Totentanz (27 page)

"I guess we'll see who was who."

"I'm leaving, Ash."

Ash seemed unsurprised. "And where will you
go?"

"Anywhere. Away from the hate."

Ash lit another cigarette, even more
deliberately than the first. For a chilling moment it occurred to
Jeff Scott that Ash was trying to drag the moment out, to savor
it.

"I think," Ash said, again drawing deeply on
his cigarette, and pausing before completing his sentence, "that
Mr. Jeff Scott has made a discovery. He has discovered that he no
longer holds within him that great and constant hatred that he
believes has made all of this glorious enterprise possible. He
thinks that through an act of his own will, the will of a dead man,
he has banished this hatred from himself. Am I right?"

"I won't help you anymore. There's nothing
left in me for you to feed on."

Ash shook his head and stepped forward. An
unaccountable coldness came into Jeff Scott, a coldness he had
never known even when he had been in the ground, covered with cold
earth. He dropped to his knees, holding his middle.

"Get up," Ash said casually. He touched Jeff
under the chin, bringing him painfully to his feet. Jeff felt
himself propelled backward and down into the single wooden chair
left whole in the room. He bent over double again, trying to warm
himself with hands as cold as ice.

"Oh . . . " he moaned.

"How wrong we can be," Ash said in that same
nonchalant tone. "Even in death, human egos continue to prosper.
Do I look unwell to you'? Do I?" He pulled Jeff Scott's chin up,
forcing him to look into his full, white face. "Don't I look as
well as always, or better, even though your precious power has been
taken from me? How is it that I look so fit if the only thing that
kept me in existence was your puny hatred? Tell me!"

"Oh . . ." Jeff moaned.

Ash released Jeff and paced
the room. In the doorway behind him, Jeff saw two other figures.
Through his haze of cold pain he could not make them out. "How
foolish you have been. Your hatred kept only you going. But
me
? Let me assure you,
there's plenty of hate to go around, enough to continue the work
here and elsewhere."

The pain in Jeff's gut slackened. He
distinguished the figures in the doorway: a tall, sallow woman with
short-cropped hair and glazed eyes, and a slightly overweight boy
of thirteen or fourteen with the look about him of a sly animal.
The boy was especially alert, his small pebble eyes following Ash's
every movement.

"I . . . still say . . . you're . . . afraid
of something . . ." Jeff said.

The pain grew again, and the figures receded
into a teary mist. Only Ash's face was there before him now, in
sharp outline.

"Are you quite sure," Ash's face asked, "that
your hate is gone?"

Jeff found nothing but cold inside him.
"Yes," he got out painfully.

The thin lips parted, moving down on him.

With his cold hands, Jeff Scott tried to push
Ash away. His hands melted into Ash's coat. There was nothing
inside—no body or bones, nothing. When Jeff tried to remove his
hands, they would not come out, but only sank farther in. Ash's
face moved closer, the razor-red lips dusting his cheek, his chin,
then finding his mouth. A scream formed deep down in the coldness,
but Jeff Scott could not bring it to life.

Ash's mouth opened wide. Then it opened
wider, became all, and Ash demanded of him, using the two words
Jeff Scott had so long feared and hoped to hear.

Death.

It was liquid in the mist that settled on his
skin, gaseous in the air that went into his nostrils, solid in the
ground beneath his feet. Death was an envelope; it surrounded him
and tried to get in at him through his pores, his eyes, his skin,
his mouth. He tasted death when his lips parted. With each step he
took, he had to kick it aside, push it back with his fingers, drive
it away with his head. Death had become concrete, tar and paper,
and board and paint; had subsumed the atmosphere and the sacred,
walked-upon earth itself.

Death wanted him.

Ahead of Reggie Carson, the old black man
hobbled like a broken broom. From the cemetery to the gates of the
amusement park he had been normal enough, walking straight, but the
moment they had passed through those iron gates, he had become
something else, not a man, not an animal, but fear embodied. He
looked to the left and right, his hands held out before him at
every crooked step to shield himself from a possible blow. Reggie
could see the bones move beneath his ruined skin as the old man
danced and shuddered in front of him.

And Reggie felt it too, as if the two of them
had been covered with something living and rabid that waited only
for a moment of weakness to attack.

Death.

"Bad . . ." Lucius moaned.

They paused under the Ferris wheel. The old
man put his clawed hand on Reggie's arm and pointed with his other
hand. "This way," he croaked, and for a moment, in the glare of the
bright lights, when Reggie looked into his eyes, he
saw—nothing.

Lucius turned away.

They came to a wooden trailer, painted gloomy
black. Lucius mounted the three short steps at the back and knocked
at a deeply inset door. No answer. He listened, his head trembling,
and then he stepped back and put his hand to the knob. Reggie
climbed up beside him as he pushed open the door and went in.

A shade was drawn over the single window; the
room was pervaded by a sharp, sweet odor. The old man called
softly, "Jeff Scott?" and then turned to Reggie. "1 can't," he
said, stopping in his tracks.

Reggie pushed past him and entered. The room
was close and hot. He could see nothing. His foot slipped on
something, and he bent down to pull it from beneath his shoe. In
the glow from the doorway, he saw that it was a cluster of pages
from a book. He put it back down on the floor, and his fingers felt
other pages scattered about, and what felt like splinters of
wood.

"Jeff Scott?" the old man called again. He
stood rooted in the doorway. "The window," he rasped, and Reggie
moved his hands like spiders over the wall, grasping the shade and
trying to raise it. Finally he fumbled at the bottom, and the shade
flew up, splashing artificial light from outside into the room.
Other, smaller windows were revealed, with black tape over
them.

"Oh, Lord," Lucius said.

The sharp illumination revealed the figure of
a man slumped in a chair. The room was littered with broken
furniture and torn books. The man's head was tilted forward on his
chest, his feet planted firmly on the floor. One arm was draped
across his lap.

"Jeff Scott?" the old man whispered
fearfully, pushing into the trailer.

The figure made no response.

Reggie slowly reached out and put a finger to
the figure's hand. It was cool to the touch. The face was away from
him. He was lifting his hand to touch it when it suddenly turned
and looked straight at him.

"That's not Jeff Scott," Lucius gasped.

"Son . . ." the thing in the chair
rattled.

A transforming wave passed over Reggie. He
felt joy—pure, silver joy—mingled with the chilled grip of doubt.
The thing on the chair swiveled around, turning its body fully
toward him and half-raising itself off the chair. It looked weak
and stiff, but the same mixture of emotions, in a duller, more
somber form, passed over its thin, dried features.

"Dad . . .” Reggie choked out.

His father settled his weight back into the
chair and put his hands on his knees. His hollow eyes filled with
an inner light. He shook his head, a slow, deliberate action that
seemed to consume all his energy and attention.

"Son," he repeated.

A battle raged within Reggie. He felt a
smooth, long curtain drop over his eyes, a curtain that would turn
this thin, shivering thing into the father he had once known. Even
as he watched, his father's face filled out; his uniform became
sharply creased and spanking clean; his face widened into the
happy, fulfilled expression he had always worn for Reggie. His
hands were smooth and sure-gripped, his shoes polished to a shine.
His eyes said, "Yes, this is me, here I am, enjoy me and forget
about everything else. . . ."

"That's not what you are!"

Reggie drove the curtain away and it
dissolved, leaving a quivering thin bit of flesh stretched over
crumbling bones with his father's face, his father's sad, dead,
animated body.

"That day when I rode my bicycle—"

"I know," his father said painfully.

"I only wanted to say good-bye."

His father nodded, a torturous act. "Your
mother—" he began.

Suddenly his father's corpse seemed possessed
by demons. Something had entered the room, a presence that was not
physical but hung in the air, in the corners, coldly.

"Oh, God, please help me!" his father
shouted. He held a shaking hand out. "I only want to go back!"

Reggie saw that Lucius, too, had reverted to
the wailing, begging thing he had seen first in the church-yard and
had fallen to the floor.

Reggie's father pleaded, "Don't let him
deceive you, Reggie. Oh, God, just let me go back!" Once again the
curtain sought to drop across

Reggie's vision, making his father's face
burst into a false, filling smile, his begging hand become
caressing.

Reggie fought it, and once more his father
was a decaying, crying thing begging for acquittal.

Reggie's mind was a battleground. He felt two
powers fighting within him, one cool and rational, calmly assessing
what was happening around him, draining him of the cringing fear
that had possessed him in the churchyard; the other insidious,
seeking to fog his mind and eyesight, a pouncing terror that would
lull him with hallucination and then push him over the ledge into
the abyss. He knew now who this second power was—the abyss, the
Dark Thing itself—but the first remained a mystery to him, although
he drew deeply from it now, filling his mind with the clarity it
promised and the calmness of spirit it produced.

Close by, Reggie heard a
sibilance of rage.
Go then.
His father screamed once, in relief as much as in
terror, and his face began to melt away. In the dimming eyes, for
the last second of existence, there was the barest hint of love.
"Good-bye," Reggie whispered, and the mouth, rapidly falling away,
formed for the briefest time the same word in answer before the
face was gone.

The mass of skin flaked away. This was not
Reggie's father any longer. The head fell powerless onto the
breast, and there Reggie thought it would stay, but it suddenly
raised itself again.

The face was transformed. Patches of skull
shone through, and the eyes were liquid masses of jelly. One eyelid
curled up all the way over an eye, revealing it as perfectly
round; then the eyes disintegrated, and something long and gray
dropped out.

This is what I am,
the hissing voice spoke behind Reggie.
This is what you fight.

That other, second power assaulted Reggie,
sought to throw his mind into turmoil and reeling panic.

Since you care so much for the dead, let me
show you what will happen to your body when I have you.

The other eye of the thing in the chair
snapped open, and a long, gray worm dropped out, followed by
another, and another. The front of the thing's chest was quickly
covered with worms. The segmented monsters began to fall to the
floor, sliding toward Reggie. The mouth of the sitting creature
opened in a slit grin, revealing no teeth behind the thin lips; the
jaw dropped down, and more worms, larger, oozed out. The figure's
arms came up, and the ends of the hands, the fingers, became worms
that quickly fell to the floor.

The thing's face turned toward Reggie, and
the smile widened. The remaining skin was paper-thin, revealing the
outline of the skull beneath.

"Reggie Carson," the thing rasped, its voice
the same angry hiss Reggie had heard in the air close by his ear,
the sound a baseball card makes against the spokes, of a bicycle.
"This will be you, Reggie Carson."

The figure stood unsteadily. The mass of
worms now reached, roiling, up to its ankles. It took a stumbling
step toward Reggie and pointed a long, skeletal finger at him.
"I'll have you soon." It threw back its head and screamed, a long,
soulless screech. The head snapped down, the hollow eye sockets
boring into Reggie, and once again it smiled.

"Let me show you what waits for the
living."

The world darkened before Reggie, and then
before him hung a face, moving too fast to see clearly. The
picture enlarged to show figures speeding by. The image slowed and
Reggie saw that it was the visage of a horse on the merry-go-round.
Its head was tossed back, lips pulled away from its huge teeth,
eyes staring wildly, ears against the skull in an attitude of fury.
Its front legs were half-lifted; its back legs dug into the gray
wooden platform of the carousel, almost sinking into it. Strapped
to the horse's red saddle was Reggie's mother. She was sobbing, her
dress torn down nearly to her waist. The leather of the horse's
restraining strap was pulled into a bleeding cinch around her
middle.

The horse reeled toward Reggie, and his
mother saw him and began to call out, reaching her hands to him. As
Reggie watched helplessly, the horse came to life, its wild head
rearing up with a howl of frenzy that drowned his mother's screams.
The head rotated, burying itself in his mother's breast. She let
out a horrified cry and tried to push away from the animal. Foam
flew from its nostrils as it bit at her wildly.

See what happens to the dead.

The carousel wheeled, carrying his mother
away, and the vision disintegrated. Reggie saw that the thing in
the chair was gone, and now Lucius was whimpering behind him.