The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel Read Free

the
house, thought of those kids and their bikes and how they had
reminded me of parties, and how the parties had reminded me of
carnivals and fairs. Flares themselves, but blinding for a night or
a weekend and just as swiftly gone, leaving behind nothing but an
empty field, a blowing wind, tracks in the earth, and the smell not
of cotton candy and candied apples, not of greasepaint and grease,
but of a slow smiling dying.
    The way a carousel sounds when the last tune’s
been played and the animals stop spinning.
    I led Nina and Deric to the steps, and we sat,
took our glasses when Callum joined us, and I plucked with some
trouble an ice cube from my drink.
    “Imagine,” I said, “what it must be like when
all the ice melts and there’s nothing left to hold but the cold air
left behind.”
    “Hey,” Nina said softly, and placed a light hand
on my knee.
    This time I did smile.
    “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m not the one who’s
dying. Tonight.” She squeezed; I covered her fingers. I looked to
Deric and said, “Abe ever tell you about a guy called Casey? A
carpenter named Kayman? People like that?”
    He shook his head. “Are they . . . what did you
call them, Pilgrim’s Travelers?”
    “No,” I answered, dropping what was left of the
ice cube back into the glass. “No, but they were there. Holding
on.”

I: Penny Tunes for a Gold Lion
     
    A wagon’s broad painted wheels rattled and
slipped over the cobblestones that night, its team of old black
geldings snorting in their traces, the driver’s voice carrying
through the early morning fog, urging the horses on in a practiced
monotone.
    The sound of a lazy whip.
    The rattling of a harness.
    Hooves clattering on stone, striking sparks,
moving on. Another wagon, much heavier, a caravan that carried with
it the tuneless, oddly melodic jangle of a dozen tin bells hanging
from a brace above the locked doors in back.
    A third to make it a procession, and the soft
quiet sound of a young woman laughing.
     
    “There’s nothing to it,” said Casey Bethune from
his customary place at the door end of the bar. “The damn things
are weighted.”
    “So if there’s nothing to it, what’s the
trick?”
    Casey looked in wonder at the other men and
women on the stools down toward the other end and not paying
attention, looked in comic disbelief at the big man seated at his
left hand, immediately around the bar’s squared comer. “The trick?
That’s easy — you don’t even try.”
    Mayard Chase stared.
    “Think,” Casey urged gently and with a
smile.
    Chase wrinkled his face, put a finger to his
temple, closed his eyes.
    From behind the bar Molly Burgess stopped
washing glasses and looked at Casey. “What’s Yard doing?”
    “Thinking.”
    “Quiet,” Chase demanded. “I’m thinking.”
    “Drunk,” Molly said with a knowing nod.
    “Thinking,” Casey insisted. “I’ve told him a
kind of joke and he still doesn’t get it”
    “Oh God save us,” she said. “We’ll be here all
night”
    “Hush,” Chase commanded, opened one eye, closed
it again. “There’s got to be a trick to the trick, you see. Casey
wouldn’t know straight if he was whacked with a ruler.”
    Molly groaned and walked away; Casey grinned
after her and took a careful sip of his drink, a small Scotch and
soda, only his second that night and probably his last. He was
going to Pilgrim’s Travelers later on, and he wanted his head
clear, his eye keen, his arm steady. He was going to win a stuffed
panda if it killed him.
    Another sip, and he looked around him, not
seeing much because all of it was as familiar as the lumps in his
mattress.
    The Brass Ring was long and narrow, bar on the
right and small round tables on the left; the aisle between, bare
hardwood and comfortably scuffed; beyond, more tables in two rows,
and beyond them an open space for those who attacked the three
dartboards each night, making more noise than an army in full rout
Gleaming brass horse braces on the