THIRTEEN

Plain as day, Mayor Poundridge had seen his dead father waiting for him just inside the gates to the new amusement park. Plain as day, he'd seen that bemused, tolerant look, the look that said, "You're my son, and you'll do all right," and the ache of recognition and remembered loss had grown so strong that all other thoughts had disappeared. Despite the impossibility, not an atom of doubt had been in his mind. It was his father; he was alive again, period. Only joy and reunion could follow.

But where was his father now?

And where was Emily?

Emily had been right behind him as they rushed up to the gates. When he saw the swell of people begin to gather there, he'd felt it was his duty to be the first through—to say something to them, to make the occasion official. Heck, it was his privilege. Some were in their nightclothes, but most wore light summer shirts or blouses and pants. Most looked expectant, but some looked downright joyful—like that Reggie Carson's mother. She was staring at the sky, and Poundridge had looked up just in time to catch sight of a plane, long and sleek, before it was lost in the glare of the lights. Hadn't her husband died in a plane crash?

There was a great swell of anticipation. Emily had been beside him then, he knew, because she had clutched his arm and pointed to a short woman beyond the entrance who looked like her departed Aunt Lucy. At that point Poundridge felt he had to speak, and he pushed his way to the closed gates, Emily following.

"Friends!" he shouted, and for a moment they ignored him, too caught up in their own emotions to pay attention. But he knew crowds—there were too many politician's genes in him for something like this to stand in his way—and when Emily put her hand on his arm, he tried again.

"Friends, please!" This time a few heads turned. "This is a great occasion in our town's history, and I just wanted you to know that I am here to represent—"

Then the gates swung open, and his words disappeared in the surge forward. He was just able to push to the front as the great mass flowed into the park.

He was sure Emily had still been with him at that point. He had felt her hand on his arm as they went through, had even patted it. But then he'd seen something that annoyed him. He had thought he was the first to enter the park, but somehow that scamp Pup Malamut had found his way in before him. There he was, standing next to a stall that said "Guess Your Weight" in fresh red letters. He was smiling, with his arms folded. The nerve of that boy! Everything else was pushed from his mind at that moment, and when Pup turned and began to swagger away down one of the causeways, Poundridge stalked after him.

It was then he discovered that he had somehow been separated from Emily. He tried to catch sight of her closely bunned hair in the crowd, but she was nowhere in sight. Which was strange, because she was always there, like a hand or a foot, always where she was supposed to be. What had she been wearing? He couldn't remember. A blue dress? Brown? He didn't even know if she owned a brown dress. He hadn't really looked at her in years; she had just always been there. When he needed something, there Emily was, with a file from the office, or his pipe, which he was always mislaying—anything. He found it hard now to remember what she looked like, it had been so long since he had really looked at her. To live with someone so long and yet forget what she looked like. . . .

Pup Malamut was disappearing around a corner.

Mayor Poundridge hesitated a moment, then turned to go after the boy. Emily was important, but this was more important. The youngster had smirked at him, as though he knew the mayor had lost face and he was gloating over it. That wouldn't do. Pup Malamut's father had caused trouble for Mayor Poundridge, had challenged him a few times in Council meetings and had even considered running against him once. They were a high and mighty bunch, that Malamut family, and there was no reason why the mayor should put up with it any longer. He'd teach old Malamut a lesson this time. They thought money could buy everything and, well, it couldn't. Not everything. He'd catch that boy by the scruff of the neck and

When he got to the corner, the boy had vanished. A long line of shooting galleries and other games of chance lay before the mayor. There were a few people milling about, but Pup Malamut was not among them. The mayor thought of asking anyone if they'd seen the boy, but that would only call attention to the fact that Pup had upstaged him. He was about to turn away, to go back and find Emily, when he caught sight of the boy leaning over the counter of the last game tent, pitching softballs into an angled barrel. He finished the game and turned away, but not before giving the mayor that insolent took again.

Infuriated, Poundridge followed. Damn boy, he thought. He instantly rebuked himself for thinking a curse word, but the sentiment would not leave him. He reached the game tent where Pup had been and stopped to regain his breath. He looked and saw that all three softballs were neatly nestled in the wooden barrel.

For the oddest moment, as Mayor Poundridge looked at that barrel with those three large balls in it, it became a face, and the three balls merged into two enormous eyes—an animal of some sort stared at him. But like Marley's face on Scrooge's door knocker, the vision passed. His mind still bent on catching the boy. Poundridge moved on.

He turned into another causeway, this more isolated than the other; the lights were not quite so bright and there were dark patches of shadow. It was, in fact, a rear alley of sorts; the backs of tents lined either side, and occasionally there was a thump as a mis-aimed baseball or thudding dart struck against the canvas. It was very dark ahead of the mayor, as if all the brightness had suddenly bled out and night had fallen in. Pup was nowhere to be seen. Poundridge's anger began to subside, replaced by a hint of anxiety. Maybe it wasn't Pup he had seen after all; maybe that hadn't been Pup pitching softballs.

He advanced a step at a time. As he passed the space between two tents, there came a sound. He jumped and then saw a softball rolling toward him. Vaguely he heard voices and the distant, murky tinkle of the calliope. The ball rolled to a stop at his foot, just inside a small pool of dim light. Poundridge looked down at it. There was a face on it: the face he had seen in the barrel with the three balls in it—large and round, the face of a lion or a hare, with monstrous eyes. The eyes stared up at him, becoming bigger and bigger until they filled the whole face.

Then the face vaporized, and Poundridge kicked the ball into the shadows ahead. The lights had gone out. He was standing under the only light to be seen. There was a glow of luminosity to his right, from between the two tents, but as he watched, it faded. Above him there was a single dim bulb taped to a tall pole, along with a speaker horn. The calliope music he heard was coming tinnily from the horn.

Someone lit a match very close in front of him. As quickly as it flared, it went out.

"You'd like to go back?" a disembodied voice said.

Poundridge turned to flee. Immediately he collided with something solid in the dark, banging his face and shoulder against it. He staggered back, holding his bleeding nose. The voice behind him laughed, and he reached out to see what he had hit.

It was solid, a wooden beam connected to wooden struts. He could not see it but he traced the outline of the structure with his hands, frantically trying to feel his way around it. The laugh, low and coarse, came again. He found a step at the far right of the structure; since there was no way to get beyond that, he felt upward another step, and then another, until his hand chanced upon something not made of wood—a leg, as cold as ice, with a smooth shoe on the foot. He pulled back with a start.

"What's happening here?" he called out in a tremulous voice. His fear did not allow him to project the authority he wanted.

The bulb overhead brightened, the filament inside glowing hotter and hotter as though turned up by a dimmer switch. Now light filled the entire space in front of him, revealing the sharp outline of timbers and struts leading upward into the dark.

Poundridge looked up at the figure attached to the leg he had felt on the stairway.

"Hello, son," the figure said.

"Father?"

Poundridge gazed into the face of his father. He blinked fiercely, not believing his eyes. So it was true. Momentary joy welled up within him, but instantly it was gone. When he had seen his father through the gates of the amusement park, it had seemed right. It was impossible, but it had been all right. Now he knew it wasn't right—that something was horribly not right. A curtain had been lifted from his mind, and what had seemed before a joyful reunion was now, in cold, clear logic, a terrible event.

On the step above the one on which his father stood was another figure; it resembled his father but was a bit stouter. On the step above that was another figure, and another up into the darkness. Mayor Poundridge stood staring into a dim, silent line of faces, each like his own, each fuller and fatter than the one below.

"I'm losing my mind," he muttered, trying to blink away the phantoms before him.

"No," said that cold, disembodied, slightly amused voice behind him. Jonathan Poundridge whirled around but saw nothing except darkness. Turning back, he fully expected the silent line of clones to be gone, but it was not.

Poundridge's father said, “This is my father behind me, and his father behind him. All your ancestors stand before you. Jonathan."

"You're all dead,” the mayor said to them, still hoping they might vanish like smoke, drift away like ghosts, along with the darkness and the wooden structure, and that he would find himself back at the entrance to the amusement park, bidding all of Montvale to have a good time, and Emily by his side.

"Emily," he said, feeling very alone without her.

From higher up on the wooden structure, above the cone of light, someone sniggered. Another bright bulb flashed on, and Poundridge saw who it was.

"You. . .”

Pup Malamut grinned down at him, an odd, triumphant smile on his face, his tee shirt askew, half-pulled out of his pants.

"Yes.” Pup said. "Mad at me, aren't you?"

Poundridge's anger returned. But it melted like butter at the sound of the other voice, the voice in darkness.

"Go ahead.” the voice laughed.

Pup Malamut clattered down the wooden steps, making them creak with his weight, and ran off sniggering into the night. Poundridge wanted to go after him but found that he was unable to move. It occurred to him that this entire episode, this black-and-white scene, black of night with white light from the bulbs on the pole, looked exactly like one of those old television shows from the nineteen sixties. Like a scene from Gunsmoke or that strange show he had watched once but never again, making Emily turn it off when he didn't understand it: The Outer Limits.

"Get on with it," the voice behind him said. It sounded bored, yet tinged with anticipation.

Jonathan Poundridge went limp in the knees. A terror gripped him by the back and paralyzed him. The curtain that had been drawn over his mind was yanked away, and he knew that something horrible was going to happen to him. This was no stunt, no amusement-park ride or crazy dream he had wandered into. Something bad was going to happen to him, and there would be no Emily there to help him or tell him what to do.

"Pup Malamut!" he called desperately. "Come back and help me. I promise nothing will happen to you—1 won't even tell your father!"

His own father's dead face, dead voice, seemed almost to be pleading with him now, for understanding, for . . . forgiveness?

"We . . . must. . . ."

The light beam traveled slowly up the steps to stop at a platform at the top. Poundridge looked up at the silent white faces of his ancestors.

The voice behind him grew hard and commanding. "Walk."

Poundridge tried to resist but could not. He began to whimper. His foot, in spite of his efforts to keep it where it was, moved forward a hesitating step, and then the other foot followed. He was on the first step with his father.

"Keep going," the voice commanded.

His feet lifted, set down, lifted, set down. Step by step he passed first his grandfather (a vague memory, smelling of strong tobacco and old war stories), then a succession of ghosts, each vaguer and fuller of body than the one before. It was as though something corporeal, something of the flesh, had been bled out of each succeeding generation of Poundridges, leaving his own lean body to answer to the ages. Each ancestor wore a different kind of clothing, and it was, as he passed, like watching the same man slowly gain weight and move through a succession of time shifts into the past.

He was on the top step.

His feet stopped. There was something before him on the platform that he did not want to see. The light ceased, knife-sharp, a few feet in front of him, and he felt out there in the darkness a presence that made his stomach turn over.

"Emily!" he called, but he heard the word as it left his mouth swallowed, as if his face had been muffled by a pillow.

He heard a slow tread on the steps and knew it was the voice in the dark.

"Oh, God," he whimpered.

"Move," the voice said from directly behind him.

He advanced, a reluctant puppet. He saw and then felt hands reach out of the darkness, hands and arms that seemed to come out of a solid wall of black. They took hold of him and propelled him forward; at the same time, something was quickly wrapped around his neck and pulled tight.

Illumination blossomed all around him, making night into day again, revealing the platform and the tall, straight length of timber that rose behind him and elbowed over his head to hold the thick hemp rope that was knotted around his thin, sweating neck.

A dark man stood there. "Ever hear of 'the sins of the fathers,' Mr. Mayor?" the mouth in the white, sack-like face said.

"Tell me what's happening here," Poundridge wept; once again he tried desperately to put authority into his words but failed.

"Let's get on with it," the other said, ignoring him.

A solid terror started in Mayor Poundridge's stomach and immediately reached to the ends of his body. I'm going to die, he thought, amazed that he was even taking the time to think such a thing; I really am. With further illogic he thought, This is what men in war feel like. There had been only one other time when he had perceived anything like this. He had been watching a movie on television called Paths of Glory. Kirk Douglas was in it. He had tuned in because he thought it would be a good war picture and he had always liked war pictures. But this was something different. Kirk Douglas was defending three French soldiers who had been accused of not following orders during World War 1; they had been told to go over the top and had refused. They were to be court-martialed and shot. His uneasiness had begun when he realized that everyone in the men's regiment had disobeyed the orders and that these three had been picked at random as examples. It was obvious that despite Kirk Douglas, they would be shot at the end of the movie. Poundridge had watched with mounting fascination and horror as the film zeroed in on the three soldiers and made them into real characters. They were just men. The order to go over the top had been insane, and they were just unlucky enough to get picked to take the punishment.

Poundridge had wanted to turn the movie off but found that he couldn't. Inevitably the men were led out to execution, and he saw them actually tremble as they realized that this would be it; they were going to die; the rifles of the firing squad would be aiming at their hearts and then pumping little slugs of lead into them, and in a minute, five minutes from now, three minutes from now, whenever, they would be dead. As the firing squad took aim after the blindfolds had been put in place, one of the men began to whimper, to cry, and Poundridge had suddenly leaped from the sofa and hit the "Off" knob on the television. He had stood there, shaken, for a few minutes, and then had gone to bed without watching the news or anything else. The next morning Emily had mentioned to him that he hadn't touched the potato chips she'd put out for him the night before, or the soda, and was there something the matter with him?

And now it was going to happen to him. Here he was, with this thick rope tight against his neck, tighter than any collar he had ever worn, so tight he could feel individual gnarled strands against the flesh of his neck, could feel the tautness of the rope if he moved his head from side to side—and in a few moments, in three minutes or five, the wooden planking beneath his feet would give way and there would be nothing for him to stand upon. Either his neck would break or he would gulp for air that wasn't there, and he would die. He would be dead. Every cell in his body knew that, every cell fought against it, but there was nothing any of them could do. In five minutes at most, he would no longer be here; he would be dead. Gone.

"Oh, God, please," he began to whimper.

The man on the platform next to him, a fat, nameless copy of himself with averted eyes and trembling hands, put his fingers on the straight piece of wood that would release the trap door beneath Jonathan Poundridge.

"Please, no," Poundridge whimpered, but the fat man would not look at him.

"I've changed my mind, Ash," a quiet voice said from below.

The fat man paused with his fingers on the lever. The light softened; the stark black and white of the scene (that was the way Paths of Glory had looked) shifted to a more natural shade of night. The clench in Poundridge's stomach, the rock-hard fist, loosened a fraction.

For the slightest moment, Ash seemed to shrink down into his clothes. But this passed so quickly that Poundridge could not swear it had happened. With slow, deliberate steps, Ash dismounted the gallows until he stood on the black tarmac at the bottom, facing Jeff Scott. Miraculously, Poundridge discovered he was able to move, and he leaned forward, the rope pulling taut at the back of his neck, to watch what went on below.

"You've changed your mind?" Ash asked calmly but with a tinge of ominousness slithering beneath. "Yes," Jeff Scott answered.

"What do you think happens now?" Ash questioned. His words rose to a shrill shout. Jeff Scott flinched. "Do I walk away? Do you? What happens, you fool?"

Jeff Scott answered, "You tell me, Ash." Then he said, "I think you're afraid of me."

Ash's arms rose; for a moment they seemed as high as the top of the platform—two long, horrid spider legs, as thin and taut as piano wire, with horrible claws at the tips. But then they were only long, thin arms again.

"Do you think this is all for you?" Ash screamed.

Jeff Scott fell to his knees. "Do you think this whole stinking world was created for your indulgence? I've watched you. From the very beginning, I've watched your introspection with amusement. Trying to come to terms with yourself. Trying to understand your hate. Trying to figure out why you found yourself on this stinking earth again, a walking corpse with feelings and emotions." Ash mocked in a falsetto: "Oh. Lord, why am I here? What is my mission? Why have I been brought back?" He raised a hand to strike. "You fool! Haven't you figured out by this time that you're one of the walking dead? That's all you are! There isn't any hope for you, no reason for you to try to puzzle out your predicament. Right now, at this moment, as you walk and seemingly breathe and push at the world with your little hands and try to figure out the universe, you are dead.'' Ash raised his hand even higher and brought it down in a long, scythe-like arc. Jeff Scott screamed as half his face was torn away. In its place was a half-exposed skull with bits of muscle and tissue attached to it. He shrieked, throwing his hands up to his face, but though the pain diminished, the wound was still there, open and alive.

"Look at me," Ash commanded, and Jeff Scott looked into his face. The white, pasty mask melted away into a silver disk, a pool of water or a liquid mirror, and Jeff Scott saw his own face as it was now, half-living and half-dead. He felt fire course down his body and saw the flesh and blood stripped away from one side. "Stop!" he screamed, but the pain would not cease. He was half-bone and half-flesh.

"This is what you are," Ash spat, pointing contemptuously at the skeletal half. "This is what you have been for a hundred and twenty years, since that gallows rope choked your breath way. A dead man." Ash stretched a talon-like hand toward the sky. "All of this is gone for you: all of this is dead to you. You can't touch or feel it. You might as well be maggots and soil for all the difference it makes to you. You're a worm, a pile of filth." He pushed at Jeff Scott, pushed at the bones on the left side of his body, and Jeff Scott felt the hand there, cold against cold bone. He collapsed, and Ash's face hovered over him. "Your hate sealed you long ago," Ash said quietly. "Do you still think I fear you?"

Jeff Scott looked into that non-face, into the eyes that were puddles of blue emptiness, at that red mouth, and said, "You're afraid of something."

A crack appeared deep in the mask. There was fear in that blank emptiness, in those ice-blank eyes, and for a hushed tick of time, Jeff Scott saw Ash's face for the mask it really was—the hard, vicious play-face held over something fathomless and cruelly sure, yet deathly frightened.

Ash's bladelike lips parted, and he screamed into Jeff Scott's face. The cry climbed to an impossible pitch of rage. Jeff saw the face above the mouth contort, the outstretched, arching hand ready to fall upon him. . . .

A moment of infinity passed.

"No," Ash said finally. "That's what you want.” He rose, leaving Jeff Scott on the ground before him. "I won't give you that. But I will give you this."

Ash turned to the gallows and made a curt motion to the man at the top. Poundridge, who had been watching the scene below with fascination, almost forgetting that he was a player in the drama—thinking, with an insubstantial spark of hope, that possibly this was a form of entertainment after all, some part of the amusement park designed to give the customer a real thrill, something to remember for a long time—was abruptly pulled back to his situation. The rope was still around his neck. He still stood on the gallows; the pleading in his defense that had gone on below had not worked to his favor. The fist in his stomach gripped harder. He knew that the moment was upon him, the reprieve past. He saw his chubby ancestor's trembling but ineluctable hands tighten on the lever to the trap door, and he cried out for pardon, to be let free. Like James Cagney, he thought insanely, at the end of that picture where they drag him to the electric chair screaming and pleading. Panic seized him even more fiercely, and he began to wail.

"Please don't do this! I haven't done anything! Please! Oh, God, please!"

The fat ancestor's hands trembled like leaves in the wind.

Jeff Scott tried to raise himself, but failed. As he fell back against the cold ground, Poundridge became hysterical. He felt his bowels empty, and at that moment the trap door pulled open.

"The sins of the fathers," Ash said, his eyes growing bright.

Jonathan Poundridge cried out as the earth was pulled away from him. He fell a long way, past row on row of his own face, each growing thinner, each silently turned toward him. He watched the dissipation of a race of men. And then he heard rather than felt a loud snap, and everything in his body was on fire, including his shrieking voice, which he heard no more.