by Laird Barron
“Well, my uncles swallow the whole bit. Power of suggestion cannot be denied.”
“Fine. Go on.”
“They say it clouds the minds of outsiders. The carnival settles into an area, some gruesome murders occur, the carnival pulls stakes and moves on. The cycle repeats. Reports get filed, news stories are written. Locals squawk. Nothing comes of it, though. The outside world forgets, as if the incident is erased from memory. It becomes an urban legend, a wooly tall tale to scare the kids, and everybody accepts it as myth.
“Only family remembers the details. Blood kin and those who are so tangled up with the carnival they may as well be kin. Company members who flee? They disappear or wind up in pieces. Doesn’t matter where they run. Our last sword-swallower made it to Malaysia. Authorities found his arm in a hedge.
“The Gallows travel far and wide and the cycle continues. Sometimes it goes weeks, sometimes months, maybe even a year or two. The company members aren’t the ones who suffer the worst. Those victims in the woods? Locals. The curse cuts down innocent bystanders like a lawnmower through grass. I was around for the last occurrence. Ohio. Seventeen citizens in three weeks. Horrible, horrible shit. Not a peep in the national news.”
I gave this a few seconds to percolate in my imagination.
“Some freak has a hard-on for your uncles, okay. Obviously it’s an inside job.”
“Could be. Might be something stranger.”
“Either way, you gotta have a theory.”
“Sure, I’ve got suspicions. About all I got, though.”
“How many people work this joint?”
“A couple dozen.”
“Kind a narrows down the suspect list.”
“Jess, you don’t understand. This isn’t simple.”
“Doesn’t seem complicated either. Can’t the cops catch this murderer? Must be a trail of corpses strewn across the country. Clueless as law enforcement tends to be, brute force will out eventually. For the love of God, all those bodies, dude. Where’s Nancy Grace and Geraldo? This is national news. A CNN spectacular.”
“You’d think so,” he said.
“My instincts are razorblades, else I’d figure you were running a con, Bease. Is this reality TV? Got a camera crew stashed nearby?”
“Trust your instincts.”
“Dude, I’m open-minded, as you are intimately aware. What I saw in the field, how the cops reacted…None of it adds up. Sheriff Blondie seems to be in it to win it, though. What’s his story?”
“His great-grandfather was sheriff in ’65 when the, ah, inciting incident, occurred. Vinette, a woman who worked at the carnival, got butchered by a jealous suitor. That suitor went on to terrorize the countryside until Grandpa Holcomb helped bring him down with a load of double-aught buckshot. He didn’t get re-elected. Von’s the first Holcomb to be appointed sheriff since the curse took hold.”
“You keep using that word as if it’s not superstitious bullshit.”
Beasley dragged a cardboard box from under a table. He emptied its contents on the bed — a meticulously dissected series of clipped newspaper articles and photographs. The oldest were blurry, preserved from the decade of Flower Power and Vietnam, the newest had been shot recently. Articles about wild animal attacks, mysterious slayings, missing persons, all connected by some elusive thread. The connection seemed patently obvious — every article covering these incidents was juxtaposed with another featuring the Gallows Brothers Carnival.
He watched me thumb through the clippings.
“Curses might be country bumpkin nonsense, sure. I try to see it from the rustic perspective. Forget curses. Imagine…Imagine there’s a conspiracy. Nasty, violent, spans generations, and we’re going to put an end to it. You and me.”
“Conspiracies I can sink my teeth into.”
“Now we’re speaking the same language.”
“The authorities can’t make a dent in this case, what makes you think I can help?”
“Because we only need you to play a role—you get to stand in for the woman who got murdered back then. The Gallows, Victor, our resident guru, they all believe a reenactment of that original crime will allow them to interrupt it and break the curse. None of the ladies with the carnival has the guts to act as a decoy. I’m good at taking a person’s measure. My hunch is, you’ve got a gift for survival.”
I had another sip.
“Bait doesn’t sound fun.”
“Bait hides the hook.”
“This is about Alaska. Oh boy, you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think Eagle Talon qualifies me for what the fuck ever Freak-Olympics you got going on here.”
“Damned right it’s about Alaska. Alaska was the crucible that made you. Your life ended when that man slashed your throat. The old you went up in smoke. You’re a dancing star.”
“What did you say?” Fear stirred in my heart. Fear and an incongruous trickle of exultance. A sense of deeper purpose.
Beasley retrieved his flask.
“I recognized your face the second I walked into that tavern. What’s more, I recognized the light in your eyes. I wasn’t there looking for Ms. Goodbar or a heroine to pull our fat from the fire. I went there to get drunk because we’d failed to find a leading lady for the big night. Meeting you is fate. Can’t be anything less than the machinery of the universe clicking into place.”
“Flattering, except I still don’t understand what you want. Eagle Talon doesn’t mean anything. I went head to head with a creep and lived to tell. The media tried to spin the hero angle. It ain’t me. I’m a survivor, not a savior.”
“Remains to be seen, Jess. Come on, you need to speak with Conway. He’s the only one left alive from the bad days.”
“Ask the dismembered people in the den, they’d probably say these days are pretty lousy,” I said.
“The other bad days.”
* * *
On the way to the Knife Thrower’s tent, we crossed paths with Victor the Magician, the carnival’s resident fortune teller/mentalist. Youngish guy, seven or eight years my senior. He dressed in a white shirt and jeans. Lacking the glamour and glitz of a stage, his salt and pepper goatee belonged on a ski bum rather than a fortune teller or magician.
Victor did a double take at the sight of me. He clutched my hand and kissed it with unctuous ardor.
“Oh, you magnificent man,” he said to Beasley. “You have done the impossible. She is perfection.”
“Yeah?” Beasley said. His cheeks seemed ruddier than usual.
“No question. Ephandra must be wild with jealousy.” Victor finally released my hand. “My dear, it is a pleasure. You must visit Conway. Go, go! Time is short.”
The interior of the tent lay in gloom, although it didn’t matter — Conway the Knife Thrower blindfolded himself and continued to chuck the knives with eerie accuracy.
“Oh, Beasley, what have you done?” he said. He spoke in a deep, trained voice that made me marvel why he wasn’t an actor instead of a knife thrower. Tall, and muscular. Wouldn’t have guessed him for his mid-seventies. Raw-boned with the hands of a pianist. The Ace of Spades tattooed his left forearm.
He threw a brace of specially balanced knives at a slowly rotating wheel with a busty silhouette for a non-bull’s eye. A scantily-clad assistant would occupy the blank heart of the wheel whenever the curtain lifted again. I’d seen the chick, Gacy, stumble from the animal wrangler’s shack, hung-over and falling out of her sun and moon robe. Every fifth or sixth cast of a knife thunked solidly in the center of the silhouette. Obviously, Conway knew where she’d slept too. I’d caught a gander of Niko, the Lord of Beasts, and he was easy on the eyes. Conway had run afoul of an immutable law of physics—chicks dig a guy who knows his way around cats.
“I’m not sure if I should go into family matters with young Jessica,” Victor said. “For her own protection…It is unethical to inveigle her into our wretched troubles.”
“I agree,” I said. “This whole deal seems extremely personal.”
Beasley smoked a cigarette. His hair stuck every which way from crawling into the bushes. He smelled rank. Still sexy.
“There’s a bus station half an hour down the road, Jess. Say the word.”
I didn’t give the word. Could be my heart in my throat blocked the way. My ever-intensifying death wish might’ve compelled silent complicity, or whatever wish it was that had followed me since the debacle in Alaska. There was also the distinct possibility I desired round two in the sack with Beasley. What can I say? I’m a complicated woman.
“Okay, tell it,” Beasley said to his pal the Knife Thrower.
Conway shrugged and orated a real potboiler. Back in 1963, when the Gallows Carnival was purchased from a central European mountebank who shall remain nameless, some of the original players immigrated to the US and continued under new management. Chief among them, a pair of star-crossed lovers: Artemis, the Animal Trainer, and Vinette, lovely assistant to the Magician from the Black Sea. The Magician was a handsome and acerbic mature gentleman named Milo. Milo, a long-time widower, coveted the sexy, young Vinette and schemed to win her affection from his rival Artemis.
Predictably, nothing good came of this situation. Milo failed to woo the object of his affection through honest means. He turned to skullduggery, black magic, and plain dirty tricks. It failed. Then Artemis and Vinette announced their engagement and Milo lost the remainder of his wormy, rotten mind.
Upon the couple’s engagement night, while everyone else attended the celebratory feast, Milo slinked into the tent where the dancing bears, big cats, and wolves slept in their cages. Some beasts he poisoned and they died, foaming at the muzzle. Others he slew with a carbine. The aftermath proved so disturbing, even hardened veterans of World War II (and there’d been several on staff) wept at the carnage.
Ah, the worst remained. Innocent Vinette, who had no conception of the magician’s sickness, considering him a dear and trusted friend, slipped away from the supper to collect him. After searching high and low for the magician, she came upon the scene and screamed in horror to witness Milo skinning Artemis’s prize animal, a black wolf. A massive and terrifying beast, originally captured along the Mackenzie River, the wolf hadn’t gone down without a struggle—a savage slash of its fangs took a swathe of the magician’s face to naked bone.
Legend insisted Vinette had fled blindly, Milo on her heels. She in her dinner gown, he wrapped in the dripping pelt of the wolf, his face flayed. He brought her down in the field and tore her flesh with nails and teeth. When he had finished her off, the magician fled into the hills. His wounds festered, as did his madness. Over the course of a fortnight, he roamed the land, murdering farmers, truck stop waitresses, untended children, and other hapless folk.
Eventually, he took shelter in an abandoned wolf den on a desolate mountainside. The men of the carnival, led by an enraged and grieving Artemis, came with lanterns and rifles. Milo charged the hunters and they cut him down in a blaze of gunfire. He cursed them with his dying breath. And lo, a few years later, the carnival troupe became aware of a dark presence haunting the show. Mysterious and brutal killings began. Beasley had filled me in on the rest.
“Tonight is the fiftieth anniversary of Milo’s murder of Vinette,” Conway said.
“Of course it is.” I considered a void, then a crack of white light, all the fire pouring forth, and a sweet young thing’s face contorted in screams at the heart of the inferno.
Beasley leaned over and whispered into my ear.
“Please help. The Gallows will make it worth your while.”
We’d see, wouldn’t we?
* * *
Benson and Robert Gallows returned from wherever in an antiquated flatbed truck. Paternal twins, middle-aged, dressed in fleece and plaid and denim. It appeared Benson was the drinker of the pair. His hair had gone white. Gin blossoms patterned his squashed nose. Robert’s hair was dark, his features somewhat delicate. No burst blood vessels nor cauliflower ears. Both wore revolvers under their coats and wolfsbane garlands around their necks.
Beasley explained that I knew the history of the alleged curse and that I hadn’t entirely decided to play the role of doomed Vinette.
“What do you think?” Benson Gallows said.
“She doesn’t resemble Vinette,” Robert Gallows said. “However, the proper spirit counts for everything. There’s also the factor that we have little choice.”
“Agreed.”
“Hello, boys,” I said. “You two could try talking to me since I’m standing right here.”
“You were with Beasley when he discovered the remains,” Benson Gallows said. “You haven’t high-tailed it for the hills. An intriguing sign.”
“Technically we’re in the hills. Also, I think you’re a bunch of kooks, or you’re having me on.”
“Come now, you saw the corpses,” Robert Gallows said. “No chicanery there.”
“I’ve some experience with murderers and none with mumbo-jumbo curses. Primarily because murderers are real while curses are not.”
“The belief some hold in them is real enough to draw blood. Leaving that aside, what would it take for you to indulge us our roleplaying exercise tonight?”
“Roleplaying?”
Robert Gallows nodded.
“Easy as pie, my dear. You dress to the nines, enjoy a world-class supper with the company, and then retrace Vinette’s path from the night she died.”
“From the night she was horribly murdered, you mean.”
“Yes. While you’re wandering in the field, the rest of us will enact—”
“We’ll perform our mumbo-jumbo,” Benson Gallows said.
“Your hoodoo is going to do what? Trap the ghost, or werewolf? My bad, I don’t know what you boys are calling your fairy nemesis.”
“It’s a revenant, a spirit of vengeance. We want to trap it in a circuit. Then open that circuit. Not your concern. Your concern is to look pretty and follow a scripted sequence of movements.”
“So, how much?” Robert Gallows said.
I thought fast.
“Uh, ten grand. Cash.” The ol’ Mace piggy bank rattled emptily of late. My heart sank when the brothers smiled as one.
“Done,” Robert Gallows said. “Let’s make you presentable, shall we?”
“Keep your creepy sheriff away from me. He’s a deal-breaker.”
“As you say. Sheriff Holcomb will not come within a country mile of your person. Right, Beasley?”
“A country mile,” Beasley said without enthusiasm.
“Then we have a deal,” Benson Gallows said. “I must warn you, however. A deal is a deal. Sealed in blood as far as we’re concerned.”
“Indeed,” Robert Gallows said. “Should you renege on our arrangement, there will be consequences. The Sheriff sounds as if he’s taken a shine to you, Ms. Mace. I am sure he’d be amenable to drumming up any number of phony charges to lock you in his jail for a while. Vagrancy and trespassing on private land among others.” At least the bastard had the decency to seem embarrassed. He shuffled his feet and glanced away. “Apologies for this element of threat. The warning is necessary.”
“Beasley,” I said.
“Hey, you shook hands.” Beasley too averted his gaze.
Benson Gallows sighed in exasperation.
“Please, please, everyone. Dispense with the melodrama. No one is going to jail. Keep your word and all will be well. Simple as that.”
“I’ll alert the girls,” Robert Gallows said. “They’ll prepare you for the festivities.”
“Blow it out your ass,” I said. But, I went along.
Mary the Magnificent and Lila the Bearded Lady took me into their trailer to get ready for the “dinner and a séance” portion of my upcoming date with Beasley. I had doubts about Mary — her spine was so twisted with muscle she hunched; her hands were enormous and rough as cobs. Even so, she could’ve had a chair in a Beverly Hills salon if the magic she worked on my snarled mane with a jug of warm water and a
washtub was any indicator. After bathing and styling came the glamour detailing. I’m okay with makeup, though I don’t usually apply much, if any. The ladies laid it on thick. Lila took charge, and she too exhibited a deft touch. After the detailing, they put me into a dress that would’ve done well for a night on the town visiting swanky 1960s hotspots. White and flowing, open in back and slit up to here on the side. Entirely too seductive for supper in a carnival tent in the Middle of Nowhere, Montana.
When they finally handed me a mirror I gasped.
The ladies’ reflections smiled at one another. I turned my head and dark clouds descended.
“Lila and I ran away from the circus,” Mary said. “This is where we landed.”
“A grave mistake,” Lila said. “Carnivals are even worse.”
“Because of the psycho-killers?” I admired my cleavage. “Or because this one killed the clowns? Seriously, what gives? I’ve hunted high and low and seen nary a trace. Isn’t that carnival sacrilege?”
Mary smiled venomously.
“It is easy to scoff. We thought the curse was a joke too. Bitterly, bitterly we’ve learned otherwise. We are trapped.”
“Someone should do something,” I said, dry as toast.
“We’ve tried,” Lila said. “This is beyond our reckoning.”
“It’s not beyond mine. People’s heads are getting severed. Kinda physical for a ghost.”
“Perhaps you are an expert in this area,” Lila said.
“I straighten horseshoes with my bare hands. I can lift a grand piano on my back.” Mary flexed her massive biceps. “Even I could not hope to confront the terror in the hills and survive.”
“Run,” Lila said. “And don’t look back. You aren’t a part of this yet.”
“She won’t run. Ever seen a more stubborn jaw? Our friend is a warrior. She will fight.”
“Who’s out there?” I said. “Really, no bullshit.”
“Some sort of Jungian manifestation,” Lila said. “The shadow personified.”
“Baby, that’s the best description I’ve ever heard.” Mary kissed the Bearded Lady’s cheek. “Whatever the truth, don’t mess with it, it’ll turn you to mincemeat.”