Nightmare Carnival

“We’ll need a volunteer from the audience.” The spotlights are set swinging. They whirl about the audience. A drum rolls and there’s a hush. Christos drops his raised arm and the lights land and shrink to reveal two faces at opposing ends of the tent.

“Come on down!”

The first is a woman, dressed in a cotton smock and clogs. She looks overawed, blinking in the light. Rebecca has put down the case of guns and goes to meet her, smiling like she’s welcoming a friend.

“Madam, what’s your name?” Leo enquires, taking her hand. Her skin is rough and red from country living.

“Sally.”

“Thank you for your help, Sally. Would you mind waiting here for a moment while we meet our other volunteer?”

Rebecca holds his arm. It’s a man dressed in work boots and a shirt. He has an everyman face, essential in a shill, a circus man that Leo trusts. He’s not willing to chance his brother’s life on a real volunteer. Bad luck that it would be some wisecracker, the sort who’d load something else into the gun for a laugh.

“And your name?” Christos asks.

“Jack Milner.”

“Thank you, Jack. Do you know guns?”

“A little.”

“These are Delfontaine’s Rangers.”

“If you say so.”

The audience laughs. Rebecca carries a tray over to them, aloft on one hand. On it there are a pair of bullets and a pocket knife.

“Now, Jack, would you do us the honor of marking these two bullets so that we can identify them later?”

There is a pause while Jack scores the bullets’ casings with the knife.

“Now, Sally, I want you to take a good look at these as you’re going to see them later.” Leo hands her one bullet and waits, giving her time to examine it.

“Happy? Good.”

Christos takes the second bullet from Jack, repeating the ritual. Leo watches, pleased with Chris’s sleight of hand. After Sally’s inspection, they’ve both swapped the bullets, replacing them with fake ones on the trays.

Leo hates this part. The feel of the real bullet that he’s palmed and hidden in his mouth. The taste of metal filings that cling to the case.

“Now, Jack, we’re going to ask you to load one bullet into each gun.”

Jack the shill obliges, putting the fakes into the gun barrels.

Here it comes. Leo and Christos stand back to back like duellists at dawn. There’s a drum roll. They each count fifteen paces. They’ve been drilled by Rollo until their timing’s perfect. He’s even done target practice with the brothers.

They turn. Leo takes aim. Both of them have been careful to consider angles.

Leo squeezes the trigger. The sound deafens him temporarily. Something’s wrong. Christos looks at him, bewildered. There’s a slow trickle of blood from the hole in Christos’s forehead. It gathers in his eyebrow and falls in heavy drops. He staggers and then pitches backward.

Someone, maybe Sally, screams.

“How did you know?” Rebecca’s in the lounge. Henry stands in the doorway.

“A hunch. I remembered that you always called your dog by the name of Sam. It got me thinking.”

“How astute.” It doesn’t sound like praise.

“I saw you and Leo burn.”

“You were there?”

“Yes. I was only eighteen. You should be dead.”

“Come and sit down so we can talk.” Rebecca’s voice softens.

“Is Leo alive too?” Anything’s possible.

“No, Leo’s dead. You saw it yourself.”

“I saw them take your body away.” A charred corpse laid on the tarpaulin.

“Why have you pursued this?”

He can’t verbalize it. “I came to see you as often as I could.”

Rebecca’s look is both amusement and bemusement.

“You’ve fallen in love with your own fantasy. That’s about you, not me.”

“I need to know what happened.”

“You weren’t part of it. You were just a spectator.”

It rankles that he has no claim to her tale.

“I’m a witness.”

“You’re a pompous ass.”

She isn’t the sweet girl of his imagination. She has no truck with romance. He wants to shock her into revealing the truth.

“Your husband was murdered by his own brother and I think you burnt him to death to get revenge.”

“It was an accident.”

“It was a live bullet. It’s all in the book.”

“I didn’t read your book and I don’t believe it. Leonides would’ve cut off his own arm before he hurt Christos.”

“The bullet they found at his autopsy was real.”

“What possible reason would Leo have?” She stares at him.

“He found out Christos was robbing him.”

“Christos wasn’t a thief. And Leo wasn’t a murderer. Who told you that?”

“Rollo.”

She rocks back and forth, roaring with laughter that dies in her throat as fast as it starts.

“I might have known that he’d do for all of us in the end. He was the one with the light fingers.”

“What do you mean?” This rapid revisionism makes Henry weak. “Leo trusted Rollo. He was going to make him a partner.”

“Leo was going to make Rollo and Christos partners. It was a mark of the man that he overlooked Rollo’s thieving and treated him like a brother. Where did you get the information for your book? Rollo? He was an inveterate liar and crook.” Her derision’s on her face. “You should’ve known better, professor.”

“I don’t understand. The bullet was fired from the gun they found on the floor.”