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

streets
yet.”
    “I know,” she said, and ran through the house,
down the front steps, and stopped at the foot of the walk, whose
concrete had been shoved up and cracked and split by last winter;
something else, her father had said, he’d have to take care of
pretty soon, before somebody tripped and broke a leg and sued him
to death. Like the bushes along the front, nearly as high as she
was and tangled together almost like a hedge. Large leaves and
bright berries mixed with tiny leaves on long branches with tiny
yellow flowers. It was ugly; it was all ugly and horrible, and
before her parents changed their minds, she raced up the street,
not looking at the other houses, not looking at the other yards,
not looking at anything until she reached the corner.
    When she looked back, the new house was
gone.
    The block twice as long as any she’d ever known
had swallowed it in every shade of green she had ever seen in her
life.
    She grinned, snapped her fingers and whispered,
“Yeah!”
    She crossed the street and walked this time,
picked up a long whip of a branch and lashed viciously at her
shadow, at bugs that flew too near, at every bole she passed. She
paid no attention to the numbers on the doors or the street signs;
she wasn’t curious about the voices she heard, either way off in
the distance where Daddy said there was a park, or behind some
house that looked like the one where the witch caught Hansel and
Gretel, only bigger. She turned. She walked. She turned again.
Patiently, not bothering to worry about the time. Because sooner or
later a policeman would stop her, ask her her name, and when she
had to give her address she would give him the one in Cambridge and
get all weepy and tell him she was lost and missed her mommy. The
policeman would take her home. Not here. There. She would drive all
the way across Connecticut in a police car and pull up in front of
her apartment building to the cheers of her friends. Her parents
would worry for a while, but it wouldn’t be long before they’d
figure it out. They would follow, they would find her sitting on
the steps, waiting, and they would know that they had made the
worst mistake in their lives.
    She whipped her shadow again, caught herself on
the shin, and yelped.
    It would never happen.
    There wasn’t a policeman that dumb in the whole
world. Maybe there was a bus she could take. God, this place had to
have a bus, didn’t it? She searched her pockets and found nothing
but lint.
    She was stuck.
    No chance at all.
    At last the first tear — the one she had beaten
back a dozen times since getting out of the motel bed that morning
— made its way to her cheek. And once it had been freed, the others
followed before she could stop them. She walked, crying without a
sound, not wiping her face, just letting the tears drip from her
jaw, the tip of her chin, letting her nose run, letting whatever
clung to her chest cling tighter, harder, with barbs like thorns,
until she sagged against a tree in the middle of a block and
covered her face with her arms. The whip dangled between her
fingers. The bark scratched her spine. Her legs bent until she
settled on a great knee of a root, pulled her own knees up and
pressed her eyes into them until there were sparks and pinwheels
and a muffled, lonely sobbing.
    Forever.
    Nothing else.
    “You hurt?”
    Her head snapped up so sharply she yanked the
muscles in her neck, and that made her angry. “No!” she said,
rubbing her nape, burying a wince with a frown.
    The girl in front of her leaned over, hands on
her knees, blond pigtails — oh god, pigtails — flapping over
her shoulders. “So how come you’re crying?”
    “I’m not,” she insisted, getting the backs of
her hands to work across her eyes, under her nose. “I got
allergies, okay? That all right with you?”
    The girl shrugged. T-shirt and shorts and
sneakers without socks. “I don’t care. I just thought you were
hurt, that’s all.” She looked up and down the