Sara’s heart thundered. She felt helpless – she couldn’t do anything. She didn’t know first aid. She’d never seen a seizure before, hadn’t even known that Kara was epileptic. She had no clue. Sara stood, hands clenched, fingers intertwined, knuckles white as she rolled them, watching her friend.
Then the seizure stopped, the violent shaking and twitching fading until Kara was still. She rolled onto her side, her eyelids fluttering again and then closing, and she gave a sigh, but showed no sign of regaining consciousness.
Sara had to get help. Her racing heart had slowed and now she felt the rising tide of panic. Help. Get help. Now.
“Well, isn’t this an arresting situation.”
Sara screamed in surprise and spun around. Joel stood behind her in the shadows, one thumb hanging from a belt loop, the fingers of his other hand fumbling inside the fob pocket on the front of his waistcoat. His stovepipe hat made his silhouette look too tall, and despite the dark, his bad eye almost seemed to glow white.
“Kara’s had a fit,” Sara managed to say, her breath regained. She paused. Joel didn’t move, didn’t speak. “We need to get help.”
Then Joel finally came to life. He walked around to Kara, circling the unconscious girl slowly, until he was standing opposite Sara. Behind him, across the carnival paddock, stood the dark carousel. He stared down at the body, apparently unconcerned and unwilling to lend assistance.
Sara stepped forward. “Fuck, Joel, I’m going to get–”
There was a cranking sound from somewhere ahead. Sara jumped, her attention drawn to the machines arrayed behind the carnival master.
The fairground attractions on either side of paddock had lit up faintly, strings of bare colored bulbs that outlined their frames buzzing softly in the evening air. The light flickered rhythmically, almost like a heartbeat. Like her heartbeat, Sara realized with growing fear. She held her breath, willing the lights to stop, but they didn’t. Still Joel stood, silent, unmoving.
Sara stumbled backward, fear coursing through her body. The cranking sound increased in volume, increased in tempo, as all around the lights on the carnival rides glowed brighter and brighter, but not in synch. The light spread out from the stall of wooden clown heads to her left – heads that were all facing her, their mouths gaping – and grew in brightness as it swept around clockwise. Sara turned her head and watched as the rides on her right lit up, the wave of bright white, red and yellow sweeping back around, meeting in the middle with the light from the other side.
Sara felt her heart in her chest. The lights of the carnival pulsed to the same beat.
In the center of the field, the carousel lit up in a blaze of Victorian glory. The giant machine was an orgy of elaborately carved and painted wood: horses, unicorns, and winged versions of each; dragons, centaurs, and other things: things with tentacles and heads like starfish, undersea monstrosities that scared adults but that children loved. At the center, crouched above the steam-powered organ, sat the carved wooden form of a monkey, its eyes cut red crystals that shone as bright as the bulbs that ran along the edge of the carousel’s revolving platform.
Sara fell onto the damp grass on her backside, jarring her elbows as she instinctively put her arms out behind her. She tried to push herself backward, away from the nightmare in front of her, but she felt like she weighed a thousand tons, each movement a titanic effort.
Joel spread his arms out wide as he stood behind Kara’s unconscious form, then he turned to face the carousel. He tilted his head back and began to chant. Sara couldn’t understand the language. All she felt was fear, cold and pure. Then her attention was taken away from Joel by something else.
The fairground was moving. Joel bobbed his arms up and down, the rise and fall of a conductor directing his orchestra. As he swayed here and there, up and down, so the machines around him responded. The big dipper behind the carousel rocked, the movements of the sailing ship that swung like a giant pendulum matching the side-to-side motion of Joel. The lights on the Ferris wheel looming over everything on the other side flickered and buzzed, and the wheel rolled in either direction, all in time to Joel.
Sara’s eyes crawled around the ring of machines in horror. Each of them moved, twitching in time with one another and in time with their master. The lights were on full now, and they pulsed, almost organically, as power ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed. Far and near, far and near, as Joel swayed and swung his arms from side to side, side to side. In front of Joel, the carousel puffed like a steam train as the engine at its heart sprang to life, and it began to rotate, slowly at first, spinning about its axis as it should. In the machine’s hub was a pipe organ, surrounded by mechanical puppets and automaton musicians, and on top sat the monkey, as large as a small child. It’s red eyes were glowing, and the organ started to play, a drone, a tuneless wailing, a whistling of pipes that sank into Sara’s bones, the sound of stars falling, the sound of the endless cold of space.
Joel swayed and the carousel began to accelerate, faster and faster, around and around. Sara watched the painted horses and elephants and monsters whip around, their forms and lights blurring in the misty evening air. The discordant drones of the pipe organ formed a familiar fairground melody. But it was slow, somehow, and out of tune. As Sara watched she felt her heart beat and her head thump, in time to the music, in time to the pulsing lights.
The pipe organ melody turned into a single shrill blast, and the carousel suddenly braked. Sparks flared from the undercarriage beneath the painted wooden skirt.
In the center of the merry-go-round, between the monsters that orbited the hub, the automatons on the pipe organ began to move. Maybe they were supposed to, maybe the carved wooden animals spinning around just gave the whole thing that zoetrope flicker. Sara blinked. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. She pushed back, felt the air leave her lungs, felt the sweat on her brow.
The automatons had turned, and they were all looking at her. In the center of it all, the monkey sat, and now it was pointing at her, its eyes burning red.
Sara screamed and Joel turned around, his gray-white eye now glowing red.
He smiled, and Sara screamed again.
WAKE UP
— INTERLUDE —
SPEARMAN, TEXAS
1935
Connie opened the door eventually, wiping her hands on her apron as she did. The damned man at the door had kept knocking and knocking and knocking, ignoring Connie as she’d called out from the kitchen that she’d just be a minute, that he should hang on a moment, that he should damn well stop banging on the goddamn door. She was in no mood for callers, not now. The early evening was hot and bothersome, and her husband Lawrence hadn’t got back from town yet.
It was their last chance, too. Their farm was dead, the ground nothing but a dry powder, just like the ground all over the whole county, if not the whole state. If Lawrence hadn’t managed to sweet talk the bank manager in Spearman for an extension… well, that was it. They’d have to move, head west, where maybe the land maybe wasn’t a dust bowl, where maybe they could salvage something out of what their lives had become.
Some hope. The town was nearly empty. Connie knew that Lawrence didn’t stand a chance, but they had to try, didn’t they? They had to try. And after trying they could load up the truck and they could drive west, with everyone else. And while Connie’s heart would ache, she knew that as they drove she and Lawrence would talk about the future with purpose, optimism, even if neither of them knew what that future would bring, where the road would lead them. But they had to. What was the point of it all if they didn’t? So they’d load up the truck with the little that was left: clothes in bundles tied with rope, the dresser in the parlor that had been in Connie’s family for two generations, as many farm tools as would fit on the truck. They wouldn’t farm again, never again. But metal tools had to have value.
They’d leave their house to the dust, leave their farm to be buried by another storm.
Connie opened the door, taking
a deep breath, ready to send the caller packing. There was no business to be had, not in Spearman anymore. They’d had callers before, quacks selling snake oil or encyclopedias. Connie knew they were as desperate as she, but that didn’t stop her wishing them away, like the dust and heat and the drought.
The man was dressed nicely in a dusty black suit, old and rumpled but well-fitted. Connie pulled her head back in surprise as the man smiled on her porch and took off his hat, an old-fashioned stovepipe. His black hair was unruly and one eye was pale and gray, near to white. He bowed and pushed a book toward her.
Connie eyed the small tome, bound in soft scarlet leather, and then looked over the man’s shoulder. In the dirt road that led away from the farmhouse sat a huge car, looking more like a beached yacht than an automobile. It was red, darker than the book in the man’s hand, more like the blood that poured from the neck of a slaughtered pig. White-walled tires caught the last of the day’s sun and glowed like blazing comets.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” said the man with the smile and the book, “but I know you have been saved. I can tell these matters, and believe me when I say I am not here to preach the Lord’s word at you, no ma’am, not at all.”
Connie frowned, hands twisting her apron in front of her. The man didn’t stop smiling.
Beyond the man’s car, toward the town, the sunset sky was scarred with something large and brown, as light as the powdery ground on which the farmhouse sat. Connie frowned and looked at the book being held toward her.
“For you see,” the man said, “the word of the Lord is His most precious gift, one every man, woman, and child on his good green earth must hold dear to the heart.”
Connie laughed. It felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Her hands dropped the apron, and she leaned on the doorframe.
“Don’t know if maybe it’s you who needs your eyes opening, but take a look around. There’s not much good and green about this earth here.”
The man chuckled and hefted the Bible in his hand, like he was weighing it to see how far it would fly with a really good pitch.
“The Lord tests us in many ways. But he knows our will and our verisimilitude, and–”
“He knows our what now?”
The man smiled again. “Ma’am, if you’d allow me to sit awhile and tell you about this remarkable book and why–”
“We already got a Bible,” said Connie with a sniff. Time was a-wasting. Lawrence would be back soon and damned if it didn’t look like there was another dust storm on the way. A mighty big one too, size of the cloud speeding along the horizon. She only hoped that Lawrence was ahead of it in the truck, because that vehicle was their one means of escape from this hell on Earth.
“Oh, of course, every home is the home of the word of the Lord,” said the man with surprise so fake Connie had to laugh. The man joined her, waving the red book in hand. “Now, there’s no good to an honest Bible seller like myself traveling the length and breadth of the land just to pile the unsuspecting with unnecessaries!”
The man’s smile froze and then dropped, and his eyes narrowed and he looked at Connie down the length of his nose and Connie was suddenly afraid and wanted Lawrence there, right now.
“But this book is a might lighter than the family tome you have in the dresser in the parlor,” said the man, pointing past Connie with the book, into the house, although the inside of the house was dark and she knew it was impossible to see in, not from the porch. And the parlor was a room away. “And there’s an awful lot of your worldly goods to pile into the back of the farm truck. It’s a long way to California, Connie. A long way.”
Connie wrapped her arms around herself and shivered despite the warmth of the evening. She took a step back into the house. Behind the man, the sky was getting darker and darker.
She ignored the way the man knew her name, knew about Lawrence and the truck and the fact they were going to be leaving soon. Ignored how he knew she kept the huge family Bible in the dresser in the parlor. Heck, anyone could guess such things, and she and her husband were known in town, their names hardly secret. The man was another seller of snake oil, and a smooth one at that.
Instead, she nodded at the man’s car. “You might want to get your shiny automobile to cover. Looks like there’s a storm coming.”
She closed the door.
Joel sat in his car and turned the coin between his fingers. The coin was cold, and as he flipped it Joel could feel it move – not a pull, or a tug, or anything quite so strong, and he knew that if he let it go it would merely fall to the mat between his feet. But as he turned the coin he felt it had a tendency – an inclination – to lean away from him, toward the farmhouse. As he turned it, the coin caught the light and seemed to glow gold in the low sun.
“I follow the light,” said Joel, “and the light it shines on thee.”
Then the dust storm arrived and darkness descended, and just for a second the inside of the car was lit in gold and white by the coin turning in Joel’s fingers.
Black Sunday, they would call it later. The dust storm crossed the southern United States like a tidal wave, lifting three hundred million tons of dirt from the Great Plains and depositing it on cities, towns, villages, farms, houses, people, animals. The town of Spearman was directly in its path, and little would be left afterward.
And perhaps the dust cloud, an apocalyptic fury two hundred feet high and two hundred miles wide, perhaps it pushed down on the farmstead with a force that wasn’t quite natural, like there was something in the world that didn’t want anything found afterward, especially not by the man sitting inside the red automobile, the dust and sand piling high against its closed windows.
Especially not by the man inside with the gold coin turning, turning, turning in his fingers, as cold as a thing out of space, as bright as a comet in the morning sky.
The sky was clear the next morning, blue and cold. Joel pushed at the car door once, twice; as it opened, finally, light brown dirt, the color of sand, the color of the sun at daybreak, leaked into the car, pouring in around his ankles, filling the well beneath the wheel. Joel pushed the door open to its full extent, and then lifted his boots and planted them firmly in the loose dirt piled high outside.
The landscape had changed, just like that. The road leading to the farm had been dirt itself but it was a road, with scrabbly and desiccated trees dotted along its length. There had been more trees in front of the house, which, while rundown and tired, still showed its proud workmanship across two broad floors.
The man and his car now stood in the middle of a desert, dirt in high dunes, the morning breeze scuffing dust from their summits like it was the middle of the Sahara.
Where the farmhouse had once stood was now a pile of rubble, twisted and broken, abused as though a tornado had hit it. It was half buried in the dirt. Within days, maybe hours, little of the house would remain above the surface. The Dust Bowl would claim another victim, and nobody would notice. Connie and Lawrence would not be seen again.
Joel slipped the coin into his pocket. Immediately his fingers hurt. He turned and looked to the west. His future lay in that direction, he knew, but he also knew there was much to be done and that he wouldn’t be free of the light, not yet. The light was helping as best it could, but his road was long.
He walked around to the back of the car, pushed the dirt off the spare wheel attached to the rear in one sweep of his forearm, and opened the compartment. The trunk was large and empty save for a battered suitcase in brown leather and a long wooden pole.
Joel grabbed the end of the pole and pulled the shovel out from where it lay diagonally across the trunk.
“I follow the light,” he said to no one at all, “and the light it shines on thee.”
Shovel over one shoulder, Joel walked toward the ruins of the farmhouse, the coin cold in his pocket and pulling, pulling, pulling toward what lay buried within.
— XVII —
SHARON MEADOW, SAN FRANCISCO
TODAY
Curtain up. Showtime. The circus was filling up. Ticket sales were brisk. Stonefire had lit their bonfire, and Sharon Meadow was filled with laughter, screams of delight, and all the sounds of the fair.
Nadine tore herself from the doorway of the Winnebago. Showtime, and Jack was still missing. He often disappeared. He never said where he went or what he did, but then again Nadine never asked. They were in a great location in Golden Gate Park (she still couldn’t quite believe they’d scored the permit), and she assumed Jack just liked to take himself off for a wander, clear his head from the controlled chaos of The Magical Zanaar’s Traveling Caravan of Arts and Sciences.
But this time, he was taking it to the very limit. The gates opened at seven. The show in the Big Top started at eight sharp with a crack of the ringmaster’s whip. The stands would be packed. Already people were milling around, lining up at the four entrances of the main tent, waiting to be ushered inside for an evening of old fashioned circus entertainment.
“Fuck,” she said. She left the Winnebago just as David the Harlequin came jogging over.
“There’s a problem,” he said. He pointed back over his shoulder at the Big Top.
“Tell me about it. Where the fuck is Jack?”
“Jack’s gone too?”
Nadine pursed her lips. “What do you mean?”
“You’d better come with me.”
David led her through the backstage area behind the Big Top. It sounded busy out front. Full house.
Inside the main arena, the lighting crew was fussing over settings, spotting the floor and walls of the tent in alternating colors as they made checks to the programmed sequence. At the back of the tent the AV guy messed with the mixing desk. In the center of the ring, Jan and John were having an argument. As Nadine approached, David at her side, the couple stopped. John pulled the spandex hood off his head and ran his hand through his hair.
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