Carniepunk

by Rachel Caine

  Why, Bart? Why, you asshole? Why’d you have to go and screw everything up?

  He buried a hand in Becca’s hair and dragged her back into the trailer, dropping her on the floor and locking the flimsy door behind us.

  “Doodle this and Doodle that,” he sneered at her. “You never had a word to say to me until goddamn Doodle came along.”

  That was why. It was why Bart had messed things up for me and Becca, and it was why I had to fix it. If I hadn’t been here, this wouldn’t have happened. Mr. Murphy would’ve—already had—but not this.

  “Becca? Did you open the door? I told you not to go outside after dark without me.” Starling came out of the tiny bathroom and stopped short at the sight of the unconscious bundle that was her sister. “Becca?”

  She sounded lost, but she wasn’t. I don’t think Starling had ever been lost in her life. She stood, short hair damp, the wet gloss of red-and-black stripes screaming “Beware!” Wrapped in a scarlet robe, feet bare like before, she was a queen and Bart should’ve feared her. But Bart was an idiot.

  I wasn’t. When she whipped that man-eating knife from behind her back and lunged to stab him in the chest, I applauded, unnoticed. Bart spat curses and grabbed her neck to throw her to the ground, the knife still in him. Starling was a fighter, but she was small. Five foot three at best. Barely a hundred pounds. But no matter the size, a tiger is still a tiger. She was back on her feet in a fraction of a second, her hands back on the handle of the knife, trying to shove it in deeper. It had gotten hung up on a rib bone, more’s the pity.

  This time Bart grabbed her throat and held on, choking fast any screams she might’ve made. With the other hand he pulled the blade out of his flesh. “You fucking bitch.” His teeth were bared, his eyes full of fury, but a cold fury. When rage burns, at least it’s quick. When it’s cold, it can make a death last forever. Slice by slice by slice.

  Holding the knife just under her chin and above his hand, he seethed curses that seemed to crawl over both of their bodies. “I’m going to kill you—don’t think for a second there’s a way out of that. But first I’m going to hurt your little sister. Hurt your Becca. I’m going to fuck her five ways to Sunday and then I’m going to cut every inch of her so the next man that looks at her pukes from the sight. And then I’m going to leave her alive on top of your fucking entrails. If ‘alive’ is what you can call that. In fact, I’ll call her up in a few years, ask her. Ask her if she’s alive or if she’s a corpse walking around with a beating heart. How’s that sound, Starling my darling? Well? How’s that sound? Fucking answer me, bitch!”

  I was different. I was a freak, maybe. I was the passive watcher, blending in and never getting involved. Speaking only to kids too little to know how strange I was. That’s who Doodle was. That’s who Doodle had always been.

  Until now.

  Now . . . now I got involved.

  Now I spoke.

  Because now I was fucking pissed.

  “Time to go home, Bart,” I said, stretching against the tightness of being still. Shedding the inertia of blending in.

  Past Starling and the knife I could see the three of us in the bathroom mirror. I could see the surprise on Bart’s face, the bulge of his bicep where he all but held Starling off her feet. And I could see me.

  On his bicep. On his skin.

  A cute, happy monkey with a cheerful grin, the hat of a clown, several balloons of red, blue, and green held in one paw, the tail wrapped around Bart’s arm and below that, my name: Doodle.

  Bart’s drunken vacation had him waking up with a tattoo he couldn’t even remember getting. Everyone in the carnival had loved it, though. Loved me. Joked about his new friend with the funny name, Doodle. Bart had been pissed about me, thought I was goofy and stupid, until people started talking to him to look at me. He regretted it less then, that mysterious tattoo. Bart, who’d take any advantage he could get.

  Me? I’d just wanted to see life in a carnival. See this world. I’d spent millions of years in a different place and, once out, I wanted to see it all. It was brand-new to me and much better than home. Home . . . well, home was hell. Plain as it came.

  Once, when especially bored, a demon had sketched me in the burning sand. Hence my name—hilarious, huh? I was a demonic doodle, who after endless years had finally escaped Hell, snaking through the smallest of cracks. I was a line of sulfur and will, and I could shape myself into any form and color. I thought a monkey was good for a carnival and particularly appropriate for Bart. He didn’t fling his feces, but he bit and he bit hard.

  So did I.

  I slithered out of the monkey shape, shed those colors, and went up Bart’s arm, winding back and forth at a speed even a rattlesnake couldn’t have managed. In less than a breath I was wrapped several times around Bart’s neck and that breath . . . it wasn’t something he had to worry about any longer.

  I tightened until he turned blue and dropped the knife from Starling’s throat. I tightened again until he was purple and dropped himself, too, beside the knife. He foamed at the mouth a bit, like they do, and then he died and shot straight down to the burning sands I’d escaped.

  Of all the predators that prowled the carnival with strange appetites and stranger shapes, the human was the truest monster of them all. The truest evil.

  I know what people would think. I’m from Hell. Big H, little e, double-hockey-sticks Hell. I should be evil myself, pure malevolence, every part of me. Eh, not so much. You live in Hell for millions of years and you realize something about evil: it’s boring. You can say it’s wrong and morally reprehensible and all that, and you’d be right. But mainly it’s just so damn boring that after a while you don’t ever want to see it again. Life, even when it lasts millions of years, is too short for boring.

  I wasn’t putting up with boring again.

  Bart was wrong. Bart was boring. And now Bart was gone.

  “Doodle?” Starling was crouched on the floor, staring at the tattoo line garroting Bart, finally seeing me.

  I slid from around Bart’s neck and re-created the monkey shape and offered her the balloons.

  “Doodle,” I confirmed.

  She reached out and took them. Hesitantly, but she was a tiger and feared nothing, so she accepted them. The painted colors poured over her hand like a melting rainbow before disappearing.

  “You . . . what are . . . ?” She shook her head, because this was Starling and even if I’d known her only days, I knew her still. She was infinitely practical. She didn’t second-guess, she definitely didn’t look a gift Doodle in the mouth. “You saved us. Thank you.”

  My monkey tail curled around her wrist, black and brown lines of ink. “Doodle loves you.” I couldn’t talk much. Throats and voice boxes and tongues, they’re beyond a simple doodle, and I hadn’t regretted it before, but I did now. I eked out the words anyway. I couldn’t have held them back.

  Because, yes, love is a bitch and doodles and tigers can’t be together, but love is still worth saying aloud.

  “Doodle loves you.” I let go of her wrist, unraveled this shape, and slipped away through the small crack under the door and into the night.

  Soon enough I’d find someone else to hitch a ride with, see something new, and maybe fall in love again. It was possible. Evil was boring, but love was interesting and exciting—everything I could imagine—and covered the world. I could meet love over and over.

  Love is a bitch, I thought sadly, yet fondly, too, as I disappeared from the carnival and into a promising darkness.

  Love is a bitch.

  But she’s my bitch, and I couldn’t wait to see her again.

  “The Three Lives of Lydia”

  A Blud Short Story

  Delilah S. Dawson

  Lydia woke to the curious sound of a calliope. Opening her eyes to a swaybacked, star-studded sky, she shivered. Something was deeply, deeply wrong, as if she had just fallen out of a nightmare, heart pounding and head spinning, limbs still too numb to run away. A ch
ill breeze played over her naked skin, making the tall grass around her whisper and sway. She sat up and contracted into a ball in one breath. Running a finger over the crooked heart tattooed on her left wrist, she inhaled the scent of crushed grass and cold iron and waited for something to happen.

  “Am I dead?”

  Her voice was overloud in the moon-bitten night, and she suddenly felt like an extra in someone else’s movie. The background sounds descended with a vengeance: the cheery calliope, squealing metal, an excited burble of voices overlaid by the amplified shriek of a barker, like at an old-fashioned carnival. The tall form rising above her turned out to be a train car, one of a wide circle of wagons enclosing a cluttered meadow. Lydia was on the inside of the circle, and the warmth and laughter were all on the outside. Crawling to the dark wall, she put a hand against the freezing enamel, curious as to why the wagons were circled, why the inside of the ring was abandoned while the outside was full of life. From under the wagon’s belly, warm light flickered and twitched, beckoning her close with curling fingers.

  She parted the grass and jerked her head back when she found a gleaming coil of razor wire. Just out of reach, hundreds of people swarmed through the brightly lit space. Lydia’s eyes danced with leather boots, the hems of jewel-colored gowns, gaily striped parasols, and tapping canes from another century. It couldn’t be real. This had to be heaven or hell or purgatory. It had to be a dream, and a beautiful one. The vision was too lovely to inspire terror, even if every cell of her body knew it was wrong.

  As if a golden hook had wrapped around her heart, she knew she had to get to the other side, to the carnival there. But first she needed clothes. She stood and ran a hand along the side of the wagon until she found a doorknob. The car was completely dark, and she was willing to bet it was empty.

  The door creaked open on more darkness, and stepping through it she fumbled along the interior wall until she found a button. A series of Victorian-looking sconces lit with an orange glow. She was in luck: the room was a jumble of mannequins, hats, and sequins. Costumes sprouted from dress forms, half finished in harlequin diamonds or lurid stripes. Feathers exploded from upturned top hats, and bolts of cloth swooped across the ceiling like gypsy tents. When no one appeared to challenge her presence, she went to a rack to borrow some clothes.

  Half of the outfits revealed far too much skin, while the other half laced up so tightly at neck and wrist that she dismissed them on the grounds of claustrophobia. At last, she selected a long green gown with a low neck that covered her full sleeves of tattoos but neatly framed the sparrows on her clavicles and the banner strung between them. The dress covered every other tattoo except the one on the back of her neck. She chose a hat that would hide that and her hair, tying the ribbons under her chin with more determination than she’d felt in a long time. Finding a pair of worn slippers under an ancient sewing machine, she slid her feet in, turned off the lights, and slipped back out the door to face the darkness where she’d begun.

  She paused outside and leaned her back against the wagon, her head tilted upward to half-familiar constellations partially hidden by swirling wisps of cloud. This place—it couldn’t be real.

  Then again, considering reality had failed her, did she care?

  Lydia breathed out, low and long. Whatever this place was, she had to go to the carnival. It called to her, whispered in her ear with every caressing breeze, drew her inexorably forward. The dress swished around her as she stepped down the stairs and crept around to where the wagon hooked on to the next car. The path to the carnival beyond was blocked by a strange contraption. As Lydia approached, a demonic head on a long neck swung toward her with a metallic creak. Red eyes flashed in her face, and she stumbled back as steel teeth clanked inches away from her nose.

  She’d almost been bitten by an animatronic giraffe.

  There was no way around it. She slunk back around the wagon, only to find a unicorn at the next juncture between cars. Then an elephant after that. Then a panda bear. She began to feel very much like Alice in Wonderland, met at every path by blockades of her own feverish imagining. It made no sense; why would robots guard the spaces between the train cars? Wasn’t the point of the carnival to attract an audience? When she came to a trio of ridiculous flamingos, she decided it was time to take control of the limbo world and force her way through.

  The dancing flamingos were made of metal scraps held together with rivets, their legs coiled springs. Lydia was about to dart past their pedestal when one of the heads sprang back toward her, the banana-shaped beak opening to show sawtooth ridges. With a determined grunt, she pushed it to the side and tried to duck past. Another head appeared in her way, the beak latching onto her arm.

  Lydia stumbled back, jerking her sleeve away. Stunned and shaking, she looked down at her torn gown and the red scratch across her arm.

  So she could be hurt here, then, wherever here was. The flamingo’s head turned, the beak wide open and spinning with saw teeth.

  “You lost?”

  Swallowing a shriek, she jerked her head to the side. An oddly fierce man stood in the scant light, far too close for comfort. His face was narrow and pale under a mop of wild hair, his dark eyes outlined in black. He was dressed in a loose shirt, suspenders, and striped pants that accentuated his wiry build. He had appeared from nowhere, and it unsettled her.

  Trapped between the stranger and the chainsaw teeth, she whispered, “Yes.”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Come on, then.” He jerked his head away from the flamingos, and she nervously followed him across the wide patch of grass circled by the ring of linked wagons. When he slowed a little and half turned to her, she could barely see the shadow of a smile.

  “Settle down, girl. I’m not going to eat you. I promise.” She didn’t say anything; she couldn’t. “How’d you get back here, anyway? This area’s off-limits.” He focused on the rip in her dress, nostrils flaring. “Did one of the carnivalleros bring you back here? Take advantage?”

  Lydia shook her head no before realizing that gestures weren’t enough.

  “I got lost.” Her voice was small, swallowed up by the night.

  “That don’t explain your undressery.” He started walking again, and she felt every pebble through the slippers. “Pretty lass like you might get in trouble, letting that much skin out. You foreign or something?”

  When he said something, his mournful British accent turned it into sumpin’, and she smiled a wobbly smile. It was hard to be scared of a guy who looked and sounded like John Lennon.

  “Or something, I guess.”

  He stopped walking when they reached the patch of light between two train cars. The shadow of a large mechanical ostrich danced over them, and the man ran a hand through wavy auburn hair and held out a red-gloved hand.

  “I’m Charlie Dregs.” His smile was crooked but contagious, and Lydia reached out to shake.

  “Lydia Beckwith.”

  He bowed and went gallantly to kiss her hand. As his lips brushed her skin, he breathed in deeply and let out a small moan. Lydia snatched her hand back and crossed her arms protectively over her chest.

  “Are you some kind of creeper, Charlie Dregs?”

  Charlie swallowed and glanced around the field as if someone might step forward to vouch for him. Lydia took a step backward, on the off chance he was checking for possible witnesses. Her instinct was to trust him, but her instinct had been wrong before.

  “I ain’t a creeper. Plain enough to see I’m a Bludman.”

  “A blood man?”

  “Bludman. A man who drinks blood.”

  She reared back, panicking, looking for a place to run, but he just snorted.

  “If I was going to attack you, don’t you think I would have done it when you wasn’t looking?”

  It was true. It was crazy, but it was true. And he wasn’t attacking her now. And she was trapped back here, in the field, thanks to the robot animals. Trusting Charlie Dregs was the only way to the carnival. She wr
apped her arms more tightly around herself and glared at him.

  “Why aren’t you attacking me, then?”

  He stared at her for a moment; then his eyes lit up, and he let out a bark of laughter.

  “I get it now, Lydia. You’re a Stranger.”

  “What?”

  “This ain’t your world, is it? That explains your smell, why you’d dress like that, how you got on this side of the clockworks, how come you got ink when you ain’t a Bludman. It’s true, right?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You just woke up here, naked. And it ain’t where you’re from.”

  Lydia looked up at the sky. The stars seemed all cattywampus, tilted and dizzying. She blinked, and the world coalesced around her like a new coat that already fit perfectly.

  “No, I guess it’s not.”

  A brilliant grin lit Charlie’s face. “I always wanted to find a Stranger. We got to tell the caravan master, but then we’ll see the sights, eh?” He raised his eyebrows at her and smirked, but sweetly. “Unless you’re scared?”

  She stiffened. “Should I be?”

  “Plenty in this world to be scared of, but you needn’t fear me. I’ve not drunk blood straight from the source in at least ten years. Only vials.” He jerked his chin at the carnival beyond. “You’re going to need somewhere to stay, you know. You won’t last a night on the wild moors alone. Master Criminy likes to take in Strangers, so long as they don’t mind work. How about it?”

  “I . . .”

  Lydia stared at the glittering dreamscape beyond. Women in corsets and bustles and bell-shaped skirts flitted about like tropical birds on the arms of men wrapped in tailcoats and doffing top hats. The calliope music had segued into something familiar that sounded like “Yellow Submarine.” The air was chill with autumn, spiked with the scents of caramel and apples and pumpkin and topped with the buttery kiss of popcorn. Her mouth watered. She still didn’t understand what was happening or why this friendly yet strangely fierce man had fangs. But she couldn’t stand on this side of the wagons any longer. The carnival tugged at her. She had to get to the other side, where the magic was.