The Dark Side Read Free

ahead. The midway was deserted because of the rain. The merry-go-round was still, but its music played and crashed in the open spaces. And Joseph Pikes rode up into the cloudy sky and came down and each time he went around he was a year older, his laughing changed, grew deep, his face changed, the bones of it, the mean eyes of it, the wild hair of it, sitting there in the green bucket-seat whirling, whirling swiftly, laughing into the bleak heavens where now and again a last split of lightning showed itself.
    Hank ran forward at the hunchback by the machine. On the way he picked up a tent spike. “Here now!” yelled the hunchback. The black Ferris whirled around. “You!” stormed the hunchback, fumbling out. Hank hit him in the kneecap and danced away. “Ouch!” screamed the man, falling forward. He tried to reach the machine brake to stop the Ferris wheel. When he put his hand on the brake, Hank ran in and slammed the tent spike against the fingers, mashing them. He hit them twice. The man held his hand in his other hand, howling. He kicked at Hank. Hank grabbed the foot, pulled, the man slipped in the mud and fell. Hank hit him on the head, shouting.
    The Ferris wheel went around and around and around.
    “Stop, stop the wheel!” cried Joseph Pikes-Mr. Cooger flung up in a stormy cold sky in the bubbled constellation of whirl and rush and wind.
    “I can’t move,” groaned the hunchback. Hank jumped on his chest and they thrashed, biting, kicking.
    “Stop, stop the wheel!” cried Mr. Cooger, a man, a different man and voice this time, coming around in panic, going up into the roaring hissing sky of the Ferris wheel. The wind blew through the high dark wheel spokes. “Stop, stop, oh, please stop the wheel!”
    Hank leaped up from the sprawled hunchback. He started in on the brake mechanism, hitting it, jamming it, putting chunks of metal in it, tying it with rope, now and again hitting at the crawling weeping dwarf.
    “Stop, stop, stop the wheel!” wailed a voice high in the night where the windy moon was coming out of the vaporous white clouds now. “Stop…” The voice faded.
    Now the carnival was ablaze with sudden light. Men sprang out of tents, came running. Hank felt himself jerked into the air with oaths and beatings rained on him. From a distance there was a sound of Peter’s voice and behind Peter, at full tilt, a police officer with pistol drawn.
    “Stop, stop the wheel!” In the wind the voice sighed away.
    The voice repeated and repeated.
    The dark carnival men tried to apply the brake. Nothing happened. The machine hummed and turned the wheel around and around. The mechanism was jammed.
    “Stop!” cried the voice one last time.
    Silence.
    Without a word the Ferris wheel flew in a circle, a high system of electric stars and metal and seats. There was no sound now but the sound of the motor which died and stopped. The Ferris wheel coasted for a minute, all the carnival people looking up at it, the policeman looking up at it, Hank and Peter looking up at it.
    The Ferris wheel stopped. A crowd had gathered at the noise. A few fishermen from the wharfhouse, a few switchmen from the rail yards. The Ferris wheel stood whining and stretching in the wind.
    “Look,” everybody said.
    The policeman turned and the carnival people turned and the fishermen turned and they all looked at the occupant in the black-painted seat at the bottom of the ride. The wind touched and moved the black wooden seat in a gentle rocking rhythm, crooning over the occupant in the dim carnival light.
    A skeleton sat there, a paper bag of money in its hands, a brown derby hat on its head.

Many of the writers in this book, like Ray Bradbury, have pulp-magazine backgrounds, and you will find bits and pieces of pulp writing in their stories, woven in just because it was the handiest material, like the rags and string in a bird’s nest. But here is a story which owes nothing to conventional popular fiction and is really