Dark Carnival (A Horror Anthology)

by Macabre Ladies

  I chuckled and bent over the blank Tree of Life.

  A chorus of expletives was spouting from Magdalena’s mouth as she picked frantically at the tiny quartz stones.

  “Fuck!” she screamed. “Wait, found it. Aleph,” she muttered under her breath. “Now, where’s Tav?”

  “What are you doing?” I shouted at her. “We’re going to get killed! Get up, we need to get to the car!”

  She held up a hand, not listening.

  “Jesus H.,” I spat.

  Another clown was hurtling towards us, stumbling over its oversized shoes as he approached.

  His rainbow wig was in pieces. Clumps of false hair had fallen off and stuck to the blood that coated his chest and shoulders.

  He was flanked by one of the singing mummies and a pale goth chick from the Carving Shack who would have been gorgeous if she hadn’t been sporting a mouthful of liver.

  My thoughts blurred with adrenaline as I moved in front of Magdalena. My limbs were moving, reaching. My head swiveled to gauge the distance between us and our attackers.

  I scooped up Stuffed Count Chocula and flung it into the eyes of the rainbow-haired clown as he closed the gap between us. I watched my shin jerk up and land between his legs as he pulled his head back in surprise.

  I felt a jolt of relief as his eyes bugged out. A gust of air exploded from his mouth as he doubled over, holding his crotch.

  The employees of the Halloween Fantastic may have gone insane, but it was good to know that the good ol’ fashioned Nut Shot was still just as effective as ever.

  I grabbed Rainbow Clown by his shoulders and shoved him into the mummy. They both stumbled to the ground, and Goth Chick was on me before I could turn around.

  I twisted and stumbled as she closed her forearms around my neck in a headlock. I could feel her warm breath on the side of my cheek as her teeth tried to find my skin.

  I felt my right foot snag on a crack in the asphalt and down we went. She yelped in pain as her forearms hit hard tar. I scrambled out from beneath her, wheezing and heaving and struggling for balance as I backpedaled in the opposite direction.

  A roar sounded to my left. Mummy and Rainbow had gotten to their feet.

  “Oh, f—” I started to say, when I was cut off by the sound of Magdalena’s purse coming down hard on Goth Chick’s forehead.

  “Take it, you painted little shit!” Magdalena shrieked over a volley of wet smacking noises.

  After Magdalena had finished, she looked up at me, heaving, her hands on her knees. Just a few feet to my left, Rainbow and Mummy stood growling, lowering themselves into fighting crouches.

  “Take care of them,” Magdalena yelled. “I’m almost finished! I just need He!” she added, returning to the scramble of quartz at her feet. “I’ve got Tav, Mem, and Aleph! I just need He! Hold them off until I find it!” she cried.

  “I’ve been reading,” I began slowly, half an hour into our third lesson.

  Magdalena cocked an eyebrow at me. “And?”

  “The legend of the Golem,” I said, looking at her. “A giant, living thing, made from clay. Given life by a Rabbi with mystic powers, who created it to protect the Jews of Prague.”

  I paused.

  “The legend says that the Rabbi who created the Golem did it with the power of Kabbalah.”

  I paused, waiting for her to respond. When she didn’t, I went on.

  “Since I started these lessons, I’ve seen you read my mind, make my stomach pain vanish with a wave of your hand, and heat your palms at will. And there was that one time when you wanted to borrow my pen and I wouldn’t let you, so you did this thing where you flicked your fingers at me, and I dropped it.”

  I paused again. Magdalena chewed her lip at me and tapped the butt of her pen on the table.

  “I don’t know, Magdalena. There are all these myths and legends of all this insane shit happening in the world of mystics. Stories of shamans flying through the air in books of old Indian myths. Yogis who can breathe fire. Prophets in the Old Testament who can call up storms and resurrect the dead.”

  I looked at her. “How far does this stuff really go? How big is the gap between you being able to do what you do, and things in storybooks? Are there people out there who can—I don’t know—do more than just take away pain and more than… than that thing you did when you made me drop my pen?”

  Magdalena looked at me for what felt like a long time. Then she shook her head.

  “You’ve read the story of the Golem,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Then you know that the Rabbi only made the Golem because his people needed him to. They needed protection. They needed strength at a time when they had none.”

  She pointed at me with her pen, stretching her arm across piles of worksheets and printouts.

  “The power,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me, “Isn’t the point. You study Kabbalah because it’s spiritual. It’s supposed to put you in a spiritual state of mind. To help you be a better person. Some power may come, but it’s a sidebar. A footnote. You’d be amazed at how easily even the most spiritually minded people can forget that,” she finished bitterly.

  She looked down for a moment, then added, “The use of any power that comes with all this should be guided by the needs of a world that has, more or less, lost its way. If spirituality is about learning how to be less of an asshole, then it’s also about chipping away at the number of assholes in this world by not becoming one of them. Not by creating Golems to mash them up, or storms of fire to incinerate them. Think about it like Star Wars: the prequels had better special effects and bigger explosions, but they still sucked. The originals were better because they had more humanity.”

  She looked me in the eye. “You get me, kid?”

  I nodded. “I get you.”

  “Good,” she cackled, then added, “Two quarters fell out of your pocket on the way here. Here’s a buck for the cinnamon latte you were planning on buying after our lesson.”

  She slid a dollar across the table with a grin as I patted my pockets, gawking in surprise.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “You’re right.”

  She laughed. “I know. Take the dollar.”

  I grinned at her. “You’re the bomb.”

  She shrugged. “You know it.”

  After another pause, she tapped her pen on the table again and added, “You’re a lonely kind of person. You’re smart, and you’re broke, and you’re bored. Halloween is coming up soon. Do something fun and come to the Halloween Fantastic with me. Heard of it?”

  I nodded. “Hell yeah, I’ve heard of it. Annual thing. They Halloweenify the theme park downtown, the one near the aquarium. There’s all sorts of cool shit to do.”

  She bobbed her head in agreement. “It’s fun. Come. We’ll hang out and you can give me all the shit you want about smoking too much. Hell, I’ll win you a stuffed Swamp Thing at the Razor Blade Toss.”

  I grinned again. “Sounds good,” I said.

  Two things happened at once: Rainbow and the mummy lunged forward, and I fell over trying to sidestep them.

  I scrambled backwards on my ass in a panicked crab walk as the two maddened Halloween Fantastic employees toppled onto me, clawing at my face as I threw up my arms to block their hands.

  “Where is it?!” I could hear Magdalena shriek over the sound of Rainbow and Mummy slobbering onto my arms as they tried to find a place to bite.

  The weight of them was unbearable. I felt Rainbow get a hold of one of my wrists with a clammy, grease-painted hand. I felt Mummy biting at the sleeve of my hoodie, felt the pressure of his teeth bearing into my forearm.

  I closed my eyes, Magdalena’s voice echoing in my head.

  Which one feels the most real to you?

  He.

  It’s a good omen that you picked this one.

  You picked it because you felt it.

  All of a sudden, I knew where Magdalena’s missing stone was.

  “Magdalena!” I scream
ed as Rainbow’s teeth latched onto my hand.

  “It’s in your shoe! It fell into your shoe when you opened the bag!”

  As Rainbow’s teeth clamped down to a bruising point, a steady, rumbling noise mounted in the air around us.

  Rainbow and Mummy looked up, dull expressions of surprise spreading across their faces.

  If I thought it had been a weird day so far, I hadn’t seen fuck-all just yet.

  An enormous humanlike shape erupted out of the asphalt beneath Magdalena’s hands. Its forehead bore the crystals with Mem, Tav, Aleph, and He, and they crackled with bolts of pink and silver light.

  Coated in cracked plates of tar, with dirt and gravel dribbling from the spaces in between chunks of asphalt, the shape towered above Magdalena. It reared back and unleashed a gigantic roar, balling up its chunky fists and arching its back.

  Rainbow and Mummy blinked in shock, before the shape ripped a parking space stopper out of the ground and batted them halfway to the Scary-Go-Round.

  “Ha!” Magdalena crowed as the two employees skidded over the asphalt.

  “I did it! We fucking got this!” she screamed. The shape roared again, brandishing its stopper.

  “Holy Christ,” I whispered. “You made a golem.”

  Magdalena winked at me, a wicked glimmer lighting her eyes.

  “You’re Goddamn right I did,” she said.

  She looked up at the golem as it began to lurch toward the Fantastic, swinging its weapon at a now-scattering crowd of clowns and zombies and vampires and cannibals as they fled back towards the Fantastic, trickling into its labyrinth of rides and games.

  “Give ‘em hell!” she shrieked after it.

  I watched it lumber farther into the Fantastic as panicked carnival-goers pelted past us in droves, some limping from bites and scratches.

  I heaved a sigh. “That was insane,” I panted.

  Magdalena pulled a cigarette from the pack in her pocket and lit up, nodding.

  “Pretty much,” she agreed, jamming her lighter back into her jeans.

  I gagged as my body decompressed from its adrenaline surge. After I had fought down the urge to vomit, I spoke up. “So, like, what the hell was that?”

  Magdalena shrugged, taking a deep drag. “My old mentor, probably. He got carried away with his power a long time ago. Started putting demons into people, making them do things. I’d bet dimes to dozens he was behind this.”

  I stared at her, scratching my chin. “Won’t people start to talk? I mean, demon-maddened carnival clowns? A golem? Come on, Mags, if stuff like this goes down, how do more people not know about magic? About mind reading, and flying shamans, and shit?”

  Magdalena shrugged. “Stuff this big doesn’t go down a whole lot. I was saving that golem trick for a rainy day.”

  She took another drag. “Magic happens in the shadows, kid. And when it happens in broad daylight, people make something up. They find a way to reduce it to, I don’t know, whatever they’d rather think about than golems and demons. You watch,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “All the news channels will say it was some kind of terrorist attack, or some shit. Everybody likes a bit of magic when it happens in storybooks, but nobody wants to deal with it in real life. It’s just the way things are.”

  She heaved a long sigh. “Sometimes I wonder why all this mystical stuff even exists. Nevertheless, here we are.”

  I nodded. “Here we are,” I said. “Also, you definitely owe me, like, a year’s worth of free lessons after all this.”

  She blew out a stream of smoke. I watched it dissipate until only the smell was left.

  “Fifty percent discount,” she said. “And I’ll bring you coffee every time.”

  “Done,” I said, grinning.

  12

  Augustine’s Carnival of Nightmares and Mirrors by Rachael Boucker

  Jessie leaned on the fence, staring past the field painted gray by darkness and ice, to the decomposing wreck of the carnival.

  This is where she’d stood that night; checking her watch, glancing over her shoulder, watching the line of excited carnival goers grow shorter. The last person had slipped past the ticket booth when Jessie trudged across the long, snow-blanketed field. She’d paused near the entrance, put the Big Top to her back, and a fake smile on her lips.

  The fourth selfie was the best, so she uploaded it to all her social media with the headline “Ready for a magical night!” and moved off from the carnival… That smiling photo put her at the scene, and though she’d walked away from that night, no other soul did.

  Jessie wrapped her arms around in a hug, feeling the cold penetrating her thick coat. They won’t even talk about it now, just call it ‘The field’. Usually with a prefix, like, ‘Stay away from’. They never said it aloud, but that prefix stretched to her too. No one believed she’d taken that selfie and walked away. Hard enough to live with the truth—jilted, stood up, left out in the cold—never mind mass murderer!

  The town’s witch-hunt ended with a not guilty verdict, the judge emphasizing, sympathizing, that there was not enough evidence to convict. Not enough evidence? How about no bloody evidence! Jessie would always be guilty in the eyes of her townsmen, shunned at every turn. If they saw me now, they’d say I’m returning to the scene of the crime.

  But that wasn’t why she came out on this frigid January night, on the anniversary of the slaughter. Jessie had been here, walked right up to the tent and survived, but even after a year, no one could tell her what she’d survived. A massacre, sure, but how they’d died left coroners and forensic specialists scratching their heads.

  Jessie watched the minutes on her watch creep up to 19:56 and retraced her route across the field. Trev was late—almost an hour late—when I accepted that he wasn’t coming. Closing her eyes, remembering the way the snow-covered grass had crunched under her stomping boots, she felt the rage she’d held for Trev, and pictured Augustine’s Carnival of Wonders and Dreams as it had been.

  Spotlights on the ground lit up the Big Top, and the overpriced rides flashed in multicolor. Smells of popcorn and candy floss filled the air. So much color, so much promise.

  The joyous screams and laughter echoed in her mind when she looked at the fairground rides—corroded machines that once twirled and spun, forcing smiles onto even the most solemn of lips. As the wind blew through the rags of canvas clinging to the Big Top’s metal bones, Jessie’s memories faded, leaving her with eerie shapes and a foreboding darkness.

  Tattered police tape snaked across her path leading to the tent’s entrance. Jessie nudged it with her boot, but parts were submerged in the mud, preventing her from kicking the tape aside. Why has no one cleared it? Just leaving it all here to fester and age.

  This place hadn’t inspired nightmares on that night, but now? Jessie shivered and hugged herself tighter. The wind blew the torn marquee once more, revealing scattered benches, no longer seated in rows.

  Something clicked behind her and a beam of light hit her feet.

  “What are you doing out here, Jess?”

  Jessie turned to meet a young man in police uniform. She didn’t recognize him, but there had been so many police officers wanting their turn to rip apart her statement. If she didn’t remember him, he was likely one of the less assuming ones. His scruffy brown hair, though, triggered a memory of a different man.

  The snowflakes didn’t sizzle and steam as they hit Jessie’s fiery red hair, but they looked as though they should. She considered adding an effect to simulate steam, but instead clicked post, sending the selfie out for all to see. She wouldn’t watch the circus this night, or line up for the rides, but Trev didn’t need to know that. Cramming the phone into her pocket, she started back across the frozen field.

  “Hey there, Matchstick, you not coming to join the fun?”

  “Are you taking the piss?” Jessie crossed her arms over her generous curves and spun around to meet the grinning face of a stranger. His hair was wind-ruffled, and his clothes were shabby-chic,
if not a little old-fashioned.

  “No, ma’am, I meant your hair. Looks like your head’s on fire.”

  Jessie glared at him, but he grinned all the more as the wind twisted and flicked her bright hair like a dancing flame.

  “So, not Matchstick. How about Redstar?”

  “Call me whatever you want when I’m gone.” She strolled away, leaving the man behind.

  She hadn’t remembered that conversation before.

  “What are you doing here?” the young officer repeated, raising his flashlight beam to land on Jessie’s face.

  “I’m… I’m trying to understand,” she said, shielding her dazzled eyes.

  The officer lowered his light. “We’re all trying to understand, Jess.”

  Jessie shook her head. “Most people are just trying to forget.”

  “You of all people should want to forget.” He took another step toward her and shone his flashlight through a hole in the tent. “I heard you’d moved, got yourself a new place, a fresh start over in Bristol.”

  “I did, but…” Jessie didn’t like the way he looked at her, probing her words for lies, just like the rest of them. “You don’t understand. I was here, right here! I took that selfie and walked away.” Jessie sighed. “How can I start fresh without knowing what it is I’m running from?”

  The man held out his hand. “I’m Noah. I was the first responder on scene.”

  Jessie took his hand, shook it once, then snatched her hand back. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Never believed you did. More than a hundred people died that night, heart attacks, asphyxiation, and those that died bloody? We never found any kind of weapon that could have done that. Some torn open from the inside-out, others melted.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “You left the carnival around 8 p.m. You’ve always been clear on that, but CCTV doesn’t put you back on your street until 2 a.m. and—”

  “I went straight home!” Jessie cut in. “The timestamp on that footage is bullshit!”