The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel by Charles L. Grant

of grass right in front of her,
tall evergreens on the far side; to the left a ballfield, and
beyond it a large white bandstand at the foot of a hill that sloped
gently upward to more trees on top. It was like the country in the
middle of a city, she thought; riding past it in the car had given
her no idea that it looked like this.
    “Neat, huh?” Kitt said, grinning.
    She nodded.
    Drake leaned over, bat in both hands, and looked
at Kitt.
    “You going to the pond?”
    “The moon.”
    “Suits me,” he said. “Just don’t leave without
me, okay? You do, I’ll pound you.”
    “Oh boy, I’m — so scared.”
    He looked at Fran, and suddenly smiled so
broadly she couldn’t help but smile back. “When you’re ready to go
home, lady, I’ll be right here, all right? Don’t let her talk you
into anything stupid.”
    “Sure,” she said.
    “Sure,” Kitt echoed sarcastically, and bolted
across the grass. “C’mon, Lumbaird, leave the creep to the
creeps!”
    Fran ran.
    Around people on sheets and blankets sunning
themselves, burning themselves, playing catch and slow tag and just
walking without having any real place to go; looking over once to
see Drake joining his friends, pushing and shoving and threatening
with the bat; looking to the right to the spear-tips of the fence
that rose above the shrubs and between the trees, but not being
able to see the village on the other side; breaking through the
evergreens behind Kitt, And stopping again.
    “Damn,” she whispered.
    The pond was a bloated L shape, its high banks
covered with pine needles, the water a darker blue than the sky.
Darker, almost black. A small rowboat anchored in the center, two
people in it beneath a large umbrella. Another world again, a world
within a world, and she wondered how many more surprises this place
had.
    She followed Kitt along the lip of the bank
until they reached the far end. She knew Chancellor Avenue was out
there, but the greenery cut it off, smothered the traffic’s noise,
and smothered the heat as well, making her shiver as she ducked
under the branch of a multi-trunk elm and found herself in a small
glade whose grass had long since been trained to grow in ragged
patches amid patches of dark earth where violets grew low. High,
crisscrossed branches masked most of the sky, sliced the sun into
fragments that barely lit the ground. Not quite twilight, not quite
an autumn afternoon.
    Elly was there, sitting primly on a folded
tartan blanket, and Susan with her dimples, and two others she
didn’t recognize. Kitt introduced them, but Fran couldn’t hold onto
their names right away, and maybe didn’t want to the way they
looked at her. Sideways, not straight on, checking her out,
measuring her. Not really friendly. City kid. She found a place to
sit-behind and to the right of Elly, on a root like the one where
she’d cried on the day she’d arrived.
    There were no boys.
    Elly crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt with
both hands, brushed her bangs carefully away from her eyes. “All
right,” she said, and the others quickly formed a ragged half
circle in front of her. One of them — Maddy? she couldn’t remember
glared at Fran until she deliberately looked away. She wasn’t about
to play this game until she knew the rules. All of them. And being
like some kind of servant to some kind of queen wasn’t what Daddy
would call her style.
    Elly didn’t seem to mind.
    The faint crack of bat and ball.
    A duck calling to another, was answered, and
calling again. A bumblebee checking the flowers, Fran watching it
uneasily, praying it wouldn’t come near though she could hear it
buzzing loud and soft, loud and soft, swaying side to side in the
air and moving on, and buzzing.
    Then Kitt said, “Fran hasn’t got a friend.”
    Maddy — was it Maddy? Maggie? who cared, she was
fat and had frizzy hair — looked at her sorrowfully, and Fran felt
her temper tug a scowl into place. What was going on here? She had
a friend. Kitt was one.