Twilight Eyes (53 page)

“Yes,” Rya said, evidently thinking of the orphanage she had endured. “Yes.”

“I can’t go back. I can’t live like I’d have to live.”

“There is a way,” I said.

Cathy turned her head and looked at me, more with disbelief than with hope.

“There is a place,” I said.

“Of course,” Rya said.

“Sombra Brothers,” I said.

And Rya explained: “The carnival.”

“Become a carny?” Cathy asked, amazed.

Her voice betrayed a mild distaste at which I took no offense—and which, I knew, Rya also understood. The straight world is always anxious to affirm the illusion that its society is the only right one; therefore it labels those in the carnival as drifters, social outcasts, misfits, and probably thieves, every one of them. We, like real Gypsies with Romany blood, are held in universally low esteem. One simply does not acquire two or three prestigious university degrees, a deep knowledge of the arts, only to blithely throw over a thriving academic career in favor of the carnival life.

I did not gild the future that such a decision would assure for Cathy Osborn. I put it bluntly, wanting her to have all the facts before making up her mind: “You’d have to give up the teaching you love, the academic life, the career you’ve worked so hard to build. You’d have to come into a world almost as alien to yours as ancient China. You’d keep finding yourself acting like a straight, talking like a mark, so the other carnies would be suspicious of you, and you’d need a year or more to win their complete confidence. Your friends and relatives wouldn’t understand, not ever. You’d become a black sheep, an object of pity and scorn and endless speculation. You might even break your parents’ hearts.”

“Yeah,” Rya said, “but you can join Sombra Brothers and be sure that there are no goblins among your neighbors and your friends. Too many of us in the carnival are outcasts because we
can
see the goblins and therefore need a refuge. When one of them comes among us, other than as a mark spending money, we deal with it quickly and quietly. So you’d be safe.”

“As safe as anyone ever is in this life,” I said.

“And you could earn your way, working for Slim and me to start.”

I said, “Eventually you could put aside enough money to have a couple of concessions of your own.”

“Yeah,” Rya said. “You’d make bigger bucks than teaching; that’s for sure. And in time . . . well, you’ll pretty much forget the straight world you came from. It’ll begin to seem like a very long-ago place, even like a dream, and a bad dream.” She reached out and put a hand on Cathy’s arm, reassuring her, woman-to-woman. “I promise you, when you’ve become a real carny, the outside will seem awful bleak to you, and you’ll wonder how you ever got along out there and why you ever thought it was preferable to the world of the road show.”

Cathy bit her lower lip. She said, “Oh, God . . .”

We could not give her old life back to her so we gave her the only thing we could give just then: time. Time to think. Time to adapt.

A few cars passed us. Not many. It was late. The night was deep—and cold. Most people were home by their fires or in bed.

“God, I just don’t know,” Cathy said tremulously, wearily, indecisively.

The crystallized exhaust vapors plumed along the window. For a moment as I looked through the glass, I could see only those swirling mists, silvery and swift, in which spectral faces seemed continuously to form and dissolve and quickly reform, peering hungrily at me.

At that moment, Gibtown, Joel and Laura Tuck, and my other carny friends seemed far away, farther than Florida, farther than the dark side of the moon.

“I’m lost, confused, afraid,” Cathy said. “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know.”

Considering the terrifying ordeal she had endured that evening, considering that she had not gone entirely to pieces as most people would have done, considering that she had in fact quickly recovered from her shock once Rya and I had dispatched the goblins that were tormenting her, I figured she was someone who ought to be on our side, in the carnival with us. She was no meek professor; she possessed unusual strength, uncommon courage, and we could always use more people of strong mind and heart—especially if we eventually continued and widened the war against the goblins. I sensed that Rya felt the same way as I did and that she was praying that Cathy Osborn would join us.

“I just . . . don’t know....”

Two of the three bedrooms in our rented house were furnished, and Cathy stayed the night in one of them. She could not bear either to drive on to New York City or to abandon her career and her current life on such short notice, regardless of the compelling reasons for doing exactly that. “By morning I’ll make up my mind,” she promised.

Her room was farther along the second-floor hallway from ours. She insisted that we leave the doors open on both chambers, so we would be able to hear one another in the night if one of us called for help.

I assured her that the goblins did not know we were among them.

“They have no reason to come here tonight,” Rya said soothingly.

We did not tell her that this house was owned by Klaus Orkenwold, or that he was the new sheriff in Yontsdown, or that he was a goblin, or that he had tortured and slaughtered three people in the basement.

Nevertheless, in spite of what we told her and chose not to tell her, Cathy remained worried, edgy. She insisted on a night-light, which we rigged for her by draping one of her dark blouses over the shade of a nightstand lamp.

When we left her, I felt really bad, inadequate—as if we were abandoning a child to the mercy of the thing that lived under the bed or the monster that hid in the closet.

Eventually Rya slept.

I could not. At least not for a long while.

Dark lightning.

I kept thinking about that black lightning bolt, trying to figure out what it could mean.

And now and then, as if it were the stench of dead men buried under the house, a vague wave of psychic radiation passed up from the cellar below, where Orkenwold had killed a woman and two children.

Again I felt certain that I had unconsciously led us to this place, that my clairvoyant power had somehow chosen this house of all the houses that might have been available, because I wanted—or was destined—to deal with Klaus Orkenwold as I had dealt with Lisle Kelsko before him.

In the ceaseless moaning of the wind, I could hear something of the shrill cries of the goblin freaks in that cage before I had shot and then incinerated them. I could almost believe they had dragged their bullet-riddled corpses, their fire-scorched bones, from the smoking ruins of that house and were crying out to me now as they crept and hitched and scuttled through the night, moving unerringly in my direction as hell-hounds might relentlessly sniff out the damned and rotting souls of their prey.

At times, in the creaking and popping of the house (which was only its natural response to the fierce cold and the insistent wind), I thought I heard flames springing up beneath us and devouring the lower floor, a blaze perhaps lit by the things I had burned in the iron cage. Each time the forced-air furnace came on with a soft roar, I twitched with surprise and fear.

Beside me, Rya groaned, dreaming.
That
dream, no doubt.

Gibtown, Joel and Laura Tuck, and my other carny friends seemed far away then—and I longed for them. I thought of them, pictured each friend’s face and dwelt on it for a time before calling up another, and just thinking about them made me feel a little better.

Then I realized that I was longing for them and taking courage from their love, as I had once longed for and taken courage from the love of my mother and sisters out at the far edge of the continent. Which probably meant that my old world, the world of the Stanfeuss family, was gone, gone forever beyond my reach. On a subconscious level I had evidently absorbed that terrible fact, but until now I had not accepted it consciously. The carnival had become my family, and it was a good family, the best, but there was great sadness in the realization that most likely I would never go home again and that the sisters and mother I had loved in my youth were, though still living, dead to me.

On Saturday morning the clouds were a more ominous gray than they had been on Friday. As if the darker shade indicated greater weight, the sky settled closer to the earth, too heavy to maintain a higher position.

The huffing-gasping-wheezing wind of the previous night had gone breathless, but there was not a good feeling to the resultant calm. A strange, expectant quality, an eerie tension, seemed to be a part of the snow-covered landscape. The evergreens, silhouetted against the slate-colored sky, might have been sentinels standing in dread anticipation of the advance of powerful armies. The other trees, stripped of their leaves, had a foretokening air, as if they had raised their black, skeletal arms to warn of approaching danger.

After breakfast Cathy Osborn put her luggage back into her car with the intention of continuing her drive to New York. She would remain in the city only three days: just long enough to settle her apartment lease, deliver her letter of resignation to Barnard (she would claim a health crisis, thin as that excuse might be), pack up her book collection and other belongings, and say good-bye to a few friends. The good-byes would be tough, because she would truly miss those people she cared about and because they would think she’d taken leave of her senses and would make well-meaning, though frustrating, attempts to change her mind, but also because she could not be sure that they were really the ordinary men and women they appeared to be.

Rya and I stood by her car in the still but penetratingly cold morning air, wishing her well, worried but trying not to reveal how deeply we feared for her. Each of us hugged her very tightly, and suddenly the three of us embraced together, for we were no longer three strangers but were inextricably linked to one another by the bizarre and bloody events of the previous night, bound by a bond of terrible truth.

For those of us who have discovered their existence, the goblins aren’t merely a threat but are also a catalyst for unity. Ironically they engender a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood between men and women, a sense of purpose and responsibility and shared destiny that we might lack without them; and if we ever manage to eradicate them from the face of earth, it will be because their very presence has united us.

“By Sunday morning,” I told Cathy, “I’ll have called Joel Tuck down there in Gibtown. He’ll be expecting you, and he and Laura will make a place for you.”

We had already described Joel to her so she might be appalled but not shocked by his deformities.

Rya said, “Joel’s a book lover, a voracious reader, so you might have more in common with him than you’d think. And Laura’s a dear, she really is.”

As we talked, we sounded flat and iron-hard in the perfectly still, glacial morning air. Each word we spoke was expelled with a white puff of frosted breath, as if it had been chiseled from a chunk of Dry Ice and released to convey its meaning as much by the pattern of its vapor as by the sound of it.

Cathy’s fear was nearly as visible as her crystallized breath. Not merely a fear of goblins but of the new life she was about to embrace. And a fear of losing her old and comfortable life.

“See you soon,” she said shakily.

“Florida,” Rya said. “In the sun.”

At last Cathy Osborn got in her car and left. We watched her until she had reached the end of the driveway, had turned onto Apple Lane, and had disappeared beyond a bend in the road.

Thus professors of literature become carnies, and belief in a benign universe gives way to darker realizations.