Nightmare Carnival

There were audible groans from the crowd and someone in a most pitiful voice whispered, “No more.” As if those words were the cue, the old man’s entire body was covered instantly by fleas. It happened so fast, I thought it was a trick of shadows from the torchlight. But no, every inch of him, instantly. His screams were muffled by the minions filling his mouth. They remained latched to Hibbler, pulsating en masse with the rhythm of feeding. And then as quickly, they were gone. His corpse remained standing for a moment — snow white, shriveled, sucked dry — before collapsing in upon itself. We gasped and rose to our feet, standing there stunned, wondering what would come next. It took no more than a moment for us to realize — this was to be the end of the road for Ichbon’s Caravan of Splendors. The fleas had somehow detected the unspoken treachery against them.

They struck again, covering in an eyeblink the slouching form of Hector, the Geek, making a mummy of him in less time than it took him to bite off a chicken head. As he fell away, they settled on the juggler and his apprentice. The Three Miserable Clowns stepped forward then, brandishing jars full of gasoline. They doused the writhing, flea-draped forms, and then the most miserable of them all flicked his lit cigarette at them. The sudden explosion knocked me off my feet. The next thing I knew, I was helping me up and we were running away from the caravan into the night. Ahead, it was pitch black and behind, I saw flames engulfing the trailers, bodies strewn on the ground, and a man’s form made of fleas, tipping his hat to me and waving.

I ran at top speed like I never had nor ever would again, and when I finally stopped to catch my breath, at least a mile from the burning caravan, my other me admonished me. “Up, you laggard,” he bellowed. “They can suck you dry, but I want to live. Get moving.” I pulled myself together and took off again. I wandered over dunes and across barren fields. When the wind finally died down and the sky cleared enough to let the moonlight through, I found an abandoned house, one whole side up to the roof covered in sand. Smaller dunes surrounded the entrance. Exhausted, I pried open the door, pushing a foot of sand away. Inside, there were two rooms. One was full to the ceiling with sand. The other was clear and had a rocking chair by a window that still offered a partial view of moonlight on the waste.

The next day, I awoke in the rocker to the roar of a black blizzard moving across the prairie. The approaching sound, like a locomotive, woke me. I ran outside to see it coming in the distance. Dust two miles high, rolling toward me, a massive brown cloud one might mistake for a mountain range. I’d survived the caravan and now I was to be buried alive. I told myself I would stand my ground, but the sand that was pushed ahead of it in the wind stung me everywhere, and I thought of fleas biting me. Before I turned and ran for the house, I saw it as Arvet had described: the face of Satan coalescing in the roiling dust — horns and snake eyes and maw open, hungry as a flea. I got inside and shut the door behind me just when it hit. Huddling in the corner of the clear room, I took off my jacket and threw it over my faces. The air grew thick with dust and the noise outside was deafening.

That night, after Satan had passed, I dug out. On my march back to civilization the following morning, I came upon the carnival half-buried in sand and tumbleweeds. I saw the drained corpses of my colleagues, even those of the Three Miserable Clowns. No sign of the fleas, though, as if the dust storm had sent them back into hibernation. I broke into Hibbler’s trailer and took the cash from the cash box — considerable, given the success of the flea shows. I managed to get one of the trucks going and drove down to Liberal, Kansas, where I eventually settled. I was surprised folks there accepted me for what I was, but then my having two faces was the least of their problems in those years.

I never spoke about the fate of the caravan, yet I often pictured it out there on the plain, covered over with blowing sand. A couple years later, I was volunteering for the Red Cross in one of their makeshift hospitals, treating those laid low by the dust plague, when I came upon a female patient brought in after a blizzard, close to death’s door. It was Maybell, the Rubber Lady. She was in a bad way, wheezing up clouds of dust, her chest rattling like a hamper of broken china. She remembered, called me Janus, and smiled. In the evenings, when the ward was quiet, I sat by her bedside and we reminisced about the show and Ichbon and the appearance of the minions. She told me she’d escaped being drained because her flesh was too elastic. That got me thinking and I said to her, “That’s the one thing I always wanted to know. Why they allowed me to escape.”