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the rain froze in midair and the landscape shifted as
if one slide were being stuck in the projector over
another slide. There were fires all along the hills
where trees and houses had been struck with light-
ning and now seemed to be lighting our path.
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The calliope music was getting louder, and as I
drove down the rest of the way to the boathouse, the
road was blocked by what I figured were several
horses, having escaped some stables nearby.
But the horses had lances through their backs.
As my headlights lit them better, I saw that the
horses were painted various colors.
They were from the carousel at Sea Horse
Amusement Park.
Sumter had brought them to life.
One horse stood there right in front of the car,
scraping its right front hoof against the road.
From its flared nostrils came breath of fire.
Sumter called to me. I don't want to hurt you, cuz,
but don't try and stop me, 'cause I'm gonna do what I gotta
do. If you get in the way, I'll stomp you.
DON'T YOU HURT HIM!
My mind's eyeball went crazy, like somebody was
switching channels on a TV at a rapid pace. He was
sending me images now; I was picking up what his
mind was producing. Aunt Cricket holding him so close
to her breast, kissing the top of his head; Uncle Ralph
unlooping the belt from his pants and curling it double,
swatting it at the back of Sumter's unprotected leg; a sum-
mer day on the island, and Sumter looking all of six years
old, crying by a tree stump — in his left hand he held a
jagged piece of glass, and he shut his eyes tight and thrust
the glass into his right arm and sliced the flesh up; Sumter
sticking the trowel into the kitten, and that wild look on his
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face; and then a place I didn 't recognize, a place of vast
fields of ice and red sky, and Sumter walking with the
woman I knew to be Lucy, and there were other children
there, too, playing games of freeze-tag, but there was some-
thing not right about the picture, it wavered — the word
Neverland whispered across the barren white land — black-
and-white bunnies sniffed the air; Bernard the teddy bear
lumbered out from behind a tree carrying a dead bunny in
his mouth, still shaking its hind legs even as blood stained
its fur; whatever Neverland was exploded across this vision,
and the ground that Sumter walked on began bleeding,
until both he and Lucy were up to their ankles in a dark
crimson marsh, and I heard cries of animals and children;
and the creature in Bernard's jaws was not a bunny after
all, but my brother Governor, his small hands reaching out
for a mother who was not there, his mouth opened but with
no voice left with which to cry.
Sumter, I said, Neverland is a bad place. Don't put
Governor in a bad place.
Lucy's soft voice whispered, Do what you will.
It was a Neverland commandment, and I felt a key
turning in my head.
All right, I figured, I will.
I opened my eyes, back in the Chevy, with Grammy
Weenie's hand on my arm.
"Beau?" Her voice was filled with panic, and I
glanced back at the road: the carousel horses had
their heads down and pawed the road with their
hooves. Fire shot out of their nostrils and sprayed
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red sparks across the windshield. The largest of the
herd charged first; it reared up on its hind legs and
brought its front hooves down on the hood of the
Chevy; the pole that was thrust through its middle
punctured the hood, and I was sure the car would
die at any moment. Other horses attacked the sides
of the car, rocking us back and forth. Grammy gave
a shriek as one of the horses rammed her window
with its head; the glass broke, and the horse spat fire
at her.
The horses formed a circle around us.
It's only Neverland, I thought, it ain't real. It's just
Sumter.
I jammed my foot down on the accelerator and
rammed the car right through the lead horse; I shut
my eyes for one second, figuring that we'd get burnt
to a crisp or stomped under their hooves, but the
commandment of Neverland applied. The horses
had fallen to the roadside; they writhed in pain, howl-
ing louder than the calliope and louder than the
wind, for the carousel poles in their middles now
impaled them to the ground. I was going to will us
through these creatures, I was going to get to a boat
and row us out to the island in Rabbit Lake. I was
going to keep my brother from harm.
I was going to do battle with Neverland, and it
would take all the imagination I possessed, all the will
in me, to fight my cousin Sumter's own imagination.
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8
As we approached the boathouse down at Rabbit
Lake, the wind died and the rain turned to a drizzle.
Fog was rolling in off the bay — a thick white mist
barely touching the water. What was not white fog
was piss-yellow sky, but the light was not from the
sun; the light, I knew, was from Neverland. I thought
perhaps the storm was finished, and this terrified
me, because it would mean that he'd already sacri-
ficed my brother. But Grammy gasped, "Dear Lord
God," and I saw what she meant: the storm still
raged, but it was all behind us — a protective calm
surrounded the swamp. A place of pure innocence.
Where the dead dance, was what Julianne Sanders
had called it.
Grammy Weenie touched her burned hand to her
face; her skin had paled beyond whiteness and was
now a translucent blue with the pulsing veins beneath
its surface. "What must I do now, dear Lord?"
"Can you make it?" I asked, helping her from
her seat. She felt like she weighed a ton leaning on
my shoulder.
"I'll just have to," she said, but she winced with
pain. Each step she took brought with it a sigh. In her
hand she clutched her silver-backed brush.
Shep and Diane's Nightcrawlers Live Bait Shop
was too quiet; in fact the whole dock and boathouse
were dead silent. It was deafening, having come out
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of the hurricane. Our shoes got sucked and slurped
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