Authors: Carol Weekes
He was never a kid. I stopped at the thought, my foot on the first step of the newspaper building. I needed some answers and I would get them tonight before going home, once my shift was over. I’d find whoever owned the carnival, their boss, and I’d talk to him about how one of his workers had made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, and that if he’d had that effect on me, he’d have it on others too. I’d tell him that it wasn’t good for his business. I’d have the dark carny man brought before his boss to explain himself to me, and where I could tell him what I thought of him and that he’d better not ever come near my family for any reason. Then, somehow, I got through my shift, one of the paper’s articles being none other than a photograph of the lurid fairgrounds from the entrance to the park, and a write-up about how carnivals bring a ‘special magic’ with them wherever they travel.
“Magic, my ass,” I mumbled. It was more of a burlesque perversion, a fascination with the dark side of things that bordered somehow on dangerous, and it had to do with that man and his monster sign.
* * *
2:15 a.m. I idled on the road, knowing that the public had long gone home and were tucked into their beds, perhaps a few people still up to watch late night television or to read, this carnival on the edge of our town like shingles resting against skin. I had the distinct impression that he knew I was here, my headlamps off, my engine idling so that I could keep the heater going in the car to provide warmth against a night that had brought a thin layer of snow to the ground. I could smell the carnival ground trailing in through the heaters; the paper and chunks of wood that they burned in their heat-blackened oil drums, the stink of bags full of trash…discarded bits of hotdogs and fries, castaway soda pop cans, baby diapers, remnants of cotton candy clinging to sticky paper tubes. Their fires cast an orange glow against the backdrop of trucks, stands, and tents.
It struck me that this traveling show was the epitome of autumn, that season of sleep and dying where everything rots down and goes quiet. This carnival had managed to capture all of its aromas, its shadows, its lingering frosts, the symbolism of decline and fear caught within the folds of its heavy curtains and costumes, in the whirl of sparks amid the fire eaters, the serpentine menace of its snake charmers. Our ancestors had feared autumn’s approach with the falling of its leaves and the shortening of its days as fields grew brown and bacterium set in; fires set and sacrifices made to appease the gods of fate. This show tempted fate; it played with images of death, teased it in its death-defying acts, invited it close enough so that you could smell it everywhere.
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 clouds, 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.