Supernatural Noir (21 page)

What causes the firing pin’s descent, of course, is the convulsive clenching of a human hand.

——

They’re not as young as they used to be: by midnight, the crowd has thinned. January’s still there, and so is Martin, and so is Jeff. In search of a place to sit, they’ve moved to the mostly empty carousel and claimed one of the carriages, really two ornately carved and gilded red-painted benches set facing each other. The boys sit together with January across, her feet tucked against the footboard and her knees between Jeff’s and Martin’s.

January’s coming down, and she’s pretty sure Martin is long grounded. It must be seriously cold outside; there was a frost warning, and the draft every time the doors open to let somebody else leave is bitter. She thinks she’ll be good to drive in another twenty minutes, anyway, and somewhere east of here her cats are probably picketing.

She’ll make her excuses after two more rounds on the carousel. The woman running it for the rental party is probably ready to go home to whomever she has, even if Martin has the place until one.

Besides, if January stays much longer, she’ll be stuck cleaning up.

The conversation has reached that point where they’re tidying up stray threads from earlier—like the end of a well-constructed movie—and Jeff has just finished telling them how the Yard Bunny defeated him as roundly as the Road Runner waxing Wile E. Coyote when she remembers something she was going to ask about earlier. Her research bump is itching: it’s a hazard of being a librarian.

“Did you ever find out what the backstory on the ghost plate was?” she asks.

“Backstory?” Jeff looks sleepy and contented, to the point where January is a little worried about him driving home. She doesn’t think he’s touched a drop of anything mood altering all night, however, which puts him on firmer ground than she and Martin, even if they’re both coming all the way back through sober and into a little cold and achy.

“You know.” She gropes dreamily after the right words. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the thump and blare of the band organ as they come around in the circle once more. They’ve been through its rolls—assuming they are rolls; the Internet tells her many band organs now run on MIDIs—so many times that she knows what order the songs come in now. She’ll be hearing them in her sleep.

One rank ahead of the red-painted chariot, the gray ponies—including the mismatched one—go up and down in little circles, riderless as horses in a funeral parade. “Provenance. History. Who put it there and where did it come from? That sort of thing.”

Jeff leans his head back, closes his eyes, and shrugs. “Houses are mysteries, and not all of those mysteries are nice things. Sometimes it’s best to not ask.”

Behind him, the brass ring glints in the dispenser, but January is so surprised to see it she doesn’t think to stand up and grab it until it has gone by. The carousel slows, song ending. She’d thought they were the only riders, but there must be somebody on the other side. Because when they come around again, the ring in the dispenser is just dull wire.

She’d swear the gray filly flicks its tail in annoyance, but of course it’s just a cold draft from the opening door. Somebody else is leaving the party for the long drive home.

——

Once the decision to fire the gun is made, the neural impulse to pull the trigger travels from brain to finger. Or possibly the action is reflexive. Possibly deep in the animal regions of the brain, electrical activity commences, leading the finger to convulse upon the trigger, the gun to discharge, and the mind—a few tremendously significant fractions of a second later—to justify the action to itself, believing it—
I
—has made a decision.

Or maybe those animal regions of the brain are part of its
I
, whether—culturally speaking—we are trained to regard them as such. Maybe those bits of ourselves that we alienate as subconscious impulses are as much
I
as the things Freud quantified as the ego and superego.

That
I
will provide reasons—motives, justifications, triggers. Jilted love or spurned advances. Money, sex, control. Any homicide cop can tell you those are the reasons people die.

In real life, it’s simple. The romance only happens in the movies.

——

All her best intentions of making a clean getaway evaporate, and January—of course—winds up staying behind to help clear. She and Martin and Jeff divide the spoils between them. Her share of the take includes a plate and a half of assorted cookies (unadulterated—January notes with a bit of pride that all of
her
brownies are gone), half of a tuna casserole, three deviled eggs, the heel of the saffron bread, and some shrimp dip. She won’t have to cook for a week.

She hopes none of the folks who left plates behind want them back, because she’s got no clue who brought what, or even who half the people in attendance were.

Behind her, the carousel sits empty and silent, even the Wurlitzer no longer breathing out its jangling tunes. The lanky Latina operator has been bagging trash and hauling it out to the dumpster. She seems overjoyed that some of the partygoers stayed behind to help tidy, and keeps shooting January shy thank-you smiles whenever their paths cross.

Actually, considering the crowd, the mess isn’t bad. January finds the brooms and dustpan behind the popcorn counter. While Martin starts cleaning out the popcorn machine, Jeff takes the big push broom, leaving January with the flat corn broom. She climbs onto the carousel platform and begins ferreting crumbs and paper wrappers from under chariots and between horses. She holds onto the pole that runs through a panda, leaning down to sweep between its paws, and the surreality of the moment strikes her.

The poles impaling the standing animals are the ones that support the platform. She can almost feel the weight of it, the tension, prickling her palm. If she’d thought about how the carousel was constructed, she realizes now, she must have thought the turntable rested on bearings, but really it’s cantilevered out on sweep arms, and those arms are supported by the poles that hang from above. The whole things turns around one central pillar.

She discards two dustpans’ worth of debris, starts on the third. Now she’s working around the lion and the tiger and the out-of-scale elephant, and in a moment she’ll be back to the gray ponies. That’s probably where she should dump; there will be another dustpanful at least in the rest of the carousel. As she passes, she can’t resist the urge to pet the ugly filly on the nose.

Velvet skin and hot breath tickle her fingers.

With a wheeze, the Wurlitzer shudders to life. The carousel begins to turn with a savage jolt that sets January teetering. Pain stabs her ankle. It stretches as her Mary Jane rolls sideways and the tendons give. The broom skitters from her hand as she windmills like Wile E. Coyote on the edge of a cliff. If she falls backward into the center of the carousel, the sweep arms will catch her and drag her over the concrete floor.

She flails, diaphragm tightening, fingertips splayed. Gravity pulls her down. But as the fall becomes inevitable her right hand slaps something rigid, closes on it, pulls
hard
. She remembers reading about panic strength, how in extreme peril your body discards the safety margins and does whatever it has to do, whatever it can, to get you out of harm’s way.

She’s never experienced it before.

When she comes back to herself, she’s breathing raggedly, in deep concentrated gasps that hurt her trachea and lungs. For a moment, those breaths are all she can think about, until a moment later the burn in her bicep and forearm makes its presence known.

The foreleg of the gray filly is clutched in her hand. It is no longer attached to the filly.

The thing protruding from the broken end is not a metal bar, but a snapped-off length of bone.

January knows she should scream, but apparently she’s not the screaming type. She stands there looking at the horse’s leg, at the place where the horse’s leg used to attach, at the two cleanly broken ends of bone.
Human bone
, she can’t help but think, but how would you know for sure? She’s read that even homicide cops have to send skeletal remains out for testing sometimes to be sure if they have uncovered the remains of a person or of an animal.

Like a child with a broken toy, she tries to slot the stiff wooden leg back onto the body of the filly. It fits, but of course it won’t stay. So January stands holding it, feeling foolish and terrified, her heart still churning residual adrenaline through her veins. In a minute, she will start to shake. She’d rather not do that while she’s still stuck on a malfunctioning carousel.

With a corpse
, the helpful part of her brain volunteers.

They probably used horse skeletons as the form for the ponies.
The ponies she’d been riding on. Like the real manes and tails, and she’d thought
that
was macabre.

Real horses aren’t this small. Real people are.

“Shut up,” she says. “We have to get off this thing.”

She can’t figure out what else to do with the filly’s leg, so she holds it in her hand as she moves to the center of the deck. The carousel is going faster than before. Inexorably, it’s accelerating. It seems as if the Wurlitzer is accelerating with it, though she can’t think of any reason why they would be geared together. The music has a hysterical edge.

Which, in fairness, January could be imagining.

Threading between horses, holding onto the brass sleeves surrounding the steel poles, January tries not to touch the glossy, brilliant paint where a few moments ago she lingered to stroke it. Is there something dead inside every one of them? Is it possible she’s tripping and none of this is real?

Holding onto the lion’s pole—easier than the gray stallion’s, because the lion does not go up and down—January leans as far out as feels safe. The carousel is whipping fast now, the wind slapping her hair to sting her cheeks and the corners of her eyes. Jeff, Martin, and the carousel operator stand in a tight huddle. Jeff gesticulates; the carousel operator shakes her head. January can’t hear a word over the Wurlitzer.

She draws a breath and shouts as she comes around. “Hey!”

Martin’s head jerks up and he’s about to shout something when she’s carried around the curve. When she comes back, he’s ready. “Sit tight! We have a plan!”

A good plan, she hopes. One that doesn’t involve damaging her
or
the carousel. Any more than she’s already damaged it, that is.

When she comes around again, Jeff is sprinting beside the rotating platform. Running hard, too, which gives her an idea of how fast she must be moving, because he’s losing ground. He reaches out as the lion gains on him and she steps back to make a landing zone. He jumps, arms swinging, and lands lightly beside her, one hand making contact with the lion’s support pole where hers had rested a moment before.

“Great,” January says. “Now you’re stranded too.”

He grins, flush with success. “The motor’s in the middle,” he says. “If I can reach—”

A thump cuts him off, a sharp wooden thud as the lion statue twists and lashes out with one gilt-clawed forepaw. January has a thousand years to watch Jeff’s expression of pained surprise as he topples backward off the carousel, a spray of blood scattering from his slashed thigh. January reaches for him instinctively, the broken leg of the gray filly falling to the deck, but all she feels is the brush of his warm, clutching fingertips against hers and then he’s gone. She almost throws herself after but something unyielding blocks her: the lion’s leg, extended like a crash barrier.

She withdraws, shuddering, into the second file. The tiger’s no better, objectively, but at least she has yet to see
it
move.

The next time the carousel brings her around she sees Martin hurtling the barrier, crouching beside Jeff. The time after that Jeff is up and hobbling, Martin supporting him, both of them holding a bandage made of Martin’s shirt over the gash on Jeff’s thigh.

“We’ll try something else!” Jeff shouts, but it sounds far away. Misty, if things can sound
misty
, exactly.

“Don’t!” January yells back, after one more revolution. “Call an
ambulance
.”

The carousel operator has her cell phone in her hand; it doesn’t look like she was waiting for instructions on that front. January blesses sensible women and looks left and right for the gray filly’s leg, but it’s not in sight anywhere. Maybe the same centrifugal force that wants to hurl her off the carousel when she leans too far out has sent it spinning over the side.

Because she doesn’t have any idea what else to do, she goes back to the gray filly. It feels like home base, and it’s farther from the lion. She has a hard time making herself touch it at first, but eventually stops snatching her fingers back as if she expected the lacquered wood to be hot and leans on the filly as she bobs up and down, trying to feel warm flesh and living bone under satin hide once more.

She didn’t imagine it. She didn’t imagine what the lion did to Jeff, the momentary glint of intelligence in its glass eye. She didn’t imagine the way the filly stretched under her petting.

The boom of the Wurlitzer hurts, now, so loud and so close. It’s almost impossible to think for the pounding of the base drum in her chest cavity. January imagines she can hear her brain ringing as it rattles from side to side against bone. She can’t think; she can’t jump; she can’t wait for rescue.

She has to do something.

Gingerly, teeth clenched, January leans on the sleeve and starts trying to fit her left foot into the iron of the undulating pony’s stirrup. She jams her clog in, her twisted ankle complaining, and takes a deep breath as the maimed filly’s ascent jerks her hip joint uncomfortably wide. As the pony comes down again, January jumps at the saddle, her skirt furling unevenly about her thighs. She’s grateful for the real horsehair tail now, because an arched carven one would have caught her hem and she would have fallen stupidly back to the deck and probably broken her leg. As it is, the skirt snags but tugs free, and she lands in the saddle only bruised on her inner thighs, clutching the pole and breathing hard through her nose.