Mom, something's wrong with that ride. If I said that to anybody around here, they'd laugh in my face, but I get the feeling that a lot of other people stay their distance from the Octopus too. Just last night, when we were setting up, a roustabout helping Mr. Edgers got his foot crushed when a piece of machinery fell on it, like he did it on purpose. There have been a lot of fights lately, too, and there weren't before the Octopus joined us. People are irritable, and spoiling for trouble. A roustabout named Chalky disappeared just before we left Andalusia, and a couple of days ago Mr. Ryder got a call from the police because they found Chalky's body in a field behind the shopping center where we were set up. His neck had been crushed, but the police couldn't figure out how, I heard tell. Anyway, there's a bad feeling in the air. I'm afraid of the Octopus too, probably more than anybody else, because I think it likes the taste of blood. I don't know what to do.
Dr. Mirakle and I have been talking after the Ghost Show closes up for the night. Did I tell you he wanted to be a dentist? Did I tell you the story he told me about the machine Thomas Edison invented to try to communicate with spirits? Well, Edison drew up the blueprints for it, but he died before he could build it. Dr. Mirakle says nobody knows what happened to the blueprints. Dr. Mirakle drinks a lot and he loves to talk while he drinks. One thing he told me that is interesting: he says there are institutes where scientists are studying something called parapsychology. That has to do with your mind, and spirits and stuff. I've never told Dr. Mirakle about Will Booker, or the sawmill, or the black aura. I've never told him about Gram or the Mystery Walk. He seems to want to know about me, but he never comes right out and asks.
Well, I'd better get to sleep now. Dr. Mirakle is a good man, and he's been right about one thing: the carnival does get into your blood.
I know you can put this thirty-five dollars to good use. I'll write when I have time. I love you both.
Billy
34
Wayne Falconer sat with his mother in the backseat of the chauffeured Cadillac limo. They were on their way to the Cutcliffe Funeral Home in downtown Fayette. Jimmy Jed Falconer had been dead for two days, and was going to be buried in the morning. The monument was already picked out, ready to be put in place.
Cammy had been sobbing all morning. She wouldn't stop. Her eyes were red, her nose was running, her face was bloated and blotchy. It disgusted Wayne. He knew his daddy would've wanted her to carry herself with dignity, just like Wayne was trying to do. He wore a somber black suit and a black tie with small red checks on it. Last night, while his mother was drugged and sleeping, he'd taken a pair of scissors and cut his silk shirt and trousers, both of them stained with grass and lake mud, into long strips of cloth that he could easily burn in a trash barrel behind the barn. The stains had gone up in smoke.
Wayne winced as his mother cried. She reached out and grasped his hand, and he gently but firmly pulled away. He despised her for not getting the ambulance to the house soon enough, despised her for not having told him about his father's weak heart condition. He had seen his daddy's dead face in the hospitaclass="underline" blue as frost on a grave.
The last word J.J. Falconer had spoken in the hospital, before he went into a deep sleep that he never came out of, was a name.
Gammy was puzzled over it, had racked her brains trying to remember what message it might carry—but Wayne knew. Demons had been afoot in the darkness that terrible.night; they had been grinning and chuckling and drawing a net around Wayne and his daddy. One of them had appeared to him as a faceless girl on a lake's diving platform whose body—if indeed she had existed as flesh and blood at all—hadn't yet emerged from the depths. Wayne had checked the newspaper, but there was no account of the drowning. Terry Dozier had called yesterday to give his sympathy, but again there was no mention of a girl named Lonnie found floating in the lake. And Wayne had found himself feverishly wondering if she had existed at all . . . or if her body was caught in a submerged tree limb down on the muddy bottom . . . or if his daddy's death had simply eclipsed that of a poor white-trash girl.
The second demon had come creeping in the darkness to steal his father's life away; it had been sent by the Hawthorne witch-woman in revenge for his father's urging a few Hawthorne men, in a secret meeting, to put a scare into the Creekmores and get them out of the county. It was for the best of the community, Wayne remembered his daddy telling the men, their faces washed by candlelight. If you rid Hawthorne of this corruption, Falconer had said, then God will see fit to favor you. In the darkened, shadowy room Wayne had imagined he'd seen movement over in the far corner, beyond the ring of listening men; he'd had the impression—just for an instant—of something standing there in a place where the candlelight couldn't reach, something that looked almost like a wild boar that had learned to walk upright, seven feet tall or more. But when Wayne had stared into that corner the thing wasn't there at all. Now, he thought it might've been Satan himself, spying for the witch-woman and her son.
There were scores to settle. Wayne's hands were curled into fists in his lap.
The Crusade, the Falconer Foundation, the radio station, the magazine, the real-estate holdings in Georgia and Florida, the stocks and bonds, the Airstream trailer, and all the road equipment had become his, Henry Bragg and George Hodges had told him yesterday. He'd spent the morning signing papers—but not before he'd read them over several times and knew exactly what was happening. Cammy was to receive a monthly allowance from J.J. 's personal account, but the remainder of the estate, and the responsibilities that went with it, had fallen to Wayne.
An evil voice hissed through his mind like the noise of wind through lake reeds: You can't get it up. . . .
Reporters and photographers were waiting in front of the funeral home when the limousine pulled to the curb. Cameras clicked as Wayne helped his mother out of the car, and she still had enough presence of mind to lower the black veil of her hat across her face. He waved the questions aside as George Hodges came out of the funeral home to meet them.
The interior was cool and quiet and smelled like a florist's shop. Their heels clicked on a marble floor. Many people were waiting for Wayne and Cammy outside the memorial room where Jimmy Jed Falconer lay; Wayne knew most of them, and began shaking their hands and thanking them for coming. Women from the Baptist Ladies' League came over to comfort Cammy. A tall, gray-haired man in a dark blue suit shook Wayne's hand; he was, Wayne knew, the minister of a nearby Episcopal church.
Wayne forced a smile and a nod. This man was one of his father's enemies, he knew—one of the coalition of ministers who had questioned J.J. Falconer's passionate approach to the gospel. Falconer had kept files on the ministers who opposed the tone of his Crusade, and Wayne planned to keep the files in good shape.