Nightmare Carnival

Jalena’s next move is instinctive, immediate. She loves — and doesn’t at all trust — being out here, in all this nowhere, with these people, who might be the only people on the planet, currently, that she could claim to know. Only living people, she thinks, and squashes that thought as she drops her hands to the cold steel sides of the truck and eases over onto the dirt. The one thing she is certain of is that she is going where Frazee goes. She turns toward the grass.

Then she wonders if that is exactly what they’re all counting on: getting her out there, away from the road, and any semblance of safe haven. So they can finish whatever the hell they’ve planned for her. Make her one of them.

She’s at the very edge of the gravel — the grass lapping at her feet like a lake tide, hitting exactly the same spot on the toes of her boots with each new gust of wind — when Frazee drops to one knee. She’s already fifty yards or more away from them. The grass does not rise up, gets no deeper around her. But Jalena could swear it stills as Frazee reaches into it. Her scarves are blowing, but the grass has gone quiet, which makes Frazee look like a Sioux squaw in a Charlie Russell painting, pulling washing out of a river.

From the grass, Frazee pulls up something striped. Even from this distance, Jalena can see that it’s fabric, and also filthy.

In the truck bed, Rogan has stood, now, too. “What is that? Alexa, come back.”

Frazee turns the fabric in her hands. She’s saying something, but her voice is inaudible.

“It looks like part of a prison uniform,” Jalena calls.

But Frazee shakes her head, lays the fabric neatly back where she found it, and smoothes it on the ground. This time, somehow, Jalena hears her loud and clear. “More like pajama pants. Maybe.” Then her head jerks up. “Bill?” she shouts into the dark. Then she’s up, and she’s running.

“Alexa!” Rogan shouts.

“Wait,” Jalena calls, and gets one foot in the grass before Parrott grabs her around the wrist and yanks her back.

“Listen.” Even now, Parrott speaks in that blank, airy whir. But her fingers grip like handcuffs. “Hear it?”

And for just a second, as she starts to shake loose, Jalena thinks she does. It’s faint, far away, out there where nothing is or at least should be.

“Is that a calliope?” says Parrott.

But Jalena is thinking about South Carolina. County fairs, cotton candy in her hand, a beer in her father’s and his other hand on her shoulder. The sounds out here are those sounds — rides, organ melodies in crackling speakers — but even tinnier. Half-strangled. “Could be an ice cream truck,” she says.

Parrott lets go and lights out in the direction of the sound, which is roughly toward Frazee, but at an angle, and the slope she stumbles down is a different one. Jalena almost calls her back. She feels the ghost of her father’s hand lift. Not that it was ever actually holding or steering or protecting her, anyway, even when it was really there.

“All right, that’s enough,” she says, and steps off the road.

“Don’t,” Rogan barks behind her, and then yells, “Alexa!” again.

“Shut up,” Jalena says. Rogan is either too frightened or playing too frightened to leave the truck, even for her lover.

She takes exactly two steps before the prairie grabs her. Just like that, she’s falling, her hands flying up not just to break the fall but to grab the ground, which is going to open, Jalena screams inside herself, is going to swallow me down, but it doesn’t. It smashes into her palms and mouth and punches her breath from her instead.

And in that single, silent moment — her lungs motionless inside her ringing bones, like empty stalls in an abandoned barn — Jalena hears the grass-waving sound again, and realizes that it isn’t grass at all; it’s whispering. A thousand, million whispering voices, just under her bruised hands, under the tissue-thin veil of earth, calling out to each other. Calling her down.

Just the ground, she snaps, inside her own head, where nothing and no one whispers. She makes herself breathe.

“Jesus, Jalena,” Rogan is calling, one leg over the truck side, though even now she seems reluctant to climb down. To touch this ground. “Are you all right?”

Jalena is still caught in whatever tripped her. Sitting up, she reaches back, edges her foot free, and stares at the single tent stake tilting out of the dirt. A big one, at least a foot and a half long. Strips of ragged orange and red cloth stream from it, as though whatever was here got ripped from its moorings and tumbled away down the grass.