Quicker than the Eye

“Don’t be afraid,” Zelda called, braver now. “Don’t listen to those others yelling. We won’t hurt you. It’s just us. I’m Zelda, you wouldn’t remember, and this here is Bella, and we’ve known you forever, or since we were kids, and we love you. It’s late, but we thought you should know. We’ve loved you ever since you were in the desert or on that boat with ghosts or trying to sell Christmas trees door-to-door or in that traffic where you tore the headlights off cars, and we still love you, right, Bella?”

The night below was darkness, waiting.

Zelda punched Bella’s arm.

“Yes!” Bella cried, “what she said. We love you.”

“We can’t think of anything else to say.”

“But it’s enough, yes?” Bella leaned forward anxiously. “It’s enough?”

A night wind stirred the leaves and grass around the stairs and the shadows below that had stopped moving with the music box suspended between them as they looked up and up at the two women, who suddenly began to cry. First tears fell from Bella’s cheeks, and when Zelda sensed them, she let fall her own.

“So now,” said Zelda, amazed that she could form words but managed to speak anyway, “we want you to know, you don’t have to come back anymore. You don’t have to climb the hill every night, waiting. For what we said just now is it, isn’t it? I mean you wanted to hear it here on this hill, with those steps, and that piano, yes, that’s the whole thing, it had to be that, didn’t it? So now here we are and there you are and it’s said. So rest, dear friends.”

“Oh, there, Ollie,” added Bella in a sad, sad whisper. “Oh, Stan, Stanley.”

The piano, hidden in the dark, softly hummed its wires and creaked its ancient wood.

And then the most incredible thing happened. There was a series of shouts and then a huge banging crash as the music box, in the dark, rocketed down the hill, skittering on the steps, playing chords where it hit, swerving, rushing, and ahead of it, running, the two shapes pursued by the musical beast, yelling, tripping, shouting, warning the Fates, crying out to the gods, down and down, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred steps.

And half down the steps, hearing, feeling, shouting, crying themselves, and now laughing and holding to each other, the two women alone in the night wildly clutching, grasping, trying to see, almost sure that they did see, the three things ricocheting off and away, the two shadows rushing, one fat, one thin, and the piano blundering after, discordant and mindless, until they reached the street, where, instantly, the one overhead streetlamp died as if struck, and the shadows floundered on, pursued by the musical beast.

And the two women, abandoned, looked down, exhausted with laughing until they wept and weeping until they laughed, until suddenly Zelda got a terrible look on her face as if shot.

“My God!” she shouted in panic, reaching out. “Wait. We didn’t mean, we don’t want—don’t go forever! Sure, go, so the neighbors here sleep. But once a year, you hear? Once a year, one night a year from tonight, and every year after that, come back. It shouldn’t bother anyone so much. But we got to tell you all over again, huh? Come back and bring the box with you, and we’ll be here waiting, won’t we, Bella?”

“Waiting, yes.”

There was a long silence from the steps leading down into an old black-and-white, silent Los Angeles.

“You think they heard?”

They listened.

And from somewhere far off and down, there was the faintest explosion like the engine of an old jalopy knocking itself to life, and then the merest whisper of a lunatic music from a dark theater when they were very young. It faded.

After a long while they climbed back up the steps, dabbing at their eyes with wet Kleenex. Then they turned for a final time to stare down into the night.

“You know something?” said Zelda. “I think they heard.”

The Electrocution (#ulink_a30fe5e4-d13d-5a50-9180-df97b3551151)

She let him tie the black silk over her eyes and he knotted it and jerked it so tight that she gasped and said, “Loosen it, damn you, Johnny, loosen it, or I won’t go on!”

“Sure,” he said easily, and she smelled his sharp breath; while beyond, the crowd rustled against the rope barrier and the carnival tent flapped in the night wind, and far off, there was a drift of calliope music and the rattle of a trap drum.

Dimly, through the black silk, she could see the men, the boys, the few women, a good crowd, paying out dimes to see her strapped in this electric chair, the electrodes on her wrists and neck, waiting.

“There.” Johnny’s voice whispered through the blindfold. “That better?”

She said nothing, but her hands gripped the ends of the wooden chair. She felt her pulse beating in her arms and neck. Outside, the pitchman yelled through his small cardboard megaphone and slapped his cane across the banner where Electra’s portrait shivered in the wind: yellow hair, hard blue eyes, sharp chin, seated in her death-chair like someone come for tea.

With the black silk blinding her, it was easier to let her mind run back to wherever it wanted to go …

The carnival was either setting up in a new town or letting go; its brown tents inhaling by day, exhaling its stale air by night as the canvases slid rustling down along the dark poles. And then?

Last Monday night this young man with the long arms and the eager pink face bought three tickets to the sideshow and stood watching Electra three times as the electricity burned through her like blue fire while this young man strained at the rope barrier, and memorized her every move as she sat high up there on the platform, all fire and pale flesh.

He came four nights in a row.

“You got an audience, Ellie,” said Johnny on the third night.

“So I see,” she said.

“Don’t pay no attention,” said Johnny.

“I won’t,” she said. “Why should I? Don’t worry.”

After all, she’d done the act for years. Johnny slammed on the power, and it filled her from ankle to elbows to ears as he handed her the bright sword and she thrust it out blindly over the audience, smiling under her half mask, to let them tap shoulders and brows as the blue sparks crackled and spat. On the fourth night she shoved the sword far out toward the young man with the sweating pink face, first among the crowd. The young man raised his hand swiftly, eagerly, as if to seize the blade. Blue sparks leaped the gap, but his hand didn’t flinch or stop as he grabbed on and took the fire in his fingers and then his fist and then his wrist and his arm into his body.

His eyes, in the light, flared with blue alcohol flame, fed by the sword, whose fire in passing lit her arm and face and body. He stretched his hand still farther out, his waist jammed against the rope, silent and tense. Then Johnny cried, “Everybody touch it! Every one!” And Electra lifted the blade out on the air for others to feel and stroke, while Johnny cursed. Through the blindfold she saw the terrible illumination which would not leave the young man’s face.

The fifth night, instead of touching the young man’s fingers, she tapped the blazing tip of the sword against the palm of his hand, brushing and burning until he shut his eyes.

That night she walked out on the lake pier after the show and did not look back as she moved, but listened and began to smile. The lake shook against the rotting piles. The carnival lights made wandering, uneasy roads on the black water. The Ferris wheel whirled high and around, with its faint screams, and far away the calliope steamed and sobbed “Beautiful Ohio.” She slowed her walking. She put out her right foot, slowly, then her left, then she stopped and turned her head. And as she turned she saw the shadow, and his arms moved around her. A long time later she leaned back in his arms and stared up into his healthy, excited pink face, and said, “My God, you’re more dangerous than my chair!”

“Is your name really Electra?” he said.

The next night as the power leaped through her, she stiffened, shuddered, and clamped her lips in her teeth, moaning. Her legs stirred; her hands groped and scratched the chair arms.

“What’s wrong!” Beyond the blindfold, Johnny cried out, “What?”

And cut the power.

“I’m all right,” she gasped. The crowd murmured. “It’s nothing. Go on! Now!”

And he hit the switch.

The fire crawled through her and again she clenched her teeth and threw her head back against the chair. A face rushed out of the dark, and a body with it, to press against her. The power exploded. The electric chair stopped, then melted.

Johnny, a million miles off in the dark, handed her the sword. Her limp, twitching hand dropped it. He handed it back and instinctively she shoved it far out into the night.

Someone, out there in the roaring darkness, touched the blade. She could imagine his eyes burning there, his lips parted as the power jolted him. He was pressed against the rope, hard, hard against the rope, and could not breathe or cry out or pull back!

The power died. The smell of lightning stayed.

“That’s it!” someone cried.