The Mammoth Book of Terror (65 page)

Spaced around the perimeter of the enclosure, and making the tinkling, bleeping noises we’d heard from outside, were six or seven pre-video arcade games, and stationed at the one directly
across from us, elbowing each other and bobbing up and down, were two kids, neither older than seven, both with startlingly long white-blonde hair pouring down their backs like melting wax.
I’m not sure why I decided they were brother and sister. The one on the left wore a dress, the one on the right jeans. Of Rebecca’s grinning horses, the only possible remnant was the
room’s lone attendant, who was hovering near the kids but looked up when we entered and shuffled smoothly away from them, head down, as though we’d caught him peeping at a window.

“Come here,” Ash said, standing over one of the machines to our left. “Look at this.”

We moved toward him, and as we did, the attendant straightened and began to scuttle over the planking toward us. Despite his surprising grace, he looked at least a hundred years old. His skin
was yellow and sagging off his cheeks, and his hair was white and patchy. His shoulders dipped, seemingly not quite aligned with his waist, and his fingers twitched at the fringes of his blue
workman’s apron. It was as though nothing on that body quite fit, or had been his originally; he’d just found the shed exoskeleton and slipped inside it like a hermit crab. I
couldn’t take my eyes from him until he stopped in the centre of the room.

“Hey,” Rebecca said to Ash. “You’re good.”

“Sssh,” Ash murmured, “Almost got it.
Shoot.
” There was a clunk from the machine, and I stepped up next to him.

“We had one of these at the 7–11 by my house,” I said.

Simple game. You stuck your hands inside the two outsized, all-but-immovable gloves on the control panel. The gloves controlled a sort of crane behind the glass of the machine. You tried to
maneuver the crane down to the bone-pile of prizes encased in clear, plastic bubbles below, grab a bubble in the jaws of the crane, then lift and drop it down a circular chute to the left. If you
got the bubble in the chute, it popped out to you, and you claimed your prize. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone win that game.

“Let me try,” said Rebecca, and slid a quarter into the slot and her hands into the gloves. She got the crane’s jaws around a bubble with a jiggly rubber tarantula inside and
dropped it before she got it anywhere near the chute’s mouth.

“I’m going again,” Ash said, jamming home another quarter.

Behind us, the attendant wriggled two steps closer. His hands fumbled at the work apron, and I finally noticed the change-dispenser belted around his waist and rattling like a respirator. The
thing was huge, ridiculous, had to have housed fifty dollars worth of quarters, and could probably accommodate ten years worth of commerce on this pier, given the traffic I’d seen tonight.
The man looked at me, and a spasm rolled up his arms – or maybe it was a gesture. An invitation to convert some money.

“Fucksickle,” Ash said, kneeing the machine as another plastic bubble crashed back to the pile.

“Now, now,” I said, reaching for both his and Rebecca’s shoulders, wanting to shake free of the change-man’s gaze, and also of the mood I could feel rolling up on all of
us like a tide. “Is that the Middle Path? The elimination of desire or whatever—”

“Don’t you mock that,” Ash snarled, half-shoving me as he whirled around. His face had gone completely red again, and at his sides his fists had clenched, and I wondered if
some of the assumptions Rebecca and I had been making – about whether he’d actually been in a boxing ring, for example – weren’t years out of date.

Startled, shaking a little, I held up a hand. “Hey,” I said. “It’s just me. I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were,” Rebecca said, and my mouth fell open, to defend myself, maybe, at least from my wife who had no right, and then she added, “We both were. Sorry,
Ash.”

“I’m used to it,” he said, in his normal, expressionless voice, and wandered away toward the next machine.

For a while, Rebecca and I stood, not touching, watching our friend. I hated when Rebecca went still like this: head cocked, hands in her pockets, green eyes glazed over. At least right now she
was doing it during an argument, and not over breakfast coffee, in the midst of reading the paper, just because. Daphne, having sickened of being chased, turning herself into a tree.

Finally, I blew out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and said, “You’re wrong, Rebecca. You both are.”

“Oh, come on, Elliot. Even when he’s not around, what do we talk about when we talk about Ash? His vests, and his inability to land a life-partner, and his refusal or whatever it is
to hold ajob, and the crazy situations he seems to wind up in without even trying, and—”

“There’s a difference between enjoying and mocking.”

That stopped her, and even unlocked her, a little. At least she re-cocked her head so it was facing me. “You enjoy us too much,” she said, and followed Ash.

I was angry, then, and I didn’t go after them immediately. I watched Rebecca approach Ash, stand close to him. They were at the back of the space, now, both seeming to lean forward into
the towering white curtain, almost pressing their ears against it. Briefly, it occured to me to wonder where the blonde kids had gone. Fifteen feet or so to my left, the attendant shifted, stared
at me, and the change-dispenser rattled against his waist. I started forward, got within five steps of my wife and my oldest friend, and became aware, at last, of the new sounds.

Actually, the sounds had been there all along, I think. I’d just assumed that the murmuring was coming from the ocean, the bursts of rhythmic clatter from the arcade machines. But they
originated on the other side of this curtain. For the second time, I thought of the Wizard of Oz crouched in his cubicle, furiously pulling levers to make the world magical and terrible. More
magical and terrible than tornadoes and red shoes in green grass and dead or disappearing loved ones and home had already made it.

Ash glanced over his shoulder at me. I stepped forward, uncertainly, and stood behind him. Reaching out slowly, he brushed the curtain with his fingers, causing barely a stir in the heavy
material.

“Crawl under?” he muttered. “Just push through?”

He bent to lift the curtain’s skirt, and my wife turned briefly toward me, so that I caught just a glimpse of her face. Her lips had gone completely flat, and all trace of color had
leached out of her cheeks.

“You know what’s back there, don’t you?” I said, as the attendant rattled closer, and Ash disappeared under the curtain.

“It’s why we’re here,” said my wife, and followed him.

What struck me first as I struggled through the curtain and shrugged it off was the motion. Even before I made sense of what I was seeing, the whole space seemed to tilt, as though we’d
stepped onto some sort of colorful, rotating platform. The color came courtesy of a red neon sign that hissed and spat blue sparks into the air. The sign was nailed to a wooden pillar that had been
driven through the planking of the pier right beside where we emerged. I didn’t even process what it said for a few seconds, and when I did, the words meant nothing to me, anyway.

“Change?” murmured a voice, right in front of me, and I jerked back further still, bumping against the curtain and feelings its weight on my back.

The girl who’d spoken couldn’t have been out of her teens. Her skin glowed translucent red in the tinted neon like sea-glass. Her eyes were brown and bright, her lips full but
colorless and expressionless. Her brown hair swept up off her scalp and arced in a slow inward curl to her shoulders, but where it brushed her black turtleneck, the tips had turned white, like a
breaking wave upside down.

Before I could say anything, she was floating away, the smoothness of her movements terrifying until I realized she was on rollerskates. Her wheels made bumping sounds between the planks.

“Hi, Dad,” Rebecca whispered, shoulders rigid, arms tucked tight to her sides, and I shuddered, my eyes flying around the space.

Mostly, what I saw were machines. Ten stubby, silver pinball tables jammed together end to end at awkward, irregular angles like dodge-em cars between rides. Hunched in identical poses over the
glass tabletops were the players, and none of them looked up. They just kept pulling what I assumed were the ball-release levers and then pushing and patting at the flipper controls on the sides.
Straight across the space from us, his ass to the drapery that hung from the magician’s hat and divided this space from the night and the open ocean, a fifty-ish, red-haired guy with tufts of
wiry beard sprouting from the cracks in his craggy face like weeds through pavement bent almost perpendicular over his machine, whispering to it as his fingers pummeled the buttons. I could just
see the ripped, faded American flag design on his T-shirt when he rocked back to jack another ball into play.

“Oh my God, Rebecca. That isn’t—”

“Huh?” she said, still rigid.

Of course it wasn’t really her father, I realized. I’d seen pictures. And anyway, she wasn’t looking at the red-headed man, or any of the other players. She was watching the
electric board that hung, like the LITE YOUR LINE LITE YOURS sign, on another wooden pillar across the space from us. It was flashing the numbers 012839. Every few seconds, the numbers blinked.

Abruptly, a bell dinged, and the display on the electric board changed. #5, it read now. And then, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’RE LITER! Then bumping sounds as the rollerskate girl swept the
room, removing quarters from atop each player’s machine, and dropping a single red poker chip at the feet of the red-haired man.

“Change?” she said to us, gliding past without looking or stopping, and abruptly Ash was out amongst them, assuming a place at a table kitty-corner to the American flag man’s.
On the board, a new number flashed. 081034. The lever jerking and button tapping resumed in earnest. American flag man never even looked up.

I watched Ash glance at the numbers board, down into his machine, across to American flag man. Then he was pulling his own lever, nodding. There were now five players: two stick-thin older women
in matching bright red poodle-skirts, twin sets, and bobby socks, who might have been sisters; a kid in skater shorts with some kind of heavy metal music erupting from the sides of his headphones,
as though everything inside his head were kicking and screaming to get out of there; American flag man; and Ash.

“What planet is this?” I murmured, and a bell dinged, and the rollerskate girl circled the room once more while Ash rocked back and laughed and dropped another quarter on his
machine-top for the girl to collect.

Closing her eyes, Rebecca surprised me by taking my hand. Then she leaned in and kissed my cheek. “This is where he came. Before he walked out. It’s been just like this for . . .
God.” She shuddered. “He’d put us on the merry-go-round, and he’d come in here, and he’d spend his hours. One quarter at a time. Most days, he wouldn’t even take
us home. My mom had to come get us.”

Another ding, and the kid in the skater shorts flipped his hands in the air and moonwalked a few steps to his right, then back to his machine to pop a quarter in place just as the rollergirl
passed and dropped a red chip at his feet. One of the women in the poodle skirts laughed. The laugh sounded gentler than I expected, somehow. The board flashed, and a new round began.

“Ever played?” I said, holding my wife’s hand, but not too tight. Whatever tension there had been before between the three of us tonight, it was fading, I thought. Around us,
the canvas outer draping undulated in slow motion as the sea breeze pushed against and through it. There was another winner, another burst of quiet laughter from somewhere as some lucky soul got
liter,
another new number flashing. One more sad-magic night with Ash and Rebecca, so long after the last one that I’d forgotten how it felt.

A good while after I’d asked, Rebecca sighed and leaned her head against me. “I miss our daughter,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“Should we call?”

“She’s alright.”

“Look at him,” Rebecca said, and we did, together.

He was bent almost as far over his machine as the red-headed man, now, and when he played, the lights inside it and the red neon from the LITE YOURS sign reflected off his skull, and his vest
beat and twitched with the rhythm of his movements, as though we were looking straight through his skin at the mechanisms that ran him.

“Poor Ash,” I murmured, though I wasn’t sure why I felt that way, and suspected he’d be furious if he heard me say it.

“I’ll bet you a bag of Patriot Popcorn I can win before he does,” said Rebecca, and she straightened and let go of my hand.

I thought of the fisherman on the empty pier behind us with the ray dying in his lap, the gaggle of beggars, and beyond them, the too-bright streets of downtown Long Beach. “And where will
we find Patriot Popcorn, wife of mine, now that the Gap has come?”

“I think I know a place.”

“I bet you do,” I said, and let her go. On every side of us, at all times, at least one person was laughing.

“Change?” said the rollergirl, gliding past, but she executed a perfect stop even before Rebecca got her hand to her pocket. She took my wife’s dollar, nodded. Her turtleneck
clung tight to her, and there were tiny beads of sweat along the mouth of it like a string of transparent pearls. The tingle that sizzled through me then was more charged than any I’d felt
since adolescence but sadder and therefore sexier still, and I had to bend over until it passed. Whether it was for my wife, the rollergirl, or just the evening, I had no idea.

When I next looked up, Rebecca and Ash were side by side, both bent over their individual metal machines, fingers pushing and pumping while the lights on the metal board flashed and the
rollergirl rolled and the ocean breathed, in and out. Not wanting to distract them – and also, for some reason, not wanting to play – I stepped just close enough to see how the game
worked.