Nightmare Carnival

“It’s all right,” I said, like I was talking to the farm dog back home. My key hand was shaking worse than my lantern hand.

I set down the light, unlocked the padlock, took a steadying breath as I lifted it away; then there was just the bolt left, and the cage would be open. I curled my fingers around it.

“What are you doing?”

Carvessa had a voice like a saw even when he wasn’t drunk, and I froze with my hand on the lock despite myself. When I looked up I was looking at the lions, and I saw a tawny slice of cheek and a high arched brow and nothing else.

He was behind me and they were in front of me, and it was no competition at all.

“What you should’ve,” I said, and slid the bolt free.

Then I dodged to put the cage between us, and ran.

But I knocked over the light as I went; it sputtered and went out even before I started running, and in the desperate dark my legs gave out on me. I landed with a sour thud that knocked my sight sideways for a heartbeat.

Then — I couldn’t help myself, I had to know — I turned.

The lights from the train car were far off and flickering, and in the moonless night the lions looked like shadow puppets before a candle as they jumped, and then I didn’t understand what happened.

Carvessa fell between them — he was pulled down under them — they slid on top of him — they blinked out of sight and appeared again without him — Carvessa vanished at the touch of their paws.

Carvessa gasped; he must have gasped, or sobbed, or started to speak, because then there was a terrible sound of something swallowing up all his breath.

One of them turned toward me, licked her lips with a tongue that left no blood behind.

Blood was missing, I thought, so numb with fear that it seemed like a disappointment rather than a horror. If there had been blood, it meant Carvessa would have died from tooth and claw, and mine would be a death like any other death, instead of whatever was about to happen to me.

Her eyes had no reflection; I only knew she was moving because her teeth gleamed close and white as she opened her mouth.

I braced myself, stared right at her as she stepped toward me. I was so terrified I couldn’t force my eyes closed. I knew down to my eyelids that in the next step she’d make a sound and that would be the end of me.

Her jaw slid open and open and open, far beyond what was possible, wide enough to eat the night, and inside her mouth unfurled the warm dark deep.

Joseph told me later — he told me a hundred times — that I fainted, that when they found me my eyes were rolled up so far in my head they could only see the whites.

I woke up surrounded, everyone leaning in like a circle of faces in a musical picture and trying to decide among themselves what must have happened.

“Never met a soul Carvessa wouldn’t try to frighten out of its skin just to see if he could,” Allan said, and Peter said, “I don’t care what the brothers might say, we’re well rid of him,” and they nodded back and forth.

“She doesn’t even remember what happened, I bet,” said Daisy in a tone I recognized, “none of you are helping, move.”

“When you caught Carvessa taking those cats out, it must have scared you something terrible,” Joseph said, looking at me like there was only one right answer.

He still had that little spot in his right eye, a pretty accident.

I said, “I swear they could have killed me.”

No one seemed surprised; they’d figured Carvessa set them on me just to get in one last scare on his way out.

Peter asked me, “Which way did they go?”

“Don’t remember,” I said.

It worked well enough as an answer. It wasn’t an absolute lie.

After the lions, I lost my strength. I was as big as ever, it was nothing so easy to see, but in the first days I wasn’t good for anything but holding something you put into my hands.

“Shock,” Daisy said. “Happened to me once when I dropped a pole and thought it was going to hit Peter, couldn’t get any work out of me for a week. Stop twisting your fingers.”

Jim Brandini never spoke to me again. Matthew came by the crew car a few times when Jim was away, and asked anyone but me how I was doing, with the sort of earnestness that could be equally fake or real on a man like him. Joseph disliked him something serious; he never got anything out of Joseph.

The worst of it lasted a week or two, where I woke up gasping and sweating and unable to even drop out of bed because my legs were just marrow and air, and Joseph would hand me a glass of water and sit with me until I stopped shaking.

Then one day I could help Joseph thread the pulley. A week after that I was dragging things up to him hand over hand, and only my white knuckles gave away that anything had ever been wrong.

He was kind to me, always, but I couldn’t look Joseph in the eye after the lion cage. I knew something he didn’t; I didn’t dare show him.

“Good as new, then,” Matthew Brandini said encouragingly when he saw me, and ran a hand through his glossed blond hair like it was a relief.