“How the hell did you know that was there?”
“The map.”
“But how did you see it?”
“I was looking for it. David, let’s go.” Kate looked at me. Her face was still red, but whether from crying or excitement, I couldn’t tell.
Backing us up, I paused just a moment at the lip of the path. I cracked my window, and the whistling silence sucked at our little bubble of life inside the car.
“What are you thinking?” Kate said softly.
“Little Bighorn. The Donner Party. Fifteen or twenty other examples of overconfident white people overestimating their power over the West.”
“This really could be it, David. Couldn’t it?”
“It really could be something.”
I pushed my foot on the gas, and we were off the highway, jiggling over the dirt.
“How far?” I mumbled.
Kate glanced down at the map. “Three miles, maybe.” I groaned. Kate said, “Christmas Eve, 1885.”
I watched the grass disappear under our tires, the snow that seemed to float on ground so flat and featureless that it didn’t even really seem to be there. “On Christmas Eve, 1885, at approximately eight-forty-five p.m., a group of local ranchers calling themselves the Guardians of Right appeared at the door of Judge Dark’s rather lavish creekside home—it was destroyed by fire, incidentally in 1956, and is now buried under the high school football stadium—and demanded entrance. With them, the Guardians had brought a Chinese homesteader who’d been hitched to a wagon with his feet bound and made to hop all the way from his claim two miles outside of town.”
“How do we know this?” Kate asked.
“Primary source, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a source, of course.”
An old, habitual joke of mine. Kate ignored it. I went on.
“The judge himself kept an impressively detailed notebook. The Guardians demanded immediate entry, a trial right then and there, and a hanging verdict. And Judge Dark, inexplicably, showed the men into his living room, then called his wife down to act as court reporter and witness. The prosecution case lasted ten minutes and involved somewhat circumstantial but undeniably incriminating evidence of the theft of foodstores and two horses. There was no defense, seeing as how the homesteader in question did not speak English and couldn’t even stand because the bones in his feet and ankles had been smashed during his trip to the judge’s door. The guilty verdict and death sentence apparently came so fast that even the Guardians were startled to silence. The judge makes specific and rather self-satisfied note to this effect.
“What the judge actually said next, I cannot tell you. But I can tell you what he wrote. And I can tell you that word for word: ‘I attached a single condition: that the prisoner be hanged by no hand but my own, and that he stay this night, his last on this Earth, in my home, under my care.’ This was assented to, and the stunned Guardians left. And on Christmas morning, in front of over a hundred witnesses in what was then the town square, Judge Albert Dark wheeled the homesteader to a poplar tree, strung a rope around his neck, positioned him in a sort of crouch in the back of a wagon, and executed him, cleanly and quickly. No one yelled ‘3-7-77.’ ”
“What does that mean, by the way?”
“No one knows, really,” I said. “None of the original Virginia City vigilantes ever said. They just left those numbers pinned to their victims. Anyway, the homesteader, by every account, said not a word and made no sound. But he did look up, right as the wagon fled him and the rope bit into his neck. Two of the four published accounts claim he was smiling. Kate, what the hell is that?” But I could tell what it was. It was a kid. In pajamas.
He was barefoot in the grass, straddling the tire ruts with one arm stretched perfectly perpendicular to his shoulders, pointing off into the blackness. His skin glowed white in the headlight beams, as though the snow had somehow sunk inside it. He had short blond hair that stuck straight up. His pajamas had zebras on them.
I hit the brakes, started to slow.
“God,” Kate said as we rolled to a stop fifteen feet from the kid. “How old do you think he is?”
“How cold do you think he is?” I muttered, staring at the kid’s feet.
He was about as tall as the top of my windshield. I rolled down my window and leaned out, but the child made no move toward the car, and he didn’t lower his arm. It occurred to me that maybe he was an astoundingly realistic scarecrow. But he wasn’t. I could see his lips, blue with cold, twitching when the prairie wind whipped across them.
“Are you all right?” I called. The child didn’t move.
Then, abruptly, I smiled. I hadn’t even gotten to this latest Mr. Dark’s Carnival, and already it had me pleading with the ghouls, trying to get them to break and speak to me. The bubble of nervous excitement inside me swelled.
“Follow the yellow brick road,” I said, and turned in the direction the child had pointed.
There were other tire tracks, I noted, all around us. I took an absurd amount of comfort in the fact that we weren’t the first ones out here. I drove slowly, letting the prairie drum against the underside of the car like a choppy sea against the hull of a sailboat. Except for the dirt we stirred, nothing moved.
“How many did Judge Dark hang?” Kate asked, though her eyes, too, were straining forward into the void.
“Four that we know of between 1885 and statehood, when he drops from the official record as abruptly as he appeared. In each case, he allowed a local vigilante group to bring suspects to a lightning trial, convicted the suspects, then kept them all night in his home, where one assumes he served as confessor and last meal chef or possibly something completely different, and then performed the killing the next morning. He apparently was a master executioner, because, according to the Plains-Ledger, ‘not a single one of his charges so much as danced. And none of them said a word before they went to their makers.’ ”
“Look,” said Kate, but I’d already seen.
Drawing the car forward, I pulled into a space between two pickup trucks and switched off the ignition. There were six other vehicles arrayed around us in a makeshift parking lot. Of the drivers and passengers, I saw no trace.
I looked at Kate. We listened to the snow tap the roof of the Volvo. Beyond the impromptu circle of cars, the prairie grass rolled in the raging wind.
“So remind me,” Kate murmured. “How did this murderous judge, whoever he was, become part of the carnival myth?”
“Can’t remind you,” I said. “ ’Cause I never told you. ’Cause I don’t know.”
“And why ‘carnival?’ Why not ‘scary house’?”
“Got me yet again.”
Suddenly, Kate was smiling once more, and the red in her lips spread up her cheeks, and I felt so grateful, so lucky, that I wasn’t even sure I could move. “Thank you for coming to get me,” she said.
“Thank you for coming along, my love.”
Kate blew me a kiss. She jerked the door handle down, still smiling, and—gently, as though easing into water—climbed into the night. I opened my own door and joined her. We stood at the hood of the car and stared around us.
There was no sound except the wind in the grass. No child in pajamas appeared to point us the right way. I jammed my hands into my pockets as the cold gnawed at my wrists.
“There,” I said.
“I see it,” said Kate.
It was just a glow, barely brighter than the moonlight on the snow. Distances are hard enough to gauge on the plains in broad daylight. But given the limited visibility, I decided the glow couldn’t be more than a half-mile away, straight out from the highway into the grass. We started walking.
It was an illusion, of course, that the dark got darker as soon as we left the circle of cars. Nevertheless, I could feel the eastern Montana night sweep over our heads on its enormous wings. I could feel its weight up there, and its talons. I kept my head down and walked. Kate walked beside me, the sleeve of her coat bru
shing rhythmically, repeatedly, against my own. We’d gone maybe three hundred yards when both of us looked up together and saw the house.
It loomed out of the prairie shadows, black in the moonlight, inexplicable as the monolith in 2001. The glow we saw came from a lone floodlight buried in the grass and aimed at the white fence surrounding the structure. As we got closer, I saw that the building wasn’t black but barn-red, single-storied and rectangular and long. In the yard demarcated by the fence, people-shaped figures glided back and forth.
“If it was nothing else but this,” I said, staring at the tableau before me, “I think I’d be satisfied.”
“It’s like something out of a painting,” Kate said, and that stopped me. The chill that flooded my mouth seemed to have come from inside rather than out.
For a second, I couldn’t place the source of my discomfort. I looked at the structure. I looked at the floating figures, just beginning to acquire distinct faces from this distance. I looked at the fence, and then I had it.
Because it wasn’t a fence. And the scene didn’t remind me of a painting but of a photograph. The one on page 212 of the Montana History Primer I’d penned, to be exact, that showed the stacks of jumbled buffalo skeletons piled on the plains during the years the federal government paid the most desperate or ghastly Montanans to shoot every bison they could find and export the bones downriver.
I started to speak, had to wet my lips, tried again. “There, um, been any recently reported mass murders of oxen in the vicinity?”
Kate turned, her brow furrowed. “What?”
“Take a good gander at that fence, Kate.”
She did. Then she said, “Ooh. That can’t be real.”
“One hopes not. One hopes there is a large placard pasted over the entry reassuring us that NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED OR MISTREATED DURING CREATION OF THIS CARNIVAL. But one is disturbed.”
“Come on,” Kate said, and on we went.
Up close, the bones looked a little less real, if only because they were reassuringly clean. Somehow, I’d been expecting bits of gristle to be hanging from them like party streamers. The four figures gliding back and forth in the house’s mock garden were all young women, and they all wore long white nightgowns that flowed down their forms like liquid moonlight. They were bare-armed, black-haired, and they might have been sisters. Certainly they all had the same porcelain skin pallor, the same slightly upturned noses, the same half-smiles on their red-black lips. I found the sight of them slightly disappointing. After everything that had come so far, this seemed too familiar a horror-movie image, and something of a failure of imagination.
The mound of bones—up close, it was more hedge than fence—had one opening off to the right side of the house. Crouching beside the opening, staring straight past us at the eternity of nothing beyond, was another child. This one wore a green overcoat belted at the waist. He had jet-black hair that made his skin look bleached of features, like a face in a photographic negative. He, too, was barefoot.
When Kate and I moved toward the opening in the bones, the child stood up and stepped in front of us. We waited for him to speak, but of course he didn’t. He didn’t move, either.
“Now what?” I finally said.
The nightgown wraiths weren’t the only people in the yard, I could see now. There were other people with plain old Montana-pale skin and good winter jackets and gloves and scarves. Hauntees. Maybe eight of them, milling about.
Slowly, still looking beyond us—just like the man on the bridge, I realized, and wondered if this particular Mr. Dark ran an extended and brilliantly effective training program for his employees—the gatekeeper child raised his arm, palm upward, and held it toward us.
“Blood?” I muttered to Kate. “Cheez-Its? What does he want?”
After a long moment, Kate dipped her hand into her coat pocket and withdrew the black construction paper. “Ticket,” she said happily.
“Oh, yeah. Wouldn’t want any party crashers,” I said, but I moved forward with Kate as she placed the folded paper in the child’s hand.
“Brrr,” she said as she touched him. “Honey, you’re freezing.”
“It’s not so bad,” said the child, and my mouth flew open and my knees locked. I’d gotten used to the lack of response.
Kate maintained her poise better than I did. She glanced at me, then back at the child. Then she nodded. “You’re right. It isn’t.” Taking my glove in her hand, she drew me forward through the bone hedge and into the yard.
We’d taken all of three steps when one of the winter coat–wrapped figures threw back the flaps of its red wool cap and squeaked, “Professor R.!” at me.
I blinked, glanced at Kate, then back at the person flouncing toward us. “Um,” I said. I run into students every time I leave my house in Clarkston. But somehow, for no good reason, I’d forgotten it was possible tonight. I blushed. “Hello, Ms. Corwyn.”
“And who’s this?” said Tricia, completely unaffected.
My blush deepened, and I felt a flicker of annoyance. Surely, at age forty-one, after seventeen years in the classroom, I’d stopped being embarrassed about the gaps that existed between my teaching self and my home self. But that didn’t mean I’d found a way to bridge or even explain them. I don’t know anyone who has. “This is Kate,” I finally answered.
I turned to Kate for a smile, a gently mocking putdown, something. But the expression on her face had sagged. She looked at me, and she seemed so tired all of a sudden, and I knew Brian Tidrow had floated up over her shoulder. He’d done that periodically, even when he was alive. It wouldn’t be the last time, I knew.
“Okay,” she said, and wandered away into the garden. I had no idea what she meant.
“Hmmm,” said Tricia.
Instantly, with Kate out of earshot, I was Professor David once more. “You just keep those fast-developing observational skills to yourself,” I said, and smiled with my mouth closed. A teacherly smile.
“Is this unbelievable or what? This corpse crawled up out of the river and gave me a map.”
“A corpse.”
“All white. I don’t even know how long he was down there, because I sure didn’t see him. Robert and I were walking along the bank in Poplar Park and suddenly this thing wriggled up out of the water at our feet. He was stark naked except for a Speedo. Robert almost flew up the nearest tree.”
I went right past the corpse. A Speedo-wearing corpse in a half-frozen river did not seem so very strange on a Clarkston Halloween night. At least, not this Clarkston Halloween night. “Robert,” I said. “Robert Hayright?”
“Yeah,” said Tricia. “Why?”
I felt my jaw start to drop, clamped it shut. Annoyance flared in me, though I had no idea why. I needed to go to Kate. And I wanted to get lost in the marvelous atmosphere of this haunted house. But I couldn’t quite wade out of Tricia’s blue eyes yet. And I couldn’t get comfortable with the way she floated through the world. I’d met people like her before, of course. A few. The ones born with smarts, beauty, self-confidence, everything, gliding on their own private seas, remote and mesmerizing as lighted yachts as they drift among the teeming rest of us, struggling in our leaky johnboats from one shore we can’t remember toward another we’ll never know.
“How did that happen?” I said.
Tricia shrugged. “Robert? He asked.”
Good for both of you, I almost said, then decided that was beyond condescending. “I have to go find Kate.”
“Don’t miss the booth. It’s weird as hell. Professor R., do you think this is it? The real Mr. Dark’s?”
I studied her cold-flushed, happy, markless face. And my annoyance transformed into sadness, still and deep. “I think it may be our Mr. Dark’s, Tricia. I think this may be as close as we’ll ever get.” Not until I was several steps away did it occur to me to wonder where Robert Hayright was.
In the corner of the house’s backyard sat a game booth draped in red and yellow carnival bunting. Kate stood to the
left of it, but she wasn’t playing whatever game the booth offered. She was looking at the prairie outside the bone hedge.
I was fifteen feet away, closing fast, when two of the nightgown girls appeared on either side of Kate, took her arms, and spun her, gently, toward the house. I hurried forward.
“Wait,” I called.
“Move it, come on,” Kate answered, turning her head toward me but letting the nightgown girls lead her. The spirit of the evening seemed to have seized her once more. “I think it’s our turn, David.”
They were guiding her around the side of the structure toward the front door. Like all haunted houses, I surmised, Mr. Dark’s could accommodate only a few guests at a time. Then the illusions had to be reset, the trap doors and lunging scarecrow monsters propped back on their springs, the fog machines reloaded. I had just about caught up when a third nightgown girl drifted directly into my path, held up a warning hand like a school crossing guard, and stopped me.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m with her. I came with her.” I stepped to the side, and the nightgown girl stepped with me. Her bare feet made cracking sounds in the snow-caked grass and left half-formed impressions. Her hand remained extended, blocking me. For several seconds, we stared at each other.
“They’ve been doing that since I got here,” said Tricia, walking up next to me. “No one gets to go inside with the person they came with.”
“Forget that,” I said, ignoring Tricia, watching Kate. The nightgown guides on either side of her still held loosely to her arms, but they’d stopped walking, allowed her to turn around.
Kate’s eyes were hooded in shadow. I couldn’t tell if she was steeling herself or enjoying the whole thing or resigned or what. All she said was “It’s okay. It’ll be fun.”
“I came here with you,” I said. “I want to go through it with you.”
“Guess there are still at least a few things we don’t get to go through together,” said Kate. Then she smiled another of those wide, blooming smiles, but she aimed it at Tricia. “Take care of the poor professor. See you out the other side, David.”
Halloween Carnival Volume 2 Page 3