Campfire

by Shawn Sarles

  “We’re best friends,” she sputtered. “And I don’t—I don’t—”

  The girl broke into tears. Jennifer didn’t know what to do, so she took the flyer.

  “I haven’t seen her. But I’ll keep an eye out.”

  This seemed to calm the girl. She sniffled, sucking the snot back up into her nose, and wiped her eyes. She said thanks and moved on, another flyer ready to hand out. Jennifer looked back down at the face of the laughing girl—Rachel. She’d never seen her. But maybe she would.

  She folded up the paper and slid it into her back pocket. Then she grabbed her string of red tickets and walked through the fair’s gates. She had an ex-boyfriend to forget about.

  As Jennifer picked her way through the fairgrounds, she tried everything. She lost at the ring-toss and could have been drunk for how badly she did at the shooting gallery. But she did manage a solid hit at the dunk tank. Visualizing Max plummeting into the chilly water had helped her focus. She rode the bumper cars and even made it through the haunted house without screaming too much. But she avoided the Ferris wheel. It was too depressing to ride that one single. And she definitely wasn’t going up there with a stranger. If the wheel stopped at the top, who knew where he’d try to put his hands.

  Nibbling on a deep-fried Oreo, Jennifer took stock of her ticket situation. She had just enough for one last attraction. Maybe another go at the shooting gallery. She couldn’t do worse. She turned to walk back and find the booth, but right then, a tinkling caught her attention. She stopped and listened for it again.

  There. Like a wind chime. Delicate and sweet, dancing above the rowdiness of the crowd. Jennifer paused and listened to it ring. She closed her eyes and felt calmer. A smile sneaked its way onto her face. It might have been the first time she’d been happy in weeks.

  Slowly, Jennifer opened her eyes, and that’s when she spotted him. She’d know that shaggy brown hair anywhere. Her heart leaped into her throat. She hadn’t run into him at all in the past weeks. But maybe… if she talked to him, things could be good again.

  He hadn’t noticed her yet, so she took a step toward him. But then she saw Kara. She saw the two of them laughing. Holding hands. Out on a date?

  Jennifer’s heart took a suicidal leap into her stomach. She had to get away. She couldn’t let Max see her alone and miserable while he held hands with another girl. She panicked and rushed into the nearest tent.

  She couldn’t breathe. Or rather, all she could do was breathe. In and out and in and out, too fast for any air to actually get to her lungs. She had to slow down.

  And then she heard it—that tinkle. Louder now. Closer.

  Her eyes popped up and she saw a man standing in the center of the tent, holding a miniature bell in one hand. His other hand was stuffed into the pocket of a flamboyant red jacket, its seams etched with brilliant gold embroidery. He wore a huge black top hat, which perfectly matched his knee-high leather boots.

  The man rang the bell twice more, and a hush fell over the tent. Only then did Jennifer realize she wasn’t the only one watching, wasn’t the only one spellbound by this odd man in his ringmaster get-up. She shuffled forward a bit and joined the back of the audience.

  An eerie silence filled the tent, anticipation and dread colliding in the air as everyone waited and wondered what would happen next. Then another bell jingled in answer. And kept jingling.

  From the shadows behind the ringmaster, a burly figure twice the ringmaster’s size and five times as hairy ambled forward. It took Jennifer a moment to realize it wasn’t a man the ringmaster had summoned, but a wooly behemoth of a bear.

  Dressed in a light pink vest and matching tutu, the bear jingled as it lumbered into full view. Jennifer looked closer and saw that it wasn’t glitter shining from the tutu’s fabric, but actual bells, dozens of them sewn into the hemline. The bear walked into the center of the tent and stood up on two paws, watching the ringmaster.

  “Allow me to introduce you to Bambi.”

  The man gave his bell a quick shake, and the bear let out a magnificent roar, teeth bared to the heavens, spittle flying from its snout. The audience sucked in its breath as one and pulled back.

  “Oh, now, now. Don’t you all worry.” The ringmaster’s voice carried over the crowd’s gasp. “Bambi really likes people. In fact, she’s quite harmless.”

  The man gave his bell two shakes and the bear snapped its jaws shut and plopped down on the ground, a puppy dog lapping at its master’s feet.

  “See…” The ringmaster waited for the applause to go down before he continued. “As long as you know how to talk to her—”

  He rang the bell again, this time a new pattern of short and long tolls, like he was speaking in Morse code, and the bear jumped back on its feet to give the man a high five.

  “She’ll do anything you ask.”

  The crowd broke into a round of applause, and the man beamed out at them all. Then he sent the bear dancing across the little stage in the center of the tent. He had Bambi prance and play dead and stand on one leg. He had her jump over hurdles and through hoops, turn not-so-dainty pirouettes. And for the grand finale, he had her take a treat from between his own teeth.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the ringmaster shouted, snapping his top hat from his head and dipping into a deep bow, “I give you Bambi.”

  The small crowd broke out into applause again as the bear mimicked its master. Another bow and the two walked off stage. The audience began to spill out into the night.

  The show had only taken twenty minutes, but in that short time, the fair had emptied out considerably. Most of the attractions had closed up, and the few fairgoers Jennifer saw were heading toward the exit. She was ready to go home, too.

  As Jennifer walked through the rows of shuttered tents, she couldn’t help thinking about Max. And Kara. She paused and pulled out her phone, but stopped herself from looking down at it, from writing him an angry message. A pathetic text that would only embarrass her come morning. Instead, she squeezed her phone tight, thinking. Even if Max had called, she didn’t want to speak to him. She could do so much better than him. In fact, she never wanted to speak to him again.

  The smile from earlier in the night sneaked back across her face. She moved to put her phone away, but her fingers slipped. She looked down and saw a folded piece of paper there in her hand. It took her a second to remember the flyer. She unfolded it and looked at the missing girl again.

  What was her name? She was young and happy. So pretty. She looked cool with that infinity-sign tattoo, like someone Jennifer would have liked to know. She folded the paper back up and hoped that the girl’s friend would find her, that the girl had simply run off and holed up in some hotel room with a guy.

  She took a step forward, but before she could take a second, she felt an arm twist roughly around her waist. A hand crammed a rag against her mouth and nose as a bitter chemical seeped in through her nostrils. It coated her tongue. Made her dizzy.

  She wanted to scream. She wanted to thrash. She wanted to bite and scratch and cry and vomit.

  But she couldn’t do any of that.

  Terror overwhelmed her as the world faded before her eyes and she collapsed.

  Jennifer groaned and turned over. She didn’t remember drinking the night before, but how else could she explain this feeling, like the world’s worst hangover had taken her and wrung her within an inch of her life? Her head pounded. Her ears rang with an unending, dull drone. Her mouth was bone dry, and her tongue tasted like she’d swallowed a Molotov cocktail.

  She opened her eyes slowly. Or at least, she thought she’d opened them. But she could only see a pitch-black nothingness. She waved her hands in front of her face to be sure. Was this what dying felt like?

  She rolled over and her body hit a wall. She rolled the other way and hit another wall. Her hands flew out to both sides, and she felt rough wood beneath her fingertips, less than three feet apart. She sat up in a panic but only got a quarter of the way before her
head smashed into a ceiling.

  She panicked. Her fingers clawed at the lid. She kicked at the box. She tried to scream but could only croak, her throat still too dry to make a real sound. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She couldn’t breathe. The walls pressed in all around her. Her prison got smaller, and she realized with heart-shattering certainty that it wasn’t just a box, but her coffin.

  Minutes passed and Jennifer grew tired. She lost hope. She lay there on her back and tried to slow her breathing. She had to conserve whatever oxygen she had left. If she was buried alive, maybe someone would find her still. She closed her eyes and tried to calm down.

  Slowly, the night’s events seeped into her mind. The fair. The bumper cars. The haunted house and the dancing bear. Seeing Max with Kara. The fingers pressing into her mouth, gagging her. All of it happening in a flash.

  Her phone.

  She groped for her pockets. If she could get to her phone, maybe she could call for help. But no. She must have dropped it. Or whoever had attacked her had taken it.

  A yelp escaped her lips, sad and forlorn, as depressing as a dying puppy.

  “Ah,” a man’s voice shocked her out of her stupor. “Finally given up, have we?”

  “Wh—who’s there?” Jennifer’s voice wavered. “What do you want with me?”

  The man didn’t reply. Jennifer strained to hear. She tried to push aside the incessant droning still burrowing into her ears and she managed to hear something beneath it. Something wet and squelching, almost like the man was sucking the last tendrils of meat from a chicken bone.

  Suddenly, the lid of her coffin flew open and Jennifer felt a rough hand reach in. Fingers snagged her by the hair and yanked her out, sending her tumbling across the room. She fell to the ground in a heap and heard a clanging behind her. The click of a padlock. She turned in a frenzy, pulling her hair out of her face just in time to see a man putting a key into his vest pocket, a barred cage door separating them.

  At first, she didn’t recognize him. He’d lost all of his magnificence from earlier in the night. His hair lay flat and greasy on his head, patchy in spots. Without his black boots and top hat, he looked half as tall. But he still wore his vest, bright and festooned with gold. And he had that same hand stuffed into his pocket, a familiar pose of confidence and ease.

  “What do you want with me?” Jennifer asked the question again.

  “It’s not what I want,” the ringmaster smiled cruelly. His hand dipped into his pocket and pulled out that damn bell. He rang it.

  The sound pierced Jennifer’s eardrums. It cut through her like a knife. It no longer sounded like a soothing wind chime, but like glass shattering, dreams dashed, a life snuffed out. She whipped her head around just in time to see the huge bear twist its snout around to face her.

  The creature held Jennifer’s gaze, unfazed as it continued gnawing on something. Blood spotted the fur around its mouth. Its teeth gnashed and Jennifer heard a bone snap. She looked closer and saw a finger, a manicured nail, the split ends of severed bones.

  Jennifer’s face blanched. Her stomach heaved and she vomited up the remnants of her fried Oreo.

  It was a human arm. The bear was chewing on it like a drumstick, tearing flesh off at the forearm. Jennifer didn’t want to watch, but she couldn’t turn away. Her eyes slid down to the hand and that’s when she saw it—the figure-eight symbol from before.

  Rachel.

  The name came back to her with a seismic bolt of thunder. It shook her out of her daze. She turned and scrambled across the floor to where the man stood, the door of the cage still between them.

  “Please!” Jennifer shook the cage door as she screamed. “You can’t do this!”

  “Quiet now.” The ringmaster looked sympathetically down at her. “You’ll only make it worse.”

  “But—but—” Jennifer grappled for the right words, but none came.

  “Shh.” The man reached through the bars and placed a gloved finger against her lips. If she had been thinking straight, she would have bitten it off.

  “Bambi likes to play with her dinner before eating it.”

  The man pulled his hand back and gave his bell four quick shakes. Jennifer swiveled her head around and watched in terror as the bear dropped its human drumstick and turned its attention on her.

  Only a handful of steps separated them, trapped in the same floor-to-ceiling cage. The bear rose onto its hind legs, a towering mass of fur and muscle, of sharp teeth and flashing claws. Jennifer wished she could go back to her coffin, anything to get away. The bear would tear her apart in a heartbeat. Just like it had Rachel.

  Bambi took a step forward and its costume jangled to life. It still had on the tutu and vest from the performance earlier in the night, the ones festooned with glittering bells. It took another step and the bells clanged out a sort of rhythm this time.

  “Oh, God. Please. Please. You don’t have to do this.”

  Jennifer didn’t know who exactly she was pleading with, but it was the ringmaster who answered.

  “I’m afraid it’s out of God’s hands.”

  “But why? Why?” Jennifer took her eyes off the bear to stare up at her kidnapper.

  “Why?” The man crouched down and leaned in close so that only the cage’s bars separated his face from Jennifer’s. He could have licked her cheek if he’d wanted. “Because Bambi has to eat.”

  Jennifer’s pupils widened and then narrowed again. That didn’t make any sense.

  “Bambi and I have been together for over a decade,” the man elaborated. “She’s my best friend. My only family. And family doesn’t run out on each other.”

  The man paused here, considering his next words carefully. Slowly, he shifted positions and took his hand out of his vest pocket. Only then did Jennifer realize he’d kept it hidden away the whole time, even during the show that night. And now she understood why.

  “You see, a few years ago Bambi got a little taste of human flesh.” The man held up the hand he’d just taken from his vest pocket and showed Jennifer his whittled-down stump of an arm.

  “She didn’t mean it. We were playing, and she only got a few of my fingers. But after that, she didn’t eat for days. At first, I thought it was because she felt guilty. I tried to show her I was okay, that I loved her still. But she wouldn’t eat.

  “I was desperate, then. My Bambi was weak. She could barely walk. I couldn’t sleep, I was so worried. That’s when I got an idea. It seemed crazy, I know, but I was willing to try anything to save my baby.

  “It took three chops with a meat cleaver, right here below the wrist.” The man pointed it out to Jennifer, and she realized just how crazy he was. Her stomach rebelled against her again, but only green bile came up. “It hurt like hell. But Bambi ate after. And has eaten ever since… as long as I provide her the right diet.”

  A sound like a tambourine clanged only a foot away from Jennifer, and she turned from the man to see the bear looming over her now.

  “Looks like Bambi’s ready for dinner.”

  “No!” Jennifer shrieked. Without a thought, her hands shot through the bars of the cage and grabbed the ringmaster’s vest. She clawed at his buttons, his pockets, anything to get at him, to stay alive for a second more. But he only chuckled and pushed her away with ease. She fell to the floor again.

  “You can’t fight it. There’s nowhere to hide, little girl.”

  But Jennifer didn’t listen. Instead, she uncoiled her legs and leaped to her feet. While she’d wrestled with the man, she’d managed to grab the key from his vest pocket. Now, she fumbled with the lock. She had surprise on her side, but a hungry bear at her back.

  Somehow, despite her shaking hands, she managed to get the key in the lock and twisted it open just as the bear lunged forward.

  The weight of Jennifer and Bambi simultaneously crashing against the cage door popped it open like a mousetrap. The door snapped the ringmaster in the chest and he flew backward. Jennifer didn’t waste a glance in his direction
as she picked herself up off the floor and made for the door. She heard him laughing, though. And it unnerved her.

  “I don’t know where you think you’re going.”

  Jennifer tried to ignore him. She grabbed the door handle and pulled hard. It slid open with a stubborn screech.

  A cry leaped from her mouth and flew away on the wind as it whipped into the room and blew her hair back. Below her the ground whooshed by, at fifty or sixty miles an hour. The drone she’d been hearing ever since waking up wasn’t only in her head.

  No. It was a train, hurtling her to God knew where.

  The world raced past in a blur. If she jumped, she was dead. But if she stayed, she was also dead. She didn’t know what to do.

  “I’m afraid you’re out of options.”

  Jennifer turned and saw the man leering at her. He’d picked himself up off the ground and had his bell out. He rang a command, but Bambi didn’t react. Instead, the bear looked around the room uncertainly. Its snout twitched. Its tongue tasted the air. It was disoriented. It’d probably never been let out of its cage like this. In that moment, Jennifer saw her one chance at survival. She rushed forward, surprising the man. Her hand flew to his good one and she snapped up the bell. Before he could react, she’d run back into the cage and locked it behind her.

  “You think those bars will save you?” the man snorted.

  “No. I’m hoping this will.” And Jennifer rang the bell as hard and as fast as she could. Its sound bounced off the walls of the train car, ricocheting and getting louder. She kept it up and began ringing harder when she saw Bambi start to freak out.

  The bear roared to life. It swatted at the cage door. It tried to get in and claw Jennifer to ribbons, but she danced out of its reach and rang the bell even faster. The bear tried to cover its ears, but the ringing still got through.

  “What are you doing?” the man cried out. “You’re hurting her! Stop it!”

  But Jennifer kept up the ringing, and when Bambi couldn’t get to her, it turned on its master.

  With one heavy swat, the man crashed to the floor. He tried getting up, but the bear hit him again and sent his body skittering close to the train car’s open door. Jennifer kept up her ringing and the bear continued its attack. It hovered over the man and then dug its claws into his chest. He didn’t scream, though. The bear hit him again and he coughed up blood, which Bambi happily licked off his face. Tears spilled from his eyes and a strangled cry escaped his throat. He looked up at Bambi with a glimmer in his eyes.