Totentanz (9 page)

"Papers . . .” he said, and then he doubled
over again, crying out as his bowels emptied into his underpants.
"Oh, God. . .”

"Do you want to go to the bathroom?" the
voice asked.

"Yes.”

"Does it really matter?"

“. . . yes . . .”

"Really?"

He was on the cold floor, curled up.

"Stand.” the voice said.

"Yes, Sister.”

"I said stand up.
Now
.”

"I can't, Sister. Please let me go to the
bathroom.” His sphincter convulsed, and he felt a racking pain in
his bowels.

He looked up pleadingly to see his sergeant
from Korea standing over him. The man leered. He had always leered.
He had been a stupid and vain man, and there had been more than a
hint that the mine he had stepped on had not been planted by the
North Koreans—or at least had been passed over by the American
detachment.

"Get up," the sergeant ordered.

"You can't be here," Barney said
wonderingly.

"Of course I can," the sergeant said, and
then Barney saw that the sergeant had turned into something
else.

"Oh, God," Barney Bates sobbed.

The figure was not Sister, or Sergeant
Crimins, or the beast with eyes as big as saucers. The figure blew
smoke in his face. It was black smoke, and it burned his skin like
acid. The face was very white. The eye colors were reversed, the
pupils' white speckled with gray, the irises black. He could see no
teeth in the mouth.

"Speak," the voice said, smooth and low and
not kind.

". . . Oh, God. . . ."

"You want to see my papers?" the voice
mocked, as acidic as the smoke from its cigarette. "Afraid I'll
make too much noise?"

"Oh, God, no."

The figure laughed, angling its head all the
way back theatrically and barking out low, half-strangled gasps, as
if its throat was not deep enough to bring up true vocalization. It
began to cough and then threw its cigarette down at Barney's feet.
Barney moved to pick it up, but the figure made a sharp move of
dismissal and he stood where he was, straight up now, and shaking
and cold and wet.

"Time to see my papers, Barney Bates," the
figure said, and then it was Sister, and she did not have the
knowing look on her face as when she had turned around from the
blackboard, but rather the look that said, "No, you can't leave,"
and Barney saw her bring the ruler out from under her cassock, the
one she always seemed to have hidden in her right hand. She raised
it above him, and then he remembered his gun. He had a gun and he
would use it on her. Miraculously he found it still with him,
tucked into his underpants, inside the tight elastic. It was cold
against his belly. He pawed it out, pleading, "Sister, just let me
go to the bathroom," but as he held it up, her hand, the one with
the sharp ruler, came down and knocked it from him. There was great
pain in the hand that had held the gun, and as he looked up, he saw
that Sister was gone, and in her place was that dark figure again,
the horrid, toothless thing with the cigarette and the inside-out
eyes.

Barney tried to say something, but when he
opened his mouth, he found that he was already screaming, and as he
looked at the hand that had been hit by the ruler, he saw why he
was screaming: The flesh had been stripped from his fingers, and
that all that remained was the white, dry bone of skeleton. His
bony hand was curled up on itself like a claw. And then he saw that
Sister, once again, was back and that she had raised the ruler high
over him, mouthing the word "No!" and when she brought the ruler
down upon him, the scream that he was screaming was ripped raw and
bleeding from his throat.

Reggie felt someone's eyes on him.

In the closet, with his comic collection
spread around him, something cold settled on his neck. But when he
turned, there was nothing to see. He brushed at his collar; the
washing-instruction labels on his shirts sometimes dug into the
back of his neck and irritated it. But the label had been ripped
out.

A curl of cool air passed over him. Again he
turned from the closet to find nothing there. Even the window was
closed, the air conditioner off, since the day had stayed so
cool.

I'm here . . . .

The thought brushed across him, as that cold
breath had. Suddenly he felt dissociated from himself, as light as
air. He hadn't felt this way since the day he had been hit by the
truck. He was half in the world and half out of it; he felt like he
was back in the tunnel with those two figures, one reaching to
whisper horribly in his ear, the other watching impassively. And
then, as if a cloud had passed over him, the feeling was gone.

He shrugged and turned back
to the closet. It was a small cubicle, barely a couple of feet
deep, but all the walls were lined with stacked comic books. These
were things he didn't even let the rest of the Three Musketeers put
their hands on. They were carefully arranged and cataloged, with
big hand-lettered labels his mother had helped him with (after she
had finished her calligraphy course and wanted to try it out), and
they were stacked according to date. Knowing that the really
expensive and famous comics were beyond him, and not really
interested in them anyway, he had started gathering some of the
more available, although weird, titles. He had all issues of
Superman
published in
the 80s, and he also had the whole short run of
Nukla
, about a superhero who got his
powers from a dose of lethal radiation. He had all of the
Twilight Zone
comics
published in the 1960s.

The thing that separated him from other
collectors, though, and made him a blasphemer in most eyes, was
that he actually read his comics. As far as he was concerned, he
wasn't collecting so that someday he could unload the whole mess
and make some money—he collected comics simply because he loved
them. A lot of people didn't understand this, including Pup, who
couldn't see the use in doing anything unless you got something out
of it. He often asked Reggie why he was always taking his books out
of their protective glassine bags and reading them—"junking them
up" was the way Pup put it—and Reggie couldn't make Pup understand
that he did it because he loved them not for what they were as
possessions, but for what they were in themselves.

"There's great artwork in these books, and
some of the stories are as good as the stuff you read in regular
books, and the way it all goes together makes it like nothing
else," he'd say, but Pup would give him that blank look,
half-put-on and half-serious, and Reggie would give up. Pup's
problem was that he had too much, since his parents seemed to own
half of Montvale and he got anything he whined for. "Too much,"
Reggie's mother always said, and no one had ever denied it.

I'm here. . . .

Reggie was lifting the last two books from
his "Toss-in" box, where he threw them after he'd finished reading
them and where they waited for him to re-file, when a cold hand
slipped around his neck and tightened slightly before letting go.
He gave a yell and jumped up, but there was no hand and no one
there for it to be attached to.

The feeling that he was
back in the tunnel returned, and Reggie looked up to see in the
corner of the room, up near the ceiling, a pair of huge eyes
staring at him. They gazed unblinking until they faded, like the
Cheshire Cat, into the sharp corners of the ceiling and nothing was
there.
I'm here, I'll be
here
, he heard, and then the feeling of
dissociation disappeared as if it had never been, and he was
alone.

A real shadow caught his eye at the window,
moving from right to left against the pull-down shade over the air
conditioner. Reggie stood dead still and watched the shadow cross
back from left to right. He dropped the two comics he had in his
hand and walked to the window.

For some reason, he was not afraid. The other
presence was entirely gone; whatever was behind the shade was
something else—but the other thing, the eyes that had been with
him, had left a feeling be-hind, a strength, that stayed with him
now.

He lifted the shade on the window—

And screamed.

There was a face pressed up against the
glass. At first he thought it was his own face, distorted and
beaten and old. Now he saw, as the face pulled back from the
window, that it looked only a little bit like him. It looked more
like his father had, only much older; and for a moment of hope and
fear, he thought it might be his father, returned after ten years
to live with them again. But the face was much too old—lined with
deep black crevices and with pain sunk into the eyes so deep that
the eyeballs were scarcely visible. But they could be seen, and
when Reggie saw how brightly and desperately they burned within
their deep, hurting wells, he cried out again.

It was the face of a dead man, like something
from his horror comics.

The old man had stumbled back away from the
window. He seemed as terrified of Reggie as Reggie was of him. The
old man stared at him, his sunken, haunted eyes lit wildly. Reggie
eased open the window over the air conditioner and as he did so,
his pressing arm hit the -On" button. The air conditioner roared
into life. The man outside moved back-ward and started to stumble
away. Reggie threw the window all the way up.

"You!" the old man croaked at him in a half
voice.

"Wait!" Reggie shouted.

The old man gave a shrill, tinny scream. He
held his hands in anguish to his head. "Flames!" he shouted. "The
dream!" And then he suddenly turned as if pulled by an invisible
magnet. He lurched away from the house, onto the sidewalk and
across the street. A car, honking its horn loudly, narrowly missed
him, but the old man paid no heed, pushing off the hood and running
on. His legs would not carry him as fast as he wanted to go and he
fell, rising and stumbling on.

Reggie ran from his room, making it out onto
the front lawn in time to see the old man disappear around the
corner of the house across the street. His cries faded. Reggie
considered following him, but he saw that the old man had made a
direct line for the amusement park.

I'm with you. . . .

Once more a coldness enveloped Reggie. He
looked up, expecting to see two huge, fading eyes glaring at him.
But as quickly as the sensation came, it was gone. He was left
staring at the brooding, girder-like visage of the amusement park.
It looked reptilian. Another feeling gripped him—one of dread and
foreboding; and a deeper kind of cold, with fingers that wanted to
hold and squeeze him till he choked, enveloped him. Once again he
saw before him a vision of Montvale in flames, the fire of
Breughel's "The Triumph of Death," a red landscape, and from the
midst of the inferno a sticklike hand, covered in a black sleeve,
held out to him. At the end of those fingers was the cold touch,
the hurting one that sought to reach inside, and then the arm
extended back to a body and a face, the face whispering, soothing
him and pursing its lips, opening its mouth wide, telling him
something, something secret for him alone as the flames and the
cold mingled:

"K—"

He shook the vision off, ran into the house
and shut the door behind him. The house was cold. He went back into
his room, but the chill was just as great there. The light was too
harsh. He stared down at the pile of comics he had left; now they
looked like just a pile of newsprint, unimportant. They seemed
trivial, a little boy's escape reading—like all the things in Pup's
garage seemed trivial too.

So it’s real. Something is really
happening.

Reggie felt his heart harden a little. He had
suddenly grown older. All the things in his room, the horror books
and models and masks hanging on the corners of the bedposts, were
just toys. He hadn't imagined any of what had happened; it was all
real. The only important thing in the room, the one thing that had
any meaning at all, was the poster over his bed, the painting of
Breughel's landscape of death; and as he looked at it once more,
the red fire began to dance, and that hand, that long white hand,
reached out toward him. . . .

Pup Malamut was furious. He had always known
his parents were idiots, but now there was no doubt left. Ever
since the age of three, and probably even before, since he couldn't
really remember beyond that, he had been able to get whatever he
wanted out of them. Just by making a certain face, or a certain
noise—or, later on, just by making everyone around him so miserable
that it was easier to serve than to punish him.

And with the money his parents had, they
could serve him a lot. He had more things than anybody he knew: two
bicycles, a snowmobile for the winter and a pair of water skis for
the summer. Most of these things he never used. It was the
acquisition itself that gave him pleasure. He liked getting things
out of people, and the only people he couldn't get things out of
were those he made friends with. Like Jack and Reggie—they were the
only two guys at school who hadn't given in to his bull about
needing money for lunch, the only two who hadn't listened to his
threats that his father could make life in Montvale miserable for
their parents if they didn't do as he said. They'd both told him to
buzz off. At first he had tried to get to them in other ways, even
using physical force since he was bigger than either of them. But
nothing worked. Eventually he came to them as an equal. Neither of
them was particularly tough, but the very fact that they hadn't
knuckled under to any of his tricks made him respect them and seek
out their friendship. And that had come easily enough; all they had
demanded was that he not "act like a jerk," as Jack had once said.
After a while he had found that he was part of the Three Musketeers
and that he didn't have to act like such a jerk around the other
kids either.