Nightmare Carnival

Back then, the cemetery gate was not burdened with locks or chains; it simply had a latch, oiled and polished, which Wormcake lifted without trouble or fanfare. The gate swung open, and the wide, bright world spread out before them like a feast at the banquet table. He turned to look at his friends. Behind them, the other children had assembled in a small crowd, the game of skullpocket forgotten. The looks on their faces ranged from fear to excitement to open disgust.

“Well?” he said to his friends. “Are you cowards?”

Slipwicket would not be called a coward! He made a grand show of his exit, lifting each foot with great exaggeration over the threshold and stomping it into the earth with a flourish. He completed his transgression with a happy skip and turned to look at Stubblegut, who lingered on the grave side of the fence and gathered his face into a worried knot. He placed his hands over his wide belly and gave it gentle pats, which was his habit when he was nervous.

At that moment of hesitation, when he might have gone back and warned the adults of what was happening, some unseen event in the fair below them caused a fresh bouquet of screams to lift up and settle over the ghouls like blown leaves. Slipwicket’s whole body seemed to lean toward it, like he was being pulled by a great magnet. He looked at Stubblegut with such longing in his eyes, such a terrible ache, that his frightened friend’s resolve was breached at last, and Stubblegut crossed the threshold himself with a grave and awful reluctance.

He was received with joy.

And before anyone could say jackrabbit, Slipwicket bolted down the hill, a pale little gremlin in the dark green waves of grass. The others followed him in a cool breath of motion, the tall grass like a strange, rippling sea in the moonlight. Of course, they were silent in their elation: the magnitude of their crime was not lost upon them. Wormcake dared not release the cry of elation beating in his lungs.

But, children, they were in high rebellion. They were throwing off the rules of their parents, and riding the wave of their own cresting excitement. Even Stubblegut felt it, like a blush of heat over his moss-grown soul.

Naturally, Uncle Digby’s story stirs up memories of my own first fair.

The dream of the Maggot came to me in 1944, when I was twelve years old. The tradition of the Cold Water Fair had ended thirty years before, on the bloody night Uncle Digby is speaking of, and Hob’s Landing had done without a festival of any sort since. But though we didn’t know it yet, this would be the year the Skullpocket Fair was begun.

I was the sixth kid to receive the dream that year. I had heard of a couple of the others, so I had known, in some disconnected way, that it might happen. I didn’t know what it meant, except that parents were terrified of it. They knew it had something to do with the Wormcake clan, and that was enough to make it suspect. Although this was in 1944, and they’d been living in the mansion for thirty years at that point — peacefully for the most part — there were still many in town who considered them to be the very incarnation of evil. Many of our parents were present at the night of the Cold Water Fair, and they were slow to forgive. The fact that the Orchid Girl came into town and patronized the same shops we did, attended the same shows we did, didn’t help matters at all, as far as they were concerned.

She’s putting on airs, they said. She thinks she’s one of us. At least her husband has the decency to keep himself hidden away in that horrible old mansion.

My friends and I were too young to be saddled with all of the old fears and prejudices of our parents, and anyway we thought the Orchid Girl was beautiful. We would watch her from across the street or through a window when she came to town, walking down Poplar Street as proud as you please, unattended by her servants or by any friends at all. She always wore a bright, lovely dress which swirled around her legs, kept her hair pinned just so, and held her head high — almost defiantly, I can say now, looking back. We would try to see the seams on her face, where it would open up, but we never got close enough. We never dared.

We believed that anyone married to the Orchid Girl couldn’t be all bad. And anyway, Mr. Wormcake always came to the school plays, brought his own children down to the ice skating rink in the wintertime, and threw an amazing Halloween party. Admittedly, half the town never went, but most of us kids managed to make it over there.