Item
Always, there was the sword, long and sleek and sharp. The grip, the hilt, fit his hand, and the blade wanted blood. I never saw him without it. It was just over three feet long. The sheath was black leather, softly reflective like frosted glass. It smelled of old leather, brass, and steel, of the pale, amber oil he wiped the blade with once a week. It was the smell of danger, of a lethal beauty like a razor perfumed with cinnamon and poppy. It was the smell of brightness, like the burnt, soaked ground after a lightning strike. It held up against the best the walking dead could forge.
His saber clashed like any sword, but sometimes, it wasn't so grating. There were nights it reminded me of a church bell. It was the ray of righteous anger cracking the night. It was blood on the grass, evil things struck down by the tracks crawling back through the forest to die.
He oiled it once a month. Someone else could have done it, but it was his sword. He went into the barn, took a small, brown glass bottle out of a niche in the wall, and let three drops trickle out onto a rag. He ran it down the edge and worked his way inwards. Then there was another cloth to take off excess oil. He buffed the steel until it shone. I never saw this change or vary. It's that bit of protocol that preserves a ghost rider's sanity. It's probably I've never had a problem with people showing up for work out of uniform.
At night, the lantern light ran down the blade. It left the lamps warm and was cold by the time it trickled down to the point. It froze like the bite of the metal. It was the scythe of death swinging back to get creatures that escaped it a hundred or a thousand years before. It was justice. It was what they had given up their humanity to escape coming down on their heads.
Place
The park is almost what you would expect. It has a gate, a huge piece of wrought iron that was there when Delokgate was new. The midway is long and flat. The ridge of the only hill in the county hangs over it like a warning. The Ferris wheel stretches its pale, wooden limbs like a dancing starfish frozen in time. The haunted house is down a path to the west that runs along the edge of the forest. It's sad, broken windows look out over the overgrown lawn. It was here before the park, built by the first white owner of this land. After his family was slaughtered by vampires, he drank himself to death. It's a good haunted house, with real ghosts. Three different priests have been brought in to help them move on, but so far no one's had any success. Maybe if I could find someone who wasn't Catholic. Oh, well. They've been there a hundred and fifty years. They can wait a little while longer.
The midway stretches from the gate to the hill's steep sides. It's around a hundred and fifty yards across, maybe seven hundred yards from side to side. It always smells like buttered popcorn and fry oil except late at night and early in the morning in winter. When the park is closed and there aren't any footsteps in the snow, the air is pure and clear. It's like still water. In the half an hour between the setting of the moon and the dawn, when the werewolves walk on two legs again and the vampires have retreated into the dark, my park is the most beautiful sight in the world. There's a kind of rightness in the angle of the rooftops of the booths. The iron fence, and Carl Jaworkski's weed whacker, hold the forest at bay. The paint on the facades of the outbuildings and sheds, the original owner's attempt to recreate his distant hometown in the rosy glow of Victorian idealization, is fresh and clean. The stripes on the tents hold their colors, and the white doesn't look yellowed in the first rays of the rising sun. The poles are perfectly straight. It's my reward for browbeating Sammy Flynn, who is sixteen, into taking his hands off his girlfriend long enough to do the job right. The whole thing looks proper, correct, decent. It looks like a job well done.
Deloksgate is silent in that perfect half an hour. When the gates open, though it fills with all the noise of humanity. People talk and laugh. Babies cry. Lovers argue and make up. Little old ladies argue whether the park has gotten better or worse since I took over. I don't worry about it. Each of them can argue either side, and they switch from hour to hour. Thirteen-year-old boys and girls whisper to each other about ditching their chaperons and heading for the Ferris wheel. The hum, the babble, is like the warm waves of a tropical ocean. It rises and falls, lapping at my ears more or less gently most of the time. Beneath these voices, there's the sub-bass thunder of my train, the piercing falsetto of the whistle. The whistle's cry gets sweeter and more mournful every year. Sometimes, it sounds like the wail of a newly widowed woman or orphaned child. Other times, it's a prayer for the souls of the dead. When it sounds along with the first bright notes of the merry-go-round, it's as haunting as children playing in a cemetery.
The crowds drift from ride to ride in a swirl of color, trailing the smell of candy and fried food that goes sour after they pass. They dazzle my eyes, too used to picking a single movement out of dark monotony. There's always light and music, colored metal spinning. At Halloween, decked out in all her finery, Deloksgate is a grand old lady. My park is also a facade, but that's another story.
