Carnival

by William W. Johnstone

  His captor dropped him to the floor, on his feet, and slapped the boy on the side of the head, bringing involuntary tears to his eyes. “You behave, you little punk! ”

  Gary spun around, driving the blade of his knife into the man’s lower belly. He stabbed him three times and then ducked as the man screamed and tried to hit him. Gary darted under the blow and stabbed the man again.

  Gary ran to his sister just as the man between her legs was crawling up on one knee, cursing. Gary drove the blade into the man’s face. With a cry of pain, the rapist jerked backward, both hands to his face. Gary stepped over his sister’s bare legs and drove the blade into the man’s throat. He gurgled in pain as his blood squirted. He fell back, the blade pulling free.

  Susan jerked on her jeans and fastened her belt just as her brother was slashing a hole in the canvas. The kids jumped to the ground and hit it running.

  “Somebody grab them!” a woman yelled, pointing at the running kids from her spot on the midway.

  Gary and Eddie appeared between concessions. Gary had the Diamondback in his hand and a very odd expression on his face. He leveled the pistol and shot the woman in the head. Her feet left the sawdust and she fell in a boneless heap, a hole in her head.

  Eddie said some very uncomplimentary things about life in general and certain types of people in particular just as the kids ran past him.

  But no one on the midway paid any attention to the dead woman with a bloody hole in her head or to the doctor with the smoking gun in his hand.

  “Fun! Fun! Fun!” the loudspeakers blared the message. “Come one and come all to the fun house. It’s crazy, friends. Bring the entire family. Fun! Fun! Fun!”

  Gary looked at the loudspeakers, grimaced, and then ran to join his family.

  “That was Mrs. Jamison you killed, Gary,” his wife told him, one arm around Susan. Rich had Gary by the hand.

  “She was expendable,” he replied. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Where?” She looked at his face. There was a very strange look in his eyes. And that expendable bit was a very odd thing for him to say.

  His smile was not pleasant. He turned and walked away.

  FIVE

  Nabo suddenly popped up in the middle of their group, startling them all. He smiled at them. “Oh, good moves, people!” he complimented them. “Very good. Showed a lot of initiative on your part. This is going to be such an exciting evening.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Janet cursed him. “Look what you’ve done to my daughter. You think it’s exciting and fun.”

  “People are only doing what they have always wanted to do, Mrs. Doctor. Like the old song, ‘Anything Goes.’”

  “But you could stop it!”

  “Au contraire, Mrs. Doctor. I cannot. I am powerless to stop them. It is completely out of my hands.”

  Janet was trembling with rage. She turned away from the evil smug face. She wanted to slap him.

  “Then who can stop it?” Ned demanded.

  Nabo smiled at him. “You are a man of the cloth and have to ask that, Preacher? Your god and my god can stop it. That’s who. Why don’t you ask your god to intervene? That should be good for a laugh.”

  Ned stared at the man for a moment, his expression grim. “Perhaps I shall. But bear this in mind, worshipper of the devil: my god works in strange ways.”

  “Then He’d better get off His ass and start working,” Nabo replied. “For your time is growing short.”

  Then he was gone.

  The group looked around them for some trace of the man. There was none.

  “Let’s walk the fence,” Dick suggested. “Surely they can’t be guarding the entire length of it.”

  “One man with a rifle every hundred yards or so would be sufficient,” Martin said.

  “Yeah,” the foreman said glumly. “I already thought of that.”

  And that was the way it turned out. And the men were on the outside of the fence, behind cars and trucks, reasonably safe from any gunshots that might come from inside the fenced area.

  Gary had never said one word about his daughter being molested, and his lack of concern was beginning to irritate Martin.

  As they walked, Gary, Linda and Joyce in the rear of the group, Martin asked, “Did you know the man who raped you, Susan?”

  “Just his face. I think he works for some ranch. I’d never seen the other man. Mr. Holland? What’s wrong with my father?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I was about to ask you the same question about Linda.”

  “And Mrs. Hudson?”

  Martin nodded.

  “They sure are acting weird, I know that.”

  “I agree.”

  The group had walked about half the fenced area, and were now behind a livestock pavilion, and the irony of that had not escaped Martin.

  “Listen to them,” Rich said, disgust in his voice. “They’re in there talking about the price of cattle and breeding stock and so forth. Like nothing has happened. It’s like . . . we don’t exist, or something.”

  They stopped to rest under a huge old tree.

  “I sort of understand what is happening,” Janet said, “but not the why of it.”

  “Perhaps there is no why of it,” Ned said with a tired sigh. “Although I’m sure there was to begin with. From what you’ve all told me, revenge was originally the why of it. But I believe that probably got lost along the way as this Nabo and his people made their pact with Satan. I’m no expert on the supernatural, folks. I’ll admit that I never really believed in it. We always left exorcisms and the like to the Catholics. Somebody remind me, if we get out of this situation, to apologize to the first priest I see.”

  “We’ll get out of it, Ned,” Martin said, with more assurance than he felt.

  “There has to be a why to it, Reverend Alridge,” Jeanne said.

  “Not necessarily, child. While, as I said, I’m no expert on the supernatural, I do come with some degree of expertise on the subject of Satan. He’s the great destroyer. The ruiner. Creator of havoc. Nabo was right. It’s nothing more than a game to the Dark One. Tweaking the nose of God. That’s all this is. There is nothing more to it.”

  “A game,” Amy spoke softly, as she held Mark’s hand.

  “I’m afraid so, child,” the pastor told her. “All in the blink of an eye,” he whispered.

  “And when they’re finished here in Holland? . . .” Eddie asked.

  Ned shrugged. “Who knows. Who is to say that even should we survive, we’d remember any of what has happened? I can’t say. You’d have to ask either God or Satan about that.”

  “Why us, Pastor?” Dick asked. “Why were we . . . spared, for the want of a better word? I’m certainly not a religious man.”

  “It was for a reason. Of that I’m sure. But the specific reason? ... I don’t know.”

  The ferris wheel was slowly making its circles, music from the midway reached them along with shouts and shrieks of laughter. But the laughter was darkened with an evil sound.

  “Mr. Holland?” Susan touched his arm.

  Martin cut his eyes.

  “The carnival people haven’t done anything that obvious, and I don’t think they’re going to. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I’m not sure I do, honey.”

  “Well, if—when—we get out of this, what can we say for sure that the carnival people have done? That we could prove or that anybody would believe? They haven’t done anything that I’ve seen. It’s all been townspeople. I don’t think the carnival people are going to destroy the town. I think they’re going to sit back and let the townspeople do it. So if the cops were to come in while all this was going on, Nabo and his people are clear. It would just be sort of a reverse play on what happened back thirty-odd years ago. You see what I mean?”

  “I think she’s right, Martin,” Eddie spoke.

  He nodded, cutting his eyes to Gary, sitting with Joyce and Linda. They all three had odd expressions on their faces, and a strange look in t
heir eyes.

  Joyce met his eyes and smiled at him. But it was not a pleasant smile.

  What was going on? “One thing for sure: Nabo can’t afford to have us talking when it’s all over. He’s got to get rid of us.”

  “Kill us, Mr. Holland?” Jeanne asked.

  “Maybe not,” Ned broke in.

  Eyes turned toward the preacher. “Would you explain that, Ned?” Janet asked.

  “Not if he could convert us. The devil would much rather do that than see us dead. That would be a much greater victory for him. And wager on this: the Dark One will really increase the pressure on us as the night closes in. Divide and conquer, I should imagine.”

  “I think you’re right.” Dick met the man’s eyes. “But there has to be something we can do.”

  “Oh, there is.” Ned took out a small pocket Bible and opened it. “I would suggest prayer for starters.”

  * * *

  Audie and Nicole had gone boldly onto the midway and returned with armloads of hamburgers and Cokes.

  “No one bothered us,” Audie said, passing out the hamburgers as Nicole handed around the large Cokes. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “People would look at us or stop us and chat like it was old times,” Nicole said, before Audie could elaborate on his last remark. “But I didn’t know what they were talking about half the time. They were talking about things and people and events that I never heard of.”

  “What do you mean?” Eddie asked.

  “Well . . . Mr. Harris kept talking about a basketball game between Holland and Chadron and about the big fight afterward.”

  “That was in ’59,” Martin said. “I remember it. What else?”

  “Well, he kept using terms like ‘groovy’ and ‘neat’ and ‘cool’ and ‘hip.’ And he asked me if I was going to the sock hop this evening.” She looked at Martin. “Mr. Holland—what is a sock hop?”

  “It’s a dance. Usually held on a basketball court. You take off your shoes so you won’t scar up the floor. Dance in your socks.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve seen that in the movies. I—” She stopped as Gary and Joyce both started snapping their fingers and singing “The Boy From New York City.”

  “What is that?” Audie asked.

  “A song that was popular back when we were in high school,” Martin told him. “Back in ’64 or ’65—somewhere along there.”

  “They look stupid!” Rich summed it up, watching his father and Joyce.

  Gary and Joyce shifted vocal gears and began singing the old Dave Clark Five hit “Bits and Pieces.”

  “I don’t get this,” Frenchy muttered. “And I don’t think I like it either.”

  Nicole shook her head. “That guy that jumped off the ferris wheel? He’s still laying out in the open, gathering flies. And the woman that Dr. Tressalt shot is still in the middle of the midway.”

  “And nobody is paying any attention to them?” Martin asked.

  “No one.” Nicole grimaced. “And they’re beginning to smell.”

  “I saw Lyle Steele,” Audie spoke to Martin. “He told me to give you a message.” He cut his eyes to Linda, snapping her fingers to the song Gary and Joyce were singing.

  “Say it, Audie.”

  “Well...”

  “Go ahead, Audie. The whole message. Intact. I told you the other night that I thought I’d have to kill Lyle someday. Just give me a good excuse to do it.”

  The deputy sighed. “Okay. He said that at first he was gonna screw your daughter and then give her to his men for a good old time. But something better has come up for you.”

  Martin’s brow furrowed. “What is he talking about?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Susan,” Martin asked, “just before you were taken away, did you feel anything strange at all?”

  “No, sir. Nothing. And I’ve thought about that. One second I was with the group, the next second me and squirt were in that dark place.”

  “Hey!” Jeanne said. “Where’s Don?” She looked around her. “He was right here a second ago.”

  They all looked around them. All but Linda, Joyce and Gary. The three of them were sitting and looking at each other in total silence.

  The young cowboy was gone.

  “I just handed him a couple of hamburgers!” Nicole said. “He was eating one.”

  Don was standing amid some of the strangest creatures he had ever seen in his life. Tiny towered over him, while Samson stood looking at him as though he would like to break every bone in the young man’s body. Which he would cheerfully do if Nabo would cut him loose.

  “A gentleman’s agreement, young man?” Nabo asked with a smile.

  Don looked around him. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there. “What kind of deal and how did I get wherever I am?”

  “You are neither here nor there, young man,” Nabo told him. “You are in limbo.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You are behind the veil. You are between lives. For the moment, you are neither dead nor alive. Is that explanation sufficient?”

  “I guess. What do you want?”

  “Oh, I think you know.”

  Don lifted his right hand. Still had his hamburger, half eaten. He smiled and offered it to the man. “Care for a bite?”

  “Don’t be absurd!”

  “Just thought I’d ask.” He took a bite of the hamburger. It was tasteless. He looked at the sandwich. “What’s wrong here? ”

  “You may experience only what I wish you to experience. And I assure you, pain is not an option.”

  He recalled Ned’s words. “I won’t sell my soul to the devil or betray my friends, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “Don’t be too hasty, young man. I would suggest you give it careful thought.”

  Don started to tell the man to shove it. But the words would not form on his tongue.

  Nabo suddenly became angry. “Interference! Why?” he shouted.

  Don couldn’t understand who or what he was talking about. Or talking to.

  The dark lenses of Nabo’s glasses turned to the young man. “How would you like to spend eternity listening to your flesh burn, and living in the most excruciating pain you could possibly imagine . . . forever!”

  “That would probably be unpleasant. But I don’t think my God will allow that to happen.”

  Nabo spat in his face.

  Don met the man’s eyes. Or lenses. He was scared, but refused to let Nabo see the fear. “I may not be the most religious man in the world, Nabob, or whatever your name is, but I try to be a good person. I’m kind to people, I’m kind to animals. I don’t even like to brand stock. And I was raised in the church. You want to hear me sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’?”

  “What?”

  Don started singing as loudly as he could. Lot of echo in this place.

  “Enough!” Nabo shouted. “The words are offensive to me.”

  Don kept singing.

  Nabo slapped him across the face, bloodying Don’s lips, silencing him. “I should have Samson tear your arms out of the sockets and then throw you back to your friends. How would you like that?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Don replied honestly. “You always have to have others to fight your battles and do your dirty work for you?”

  “I should tear your tongue from your mouth. You’re a fool!”

  Don didn’t try to argue that. Maybe he was. He looked first at Samson, then at the giant, Tiny. The hate in their eyes chilled him. Scared him. But this came to him: If Nabo was going to do something, why didn’t he just do it and stop talking about it?

  He met Nabo’s dark lenses and wondered if the man could read his thoughts?

  Nabo smiled as he walked around and around the young man. Don didn’t know where he was, but it was weird, no doubt about that. All black and foul-looking. But shiny enough to see. Dead silent and dark as hell. Then the thought came to him: Maybe that’s where he was. Hell.

  “No,
no, you idiot!” Nabo snapped at him. “You are not in Hell.”

  That did spook Don. But confirmed his suspicions. Nabo could see into his mind.

  “The entire town,” Nabo said, disgust dripping like slime from his cruel mouth. “I have the entire village in the palm of my hand; a total victory-except for your little group. You’re ruining everything!” he roared, spittle spraying Don’s face. The man’s breath was stinking. Smelled like . . .

  ... the grave.

  Don forced himself to keep his expression as bland as possible and figured the best thing he could do was keep his mouth shut.

  Nabo shouted threats at him. Told him what he could do, the most hideous of things. Nabo circled the young man, screaming threats and curses at him, seemingly never taking a breath.

  Or course not, Don thought. Why should he have to? The man is dead.

  “Let me gouge his eyes out,” Sam rumbled, “before you send him back.”

  “Yes!” Tiny said, smiling cruelly. “Let’s all enjoy listening to him scream.”

  Nabo shook his head. “That would only serve to solidify the group. He pointed a thick finger at Don. ”But the night shall change it all. You Christians will probably survive the light, but not the dark. Go!” he screamed.

  Don slid on his face and chest and belly and came to an abrupt halt, his head in Jeanne’s lap. His face was cut and bleeding from the crashing impact with the ground. But he still clutched the mashed hamburger. Maggots crawled from the wrapper. Feeling them crawling on his flesh, Don jerked his hand back. Martin kicked the hamburger away.

  Jeanne yelped in surprise as his head landed in her lap. She fought back her surge of fear and helped to roll him over on his back. He was scared and disoriented and looked to be in shock.

  Gary, Joyce and Linda had gone for a walk, ignoring the warnings from Martin and the others. Susan wet a cloth from a nearby outside hydrant while Martin took the young man’s pulse.

  “Fast but very strong,” he said.

  Don tried to sit up. “I’m all right.”

  Jeanne pulled his head back down. “You stay still for a minute.” She took the cloth and bathed Don’s face. The cuts were minor, already closing.