Despite all that, Harry still had to cover his friend’s mouth, bite his own lips, and look to see that Dejan was doing the same. Had to. They also had to get inside.
Dejan helped lift a corner of canvas up, it was unnaturally heavy. They were wet and muddy already, so it was nothing to roll in the muck to get inside. Nothing, that was, compared to the all-engulfing darkness within.
Uncle Funbo’s Natalia Circus. 19th December 1999. 19:00. Admit One.
“People are some of the worst things in this world. You should be scared of them. But you should be more scared of the non-people…”
Inside, it was as dark as nightmares. As dark as every unlit room and shadowy hallway Harry had ever fearfully gazed down after a bad dream. There was no parents’ room at the end of this. No comfort. No hugs. No light.
The percussive bomb fall of the rain against the tarp was relentless. Yet, it was something Harry was secretly grateful for. They had no way of knowing who or what else was still inside the great marquee, and the noise of the storm would at least cover their noises within. He hoped.
They huddled together, wet and dirty and scared. Too scared, for the moment, to walk deeper into the inky darkness, for fear the pitch-black had actually solidified, for fear that they would reach out with their hands and touch something. Something that would feel like the performers, something that would feel like hay and straw but wouldn’t be. Just the thought of that was enough to make Harry’s head spin and his stomach swivel.
The three friends put their heads together, feeling each other’s hot and clammy breath, feeling their sopping wet clothing crusted with mud. The only sensations of this whole ordeal that were comfortably part of the real world. The world before they had come here.
“We came in through the back,” Dejan whispered, so low Harry could have believed he was actually reading his friend’s mind. “So, as long as we keep our backs against the way we came in, if we just head forward, we’ll get to the entrance and get out?”
“No,” Miguel hissed. “Too much like swimming. In the sea. We can’t see what’s underwater, you know? What’s in the dark.”
Harry saw the image in his mind. The darkness wasn’t just regular darkness. It was sunless depths at the bottom of a gelatinous ocean, and if they walked through it so openly, all manner of undersea creatures might watch them, might see them, might be right behind, above or next to them. They would never know until those creatures touched them, grabbed them, and ate them.
“Migs is right,” Harry whispered. “We need to maybe go in a circle, close to the edge the whole way, until we get to the other door. Then we just run for the road, cross it, and get to the shopping center.”
The other two agreed.
“I’ll go at the front, I guess,” Harry said. There were no complaints. He’d hoped Dejan might have said something. “Maybe we can take turns?” Harry added.
“Hope it doesn’t take that long,” Dejan said.
But they all pictured it in their heads, it was a big tent. None would say it, but there was a sensation that it was impossibly bigger inside than it looked from outside.
“Well, I don’t want to be at the back,” Miguel said. He sounded on the verge of tears. Harry felt like he was too, he could feel his knees shaking. Miguel finished his thought, “That’s how things get you.”
So Harry led with his left hand against the tarp. It rippled irregularly from the wind, and he could feel the rain being driven against it. Could hear the thunder, but the canvas was so thick Harry couldn’t see any bolts of lightning flaring through.
In his right hand, he held Miguel’s hand, with Dejan bringing up the rear. Harry took one step forward. His foot squelched in boggy mud. He took another step forward, his hand dragging against the canvas. It felt a little like when he’d rubbed his finger along shark skin at the aquarium during a school trip earlier that year.
He tried not to remind himself of what the marquee’s skin had looked like in the flash of electricity. Blood and ghosts and flesh. Tried to squeeze his eyes shut and see it as he’d first seen it: candy cane red, snow white, a Christmas wonderland, a circus and carnival, and all the things he’d never seen wrapped in one.
Only it wasn’t any of that. It just pretended to be.
His teeth chattered, from cold or from how scared he was, he didn’t really care which. His clothes were still wet, and the longer they spent in the dark, the better the idea of running outside, around the marquee, and through the storm seemed. He didn’t care if Uncle Funbo himself saw them and caught them.
He didn’t care, because in here, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Uncle Funbo and his circus crew might have chairs pulled up right now, watching Harry and his friends. Snickering and grinning and biting their lips so as to not let the children know how futile their plan was.
There was whispering behind him. Miguel leaned forward and whispered something right into Harry’s ear. It was a miracle Harry didn’t shriek with fright. “Dejan says he feels like we’re being watched.”
“Just tell him we’re not,” Harry made himself say.
He squeezed Miguel’s hand, mentally counting his friend’s fingers, the feeling of his skin. He had the idea that it was a monster creeping behind him. A monster pretending to be Miguel. Or maybe it was Miguel holding a creature’s hand… or maybe Miguel was holding Dejan’s hand, and the creature was holding onto Dejan’s severed wrist, smiling in the dark behind long, sharp teeth. Smiling about how it was tricking Miguel and Harry. Smiling about how good Dejan tasted.
One step forward.
Harry tried to focus on that.
Next step forward.
Fingers tracing the canvas.
If something did grab them, he could roll out and dig himself under the canvas like a dog digging under a fence. He tried to focus on that. Tried not to let his imagination draw up the picture of him burrowing under the tent, only to find three duck-like triplets waiting for him outside. Their beaks filled with teeth.
Just one step forward, Harry told himself, counting the fingers on Miguel’s hand (still five, still normal).
One more step forward, and they were closer to the entrance—exit for them—than they were a few steps earlier.
The next step, however, was blocked.
“Migs,” Harry whispered. “You and Dejan, come feel this.”
From the texture and what scratching sounds he could hear beneath the storm’s bellows, Harry had an idea of what it was.
“Hay bales,” Miguel said.
“That’s what I thought,” Harry said. He reached up. They were stacked high. They shuffled to the side. They were stacked wide.
“We’ve got to find a way around,” Harry said, not wanting to move farther away from the tarpaulin wall they had been following.
“Maybe we can climb over them?” Miguel said.
Harry pulled on the ropes binding the bales. Maybe.
“They go too high.”
“Dejan?” Harry asked.
“And if lightning strikes the tent pole, they’re not going to be haybales anymore. They’re going to wriggle, and then you’d lose your grip and fall.”
“Dejan?” Miguel said.
It hadn’t sounded like Dejan… It had sounded like someone pretending to be Dejan.
“How do you know they go too high?” Harry tried to keep his teeth from chattering more as he put the question to the unremitting darkness.
“Because I stacked them.”
There was screaming and running.
And howling, cackling attempts at laughter.
Harry made for the wall of the marquee, but something touched him from behind. Straw scratched his flesh. Straw that was wet and wriggly. He screamed for Miguel, got no answer, wrenched himself free from the grasp of whatever had stolen Dejan’s voice, and ran.
He tried to pull the canvas up, to wriggle under, but he couldn’t. It was too heavy, or else it just wouldn’t let go of the wet earth.
Harry screamed h
is friend’s name again.
He heard screams of his name.
He doubled back and fled helter-skelter, deeper into the darkness.
Trying to head for Miguel.
It sounded like his friend.
His friend sounded as terrified as Harry felt.
He ignored “Dejan” calling out. Whatever sounded like Dejan didn’t sound scared. It was acting scared, trying to sound scared, sounding like adults when they played hide-and-seek with toddlers: ‘Oh, I just can’t find you, you’re hidden too good. Wow! You must’ve disappeared!’
Harry was terrified he was going to bump into something; something that spoke with his friend’s voice and looked like a molten plastic version of a cartoon character. He had his hands out, reaching, maybe for the canvas wall, maybe for hay bales. He felt nothing.
He wandered blindly in the midnight interior. Rain still ricocheted off the roof and walls, and thunder still boomed and clapped above.
Tears—as silent as he could keep them—came down Harry’s cheeks.
He moved slow and low. Quiet as he could. At least where he was now, the floor was less wet, so he guessed he must be closer to the center of the tent. Drier floor meant less squelching with each step. He still had to be careful of anything that might crunch or snap underfoot. That always happened in the movies.
He had his hands out. He didn’t want to, but he had to feel his way through the darkness. He’d been in this pitch-black so long he couldn’t tell whether he had his eyes opened or squeezed shut.
Then, off to his right, Harry saw a light. Not electrical, but fire, a candle or something burning behind glass. A lantern light.
He didn’t know if he could hide, or if he was even near anything to take cover behind or under. So he threw himself to the floor and hoped all the mud and dirt over the past few—how long had it been?—hours, would act as some camouflage. Now he was relying on the darkness.
Thunder shook the sky, and under the constant drumroll of rain, Harry heard crying. A little boy crying. The lantern came closer.
He saw a hand holding it. A hand with fingers as long as Harry’s arms. He saw long legs walking. Long legs like trees bending in the wind. And another hand guiding Miguel forward.
The light from the lantern didn’t cast enough of a glow to see even the chest or face of whoever—or whatever—was leading Miguel. Harry noticed this tall man, taller than a person should be, didn’t leak straw behind with each step.
It—or he—was talking to Miguel, “Yes, you have to be careful. Young children the world over must. Not only in these lands… easy to go missing, to be taken… Grown-ups, adults…”
Harry couldn’t make it all out, between the storm and Miguel’s sobs. But he did hear it say, “People are some of the worst things in this world. You should be scared of them. But you should be more scared of the non-people…”
Lightning struck. Harry knew it had struck the very top of the highest pole of the tent. That strange and eerie metallic finial that he’d first seen reaching for the sky. Somehow it illuminated, for a few seconds, the interior of the tent in a pale blue-green light.
Harry saw too much.
Things pretending to be people acting as movie monsters stood nearby and around Miguel. Others sat on hay bales that weren’t really made of hay. Harry recognized the clown with the monstrous fingers, the lady with nails for teeth—if everything about them looked fake, those teeth looked very real—the man with pins driven into his head.
No cartoon or children’s shows creatures here. They wanted Miguel scared, maybe needed him scared; or maybe horror movie monsters were just closer to what they truly were. It was less of a costume for them, more comfortable.
There was no way Harry saw that he could even get up and run through or past them all without being grabbed.
Harry also noticed the flickering light still didn’t illuminate the tall man who’d been talking. As if the electric glow, or all light, was swallowed by the tall man. It showed more than the lantern but still not his face, though Harry thought he got a glimpse of what might be a straw beard, hanging down his chest. Harry saw long scarecrow fingers shoving straw down Miguel’s mouth. Miguel’s mouth which looked too wide. Far too wide.
Turning away, already missing and wishing for the darkness in this pulsing flash, Miguel saw another pole near him. It looked different from the center pole. This one looked more normal: made out of wood. A rope dangled down from it, and that rope, near the top, connected to another pole.
Then it was dark again.
Harry carefully and slowly tried to crawl for the pole. If he couldn’t run, he could climb. Ahead of him was only the dim lantern light now. Those impossibly long fingers—Uncle Funbo’s fingers, Harry realized—still forced hay into his friend’s broken mouth.
Harry felt around the pole for the rope as quietly as he could. He had his hand over his mouth to stop from crying, but he knew with the storm, Miguel’s moans, and the other noises the things—the non-people—were making, it might be his best chance to climb without being noticed.
Harry climbed, and then when he felt the rope going taut and off to the next pole, he shimmied along it like he had the branches earlier. With something far worse than electric fencing or a broken neck now below him. He shimmied until he got to another post. Then to the next one. Until he saw a tent flap blowing with the wind, smelled the dank petrichor, and saw the gray light of the outside. Of the world.
This was it. He didn’t know what happened to Dejan, didn’t want to think about what was being done to Miguel. He had to lower himself down and just run. Run right into the road without slowing or looking back. Run right into the traffic and an oncoming car if he had to.
It didn’t matter.
He needed to be out of this marquee and off this field— which should’ve stayed empty—and on to the road, on to the tarmac. They couldn’t get him there. They couldn’t. They shouldn’t be allowed to. And if they could?
He’d rather let a car get him.
Uncle Funbo’s Natalia Circus. 19th December 1999. 19:00. Admit One.
They know where we live.
He’d somehow made it home, wet, wretched, and tearful. There were police cars outside by the time he walked up and rang the intercom.
Harry showed them where he and his friends had climbed the trees to get into the woods.
He’d told them men had been in the woods too. Things like that could happen in this country. They happened all the time, apparently. Nobody would think to suspect the circus. The adults all believed it and believed that he had somehow managed to escape. He still couldn’t quite believe he had gotten away. There was little about Uncle Funbo’s he could and wanted to believe.
He didn’t mention Uncle Funbo’s. Sending the police there would be bad. It would let those non-people and their ringmaster know one child got away. The police couldn’t help his friends, anyway. They were beyond the help of adults.
Even though his door was opened, his mother still knocked before entering.
She said, “Maybe this will cheer you up a little.”
She handed him a newspaper. It said that the traveling circus, Uncle Funbo’s, had invited him, Haralambos Georgiou, as a guest of honor and that all proceeds from the show would go towards the investigative effort to find his missing friends. His mother had to help him with some of the words, but his reading skills weren’t what made him freeze and stutter so much.
“They sent this in the mail,” his mother said.
What Harry heard was, they know where we live.
She tipped an envelope upside down and something fell into her palm.
She handed him a ticket.
The ticket had been signed. Harry knew if he stood outside during the next thunderstorm, held the ticket up as the lighting cracked the sky, he’d read the true name of the signee. See the name that was behind this one.
The ticket said:
Uncle Funbo’s Natalia Circus
19th December
1999
19:00
Admit One
3
The Siren’s Song by R D Doan
I never thought this day would come. I’ve been with this carnival for as long as I can remember. I was just a kid when I left to spend my life with the carnival. It’s taken me to every corner of the country, from small towns to big cities.
In its heyday, this carnival was the biggest traveling carnival in the South. People would come from all over to see the freak show, play the latest games on the midway, or ride the biggest or best rides ever seen.
Of course, over the years, amusement parks started popping up and building permanent rides that were even bigger or faster. Carnivals like this were dying off, except for those that could make it to small town fairs. Even then, the crowds were smaller. Nobody wanted to ride our rides. They didn’t thrill the riders like the big coasters. They weren’t scary enough.
Some rides can be plenty scary, though, if conditions are right. Certain rides have stood the test of time. I think you know what I’m talking about.
Every once in a while, you’ll ride an old carnival ride, maybe something like the Scrambler or the Gravitron, and you’ll get this unsettling feeling. It’s a feeling as if you know something will go wrong.
Of course, nothing ever does. You get off at the end and walk away unscathed; but there is that brief moment before it starts. Sometimes you’ll think you can hear something. A soft singing voice. Then, poof! It’s gone, as if it never happened. You’re left feeling a little perturbed, but that’s all part of the fun. Isn’t it?
It’s fine.
Unless the song never stops.
Dark Carnival (A Horror Anthology) Page 5
