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

Author:Charles L. Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short fiction, horror, collection, novellas, charles l grant, oxrun station, the black carousel
Publisher: Bob Booth

III: Lost In Amber Light

There was no question that the music didn’t fit the night. It was too fast, too loud, too demanding. The band prancing on the portable stage at the back of the yard wore clothes that were too bright, too much like neon woven through itself, and even when they stood still there were spectral images of them hovering against the backdrop of heavily branched trees and thick shrubs nearly as high as small trees themselves. Speakers five feet tall shrieked. A single guitar note was a siren, an undulating bass too much a throbbing bomb, and the drummer wielded his sticks as if they were muskets crackling in the midst of ferocious battle. And all of it aided by strobe lights in blue and red, white and green, flailing the band and the dancers and the barely visible stars.

It was wrong.

All wrong.

On a night so warm and muggy, a languid breeze lazing through the upper branches, heat lightning now and then flaring on the horizon, crickets in the shadows, it should have been the blues. A saxophone, maybe a muted horn, talking music to the dark, keeping the dancing and the chattering and the movement slow. People would listen even when they weren’t, feeling it inside where emotions weren’t frantic but not always soothed, feeling melancholy or more tender without really knowing why.

It should have been the blues.

The night was too warm.

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