Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“Oh, my lost youth!” he cries.

“Hush, cutie,” the girl beside him says, “the tour’s almost done. Another two minutes.”

Charles Mudd-Gaddis begins to scream. Colin, the children, Mary, are frightened. He screams. He screams and screams.

“Another two minutes,” the big girl says. “Two minutes. I promise.”

He screams.

“Stat!” shouts the girl to cast members behind the scenes. Charles knows the word. Mary, Colin, all the children do. It is the code word for emergencies in hospitals. Mary, Colin, and the kids think something has happened to Charles. “ Stat! Stat!” the girl shouts. The gondola stops abruptly.

“Hey!” a tourist jokes. “Whiplash!”

Cast members rush up with flashlights.

“What is it?”

“What’s happened?”

“I think he’s scared of the dark,” the girl says.

Colin starts to climb over the seats to get to Charles.

“Please don’t do that, sir. Please sit down. Arlene’s got the boy.”

“He’s—”

“I’m going to have to ask you to sit down, sir. For your own safety. The little boy will be fine. We’re going to evacuate him.”

“He moves like he’s a thousand,” Benny Maxine says. “He’ll fall and break his hip in the dark.”

“There’s an ample catwalk. He’ll be all right.”

All have scrambled out of the car; the children are led away by solicitous cast members. It’s as if they’re being guided through tear gas. Then lights come on through the Haunted Mansion like the stark auxiliary lights in theaters and hospitals, like emergency lights in subway cars. Props fade, patterns disappear from the bare canvas walls, the specters are snuffed out, the crystal ball is empty, the bats’ eyes on the wallpaper are tiny light bulbs, the puppet teapot spills a ribbon of twisted, colored cellophane, the coffins and old chests seem only a reliable wood, the ravens some hinged taxidermy, the illusionary space they have been traveling through a sort of warehouse. Visitors to the mansion groan.

“Just look at this place,” Noah Cloth grumbles. “I bet there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“I guess not,” Tony Word agrees dispiritedly.

“Dying blokes like us ain’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell,” Benny Maxine says, moving along the pavement beside the curving tracks, the baffled architecture, up the trace inclines and down the indifferent slopes which, in the dark, had seemed so formidable.

“There’s probably no such place as Hell,” Noah says.

“No,” says Tony Word.

“No,” says Benny Maxine, “it’s just an expression.”

“Like Heaven.”

“Let’s don’t tell the girls,” Benny says.

And the three boys dissolve in tears.

Charles Mudd-Gaddis was inconsolable.

So was Mary Cottle, who, practically bleeding from the nerves by this time, her mile-high tensions actually giving her a sort of pain, managed to shake Colin, who received the four children at the same door through which they’d been admitted, accepting them like prisoners formally surrendered by the good- looking attendant who’d dusted off the boy’s blond wig and handed it to the male nurse (“Still got the little fellow’s yellow hat, Dad?” “Oh, I’m not their dad.” “No?” “I’m just the nurse who travels with them.” “Is that so?” “I’m nobody’s dad.” “Not the daddy type?” “Never have been, never will be.” “Where you staying?” “At the Contemporary.” “Swell health club at the Contemporary. You ought to check it out.” “Maybe I will”), and extricated herself from the crowd on the ramp at the Transportation and Ticket Center, using it as a shield and positioning herself behind a lone gate on the platform, and now sits by herself in the dark, empty car on the same monorail on which Colin Bible and the four boys ride, her skirt hiked above her knees, her hand down in her panties and two fingers on her dry clit, pulling the till-now dependable flesh, ringing it like a bell, but distracted, her mind not quite blank this time (which, frankly, her body abandoned to a merely mechanical friction had always been an ally in this business) but filled with a whole catalogue of vagrant images (rather, she thinks, like the Haunted Mansion itself), from the could-be-trouble exchange between Colin and the tall, good-looking attendant to, for example, the skirt, the dresses she’s packed, how proud she is of what can only have been a keen sense of her own character, a trained forethought, anticipating, she supposed, that there would be scenes, that there’d have to be, and so eschewing pants suits (though she had known that these, in all likelihood, would be the standard mode of dress, as indeed, they quite turned out to be) for the skirts and dresses which would be more convenient in emergency. So on the one hand — even the idiom distracts her, takes her still further from that state of mind, not desire, not lust, but merely the bleeding nerves, the mile-high tensions, the sort of pain — pleased, but on the other bothered, the absence of soap and water, for another example, being a damned nuisance just now, most inconvenient, for if she brings herself off or, for that matter, even if she doesn’t, it won’t do to touch any of the children without first washing her hands, so she’ll have to continue to hide from them, duck into the Ladies’, though none of this constitutes even a fraction of her real nervousness, for if she is able to bring herself off, why, she’ll be cool as a cucumber, able to cope, but she’s not so sure now she will. For one thing she hadn’t paid close enough attention on the way out, can’t recall how long it takes to get to the hotel, whether there’s a stop. There is, at the Polynesian Village Resort Hotel, and though more people get off the monorail there than on, and absolutely no one comes into her car, the doors automatically open and Mary is forced to do some very fancy cape work with the skirt — thank God she’s wearing one, otherwise she’d have had to stand, she’d never be able to get the pants up over her hips in time without becoming something of another attraction at Disney World, at least for the people passing by on the station platform — and now she’s quite sure it’s clear sailing back to their hotel and she might just be able to make it if only the recorded voices on the car’s loudspeaker that keeps nattering on about Disney and the “imagineers” who built this place would just shut up for a minute, and if only she could get that damned vision of Colin Bible out of her head. The silly sod. The poof nurse would have to go making googoo eyes at the kid from the Haunted Mansion. Blast people who make scenes, she thinks.

As the train pulls into the big bright interior of the Contemporary Resort Hotel. And the doors open. And Mary Cottle, coming up empty, hastily lowers her skirt over her bare thighs and her awry panties and leaves the monorail.

Pretending to be searching for something she’s dropped, she crouches behind the wide-flung doors and waits until Colin and the kids clear the platform, are out of sight.

Then she goes down to the desk and rents that room.

dunno,” Colin Bible said. “I dunno what happened. Maybe he’s bent.” I

“He’s a little kid. He was spooked. He was afraid of the ghosts,” Bale said.

“It was before we ever got inside. It was before he ever even seen any ghosts. We was still in the queue.”

“You waited in the queue?”

“They don’t want special treatment, Mister Bale.”

“Eddy,” Eddy said.

“Jeez, ‘Eddy’s’ hard, Mister Bale. No disrespect, but ‘Eddy’s’ hard for me. You’ve got to remember that Liam was my patient.”