Nightmare Carnival

Together we look up, and up, and up, and from our starry perch we see the deep woods of all the worlds, the labyrinths and groves, we see the satyrs and stags and bulls and the wolves and women and men. Masked and naked, they dance and contort around frightened fires, they chant their prayers and pleas into the shadowed cracks of the world, they laugh and crash together in god-fevered horror and cry out as the sparks of their devotion float up and wink out with their ecstasy. They gyre together and pull apart transformed, endless variations of monstrosities kaleidoscoping out of their frenzied couplings. And I am the night, and out of the night and the woods their god comes to them, into them, into her, in the strike of lightning and the shuddering of the earth, in the terminal vastation of his song.

— Close your eyes, I whisper.

— Never.

I sigh, and the fires wink out one by one, and I sink back down to the floor, to a room filled with clear light and the silk rattle of morning through the tree’s wintery bones.

I force my sticky eyelids open. My body feels empty, still. I blink, and the ceiling swims in a thin wash of red. I can’t tell if I’m dead or alive. I’m not breathing, and I cannot feel the beating of my heart. There is no pain, I realize in shock: the complete absence of such an all-consuming presence makes me light, free. I roll slightly, slowly, and sit up. I am covered head to toe in blood, and I am whole. My right hand holds the mangled, broken wrist of a woman’s severed arm, the grip so tight and deep beneath her flesh that I cannot see my fingertips. Crimson-brown gobs of placenta and blood cover every inch of our joined skin. Under the drying gore, I recognize the Grand’s flower-carved wedding ring. I leave the ring on the couch, with the arm.

Outside, gossamer trails of night-blue mist waft through the backyard like torn strands of the Milky Way, sparking with millions of little pinpricks of pure white light. They drift and catch on the sleeping faces of the women and men pulled from their neighboring homes in the carnelevare’s orgiastic wake, settle into their hair and over their bare tangled limbs, crash and break apart against tall pine trees and dissipate with the rising sun. A thread of it trails against my bare leg, disappearing beneath the triangle of matted hair. The effluvium of a nameless carnival as it blew in and out of town. I gently pull it out and let it float away.

At the edge of the yard, legs tucked under thighs white and hard as marble, the small body of a woman with a missing left arm rests under a large tree. I walk over, and kneel before the Grand. She looks no older than me. Her pale green eyes are open, wide, blank. They stare through and beyond me, up into the sky. Her face is raised and lips are parted, as if being forced to drink from a bottomless cup. Or perhaps, as if about to speak a name.

6

A blood-orange sun was sinking slowly into the edges of my city’s wide electric edges, and I raised my worshiping hands and face like a grateful Akhenaten into its early autumn heat. I had lost a month, and so much more. It was time to go home, all the way home. Behind me, just within the shadows of the open warehouse doors, behind the boundary he could not see or cross, the barker stood, hesitant.

— What does it feel like? he asked.

— This? I turned, hand on my stomach, already slightly curved.

— That. All of it, the god and the power and the mysteries, folded into something so small and insignificant as you. To be so full. And — the sun. The weight of the air on your body. The pleasure of bearing so much pain. Being a part of the world, while knowing you’re not really a part of anything at all.

— I couldn’t tell you. I don’t have any answers.

He stared at me, waiting, disappointed yet still expectant; and then his eyes glazed. I could see him moving beyond me, his mind traveling to that invisible realm beyond the carnelevare’s end, where all questions are answered, all hunger sated, where all the endless pleasurable and terrifying variations of the chase dwindle down to a dead and desiccated end.

— Do you really want to know?

He looked up into the sky, then smiled his yellow-teethed grin.

— No.

SCREAMING ELK, MT by Laird Barron

One night, a trucker dropped me at a tavern in Screaming Elk, MT, population 333. A bunch of locals had gathered to shoot pool and drown their sorrows in tap beer. CNN aired an hour-long feature on survivors of violent crime. The Jessica Mace segment popped around halfway through and I told the bartender to switch it pronto. A sodbuster on the next stool took exception, started to bark his offense, then he did a double take at the file photo of me larger than life onscreen and things went from bad to ugly.

“You’re that broad! Yeah, yeah, you’re her!” Shitkicker had crossed over to the dark side of drunk. “Nice rack,” he went on in a confidential tone. “I wouldn’t pay a nickel for anything above the tits, though.”