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

street. “So, you
visiting or what?”
    “I live here.”
    “No kidding?” Another look, this time searching.
“Where?”
    Fran waved her right hand. “That way, I think. I
don’t know. Someplace.”
    The girl seemed puzzled.
    Fran didn’t feel like helping.
    “Oh. You’re lost, huh. My name is Kitt.”
    Fran’s disgusted look took care of the lost
question but, as she pushed herself to her feet, she said,
“Kitt?”
    “Yeah. Kirt Weatherall. Kitt’s short for kitten.
That’s what my father calls me.” She glanced hopelessly at the sky.
“Now everybody calls me that.”
    “Kitten?”
    “No! Kitt. I don’t want to be called kitten all
my life. God.” A final swipe across her face. “My father calls me
‘pal’ sometimes.”
    “Ugh,” Kitt said. “Like you were a boy or
something.”
    “Yeah. Ugh.”
    They walked, and the day’s heat cooled in the
shifting speckled shade.
    “So you’re new?”
    “Yeah. I guess.”
    “You going in sixth grade?”
    Fran nodded.
    “Me too.”
    They both aimed for a spider scurrying over the
pavement, nearly stepped on each other’s foot, and giggled.
    “You got any brothers or anything?”
    Fran used her whip to decapitate a low weed.
“Nope.”
    “Me neither. If I had a brother, I’d probably
kill him.”
    “Yeah, me too.”
    They reached a broad street, a large church on
the corner, its greystone walls stained with faint green age. A
steeple that didn’t impress her with its height. A signboard in the
shape of a crest near the entrance proclaimed it to be Anglican;
Fran wasn’t sure what that meant but didn’t want to ask.
    Kitt pointed to the left. “That way’s Mainland
Road. It’s the only road to get here from wherever unless you take
the train.” To the right. “Up the Pike — this is Williamston Pike —
there are some really neat houses. Monsters. I mean, people live
out there who are richer than God.”
    Fran stared down toward the Road. She could see
a blinking amber light and not much traffic. The only way out. What
kind of a place was this that only had one way out?
    She wasn’t stuck; she was trapped.
    “Hey,” said Kitt, a quick touch, a drop of the
hand. “It isn’t that bad.”
    Fran shook her head quickly.
    “No, really. I mean, it’s not like we’ve got a
zoo or Disneyland or anything, but there’s the park and the pond, a
whole bunch of ducks live there all summer, and we can ride horses
out in the valley sometimes, and the woods and all and . . .” She
wrinkled her face until Fran thought it would disappear. “And the
Pilgrim’s Travelers are here.” She gestured vaguely. “On the other
side of the Road.”
    “Travelers? What’s that.”
    “It’s a carnival thing, like a circus kind of.
You know, rides and food and stuff. Sometimes they stay just for a
little while, sometimes it’s like they’re around for practically
the whole summer.”
    “Oh.” No excitement, no anticipation. She could
just imagine what a circus would be like in a dump like this,
especially one that had no place else to go. “So that’s it?”
    Kitt shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But it’s better
than living in the city, that’s for sure.”
    “How would you know?” She felt heat in her
cheeks and the heated tears gathering for another charge. “I lived
in Cambridge. That’s pretty neat.”
    Kitt wasn’t impressed. “I used to live in New
York, when I was a kid.”
    Fran glanced at the church again and thought
about how old it must be to look that old. Like the fence in her
backyard, it looked old enough to fall down any minute, yet the
stones it was made of looked thick and big enough to last forever.
She frowned. That wasn’t right. How could something look weak and
strong at the same time? That was dumb. She was dumb. This whole
place was dumb.
    “Shit,” she said disgustedly.
    Kitt’s eyes widened.
    Fran grinned. “Hey, I thought you lived in New
York.”
    “Yeah, but I never said stuff like that.” A
half-trembling