CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The second that I walked out onto Toulouse Street, every light turned off. The streets, businesses and homes were all completely dark. As I suspected, everything here had existed only to extend Arrosha’s illusion had I actually taken “Edmond” up on his offer to accompany me.
It wasn’t pitch black, but rather it was as the dark of a full moon, holding just enough cold light for me to see where I was going. There was no full moon, though, just the mysterious non-specific twilight illumination that had no definable source, which seemed to be so prevalent in this dimension.
Bourbon Street appeared sooner than it should have. It had either been moved up a few blocks or I had taken another spatial “jump” as I did at the mansion and shack and it had been too dark to notice. I’d long since stopped trying to make sense of this dimension without normal rules, for it was like trying to make logical sense of a nightmare.
When I turned the corner onto Bourbon Street, it, too, was closed, dark, and deserted. I felt as if I were in an “end of the world” scene in some bad movie that I didn’t want to watch. The city was silent and there was no one else around, no sign that any other life existed at all. I was sure the rest of the city would be the same, had there been a rest of the city, but I suspected that only the parts of New Orleans existed here which suited Rochere’s purposes. I could easily have been mistaken for a somnambulist as I walked down Bourbon Street without purpose, for the lack of life in this French Quarter, even though fake, was an unsettling and disturbing illusion.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, music began to play. It jarred me, for it was sudden and unpleasant, certainly not the kind of music that anyone would expect to hear in the Quarter. It was coming from the direction toward which I was walking, becoming disproportionately louder as I walked toward it. It was the warped sound of a calliope, the sound of a merry-go-round, belonging to a broken-down fair or a carnival, not to the French Quarter.
A dim light appeared at what had now become the end of Bourbon Street, a light that grew brighter as I continued toward it. As I got closer, I could see that it was an entrance of some sort, but I couldn’t see what was on the other side of that entrance. Then, when I was about thirty feet away, I heard a horrible laugh that started up without warning. It was the dreadful, electronic “canned” laughter of a laugh box that sounded, in its dead way, as if it were mocking me. At the same time that the laughter stated, the calliope music became unpleasantly loud.
I covered my ears, not so much to dull the volume, but rather to muffle the laugh, so evil and soulless, made even more bizarre by the music. As if triggered by the laughter and the “da-da-dudda-dudda-da-da-du-da” of the calliope, more, even brighter lights turned on without warning. Startled, I looked up and the oversized face of a huge, gigantic clown stared back. The lighted entrance was now the opening of the clown’s mouth. It was not a friendly clown’s face, either, nor was it exactly evil. Bad and tasteless, it was the “am I good or am I bad” in-between kind of face that made it so horribly creepy.
The canned laughter thankfully stopped as suddenly as it had started, but the music kept on playing. I began to back away from the psychotic-looking clown, afraid to turn my back on it, but an invisible force pushed me, against my will and beyond my strength, up to the entrance of the menacing clown’s mouth. Something stronger than myself had control of my legs and feet and I found myself crossing the threshold, even though I fought against it.
I found myself back in the twilight world with which I’d lately become far too familiar. Despite the amulet, I felt my stomach sink, leaving a horrible, empty feeling in my gut.
“Oh no, not again,” was my initial reaction.
When I turned to look behind me, the clown, facing this world now, had changed and possessed long, sharp and pointed metallic upper and lower teeth. The music, like the laughter, ceased and the world became all too quiet again until, as if for effect, the clown let out one last single, soulless laugh and its sword-like teeth clamped shut with a clang, interlocking to become an impenetrable metallic wall. That done, the clown disappeared altogether, leaving me stranded, once more, in the grey, dismal, silent landscape in which I’d found myself all too often before. For the first time I now recognized this dull, dreary twilight world as a land of my own making, one which I myself, inside of my own nightmares, had invented. It was my personal world of fear and helplessness. No wonder Rochere kept bringing me back here. It had taken me so long to recognize the landscape because my dreams had not taken me here since childhood. My conscious mind had wisely forgotten about this terrible place. My unconscious mind, however, had obviously not.
This time, the only difference was the atmosphere, which, instead of exhibiting the dryness of an extended drought, now had the ominous, oppressive feeling of impending tornado weather. It was so hot and sticky, that even though I’d only walked a few steps, I could feel the sweat running down under my arms, soaking my clothes. The humidity was so burdensome and profound that the air was thick and hard to breathe. The barometric pressure spoke of catastrophic storms just over the horizon as heavy thunderclouds, black and sinister, hovered in the air, exerting a pressure that I felt to my very soul. Even the atmosphere was now itself a heavy cargo.
Once again, there was nothing around but the dirt road upon which I walked. While I walked in the direction in which I was prompted, away from the spot where the clown’s mouth once stood, I knew it didn’t matter, that I’d wind up in the same place regardless. So I traveled along the dirt road toward nothing as the familiar dead trees of this realm, again sparse in number as well as in appearance, dotted the landscape. Whatever remained of an old wood rail fence on either side of the road was so rotted that it was falling apart, with only bits and chunks of it left standing. It was in fear that I prayed that the ghouls were no longer here, for there was nowhere to hide from them. Realizing that in this oppressive humidity, I needed to conserve my energy until I needed it, I put that fear aside and kept my gait to a slow walk.
I hadn’t gone far when I heard the calliope music again, very low and far off into the distance this time. Rather than getting my hopes up, I dreaded what I would find when I got to its source. As I walked toward it, the flat landscape suddenly changed to a low, dropping slope. Downhill, in the distance, I saw brightly colored lights, loud and garish against the drab countryside.
While I had continued my slow pace, without even noticing another spatial jump, I came upon the source of the lights all too soon. Judging distances in this nightmare land was tricky because the distances themselves tended to change. Things that seemed close could take forever to get to, and things that were far away were sometimes ridiculously easy to reach. As I approached the lights, the calliope music started up again, becoming gradually and normally louder until I had arrived at some kind of carnival midway.
A run-down chain link fence enclosed the area. Actually, I should say that it once enclosed it, for it had long since stopped doing its job. The ticket booth sat dead at the gates to the carnival, far past caring if anyone bought a ticket or not. When I walked into the carnival area proper, all the rides were closed, for there was neither anyone here to work them or to ride them. Everything was closed down; the carnival was deserted. The only signs of life were the lights that I saw from the distance and that had led my way, yet once I crossed the entrance gates into the park proper, they went dark as well and the music stopped. The Ferris wheel and the roller coaster appeared skeletal, standing stark and rusted against the gray, storm-clouded sky. Everything looked old and had a shoddy, decayed look and feel about it. Even the air in this place seemed to have a grimy, rank quality to it.
Slowly, I walked through the midway looking for signs of life, almost hoping I wouldn’t find any. Even as a child, carnivals and fairs held an unhealthy feeling for me. I always found them a little creepy, especially the traveling, transient ones. It was only the crowds that provided the gaiety, an element that was notably absent today. Since t
his carnival was the only thing in sight, I was sure that it was the only thing that even existed in this forsaken land, for like the tomb and the crumbling shack, it was most likely the sole point if this particular section of this dismal, dismaying realm. I was at my destination and I dreaded it, for I knew in my heart that there would be nothing good here. This was an evil place. I could feel it.
I wished that I could wake up, but I knew that even though this place had the look and feel of a nightmare, it was real. Almost as if on cue, a bead of sweat ran down my face, reminding me of that fact. I knew that when the time was right and when Arrosha became bored with playing with me, that unless I could stop her, she could and would kill me. Edmond, my real Edmond, had told me as much.
As I sauntered about the deserted complex, for the first time since walking through the third door and for a few minutes, at least, I wasn’t dealing with some attack or another. I had time to think and I almost wished I didn’t. Now I had to face the truth that I was presently existing inside of a real living nightmare. This was nothing from which I could wake; it was not a movie I could leave if it got too intense. I was trapped in a realm where there were no exits.
A slight wind started up, making the old, rusted carnival rides squeak and groan, sounds of mechanical objects far beyond the need of simple oiling. It startled me and I jumped. I looked around nervously. The sound of the squealing metal acted as a reminder that I needed to keep on alert, that ghouls could be skulking around any corner. I stopped my reflections and proceeded slowly and deliberately, once again becoming very aware of my surroundings. I put one foot in front of the other with care, as aware now as any policeman entering a building in which he knew armed perpetrators were hiding.
Then, as suddenly as it sprang up, the wind stopped altogether, and along with it, the creaking of the rides. Looking at their skeletons against the sky, I wondered if anyone was ever killed on these rides in a past incarnation. Knowing Arrosha as I did now, I was sure the answer had to be yes.
I continued to walk along slowly, suspecting danger at every turn. When I came to the middle of the carnival, I heard the calliope music start up again. Arrosha was using it to set me on edge and it was working. Once I rounded the bumper cars, I saw the lights were on at the freak show. It was the second time I’d passed it. When I’d come this way before, this particular “attraction” was closed. Since this was now the only exhibit that showed any sign of life, I knew this was where Arrosha wanted me to be. A recorded voice, very hard to understand over the old speaker system, then joined in with the calliope music as, in garbled manner, it announced its “come one, come all” sales pitch.
I approached the exhibit slowly, my guard up. When I reached it without incident, its lights began to flash, but it was quite deserted. The music and the voice stopped, leaving the carnival, once again unnaturally quiet. The doors at the entrance to the freak show were still closed for business, but I tried them anyway. Locked. I backed up from the exhibit and studied it. It was a seedy, squalid-looking attraction. Even the tent itself was dirty and moth-eaten.
Five large posters that had seen better days advertised the exhibit, three widthwise across the top and one at each side of the ticket booth. “Nightmares of Science”, the exhibit billed itself. Of the three posters above, the first was a snake with a girl’s head. It was flanked to the right by a mentalist with an oversized brain who was levitating a very scantily clad woman, while to the left marched quite animated, almost cartoon-like skeletons, dripping blood as they walked through a graveyard. The poster to the left of the ticket booth bragged a rather well-muscled red-eyed, wild-eyed lizard man, drooling and raging against jailhouse bars, while the one to the right boasted a seaweed-laden swamp creature carrying away a screaming, even more scantily clad woman.
I now recognized this particular nightmare. It was not so much the carnival rides, but rather the freak shows and their posters which always frightened me as a child whenever my family had taken our yearly trip to the parish fair. I always found them creepy and depressing with their half-amateurish, distasteful crudeness. A cheap and trashy semi-sexual vulgarity seemed to course through them, appealing to the base in most of us. No matter how sordid or unsavory the subject matter, they had a smutty sleaziness that appealed to that coarse, unhealthy part of the human psyche that had a fascination with the twisted steal and human blood intertwined of auto accidents, to the part of us that wants to watched the horrific in movies and steal ourselves against greater and greater shocks. No matter how strange, sad or pitiable the actual “attractions”, the oddities themselves were inside the tent, the posters turned the strangeness of their unfortunate qualities from something that should garner empathy and compassion into something dirty and unsavory. Feeding not on our need to help the less fortunate, but on our opposing, usually stronger voyeuristic traits, turning even normal people momentarily into sordid peeping Toms. It had been so long since I’d been to a fair that I didn’t know if the posters still were that way, but those were the ones of my childhood, the ones that I remembered, the ones upon which Arrosha was capitalizing. These particular posters looked old, and their once garish and gaudy colors were now faded, their paper, like the tent they advertised, shabby and tattered. Yet while their colors were well-faded, they still retained that loud, exploitative quality that made people want to stay away and go inside at the same time. It was a quality that seemed to speak opposing messages to the opposing sides of human nature, so often portrayed as the angel sitting on one shoulder, while simultaneously the devil sat on the other. The calliope started to play again, this time at so low a pitch I had to strain to hear it.
I was transfixed, unable to stop looking at these posters, momentarily forgetting even about the ghouls. My own simultaneous fear and fascination were fanned by everything around me in a way it had not been since I was a child. I became lost as I stood there, lost in the look of the decaying tent and posters, overtaken by the heat and the humidity, the dirtiness of the air and of the unhealthy smells around me.
It was awhile before I realized that the recording had quit hawking its curiosities, leaving the low, steady melody of the calliope alone to turn into background music, a lullaby of sorts, lulling me into a trance. Time seemed to have stopped.
For the first time in a long time, I remembered a particular nightmare, the recurring nightmare theme of my childhood days. I remembered standing in this very spot as a child, in front of these particular posters that had cemented themselves into my subconscious, transfixed, nothing happening yet. These elements and feel were always the same, but the nightmare, while it always began the same, always ended differently, with various monsters, various dangers that would whip me into a frenzy of horror so extreme that my mind would rouse me and I could escape into wakefulness, soaked with sweat, unable to go back to sleep again.
I wondered now how many times in my dreams I had stood here, in front of these very posters that had been on display that one particular trip to the fair the year, that year I was in Kindergarten and so impressionable. They had burned themselves so deeply into my subconscious as I had stood here, on this very spot, until the nightmare they inspired took on a life of its own. The recurring nightmare had been so intense that I could not believe that I’d even forgotten it until now.
I’d been slowly backing away from the freak show until I realized I’d made my way to the popcorn and corndog stand. Suddenly, I became aware of something touching or crawling on my hair, so light that I could hardly feel it. I tensed up, whisking around immediately. Something or someone was behind me. I jumped.
It was Geoffrey.
“Stop doing that!” I ordered.
“Hi!,” he said. “Miss me?”
“What’re you doing here?” I asked, making it clear that his presence was not welcome.
“What, you’re not glad to see me?” he replied.
“No, Geoff, I’m not glad to see you. I asked you a question. What’re you doing here? How did you get here?”
>
“I got here the same way you did. Through that passageway at the shack.”
“Then where’s everybody else? Ben and Illea, they were right behind us in the passageway. They should be here, too.”
“Ben’s a no-show, Ash, but Illea made it just fine. Well, maybe not just fine, but she made it. I can’t tell you, but I can show you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’ll have to be patient and see for yourself.”
“While I’m waiting, let me ask you. What are you doing in that ridiculous outfit?” He was dressed like a Broadway revue’s idea of an old-timey flim-flam man. A straw hat, white shirt, baggy pants held up with both a belt and suspenders, a red bow-tie, Geoffrey was a walking cliché.
“Oh, this? It was Arrosha’s idea. She loves theatrics, haven’t you noticed by now?”
I turned back toward the sideshow and we slowly walked toward it.
“Man, you were really into those posters. Seen them before somewhere?” he asked, as if he already knew the answer but was goading me.
“Yeah, you could say that,” I told him.
“You know, the funny thing about these posters is that they always over promise. The stuff in the tent is never as good, never as interesting as the posters make it out to be. I used to be disappointed all the time. Like, I remember this one poster I saw at a county fair when I was a kid and it was cool, it was really, really cool,” he said, getting a little too giddy and having too much fun relishing the memory. “It was this vampire woman, y’know, but her vampire teeth weren’t like in the movies. They were long, really long. And she had red eyes but she was really, really sexy. Big tits, long legs, great figure. And she was mostly naked in this super-tight, trashy, torn dress, you know, the kind of dress that makes a woman look even more naked than when she’s not wearing anything at all. Man, was she hot.”
“Illea was right, Geoffrey. You’ll screw anything.”
The Nightmare Game Page 58