “holding on,” we
are told.

As they make their way back home, they can
hear the carnival’s carousel far off in the distance, playing its
strange, haunting, ghostly music. The carnival is slipping away
into the night, leaving them there, as the last line of the book
reads, “Holding on.”

I would encourage you to read and reread this
excellent example of Charlie’s craft, and anything else of his that
you can lay your hands on, as a way of “holding on” to him, and all
the good things he represented. If enough of us do that, the
strange but moving music he created will never fade away.

— Hank Wagner, July 2013

Stars fall in summer, and it makes no difference
when someone claims that the light in the night sky isn’t really a
star. Stars fall, just like gods, and like fallen gods there’s no
sense searching for the site of their graves. There are no craters,
no ashes, no explosions that at least give the dying a brilliant
moment of satisfaction. A flare. A glance. A pointing finger to
mark the trail.

Nothing more.

Nothing after.

People are the same.

Not the geniuses, the truly special, who put the
lie to the notion that we’re all created equal; it’s the other one
—

the one who sits alone on the porch after supper
and listens to the neighborhood wind itself down toward sunset,
drink or newspaper in one hand, the other on the armrest, holding
on;

the one who walks the dog and changes the litter
box and tunes the car engine and vacuums the carpets and scolds the
baby and suddenly stands in the middle of the staircase,
momentarily confused, one hand lightly touching a throat, the other
on the banister, holding on;

the one who can’t figure out where the hell it
all went because it was only yesterday — and it had to have been
only yesterday, for crying out loud — that he had all his hair and
she had no laugh lines and he could sprint a block without losing
his breath and she could fit into the dress she wore the night she
graduated from college . . . and they stand in the middle of the
kitchen, staring at strangers, perplexed, bewildered, not wanting
to cry because there is no tangible hurt, not wanting to scream
because the monsters aren’t real, but afraid to move or speak
because they’re too busy, holding on.

It has nothing to do with attaching a meaning to
a life; it has everything to do with measuring the length of that
flare that barely lights up the night sky.

It has everything to do with holding on.

At that point, Callum Davidson shook his head
and walked away, to fetch, he said over his shoulder, either drinks
or rations of poison for the rest of us, and Nina Hunt said, “Gee,
and I thought shooting stars were supposed to be romantic. Silly
me.”

We were, that night, escapees from the
boisterous reception going on in my house. A lot of townspeople, a
lot of laughter and chatter and nudging and sideways glances; food
catered by Gale Winston from the Cock’s Crow, drinks thanks to
Nigel Oxley at the Brass Ring. I provided the space because they
asked me, and because I couldn’t think of one damn reason why
not.

Nina, four-year proprietor of Melody Tapes and
Records, had lugged over a carton of records and compact discs that
everyone picked over and no one listened to while they were
playing. And when I suggested some fresh air, she grabbed my arm,
grabbed Callum’s, and we lit out for the territory — in this case,
the patch of green and trees and nightdark flowers in front of my
house . . .

“What’s the problem?” she asked after a while of
staring at the houses across the street, at the empty street
itself, and at the evergreen shrubs that lined the base of the
porch. “You lose a bet?”

I smiled, albeit wanly. Until that moment, I had
no idea why I’d been smothered in such gloom. After all, the
Station was welcoming its new chief of police; the reconstruction
of Centre Street, after a number of political and economic delays,
was at last completed and most of the shop and office facades
finally remodeled to everyone’s satisfaction; and all was
supposedly right with the world.

“Don’t know,” I said, leaping back against a
bole.

“A writer’s thing, huh?”

I frowned.

“Moods,” she explained, as if I should have
known. A tiny creature without seeming short, hair woven from
ebony, skin that took the sun without looking like leather. “Up,
down, sometimes sideways, for no reason at all. All great poets are
reputed to be temperamental, you know.”

“I’m not a poet”

“No kidding.”

Wan smile, instant grin.

A waft of laughter from the backyard, where
lights had been strung and tables set out. I looked that way,
massaged the back of my neck.

Callum returned and handed each of us a glass.
When Nina questioned him with a tilt of her head, he stood tall —
which was very tall indeed-and glared indignantly. “Madam, if I
were going to poison you, I wouldn’t ruin perfectly good Scotch
doing it.”

She chuckled.

Callum drank and said, “So?”

I bridled a little. “What the hell’s going on?
You guys think I’m going to cut my throat or something?”

He took a spot beside me, shoulder against the
bark. “No, but I think that you think you’ve already run the race,
my friend You never reached the top, the way’s too crowded now with
people who have more energy, the only way left is down. And if I
know you, and I do, you’re about to go into a funk that’ll keep you
from working for weeks.”

“Go to hell.”

He grinned at Nina. “See?”

He was wrong, and he was so right I wanted to
throttle him, but, as I proceeded to tell him without meeting his
gaze, my immediate concern was the new top cop. Not a big man was
Deric Stockton, but he was large enough to be intimidating if he
had to be. He also had the laconic manner all Stocktons seem to
have had, and no fear at all that he was about to take over a job
that had been held by his family with few exceptions since Lucas
Stockton inaugurated the position, back in the middle of the
nineteenth century.

What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was
how much he understood about Oxrun Station.

And when he found out, how long it would be
before he was on the next train out-the direction wouldn’t
matter.