by Ellen Datlow
The roar of the wind begins to fade. When it falls to a whisper, you let go of the grate and push up into standing. The tracks are being swallowed under the end of the train in a thick, gleaming band. Behind you, the chain of cars vanishes into the dark.
Alice, you think. Raven-haired, hateful Alice. Smoking weed in her bedroom with the stereo up to drown out the arguments downstairs. Setting herself free while someone, her sister—you—lay in the next room straining to make out the words of the fight. Not that they mattered, given the rules for your mother seemed to change every time. She was able to do something wrong no matter what she did. Alice once told you that it was your fault they fought. Your fault he hit her. That Alice remembers how angry he used to get when you cried as a baby through the night. Alice. Washing her hands of the problem the day that your mother’s face was finally so bruised it could never have been the stairs or whatever it was she used to tell people who asked. You realise now that probably no one ever had asked.
And then Alex, coming into the café where you worked around lectures, while you wondered if you were ready to change subjects, change degree, change to doing something you really cared about. Alex would come in just before closing, when you were wiping down the counters or mopping the floors, and sometimes buy nothing, but smile and tell you how nice you looked with your hair pale like a ghost. Alex, coming in week after week, until you were listening to his promises and forgiving his temper and relishing his attention and living in his apartment and turning into your mother.
Then you applied for that research assistant job, the one through that young professor who takes the course you wish you had signed up for from the beginning. They didn’t list you for an interview, and you were so afraid to tell Alex in case he was too angry you had failed. But maybe there still is some way to make it. You’ll get the train in, ask to talk to the professor. There might be some way to make him understand. You see his face. He can help you. Let’s go, you think. You spread your arms. You reach for him, call out. The track is pouring out of the night and vanishing under the train.
Must Be This Tall to Ride
Seanan McGuire
There is a point at which sound becomes a physical thing with teeth and claws, slashing wildly at everything around it. Briana held the strap of her purse a little tighter and tried to stand fast against the assault coming from all sides, the fangs of the world biting into the soft flesh of her ears, dazing her and slowing her down.
“Come on, slowpoke!”
Her sister’s hand grasped her elbow, tugging her deeper into the midway, refusing to yield to the sound. Briana didn’t fight. It was easier if she let Cindy pick the direction and guide their activities. That way all Briana had to do was keep her knees from buckling as the roaring of the world crashed down on her head.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Anywhere! Everywhere! Loosen up, Bri. We’re having an adventure!”
Briana—who would have been happier if adventure had been something that happened to other people and left her out of it—didn’t say anything. She just held on.
The kids from school would have been amazed to see them now, the Harris kids at the carnival, both of them running through the crowds like they belonged, like they wanted to be there. Briana felt a little smug about that. Everything was too loud and too bright and too much, but she was still there, still a part of the scene that was unfolding all around them. None of the people in this crowd were going to whisper behind their hands about how sad it was for Cindy to have a freak for a sister, or how lucky their parents were to have at least one ordinary daughter, one daughter worth the effort required to love her.
Never mind that Cindy didn’t think there was anything wrong with Briana. Never mind that Briana was perfectly happy to be who she was, and couldn’t imagine wanting to be anyone else. She was still, and would always be, a social millstone dragging her sister to the bottom of the lake when she could have been skimming the surface like a queen. It couldn’t be helped.
But here they were despite it all, running through the summer carnival like they didn’t have a care in the world. It had appeared in the empty Target parking lot across from their hotel overnight, seeming to burst out of the concrete already assembled and ready to beguile. Their parents, worn out from escorting two teenage girls with radically differing ideas of “fun” across America’s heartland—a road trip that had seemed inspired when it began, and now seemed simply endless, the sort of thing devised as a punishment for some unspeakable crime—had been quick to press money into their hands and shoo them away, seeing the promise of peace in the sunlight glittering off the Ferris wheel.
It was early enough in the day that the crowds were thin, at least compared to what they would swell into as the afternoon ripened toward evening, and while the sound and spectacle was still enough to make Briana’s head spin, she could handle it if she kept her eyes on her sister and didn’t try to look around. Cindy, who had been guiding Briana through the world for their entire lives, didn’t let go or slow down as she plunged forward, hauling her precious cargo in her wake like the world’s blondest, bubbliest tugboat.
“I want to ride the Scrambler,” announced Cindy gleefully. “And the roller coaster. And the centrifuge. And the Ferris wheel. And—”
“We don’t have that many tickets, and we don’t have the money for that many tickets.”
“Well, I want to ride as many of them as I can.”
Briana closed her eyes, letting Cindy pull her along, and did the silent math of the carnival’s costs in the comforting dark. She stumbled, but didn’t fall; she opened her eyes again. “We can both do two rides, and then you can do one on your own. After that, we have to go back and shake Dad down for more cash.”
Cindy snorted. Their father would talk about how neither of them appreciated the value of a dollar, how when he’d been their age he’d held down a steady afterschool job and graduated high school ready to make his own way in the world, and then he would hand them each another twenty dollars, because he wanted their teen years to be happier than his had been. It was a predictable dance. She was fairly sure he’d given them insufficient funds entirely so they’d come back and verify that the carnival was both safe and enjoyable, rather than running off to the movies or something when they stopped having fun.
Control of the finances was a viable way to maintain control over his twin daughters, but sometimes it was more annoying than he could possibly know.
“I don’t want to ride the roller coaster,” said Briana. “So we could start there, and then do the rides we do want to ride together?”
“Sounds good,” said Cindy, and changed her trajectory, now hauling her sister toward the rickety wooden frame of the coaster. It sucked to ride solo, but it would have sucked even more not to ride at all, and Briana didn’t coaster. She’d tried once, on their ninth birthday, verified that it was too much—the sound, the speed, the screaming, all of them mixing together into something she could neither enjoy nor endure—and since then, Cindy had either been riding alone or with other friends.
It was okay. There were things Briana could do that Cindy couldn’t, like finish her homework on time, and missing a few coaster rides was a small thing in the annals of sisterly sins. As long as they could share the Ferris wheel, everything else was negotiable.
Cindy stopped running. Briana stopped in turn, raising her eyebrows.
“Looks like nobody else wants to ride either,” she said, and glanced around at the crowd. “Maybe they know something we don’t . . . ?”
“It’s lunchtime,” said Cindy. “Nobody rides a roller coaster at lunchtime.” Her grin was wicked, sharp as a dart in a carnie’s hand. “Good thing I haven’t eaten yet. Come on!” She ran into the empty corral that was meant to contain a queue, and currently contained nothing but the bored-looking carnival employee who leaned against the coaster’s controls, a baseball cap jammed down over her curly black hair.
Briana followed more re
luctantly, and saw the moment when the carnie spotted Cindy, straightened, and put on her professional liar’s face. She frowned. It was odd for a carnie to stand that straight all because two townie girls were on the approach.
Then again, so much about this carnival was odd. The rides were rickety, with peeling paint and blown-out bulbs. They were also overly large, more like something from an amusement park than the sort of rides she expected to see assembled in a parking lot overnight. The coaster even had an inversion loop, and a tunnel. Who did that at a carnival? How was that safe?
“Welcome to the Jaws of Death,” said the girl, rapid-fire, accent an indistinguishable mix of a dozen states. She had Indiana vowels and Alabama declensions and while she might have been a linguist’s dream, to Briana’s ears she was blurry, like the lines of her weren’t quite drawn correctly. “Two?”
“One,” said Cindy, unslinging her purse and thrusting it at Briana. “My sister doesn’t like roller coasters.”
“Some people don’t,” said the girl philosophically. She shrugged. “There’s always the Ferris wheel.”
“Yes, there is,” said Cindy. She took a step toward the coaster, still holding out her purse.
Briana grabbed her arm. “No.”
Cindy stopped, blinking. “What do you mean?”
“I mean no. I mean let’s go ride the Ferris wheel.” Briana tugged. “It’s . . . it’s not right. Something isn’t right.” It was in the shape of the coaster, the way it arched against the sky. The way it wasn’t moving. All the other rides were moving. This one should have been moving too, should have been seasoning the air with screams that hurt her ears. It wasn’t. It was wrong.
“Honey . . .” Cindy deftly worked her arm free, somehow shifting her purse into Briana’s hand in the same smooth gesture. “I get that you don’t like roller coasters, honest I do. But you need to chill. I’ll be back in five minutes, tops.” She whirled then, holding a fistful of bills out to the carnie. “One, please.”
“I’m sorry,” said the carnie. “We only take tickets here.”
Cindy’s face fell, and Briana’s heart leapt up to catch it. It was going to be okay. It was going to be okay. Cindy wouldn’t ride, and they would walk away, and—
“But since you’re my first customer of the day, why don’t you have one on the house?” The carnie continued smiling her midway-dart smile as she gestured grandly toward the coaster train. “Your chariot awaits.”
Briana grabbed for Cindy’s arm again. It was too late. Cindy was past listening to her objections, past caring about what she wanted: Cindy was going to ride, and it was going to be glorious. She dropped herself into the car and pulled the safety bar down over her head, and if the carnie’s smile was a sharpened dart, hers was a balloon, bright and beautiful and ready to burst.
“Away we go,” intoned the carnie, and jabbed her finger down on the button that would send the train creaking down the track, gathering speed as it went.
Briana clutched her sister’s purse against her chest and watched the train move, unable to shake the feeling that something was terribly, impossibly wrong. The sounds of the carnival seemed almost muffled now, heard through a wall of cotton, not nearly as overwhelming as her dread.
The train slipped into the tunnel’s mouth, vanishing from sight. The carnie turned to face Briana, removing her hat so that her hair cascaded down in a cotton candy cloud, and she wasn’t smiling now, no, she wasn’t smiling at all, although her mouth was still a dart waiting to be thrown. Everything about her was a weapon, and all of her was aimed at Briana.
“The track broke,” she said matter-of-factly, like this made all the sense in the world. “Seven years ago. It broke, and the train came off the rails and slammed into the loading area. Everyone on the train died, along with two carnies. You would have heard about it on the news, if you’d been from around here. You would never have stopped to ride a coaster at this carnival, because you’d know we didn’t have one.”
Briana’s legs were rotten timbers, shaking, threatening to drop her to the ground, even as they refused to let her move.
“It’s funny, though,” continued the carnie. “Sometimes a big enough blood sacrifice comes with certain . . . compensation. People like to make jokes about carnivals being dangerous, but the fact is, it wasn’t their fault. Wasn’t our fault. There was a flaw in the steel, nothing the safety checks could have caught. It could have happened to anyone. It could have happened to Disneyland. I guess we drew the low card in the deck that day—but since then, there haven’t been any accidents. There haven’t been any deaths. There haven’t even been any major injuries. Except . . .” The carnie looked, meaningfully, to the coaster.
In the distance, Briana could hear her sister’s joyful screams. They weren’t terrified yet. That part was coming.
“You’re lying,” Briana said, even though she knew the woman wasn’t. No line for the roller coaster on the first day of the carnival, the way the sound of the midway was muffled, like the world was far away. This was a bad place. This was a wrong place.
“If you like,” said the carnie. “That would be the easy choice.”
“Choice?” asked Briana.
“I don’t usually get two people on the platform, so yeah, choice.” Calmly, the carnie looked at Briana and asked, “Does the train crash into the parking lot or the platform? Heads she dies, tails you do. Choose. Or decide this is a lie, and walk away. That’s a choice too. Blood sacrifices have to be renewed. Once every seven years, there has to be a reminder of what we’ve paid, and what doesn’t have to happen anymore.”
“If the train crashes into the platform, you’ll die too.”
“Too late for that. I said two carnies died, remember?” The carnie turned, seeming to track the progress of the train with the motion of her head. “Now I make sure the sacrifice gets renewed. I keep us safe. Almost out of time. Choose.”
Briana knew which choice she was supposed to make, the choice the stories had been sketching out for her since she was old enough to understand that she was odd: She’s supposed to say that she’s the strange one, she’s the one who doesn’t quite fit in, and stand aside in favor of her sister, who could live a normal life without all the tangles and trappings of Briana’s neurology. She also knew that supposed to or not, she couldn’t live with being the reason her sister was gone, and Cindy—normal or not—could never live with being the reason Briana was dead. Cindy was the only reason she was standing there for the train to crush. One way or the other, one of them wound up with blood on her hands, and all to pay—
To pay.
Briana smiled, looking at the carnie, and said, “No.”
The carnie blinked. “What?”
“No. I don’t know if you’re a ghost or a demon, and I don’t care. Cindy took a ride because you told her she could have one. She didn’t pay for it. You said that sometimes a blood sacrifice comes with compensation. Well, everyone who died on the train paid to be there. Everyone who died on the platform worked for the carnival. You made contracts. You made promises. Cindy didn’t. She lives, and I live, and I take my sister home.” Briana was shaking by the end, her hands clenched by her sides and her heart pounding.
The carnie blinked again. Then, slowly, she smiled that sharpened-dart smile and said, “Clever. You ever want a job, little girl, just climb to the top of the nearest Ferris wheel and convince yourself that you can fly.”
Then she was gone, winked out in an instant, leaving the roller coaster unattended.
Briana made a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a squeal as she launched herself at the controls. The train came rolling around the corner. She slammed her hand down on the stop button and it rolled safely up to the platform, its lone passenger laughing through the tangle of her hair. The sounds of the carnival rushed back in, returning to their previous volume, and Briana fought the urge to clap her hands over her ears.
Cindy kept laughing as she climbed out of the train and walked to where Bria
na waited. She frowned, slowing to a stop.
“Where’s the ride operator?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you when we get back to the hotel,” said Briana. She grabbed Cindy’s hand, pulling her away from the roller coaster that wasn’t there, and this time she was the one pulling her sister through the crowd, keeping her safe from all its dangers, and she didn’t look back, not even once. Not even once.
On the platform, the carnie reappeared, hat once again seated firmly on her head, and leaned against the platform housing the ride’s controls. The season was young; there was plenty of time to pay for another seven years of good luck. And if there was one thing every carnival kid learned early, it was that nothing would ever replace word of mouth. Those girls would talk. The thrill seekers and the ghost hunters would listen, and they would come, and sooner or later, one of them would split off from the herd, would see a ride that wasn’t there, would hand over their ticket. Over and over, until it was time to let someone else get away, to set the lure again.
“You must be at least this tall to ride,” she said, and laughed.
Outside on the midway, the Ferris wheel turned, and the crowd roared on.
The Surviving Child
Joyce Carol Oates
1.
The surviving child, he is called. Not to his face—of course.
The other, younger child died with the mother three years before. Murder, suicide it had been. More precisely Filicide, suicide.
The first glimpse she has of the surviving child is shocking to her: a beautiful face, pale and lightly freckled, darkly luminous eyes, a prematurely adult manner—solemn, sorrowful, wary and watchful.
Sharp as a sliver of glass piercing her heart comes the thought—I will love him. I will save him. I am the one.