21
A second after the toy railroad landed me outside again, I was out of the car and running through dusk as though hell had opened behind me, toward the pair of doors I’d gone through the first time. Then I stopped and reversed field.
The doors to the left opened out, as quietly as the ones to the right had opened in. All I had to do was slip my fingers into the crack between the doors and tug. Maybe, just maybe, Wilton Hoxley’s death’s-head was still facing in the other direction.
Maybe he was expecting me to come back the way I’d come before. Maybe I could feel my way through the dark until I came up behind him, aimed, and pulled the trigger four or five times. Maybe the green cheese the moon is supposed to be made of can be bought at discount at Trader Joe’s. Maybe, one of these days, it’ll finally rain up.
The ragged sound like ripping paper that followed me into the blackness inside the castle was my own breathing. I put the automatic against my cheek and felt its reassuring cool as I willed my lungs to slow down. Water, my own water, was pouring down my sides, saturating the towels.
It was as dark as it had been before the lights went on. Once again my feet told me that I was going uphill. It made sense to whatever part of my brain was still trying to make sense: The train went up through the mild, programmed horrors of the Haunted Castle, and then it went down again. Simple amusement-park physics. Let the suckers get comfortable going uphill, scare the bejeezus out of them at the top, and then throw the whole phone book at them as the train accelerates out of control-downhill. Screw with their sense of gravity, the first thing a kid learns, so primal that we take it for granted.
At this point, there wasn’t anything I was willing to take for granted.
Up and down, I thought. Very simple, dark or no dark. The rails went up, peaked, and went down again. Pseudo-ectoplasmic interruptions and living homicidal maniacs notwithstanding, I had a simple mental map.
I slid one dripping ankle uphill to find a tie. It had finally occurred to me that all sets of rails have ties between them. If I could measure the distance between the ties and hit them with every step, I could walk without the musical accompaniment of my sneakers squealing against the steel. All I had to do was walk along the right-hand edge of the ties, taking steps of exactly the right length and keeping my right hand extended, brushing the wall to follow the curves. Simple.
Except for the gun. If I wanted to follow the right-hand wall without making noise, I’d have to transfer the gun to my left hand. Skin is quieter than metal. I’d been born left-handed and trained to write with my right, and the training had stuck. I transferred the gun to my more or less useless left hand. It had fit into the right with a comfortingly familiar weight; in the left, it felt fat and cold and greasy.
Still, it was a gun. Did Hoxley have a gun? No way, I comforted myself, as I took the first steps. A gun would have been an affront against Ahura Mazda. The Fire was All. Fire was Beginning and End, and a gun would have been technological irritation.
The track and the walls began to bend to the right. I knew someone must have gone to call the police, but no sound from outside signaled the arrival of a SWAT team to quell the castle’s resident lunatic. Listening as I climbed, I caught the sawtoothed sound of my breath again, and chewed down on my lip to silence it.
Then my right hand hit nothing. My fingers extended themselves without my permission, five little soldiers hopelessly assigned to the last patrol, and felt nothing whatsoever, just cool air against a perspiring palm. Another corridor, inhabited by mechanical spooks programmed to go woo-woo at the right moment to give the suckers their last fifty-cent thrill on the way out.
Stepping over the right-hand track, I backed into the corridor and stretched out my arms to feel its width. By extending my arms fully, I could just touch both of the corridor’s walls. I couldn’t hear anything at all, if I discounted muffled music that had to be coming from outside. Somewhere ahead of me, the Grim Reaper was waiting, counting down toward ignition with his squirt bottle and his kitchen matches. Some part of him was probably shrilling gleefully, but he was keeping still. He’d had practice. He’d made it through childhood and adolescence by keeping still, by not letting anyone hear the earsplitting screaming of his soul. He’d learned to muffle it in a pale ordinariness. Wilton Hoxley was an expert at stillness.
The walls of the corridor felt reassuringly solid. I stretched my arms out for support and sagged. I’d never needed a good sag quite so badly. Relaxing into my sag, I began, for the first time in four or five minutes, to think about where I was, rather than letting my mind bathe me in soothing, irrelevant data about where I’d rather be. The Crab Nebula, for example.
But I was here and Hoxley was ahead of me, waiting to shrill and squirt. My armor, so solid-seeming when I’d imagined it all those endless subjective years ago, felt as permeable as a wind sock. Then the walls on either side of my hands trembled, I heard a sound like a ratchet wrench, and then a bang. The trembling increased, and I stepped back and bit my tongue as the sound grew louder and a ghost’s hand passed over my face. Air, just air. The little train had carried poor Eddie through his last ride again, a new and improved vision of helclass="underline" burn to death and then revisit the scenery.
The train was a probe sent to root me out, to push me noisily off the tracks. Hoxley was still in front of me, waiting. Whatever I meant to him, it was enough to keep him where he was, in the center of a web where he knew he might soon be discovered.
As the doors below me banged shut behind Eddie’s ride, I lunged out of the corridor and up the incline, hugging the wall to my back and ignoring the ties, praying for the echo to linger. It boomed back and forth between the pasteboard walls long enough to cover the sound of my movement until another opening yawned behind me and I stepped backward into it, into the realm of some other ersatz ghost.
He’d sent the train to sound me out, or-maybe-to chase me out. Maybe he thought it had. Whatever buttons or levers controlled the train were obviously in front of me, where he was. Why go any farther? If he was ahead of me, he’d wait until he couldn’t wait anymore, and then he’d move. If he came toward me, I could kill him. If he ran away from me, out through the right door, I could either chase him or go out the way I’d come in and shoot him in the face. With my left hand free, I swapped a gun into my right, and my fingers wrapped themselves gratefully around the automatic’s handle. End of the road, I thought.
And feeling smug, I backed into the end of the road.
I had my left hand stretched protectively behind me and I dismissed the first wisp of cloth as more musty ectoplasm. It didn’t even slow me. I brushed it aside and took two more backward steps and brushed it aside again. And felt a thigh under it.
“No,” I said. And then flame bloomed behind me and I smelled gasoline and my shoulder was on fire, a yellow tongue seeking my face. My hair caught, and I lost it all, all the planning and calculation, and I swatted at my hair and dropped to my knees to get under the flame, shredding the plastic raincoat as I ripped it off me, and succeeded in tossing it a few feet, and kneeling with my spine curled tightly against the flame of death, I heard Wilton Hoxley say, above and behind me, “Simeon. What terrible clothes.”
“Don’t,” I said, convulsing into an even smaller ball. The automatic clattered from my fingers, bounced once, hitting my knee, and then landed behind me.
“Don’t what?” Hoxley said. He lit another match. “Ah, of course. Don’t burn little Simeon. Well, I’ve heard that before. And what’s this?” I heard the gun scrape the ground as he picked it up. “Well,” he said, “this is an unfair advantage, is what it is. Is this how a couple of guys talk?” His hand touched my back. “Do you know that you’re all wet?” He waited.