by J. W. Ocker
Finally, Lowell veered from his course, heading for a simple-looking white food truck decorated with bright illustrations of apples on sticks. Embedded inside, as firm as a hermit crab in its shell, was a giant woman in a white apron. She had an anvil tattooed on one swollen forearm, like Popeye.
“What do you want?”
Lowell dropped some money on the counter and threw a fastball question over his shoulder. “Candy or caramel?”
“Caramel,” said Douglas.
“Candy for me,” Lowell said to Ms. Popeye. She handed the treats to Lowell, who grabbed them by their sticks. Douglas took his, a beautiful, smooth brown sphere, except at the bottom of the apple, where the excess caramel had run down its sides and congealed into a thick disc of sweet, enamel-ripping tar. Lowell’s was bright red and had a face painted on it with icing and cookie bits, like a shrunken head right off the necklace of some Candy Land headhunter. He tore half the face off with one bite, a double crunch of candy coating and apple guts.
“So, what do you think?” With the apple chunks glued to the roof of his mouth by red cement, Lowell’s voice sounded lower and his vowels came out funny. “Giant pumpkin tent or alpaca barn?” He suddenly froze, his eyes lifted as if they’d been tugged by a string. “Wait a minute … we’re going there.”
He used his half-eaten candy apple to point to a canvas sign strung across the roof of a tent: ODDITORIUM.
Once the boys got closer to the tent, they could see it was covered in illustrations of people … strange people: a man so skinny you could make out every bone in his skeleton; a little girl in a long-sleeved plaid dress and knee-high socks, her face covered in werewolf fuzz; a man whose torso was poked full of holes; a woman whose skin looked like tree bark.
At the entrance to the tent was a podium where a young man with long, greasy hair, wearing a T-shirt with a character from a thirty-year-old video game, stared down at the screen of a tablet computer. Lowell pulled out a snake of red tickets from his pocket and handed it to the man who took them without counting. Douglas did the same, but this time the man’s eyes lifted from the screen. A smile stretched the ratty hair around his mouth, “Welcome to the freak show. No refunds.”
As they passed through the half-open flap, it took a few moments for Douglas’s eyes to adjust to the dim interior. His nose started collecting clues first. Formaldehyde. Alcohol. Old death. Rot. Familiar smells for Douglas. Nostalgic smells.
“Stinks bad in here,” said Lowell, eyeing what remained of his candy apple dubiously.
Then they saw the jars.
Directly in front of them was an eight-foot high wall of shelves packed with glass jars of varying shapes. Each was filled with liquids—orange liquid, yellow liquid, brown liquid, clear liquid. Each glass container preserved a dead animal—a deformed dead animal. A piglet with two heads, a kitten with five legs, two ducklings joined at the breast, a bald mouse covered in small round nodules, a puppy with tusks jutting out of its muzzle. Not everything sunk within the jars was recognizable.
The preserved animal freaks continued down a maze of hallways like a house of mirrors, although instead of Douglas and Lowell seeing themselves in the glass, they saw a tortoise missing its top shell and a fish with an extra mouth halfway down its body and a gecko with three tails.
There were strange creatures outside of the jars, too—taxidermied specimens evolution had ruled out millennia ago: a pony sprouting a narwhal horn from its forehead; a bat with frog legs instead of wings; a ferret with a rattlesnake tail. Sometimes, the animals were immortalized in fanciful poses, like two bullfrogs dueling with tiny sabers or a guinea pig in a bonnet and glasses sitting in a guinea pig-sized rocking chair reading a guinea pig-sized book.
“Man, ain’t no people in here. Just animals. Sort of,” said Lowell.
Just death, thought Douglas, taking a bite out of his caramel apple. Death on display.
As they wandered the labyrinth of jars and sawdust-stuffed corpses, their disappointment at the false advertisement quickly evaporated.
“A squirrel with one eye!”
“There’s a face on the back of that stingray!”
“No way that’s a real worm. Look how long it is!”
And then a quiet question stranger than any of those exclamations.
“How are you feeling?”
Douglas turned to face Lowell, who had asked the question around the bare candy apple stick still in his mouth, while he bent down to examine a creature that looked like a shaved monkey torso sewn to a fish’s tail. A paper placard labeled it a Feejee Mermaid. “I don’t know. It’s kind of cool. Kind of nauseating, too.”
“I mean about last week. After the cemetery.”
“Oh, that. I’m okay.” Each day since their cemetery visit seemed to push the nightmares father away. Now they were merely the monster-stalking-town sort of nightmares instead of the monster-personally-had-it-out-for-him sort. Douglas was becoming a nightmare connoisseur.
The few intervening days had done little to resolve the argument in the showroom, though. The trio had since occupied themselves with what Lowell loved to call “patrolling” and “investigating,” but what was, in reality, much closer to wandering and hanging out downtown at the shops or the movie theater, before they invariably found themselves back at the graveyard. Still, the quandary of whether to tell their parents was always present.
“Think we’re doing the right thing?” Lowell leaned in closer to the mermaid as if he were trying to see the stitching in the dimness. The stick in his mouth quivered inches from the mermaid’s features, which seemed to be peeled back in permanent horror.
“I don’t know. We’re definitely doing the scary thing.” Douglas peered into one of the jars and saw a furry spider the size of a bowling ball floating inside.
“Well, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s the right thing. Mostly because of you. If you are right about what happened that night, you might be the most important person in Cowlmouth right now.”
“Why?”
“You’re the only one to have gotten near the monster and lived. Sure, you don’t remember anything useful about him, but who knows what might come to you under the right circumstances. Maybe you’ll spot somebody in the crowd outside, and you’ll recognize their vibe. Or you’ll overhear somebody talking, and it’ll sound like the voice you heard. Or you’ll bump into the killer around the corner and he’ll stare at you like you’re a baby shark with feathers or something, and you’ll suddenly know it’s him. It’s one of the reasons you need to be out in the open and not holed up in your house.” Lowell was facing Douglas, his head framed by a large jar with something horned suspended inside. Douglas looked at his best friend like he was the weirdest thing in the entire tent. It took him a long time to respond.
“I never thought about that. I wish you hadn’t made me think about that now.”
“What do you mean?”
“If there’s a small chance I might be able to recognize the monster here, there’s a pretty large one that he’ll recognize me. He’s probably already seen me. He might even have followed us in here.” Douglas was surprised at how matter-of-fact his voice sounded. His nightmares were apparently exhausting his ability to be terrified.
Lowell didn’t have a response. The two boys stood there, surrounded by animal oddities, as cold inside as the things submerged in the jars.
“Maybe we should go somewhere less eerie,” Lowell finally suggested.
“Maybe.”
But Douglas’s worry wasn’t left behind with the beakless raven and the fox with the hawk wings. It followed him to the alpaca barn, where they watched a man shear one of the strange beasts of its wool coat in less than a minute. It followed him as they sat in the classic car lot, trying out horns and steering wheels. It followed him as they perched on the fence and watched the scarecrow-stuffing competition. It followed him as they passed the photo booth Audrey had mentioned, where a balding man with a mustache and glasses tried fra
ntically to pose a family of seven in matching vampire capes and fangs so he could take their picture. It looked like a stressful job.
Everybody at the carnival seemed to be a fun house mirror reflection to Douglas—distorted versions of those whom he usually saw. Either they were killers or they were victims. Douglas wasn’t sure which was worse.
“I wonder if any records were broken this year.” The two friends were in line to see the bloated orange wonders of the season, the giant pumpkins. Lowell had a cinnamon-sprinkled sugar cookie the size of a hubcap in his hand. Douglas was dissolving a wasp nest of maple cotton candy in his mouth.
Douglas shrugged. “Last year, they had one that was almost three thousand pounds. That’s like a ton and a half of pumpkin. That’s going to be hard to beat.” The giant pumpkins were Douglas’s favorite part of the carnival. He loved those massive, misshapen fruits. Regular pumpkins were great. They were the defining feature of fall, spooky and comforting and delicious and disgusting. He couldn’t imagine if the seasons had been different and the official fruit had ended up being a strawberry or a grapefruit or worst of all, a banana. But pumpkins—you could turn those bright orange globes into goblins with a few slices of a kitchen knife … and a few more is all it took to turn them into pies, to roast their seeds into crunchy, savory tooth-crackers. They were perfect.
Especially because you could grow them into giants.
About three-quarters of the way through the cookie and all the way through the cotton candy, the boys made it inside the large tent. The space was so full of giant pumpkins that it almost seemed as if the inside of the tent glowed orange. They wandered among the squash in awe, the way people walk through redwood forests or beneath the shadows of mountains. There were fat, wide pumpkins that you could sit on like hard chairs; tall, slumped ones that looked as if they had been frozen mid-melt; surreally-shaped ones that looked as though they’d erupted from the ground with a loud bloop instead of blossoming slowly at the end of vines. They had names like Cinderella’s Coach and Peter Peter’s Wife and Linus’s Nightmare. Every single one was a glorious, swollen, ugly, beautiful, bloated dream-creature that could only live in the twilight season of fall.
The pumpkins were so massive, they had to be set on wooden pallets so that forklifts could pick them up to move them. Every once in a while, the boys would see a pumpkin farmer rubbing oil on the taut skin of one of the mini-planets, trying to avoid the cracks that would disqualify it from the competition.
Later, the winner would have the honor of carving his giant pumpkin into a monstrous jack-o’-lantern and setting it in the middle of downtown for Halloween night. The three runners-up would be taken to a field on the fairgrounds, hoisted up by a crane and dropped with an enormous explosion of pumpkin flesh. A few others would be carved into boats and paddled around the river.
Giant pumpkins were absolutely awesome.
Of course, this year, the thing that Douglas noticed most about them was how easily they could conceal somebody behind them. The rows of giant pumpkins were almost more eerie than the dim maze of jarred dead things in the Odditorium tent.
Suddenly, a terrible yell, almost a scream, ripped through the crowd.
“Somebody cut Jill! Somebody cut Jill!”
The crowd started surging toward and swirling around a single point in the tent like somebody had pulled a drain plug from its hole. Douglas and Lowell were borne along, but were able to take advantage of their smaller size to wriggle their way to the front.
A gray, grizzled man in a tractor cap and faded red sweatshirt was kneeling in front of the victim, weeping.
“Jill, Jill,” the man kept repeating. He looked around at the gathering crowd “Who did this?”
In front of the man, the orange behemoth—JILL THE GIANT, according to a homemade poster decorated in orange and green marker—seemed unperturbed by his outpouring of sorrow and anger. Right in the middle of the pumpkin, a jagged S gaped in the orange flesh.
Aside from the pumpkin farmer, the individuals who seemed most unsettled by the act of vegetable vandalism were the two boys standing frozen behind him. They stood there while the rest of the crowd stared and whispered, and while most of the onlookers dispersed, and while the grieving pumpkin farmer stormed off to find a way to avenge Jill.
Finally, when the crowd had thinned, the boys were able to get closer to examine the latest victim.
“It looks like Martin’s S,” said Douglas in a low whisper.
“Yeah, just bigger. Same knife-writing for sure.”
“Why would the killer slash a pumpkin?”
“There should be police tape around this thing.”
Douglas reached out and traced the long angular letter. “I think this is a warning.”
“A warning.”
“Martin’s S was for Saturday, this one must be for Sunday.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Exactly.”
Lowell started pulling at the cuffs on his shirt. “It’s kind of a strange warning. Most of Cowlmouth doesn’t even know there’s a letter-obsessed killer out there. You heard the crowd. They think kids did this.”
“You said it yourself in the graveyard the other night. The killer wants his marks seen. That’s why he’s making them. So far, thanks to the police, nobody knows about them.”
“So this is him … ”
“Warning everybody holding onto the secret when the next murder will happen: Sunday. Tomorrow. Now the police have to let people know to protect them.”
“Maybe. If the police even get this message.”
Douglas nodded slowly. “You’re right. I think it’s up to us. We need to tell the police about this.”
“Yeah, I guess we do. My dad’s going to ground me until college.”
Douglas plucked at the strands of hair streaking across his forehead like they were harp strings. “I think there might be another way. Come on.”
He led Lowell through the bulbous orange rows and back out into daylight. “Look around. Do you see anybody that works for your dad nearby? Somebody that looks like they’re not on duty?”
“This is a big carnival. Most of the force is here. Wait, there’s PH.” Lowell pointed at a solitary man hanging out near the backside of a tent. The man wore jeans, white sneakers, a thick hoodie adorned with a large football, and a ball cap with a baseball on it. “His name’s Philip Hubbell, but he always makes me call him PH. Why does it matter that he’s not on duty? Ooooooooh.” Lowell smacked his forehead with the palms of his hands. “I get where you’re going with this. We just need to casually place the information, all innocent-like. Let me take us the rest of the way.”
Lowell and Douglas approached the officer at an angle that made it look like they were just happening to pass by the man. “Hey, PH,” said Lowell as they got close.
“Mr. Lowell Pumphrey. Enjoying the fair?” In one hand, the officer held a paper cup with something steaming in it and a large cinnamon pretzel in the other.
“It’s great.” Lowell’s voice suddenly sounded different to Douglas, like he was three years younger. “This is my friend, Doug.”
“Hello, Doug.”
“Is your family here?” asked Lowell.
“They’re here … somewhere. I think at the tractor museum. I wanted to get a pretzel and a cider.” He held them up like they were evidence.
“I’ll make sure I say hi if I see them. We just came from the pumpkin tent across the way. Some big ones over there.”
“I’ll bet. Did they announce the winner? I’ve got twenty bucks on Pumpkinhead.”
“No, not yet. But there was a big commotion in there. Apparently, somebody vandalized a pumpkin.”
“I hope it wasn’t Pumpkinhead.”
“No, Jill the Giant. So is that like a crime? Just curious. Do you have to investigate it and treat it like a crime scene?”
“I’m off duty, kid. Just enjoying the fair. Tell you what, though. I’ll make sure the Pumpkin Crimes Division handles it.”
>
“Ha, Pumpkin Crimes Division. Anyway, whoever did it really messed the pumpkin up. The farmer was devastated. All because somebody carved their initial into its face.”
Hubbell’s own face suddenly went stony. “Yeah, that’s too bad for the farmer.” He knocked up the bridge of his cap with the rim of his cup. “Um, so what letter was the initial?”
“I think it was an S. Anyway, we’re headed to the Ferris wheel, so I guess we’ll see you around. Hope your pumpkin wins.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll talk to you later, Lowell.”
Lowell and Douglas waited until they rounded the corner of a tent before they peeked back the way they’d come. Hubbell was halfway to the pumpkins, tossing his full cup of cider and barely nibbled pretzel into a trash can as he went.
“Let’s go find Audrey,” said Douglas.
The two boys took off through the carnival crowds. They ignored the insults of the carnies at their game booths as they passed through the midway. They didn’t look twice at the sign announcing the world’s largest horse and were oblivious to the loudspeaker proclaiming the world’s smallest woman, “She’s only twenty-nine inches tall! Her shoe size is a two! And her four sons are each over six feet tall!”
Audrey was waiting for them at the Ferris wheel when they got there.
“You two look like you have something to tell me.”
“Man, do we,” said Douglas. He began to explain, when he was interrupted by a couple of teenage girls behind them.
“Are you guys in line?”
“No,” said Lowell.
“Yes,” said Audrey, and then to Lowell and Douglas, “Let’s go on the Ferris wheel.” A few strange, silent seconds went by. Finally, she asked, “What?”
