Free Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham Page B

away. They formed a line and passed by.
    Clem Hoately came first, his furrowed face showing nothing. Then Bruno, holding Major Mosquito on his forearm so he could look down and see. Molly came next and Sailor Martin fell in behind her, moving close. Then old Maguire, his cap crushed in his hand. Joe Plasky hopped across the floor, pushing one of the folding chairs. When it came his turn to view the remains he moved the chair into place by the head of the coffin and swung himself up on the seat. He looked down and the smile was still around the corners of his eyes although his mouth was sober. Without thinking he made the sign of the cross.
    Stan swallowed hard. It was his turn and there was no way of getting out of it. Joe had hopped to the floor and pushed the chair against the wall; Stan shoved both hands deep into his pockets and approached the casket. He had never seen a corpse; the skin of his scalp prickled at the thought.
    He drew his breath and forced himself to look.
    It seemed at first like a wax figure in a dress suit. One hand rested easily on the white waistcoat, the other was by the side. It held a round, clear glass ball. The face was rosy—the undertaker had filled out the drawn cheeks and painted the skin until it glowed with a waxen counterfeit of life. But there was something else that hit Stan like a blow between the ribs. Carefully fashioned of crêpe hair and stuck to the chin was a lifelike, neatly trimmed, little black beard.
    “For the last demonstration Mamzelle Electra will perform a feat never attempted since Ben Franklin harnessed the lightning with his kite string. Holding the two filaments of a carbon arc light, she will allow the death-dealing current to pass through her body….”
    Stan quietly slipped into the compartment below the stage of Zeena, the Woman Who Knows. It no longer smelled of whisky. Stan had installed a piece of canvas as a ground sheet and had cut ventilation scrolls in the sides of the boxlike little room. Over the bridge table and on three sides of it he had erected a cardboard shield so he could open the envelopes and copy the questions on the pad by the light of a flashlight.
    The rustle of feet surging around the stage outside, then Zeena’s voice in her opening spiel. Stan took a bundle of dummy questions—blank cards in small envelopes—and stood by the window where Hoately would pass behind the curtains.
    They parted at the side of the stage; Hoately’s hand appeared. Quickly Stan took the collected questions and placed the dummy batch in the hand which vanished upward. Stan heard the creak of feet on the boards above him. He sat down at the table, switched on the shaded flashlight bulb, squared up the pack of envelopes and cut the ends from them with one snip of the scissors. Moving quickly, he shook out the cards and arranged them before him on the table.
    Question: “Where is my son?” Handwriting old-fashioned. Woman over sixty, he judged. A good one to open with—the signature was clear and spelled out in full—Mrs. Anna Briggs Sharpley. Stan looked for two more complete names. One was signed to a wiseacre question which he put aside. He reached for the black crayon and the pad, wrote, “Where son?” printed the name swiftly but plainly, and held the pad up to the hole in the stage at Zeena’s feet.
    “I get the impression of the initial
S
. Is there a Mrs. Sharpley?”
    Stan found himself listening to the answers as if they held a revelation.
    “You think of your boy as still a little fellow, the way you knew him when he used to come asking you for a piece of bread with sugar on it….”
    Where the hell did Zeena get all that stuff from? She was no more telepathic than that kid, Molly, was electricity proof. The Electric Chair act was gaffed like everything in the carny. But Zeena—
    “My dear lady, you must remember that he’s a man grown now and probably has children of his own to worry about. You want him to write to you. Isn’t that