Totentanz by Al Sarrantonio Page A

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