Nightmare Carnival

“You never saw that Clarkston, Jalena. It was already vanishing by the time you came. But my God. There we were following a frantic mother on a motorbike straight out of town, in the hopes of saving her son from her very possibly deranged brother, our former colleague and friend, and we all kept getting distracted by the light. And the houses. All those decked-out houses.”

“All done up in black crepe,” says Parrott.

“Lit skulls in upstairs windows, peeking out of drawn drapes,” Rogan adds.

“Whole flocks of ghosts tethered to the rooftops like. I don’t know. Like goats. Just floating around on whatever held them there.” Frazee is still looking at her gloved hands. She has actually turned her back on the grass, though she keeps glancing over her shoulder. “And then there were the kids, of course. Legions of them. People used to come from hundreds of miles away for Clarkston Halloween. From across the Continental Divide, even. From the Dakotas. They’d drive all the way here just to park somewhere on the outskirts of our town and spend as long as they possibly could wandering from haunted block to haunted block, or crawling through Stanton’s maze to get covered in spiderwebs and then rewarded with those brownies at the end.”

“Oh, my God,” says Rogan. “Stanton’s wife’s brownies. Those butterscotch chunks? Those hazelnuts?”

“Everybody, everywhere, just screaming and laughing.”

“Getting grabbed,” says Parrott.

“Getting laid,” says Rogan.

“Sounds Dionysian.” Jalena watches their faces. None of them are looking at each other. They are looking at their laps, or the grass. Yet again, Jalena feels that murmur of disquiet all over her body. “Sounds made up, to be honest. Like you’re pulling my leg.”

“Doesn’t it, though?” whispers Frazee.

And that’s when Green bursts from the truck, which doesn’t stop and veers suddenly as Bemis shouts, “What the fu—” and the door Green has flung open slams shut behind him. Frazee gets flung sideways into Jalena, and Parrott almost tips over the side before Bemis gets the truck straight, jams on the brakes, and brings them to a stop.

“Green!” Bemis shouts, flinging open his own door and racing around the front of the cab through the headlight beams to stand at the lip of the prairie. Parrott has straightened and stood up, and Frazee has got herself untangled from Jalena and hopped out of the truck bed to the gravel. She and Bemis stand together and watch Green lumber at startling speed, like a grizzly roused from hibernation, up a rise that didn’t even seem to be there a moment ago, down a little depression, the prairie nowhere near as flat as it appeared from the road, not flat at all. Green crests another slope, way out on the plain, already, and then he vanishes into the grass.

“Bill, what the hell?” Frazee asks.

Bemis pulls hard at his beard with a shaking hand. “Fuck if I know. He kept asking, ‘You see that?’ I didn’t see shit. And then he just. ” He waves his other hand at the prairie.

“Hey,” Rogan says, having crawled across the bed and joined Jalena and Parrott. “This is it, right? Is it? The exact same place?”

The glance Bemis aims at her is saturated with years-old contempt and resentment, and somehow makes him look even more exhausted than he usually does. “How would we know that, exactly? It’s grass.”

“How did we know then?” Parrott is climbing over the side of the bed, so awkwardly that both Frazee and Jalena have to help her down. “I don’t remember, do you?”

“The coordinates,” Frazee says.

“Which we may or may not have had right.”

“And Maddy Roemer’s bike, where she dumped it on the shoulder.”

“I think we better. ” Bemis says. With a sigh, and a single glance at his ex-wife and her lover — and without even looking at Jalena — he reaches back into the cab, under Green’s seat, and pulls out a rifle.

“What’s that for?” Frazee asks.

But Bemis just steps off the gravel to go find Green.

For a while, they stand and watch as he picks his way. Rises, descends. The same rises and descents as Green? Jalena isn’t sure. Bemis isn’t either, apparently; he keeps stopping to look around. In a surprisingly short time, he is far out toward the horizon, and those sparks of light have started up again, are shooting up not exactly around him, but too close for Jalena’s comfort. Not that he seems to notice. Bemis stops again, appears to bob in place.

Like a surfer sucked out to sea, Jalena thinks. As though the prairie has an undertow.

Then Bemis, too, slips from sight.

“Hey,” says Parrott.

“I see it,” says Frazee, stepping into the grass.