Everybody Scream! (36 page)

Dingo was quick and caught Garnet before he could reach the prisoner. They fell sideways to the floor. Del dove at them, as did one of the uniformed town-hired guards who was present. Mortimer had backed off, bald terror coming over his face. He straightened his top hat as Dingo, Del and the guard hoisted Mitch to his feet. “Okay, alright, alright!” he shook them off.

“We have more to worry about with these killings, Mitch,” Sophi tried reasoning.

“If you let him go I won’t be back next year either.”

Sophi held his gaze. Del cooed, “Mitch…”

“I mean it.”

“Don’t threaten me, Mitch. That won’t change my mind. I can’t stop you from leaving…but I’m boss here and my authority holds. Leave or stay, that’s your decision, but I won’t be threatened.”

Oh?
she thought.
Oh?
Wasn’t that it? That she
had
been successfully threatened?

“He’s nothing,” Del backed her up, as promised. “We made our point, Mitch, they’ll be gone next year. That’s enough.”

“Do what you want.” Mitch stormed from the trailer.

“Thanks, folks.” Ficklebottom pocketed his tattered wallet.

“Don’t thank me, you pathetic slime,” Sophi replied. “Get the fuck out.”

“He’s out there,” Mort realized.

“He won’t touch you. Get out of my sight.”

He did. Dingo came closer. “New developments.”

“What?”

“Mendez here came in with a girl named Cookie Zalkind right after we read off the names. A few minutes later some other kids came in…Colleen Narcisi, Rena Tushkin and Diana Talmud. They were schoolmates of Heather Buffatoni. Zalkind says she saw Buffatoni go off with Sundry. And all four girls say they know the girl who went off with Fernando Colon. Her name is Fawn Horowitz. A classmate, too. They haven’t seen her since. So we were right about that. Mitch called her mother and told her that her daughter is missing. She’s coming down. He didn’t tell her about Buffatoni being dead, yet.”

“Is she bringing pictures of her?”

“Yeah. Her lawyer, too, probably–she said if anything happens to her daughter she’ll stomp this place into the ground.”

“Better call Max down,” Del told Sophi. Max Schenkel was their attorney. Tonight would keep him busy for months, but the carnival had never lost a case.

“Okay, more lab results,” Dingo went on. “No print match-ups to police files. The only blood in the Colon car was from Colon. Nothing from Fawn Horowitz–a good sign. On the floor of the Colon car we found a red shocker tablet but none on him or in his system. No shell casings. No report yet of gunfire, but people might mistake it for firecrackers or even ignore it. With all three vehicles the shots were not fired
through
the glass. The doors must have been opened for Sundry and Colon. For Habash the windows were open. No one even drew a gun in defense. Maybe it was someone they all knew.
However
…”

“Yes?”

Dingo sighed. “Habash and Gross were killed with a different gun, and had been dead for two hours in their car before the other three were killed.”

“Great,” said Sophi.

“So that’s where we stand. The town boys have arrived, they’re at the morgue. You might wanna go talk to them.”

“Would it be dangerous to page Fawn Horowitz?” Sophi asked gravely.

“I don’t know.”

“Does that Cookie kid or the others have a picture so we can start a search?”

“They’ve gone–sorry. Zalkind’s people came right out and got her.”

“Mitch must have gone over to see Pearl. Do you know how she’s doing?”

“Good, I guess. Okay.”

“What about Noelle Buda?” asked Del softly.

“She’s lying down–they gave her a sedative or whatever. She’s pretty shook. I guess she’s stranded for now too but we can worry about that later. I don’t know if she’s called her people.”

“Let her rest. Thanks, Dingo, you’re doing a good job.”

“Some last night, huh?”

“Mm,” Sophi grunted in bitter agreement.

“Let me see your hand.”

The face hovering high over her was washed with wave after wave of colored light. A sliding red light would pool into the eyes of the face and then pull itself up and out and slide off the other side of the face. The black helmet on the head of the face was a seething mass of swirling nebulae of light, and myriad glints were stars. The expression was harsh.

“Let me see your hand.” Someone took her wrist, twisted her arm. Vacantly she looked. There was a dark mark on her hand, which looked so far away and didn’t feel like part of her, her nerves not reaching that far. The face was satisfied with this mark, nodded. Let go. “Go on.”

She stumbled along, her body only a dragging string dangling from the balloon of her head. She was pushed along by those swelling behind her, until she washed onto a small patch where she stood watching the tides and eddies all around her. She swayed. She lifted her head and stared at a machine rising above some trees nearby. It had long arms that rotated, dipping up and down, and in each palm twirled a little box, like some octopus juggler. It was a glossy black with green lights running along the arms, dispensing a green glow to the foliage of the trees and to whatever or whoever else was near. And above this pirouetting monster hung a full moon. It bled tatters of ectoplasmic clouds. A violent shiver went through Fawn. She hugged herself, turned sharply away and blundered into the ocean again.

She shot a glance over her shoulder. It was following her.

She collided. Hands shot out and gripped her. Her heart was jolted as if a cattle prod had been touched against it. Whipping her head, she bugged her eyes into a new hovering face. It was darkish-skinned. The beginnings of a beard. Long filaments of flesh were being pinched away from the face like stretched strings of bubble gum until they snapped and new strings were drawn out. Fawn’s eyes lowered to a white shirt. Strings were also being pulled out of this reflective mass. Fawn saw colors that she had never seen before in opalescent swirlings on that white surface. Much of the shirt, though, had been darkened–mostly about the shoulders–with thick dried stains. The man shook her by the arms so that she would look at him again. He didn’t seem to be really any older than she. Maybe she could appeal to him, in that light.

“Watch where you are going, Satan’s whore!” A violent shake. Her arms hurt. She heard laughter and saw others like this young man close at hand.

“Help me,” she said. Her voice sounded absolutely alien to her and yet, also, the only familiar and reassuring sound in this loud place. “I’m…I must be drunk…”

“She is on drugs,” sneered a voice close at hand.

“You knocked my drink on me–look!” A hand had switched to her hair, clenched it. Her head was jerked low and she whimpered. She was meant to see a stain amidst the opal swirls but only saw the dark dried stains–was that what he meant? She did see a cup and spilled ice on the ground.

“I’m sorry,” Fawn mumbled, wanting to cry. But tears would never be able to climb up out of this smoke-filled abyss. Her head was lifted for her. Now red sparks were leaping out of the man’s glaring eyes and she recoiled in his grip, horrified, afraid that if the hot sparks lighted on her face they would sear her. She saw his mouth form as if to speak but a liquid thing leaped from it, a glowing red projectile of lava. It struck her face.

Fawn screamed, thrashed. The agony was unbearable. The flesh of her face bubbled, hissed, spat like frying bacon. She clawed the man’s shirt. People passing glanced at her, she noticed through her shrieks. A hand struck her face. Wasn’t it afraid to be burned on her skin? She fell, and hitched with sobs, the pain beginning to subside. Didn’t severe burns stop hurting once the nerve endings were destroyed? Multiple hands hoisted her roughly back to her feet.

A half dozen passing black boys smiled at her. They wore black graduation robes, open over their street clothes, and mortarboard hats with red tassels–the next fad, maybe, when the rubber swimming caps and clear ruffled shower caps died out. A brown and white mottled mollusk with eight heads and one thick tentacle floated by, a few of the heads seeming to regard her for a moment.

The man wouldn’t let go of her. Were he and his companions going to rape her? A rogue memory slithered inside her in many small broken worm-like pieces and she shivered violently. She retched. The man held her farther out from him.

“This is a typical female infidel,” said the man who held her. “Look at her. They are all like this. You see this?”

Fawn looked toward where he was directing his voice in particular. Three figures in black robes, their hair and lower faces hidden. At first Fawn took them to be nuns. Dark eyes solemnly staring. She felt on trial.

“Someone will see us,” said a voice behind her. “Let her go.”

“She spilled my drink on me. I want her to pay me for it!”

“She isn’t worth the trouble. Look how drugged she is.”

“They would have our women become like this wretched
thing
.” A twist of her arm. Fawn staggered, groaned. The young man regarded her, and now grinned. His teeth gave off white sparks…cool, but they smelled. “You have taken more drugs than you had intended, haven’t you? Does it make the colors brighter and the rides faster, to take your poisons? How much brighter the colors are now, eh? And the rides must surely be faster eh? Well–we must help you! We can help you have fun!”

The others laughed, but for the grim women, and the one dissenting voice behind her. “We mustn’t make trouble for ourselves.”

“She has made her own troubles.” The man looked around him, settled on something. “Over there–that looks fun. Eh?” He tugged Fawn by the arm and she stumbled after him. Another man took her other arm to help her along. The rest trailed behind.

This machine stood out through the fog in the swamp of her mind. It was a great wheel, with many individual open cells along its outer edge, facing in. The fetus of a memory stirred in her. They approached a glum, wordless operator. Someone gave him tickets. A few tongues of electricity played between the two hands as the tickets were exchanged. The glum man had a dim blue aura and blue sparks spilled out of his nostrils, bouncing down his shirt and bouncing on his shoes until they faded.

“I’ll put her on,” offered the man who held her arm. “She’s a little sick.” She was escorted to a cell. Electricity from her contact with the metal mesh floor coiled vine-like around her legs. Ahead there was someone already in a cell. Two purplish, gaseous beams were being shot from this person’s eyes. Or
drawn
from its eyes. Long, dim, stretching off high into the black sky until they were lost.

Her escort locked her restraining bar in place. He had, it seemed, purposely chosen the cell next to the being with the beaming eyes. Cool sparks from his teeth, again–smelly. “Have a nice ride.” Then he clanged away, electric tongues lapping his legs.

There were a few others on the wheel but their eyes didn’t beam. Shortly, the wheel began to turn…

She tried to make out the faces on the people across from her. Did she know them? It seemed that she did. Names hopped like grasshoppers away from her grasping hands. Cookie? Cookie. That was someone’s name…

And to her right the cell was empty, though she thought sure that someone had been there before…

“
And I love you!
” a voice cried out remotely from that cell.

She felt a pain inside. Not of loss, because she hadn’t really lost anything. It was the pain of fear. Because she had opened the door to a nightmare and was locked in its cell, like a prisoner in a burning prison unable to escape, no one to rescue her. The flames of unknown carnival color leaped and lapped all around her.

The wheel spun faster. It began to tilt at an angle. It tipped more and more and seemed it wouldn’t stop until it was fully vertical, but did stop just short of that. Lights like tracer bullets whizzed all around her, pierced through her. She hurtled at the ground, a flesh meteor. Faces down there stared up at her from the bottom of the ocean. She hurtled at the sky, at the stars. Veered. She was plunged to earth, reborn, whisked to heaven again, reborn again, an endless cycle of reincarnation, life after life lived out in seconds.