“You’re on your own now, Carnival,” The hermit called, making for the dubious safety of his rickety abandoned warehouse.
I won’t leave you here on your own, my son. Not now, not ever.
“Good,” Carnival said. “You stay here and talk to the giant building while I run for cover.”
The city spirit loomed down towards Carnival. Carnival had just enough time for a truckload of second thoughts.
It’s too late to go back to the hooker now. You had your chance.
The city spirit grabbed him. Like a fat olive from the world’s largest Greek salad.
It grabbed Carnival/Olaf up and pulled him down under.
He’d take this call.
Chapter 55
Deeper Than He Needs to Go
There’s a world down here in the bottom of the sea. This is where memories go when they’ve been long forgot them. This is where bad dreams go and unanswerable regrets linger on. This is where the ghosts come out to play, where the sun can’t touch them, nor do men’s eyes soil them.
Carnival talked to the city familiar through Olaf’s mouth.
“Aggregate. I would have words with you.”
Polite now, aren’t you?
Carnival had to be. Talking to a city spirit called for a more proper tone of voice than badgering blood demons.
“Who are you, little deadling, to talk to me so?”
“Look deeper, familiar. Look through the rot and the crabs.”
His eyes focused upon Carnival like a thousand window shields of pain. Carnival felt a little like an ant beneath a burning glass.
“Ah yes. The gypsy. I knew your father. He feels close.”
“Don’t hold that against me.”
“I felt the wounds you gave for misguided love. I felt the drunkard and the whore. The delivery boy you took. All of them were close to me. Close to the street.”
“You missed them? You missed one single being?”
“A solitary tear drop falls no easier than a three day rain. The Aggregate is in tune with the individual. Those who are close to the street, they are my bones, they keep me alive.”
Carnival hadn’t thought of it that way. It was a little unnerving to imagine that a city incarnate might possess a little more humanity than a single misguided palm reader.
“Bear me no ill will,” Carnival said. “I have been beneath a darker force. Something moves my spirit against my will.”
“Moves it still, I would wager. You did not come here unasked.”
“It is true. I have been spoken to by higher sources.”
“Your father, I warrant. He is close to us, here.”
The windows peered a little closer.
Hello Big City. You’re looking good these days. Have you done a little subdividing?
“I see your father now. We have much in common, you and I. We both bear spirits other than our own. Someone rides your soul, yet. You are a multi-leveled creature. How can you stand the strain?”
Carnival yearned to pry a little deeper. What had the Aggregate seen inside him? But it didn’t do to fart around with the Aggregate. He had to ask the question he came for as soon as he could.
“How can you carry a city’s worth of spirits,” Carnival asked. “How do you bear a century’s worth of souls?”
The Aggregate smiled a huge concrete dam of a grin.
“I know what you are asking for.”
“Can you help me?”
“I don’t know why your father had you talk to me. I don’t have enough power for what you want. To turn a nightwalker is no small task.”
Carnival didn’t know why Poppa had sent him here, either. Why he ever thought this was a good plan.
What had Poppa been thinking?
What had Carnival been thinking?
What tangled spider’s web had he stumbled into?
“Goodbye to you gypsy. I have duties to fulfill, as do you.”
Just like that the Aggregate yanked Carnival away from the encounter.
Away and out.
Too damn soon, boy. He pulled you out too damn soon. Possession interruptus. A serious matter at any time, it could be downright fatal now.
When Carnival opened his eyes, he was in the water, alone with Olaf.
Outside of Olaf.
Then Olaf grabbed Carnival by the throat, dragged him down and held him under the dirty harbor water.
The bubbles slid by like balls of dirty glass.
Chapter 56
Ouija Dreams
Momma sat in her room and worked the Ouija. She needed to talk to someone but who could she talk to? Right now she was talking to herself and that was rarely productive - introspection, the art of the inner me, myself and I. There are three sides to a plenum. There is magic in threes-the three Calvary crosses, the three eyes. All three directions, past, present, future. Three sides to every story the three old women say. Yours, theirs, and the truth. Three sides like a pool rack. All of those combinations, just waiting to spin and roll.
She let the plenum slide, feeling it move beneath her hand. The letters glowed a soft phosphorescent green. Talk to me board, Momma pleaded.
The Ouija is an imperfect tool, tainted by the money stained hands of hundreds of parlor room spiritualists. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have bothered with it. It was a child’s toy. But she wanted something her husband wouldn’t recognize.
So she played an old tune on a new instrument.
There are those that believe this art ought to be practiced in a group but Momma thought otherwise. Conjuring in groups was for those who lacked self confidence. Cattle conjurers milling in herds. There is weakness in numbers.
A gypsy woman prefers to think for herself.
She smiled at that thought. She really wasn’t gypsy. Never has been. She’d just married into the clan. She was a witch first. A gaujo, Poppa called her. He gave her a name. Magda he’d called her. At first this had been a gift. She was tired of her original name. Tired of the name her father had given her.
Why couldn’t we name ourselves? Her great grandmother had been named Elspeth. She’d practiced herbal healing and the townsfolk of the time had called it witchcraft. And so witchcraft it had become. Once you name a thing, it becomes what you call it.
Poppa had seen her witchcraft as a rich dowry, ready to be reaped. Poppa always had an ulterior motive. It certainly hadn’t been love. Why then had she married him? Was it rebellion? Love? Who knew? It was the road she chose and she walked it freely and of her own will, in death as well as life, she was ready to be reaped.
She touched the spirit board. She didn’t like using the Ouija. There’s danger here. You open a door, no telling what will step through. Needs must will out over discretion, when the devil rides for home.
She looked into the Ouija and in its blank flatness she saw a vision of her son, Carnival, sitting on a man’s lap in a wheelchair by the sea. She’d thought he’d only liked girls. She looked closer. It was a dead man. She could smell the rot, now.
She reached out. The man in the chair heard her coming. He touched her. He wanted her. His touch was wet and not in a nice kind of way.
She smelled brine. She felt the sea.
And then she was in it.
Chapter 57
Under the Sea
Carnival felt as if he’d stepped through an invisible door into a world of thick smoke, molasses and viscosity. His movements became slow and awkward. The blood hammered like a trip-hammer in his skull.
Olaf’s face loomed like a moon wide jack lantern, all shriek and laugh and terror and he is going under one more time. He felt the man’s fingers at his throat, his fingernails working themselves under the skin. This was more than murder, more than vengeance. There was an unholy eagerness to this act.
I’m dying, Carnival thought.
Live, boy. Don’t let old Ironsides drown you.
Carnival saw a memory: Poppa, making him kneel for hours upon sharp gravel for daring to doff his cap to a passing nun.
“No man’s god,” Poppa had roared. Even as he roared Carnival heard the small g in god. “You bow to no man, no woman, no god but yourself.”
Live, boy. Fight!
Poppa was a dark giant with a voice like a heated boning knife, a hand as quick and hard as a leather strop.
Carnival felt him raging against his chains down deep inside his chest, a chest that was soon to be buried beneath the sea. He looked up and saw something behind Olaf’s eyes. Banging against them like an eel against glass.
Carnival’s last few breaths chortled up past him like a baked bean bubble bath.
He tried to fight. He kicked against the bastard. How hard could this be? He’s tied to a chair for god’s sake.
He was losing.
Dying.
Fight, boy. Kick and bite and butt and knee and chew your way through the bastards. Always on top. A gypsy should stay always on top.
Fear, as raw and cloying as freshly spilled blood, caught at the back of Carnival’s throat. The only good thing about losing it under water is nobody notices if you wet your pants.
He kicked at Olaf. He kicked him hard, right where it would hurt most men but Olaf was dead, and the dead don’t worry about minor nuisances like a pair of soundly punted testicles.
In fact, it seemed to stir him.
His lust hardened.
He had unfinished business. That’s what kept most dead men on the earth.
Unfinished business.
Olaf needed to get laid.
Carnival felt Olaf’s member, cold and stiff like a frozen lamprey, butt against his pants.
Fight, boy, fight.
Carnival struggled in vain. He tasted the pennies of fear, coppery and cold in his mouth.
He saw his face, dying, reflected in Olaf’s dead staring eyes.
Help, he thought. I need help.
Where’s the man from Atlantis?
Aquaman?
Flipper?
It was no use.
Carnival was dying.
And then suddenly Carnival saw this old man, swinging what looked like a trowel or a Ouija plenum, slamming it into Olaf’s dead chest.
Momma?
And then the two of them are gone, and Carnival was alone in the water, drifting downwards, too tired to care.
Wake up boy. Open your eyes.
He looked up once and saw the face of a mermaid or an angel, drifting down towards him like a glimpse of far off sunrise.
It looked like Momma.
It looked like Maya.
Carnival closed his eyes and let the water take him home.
Until angels wake us and we drown.
Chapter 58
Like Waking on Baywatch
Maya pulled Carnival out of the harbor as easily as a magician pulling a stuffed rabbit out of a hat.
Your girlfriend is back, boy.
It was Maya, standing there in the water like a half shell-less Venus.
“Where’d you come from?”
Carnival hacked and choked like a case of walking emphysema. He shouldn’t try to talk with a mouthful of harbor water.
“I followed you down here,” She said. “I was worried about you.”
He knew she was lying but it was good to hear. She’d saved his life. It was enough to kill for. He looked up at her. He was dripping wet and she was bone dry. Like a selkie, dragged out of the water by the world’s most beautiful fisherman. She seemed so sleek, so beyond his reach.
A fish can love a bird, but where would they live?
“You said they don’t come back.” Carnival sputtered.
“What?”
“The dead. The one’s you’ve killed. You said they don’t come back.”
“Maybe he has a reason.”
“I know. Unfinished business. But that’s not enough. Not for the kind of hate he was feeling.”
Maya shrugged. “You killed him. It only seems natural he’d try and return the favor.”
Carnival shook his head. It began to swim.
“No. There’s something more. Something is pulling the strings around here. I don’t like not knowing who or why.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Carnival spat, partly in disgust, partly to clear his mouth. The harbor water tasted like runny shit. Maya opened her mouth. Then she closed it and thought about what she wanted to say.
“Where’s my supper?” she asked quietly.
Careful boy. When a woman changes a subject, she’s got something on her mind.
Carnival didn’t care. He was tired, and he let her get away with it.
“Let’s go home,” he suggested.
Chapter 59
Deep Thinking
Olaf lay in the darkness of the harbor water trying to figure out what had dragged him away from the gypsy. He didn’t like it down here. It was cold and lonely. That’s what he wanted, more than anything else. That’s what he’d wanted from the gypsy, nothing more than a little companionship. All it would have taken is a little push. And then he could have been happily fucking. He wasn’t horny. Not really. He was just lonely. Touching the gypsy in that way, it might have healed him for just a half a moment’s time, but the gypsy hadn’t let him through.
It was like the water. There was a constant skin of surface tension hovering between the wet and the dry. Like a line drawn between the sea and the sky so that everything wouldn’t run together. It was like skin, like surface tension. You could never get through it.
He moved a little deeper. Who had grabbed him?
It was the woman on the bed. He’d had her, once, so many years ago. She’d laughed at him when he couldn’t make himself hard. So he’d hit her with a beer bottle. It broke across her skull and cut down her cheek bone. He remembered how pretty she’d looked, under her skin, all pink, like wet cotton candy. He’d wanted to lick her there, under her skin. That’s what loving a woman was about, her letting you under her skin through the hole between her legs.
Well Olaf didn’t need that hole. He knew how to get under a woman’s skin without her permission. He’d gagged her and worked at her all that night. Then, when she’d stopped moving, he got frightened. So he piled her blankets around her and emptied a whiskey bottle over the blankets. Then cooking oil and a bottle of lighter fluid he’d found on her dresser. Finally he threw the match and ran out the fire exit.
The building had gone up like a prayer. Twenty three people burned to death in their sleep. He didn’t care. He’d got away.
Then he forgot about it. He finished university, got a job, got married and forgot about it, except for nights in bed with his wife. She’d always ask him to trim his fingernails. He was forever cutting at her. Cutting at her and dreaming about that woman tied to the bed in her rooming house.
Until the night the gypsy boy had tricked him in going after another woman. And then the gypsy had come out and used his knife. Olaf still felt the pain in his chest, worse than the gypsy’s knife. The water moved the wound, in and out, like soft wet silk, waving goodbye.
He’d always hated the water. When he was younger, a lifeguard had tried to teach him how to swim by throwing him into the deep end of the pool. He remembered that stark bottomless feeling, his feet kicking impotently, the surface so damned far away.
You don’t forget something like that.
He remembered the gypsy killing him. Vaguely, like you might remember bumping against someone on a crowded bus. He didn’t really have any hatred left in him. Death had washed that sort of feeling away.
What he had left was a deep aching need.
His thoughts kept washing back on him, echoes, rolling back and back. He was fading. He’d be gone, if he didn’t do something quickly.
He needed to fuck. He needed the feel of something else against his cock to remind him that he still was close to being alive. He wanted a woman. He had died wanting sex. Now, back from the dead, he wanted it even more.
He humped an octopus, enjoying the feel of the suckers a
bout his anus. They tore ring shaped puckers from the cheeks of his ass and his thighs. He didn’t care. He was dead. He just wanted something to fuck. He fucked the octopus until it ruptured in his hands, like a spongy eight pointed donut.
He tried to catch a fish but the fish moved too fast to catch. It was like trying to fuck an evening shadow. He tried fucking a rock but that was too hard. The leg of the pier gave a little more satisfaction although the creosote scorched his pecker. The water rotted wood gave way beneath his thrusting like the bristles of a hard used woman.
He reached for his cock but in its place he felt a Ouija plenum. He felt the rounded triangle, the balls underneath.
He grabbed it.
Hard.
As he touched it he saw above it, shimmering like a mirage, a woman who looked just like a man. The one who’d stabbed him. The one who’d helped the gypsy escape.
Like a salmon, leaping towards spawning death, Olaf flowed straight up towards Momma, wherever she was.
Chapter 60
Talking Pictures
Carnival rode home in the flower cart.
When he got there he did his best to uncharm Mario, chanting three old formulas in the best Latin he could remember and burning a page of the Holy Bible in the palm of his open hand.
He wasn’t sure if it had worked or not.
“Will he be okay, Poppa? Will your spell leave him unharmed?”
Who can say? It’s been too long since I’ve worked such magic. It’s hard to tell from in here. There’s no light to work with.
“What kind of answer is that? Is he going to be all right, or not?”
Crabby. It serves you right for trying to drink the harbor dry.
“Poppa!”
He’ll be as alright as he ever was. He had a cancer growing next to his belly. Too much borscht, no doubt. If my magic hurried things along, where’s the harm?
Carnival was too tired to answer. He felt like the guts of a road killed cat, dragged in from a rainy monsoon. Morning was breaking through and he hadn’t been to bed yet. This had to stop. He was tearing up his life. Momma didn’t raise her boy to throw away everything he’d built on a pair of pretty fangs.
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