by Paula Guran
She told the wind, “I don’t want to die today.”
Perhaps the distant notes of a calliope reached her. Perhaps it was simply the way the birds turned, a scattered flock of pigeons appearing much larger and more sinister as they banked away. Or it was the scent of popcorn. Candy apples. Sawdust. The flicker of lights lining a fairway.
Whatever it was, Melissa remembered how to turn around. She climbed from the ledge and tore the delicate soles of her stockings as she crossed the roof to reclaim her shoes. She put her jacket back on, rode the elevator to the ground floor, and instead of returning to her desk, she walked three blocks to the university museum.
Melissa Anderson did not return to work the next day. Or the day after.
On the twentieth of June, the car carrying the IRS auditors to the firm of Beckman, Deniller & Wright was struck by a city bus. The driver and all three passengers were killed.
The next day, the carnival left town.
How long does it take to fall in love? Seven minutes? Five hours? Two months, fourteen minutes, twenty-six days?
Walter catches his gaze drifting to Marian as he reads of the lost and disappeared and it gets harder and harder to look away.
Maybe it isn’t love. Maybe it’s only that he missed her when she was sitting across from him, so distant he couldn’t bear to take her hand.
Maybe it’s only that he knows he lost her the moment he asked about the Miller family instead of her telling her about the hushed, connected world of held breath, psychic predictions, telephone lines, and rain.
The fourth piece of evidence . . . Well, no one’s really counting anymore, are they? There is a standing stone in Ireland, carved with Russian characters. There is a body frozen into a chunk of ice, forensic evidence dating it from the 1760s though its brow is sloped like a Neanderthal’s. There are documents written in code on devices that haven’t been invented yet. There’s a set of coordinates leading to a planet no one has yet discovered. All delivered in nondescript envelopes, no return address, bearing Walter’s name.
Whatever the evidence, it is always the same. The carnival enters town, the carnival leaves town. People disappear.
As the clock ticks over from December 13 to December 14, 2015, Walter Eckert wakes in a panic. It’s Marian. Marian is gone. Of course she’s gone. Because the invitation was never meant for him.
Frantic, he drives to her apartment—an address he shouldn’t have, because she didn’t give it to him, but which wasn’t particularly hard to find. He told himself “just in case” at the time. In case what? This, he thinks, hunched forward, windshield wipers struggling to keep up with the rain. He parks catty-corner to the curb, leaves the car door hanging open, takes the stairs two at a time. He pounds on Marian’s door, not expecting an answer, and eventually he kicks it in.
The windows are open. Rain blows in and dampens the sill. The air smells faintly of mildew, as though it’s been raining in Marian’s apartment for a very long time. She could be out, visiting friends, on vacation, at a Christmas party, but Walter knows she isn’t. He goes through Marian’s apartment, room by room.
The clothes in her closet and her drawers, the towels in her bathroom, the bed sheets, the curtains—every bit of fabric in Marian’s apartment has been carefully knotted and left in place.
Under the scent of mildew is the lingering odor of lightning and popcorn.
And Marian is gone.
On New Year’s Eve a stray firework ignites a blaze that burns the library to the ground.
“Follow her.” Walter’s mother calls him in the middle of the worst ice storm in memory.
It’s New Year’s Day plus one. His mother’s voice is slurred. It’s dark, and Walter can’t work out whether it’s from ice coating the windows or the time of day. His bare feet kick empty bottles as he fumbles toward the bedside clock and its ruby light.
“Mom? I can barely hear you.” Walter’s tongue feels thick, as though he’s trying to shape words in a dream. Maybe the dwarf will show up soon and tell him how Laura Palmer really died.
“Go after her,” his mother says. Walter grips the phone.
“I don’t know how. Mom?”
There’s a hush like static. Like a secret world of rain. Like ice freezing on the telephone line sealing up his words. His world.
“Go.” His mother’s ghost-voice is buried under a fall of not-snow. The line dies. As it does, instead of a dial tone, Walter hears the murmur of a calliope.
It is January 4, 2016, and Walter awakes from a dream.
It must be a dream.
It is a dream because he enters the carnival with no invitation, only the evidence in his hands—the poster, the shirt, the film. He is allowed in. Even though none of the invitations are for him. They are for Charlie Miller and Melissa Anderson. They are for Lemuel Mason and Marian. But not him.
Unless, taken all together, they are. Evidence numbers one through To Be Determined—case files, half-vocalized conversations, newspaper articles, microfilm, archives, cigarettes smoked, and alcohol consumed. Perhaps these are Walter Eckert’s invitation to step right up, come on in.
It hurts. And Walter will never admit this.
What has he been chasing?
It has to be a dream.
Walter passes through the turnstile, evidence clutched in his hands—the photograph, the film reel, a reproduction of the shirt, the standing stone, the Neanderthal man. He holds them out to a blank-eyed boy at the ticket booth who waves his hand and makes the gate standing between Walter and the carnival disappear.
Walter steps inside.
The boy, no longer blank-eyed, runs ahead of him. Walter follows, hurrying to keep him in sight. No older than thirteen, the boy is naked, loping on hands and knees between tents staked into the dusty ground. Skinny. Faint bruises trace the ladder of his ribs, the knobs of his spine. Walter almost remembers the boy’s name. But every time he opens his mouth to speak, it slips away.
Down narrow ways. Between tents pulsing with breath, buzzing with the sound of tattoo needles, humming with the burr of electricity and the importance of a honey-producing hive. Walter is utterly disoriented.
There!
When Walter catches sight of him again, the boy wears a wolf’s head in place of his own—muzzle frozen in a snarl, glass eyes reflecting the glow of the pale fairway lights.
Fried crickets served here. Ten for a dollar, all skewered up neat and crunchy in a row.
Skin of mice. So nice. Peeled fresh and heaped with shaved ice. Drizzled with any flavor syrup you want.
Try your luck, Ma’am-Sir. Prizes no worse than your heart’s desire! Careful what you wish for. At-any-cost is a steep price to pay.
Walter almost loses sight of the boy again; he ducks into a tent. Walter follows.
Seats rise in concentric circles from the center ring. A spotlight, dusty-dim, pins the boy, who throws his head back and howls. The sound is muffled inside the echo chamber of the wolf’s skull.
In the spotlight there is no mistaking the bruises, dark purple scars that will not fade numbering his ivory bones.
The boy crouches and the light snaps off. Wolves, real wolves, who bear no human skin, creep between the seats, which are full now. The rabbit-masked audience holds collective breath, leans forward. The wolves ignore them, dripping slow between the seats. Trickling down. The boy curls in the middle of the ring. Skinny, scarred arms wrap around the taxidermied wolf’s head. He waits.
Walter can’t bear to watch.
He flees.
And stumbles into another tent with a single man, a clown, spotlit in the center of the ring.
The clown stands behind a table, stitching. His eyes are downcast, covered in crosses. He works with infinite care, unpicking seams and re-doing them, crooning softly all the while. A lullaby. The needle goes in, the needle comes out. The thread is a form of weeping, one that won’t smear his makeup, joining rust-colored bone to gleaming fish scale. The child’s skull is exaggerated, swollen.
A hairline crack runs from brow back to somewhere Walter can’t see.
There are other tents, other exhibits. A woman rides a bicycle. Her legs churn the pedals, turn them insistently. Blood flows. Walter traces it from the wheels to her heart, to her legs, to her arms, and back again. Her skin is translucent. The bicycle, too.
A flock of crows follows her around the ring. If she slows, the blood will stop moving. If she slows, the birds swallow her eyes.
Walter runs, on and on. Faster through the carnival, through the fortune teller’s tent where tarot cards chase his heels like fallen leaves, past the world’s strongest man, the living skeleton, the ring toss game. He is looking for something, someone. A woman whose eyes are inkwells, whose spine is a card catalog, whose skin holds the tales of a thousand library books lost and burned. He needs to tell her he’s sorry; he needs to take hold of her hand.
But all he finds is a snake woman—half-mechanical, half flesh-and-blood, selling lies for twenty-five cents a go in sawdust-filled ring. All he finds is a surgeon with a silver mallet and a scalpel in his hand. A band of seven old women and three old men, playing flute and drum, xylophone and horn, with each other’s bones.
The exhibits are endless. They smell of popcorn. Cotton candy. Lightning. Eternity. Walter keeps running, but he never arrives anywhere. There is always another corner, some trick and fold of the carnival, keeping him close but at bay. After all, if there’s no audience, no one there to observe just outside the ring, how can the show ever go on?
It is a dream. It must be a dream. It doesn’t matter that his boots are sitting beside his bed in the morning, caked with dust when he left them neat and clean on the mat beside the door before going to sleep. It doesn’t matter that his hair smells of greasepaint. It doesn’t matter that his palm remembers the touch of a librarian he didn’t have the courage to reach for across a table spanning the gulf of a thousand years.
Once invited, once the invitation is turned down, it will never come again.
It has to be a dream.
Because right now, Walter’s entire world is made of wanting. If he really went to the carnival, he would still be there, wouldn’t he? If they invited him in, asked him to stay, dear god, why didn’t he?
And more importantly: How will he ever get back there again?
A. C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories appearing in publications such as Apex, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One. Her first collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, will be published by Lethe Press in 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Find her online at acwise.net.
Oona, this gorgeous eccentric, charming enough to sideswipe the fact that she’s professionally a scholar of creepiness . . . There’s a thin line between out of control and spectacular . . .
Who Is Your Executioner?
Maria Dahvana Headley
Five
Since we were little, Oona’s collected Victorian photographs. A certain subset of people love them, but I got a library book of them once, just before I met her, and I’ve never not been appalled. I don’t know what a book like that was doing lost in our local library. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would normally have been removed by a logical parent. The book was death images, yes, but worse than that. These were all dead children and babies dressed in their best clothes and propped up for the last family photo. Held in their parents’ arms, posed with their pets and toys, staring at the camera. It was like some sort of Egyptian funerary ritual, except much more hardcore. The thing about them was that everyone in them had to pose for a long time to make it through the film exposure. There’s lots of accidental motion, lots of blur, and so the families look like ghosts. The dead children are the only ones who look alive.
“Did you hear about Oona? Because if you did, and you didn’t call me, I don’t know who you are anymore,” the voice on the other end of the line says.
The same rattle Trevor’s had in his voice since we were seven, a sound like tin cans tied to the back of a wedding day junker. It’s been a while since we’ve spoken. Since I’ve spoken to anyone, really. I tried to start over with new people, but I was still the same person and it never works the way you think it will.
Trev and I faded out in a record shop a few years back, arguing over Kate Bush for reasons that are now difficult to recall. Kate Bush wasn’t really the problem. The problem was the way friendship can tilt into more than friendship for one person, and less than friendship for the other. Trevor and I have a history of cheater’s matinees in crappy un-airconditioned theaters. Back then, we watched superhero movies together, the three-dollar shows where no one we knew would be hanging out. Sometimes I reached over and put my hand in his lap, and sometimes he put his in mine. We were having an affair, but neither of us could commit to a bedroom. Instead, it was his fingers inside me, and my hand on him, both of us watching the latest incarnation of Spider-Man like nothing was happening below our waists.
We were trying, as we’d been trying for years, to not be in love with Oona.
“What about her?” She and I have history too, but not the history I wanted. Probably she’s gotten married or is happy or had a baby or something. I’m expecting a New York Times announcement, her with something handsome beside her, a grinning, sports-playing something, and Oona, her yellow eyes and long red hair. She looks—has always looked—like a tree on fire. She’s six foot two and covered with freckles. One time she and I were naked, and I drew the constellations on her with a Sharpie. All there. Next time I tried it, they were gone. There were new configurations but not the ones I’d mapped.
It’s getting to be time again for weddings and babies. This is the second round after the first marriages. Trevor’s been divorced a couple years now, and I’m single again too after trying to settle for a woman in Georgia who got pregnant by sperm donor and then said, witheringly, “You always act like you’re so smart, but you’re not as smart as you think you are. You’re fucked up. You’re in love with her, and you should stop lying about it.”
She was four months pregnant and I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t know she wanted to have kids with me, and she didn’t, it turned out. She wanted to have kids without me. Now I’m back in the city, avoiding my roommate. My life, what there was of it, has dissolved like Kool-Aid in a cup.
We’re all thirty-seven, Trevor and Oona and me, and we’ve known each other since second grade. I haven’t talked to Oona in years. Every time I see her name in my inbox, I delete it. After the last time I saw her, I’m better off alone. She messes with my head.
“She’s dead,” says Trevor, sounding astonished. “Oona finally died.”
He says it like Oona’s gone to India. I’m used to mishearing things like this. Every time I pick up the phone I think someone’s going to announce a tragedy. I’ve been writing a lot of condolences, everyone of my parents’ generation fizzling out, and a fair number of mine too, suicides and cancers, car wrecks.
“She did what? Who did what?” In my head, I’m looking frantically at a slideshow of the Taj Mahal.
“Oona,” he says. “What the fuck? Oona died. Where are you?”
I take a moment to try to be this person, in this world, where Oona isn’t. “On my way wherever you are,” I say.
“Around the corner from your place, in that bar. The shit one.”
I didn’t know he knew where I lived. “Are you drunk yet?”
“I ordered for you. Your ice is melting.”
I walk in, and there he is. His hair long and dark, his face gaunt. Goatee pointing off his chin like he’s a cave ceiling. He’s got on a T-shirt that I recognize, an anatomical drawing from the 1700s, a memento mori, a face pared down to the skull on one side, handsome and bearded on the other. Trevor has the whole bottle on the table, and when I look at it, he shrugs.
“To Oona,” he says and raises the bottle at me.<
br />
“To Oona,” I say and pour my own bourbon down my throat. For a minute, we sit in silence. But then:
“You know what I’m going to say.”
I’d rather he didn’t.
“Is she really dead?” Trevor insists. “Where is she, if she’s not? Is she back there?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “How would I know? We don’t even know where there is, not really, Trev. What do we know? Nothing.”
“Because,” Trevor says. “You know why I’m wondering.” And he sings it, against the rules, the first time I’ve heard it in years. “Dead girl, dead girl, come alive.”
“Christ, Trev. Fucking don’t,” I say. My skin is covered in buzz. I feel like I’m full of tiny brainless insects, my body a sack of wings and antennae. My stomach lurches painfully, like something inside me’s trying to get out.
“How?” I ask him.
“Obit didn’t say,” he says. “I called. Her mom wouldn’t tell me. She was in Indonesia somewhere, collecting beetles. She got some kind of weird entomology job. Fuck,” Trevor says, and sighs. “The last time I saw her, something bad happened.”
“Don’t,” I say, again. “Please. I don’t need to know any more stories about Oona. I know what she was like when she was weird.”
But Trevor can’t help himself. “I was sitting at a bar,” he says. “Six o’clock on a Tuesday. Bar was empty except me and the bartender. I heard this sound.”
“Stop it,” I say. “I don’t want to talk about Oona anymore.”
Trevor looks at me. “I tried to tell Bridget about it, and you should have heard her. ‘Always been in love with Oona,’ she said. ‘You think that woman’s mouth is magic. You want a witch, Trevor,’ she said.”
I look at Trevor. He blushes.
“She wasn’t wrong. So, I hear this noise, and I’m trying to figure it out, when something crawls over my foot. Big black bug. Like, huge. Size of my middle finger. And more of them coming. A whole row of them. Each one of them perfectly in line with the next.”