Everybody Scream!

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Oh–huge thrill, I’m certain.”

  “I rather enjoy it.”

  The earnestness of his words and the way his words pressed down on her made her flush, her gaze diving to hide amongst the colorful food. “So, um...do you think you’ll do another album anytime soon?”

  She didn’t see his grin stumble, slow its pace to a mere wobbly smile. “Who knows?”

  “Oh,” she looked up suddenly, “you have to record again.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do I have to?”

  “Because you have a talent! How many people have that kind of talent?” She wondered if he could be simply teasing her. Joking and wittiness seemed to be his charming way. But his reply, slow in coming, was unsmiling and somber.

  “My last chip, Heroes, sold less than any of my previous chips–my first one included.”

  “Well, you know, it’s the quality of your fans, not the quantity.”

  “Quantity matters, too. You needs sales. Who’s the quality, anyway?”

  “Well, you know, people who really listen to the lyrics, understand your meaning. Wouldn’t you rather have a million listeners like that than ten million who just want music to drive to or dance to? It would seem to me the more people you try to please the more you have to sacrifice your, ah, you know–vision.”

  “Yes and no. There are some themes and meanings large enough to touch almost everybody–if they only chose to listen. It’s stupid of me, since the people always come before the critics for me, but maybe if the critics had been kinder to Heroes I wouldn’t have been so disappointed. But they weren’t. Bosley Simon said, and I quote verbatim, ‘Del Kahn’s self-serving pretentiousness is exemplified in his attempt to align himself with heroes more or less familiar, including Choom rebel-leader Mooa-Ki Fen in the dirge-like ballad Rust. His name-dropping seems to be an endeavor to glorify himself by association, to sell himself to us as a hero in the company of heroes.’” Del gave a bitter smirk. “Boss used to give me great notices. But I was lean, then. Now I’m a big fat lazy rich sacred cow and Bosley and his kind are the jackals. Same with the audience. They loved me when I seemed like one of them, lean and driven to make it–I was them. If I made it they made it. But I made it and they saw me as a cow, too. They didn’t savage me, but they left me to starve.”

  Noelle looked sympathetic, even sad. “I didn’t,” she said, “Not everybody did.” She made him less regretful of his self-pitying analogy. “I loved Heroes. It was so deep. I, for one–though I’m positive I’m far from alone–would love to see a new album. You know your song Candy Apples? Man, I love that song! That’s a real carnival song. It’s perfect for this place. I know the lyrics by heart. Want to hear?”

  Del leaned forward, planted his jaw on his cupped hand. Smiled. “Sure.”

  “I’ll say it, I can’t sing it...

  ‘The smell of french-fries is in the air

  And the smell of popcorn everywhere

  We’ll risk the haunted house, my dear

  Rest your head on my shoulder and ride out the fear

  Tonight will be as sweet as candy apples

  Tonight will be as sweet as candy apples.’”

  She giggled. “Go on,” he urged her, enchanted even in his melancholy, as if seduced by his own words.

  “‘Well, the thing we saw in the House of Freaks

  Reminds me of the horror film we saw last week

  I’ll win you a cheap plastic teddy bear

  That’ll end up in a drawer with your underwear

  And the things that we’ll see

  And the things that we’ll do

  Will come back in memories

  And seem brand new

  Tonight will be as sweet as candy apples

  Tonight will be as sweet as candy apples

  The stars are ferris wheels spinning in the sky

  Tonight I’m glad to be the apple of your eye

  I’m sorry that the target range hurt your ears

  You say you want to risk the haunted house again, my dear?

  Tonight has been as sweet as candy apples

  Tonight has been as sweet as candy apples.’”

  “Very good. No mistakes. That’s an old one–from my first chip.” Cute. But did Noelle know by heart the lyrics of Blue Blues? That reminded Del (glance at a clock) that he had best attend Pearl’s final show shortly–no doubt she would expect him to be there.

  The lyrics to Candy Apples pleased him but also embarrassed him. Same thing, now, with Rust or Blue Blues. Too bad. There lay the greatest sin of it: that as much as he hated them he ached to be valued by the critics, to please them, and they had made him doubt, at times, the worthiness of his creations. His value as an artist.

  “You ever listen to old music? Pre-colonial pop?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “There’s a line in a song by a man named Elvis Costello, a far better lyricist than I could ever be. It’s from a song called Watch Your Step. It isn’t about carnivals, but I think about it a lot. It says, ‘Ev’ry night go out full of carnival desires.’”

  Noelle pouted in exaggerated appreciation, mostly just catching the pun. And then a particular meaning she sensed was intended for her by Del, via Elvis, dawned in her. Actually it was transmitted more in the way Del eyed her–drank her. His clinging melancholy, consciously or unconsciously, aided him by giving him a romantic sad dreaminess. Noelle’s heart was a bird carried upward in a strong air current. It frightened her a little but exhilarated her much. She wasn’t a stupid woman. She could see and feel what it was that this man, Del Kahn, desired of her.

  And why should she deny him, or herself? Could the sex act with this relative stranger really be a sin when it was just an unfamiliar penis inside her instead of a familiar one? She had sucked her friend Jackybuns off in a bathroom. But then she knew Jackybuns. Then again, through his vids, his voice and face and especially his lyrics, might she not know Del Kahn as well as she knew Jackybuns, or Kid, or anybody?

  “You’re very attractive,” Del cooed, softly so Zebo wouldn’t overhear. “In fact, you are truly gorgeous.”

  “Thank you,” Noelle said huskily.

  “And what’s more, you’re sweet. I like a sweet girl. They’re not as abundant as everyone would have you believe. If I were a wee bit younger and a wee bit unmarried I’m sure I could fall in love with you.”

  Wow. The air current was whipping faster, and higher than she’d imagined, the air becoming rarefied, the spinning scenery below obscured in clouds. It was disorienting. The flesh of Noelle’s face felt molten.

  What he’d said about being younger was wrong. What he’d meant was if he could go back in time. Age difference in itself meant little to him...he had, in his thirties, gone to bed with teenagers, even a few precociously younger teenagers, but he had never devirginized or even had to seduce any of them. There had been no effort; they had fallen to him easily, quickly. Like now. This was like the old days. Thus it was not only Noelle’s perceived sweetness that enchanted, moved him.

  “I find you very attractive, too,” she croaked under her breath, squeezing her palms together between her knees under the table. “Needless to say.”

  “I want to go to bed with you.”

  Noelle swallowed the bird back down as it sought to fly up her throat, out her mouth. “I want that, too.”

  Her fear made her face more sensuous than ever, brittle with emotion ready to leak out at the first piercing. It made him a little afraid. This would be no mere mechanical exchange for either of them. So what, then, might come of it?

  “We can’t go to my trailer–I have no idea where my wife might be. But I know a safe place.” He didn’t add that he’d ascertained its safety by having used it before.

  “Alright,” Noelle said, and again swallowed...an almost comic gulping sound. She watched as Del meaningfully lifted his hand phone between them and shut its ringer off.

  They were obviously finished ea
ting; Del went to the counter to pay the check. Tossed a tip on the table, then gently took Noelle’s arm to lead her out of the saucer.

  Zebo watched their backs intently as they left, jotted some notes in the margin of his magazine, and then resumed his reading.

  The first ride Fawn went on with Fen was a circular wheel with many individual open cells along its outer edge, facing in. Wes and Heather took cells beside each other (and Cookie, now a muttering tag-a-long, beside them) and Fawn and Fen crossed to the opposite side. Fawn stepped into her cell, pulled down her own restraining bar. At no point did the glum, wordless operator come in to see if these bars were being employed.

  They were the entire group of passengers but for someone to Fawn’s left separated by one empty cell, the first aboard. The wheel began to turn...slowly...picked up speed. Fast. The black sky overhead was a whirlpool. The carnival lights were being mixed in a food blender. Her hair dancing crazily, a snapping tattered war banner, Fawn cried out to Fen on her right, “This is great–I love it!”

  “And I love you!” he grinned back at her, leaning over his restraining bar so she could see him clearly.

  The wheel began to lift at an angle. It tipped more and more until finally it seemed it would become totally vertical, but it stopped tilting at a steep angle. Far across from Fawn, Cookie laughed crazily and waved. Behind Cookie the whole world was a whirlpool now, earth blended into sky. The wheel whipped Fawn up at the sky, then swung her down at the ground. This was the greatest point of the spinning–when you hurtled at the ground, the lights illuminating the people below like fish in an aquarium. Standing just below the ride was a woman eating something, a baby stroller in front of her. Upon each rotation and plunge Fawn imagined the wheel would become unfastened and she would crash directly into that woman with her stroller, they were placed so perfectly below, like sacrifices, or as if mocking the precarious power of the great machine whirling down at them. Turning her head against the heavy g-force was difficult, but Fawn watched Wes and Heather for a few moments. Heather was laughing appreciatively as Wes showed off by pushing his restraining bar up and away, simply holding on by planting his feet and gripping two poles. Then just one pole. His army jacket was flapping open and she was sure she could detect the black presence of a gun beneath.

  Cookie, too physically stimulated to feel sorry for herself at the moment, went on laughing insanely. Sky and earth were a flicker behind her, a yin and yang spun into blurred motion. They had been sucked into a black hole. It was exhilarating, but scary. Fawn glanced over at the person on her left, who had said nothing, didn’t laugh or cry out. Long dark hair streamed, writhed, but the person was too dark behind the mesh of the intervening cell for Fawn to see, at first. But as the wheel hurled them once more toward the ground as if to impale them on the glowing knives of light, Fawn saw greenish illumination pass over a woman’s face. The naked grimace was not due to the g-force. The greenish light made distinct black pits for eyes, and as it left poured into and then out of one of the empty skull sockets. Fawn shuddered. This passenger never tired of the dizzy spinning, and never had to pay. But she didn’t look too happy about it.

  Fawn staggered down the steps, Fen pressing in to help her. Fawn looked for the mother and her baby but they were gone. “How do you feel?” Fen said close to her ear, his lips brushing it.

  “Great,” her voice trembled. She could barely look at him since what he’d said. Exhilarating, but scary.

  New people scrambled up into the wheel to replace them. Fawn and the others moved along, and so Fawn didn’t hear one of the new passengers cry out in recognition, “Oh my God–Jeanie! Jeanie! Jeanie!”

  The second ride they entered together also gyrated in a fast circle, but there were branches growing from the center, with two carriages pointing in opposite directions at the end of each, which would rotate around each other as the entire machine rotated. It had an exact twin close by, actually the same ride, and the spinning path of their branches overlapped at one point. Were the mated machines so perfectly timed and calibrated that the whipping carriages of one would never collide with those of the other? Such a concern was the whole purpose of the thing. Fawn and Fen squeezed into a carriage.

  The sadistic machine hurled them gleefully, cracked them in its whip, jolted them from side to side. Fawn screamed as their car seemed about to crash into those of the twin machine upon which Wes and Heather rode, but the car wove out just in time. Upon every full rotation their car also flew at the young man who collected the tickets and stood so still and calm watching their frenzied hurtling. He was grim, homely, tough-looking, a deep scar on a pocked face, the many colored lights pooled in the pocks like rain water reflecting neon. He seemed to be showing off to Fawn in particular (his eyes would appear to meet hers as she rushed at him) but she was sure he always did this...standing so close that the carriages brushed his shirt. Fawn resented him for making her nervous.

  The solitary man in the other carriage at the end of their branch wore an expensive business suit, secured with a more complex harness than the others, perhaps of his own devising. He typed intently at a keyboard on his lap. Fawn didn’t know, but he would ride this ride all night, had paid to ride this ride all day every day this season. He had a disease. Sometimes he had to go into constant spinning motion to find relief. He was having a device built into his home and one in his yard. He would allow his children to ride in them once in a while. This was the only way he could currently work at his job.

  The force of the spinning pressed Fen painfully against Fawn, squashing her, pinning her. He had taken her hand; she squeezed it back. Shortly before the ride ended he leaned even closer to kiss her lightly on the lips.

  The third ride was the Screamer, back toward the entrance. She, Heather and Cookie had ridden on it earlier, but without the company of the boys. Its loud music crashed in Fawn’s ears, the wailing force which seemed to generate the spinning of the ride. She and Fen ran up the clanging metal ramp, squeezed together in one tiny rocking car. Wes and Heather, and Cookie alone, took cars on the other side, and were soon out of sight and out of mind.

  Chauncy Carnal of Sphitt lustily rasped out In Your Face. Though the song was from a man’s point of view, Fawn sang along softly and bounced in her seat to the beat as the last cars loaded up. She smiled to Fen as she sang, and he grinned. She became shy, stopped singing. He took her hand again and squeezed it as the circular train pulled out of the station. “Man, you’re so blasting gorgeous,” she could just barely hear him say to her.

  Again, they were in a whirlpool of black night smeared with colored light and watching faces painted with glowing pigments, also blurring all together as if to create one huge hideous staring being. The Screamer blazed with bulbs from every available railing, support beam, rim and edge, and the lights flickered and fluctuated, pulsed and throbbed in time to the blaring, deafening, raucous music.

  “Do you want to go faaast-er?”

  “Yeahhh!” came the giddy chant.

  Fen had released Fawn’s sweaty hand, and rested his own on her leg above her knee. He gave it a light squeeze, then began rubbing his hand slowly up and down the length of her long slim thigh. Fawn’s hands tightened slickly on the metal restraining bar…

  “I said, do you want to go FAST-ER?”

  “Yeahhh!”

  Fen’s hand caressed the inside of her thigh, damp with perspiration through her black sweat pants, the heel of his hand pressing into her crotch at the end of each heavy stroke. And, inevitably, his hand continued in its stroke, cupped her crotch, the fingers moving. Without even thinking Fawn moved her legs open wider, but she didn’t look at Fen’s face. She knew, uncomfortably, that he was watching hers, his gaze weighing more heavily against her than his pinning body.

  “Alright…everybody SCREEEAM!”

  Voices rose. Fawn made not a sound. Like a spider burrowing, his fingers teased the elastic waistband away from her soft belly. The spider scurried into the dark out of view, dug
at the scantier inner layer. Fawn sank down lower in her seat. The legs of the spider slid lightly over her red crinkly hair, brushing it. Then proceeded lower. Teased at a more intimate layer. One leg made a reconnaissance mission into the dampness of this final burrow and found it inviting. Two legs hooked inside it, and the spider moved rhythmically as if in hopes of squeezing its entire bulk inside. His thumb rubbed at the tiny protuberance over the top of the cave like some kind of emblem.

  Fawn arched her back violently, arched her neck back, clenching her eyes shut and grimacing like the trapped rider on that hurtling wheel. The music had plunged inside her through this opened hole, and crashed around madly, gleefully inside her body. The whole carnival had been sucked into her. She was the black hole. She squirmed and jolted in her seat as if this ride had finally revealed its true purpose to her, and was a torture device she was strapped into, electrified.

  But, masochistically, despite the drug-like dizziness, the reeling disorientation, the shocks through her body, she welcomed the torture. She wanted to reach over and take him in hand but didn’t dare let go of the bar. If she let go she would be flung off into space.

  Fen’s grin and gaze hadn’t left her. Though he didn’t share her rocking orgasms he loved just watching her face, knowing that he was doing that to her…it made him feel powerful; he had her fully in his hand. Anyway, he had no doubt whatsoever that his time would come soon now.

  Del wove his way alone through the carnival, more a living ever-shifting maze than an inorganic one, the volume of flesh perhaps outweighing the volume of the inorganic materials which composed it. Del moved quickly. He had a slight fear of losing Noelle before he could get to her. He had sent her along ahead of him; luckily she knew the spot he’d chosen for a rendezvous, although she had expressed confusion.

  He had been afraid to have Noelle accompany him. God only knew where Sophi might be. But even alone he dreaded seeing her pop up. Thus it was that he moved swiftly, furtively. Guilt drove him as much as his hunger.