Carnival of Souls

by Nancy Holder

  This is wrong, she thought.

  “Shh,” Caligarius whispered. “It’s all right.”

  The silvery notes enfolded her, soothed her, eased her back into the good place she had found.

  Where she was special.

  “Yes.”

  “Wait,” she said, fighting against it, fighting…why was she fighting?

  Because I am a fighter. That’s what I am.

  Because something here was not right.

  Buffy blinked at the silver door.

  But it wasn’t a door. She was standing in the mirror maze, staring at herself in one of the panels. Alone. Her reflection stared back at her.

  “Mom?” she called.

  The calliope music played.

  “A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go…

  “Come to me. Be with me. Your pride will be your greatest pleasure. And you should be proud. You are one of a kind. The only one in all your generation.”

  “Come to you,” Buffy said, reaching out a hand toward the mirror.

  Something reached back.

  And grabbed hold.

  Hard.

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer™

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie tie-in)

  The Harvest

  Halloween Rain

  Coyote Moon

  Night of the Living Rerun

  Blooded

  Visitors

  Unnatural Selection

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  Deep Water

  Here Be Monsters

  Ghoul Trouble

  Doomsday Deck

  Sweet Sixteen

  Crossings

  Little Things

  The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 1

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  The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 3

  The Xander Years, Vol. 1

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  The Willow Files, Vol. 1

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  How I Survived My Summer Vacation, Vol. 1

  The Cordelia Collection, Vol. 1

  The Faith Trials, Vol. 1

  The Journals of Rupert Giles, Vol. 1

  Tales of the Slayer, Vol. 1

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  Resurrecting Ravana

  Prime Evil

  The Evil That Men Do

  Paleo

  Spike and Dru: Pretty Maids

  All in a Row

  Revenant

  The Book of Fours

  Tempted Champions

  Oz: Into the Wild

  The Wisdom of War

  These Our Actors

  Blood and Fog

  Chosen

  Chaos Bleeds

  Mortal Fear

  Apocalypse Memories

  Wicked Willow Trilogy

  The Darkening

  Shattered Twilight

  Broken Sunrise

  Stake Your Destiny

  The Suicide King

  Keep Me in Mind

  Colony

  Night Terrors

  Queen of the Slayers

  Spark and Burn

  Afterimage

  Carnival of Souls

  Available from SIMON & SCHUSTER

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  ™ & © 2006 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT and related logo are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number 2005933337

  ISBN: 1-4169-3431-6

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  In memory of Belle’s beloved grandfather,

  George Wayne Holder.

  We miss you, Papa Wayne.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, my thanks first and foremost to Joss Whedon; and to Sarah Michelle Gellar, David Boreanaz, David Greenwalt, Tim Minear, Marti Noxon, David Fury, and the many other producers, actors, and staffs of both Angel and Buffy. My deepest gratitude to my agent and dear friend, Howard Morhaim, and to his assistant, Allison Keiley. Thank you to Patrick Price, who has been such a wonderful editor and a writer’s true friend in the publishing loop; and to Debbie Olshan at Fox, whose insights have kept me out of more trouble. Thanks to the Buffy and Angel fan clubs, Abbie Bernstein, Tara DeLullo, Kristy Bratton; Titan/Dreamwatch; Inkworks; cityofangel.com; litvamp, saveangel.com, IAMTW, novelscribes, SF-FFWs, Persephone, and Buffy Studies gurus David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox; Ashley McConnell, Monica Elrod, Terri Grazer Yates, Linda Wilcox, Karen Hackett, Barbara Nierman, Elisa Jimenez-Steiger, Ellen Greenfield, Wayne Holder, Amy Shricker, Jennifer and Janice Kayler; and Christie and Richard Holt; to Steve Perry; Del and Sue Howison, Lydia Marano and Art Cover, the YaYa’s—Lucy Walker, Anny Caya, Leslie Ackel Jones, Elise Jones, Kerri Ingle, and Belle Holder; to Sandra Morehouse and Richard Wilkinson; to Bob Vardeman, and Jeff Mariotte and Maryelizabeth Hart. Thanks to Andy Thompson at Family Karate for teaching us to live the black belt way. Lisa Clancy, you are my Termie. Belle Holder, you’re my daughter, and I love you. Courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, indominitable spirit.

  Prologue

  It was Tuesday.

  After nightfall.

  In Sunnydale.

  And Buffy Summers the Vampire Slayer was out on patrol instead of at the Bronze with Willow and Xander (and hopefully Angel) because Giles had figured out that tonight was the Rising.

  The Rising of what, Buffy’s watcher did not know, but it was easy to guess that it probably meant vampires. Maybe zombies. Something that rose from graves, anyway.

  Something that kept her from the fun other sixteen-year-olds were having.

  Sighing, Buffy trailed her fingers over the lowere
d head of a weeping cherub statue and waved her flashlight in an arc.

  “Here, rising guys,” she called plaintively. “Ready to play when you are.”

  She had on her black knitted cap and Angel’s black leather jacket, but she was still a little chilly. Maybe it was just because she was walking through Blessed Memories, the graveyard that contained the du Lac tomb, famed in the annals of Buffy’s diary as the graveyard out of which Spike and Dru had stolen a fancy decoding cross called, amazingly enough, the du Lac Cross. They had used it to nearly kill Angel. Since then, it was not her favorite cemetery ever.

  Blessed Memories also contained a pet cemetery, a little square of plots with miniature headstones that tugged at Buffy’s heart. TOBY MY PUP RIP 1898. R KITTIE LUCY 1931. She had no time for pets, not even zombie cats freshly risen from the grave. She had hardly any time for anything, what with the slayage and the studying, okay, not the studying; but still and all, it was Sunnydale that was the problem, with all its death and monsters and standard normal-teenage-girl pressures, like having friends and not getting kicked out of school….

  If my best buds and I could be anywhere but here, that would be…She thought for a moment. She and Willow were really good at that game. Anywhere But Here was created for high school kids, especially those who had to live in Sunnydale.

  …in Maui, with Angel…. Okay, not. Too much sun for a boyfriend who would burst into flames if he stepped into the tropical rays. So…

  …in Paris, with Angel…and Willow could be with James Spader—I officially give him to her because I’m with Angel now—and we’re so not eating snails, but oh, I know! French pastries. And we are shopping…

  …for rings…

  Buffy stopped and cocked her head. Did she just hear something? Snap of a twig, maybe? A cough?

  She listened eagerly for a replay so she could head toward it. She waited. Waited yet more. Heard nothing. Turned off her flashlight. More waiting.

  Behold the sounds of silence.

  She tried to pick up the Paris thread again. French pastries, okay, maybe too early in the relationship to shop for rings, then for shoes…. Truth was, she really would be happy to be just about anywhere but here. If only she could just run away, join in the fun-having of other kids her age. Join the circus, even.

  Except she didn’t like circuses. Never had. What was with those clowns, anyway? She shivered. She was with Xander on that one: They gave her a wiggins.

  Send in the clowns.

  Six miles away, just past the outbuildings of Crest College, the trees shivered. The clouds fled and the moon trailed after them, desperate to hide.

  Sunnydale, loaded with souls ripe for the plucking…

  Five miles away.

  The clowns materialized first, big feet flapping, overstuffed bottoms wiggling, in polka dots and rainbow stripes, and white gloves hiding fingers that no one should ever see.

  A jag of lightning:

  A parade of trucks, wagons, lorries. A maroon wagon, its panels festooned with golden Harlequins and bird women plucking lyres, shimmered and stayed solid. Behind it, a Gypsy cart with a Conestoga-style bonnet jangled with painted cowbells, and beneath the overhanging roof, black-and-silver ribbons swayed. Behind the wagon, a forties-era freight truck blew diesel exhaust into the velvet layers of moonlight. A jagged line, creaking back into shadows, disappearing. Maybe the entire apparition was just a dream.

  Thunder rolled, and they reappeared.

  Maybe they were just a nightmare.

  Spectral horses whinnied and chuffed; it began to rain, and through the murky veil of downpour and fog, the horses’ heads were skulls; their heads were…heads. They breathed fire; they didn’t breathe at all.

  They began to rot in slow motion.

  The clowns ran up and down the advancing line, applauding and laughing at the flicker-show, the black magic lantern extravaganza.

  Skeletons and corpses hunkered inside truck and wagon cabs and buckboard seats. Whipcracks sparked. Eyes lolled. Mouths hung open, snapped shut. Teeth fell out. Eyes bobbed from optic nerves.

  Things…reassembled.

  A creak, and then nothing.

  Two ebony steeds pulled the last vehicle—the thirteenth wagon in the cortege. It was an old Victorian traveling-medicine-show wagon, maybe something that had crisscrossed the prairies and the badlands, promising remedies for rheumatism and the gout when the only ingredients in the jug were castor oil, a dead rattlesnake, and wood alcohol.

  Where their hooves touched, the earth smoked. Black feathers bobbing in their harnesses, black feathers waving from the four corners of the ornate, ebony wagon, the horses were skeletons were horse flesh were demon stallions ridden by misshapen, leathery creatures with sagging shoulder blades, flared ears, and pencil-stub fingers. And as the moon shied away from the grotesquerie, the angle of light revealed words emblazoned on each of the thirteen vehicles that snuck toward Sunnydale, home to hundreds of thousands of souls determined to ignore the peril they were in:

  PROFESSOR CALIGARI’S TRAVELING CARNIVAL

  The wind howled through the trees—or was it the ghostly dirge of a calliope?

  Too soon to tell.

  Too late to do anything about it.

  Chapter One

  What the heck is that? Buffy wondered as she stepped from beneath the shelter of a tomb in Shady Rest, cemetery number eight on her hit parade of twelve. The repeated hollow sounds, which maybe were musical notes, had coincided with the stopping of the rain. They were even stranger than the Hindi songfest she had watched with Willow and Xander, the one about the podiatrist and the water buffalo.

  She listened hard. Was it a distant boom box? Did it have anything—please—to do with the Rising? It would be so nice if something actually happened before she packed it in, aside from ripping her black leather pants on the chain-link fence she’d hopped to get in there. Plus dropping her big black flashlight, which now no longer worked.

  There it was again, kind of a sinister tootling or something…. She was already trying to figure out how to describe it to Giles. It was nothing she had ever heard before.

  A terrified shriek pierced the darkness.

  Ah! But that was!

  The Slayer brightened. No, no, not brightened—because that would be wrong—so much as erupted into action, racing toward the plea for help. She put on the turbo as the shriek was joined by a cry, this one lower in pitch. A guy and a girl, then.

  Without her flashlight, Buffy scrutinized the passing shadows: grave, grave, crypt, tree draped with moss, grave, stone vase of dead flowers, darkness. Naturally whatever was going down, would go down in darkness. It was the way of evil.

  From the sleeve of Angel’s leather jacket, she pulled out a stake. Well-whittled death, that was the way of the Slayer.

  She ran into the black gloom, her gorgeous and, unfortunately, suede boots crunching wet leaves and twigs, and a plastic drink cup—wishing now for Angel’s help, because he could see in the dark—and then she stepped on, or rather in, something slippery and gross—okay, maybe it was okay that he wasn’t here to witness that.

  “Oh my God! Help!” screamed a girl. She was maybe twenty yards to Buffy’s left…and she was being pursued by something big—make that a lot of something bigs, judging by the rhythmic thudding of many footfalls.

  “Stephanie!” yelled a guy. From the somewhat familiar sound of his voice, Buffy figured him for David Hahn; and that would mean these were the Hahn twins. Sophomores, kind of geeky, definitely not part of the socially acceptable crowd. They both had scraggly teeth, which couldn’t really be laid at the door of fault; but no one was forcing them to appear in public with monumentally bad hair, unless they were under a curse or something.

  “David!!” Stephanie shouted.

  “The Hahns it is,” Buffy crowed under her breath as she homed in on their voices.

  She did a huge leap across an open grave—hmm, the Rising, as in finally rising from a grave?—and landed hard in a pile of
leaves.

  There they were, two freaked-out figures dashing through a patch of moonlight. They were wearing baggy jeans and badly fitting sweaters with matching diamond patterns. The Hahns were as unfashionable, and therefore conspicuous, as vampires that had stayed underground too long, then tried to pass as regular kids.

  The moonlight also revealed that the things after them were vampires, with elongated faces, mouths full of fangs, and glowing gold eyes. Not such good outfits on them, either, all dressed in black and thick, heavy boots—the total vamp fashion trend Spike seemed to have started. Maybe it would eventually die along with him.

  “Vampires, so not a problem,” Buffy muttered, gripping the stake in her fist as she ran toward the terrified twins. Stephanie and David were zigzagging, in an effort to dodge the monsters. Good strategy.

  But the tallest of the vampires gained on them. He was scary-bad with tattoos—maybe brands—on his bald head and a motorcycle patch on his jacket that featured a skull wearing a pirate hat. The insignia read DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, but Buffy knew that was wrong. In Sunnydale, the dead had lots to say.

  Sure enough, the vampire caught David’s sweater and gave it a good, hard yank. The fabric of the sweater ripped down the back, and the two sides flapped like wings.

  “Hey! Stop that!” Buffy yelled, although truth be told, the vamp had done David a favor.

  In response, one of the other vampires whirled around and hunched forward in a hulking stance with outstretched arms and slashing nails. Its hair was yellow-white, like Spike’s, and it had piercings all over its face. The pose was meant to be menacing, and it would have been if Buffy weren’t the Slayer and had therefore seen the same stance a bazillion times before.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you guys not to play with your food?” she asked the monster. It was a lame quip and she’d used it before, but she doubted the life of a stand-up comedian awaited her.

  “The Slayer!” it shouted, maybe hoping to warn the others. Although, frankly, vampires were not usually known for their thoughtfulness.

  “C’est moi,” she said, in a pretty good French accent if she did say so herself. Then she sprang forward so fast that it didn’t have time to dart out of her way. It had a second to stare in shock at the thick end of Mr. Pointy’s cousin sticking out of the dead-center heart area of its black T-shirt; and then—whoosh!—it exploded into a shower of dust.