Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  Cate holds a twenty-dollar bill instead of her son and no longer is she hungry, the appetite for junk food replaced with a gut-wrenching feeling of losing him. The man leaning through the window balances a pair of hefty golden corn dogs in one hand, the other expecting money. She hands him the bill, not remembering having taken the cotton candy.

  “Ma’am?”

  He holds her food, calling for her as she calls for Ian.

  “Did you see a boy,” Cate says to the couple, her hand waist-high to estimate height, “blond hair, red and white striped shirt?”

  Ian had chosen his outfit to match the tents he’d seen from the road when they were first setting up the carnival, she knew, because he had pestered her the entire week to go.

  Shaking their heads, they take her place as she steps out of line.

  Hundreds fill the food court and labyrinth of walking paths.

  “Ma’am?” the man calls again.

  She no longer cares about the food or the money. She holds onto the cotton candy like a beacon, hoping Ian will see the pink light and come running from out of the darkness.

  “One more ride, after we eat something,” Mom says.

  She drags him through the crowd, making her own path. Behind them, Ian’s wake is swallowed by kids able to ride the bigger rides (by themselves), drunken men stumbling around and yelling, hanging off each other, beers sloshing over plastic cups (even though Ian knew there’s this place called the beer tree where they’re supposed to drink), and other kids—Ian’s age—dragged around by their parents.

  Heavy metal music blasts from speakers hidden around the rides, and then pop music, and then what the older kids at school call dub step, and then country. The music changes as rapidly as the scenery, fading in and out as they make their way from the rides to the food court.

  He has enough tickets clenched in his fist for two rides, but his mom wants to go with him on the Ferris wheel after they eat and that will eat all ten that are left.

  “One last ride,” she had said, meaning either the marvel of their day would soon end, or they’d be going to the stupid adult stuff, like seeing the animals, or going to the building with all the paintings and quilts, or to the place with the judged fruits and vegetables and jarred stuff, which they could see any other day by going to the grocery store.

  And they still hadn’t played any games.

  “Step up, son,” says a man who isn’t his father. He holds a softball that’s supposed to be tossed into a tilted basket without bouncing out. “It’s easy,” he says, tossing the ball underhand, and it is easy because it stays in the basket, and he wasn’t even looking at it.

  “You can win one of these to take home.”

  Stuffed animals bigger than real animals hang from their necks.

  “Can we play games?”

  “After we eat, maybe.”

  Maybe means no most times.

  The man with unkempt hair and brownish teeth leans out of the booth. Three baskets are lined behind him, no one else playing his game.

  “Free game for the boy,” he says.

  “Mom!”

  “There are no free games,” she says, pulling him along.

  The man puts his hand to his heart.

  “Honest. One free toss.”

  “Please, Mom?”

  “A gift from me to you,” the man says. “No money involved, I promise. Let the boy win something to take home. One free throw.”

  They stop.

  A bright disc of moon shines onto them.

  Ian already knows he wants the dragon. It’s red and about two feet long and has a forked tongue hanging out of its mouth.

  The man wanting him to win the stuffed animal is within what his mom had warned as “grabbing distance”, holding out a yellow dimpled softball like they have in the batting cages. He tosses another behind his back, which spins in mid-air and lands in the basket.

  “One,” says his mom.

  “There we go! Step up to the counter here, but don’t lean over, and simply toss it in.”

  He throws another spinning ball and makes it in, and Ian thinks he might have it down. It just takes some backspin and needs to brush the upper, back portion of the basket.

  Ian takes the ball, tries to copy the technique. The throw looks similar, but the ball hits the bottom of the basket and comes shooting out.

  “Good try! I think you almost have it down.” He holds out another yellow ball. “One more go at it.”

  “That’s how they work,” his mom whispers to him. “See?”

  “One more for the boy.”

  “No thank you,” she says.

  The man in the booth sets the ball on the counter. “Try it again. No gimmicks. I want to see the boy get one in. You can try it, too,” he says, placing a ball in front of her as well.

  This time his mom’s the one smiling, but her teeth are much whiter. She hesitates and drops Ian’s hand.

  “One more,” she says.

  She picks up the ball and throws it underhand, but doesn’t put any spin on it so it bounces back at her and she has to pick it off the ground.

  “The boy’s going to do it,” the man says. “I have a good feeling about this one.”

  Ian takes his turn and again concentrates. He needs to throw it like last time, but not as high. Softly, he lets it roll off the tips of his fingers and there’s plenty of backspin. It hits the basket in the right spot, nearly rolls out, but remains inside.

  “He’s a natural,” the man in the booth says, crouching behind the counter.

  Ian points to the dragon, but the man stands upright with a goofy smile. His prize is a cheap metallic-looking pinwheel tacked to the end of a straw that matches his shirt.

  “Ah, you want the dragon,” he says. “You gotta work your way up to that one by trading up from the smaller prizes.”

  He hadn’t noticed the various price levels until now.

  “That’s how they work,” his mom says.

  You flip the card in your hand to find the other side black. The white side, with the message about the underwater Ferris wheel, contains only the invitation to ride it and nothing more. The lanky man in the pinstripe suit is gone. You took the card and read the words and sometime in between, the man resembling a make-up-less clown vanished into the crowd, his pinstripe coattails consumed by kids holding balloon animals.

  Cate wanders, but not far. She doesn’t want to stray from the food court because Ian can’t be far and he’s not prone to exploring on his own. She nearly steps onto a lone ticket, remembering Ian’s longing for one final ride, and retrieves it from the ground.

  Like money in his wallet, Ian counts the red tear-off tickets to make sure there are still ten. He lets them accordion out, the last ticket lapping a puddle of a spilled soda. He holds his mom’s hand as she drags him around. It would be much easier to count them if he had his other hand. He tugs and his mom tugs back to let him know she’s in control and that counting won’t be very easy.

  He’s not even hungry, but they pass through ever-changing music and laughing and cheering and the shrill of those flipping cages on the Zipper, kids screaming through the fast loop of the Ring of Fire—yellow and red bulbs flashing in circular patterns as the coaster cycles, first clockwise, then counter-clockwise—and the mesmerising vertical array of green, white and blue bars of light on the Graviton as it spins like a flying saucer dreidel.

  A tongue of tickets trails behind as he counts. He folds them, one onto the next, with the flip of his index finger and thumb. He gets to five when a Goth girl he recognises from school bumps into his shoulder and jars them loose.

  They stop at a path of pavement to let a medic golf cart pass, and that’s when Ian notices what he thinks is a clown. He doesn’t resemble the colourful clowns with the big feet and honking noses and painted faces, and he’s not one of those clowns seen around the park squeak-tying balloons into poodles and pirate swords. This one’s unremarkable, except for the scrunched doily thing around
his neck. He looks like someone from an old black-and-white photograph, like the ones hanging on his grandma’s wall: pictures of his grandparents’ parents. He thinks of this because the man is not smiling—lips pressed in a flat line—like old people in old photographs, dressed in what he thinks is an old black suit and jacket.

  And he stares, eyes not moving away.

  The cart is suddenly gone, the world no longer paused. A soft tug on his hand tells him they’re moving again and Ian looks at his feet for only a moment because someone’s stepped on his laces and he nearly stumbles. Looking back, the man is gone, the crowd alive in his place.

  “You’ve never had cotton candy before, have you,” his mom says.

  Ian shakes his head no, although she doesn’t see him do it.

  “When I was your age, I loved cotton candy,” she says over the noise. “Me and your father used to go to the Brendan Carnival every year when it was still around.”

  When Dad was still around.

  She always started conversations this way, always talking about what they did as a couple before Dad died, before a non-drunk driver clipped his car and drove him off the cliffs and into the ocean where he drowned.

  “Your father always liked the candied apples. He had a sweet tooth. Sometimes we’d share the…I’m not sure what it was called, but it was multicoloured popcorn in these little rectangular shapes wrapped in plastic; each clustered section of colour was a different flavour, like orange or cherry or grape, kind of like caramel corn but different. I haven’t had that in years.”

  The symphony of carnival noise dulls the closer they get to the food court, the lights brighter, and the stench of puke, beer and cigarette smoke lingering, yet overpowered by Chinese food, barbeque and deep-fried everything.

  “Wait until you try the corn dogs. Your father used to love those, too.”

  Nine tickets. There are only nine.

  “Mom, we need to get another ticket to ride the—”

  “No rides until after we eat. Here, this one looks good.”

  They stop in front of a trailer lit up in yellow bulbs and the entire thing glows. One of the smaller bulbs in the word SNACKS is missing, like his tenth ticket.

  You attempt to follow him, but he weaves in and out of the multitude of people as if gliding over ice: a glimpse of a coattail, a pinstripe leg, night-black hair. He is quickly absorbed into crowds of parents and children and ages in-between. The wind picks up and you drop the card, which flaps along the ground like a dead butterfly. It flips over and along the ground as easily as it flipped in your hand, and you can read the words in a strobe-like flutter of black and white—the invitation for the ride.

  Cate turns a boy around, but it’s not Ian.

  She calls his name again and then sees him standing in front of a game booth fifty feet away. Warmth flushes through her body as she remembers to breathe, the thought of losing Ian more than she can handle. Losing a husband is one thing, but losing their only son who resembles him so undeniably…

  “Ian!” she says, willing her voice to reach him.

  He turns just then, but not in her direction, and her heart drops.

  Running to him, she continues to call his name, jouncing shoulders against those in her path and nearly trampling people over entirely. A baby stroller built for two trips her and she falls and scrapes her knee, rises, and keeps going, somehow never losing grasp of the lone red ticket and the cotton candy she points to the sky. Ian passes in and out of view, as if projected against the throng of fairgoers from a spinning shadow lamp.

  “Ian!”

  One moment he’s there, another he’s not.

  A flash of silver and the pinwheel he no longer wants falls to the ground. A gangly man leans over to pick it up—one of the carnival folk, perhaps. He’s the only immobile person in the multitude and wears a black pinstripe suit, as out of place in the crowd as would be a dandelion disguised in a bouquet of yellow roses. An aged neck-ruffle strangles his throat and he smiles as she approaches.

  He offers the pinwheel, but she doesn’t want it. She wants her son.

  Cate looks around him frantically.

  “Did you see the boy who dropped that?”

  The silence tells her he’s mute. He stares at her, expressionless, his face drained of both colour and emotion.

  “I’m looking for my son, Ian. He dropped this,” she says, taking it from him, “and you just picked it up. Did you see where he was going?”

  He doesn’t point, nor does he say anything. He simply takes his finger and spins the cheap toy on the stick and magically reveals a card from one of his shirtsleeves. The man stands there a moment before facing the ocean pier.

  He tugs on his mom’s hand, but she doesn’t tug back to let him know she’s still in control. Glancing up, Ian finds that he’s not holding his mother’s hand at all, but the hand of a tall man with long arms that dangle well past his knees. He can’t remember ever letting go, but he must have, and somehow grabbed this man instead. Clammy fingers curl around his own. It’s the man who isn’t a clown, the old photograph man he saw before.

  Ian jump-startles and the man lets go.

  He isn’t scary because he doesn’t wear a fake face like regular clowns who pretend to be happy or sad or sometimes mad. He has a normal face.

  He hands Ian a card.

  “Are you supposed to be a mime?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “I read a story once about a mime and he never said anything, either. He would pretend to be stuck in invisible boxes and climb ropes that weren’t really there. But he wore make-up and had a white face and black lips like Charlie Chaplin. I don’t know who that is, but my mom says he looked like Charlie Chaplin.”

  He shows Ian the rest of the cards, which are bound together with a rubber band. His dad used to do card tricks, so Ian knows what to do. He’s supposed to take a card and look at it without showing and hand it back. Ian’s card is a stained joker with worn edges and a crease down the middle. The joker wears a jester hat and rides a unicycle and looks drawn in scribbles of pen.

  Before handing it back, the cards are splayed before him, at least two dozen. They are all different. About half are standard playing cards of different makes, some old, some new; mixed within are handmade cards like the joker, along with some baseball cards, a library card, credit cards and a few driver’s licenses from different states.

  Ian hands the card to him face-down and watches as it’s shuffled into the deck over and over again, and in lots of different ways. The unsmiling carny—his mom would call him—bends the cards and bends them back like his dad used to, and shuffles them flat in the air with his thumbs and then reverses the cards in an arc to slide them into place—what his dad deemed “the bridge”.

  He hands the deck to Ian.

  “I pick one?”

  The man doesn’t say anything.

  Expecting his card to be on top because the back looks similar, Ian lifts a three of diamonds, which looks as though someone with shaky fingers drew the number with black crayon and then smudged three red diamonds on the card with lipstick. The one after it isn’t his card either, but a jack of clubs. He flips over the next card with stats printed on the back and it’s a rookie card for someone who used to play on a team called the Royals; over the player’s face is a smiley face sticker with the eyes scratched out. The next card is a VISA. The next is a king of hearts from a standard Bicycle deck, followed by a ripped-in-half five dollar bill with a spade drawn in Sharpie over the president’s face, and then a seven of clubs, and then another hand-drawn card.

  Confused, Ian hands the deck back to him.

  The man wraps a rubber band around them and slides them into his suit pocket.

  “What’s the trick?”

  The man holds out his hand, as if peddling for money.

  That’s how they work, his mom would say.

  Three of the fingers curl until he’s pointing at Ian’s pinwheel.

  As if on cue,
a cool breeze spins the cheap metallic flower around, which Ian didn’t want anyway; he had wanted the dragon but they didn’t have enough money to pay for more games, even though he would have given up food to pay for a few more tosses into the basket so he could win the bigger prize. Dad would have let them play. If he hadn’t died, they’d have enough money to play more games and ride more rides and really have fun.

  Ian gladly gives it to him. In the process, the man who looks sort of like a clown clumsily drops it as part of a gag and they both fetch for it on the ground. Lying next to the cheap toy is Ian’s joker card, which the trickster silently places into his pocket with the others.

  He pulls out another card, but this time it’s not one of the strange playing cards; it’s a business card with a black side that reflects the moon and a white side that absorbs its light. A trade for the pinwheel, it seems. Printed on the white side is an invitation.

  You hand the carnival worker five red tickets and he lets you past the chain and through the gate. A set of aluminium steps leads to a grated path to the ten-storey wheel. Every angle of metal is lit by long neon lights and flashing bulbs that cycle in hypnotic patterns. The cart awaits—the slightly rocking yellow one with the number eight on the side. You are alone for the ride as you were in line, the carnival empty. A mechanical click and the wheel moves. The world drops with the wind at your back. You elevate in a reverse motion with the giant silver axle as you rotate around. Rods and lights and the other carts fall as you rise. At the peak, black water rises from the pier, and for a moment you float above it all, nothing but sky and water and the thin line between. The entire lit wheel is cast against the water, appearing as though there are riders beneath the placid surface revolving horizontally, perhaps looking up to you in the stars. You see your reflection on the water, and then you free-fall fly, arms stretched outwards, the wind at your face. The water rising.

  COME SEE THE UNDERWATER FERRIS WHEEL

  Cate reads the card a second time and when she looks up from it, the man in the pinstripe suit is gone, like her son.