Mr. Fahrenheit (23 page)

“N— Wait, yes, she did! She saw something on the ice when we tried to pull the saucer up! There were these blue lights, like patterns the saucer was accidentally projecting. It was the only thing that she recorded before the camera shut off.”

“
Recorded
? That's good, son! Where's the tape? Please don't tell me she had it with her tonight.”

“No, she didn't want it on her, in case McKedrick came for us. . . .”

Benji trailed off, silently cursing himself.
This is my fault. If I would've just listened to her about the lights, maybe we could have figured it out.

He'd always envisioned the Voyager's aims as being unimaginable because they were so amazing. There was no use in trying to think like that anymore, no point in trying to fathom the creature as he had before. Benji had no mystery or magic inside himself. In fact, it was pretending that he
had
that let all of this happen in the first place.

I'll do anything; I'll be whoever I need to be. Just let her be safe.

“She hid it someplace where people would find it if something happened to us,” he said. “Papaw?”

“Yes?”

“We're going to the carnival.”

T
he county fairgrounds waited for them in the eternal quiet of the abandoned farmland dark. The empty carnival climbed the hill like a spider toward the full searchlight moon. There was no ticket required for entry tonight, no lines to wait in for the really good rides. The unoccupied playland was like a kid's ultimate fantasy. But Benji was not on an errand of childhood anymore.

They parked the SUV and Cadillac by the front gate. Zeeko helped remove the Cadillac convertible's soft-top roof. Papaw pulled out his key ring to unlock the gate. Benji took the ray gun and vaporized the lock.

Papaw said, “Attaboy,” smiling. Sadly.

Zeeko drove the Cadillac up the carnival midway slowly.

The midway was a wide walking lane covered in cedar chips and sawdust that ran between parallel rows of food trucks and games. Kneeling on the passenger seat, Papaw swept the ray gun back and forth, scanning the carnival. Benji did the same with McKedrick's pistol in the backseat.

There was a brief gap between the attractions, so Benji could see beyond the fences to the area surrounding the fairgrounds. To their right was nothing but cornfields, the cornstalks waving in slow motion like a homecoming queen. To the left were more cornfields, but miles away you could just see the light of the Bedford Falls High School football stadium. The dimmest phantom sounds of the cheering crowd floated to them. It seemed impossible to Benji that there was a place in the world where people still cared about a football game, where they did not know that Ellie had been taken. He had never wanted so badly to let everyone in on a secret. . . . But that was kids' crap again, that was him hoping someone else would step in.
He
was going to fix this, or it wasn't going to be fixed.

“
. . . in Jesus' name we pray,
” Zeeko whispered.

“Zeeko, quiet, this Beast might already be here,” Papaw hissed.

Zeeko flinched; the Cadillac jerked to a stop. “I'm sorry, Mr. Lightman. I didn't think anyone could hear me.” Zeeko's voice shook. “I'll just do it in my head—”

“Don't even waste your time,” Benji interrupted. His voice was low but fierce. Papaw stared at him, taken aback. “If there's a God and He did this, I'm not really sure I want Him on my side.”

“Benjamin, easy,” Papaw whispered.

Zeeko had been facing forward all this time, and even now he did not look back at Benji. His grip on the wheel turned white. For a second it seemed that for the first time in the history of their friendship, Zeeko would truly and completely lose his meditative cool and erupt. Benji almost wanted him to.

But he didn't. He drove.

Now the midway climbed again. They followed it around a
sharp turn and left the games area behind. A banner stretched above them:

AMAZEMENTS A-WAIT!

(RIDES RIDES RIDES!)

This was the heart of the carnival, jam-packed with rides. The midway grew thinner as the rides pressed in claustrophobically. All Benji's senses seemed to be dialed to their maximum: the wind on the back of his neck claw-sharp, the
pop-pop-pop
of the tires on the cedar chips as loud as distant machine-gun fire. The rides' shadows scrawled the midway wildly, no longer like the neat rectangles of the uniformly shaped food trucks and game booths. The Vomatron unlike the Tilt-A-Whirl unlike the caterpillar roller coaster unlike the mirror mansion unlike the haunted house (its own banner read
YOU'LL HAVE ONE
HELL
OF A TIME!
) unlike the carousel (
HEY-HEY-HEY GRAB THE GOLD RING TODAY!
). Benji double-checked that the pistol's safety was off.

“We'll walk from here, Zeeko,” Papaw said when they had almost reached the top of the hill. Benji peered up at the “Starlight Express” Ferris wheel, whose shadow now webbed them like the work of a spider. In the frozen moonlight, its wires and struts glowed like bones in an X-ray, its dozens of suspended cars swaying, crying softly in the wind.

Because the Ferris wheel required so much power, it had its own diesel generator, which was hidden underneath the raised wooden platform where passengers boarded their carriages. “Zeeko, you know how to turn on a diesel generator?”

“Sure, Mr. Lightman. We use them at the hospital in case the electricity goes out.”

“I thought so. Could ya crawl on under the platform and power up the generator, young man? It would be a big help.”

Zeeko nodded, looking relieved to have something helpful to do.

Benji followed Papaw up the small wooden staircase to the boarding platform. An operator's control panel sat on a kind of raised metal podium to their left. As they walked to it, Papaw said softly to Benji, “Think you might've been a little tough on your friend?”

“What do you mean?”

“If prayin' helps him through this, where's the harm?”

“I was telling the truth, to grow up, like you always do.”

A strange sadness appeared in Papaw's eyes. “Is that what I sound like? Damn. . . .” He peered at the sky, at nothing. “The truth,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe the truth doesn't matter so much, Bob Lightman. What the hell
is
it, anyway?”

The generator sputtered to life under the platform. The lights on the Ferris wheel turned on, clacking and blinking. As Zeeko joined them on the platform, Papaw hit a big green Go button on the control panel, shifted the large emergency brake handle, and with a pneumatic chuff, the Ferris wheel began to revolve. “You said Ellie put it in the top carriage?” Papaw asked.

“Yes, sir,” Benji said.

When the top carriage, number five, reached the platform, Papaw pulled the lever to set the brake. The wheel squealed to a stop.

Papaw tucked the ray gun into his waistband and went into the carriage. He found a plastic bag with a note pinned to it (
If you find this, play it & turn it in to the police. The people in this video are Bedford Falls High School students Ellie Holmes, Benji Lightman, CR Noland, and Zeeko Eustice
). The memory card
was in a hard plastic case, insulated in several Ziplocs.

“Can we watch this on that fancy phone of yours?” Papaw said.

Benji nodded, popped the back off his phone, and inserted the memory card into the slot. Being several years old, the phone took a while to load.

Finally, a thumbnail image appeared on the screen, previewing the video. The thumbnail showed the quarry, as seen from Ellie's point of view on the cliff. Papaw and Zeeko closed in for a better look at the screen, and Benji, feeling his heartbeat thunder in his thumb, pressed Play.

Ellie hadn't been kidding about how brief the video was: After the mayhem began, it was ten seconds at most. Benji saw himself on the ice, the magnet already lowered into the lake.

Benji-in-the-video said, “You guys, it's working!”

There was a tremendous
THRUMMM!
as the magnet fused with the saucer, and then the magnetic interaction unleashed chaos. (Benji heard Ellie-on-the-video gasp, and could almost literally feel his heart crack.)

From the camera's elevated perspective, it was much clearer that the saucer was going haywire on the bottom of the lake. A dim blue light blazed from the hole in the saucer's hull and struck the underside of the ice. It reminded Benji of the movie light from the projector at the homecoming assembly.

The blue light strobed on and off several times, painting some kind of pattern on the ice, though it just looked like a random series of concentric circles. Then there was a flash of brilliant green from the lake and the video stuttered, pixelated, and went black.

Benji and Zeeko looked at each other, both disappointed. There was nothing useful in the video.

“Can you play that again?” Papaw said. “Real slow this time.” He was staring at the screen. Benji didn't know what Papaw
could have seen, but played it again in slow motion.

“Slower now, bud. I don't have my specs,” Papaw whispered when the video-lake went berserk. He leaned in, squinting intensely. Still bewildered, Benji tapped the video forward frame by frame.

There was a soft scream somewhere very far away. He looked up, expecting to see celebratory pyrotechnics above the football stadium, but just then, Papaw said, “
Stop right there, Benjamin!
”

Benji paused the video, freezing on the moment when the blue light painted the ice. The pattern was just random and meaningless, wasn't it?

“What the ass . . . ,” Papaw breathed. Benji was startled to see how very pale he'd become.

“Mr. Lightman, what is it?”

Papaw shook his head and breathed out hard, stunned, like a sucker punch had knocked the wind out of him. Finally, he said, “We didn't have GPS when I was young. If you wanted to get around, you had paper or other people. In high school, I used to sit in my room—your bedroom now, Benjamin—and memorize maps, memorize all the roads in town, and all the elevations. God knows I didn't have a full dance card. Sometimes I'd try to figure out the best way to Hollywood, California.”

“Papaw, what are you talking about?”

Papaw tapped a quivering finger on the blue light pattern. “That right there is a
map
, son. A map of someplace in Bedford Falls.”

“What? Why would the Voyager have a map?”

“Because that's where It was going to go that night after It left the quarry,” Zeeko said, stunned himself.

Papaw nodded, then corrected him: “And where It
still needs
to go tonight. I recognize that spot on the map, I know I do. . . .”

Papaw closed his eyes, trying to think, to remember. . . .
Very distantly, there was that scream again, but Benji didn't pay attention this time.

Papaw's eyes sprang open. He peered at the screen one final time, comparing it to his memory. And when he seemed to confirm the match, he said, “Mary and Joseph. Boys, I know where that Beast is going to go.”

“Where?” Benji asked, though he suddenly was terrified to know.

As Papaw answered, Benji heard that faraway scream again, but could not have been less interested, because when Papaw told him and Zeeko the answer—told them where the next piece in the Voyager's secret plan lay—everything inside Benji went cold. . . .

And so that was why it took him so long to realize that the scream on the wind wasn't coming from the stadium, and they weren't alone in the carnival anymore.

T
he scream had gotten louder, and seemed to form a word, but Benji was so thunderstruck by what Papaw had told him that he thought he was only imagining it.

“
Benji . . .
” said a voice somewhere in the night. He turned numbly toward the midway. The lights from the Ferris wheel glittered across the mirror-like surface of the Cadillac, but otherwise the carnival lay dormant and dark.

“
BENJI!
” The voice came from somewhere on the midway, and it made Benji's heart leap with both fear and relief.

“That's Ellie!” he said.

The carnival shrieked to life.

It was like a monster being animated by a lightning bolt: a violent resurrection. A thousand lightbulbs along the midway simultaneously sizzled on. Melodies from a dozen calliopes blared like discordant sirens. The merry-go-round revved and then spun at top speed, the faces of the painted horses strained and demoniac as they raced. The doors to the haunted house slammed open, its passenger carts jerking forward and prattling madly toward the prerecorded bellows within the house.
Behind them, the Ferris wheel tried to revolve and strained against the emergency brake.

Benji felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder. He realized he was already halfway down the platform stairs, running toward Ellie's voice.

“Don't you move, honey,” said Papaw. His eyes were fixed on the midway. Behind him, Zeeko's glasses flashed with the midway's terrible maniac light. When Ellie screamed again, Zeeko crossed himself. “This is a trick. The Voyager wants you.”

“I don't care! This is my fault! I don't care if It kills me, but that Thing is
not
going to hurt her. And I told you:
I don't know anything It could want!
”

“Benjamin, think! If that Thing wanted to kill you, you'd already be dead. We all would be. It knew we would come here, and It still has Its gun. So why isn't It just shooting us? Right now, why isn't It?”

Papaw stepped off the platform, standing in the open air, bringing Benji with him, screaming over the carnival cacophony:

“
DRAW YOUR PIECE AND TAKE YOUR SHOT, YOU SON OF A BITCH!
”

But nothing happened.

Nothing except Ellie's scream once again piercing the air: “
HELP ME, BENJI!
”

Papaw had to drag Benji back up the platform. “Papaw, we can't just let It kill her!”

“I have no intention of that whatsoever. Now listen to me, child. That Thing ain't shooting at you because It still
needs
you. It got what It needed from Zeeko. My guess is It saw something in your mind but didn't quite get to finish the job. Can't you
feel
how much It wants you, son?”

For a moment Benji was silent. Perhaps the Voyager was
trying to block Its emotions from him, but if so, It wasn't quite doing it completely. Yes, Benji thought he felt a dim desperation from the Voyager. But the creature was wrong, just deceived by Its nearly destroyed mind; Benji had
nothing
It needed.

“Benjamin, if you go out there and It touches you again, It might know everything It needs to know, and God help us all then.”

“Couldn't It need
you
, though, Mr. Lightman?” said Zeeko.

“No,” Papaw said simply. “It's done with me, I believe. Everything I remember from the first time It came, It knows now, too.”

“Papaw, dammit, sir, I don't know anything!”

“Benjamin, look at me. Please do that,” Papaw said gently. “You love that girl.” It wasn't a question.

“Yes,” Benji said, confused and caught off guard. “More than anything.”

“And you'd walk into the gates of Hell to save her.”

Benji nodded. Why was Papaw asking this?

Ellie screamed once more, this time unmistakably a wail of pain. Papaw faced the midway again and said in an oddly calm voice, “It's time. Benjamin, I dropped the ray gun in the Ferris wheel. Fetch it for me.”

“We're going to get her?”

Still looking at the midway, Papaw nodded. “I'll see if I can bring down the carriage,” he said, for indeed, the wheel had strained against the emergency brakes and rotated a bit since they'd stopped it. There seemed to be something strange and stiff about the way Papaw walked to the control panel at the end of the platform.

The wheel began to revolve as Papaw released the brake. When carriage number five—the one where they'd found the memory card earlier—neared the bottom, Papaw hit a button on the panel. The brakes let loose their pneumatic chuff and the
wheel's revolutions stopped, carriages creaking back and forth with leftover momentum.

Papaw's timing had been off: Carriage number five had already swung past the boarding area and risen a few feet into the air, so it was now about as high as Benji's chest. Benji grabbed on to the sides of the carriage and heaved himself up. The carriage swayed underneath him like a buoy. He got onto his knees, checking the dark space under the seats.

“Papaw, it's not in here.”

“Zeeko,” Papaw said, “how 'bout'cha check number six there?”

And as Zeeko stepped into the carriage below Benji, Papaw reached slowly for the control panel's big green Go button. . . .

“
Zeeko, no!
” Benji screamed, but too late: Zeeko was already in carriage number six when Papaw punched the Go button and released the brake, and the Starlight Express Ferris wheel began to carry Benji into the sky.

The carriage gave an almighty jolt, tossing Benji onto its corrugated metal floor. He struggled to his feet, the tremendous gears of the Ferris wheel clacking and ratcheting.
Jump down! Now! Before you get too high!
he told himself. But already he'd risen twenty feet, and there were dozens of steel beams and struts between him and the earth, just waiting to shatter anyone stupid enough to fall.

There was another lurch; this time, the Ferris wheel stopped. There was one brilliant moment when he allowed himself to hope that Papaw had made a mistake, that he was not sending Benji skyward to protect him.

Then something flew from below, arcing toward Benji like a silver flare. Papaw had thrown the ray gun, and it clanged on the carriage floor between Benji's feet.

“I'll come back for you, Benjamin! But if I don't, you use
that to keep yourself safe!”

“Papaw, don't do this,” Benji began, but the gears of the Ferris wheel engaged, and he rose into the windy night, cursing, the light of the carnival world falling away beneath him.

When the wheel had taken Benji's carriage to the highest possible point, it lurched to a final stop.

From here, one hundred feet above the earth, separated by the intricate webbing of beams and gears and lights, Benji could barely make out his grandfather. Papaw was a fragile shape, just the size of a boy. How much Benji hated his grandfather then. And how much he loved him.

Papaw looked heavenward, and Benji had never wished for anything more in his life than to fly through the air between them and vanish into grandfather's arms, and kiss his anciently warm cheek. Papaw called to him, but he was like a man shouting in a dream from another shore. Benji could not quite make out the words. And there they stood for a moment of time that seemed suspended, separated by a hundred feet and a half century of age, and by no space nor time at all. Papaw put two fingers to his lips, kissed them, and lifted them toward Benji. Then he was gone, striding toward the ignited midway, pausing only to retrieve his hat from the Cadillac. For all the world, he looked like a figment gunslinger in a little boy's fantasy, and it was only then, then when it was too late, that Benji realized what his grandfather had been shouting:

Benjamin, you are so loved.

Tears of frustration and anger burned Benji's eyes. Zeeko looked up at him from the carriage below.

“O-oh boy, Benji,” he said. “Oh, shit.”

“
Come out, you ugly pissant!
” Papaw shouted as he passed the whirling merry-go-round. “
How 'bout you come out and
dance
?
”

Benji grabbed the ray gun from the gum-covered floor. He swept the weapon from right to left, scanning the entire glaring panorama of the carnival.

But as Papaw strode past the mirror mansion, the sky made good on its stormy promise, and curtains of snow closed in front of Benji, sealing his view of the fairgrounds.

“Goddammit!” he screamed. “Zeeko, we have to get down there. Do you think we can climb?”

Zeeko leaned over the edge of his carriage, assessing the situation. As soon as Benji had said it, he knew it was impossible: A hundred vertical feet of suicidal jungle gym lay between them and the earth.

Zeeko peered up, his eyes flashing behind his glasses. “Y-yeah, okay. I'm game, sure, sure,” he said. “You stay here. Be right back, buddy.”

“What?! No, that's not what I meant!”

As if to prove the danger, wind surged into them, making not just the carriages sway but the entire structure of the wheel. Forcing the world's shakiest smile, Zeeko shrugged and said, “Eh. If we both fall, it won't do us any good.”

“Then I'll go!”

“No, y . . .
Benji, what is that?
”

Benji followed the trail of his friend's gaze to their right. Although the snow obscured the midway, the storm was weaker in this direction, Benji could see past the carnival's fences, its generators, and beyond them, the cornfields.

It was as if four glowing eyes were approaching through the cornfield, the enormous lit eyes of a monster moving viciously fast and low to the ground less than a mile away. Stalks of corn parted and flew before the monster like the Red Sea.

The four glowing eyes split, becoming separate pairings of two. One pair continued dead ahead toward the carnival, the
other turned and sped in the direction of the front gates, corn flying in its wake.

From the hidden midway, Benji heard Ellie scream, “
Sheriff look o—!
” Papaw's pistol fired, then the bright signature green light of the Voyager's ray gun flashed through the snow. Papaw cried out, though Benji couldn't tell if it was in pain or victory.

“Papaw! Papaw, what's happening?”

Benji heard the crack of another gunshot. The gunshot sounded strange, too loud, and it didn't seem to come from the midway.

He felt something like a high-speed needle tug the shoulder of his tuxedo. He whirled toward the cornfield, where the monster eyes had stopped a few hundred feet from the fence. Beside the eyes, he saw a small flash of light, and heard another gunshot—and the sniper's bullet smashed into the side of his carriage with a spark.

“Zeeko, get down!” Benji shouted, diving to the floor.

“It's more agents, I'm pretty sure!” Zeeko said; his carriage screeched as he ducked to shield himself. “They must've tracked the GPS in that dead guy's SUV, Benji!”

A rapid-fire series of bullets, fired from several guns among the corn, stitched into the carriages.

From the front of the carnival came a crash of metal on metal: The other SUV had smashed through the gates. Benji could just see its headlights whipping back and forth as it negotiated the midway.

“Zeeko, if they get to Papaw, they'll kill him! We have to get down there!”

Climbing was not an option. There was no time, and also: snipers. As the snipers' assault paused, Benji dared to look toward the cornfields. Several figures disembarked from the SUV, approaching through the rows. Three glowing circles
protruded from their foreheads like eyes on a B-movie Martian: night-vision goggles. The dark men were only a hundred yards away, with nothing but the cornstalks and the thin fence between them and Benji.

Except, no, that wasn't quite right. There were also the generators, just outside the fence.

The
gas
generators.

Benji raised the ray gun over the rim of the car, frozen for a split second by the gravity of what he planned to do.

Gunfire chattered from the other SUV, nearing Papaw's position in the carnival.

Benji fired.

And missed.

The night-vision men were raising their weapons.

He fired again. . . .

FWWWWWOOOOOOOMMMMM!!!
The generators roared. A blinding tower punched skyward. Even from this distance, Benji could feel its savage energy. He flinched and closed his eyes against the mushroom cloud.

When he opened them, the blast had begun its terrible harvest: The cornfield had become a red sea, churning with a great and crimson fire that lit more rows every moment. The agents ran back toward the SUV, but already the fire was encircling them.

Benji didn't know whether they'd make it. And he didn't care.

He looked back toward the carnival. The snow abated just long enough for him to see the second SUV speed into the games area, which meant it would soon reach the rides section where Papaw had been. Benji swelled with panic and despair. He peered downward, again contemplating the climb.

The cornfield firelight whipped over the beams of the wheel,
tossing wild shadows that made it look like the wheel was revolving. For one insane moment, it reminded him of the way the spokes of his bicycle had flashed as they'd spun through the morning air. . . .

And a stomach-jolting inspiration struck him.

He looked directly under his carriage, at the hub of the Ferris wheel. The hub was the ride's engine, covered with great gears and chains. It was also its most vital means of support; all the wheel's beams originated from it. In other words, if the center couldn't hold, this thing would fall apart.

This idea is insane
, Benji thought. Fair enough. It was also the only choice he had.

“Zeeko, hold on to something! I'm going to shoot the middle of the wheel!”

Zeeko's jaw dropped. He seemed like he was about to protest. But after a pause, he just said, “I trust you, Benji.”

Benji aimed the ray gun at the hub. Fear threatened to overpower him—he had no idea what would happen next—and despite himself, he said, “Zeeko, pray.”