Chapter Twenty-Two.

It didn't take long for them to reach the woods, nor did they have much difficulty finding the hole Rick Reardon had clawed his way out of. Justin stood at the edge of the makeshift grave while Reardon went off to get a shovel. He returned a few minutes later with a long-handled spade, the same one Tricia Reardon had used one moonlit night, Justin figured, six weeks ago when her son was spending the night at his best friend's house. Reardon cleaned out a deep enough area in the dirt, and then he and Justin dropped the lifeless form of his father into the hole, first his body and then his arms.

Justin filled in the grave-Reardon asked him to. For some reason, he couldn't bring himself to shovel dirt over his own father. He'd whacked off his head and bashed it to smithereens against that wide, flat stump, but that was something he'd done to save his best friend's life, something that couldn't be avoided.

They stood in the moonlight, over the grave, the cool breeze ruffling their hair as Reardon stared down at the ground. He stood for a long moment, looked at Justin, then up at the sky. Finally, he shook his head, and once again said, "Bye, Dad." But this time it was different. This time they were not words spit from his mouth in anger and rage, but the heartfelt sendoff from a thirteen year old boy who simply had no other words within him. He picked up his shovel, and he and Justin turned and walked away, leaving Rick Reardon alone in the grave his wife had dug for him.

Moonlight bathed them as they crossed the yard and continued past the clothesline, on to the stump, where Reardon tossed the shovel onto the ground. They stood for a moment, looking down at the greasy remains scattered in and around the place. Then they turned and went up the steps and across the porch, back into the kitchen.

Justin grabbed his c.o.ke off the counter and took a nice long drink.

Reardon swung open the refrigerator door and grabbed a c.o.ke of his own. Then the two of them took a seat at the small, rectangular table that sat against the kitchen wall. Neither of them looked much the worse for wear. Justin had scratches on his neck, a few bruises, but Reardon, other than his hair having dried, looked about the same as when he'd first stepped up behind Justin after having climbed out of the shower. His hands were dirty, but that was pretty much it.

They sat there for a moment, both boys obviously stunned.

Finally, Justin said, "What just happened here?"

"Looks like that tall p.r.i.c.k brought my dead dad back to life."

"That wasn't your dad, Mickey. Did you hear his voice? That wasn't your dad's voice. And whatever he was, he sure as h.e.l.l wasn't alive."

"Hannibal Cobb."

"What is he?" Justin said. "What's he doing here? That carnival out at the old Negro field, out there where all them people were strung up and slaughtered, where the slaves were tortured, where all those people were brutalized back when the Klan was running things around here. You've heard all those stories,"

"So, what, you think some weird Stephen King bogeyman's come to town? To do what? It's just a-"

"What? Just a carnival? What kind of carnival shows up with a Ferris wheel that shoots up out of the ground like a runaway vine-*cause I believe you now, Mickey. You can bet your a.s.s on that. Tents rising all on their own, lights and music and rides going round with no electricity to power them? And back there tonight, all those cars parked in the clearing, all those people. All of them were still there when we left-the same people, the same cars. We were there four hours and n.o.body left? The same two kids shooting those squirt guns were still squirting water into the same holes four hours later?"

"Jesus," Reardon said.

"I think we saw what we wanted to see out there: clowns and rides, smiling couples, kids running around laughing and having a good old time; corndogs and cotton candy and all those carnival games. We saw what we expected we'd see because that's what we're used to seeing. Because that's what we've always experienced at the carnival down by the schoolyard. I don't think any of that was real. What I saw when I hit my head-that was real."

Justin took a drink of c.o.ke, and Reardon said, "What're we supposed to do now?"

"I don't know, but we need to do something. You think we're the only people who went out there tonight, the only people to rub up against Hannibal Cobb? No telling how many people wandered out there, or what's happened to them."

Justin paused for a moment.

"Ears," he said.

"What?"

"On the tent, before you went in. Did you notice the pictures painted on the front of the tent?"

"Yeah," Reardon said. "I did."

"They all looked like the Sideshow performers. Just like them... exactly like them."

Reardon shrugged his shoulders, gave his head a little nod, took a drink of c.o.ke and set the bottle on the table.

"The Pickled Punk looked exactly like that thing in the bottle, exactly like it. Who did it look like when we came back out?"

Mickey looked over at Justin. "No way," he said.

"He's done something to Danny Roebuck. I bet you anything he has."

"Jesus," Reardon said, then, "The h.e.l.l is that?"

"What?"

"That purse hanging on your chair."

"What about it?"

"Was it here before we left?"

"Yeah, so what?"

"My mom never goes anywhere without her purse. Her car's out there and her purse is in here, but she isn't?"

"You don't think she went off with Jack Everett?"

"I don't think she went anywhere, willingly."

"What do you mean?"

"Her purse is here. Her car is here. The lights were on and the door was open when we got here-five f.u.c.king hours ago. Hannibal Cobb and that cloud of his has the whole town under their spell... Where do you think my mother is?"

"s.h.i.t, Mickey," Justin said. "What're we gonna do?"

Reardon stood up, s.n.a.t.c.hed his mother's purse off the chair and dumped its contents onto the table. He fished through them for a moment, and then grabbed Tricia Reardon's key ring. "She never goes anywhere without her purse, and she always locks the door... always."

Justin got out of his seat, glancing out through the kitchen window, halfway expecting to see a headless and armless Rick Reardon come staggering out of the woods.

Why not, with everything else they'd seen tonight?

"Seriously," he said. "What're we gonna do?"

"We're going back to that piece of s.h.i.t carnival and get my mom back."

"Who," Justin said. "You and me? With what?"

Reardon turned, crossed the room and went out the back door. Moments later he was back in the kitchen, the ax in one hand, the keys to his mother's car in the other.

He slammed the door shut, and held the ax before him.

"With this," he said.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

She had killed her husband, and she deserved the misery that had befallen her. She had taken her son's father right out of his life, and no matter how many times she told herself it was Rick's fault for having driven her to the brink of madness by running out on her all those times, by leaving her alone those many nights, Tricia Reardon knew that she was responsible for the sorry set of circ.u.mstances she and her son now found themselves in. She shouldn't have fought with him. She should have let him go. When he laughed in her face she should have walked down the hallway into the bedroom, slammed the door shut and locked it.

She shouldn't have grabbed that butcher knife and driven it into his chest.

But that was exactly what she'd done.

It was supposed to be a night of reconciliation. Their night. A very special night, one that would get them back on track. If not for their sake, then for Mickey's. He came to her with a smile on his face, flowers in his hand-Rick could be charming when he wanted to be, and he was pushing all the right b.u.t.tons that night. For one fleeting moment she let her guard down, and let Rick Reardon back into her heart, and then back into her bedroom, where he f.u.c.ked her and then got right up to leave, to go *take care of some business', he said to Tricia, who couldn't f.u.c.king believe he was doing it again.

One thing led to another: a push to a shove, a slur to an insult, an angry tirade to the laugh in the face that ended a life. Before she knew it the knife was out of the block and sunk into her husband's chest, blood soaking his clean white shirt while his eyes bulged and his mouth hung open, that shocked look of surprise frozen onto his face as he dropped to his knees, and then down to the floor, leaving Tricia Reardon scrambling for a way to cover her crime, to make it go away before she was led away in handcuffs and chains. The look on his face when his legs buckled and blood spattered the floor. Like he couldn't believe what was happening to him, as she grabbed first one foot and then the other, and began sliding him across the kitchen, out onto the back porch. It was tough going getting him into the wheelbarrow, tougher hauling him across the back yard and into the woods. But she got him there, and when she did she grabbed her long-handled spade from the shed and went to work.

Moonlight washed over Tricia Reardon as dirt flew and the hole grew deeper, and tears ran down her face, all the while her husband lay splayed on his back in the recessed metal bucket of that rusty old wheelbarrow, wheezing and moaning softly. Every once in a while a foot would move, an arm or a leg. Soon nothing was moving at all. She stood in a soft September breeze on the lip of a freshly dug grave, wondering how long it would take someone to figure out what she'd done. People would be asking about him, looking for him. His no account friends would be ringing his cell. Mickey would want to know when his father was coming home and, after a while, why he hadn't. Sooner or later the rusty old piece of c.r.a.p he drove would be found in the lake she was going to sink it into-snagged by some old codger fishing off the sh.o.r.eline, stumbled upon by a swimmer when the weather turned warm and children swarmed the place.

Tricia walked back to the house and got her husband's guitar, came back to the grave and tossed it onto his body. Everybody in town knew Rick Reardon had failed to come home many times before, that someday he simply would not come home at all, and on that dark and breezy September night, Tricia Reardon came to realize that was the story she would have to stick with. She stood over her husband holding that long-handled spade, staring down at his blood-soaked shirt, at the knife still lodged deep in his chest. Then she began to fill in the hole, one shovelful of dirt at a time. First his feet disappeared, then his knees. She covered his belly, and then his chest. She tossed a spade full of dirt onto his face and he gasped out her name. An arm rose up; his eyes grew wide as grains of soil trickled along his cheek. He tried to move but he didn't seem able.

"Trish," he said, his voice weak, feeble. "Trish."

She wanted to stop, to take it all back, to start their night over from scratch.

But she'd gone too far to stop now, too far to even think about stopping.

She sunk the shovel into the dirt and tossed the dirt into the hole, and kept on tossing until his face was buried and his arm grew limp, until the hole was filled and Rick Reardon was nothing but a painful memory that night after night would refuse to go away.

She'd stabbed her husband in a moment of anger, buried him while he was still breathing. She had brought misery to her young son, and she deserved whatever happened to her now.

They'd each had a turn with her before leaving the store: Chester Roebuck, as good a man as any before this night, a better man than most; Jim Kreigle, a deacon of the First Baptist Church, a good and honest man who had just slaughtered his own wife. And good old Jack Everett, a man who more than likely had butchered a wife of his own before dragging Tricia into the h.e.l.l she now found herself in. She sat quiet as they drank their beer, stood up when ordered and marched out to the car on cue. They roared away from town in Jack's sleek black Caddy, her and Jack in the front, Kreigle and Chester Roebuck in the back, on either side of two cases of beer they'd stacked between them; Chester with that bizarre necklace hanging across his chest.

The full moon seemed to guide them as they drove out to the edge of Pottsboro, to the old dirt road leading up to that overgrown field, whose horrifying tales had been pa.s.sed down through generations of townsfolk.

Tricia had heard those stories, plenty of them. Old Black Moses, who led the slaves not to freedom, but to a ma.s.s grave at the end of the old country road Jack Everett's Caddy now traveled upon; the master's wife, whose strong black lover had cursed her with a half-breed b.a.s.t.a.r.d child who would be the ruination of them both. Men, who throughout the first half of the century dared speak up against their oppressors, receiving for their efforts a steady diet of whips and chains. Men and women who wouldn't knuckle under to the powers that be, strung up from seemingly every available tree limb that populated the field. Children tarred and feathered, and dragged screaming across that rocky patch of South Carolina soil, many of these atrocities carried out by ancestors of the very men who now surrounded her: Jack Everett, whose family settled this land with anger and rage, rifles and pistols and knives and clubs, and manacles made of st.u.r.dy iron and steel. Chester Roebuck, who secretly pined for days gone by, when his forefathers were not wage-slaves whiling away their lives for twelve bucks an hour, but feared and respected overseers for the movers and shakers, the shapers of destiny of their little corner of the southland. And Jim Kreigle, the good and kind Christian who spent his days in service to the poor and downtrodden, his Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights giving penance for the violent and abhorrent acts the root-bearers of his family tree had gleefully perpetrated down through the ages.

Down the old country road they roared, Hank Williams Junior's whiskey-soaked voice filling the car as the night rolled on and a spinning Ferris wheel loomed on the horizon. A curious sight that took Tricia straight back to a line of men standing in front of the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, staring wide-eyed up at a top hat-shaped cloud that soon had them scurrying off crowing about some kind of a carnival.

And now here that carnival was.

She could see through the tree line, cars and trucks and pieces of junk, all parked before a periphery of poles whose light cast a strange and eerie glow over G.o.dby's field. It was a carnival, all right, but not much of one as far as Tricia could tell. There was, of course, that gigantic spinning Ferris wheel, along with a few dilapidated booths and stalls. A gaming table or two sat off in the distance, not very far from a banged-up sheet metal trailer, whose lone occupant, a hugely obese woman in a polka dot dress, stood slaving away over a portable grill. Smoke rising from whatever sizzled on the griddle curled up past her face, to a sign that ran along the top of her stand. Hamburgers and hot dogs, it said, corn dogs and French fries and roasted ears of corn, words that brought back memories of all the different carnival delights from her youth. But Tricia didn't think she'd be eating anything this wretched-looking creature served up tonight.

The car was parked, doors opened and shut as Tricia and her companions stepped out into the night.

"The carnival," Jack said as he led Tricia across the clearing, as if he'd just discovered the most wonderful thing ever to have been created.

"Look at it!" said Chester Roebuck, his face lit up like a child standing before a heaping mound of presents Santa Claus had left him.

Side by side they approached the carnival's entrance, Tricia and the men who'd taken her from the frying pan and into the fire, spiriting her away from one miserable life straight into a h.e.l.l she wondered if she would ever get free of. All three had raped her back at the general store, but for some reason Tricia couldn't quite grasp, she felt like something much worse was on the horizon, a thought borne out when they stopped and stood before a worn wooden sign advertising Hannibal Cobb's Kansas City Carnival. The sign, which swung slowly back and forth in the breeze, should have seemed silly, ludicrous even, promoting a broken down sh.e.l.l of a carnival from halfway across the country. But there was nothing frivolous about the man who loomed beneath that sign, nor was there anything silly about his black companion.

They stood there, an unalterable sign of impending doom: the tall man, his stovepipe hat standing in direct correlation with a dark and imposing ent.i.ty, whose eye even now could be felt staring down from the heavens; the black man, who, in the tattered pair of bib coveralls that hung off him like moldering rags, looked as if he'd stepped straight out of a grave. He was thin as the concentration camp survivors Tricia had seen in her high school history books. His eyes were wide, the skin covering his sunken cheekbones dry and ragged as an ancient piece of black parchment.

He smiled at Tricia, smiled and said, "We've been waiting."

A midget stepped up to the tall man, dressed in a silk costume striped with blues and reds and several shades of green. His pointed shoes curled up at the toe like a genie's lantern. He wore a jester's hat, whose two pointed p.r.o.ngs hung curved off the left and right sides of his head. Though he was no taller than Tricia's young son, his face, made up of deep lines and creases, belied his youthful form.

"Hannibal Cobb," the tall man said. "Owner and proprietor of the fine establishment you now find yourselves in. And make no mistake about it; we most definitely have been waiting for you."

"Step up, my friends," the Negro said, eyes bulging, a great wide smile splitting his thin face, his voice a ragged rasp of tombstones and graveyard dirt, rats and c.o.c.kroaches and all the things that burrow deep within the earth. "Step right up to Hannibal Cobb's Kansas City Carnival!"

"Look at this place," Jim Kreigle said, eyes wide, his head bouncing around like a bobble-head doll's.

"It is quite spectacular," Hannibal Cobb said. "Isn't it."

"I'll say," said Kreigle, as Chester Roebuck gleefully cried out, "I'm going on that rolly coaster! Look at it, stretching all the way up to the sky!"

Tricia said nothing. She stood there, stunned, looking out at this miserable excuse for a country carnival. A carnival, really, that would've seemed more at home in a backwoods civil war-era frontier town than where it stood now. The weather-beaten tents were old, the fabric yellowed with age. There was no roller coaster stretching up to the sky, just a Ferris wheel and a few raggedy-a.s.sed games-rigged, more than likely, Tricia thought, so the fine proprietor could fleece anyone stupid enough to enter the place.

"I'm going on the spinning cups," Kreigle said. "Always liked them cups."

The spinning cups, Tricia thought. Another imaginary ride.

"Jack Everett," Jack said, extending his hand to Hannibal Cobb, two powerful men standing in the middle of a rundown field in a far off corner of South Carolina.

"Yes," Cobb said. "Jack Everett, the mover and shaker, the patriarch of this grand old town."

They shook hands, and Cobb said, "Come on in. Come one and all. Step up to my Kansas City Carnival and have yourselves a ball!"

Jack took a step forward and so did Chester Roebuck and Jim Kreigle.

But not Tricia.

Tricia didn't move an inch. She stood in place, watching her companions-her captors-stride through the entrance, happily watching the sorry pieces of human sc.u.m who not forty-five minutes ago had taken turns savaging her move further and further away. She wasn't going into that place-she wasn't about to go. She was going to wait until they got just a little further down the field. Then she was going to turn and run her a.s.s straight down the old country road, and keep on running all the way back to the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, where a single frantic telephone call would bring the state police racing to Pottsboro, South Carolina. If they weren't on their way already. Surely someone had heard those shots ring out at the general store, walked over and saw that grisly scene and called for help.

"You're gonna like it here." It was the midget who said this, this perverse-looking mayor of Munchkin Land. He took a step closer to Tricia, who said, "What?"

"You're gonna like it here," he said, as he once more stepped forward. "You're one of us. I knew it the moment you grabbed that butcher knife and-"

"What?"

"-rammed it into his chest. I knew the minute you tossed the dirt in his face that you were one of us. When you drove his car into the lake and walked all the way back home, I knew. Deep down inside, you know it, too."