Carnival of Death

by Carnival of Death (v5. 0) (mobi)

  “The cops are not our friends,” Cap’n Bob had continued. “We take care of our troubles on our own and in our own way. We don’t want anybody meddling in our business. Especially cops.”

  That was fine by Matt. The carnies were a little strange, most of them, but certainly no more strange than Matt himself. Like Matt, a lot of them had secrets, and they knew how to keep them. In fact, Matt hadn’t even told Cap’n Bob his real name. He’d said he was Matt Axton and that he’d like to be paid in cash. Cap’n Bob had no problem with that.

  Some secrets were easier to keep than others, however. Attempted rape was serious business, and Matt didn’t like the idea of letting the three kids off the hook.

  “You can turn around now.”

  Matt turned and saw that the girl had put on her pants and shirt. She looked about fifteen, but she was probably older, seventeen or eighteen maybe. Matt had trouble judging the age of anybody under thirty.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Sue Jean. I want to get out of here.”

  Matt looked at the three young men who’d attacked her. The one whose ear she’d almost removed was still lying curled up on his side, but he’d stopped whining. The one who’d been whacked across the face with the sap cap was making snuffling sounds as he tried to crawl away. The one with the cracked wrist sat cradling his arm and glaring at Matt.

  Three teenage punks who’d thought they could get away with something, Matt thought. He still didn’t see any signs of corruption on them. He also didn’t see any sign of whoever had handed him the tent stake. Where the hell had he gone? There wasn’t anyplace to go. No time to worry about it. Right now Matt had other problems.

  “You think we should call an ambulance?” Matt asked. “Or the cops?”

  “I don’t care who you call, but I’m not staying here,” Sue Jean told him. “I need to get away from this place. That old woman told me to. I should’ve listened to her. Then this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “What old woman?”

  “That fortune-teller, whatever her name is. She told me to leave, but I had to have a snow cone.”

  Maybe those rumors Matt had heard were true, but he couldn’t keep from grinning. Madame Zora wouldn’t appreciate being called an old woman.

  Sue Jean started walking.

  “Hold on,” Matt said. “Don’t you want to press charges against these three?”

  Sue Jean didn’t slow down. “I don’t care about them. They didn’t hurt me.”

  Matt started after her. If she didn’t care, maybe he shouldn’t care. Cap’n Bob almost certainly wouldn’t, not as long as the culprits had suffered some damage. Which they had. Matt still thought he should try.

  When he caught up with Sue Jean, he said, “Do you know who those guys are?”

  “Assholes.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out for myself. But I meant aside from that.”

  “I know who they are. Just some guys from school. What difference does it make?”

  Matt thought it over. OK, maybe it didn’t matter. The kids weren’t hurt badly except for the one with the knife, who probably had a broken wrist. Well, it would heal. They’d get over what had happened, and they could find their own way home. He was sure they could come up with some clever way to explain their injuries rather than telling anybody they’d been trying to rape one of their classmates. And Cap’n Bob didn’t want the cops coming around. Matt didn’t want them any more than the cap’n did.

  But the whole thing bothered him. So he tried again. “They wanted to hurt you. They might try to hurt someone else.”

  Sue Jean gave a short laugh. “Them? They’re drunk or they wouldn’t have bothered me. I think they learned an important lesson.”

  Matt hadn’t smelled any liquor, but maybe the girl was right about the lesson. They’d sure gotten their asses kicked.

  As he and Sue Jean got back to the midway, Matt turned back to look for them. He didn’t see them anywhere.

  He also didn’t see the lollipop wrapper that the breeze blew across the bent tops of some weeds. It caught for a moment on the jagged edge of a leaf and then slipped away to move on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Madame Zora’s real name was Gloria Farley, and she was scared witless. She’d been scared before, but never like this, not even when she’d been arrested that time in a little northern Mississippi town for shoplifting. She’d been eighteen years old and two days away from the home she’d fled the day after her stepfather had come into her bedroom for the first time.

  She wouldn’t have tried shoplifting if she’d known of any other way to get free food at the supermarket, but she didn’t think they’d give it to her. She was trying to slip out with a couple of cans of tuna and five candy bars when they grabbed her. The candy bars had probably been a bad idea. Not much nutrition in a candy bar.

  She’d thought that if she cried enough and acted younger than her age, she wouldn’t go to jail, but Mississippi was tough on shoplifters, at least in that part of the state, and she went to the pokey all right. It turned out that the chief of police wasn’t a whole lot different from her stepfather when it came to methods of interrupting sleep, and after she got out of jail a couple of days later because the supermarket manager decided not to press charges, she promised herself she’d never go back in.

  Not long after that she met a woman named Frances Devore, a woman who was old and getting frail but who still had an active and inquiring mind. She and Gloria had both been in a public library in another little town in Mississippi, which, in spite of what some people thought, did indeed have a literate population.

  Gloria was there because it was warm and had comfortable chairs. Frances was there to read the magazines and be around people for a change instead of being cooped up in her house. She’d struck up a conversation with Gloria that had begun with her asking why Gloria wasn’t in school. Gloria had told her the truth, more or less, glad to have a sympathetic listener, and Frances got interested.

  She was looking for somebody who’d help her out a little bit, keep house for her, do her shopping, drive her to the doctor, and fix a few meals.

  “I could give you a roof over your head and your own room,” she said, “and I’ll keep you out of trouble.”

  It sounded like a good deal to Gloria, who went home with Frances and stayed for six years, until the old lady died. Frances had an eclectic library of her own and didn’t mind if Gloria read the books that were there. In fact, she encouraged it. Frances didn’t have TV, so when Gloria wasn’t doing her chores, she read. She read novels and biographies and self-help books, books about Greek and Norse mythology, Shakespeare. She’d discovered that she loved to read. Whenever a book interested her, she picked it up and read it, and she was interested in a lot of things.

  One day Frances saw Gloria with a book on palmistry and said, “You could learn to read palms in about five minutes.”

  “It’s all a fraud,” Gloria said.

  Frances sniffed. “Of course it is, or at least the kind in that book is. But palmistry’s real enough, if you have the gift. Some people really can see a person’s future in those lines.”

  “Ha,” Gloria said, but she read the book, studied the charts, learned about the shapes of hands, and memorized all the lines and what they meant. After a while she tried out her new skills on Frances.

  “Not bad,” Frances said when Gloria had finished. “You almost had me believing you a time or two. You have a way of sounding convincing.”

  “I don’t have the gift, though,” Gloria said.

  “No, you don’t, and that’s a good thing. People shouldn’t know the future. It never holds anything good, not even for a pretty young girl like you, and especially not for an old woman like me.”

  “That’s not very encouraging.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be. You should know by now that life gives everybody a hard row to hoe. And then you die.”

  Gloria thought about her stepfather and about that po
lice chief. Life hadn’t been so hard for them, as far as she knew, but maybe they were dead. It was pleasant to think so. She hoped they’d been run over by a bus or a train or some other form of heavy transportation and flattened out like roadkill. Serve the bastards right.

  Gloria was with Frances for another year or so after that conversation, and although she read many other books during that time, she kept coming back to the one about palmistry. She had it pretty much memorized by the time Frances died.

  In her last illness, Frances told Gloria the future, and as she’d promised, it wasn’t pretty.

  “My cousins never gave a damn about me before, but they’ll show up because they think I have money. I don’t, but they don’t know that and wouldn’t believe it if I told them so. They’ll run you off first thing, no doubt about it. I have a will, but all I really have is this house, so I’ve left that to them. Maybe they’ll be satisfied. I wish I could do something to help you, but all I can do is give you the money that’s in the metal box under the sink. It’s not much. I wish it were. You’ve been a big help to me, Gloria, so you take it and don’t tell anybody.”

  Sure enough, Frances’s prophecy came true. The relatives who’d never had anything to do with Frances while she was alive appeared and started squabbling right away. They kicked Gloria out of the house and told her that if she made trouble, they’d call the cops. They told her it would be a really good idea if she left town.

  Gloria had already had enough of cops, so she left town, but she left knowing a lot more than she had when she’d moved in with Frances.

  Gloria found a little over three hundred dollars in the box, and she put it in her purse. Tell anybody? Fat chance. It was all she had when the cousins kicked her out. They didn’t even let her stay for the funeral.

  The three hundred dollars lasted Gloria for a month, and just as she thought she might have to resort to stealing again, she happened upon Cap’n Bob’s Stardust Carnival. She saw the ads taped to telephone poles in a little town she was passing through and realized that a carnival might be just what she was looking for. What better setting for a skilled palm reader? OK, maybe not skilled, exactly, but good enough. Even Frances had said so.

  Gloria wandered around a bit, enjoying the crowds, the music, and the atmosphere. Not bad at all. She asked a barker how to find the boss, and he told her to look for a portly man wearing a ringmaster’s outfit. He wouldn’t be easy to miss.

  Gloria found him in about five minutes near the tent of the Seven Dwarfs. He had a big smile that looked only a little fake, and she told him she was looking for a place to ply her trade.

  “And what might that be?” he asked, never losing the smile.

  “I’m a palm reader.”

  “You any good?”

  Gloria was tempted to pad her résumé but thought it might not be wise. She said, “Pretty good.”

  “Follow me,” Cap’n Bob said. He led her to a big trailer in the back of the lot, opened the door, and motioned her inside.

  Gloria had a momentary flashback to her experience with the cop, but she could handle herself better now. If the cap’n gave her any trouble, he’d be sorry.

  Cap’n Bob didn’t try anything funny, however. When they were inside, he put out a hand and said, “Show me.”

  Gloria took his hand, pretended to study it, and gave him some of the usual baloney about his life line and his heart line, explaining what each one meant and elaborating on the shape and length of his.

  “You’ll do,” the cap’n said, taking back his hand. “Do you have a costume?”

  “I can come up with something.”

  The cap’n seemed satisfied with that answer, and he explained the percentage of the take he’d get for allowing her to work the carnival.

  “That’s to pay for your booth space and my traveling expenses,” he said. “You can rent a spot in one of my trailers or buy your own.”

  “I’ll rent a spot for now.”

  “I’ll put you in a trailer with one of the other performers. When do you want to start?”

  “Tonight would be fine.”

  “I’ll set it up,” the cap’n said, and Gloria had been with the carnival ever since. It was a good enough life, better than a lot she could think of, and she’d grown to feel as if the carnival was her home and the carnies her family. She didn’t mind the traveling, and she felt safe and happy most of the time.

  Not anymore. Not since things had started happening to her, things she didn’t understand at all.

  She’d developed a good line as Madame Zora. She could string most people along for ten or fifteen minutes with no trouble at all, feeding them a line of bull that they seemed eager to hear and believe. If it made them happy, what was the harm? She didn’t believe any of it herself, and there was no harm in that either.

  No harm in any of it, until a few weeks ago. Just about the time when that new security man had started to work. Matt Axton, he called himself, but Gloria knew better.

  He’d arrived, and that was when things had started to happen. Gloria had started to see things, real things, not just lines in hands but things that were going to happen. She knew they were going to happen.

  At first it was nothing much, like she knew a man was going to stumble when he left her tent, or she knew a woman was going to forget her purse. Little things that wouldn’t seem to mean much, maybe, but they gave Gloria a little bit of a hollow feeling inside.

  After that, a man came in and after looking at his hand she knew that he’d lost his grandfather’s pocket watch. More than that, she knew exactly where it was. When she told him, he couldn’t believe it, but he rushed out of the tent to go home to look. Gloria knew he’d find it. She should’ve felt good about that, excited that she seemed to have the gift after all. But she wasn’t excited. She was scared. Something had happened. She’d changed, and she didn’t know why.

  She remembered one particular day when a tall man walked into her tent. A woman was with him, and they were both smiling, happy to be together, having a fine time at the carnival.

  “Hey,” the man said. “You must be Madame Zora.”

  “Yes, I am she,” Gloria said. Among the other things she’d learned from Frances, she’d picked up a few rules of good grammar. “Please be seated.”

  The man looked at the woman, and they both laughed. “Can you do us both at once?” the man asked.

  Gloria didn’t smile. The hollow feeling was back, and it was worse. “Not for the single price.”

  The couple laughed again, and the man said, “Didn’t expect you to.” He pulled a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to her.

  Gloria tucked the money away inside her robes. The hollowness had been replaced with something like despair. She wished the man and woman would go away, but she knew they wouldn’t.

  “Tell his fortune first,” the woman said, and the man held out his hand.

  Gloria was reluctant to take it, but she didn’t see any way to avoid it. When she touched it, her stomach twisted. Her pain must have showed on her face, because the woman said, quite concerned, “Is something wrong?”

  Gloria tried a smile that she knew must be ghastly. No, not with me. It’s him. He has cancer. He doesn’t know it yet, but he does. A tumor of the brain. No cure. He’ll be dead in six months.

  “Please,” the woman said. “Can we help?”

  Gloria straightened her face, put on what she hoped was a genuine smile, and said, “I am fine. And so are you two. I see nothing but happiness ahead. Look here at these lines…”

  She traced the lines in the man’s hand, then those in the woman’s, giving them a cheerful lie about their lives. They were laughing again when they left her tent. They’d be happy for a while longer. It was all she could do for them.

  When they were gone, Gloria slumped in her chair. Tonight had been the worst so far. She knew the girl—what had her name been?—Sue Jean was going to be attacked. Raped. She could see the faces of her attackers.

&
nbsp; So she’d warned the girl, told her to go away from the carnival, knowing all the time that she wouldn’t go, knowing that something bad was going to happen.

  And knowing that Matt Axton would be involved.

  Knowing that Matt Axton wasn’t even his real name.

  Knowing that, whoever he was, he was surrounded by darkness and that someone surrounded by an even deeper darkness was near the carnival too.

  Knowing that things were going to happen, terrible things.

  Even worse, not knowing what they were but certain there was nothing at all she could do about them.

  So she shut the tent, went to her trailer, located the bottle of Ezra Brooks that she kept in a cabinet for special occasions, and opened it up.

  She’d hardly finished her first drink when she heard a crash of thunder. Seconds later rain started to patter down on the roof of the trailer.

  Then all hell broke loose outside, and to her horror, as soon as she heard the commotion, Gloria was sure she knew exactly what the trouble was.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Matt decided that he couldn’t let Sue Jean just walk away from what had happened. The wind came in gusts across the field, and lightning flashed through a cloud. Thunder followed. The rides would be shutting down because of the danger of lightning strikes, and people would begin leaving.

  Matt turned back from the field to look for Sue Jean, but she was already lost in the crowds. He walked almost the length of the midway, but he couldn’t find her. He might have continued to look, but he saw that one of the other security guys, Ken, was having a problem at the ringtoss booth.

  Ken wasn’t a big guy, but he was wiry and had a mean, squinty look. Most of the marks backed down from him without much of an argument, but not this one, a man of about thirty wearing a shirt with the sleeves pushed up to show off his muscles and his tats. He seemed convinced that the ringtoss was rigged.