by Carol Weekes
I couldn’t make myself go there now. It would be me against them, all of the regular public gone, and only the carnival types huddled in circles around their luminescent cans, their features half-lit by the flames, watching me approach. No. I’d just go home and we’d wait for them to leave in the next few days. They’d move on and the field would freeze under another winter, killing any residual essence that they’d left behind.
I arrived home barely ten minutes later and parked the car in the driveway. That same sense of having been followed and being watched persisted, but I scratched it up to having seen the carny freak with the stabbed gorilla earlier. The Ferris wheel still looked black against the sky, flurries marring the image a little. I peered under the car, preparing myself for anything…but nothing met my gaze. No acorn on my front step, either. I let myself inside, grateful for the warmth of the wood stove and for the comforting embrace of my home and family. I carried the new teddy bear and jelly beans under one arm and stepped in to Randy’s room to place the gifts at the foot of his bed, where he’d discover them in the morning. A pale band of yellow light from a nearby arc sodium lamp cast a glow in the room, as it always did.
His bed was empty. Panic tore at my legs, sinking nails into flesh. I spun about, dropping the box of jelly beans and the bear. Okay, he had to have crawled into bed with Leonora, something he often did when I worked late. Relax. Everything was okay, I reasoned. I pushed into my and Leonora’s bedroom, darker in here because she always drew the drapes against the street light, and sought them in the dark. My hands landed on our bed, feeling, grappling for the warm, familiar shapes of my wife and son’s sleeping forms. The bed was cold, empty, the sheet and blankets pushed back.
“Lee!” I yelled. I ran and slapped on the light switch, filling the room with brilliant yellow light. They weren’t in here. I can’t recall running from room to room through the house, checking the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, the basement laundry room and furnace room, finding them nowhere. Frantic, I sought any rational explanation as to where my family might be at almost 3 a.m. on a cold October morning, some note of clarification as to where they’d gone. My mind raced. Something must have happened. One of them was sick and at the hospital. It wasn’t like Lee to not leave me some kind of a note or call me and leave a message on my cell phone.
“Where are you?” I screamed, desperate, hysterical. I stood in our kitchen again, the dark red digital numerals of the clock in our stove face reading 2:39 AM, looking at our refrigerator with its plethora of happy, colorful magnets, looking at a cutting board with crumbs from bread still sitting on it, looking at our table and chair set with its three bright orange placemats set out for meals.
And on the center of Randy’s placemat sat a single acorn, brown, shiny, almost perfectly spherical in shape.
Suddenly, I knew where they were and that I’d have to go back if I ever hoped to see them again. I also knew that, if I should call the police to accompany me that we wouldn’t find them. Somehow, like an optical illusion of magic, they’d be held outside of sight. It would have to be me and me alone.
* * *
I set out, racing, not caring about speed limits as I made my way back to the highway that would lead me to Barker’s field and the huddled shadow of the traveling carnival show. I steered the car over potholes, hearing gravel fly up and tick at the undercarriage, until I got as close to the structures as possible. I got out of the car, leaving the doors unlocked and marched with determination towards the area where I saw the glow of their oil drums in front of their sleeping tents. I moved past the various stands, the single O’s with their exaggerated depictions of deformities and freaks, of dark promises of things worse. Step up, step up and see the bloodied, riddled clothing from the Bonnie and Clyde death car that they wore on the day of their ambush, ladies and gentleman. The blood is real. See it and touch it for yourself…
I came upon a group of them huddled around a fire, two women and three men, some still sporting remnants of their face makeup, some sipping hot coffee that they brewed over a small butane stove.
“Where is he?” I demanded of them. “That freak who runs the beanbag toss over there!” I pointed at the sign, its monster face almost glowing in the radiance of the tin fire, its open mouth easily two feet wide and looking like the entrance to a sooty tunnel.
One of the women, a specimen with long, straggly red hair and equally red fingernails, cackled at me. “You looking for John Gore?”
“Is that his name? Gore? Yeah, I’m looking for the bastard. He’s been taunting me and my family since we arrived here yesterday, and now I can’t find my family. It’s the middle of the fucking night and they aren’t home, my wife and my little seven-year-old boy.”
The carny workers didn’t appear fazed by my emotional outburst, as if it was an ordinary occurrence for them to witness this kind of display.
“He’s around somewhere,” one of the men said. He still wore a clown suit, but he’d removed his face makeup and wig, an undergrowth of dark beard clouding his face.“ Maybe your family went to visit someone.”
They tittered as if amused by my situation.
“Not at this time of the morning,” I shot back.
“Well, maybe your boy got sick and your wife took him to the hospital,” the redhead leveled back at me. “It might have been an emergency and she just went there.”
I thought of the popcorn, of the potential for disease in it. I thought of the acorn that kept reappearing, and that I’d forgotten on Randy’s placemat back home in my haste to come here to find them.
“Come one, come all and try your hand with the beanbag toss!” A voice as cold as January river water trickled through the night air. “Many prizes wait to be won! We have stars that glow, games and tricks, candied popcorn, and gorillas on sticks!”
I felt myself turn slowly, taffy-like, the feel of a bad dream where the feet stick to the ground, and saw him before his stand. A dull green spot lamp highlighted the face of the monster, the black cloud and shining eyes around its open maw, its curled fingers that threatened to reach beyond the edge of the plywood sign. The carny freak named John Gore stood before the stand, his two hands held out in my direction, bearing the three black oily beanbags.
“We have a woman and a boy, the most delectable toys, come win them back if you can get all three bags through this mouth, intact. Try your hand, dear man, if you believe that you can—may your aim be astute if you wish to see them again. One bag for her, one bag for him, and one bag for you, and one chance only to see this through.”
A gust of wind picked up, a lonely note that gusted the stink of ash and fire around us. I felt myself pulled towards Gore. He hurled the three oily bags at me and I caught them, feeling repugnance at the sensation of them, but knowing that my boy had held these same bags just last evening. They weren’t filled with beans. One of the bags tore a little as I caught them and what came out into my hand were several acorns. The others felt different; my fingers explored them a little and what I thought I felt in the other two were linear, sharp…the feel of bone fragments of different shapes and sizes.
“Drop one, you lose and they become mine, a small autumnal sacrifice carried through time.”
“Fuck you and your carnival rhyme,” I spat at him.
Gore, his ruby brooch glowing unnaturally beneath his throat elicited that same cold laugh that he’d done just hours ago. “Ah, the man has a poetic bent.” His face went solemn, his features half lit, half shadow in the dancing fire behind us.
“I’m going to have you charged with kidnapping just as soon as I find my wife and son,” I told him. “You tell me where they are or I swear I’m going to hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” he hissed. “Impossible. You can’t stop the season.”
He made no sense. He pointed at the sign of the monster. “This is autumn, or what some of you call ‘fall.’ I bring fall to the carnival, the encroaching season of death and sleep. See the blackness of its storm clo
uds, see the orange glow of its fiery pits, your pitiful attempts to ward it off. You can’t stop the arrival of the dark season, of sleep, of cold, Mr. Arthur.”
“How the hell do you know my name?”
“Because they told me.”
“Where are they?”
“They’re in…there!” He pointed to the mouth of the sign he called fall. “Waiting for you to take perfect aim and win your prize.”
Enraged, but puzzled, I walked around the stand and looked on the other side of the sign; it was flat, unpainted plywood on the other side. It bore no room, no chamber in which anyone could huddle. And then it occurred to me that, given this, how could beanbags sail through its open mouth if it had no chasm behind it for them to land within? The nonsensical absurdity of it made me feel like fainting.
I bore back at him, one fist clutching the dirty cloth bags, the other curled. I grabbed Gore by the collar of his coat and drew him to me, my own teeth clenched as I addressed him. “You tell me where my family is right now or I swear I’ll kill you.”
He felt like his bags; slippery, dust-encrusted, and smelling of yellowed, forgotten paper. When he laughed, I saw his teeth up close and bits of what looked to be raw meat wedged between the broken calcium husks. “You can’t kill what’s already dead, Mr. Arthur. Toss the bags, or toss your chance, I offer it once…take it, or I’ll recant.”
The night moved into me. Behind me I heard the rest of them gather, the carnival workers, circling to watch a show instead of presenting one, all of them unsympathetic towards me. A few lit cigarettes and sat up on small stools.
“What will it be?” Gore repeated.
“You miserable, diseased fuck,” I said to him. I walked up to the edge of the stand, noting the hideous open mouth of the sign that led to nothing on the other side.
“Daddy?” I heard Randy’s voice coming from somewhere inside that mouth and my mind bent, along with my heart. It had to be an illusion; although the sign was flat plywood, my family was somewhere nearby.
“I’m here, baby,” I called out to him.
“The bags…” Gore growled.
I saw the collection of popcorn boxes lined up along the shelf, each one no doubt filled with an acorn and a dead insect, residual bits of autumn tucked inside each box. The collection of other shiny, lurid prizes, and Gore’s walking stick leaned into a corner, Randy’s dropped and filthy pink gorilla still speared to the bottom of it.
“Why do you hate me and my family so much?”
Gore raised his eyebrows. “But I don’t. I consider you all rather…delectable.”
I took aim with as much care as possible, given the shaking of my arm and tossed the first of the disgusting bags. It sailed through the monster’s mouth and I heard it land somewhere inside. I shuddered.
“Very good, Mr. Arthur. Now do it twice again.”
I steadied myself and, lips trembling, hurled the second bag. It, too, sailed through the mouth and landed inside an impossible place.
“One to go, create the show, win the prize, or your family dies.”
I shut my eyes and prayed.
I let go of the third beanbag, feeling my arm swing up, my fist open, allowing the dark cloth with its innards of bone shard to soar forward, closer, closer to the monster’s mouth–
Where it hit the edge of the bottom of the mouth and leaned inward, the majority of the bag still sliding, but slowing.
Someone behind me whistled, and the carny crowd tittered.
“Shall it slide or shall it stop? Tick-tock said the clock!” Gore taunted me.
I felt him stare at me as I watched the third beanbag begin to slow.
“Get in there, you bastard.” My voice broke. What felt like forever slid past, dreamlike and stinking of rancid clams, of backed up sewer tunnels, of wet, dark places, of smoke and leaves, the stench of descending autumn somehow culminated in this man and his stand.
The bag teetered…and dropped in.
The night stopped. Even the carny workers behind me didn’t issue so much as a chuckle or whisper.
“You did well, Mr. Arthur. You may go ahead, into the monster, and retrieve them.”
“There’s nothing on the other side of that platform,” I clenched my teeth at him.
“Ah, but there’s the magic. You come to the carnival because you want to see magic tricks, don’t you? Well, we don’t disappoint. Go ahead, and look for yourself.”
I shoved through the small wooden gate that separated the bag throwers from the plywood and walked up to the mouth of the monster named fall. This close, I smelled the thing. A cold, residual air issued through the black hole of its mouth, smelling of rotting leaves and putrefaction and worse; smelling of rotting meat.
I stuck my hand through the mouth and felt damp, dark air in there.
“Randy? Leonora?”
“I’m here, Daddy,” I heard my boy whimper somewhere in there, in the darkness of this invisible, darkly magical place; the innards of the monster that lay somewhere between reality and death on the other side of this plywood.
I hauled myself up and into the mouth, my foot stepping on one of the disgusting bags as I felt my way through the dark until I found Randy who clung to me, sobbing. Frantic, I gripped him to me, and tripped over the unconscious form of my wife on the wooden floor of this diseased bunker.
“I’m here, son. I’m going to lift Mommy over my shoulder, and you’re going to take my other hand. We’re going to go back out that open hole again, okay?
“There’s no hole, Daddy.”
I turned around and looked. Whatever dim light had been in the background from their wood fires had extinguished. We stood in darkness. Time went still.
I let go of Randy’s hand and beat with both fists against the backdrop of the plywood.
“You let us out of here, you filthy son of a bitch!” I screamed. My voice broke and salty tears filled my throat.
“I’m cold, D-daddy,” Randy whimpered, hanging on to my leg. “I want to go home.”
“Somehow, I’ll get us there,” I promised him. No begging, screaming, thrashing availed us. We were locked in the dark someplace behind the sign. Hours passed and hunger and thirst set in. Leonora woke up and sobbed against me.
“It’s him,” she said. “And he hasn’t changed a bit.”
“Who?” And then I knew; the same carny worker that she’d seen as a little girl who had frightened her almost twenty-five years earlier. Impossible—much like a flat plywood stand that encompassed missing people.
During this timelessness I became aware of a small pinprick of florid crimson light that danced and floated in the dark above us, pulsating. It hovered just beyond reach and when I stood to try and touch it, I felt it emanate a cold heat, like dry ice; painful. It made me pull my hand away. No doubt another of Gore’s tricks.
The fairgrounds went quiet. Then the sound of people arriving, and with it, John Gore’s voice as he took his place in front of the stand.
“Step up, step up and win a prize, you there, young lady, dare you try?”
We listened as the first of the beanbags thudded against the outside of our prison. Another soared in through the dark and hit my shoulder. The third bag missed.
Over and over it went through the evening. We grew colder, stiller, and I knew that we were dying as the hours passed. We’d come looking for the ultimate thrill, the titillating magic act, and we’d found more than we could bear. We’d been an autumnal sacrifice, a gift to whatever dark powers granted them their magic, a time-long tradition upheld by the traveling carnival, a small appeasement to the gods.
During the quiet hours, when I knew that the public had long gone, we heard the footsteps of numerous people approach, and within that shuffle, the sliding growl of John Gore’s voice.
“Let’s get it onto the truck right away,” Gore said, “and we can divide up the payment afterwards.” I felt several people lift us up from the platform that the monster billboard had rested upon, and we were tra
nsported a short distance. The Monster sign was slid onto the flatbed of a truck, my unconscious boy rolling against me. I reached out for him and felt that his skin had gone cold.
“Randy?”
He didn’t respond. I found Leonora in the dark and pulled her to me, realizing as I touched her that she’d already died. Her body contained no pulse.
“I hate you!” I screamed inside this void of darkness and heard Gore chuckle.
“It sucks to lose,” he said to one of the other workers. “Try your hand with fate, mate?”
“Not me, thanks,” the other voice said.
“He’ll quiet soon enough, once we’re fully engulfed by the night,” Gore told him.
“I won’t be quiet!” I shrieked. “I’ll scream until someone notices.”
Tears broke past my eyelids and burned my cheeks. That unusual light appeared to my left again. It grew closer, larger, and then I saw that there were two orbs of icy luminescence. Something large, heavy, and rancid with fetor rushed at me in the dark, those fiery circles baneful and hungry. Something opened in the dark, like a suck hole giving way and I felt teeth slice into my legs, hauling me towards it—all of this within the timeless void attached somehow to a traveling monster billboard. The essence of death had found us, its hunger an innate, formidable thing, and it was not merciful.
Then it began to swallow.
The End