Mystery Walk

stretched . . . and the mouth tore open, white sutures dangling; the inside of the mouth was an awful oyster gray, and cotton had been stuffed in to fill out the cheeks. The head jerked as if in agony, the body writhing beneath Wayne's hand.

Someone hammered wildly at the door. 'WAYNE!' George Hodges shouted. 'STOP IT!'

But Wayne was filled with righteous healing power, and he would atone for his sins by bringing J.J. Falconer back from the dark place. All he had to do was concentrate a little harder, sweat and hurt a little more. 'Come back, Daddy,' Wayne whispered to the writhing corpse. 'Please come back. ...'

'Wayne!' his mother screamed, her voice on the raw edge of hysteria. 'He's dead, he's dead, leave him alone!'

And he realized, with a sickening certainty, that he had failed. All he was doing was making a dead frog jump. His daddy was dead and gone. 'No,' he whispered. Falconer's head twisted to one side, the mouth yawning wide.

Wayne unclenched his fingers and stepped back. Instantly the corpse lay still, the teeth clicking together as the mouth shut.

'Wayne?'

'Unlock the door!'

'Let us in, son, let us talk to you!'

He stared down at the drops of blood on the marble floor. Numbly, he wiped his nose on his sleeve. It was all over, and he had failed. The one thing he'd asked for, the most important thing, had been denied him. And why? Because he had plummeted from the Lord's grace. Somewhere, he knew, the Creekmores must be celebrating. He touched his pounding forehead with his bloody hand, and stared at the opposite wall with its mural of sheep and shepherds.

Outside the memorial room, Cammy Falconer and the assembled mourners heard the terrible crashing noises begin. It was, as a Methodist minister would later tell his wife, as if 'a hundred demons had gotten in that room and gone mad.' Only when the noises stopped did George Hodges and a couple of men dare to force the doors open. They found Wayne huddled in a corner. Vases of flowers had been thrown against the walls, scarring the beautiful mural and slopping water all over the floor. The corpse looked as if Wayne had tried to drag it out of the coffin. Cammy saw her son's bloody face and fainted.

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 cafe. 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 cafe, 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