Twilight Eyes (11 page)

With the inconstancy of a figure in a dream, she was suddenly no longer there. The night was empty.

I stumbled through the muggy air where she had been.

I fell to my knees and hung my head.

I stayed that way for a while.

I did not want to accept the message of the vision. But I could not escape it.

Had I come three thousand miles, had I obligingly allowed destiny to choose a new home for me, had I begun to make new friends only to see them all destroyed in some unguessable cataclysm?

If only I could foresee the danger, then I could warn Rya and Jelly and anyone else who might be a potential victim, and if I could convince them of my powers, they could take steps to avoid death. But though I made myself as receptive as possible, I could not obtain even a hint of the nature of the oncoming disaster.

I just knew it involved the goblins.

I was nauseous with anticipation of losses to come.

After kneeling in the dust and dry grass for uncounted minutes, I struggled to my feet. No one had seen or heard me. Rya had not come to the door of her trailer, had not looked out. I was alone in moonlight and cricket-song. I could not stand up straight; my stomach roiled and cramped. More lights had gone off while I had been inside, and still others winked out as I watched. Someone was making a late meal of eggs and onions, and the night was redolent with a sublime fragrance that would ordinarily have made me hungry but which, in my current condition, only increased my queasiness. Shaky, I set out for the trailer where I had been assigned a bed.

The morning had dawned with hope, and when I had returned to the carnival from the locker room under the grandstand, the place had seemed bright and filled with promise. But just as darkness had come to the midway a short time ago, so it came to me now, poured over me, through me, and filled me up.

When I had almost reached my trailer, I became aware of eyes upon me, although no one was in sight. From behind, under, or within one of the many trailers, someone was watching, and I was more than half certain it was he who had carried off the goblin’s corpse from the Dodgem Car pavilion and had later spied on me from an unknown corner of the night-mantled midway.

I was too stunned and despairing to care. I went to my trailer and to bed.

The trailer had a small kitchen, living room, one bath, and two bedrooms. In each bedroom were two beds. My roommate was a guy named Barney Quadlow, a roughie, very big and slow-witted, perfectly content to drift through life, giving not a thought to what would happen to him when he was too old to heave and tote equipment, confident that the carnival would take care of him—which it would. I had met him earlier, and we had talked, though not long. I did not know him well, but he seemed amiable enough, and when I had probed at him with my sixth sense, I had discovered a personality more placid than any I had ever before encountered.

I suspected that the goblin I had killed at the Dodgem Car pavilion was a roughie, like Barney, which would explain why no great fuss had been raised when he had turned up missing. Roughies were not the most dependable employees; many of them had wanderlust, and sometimes not even the carnival moved around enough for them, so they just split.

Barney was asleep, breathing deeply, and I was careful not to wake him. I stripped to my underwear, folded my clothes, put them on a chair, and stretched out on my bed, on top of the sheets. The window was open, and a mild breeze found its way into the room, but the night was very warm.

I did not expect to sleep. Sometimes, however, despair can be like weariness, a weight dragging on the mind, and in a surprisingly short time, no more than a minute, that weight pulled me down into a welcome oblivion.

In the cemetery-still, graveyard-dark middle of the night, I came half awake and thought I saw a hulking figure standing in the bedroom doorway. No lights were on. The trailer was filled with multilayered shadows, all different shades of black, so I could not see who stood there. Reluctant to wake up, I told myself that it was Barney Quadlow, coming from—or going to—the bathroom, but the looming figure neither departed nor entered, merely stood there, watching. Besides, I could hear Barney’s deep and rhythmic breathing from the adjacent bed. So I told myself that it was one of the other two men who shared the trailer . . . but I had met them, as well, and neither was this large. Then, besotted and befuddled by sleep, I decided that it must be Death, the Grim Reaper himself, come to collect my life. Instead of bolting up in panic, I closed my eyes and drifted off again. Mere death did not frighten me; in the bleak mood that had accompanied me into sleep and had informed my dim dreams, I was not particularly averse to a visit from Death—if, indeed, that was who he was.

I returned to Oregon. That was the only means by which I dared go home again. In dreams.

After four and a half hours of sleep, which was a long rest for me, I was wide-awake at six-fifteen, Friday morning. Barney still slept, as did the others in the next room. Gray light, like dust, sifted in through the window. The figure in the doorway was gone—if it had ever been there.

I got up and quietly retrieved a clean T-shirt, briefs, and a pair of socks from the backpack, which I had stowed in the closet yesterday. Sticky, grimy, pleasurably anticipating a shower, I put those items of clothes in one of my boots, picked up the boots, turned to the chair to pick up my jeans, and saw two slips of white paper lying on the denim. I could not remember putting them there, and I could not read them easily in the gray light, so I tucked them in one hand, picked up my jeans as well, and went silently down the hall to the bathroom. In there I closed the door, switched on the light, and put down the boots and jeans.

I peered at one slip of paper. Then the other.

The ominous figure in the doorway had not been an illusion or a figment of my imagination, after all. He had left two items he thought might be of interest to me.

They were free passes of the kind that Sombra Brothers issued by the bucketful to swill-seeking local authorities and VIPs in every town where the carnival played.

The first was for a ride on the Dodgem Cars.

The second was for the Ferris wheel.

Established on coal fields that were now depleted, sustained by a single steel mill and a regional railroad yard, steadily decaying but not yet quite aware of the inevitability of its decline, the small city of Yontsdown (population 22,450, according to the welcome sign at the edge of the city limits), in mostly mountainous Yontsdown County, Pennsylvania, was the next stop on the Sombra Brothers tour. When the current engagement was concluded, Saturday night, the midway would be torn down, packed up, and carted a hundred miles across the state, to the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds. The miners, mill workers, and rail-yard employees were accustomed to evenings and weekends structured around either the TV set, local bars, or one of the three Catholic churches that were always holding socials and dances and covered-dish suppers, and they would receive the carnival just as eagerly as the farmers had done at the previous stop.

Friday morning I went to Yontsdown with Jelly Jordan and a man named Luke Bendingo, who drove the car. I sat up front with Luke, and our portly boss sat alone in back, neatly dressed in black slacks, a maroon summer-weight shirt, and a herringbone jacket, looking less like a carny than like a well-fed country squire. From the luxury of Jelly’s air-conditioned yellow Cadillac, we could enjoy the green beauty of the humid August landscape as we drove through farm country, then into the hills.

We were going to Yontsdown to grease the rails ahead of the show train, which would be rolling in during the early-morning hours on Sunday. The rails we were greasing were not actually those on which the train would run; they were, instead, the rails that led straight into the pockets of Yontsdown’s elected officials and civil servants.

Jelly was the general manager of the Sombra Brothers Carnival, which was a demanding and important job. But he was also the “patch,” and his duties in that capacity could sometimes be more important than anything he did while wearing the mantle of GM. Every carnival employed a man whose job it was to bribe public officials, and they called him the patch because he went ahead of the show and patched things up with cops, city and county councilmen, and certain other key government employees, “gifting” them with folding money and books of free tickets for their families and friends. If a carnival tried to operate without a patch, without the additional overhead of bribery, the police would raid the midway in a vengeful mood. They would close down the games, even if it was an honest outfit that did not bilk the marks out of their dough. Spiteful, exercising their authority with a gleeful disregard for fairness and propriety, the cops would board up even the cleanest girlie shows, misapply the Health Department codes to shutter all the grab-stands, legally declare the thrill rides hazardous when they were patently safe, quickly and effectively choking the carnival into submission. Jelly intended to prevent just such a catastrophe in Yontsdown.

He was a good man for the job. A patch needed to be charming, amusing, and likable, and Jelly was all those things. A patch had to be a smooth talker, thoroughly ingratiating, able to pay a bribe without making it
seem
like a bribe. In order to maintain the illusion that the payoff was nothing more than a gift from a friend—and thereby allow the corrupt officials to keep their self-respect and dignity—a patch had to remember details about the police chiefs and sheriffs and mayors and other officials with whom he dealt year after year, so he could ask them specific questions about their wives and could refer to their children by name. He had to be
interested
in them and appear glad to see them again. Yet he dared not act too friendly; after all, he was only a carny, almost a subhuman species in the eyes of many straight types, and excessive familiarity was sure to be met with cold rejection. Sometimes he had to be tough, as well, diplomatically refusing to meet demands for more sugar than the carnival was willing to pay. Being a patch was akin to performing a high-wire act, without net, over a pit occupied by hungry bears and lions.

As we drove through the Pennsylvania countryside on our mission of genteel corruption, Jelly entertained Luke Bendingo and me with an endless stream of jokes, limericks, puns, and hilarious anecdotes from his years on the road. He told each joke with evident relish and recited every limerick with sly style and gusto. I realized that, to him, wordplay and clever rhymes and surprising punch lines were just more toys, convenient playthings to occupy him when the other toys on his office shelves were not within easy reach. Although he was an effective general manager, overseeing a multimillion-dollar operation, and a tough patch who could handle himself well in tricky situations, he still determinedly indulged a part of himself that had never grown up, a happy child still facing the world with wonderment from beneath forty-five years of rude experience and untold pounds of fat.

I relaxed and tried to enjoy myself, and I did somewhat, but I could not forget the vision of Jelly’s blood-covered face, eyes open in a sightless gaze, which I had seen yesterday. I had once saved my mother from serious injury and perhaps death by convincing her of the reliability of my psychic foresight and persuading her to change from one airliner to another; now, if only I could foresee the exact nature of the danger that Jelly faced, the day and hour when it would come, I might be able to persuade him and save him, as well. I told myself that more detailed visions would come to me in time, that I would be able to protect my newfound friends. Although I did not entirely believe what I told myself, I held fast to enough hope to forestall a steep descent into total despair. I even responded to Jelly’s good humor with a few carny stories I had heard, and he gave them more laughter than they deserved.

From the moment we set out on our journey, Luke, a rangy man of forty with hawklike features, spoke in one-word sentences;
yeah
and
no
and
oh
and
Jesus
seemed to comprise his entire vocabulary. At first I thought he was moody or downright unfriendly. But he laughed as much as I did, and his manner was otherwise not cold or distant, and when he finally tried to chime in with more than a one-word response, I discovered he was a stutterer and that his reticence was a result of that affliction.

Occasionally, between jokes and limericks, Jelly told us something about Lisle Kelsko, the chief of police in Yontsdown, with whom we would conduct most of our business. He casually parceled out the information as if it were not particularly important or interesting, but gradually he painted a very nasty picture. According to Jelly, Kelsko was an ignorant bastard. But he was not stupid. Kelsko was a toad. But he was proud. Kelsko was a pathological liar, but he was not a sucker for the lies of others, the way most liars were, for he had not lost the ability to perceive the difference between truth and falsehood. He simply had no
respect
for that difference. Kelsko was vicious, sadistic, arrogant, stubborn, and by far the most difficult man with whom Jelly had to deal in this or any of the other ten states in which the Sombra Brothers outfit played.

“You expecting trouble?” I asked.

“Kelsko takes the sugar, never presses for too much,” Jelly said, “but sometimes he likes to give us a warning.”

“What kind of warning?” I asked.

“Likes to have a few of his men pound on us a little.”

“Are you . . . talking about a beating?” I asked uneasily.

“You absolutely got it, kid.”

“How regular does this happen?”

“We been coming here nine years since Kelsko was made chief of police, and it’s happened six out of the nine.”

Luke Bendingo took one big-knuckled hand from the steering wheel and pointed to an inch-long white scar that curved down from the corner of his right eye.