Totentanz (23 page)

Within, something heavy crashed to the
floor.

He heard soft, cold laughter nearby, through
the trees. As though in answer to it, the calliope music grew
louder. He did not listen; whatever it called to he had already
seen.

There was another crash, metal against
concrete, from within the crypt, and the moan of a hurt,
despairing animal calling to its maker.

Reggie stepped into the darkness.

A sudden clamp of dread took hold of him, but
he shook it off and took another step forward.

"I know you," he said, but even as he said
it, that dread overtook him again. His voice sounded weak in the
darkness. His resolve had lessened a fraction; a memory barely
hidden in cloud was gnawing at him, forming a small kernel of fear
that began to grow. "1 know you," he repeated, but now his voice
sounded like that of a hollow man, and for the first time, he was
not sure that he knew to whom he spoke.

The walls of the tomb were smooth, as he had
imagined they would be; only now they dripped with a sticky
substance that smelled like blood, like death-juice. It pumped out
of the walls and onto the floor, a flowing mass drawn from some
hidden, failing heart. The pools began to merge, covering the floor
and washing toward Reggie in a gently rising wave, pool meeting
pool to converge on the spot where he stood rooted. Warm blood ran
over his shoes, wetting the bottoms of his jeans, lapping warmly at
his ankles.

Do you know me?
someone—the eyes?—said close by,
viciously.

The kernel of fright sought
to explode within him. He fought it valiantly, forcing it back to
seed. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the blood was
gone.
Hallucination
, he thought. After a blinking moment of confusion, he took
another step, and something sounded from behind him; he looked back
to see the dim shape of a huge and bloated thing lowering itself to
the floor in the doorway of the vault. Long, tapering legs, many of
them, preceded a fat, bulbous body covered with faintly glistening
hair: he could almost hear a puff of expelled breath as the huge
spider found the floor and began to scuttle toward him. The hairs
on Reggie's body stood on end. With a gigantic effort, he closed
his eyes for the briefest moment, remembering the dream he had had
where he stood in the trench to warn the soldiers that the
monstrous, greasy worm advancing on them could not hurt them: "It's
only a dream!" When he opened his eyes, the spider, too, was
gone.

Bullshit,
he thought,
all
hallucination.

He turned to the inner
sanctum again. Two heavy stained-glass doors were ajar before
him.
Over the ledge,
he thought.
Now I'll know what's
over the ledge.

"I'm not afraid of you," he said, and this
time the fear was gone and he believed himself.

He put his hands on the double doors, drawing
them back, and suddenly it was there. He was there in the tunnel,
with the bright warm light in front of him; he was drifting slowly
toward it, toward the figure with the two huge eyes. He could
almost see the face, could almost feel himself drawn into those
eyes, when he felt the cold clamp of hands on him from behind and
he looked back to see the other end of the tunnel, filled with the
dark shadow, close behind him, and there was the grip of cold,
spidery hands and a beginning whisper that was suspended on the
edge of time

And this time no doctor's hands reached in to
pull him back to the world. A merciless fear gripped him as the
specter spoke; a pure, unsifted terror filled him, sinking into him
like cement.

"Why don't you help me?" he screamed at the
huge eyes, but they only regarded him with unblinking calm. "You
said you would be with me!"

"Kiss me," the dark serpent's whisper came
into his ear.

Death
. Here it was at last. Here was the icy, bleak madness, the
skin-ripping coldness of it, the bleached-bone, screaming thing
itself.
Death
.
Here it was, as thick as molasses; it would reach out at him, an
octopus, a thing with grasping hands and claws, with suckers to
suck the life from him, to draw him to its breast and squeeze the
life from the cells of his body and mind. Here it was, sickly sweet
and fetid, damper than mold, wetter than thunderous rains:
Death
. It gripped and
twisted and bit; it pierced him through the middle, searing him
with heat and unbearable sharp burning light.

Death.

"Kiss me," the shadow breathed with rotted
breath, bringing its lips to his.

He fell to the floor of the crypt and
screamed, throwing his hands over his face. This was what lay
beyond that tick of time. The black pit. Nothing. The eyes were not
here to help him because they could not. You moved toward the
light, and then the blackness caught you from behind, crooning into
your ear and biting your body in two. Over the ledge there was a
dark, deep hole, infinity in length; the thing kissed you, and down
you went. A fear quaked through him greater than any he had ever
known or imagined. So it had all been games, all of it: the dreams
and the longing to know what lay just beyond. The warmth of those
enormous eyes was a false, suckling heat, a diversion, while the
real work went on behind, shooting you in the back. . . .

The blackness rose up to encircle him again,
to take him finally into its maw—and then suddenly it retreated. He
heard a brush of low laughter. "Soon," the voice said, "soon," and
he felt the presence, the dark man, move away. He heard an outrush
of air and then silence. Shakily he looked up to see the two eyes,
the eyes as large as plates, animal's eyes, the eyes of the
betrayer, regarding him placidly from the corner of the room.

I am with you. . . .

"Liar!" he screamed, throwing himself
forward. He would squeeze those eyes to pools of jelly if he could,
but they only moved calmly away from him, hovering like two
enormous stars in his heaven.

And then he heard the soft calliope music
calling to him, and he knew that whatever immunity he had
possessed, whatever privilege these evil eyes had graced him with,
was gone.

Come to me, come to
me,
the calliope called.

He heard the soft, calling whine of an
airplane passing overhead, felt the soft, insistent pull, the
promise of a long-delayed reunion. . . .

The eyes were gone. He rose unsteadily to his
feet and looked into the open casket of the Unknown Man. It was
smooth and clean, an empty bronze box. He felt as cold and empty as
the casket. Where there had been hope, there was now only dread. It
wanted him, and he had to go to it.

He thought of his mother, and of Jack, and of
Pup and everyone else in Montvale caught in that bright amusement
trap, that thing with claws and tinny music and teeth. It didn't
matter anymore; he must go to it. He walked out of the mausoleum,
leaving the stained-glass doors ajar, and there it rose before him,
the glow of its neons and glass-white bulbs turning the night into
a hard outline of low tents, booths and rides. He stared at that
simple, hideous skyline, and suddenly he recognized it. Slowly his
hand went to his back pocket and he took his wallet out, drew from
it a single, carefully folded sheet and opened it, smoothing the
creases.

He held it up, comparing it with the outline
that dominated Montvale. In the center was the Ferris wheel,
corresponding to the black citadel on fire: to the right—where, in
the picture, there was a huge open-mouthed coffin into which
peasants were being forced by a phalanx of skeletons—stood the
House of Fun; to the far left stood the House of Mirrors in place
of the crumbling, tree-topped castle with two bell-ringing corpses.
There was even a bell—a brass monstrosity with a long, heavy
clapper hanging out of it like a dog's tongue—at the summit of the
House of Mirrors. In the background were other, less distinct
structures, all roughly corresponding to scenes in Breughel's
ghastly painting. To the right in the picture stood a gallows, and
through the bright lights Reggie thought he saw a vague outline of
some such thing poking up beyond the shadow of a tent. And in the
far background, partly visible through a whirligig ride and a
length of arcade games, was the carousel. From this distance Reggie
could barely make it out, but enough was revealed for him to see
that it was turning lazily. He heard a faint call, a cry.

The Triumph of Death.

Come to me, come to me.

He began to make his way down the far side of
the hill, toward the bright lights in the distance. There was great
fear in him, but it was strangely muted by the rocking lullaby of
the steam whistle. The paper dropped from his hands, skittering off
over the perfectly cut blades of grass to settle between the crook
of a manicured bush and the wall of the mausoleum. It fluttered a
few times and then the breeze died, letting it settle quietly to
the ground.

“Mom, please, Mom."

Jack Gantry had never panicked before, never
lost his cool, and here he was doing it in spades. His feet ran
without instruction from his mind: they pulled him along so fast
that the rest of his body had trouble keeping up. His muscles were
so tight he thought he must get a charley horse any minute; but he
knew that even if that happened, his legs would keep on
running.

"Oh. Mom, Amy."

He knew that Reggie was
alone now back there in the cemetery, that one of his best buddies
had been deserted, one of the Three Musketeers left behind, but
that made no difference to his legs. If he could have seen his own
face at this moment, he would have beheld the countenance of a
blind person: open, staring eyes and reaching hands. He had never
been scared like this before. He had even thought he would grow up
to be like his father, a Marine through and through, maybe go to
some foreign country, landing on the beach with a "Gung-Ho!" and go
screaming up with his rifle at the ready, the way he and Pup and
Reggie used to play. He knew there was more to being a Marine than
that; his father had sat him down and told him what it really
meant, how it "made you a man," but still Jack had thought he'd
like to try it. He doubted they'd let him in if they could see him
now.
Running away.

He had never panicked
before; when the little McMasters girl had fallen into the skating
pond three years before, he had been the first in to get her; he
hadn't even thought about the ice, about how thin it must have
been, how deep that part of the pond was. That was the same spot
where another little kid had drowned while swimming the year
before, and even though he knew that, he had gone after the
McMasters girl. He'd even enjoyed it in a way. This was what the
Marines did, threw themselves into danger without a thought
because it was right,
and they always came out victorious. And he'd saved that kid,
finding her arms as they slid smoothly under the ice, his own hand
growing instantly numb as he plunged it in. He knew that if he
didn't find her in that first instant, he wouldn't find her at all
because she was heavily dressed and once all that water got into
her coat, she would drop like a stone. He remembered that little
hand, the arm from elbow to fingers the only thing left above the
cracked blue-white ice, the fingers moving slowly up and down, back
and forth, almost calmly searching the air, grasping at the pieces
of ice floating around her for something safe to hold on to. And
then the arm began to slip, turning slowly, sliding silently
underneath the water.

Somewhere behind him, Jack heard Reggie and
Pup yelling, and then he felt the ice beneath his own crawling
belly begin to soften and collapse. He felt a cold rush of water
cover his front, but his hand went down into that cold numbness,
and he calmly moved it around. It moved against something solid and
then lost touch; quickly he plunged his arm deeper, and there she
was. He grabbed her by the arm, at the exact point where her elbow
had been visible above the water line, and began to haul up. Only
then did he realize that the entire top half of his body was nearly
underwater and that he was skimming forward into the dark hole.
Carefully he tried to snake backward, moving his legs from side to
side and digging his boots into the mushy ice behind him, but it
was no good. He was gliding down, and soon he would be under the
ice and too cold and wet to get out.

But then there were hands on his boots,
pulling him back, and he glanced behind to see Reggie and Pup,
their faces strained, the sky cobalt blue over them, and the
skeletons of a few gray-black trees at the edge of the pond making
the scene suddenly beautiful, and then they had him on firm ice and
they had the girl from his arms. There were other people there, and
the girl's father came running and screaming across the snowy
field next to the pond, along with a couple of other men,
farmhands, and they were working on the girl and getting the water
out of her lungs and then bundling her up when she began to cough.
They carried her away.

No one had bothered with him for those few
minutes while they were bringing the girl around; but he didn't
mind because he laid still, the cold not yet into his bones, and
just stared at the perfect blue sky and the silver branch of a tree
that arched overhead. He had never felt so alive, had never before
thought about being alive, and his whole body tingled with the
strain of mere existence.

"Jack?" someone said finally.

It was Reggie; his face came into view,
partially blocking out the blue sky. There was a worried frown on
his face. "You okay?"