* * *
Vanessa dreamed of the circus.
11
Halloween Fantastic by Shea Herlihy-Abba
“Shit, that old wolf will be dead before he sells all that Lapis to the Crow’s Foot,” I said, stamping on a discarded paper container half-full of stale popcorn.
“Don’t be silly,” said Magdalena. “His business is thriving. And he’s clever. He’ll be hosting a new class on using Lapis to open the throat chakra within the week. And all those starry-eyed regulars will be at his doorstep with bags full of cash before Sunday.”
I chortled, squinting through the blaring lights of the Halloween Fantastic at the milling crowds and spinning rides.
To our right, the Scary-Go-Round revolved in slow motion. Eerie live accordion music accompanied zombified horses as they made their revolutions while two hunchbacked actors in clown makeup and huge, false facial stitching squeezed classic Halloween tunes out of their blood-speckled accordions.
One of them had dyed green hair in exaggerated tufts and sported an enormous fake head wound, coated with syrupy gore.
To our left, a barbershop quartet of four paper mache mummies were belting out classics like “The Monster Mash” and “Werewolves of London” in sepulchral tenors while passerby chucked singles, fives, and fistfuls of change into an open sarcophagus lined with black velvet, gold-painted ankhs, and cobra-headed scepters.
Magdalena crammed another handful of Skittles into her mouth and clucked at my ignorance.
“Besides, the Crow’s Foot does good business. They overcharge the hipsters for their crystals and their cutesy animal totems, but they’ve always been good to me and ol’ Will.”
I squinched up the ends of my eyes. William Yellow Hawk: the toast of many of Denver’s spiritual communities, and a clever salesman to boot.
He had good medicine, and while I wasn’t opposed to the idea of relieving the drooling masses of their extra cash in exchange for some extreme basics of the human energy system, his easy shyster’s grin and gleaming eyes gave me the creeps sometimes.
“Strong medicine,” as an old South Dakotan medicine man—who I’d met through Magdalena—would’ve said, in his stiff, throaty Lakotan accent. “But a tricky guy.”
I shrugged and took a slug from my glass-bottled Coca Cola.
“Sounds good,” I said, eyeing the Plunge of Terror, which was delivering its next payload of shrieking carnival goers to the bottom of its cobwebbed tower.
Magdalena eyed me. “You need to lighten up. You know that, right?” she said, her sharp, mystic’s gaze scanning my face like a fax machine laser.
“Tell you what,” she added with a wink. “I know you’re doing the college kid budget thing. If you cheer the heck up and do the House of Twisted Mirrors with me, I’ll take another fifteen bucks off your next lesson.”
I brightened up immediately.
“Hell, yes,” I said, twisting up an eyebrow at her. “You kidding? I’ll even race you there,” I said with a wink of my own.
* * *
We arrived, giggling and panting, at the House of Mirrors. Magdalena planted her hands on her knees, doubling over and chuckling gleefully.
“You’re way too young,” she wheezed. “These knees can’t handle this shit anymore.”
“Dude, you’re what, in your mid-forties?” I said. “If you’d stop smoking, you’d be fine.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, frowning. “You’re twenty-two. You don’t know.” She pulled a cigarette from the carton in the pocket of her jeans and lit up.
“Let’s get in there,” she grumbled. “My tits are starting to sweat, and they’ve got AC in there. I can feel the cool air from here.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said a skinny, pale-faced zombie with a couple of half-assed wounds sketched onto his thin-boned face. “We don’t allow smoking in the House of Mirrors.”
“Shove it up your ass,” Magdalena muttered, butting her cigarette on the metal railing that formed the boundary for the queue.
A couple of people behind us whispered their disapproval: a tubby, sagging woman in her fifties and an elegant-looking young couple, decked out in trendy Halloween wear. The man wore a top hat with a skull-‘n-crossbones pin, plus a rich black trench coat and velvety red vest. The woman had a strapping, lacy corset decked out with finely-crafted false bones and Dia De Los Muertos face paint.
Magdalena silenced them with an icy death stare, and we entered.
* * *
I met Magdalena my Junior year at Denver Community College. I was wandering around campus because my bus didn’t leave for an hour and a half and I had some energy to burn.
I meandered across the South Quad toward the Student Lounge, fingering the buck fifty I had stuffed down the front pocket of my jeans as I had rushed out the door that morning.
I was hoping I could pull a long face at the guy working the register at the Student Cafe and get a mocha to slug down my throat so I could kill time as I made my way to the bus stop. Because $1.75 was apparently 17% over my after-class coffee budget.
I was shuffling up to the cafe counter when a poster pinned to the Student Announcements Board next to the espresso maker caught my eye.
LEARN KABBALAH
THE ANCIENT ART AND SCIENCE
OF HEBREW MYSTICISM
The poster flared with color, flush with a bright diagram that featured a series of diagonal lines that interconnected a pattern of circles labeled with words that looked like they came from a mystic hermit’s vocabulary workbook: MALKUTH, KETER, BINAH, CHOKMAH, and others.
The lines and their circles climbed a charcoal sketch of a tree whose branches and roots interconnected, like the Celtic Tree of Life.
“It’s like an acupuncturist’s diagram of blood vessels and pressure points,” I had observed to Magdalena, ten minutes into our first lesson.
“Only instead of mapping the human body, it maps the human consciousness and its progression toward unity with the divine. All the spheres that indicate the stages of being are like the gates your consciousness has to flow through as it passes through the Tree.”
“Exactly,” Magdalena had said, cracking her sharp, oldster’s grin. “I like you already. Now tell me what you think of these, and then you can pee. You’re good at hiding it, but I can feel your gallbladder squirming around. Don’t drink so much coffee before your next lesson. It’s not as good for killing your anxiety as you think,” she added as my face dropped into a look of total shock.
Before I could finish wondering how she knew all of that, she took out a sack of tiny quartz stones with Hebrew letters engraved on them in silver.
After she had finished dumping them out onto the little worn, plastic table that took up most of Library Study Room C-023, she looked me in the eye.
“Hold out your hand,” she said plainly. “Move it over the stones without touching them. Which of them feels the most real to you?”
“And, anyway,” Magdalena continued as we strolled through a long hallway full of cotton spiderwebs and tall, squiggly mirrors. “There’s nothing wrong with turning a little extra profit on the side when you’re in the business of spiritualism. My old mentor used to scam all those trendy Instagram witches out of their cash all the time. Before he turned into an asshole,” she muttered.
“I know, I know,” I said, grinding my teeth in concentration as I parsed through my various, competing opinions on money in the world of spiritualism.
“It’s not that I have a problem with it. If they have enough cash to blow through three hundred dollars for a weekend workshop where all they do is burn some sage and learn to visualize, then at least some of these fakey gurus are doing real stuff behind the scenes with all the extra dough.”
I furrowed my brow as we passed a gaunt-looking clown with expertly done skull makeup. He was positioned by a fractured mirror, and he waved silently at us as we walked past, his arm steadily working in an eerie, robotic motion.
“Yellow Hawk jus
t weirds me out sometimes. Now, what was this about your old mentor? First I’ve heard you talk about him since we met.”
“Yeah, well, everybody’s got a mentor,” she groused, waving the question away with a flabby hand. She coughed into her fist and tugged on the collar of her T-shirt, where a sweat stain was steadily broadening.
“Besides, Yellow Hawk’s a good guy,” she continued. “Lots of that cash goes back to his reservation, where the most exciting times of the year are Sun Dance and EBT night. His relatives get to eat because of him. You know, I saw him cure some guy of COPD one time? Guy came to him with a thousand bucks cash, five years left in him, and nothing else to lose. Forty-five minutes of tobacco offerings, prayer songs, and chanting and the guy’s totally cured. Doctors couldn’t believe it. What do they know?” she said, spluttering more wheezy laughter into her fist.
“I heard about that,” I mused. “Some people down at the Crow’s Foot were talking about it when I went down there last week to buy that turquoise you asked me to get.”
We turned a corner and almost bumped into another clown. This one had a rubber mask with a big split-open nose and a gored-out eye.
The mask was expertly smoothed onto his skin, and he tugged at his red suspenders, giggling at us as we passed a mirror that was bent to reflect three other mirrors on the opposite side of the hall: distorted images that echoed each other into infinity.
“And?” said Magdalena, arching an eyebrow at me as we rounded yet another cotton-webbed corner.
“And these clowns are getting creepy,” I remarked as we turned into an open, circular room lined with more curving mirrors.
In its center was a flickering lamp post. A single zombie clown dressed in a white suit smeared with red stripes gripped the post with one hand, swinging slowly around it and holding a tattered umbrella in the other hand.
Hidden speakers played a scratchy, distorted version of “Singing in the Rain” as the gore-painted actor revolved slowly around the lamp post, not seeming to tire at all.
Magdalena arched an eyebrow, looking at me directly.
“Yeah, yeah. The turquoise is helping the anxiety, like you said it would,” I grumped. “Let’s get out of here. This place is a little much.”
We exited the House of Mirrors as I fingered the little oval of turquoise in my pocket.
I had taken to bringing it everywhere with me. Magdalena’s knowledge of the medicinal properties of various crystals was incredibly accurate, and every time I touched the palm-sized blue stone, I could feel it sap my anxiety, along with the stomach pain that had plagued me since my early teens.
We hit the Splatter Stand for some goopy red snow cones, then the Creep Show, where burlesque dancers in gore-streaked, buxom raiment performed as vampires, demons, and zombies.
A drag queen named Pride of Frankenstein closed the show with a ravishing little number to an old Annette Hanshaw tune. We cheered and screamed, and Magdalena wolf-whistled louder than anyone in the audience.
By the time we had finished tossing fake intestines at a jibing, green comedian in the FrankenStocks, making fun of each other’s sloppily carved pumpkins at the Carving Shack, and shooting laser guns on a moving track at the Chainsaw Blast, we were ready to leave.
“That wasn’t even a face you carved on that thing!” Magdalena cackled as we headed for the parking lot, where her junky little VW sat parked at a slant across two adjacent parking spaces.
She slung a giant stuffed Count Chocula she had won at the Razor Blade Toss under one wrinkled arm. “I’d hate to see that fucking thing outside your doorstep this Halloween! Who taught you how to carve, a cannibal lumberjack?”
I chortled in reply. “Like I didn’t see you whipping out your phone and thumbing through Tinder after the burlesque show to see if you could find Pride of Frankenstein on there.”
She spit up a mouthful of her crimson Slurpee. “Old ladies know how to have fun,” she said, leering at me. Then she quieted, her tone dropping to a whisper.
“Listen, about my old mentor,” she said. “You have to be careful about this stuff. People get into magic, spiritism, stuff like that. Sometimes they get twisted. It’s like anything else,” she continued, handing me her Slurpee as she adjusted her grip on Chocula.
I took a long, noisy sip, smirking at her in hopes of getting her humor up again.
But she continued, grim-faced, “It’s like anything else in life. If you’re good at something, you get to pick how to use it. If you’re good with numbers, you could run statistics for a nonprofit, or you could hustle fake data for some bogus corporation. Your call.
“If you’re artistic, you can be a bold, original, starving artist, or you can go into Graphics and Design and spend your whole life pouring your talent into Infographics about the health benefits of ergonomic keyboards. Same with all this mysticism stuff. What you do with it is up to you, kid,” she said, breaking into her familiar grin.
I squinched up my face. “Guess so,” I said.
I whipped around to face the Halloween Fantastic before I said anything else, because a noise like dogs out of hell chewing on hunks of barbed iron had ripped through the air around us, accompanied by a crescendo of screams.
And then all hell began to break loose.
Literally.
When I twisted my head around to see what was happening, the first thing I did was drop Magdalena’s Slurpee, spattering goopy red syrup all over the blacktop.
The second thing I did was notice Magdalena dropping her stuffed Chocula and whipping her hand into the front pocket of her slashed-up jeans.
“Get down!!” she barked, as a carved-up pumpkin sailed over our heads.
“What the fuck,” was all I could croak out as I bellied on to the pavement, my eyes bulging as I watched a gore-painted clown bite into the neck of a bearded, shrieking hipster.
The hipster dropped his Spook-a-Latte as his pumpkin-patterned scarf sprouted streaks of crimson. The clown’s green wig wobbled frantically as it followed him onto the pavement.
All over the carnival, similar scenes were taking place.
The costumed couple that had stood in line behind us at the House of Mirrors went down beside the Scary-Go-Round, yelping in terror as a man dressed as Zombie Elvis stuck his hands into their stomachs while two gore-specked Coffee Stand workers held them down.
Blood decorated the zombified horses on the Scary-Go-Round as they continued to churn in a circle in mechanized slo-mo.
I cranked my head to my right, still bellied on the blacktop. Magdalena was shimmying a small leather bag out of the pocket of her jeans. Nearby, a blood-hungry clown stumbled toward an older woman, who fumbled with her carved pumpkin as it bore down on her.
Her grandchildren sprinted ahead as she screamed, trying to shove her purse in between her neck and the clown’s teeth.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted at Magdalena, who had dumped the contents of the bag onto the pavement.
“Shut up, I’ve almost got them!” she hollered back over screams and crunching noises.
I looked over at her flabby, well-lined hands, which were sorting through a familiar assortment of quartz crystals, inscribed with silver Hebrew letters.
I learned a lot of things that first day in the tiny, cramped confines of Library Study Room C-023. When I got back from the bathroom, Magdalena was grinning like a maniac.
“I like your selection,” she said slyly.
“What do you mean?” I replied.
She pushed one of the Hebrew crystals across the plastic table—the one I had chosen.
“Do you know what this is?” she said, still grinning.
“No,” I said uncertainly. “I just picked it because it looks like the Pi symbol. I like math,” I finished, trailing off meekly.
“No,” she said sternly. “You picked it because you felt it. Your left-brain logic had to justify your decision, so you told yourself you picked it because it looks like the Pi symbol. It’s He,” she finishe
d.
“Hey, what?” I said.
“He,” she repeated. “That’s the name of the letter. It’s a good omen that you picked this one. Its mystical significance goes way back to Melchizedek, Priest of Abram, from the Old Testament. Some Kabbalists believe that the letter He contains the secret of life itself.”
“Cool,” I said, hoping she didn’t notice my blank, confused expression.
“Out of twenty-two stones in this bag, this is the one you chose.” She looked me directly in the eyes, as though expecting me to understand.
“Uh, cool,” I said. “Can we get back to the lesson now?”
She chortled. “Yes. But I’ve got to pee, too. Fill out this worksheet while I go.”
She handed me a blank Tree of Life with horizontal lines inside its circles before clucking at me.
“Yes, you can cheat. Use the laminated copy in my binder,” she finished, indicating the red binder that sat on her side of the table.
I looked at her.
“Can you, like, read minds or something? You keep responding to what I’m thinking like I’m saying it.”
She shrugged and coughed into a fist. “Yeah, but it’s not a big deal. You study all this mystical stuff for long enough, you pick up a few things. Be back in a few. I’ll be counting the number of dirty thoughts you have about that one classmate of yours while I’m in there,” she added, waggling her eyebrows. “The one with the brown hair and the nice rack that you keep thinking about. What’s her name? Starts with a J?”
I shook my head. “God, you’re creepy good at that,” I replied, grinning a little in spite of myself.
I paused. “So, people reading minds, mystic powers—that stuff is all real?” I queried, looking up at her.
She shrugged again, turning toward the study room door.
“A lot of things are real,” she said. “Now get to filling out that worksheet. You can think about what’s-her-name after we finish for the day.”
Dark Carnival (A Horror Anthology) Page 17
