Authors: Carol Weekes
“Stop it,” I said. Nothing was there. I was letting my imagination get the best of me. Yet, I felt chilled. I turned towards our house and, in the process, happened to glance towards the area where the carnival sat in the field. My eyes picked up the skeletal shape of the Ferris wheel towering above the town, its frame still lit up by ground lights.
And I swore I saw someone sitting in the chair at its top.
Yes. There was a figure there, whereas the other seats were empty.
“What the fuck?” I felt myself freeze. I kept a pair of small binoculars in the trunk of the car, along with a map book and other items for whenever we’d take a drive. Nature watching was one of my and Leonora’s favorite pastimes. I unlocked the trunk and took the binoculars out of their case, bringing them up to focus on the top of the Ferris wheel.
I almost dropped the binoculars.
The carny man from the monster beanbag toss sat alone in the top seat, his long silver hair shining like polished nickel in the moonlight, his dusty black coat forming a sooty silhouette against the seat. And he was looking right back at me, his eyes caught within the twin disks of the binocular glass. I felt winter grip each of my ankles, sending frost lines racing up each leg.
“What do you want with me?” I whispered. At my words, he smiled. He looked right at me and he grinned that wraparound grin, the corners of his lips stretching back towards each cheek, his teeth yellowed and broken like…
(like old snapped bones) my mind shot up.
“You stay away from my family, you deceitful son of a bitch.”
Leonora stepped out onto the porch again. “Dean? What are you doing?”
I shuddered and returned the binoculars to their case. “Just looking at the carnival skyline from here,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. Without the binoculars, the carny man became a small human shadow in the seat again, but the wheel held him in place, high above the town. And I knew he still watched me as I went inside the house. I had a feeling that he sat up there for quite a while, observing my place of abode. The stink of smoke and damp leaves followed me inside. I lit a fire, throwing several logs onto the grill to ward off the chill damp that pressed against the windows and walls of the house.
With Randy put to bed, Leonora joined me and we sat by the fire, each of us clasping a glass of wine, watching the logs pop and glow.
“Hard day at work?” she asked me.
I glanced up at her, shaken from my reverie about the dark man. “Huh? Oh, no, not more than the usual.”
“You seem lost in thought. Randy seemed to have enjoyed himself, other than he lost a toy gorilla and his popcorn was stale.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, he did. He dropped his gorilla from the Ferris wheel. Somebody else picked it up.” I forced a grin, not telling her about how the gorilla had been ‘found’ again at the monster stand. My grin faded when I saw that odd shadow cross her face. I thought of how Randy and I could see our house clearly from the top of the Ferris wheel and wondered if that creeper still sat up there, looking this way.
She sipped her wine. “I’ll be glad when they move on. They always bring this strange kind of feel into the town, like ink floating through water.” She shivered, her shoulders giving a little shake. She moved closer to the fire.
I shivered at the image her analogy created because that had been the kind of sensation I’d felt trailed us home. Only for me, it was more like something spreading through the damp of the streets, sneaking under hedges and through wet leaf piles, floating within the various autumnal scents and ribbons of wood smoke, hidden among everything out there that was cooling and dying with the season.
“You just had a bad scare when you were little and it’s never left you,” I said.
“I’m not little anymore and those things still terrify me.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I know it sounds stupid, but it’s true.” She shook her long, dark hair over one shoulder and I saw that she really did feel uncomfortable just talking about it.
“What exactly scares you still?” I wanted to know. “You said that circus guy loomed over you, but you were a little kid. All adults seemed too tall and stern.”
Her face grew more solemn. “I don’t know; just this feeling that there’s something out there whenever they’re around. Something dangerous that travels with them. I don’t want to go to a show because—” She stopped talking.
“What?” I implored.
“Because I’m afraid I’ll see whatever it was that frightened me again and this time it’ll get me,” she finished.
“That guy would be dead by now.”
“It wasn’t just him. There was something about him, something with him, like this feel of a shadow lurking nearby. I remember feeling like he’d followed me and my parents’ home, even though there was nothing there.” Her words shook me.
“What?” she said. “You look horrified. All these years later, I’ve never seen him again, but then again, I don’t go to those things.”
“Nothing,” I told her. “Just got a chill from the cold air tonight. Forget about that man, Lee. He’s long gone. But I agree with you, these things are made to feel creepy. That’s why people are attracted to them, to see the bizarre, to obtain a cheap thrill for their buck. It’s why we go see horror movies.”
She stood up, finishing the last bit of wine in her glass. “I’m going to take a shower. I’ll see you in bed soon.”
“Okay.” I watched her move into the depths of the house and sat by the fire for another minute, moving closer to soak up its warmth. Her words had echoed the very sensation I still felt from tonight. I couldn’t recall seeing this dark man there last year; he was new with this year’s show. When I heard the hiss of the shower head turn on and knew she was occupied, I stepped back outside into the driveway and took a look around.
I noted the ground lights at the Ferris wheel had been turned off, setting the shape of the wheel into a black circle against an indigo sky. I had the same crawling sensation that the carny man was still up there, in the dark, watching me.
I peered inside the car. Everything looked normal. On impulse, I got down onto my knees again and looked underneath.
A pair of golden eyes, lit up in the dark, stared back at me.
“Oh!” I fell back on my ass at the same moment a dark grey cat shot out from beneath the car, and into the road where it disappeared through someone’s backyard.
“Shit!” My heart pounded. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Somebody’s cat out prowling. If a neighbor should ask what I was up to, I’d feign an innocent excuse. Oh, something’s been rattling under there while I drove around today. Loose bolt or maybe the muffler needs some work. What else could I say? That I felt I’d brought some kind of a bogeyman home, something unseen that had noticed me and my little boy there this evening and had hitched a ride home with us somehow? Unable to help myself, I got the binoculars out again and trained them on the distant Ferris wheel. I didn’t see him up there, but I felt him close by. The night smelled almost fungal in its encroaching frost. A wind picked up and sent a pile of loose leaves into a twirling dervish in the road, their dryness making soft scraping sounds as they danced. Wood smoke from many fireplaces hung heavy in the air, and underneath it all that cloying, dying scent of a season going to sleep.
I walked back to our porch to go inside. There, in the center of our step sat a solitary brown acorn, just like the one Randy had found inside the little white cardboard prize box in his insect-infested popcorn. It couldn’t be the same one; I’d watched him toss it through the window back at the fairground. I kicked the acorn off the porch and into the damp grass of our lawn. My mind reasoned: maybe he’d hung onto it anyway, only pretending to throw it out, and had dropped it on the way inside. Somehow, I’d missed it. Well, what the heck; it was only a stupid acorn.
Annoyed with the night, I got into bed beside Leonora and held her until she fell asleep. I lay in bed, listening to the night, listening to the wind tick and tap at the windows, smelling that miasmic perfume of smoke, leaves, damp, an undertone of rot and felt winter coming, the dead season that would shut us all down for months. When Leonora was asleep, I got up and walked across our dark hallway to check in on Randy whose room sat directly across from ours. He was fast asleep, his blankets tucked under one arm, his favorite teddy bear nearby. A small night lamp provided a soft glow to the entrance of his room so that he could see where he was going if he needed to get up to pee at night.
“He can’t touch you,” I whispered. “He won’t.”
Why did I feel then that the carny was after my boy, my family?
“Because he’s a jerk, and jerks have that effect on people.” I got back into bed. I took a long time to fall asleep, and my sleep was riddled with dream pieces about candlelit lamps, greasy black beanbag sacks, quiet carnival stands, the last one being the monster, its mouth wide and eager, and its painted lips quivering with anticipation in the void of night. What did it want? I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to speculate.
* * *
My job at a local newspaper office often has me working late shifts. This evening I was slated to start at 5 p.m. until midnight. On the way there I had to drive past the carnival ground, its rides lit up against the waning evening, its cloying stench of oil drum fires, popcorn grease, spun sugar and cigarette smoke creating a formidable perfume that infiltrated the car’s shut windows. I slowed a little, staring at the place. At the top of the Ferris wheel, which now held innocent riders who’d paid their ticket prices just like I had the evening before. The road twisted around the natural circumference of the farm field, with a second narrow lane where they’d lined up their trucks and sleeping tents at one end. I watched it for a while, then prepared to change lanes as my exit came up shortly.
He stood in the center of the lane, just beyond the end of the last eighteen wheeler truck parked there; his frock coat tails blowing in the wind, his hair looking like alabaster entrails that looped and curled over his shoulders, his smirk as wide and toothy as ever. He held an ebony walking stick in one hand, its head adorned with a ruby set into silver, and on the other end, speared to it like a crab caught at sea, was the pink gorilla, its fake fur still smeared with grease. The carny man held the stick up for me to see, watching me brake hard, the car sliding all over the road and almost going into the ditch as I brought it to a halt on the soft shoulder. Something hard ticked off my windshield and bounced before coming to a rest against a windshield wiper. It was an acorn.
No, the acorn. I knew it. The one that Randy had tossed from the window here last night, but that had somehow managed to end up on my front porch over an hour later; the one that I’d kicked from the porch and onto our lawn…was here, resting at the base of my windshield. I felt fear as old as tectonic plates shift in me, shoving me a little in my seat. I saw the carny man laugh, heard his laughter coming through the air,
(like dark ink looping through water)
this sound like ice cubes impacting against glass. He spun about, the pink gorilla still spiked on the end of his walking stick as he slipped back behind the truck and disappeared somewhere into the fairgrounds where the crowd ate him up. I wanted to get out of the car and run after him, haul him back by those slimy locks of his, and punch his face repeatedly until his grin would become a broken, bleeding thing, like a piece of raw liver spread over his face. He wanted something from me. He was taunting me, watching me…teasing me with some kind of malevolence. But if I went after him, I’d be late for work—and I couldn’t be late. The printing machines had to be set up, the papers produced for the morning newsstands, where the skeleton crew would take over from my midnight shift.
“If you ever come near my family, I’ll kill you,” I yelled through the open window at the fairground. I had the feeling he heard me, and that he continued to cackle as he took his place in front of his monster frame, his dusty, ancient beanbags lined up for a toss. I flipped the wipers on to hurl the acorn from the car. It landed on the soft shoulder and rolled to the edge of the ditch. On impulse, I got out of the car and, using the heel of one shoe, I proceeded to stomp and crush the acorn down into so many small bits of shell and flattened nut meat. I danced on it, oblivious to how I might appear to other drivers who slowed to regard me, until the acorn was nothing more than fine shards and moist dust in the ground.
“See if you can come back again after that!” I told it. I got into the car, chilled from the cooling night air and from having seen the carnival freak watching me. I pulled out into traffic and drove to work, but before heading into the newspaper building, I walked across the street to a small gift shop and purchased a new stuffed teddy bear and a box of fancy jelly beans for Randy, as I’d promised him I’d do. I used my cell phone and called home, getting Leonora on the other end.
“How’s things?”
“Fine, hon. What’s up?”
“Oh, just thought I’d touch base with you before another late evening. What’s Randy doing?”
Leonora laughed gently. “He’s outside, playing with his friend Kevin. They’re raking leaves into a huge pile in our front yard and jumping into them. We’ll have to get those things bagged for pickup soon.”
For some reason, the image of him in those leaves bothered me. I thought of my kicking the acorn into them the evening before, yet I knew I’d destroyed the acorn out on the soft shoulder of the highway barely twenty minutes earlier.
“Don’t let him play in those things,” I said. “They’re wet and decaying.” They smell of autumn, and autumn is about rotting and dying things, isn’t it, Dean? Isn’t it? It’s the time when the circus always comes to town.
“Oh, they’re fine.” I could hear her doing things while she no doubt had the phone squeezed between her cheek and shoulder; the sound of a pot being placed on a stove. Good, normal, household sounds. I wanted to be home with my family right now. I didn’t want to be here, away from them. I was letting that creep get to me, scaring me in a way I didn’t understand and wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone. I couldn’t even call the police because he hadn’t directly threatened me. I couldn’t tell them I felt threatened because I happened to see him sitting on the top of a Ferris wheel five blocks away, or that my kid had picked a stale box of popcorn that contained a dead beetle, or because he’d taken a fancy to pushing a greasy stuffed animal onto the end of his walking stick; odd, eccentric, mentally unbalanced in an uncanny kind of way, perhaps. Had he broken the law, per se? No. He just brought a shiver to my skin. I started to wonder who he was, who he’d been, where he came from. What had he been like as a kid?