EIGHT

Pup Malamut was furious. He had always known his parents were idiots, but now there was no doubt left. Ever since the age of three, and probably even before, since he couldn't really remember beyond that, he had been able to get whatever he wanted out of them. Just by making a certain face, or a certain noise—or, later on, just by making everyone around him so miserable that it was easier to serve than to punish him.

And with the money his parents had, they could serve him a lot. He had more things than anybody he knew: two bicycles, a snowmobile for the winter and a pair of water skis for the summer. Most of these things he never used. It was the acquisition itself that gave him pleasure. He liked getting things out of people, and the only people he couldn't get things out of were those he made friends with. Like Jack and Reggie—they were the only two guys at school who hadn't given in to his bull about needing money for lunch, the only two who hadn't listened to his threats that his father could make life in Montvale miserable for their parents if they didn't do as he said. They'd both told him to buzz off. At first he had tried to get to them in other ways, even using physical force since he was bigger than either of them. But nothing worked. Eventually he came to them as an equal. Neither of them was particularly tough, but the very fact that they hadn't knuckled under to any of his tricks made him respect them and seek out their friendship. And that had come easily enough; all they had demanded was that he not "act like a jerk," as Jack had once said. After a while he had found that he was part of the Three Musketeers and that he didn't have to act like such a jerk around the other kids either.

But that hadn't stopped him from acting that way around his parents. He despised them, in a way. They were rich and weak. His father was president of the largest bank in town, his mother a social butterfly who headed the various committees that ladies of her sort were always creating or chairing. The funny part about it all, to his mind, was that they had never tried to blame him for their misfortune in child-rearing; they had always blamed themselves for producing a son neither good-looking nor conversant in the social graces they supposed their social standing required. Pup was big and awkward, with an unathletic body and a non-intellectual mind. The way his parents continually flogged themselves around him, and their sad looks and half-veiled allusions to "weak genes," only made him hate them more. At an early age he had learned of their imagined failure in him, and he had quickly discovered how to make them pay for it. They paid in money and in continual mental anguish; and Pup found that by merely pointing or throwing a fit, he could have whatever he wanted. For them, it was easier to give in than to try to understand. For Pup, that was just fine.

But now he was furious because they had said they didn't know if he could be the first one in the new amusement park when it opened.

"You mean,” Pup had shouted at his spotlessly dressed father, "that you don't control the damn thing?"

"No,” came the reply.

"Well. I want to be first in there anyway,” Pup had said. And then he had stalked to his room, slammed the door and begun to brood.

When Pup brooded, he did nasty things. Once, when he was four years old, his parents had told him that he had to get rid of a frog he had captured from Mailer's Pond and was keeping in a jar by his bed. They said it was dirty, that it would die in the house and that he would have to get rid of it because they knew he wouldn't take care of it. Pup went into a rage. Before he went to bed, he screwed the lid of the jar on tight, plugging up the air holes he had put in it, and in the morning he had flushed the dead frog down the toilet. When he got home from school that day, he screamed and pounded on the floor, accusing his mother of destroying the frog while he was away. "You killed it. How could you!” he wailed, and his mother had stood by helpless, unable to understand what had happened to the frog and unable to calm down her son. In the end they had bought him a dog.

And a curious thing happened with that dog. Pup found himself becoming attached to it. And now, nearly ten years later, his dog Sprinkles (so named because the night his father had brought the puppy home he had, with his typical lack of grace outside of business, held the dog so clumsily that it fell from his arms and into a bag of groceries, spilling a canister of chocolate sprinkles all over the floor; when his mother began to scream, Pup had only laughed, watching the puppy lick up the tiny candies. He had made sure the dog got all the sprinkles he wanted, and later, when the dog was sick in his room, he had cleaned up the mess himself and not let anyone else know about it) was the only creature outside of his friends Jack and Reggie whom he tolerated.

"Sprinkles," he called, and the dog climbed ponderously up onto the bed and laid its head in his lap. There had been a time when the dog could have leaped onto the bed, but that was past. He was getting old, and when he ran, he sometimes panted. When he had gotten sick the year before, his mother had timidly hinted that maybe it was best not to let the vet do the small operation on him that was needed—that maybe another dog, a new one, would be better. After a few days of Pup's spite, she had begun to think differently and the dog had been delivered home, patched but alive. There hadn't been any talk about another dog after that.

The problem now, though, was what to do about the new amusement park. Pup wanted badly to be the first through the gates when it opened; wanted to parade himself and his two friends through all the exhibits and rides, maybe even get a private showing of all the equipment from the manager. But if his father was unable to arrange this, other plans had to be devised. Pup burned with desire for the place; he had been watching it through his telescope all day.

"Stay, Sprinkles," he said, moving to the window and swiveling the scope back toward the amusement park. He had wheedled the instrument out of his parents after seeing the stars one night through Jack's, and he had used it for nothing but spying on other people and watching downtown from his upper window. Through it, he had once seen Lavinia Crawford undress. He had missed nothing, and ever since then, he had had the scope pointed in the direction of her house four blocks away.

It was getting late in the day, but there was still plenty of light to see by. He slipped in a higher-magnification eyepiece and focused on the top of the Ferris wheel, jutting like a big eye over the row houses between himself and the park. The top seat of the Ferris wheel looked as though it was swaying back and forth. . . .

He gasped at what he saw and for a moment pulled his eye away from the scope. He regained his composure and looked through the instrument again. For a second he saw nothing but the swaying side of the red-enameled seat, a silver stripe running around its upper edge, and then—yes, again he saw something. A bare arm above the edge, then a long, slender, naked back, and then the hint of a breast and then Lavinia Crawford turned full-face toward him. She seemed to look straight at him as she stood up in the car completely naked, her mouth open and thrown back, panting, her breasts high and rounded just as they were that day he had seen her undress. Both her hands were down between her legs, the fingers playing in and out. . . .

And then, all at once, she was gone. She slipped, snakelike, down into the open car, and Pup could not find her anymore. He realized he was breathing fast, and he quickly swiveled the telescope away from the Ferris wheel and to Lavinia's house. The bedroom window was open, as it normally was, but there was no one there. Pup angled the scope back to the top of the Ferris wheel. But now he saw only the red seat swaying gently back and forth, back and forth. . . .

He kept the scope trained on the seat for five full minutes but there was nothing else to see. Only that unnatural swinging of the car. He could have sworn it was Lavinia Crawford and a chill ran up his back as he remembered how she had seemed to look straight at him. Of course she couldn't have been, but that was the way it had looked.

Systematically he swept the instrument over all the rest of the amusement park that he could see and found nothing of interest. It looked more like an attraction closed for the winter than something getting ready to open soon.

One last time Pup swung the barrel of the scope up to the top of the Ferris wheel. His heart skipped a beat. There, once more, was Lavinia Crawford, looking into his eyepiece, a languid smile on her face. Pup knew she was looking at him: there was nothing else for her to be looking at. And then once again she was gone, sliding down into the car. One long, nude leg appeared, slim foot flexing, and then this too disappeared.

"Come on, Sprinkles." Pup said, pushing the telescope out of his way and picking up his golf jacket. The old dog looked at him uncomprehendingly, but when he spied Pup turning up his collar, he bounded from the bed and gave a weak yelp. "Not so loud." Pup cautioned, and they made their way quietly down the stairs to the kitchen.

He could hear the television going full blast in the living room: by now his mother would be half-asleep in front of it, watching Live at Five. He stopped at the kitchen counter to pull a few Oreos from the open box. He put one in his mouth as he moved to the back door. Sprinkles walked happily beside him, half-climbing up his leg until Pup bent down and shoved a cookie in his mouth.

It was chillier than he had thought it would be outside, and he tightened the jacket zipper under his neck. He broke into a trot. Squinting, he could just see the top of the Ferris wheel over the rooftops.

"Coming, Lavinia," he said, smiling to himself.

He still couldn't believe she had been beckoning for him. But why not? He'd once had the impression she knew he was watching her through her bedroom window when he'd heard her remark to one of her checkout-counter girlfriends in the supermarket that someone was "always trying to cop a look at me." When she'd said it, she'd turned full-face on him with that same half-pouting look she'd had when he saw her through the telescope, and he had fumbled on the checkout line with the National Enquirer until she looked away.

So why not? Who the hell knew how hard up she was? There was talk that she was loose; the paperboy, Billy Squiers, had told Pup that once she had tried to lure him into the house, when he went to collect the weekly fee, saying, "You have a minute? I think there's something wrong with my television." She had been wearing only a robe, and not much of that, Squiers had said. When Pup had asked him why he hadn't gone in, Billy had blustered something about having a lot of homework to do and then shut up. That was why Pup got so pissed at Jack and Reggie—they just got embarrassed like Billy Squiers whenever he tried to talk about girls. Well, this time they didn't know what they were missing.

Without realizing it, he had quickened his step to the point that Sprinkles was half a block behind. "Come on, boy," Pup called, waiting patiently while the dog caught up. He bent down, giving him the last Oreo, and Sprinkles waved his tail happily. Pup tried to slow his gait to accommodate the old dog.

As they reached the long black fence of the park. Sprinkles trotted beside him. Suddenly Pup hesitated.

"Well, now what?" he said out loud. He felt the same hesitation he had felt before in front of this fence. He almost wished Jack and Reggie were with him. Although there was no way he could share his knowledge about Lavinia with them, he valued their coolness in situations like this. He could always ditch them after they got inside, but at least they would help him get in if he told them how important it was.

He pulled his collar even tighter around his neck and saw that Sprinkles was reacting to the same feeling that was washing over him. Fear. Maybe it wasn't a good idea after all to go snooping around in here, at least not now. Maybe Lavinia Crawford wasn't worth it. Then again, maybe she was.

Ignoring Sprinkles' low growl, he hoisted himself halfway up the iron fence and immediately dropped back down. He saw a place where someone had made marks on the fence a little farther down the line. There were good footholds there, and it suddenly occurred to him with a rush of anticipation that maybe that was how Lavinia had gotten in.

In a moment he was up and over. Sprinkles was whining on the other side, and Pup thought of leaving him there, saying something like, “Good boy, I'll be right back," but the sad look on the dog's face made him change his mind. And the chill in the air made him want to have the dog with him. After some searching, he found a spot where the bottom of the iron grating was not quite flush with the earth, and by widening and deepening the depression at the bottom, he was able to pull Sprinkles underneath. The dog resisted. Pup cursed him as, half in and half out, the dog decided to use his hind end to scrabble back out. "Goddammit, come on!" Pup shouted and then, with a heave, the dog was inside. After a furtive look at the outside world, it brushed up against him.

Part of Pup wanted to do a little snooping, but another part wanted to get right to the Ferris wheel and see if Lavinia Crawford was really there. And then there was a third part that made him feel uneasy just to be in the place.

Soon the third part grew stronger. Every step Pup took magnified his fear. Before long he was moving as though someone were pushing him from behind. He had the feeling that he was being watched through a telescope.

Sprinkles felt it too. The dog was glued to Pup's side, making angry noises in its throat and looking around furtively. The hair on its back stood nearly straight up. Every time Pup tried to brush the dog away, it pushed right back to his leg.

And then Pup was at the base of the Ferris wheel. It loomed above, bigger even than the one in the park he'd made his father take him to once when he was younger, a park that had boasted the largest Ferris wheel within three hundred miles.

And there, at the top, gently swaying still, was the red car that held Lavinia Crawford.

Vaguely Pup wondered about how she had gotten up there, and why. But these thoughts were pushed aside by his mounting excitement. There was a warm feeling spreading under his belt. Who cared how she got there? If she really wanted him, she could have him. He had read enough and seen enough of the books his father kept hidden under the storage shelves in the basement to know what he had to do.

"Lavinia?" he called tentatively in an embarrassed whisper.

The car stopped rocking. A thin, naked figure stood up and looked down at him. He wished he had his binoculars with him, but he could have sworn she had blown him a kiss. She leaned over, her breasts clearly visible, and then she stepped back and was lost to view.

A hidden engine whirred into motion, and the Ferris wheel began, ponderously, to turn. The car with Lavinia in it crawled down toward him.

Sprinkles reared back on his haunches, growling, but Pup ignored him. His eyes were transfixed on the red carriage arcing inevitably toward him. The warmth below his belt became a tight, hard excitement.

Reggie and Jack, you don't know what you're missing.

A shiver passed across the back of Pup's neck. It was as though a hand had touched him lightly, a hand that had been held in ice water. He was filled with wild panic. What am I doing here? For the briefest time, reality returned to him. There was no logic in all this. That couldn't be Lavinia Crawford in the red car—Lavinia might be a cock-tease, but basically she was a scatterbrain. She almost never went anywhere without one of her plain-faced girlfriends, carefully chosen so that she would look better next to them, and also for "protection." Pup had once heard from a high-school senior that Lavinia liked to show off but that she never gave anything out—that all that talk about her being loose was baloney—and now that Pup thought about it, she had undressed only that once in front of the window. She left the shade up for him but never did anything in front of it.

Actually, now that a cold rationality gripped him, there was no way that Lavinia Crawford could be on this Ferris wheel.

That icy tingle touched his back again, and Pup whirled around. There was no one behind him, but he knew someone had touched him. The same someone who was watching him through a telescope. Pup was a jerk and he knew it—he had come alone to a place that gave everyone the creeps, with only an old, scared and useless dog for protection. This place, he saw now, was as creepy as any of the stories Reggie told in the churchyard or that he had in those treasured comics he kept locked in his closet.

Sprinkles whined loudly.

"Be quiet!" Pup said, and then he turned back to the Ferris wheel.

The red car was more than halfway down. A slim hand trailed over the railing, then was gone. Pup's excitement overtook his reason. Maybe it wasn't Lavinia Crawford in there, but it was a naked girl anyway. Then cold panic, as if switched back on, took hold of him again, and he decided not to wait to see what happened. He backed away briskly, moving toward the distant iron fence.

He was fifty yards from the Ferris wheel when he realized that Sprinkles was not with him. The fool dog was lagging behind again. He called sharply, but there was no answer, and when he looked back, the dog seemed to have disappeared. "Damn," he muttered, and began to make his way back.

He tried not to look at the Ferris wheel. Something was building here, something greater than the electricity in the air when his parents had one of their frequent fights over him, blaming each other for the way he was. That same kind of crackle was here. Maybe that was what he had felt on the back of his neck.

"Sprinkles!" he called, but there was no reply. Usually the dog at least answered him with a tepid bark. Maybe he had to take a leak; that seemed to be about all he did anymore, and he would look for a proper place to do it.

Pup thought he spied the dog inside the low retaining wall housing the Ferris wheel, his leg lifted next to the control box. But when Pup got close, he saw that what he had seen was only a painted cutout of a rabbit, part of the control box itself. The rabbit had a happy look on its face, but the eyes weren't painted right. They were too large. The rabbit was smiling cutely, like the rabbits painted on Easter-egg boxes, but the eyes looked five times too big.

Pup tried to turn away to look for Sprinkles elsewhere, but he was unable to take his eyes off the rabbit. The eyes were looking at him intelligently. Now they were even bigger. Were these the eyes that he had felt were watching him through a telescope? He didn't know. Then the huge eyes were gone, and there was only the sweetly smiling face of an Easter bunny looking at him flatly.'

"Hello. Pup," someone said from a place to his right. Pup couldn't think. His vision blurred. A small part of his foggy mind almost laughed because he was seeing like one of those movie lenses that they smear with Vaseline: the outer edges fuzzy and the inner part sharper, though still indistinct. He couldn't remember: had he been looking at the sun? In science class, Mr. Weiss had once yelled at them not to look at the sun during an upcoming eclipse: they could focus the eclipse on white paper, but they shouldn't look at the sun directly because it would burn out their retinas.

Had he looked at the sun and burned out his retinas? No, he hadn't looked at the sun. He had been looking at the rabbit. If he remembered correctly, he thought that burning out your retinas meant that you would be blind in the center of your eyes but could still see things around the edges. That warning had scared the whole class into not looking at the sun during the eclipse and had convinced Pup not to bother with the eclipse at all. He had gotten Jack to help him with his report, and since Jack had had his telescope taking pictures of the thing, Pup was able to wheedle one of the pictures out of him and had gotten an A.

But where was the rabbit he had been looking at? And where was Sprinkles? Everything was fuzzy. The rabbit was gone. Should he call the rabbit? Should he call Sprinkles?

"Sprinkles," he tried to say, and he found that his mouth wasn't working very well either. It came out sounding like "Spin-key." Was that him who had said, "Hello, Pup"? Why would he say his own name? There was really something wrong with him. That wasn't his voice, was it?

"Pup," the voice said again, and now he knew he hadn't said it. It was a smooth kind of voice, low and almost sexy. When it said "Pup," it sounded as though it was drawing the word out with its tongue and wrapping it around him. Was it a woman's voice? Wouldn't a sexy woman's voice make his name sound like that? Like the voices you imagined telling you all those things about themselves in Penthouse?

He yanked his head from the rabbit to the place he thought the voice was coming from. His head lifted too high, and he saw a slate-gray patch of lowering sky and some fluttering red-and-white pennants on poles and a rounded pie-piece slice of the Ferris wheel, and suddenly there was the open red car, stopped on the bottom platform, its door swinging open languidly and the car itself still swaying back and forth, and there, standing on the platform in front of it, the smiling, nude form of Lavinia Crawford.

"Oh, Pup," she said, her voice low and gravelly, like a sexy woman dee-jay. She stepped toward him, down off the platform. Pup watched her bare foot as she did this small liquid act, and then his eyes swung up to her smiling face again and down to her perfectly round breasts and the move of her hips.

"Lavinia?" he asked, but it came out. "Lars? Vina?"

"Yes, Pup," she answered, moving closer to him.

He wished he could think straight. There was something horribly right and horribly wrong about this: this must be Lavinia Crawford because it looked like her—at least the face looked like hers, and the body looked like hers had that time he'd seen her in her window through the telescope. But how could it be? How did she get here? How did she know he would come to her? Did she really want his ugly body? She was no slut. Was it because he had seen her that time and she knew it? That happened in the books his father kept hidden, so it must happen in real life. But could it happen to him? Why not?

She was so close now that he could smell her odor. And then, even in his confusion, a terror seized him again. Why didn't she smell good? He thought she should smell like perfume, or at least clean like his mother did. His mother always smelled like rose water. Not like this. This was the worst body odor he had ever encountered. Like sewage. And he couldn't see her face now: it was as though someone had rubbed Vaseline all over the lenses of his eyes.

"I want you," Lavinia purred, and Pup stumbled away from her. This wasn't right. She smelled wrong. He turned and tried to run.

He was half blind. He tried to rub at his eyes, to get the Vaseline off, but he suddenly didn't know where his hands were. He couldn't feel them. Someone else's hands were on him now. He strained his eyes desperately and saw the inflated face of Lavinia only inches from his face. The disgusting odor swept over him again. He felt her hard nipples rub against his jacket, and her voice was in his ear:

"I want you, Pup. Lie on me." She was groping at him, at his pants. He kicked wildly, trying to escape her smell, and then he had power over his hands again. He used them to push her off. She drifted away from him, and he heard the click of the door to the Ferris-wheel car. He rubbed at his eyes. As though he were rubbing Vaseline away, they began to clear, and then his head cleared and he was standing at the entrance gate to the Ferris wheel, facing the wooden platform and watching the hypnotically swaying red car. There was still an unreleased tightness in his pants.

"Don't like the smell of sex, Pup?" someone said behind him. It wasn't Lavinia's voice. It was low and smooth, and it held no question in it. It was the voice darkness would have.

Pup turned and saw a figure, more the essence of a shadow than a solid form, a shadow separated from what it reflects, leaving only the darkness that it represents. A shadow by itself would be a frightening thing, an unbalanced and spectral monstrosity, a hole outside of nature with only nature, in its continual balance, to define and outline it. But this thing was more; it had a mouth and eyes, and two hands, and a smile that was the inverse of a smile. In one hand it held a cigarette, a long black thing, itself made of seeming shadow; and when it lifted this to its lips, it blew black smoke that subtracted from the air rather than added to it. In its other hand the shadow held Sprinkles by the neck in something more than a nape hold, painfully, as though the dog were only a feather.

Pup was mesmerized. With a fluid motion, the shadow threw down its cigarette, at the same time blowing out its last smoke. It reached under its short coat and drew out something with a smooth black handle and a long gemlike blade. It resembled an elongated diamond, too sharp to hold.

There came a noise from the Ferris wheel. Pup looked to see the door to the red car swing open as a weight from the inside pushed it out. There was a hand there, made of white bone, and as it spilled out, it was followed by a skeleton arm and then a skull and the rest of a bony body that fell into a broken heap on the wooden platform. Inside the car, Pup saw stains, red and gray and white, and there was a puddle of something on the floor of the car that looked as though it might tilt also out onto the platform.

“Not to worry, Pup," the shadow man said. That wasn't the real Lavinia Crawford." And as if on cue, the pile of bones, the stains in the car, all of them, melted into nothingness, disappeared. "You can have the real Lavinia later if you want. But isn't there something better than sex, Pup? Isn't there something you always knew was better than sex?"

The shadow's grip tightened on the dog. Sprinkles whined sorrowfully, way back in his throat, and his brown eyes, through a hollow haze of pain, beseeched Pup, as if he knew what was about to happen.

"No!" Pup said, but the word stopped in his mouth even before the shadow's free hand started a long sweep up and then down, carrying the long white blade across Sprinkles' throat. The dog howled once, an empty sound that broke into a shallow, wheezing gurgle. He went stiff and straight and then, after a moment, slack, and as the pool of the deepest red Pup had ever seen gathered below the dog, the shadow man dropped Sprinkles into it.

"Isn't there something better'?" the dark man said, and Pup, as though a door had opened for him with the man's words, a huge door leading into an infinitely long corridor, pitch black as night and angling always down, felt the long tension below his belt break and a spreading wetness. And something like peace came over him, something like the blissful calm after a long and mightily fought storm, as the dark man turned away and he followed.