Nightmare Carnival

Immediately, Rogan is back on her feet, racing for the edge of the jump as though she’s going to throw herself off it. Jalena scrambles up, too, knowing the earth is not actually grabbing her. But the second she’s standing, the wind unleashes, crashing through her like a tidal wave, and it has things in it, flapping and gigantic and shapeless as that leaning, empty cowl on the airport terminal roof. There are sounds everywhere, too, in her hair, her ears, inside her skin. Bird wings beating. Locusts buzzing.

Grinding her teeth, flinging her hands across her face, Jalena stumbles off the mound — off David Roemer’s grave — toward the lip of the jump. She reaches it just as the wind passes all the way over, carrying off everything else with it, leaving her so surprised and her movements so unresisted that she almost tumbles into space.

But she doesn’t. She stops, staring down in stunned astonishment as the world opens beneath her, the real prairie, vast and flat and endless and utterly empty. Except for Frazee on her knees at the rocky base of the cliff, tearing at the grass as though she could rip out its heart, screaming, “God damn you. GOD DAMN YOU.”

And there’s Rogan, edging down the switchback path Frazee must have taken to get to where she is. She’s shouting, too. “Alexa, I’m coming!”

And there’s Bemis, who seems to pop up on the flat plain, somehow behind Frazee, and gazes wildly around himself, as though he’s surprised. As if the wind has lifted him up and dropped him there. The rifle in his hands seems to jerk as he lifts it. As though it is what’s lifting, not his arms.

No. As though the air itself is tugging his arms. As though he’s a marionette.

And just as it happens — right as the wind rises again, Jalena can see it this time, a huge, black, screaming thing, boring down on Bemis like a steam train — she begins to understand. Realizes what her brilliant colleagues have somehow missed, all these years. Whatever is out here — whatever spirited off David Roemer’s lover, or some flickering essence of her, and lured him after it, again and again, until it was finished playing with him, whatever has drawn them all out here tonight — it isn’t kind. Mr. Dark and his Carnival, whatever they are: they are not kind. They are not offering opportunities to commune with loved ones, or invitations to join them, or comfort in grief. They are playing. Toying. Casting the living in roles they cannot help but enact. Assigning them parts in a pantomime all its own.

She watches the wind smack into Bemis, all but lift him off his feet as it yanks his arms up, levels the rifle. Frazee shrieks, “David,” one last time before the gun goes off and the bullet blasts through her brain.

Then the wind engulfs Jalena, too, driving her to the earth, which is giving way as she knew it would, opening as she teeters, falls, the ground shockingly soft on her bruised back, the sky whirling and full of faces. So many faces.

“Dad?” she hears herself say. Then her vision clears, and the stars are on her.

She awakens in the bed of the truck, laid out flat with her head in Parrott’s lap. When she opens her eyes, the stars are still wheeling. She tries to lunge upright but her spine seizes, and she cries out.

“Sssh,” Parrott says, stroking her hair. “Sssh.”

The stars slow, like a switched-off ceiling fan. Slow. Go still. Stay put. Then they start to fade.

Which means it’s morning?

“How long?” she finally manages.

Parrott never looks down, answers automatically, as though she’s one of those fairground fortune-teller automatons. Climb on the scale, tell me your birthday, I’ll show you your future.

“A while,” she says. “You better have that head checked when we get back. Although I don’t think anything actually hit you.”

Red and blue lights skitter over the back of the truck cab, and again Jalena tries to rise. Again, she fails, but realizes what those lights are. She sucks in a long, deep breath, and a new feeling fills her. It should be panic. But it hurts too much.

“Frazee?” she whispers, although she already remembers.

Parrott just goes on stroking.

“Bemis?”

With a nod, Parrott directs Jalena’s gaze to the right. The bed of the truck is open. Bemis sits in the back of the nearest of three police cars, his head down, his handcuffed hands in his hair.

“Rogan?”

“She went with Alexa, of course. With Alexa’s body. They’ve already taken that.”

“Green?”

Parrott goes silent again, and Jalena thinks of his bottom desk drawer, full of photographs he has never let anyone see. Of a life, she is now certain, he had long since lost.

“Green’s gone, too?”