Twilight Eyes (9 page)

“Seventeen.”

“You look younger.”

“Going on eighteen,” I said defensively.

“That's the usual progression.”

“What?”

“After that it'll be nineteen, then twenty, and then there'll be no stopping you,” she said, a distinct note of sarcasm in her voice.

Sensing that she was the type most likely to respond better to spunk than to subservience, I smiled and said, “I guess it wasn't like that with you. Looks to me like you jumped straight from twelve to ninety.”

She didn't smile back at me, and the coolness didn't go out of her, but she gave up the frown. “You can talk?”

“Aren't I talking?”

“You know what I mean.”

By way of an answer, I picked up the sledgehammer, swung it at the striking pad hard enough to ring the bell and attract the attention of the nearest marks, turned toward the concourse, and launched into a spiel. In a few minutes I brought in three bucks.

“You'll do,” Rya Raines said. When she talked to me, she stared straight into my eyes, and her gaze made me hotter than the August sun. “All you have to know is that the game isn't gaffed, which you've already proved, and I don't want you being an alibi agent. Gaffed games and alibi agents aren't allowed on the Sombra Brothers' lot, and I wouldn't have them even if they were allowed. It's not
easy
to ring that bell; pretty damned hard, in fact; but the mark gets a fair shot at winning, and when he does win, he gets the prize, no alibis.”

“I got you.”

Taking off her coin apron and change-maker and passing them to me, she spoke as firmly and briskly as any no-nonsense junior executive at General Motors: “I'll send someone around at five o'clock, and you'll be off from five till eight, for supper, for a nap if you need it, then you'll come back on and stay on until the midway closes down. You'll bring the receipts to me, at my trailer, tonight, down in the meadow. I have an Airstream, the largest they make. You'll recognize it because it's the only one hitched to a brand-new, red, one-ton Chevy pickup. If you play straight, if you don't do anything stupid like trying to skim the take, you'll do all right working for me. I own a few other concessions, and I'm always on the lookout for a right type who can handle responsibility. You get paid the end of every day, and if you're a good enough pitchman to improve on the average take, then you'll get a slice of the higher profits. If you're straight with me, you'll get a better deal from nobody. But—listen up now and be warned—if you jack me around, buster, I'll see to it that you wind up with your balls in a sling. We understand each other?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Remembering Jelly Jordan's reference to the girl who had started out as a weight-guesser and had worked her way up to a major concession by the age of seventeen, I said, “Uh, one of these other games you own—is it a duck shoot?”

“Duck shoot, one guess-your-weight stand, one bottle-pitch, one grab-stand that specializes in pizza, a kiddy ride called the Happy Toonerville Trolley, and seventy percent interest in a sideshow called Animal Oddities,” she said crisply. “And I'm neither twelve nor ninety; I'm twenty-one, and I've come a hell of a long way from nothing in a hell of a short time. I didn't put it all together by being naive or soft or dumb. There's nothing of the mark in me, and as long as you remember that, Slim, we'll get along just fine.”

Without asking if I had any more questions, she walked off along the concourse. With each brisk stride she took, her small, firm, high ass worked prettily in her tight jeans.

I watched her until she was out of sight in the growing crowd. Then, with a sudden realization of my condition, I put down the change-maker and the apron, turned to the high-striker, picked up the sledgehammer, swung it seven times, one after the other, ringing the bell with six of the blows, not pausing until I could face the passing marks without the embarrassment of a very visible erection.

As the afternoon wore on, I ballyed the high-striker with genuine pleasure. The trickle of marks grew to a stream and then to a river, flowing endlessly along the concourse in the warm summer glare, and I pulled in their shiny half-dollars almost as successfully as if I had been reaching into their pockets.

Even when I saw the first goblin of the day, at a few minutes past two o'clock, my good mood and high enthusiasm stayed with me. I was accustomed to seeing seven or eight goblins a week, considerably more if I was working in an outfit that drew decent crowds or was traveling through a big city where there were lots of people. I had long ago figured that one out of every four or five hundred people is a goblin in disguise, which means perhaps half a million in the U.S. alone, so if I had not adjusted to seeing them everywhere I went, I would have gone mad before ever arriving at the Sombra Brothers Carnival. I knew by now that they were not aware of the special threat I posed to them; they did not realize that I could see through their masquerade, so they took no special interest in me. I had the itch to kill every one of them I saw, for I knew by experience that they were hostile to all mankind and had no purpose but to cause pain and misery on the earth. However, I seldom encountered them in lonely circumstances that permitted attack, and unless I wanted to learn what the inside of a prison was like, I did not dare slaughter one of the hateful creatures in full view of witnesses who could not perceive the devil under the human costume.

The goblin that strolled by the high-striker shortly after two o'clock was comfortably ensconced in the body of a mark: a big, towheaded, open-faced, good-natured farm boy, eighteen or nineteen, dressed in a tank top, cutoff jeans, and sandals. He was with two other guys his age, neither of whom was a goblin, and he was just about the most innocent-looking citizen you ever saw, joking and cutting up a little, enjoying himself. But beneath the human glaze a goblin peered out with eyes of fire.

The farm boy did not stop at the high-striker, and I kept my spiel un-spooling as I watched him pass by, and not ten minutes later I saw a second beast. This one had assumed the appearance of a stocky, gray-haired man of about fifty-five, but his alien shape was grossly apparent to me.

I know that what I see is not actually the physical goblin itself encased in some sort of plastic flesh. The human body is real enough. What I perceive is, I suppose, either the spirit of the goblin or the biological potential of its shape-shifting flesh.

And, at a quarter of three, I saw two more of them. Outwardly they were just a pair of attractive teenage girls, small-town gawkers dazzled by the carnival. Within lurked monstrous entities with quivering pink snouts.

By four o'clock, forty goblins had passed by the high-striker, and a couple of them had even stopped to test their strength, and by that time my good mood had finally vanished. The crowd on the midway could not have numbered more than six or eight thousand, so the monsters among them far exceeded the usual ratio.

Something was going on; something was meant to happen on the Sombra Brothers' midway this afternoon; this extraordinary convocation of goblins had one purpose—to witness human misery and suffering. As a species, they seemed not merely to enjoy our pain but to thrive on it,
feed
on it, as if our agony was their only—or primary—sustenance. I had seen them together in large groups
only
at scenes of tragedy: the funeral of four high school football players who had been killed in a bus accident back in my hometown a few years ago; a terrible automobile pileup in Colorado; a fire in Chicago. Now, the more goblins I saw among the ordinary marks, the colder I became there in the August heat.

By the time the explanation came to me, I was so on edge that I was seriously considering using the knife in my boot, slashing at least one or two of them, and running for my life. Then I realized what must have happened. They had come to see an accident at the Dodgem Car pavilion, expecting a rider to be maimed or killed. Yes. Of course. That was what the bastard had been up to last night, before I had confronted and killed him; he had been setting up an “accident.” Now that I thought about it, I was sure I knew what had been intended, for he had been tinkering with the power feed to the motor of one of the small cars. By killing him, I had unknowingly saved some poor mark from electrocution.

Word had gone out on the goblin network:
Death, pain, horrible mutilation, and mass hysteria at the carnival tomorrow! Don't miss this stupendous show! Bring the wife and kids! Blood and burning flesh! A show for the whole family!
Responding to that message, they had come, but the promised feast of human misery had not been laid out for them, so they were wandering the concourses, trying to figure out what had happened, maybe even looking for the goblin I had murdered.

From four o'clock until five, when the relief pitchman showed up, my spirits rose steadily, for I saw no more of my enemy. Off duty, I spent half an hour searching through the crowd, but the goblins all seemed to have gone away in disappointment.

I returned to Sam Trizer's grab-stand for a bite of supper. After I had eaten, I felt much better, and I was even whistling when, on my way to the carnival headquarters to see about my trailer assignment, I encountered Jelly Jordan by the carousel.

“How goes it?” he asked, raising his voice above the calliope music.

“Terrific.”

We moved beside the ticket booth, out of the swarming marks.

He was eating a chocolate doughnut. He licked his lips and said, “Rya doesn't seem to've bitten off any of your ears or fingers.”

“She's nice,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Well, she is,” I said defensively. “A little gruff, maybe, and certainly plainspoken. But underneath all that, there's a decent lady, sensitive, worth knowing.”

“Oh, you're right. Absolutely. I ain't surprised by what you say—just that you saw through her hard-bitten act so quickly. Most people don't take time to see the niceness in her, and some people
never
see.”

My spirits rose further when I heard his confirmation of my vague psychic impressions. I wanted her to be nice. I wanted her to be a good person under the Ice Maiden act. I wanted her to be a person worth knowing. Hell, what it came down to—I just
wanted
her, and I didn't want to be wanting someone who was genuinely a bitch.

“Cash Dooley found trailer accommodations for you,” Jelly said. “Better settle in while you're on your break.”

“I'll do that,” I said.

I was feeling great as I started to turn away from him, but then I saw something out of the corner of my eye that brought me crashing down. I swung back on him, praying that I had imagined what I thought I had seen, but it was not imagination; it was still there. Blood. There was blood all over Jelly Jordan's face. Not real blood, you understand. He was finishing his chocolate doughnut, unhurt, feeling no pain. What I saw was a clairvoyant vision, an omen of violence to come. Not merely violence, either. Superimposed on Jelly's living face was an image of his face in death, his eyes open and sightless, his chubby cheeks smeared with blood. He was not just swimming down the time-stream toward injury but . . . toward imminent death.

He blinked at me. “What?”

“Uh . . .”

The precognitive flash faded.

“Something wrong, Slim?”

The vision was gone.

There was no way I could tell him and make him believe. And even if I
could
make him believe, there was no way I could change the future.

“Slim?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing wrong. I just...”

“Well?”

“Wanted to thank you again.”

“You're too damned grateful, boy. I can't stand slobbering puppies.” He scowled. “Now get the hell out of my sight.”

I hesitated. Then to cover my confusion and fear, I said, “Is that your Rya Raines imitation?”

He blinked again and grinned at me. “Yeah. How was it?”

“Not nearly mean enough.”

I left him laughing, and as I moved away I tried to persuade myself that my premonitions did not always come to pass—(although they did)

—and that, even if he was going to die, it wouldn't be soon—(although I sensed it would be very soon, indeed)

—and that even if it would be soon, there was surely something I could do to prevent it.

Something.

Surely something.

The crowd began to thin out and the midway began to shut down at midnight, but I kept the high-striker open until twelve-thirty, snaring a last few half-dollars, because I wanted to report a HE-MAN (rather than a GOOD BOY) take for my first day on the job. By the time I closed the concession and headed for the meadow at the back of the county fairgrounds, where the carnies had established their mobile community, it was a few minutes after one o'clock.