Carniepunk

by Rachel Caine

She knew that voice well. “Dr. Werner. Why are you here?”

  He had been her private physician since her mother died giving birth to her, and she wasn’t surprised when he sat on the corner of her bed. She didn’t open her eyes. She’d always despised his artificially benevolent smile.

  “Your father called me. He’s worried about you.”

  “Can you put me back to sleep?”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. “Your father pays me to keep you alive, Lydia. Now, can you tell me why you tried to kill yourself?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I want to go back.”

  “Back to college? Alone? You know you can’t do that.”

  “Back to sleep. Back to Sang.”

  He sighed sadly. “Lydia, you can’t go back to sleep. Open your eyes and look at me. We have to talk.”

  “No.”

  “I know you wanted your father’s attention, and now you’ve got it. He trusted you. You promised you wouldn’t go back to that tattoo parlor.”

  Tears stung her eyes, and she wrenched an arm out from under the blanket and flung it over her face. The gauze was soft against her forehead as it soaked up the tears.

  “I had to go back. I had to see him again.”

  “Lydia, Jayson doesn’t know who you are. Your father asked me to talk to him. Jayson doesn’t even know your name. Whatever romance you’ve concocted in your head—it doesn’t exist.” Dr. Werner leaned close and whispered, “I’m going to be brutally honest. You’re just an overprotected little rich girl, playing at suicide and making Daddy angry with your obsession with that tattooed sideshow freak.”

  “Don’t you get it, Dr. Werner? I am the tattooed sideshow freak!” She pulled her other arm out from under the sheet to show him her forearms, even though her wrists still stung. “I’m a legal adult, and even if he does own half of Nashville, he doesn’t own my skin—he doesn’t own this unicorn, or this sparrow, or this winged snake. They’re mine, and he can’t take them away. And I finally found a place where they make me special and beautiful, a place where I fit in.”

  The pause spun out longer this time, but she utterly refused to fill the silence or open her eyes to a world she’d already abandoned and the room she’d outgrown at fourteen. Dr. Werner sighed deeply.

  “Lydia. I need you to open your eyes. Please. Look at your arms.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. What was he playing at? Surely the cuts hadn’t messed up her ink too much, not if he’d sewn them with any care.

  She opened her eyes just a little and immediately squeezed them shut again.

  “Lydia.”

  “No.”

  “Lydia, there are no tattoos.”

  “There are. I have a job at the carnival. Ink like mine—it’s rare. Charlie likes it.”

  The doctor placed his hand against her forehead, and she shook it off.

  “Your father wants me to stay nearby while you recover. After your little trick with the mirror shards, he’s put up cameras and taken the door off the hinges. You can’t hurt yourself now. We can help you heal.”

  She swallowed a sob. “Am I allowed to use the bathroom, at least?”

  He looked away, cleared his throat. “I can’t leave the room, but I’ll turn my back.”

  Lydia slid out of her bed, stunned to see the uninked skin of her legs poking dully out of a flower-sprigged gown. As she passed the empty place that had once held an ornate floor-length mirror, she was struck by a series of fun-house-mirror memories that seemed as ephemeral as the ringmaster’s glitter strewn against the stars.

  Passing a tattoo parlor while walking from the bookstore to her posh condo. Watching the artist through the plate glass, laughing with a pretty girl with spiky pink hair as he tattooed sparrows on her clavicles. Going back the next day to watch him drawing art at a table, running his hand through long, dark hair. Making a daily pilgrimage past the shop to see what he was doing. Skipping class to sit at the café across the street and imagine him undressing her on the black leather sofa by his station. Checking his website daily for new flash and printing out every design, pinning them to her blank, white walls. Buying a rainbow of Sharpies and sitting alone in the cold apartment, drawing on her skin and imagining the buzz of his needle, the brand of his eyes, the endorphins shuddering through her as his wrist rested gently against her pounding pulse. Scrubbing the Sharpie away before Sunday brunch with her father.

  And finally, catching Jayson in an alley, kissing the pink-haired tattooed girl.

  Things went dark after that.

  Her feet were leaden as if still bruised by stones through thin slippers. The bathroom door was gone. So was the mirror, leaving behind scarred plaster. At least she didn’t have to look at her perfectly straight blond hair and mud-brown eyes and uninked skin and the beautiful face that didn’t match who she was in her heart. The father-daughter photos with their glass frames and the gilt cup that had held tweezers and eyebrow scissors were also gone. Her father was so determined to keep her here, to keep her safe, to keep her pure. To keep her for himself.

  Sitting down on the gleaming tub and breathing in the scent of blood washed over with bleach, Lydia turned her face away from the life of splendor she’d always known but never loved. She pulled down the gauze on her wrists and saw for the first time how ugly and harsh stitches could be, bristling and black. On the left, the crooked seam held a Sharpie-drawn heart inelegantly together as if it had always been broken.

  Setting her teeth against a knot in the stitching, she began to gnaw with an animal’s rabid hunger. The blood on her tongue tasted of victory and freedom, and she waited to hear the calliope dancing on starlight, to feel the lanterns’ warmth kissing her tattoos and Charlie’s fingers in her hair.

  Soon she would wake up in Sang as a Bludman. She’d open her eyes to her own Elysium, dance through the flower-dotted fields in the powerful body of an elegant monster, an untouchable predator, a creature of her own devising that carried forever the mark of the man she’d chosen for her own. She would pull him into the shadows, draw his hands down to her inked skin, dare him into abandoning all pretense of being a gentleman. The caravan had called her, but Charlie had saved her, and he would save her again.

  She’d bitten out all the stitches in her left wrist and half the ones on her right before the darkness finally fell, before she finally got past the skin and struck bone.

  “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street”

  An Iron Druid Chronicles Short Story

  Kevin Hearne

  (This story takes place six years after Tricked, the fourth book of the Iron Druid Chronicles, and two weeks after the events of the novella Two Ravens and One Crow.)

  I fear Kansas.

  It’s not a toe-curling type of fear, where shoulders tense with an incipient cringe; it’s more of a vague apprehension, an expectation that something will go pear shaped and cause me great inconvenience. It’s like the dread you feel when going to meet a girl’s father: Though it’s probably going to be just fine, you’re aware that no matter how broadly he smiles, part of him wants you to be a eunuch and he wouldn’t mind performing the operation himself. Kansas is like that for me. But I hear lots of nice things about it from other people.

  My anxiety stems from impolitic thinking a long time ago. I am usually quite careful to shield my thoughts and think strictly business in my Latin headspace, because that’s the one I use to talk with the elementals who grant me my powers as a Druid. But once—and all it takes is once—I let slip the opinion that I thought the American central plains were a bit boring. The elemental—whom I’ve thought of as “Amber” since the early twentieth century, thanks to the “amber waves of grain” thing—heard me and I’ve been paying for it ever since. The magic doesn’t flow as well for me there anymore. Sometimes my bindings fizzle for no apparent reason, and I know it’s just Amber messing with me. As a result, I look uncomfortable whenever I visit and people wonder if I’m suffering from dyspepsia. Or maybe they stare
because I don’t look like a local. I’d fit right in on a beach in California with my surfer dude façade, but at the Kansas Wheat Festival, not so much.

  Said Wheat Festival was in Wellington, Kansas, the hometown of my apprentice, Granuaile MacTiernan. We were visiting in disguise because she wanted to check up on her mother. We’d faked Granuaile’s death a few years ago—for very good reasons—but now she was worried about how her mom was coping. For the past few years she’d been satisfied by updates from private investigators willing to do some long-distance stalking, but an overwhelming urge to lay eyes on her mother in person had overtaken her. I hadn’t been able to fully persuade her that it was a bad idea to visit people who thought you were dead, so I tagged along in case she managed to get into trouble. Granuaile said I could look at it as a vacation from the rigors of training her, and since I’d recently escaped death in Oslo by the breadth of a whisker, I hadn’t needed much convincing to take a break for my mental health. We brought my Irish wolfhound, Oberon, along with us and promised him that we’d go hunting.

  he told me.

  Sure, buddy, I replied through our mental link. But that’s going to be quite a run. Hard to sneak up on anything in flat land like this.

 

  I’m not sure it works like that.

  Red hair dyed black and shoved underneath a Colorado Rockies cap pulled low, Granuaile had already taken care of her most distinguishable feature in one go. She had on a pair of those ridiculously oversized sunglasses, too, which hid her green eyes and the freckles high up on her cheeks. A shirt from Dry Dock Brewing in Aurora, a pair of khaki shorts, and sandals suggested that she was a crunchy hippie type from the Denver area. I was dressed similarly, but I wore my Rockies cap backward because Granuaile said it made me look clueless, and that’s precisely what I wanted. If I was a clueless crunchy guy, then I couldn’t be a Druid more than two thousand years old who was also supposed to have died in the Arizona desert six years before.

  Everybody in Wellington knew Granuaile’s mom because everyone knew her stepfather. Beau Thatcher was something of an oil baron and employed a large percentage of those locals who weren’t wheat farmers. A few inquiries here and there with the right gossips—we posed as friends of her late daughter—and small-town nosiness did most of the work for us. According to reports, her mother was properly mournful without having locked herself in her house with pills and booze. She was taking it all about as well as could be expected, and once we expressed an entirely fake interest in dropping by to pay her a visit, we were ruefully informed by one of her “best friends” that she was off on a Caribbean cruise right now, or else she’d be at the festival.

  I hoped my relief didn’t show too plainly. Though I’d wrung a promise from Granuaile that we wouldn’t visit her house, there had still been a chance of an unfortunate meeting somewhere in town. Now I could relax a bit and bask in the success of our passive spying in the vein of Polonius: “And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out . . .”

  Having satisfied her need to know that her mother was adjusting well, if not her need to see her in person, we enjoyed the festivities, which included chucking cow patties at a target for fabulous prizes. Oberon didn’t understand the attraction.

 

  The town had invited an old-fashioned carnival to set up alongside the more bland wheat-related events. It had some rides that looked capable of triggering a rush of adrenaline, so once the sun set we passed through the rented fencing to see if we could be entertained. Sunglasses weren’t practical at night, so Granuaile just kept her hat pulled low.

  Though health codes didn’t seem all that important to this particular operation, I cast camouflage on Oberon so that we wouldn’t get barred from the venue. The spell bound Oberon’s pigments to the ones of his surroundings, which rendered him invisible when motionless and as good as invisible at night, even when on the move.

  It’s odd how a dog roaming around is a health code violation but serving fried death on a stick isn’t. The food vendors didn’t seem to rank using wholesome wheaty-wheat in their foodstuffs high in their priorities, despite the name of the festival to which they were catering. Salt and grease and sugar were the main offerings, tied together here and there with animal bits or highly processed starches.

  Bright lights and garish painted colors on the rides and game booths did their best to distract patrons from the layer of grime coating everything. The metal parts on the rides groaned and squealed; they’d taken punishment for years and had been disassembled and assembled again with a minimum of care—and a minimum of lubricant.

  The carnies working the game booths were universally afflicted with rotting teeth and gingivitis, a dire warning of what would happen if one ate the carnival food and failed to find a toothbrush afterward. They made no effort to be charming; sneers and leers were all they could manage for the people they had been trained to see as marks instead of humans. Granuaile wanted to chuck softballs at steel milk bottles.

  “You go ahead. I can’t,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the carnie will mock me for not winning his rigged game, and then I’ll be tempted to cheat and unbind the bottles a bit so that they all fall over, which would mean I’d receive something enormous and fluffy.”

  “If the game’s rigged, then you’re not cheating. You’re leveling the playing field. And if you decided to reward your apprentice with something enormous and fluffy for all of her hard work, then there’s really no downside.”

 

  “The downside is I’m not on good terms with the elemental here. Using the earth’s magic for something trivial like that would hardly improve matters. Camouflaging Oberon so he can walk around with us is bad enough.”

 

  You might scare the children.

 

  Granuaile went a few rounds with the milk bottles and the carnie tried to chivvy me into “rescuing” her. My apprentice nearly assaulted him for that but showed admirable restraint.

  “Whatsa matter, can’t hit the ground if you fell out of a plane?” he called to me.

  “Whatsa matter, employers don’t provide a dental plan?” I responded.

  He didn’t want to open his mouth after that, and Granuaile finished her game play scowling.

  “It’s funny,” she said as we walked away. “People come here to be happy but I bet they wind up in a fouler mood than when they walked in. Kids want plushies and rides and sugar, and parents want to hang on to their money and their kids. And everybody wants to go away without digestive problems, but that’s not gonna happen.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “So why do people come here?”

  I shrugged. “Because we pursue happiness even when it runs away from us.”

  We passed several booths, ignored the pitches of more carnies with alarming hygiene issues, and examined the faces of people walking by. There were no smiles, only stress and anger and frustration.

  “See, there’s no happiness here,” Granuaile pointed out.

  Distant screams of terror reached us from the rides. “Maybe you would find it amusing to experience the joys of centrifugal force.” I waved toward the flashing lights of the ca
rnival’s midway. “Allow the machinery to jostle the fluid in your inner ear.”

  “Oh.” She grinned at me. “Well, if you put it like that.”

  “Step right here!” a voice cut into our conversation. “Priceless entertainment for only three dollars! Gape at the Impossibly Whiskered Woman! Thrill at the Three-Armed Man and watch those hands! Chunder with the force of thunder at the Conjoined Quintuplets! Guaranteed to harrow your soul for only three dollars!”

  The barker hawking hyperbole was a dwarf on stilts. Dark pin-striped pants and oversized clown shoes masked his wooden limbs and remained very still while his torso gesticulated and waved wee, chubby, white-sleeved arms at potential spectators. A red paisley waistcoat flashed and caught lights from the midway, giving his torso the appearance of flickering flames. His eyes were shadowed by a bowler hat, but his mouth never stopped moving, and it was working. A line of people queued outside a yellow pavilion tent, drawn there as much by the barker as by curiosity over the stunned people coming out the other side.

  “Amazin’,” one mumbled as he staggered past me. His eyes seemed unfocused and his mouth hung slack in disturbing fashion. He didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular. “Incredible. Whadda trip. Sirsley. I mean rilly. Nothin’ like it.”

  My first, somewhat cynical thought was that he was a plant by the management. But then I noticed that more and more people kept coming out of the tent with their minds clearly boggled, too many to be in on the shill. The barker kept fishing with his verbal bait and was hooking plenty of people.

  “It’s not a House of Horror! It’s a Tent of Terror! Add thrills and add chills and you get adventure! Only three bucks to reap what you sow!”

  The last line struck me as a non sequitur and I looked around to see if anyone else had been bothered by it. It was an odd pitch to make for a carnival amusement, but people were forking over their cash to a muscle-bound hulk at the entrance and walking inside as the barker continued to weave together rhymes and alliterative phrases in a tapestry of bombast.