Carnival of Shadows

by R.J. Ellory

  A gasp of amazement filled the air.

  Haynes held his stomach and mimed laughter.

  Again, Travis experienced that rush of awkwardness, as if his own skin could not contain him. It was an illusion, no doubt about it, but how had Haynes created that illusion? Was this some kind of mass hypnotism? It could not have been, for there was no such thing. Surely it was not possible to make everyone see the same thing at the same time? Travis did not have a moment to question it further. Haynes was at the edge of the stage, within arm’s reach of those at the front of the crowd. He started to turn then, just around and around, and as he turned, he appeared to shrink down toward the ground. Faster and faster he went, and with each revolution, he grew smaller and smaller, somehow contracting his limbs until he was little more than three feet tall, and yet he was entirely proportioned, and he did not seem to have bent his legs, and he could not have been kneeling, for Travis could see the man’s feet. Oscar Haynes was the same height as Travis, perhaps taller, and then he was half that height, and still turning, turning, growing in height again, yet again, until he was once again as tall as he’d been when he’d begun.

  Haynes slowed to a halt, and as he stopped, Travis could see that he held three or four scarlet balls in each hand, each of them the same size, no bigger than a golf ball. Where had they come from? How had he created the appearance of shrinking in size, and—even as he returned to his normal height—obtained six or eight red balls?

  Haynes started to juggle those balls, and Travis watched, his eyes wide, as those balls flew ever faster and higher. There were six or eight and then there were ten, then twelve, and then it was as if there was a constant stream of scarlet red balls flowing from one hand to the other in an uninterrupted sequence. Again a gasp of wonder and disbelief issued from the gathering, and Travis stepped forward again to see more closely what was before him. His mind was fighting what was in front of his eyes, and yet he knew this was no hallucination, no delusion. This was an illusion—it had to be—but it was unlike anything he had ever seen before.

  And then the balls were disappearing, seemingly being absorbed into Haynes’s hands, for there was an endless stream of them, and then they seemed to be intermittent, and then Travis believed there were few enough of them for him to count, and then there was four, then two, then none.

  The balls were gone—every single one of them—and there was no place into which they could have possibly vanished.

  The crowd erupted into spontaneous cheers and clapping and whistling. The sound was close to deafening.

  Travis clapped with them, involuntarily perhaps, for his mind was elsewhere, still trying to fathom this, still trying to make sense of something that made absolutely no sense at all.

  Haynes looked at him then. Travis knew it. He felt it. That skull looked right at him, and did Haynes wink at him? Was that some sly and knowing glance of acknowledgment?

  Got you now, haven’t I? it said. Go figure this one out, Agent Travis.

  Or was it merely Travis’s imagination?

  He stepped back, trying perhaps to be invisible, to go unnoticed, but he knew that Haynes was fully aware of his presence.

  “Two volunteers!” Haynes shouted.

  It seemed that everyone in the tent but Travis wanted to volunteer, but Haynes plucked two children from the front row, neither of them more than ten or twelve years old. He positioned them facing each other and at right angles to audience, Haynes himself behind them and facing the crowd.

  “Silence please, ladies and gentlemen,” Haynes said.

  The crowd hushed, as silent as a funeral.

  Haynes raised the hands of the child to his right, turned their palms upward, and then had the second child do the same. Their fingertips were perhaps two or three feet apart.

  Haynes stepped back again, and then he raised his hands.

  Before either child could do or say anything, a fine white line seemed to materialize between their outstretched fingertips, spanning that gap between them, and as it grew brighter, it seemed to solidify, until it was as if a rope of light tied their hands together. The light moved, no doubt. It seemed alive and real and as tangible as daylight itself. The crowd gasped. The children’s faces were animated and dreamlike, full of amazement, seemingly unperturbed by what was happening between them.

  Haynes clicked his fingers and the light changed color. White to blue. Again, another click of the fingers. Blue to scorching red. Red to yellow. Yellow to white once more. And then he was waving his hands over that rope of light, and the color changed again and again, faster and faster, until there was a pulsing rainbow between those children.

  The crowd was stunned into silence.

  And then the light went out. It snapped almost audibly, like a distant crack of thunder, and it was gone.

  The children stood there, and their hands were filled with candies, almost too many for them to hold. Simultaneously, seemingly without prompt, they both turned toward the audience and tossed those handfuls of candies toward the spectators. The children grabbed those candies from the air. The kids on the stage were laughing, and as they stepped down and were received by their parents, Travis could see an expression in those adults’ faces. It was almost gratitude, as if their children had been selected to receive some special gift, as if they had been chosen above all others to experience something truly meaningful and profound.

  Haynes took his bows, and then he left the stage.

  The tent started to empty out, the hubbub of excitement and chatter dying down, and Travis was one of the very last to leave.

  He took some steps toward the stage, scanned the ground for the petals that Haynes had thrown into the audience; he saw nothing but trampled grass and muddy footprints.

  He heard someone behind him, knew it was Doyle, had a question on his lips even as he turned.

  “Not yet, Agent Travis,” Doyle said, preempting anything Travis might have asked.

  “But—”

  “The show isn’t over yet,” Doyle said. “You have yet to see Mr. Greene weave his… his—what shall we call it?—his mind magic. Then, and only then, will I answer your question.”

  Travis had already forgotten the question he’d intended to ask.

  “Walk. Breathe. Look at the sky for a while, Agent Travis. Come back to earth, as they say.” Doyle smiled, and there was something so sincere in his expression that Travis felt completely undone. He felt as if the stitching that held all his seams together had loosened considerably, and all of a sudden he would fall right out of his body and never be able to return.

  “All I will say,” Doyle whispered, “is that people sometimes see just exactly what they want to see. The mind is powerful, Michael. Too powerful to put in a box. Too powerful to hide away from. Too powerful to do anything but accept that it has unknown and unlimited capabilities, and we haven’t even scratched the surface. As you know all too well, sometimes things happen simply because we believe they will.”

  Doyle reached out and touched Travis’s arm.

  “It gets easier, Michael,” he said, “just as long as you don’t fight it.”

  29

  Travis did not fight it, not because he didn’t wish to, but because he possessed neither the will nor the strength.

  Somewhere within himself something was faltering, as if some slow and relentless wave of self-doubt was eating away at the foundation of his certainties. He did not feel good. Nor did he feel bad. He did not know how he felt, and thus he was unsure of what to think. He knew that these people had done something to him, but he did not know what. He knew that they were doing something to the people of Seneca Falls, to all the carnival’s visitors, but he could not identify what it was that was happening. Some kind of mass hypnotism. Some kind of mind invasion perhaps. Some kind of mental intervention that created a collective experience, a collective appearance. But such things were n
ot possible. Travis knew that such things were utterly impossible, and yet he possessed no other explanation.

  Travis then did as Doyle had suggested. He walked out of the tent and crossed to the edge of the field. This time he was not turned back by crowds of people. He held on to the wooden fence and he looked out toward the horizon. The air was chill, the sky clear, and visible as if within arm’s reach were not only the lights of Seneca Falls, but also the stars above his head. They seemed equidistant, as if one were merely an earthbound reflection of the other, and somewhere out there, somewhere farther than his eyes could see, the sky and the earth were stitched together by some invisible hand.

  “Mr. Travis?”

  Travis turned at the sound of the voice.

  Laura McCaffrey stood there, her brothers Danny and Lester nowhere to be seen. She seemed almost embarrassed.

  “Laura,” Travis said, wishing he could remain alone, wishing he could just have these few moments to gather his thoughts together.

  “I was just wondering if you…” She looked away, as if consulting some unseen person on how best to ask whatever she wished to ask.

  “If I?” Travis prompted.

  “Well, Danny and Lester and I… we just wondered whether you would like to come to dinner at our house on Sunday.”

  She paused for a moment. “We are at church in the morning,” she went on, “but we always have a Sunday dinner afterward, and you don’t know anyone here, and you spend all your time working, and we just wondered if you—”

  “That is very much appreciated, Laura, of course, but Bureau protocol…”

  Laura nodded understandingly. “I thought that would be the case,” she interjected. “Nevertheless, the invitation is there. I wanted to ask you, and I’ve done so. I am sorry you can’t come, and I’m sure Danny will be sorry too. He does so admire you, you know?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, he always had his heart set on being in the Sheriff’s Department like his brother, but he was sick when he was a child, and he has some kind of weakness in his heart you see? It’s not life-threatening or anything like that, but he is limited when it comes to heavily exerting himself. He can’t run very far. He tries not to lift things that are too heavy. That’s all, really. However, it meant that he couldn’t be a sheriff, and I know that is always going to be a disappointment for him.” She smiled coyly. “You, however, are from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She laughed briefly. “He calls you the G-man. I know from the way he talks about you that he admires what you do, and he kind of wishes he could do the same.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I am sure Danny would make the most excellent G-man.”

  “Oh, you should tell him that, Agent Travis. That would just make his day. You have absolutely no idea.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that, Laura.”

  Laura McCaffrey hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “Are you not allowed to have any friends, Agent Travis?”

  Travis looked at her. A frown creased his brow.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was very rude of me. I didn’t mean—”

  Travis raised his hand and she fell silent. “No offense taken. I understood what you meant just perfectly.”

  “Well, yes, and I am sure you have just a wealth of friends back in Kansas, right?”

  “Yes, Laura. A wealth of friends.”

  “I have to be getting back,” she said. “I want to see the little man again. What he did on Friday was just remarkable, and I have to see him do it again.”

  “You’re speaking of Chester Greene, right?”

  “If he’s the little man, then yes, that’s him.”

  “And what is it that he did on Friday?” Travis asked.

  “Oh, he can see right into your mind, Agent Travis,” she said. Her eyes lit up like Roman candles. “Right into your mind. The most remarkable thing I ever saw. It just has to be seen to be believed.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t miss it for the world, then,” Travis said.

  “Okay,” Laura said. “Well, the invitation for dinner is still open if you decide we’re no longer murder suspects.”

  “Appreciated,” Travis said.

  Laura stepped forward and started to reach out her hand. She hesitated, merely grazed the sleeve of his jacket with her fingertips, and it seemed that there was just a world of unspoken words in her eyes.

  “If you ever feel like you need another friend,” she said. “I mean, I know you have so many back home, but if you ever…” She looked away, embarrassed again, but there was such kindness in her eyes that Travis felt his heart would burst.

  “It was nice speaking with you, Laura,” he said.

  She touched his sleeve once more, and then she turned suddenly and hurried away.

  Travis watched her go, his breath caught in his chest, and then he looked upward to the sky, down again to the lights of Seneca Falls, and he inhaled deeply.

  He knew then that he was tired of fighting the world, but he knew he dared not stop. If he stopped, then what would he do? Who would he be? What would become of him?

  Michael Travis gripped the fence and bowed his head.

  He counted to ten, and then he headed back to the marquee to see a dwarf from Oklahoma City perform mind magic.

  30

  Travis was not late, but he did enter the marquee to find the place jammed from side to side. There must have been three hundred people in there. Scanning faces, he recognized almost no one. It seemed that each time he looked, there were new people to see, all of them strangers, all of them wearing that self-same expression of transfixed anticipation. There was something in the atmosphere. There was no denying it. Travis did not like it, nor could he determine what it was that he did not like.

  The stage was empty but for a single wooden chair. It was the folding kind, the kind one might put in the back of the car for a picnic. There was no sign of Doyle or Valeria Mironescu, nor Slate or Benedek or Akiko Mimasuya. He could not see Laura or the McCaffrey brothers, nor Larry Youngman or Sheriff Rourke. Travis felt even more alone than ever before.

  It was a little while before Travis became aware of the music. If he was not mistaken, it was Stravinsky’s The Firebird, again something he knew solely because of Esther’s interest in such music. It created an ominous feeling perhaps, something altogether uneasy and unsettling, and when Chester Greene finally walked onto the little makeshift stage, as the music swelled and then quietened, the crowd of spectators seemed to hold their breath in unison.

  Greene stood center stage, and for such a tiny man, he seemed to not only command the attention of everyone present, but also project a charismatic aura that reached the very back of the tent with ease.

  He smiled, winked at the audience.

  “Lighten up,” he said quietly. “I ain’t gonna bite.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, and then a ripple of laughter spread through the tent. There seemed to be a collective exhalation, and a sense of strange relief filled Travis’s body. He did not know what he had been expecting, but the feeling had been that it would be the worst. Now that was gone, gone altogether, and he was merely standing there watching a small man from Oklahoma start his carnival routine.

  Greene nudged his hat back on his head. He stood with one hand on his hip, the other on the back of the chair.

  “Tell you something now, you menfolk. What’s the best way to remember your wife’s birthday?”

  Greene paused for a second.

  “Forget it once!”

  A smattering of laughs throughout the crowd.

  “I have a friend called Lionel. He’s Jewish, like me. Nice guy. Has a wife called Frieda. Took Frieda to the doctor for a checkup. Doctor did a full examination. He comes out to see Lionel in the waiting room, says, ‘Lionel, I’m sorry, but I’ve got some bad news. I’ve done a f
ull examination of your wife, and I don’t like what I’m seeing.’ Lionel, he looks at the doctor, and he says, ‘Hey, Doc, no need to get personal. I seem to remember your wife ain’t no oil painting neither.’”

  The crowd was laughing then, the earlier sense of unease now completely gone.

  Greene tipped his hat and winked again.

  “Another friend,” he went on. “Name’s Moshe. Went to see his psychiatrist. Moshe says to the psychiatrist, ‘I had a strange dream recently. I saw my mother in the dream, but then I noticed she had your face. I found this so worrying that I immediately awoke and couldn’t get back to sleep. I just stayed there thinking about it until seven a.m. I got up, made myself a slice of toast and some coffee, and came straight here. Can you please help me explain the meaning of my dream?’ The psychiatrist kept silent for some time, then said, ‘One slice of toast and coffee? You call that a breakfast?’”

  Even Travis smiled, found himself resisting the desire to laugh, and then he let it go. The man was funny, no doubt about it.

  Greene took a step forward, put his hands on his hips. “A businessman boards a plane and sits next to an elegant woman wearing the largest diamond ring he’s ever seen. He asks her about it. ‘This is the Egoheimer diamond,’ the woman says. ‘It’s beautiful, but there is a terrible curse that goes with it.’ The businessman is curious. He asks her what the curse is. The woman shakes her head, looks very serious. ‘It’s called Mr. Egoheimer.’”

  There is barely a breath before the crowd erupts with laughter.

  Greene was in his element. He took a bow.

  “Too kind, too kind, too kind,” he said.

  The audience settled.

  “But we digress,” Greene said, and with that he took off his hat and put it under the chair. He sat down, his hands on his knees, his knees together, and he smiled at the crowd. He said nothing at all for a good thirty seconds. He just sat there and smiled, and instead of unnerving them, it seemed to do the opposite. People seemed to just relax, to settle down, to ready themselves for whatever was coming next.