Nightmare Carnival

They rode the Ferris wheel first, says Uncle Digby. From that height they looked down at the fair, and at Hob’s Landing, and at their own cemetery upon the hill. Away from the town, near the coastline, was an old three-story mansion, long abandoned and believed haunted. Even the adult ghouls avoided the place, during their rare midnight excursions into town. But it was only one part of the tapestry.

The world was a spray of light on a dark earth. It was so much bigger than any of them had thought. As their car reached the height of its revolution, and they were bathed in the high cool air of the night, Wormcake was transfixed by the stars above them. They’d never seemed so close before. He sought out the constellations he’d been taught — the Rendering Pot, the Moldy King — and reached his hands over his head, trailing his fingers among them. As the gondola swung down again, it seemed he was dragging flames through the sky.

“Let’s never go home again,” Wormcake said. If the others heard him, they never said so.

And unknown to them, under the hill of graves, their parents were very busy setting up the Extinction Rite. Were the boys missed? I think they must have been. But no one could do anything about it.

* * *

What’s next, children? What is it you really came to hear about?

It’s as though he’s thrown a lit match into a barrel of firecrackers. They all explode at once.

“The freak show!”

“The freak tent!”

“Freak show, freak show!”

Uncle Digby raises his metal arms and a chuckle emits from the voice box beneath the jar. The bubbles churn with a little extra gusto around his floating head, and I think, for a moment, that it really is possible to read joy in that featureless aspect. Whatever tensions might have been festering just a few moments ago, they’re all swept aside by the manic excitement generated by the promise of the freaks. This is what they’ve been waiting to hear.

Yes, well, oh my, what a surprise. I thought you wanted to learn more about ghoul history. Maybe learn the names of all the elders? Or learn how they harvested food from the coffins? It’s really a fascinating process, you know.

“Nooooo!”

Well, well, well. The freaks it is, then.

The ghouls stopped outside a tent striped green and white, where an old man hunched beside a wooden clapboard sign. On that sign, in bright red paint, was that huge, glorious word: FREAKS. The old man looked at the boys with yellowing eyes — the first person to look at them directly all night — and said, “Well? Come to see the show, or to join it?”

He tapped the sign with a long finger, drawing their attention back to it. Beneath the word FREAKS was a list of words in smaller size, painted in an elegant hand. Words like The Most Beautiful Mermaid in the World, The Giant with Two Faces, and — you guessed it—The Orchid Girl.

“Go on in, boys. Just be careful they let you out again.”

They joined the line going inside. Curtains partitioned the interior into three rooms, and the crowd was funneled into a line. Lanterns hung from poles, and strings of lights crisscrossed the top of the tent.

The first freak was a man in a cage. He was seven feet tall, dressed in a pair of ratty trousers. He looked sleepy, and not terribly smart. He hadn’t shaved in some time, his beard bristling like a thicket down his right cheek and jowl. The beard grew spottily on the left side, mostly because of the second face which grew there: doughy and half-formed, like a face had just slid down the side of the head and bunched up on the neck. It had one blinking blue eye, and a nose right next to it, where the other eye should have been. And there was a big, gaping mouth, nestled between the neck and shoulder, with a little tongue that darted out to moisten the chapped lips.

A sign hanging below his cage said, BRUNO: EATER OF CHILDREN.

The ghouls were fascinated by the second face, but the eating children part didn’t seem all that remarkable to them. They’d eaten plenty themselves.