Carnival

by William W. Johnstone

  “Frenchy,” Martin said. “I want you to arrest this . . . person.” He looked at Nabo, cowering on the dirty floor. Nabo cursed him and spit at him. “There must be a hundred different charges you can bring on him. Everything from inciting a riot to operating a carnival without a license.”

  “Curse your soul, Holland!” Nabo screamed. “You can’t do this to me.”

  “I’ve done it, Nabo.”

  Nabo squalled and kicked on the floor, the dust rising from his childish temper tantrum.

  Frenchy looked at Martin. “He’s mortal,” Martin explained. “That’s his punishment for failing here. All those who survived are now mortal. Doomed to spend the rest of their lives here on earth as mortal beings. He gave it away by having Kelson hiding in here, waiting to kill me—because Nabo knew he couldn’t do it—and by insisting upon me killing him. He’d rather die than have to spend eternity as a mortal. He probably can’t kill himself. His ... master would not permit it.”

  “It’ll probably never come to trial, Martin,” Frenchy warned him.

  “Probably not. But Nabo will be confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life. Forever locked down in a place for the hopelessly criminally insane. A far worse fate than death.”

  Nabo lay on the floor and cussed.

  The sounds of what appeared to be a hundred sirens drifted to them.

  “I called for backup,” Mayfield explained. “And for the attorney general to be helicoptered in.” He jerked his thumb toward the midway. “I have never seen so many dead people in all my life.”

  “How disgusting!” Nabo said. “How humiliating!”

  “Halp!” a woman’s voice squalled through the now-silent midway. “Halp me!”

  “Dolly Darling,” Nabo explained. “She can’t get out of her chair.”

  “Doomed to be a freak forever,” Jeanne said. “Serves her right.”

  “I have never been so humiliated in all my lives,” Nabo ranted.

  “Cuff him, Gene,” Mayfield ordered.

  “And be sure you read him his rights,” Frenchy added.

  “Halp!” Dolly squalled. “Halpl”

  SEVENTEEN

  Frenchy was with the state police. Audie and Nicole with them. The kids were asleep. Holland, Nebraska was literally crawling with officialdom.

  Martin sat on his front porch. He could not recall ever being so tired.

  His daughter sat in the porch swing, glaring at him. “You’re stuck with me and I’m stuck with you,” she said sourly.

  “That’s right, honey.”

  “I hate you!” She bluntly told her father. “And you just wait. I’ll find a way to once more become what I was before.”

  “No doubt you will try. And you might make it. But until that time, you are going to be a perfect lady. The pride and joy of the Holland family.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  * * *

  Audie stood over the still breathing body of Binkie. He lifted his walkie-talkie and called for an EMT.

  “I’m scared,” Binkie whispered.

  “You ought to be.” He looked at the boy’s crushed legs. Someone had put pressure bandages on the wounds, easing the bleeding to only a thin ooze.

  “Nicole walked up to Audie. ”Highway Patrol found Joe Carrol beaten to death in his bedroom. Billie Watson was found wandering around in the grasslands. Naked. Out of her head.”

  “Any sign of Balo, JoJo or the Dog Man?”

  “Nothing. One carnie said the Dog Man just vanished into thin air with the animals. Audie? You got to see this, man. Come on.”

  She led him to the wax museum. “Brace yourself,” she warned him, pushing back the canvas.

  Audie hissed in shock. Unlike the Crazy House, the inside of the wax museum was clean and new-looking. But it was the wax creatures that trapped his attention.

  The dead had been transformed, to forever stand—he hoped—as exhibits. Alicia was there. Mike Hanson. Lyle Steele. Matt Horton. Missy. Kelson. Gary Tressalt. Eddie. They were immovable statues. Except for their eyes, which followed the city cop and the deputy as they walked around the dimly lit room. Audie’s flesh seemed to crawl, as if maggots were sliming about on his skin.

  Audie swallowed hard and walked back outside, to stand in the warm welcome light of God’s day. “What do we tell the investigators, Nicole?”

  “Frenchy’s taking care of that. She said the attorney general is going to call it a riot and nothing more.

  “I figured a cover-up.”

  “What else could they do?”

  “They’re ... we’re ... somebody’s going to have to dispose of those ... wax things.”

  “If they can,” Nicole said grimly.

  * * *

  “You can’t do this to me!” Linda squalled at her father.

  “Bend over the end of the bed, kid,” he told her, a leather belt in his hand.

  She cut her evil eyes, her lips grinning at him.

  Martin backhanded her, jerked her up, and bent her over the end of the bed. He began applying the leather to her denim-clad bottom.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me that this hurts you more than it does me?” she wailed.

  “No indeed, girl. I’m taking a great deal of satisfaction from this. I’m going to blister your butt until you can heat your own bathwater just by sitting in it. And then we’re going to church, baby.”

  “Church!” she shrieked. “No way!”

  “Church,” Martin said grimly. “To pray for your lost soul. And to pray for me—since I’m obviously going to have to put up with you for only God knows how long.”

  * * *

  Karl Steele lay whimpering, gritting his fanged snout against the pain in his foot. Since animals do not have the ability to cry as humans, Karl could only whine and whimper.

  His rear paw was caught in a small animal trap.

  His metamorphosis was complete. He no longer in any way resembled a human. He was a dog.

  Karl whimpered against the pain. And then he began doing what he—when he was in human form—had caused other animals to do, many times. It was the only thing he could do to regain his freedom.

  He began chewing off the trapped leg.

  EIGHTEEN

  Christmas. Holland, Nebraska.

  The sightseers and morbidly curious had stopped coming to rubberneck at the town and the remaining inhabitants.

  After the riots.

  Martin and Frenchy had been married for a week. They sat in the den before a crackling fire. Mark was in his room, studying. Linda was in her room, doing only God knew what.

  And Satan.

  Frenchy had resigned her state police commission a day before they were married.

  The town was looking around for a couple of new doctors.

  Janet and the kids had moved away.

  The police had tried to destroy the wax statues. They would not burn. Nothing could burn them. They tried blowing them up. A big bang and lots of smoke was all that was accomplished by that. The statues were finally stored in a concrete block building with no windows and a steel door. Just outside of town. The carnival had been dismantled and stored. Just outside of town.

  Dick Mason had purchased the old Bar-S ranch. Renamed it the Flying-M.

  Jeanne and Don were planning to be married in the spring.

  Nicole and Audie were married shortly after the incident. The incident at Holland was how the official report read.

  Nabo was confined at a state mental institution for the criminally insane.

  Dolly Darling and a few more had joined other carnivals. They would be touring the nation come spring.

  Frenchy stirred beside Martin as a strange but now familiar chanting came from Linda’s room.

  And they knew that in other homes around the town, other kids would be picking up the same chanting, and other parents would be wondering what to do.

  “I know what I should do,” Martin said, putting his arm around Frenchy’s shoulders. “But I can
’t just walk up to her and kill her. I just can’t do it, Frenchy.”

  “I know.”

  “While you were wrapping up the reports on the ... incident, I tried to have her committed. She was calm and quite lucid. The psychiatrists said she was as sane as anyone else. I had no choice; I had to bring her back home with me.”

  The chanting picked up in tone and volume.

  Martin stood up and tossed another log on the fire.

  And in the concrete block house, Alicia opened her eyes and smiled as the sounds of her daughter’s chanting finally reached her.

  Keep reading for a special excerpt from the master of horror,

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

  BATS

  They’d flown north from Central and South America, appearing one day in the southern wetlands of the U.S. like ominous ink stains in the twilight sky. With each sunset, more appeared, first hundreds then thousands. Massing into a great black cloud of terror, the vampire bats were beating their wings in time with the panicked heartbeats in the towns below.

  No one knew how to stop them as they fell onto their prey like dark, deadly shadows. But someone had to find a way. Because somewhere in the night, they had become a threat to more than wild animals and livestock. Somewhere in the night madness took hold as these vampire bats developed a taste for human blood.

  And the feasting had only just begun.

  Click here to get your copy.

  The pull of the moon is strong

  evoking emotions that have remained dormant

  for centuries.

  But when the moon sends its blood call

  who can resist?

  Only those not born with the unseen mark.

  From the Writings of the Undead

  ONE

  He was being chased. Same old dream. He knew it was a dream. Scared the crap out of him anyway. "No!" he shouted, and the shout woke him. He opened his eyes, sitting up in bed. "Damnit!" he said, swinging his legs off the bed and planting his feet on the cool floor.

  His dogs came rushing into the bedroom, nails clicking on the tile. Skipper sat on the floor by his bed and June hopped up on the bed. Johnny named the dog June because that's the month he found her, or she found him-whatever. He'd rescued Skipper from the local pound just hours before he was to have been put to sleep. Both of them were part husky, part chow, and the rest was mutt.

  June licked him on the side of the face and he petted her. "It's all right," Johnny assured the dog. "It's OK." He looked at the luminous numbers on the clock. Five o'clock. Time to get up anyway.

  He pulled on jeans and moccasins and let the dogs out for their morning toilet and run around the fenced five acres that sat in the middle of his one hundred acres-also fenced, but not as securely as the "compound," as he called it.

  He did not turn on any lights until he reached the kitchen. He didn't have to. He knew where every piece of furniture was located. If a chair was three inches left or right or forward or backward of center, he'd know it. He also knew where every gun in the house was located.

  He made coffee, and when it was brewed he filled a mug and walked out to the screened-in front porch and sat down. It was then he noticed that the dogs were sitting together, close to the screen door, their husky-marked faces looking skyward. June whined and Johnny opened the screen door and let them in. They came in quickly, almost knocking him down in their haste.

  "Hey, gang. What's the matter with you two?" This was not like them. Early April in Northeast Louisiana and cool for this time of year. The dogs usually liked to stay outside until the sun came up. Not this morning.

  Then Johnny heard the sound. A curious sound. Sort of like the fluttering of many wings. It grew louder and louder. Then silence. He looked around for the dogs. They had vanished. He looked into the den. June was under the coffee table and Skipper was clean out of sight. Probably under the kitchen table. That's where he usually headed whenever a thunderstorm came roaring in. And in this part of Louisiana, thunder-bumpers occurred with depressing regularity.

  "Something sure scared you two," Johnny said. Then he returned to his chair on the porch and drank his coffee.

  Johnny lived about fifty miles southeast of Monroe, and about thirty-five miles north and slightly west of Natchez, Mississippi, not too far from the Tensas River. He lived in the great big fat middle of nowhere, and that's the way he liked it.

  He was not from this part of the country, but when he retired from the military he'd had no desire at all to return to his roots. There was nothing there for him. He'd run away from home at fourteen, lied about his age and joined the Army at fifteen, and stayed in the service for twenty six years, retiring a full Bird Colonel. While in the service he'd gotten his GSA and then earned a Master's degree. He was a Mustang: an officer who'd risen from the ranks. Twenty of those twenty-six years he'd spent in one form of intelligence or the other. He'd worked for ASA, CIA, DIA, NSA, and a dozen other intelligence-gathering organizations all over the world. Johnny MacBride was not his real name. He hadn't used his real name in so many years, at times he had trouble remembering what it was.

  His Army records listed him as forty-four years old. He was actually forty-one. His personality profile stated that he was a loner. That was an understatement. His psychological down-training (CRIPCivilian Reindoctrination Program) was a failure. It wasn't that Johnny didn't like people-he just didn't trust many of them. He didn't trust them because most civilians did not have the vaguest idea what they would do in any given situation. Johnny knew exactly what he would do in any situation. Johnny did not think like most people. He was not hotheaded; few successful intelligence operatives are. Like most intelligence officers, Johnny would think things through, plan carefully, and then react. There are people buried 1111 over the world who had the misfortune to confront a skilled and trained spook. But in many cases, their demise usually came months or even years after the confrontation. Many people misinterpret caution for cowardice. That quite often proves to be a fatal mistake ... somewhere down the line. Spooks have long memories, and they are very, very vindictive.

  Johnny was finishing his second cup of coffee before the dogs once more ventured out onto the porch. He petted them both and they calmed down.

  Except for the dogs, Johnny lived al(?ne. He had never been married. He'd never had time for marriage. He didn't think he'd ever been in love. He'd been in heat lots of time, but come the dawn, the heat had always cooled.

  Johnny MacBride was neither handsome nor badlooking. He was six feet tall with brown hair and dark green eyes. His heritage was Scotch-Irish and Scandinavian. He was in very good physical condition, maintaining a strict regime of physical conditioning. He wasn't a fanatic on the subject of exercise; he simply worked out at least an hour every day and had done so for years.

  Johnny showered and shaved then checked his larder to see if he needed to go into town for anything. He was low on a number of things so he decided to drive into town and buy groceries and pick up his _mail-it was a weekly outing for him.

  Johnny owned two vehicles, a new Ford pickup truck, FI50 series, with four-wheel drive, and a '65 Ford Mustang that he had spent years lovingly restoring to near mint condition. He'd take the pickup since he wanted to buy some lumber in addition to the groceries.

  Standing by the gate that led to the garage, he looked back at his house. When he'd bought this land some ten years back, he had a crew come in from out of town to build the home to his specifications. At first glance, it looked like an ordinary home. It wasn't. It was a fort. The home was three feet off the ground, built on huge pilings. The outside was cypress; between the cypress and the inside paneling was concrete blocks filled with sand. The windows were bulletproof. The home was a quarter of a mile from a parish road, the drive leading to the home a deliberately twisting one so any vehicle approaching could not raise any speed to ram the gates.

  This was not paranoia on Johnny's part. A dozen terrorist groups around the world had offered thousands and thousan
ds of dollars to anyone who could bring back Johnny's head in a sack. Only one group–so far–had learned of Johnny's new local~ and they'd sent a team in to take him out about six months back, just a few months after Johnny had moved in. A week after the attempted assassination, four bodies had been found floating in the Tensas River down in Catahoula Parish. They could not be identified because they had neither heads nor hands.

  The local sheriff had opined that, "Somebody sure had a grudge against their ass."

  Just a few hundred yards after pulling out onto the blacktop parish road, Johnny stopped and parked on the shoulder, putting on his emergency flashers and walked across the road to a ditch. He stood looking down at what was left of a cow. The poor beast had what appeared to be slash marks all over its hide. He turned at the sounds of an approaching car and when he saw it was a Louisiana state trooper, he waved the driver to a halt.

  The trooper rolled down the window and asked, "Trouble, sir?"

  "Dead cow in the ditch," Johnny replied. "But I never saw anything quite like the markings on the body."

  The trooper clicked on his rotating lights and parked. He got out and looked at the cow. "Damn!" he said. "I'm with you, mister. Looks like ... hell, I don't know what it looks like." The trooper took a deep breath and instantly regretted it. "What's that smell?"

  "It's sort of like ammonia, isn't it?"

  ''Yeah. Sort of."

  Johnny walked into the dry ditch and squatted down by the carcass, looking closely at the markings on the hide. The carcass seemed to be shrunken. And now that he was close, he could see that there were hundreds of those strange markings all over the animal's body.

  "That's a funny-looking cow," the trooper remarked. "Something's wrong with it. It looks like ... it's been shrunk."

  Then Johnny knew what was wrong. "Shit!" he said.

  "What's wrong?"

  "No blood. This animal's been drained of blood."