Bolts sheared off. A section of the flooring fell away under Billy’s legs, and on the ground Dr. Mirakle ducked as the sharp metal sailed over his head.
Billy sank his arms into the mass of apparitions before him, like plunging into an ice-veined pond. His teeth chattered. “You can get away from here…through me!” he shouted into the wind. “I’ll take your pain, if you give it up!”
No! I’ve got you now I’ve got all of you!
“Please! I’ll take it for you, I’ll keep it so you can go on! Please let me!…”
The gondola shuddered and swayed, loosened from its supporting arm. Currents of terror ripped through Billy.
The misty shape undulated, a dozen hands reaching for him. A dozen terror-stricken faces writhed like smoke. A section of the gondola’s side fell away with a shriek of torn metal.
I’m their master their keeper you can’t win.
“No! You feed on them, you use their hurting to make yourself stronger!” The gondola fell and jarred, rose again with a force that clicked Billy’s teeth together. He gripped at the revenants, his arms inside a deep-freeze. “Let me help you get away! Please!”
And then the mass began to spread over him, to cover him up, icy threads of white matter racing over his face, into his hair around his shoulders. Many people, events, and emotions filled him up, almost to bursting, and he cried out at the force of a dozen life-experiences entering his mind. Spectral hands gripped at him, clutching at his face and body, as the cold mass began to move into him.
You can’t! I won’t…
“…let you!” Buck shouted, his eyes bright with rage. He pressed the lever down as far as it would go, then threw his body against it. The wood cracked off, and Edgers flung it aside with a delightful grin. The machine was locked now, and would continue to spin until the gondola, hanging by only two bolts, was torn free. “I’ll win! Look at the boy fly, watch him fall!”
Mirakle placed the pistol barrel against the back of his head. “Stop that damned machine or I’ll put a bullet through your brain!”
Edgers turned his head; his eyes had rolled backward, just the whites exposed. He grinned like a death’s-head, and whispered in a singsong, “Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry—”
“STOP IT NOW, I SAID!”
“You won’t shoot me, old man! You won’t dare shoot me!”
Mirakle swallowed, and stepped back a pace. He saw that the gondola was about to break free. Snapped cables popped through the air. Mirakle said, “Damn you to Hell!” and swung the barrel against Edger’s face. The man’s nose splintered, blood streaming from the nostrils. The demonic face with its fish-belly eyes began to laugh. Mirakle struck again, opening a jagged cut over one eye. Edgers howled with laughter and spat blood out of his mouth. “Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mul—”
Suddenly there was a sharp cracking noise, and sparks flew. The woman had picked up the length of wood, and was hammering madly at the generator, tearing the cables loose.
The thing that was inside Buck Edgers shouted, “NO! GET AWAY FROM THAT!” He started forward, pushing Dr. Mirakle aside, but then the last of the cables tore free with a blast of sparks, the wooden lever rippling with flames in the woman’s hands. The rest of the live bulbs that said OCTOPUS blew out, and the lights that decorated the machine flickered and went dark. Mirakle put his foot to the brake pad and pressed down hard. Gears shrieked as the machine began to slow.
“NO!” Edgers whirled around, his face as yellow as old parchment. He took a staggering step toward Mirakle, as the gondolas slowly settled toward the ground and the machine’s rotations weakened. Edgers whined, “It’s not fair! Not fair!” His voice began to deepen like a record played at too slow a speed, as the Octopus continued to slow down. “Nootttt fairrrrr. Noooottttt fairrrrrrrr…” And then he fell to his face in the sawdust, drawing up like a fetus, and began sobbing.
The Octopus stopped. At once Mirakle was dragging Billy out. The boy was cold to the touch, was shaking and moaning. He put his hands under Billy’s shoulders and pulled him away as the dead cables whipped and writhed all around. Something cracked in the guts of the machine; bolts sheared off, the huge central cylinder of the machine swayed, swayed as the four gondolas came free and fell to the ground. Then the entire machine was coming apart, collapsing in a haze of spark-smoke and sawdust. Its steel arms thudded down, as if the cement that had held the Octopus together had suddenly dissolved. Dust welled up, rolling across the midway in a yellow wave.
“No fear,” Billy was saying, “please let me take it oh God I don’t want to die let me out no fear no pain…”
Mirakle bent over him. “It’s all right. It’s over now…my God!” The boy contorted in some imagined pain, trembling, freezing cold. He moaned and whimpered, his head thrashing back and forth. Mirakle looked up, and saw the woman kneeling down beside her sobbing husband.
She clung to him, rocking him like a baby. “It’s done,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “Oh dear Lord, we’re rid of that monster. We’re finally rid of it!”
Mirakle saw that there was very little left of the Octopus that wasn’t fit for a junkyard. He shivered, because now he had an idea of what kind of power Billy had; he didn’t understand it, but it made his blood run cold.
Suddenly Billy gasped for breath and opened his eyes, as if emerging from a nightmare. His eyes were bloodshot, ruby-red. “Are they gone?” he whispered. “Did I do it?”
Mirakle said, “I…think so.” He was aware of figures emerging through the dust. Mirakle gripped Billy’s hand; it was as cold as what he’d always imagined death to be.
For both him and Billy Creekmore, the fair was over.
41
THEY REACHED MOBILE AT twilight the following day, traveling in the equipment truck. Because Billy was in no shape to drive, the Volkswagen van had been left in Birmingham. Mirakle would hire someone to bring it down.
The boy’s sick, Mirakle had repeatedly thought during the long drive. Billy had been racked alternately with chills and fever; he’d slept for most of the trip, but the shudderings and moanings he’d made spoke of nightmares beyond Mirakle’s experience. It had been Dr. Mirakle’s intention to put Billy on a bus and send him back to Hawthorne, but Billy had said no, that he’d promised to come to Mobile and he’d be all right if he could just rest.
Billy’s pallor had faded to a grayish brown, his face covered with sweat as he huddled on the seat under a green army blanket. Emotions sizzled within him, and terror had a grip on his bones.
They were driving along the flat expanse of Mobile Bay, where small waves topped with dirty green foam rolled in to a bare brown shore. Mirakle glanced over and saw that Billy was awake. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah. Better.”
“You should’ve eaten when we stopped. You need to keep up your strength.”
He shook his head. “I probably couldn’t keep food down.”
“I don’t expect you to help me now. Not after what happened. You’re just too sick and weak.”
“I’ll be okay.” Billy shivered and drew the coarse blanket closer around him, though the Gulf air was thick and sultry. He stared out the window at the rolling waves, amazed at the vista of so much water; the sun was setting behind gray clouds, casting a pearly sheen over the bay.
“I should put you on a bus and send you home,” Dr. Mirakle said. “You know, I…don’t understand what happened last night and maybe I don’t want to, but…it seems to me you’re a very special young man. And possibly you have a very special responsibility, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…taking this power, or gift, or ability—whatever you choose to call it—and helping those parapsychologists I was telling you about. If you can communicate with the dead—‘lay the dead to rest,’ I suppose you might call it—then you should be working with scientists, not traveling with a two-bit carnival or spending your life in a town the size o
f a postage stamp. Billy, you have much to offer, perhaps the answer to a great many mysteries…or perhaps the beginning of new ones. Does it…affect you like this, every time?”
“It’s only happened like this once before. That was bad too, but this is…agony. It’s like having a long scream bottled up inside you, but you can’t find your voice to let it out. I feel like I’m burning up, but I’m cold too. There’s too much going on in my head, and I… I can’t think straight.” He sighed, more of a breathy moan, and let his head fall back against the seat, his eyes closed. He had to open them again, quickly, because strange blurred visions—the last things those people had seen before they died in the gondola: spinning sky and blinking lights, fingers curled in the mesh of the canopy, the world turning at frightening speed in a blaze of colors—whirled in his brain.
Dr. Mirakle drove the truck over a long bridge, and then turned off the road into an area of older clapboard houses; most of them were two-storied structures that spoke of the harsh hand of time and salt-air abrasion. Mirakle stopped the truck before a large house with a front porch and boarded-over windows. The white paint was peeling in long strips, showing the bleached gray wood underneath. They sat in the truck for a moment more, as the gray light darkened. “You don’t have to do this,” Mirakle said.
“I know. The way I feel, I don’t even know if I can.”
“Was what you did worth the pain?”
Billy considered the question, then nodded. “Yes. It was.”
“And you’d do the same thing again?”
“I don’t know. I try to…think I’m strong enough, but I’m afraid. And I know that when I’m afraid, I get weaker.” He turned his weary gaze onto Mirakle. “I don’t want to be like I am. I never asked for it. Oh God, if I just could forget about revenants and the black aura and Death for a little while!… I want to be like everybody else.”
“Everybody else is afraid, too,” the man said quietly. “But don’t you understand that you of all people shouldn’t be afraid, because you can see past Death to another kind of life? You know that going into the ground isn’t the end of it; and if you can help other people see that, then…your life can make a difference in the whole scheme of things! My God, what an opportunity you have! If I were in my right mind, I’d try to talk you into touring the country with me, and giving some sort of demonstration of the spirit world! We’d wind up as either millionaires or skid-row bums!”
Billy smiled grimly.
“But,” Mirakle continued, “your future lies far beyond the carnival circuit, Billy. Think about that parapsychology institute I told you about in Chicago. Will you?”
“Okay,” Billy said. “I will.”
“Good. Well. Are you ready? We’ll leave the equipment in the truck for now.” They got out, Billy following Dr. Mirakle up a weeded-over sidewalk. It was all he could do to climb the porch steps.
The interior was filmed with dust and sparsely furnished, though the rooms were large and once might have been quite beautiful. In the front room crates and boxes were stacked everywhere; a rug had been rolled up and stood in a corner with the cobwebs, there was a battered old pale green sofa with sagging springs and a coffee table littered with newspapers and magazines. On either side of an ash-filled fireplace were shelves packed with books. A calendar frozen on April 1968 hung from a nail.
“Forgive the place,” Mirakle said. He left the door open so air could circulate. “I had to board up the windows after the glass was broken out one summer. It wouldn’t be worth putting new glass in. Thank God the electricity still works.”
“Do you have a telephone?” Billy wanted to call the hospital in Birmingham again, to check on Santha Tully. Early this afternoon, when he’d called for the second time, a nurse had told him that Santha was still on the critical list and that the antivenom flown up from Florida had been administered soon after Santha had been brought in.
“No, I’m afraid not. I don’t have any callers. Please, sit down.” He scooped newspapers out of the sofa and dumped them on the floor. “I know you’re concerned about your friend, but I’m sure they’re doing everything they can for her. We’ll find a phone booth later, if you like.”
Billy nodded, wandering over to the bookshelves. He’d seen a pale gray aura around her, not a black one—did that mean there was a chance she might survive?
Mirakle said, “Why don’t you sit down and rest. I’ll look in the kitchen, perhaps I can find something to eat. All right?” Billy nodded, and the man went back through a corridor to the rear of the house. “Chicken noodle okay with you?” he called out in another moment. “It’s canned, so I presume it’s safe to eat.”
“That’s fine, thanks.” Billy stepped into another large room, his shoes stirring up clouds of dust. The room held a cluttered desk and an upright piano with yellow keys. He punched his finger at a few of them, hearing off-key notes ring like a stabbed cat. Then he went through another door into the hallway, and there was the staircase that Dr. Mirakle had told him about. A single bulb studded the ceiling at the top of the stairs, casting a murky gray glow.
Billy touched the banister. He could hear Mirakle wrestling with pots and pans in the kitchen, at the hallway’s end. He climbed the steps slowly, his hand clenching the banister, and when he reached the top he sat down. Water was running in the kitchen. Billy said softly, “Kenneth?” He waited for a few minutes, trying to concentrate through a wall of leftover terrors. “Kenneth?” he whispered.
There was a figure at the bottom of the stairs. It stood motionlessly for a moment, then placed a foot on the first step.
Billy sighed and shook his head. “I don’t think there’s anyone here. There might not have ever been.”
“I know,” Mirakle replied softly. “I…had once hoped that Kenneth was here, but…that’s a selfish hope, isn’t it? If some part of him remained, that would mean he was troubled, wouldn’t it?”
Billy nodded.
“I don’t know what Ellen saw, if indeed she saw anything at all, but we both had to shoulder a lot of pain. I think…seeing Kenneth’s ghost was a way for Ellen to deal with his death, but instead of laying him to rest she tried to resurrect him. He was a very good boy. You would’ve liked him. Is there…is there nothing of him left?”
“Oh yes.” Billy rose to his feet. “You bring him back to life when you remember him. Remembering doesn’t have to be sad; it’s a good thing, because you can keep your son with you all the time, in your heart and your memory. I think he’s resting easy now, and he’s gone on to whatever’s waiting, but he’s still alive inside you.”
Dr. Mirakle smiled wistfully. “Yes. And I guess that’s good enough, isn’t it? Kenneth always remains a young man in my memories; he’s always handsome in his uniform, and he’s always the best son any man could ask for.” He lowered his head and Billy heard him sigh deeply. Then he said, “I’d better check the soup. I’ve been known to burn it,” and returned to the kitchen.
Billy stood at the top of the stairs for a while longer, his hand on the railing. But there was nothing there. Nothing stirred the air around him, nothing tried to make desperate contact, nothing yearned to shrug off its earthly pains and pass on. The house was silent and at peace. Billy descended the stairs and returned to the piano room. He ran his hands over the heat-cracked wood of the piano, tracing fingers over the battered and worn keyboard. He sat down on the bench and hit a single note that reverberated sharply in the air. Then another note, down in the bass register, that moaned like a low wind on a winter’s night. He hit three notes at the same time, and winced at their discordant wail. The next try, though, the sound was sweet and harmonious, like a cooling balm against the fever that churned within him. Looking at the keyboard, trying to figure it out, was a mystery in itself: why were some keys black and others white? How could anybody make music out of it? What did those pedals down there do?
And suddenly he brought both fists crashing down onto the keyboard. Notes shrieked and shrilled, and Billy could
feel the vibration thrumming up his wrists, up his forearms, his shoulders, his neck, and right to the top of his skull. The sound was awful, but somehow the energy he’d expended had cracked the hot cauldron of emotions in him, a tiny crack allowing a trickle to escape. Billy hammered again, with his left fist. Then with his right. Then both fists were coming down like pistons, and the house was pounding with a rough, jarring noise that perhaps harmonized with the music of terror and confusion. The old piano seemed about to burst with explosive noise; under Billy’s relentless pounding several pieces of ivory flew off like rotten teeth. But when he stopped and he listened to the last echoes dying away there did seem to be a music in them: an eerie harmony of ignorantly struck chords, fading away now, fading into the very walls of the house. And Billy felt as if that cauldron had split down the middle, all the terrors and pains streaming out and flooding through him into this instrument that stood before him. He felt lightened, cleansed, and exhilarated.
And he remembered his grandmother saying, a long time ago, that it would be up to him to find a way to release the emotions he absorbed through contact with the revenants. She had her pottery, just as his mother had her needlepoint, and now…what was closer to human emotion than music? But how to bring out real music from this assembly of wood and metal wires? How to caress it instead of beating it half to death? How to let it soothe away the pain instead of ripping it out?
“Well,” Dr. Mirakle said from behind him, holding a tray with two bowls of soup, “I’m glad to see my house is still standing. I’m sure the police are on their way by now, but we’ll ask them to join in the jamboree.”
“Is this yours? Do you know how to play it?”
“Me? No, I couldn’t play a kazoo. My wife is…was a piano teacher for a while. Can I venture to say that you’re no Liberace?”