The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (23 page)

He stepped outside, grinned at himself for
forgetting an umbrella, he didn’t need to be drenched a second time
that day, and turned to open the door.

Flory stood on the top step.

Electric fire.

“Come with me, Kayman,” she said, smiling,
wearing the same blouse and jacket she had worn when they’d
spoken.

He gasped.

The smile wavered, lost its humor.

“Kayman, come with me, please.”

He ran, pushing himself through the house and
out the back door, wincing at the rain stinging, then pounding, his
head, swinging around the comer and down the driveway, running and
not moving much faster than a brisk old man’s walk. Across the
street, feet casting waves in large puddles, and up to the next
comer where he turned into the next block and slowed, looked over
his shoulder, saw nothing but the rain that turned the air
grey.

Norma’s door was unlocked; no one was there.

Flory stood on the sidewalk: “Kayman, come with
me.”

He tried other doors along the street, warm
lights in the windows, at the foot of drives, over garages; no one
was home.

“Kayman,” Flory said.

No car to flee in; he used his legs instead,
forcing himself to ignore the fire — the electric pain, that
stitched a scar across his middle — reaching Centre Street without
realizing it until he found himself panting in front of the police
station. Drowned rat, he thought as he hastened inside; god, I must
look like a drowned rat.

No one was there.

He called; he yelled; he slammed through the
gate in the low wood railing and slammed open all the doors of all
the offices he could find.

No one was there.

Flory stood in the rain: “Kayman, come with
me.”

He could barely move, barely breathe through his
mouth while his lips felt bound in ice. He nearly fell down the
steps slick with water, fell against a car parked at the curb,
swallowed, didn’t move when something cool passed over his shoulder
and she beckoned him again.

His eyes closed. Suddenly he felt so old, so
frightfully, terrifyingly old that “Where?” was little more than a
deathbed whisper.

She said nothing, and in the silence of the rain
he looked up and over the automobile’s roof Johnny stood on the
sidewalk across the street, Brenda beside him. They waved and
walked away, west toward Mainland Road. Before they reached the
corner, the rain had erased them, but he could still see the smoke
from Johnny’s cigarette floating for a while before the fain erased
that too.

“Is it over?” he asked. “Am I . . . is it
over?”

Fighting, rebelling, denying, praying that the
downhill slope wouldn’t be quite so steep, quite so rocky that the
slide would be more gentle. More right.

“Come with me, Kayman.”

Streetlights and house lights and the splash of
rain; cold and a cold wind, cold skin, in a twilight that hid the
sky but not the town around him; too weary to think, to find
reason, to find something in his madness that would give him a clue
so he could find his way back, to the house and Estelle and what
the hell did it matter, Jesus God, he was tired. So goddamn tired.
Everything about him, inside and out, ached, begged him to find a
bed, demanded he stop moving.

And then a flash of anger that they had left him
after all.

An old man alone.

Walking in the rain with a ghost that only
proved how mad he really was.

“You know,” he said, and Flory’s head tilted;
she was listening. His left hand flapped at his side. “I guess it
really is like Ronnie said once — god, that was a long time ago —
that the best you can do is hold on. There’s no stardom, no wealth,
not much of anything but just holding on for people like me. Maybe
you, too, I don’t know.” The hand stopped; the other one started.
“I make furniture, you know. Pretty good stuff, too. It . . .” He
squinted into the rain, no longer feeling it, no longer caring. “It
just wasn’t good enough. It didn’t look like anything else, you
know? It made itself sometimes, and it wasn’t . . .”

At Mainland Road he saw the fence of Pilgrim’s
Travelers.

He stopped.

“You know that song, all those books, about
doing it your way, the hell with what people think?”

“Come with me, Kayman,” she said, crossing
over.

He glanced behind him, looked ahead, watched her
glide through falling water.

“When you get old,” he said quietly, “and you
don’t have to be very old, hell, you could be fifty, I was pretty
close to it, it’s a goddamn son of a bitching thing,” he shouted,
“when you got to start the hell all over again!” He crossed the
road, a fist swiping at the rain. “You know that? You know it?” His
voice lowered. “No. You don’t know that. You don’t know that at
alL.”

She stood under the arch, waiting.

“What the hell do you want?” he demanded,
looking around her to the deserted midway. “It’s closed.”

She waited.

In the rain.

“Where is Estelle?” There were no colors left
that he could see; it felt like a graveyard. “Flory, where did
everybody go?”

She held out her hand.

He didn’t take it. He had never touched Johnny
or Brenda, not even Ronnie though there were times when he wanted
to strangle her, or punch her, or give her a good swift kick. No
touching. That was some kind of rule.

She held out her hand.

If I go in there, he thought, I’m never coming
out.

“No,” he said firmly. “It ain’t gonna rain
forever.”

Water dripped from the tips of her fingers.

“Just tell me what the hell’s going on.”

And hating the sound of pleading in his voice,
he took the hand after all, and it was cold; he followed her in,
and it was cold; yet he didn’t think he was dead, because he could
feel the muddy ground, slipped on it a couple of times, once leaned
down and brushed a hand over it and it felt gritty and touched with
slime.

The concessions were boarded up, pennants
sagging, droplets of water racing along the guy wires, streamers of
mist beginning to lift off the mud. He watched them, fascinated,
remembered with a half-smile how he had done the same when he was a
kid, watching the ragged plumes of white rise from the street
whenever there was a shower, defiant of the weather that had
created them, sometimes merging into small clouds the wind quickly
carried into the trees or hedges or into the sky, where they were
lost.

“If you’re a ghost,” he said, “why can I feel
you?”

He squeezed her hand.

It squeezed back.

“Flory, come on, you’ve got to tell me . .
.”

They stepped into the oval, and he saw the black
carousel.

He tried to stop; she pulled him on.

He grabbed her hand with both of his and tried
to break her grip; she pulled him on.

“No,” was all he could do; all his strength was
gone.

“Please,” was all he could do; the mist-feathers
rose and took form, the white sliding away from figures and shadows
and shapes that began to move toward the carousel as well;
“Please,” was all he whispered.

But none climbed aboard.

“Flory.”

“Merry-go-round,” she said, turning to him with
that smile. “Get on, Kayman, or I’ll kill you.”

Too shocked to argue, he used a stained brass
pole to pull himself up, and leaned against it.

Shapes.

Shadows.

Not one of them had a face.

“Ride,” she said.

The carousel shuddered.

Then Ronnie was there, somewhere in the back;
Johnny leaning against the iron rail, his arm around Brenda’s
shoulder.

“I’m not dead,” he said.

“Oh no,” Flory answered. “That would be too
easy.”

Directly behind him a Bengal tiger. Kayman’s
legs were stiff, his hands cramped, but he found a way into the
saddle, and gripped the pole with both hands. Afraid to fall.
Afraid to move.

Music tin and silver.

The tiger moved, the lights moved, so slowly it
was easy for Flory to walk along, keeping pace.

“If I’m not dead,” he said, “then they are?” A
nod to the shapes, the shadows, created by the rain. He included
her without meaning to, and the realization, the remembering, made
him moan.

But she said, “No, Kayman. Not all of them.”

A little faster.

She fell slightly behind.

Of course not, he thought, as if it were the
most logical thing in the world, Johnny hadn’t died; he had wanted
to move to New York where, he’d claimed, his writing would be
better appreciated. They had fought. Not argued or debated. They’d
shouted, punched the air, danced around each other the way they’d
done when they were kids and in the throes of unreasoning temper.
He had left before — the army, traveling, a short-lived job in
Texas, but he had always returned. This, however, had been
different; this had been an
I’ll come back to visit when I
can,
at a time when Kayman had been alone, left alone,
struggling with reasons why, screaming at God, feeling the press of
years that gave him increasingly less room to maneuver in, hide in,
regroup and rebuild and start again in.

An empty time.

Flory took hold of a post as the carousel picked
up speed, and swung herself lightly to the platform.

He should have been afraid. She was dead after
all, and she stood beside him. He should have been afraid, and he
was — but not of that.

Because she had left him, and she was still
here.

The music.

The glittering mirrors spinning in the opposite
direction. He watched the rain sheet off the roof, watched the
shapes and shadows, caught a glimpse of Brenda dancing with
Johnny.

Saw Ronnie beside the ticket booth.

She was smiling.

The next time around she waved to him, and his
hand automatically began to respond until he realized what he was
doing, yanked it into his lap and noticed a shape behind her, in
the rain, and he frowned because, faceless, it was nevertheless
familiar.

“You don’t remember,” Flory said.

“No. But —”

“You forgot him.”

She reached over and touched his leg, patted it,
stroked it once, and said, “Let them go, Kayman. Let us go,” before
jumping off, running to keep from falling, then, as he looked over
his shoulder so as not to lose sight of her, standing there.

Standing when he came around again, hands at her
sides.

In the rain filled with ghosts he could no
longer remember.

As easy as that, then: let them go and the
carousel would release him. He couldn’t just jump off. He was too
old. He would fall. Break a bone. Break a hip, perhaps, which would
eventually kill him. Just let them go.

Let them leave.

And then what, he asked the shapes and Johnny
and the shadows and Brenda and the almost familiar and smiling,
waving Ronnie; what will happen then?

He stared straight ahead, trying to think, not
marking the hours, not seeing the dark until the dark was nearly
done.

What would happen?

Nothing.

The carousel would slow down, the music would
stop, the lights would switch off one by one, and there would
always be Estelle, always, and the ill-tempered Norma Hobbs, and
Mayard Chase to help him find a way with his carpentry, and the
people he drank with at the Ring and the Crow, and the town itself
marking him one of them.

Nothing would happen.

Except, that night, they had all joined the
rain.

Estelle stood by Johnny the next time he saw
him.

Norma whispered to Ronnie when he saw the ticket
booth again.

Let them go.

Let the carousel stop and the music stop and the
lights switch off, and go home. And the next time it rained they
would be with him on the porch, Johnny teasing Brenda, Ronnie
telling him what it was like to be not dead, Estelle rocking with
him, forever safe from her children.

The music began to die.

I don’t know, he thought; I don’t know.

The carousel began to slow.

I just don’t know.

Let them go and they vanish, the dead to
wherever the dead need to rest, the others perhaps to living,
perhaps to join the ghosts.

Either way, in the rain, in the sun, he’d be
alone.

The music stopped when the carousel did.

And in the last hour of the dead, he sat on the
tiger and watched the rain end.

Nothing left now but mud and cloud and the
flapping of a pennant like the snap of a listless whip.

All he” had to say was
yes.

But he didn’t know.

Oh god, he didn’t know.

The music subsided when someone turned the
volume down, the voices drifted softer, the sounds of frantic
movement gone. The parade of bicycles on the street had stopped
long ago. From the backyard there was laughter, but easier, not as
forced. Cyd Yarrow came out with a tray in one hand, asking for
empty glasses, empty plates, littering would be punished by having
to listen to heavy metal without benefit of parole; we obliged
instantly, with laughing thanks, and when we were alone again tried
to get a fix on the time without looking at our watches, without
looking at one another. But time very often means little around
here, and no one offered to judge who was right, who was wrong.

Finally Deric scratched the back of one ear and
looked at me with no expression and asking questions just the
same.

I didn’t answer.

Wes Martin had taken over the police chiefs role
when Abe Stockton had . . . died is as good a word as any, I
suppose, though I’m the only one who didn’t use it; then, not long
after, poor Wes had dropped dead of a heart attack trying to
unravel a traffic snarl in the middle of Chancellor Avenue. He was
barely into his late forties. Though no one said anything publicly,
it was clear from the swift decision of the town council to contact
Deric that someone believed that only a Stockton could hold the
job.