I was overwhelmed with pity for the human inhabitants of this godforsaken place. With one school fire already seared into the city’s history, with a much worse blaze to come, I was quite sure of what I would discover if I went to the nearest firehouse: goblins. I thought of the headline we had seen in the local paper—BOTULISM KILLS FOUR AT CHURCH PICNIC—and I knew what I would find if I paid a visit to the priest at the rectory: a demonic beast in a backward collar, dispensing blessings and sympathy—just as it must have dispensed the deadly bacterial toxins in the potato salad and baked-bean casserole—while leering gleefully within its remarkable disguise. What a crowd of goblins must have gathered in front of the elementary school that day, the moment the alarm went off, to watch the erupting catastrophe with counterfeit horror, ostentatiously grieving while surreptitiously feeding on the human agony the way we would go to McDonald’s for lunch, each child’s scream like a bite of a juicy Big Mac, each radiant flash of pain like a crisp French fry. Dressed as city officials, professing shock and a shattering sense of loss, they would have lurked at the city morgue, hungrily observing the fathers who reluctantly came to identify the grisly, charred remains of their beloved offspring. Posing as grief-stricken friends and neighbors, they would have gone to the homes of bereaved parents, offering moral support and comfort, but secretly sucking up the sweet psychic pudding of anguish and misery, just as, months later, they were now hovering about the families of those who had been poisoned at the church picnic. Regardless of the respect and admiration—or lack of it—in which the deceased was held, no funeral in Yontsdown would ever be lightly attended. There was a snake pit full of goblins here, and they would slither off to feed wherever a banquet of suffering was laid out for them. And if fate did not produce enough victims to suit their taste, they would do a little cooking of their own—torch a school, orchestrate a major traffic accident, carefully plan a deadly industrial mishap at the steel mill or down at the rail yards . . .

The most frightening aspect of what I had discovered in Yontsdown was not merely the startling concentration of goblins, but their heretofore unseen desire and ability to organize themselves and take control of human institutions. Until this moment I had seen the goblins as roving predators, insinuating themselves throughout society, and more or less choosing their victims at random and on the spur of the moment. But they had plucked up the reins of power in Yontsdown and, with terrifying purposefulness, had transformed the entire town and surrounding county into a private game preserve.

And they were breeding here in the Pennsylvania mountains, in this coal-country backwater where the rest of the world seldom cast a glance.

Breeding.

Jesus.

I wondered how many other nests of these vampires existed in other dark corners of the world. And vampires they were, in their own way, for I sensed that they drew their primary nourishment not from the blood itself but from the radiant auras of pain, anguish, and fear that were produced by human beings in desperate trouble. A meaningless distinction. To cattle destined for the butcher’s block, it does not matter which portions of their anatomy are most esteemed at the dinner table.

We drove out of town with considerably less conversation than had marked our trip in. Jelly and Luke were dreading the ambush by Kelsko’s men, and I was still rendered speechless by all that I had seen and by the bleak future of the children at Yontsdown Elementary School.

We crossed the city limits.

We passed the stand of black, gnarled oaks burdened with strange fungus.

No one stopped us.

No one tried to run us off the road.

“Soon,” Jelly said.

One mile out of the city.

We passed the outlying houses that were in need of paint and new roofs, where the rusting hulks of automobiles stood on concrete blocks in the front yards.

Nothing.

Jelly and Luke grew more tense.

“He let us off too easy,” Jelly said, meaning Kelsko. “Somewhere in the next half mile...”

A mile and a half out of the city.

“He wanted to give us a false sense of security,” Jelly said, “then hit us like a ton of bricks. That’s what he was up to. And now they’ll smash us. These coal-country boys got to have their fun.”

Two miles.

“Wouldn’t be like them to miss out on their fun. Any second they’ll come at us....”

Two and a half miles.

Now Jelly said that the trouble would come at the abandoned mine, where the ruins of the railroad tipple and other structures poked jagged, toothlike timbers and metal fragments at the lowering gray sky.

But those monuments to vanished industry appeared, and we passed them by without incident.

Three miles.

Four.

Ten miles beyond the city limits Jelly finally sighed and relaxed. “They’re going to let us off this time.”

“Why?” Luke asked suspiciously.

“It ain’t exactly unprecedented. There’ve been a couple other years they didn’t pick a fight,” Jelly said. “Never gave us a reason. This year . . . well . . . maybe it’s because of the school fire and the tragedy at that church picnic yesterday. Maybe even Lisle Kelsko’s seen enough nastiness this year and doesn’t want to risk scaring us off. Like I said, seems like these poor damned people need a carnival this year more than ever.”

As we headed back across Pennsylvania, planning to stop along the way for a late lunch, aiming to arrive at the Sombra Brothers Carnival by early evening, Jelly and Luke’s spirits began to rise, but mine did not. I knew why Kelsko had spared us the usual brawl. It was because he had something worse in mind for next week, when we were all set up on the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds. The Ferris wheel. I did not know exactly when it would happen, and I did not know exactly what they had in mind, but I knew that the goblins would sabotage the Ferris wheel and that my disquieting visions of blood on the midway would, like evil buds, soon blossom into dark reality.

Chapter nine

CONTRASTS

After a late lunch, after we got back on the highway for the last hour and a half of the return trip, memories of Yontsdown were still weighing heavily on me, and I could no longer tolerate the strain of having to participate in the conversation and laugh at Jelly’s jokes, even though some of them were quite funny. To escape, I pretended to nap, slumped in my seat, head lolling to one side.

Fevered thoughts buzzed through my mind. . . .

What are the goblins? Where do they come from?

Is each goblin a puppet master, a parasite, seeding itself deep in human flesh, then taking control of its host’s mind, operating the stolen body as if the corpus were its own? Or are the bodies merely imitation humans, vat-grown costumes that they don as easily as we slip into a new suit?

Countless times over the years I had considered these questions and a thousand others. The problem was that there were too damned many answers, any of which might have been true, but none of which I could scientifically verify—or with which I could even feel comfortable.

I had seen my share of flying-saucer movies, so I was not without a pool of fanciful ideas in which to dip my bucket. And after seeing my first goblin, I had become an avid science-fiction reader, hoping that some novelist had already conceived of this situation and had come up with an explanation that would serve as well for me as it did for his fictional characters. From those often flamboyant tales, I acquired many theories for consideration: The goblins might be aliens from a distant world who crashed here by accident, or landed with the intention of conquering us, or came to test our suitability for full partnership in the galactic government, or wanted only to steal all of our uranium for use in their hyperdrive spaceship engines, or simply wanted to package us in plastic tubes to provide tasty snacks during extended and boring journeys along the spiral arms of the galaxy. I considered those possibilities and more, did not reject anything, no matter how crazy—or silly—it seemed, but remained dubious of every explanation those science-fiction novels had for me. For one thing, I had difficulty believing that a race capable of cruising across the light-years would come that momentous distance merely to crash their ship while trying to put it down; their machines would be flawless; their computers would make no mistakes. And if such an advanced race wanted to conquer us, the war would be over in a single afternoon. So, while those books provided hundreds of hours of wonderful entertainment, they gave me no raft to which I could cling during the bad times, no understanding of the goblins, and certainly no hint as to what I should do about them and how I might defeat them.

The other obvious theory was that they were demons that had climbed straight up from Hell with a Satan-given ability to cloud men’s minds, so we saw only other men when we looked at them. I believed in God (or told myself that I did), and my relationship with Him was at times so strongly adversarial (on my part, anyway) that I had no difficulty believing He would permit the existence of a place as foul as Hell. My folks were Lutherans. They had taken me and Sarah and Jenny to church nearly every Sunday, and sometimes I had wanted to stand up on my pew and rail at the minister: “If God is good, then why does He let people die? Why did he give cancer to that nice Mrs. Hurley down the road from us? If He’s so good, then why did He let the Thompsons’ boy die over there in Korea?” Although the faith rubbed off on me a little bit, it did not interfere with my ability to reason, and I was never able to come to terms with the contradiction between the doctrine of God’s infinite mercy and the cruelty of the cosmos that He had created for us. Therefore Hell and eternal damnation and demons were not merely conceivable; they seemed almost an essential bit of design in a universe built by a divine architect as seemingly perverse as He who had drawn up the plans for ours.

Yet believing in Hell and demons, I still could not believe that the goblins could be explained by the application of that mythology. If they had risen from Hell, there would have been something . . . well, something cosmic about them—an awesome sense of deific forces at work, of ultimate knowledge and purpose in their manner and activity, but I felt none of that in the meager psychic static that radiated from them. Furthermore Lucifer’s lieutenants would possess unlimited power, but these goblins were actually in many ways less powerful than I, with none of my extraordinary gifts or insights. For demons they were too easily dispatched. No ax or knife or gun would bring down one of Satan’s henchmen.

If they had looked more like dogs and less like pigs, I would have been half convinced that they were werewolves, in spite of the fact that they prowled all the time rather than only when the moon was full. Like the fabled werewolf, they seemed to be shape-changers, imitating human form with uncanny skill but capable of reverting to their true hideous appearance if that was required, as in the Dodgem Car pavilion. And if they had fed on blood in a literal sense, I would have settled for the vampire legend, would have changed my name to Dr. van Helsing, and would have (long ago and happily) begun to sharpen a virtual forest of wooden stakes. But neither of those explanations seemed to fit, although I was sure that other psychics had seen these goblins hundreds of years ago and that from those sightings had sprung the first tales of human metamorphosis into bat-form and lupine horror. Indeed Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Transylvanian monarch whose bloodthirsty interest in imaginative mass executions had inspired the fictional character of Dracula, had very likely been a goblin; after all, Vlad was a man who seemed to revel in human suffering, which is the basic trait of all goblins that it has been my misfortune to observe.

So, that afternoon in the yellow Cadillac, on the way back from Yontsdown, I asked myself the familiar questions and stretched my mind to find and encompass some understanding, but I remained utterly unenlightened. I could have saved myself all that effort if I could have looked into the future only several days ahead, for I was that close to learning the truth about the goblins. I was not aware that revelations impended, but I would learn the truth on the next to the last night of the carnival’s engagement in Yontsdown. And when, at last, I discovered the origins and motivations of the hateful goblins, it would make perfect sense—immediate and terrible sense—and I would wish, with a fervor equal to Adam’s when the garden gate closed behind him, that I had never acquired such knowledge. But now I feigned sleep, mouth open, letting my body move loosely with the surge and sway of the Cadillac, and I strained toward understanding, longed for explanations.

We returned to the Sombra Brothers Carnival at five-thirty Friday afternoon. The midway, still bathed in summer sun but with all its lights ablaze as well, was crowded with marks. I went directly to the high-striker, took over from Marco, who had been filling in for me, and set to work relieving the passersby of the coins and folding money that burdened their pockets.

Throughout the long evening not a single goblin appeared on the concourse, but that did not cheer me. There would be plenty of goblins on the midway in Yontsdown, next week; the lot would be crawling with them, especially around the Ferris wheel, where their faces would be greasy-bright with sadistic anticipation.

Marco returned to take my place at eight o’clock, giving me an hour for dinner. Not particularly hungry, I wandered around the concourse instead of heading for a grab-stand, and in a few minutes I was standing in front of Shockville, the ten-in-one owned by Joel Tuck.

A luridly illustrated banner stretched all the way across the front of the attraction: HUMAN ODDITIES FROM EVERY CORNER OF THE WORLD. The bold and colorful depictions of Jack-Four-Hands (an Indian with an extra pair of arms), Lila the Tattooed Lady, 750-pound Gloria Neames (“the fattest woman in the world”), and other genuine and self-made freaks were unmistakably the work of David C. “Snap” Wyatt, the last of the great circus and carnival artists, whose banners decorated the tents of every sideshow operator who could afford them. Judging from the human oddities promised within this ten-in-one, Joel Tuck could not only afford Wyatt but had assembled a lineup to which only Wyatt’s bizarre talents could have done justice.

As twilight approached, a large tip had gathered in front of Shockville, gawking up at Mr. Wyatt’s imaginatively monstrous images, listening to the pitchman’s ballyhoo. Although they showed some reluctance and occasionally spoke of the indignity of putting poor cripples on display, most of the guys clearly wanted to go into the tent. Some of the women were squeamish and wanted to be teased and prodded into such a daring expedition, but most of them, men and women, were gradually moving toward the ticket booth.

Something pulled me too.

Not the morbid curiosity that gripped the marks.

Something . . . darker. Something within the tent wanted me to come see it . . . something that, I sensed, I must know about if I were to survive the next week and make the Sombra Brothers Carnival my home.