by Неизвестный
“Are you sure you don’t want to come, Mom?” I asked. “I know you like the merry-go-round.” She had a little collection of porcelain carousel horses. She’d been so upset when Ray broke her favorite.
If only she’d come to the fair with us, maybe the boys would leave me alone for two minutes.
“I’m too old for things like that,” she said. She smiled at me. Was she too old? I stared into her face. I saw tiny lines at the edges of her mouth and the corners of her eyes, and deep down I saw some kind of heavy tired that made me wonder how she even got up in the morning. “Just go. Go, and have a wonderful time.” She kissed my cheek. Her lips felt as cold as the gravestones in last night’s dream.
Oh yeah. Last night’s dream. Running through an endless graveyard to get away from vampire ghosts, tripping over gravestones, falling into graves. Chris had told me a nice story about spirit-sucking ghosts last night right before I went to sleep.
I clutched my lizard stone in my pocket and made the graveyard go away.
The fairgrounds were at the edge of town, next door to the old school that burned down in the thirties. We took the bus. I waited for Ray, Will, and Chris to get off ahead of me, hoping they’d rush off and leave me alone, but Ray made them stay. “We’re supposed to look after you,” he said.
Yeah, right.
We paid our way into the carnival. I headed right to the concession booths, picked out my lizard — a really great turquoise one with a green tail, and he only cost seven dollars! — and reached into my pocket.
No money.
I looked back. My brothers stood there watching me with grins on their faces. Chris held up two five-dollar bills and rubbed them against each other. He had been practicing pickpocket skills. They all laughed when they saw how mad I was.
I checked my other pocket for the lizard stone. Whew! It was still there.
I raced to Chris and tried to get the money away from him, but he passed it to Will, and Will passed it to Ray.
“Come on. That’s my money,” I said. “Give it back!”
“We’re older. We’re smarter. We know how to use money better than you do,” Ray said.
“I waited all year for this.” I looked over my shoulder at the perfect lizard, which the concession guy had already put back on the shelf. “Come on. Give it back.”
Will lost his smile. He looked at Ray. Chris did too, his head cocked. Ray put on a thoughtful expression. For about thirty seconds I thought he might cave, but then he said, “Nawww. We’ll show you how to have some real fun.”
They bought long strips of tickets, and they took me on the Haunted House ride. Which I went on because I figured it was probably the only thing I was going to get to do at the carnival. There were some neat things in it, like a huge Frankenstein with glowing eyes, and mirrors that made us look totally twisted, and glow-in-the-dark ghosts, and a horde of chittering bats that dropped from the ceiling and flapped around our heads, but even though the production was much more professional than all the things my brothers thought up, the ride wasn’t half as scary as life at home. I mean, on the ride, I knew in advance I was supposed to get scared. Which wasn’t what I usually thought when I opened my closet door. Though by this time....
Anyway, I guess I didn’t scream enough to satisfy Ray. He was bummed by the end of the ride.
After that, my brothers went on the octopus and the hammer and the Tilt-a-whirl, and they didn’t take me.
So I watched: I watched gleaming carnival machinery spin people around and throw them up and drop them down, with a soundtrack of screams. I watched people shoot things and throw things and toss things and lose things, and every once in a while somebody won something. A kid won a bowl with a goldfish in it by tossing a pingpong ball. An old lady won a green glass dish by landing a dime in it. A boy threw fifteen darts and popped fifteen balloons and gave his girlfriend a big stuffed dog. I watched people eat fair food: pink, green, and blue cotton candy, corn dogs, elephant ear pastries, sno-cones. I smelled all those good carnival smells, popcorn, peanuts, animals, people, and dust.
My brothers whooped as they came off the Viking Ship ride, and ran on sneakered feet toward the next ride. Will stopped, though, and came back. “Here,” he whispered, and handed me four tickets and a dollar. “I’m sorry.”
“Whatcha doin’, Will?” Ray yelled. Will turned and ran after him.
Four tickets and a dollar. I could pick a ride. If it was something stupid, I might even have a ticket left over. There wasn’t much I could do with a dollar. Most of the snacks were at least a dollar twenty-five. Still, it was better than nothing.
I stood up and shoved my treasure in my pocket, then wandered around looking at everything. Now that I thought I might be able to do something, it all looked completely different. The colors were sharper and the smells smelled even better. "Maybe" sang in my brain.
Still, it wasn’t enough to buy the perfect lizard, even if I turned my tickets in or sold them to somebody else.
I checked out each of the rides. Some took five tickets, but a lot took four. Bumper cars? The merry-go-round? One of the little roller coasters? The Tilt-a-whirl?
I walked past the Haunted House ride and noticed a small dark booth for the first time. It was like a tent, but the red canvas roof had corner poles that curled up like the roofs of Chinese buildings in movies, and there was no open side; the whole thing was curtained in black. A small yellow sign hung in front. In red print, it said, “Fondest Dreams. Largest Hopes. Best Wishes. Madama Syzygy.” Below that, in smaller print, “Fortunes. Potions. Curses.”
There was nothing about how many tickets it would take.
Fortune telling always gave me the creeps. I mean, so you found out what to expect. What were you supposed to do about it? I’d rather be surprised. If I knew what to expect, I would probably find out it was all going to be the same for the rest of my life: my stupid brothers, scaring me every time I turned around because they liked to hear me scream. Maybe four years in the future, Ray would go away to college, but Will and Chris would still be around. Even four more years of scares felt endless to me.
I wondered if there was a potion that would make boys stop being boys. If there was, I probably couldn’t afford it.
I went away and watched people throw darts and dimes, squirt water guns and pitch baseballs. Will and Ray and Chris went past, munching hot dogs. I stayed in the shadow of other people and they didn’t see me. They looked so happy. Sure. It was easy for them. What did they have to be scared of?
I walked up one aisle and down the next, studying each of the rides, all of the pitch games, every snack and concession stand. I didn’t see a single ride I really wanted to go on. My stomach grumbled, but none of the food smelled good to me anymore. The only thing I craved with all my heart was the turquoise lizard with the green tail. And I wasn’t going to get that. Even if my brothers had a change of heart, they wouldn’t have any money left by now. When had they ever had a change of heart?
I found myself in front of Madama Syzygy’s tent again. “Hello?” I said.
The curtain parted in the middle. One side drew back. A pale face peered at me from under a mountain of bright red hair. “Hello,” she said in a deep, pleasant voice. “Won’t you come in?”
“How much does it cost?”
“Coming in is free. We will negotiate anything further.”
I came in.
It smelled like spicy incense. A small table stood between two chairs. Black curtains hung all around, but it wasn’t dark inside; two bowls of light sat on the table. I’d never seen anything like that before. I wanted to check them out, but I glanced at Madama Syzygy first to see if it was okay.
Her clothes blazed with a thousand winking lights as she moved. I looked harder and saw she wore a flowing black dress with little round mirrors sewn all over it. “Please be seated,” she said. She drifted around behind the table and sat in that chair herself. It was a fancy one, like a throne, carved from black wood. The arms h
ad dragons on them. Her hands rested on the dragons’ heads, right above their pale ivory eyes.
The chair I sat in was one of those metal folding ones, with a fancy tufted cushion on it. When I sat, my knees slid under the edge of the silky tablecloth. I got a lapful of fringe. I glanced at one of the light bowls and still couldn’t figure it out. It looked like a plain glass bowl full of glowing white water. Maybe neon worked like that.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Suddenly I felt like crying. I hauled out the four sweaty tickets and the dollar bill Will had given me and dropped them on the table. “This is all I’ve got.”
She stared at them for a moment, then touched them. “And what do you want in return?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. I didn’t want my fortune told. Either it was all lies, or it was going to be bad.
“What is your heart’s fondest wish?” she murmured.
“A blue lizard with a green tail.”
She laughed. After a second I laughed too. She had that kind of laugh. And then she said, in this low, compelling voice like the one I sometimes heard in dreams, “What is the wish under that wish?”
“I want to scare my brothers worse than they ever scared me,” I whispered, without even thinking about it. “I want to scare them so bad they’ll never sleep at night again. That’s what I want.”
I sat up straight. No way. No way would I ever think that, let alone say it out loud to a stranger.
Her dark eyes sparkled. She smiled at me. “Now, that is a worthy wish,” she said.
“It’s not really what I want.” I looked away from her.
“Isn’t it?”
I thought. Wouldn’t it be great, though? To scare my brothers right out of their socks? Wouldn’t that be the best thing in the world? So they would know what it felt like. Once they knew, maybe they’d stop.
“I’d like it,” I whispered.
“Let’s negotiate.”
“You can’t give me such a great wish for only a buck and some tickets.”
“No,” she said. “I accept other forms of payment, though.”
“I don’t have anything else.”
“What’s in your other pocket?”
I reached into my pocket and found my lizard stone.
Not my lizard stone. My comfort in the middle of nightmares. My secret power name. My breath when my throat tightened so much I thought I’d die.
“For that,” she said, “I can give your brothers a scare they will never get over.”
I held my lizard stone in my hand for a long time. What would it be like, next time they scared me, not to have my lizard stone? I could always find another rock, but it wouldn’t have the shape and the texture that this one did. It wouldn’t have the black lizard painted on it, the secret power inside. It wouldn’t be able to protect me the way this one did.
If I scared my brothers so bad they couldn’t get over it, maybe they’d get out of the scare business and I wouldn’t need the lizard stone anymore.
It would be worth it.
Slowly I set the lizard stone on the table. It was hard to make my fingers let go of it.
I snuck into the bathroom at midnight after everyone else had gone to sleep. I couldn’t run the bath tub taps full blast without making too much noise, so I kept the hot water down to a trickle. I poured the powder from the packet Madama Syzygy had given me under the running water and watched as it turned the water milk white. A strange swampy smell came from it. At first I thought it was awful, but then I started to like it. I almost wanted to drink it.
What if it was poison? What if it was all fake? Why did I ever trust that woman? I must have been crazy.
I sat on the floor by the bath tub waiting for it to get full enough for me to lie in, and thought about the bedtime story Chris had told me tonight. Dreamseeds, he called it.
Strange plants from outer space landed and grew in all the parks in all the cities in all the world. They bloomed at night and sent out spores. Dreamseeds. The spores drifted around until they found open windows in houses, and then they went inside where people were sleeping, and they slipped into their ears and planted themselves in their brains. Their roots sucked on peoples’ brain juices and their flowers gave people nightmares all night, every night, and after they’d lived in your head a while they started giving you nightmares during the day. You’d think you were awake, but you’d start seeing ghosts and dead bodies every time you turned around, and at last, nothing could wake you up from it.
Sure, you could close the window, Chris told me, but sometimes the spores snuck into the house through a door — and he opened the front door to the night — and then floated around in a house until everybody fell asleep. They like young minds the best, Chris said.
But I wasn’t asleep right now, and Chris was. His was the youngest sleeping mind in the house now.
The tub filled slowly. The water stayed pure white. How did it do that when there was so much more water now? Maybe the magic was real.
I looked at the counter where I had put my outfit for tonight. It was the beautiful dress I had for the ballet recital I’d never be in, and my toe shoes, and the wreath of silk flowers for my hair. Beside it sat the other thing Madama Syzygy had given me, a magic wand with a jester’s head on top. “Tap their foreheads with this to wake them,” she had told me. “It will help them be ready for fear.”
It gave me the creeps, for sure. The jester had a skull’s face.
Dreamseeds. Maybe Chris had one of those dreamseeds in his head. Otherwise how did he come up with these nightmare stories for me every night?
After tonight...I would plant a seed myself.
The water was high enough in the tub to cover me now. I turned off the tap and looked at the water, which steamed gently and smelled like wet pulled weeds on a hot day.
I heard a news story on the radio the other day about a kid who lived where the water was bad and got leukemia. A lot of other kids in his neighborhood got it too. Cancer clusters. There was another nightmare. What if this stuff was that kind of poison? Real poison?
I thought of nightmares every night, of ghosts in my closet, spiders in my doorway, slugs in my lunch bag, waking up to find my hands and feet tied together so I couldn’t move. I thought of my doll’s new paint job. What would they think of next?
I took off my nightgown and slipped into the bath tub.
The water felt warm and thick against my skin, slick and slimy like mud. It was really an awful feeling at first, but then I liked it. I sat down in it, then lay down. Finally I closed my eyes and put my head right under, the way Madama Syzygy had instructed me, and held my breath as long as I could. I felt like I was floating in something soft and warm. I couldn’t hear even the normal underwater noises. I heard nothing.
I didn’t want to sit up. I could stay like this forever, safe in the warm white nothing. Yep. This was all right.
Then I ran out of breath. I sat up and rubbed my eyes.
My hands and my face felt weird. Way too bony.
I didn’t want to open my eyes.
Something slithered down my back.
Without opening my eyes, I reached for the plug pull. I sat while the swampy water drained from around me. It took the warmth with it, until I was freezing and trembling and chattering. Then I had to open my eyes, even if I got some of that white water in them. Chattering? Not just my teeth, but my feet, my elbows, my rear against the tub, a storm of clicks and clacks.
I opened my eyes a slit and stared down at myself. Most of me was gone. Only my skeleton was left. My hair clogged the drain. All of it had fallen out.
I screamed once. The sound that came out of my mouth scared me. It was all hollow and echoey.
I gripped the side of the tub with my skeletal hands and pulled myself up on the bones of my feet. I felt so cold. And then, suddenly, that went away and I didn’t feel much of anything.
It had to be some kind of trick.
/> I looked down at my chest and saw only a rib cage with nothing inside. I poked my bony finger at my chest and it went right between the ribs and wriggled around inside me.
Maybe this was just another dream.
I ran the shower then, not caring if I had the water on full blast. I sort of hoped Mom or Dad or somebody would come to the bathroom and wake me up. This had to be a dream.
The last of the white water ran off me, though, and I stayed bony. I picked up the hair in the drain and my skeletal fingers got all tangled in it. I managed to flip it off my hand and into the wastebasket under the sink, but it wasn’t easy.
I saw myself in the mirror and had to scream again. My head was just a skull! I couldn’t see my eyes! What was I looking with? I watched the skull’s lower jaw flap open as I screamed, showing a mouthful of nothing. No way!
How could I move? How could I think? How could I even scream, if all I was was bones? How could Madama Syzygy do this to me?
I pinched myself. It didn’t help. I could hear it click, but I couldn’t feel it.
I stared at my image until I got tired of doing that. Okay. I was like this now. Or this was a weird dream. Either way, I had better things to do than stand here staring.
I used a towel, but it was scary drying myself off. I kept reaching into parts of myself I could never touch before.
I dressed in my ballet outfit. Nothing fit anymore, but I got it to stay on. I had to tie my toe shoes on really tight and knot the ribbons between my bones to hold them up. My flower wreath, though, settled onto my skull and sat there just fine.
Somehow I looked better dressed. There was less naked bone.
Finally I picked up the jester wand. The bells on his cap jingled. Strange strength flowed into me. His little skull-face looked up at me and said, “Hi, beautiful. Let’s go out and terrorize.”
Suddenly that was all I wanted to do.
First I went to Ray’s room. What a pit. I wondered if he ever picked anything up. There were dirty clothes everywhere, books dropped here and there, sports equipment and comics scattered across the floor. I tripped on a basketball on my way across the room, but Ray never stirred.