by Frank Tuttle
I sidestepped, blinded, fearing a blow. Sidestepped and then charged, whirling Toadsticker in a semicircle, hoping to force Thorkel back if he was bearing down upon me.
Toadsticker bit. The howl fell silent. I stabbed and kept stabbing and when I could see again nothing remained but a threadbare coat, skewered neatly on Toadsticker’s blade.
Pants, boots, hair. All lay in a heap on the floor.
Smoke from the fire I’d set burned my eyes. Red flames raced to the top of the tent and flattened out, spreading quickly.
I tugged at the rope. Darla tugged back, and kept pulling, and I followed it out while the black tent burned around me.
“She wasn’t there, was she?” said Darla. “You smell like smoke.”
I coughed. Smoke was all I could smell. “They moved her,” I said. When I turned back, the black tent was gone.
Passersby bumped into us. The crowd suddenly pressed in, forcing us to take shelter between two close-set outhouses.
Above, a few wisps of smoke coiled up, only to vanish into the night.
“Did you see the carnival master?”
I nodded and cleared my throat. “We talked a bit. I killed him again. How long was I in there?”
“Three minutes.” Shouts and laughter rose up from the crowd. People turned and pointed and laughed.
“Honey, did the nice man say anything about monsters before you killed him a second time?”
I pawed at my watering eyes.
“It’s a parade!” someone shouted. “Hey, a parade!”
The Hall of Horrors had disgorged its occupants onto the midway, and they were stretched out in a line, shambling, hopping, crawling, or lurching right toward Darla and me.
The skeletal dragon was out in front, waving its boney head from side to side and snapping its jaws. With each snap, a fang or two flew out, but enough remained to make the thing a threat.
I could only see the taller members of the impromptu parade through the crowd. The cave hydra towered up, heads waving and bleating. Magog the moth-eaten were-bear’s head rose above the crowd. It sniffed the air, its dead unblinking eyes turning this way and that. Engorgia limped along behind him, her horns already drooping and wobbling.
The dragon’s head stopped pivoting. Its empty eye sockets remained fixed on me.
“Time to go,” I said to Darla. I yanked Toadsticker from his sheath. We darted through a break in the crowd.
“Where are we going?” shouted Darla. She had a revolver in her right hand, but was careful to keep the barrel pointed at the ground.
“No damned idea,” I said. “But we’d better get there fast.”
I used Toadsticker to clear the way, and we raced down the midway. A few glances over my shoulder confirmed that the crowd, which was cheering and clapping, kept the assorted horrors from pursuing us at speed.
The smoke I’d inhaled touched off another coughing fit. I judged we had enough of a lead to rest for a moment, so we found a spot by a love potion stand and I hacked until my chest hurt.
A clown charged out of the shadows, menace in his eyes and a cudgel in his hand. Darla felled him with one shot. The crack of her revolver made a few passersby jump and look around, but guns are still so new to the average Rannite that no one associated the noise with danger.
The clown toppled face-down in the dirt. People laughed and stepped over him.
“Oh no,” said Darla.
“You didn’t have a choice,” I said.
“Not him,” she replied, pointing. “That.”
It took me a moment to see what she’d seen, and another split second to understand what the rippling gray bulk just beginning to show an arc of fabric over the top of the carousel was.
I was seeing a balloon being filled with the magical gas that lifts them into the sky.
“You think they’ve taken Buttercup there?” asked Darla.
I wiped my mouth. “Sure I do,” I said. “They knew we were coming. Knew we’d find the black tent. So they scattered the mirrors, let loose the horrors, hoping we’d get distracted.”
More of the net-enclosed sphere rose up, slowly taking shape against the near-dark sky.
“Can’t let them get in the air,” I said. The parade of horrors spotted us and let loose a chorus of howls and screams loud enough to be heard over the jubilant crowd. I watched the dragon bunch and heave, shoving people aside, knocking them to their feet. A few swords fell harmlessly on its moth-eaten flanks.
Of Darla, I will say this. She looked at the swelling balloon and she nodded. She deftly replaced the round she’d expended felling a murderous clown. No word of protest, no query as to how we would prevent the craft from ascending, no expression of doubt or defeat.
“I’ve always wondered what crows see,” she said. “Duck.”
I did so. She shot the clown sneaking up behind me and off we went, to catch the balloon as it rose.
By the time we pushed our way to the carousel, the crowd was turning ugly.
Men who probably hadn’t handled a sword since the War had hilts in hands once again. The ones without swords found clubs or hammers or the like. In keeping with Rannit’s progressive attitudes toward equality of the sexes, women too were arming themselves, with whatever they could find.
The few remaining clowns moved in tight little bands, scurrying here, darting there, managing to avoid most of the blows sent their way. The hastily-armed crowd was heading for the ticket gate, and the road toward home.
I wasn’t sure what had spooked them until we got close enough to hear the music that accompanied the turning of the carousel.
When I’d heard it before, it was the sort of tuneless organ bleating one associates with circuses.
The noise issuing from beneath the carousel now was a deep, angry muttering. The words were long and guttural and they weren’t Kingdom.
The carousel was turning, though no Ogres were present to push the two long handles that protruded from the base. Wild-eyed horses rose and fell on poles as the carousel turned, each one forever pursuing the painted mount ahead of it. Mixed in with the horses were other beasts—lions, a dire wolf, a hound, a hare.
Half a dozen of the poles were empty, wrenched in half as if their wooden carousel mounts had up and fled.
A huge black dire wolf wrenched suddenly against the red-and-white striped pole that impaled it. Snarling, it arched its back and set upon the pole with fangs and claws. Splinters flew.
It turned its mad eyes upon us and tried to leap free. The pole cracked but held, and the painted wolf howled.
The last of the crowd took flight. The motion of the carousel took the dire wolf out of sight, but the sounds of its struggle were only barely abated.
We ran. I took us around the carousel so that we matched its rotation. With every step I dreaded hearing the thud of the dire wolf’s paws hit the ground.
We’d gone maybe ten steps past the carousel when the wolf howled in triumph and came charging after us.
I whirled, Toadsticker at ready. The wolf was a blur in the shadows, legs pumping, back arched, massive jaws snapping.
Motion. There came a great cry, and a second dark mass slammed into the dire wolf. There was a roar, and a howl, and the sound of wet wood snapping against a single wrenching blow.
Slim the runt Troll rose to his feet. The dire wolf lay still.
“More come,” said Slim. Freed from the obstruction of the revelers, the occupants of the Hall appeared, surging around the carousel and hooting in triumph.
Slim hefted his scrap of steel rail. “I sing a second death song!” he cried. “This is a good day!”
He turned and fell upon the monsters. His blunt length of steel flashed like a sword as it rose and fell.
Darla and I made for the balloon. We could see it now, obscured partly by the riding wheel and a line of car
nival wagons. It was maybe a quarter of the way inflated, just beginning to strain against the lines and net-like shrouds that held it pinned to the ground.
Beside the balloon the gondola sat, ready to be hauled skyward by thick, oily ropes attached in pairs to each corner. The gondola showed a single door, and it was shut. Shut, and flanked by a dozen grim-faced clowns and a resurrected Thorkel, who leaned on his cane at the edge of a lantern’s faint glow.
“I’m getting tired of killing you,” I said. I didn’t stop until a dozen paces lay between Thorkel and Darla and me. I didn’t look back, though I could hear furtive shufflings in the dark. Slim still roared out a Troll battle song, but his voice was distant, and growing weaker with each bellowed refrain.
Thorkel smiled. His hair was black this time around. Black and ragged, hanging down past his shoulders.
“A brave effort,” he said. He turned his eyes to Darla, and tipped his hat to her. “There may be a place for you in our ranks,” he said. “We recently lost our living dead girl.”
“Maybe you haven’t heard,” I said. “The show’s closing. No more acts. No more darker carnivals. You should have steered clear of Rannit. You won’t be moving on.”
“Oh, but we will,” said Thorkel. He nodded to someone or something behind us. “We will soon be aloft. You will stay alive long enough to watch your lady die, and be resurrected. Hold them fast,” he added, not to us.
I turned. Maybe half the Hall of Horrors had survived their encounter with Slim, but that left me outnumbered a dozen to one. They were shambling my way, claws, paws, and hands outstretched.
Darla’s twin revolvers appeared. “Alfreda Ordwald was a child,” she said to Thorkel. “A terrified country girl. I’m none of those things. Come and get me.”
“You’ve irritated my wife,” I said. “That’s bad. But this is worse.” I reached into my pocket, pulled out a grenade, and stuck my index finger through the silver ring. “Remember these? They make things go boom. Things like you, or the monsters sneaking up behind me, or balloons. Especially balloons.”
Thorkel sneered. “I remember. Surely you remember that lifting gas is dangerous. Employ that weapon, or the ones at the edge of the trees, and you’ll kill your precious glowing child.” He shook his cane at me. The balloon behind him left the ground, slowly straining skyward. The lines that would soon lift the gondola into the night followed, uncoiling as they rose.
“No matter,” he said. “Too late.”
It was hard to hear, above all the carnival noise. But I’d been listening, while we talked, and though it was faint, Buttercup’s familiar banshee keening was audible, and growing louder by the moment.
“Wrong again,” I said. “Truth is, I’m just in time. You wanted to know what the glowing child is, you bastard? Well I’ll tell you. She’s a banshee, older than you and your sad little puppet show, and that sound you’re just beginning to hear is her banshee wail, and let me tell you one thing, Mr. Thorkel, that furious little banshee is calling for you.”
I pulled the pin. I whirled and threw the grenade at the nearest of the monsters. Darla unloaded on Thorkel until I caught her around her waist and threw her to the ground, covering her body with mine as best I could.
The grenade went off at the precise instant the gunners spotted the rising balloon and sawed the gaudy thing in half. The lifting gas caught, filling the sky with a great burst of rolling fire, and then the flaming envelope came wafting down on half a dozen tents, setting them all instantly alight.
Monsters bellowed. The gondola, which had risen perhaps a foot off the ground, fell back with a thud and the breaking of timbers. Bits of burning balloon wafted down like Hell’s own snow.
I rolled to my knees. Darla put her elbows on the dirt and emptied another revolver into Thorkel. I snatched up Toadsticker and swung at a clown, who yelped and charged away, dropping his club as he ran.
“Boy!” came a shout. Mama Hog emerged from the billows of smoke, her bloody cleaver dripping in her hand. “Boy, where are you?”
“Over here,” I shouted. Thorkel moved toward my voice. He wasn’t walking too well. Darla swapped her spent guns for new and kept firing, but Thorkel didn’t fall.
“I hear Buttercup!” shouted Mama.
The grenade left my ears ringing. But I too could hear Buttercup’s song now, louder than before, plain enough to sound over the hungry crackle of burning tents.
“Buttercup!” I yelled. “It’s safe. Come on home.”
She heard me. I know she did. Because her cry suddenly rose up, clear and loud enough to sound from horizon to horizon, from deep to high, from Heaven to Hell, and all points in between.
There came a shattering, as if a thousand tall mirrors broke together.
There came a silence, as though every throat alive paused to take in a breath.
Buttercup appeared, floating through the roof of the gondola, coming to light with her right foot resting daintily on its highest, sharpest point.
She glowed. She glowed and she smiled and she raised her favorite skull aloft, and then the Dark Carnival came alive with smashings and screams and howls.
Slim came ambling out of the smoke. His railroad steel was bent nearly double. He flung it down and moved to stand by Mama.
“I have slain things vile and unclean,” he said, Troll voice booming. “I need only sing ten more death songs, and my soul is cleansed of evil.”
“See that thing with the ruined face?” I said. “Called itself the carnival master?”
“I see it,” said Slim.
“Do me a favor and hammer it into the dirt.” I raised my voice so the few clowns who remained could hear. “Then do the same with the rest of them, if they’re still here.”
Slim nodded and headed for Thorkel. Clowns scattered.
Buttercup floated from her perch, sailing to land in front of Darla and me.
She giggled and spun while her skull whispered nonsense.
Wild laughter sounded from the sky. Something low and fast soared above us, leaving rolling billows of smoke in its wake. Something else troubled the smoke-filled sky, passing above with a sound like the beating of ten thousand small wings.
Cannons fired, one-two-three. A single round hurtled past overhead, whistling as it flew, scattering the many wings. The rotary guns barked, sending tracers arcing across the sky. The witch howled in fury from above, and Mama Hog turned her face upward.
“I calls you out,” shrieked Mama. “Get down here and fight!”
The airborne witch howled with laughter in reply.
Slim reached Thorkel’s wobbling frame, steadied the wiggling thing with one massive Troll hand, and brought a fist down square and hard.
The circus master simply flew apart. Slim grunted and stomped the empty clothes a few times.
“Unworthy of a song,” observed the Troll. “Behind you.”
I turned. Gertriss ran up to join us, Sara and Victor and a halfdead I didn’t know gliding at her side. Each of the vamps carried a long gun, and I was glad at the sight of them.
“We cut the mastodons loose,” Gertriss said, grinning. “They’re gone. Won’t be another stampede.”
The witch dipped low and hurled a handful of snakes at Mama. Gunfire erupted from everyone save Slim and me, but the witch flew on, cackling merrily.
Mama aimed a few kicks at the snakes and cussed.
The dancing light from a dozen fires turned the carnival into something out of a Church painting depicting Hell. Debris lay everywhere. Dead clowns lay sprawled about, some on their backs, their brightly painted faces glistening in the flames.
Worse, things gathered in the shadows. Eyes glowed and blinked. Shapes moved, shuffling about, finding suitable nooks or crannies in which to hide or prepare to charge.
The column of flying things began to circle us, moving through the ruined carnival lik
e a tornado formed of hissing wind and black scraps of rags. I caught a glimpse of the many-legged spider, saw all eight of its bulbous black eyes glinting in the light of the fires.
“Any chance we can get to the cannons and the gunners?” I asked.
Victor shook his head no. “The situation has deteriorated,” he said. “There is a beast roaming the midway. Large. Reptilian. Are you familiar with the fossil record, Mr. Markhat?”
“Think one of you could sneak back there and summon the gunners and the cannon, clear the midway, get us?”
The unfamiliar halfdead nodded and stepped forward. She drew back her hood. Her hair was as white as her bloodless skin.
“Give me five minutes,” she said. She handed her long gun off to Sara. “I’ll move faster without it.”
Then she was gone, darting through the ring of monsters without raising so much as a grunt.
“Five minutes there, five back,” I said. Things in the dark rustled and whispered. “Everybody to the gondola. Put your backs to it. You’ve got to hold them off for ten minutes. Piece of cake.”
We moved. Things moved with us, none ready to pounce just yet, but I knew that moment wouldn’t be long off.
Ten minutes. We didn’t have ten minutes. We didn’t have enough guns or enough Trolls or enough magic swords to hold the entire Dark Carnival at bay.
I put away my revolver, found the banshee-hair rope, slid it through my belt loops.
Darla saw. “No,” she said. “No, hon, you don’t have to. We can hold them back. Guns and cannons. On the way. You don’t have to go in there.”
“Buttercup,” I called. She came to me, did a pirouette, and held up her skull as if for me to kiss.
“I need to get inside that place,” I said. I shoved at the gondola’s ornate door, but it was locked, and probably ensorcelled as well. “Can you take me inside?”
Buttercup took my hand.
“I have to,” I said before Darla could speak again. “This isn’t over until the carnival is dead. They’ll just keep coming back.”
“Let the Corps handle it,” said Darla. “They’re coming. You said yourself they’d smash the place to dust and cinders. Let them.”