Totentanz (14 page)

"Mom?" he said again, moving off the couch
and into the kitchen. The house was like a brightly lit tomb. The
television talked hollowly behind him, but outside, of that, the
house was dead silent. He could hear his footsteps. Where was his
mother? Why was everything so quiet?

Come to me,
the calliope said, and he found himself wanting
to go.

Then he was running through the kitchen,
bumping into a chair, and dashing to the back sewing room.
"Mom?"

The room was empty. The cord was yanked out
of the wall socket, as if her foot had pulled it out as she rose,
unheedful. The laundry room was beyond, and as Reggie walked
quickly to the door, he glanced at a picture on the wall—a
photograph of his father, smiling proudly in his Navy flyer's
uniform, his helmet in his hands. At the bottom of the glass over
the photograph there was a strip of masking tape that read: "Black
and Proud."

The laundry room was empty. Reggie saw that
the door leading to the backyard was wide open.

"
Mom?
" he called fearfully. As he
stepped out into the yard, he saw her. It was as though she were
made of stone. The whole sky toward the amusement park was lit up
like a white dome. The light arced upward and out, illuminating the
town like a full moon. Where the light was brightest, the Ferris
wheel glowed like a circular neon kitchen lamp, with strings of
flashing red and green bulbs around its rim. It was spinning too
fast.

Come to me, come to
me,
it seemed to call, and as if in
agreement, the sound of the calliope grew even louder and more
hypnotic.

"Mom?" Reggie said once more, moving up
beside his mother. There was a tremulous smile on her lips, and
her eyes were wet.

"He's come back, Reggie," she said, her voice
a whispered, happy sob.

"Mom—"

"Your father's come back. I
know it." She knelt beside him, resting on one knee and taking his
shoulders in her hands. A single tear tracked its way down one
smooth cheek.
She's so beautiful,
Reggie thought. "After all this time," she said,
"he's come home to us.''

"Mom, it's not true. He's
dead. He
has
to
be dead."

She shook her head and smiled, and Reggie
could feel the tension of anticipation through her fingers.

She let go of him and stood up. The calliope
music had grown louder, and it was working a spell on her. Reggie
saw other people standing in other backyards, staring up at the sky
or directly at the amusement park.

"I have to go to him," she said.

She stepped away from him, brushing his hands
away. She moved as if under water. Reggie could not think straight;
the music was so loud and yet so soothing that it wrapped him like
a winter blanket.

Come to me now.

His mother went through the back gate to the
street. Reggie shouted to her to stop, but she did not hear him;
she was listening only to the calliope and to the inner music of
her conviction that her dead pilot husband was home.

There came a roar above the calliope now, a
sharp, piercing whine that sounded like a screaming engine. His
mother stopped and looked up. "See!" she cried. "See!" Reggie
followed her gaze to a sleek Navy plane. It looked silver in the
harsh light, and behind the cockpit window a figure could be
faintly seen. The plane swooped low over the house, dipping its
wings from side to side and then veering off sharply toward the
amusement park.

"Don't you see, he's home!"

"Oh, Mom," Reggie said. She was going down
the street. There were others there, moving like dream figures,
some pointing ahead, exclaiming, "Look! Look!" Children danced
beside them, sharing in their excitement.

"Mom, no!" Reggie ran after her and pulled
her arm, but she would not be stopped.

"He's waiting for me, Reggie," she said
quietly.

She walked off down the street, joining the
others already turning the corner to the edge of town.

Jack
, Reggie thought.

He ran back to the house and the telephone.
He had to get the Three Musketeers together. The phone rang and
rang, but there was no answer. With a cry, Reggie threw it down and
raced from the house. His mother had vanished around the corner.
Every moment others were joining the procession.

Reggie ran as fast as his feet would carry
him. One block, two blocks, and on each the eerie story was the
same: line on line of people leaving their homes and moving toward
the amusement park. Reggie passed his science teacher, Mr. Weiss,
who was shouting "Cynthia!" at the top of his lungs and nearly
dancing. He passed a hundred others whom he knew at least by
sight, each lost in his own mad skipping movements and mutterings.
And then he was at Jack's house.

"Jack!"

Jack was curled up on the front stoop, his
hands pressed to his ears. His eyes were closed, and he had a rifle
cradled loosely in his arms. The front door was open behind him,
letting a spill of warm indoor light out to be swallowed by the
white sunlight from the park. Inside, the television was on. So was
the stereo. Jack was yelling to himself, "One, two, three, four!"
over and over again, and as Reggie put his hand on his friend's
shoulder, Jack nearly jumped.

"I won't!" he cried, eyes screwed shut.

"Jack!" Reggie screamed. "Open your
eyes!"

Jack opened one eye, then the other.

"Reggie. . . ."

Jack brought his hands away from his ears.
Instantly he became another person, eyes misting over, head turning
toward the bright lights at the edge of town. He clamped his hands
back over his ears and rose, stumbling through the doorway and into
the riotous noise inside.

"Close the door!" he shouted.

When they were in the living room, he turned
the stereo up all the way and then took his hands from his ears. He
counted slowly, "One, two, three . . ." and, waiting, nothing
happened. Only then did he look at Reggie.

"Doesn't it bother you?" he asked over the
din of the electronic equipment, the blare of television
commercials. "My father is gone. He saw a bunch of his buddies who
got killed in Vietnam. He was a crazy person. I couldn't stop him."
He stumbled to the television and turned it up all the way.

“It's the calliope music!" he yelled.

"We have to get Pup."

"I tried to call him when all this started,”
Jack shouted. "His mother said he had been gone all day. She
sounded nervous, said she was afraid he'd sneaked off to the
amusement park alone. Then she dropped the phone. I could hear her
shrieking and crying, but it was the happy kind of shrieking." He
grabbed Reggie by the arm. "I've got an idea.”

They went to the cellar steps and down to the
basement. There was an old television at the bottom, covered
thickly with dust. Jack unwound the frayed cord, plugged it into
the overhead socket and turned the set on. It began to whine like a
stepped-on cat. Reggie had to cover his ears to keep out the
sound.

Jack went to one corner and rummaged through
a cardboard box. Most of it was filled with war mementos, dummy
hand grenades and copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine. He held up
a pair of blue earmuffs, pulling the curl out of them and putting
them on his head. "This won't be enough," he said, and he motioned
Reggie back upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. In a hall
closet he yanked out a wad of medicinal cotton and tore off two
great fistfuls, molding them deftly and placing them over his ears
before mounting the earmuffs over them. "Get something you can tie
around the muffs to keep them on me," he said. Reggie looked around
the floor, finally pulling a length of gray twine from under a full
bag of unloaded canned goods. But as he began to wrap it around
Jack's head, Jack suddenly pushed his hand away.

"Don't bother," he said.

He pulled the earmuffs from his head and
dropped them. As they stepped out onto the porch, the stereo and
television were still blaring inside the house.

"You hear it?" Jack asked.

"What?"

"That's just it—nothing. The calliope is
gone." He turned back into the house; in a moment the blare inside
had ceased and he returned to stand silently by Reggie.

"Wow," Jack said.

They stared over a ghost town. Up and down
the block doors yawned open, deck chairs set out on front porches
stood empty, cigarettes still smoldering in ashtrays beside them.
On one porch a black-and-white TV winked, a barely heard baseball
announcer droning high and low with each pitch, his voice rising in
sudden agitation, only to drop once more. A dog trotted by, looked
nervously from side to side, and crossed the street away from the
two boys.

The sky, sustained in its bright light,
became momentarily brighter, and then the tinkling sound of the
calliope returned. Its volume was normal now, and Jack did not
cover his ears. They saw the Ferris wheel whirr in circular
operation, and just barely they heard the creak of other rides
grinding into life.

"What do we do now?" Jack said, trying to
keep the uneasiness out of his voice.

Reggie was silent, weighing the hard knot in
his stomach.

"I don't know."

"I wish we had the other Musketeer with us,"
Jack said. "If Pup was here, we'd feel better."

Reggie said nothing. He was looking at the
Ferris wheel, listening to the distant whoosh of its heavy
mechanism rising against the artificial neon day. The wheel turned
and turned. . . . And there in the center of it was an eye,
splitting to two eyes and then coming toward him, hovering over
him, unblinking. Once again that feeling of dissociation washed
over him.

"Why didn't you help me then?" Reggie
shouted. "Why don't you help me now?"

"Who are you talking to?" Jack asked. Reggie
saw that his friend was terrified; he had the same look on his face
as the dog that had just passed.

I'm here. Follow.

The eyes moved. Out over the street now, more
like twin balls of starlight than material objects, they moved away
from the amusement park.

"Will you help me?" Reggie said.

Follow.

"Where are you going?" Jack cried fearfully.
"Who are you talking to?"

Reggie was in the center of the street now,
walking away from him. Jack looked at the open, silent door behind
him, heard the tomblike silence of the houses around him, saw the
breathless trees, the sidewalks as bright as day and as still as
night, and hurried to catch up.

Jeff Scott opened his eyes.

For a moment there was
disorientation.
Where am I?
Instantly he knew the answer.
I'm back.
There had been the long,
cold darkness, sleep without sleep, slumber without rest or real
dreams. Where did he go at those times? He didn't know. Did he go
nowhere? Was that what being dead was—not going anywhere? He
remembered dying well enough: the vain fight for breath, his eyes
so full of pressure he thought they would burst out of his head,
the sickening wetness in his crotch and then the explosion in his
mind, his eyes, his lungs. And the hate—he remembered the hate well
enough too. But what had happened after that? He recalled only
snatches of it, bits of vision, but mostly nothing. He had gone . .
. somewhere else. The next thing he remembered for sure was a damp,
dark place, with the smell of rotting wood filling his nostrils. He
had reached out and felt wet, decaying wood and wet soil. He had
brought his hand over his body to feel his other hand, and it had
felt the same as the wood and the earth: damp and soft. Then there
was a great weight lifted from him, and he was in his clothes on a
footpath under real moonlight, next to an open, unmarked grave
above Montvale. Ash appeared soon after that, and no matter where
he went, Ash seemed always to be there sooner or later. And he had
known he would return to Montvale sooner or later. And later had
come.

But where had he been before he had been
lifted from the ground? He didn't know.

So now he was awake, or what passed for
wakeful-ness. He wondered why he had to pass through these periods
of rest. It wasn't like being a vampire; he laughed at the thought
of vampires now. At least they could drink, even if it was blood.
The truth was that he felt the urge to rest at the same times he
always had; at night, and sometimes during the day. The only
consolation now was that he never got insomnia. It was easy to
sleep; he just lay down and one moment he was there, the next
moment he wasn't.

Frankenstein
. That was how, when he
got into wry moods, he thought of himself. The unliving made alive.
The word "zombie" made him uncomfortable—and anyway, he told
himself, he wasn't a true zombie because zombies were merely the
reanimated dead. They had no will of their own; they were corpses
that walked and moved as if under radio control. Zombies made him
laugh now, too. Everything made him laugh without laughing, even
Frankenstein—but at least Frankenstein, the way he had seen him on
television once, was more to his liking. The unliving made alive
and whole. Frankenstein had feelings; he thought about things. The
only trouble he had was that in the movie some fool had put a
deviate's brain in his skull, and you could hardly blame that on
him. You had the feeling that if he had had the brain he was
supposed to have had, he would not have been a monster at
all—would, in fact, have been more intelligent than the cretin who
created him.

But that—a suave monster in a smoking jacket,
talking about physics and Mozart—wouldn't have been half dramatic
enough for the movies. Nobody ever seemed to notice that it wasn't
the process itself that made the movie horrifying, only that some
jackass human had fucked up and switched brains.