A steeplechase, in the nineteenth century, was precisely that: a bunch of beefy so-called gentlemen on horseback, racing cross-country toward a church steeple several miles away, jumping, fording, or riding over anything in their path. I headed for that crooked turret with the same single-mindedness, bulling my way through people patiently waiting in line and shouldering through archways, and the crowd obediently let the lunatic in the wet jogging clothes and transparent plastic raincoat get by. Once past the turret, it would only be twenty or thirty yards to the catering truck, maybe the same catering truck that had been ministering to the workmen at the Lewises’ house, the truck he’d taken them out in, and-I was willing to bet-the truck he’d been living in for the past few days.
But I didn’t make it to the catering truck.
I’d barely hit the stretch of open ground between the medieval town and the rides when a burst of fireworks erupted from the turret of the haunted castle. Balls of fire hurtled into the darkening sky to explode into magnesium chrysanthemums, spiral whistlers shrilly corkscrewed themselves into space, and rockets sailed high above us and burst with a flat whump, like a slapstick hitting a wooden leg. The crowd around me erupted into applause and cheers.
A line waited in front of the haunted castle, but no one protested as I elbowed my way through it. My costume appeared to set urban-survival mechanisms on red alert. At the head of the line was a closed gate set into a rectangular metal frame, with a waist-high fence running from either side of the frame to the castle. On the other side of the fence was a narrow-gauge railroad track that connected the door on the left with the fake iron gate on the right.
“Anybody in there?” I asked the man in Bermuda shorts at the front of the line, a triumph of will over gravity, his potbelly and four chins somehow held erect on legs that were thinner than his arms.
“Got me,” he said, taking me in and stepping protectively in front of a woman who was probably his wife.
“How long have you been here?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“No one’s gone in or out?”
His answer was drowned out by blare of trumpets, and the gates at the left of the castle opened. A rickety little chain of four cars rattled out on the tracks and stopped in front of the gate.
“About time,” Spindle Legs said to his putative wife.
At the moment I smelled it, Wifey screamed. The second car wasn’t empty. Its occupant was lying on his side, wrapped tightly in a heavy net. He was naked, but the woman wasn’t screaming out of prudery.
He’d been roasted. The skin on his back was black and charred and creviced and fissured, like crackling on an overcooked suckling pig. His head was contorted backward against the pain, against the prison of the net, and on his fat, unburned throat, the tendons stretched taut as guitar strings. The fingers of his left hand splayed through the net, spread wide, as though he’d tried to grab coolness and wet and safety, and splash himself with it. The back of the hand was singed, its black hairs turned to ash above the porky crackling.
A brilliant rocket blossomed above us, bringing the obscene mess into bright, hard relief. There was something protruding from the center of Eddie Lewis’s back, something that went straight through him. It was metallic and thin, and the end that came out through his spine was pointed. He’d been skewered on a sword or rapier of some kind, like a shish kebab.
Stuck onto the metal point that had insinuated its way between his charred vertebrae was a piece of cardboard. On it, in carefully squared letters that betrayed no hint of urgency, were the words IT’S ABOUT TIME.
People were in motion now, milling dangerously, the people up front trying to get back, the people behind jockeying for a better look. I let the automatic slip into my right hand, jumped the little fence, and moved, fast and bent low, to the right gate of the haunted castle.
It opened with a gentle push. It opened inward, and it opened almost soundlessly: no creaking Inner Sanctum hinges, no response of gibbering laughter. It was, altogether, too much to hope for.
Wilton Hoxley was not standing behind it.
The gate closed behind me, and I stopped counting my blessings. The haunted castle was darker inside than Charlemagne’s tomb. I was standing on a track that moved upward at a gentle angle, and I could feel no walls on either side of me, even at full arm’s length. As my fingers grasped for what wasn’t there, I thought I heard someone sigh contentedly.
The sigh had been in front of me, not to the side. The railway was only about two feet wide, and I found that I could spread my feet until the inner edges of the rails touched the outside of my shoes, and that I could move relatively easily in that stance. And noisily. My wet sneakers squealed against the rails, and the plastic slicker hissed and crackled with every step.
I’ d gone forward maybe six or eight feet when the whole place started to glow. At first I thought my eyes were getting used to the darkness, but the glow grew stronger until I found myself in a twisting corridor with walls of painted stone and electrical sconces set here and there to resemble torches. Their little pink filaments flickered faintly.
There were three open doorways ahead of me. The track went past two of them, and then turned left into the third, and the corridor I was in faded off beyond the turn to the left in a trick of painted perspective.
I had one comfort: Now that I could see, I didn’t need the feel of the tracks to guide me. The first of the openings was to my right, and I put my back against the wall on that side of the corridor and edged slowly toward the doorway. When I reached the corner of the doorway, I counted three, pivoted on my right ankle, and whirled into the doorway, the gun extended in both hands. Ghosts attacked me.
When they flew at me, I shot both of them. They rushed me from the end of the tunnel, coming fast, weightless and fluttering, the ragged tatters of their robes barely brushing the ground. The bullets didn’t even slow them. In less time than it took me to inhale they were brushing my face, and I listened to the echoing spang of the gunshots and smelled dusty muslin and felt wire stiffeners, and then the ghosts slid away from me as quickly as they’d come, back up into their waiting post at the end of the little tunnel.
I’d wasted two bullets. By firing, I’d told Hoxley I was armed, although I didn’t figure that counted for much. On the other hand, I’d been made a fool of, which counted with me.
“That was pretty good,” I said out loud. “What’s next?”
What was next was the second opening, to the left this time. I approached it from the center of the tracks, not particularly eager to catch another face full of anything, and as I positioned myself in front of it, a light came on, and the medieval figure of Death, the image that has come down to us in the twentieth century as the Grim Reaper, black-hooded, with a scythe over its shoulder, and with a skull for a face, began to move toward me on some sort of rollers. It lifted its scythe.
“Too Ingmar Bergman for me,” I said, and then about twelve things happened at once. The tracks shook, the doors behind me burst open, music erupted, cold air struck my neck, I tried to dodge, and the little train hit me on the back of the thighs. I tumbled backward into it, and the last thing I saw before it trundled me away was Death winking at me.
“Drive carefully,” Death said.