The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (13 page)

Elly shook her head.

Chip laughed. “You’re a dope, you know it? A
real dope.” He looked at Fran. “So?”

Fran wanted to run; she wanted to stay; she
wanted to laugh, and she wanted to stop the tears she saw filling
Maddy’s eyes. They were all acting like he was a ghost or
something, and she had touched him, felt his arm, she knew he
wasn’t a ghost. He was as alive as they were.

As alive as Zera had been.

The sunlight died, summer died, and they were
all in winter shadow in a slow winter wind that pushed at their
hair and ruffled their clothes and blew dead leaves down the hill
over browning grass. The sky was dark, but there were no stars. The
only light left, the light that made them shadow, hid behind the
trees and gave the trees sharp edges.

Fever dream.

“You made Zera die,” she whispered.

Chip put his hands in his pockets, bent his
head, looked at her sideways.

“You make Susan’s sister die?”

Susan dropped to the ground, hugged her knees,
rocked until Maddy dropped beside her and held her and let the
tears slip out, one by one.

Winterlight.

“You’re a ghost?”

Looking at him through gauze touched with red
glitter, unable to run, unable to breathe except in shallow gulps.
Unable to look away.

“I’m not a ghost,” he said at last. “I am,
that’s all. I am.” His gaze shifted to Elly when she stamped her
foot in annoyance. “I’m a friend. A friend for life. Do
you
want to be my friend, Elly?”

The girl paled and stepped hastily backward
until she bumped into Kitt, who shoved her away as if she had the
plague.

Fever.

“Leave her alone,” Fran snapped, and ran to
Elly’s side, put an arm around her waist. “Who’d want you for a
friend? You’re mean.” She could feel her own tears surge, and
subside. “Go away.”

Chip straightened. “I’m there when you want me,
and I go away when you don’t. What’s wrong with that?”

“Yeah, but when you go away for good,” Fran
said, “we get hurt and die, right?”

He didn’t answer.

“That’s dumb. That’s a really dumb rule.” Her
arm slipped away from Elly’s waist, but the girl grabbed her hand.
“I think you should just go away and leave us alone.”

The boy’s face reddened. “But I don’t have a
friend!”

“Too bad.” She shooed him. “Screw off, Chip,
just screw off.” She grinned at the others. “That’s the way we do
it in the city.”

And when she looked back, he was gone.

Dream.

Winterlight fading; summerlight returning, and
with it the heat and the bees and the sounds of the game down on
the field. Fran felt her legs wobble a little, but Elly didn’t
release her, and the others quickly surrounded her, chattering,
giggling nervously, searching the trees and the shrub until she
suggested they go down to a kiosk and get a hot dog or
something.

They ran.

Slipping, pushing, yelling all the way down the
slope.

Running across the diamond and shrieking happily
when the boys cursed and yelled at them.

Plowing through the bushes until they reached
the blacktop path, darting around a woman with a baby carriage,
kicking a soccer ball out of their way, nearly colliding with the
refreshment stand when they reached it, then playfully shoving
themselves into line, faces red, eyes shining.

Fran grinned, then laughed when Kitt said her
mother was going to skin her alive when she got home tonight.

Elly tugged at her arm. “Do I have to wear a
dress?”

“What? Don’t be stupid. You don’t have to wear a
dress if you don’t want to. That’s silly.”

Sodas. Hot dogs.

They stood to one side and didn’t care about the
mustard dripping onto their chests, deciding that tomorrow, if they
could get somebody to drive them, they’d go see the show out at the
college.

“Boys!” Maddy cried.

They laughed and started for the exit.

“Thanks,” Elly said when they reached Park
Street, the others gone, waving good-bye.

Fran shrugged. “No problem.” She checked the
street in both directions. “See you tomorrow.” And ran to the other
side.

“Fran!”

She stopped and turned.

Elly stood on the curb. “I’m sorry,” she called.
“About all that stuff.”

Fran nodded
it’s okay
and backed away,
ready to run, ready to fly home and tell her parents about the
great time she’d had. Not about Chip, though. They’d think she was
having another fever or something, lock her away until every doctor
in the universe had had a look down her throat.

“Can I be your friend?”

Fran grinned, waved, and called a “Sure!” before
she ran.

Ran a half dozen steps before turning around to
wave again.

Elly was gone.

Nothing left but sharp edges, and the faint
scent of cotton candy.

There was no question that the music didn’t fit
the night. It was too fast, too loud, too demanding. The band
prancing on the portable stage at the back of the yard wore clothes
that were too bright, too much like neon woven through itself, and
even when they stood still there were spectral images of them
hovering against the backdrop of heavily branched trees and thick
shrubs nearly as high as small trees themselves. Speakers five feet
tall shrieked. A single guitar note was a siren, an undulating bass
too much a throbbing bomb, and the drummer wielded his sticks as if
they were muskets crackling in the midst of ferocious battle. And
all of it aided by strobe lights in blue and red, white and green,
flailing the band and the dancers and the barely visible stars.

It was wrong.

All wrong.

On a night so warm and muggy, a languid breeze
lazing through the upper branches, heat lightning now and then
flaring on the horizon, crickets in the shadows, it should have
been the blues. A saxophone, maybe a muted horn, talking music to
the dark, keeping the dancing and the chattering and the movement
slow. People would listen even when they weren’t, feeling it inside
where emotions weren’t frantic but not always soothed, feeling
melancholy or more tender without really knowing why.

It should have been the blues.

The night was too warm.

Less than an hour after the party had officially
begun, Drake emptied a third glass of tepid red punch, threw a
perfunctory smile at no one in particular, and wandered away,
around the side of a house twice as large as any two on his block,
reaching the front with a forced relieved sigh when the brick and
wood and veined marble trim sliced the sound level in half, and
half again. He didn’t suppose anyone would miss him. There were
more than fifty of them back there anyway, half strangers to one
another, the rest too immersed in the music to give much of a damn.
He stepped between two cars parked on the curving driveway and
shoved his hands into his pockets. A glance over his shoulder, at
the mansion, at the paving-stone path he had just taken, and he
headed slowly for Williamston Pike, trying to figure out why he had
bothered to come in the first place. Anita Atherton, after all,
wasn’t a close friend, or even a moderate acquaintance, and her
cousin, Jill, who had asked him to come, was a royal, expert pain
in the ass. Some of the time.

“Check it out,” she had said last week. “You
might meet someone you like.”

He had doubted it then, doubted it more when
he’d arrived and discovered that he was the only one in a suit, and
knew it for sure when Anita, her birthday outfit more like a bikini
with pretensions to a two-piece, shook his hand, kissed his cheek,
and introduced him to her parents as someone else.

Halfway down the drive his tie was tucked into
his jacket pocket, the jacket was slung over a shoulder, and he was
working on an excuse to give his mother. Rain was out of the
question; after the storms of last week there hadn’t been a cloud
in the sky, and she wasn’t the kind to buy a miracle without
reading the package first. A police drug raid was a little drastic.
Food poisoning would freak her, she wouldn’t go for a severe
headache, and she definitely wouldn’t believe that he had been
bored.

It was hard, sometimes, having a mother who had
more ambition than he did.

“Contacts, Drake,” she had told him that
morning. “It’s important that a journalist have his contacts.
Otherwise, where would he get his stories?”

“Mom.”

An exasperated shrug followed by a patient sigh
and a loving pat to his head. “Darling, it isn’t as if you’re a man
of the world yet, you know. Something like this could give you the
edge.”

The worst part was, it almost made sense, and he
hated it when she made sense. That meant he couldn’t argue; and
when he couldn’t argue, he felt as though he were being
manipulated. Controlled. He was damn near twenty and growing weary
of being on a leash no matter how well-meaning, how liberal. He
didn’t always feel it, but he knew it was there.

The Pike was dark. Too many trees hid too many
streetlamps, and the infrequent rumble of approaching automobiles
always seemed to last just long enough to force him to turn around
to see what it was. In the leaves blended into the black, night
birds shifted, spoke in hushed bursts, sometimes exploded from the
foliage and left falling twigs behind. Behind the hedge and stone
walls of the estates lining the Pike, house lights flickered in the
breeze that hadn’t yet sifted down to his level, giving him the
impression that there were men back there following him with
lanterns and silent tracking dogs. Peasants after a monster. A
posse tracking a killer. A procession of demonic monks looking for
their equally demonic Master. It made him walk a little faster,
made him wish there were sidewalks instead of just a
dirt-and-pebble apron.

By the time he reached Park Street, he felt like
a complete jerk for spooking himself.

A block later, he jumped when a tiny cry spun
him around, looking for the hideous
thing.
whatever it was,
that was after his blood, his life.

The streets were empty.

As far as he could tell, he was the only human
left alive or moving in the world, and it wasn’t even eleven
o’clock. The dim glow of shop lights down Centre Street, the
illuminated white face of the national bank’s clock seemingly
suspended in midair. A single globe of white over the post office
entrance on the opposite corner. Everything else was black, in
spite of the starlit sky.

The cry again, hollow in the silence that lay
over the village, and he frowned, shifted his jacket off his
shoulder, and peered at the library’s lawn, looking for an animal
of some kind, peered across the Pike looking for a lost child. Then
he looked up, into the lower limbs of a spindly new maple growing
by the curb, and grinned as much in relief as amusement.

“Well,” he said, “you don’t look so hot,
pal.”

Crouched in a wedge of three branches was a cat,
larger than a kitten, much smaller than an adult. It cried again,
softly, and tried to push into the trunk when he reached up. It
hissed. It lashed a small white paw.

“Jungle cat,” Drake said. “I thought you guys
knew what you were doing.”

The ears flattened; it hissed again.

He laughed quietly — mighty Simba waiting to
pounce on unsuspecting prey. A step closer, and he saw the glint of
a rhinestone stud on a leather collar. Mighty Simba got himself
good and lost. And stuck.

He reached, and the paw lashed, just missing his
thumb. Leaving it here all night, he supposed, wouldn’t be a crime;
someone would probably help it in the morning. But there’d be
traffic then, too, and he had a feeling that this cat wasn’t yet
wise to the ways of dodging speeding wheels.

“All right.” He bunched the jacket in his hands.
“Now, don’t go having a cow or anything, pal, I’m only going to
help you.” He reckoned a short jump, a throw, a grab, and he’d have
it down with no problem. ‘Just don’t get all bent out of
shape.”

The cat watched him.

He jumped, threw, grabbed, and the cat wriggled
immediately partway out of the jacket’s folds. Drake stumbled
backward when he landed, one hand instantly up to protect his face
as the animal growled, lashed out, and raked needles across the
side of his neck. He yelled and dropped the jacket. The cat landed
with a sleeve draped over its head, shook it off, and dashed across
the street, a single angry cry left behind. Drake swore at it as he
snatched his jacket from the sidewalk, then gingerly tested his
flesh for blood, vowing never to help animals again, they were
never satisfied, they never even said thanks.

The cat yowled again, down the reach of an
endless tunnel.

And quiet.

* * *

He glanced back the way he had come, stamped a
heel for welcome noise, cleared his throat and walked on, past the
post office, its white-framed windows paned not with glass but with
still, black water that gave him no reflection when he looked, and
that made him quickly check the pavement to make sure he still had
a shadow. It was there. Only barely.

A shudder rolled his shoulders; he snapped his
jacket like a whip and didn’t like the sound.

Unlighted houses.

Maybe he should have stayed at the party, given
it a second chance. Mingled a bit more, tried to fit in. But he
hadn’t even seen Jill, though she had promised to be there. Which,
he realized, was typical. Though she had been in a few of his
classes out at Hawksted, her attendance had always left something
to be desired, forcing her to scramble every time a test was
scheduled, a project due. What amazed him was that she passed.
Every time. If he didn’t work his head off, he’d be digging ditches
for the state for a living, and wouldn’t his mother just love
that.