The Magic Kingdom (35 page)

“Rena’s got a bug up her ass.”

“Ladies!”

Benny Maxine punched off the television. “Who’s up for a ghost story?”

“A ghost story?”

“You got a better idea?”

“I love a good ghost story.”

“So do I.”

“Lots of gore.”

“Gobs of guts hanging about, decorating the room like strings of popcorn.”

“Moans. Howls of pain.”

“I love a good ghost story.”

“Takes me mind off things.”

“Who’ll go first?”

“Benny.”

“It was his idea.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“You go first, Ben?”

“How do I know you won’t cry?”

“I won’t.”

“Suppose it’s so terrible you can’t help yourself?”

“I won’t cry.”

“You give me a forfeit if you do?”

“What forfeit?”

“Your money?”

“Benny!”

“You
know
what money means to Noah.”

“I’m only trying to make it interesting. I’m trying to make it interesting for us all. You bet too. Bet me my ghost story can’t make him cry.”

“Wait a minute,” Noah said. “What do I get if it doesn’t? What do
you
forfeit?”

Maxine considered. “Forty dollars,” he said. “And I’ll lay you two-to-one odds.”

“Noah?”

“Go ahead,” Noah said, “he can’t do it.”

“They laid their bets down and Benny began.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was this lad name of Noah Cloth—”

“Benny!”

“—
lad
name of Noah
Cloth.
Now Noah was a fine little fellow in all respects save one. He was even quite properly named, Noah was, for he had a disease and ripped real easy. Easy as
cloth!
The disease was called osteosarcoma, a deadly cancer, and it was the single most common bone tumor in children. There was only one way to deal with it, and that was to amputate. Wherever it showed up, that’s where Noah’s doctors had to cut. If it showed up in a finger they would chop off the finger; if it showed up in a leg the leg would come off.”

“No fair.”

“No fair?”

“No, no fair. You said a ghost story.”

“What’s no fair? He dies,” Benny argued reasonably. “I kill him, he dies. The bone cancer gets him. He dies. He dies and comes back. He appears to his poor grieving parents, his sorrowful mum, his heartbusted dad.” He glanced over at Noah to gauge the boy’s reaction. The kid was chewing his lips, but Benny couldn’t tell whether he was on the verge of tears or laughter. “It’s not too late to back out,” he said. “You want to back out?” The boy shook his head. Benny continued his tale.

“Though the cancer took a long time to tear through Cloth, Noah wasn’t even into his teens when he passed. When he finally died there almost wasn’t enough left of him to put in the ground. I mean, he was that cut up. All they could put together for his little casket—from its size you’d think they were burying a small dog—were the pieces of his face and head they hadn’t had to saw on yet: some of his jawbone, the long bone that supports his nose, the bony socket of his left eye like the mounting for a missing jewel, pieces of skull like bits of pottery. And the remains of his diseased frame all wired up like the dinosaur in the museum. There was an elbow like a patch on a jacket. There was some shin, a fragment of ankle, maybe a sixth of his spine. There was his pelvis all eaten away and looking like a hive and, curiously, most of the toes on his right foot.”

Benny Maxine looked sharply at Noah Cloth. It wasn’t pleasant what he had to do next, but his honor as a gambler was at stake. Still, if the kid had shown him only the merest sign of submission he would have called it off. He stared at Noah. It wasn’t laughter
or
tears that struggled for supremacy. Terror sat in his face like a tic.

Benny took a deep breath, rose from the chair in which he’d been sitting, and slowly paced along the wall as he spoke.

“Noah Cloth died on an operating table in a hospital in Surrey on the Tuesday following his twelfth birthday.”

The children gasped and Benny Maxine went on.

“The undertakers had to work on him harder than ever the surgeons did just to make him acceptable for Christian burial. They did him with wax and with wire, working from the photographs of infants as their model. They wrapped him in a shroud and, obedient to the wishes of Mr. and Mrs. Cloth, buried him at midnight in an unmarked grave away from the sight of men. No one was permitted to come to the funeral. Even the Cloths stayed away.

“His cerements decayed in the damp grave. The wax that held him together dissolved and returned to the earth. The wires that ran through what was left of his bones rusted and became a part of the generalized tetanus of the world, and Noah Cloth was reduced, shrunken, boiled down, distilled into a sort of pointless dice. He was no longer, if he ever had been, a part of the respectable dead. Terminally ill from the day he was born, chipped away at and chipped away at by disease, nickel-and- dimed by the scalpels and hacksaws of his doctors, he was as unfit for the grave as he was for the world, and his spirit, caged now in that scant handful of spared, untouched bone like the undiscarded remnant marble of the sculptor’s intention, rose up from the vast lake of the dead and returned one night to his parents’ flat, there to bury itself in the bed he’d slept in as a boy, in the small room which, when he’d not been in hospital, had been his grave in life!

“It was Mrs. Cloth who first heard the macabre rattle of his bones. She was in bed and very frightened and tried to rouse her husband, for the queer click sounds that Noah made in death were not unlike the sounds her boy had made in life. She shook him and shook him but he would not rouse. ‘Husband,’ she hissed in his ear, ‘husband, wake up! There are noises coming from Noah’s room!’ But his son’s life and his son’s death had taken so much from the poor man that he slept as one dead himself. So Mrs. Cloth got out of bed and followed the queer chattering sounds like the frozen blood-barren noises of men exposed to the cold.

“She reached her son’s room and snapped on the light.”

Benny paused, his back against the wall, studying Noah. Noah watched him, not daring to breathe. “Noah?” Benny called in a perfect rendition of a ruined mother’s cracked old voice. “Noah, is that you?” And seemed in very fright and weakness to swoon, his back and neck buckling, in that precise instant catching the master switch that controlled the electricity in the room and with one smart swift convulsion plunged 822 into total darkness.

Here is what happened.

Janet Order and Lydia Conscience screamed.

Benny Maxine got his cry out of Noah Cloth.

Tony Word bit his tongue and wondered if he’d infected himself.

Charles Mudd-Gaddis thought for a moment that he had fallen asleep.

Rena Morgan caught her breath and marveled at Benny Maxine’s timing.

Mickey Mouse materialized on the ceiling in full color.

Pluto stood behind the Mouse’s shoulder staring down at the children.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

In complete darkness—the tightly drawn drapes, the lightproof rubberized curtains behind them, the room’s somber-toned, dark-olive furniture, the plastic cards removed from the top of the television, the very thickness and density of the children themselves—the hidey-hole functioned exactly like a sort of camera obscura.

Because
everything
has a reasonable explanation.

The protective peephole in the door through which guests could observe their callers before admitting them had, in 822, been inadvertently reversed, installed in concave rather than convex relation to a guest’s eye (not only a reasonable explanation, but a positively scientific one), the glazed, grommetlike eyepiece turned into a sort of light-collecting lens.

Everything.

In a normal camera obscura the image would have been projected onto a facing surface, the patternless brown drapes. That’s what should have happened in 822. So why the ceiling? Because it was a room in a major hotel catering to guests not only from all over the country but from all over the world, to guests of different social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, to smokers and nonsmokers, to people who lit votive candles, to romantics on their first honeymoons or even on their second or third, to men and women not on honeymoons at all but quite as romantic as the just-marrieds, who took their meals from room-service carts by the light of flickering candles, to adolescents and a range of the mystic-inclined who would not live in an unmediated environment and burned incense at the altar of their senses. So, in a way, Mickey and Pluto were on the ceiling rather than on the drapes because of the fire regulations and the insurance premiums, the thin layer of slightly glossy fire retardant on the drapes, which, just out of plumb from vertical true, canted their images down onto the retardant-soaked rug, which bounced the light off the floor and refracted it onto the ceiling. That’s why.

All this happening too quickly to account for. Everything happening too quickly to account for. The children squealing, the girls and the boys, scurrying for cover, almost knocking Mudd-Gaddis out of his wheelchair in the ensuing melee. Holding their hands over their heads for protection, the way, one imagines, their remote ancestors might have responded to comets in the sky, portents.

“Jesus!” they screamed.

“Oh, my God!”

“Help!”

Benny Maxine, no less frightened than the others (indeed, if anything, more so; in their wild, blind wake, brushed by their dark stampede, his tender, battered organs touched, rubbed, pushed, and pained by the adiabatic conflagrancies of their blacked-out skirmishes), wheeled about, found the wall switch, and fumbled light into the room.

Mickey and Pluto disappeared at once and, seconds later, there was a loud knock on the door.

“It’s them,” Lydia said. “They didn’t call after all.”

“Hah!” Rena Morgan said.

“Well, we’d best get it over with,” Benny said, and opened the door.

The Mouse and the Dog were standing there.

“Hi, kids,” said Mickey Mouse in his high clear voice like a reed instrument, like music toward the top of a clarinet. “We’re the good guys. We’re”—he raised his strange hand, like a fielder’s mitt with its four stump digits, against the side of his fixed grin—“these Moonies, sort of. But wholesome. Really, kids. Wholesome. I think so, anyway. Forty-eight highway, thirty-two city. Your mileage may vary. It probably does.”

He started to tell them more or less what Matthew Gale had told Mary Cottle. And was warming to his theme when he was interrupted by the dog pulling on his master’s arm, pumping it up and down as if he were raising bridges or flagging trains.

“I don’t see the lady of the house anywhere about,” Pluto said.

“It’s all right,” Mickey said, retrieving his arm, watching Rena and Benny and recognizing the girl magician and the wise-guy kid, rubbing both fielders’ mitts together. “These are nice girls and boys. Just our meat. Or mine, anyway. Mickey meat, you might say. Let’s stay on a bit, Plute.”

“Or the master neither,” said the dog.

“He thinks too much on masters and mistresses,” Mickey explained. “That’s his nature, of course, but sometimes you can overdo.”

“You can overdo your nature?” Mudd-Gaddis asked.

The Mouse looked him over. Terrific, he thought. A roomful of wise-guy kids. “Well, certainly, old man,” he said. “Ain’t that what makes tragedy? When we haven’t sense enough to get out of the way of our characters?”

Lydia Conscience and Tony Word were whispering together.

“What?” Mickey demanded. Tony Word looked down at his feet. “No, what?” repeated
the
Mouse. “Come on,” he said, “won’t you share with the rest of us? No? Don’t you know it’s rude to have secrets? No more whispering campaigns,” he scolded. “Is that understood?”

“He wants to know how you got on the ceiling,” Lydia said.

So part of it at least was a misunderstanding, a garble, a gloss. A little, that is, was farce, all the knockabout calisthenics of cross-purpose. Just so much was misconstrued, lost in translation. The children, the Dog and the Mouse, misunderstood each other. (Sure, they could be smeared across the ceiling like a slide show but they couldn’t see through walls, could they?) And then there was Kenny’s theatrical orientation. He was an actor. He’d had the floor. Of course he was angry. Boiling mad, actually.

Already boiling mad when the shill opened the door and Lamar recognized him, as well as the girl on the bed, the snot- nosed charmer from the elevator, so fast—better than the Vegas mechanics he’d seen, so fast, a little quick-draw artist—with her hands, which (he was a fair man) he didn’t begrudge her in the least. Only wondering whether Matthew Gale, sweating, he trusted—anyway, hoped—in Lamar’s Pluto suit there was in on it too. Some cast member, he thought ungenerously. (He
hoped
sweating. He hoped fucking
melting,
f’chrissake. Because it really
was
an art, being in that suit was, a question of breathing, like the difference between the singers who played the lounges and the ones who played Vegas’s biggest, most important rooms: only a matter of breathing, of phrasing. What separated the men from the boys, the sheep from the goats. So if Matt
was
in on it, if all this was happening in any way, shape, or form to set him up, he hoped to God the lousy faggot was turning to tiger butter inside the Pluto suit.) So he really
didn’t
begrudge her. He respected her, if you wanted to know. Or her skills, anyway. The ends she put them to was something else. The ends she put them to was another story altogether. Scaring the shit out of people was. What kind of a way was that? This was entertainment? Thanks but no thanks.

So, already angry when he walked in the door and saw them. Snappish and primed.

Not realizing, of course, or anyway realizing the wrong things because the nature of misunderstanding, of farce (without which there would be no ball game), is that you don’t know that that’s what it is. If someone had been there who could see all sides, it would have been a different story, but there was no one. Matthew Gale didn’t remember them from the Haunted Mansion. (The girls hadn’t been there anyway, and only Mudd- Gaddis, so excited then, now so sedate, would have made any impression at all.) He saw so many tantrums during the course of a day it’s doubtful he could have remembered anything. Oddly, Mudd-Gaddis might have if Gale hadn’t been hidden by Lamar’s Pluto suit, warm and moist now as a greenhouse, incidentally, and growing gamier by the minute. Or Benny Maxine, who’d had a run-in with Goofy and Pluto in the restaurant, who’d squeezed Goofy’s nose and pulled the bristles in his jowls and messed with his hat and, on behalf of his comrades, even bet the pooches that none of them would die. (Talk, he might have thought, about your Mississippi riverboat gamblers!
I’m
a bleeding sport!) But who’d either forgotten the incident or didn’t recognize in the whipped and cringing mutt right there in front of him—from itself cringing, from its close and closing circumstances—anything of the aloof, valorous pup of that first encounter. So there was no one. Lydia’s remark about the ceiling gobbledygook to the general, Lamar Kenny’s rage not only inexplicable but not even picked up. (The whispering, of course—he was an actor, he had the floor; you don’t whisper when an actor has the floor; why, that’s worse than heckling him—Mudd- Gaddis’s remark, which he took to be a sly dig about his acting; the little girl on the bed—Of the three girls, only Rena had failed to get up when the Mouse and Dog appeared on the ceiling.)