Nightmare Carnival

“To lure the Carnival — the murdered dead — to him,” Frazee explains. As though that explained anything. “Or get himself invited. Something like that.”

“ ‘He’s going to kill Marco,’ ” Parrott says again. In Maddy Roemer’s voice. “ ‘You’re his friends, aren’t you? Help me.’ ”

“We were all on our feet by that point,” says Frazee, flat toned. She still has tears in her eyes, and her hair whips out from under the scarves as the truck plunges forward and still more stars blossom all around them. She is speaking through her scarf, her coat collar, her chattering teeth. “Because the thing is, Jalena. we didn’t understand what she was saying, exactly. We still don’t, to be honest. But we knew she was right.”

“Right? Right? About what? That. that this Carnival was full of dead people?”

“That he was going to kill Marco. Kill his nephew. We all. you could just see it in him.”

“So there we all were,” Parrott says. “Galvanized at last. Ready to help. Because we all, well, we loved David.”

“Or we loved what happened to him,” says Frazee.

Across the truck, Rogan nods furiously, and for once, she’s the one who reaches out, grabs Frazee’s hand. “That’s the truth. That’s exactly right. We loved talking about David.”

“This part was almost funny,” says Parrott, though she doesn’t sound as though she thinks it was funny. “We realized that not a single one of us had any idea what to do next. Maddy didn’t know where he’d gone, understand, just that he’d taken the boy. All that scholarship in the room, and not a single one of us could figure out how to research a moment we were actually in.”

“How to engage life as it flies by,” Frazee says.

Parrott drones on. “I can’t remember whose idea it finally was—”

“Mine,” Rogan snaps. “It was mine.”

For the first time since the lights appeared in the grass, Frazee looks up and meets her partner’s glare. A smile — the ghost of one — flickers on her face, under the scarf. “It was yours.”

“Facebook,” Rogan says. “All the kids were doing it. So many that even we’d heard about it.”

“Once we were there, on the site, it didn’t take long,” Parrott says. “We. not Googled. There wasn’t Google, was there? What was the verb?”

“Who cares? How about ‘searched’?”

“Okay, yes, Dr. Rogan, fine. Just trying to be precise. We searched. We tried ‘carnival.’ We tried ‘dead people.’ And then we just typed in its name. ‘Mr. Dark’s Carnival.’ And there it was.”

“A single mention,” Frazee says. “On one user page.”

“Mr. Judgeandjury. Born 1881. Two friends, neither of whom any of us knew. One post, zero likes.”

“What was the post?”

“Numbers. Just numbers. N E 27 07 M 12. Or something very close to that.”

“None of us had any idea what those were, obviously. But Maddy Roemer was smart as hell. Even smarter than her brother, I think.”

“GPS coordinates?” Jalena says, and Rogan takes her eyes off Frazee long enough to look right at her, for once.

“Impressive,” she says.

It’s the surprise in Rogan’s voice that rankles Jalena, and also reminds her, again, that all this is for her: a performance, unless it really is a hazing, which it really might be. The words spill from her mouth before she can catch them.

“Africanist smart. Smart African, kemosabe.”

Instead of flaring up, spitting back, or blushing in embarrassment, Rogan levels her stare and holds Jalena’s eyes until Jalena’s slide sideways.

“I was simply marveling that you recognized the notation. None of us other kinda-smart people did. Of course, it was a while ago, now, and those devices weren’t so common.”

“We got down a road atlas,” Parrott says, “then doubled back to the Facebook page to make sure we’d gotten the numbers right. But the post was gone. There was nothing there at all.

“So we just took the numbers we had and went where they led.”

“That drive,” Frazee says suddenly, and not in storytelling rhythm but her everyday cadence. “My God, Darlene. Do you remember that drive?”

The truck, Jalena realizes, has started to slow. It isn’t stopping. But it’s crawling, now. And Green has his face pressed against the passenger-side window like a little boy pulling up to his grandparents’ house on a holiday, with his puffy, weirdly manicured hands poised on the door handle.

“I remember,” says Parrott, though she, too, has turned to stare into the night, over the prairie.

“All that orange light,” says Frazee.

“Was that that year?” Parrott grips the side of the truck, nodding. “It was. You’re right.”

“They—somebody—had slid orange plastic bags over every single streetlight in Clarkston. Also, it had just snowed, remember? The first snow, I think. And the way the wind made those bags flap, so that the light flickered? It was like we were all swimming in jack-o’-lantern light. Like the whole town was a jack-o’-lantern we were floating in.”

“All those people. ” Parrott says.