Hang Wire (18 page)

It was nearly dark now, and still the carnival was dead, a collection of dull machines rusting in a field. In the gathering gloom their brightly colored designs and decorations looked washed out, faded, and very, very old. Sara wondered if the machines really were vintage. In the dying light, with their illuminations off, they were creepy as hell. Of Joel, there was no sign.

“Come on,” said Kara. She began to walk away, but stopped as Sara caught her arm. “What?”

Sara indicated the way ahead with a nod. “What are we going to do exactly?”

“We’re going to see what Joel is doing,” said Kara. She put one hand on a hip. “Remember?”

“Yeah, and then what?”

“Fine,” said Kara. “Go back to the trailer. I’ll see you at show time.” She turned and walked away.

Sara had a point, and she knew Kara knew it too. What were they going to do, exactly? Highwire seemed to have got the message, but there was no sign of him yet. They’d discussed it – the acrobat seemed to be different from the rest of the circus, separate. They didn’t know him – nobody did really – but they felt he could be trusted. Maybe he’d know what to do.

Sara pulled back, watching her partner stalk off across the grass, then swore under her breath and went to follow.

Then Kara fell over. She lay on the ground, shaking.

“Kara?” Sara drew a sharp breath. “Kara! Oh my God, Kara!”

She ran over to her friend and dropped to her knees. Kara’s eyes were rolled back into her head. Sara grabbed her shoulders, trying to hold her partner as she had some kind of seizure.

Kara twisted on the ground, foam at her lips, her eyelids fluttering.

“I… I… Belenus I… I… I… Belenus I…” she said, over and over. She bit her tongue and soon her mouth was filled with blood, but she kept talking, repeating the phrase that meant nothing to Sara.

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

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.