The First Fall

by Seanan McGuire

  Fran hesitated, biting her lip. “Johnny—” she began.

  There was a knock at the trailer door. Both of them turned to look at it. Jonathan put a hand on the pistol belted to his hip. Fran motioned for him to stay where he was as she crossed to pull it open.

  “Miss Healy?” The man outside was massive, easily six and half feet tall, with shoulders that seemed practically as wide. He was bald, his scalp pink and shiny in the sunlight. He was wearing overalls and a flannel shirt, which seemed like sensible choices, and his feet were bare. “Miss Juniper sent me to fetch you and Mr. Healy to the main tent, if you were ready to go.”

  “Actually—” said Jonathan.

  “We’re ready as rain,” said Fran, flashing a bright, performance-ready smile. “I was just saying to my Johnny how hungry I was, wasn’t I Johnny?”

  Jonathan Healy sighed. “Yes, darling,” he said, and followed her to the door.

  He had followed her this far, after all.

  The bald man’s name was Max; he had been with the carnival for five years; he was one of the strongmen when he needed to be, but most of his time was spent caring for the elephants, which were troublesome and cantankerous and extremely beloved by everyone who traveled with the show. His grandmother lived on the permanent bone yard they’d established in New Mexico, helping to care for the children who didn’t take well to traveling and training the next generation of carnival animals. Johnny and Fran learned all this in the time it took Max to lead them across the bone yard to the low canvas slouch of the main tent. Jonathan would have been just as happy to make the walk in silence, but not Fran. She had a seemingly endless well of questions, and not until every one of them had been asked would she be satisfied.

  Max looked relieved when they finally reached their destination. “Please let someone know if there’s anything you need,” he said, and dipped a hand into the pocket of his overalls, coming up with two long pasteboard ropes of tickets, brightly colored and fantastic in their solidity. “Miss Juniper said to tell you that you don’t necessarily need tickets, since you’re family and all, but that there’s been a lot of turnover since you performed here, and she’d rather you didn’t have to fight with any ride operators that don’t know who you are. You’re supposed to have a nice time tonight.”

  “Aren’t you just the sweetest thing?” Fran took the tickets with one hand, leaning up onto her toes and pressing a kiss to Max’s cheek. His cheeks and ears flamed red. She dropped back to the flats of her feet, the tickets disappearing into her pocket. “Where’s Junie tonight?”

  “Fortunes, same as always,” said Max. He bowed clumsily, managed a quick, “Enjoy your meal,” and turned to walk away as quickly as he could without being rude.

  Fran sighed. “Skittish boy. He’ll learn.” She turned back to Jonathan, that performer’s smile slapped back onto her face. “Well, city boy? What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m the tourist here,” he said. “You’ll have to lead me.”

  “It’s this way.” She moved like she was going to grab his wrist, but stopped herself at the last moment, turning it into a beckoning gesture instead. Jonathan sighed as he followed her into the dim canvas cavern of the main tent.

  Camp tables were set up in uneven lines leading up to the tent supports, each of them matched with a pair of rough-topped benches that looked like they could use a good sanding, and maybe a coat or three of paint. A few of them were occupied by carnies, eating bowls of stew or brown-bread sandwiches, but most were empty this close to show time. People had things that they needed to be doing.

  Feeling more like an intruder than ever, Jonathan followed Fran across the room to a small kitchen setup, where a massive pot of stew simmered over the larger cousin of their trailer’s portable range. There was a platter next to it, heaped high with biscuits. Fran didn’t ask him what he wanted, or even if he was hungry; she just grabbed a bowl, ladled it full of the pot’s thick, savory contents, and thrust it into his hands. “Spoons are other side of the biscuits,” she said. “You should nab a few. They smell like the same recipe I grew up on, and there’s not much that’s tastier, short of your Ma’s cottage pie.”

  “She’s had a lot of time to practice,” said Jonathan, taking his bowl without protest. He was hungry, and so he paused to snag two of the much-lauded biscuits before stepping to the side and watching as Fran expertly filled a bowl for herself. Part of him was pleased to see that she apparently intended on eating as long as they were with the carnival, rather than just picking at whatever was put in front of her. The rest of him was more concerned than anything else. Concerned about the way that she was smiling. Concerned about the way that she seemed to have put the reason that they had come looking for the carnival out of her mind the second they saw the poster on the side of that barn. Concerned, when he came right down to it, about Fran.

  She led the way to an open table and he followed, sitting down next to her and stealing small glances her way as he ate his stew, which was that curious blend of meats and root vegetables best described as tasting “brown.” He thought he could detect notes of cow, goat, and raccoon, but he couldn’t be sure of any of them. Fran didn’t seem to mind the combination of flavors. She ate quickly and with gusto, taking heaping bites of stew and chasing them down with equally large bites of biscuit. And she never stopped smiling. Somehow, that ever-present smile was even worse than the sorrow she had been wearing like a cloak since the night that Daniel left them.

  “See somethin’ green, city boy?”

  Fran’s voice snapped him out of his single-minded regard of her. Jonathan shook himself back into the present, replying quickly, “No, nothing green. I doubt this stew has seen anything green in years.”

  “Don’t be squeamish,” said Fran. “Lizards are green, aren’t they?” She snatched his half-empty bowl before he could come up with a reply, sliding smoothly from the bench. “I’ll just rinse these off, and then we can see the show. Junie was good enough to give us tickets for the midway, and it’d be a shame to let them go to waste, don’t you think?”

  Jonathan wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he’d agreed to accompany his wife on a search for the Campbell Family Carnival. No-name stew and midway rides hadn’t even made the list. Still, if this was what she needed… “I have always enjoyed a good Ferris wheel,” he said, standing in turn. “They afford such an excellent view of the surrounding landscape.”

  “Always thinkin’ like a hunter, aren’t you?” Fran’s tone was fond, but her smile flickered for a moment, tearing just enough to let him see the aching chasm of the grief she was trying so hard to conceal. Then she straightened, and her smile returned, all the brighter for having wavered. “There’s no hunting tonight. Anyone we see here is under the protection of the carnival, you understand me?”

  “We try not to hunt at carnivals anyway, save under very special circumstances,” he said. “The routewitches don’t like it, and we don’t like upsetting the routewitches.”

  “You hunted at a circus once,” Fran said.

  “Special circumstances,” Jonathan countered. “Now let’s go see that midway.”

  There is something eternal about the carnival, Jonathan reflected, as he held Fran’s hand and let her pull him through the bone yard toward the distant sound of calliope music, the distant glitter of the midway lights, which were only now starting to become visible as the night descended all around them. It might change its face and form to suit the times, but the show itself went on forever, stretching from one end of human history to the other, an uninterrupted map of midways and maze of side show curiosities. When the last embers of the sun died, there would be a carnival still glowing bright in the ashes of the world, filled with people trying to get one more ride in before they went to their rewards.

  The thought was comforting and terrifying all at once, because if the carnival was eternal, that made it a kind of parasite, a living thing with human bodies for cells. It was almost a cryptid in its own right, a
form of life so vast and slow that the mind could barely comprehend it, and so reduced it to a fun-fair dazzle of light and sound and harmless motion.

  But all living things must eat, and if the carnival was a predator, on what flesh did it feed?

  All this raced through Jonathan’s mind as Fran dragged him onto the midway, and the sights and smells of carnival shut down much of his capacity for rational thought. The dry dirt beneath their feet was tempered with thick handfuls of hay, creating the illusion of softness, and tiny twinkling lights were strung between the booths, glimmering in the early evening like captive fireflies. This was another world, and if it was a hungry one, well. He had dealt with hungry things before.

  Fran was all frantic animation and need that he had no way of filling. She pulled him here and there, now exclaiming over a game that hadn’t been there the last time she visited, now peeping through the back curtains of a sideshow. There could not, he reflected, have been a better advertisement for the carnival’s delights than his manic wife; he could see the pain tamped down behind her joy, but the townsfolk who haunted the midway like timid shadows didn’t know her well enough for that. To them, she was a beacon to greater delights, and before long, Fran had picked up a trail of people who probably didn’t even realize that they were following her path through the midway.

  They were crossing the stretch of open path between the guess-your-weight and the goldfish toss when Fran’s fingers slipped from his and he found himself suddenly rudderless in the middle of the midway. Jonathan stopped, blinking, and watched as his wife was swept away on her self-made tide.

  Footsteps beside him alerted him to Juniper’s arrival a moment before she said, “She’s broken. She doesn’t want us to know that, but I know her. What happened?”

  That was the question Jonathan had been waiting for since they arrived at the carnival, but when he opened his mouth to speak, no sound came out. It was like his voice had deserted him. He looked at Juniper and shook his head, wordless in the midway light.

  Juniper frowned, taking in the details of his expression. “Come with me,” she said, and turned, walking toward the nearest attraction. Jonathan followed her. She pulled the canvas backdrop of the wood-frame game booth aside, creating an opening, and slipped through into the hidden space behind the midway. It was a narrow path, lit only by the light seeping in from the midway, but once they were there, with the majority of the sound blocked by the structures around them, Jonathan found that he could breathe again.

  “Better?” asked Juniper.

  “Quiet,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Juniper cautioned. “I don’t like the way you look either, but it’s Fran that I’m worried about. What happened?”

  Jonathan removed his glasses, wiping them on the tail of his shirt. Even in the dimness, he didn’t want to see her face. “We came here because Fran wanted to talk to you. She said that you’ve always had difficulty with the restless dead.”

  “I’m a routewitch,” said Juniper. “It comes with the territory. Road ghosts follow us everywhere we go, and most of them are harmless. They’re just looking to have a little fun.”

  “Road ghosts are generally harmless, but it was another kind of ghost that brought us here, to you.” Jonathan put his glasses back on, bringing the world back into vivid focus, and looked at her gravely. “Daniel died five nights ago.”

  Juniper’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes going wide and round. She didn’t say anything.

  “The house wards keep out the dead and can give warning of certain other things, but neither of my parents is a witch; they do what they can with what they have, and they’ve never been able to cast wide-spectrum protections. We thought we were safe. We thought that with four adults who regularly sleep with firearms under their pillows, nothing could possibly catch us unawares.” Jonathan’s laugh was short and bitter. “We weren’t counting on something that could move silently in shadows. A bogeyman. Paid assassin. I think…I truly believe that he was sent to kill one of us. Myself, or my parents, or Fran.” He had to believe that, because if he thought for an instant that someone had paid to have his son killed, he would go mad.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” breathed Juniper.

  “We were all very soundly asleep,” said Jonathan. His voice had taken on a detached quality, like he was describing a scene that had happened years before. “Daniel screamed. He did that quite a lot—he was only three—but this was different. He didn’t sound hungry, or lonely, or wet. He didn’t even sound frightened. He sounded terrified. That was the worst of it. That was the unnecessary part.”

  Juniper flinched. “What? How can you say—”

  “Most bogeymen aren’t killers, but the ones that are tend to be very good at what they do,” said Jonathan, continuing without pause. “Their victims never wake up. They can enter a house, kill their target, and leave again, all without being seen. But this one…when he realized he was in the wrong room, he saw a chance to harm us anyway. He woke Daniel up. Our little boy saw his killer’s face.”

  There was so much more than he couldn’t describe, because he didn’t have the words for it. Oh, there were words, but none of them could do the job. None of them were sufficient to explain the sounds that had come from Daniel’s room, those horrible snapping, squishing sounds—

  Juniper’s arms were around his shoulders, holding him up. He hadn’t seen her moving, but he hadn’t felt himself begin to cry, either. Jonathan pressed his face against her shoulder, standing in the shadows behind the midway, and wept without making a sound.

  It wasn’t until she was on the merry-go-round for the second time that Fran realized that Johnny was no longer anywhere to be seen. Her heart sank, a sickening feeling accompanied by the sharp conviction that he was gone—that he had taken his horse and returned to Buckley, leaving her and her broken heart with the carnival, where they so clearly belonged.

  Fran clutched the pole of her bobbing pony a little tighter, trying to force the thought from her mind. No. Johnny wouldn’t do that to her; Johnny loved her. They were having a bad patch right now, and that was more than understandable, but he wouldn’t just leave her. He was a good man. She could break his heart a hundred times, and still he’d never leave her alone. Maybe that wasn’t a good thing—maybe that was a sign that the right thing to do would be to tell him she was staying and he was going, before she could give him that hundredth broken heart—but that was the way things were.

  Still, there was no Johnny on the carousel, and no Johnny in the crowd surrounding it. Only the bright lights of the midway and the faces of strangers met her searching eyes. As she looked, she started to realize just how exposed she was, sitting high and pretty on her painted stallion. Anyone who wanted to take a shot could have it, and there was nothing she could do to defend herself.

  When the merry-go-round came gliding to a halt, she slid down from her horse and made for the exit, moving a little faster than was strictly necessary. She needed to find Johnny; she needed to get to cover. She needed—

  “There you are, Frannie.” There was no accusation in Juniper’s voice: she sounded as calm as she always had, as if finding Fran on the carousel were still a nightly occurrence, and not something that happened only under very special circumstances. “I was getting worried about you. Your husband’s gone back to the trailer to rest.”

  Fran frowned. “Johnny’s gone to rest? Pardon me for doubting, but that doesn’t sound much like him.” He was always adamant about never leaving anyone alone when they were in the field.

  “I told him it was for the best, and he believed me.” Juniper slid her arm through Fran’s. “He’s plum worn out, the poor man. He’s not as good at being in pain as he thinks he is.”

  “He told you.” Fran didn’t pull away, but she stiffened, her body going from calm pliancy to tense hardness in an instant. “This isn’t how I wanted you to find out.”

  “You came here to tell me.” Juniper started to walk, pulling Fra
n with her. She was the slimmer and softer of the two women, with none of Fran’s combat training or working muscles, but somehow, she kept the other woman captive with nothing more than a bit of pressure. “As long as someone did, that means you’ve accomplished what you came here for, doesn’t it?”

  Fran was silent for a moment, allowing herself to be led away from the light and music of the merry-go-round. She looked back only once, filling her eyes with the motion of the painted ponies and the crowd surrounding them.

  “Most of them are dead, you know,” said Juniper calmly. They stepped off of the midway and into the shadows of the staff passages, and still she kept on walking, tugging Fran inexorably toward the bone yard. “Opening night is tomorrow. Half the people out there are locals looking for work or willing to risk things not being quite shipshape, and the other half are haunts. Road ghosts and local wraiths solid enough to pass for folks. I even saw a crossroads ghost, although he didn’t stop to say hello or pay for his tickets. Always in a hurry, crossroads ghosts.”

  “I always thought you were kidding when you said things like that,” said Fran softly.

  “You know better now,” said Juniper.

  “I guess I do.”

  They walked on for a little while in silence, until finally Juniper said, “He’s scared for you, Fran. He doesn’t have any practice grieving like this, and he doesn’t know how to help you. Poor boy doesn’t even know how to help himself. You need to be helping each other, but you’re both so lost in this that you can’t figure out where to start.”

  For the first time, Fran tried to pull away. “Don’t you even pretend you know what this feels like, Junie. He was my son. I lost my son.”