Nightmare Carnival

“Milo,” Victor intoned. “Milo, are you with us, you scurrilous fuck? We’ve brought you an offering. Come among us and claim your prize, if you’ve the balls.”

Well. I am not too proud to admit this spiel caught me flatfooted.

Chairs creaked. A staccato thumping emanated from the table; it and the chair creaking grew louder, becoming violent. Knuckles, rings, and bracelets clacked against wood as the shadowy company trembled and twitched, caught in a mass seizure. Their spasms ceased and the enclosure fell silent.

Was this a con job? Or had they taken a psychotropic drug and were frying together? Damned weirdoes. The lovely vision of ten grand in a bag steadied me, although I was tempted to step forward and shake Ephandra, see if she was playing possum.

“Girl, that’s your cue,” Perkins said, inches from my elbow. He didn’t seem quite himself in the near darkness.

“Gah!” I thought about having a heart attack.

A dozen chairs squeaked as the company unfolded to their feet in a unified motion. All of them stood stock still and regarded me in eerie silence. Their eyes blazed white with captured fire from the moon.

Hell of a cue. I got going.

Outside, a cold breeze sliced through my barely there ensemble. I called upon my reserves of hardcore Alaskaness and merely shivered.

Stars flared and died. The moon burned a hole through the black and into my mind. I decided to heist a truck and haul ass for town, or anywhere directly away from the remnants of the carnival. Keys were in everything around here. I didn’t heist a truck. I decided to fetch my loot from under Beasley’s bed and ride shank’s mare in a straight line until I hit something like civilization. Didn’t do that either.

Sensible action slipped my grip. I walked toward a massive rectangular tent, domain of Hondo the Panther Lord, as I’d been instructed. My flesh tingled the way it does when I’ve gone over my limit of booze. Weird, since I hadn’t had a snort since early in the day. I wiggled my fingers and clucked my tongue to test the theory. All systems go.

An offering, Victor had said. A human sacrifice, he’d said. Okay, he hadn’t said that, merely implied it. How much danger was I in? My hair-trigger alarm system kept sending garbled messages that filtered through static. Meanwhile, there went my sun-darkened hand on the mesh screen, and there went my feet, bearing me into a den of beasts, and there awaiting my arrival, crouched Satan, golden-black in the glare of a kerosene lantern suspended from a hook.

I call her Satan because she smoldered with an inner radiance that I’d intuited from a thousand glimpses of the devil’s likeness in illuminated manuscripts of the holy and the occult. Her shadow spread across the floor and up the wall, massive and primeval and bestial.

Satan, a.k.a. Deputy Cooper, wore blu-and-white uniform pants streaked in dirt, and nothing else. Broad shouldered, narrow hipped, sinewy, her feet sank into a puddle of gory mud. Before her lay the carcass of her K-9 partner, its jaws caked in red. She’d skinned it with a flint knife from the Neanderthal King exhibit.

Deputy Cooper slowly pivoted and revealed that the dog had eaten some of her face before it died. No, I didn’t vomit, quite.

“Damnedest thing,” she said. “I was chilling in the cruiser. Baxter tore through his kennel and went right for me.”

I almost didn’t recognize the deputy, for obvious reasons. She’d also ditched the mirrored shades. Her shape twisted and thickened into steroid-fueled contortions. Her hands were bigger than Mary the Magnificent’s, and those long, sharp nails weren’t press-ons. She lacked much in the way of body hair. That was incongruous, I guess. Folklore and Hollywood have conditioned us to expect pointed ears and a fur coat.

We were alone in the tent. Earlier in the day, a crew had loaded the animals into traveling enclosures and cruised toward Idaho. Victor had said that the phantom of Milo wouldn’t require the meat of a panther or wolf. The only force acting upon the Black Magician was his lust for Vinette. All else was pantomime. The dog’s corpse and Deputy Cooper’s wrecked face suggested Victor might not have possessed total command of the facts.

None of this was following the script. Dead dog, mutilated cop, me armed and dangerous.

“Good fucking god, Deputy.” I pulled the derringer from my purse, aimed at her head, and cocked the hammer. The pistol felt like a toy in my fist, in the presence of evil. Had I believed in evil prior to this instant?

She drove the flint blade into the ground and straightened. Blood oozed over her breasts, painted her belly and thighs. The blood flow showed no sign of slowing. Black-gold blood.

“You smell. great,” she said through impressive canines.

“Thanks,” I said. “Get on the ground.”

She tilted her partial death’s head. Her eyes were bloodshot and yellow.

“I’m going to eat your whoring heart, Nettie.”

“Okay, lady.” I pulled the trigger, saw a tiny hole bore into the exposed bone of her skull. A wisp of smoke curled from the wound.