Wayne was rushed to the hospital and checked in for nervous exhaustion. He was given a private room, pumped full of tranquilizers, and left alone to sleep. During the long night he was visited by two dreams: in the first, a hideous shape stood over his bed, its mouth grinning in the darkness. In the second, an eagle and a snake were locked in mortal combat—the eagle's wings sought the open sky, but the snake's darting fangs struck again and again, its poison weakening the eagle and dragging it to the earth. He awakened in a cold sweat, before the dream combat was finished, but this time he knew the snake was winning.
He chewed on tranquilizers and wore dark glasses as he watched the South's Greatest Evangelist enter the earth at ten o'clock in the morning.
His duty was crystal-clear.
EIGHT
Serpent
and Octopus
35
Dr. Mirakle was slightly drunk and exuded the aroma of Dant bourbon like a cheap cologne. A flask full of the stuff sat on the table near his elbow. On a plate before him was a soggy hot dog and baked beans. It was lunchtime, and the air was filled with dust as the trucks and cranes set up the sideshows at the Gadsden fairgrounds; in another week the carnival would be heading into Birmingham, and the season would be over.
Billy sat across from Dr. Mirakle beneath the wooden roof of the open-air café. The Ghost Show tent was already up, ready for tonight's business. Dr Mirakle looked distastefully at his food and swigged from the flask, then offered it to Billy. "Go ahead, it won't kill you. God, to eat this food you need a little antibiotic protection! You know, if you expect to stay with the carnival you'd better get used to the taste of alcohol."
"Stay?" Billy was silent for a moment, watching as the trucks rumbled along the midway with various parts of rides and sideshows. The Octopus was being put together out there, somewhere in the haze of dust. "I wasn't planning on staying after we leave Birmingham."
"Don't you like the carnival?"
"Well ... I guess I do, but . . . there's work to be done at home."
"Ah yes." Mirakle nodded. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed from a long night of driving and then raising the Ghost Show tent. "Your home. I'd forgotten: people have homes. I had thought you might be interested in seeing my workshop, where I put together all the Ghost Show figures. It's in that house I own in Mobile—a house, mind you, not a home. My home is this." He motioned toward the midway. "Dust and all, I love it. Next year the Ghost Show will be bigger than ever! It'll have twice as many ghosts and goblins, twice as many optical effects! I thought . . . perhaps you'd like to help me with it."
Billy sipped at a cup of hot black coffee. "Something I've been meaning to ask you for a long time. Maybe I thought you'd get around to telling me, but you haven't. Just exactly why did you want me to be your assistant this summer?"
"I told you. I had heard about you and your mother, and I . . ."
"No sir. That's not all of it, is it? You could've hired anybody to help you with the Ghost Show. So why did you search so long and hard for my mother and me?"
The man looked out at the billowing yellow dust and swigged from his flask. His nose was laced with bright red and blue veins, and the whites of his eyes were a sad yellowish color. "Can you really do what . . . people have said?" he asked finally. "Do you and your mother have the ability to communicate with the dead?"
Billy nodded.
"Many people before you have said they could, too. I've never seen anything remotely resembling a ghost. I've seen pictures, of course, but those are easily faked. Oh, what I'd give to be able to see . . . something that would hint of life in the beyond— wherever that might be. You know, there are institutes devoting their whole resources to exploring the question of life after death . . . did I tell you that already? One is in Chicago, another in New York—I wrote the Chicago people once, and they sent me back a questionnaire, but by then it was too late."
"What was too late?" Billy asked.
"Things," Mirakle replied. He looked at Billy for a moment and then nodded. "If you can see apparitions, doesn't that fill you with a hope that there is an afterlife?"
"I never thought there wasn't."
"Ah. Blind faith, eh? And how do you arrive at that conclusion? Your religious beliefs? Your crutch?" Something angry and bitter flared behind Dr Mirakle's rheumy eyes for an instant, then subsided. "Damn," he said softly. "What is Death? The ending of the first act, or the final curtain? Can you tell me?"
Billy said, "No sir."
"All right, I'll tell you why I sought you out. Because I wanted desperately to believe in what I heard about you and your mother; I wanted to find someone who might . . . help me make sense of this preposterous joke we refer to as Life. What's beyond all this?" He made a wide gesture—the café, the other workers and carny people sitting around talking and eating, the dusty midway.
"I don't know."
Dr. Mirakle's gaze fell to the table. "Well. How would you? But you have a chance to know, Billy, if what you say about yourself is true. My wife, Ellen, had a chance to know, as well."
"Your wife?" It was the first time the man had mentioned his wife's name. "Is she in Mobile?"
"No. No, not in Mobile. I visited her one day before I found my way to Hawthorne. Ellen is a permanent resident of the state insane asylum in Tuscaloosa." He glanced at Billy, his lined face tight and tired. "She . . . saw something, in that house in Mobile. Or did she? Well, she likes to fingerpaint and comb her hair all day long now, and what she saw that pushed her over the edge is a moot point, isn't it?"
"What did she see?"
Mirakle took out his wallet and opened it to the photograph of the young man in the service uniform. He slid it across the table to Billy. "Kenneth was his name. Korea. He was killed by mortar fire on . . . oh, what's the date? I carried the exact day in my head for so long! Well, it was in August of 1951. I seem to remember that it happened on a Wednesday. I was always told that he favored me. Do you think so?"
"In the eyes, yes."
Mirakle took the wallet back and put it away. "Wednesday in August. How hot and final that sounds! Our only child. I watched Ellen slowly fall into the bourbon bottle, a tradition I have since clung to wholeheartedly. Is there such a thing as ever really letting a dead child go? Over a year after the burial, Ellen was taking a basket of clothes up the stairs in our house, and right at the top of the stairs stood Kenneth. She said she could smell the pomade in his hair, and he looked at her and said, 'You worry too much, Ma.' It was something he used to say to her all the time, to tease her. Then she blinked and he wasn't there. When I got home, I found she'd been walking up and down those stairs all day hoping she could trigger whatever it had been that had made her see him. But, of course . . ." He looked up at Billy, who'd been listening intently, and then shifted uneasily in his chair "I stay in that house for most of the winter, in between seasons. Sometimes I think I'm being watched; sometimes I can imagine Ken calling me, his voice echoing through the hallway. I would sell that house and move away, but . . . what if Ken is still there, trying to reach me, but I can't see him?"
"Is that why you want me to go to Mobile with you? To find out if your son is still in that house?"