‘Give her over, son,’ the old man said. His voice was reedy and implacable. He held out his hands. It was Max Devore, he had come back, even in death he was seeking custody. Yet it wasn’t him. I knew it wasn’t. The planes of this man’s face were subtly different, the cheeks gaunter, the eyes a brighter blue.
‘Where am I?’ I called to him, accenting the last word heavily, and in front of Angelina’s booth, the man in the turban (a Hindu who perhaps hailed from Sandusky, Ohio) put down his flute and simply watched. The snake-girls stopped dancing and watched, too, slipping their arms around each other and drawing together for comfort. ‘Where am I, Devore? If our great-grandfathers shit in the same pit, then where am I?’
‘Ain’t here to answer your questions. Give her over.’
‘I’ll take her, Jared,’ one of the younger men-one of those who were really there — said. He looked at Devore with a kind of fawning eagerness that sickened me, mostly because I knew who he was: Bill Dean’s father. A man who had grown up to be one of the most respected elders in Castle County was all but licking Devore’s boots.
Don’t think too badly of him, Jo whispered. Don’t think too badly of any of them. They were very young.
‘You don’t need to do nothing,’ Devore said. His reedy voice was irritated; Fred Dean looked abashed. ‘He’s going to hand her over on his own. And if he don’t, we’ll take her together.’
I looked at the man on the far left, the third of those that seemed totally real, totally there. Was this me? It didn’t look like me. There was something in the face that seemed familiar but —
‘Hand her over, Irish,’ Devore said. ‘Last chance.’
‘No.’
Devore nodded as if this was exactly what he had expected. ‘Then we’ll take her. This has got to end. Come on, boys.’
They started toward me and as they did I realized who the one on the end — the one in the caulked treewalker boots and flannel loggers’ pants — reminded me of: Kenny Auster, whose wolfhound would eat cake ’til it busted. Kenny Auster, whose baby brother had been drowned under the pump by Kenny’s father.
I looked behind me. The Red-Tops were still playing, Sara was still laughing, shaking her hips with her hands in the sky, and the crowd was still plugging the east end of the midway. That way was no good, anyway. if I went that way, I’d end up raising a little girl in the early years of the twentieth century, trying to make a living by writing penny dreadfuls and dime novels. That might not be so bad . . . but there was a lonely young woman miles and years from here who would miss her. Who might even miss us both.
I turned back and saw the jackboys were almost on me. Some of them more here than others, more vital, but all of them dead. All of them damned. I looked at the towhead whose descendants would include Kenny Auster and asked him, ‘What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you men do?’
He held out his hands. ‘Give her over, Irish. That’s all you have to do. You and the woman can have more. All the more you want. She’s young, she’ll pop em out like watermelon seeds.’
I was hypnotized, and they would have taken us if not for Kyra. ‘What’s happening?’ she screamed against my shirt. ‘Something smells! Something smells so bad! Oh Mike, make it stop! ‘
And I realized I could smell it, too. Spoiled meat and swampgas. Burst tissue and simmering guts. Devore was the most alive of all of them, generating the same crude but powerful magnetism I had felt around his great-grandson, but he was as dead as the rest of them, too: as he neared I could see the tiny bugs which were feeding in his nostrils and the pink corners of his eyes.
Everything down here is death, I thought. Didn’t my own wife tell me so?
They reached out their tenebrous hands, first to touch Ki and then to take her. I backed up a step, looked to my right, and saw more ghosts — some coming out of busted windows, some slipping from redbrick chimneys. Holding Kyra in my arms, I ran for the Ghost House.
‘Get him!’ Jared Devore yelled, startled. ‘Get him, boys! Get that punk! Goddamnit!’
I sprinted up the wooden steps, vaguely aware of something soft rubbing against my cheek —
Ki’s little stuffed dog, still clutched in one of her hands. I wanted to look back and see how close they were getting, but I didn’t dare. If I stumbled —
‘Hey!’ the woman in the ticket booth cawed. She had clouds of gingery hair, makeup that appeared to have been applied with a garden-trowel, and mercifully resembled no one I knew. She
was just a carny, just passing through this benighted place. Lucky her. ‘Hey, mister, you gotta buy a ticket!’
No time, lady, no time.
‘Stop him!’ Devore shouted. ‘He’s a goddam punk thief! That ain’t his young ‘un he’s got! Stop him!’ But no one did and I rushed into the darkness of the Ghost House with Ki in my arms.
Beyond the entry was a passage so narrow I had to turn sideways to get down it. Phosphorescent eyes glared at us in the gloom. Up ahead was a growing wooden rumble, a loose sound with a clacking chain beneath it. Behind us came the clumsy thunder of caulk-equipped loggers’ boots rushing up the stairs outside. The ginger-haired carny was hollering at them now, she was telling them that if they broke anything inside they’d have to give up the goods. ‘You mind me, you damned rubes!’ she shouted. ‘That place is for kids, not the likes of you!’
The rumble was directly ahead of us. Something was turning. At first I couldn’t make out what it was.
‘Put me down, Mike!’ Kyra sounded excited. ‘I want to go through by myself!’
I set her on her feet, then looked nervously back over my shoulder. The bright light at the entryway was blocked out as they tried to cram in.
‘You asses!’ Devore yelled. ‘Not all at the same time! Sweet weeping Jesus!’ There was a smack and someone cried out. I faced front just in time to see Kyra dart through the rolling barrel, holding her hands out for balance. Incredibly, she was laughing.
I followed, got halfway across, then went down with a thump.
‘Ooops!’ Kyra called from the far side, then giggled as I tried to get up, fell again, and was tumbled all the way over. The bandanna fell out of my bib pocket. A bag of horehound candy dropped from another pocket. I tried to look back, to see if they had got themselves sorted out and were coming. When I did, the barrel hurled me through another inadvertent somersault. Now I knew how clothes felt in a dryer.
I crawled to the end of the barrel, got up, took Ki’s hand, and let her lead us deeper into the Ghost House. We got perhaps ten paces before white bloomed around her like a lily and she screamed. Some animal — something that sounded like a huge cat — hissed heavily. Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream and I was about to jerk her backward into my arms again when the hiss came once more. I felt hot air on my ankles, and Ki’s dress made that bell-shape around her legs again. This time she laughed instead of screaming.
‘Go, Ki!’ I whispered. ‘Fast.’
We went on, leaving the steam-vent behind. There was a mirrored corridor where we were reflected first as squat dwarves and then as scrawny ectomorphs with long white vampire features. I had to urge Kyra on again; she wanted to make faces at herself. Behind us, I heard cursing lumberjacks trying to negotiate the barrel. I could hear Devore cursing, too, but he no longer seemed so . . . well, so eminent.
There was a sliding-pole that landed us on a big canvas pillow. This made a loud farting noise when we hit it, and Ki laughed until fresh tears spilled down her cheeks, rolling around and kicking her feet in glee. I got my hands under her arms and yanked her up.
‘Don’t taggle yer own quartermack,’ she said, then laughed again. Her fear seemed to have entirely departed.
We went down another narrow corridor. It smelled of the fragrant pine from which it had been constructed. Behind one of these walls, two ‘ghosts’ were clanking chains as mechanically as men working on a shoe-factory assembly line, talking about where they were going to take their girls
tonight and who was going to bring some ‘red-eye engine,’ whatever that was. I could no longer hear anyone behind us. Kyra led the way confidently, one of her little hands holding one of my big ones, pulling me along. When we came to a door painted with glowing flames and marked THIS