by Paula Guran
Charlie stilled. Finally, in a soft voice, he asked, “The house?”
“On the other side of the field. I met the girl who lives there. She didn’t know we were coming. Charlie, did we not pay our rental fees? Are we here when we’re not supposed to be?” Aracely looked at him anxiously. “I don’t want to have to move along when we’ve just gotten everything set up, but if we don’t have permission, I guess that could be what we have to do.”
“There’s no house there,” said Charlie, voice still soft, like he was afraid that to raise it would be to shatter some thin and impossible peace. “This field . . . the people who owned it all died. The bank owns all the land for almost a mile, and we did all our rental paperwork through them, exactly as we’re meant to do. I don’t know who you met, girl, but there’s no way she lived in a house that doesn’t exist, and there’s no way she gets to say whether or not we’re allowed to linger here.”
Aracely stared at him, eyes gone wide and heart gone narrow until it felt like it was barely beating at all, like she was on the verge of toppling over. Then she turned and fled, not deeper into the midway, but out, toward the boundary line, toward the vast and formless freedom of the fields behind. Charlie swore and ran in the opposite direction, fleeing toward Daisy’s tent.
Two figures running, both as fleet as fear can make them, one heading for a secret, the other for a story. See how they run, these children of the carnival sky! The man, with his fresh tattoo still aching on his skin, who remembers rumors, yes, stories that will linger after he is gone, who knows that everything is about to change. The girl, as guarded and sheltered as any hothouse flower, perfectly adapted to the climate of the carnival, where walk things that are neither here nor there, now nor then . . . living nor dead.
She ran not because she knew the shape of the story she was becoming, but because she didn’t know it; because she was afraid, as all sheltered things are, of the aching unknown.
He ran because he understood.
Aracely was younger, more frightened, and less aware of her own limitations; when she ran, it was with the wholehearted abandon of a young thing, and this time, when she crested the ridge and saw the house set out before her like the shadow of a dream, she did not lose her footing. She ran, and ran, and ran, until her feet were pounding up the front steps of a house that shouldn’t exist, until her hands were hammering on the door. Was this how people knocked? She had seen it in movies and on television, but she had never really had the chance to try it for herself. Doors in the carnival worked a little differently. Knocking on a tent could knock it over; knocking on a tin-walled trailer was loud and hollow at the same time, taking so little effort that a child could do it.
Knocking on wood was different. The house felt solid, like she was beating her fists on bone, and when she pulled back for another volley, the skin on the sides of her hands was red and hot.
The door swung open. Joanna stood framed in the entryway, only blackness behind her, a quizzical expression on her beautiful, scarred face. “Aracely?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you real?” Aracely blurted.
Joanna’s confusion melted into sad resignation—and yes, acceptance. “Ah,” she said. “Someone told you. I guess that was going to happen, once you went back to your carnival and told people you’d seen me.”
Aracely said nothing.
“I’m real. I was real, anyway, before the fire. I don’t know if you’d consider me real now. Are ghosts real?” Joanna looked at her, sidelong and thoughtful. “Are you real? The living can’t see the dead, usually. They sure can’t touch us. You didn’t have any trouble touching me.”
“Dead?” whispered Aracely.
“In the fire,” said Joanna. “We all died. I woke up alone in the ashes. I think . . . I think I stayed for my horses.” She waved a hand, indicating the rear of the house, the fields that rolled on behind it. “They died so quickly that they didn’t realize it had happened. They’re all still here, with me. I guess they will be until someone comes along and paves these hills to build condos or shopping malls or something. Even ghost horses don’t want to stick around to argue with bulldozers.”
“What happened?”
“Bad wiring in the walls. It was over a century old, and I guess every generation had decided it could be somebody else’s problem, until the place went up in the middle of the night, and no one made it outside to watch the burning.” Joanna reached up and touched the scar on the side of her face. “I could wish these away if I wanted to, be the girl who’d never known what it was to burn, but it feels like that would be cheating, somehow. If I get to stay here, I should stay here as the aftermath, not the anticipation. How is it that you don’t know this?”
“Why should I know it?” asked Aracely. “I’ve never been outside the carnival before.”
Joanna hesitated. Then, without stepping out of the entryway, she extended her hand toward Aracely. When the other girl took it, she sighed, the sound as soft and sad as wind rustling through the boughs of an old oak.
“I thought you knew,” she said. “Aracely . . . did none of them ever tell you that you were dead?”
Charlie burst into Daisy’s tent to find her sitting with an open bottle of wine and a book of baby pictures, drinking from the one as she wept over the second. Her head was bowed, her shoulders slumped; she looked years older than she had when they’d rolled into town, a comfortable caravan that carried its secrets inside closed boxes, where no one would ever have to see.
“She gone?” Daisy asked, not looking up.
Charlie stopped. “Daisy,” he said. “What did you do?”
“You were with us,” said Daisy. She turned another page. When was the last time he’d seen that book? When was the last time he’d seen a camera pointed at Aracely, for that matter? “She was such a beautiful child. Remember? Always running around like she thought she was going to get her feet nailed to the ground. So busy. I used to watch her go and wonder what it would take to make her stop. Seemed like it would need a miracle.”
Charlie frowned. “Daisy . . .”
“Didn’t take a miracle. Not unless you think ‘miracle’ is another way of saying ‘truck.’ Only mercy was that she didn’t see it coming. She ran out into the road so fast, and the brakes were old, and there wasn’t time for her to suffer.” Daisy looked up, a tear running down her cheek. “Guess there wasn’t time for her to notice, either, because she came running straight over to me, little pigtails bobbing in a breeze that blew right through her, and she didn’t seem to realize her body was lying in the dust, like a ticket stub at the end of the night. She asked me to play with her.”
Charlie was silent.
“It took everything I had and then some to not start screaming, but I kept my wits about me, and by the time the sun went down, I had a ghost trap drawn all the way along the midway. By the time we rolled out, every truck and every trailer we owned was safe for a haunting. As long as she stays in bounds—and I’ve pushed them further every year, so she could have truck stops and motel rooms and convenience stores along with all the rest—she’s solid, she’s real, she’s growing like any other girl would grow.”
“But she’s dead,” said Charlie softly.
“She’s mine.” Daisy bared her teeth in a snarl. “My daughter, my flower, my responsibility. She’s always been able to be happy here, despite her circumstances. She’s always known that she was loved, and how many townie children dream of growing up to run away with the carnival? I gave her the life she would have wanted, if she’d been in a place to choose.”
“You didn’t give her any life at all,” Charlie countered. “She’s a shade. That poor child. Does she have any idea?”
“How could she?” For a moment, Daisy’s expression was pure smug-ness. “She’s grown up within the confines of the carnival. She’s changed with every passing year, exactly as a living girl would. There’s nothing stopping her from being happy, from doing everything she could ever w
ant to do, as long as everything she ever wants is within reach of the midway lights.” The smugness faded, replaced by sudden sorrow. “Or she would have been happy, if she’d only been content. Is she gone?”
Charlie nodded slowly. “I think so. She ran from me when I told her there was no house.”
“Then I’ll have to go and get her back.” Daisy set the book aside and stood. Her skirt was hiked high enough to show the garlands of wheat and roses tattooed around her calves, climbing ever higher toward the secret mysteries she had shared with no one since Aracely’s birth. Charlie felt his cheeks redden, but didn’t look away.
Daisy stepped toward him, spreading her empty hands in supplication. “Will you help me?” she asked.
He didn’t want to. Dead was dead and living was living, and the two were meant to exist side by side, not share a single space. But Aracely . . . she’d been dead for so long, and he’d never known. She’d been happy, despite her circumstances. Did he really have the right to refuse her mother?
“I will,” he said, and Daisy smiled.
They walked toward each other, all unknowing of their unison, drawn by forces greater than the moment, forces that had been building for years. Since a fire; since an accident; since a mother’s stubborn love had refused to let go what should have been gone and buried. Four people on the green hills between carnival and crypt, between midway and mansion.
Daisy walked with her head high and her skirts bundled above her knees, a jar of salt in one hand and a jar of grave dirt in the other. Her witchery was not complicated, old and slow and comfortable in its working, pouring like molasses into the world, stirred and spelled and carefully tended. She worked the way her mother had taught her, the way she would have taught her own daughter, had it not been so dangerous to teach those workings to the dead.
Charlie walked beside her in silence, his own hands empty and his own heart pounding. He was a simple man. He ferried the carnival from one location to the next, and all he asked in exchange was a paycheck and a clear map of his next destination. This was a bit beyond him. Had he been asked, he would have said he didn’t understand why he remained, why he didn’t turn and run back to the comforting, ordinary shadows of the midway, which lit up the sky behind them like a beacon. The crowds would be coming soon. The night was on the cusp of beginning.
From the other direction came Aracely and Joanna, hand in hand, which granted them both more power than they yet understood, for to hold a ghost’s substance is to hold their strength, and they were powerful as specters go, both of them able to pass among the living, if only for a little while, both of them prepared to fight instead of fleeing. They were what their circumstances had made of them, the flower and the fallen, and they walked with the smooth, easy steps of teenagers who had never been quite allowed to cross the line into adulthood.
Aracely’s childhood had been a dream given to her by her mother, but it was hers all the same, and the length of her limbs and the clearness of her eyes belonged to her entirely. Some gifts, once given, can’t be taken back. She walked with her fingers tangled in her new companion’s, like bones buried in the same earth, and she felt the wind blow through her, and she was not afraid. Part of her, she thought, had always known; had simply been waiting for permission to remember. Part of her was less afraid of letting go than it was of holding on.
They were not lovers, both of them scarce seventeen and dead besides, both of them trying to decide what they wanted to become, as the long years of their existence stretched out in front of them, an endless line of tickets to spend at any midway they chose. But they might be. Aracely flushed when she tried to look too long at Joanna, who she thought still burned, somewhere deep inside, a body built around a cinder in the shape of a heart. And as for Joanna, she couldn’t look Aracely in the eye without tasting honey on her tongue, without feeling her skin grow tight and hot in a way that had nothing at all to do with flames. So they were not lovers, no, but one day . . .
Time was on their side. It had been since the moment that they died.
They met at the center of the field, and the carnival shone on the hill behind Daisy and Charlie, and the house that was and was not there flickered ivory and ash behind Joanna and Aracely. Daisy looked at their joined hands and felt her heart break, just a little, just enough to let the light pour in. Aracely looked at the anguish in her mother’s eyes and forgave her, just a little, just enough to let the love inside again.
“You should have told me,” said Aracely.
“Ghost children don’t always grow up,” said Daisy. “Living children do. If I lied, it was so you’d be able to stand here like this, and not be trapped forever where you were.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
Daisy rolled her shoulders in a shrug, and said nothing.
“Are you coming home?” asked Charlie. It was a blunt question, and it fell into the delicate web of things unspoken like a stone. Aracely looked at him.
“Should I?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Daisy.
“No,” said Joanna.
“Only if you want to,” said Charlie.
Aracely was silent for a long beat before slowly, finally, she let go of Joanna’s hand. The other girl flickered for a moment, like a sheet whipping in the wind. Only for a moment, though, and moments pass.
“Mama,” said Aracely. “Why could I grow up inside the carnival?”
“It’s a ghost trap,” said Daisy. “I designed it that way. To protect you.”
Aracely nodded. “Then this is my answer. When you drive away, I won’t come with you.”
Daisy made a small, pained sound of wordless longing.
“Winter where you like: I won’t be there,” said Aracely. “But when you come back in the spring, you can collect us both.”
Joanna shot her a surprised look.
“I need some time to think, and then I need to see what else is out there in the world,” said Aracely.
“Baby . . .” said Daisy.
“No, Mama. You owe me this.”
Daisy looked at her. Then, slowly, she nodded.
“All right, baby,” she said. “I’ll see you in the spring.”
There is a carnival that tours the Midwestern United States on a shifting schedule, like all touring shows of its kind. It is among the last of a dying breed, but still it moves, and still it unfurls like a flower whenever it lands, the petals of the midway spreading wide. People who’ve seen it say there’s something special there; something that may endure when the other traveling shows have closed.
“It’s like a haunted house,” one said, when interviewed by a local paper. “It’s a little shivery, but you want to be there anyway. You want to know what happens next.”
What she didn’t say—what none of them ever say—was that as she was leaving on the first night the show was in town, she had looked back over her shoulder and seen two girls, barely blurring into women, appear at the top of the Ferris wheel. Their hands had been locked together, tight as chains, and their eyes had been on the moon, and even with all that distance between herself and them, she would have sworn that they were smiling.
SEANAN MCGUIRE—best known for her October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and the Wayward Children series—is a native Californian. This resulted in her being exceedingly laid-back about venomous wildlife and terrified of weather. Since her debut as an author in 2009, she has published more than forty novels and is the recipient of the Campbell, Alex, Hugo, and Nebula Awards. She’s also won the Pegasus Award for her work as a filksinger. She now lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard.
HUNTING BY THE RIVER
DANIEL CARPENTER
It was her eighteenth birthday and since she was his sister, he thought he’d head home and surprise her. He grabbed a bunch of flowers from a store in Manchester Piccadilly station, and walked across the city. It was early
still, and he shared the streets with bleary-eyed tourists, dawn commuters, and the sleeping homeless. He’d forgotten how the air felt in the city he grew up in: gray and wet, even on the sunniest of days. He’d missed that.
So much of the city had changed since his last visit. It felt alien to him, and the pockets that remained were small safe havens of relief. His mum had always called it a city under construction, and it was as true now as it ever had been; looking up he spotted cranes on the horizon. When he was old enough to come into the center on his own, it had been the Arndale they were rebuilding after the bomb, now though, it was housing. Glass blocks of flats squeezed into every space. The skyline changed so often he could barely remember what it looked like.
He crossed Deansgate and turned down the road toward Salford.
The key he’d had since he was twelve still worked, and even before he opened the door he could smell home, something so comforting and so impossible to describe in any other terms.
In the living room, his mum sat watching daytime TV, sunk into an armchair. When she saw him, she smiled briefly before bursting into tears.
“Jesus mum, it’s just me.” He dropped the flowers, ran over and hugged her.
Between tears she said, “She’s gone again.”
Kirsty left in the night. She’d done it before. The last time, he remembered, was when she was thirteen. They’d found her a few days later in a squat out in Oldham, sigils etched into her skin with her school compass. There had been more since he’d left.
“The last time was a week ago,” his mum said, sipping a cup of tea he’d made her. “I tried the police, but they know us. We’re a faff to deal with and they know she comes back.”
“She will come back then?”
“Something feels different Lee, don’t know what, but this isn’t like the other times.”