It

wrinkles, tattered cheeks, arid flesh. The skin of its forehead was split but bloodless. Dead lips grinned back from a maw in which teeth leaned like tombstones. Its gums were pitted and black. Ben could see no eyes, but something glittered far back in the charcoal pits of those puckered sockets, something like the cold jewels in the eyes of Egyptian scarab beetles. And although the wind was the wrong way, it seemed to him that he could smell cinnamon and spice, rotting cerements treated with weird drugs, sand, blood so old it had dried to flakes and grains of rust . . .
‘We all float down here,’ the mummy-clown croaked, and Ben realized with fresh horror that somehow it had reached the bridge, it was now just below him, reaching up with a dry and twisted hand from which flaps of skin rustled like pennons, a hand through which bone like yellow ivory showed.
One almost fleshless finger caressed the tip of his boot. Ben’s paralysis broke. He pounded the rest of the way across the bridge with the five o’clock whistle still shrieking in his ears; it only ceased as he reached the far side. It had to be a mirage, had to be. The clown simply could not have come so far during the whistle’s ten-or fifteen-second blast.
But his fe ar was not a mirage; neither were the hot tears which spurted from his eyes and froze on his cheeks a second after being shed. He ran, boots thudding on the sidewalk, and behind him he could hear the mummy in the clown suit climbing up from the Canal, ancient stony fingernails scraping across iron, old tendons creaking like dry hinges. He could hear the arid whistle of its breath pulling in and pushing out of nostrils as devoid of moisture as the tunnels under the Great Pyramid. He could smell its shroud of sandy spices and he knew that in a moment its hands, as fleshless as the geometrical constructions he made with his Erector Set. would descend upon his shoulders. They would turn him around and he would stare into that wrinkled, smiling face. The dead river of its breath would wash over him. Those black eyesockets with their deep glowing depths would bend over him. The toothless mouth would yawn, and he would have his balloon. Oh yes. All the balloons he wanted.
But when he reached the corner of his o wn street, sobbing and winded, his heart slamming crazed, leaping beats into his ears, when he at last looked back over his shoulder, the street was empty. The arched bridge with its low concrete sides and its oldfashioned cobblestone paving was also empty. He could not see the Canal itself, but he felt that if he could, he would see nothing there, either. No; if the mummy had not been a hallucination or a mirage, if it had been real, it would be waiting under the bridge — like the troll in the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff.’
Under. Hiding under.
Ben hurried home, looking back every few steps until the door was safely shut and locked behind him. He explained to his mother — who was so tired from a particularly hard day at the mill that she had not, in truth, much missed him — that he had been helping Mrs Douglas count books. Then he sat down to a dinner of noodles and Sunday’s leftover turkey. He stuffed three helpings into himself, and the mummy seemed more distant and dreamlike with each helping. It was not real, those things were never real, they came fully to life only between the commercials of the late-night TV movies or during the Saturday matinees, where if you were lucky you could get two monsters for a quarter — and if you had an extra quarter, you could buy all the popcorn you could eat.
No, they were not real. TV monsters and movie monsters and comic –book monsters were not real. Not until you went to bed and couldn’t sleep; not until the last four pieces ot candy, wrapped in tissues and kept under your pillow against the evils of the night, were gobbled up; not until the bed itself turned into a lake of rancid dreams and the wind screamed outside and you were afraid to look at the window because there might be a face there, an ancie nt grinning face that had not rotted but simply dried like an old leaf, its eyes sunken diamonds
pushed deep into dark sockets; not until you saw one ripped and claw like hand holding out a bunch of balloons: See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Ben, oh, Ben, how you’ll float —
12
Ben awoke with a gasp, the dream of the mummy still on him, panicked by the close, vibrating dark all around him. He jerked, and the root stopped supporting him and poked him in the back again, as if in exasperation.
He saw light and scrambled for it. He crawled