Billy was glad to get backstage and take off the mask of his Satan suit. Last night someone had pelted him with a tomato. He switched the laboring engine to reverse, which drew all the wires and dangling figures backward behind the stage curtain. Then Billy turned on the tent’s lights. Dr. Mirakle was “freed” from the black cabinet—though the lock was a fake and had never been locked at all—and the night’s last show was over.
Billy checked all the chains and wires that operated the Ghost Show figures, then went out to pick up the litter of cigarette butts and empty popcorn boxes. Dr. Mirakle went backstage, as he did every night, to place the prop figures in their little individual boxes, like small white coffins. They had one more day in a shopping-center parking lot south of Andalusia; about this time tomorrow night the carnival would be on its way to another small town.
When he was finished, Billy went backstage and washed his hands in a bucket of soapy water, then changed into a fresh shirt.
“And where are you going?” Mirakle asked, carefully placing a ghost into a styrofoam box.
Billy shrugged. “I thought I’d just walk up the midway, see what’s going on.”
“Of course, even though you know every game on the midway is as crooked as a pig’s tail. Let’s see: clean hands, fresh shirt, combed hair—if I recall my ancient history, ‘spiffing up’ is what I used to do when I was about to meet a member of the opposite sex. Do you have a certain young lady in mind?”
“No sir.”
“Walking up the midway, eh? You wouldn’t be planning to visit a certain sideshow that’s got all the roustabouts in such agitation, would you?”
Billy grinned. “I thought I might look in on it.” The Jungle Love show, down at the far end of the midway, had joined the carnival at the first of the week. There were pictures of the girls out front, and a red-painted legend read SEE TIGRA! SANTHA THE PANTHA! BARBIE BALBOA! LEONA THE LIONESS! Not all of the girls were so attractive, but one picture had caught Billy’s eye when he’d strolled over there a few days before. The girl in it had short, curly blond hair, and it looked as if all she wore was a black velvet robe. Her legs were bare and shapely, and her pretty gamine face sent out a direct sexual challenge. Billy felt his stomach do slow flipflops every time he looked at that picture, but he hadn’t had the time yet to go inside.
Mirakle shook his head. “I did tell your mother I’d look after you, you know, and I hear some rough customers hang around that ‘exhibition.’”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I doubt that. Once a young man sees a nude woman gyrating on stage a few feet from his face, he’s never quite the same again. Well, go ahead if your hormones are in such a galloping fit. I’ll just finish putting the kiddies to bed.”
Billy left the tent, walking into the humid August night. Around him the air glowed with lights. Some of the sideshows were closing down, but most of the rides still jerked and swung their passengers through the night, their engines growling like wild beasts. The carousel, topped with white and blue bulbs, was spinning merrily as recorded calliope music rang out. The Ferris wheel was a jeweled pendant set against the darkness.
Billy had received a letter from home today. The letters sometimes caught up with him late, though he tried to let his mother know in advance where the carnival would be stopping. There was a message in his father’s scrawl: Hope you are fine. I went to the doctor yesterday. I feel good. Love, Dad. He’d written back that he was doing fine, and business was good; he left out the fact that he had to dress up as Satan. He also didn’t mention that he’d seen the black aura several times in the throng of customers.
He’d found out that Dr. Mirakle’s real name was Reginald Merkle, and that he had a real affinity to J.W. Dant bourbon. Several times the man had gone through his Ghost Show routine barely able to stand. Dr. Mirakle had started out to be a dentist, he’d told Billy, until he realized he couldn’t stomach the idea of peering into people’s mouths all day long. Billy at one point had inquired about Mirakle’s family, but the man quickly said he had no family except for the little figures of ghosts and skeletons. He had names for all of them, and he treated them like children. Billy was puzzled about the picture of the young man Dr. Mirakle carried in his wallet, but it was obvious Dr. Mirakle didn’t want to discuss his personal life.
Billy saw the blinking red neon sign ahead: JUNGLE LOVE…JUNGLE LOVE. He could hear the faint booming of bass drums.
Another new sideshow had been added to the midway as well. It stood between the Ghost Show and the Tiltawhirl on the other side of the midway, its white clapboard structure festooned with garish paintings of snakes with venom-dripping fangs. The entrance was through the open mouth of a huge snake, and above the entrance the sign read ALIVE! SEE KILLER SNAKES OF THE WORLD! ALIVE!
It was a strange thing, Billy thought, but after four days he still hadn’t seen the man who ran the snake show. The only sign of life over there, besides the paying customers, was that the entrance was open at three in the afternoon and closed at eleven. Right now he saw that the door was slightly ajar. The huge red-painted snake eyes seemed to watch Billy as he hurried past.
“Stop it!” he heard someone wail.
“Please…going too fast…!”
Between Billy and the Jungle Love sideshow loomed another new ride that was shaped like the skeleton of a huge umbrella. Four gondolas—yellow, red, purple, and one still wrapped up in a protective green tarpaulin—whirled on the end of thick metal spokes connected to a central piston mechanism. Hydraulics hissed, and the gondolas wildly pitched up and down. Screams erupted as the ride went faster and faster, the gondolas dipping to within three feet of the ground and then quickly pitching upward to almost thirty feet. The entire mechanism groaned, swinging in a fierce circle. Two people were riding in each of the three gondolas, which had safety canopies of wire mesh that closed down over their heads. At the control lever, his foot poised above a metal brake pad, was a thin man with lank, shoulder-length brown hair. A sign with mostly burnt-out bulbs said OCTOPUS.
“…please stop it!” a voice wailed from one of the gondolas.
Billy saw the man give it more speed. The Octopus was vibrating, the noise of pounding pistons was almost shaking the ground. The man was grinning, but Billy saw that his eyes were dead. The machine seemed barely in control.
Billy stepped closer to him and touched his shoulder. “Mister—”
The man’s head whipped around. For an instant Billy saw a red gleam in his eyes, and he started, remembering the way the beast had grinned at him out on that highway in the dead of night. Then the man blinked. “Shitfire!” he shouted, and stomped down on the brake as he disengaged the gears. With a high metallic shriek, the Octopus began to slow. “Damn it, boy!” the man said. “Don’t you sneak up on people like that!” A jagged scar ran through the man’s right eyebrow, and in a breath of wind from the Octopus his hair lifted to show he was missing an ear. One hand had only three fingers.
The Octopus was slowing. The whine of brakes had faded. But in the absence of noise Billy imagined he heard another sound: a high-pitched, eerie screaming—like a dozen voices at once. The sound faded in and out, and Billy felt his flesh crawl.
The man went to each gondola and unlocked the mesh canopies, letting out angry and tearful kids. “So sue me!” he shouted at one of them.
Billy stared at the Octopus. He saw scaly, rust-eaten metal behind a hanging flap of tarpaulin. The faint screaming went on and on, drifting in and out. “Why’s that gondola covered up?” he asked the man.
“Needs work. Gonna repaint it. Don’t you have nothin’ better to do?” He glared up at a couple of approaching teen-agers and snapped, “We’re closed!”
Abruptly, the eerie voices stopped, as if they’d been silenced by a stronger force. Billy felt himself stepping closer to the hidden gondola. He had the sudden urge to climb into it, to close the canopy over his head, to let the Octopus whirl him high into the air. It would be the best ride in the
world, he thought. The most thrilling ever. But for the most excitement, the very most, you have to ride in the covered gondola…
He stopped in his tracks, and he knew.
There was something deadly in that scabrous gondola.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” the man said uneasily. When Billy turned toward him, he saw a heavyset woman with a sad face and coarse blond hair coming out of the shadows.
“Buck?” she said tentatively. “Buck, it’s time to close down now.”
“Don’t bother me, woman!” he shouted, and then he paused, frowning. “I’m sorry, hon,” he said wearily, and then he looked again at the Octopus. Billy saw a strange combination of fear and love on his face. “You’re right. It’s time to shut it down for tonight.” Buck started walking to the generator that powered the ride.
The woman came toward Billy. “Get away from that machine, boy. Get away from it right now!” she warned him. And then the Octopus sign went out.
“What’s wrong with it?” he asked her, quietly so the man wouldn’t hear.
She shook her head, obviously afraid to say any more.
“Go on about your business!” Buck shouted at him. “This is a good ride, boy!” Something was about to break behind the man’s eyes. “I was in control all the time!”
Billy saw the torment in both their faces, and he hurried away. Lights were flickering off all over the midway. He saw the Jungle Love sign go out, and knew he’d missed the last show.
The Octopus had just gone up this morning. He remembered that one of the roustabouts had split his hand open on a bolt, but then he’d thought nothing of it because accidents were common. The roustabout had bled a great deal. He decided to stay away from that machine, because he remembered his mother telling him that evil could grow in the most unexpected places—like an oak tree.
Or a machine.
The screams were silenced, Billy thought, as if the machine had offered them up to whet his curiosity. When he looked over his shoulder, the man and woman were gone. The midway was clearing out.
Billy glanced over at the Jungle Love sideshow. There was a figure standing near the entrance, where the sexy photographs were tacked to a display board. He decided to walk over, to find out if the man worked with the sideshow. But before Billy could reach him, the man stepped into the darkness between the Jungle Love trailer and the Mad Mouse maze.
When Billy reached the display board, he saw that the photograph of the blond girl—the one who troubled his dreams so much—had been ripped away.
31
“YOU’D BETTER SLOW DOWN,” Helen Betts said. “Wayne won’t like it.”
At the wheel of his fire-engine-red Camaro, Terry Dozier was watching the speedometer climb to sixty-five. Before the headlights, the highway—ten miles north of Fayette—was a yellow tunnel cut through the mountain of night. Terry smiled, his eyes full of devilment. No one, not even his steady girl friend, Helen, knew that one of Terry’s favorite hobbies was beating out the brains of stray cats with a Louisville Slugger.
Wayne was stretched out in the backseat, his legs sprawled on a half-empty box of Falconer Crusade Bibles, the last of a dozen boxes that Terry and Helen had helped Wayne hand-deliver. Fayette County residents who’d donated upward of one hundred dollars during the highly publicized “Bible Bounty Week” got a Bible and a visit from Little Wayne Falconer. It had been a long, tiring day, and Wayne had healed whole families today of everything from inner-ear trouble to nicotine addiction. His restless sleep was haunted by two recurring dreams: one of a snake of fire fighting an eagle of smoke; and one in which the Creekmores were standing in that hospital waiting room, the woman’s eyes fixed on him as if she could see right through his skin to the soul, her mouth opening to say Do you know what you’re doing, son?
He feared he was falling under some kind of spell, because he couldn’t get his mind off the woman and boy. They were using strong power on him, he thought, to draw his mind from the straight-and-narrow path. He’d been reading a lot lately about demon possession, about demons that were so strong they could inhabit both the living and the dead, and nothing scared him any worse. Praying in the chapel at home seemed to ease his brain for a while.
Wayne came up out of a light sleep and saw Helen’s autumn hair blowing in the breeze from the open window. Both she and Terry were going to college in a few weeks on Falconer Crusade scholarships. Helen was a pretty girl, he mused. Her hair smelled nice, like peppermints. He was horrified when he realized he was getting an erection, and he tried to blank out the thought of sinful sex. Nude girls sometimes cavorted in his mind, begging him to take off his clothes and join them. Stop it! he told himself, squeezing his eyes shut. But as he drifted off again he thought: I’ll bet Helen and Terry do it do it do it…
“Where are you going?” she asked Terry in a nervous whisper. “You missed the turnoff!”
“On purpose, babe. Don’t worry, it’s cool.”
“Tell me where, Terry!”
“Steve Dickerson’s having a party, isn’t he? We were invited, weren’t we?”
“Well…sure, but…that’s not exactly Wayne’s type of crowd. I mean…with everybody going off to college and all, it might be kinda wild.”
“So what? It’ll do old Wayne good.” He squeezed her thigh and she gave his hand a little love-slap. “And if somebody gets drunk, Wayne can just touch his hand and draw out the deeeemon of al-ke-hall!” He giggled as Helen looked at him, horrified. “Oh come on, Betts! You don’t take that healing crap seriously, do you?”
Helen blanched, turning quickly to make sure Wayne was still sleeping. She was sure glad it was such a clear August night, no thunderstorms around—struck by lightning would be a bad way to go.
The Dickerson house was a two-story colonial on the edge of a six-acre lake. There was a long expanse of emerald green lawn, dew glittering in the squares of light cast from the windows. Terry whistled softly when he saw the tough specimens of high-horsepower cars parked along the curb.
He parked the Camaro and winked at Helen. “Wayne? We’re here.”
“Huh? We’re home?”
“Well…no, not just yet. We’re at Steve Dickerson’s house.”
Wayne sat up, bleary-eyed.
“Now, before you say anything,” Terry told him, “there’s a party goin’ on. Steve’s folks are out of town this weekend, so he invited everybody. I thought we could all…you know, unwind.”
“But”—Wayne stared at the house—“Steve Dickerson isn’t saved.”
“Helen and I worked hard today, didn’t we? By the time we take you home and come back, it’ll be pretty late. So why don’t we go in for a while, just to be social?”
“I don’t know. My…my father’s expecting me home by…”
“Don’t worry about it!” Terry was getting out. Helen was irritated at him for dragging Wayne to this party, because she knew the hell-raisers of Indian Hills High would be here, the kind of people Terry associated with before he’d been Saved. Sometimes she thought that Being Saved was rubbing off Terry like old paint.
Uneasily, Wayne followed them up the flagstone walkway. They could hear the muffled thump of loud music from inside. Helen said nervously, “Wayne, it’ll be fun. I bet there are a lot of girls who’d like to meet you.”
Wayne’s heart skipped a beat. “Girls?”
“Yeah.” Terry rang the doorbell. “Girls. You know what they are, don’t you?”
The door opened, and the riotous noise of a party in full swing came crashing out. Hal Baker stood on the threshold, his arm around a skinny blond girl who looked drunk. “How’s it hangin’, Terry!” Hal said. “Come on in! Old Steve’s around here some—” His blurry gaze fell upon Wayne Falconer, and his face went into shock. “Is that… Little Wayne?”
“Yep,” Terry chortled, “sure is. Thought we’d stop by to check out the action!” Terry and Helen stepped into the house, but Wayne paused. Laughter and music were thunderous inside there. The blond girl’s
nipples were showing through the purple halter-top she wore. She smiled at him.
“Comin’ in?” Terry asked.
“No… I think I’d better…”
“What’s wrong, man?” the girl asked him, a foxy grin on her face. “You afraid of big bad parties?”
“No. I’m not afraid.” And before he’d realized it, Wayne had taken a step forward. Hal closed the door behind him. The Amboy Dukes singing “Journey to the Center of the Mind” blasted from the rear of the house. Sinful drug music, Wayne thought, as he followed Terry and Helen through a mass of people he didn’t know. They were drinking and smoking and running as wild as bucks through the entire house. Wayne’s spine was as stiff as pineboard. He felt as if he’d stepped onto another planet. An aroma of burning rope scorched his nostrils, and a boy stumbled past him stinking drunk.
Terry pressed a paper cup into Wayne’s hand. “There you go. Oh, don’t worry. It’s just Seven-Up.”
Wayne sipped at it. It was Seven-Up, all right, but it had gone flat and tasted like the inside of an old shoe. It was as hot and smoky as Hades inside this house, and Wayne sucked on the ice in his cup.
“Mingle, Wayne,” Terry told him, and pulled Helen away into the crowd. He didn’t dare tell her that he’d laced Wayne’s drink with gin.
Wayne had never been to an unchaperoned party before. He wandered through the house, repelled and yet fascinated. He saw many pretty girls, some wearing tight hotpants, and one of them even smiled at him across the room. He blushed and hurried away, trying to hide the stirring in his pants. On the patio that overlooked the dark, still lake, people were dancing to the roar of a stereo. Dancing! Wayne thought. It was inviting sin! But he watched the bodies rub, transfixed. It was like watching a pagan frenzy. That burned-rope smell followed him everywhere, and he saw people smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. His eyes began to water. Across the patio he saw Terry talking to a girl with long black hair. He tried to catch Terry’s attention, because he was feeling a little light-headed and needed to get home; but then Terry and Helen had started dancing to Steppenwolf music, so Wayne went off toward the lakeshore to get away from the noise.