Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Carnival of Souls

by Nancy Holder

  “He is human, yes?” Vaclav asked.

  Willow blinked. “Yes.”

  “Then he must be put in the glass coffin in the freak show,” Vaclav said. “It is ancient, as are many of us. Well, I’m just two centuries. The coffin is what keeps us all alive. Heals us, if we are injured.”

  “So that’s why that woman was in the coffin?” Willow asked. “To make her stay young?”

  “Or to heal her?” Giles asked quietly.

  Vaclav’s lower lip trembled. “She was brought back from near death. But not completely.”

  “What do you mean?” Giles said, tapping the end of the marker against his finger.

  There was a long pause. Then Vaclav said hoarsely, “Her mind was gone. It happens. They can still be useful.” His chest heaved and the stillness in the room stretched into what Giles surmised was a moment of silence to acknowledge the girl’s suffering. And Vaclav’s own.

  He loves her, Giles realized. And if that was why Vaclav had decided to betray Caligari, Giles was glad of his suffering. No, that was wrong. Glad that he had a reason to help.

  Then Vaclav cleared his throat and said, “For most of us, it works. It will probably work on your friend.”

  “Probably?” Willow looked from Vaclav to Giles, and wondered if he had the ability to explain that probability away.

  “What keeps your master alive?” Ms. Calendar asked.

  “Souls,” Vaclav replied. “He collects them. You can see them in the crystal ball. He preys upon your weakness, and then once he rips your soul from you, you go there. To be tormented.” He shivered. “You cannot let him capture me! He’ll send me there!”

  “We’ll do everything in our power to keep you safe,” Giles said.

  “How are we going to get Xander into the glass coffin?” Willow fretted.

  “We’ll have to find him first,” Giles said gently.

  Angel pushed away from the wall. He still thought it was awfully convenient that Vaclav had “just happened” to run into him.

  “I’ll do that. I’ll look for him and Buffy. And Cordelia.” Angel gestured with his head to the unconscious Claire Nierman. “I’ll take her truck.”

  Giles nodded. “Yes. Good idea. Willow will tell you how to perform the Weakening Spell. Perhaps it will cure Xander’s sickness as well.”

  Quickly, Willow gathered up the ingredients for the spell—several kinds of herbs, a white candle, and a handful of the half-dozen talismans Ms. Calendar had created from a book she had found in Giles’s vast collection in the library. They looked like tiny people made out of cloth. She put everything in a plastic grocery store bag.

  Meanwhile, Ms. Calendar typed out the ritual on her Apple and printed it for Angel. She went over it with him, making sure he understood every word. Angel folded the paper and put it in the grocery bag.

  After she was done, Ms. Calendar hesitated. “Maybe one of us should go with you. What if…what if something happened to you and they took your soul?”

  Angel hadn’t stopped to consider that. Take away his soul, and he was a monster.

  But there was no time for that now.

  “You’re all needed here,” he insisted.

  Then he left.

  He went outside, got in the truck, and drove away. He’d go to Buffy’s first. Maybe she had—

  Calliope music.

  Angel unrolled his window.

  Sweet and beckoning, tempting, whispering, insinuating. “Come to me and I will give you pleasures. Your greatest weakness will be your greatest delight.

  “Come to me.”

  Angel’s scalp prickled. He could almost taste the music. It played inside him. Inside his bones and his mind and his unbeating heart.

  “Come to me.”

  And then he saw them, emptying out of late-night bars and convenience stores, houses, and apartments: the citizens of Sunnydale, in long pants and jackets, bathrobes and slippers, shuffling down the dark streets. They reminded him of zombies.

  “Come.”

  Oompapa.

  “Come now.”

  Deedle-deedle-dee.

  “Step right up and feed me your soul.”

  Angel shook his head to clear it.

  “Come.”

  He got the paper out of the grocery bag and read it aloud to himself. He pinched the herbs between his fingers. He used the cigarette lighter to light the white candle’s wick, and let it burn until he felt more centered.

  The calliope’s tune was no longer a siren song.

  But it would be for anyone else who hadn’t yet been on the receiving end of the Weakening Spell. For them, it would be a sweet call…to their doom.

  Angel floored it. Buffy would likely be headed for the carnival, just like everyone else.

  He hung a left onto Main Street. The sidewalks were crammed with people trudging past the Sun Cinema and the Espresso Pump. Neon signs painted their slack faces with bright pink and lime green.

  He cruised past the alley where just two nights ago, he had first run into Claire Nierman. Things happened fast in a dangerous world.

  He drove carefully. The wind had caused a lot of damage. Tree limbs had smashed car hoods. Trash cans, benches, and newspaper containers were tipped over. The crowds walked over them, around them, as the calliope beckoned them with whispered promises, delicious temptations.

  The Seven Deadly Sins.

  From the corner just beyond Yasumi jewelry store, someone waved at him.

  It was Ethan Rayne. Cordelia was with him. Also, a strange black dog.

  Then Ethan froze, turned, and ran; it was a quick and easy thing for Angel to stop, leap out of the truck in hot pursuit, tackle Ethan, and throw him to the ground.

  The dog-creature began to growl and show its teeth.

  “Hullo. It’s Angel,” Ethan managed, huffing as Angel turned him over on his back. “Fancy meeting you in the center of mayhem and destruction.”

  “I could say the same,” Angel replied.

  “Angel!” Cordelia cried, sounding far happier to see him. “You have wheels!”

  “Where’s Buffy? What’s going on?” Angel demanded.

  “Haven’t the slightest,” Ethan said.

  Angel shot out his arm, grabbed the animal by the neck, and vamped. “Tell me now.”

  “You wouldn’t dare bite Le Malfaiteur,” Ethan said. Then, sighing, “I thought you were Claire. You’re driving her truck.”

  “Angel, we have to get to the carnival right away,” Cordelia said. “All my stuff is there! My glass basket! It’s all mine! She’s promised them to me.”

  So Cordelia’s weakness was greed. He was surprised. He had expected it to be vanity.

  “We’ll go,” Angel told her. He said to Ethan, “You’re going to help me stop this.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Ethan said, smirking.

  “I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Angel threatened. “And your big dog, too.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said, startled. “In that case…kill my dog.” He chuckled. “You know I’m nothing if not practical, Angel. While I would love to trust that your highly developed sense of morality would kick in before you made my heart stop, I’ll help you.”

  Grimly satisfied, Angel kept hold of him and the dog as they walked to the truck. He said, “Cordelia, there’s a plastic grocery bag on the seat. Get it.”

  “No, we have to go to the carnival now,” she insisted.

  “If you get it for me, I’ll take you there.”

  “Okay,” she said, hurrying to retrieve it for him.

  “Got it,” she reported, showing it to him.

  Making sure the keys were not in the ignition, he threw Ethan and his dog into the cab.

  Cordelia handed him the bag. Angel took out the herbs, the talismans, and the page of instructions. He laid everything on the hood of the car and quickly performed the ritual, down to lighting the candle again with some matches he found in the street beside his right front tire.

  “Oh,” Cordelia said, rub
bing her hands over her face. “Angel. Oh, my God. I-I’m better.” Her eyes grew enormous. “I knocked out the Yasumi salesclerk. Oh my God!”

  “It’s okay,” Angel said.

  “It is not!” she cried. “They’ll never let me shop in there again!”

  “We’ve all been under a spell.” Maybe she was still under it, if the foremost thing on her mind was the future of her relationship with a jewelry store. On the other hand, she was Cordelia.

  “Buffy, too,” she told him. “She’s been under a spell.”

  “Of lust?” he asked, wondering just how obvious the two of them had been. When they’d been bewitched, it hadn’t mattered.

  “Lust?” she echoed, sounding confused. “Buffy?”

  He tried another tack. “What’s she been like? Angry? Greedy?”

  Cordelia shook her head. “She has been totally stuck-up. Well, she’s always stuck-up, but she’s been arguing with Giles, telling him to leave her alone because she can do everything herself. Miss Thing to the max!”

  Angel listened hard, running down the list of the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Gluttony, Vanity, and Greed. Which was Buffy’s?

  “Pride,” he said slowly, answering his own question. “Vanity is another word for pride. Buffy’s proud.”

  “Well, if you want to call it that. I would say ‘stubborn’ or maybe even ‘stupid,’ but whatever it is, she nearly took Giles out for telling her what to do.”

  “That’s not good,” Angel muttered.

  “Hel-lo? Haven’t I been saying that?” Cordelia raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips.

  “She might not listen if I try to do the spell,” Angel continued, parsing out what to do.

  “And that would be so new for her, the rascal,” Cordelia grumped. “Are you listening to me?”

  From inside the truck, Ethan Rayne laid on the horn; Cordelia screamed and hopped into Angel’s arms.

  “Oh, I’m just so overstressed,” she murmured. “I’ll probably break out. This is all Buffy’s fault.”

  Easing Cordelia down, Angel glared at Ethan through the side window. Wide-eyed, Ethan jabbed a finger straight ahead through the windshield.

  As a flood of vampires and demons raced toward them.

  “I feel like dancing,” Joyce announced as she and Buffy skipped the parking lot and drove straight up to the entrance of the carnival. They got out of the car and walked onto the enchanted ground of the carnival.

  Joyce sighed and smiled pensively. Then she yawned. “The music is so beautiful. Oh, I want to just sit and listen to this music forever. I never want to move another muscle as long as I live.”

  Buffy was barely listening. The voice inside her head was the one worth listening to.

  “Slayer, this is your kingdom. Come to me. Come and receive the crown you so richly deserve.”

  “I am,” Buffy said.

  A large, shimmery rectangle appeared directly in front of her. It was silver, gleaming. A mirror, or a door?

  “Come,” the voice urged her.

  Buffy stepped forward, into the rectangle. She was bathed in silver light. Her skin gleamed as if it were metallic.

  I am so beautiful, she thought.

  “Yes, you are,” a voice replied. It was Professor Caligari, with his white hair and his long face and his extremely yucky hands.

  He was sitting on an ivory—bone?—bench in front of a pipe organ made of bones. Skulls, both human and demon, grinned at her. Spinal columns rose to the ceiling of a dark room.

  Not a pipe organ. A calliope.

  A noise behind her startled her. She turned.

  There were seven clowns, each dressed differently. She had seen some or all of them before. One wore a little pointed hat; another had Rasta braids. A third, purple hair.

  As she gazed at each in turn, it began to wipe off its makeup with a piece of cloth—a red bandanna for one, a lacy handkerchief for the more elegant one in the pointed hat. Yet as they swiped the bright white, red, and blue, she couldn’t see their faces. She wasn’t sure they had any.

  Next came their costumes. Beneath them, they wore black robes decorated with random red sevens. Their hands were hidden inside their sleeves, and their hoods hid their faces.

  And now Buffy stood in the center as they encircled her, the dark room blurring into a silver horizon.

  “I told you that there are exceptional souls to be savored here in Sunnydale,” Professor Caligari said to the seven men. He extended his hand toward Buffy. “This is a slayer. The reigning Slayer. Can you imagine what her soul will taste like?”

  “Wait a sec,” Buffy said.

  Then Professor Caligari began to play the calliope. The notes danced over her skin, whispering at her, making her forget what she was going to say. Oddly, that didn’t bother her.

  The men began to move, swaying, dancing. Buffy joined them, stepping in a smaller circle inside their larger one. All her cares and fears evaporated. There was nothing she could not handle, here inside the protective ring of music and magicks. The men, the calliope music, the world were silvery and beautiful.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,

  Who’s the strongest of them all?

  Who’s brave and true?

  Who’s the queen of the carni-val?

  You, Buffy Summers, you.”

  Then she saw herself on the cliff again, as she had long ago in a dream…or had it really happened? Watching the leapers through the bonfires. Druids, on Samhain.

  She smelled the wood smoke, and the burns…

  …the burning of the witches as the eager villagers screamed for their deaths…

  …the lions roaring in the Colosseum as the hapless Christians flung themselves against the barred exits…

  …Professor Copernicus Caligari, Doctor Emeritus, surrounded by glass jars labeled MEDICINALS as he stood in front of his black wagon, thumbs hooked around the lapels of his goin’-to-meetin’ suit. He had a handlebar mustache and thick sideburns; his hair was short and he had a bit of a paunch from all the dinners widows in calico fixed for him as he made his way across the prairies and the badlands.

  “Step right up, folks, step right up! We’ve got it all! Wild West show! Indians! A trained bear! And a mermaid!”

  The crowd pressed forward eagerly.

  “Forget your troubles! Forget the drought! Sit a spell and partake of our marvelous entertainments!”

  Then her vision shifted back, and the seven men in robes surrounded the Slayer as Professor Caligari played his calliope.

  She wore a crown of roses and a white dress, and she was perfectly, wonderfully unique.

  “You are the one girl in all your generation,” Professor Caligari reminded her as the calliope music slid across her skin like a lover’s caress.

  The seven men bowed low.

  “Let me introduce you, Slayer, to Greed, Lust, Anger, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, and of course, your favorite: Pride.”

  The men straightened. They were dressed as clowns again—

  —Buffy blinked—

  —who pulled spheres of glass from their colorful sleeves and began to juggle them.

  “Round and round and round she goes,” the calliope sang. Up, down, around, up and down…

  “…like your life, your oddly mixed life of boredom and death-defying adventures that does not do justice to the specialness of you. But we here, we understand.”

  The glass spheres glittered and twinkled. The calliope played.

  And Buffy stood radiant and alone, chin raised.

  Proud.

  The clowns winked in and out of existence, grinning and flirting. She grinned back, reaching for the glass spheres. But they appeared and disappeared like soap bubbles.

  Then they were the men in deep-hooded cloaks again; seven ringed around her. They pulled their hands from their sleeves and she saw hooks and barbs and talons, but no fingers—

  She froze.

  “No, it’s all right,” said Professor Caligari. Only that
wasn’t his name. It wasn’t even Hans Von Der Sieben. It was Caligarius. She knew that now. And these were his first acolytes, the men who made the sacrifices of their souls that gave him his first taste of power. They were ancient beings, devoid of souls, or pity, or any bit of goodness.

  “These are not for you,” Caligarius assured her. “You will reign beside me, lovely queen. All you must do is vanquish our enemies. They have never respected you, never admired you. That must anger you.”

  Buffy was terribly confused. Because she was angry. Very angry. Furious. But…

  “They will come, and they will try to stop us. You can’t let that happen.”

  “Of course not,” she said slowly. “But what did you say about my soul?” She couldn’t remember.

  His features softened. “Don’t worry about that. I would never harm you. Why should I harm you?” Caligarius asked softly.

  The calliope played on. Only it wasn’t a calliope anymore; it was flutes and drums…the clashing of cymbals as the hunters searched the forests and hills not for rabbits or deer, but for human sacrifices…

  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.

  “Oh my God, Angel!” Cordelia cried as demons and vampires swarmed over the people in the streets. It was like a monster stampede, and as they approached, the sleepwalking people woke up and started screaming and trying to get away.