Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  Mr. Monkey started to chant in a low monotone, saying words I couldn’t understand with absolutely no inflection, his spittle glistening in the dim light. Then he raised his hands and I saw that they held something, something that had been lying flat on the table before him. I couldn’t make out what it was, but he turned it slowly in his grip and I gathered that it was oval and about eighteen inches long. Only when its narrow orbit crossed over the candle did the shape come into focus as something I could recognize.

  It was a mask.

  An ugly mask made of rough carved wood - maybe balsa, considering how light it seemed in his hands - with grotesque painted features glued like insects onto the front. Almond-shaped eyes and pursed purple lips. A thatch of stringy black hair. Cheeks sculpted into caricatures of human features.

  Late August sweat coated my skin. And I felt - excited. Sexually charged. There was a sensual beauty, a primitive eroticism, about that mask and it forced me to react even though it disgusted me. It was the danger of being caught, too, the voyeuristic erection one gets when peeping. I’d lectured about Hitchcock’s Rear Window in the same way, but this time I was the peeper. Looking into that trailer, I hugged the window and wondered if I weren’t getting more than I had bargained for when I’d reentered the midway. What went on here after hours?

  My temples throbbed.

  The carny stood, hunched over the table, and raised his voice steadily until I could hear each S enunciated clearly. The words rang in my ears. His speech sounded like a strange mixture of Latin and Spanish, but I couldn’t be sure. Languages had never been my thing. His voice was still uninflected, like a chant, and it curled into my ears like smoke in a cave.

  There were other items on the table that I couldn’t see, and he moved them around with hawk-like claws and passed the mask over the candle’s flame once, then twice. By the third time, I could smell the scorched wood and see wisps of smoke in the light. His lips continued to form strings of words. The smoke thickened as he lowered the mask onto the flame and shook it gently, rotating it so as to keep the scorching even.

  Then he spit on the mask and made the candle sputter. His monotone rose and rose until it was as loud as normal speech, as any sound could be. It painted pictures in my head I had never seen, and formed words in my mind that I had never heard.

  He took the mask from the table and I realized that he was naked from the waist down. I blinked rapidly and watched as he impaled the mask on his erection, chanting as his hands moved the warm wood back and forth.

  I was stunned, but I also felt an embarrassing straining. The mask’s features suddenly became clear. They represented both a face and a genital area. The cheeks did double duty on that clever mask, and the effect was stunning - like a bright flash of porn inserted between the regular frames of a Disney movie by some disgruntled animator.

  I caught myself in mid-crouch, a depraved peeping tom with a bulge in his pants and the warm stain of blood on his cheeks. I felt defiled and defiling.

  And I didn’t care.

  All around me was a cloying smell, a stench of hot flux like the oxyacetylene torch in my father’s auto shop. I gagged and tried to snuff the cough that rose in my throat. Inside the trailer, the carny had finished whatever he’d been doing with the mask and now moved a stone around the edges of a picture frame that lay flat on the table. I couldn’t see the picture, but it didn’t matter because I was leaving. I’d had enough of the strange scene. Maybe the carny knew I was there all along and just wanted to put on a scary show. Man, it worked.

  But then I crouched again, because someone had opened the trailer’s door, which I could just barely see outside the cone of the candle’s light. A few whispered words floated toward me, then a body was flung at the old carny’s feet. I thought I saw a flash of red shirt and then the door was pulled quietly closed.

  I half-stood, about to go for some kind of help. This was 911 time for sure. I’d left my cell phone in the car, but there had to be a phone somewhere. Then the body groaned and I saw that it was a girl - or a young woman - wearing skintight jeans and a frilly red blouse. She sat up, her movements stiff with fear, and stared at the carny, who sat muttering as if she weren’t even there.

  She was very pretty, I thought, and vaguely familiar, with fluffy raven hair and wearing heavy make-up. She seemed almost the perfect evil cheerleader in one of those cheap slasher films, her features bloated with lust. But then I realized that it was only an illusion. It was fear, and the flicker of understanding crossed her face like a cloud. Her lips opened to scream, but the carny made a sudden gesture and no sound came from her open mouth. When she realized it, she tried to scream louder, putting her whole body into it and her eyes near to bursting, but it was no use. With a quick motion, he slipped the mask onto her face and her eyes disappeared behind the scorched wood. Her head stopped moving.

  I was too scared to move and I had to tear myself away from the sight of him standing over her with some kind of evil in his features, muttering his strange language all the while and ignoring her silent screams. I became his accomplice right then, because I could not run for help, nor turn away, and because I felt one desperate surge in my groin and soiled my underwear - the wetness in the folds of my briefs telling me more about myself than I ever wanted to know.

  Tears snaked out of my eyes, tears of guilt and disgust.

  But I kept on watching.

  How long? I didn’t know.

  When it was over, the mask that hid her face made her seem unreal, like a mannequin in a store window, with limbs made of hard plastic.

  I crouched in shame and fear, watching the inside of the trailer. The carny knelt over her silent body and I couldn’t see what he was doing now. One hand rose up and out, pulling away from his gnarled chest. A metal sliver glowed in the candlelight. Beside him on the trailer floor lay a metal bowl.

  I heard wet, slushy sounds.

  The enormity of my crime welled up not unlike blood from the open zipper of a paper cut. I bowed my head in silent shame, feeling the wetness at the front of my jeans, knowing that my manhood had shrunk timidly and now sought comfort in the cold, sticky fabric. My eyes blurred for a moment and I thought I would faint, victim of the pungent smell which clung to my nostrils.

  What was he doing?

  Something tiny and sharp flashed in the carny’s grip. A needle?

  He muttered over the picture frame, then bent over the girl and lifted her like a dead fish. As the mask slipped, I glimpsed smudges like blood on her chin and black streaks radiating almost comically from her eyes. She was all lumps and folds, as if drugged. Maybe she had been drugged - who the hell knew? Police lights flashed in my mind’s eye. Only a phone call away, if I had my cell phone in my hand. I started to slip out of the narrow alley, but I heard the front door of the trailer snap open and pulled up, mouth open and oxygen starved. I was close enough to the Winnebago’s side to hug the darkness and wait for whoever it was to walk past. With my face inches from the trailer’s corner, one of the booth’s attendants brushed past, gravel popping under his feet. The girl followed, a silent robot presence. There was nothing left of the evil cheerleader - there was nothing much left of her at all, it seemed to me. Her feet dragged in the gravel like the legs of a corpse.

  A freak of lighting, or maybe a ray of moonlight made it through a thin cloud and offered a blade of light, and I saw - yes, I saw - that the girl’s lips and eyelids had been sewn shut.

  *

  I screamed then.

  I screamed and felt my head bursting with a tight, lancing pain.

  I moved and my fists hammered at the startled attendant’s head and face, pummeling soft flesh and bone with pent-up rage. He tried to fight back but I was wild, striking like a windmill.

  Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed the girl just standing there where she had stopped, like a tall sack of potatoes with legs. Before the attendant could react, I landed a series of blows to his face and upraised arms, my knuckles now bruised and sl
ick with his blood, then I went for his middle.

  Even though I felt the hard muscle through his t-shirt, my uncontrolled enraged blows staggered him. My fists were numb with the pounding, but he went down and then I was kicking him in the side and in the head. I heard the crack of bone under my shoes, but even that didn’t stop me. As he curled up, I almost tripped over his wheezing form. I grabbed the girl’s arm and stumbled away, toward the darkness formed by another row of trailers and RVs.

  All around, lights blinked on and thin metal doors opened, releasing glowing yellow bars into the night.

  Somewhere behind us, the old carny hissed a stream of syllables and the curious rapidly closed their doors. Better not to know, and I agreed. But it was too late for me. We reached the dark even though she was a dragging weight on my arm.

  The tiny, bloodless holes that framed her lips and underlined her closed eyelids pulled my gaze and, even in the shadows, I could see the thin thread that snaked ever-so-neatly from hole to hole. Her skin was not unlike processed leather I’d once seen in a tannery. The girl herself might as well have been dead. Maybe she would have been luckier.

  And it was my fault. The thought was a jackhammer in my brain.

  I dragged her and she came, like a puppy on a leash.

  The boarded-up midway took us.

  *

  Now the smell deep in my nostrils seemed about to suffocate me, and a nightmare vision of purple wooden lips and eyelids sewn shut hovered in front of my face like a veil.

  For hours, silent figures had combed the grounds for us. Once, from behind a garbage dumpster, I caught a close-up look and almost gagged up whatever was left of the chili dogs I had eaten earlier - days earlier, it seemed.

  The searchers’ eyes and lips were all sewn shut, in that precise little stitch.

  We were driven from what should have been one end of the midway to the other countless times, but we never even saw the gate. Was I hallucinating? Time had struggled to a standstill. We were lost.

  So when I noticed that her hand, her soft and shapely hand, was putting slight pressure on my own hand, I was shocked. Up to now I thought I’d been leading her, but she was taking me for a walk.

  Above us, a darkened Ferris wheel loomed. It was dead and sinister in the unnatural darkness, spindly struts radiating outward like a gigantic spider’s web.

  And I knew the spider.

  Her hand led me to the wheel’s lowermost gondola, where the safety bar was up in a bizarre welcome gesture. It was a stupid place to rest, but I let her lead me. Maybe they wouldn’t find us here, among the steel. It was a slim chance, but I had nothing much to lose. I felt more fear now than anger. Revenge was replaced now by survival. Pure and simple. One moment’s hot-head is the next moment’s coward.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I whispered. I wondered about her name.

  She couldn’t talk, but we hadn’t had much time for talk anyway. I looked at her face, lovely and now deformed. The old carny had done this to her, and more. I sat in the swaying gondola and helped her down beside me. She just came, like a trusting pet. Her skin was clammy in the early morning haze that hugged the ground.

  I was cold, suddenly, cold and alone. Some kind of fucked-up zombies stalked what was left of the night, and my only company was a walking corpse.

  Jessie was alone, too. I hoped she was safe. At least she wasn’t here, suffering through this carnival of horrors. The thought bubbled laughter up my throat, a sarcastic chuckle bursting out from my lips, forcing me to question my sanity. I didn’t want to laugh any more, but it came out of me along with the tears.

  Damn that dart game, damn my weakness, damn my pride.

  If only I hadn’t seen that booth. But some part of me understood that I’d been meant to see it from the beginning.

  The girl stared ahead through her lids. A sullen, chilly breeze ruffled her limp hair.

  “What’s your name?” I asked for the hundredth time, hoping something would click. “What happened? How did you get into this? Shit, tell me how I got into this.”

  Her face stared ahead. I took her hand in mine and squeezed as hard as I could, but it was no more effective than handling a dead fish and hoping it would rise again.

  I dropped her hand and grabbed her wrist, searching.

  There was no pulse.

  My brain short-circuited and I smelled that hot flux smell again. She couldn’t be dead. She had walked with me half the night. I held her hand. There was no fucking way…

  I never could find even my own pulse. What made me think I could find someone else’s? She wasn’t dead, she was just in shock and her pulse eluded my efforts to find it, that was all.

  “There’s a way out of this, you know,” I said, forcing a casual tone, but with my voice cracking. “We’re both tired -” I looked at the delicate skin puckering around the tiny holes and black thread “- and we both need help, but it’ll be all right.” Sure, removing the stitches would hurt. But it could be done. Her mind could be dealt with later. “It’ll be all right,” I lied again.

  Then I remembered the Swiss Army knife in my back pocket. One of those pocket knives too big for pockets but which I carried around anyway. It had gotten me out of the occasional minor emergency. I fumbled with the blades, looking for the sharp little scissors in the dark. I pried out the folded blades and edged closer to my companion.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I won’t hurt you. I’m just going to try undoing these damn stitches.”

  I put my hand on her face and turned it slightly toward me. God, she was beautiful! Except for the scars the old sadist had given her. I applied the scissors gently, bringing my face close to hers, and in seconds I had snipped through four tiny loops in her left eyelid. Six more to go, and they gave easily. I was surprised there was no blood, but glad, too.

  I reached out with my index finger and gently slid up her eyelid, hoping I could see something - a spark maybe - reflected in her eye.

  But I recoiled in pure horror, leaping back to the other side of the short little seat and shaking my hand as if trying to shake off a disgusting insect. I heard a croak escape my lips and hang in the air between us. My rapid breathing tried to catch up to my fluttering heart, but I thought I was going to keel over.

  Her eye cavity was empty.

  There was no eyeball for her to look through. There was nothing but a black, cave-like hole.

  The severed optical nerve hung like a bloated tongue just inside the lid. I felt sour, evil-tasting chili dogs and cotton candy start a burning path up my throat again. I swallowed and thought my esophagus would melt from the acid.

  That was when the Ferris wheel groaned and we dropped a foot.

  I propelled myself off the damp metal and plastic seat, but the safety bar crashed into position and pinned us both to the back. Another groan, another drop. I wrestled with the bar, trying to pry it from just above my groin, but I could barely scrape under its rusted hardness with my fingers. I imagined feeling the circulation cut off from my legs, being torched out of the car an invalid, my legs useless stumps, and the bar seemed to dig even deeper into my flesh.

  “Hey, goddamnit to hell fuck!” I shouted incoherently.

  My voice barely sliced through the sound of the Ferris wheel’s motor, which chose that second to come to life.

  There was no one at the controls. I could see the rust-streaked podium and its levers, but there was no one there at all.

  Pain shot through my legs as the car began to rise backwards. My throat constricted as the air seemed to thin, adding to the sheen of sweat I felt on my forehead thanks to the damp coverlet of particles riding the night clouds. I glanced at my companion and saw no change. Her sewn eyelid and her open eyelid might have been shades on separate apartment windows.

  As we rose, I saw that the sky was getting lighter. Wispy early morning haze swirled below, and the suddenly the ground was only visible in patches.

  I screamed when the vibrations started, the w
heel feeling as if it would shudder itself apart into a million jagged pieces.

  Then we stopped at the top of the arc, starting to swing back and forth. The girl stared at me with her empty eye cavity and one shut lid resembling a long, evil wink.

  *

  Now, the Ferris wheel stilled except for the struts’ groans, the chill wrapped itself around me. The girl’s arm felt as cold as the air, but I grasped it eagerly as we swung.

  I had begun talking to myself. Sometime in the last hour or so the girl’s silence had finally gotten to me and I pretended she wasn’t there - except for the grip I maintained on her arm.

  “Get her to a hospital and tell the police. Bring them back. Have the old fucker in row three number six arrested.”

  It was like an agenda, scrawled on a Post-It.

  Buy coffee.

  Water plants.

  Neutralize satanic carny and his army of zombies.

  Sure.

  Still, the words sounded comforting in my ears, even if she didn’t hear me. I shivered. “I’ll make sure that fucker rots in prison the rest of his life, don’t worry.”

  Hollow words, without meaning. Might as well have been quoting greeting card verse. I laughed and the sound echoed through the dark scaffold of the treacherous Wild Mouse across the way. I saw movement on the highest level of tracks and wondered if zombies were even now climbing the struts of the Ferris wheel. Trees rustled endlessly below.

  The bar suddenly lifted, freeing our laps and almost sending us flying out of the narrow little seat. I grabbed desperately for the bar with one hand and tried to pull her closer to me.

  “Well, at least we’re not prisoners any more.” I tried to chuckle, but it came out all wrong.

  In the silence that followed, she slid down in the seat and slid off the gondola -

  out of my fucking grip

  - and I heard the wet smack clearly even though the rising wind whistled through the struts. The scream died in my throat as I grabbed the bar with both hands until my nails split against the rough metal and my bladder threatened to loosen.