Nightmare Carnival

He stands on the common and relieves himself. The heat of the day still clings to the air, but there’s a slight breeze against Shelton’s skin and he shivers pleasantly. The summer has been warm, many families have come to the circus. He has been tailing this particular circus for nearly two months, and it has worked out well; no one yet has threatened him or told him to leave, some of the carnies may have glared at him but they’ve not said a word. The circus even has a big wheel — it’s not so very big, really, by daytime it looks rather twee and apologetic. Now at night it’s the tallest structure for miles, it seems to scrape the sky, and some of the bulbs studded about its circumference are still glowing. Shelton wishes everyone could see it like this. And he shivers once more, and is at peace.

When he goes back inside the caravan he almost falls over the open trapdoor.

Joshua Shelton stares at the trapdoor. It shouldn’t be there. His caravan doesn’t have a trapdoor. After all, where could it lead to, but to the ground half a foot below? And yet he can see that there is a staircase leading down from it, gripping the side of the trapdoor like a claw. It’s too dark to see how far down it goes, after the fourth rung it’s lost to the blackness.

He pinches himself to see if he is dreaming, and the pinch hurts, but that doesn’t prove anything, he could be dreaming that the pinch hurts.

He looks at Ruth, and she’s still fast asleep. He doesn’t want to leave her. But then, he won’t really be leaving, will he? This is all nonsense. He puts his hands to the rungs of the ladder. They are hard and metal and cold.

Slowly he starts to descend.

And he’s soon underground, or so he supposes — but it doesn’t feel like underground, the air is fresh, there’s no hint of mud or soil, there’s wide open space. He begins by counting the number of steps, but pretty soon he’s lost his place and gives up. And very soon he can’t see anything; he looks down to see how much farther he has to climb and he can’t even see his feet, and when he looks back up there’s no sign of the caravan at all. And suddenly he feels all alone, and that he’s clinging blindly to something he can’t see and can’t trust and that might give way at any moment, he’s clinging to the side of the world and the world has turned the wrong way round, and if he just lets go he will fall forever, he’ll fall right into the bowels of the earth, and no one will ever find him, no one could ever find him, he’s just a speck in a void without end and it seems almost arrogant that he’s pretending to be alive when his life has no point. And the only reason he doesn’t panic, the only reason he doesn’t let the claustrophobia overwhelm him and he doesn’t take his hands off the ladder and he doesn’t give himself to the pitch blackness — the only reason is that he knows this isn’t real, none of this is real, because if he believes this is real that would make him mad. And what would happen to his poor Ruth then?

So still, still he goes downward. Because upward now seems more frightening. Because he fears he could climb upward and never reach the top.

Only at the last few rungs is there any light. And the light is so sudden that it blinds him for a moment. It’s like he’s dropped into another world, and there was never any dark, there’s light all about, there’s no room for darkness here. All above him the blueness of the sky — it’s a thicker blue than he’s used to, gloopy like syrup, dripping down impossibly through the air — and beneath him an expanse of green, green in all directions, grass green and yet too green for grass, it’s as if someone has taken every blade of grass and painted it to make it greener still, and Shelton thinks why would they do that, why would anyone want to do that, he wants to scream it out. His fingers are sweating. They slip, they slide. He misses the rung beneath him. He lets go of the ladder. And it doesn’t matter, there’s no distance left to fall. He lands on the grass, and it is grass, and it’s wet with dew. And when he looks about him the ladder has gone.

He dry-heaves. The brightness hurts his eyes, and he screws them tight, he cries out for it all to stop. And maybe it does, because when he dares open his eyes again the pain has gone. And maybe it hasn’t, maybe he’s just got used to it.

Nothing but colour wherever he looks. The blue above, smashing into the green below. And himself, jammed fast beneath the two. And then, then the animals come.

Some of them float. At least, some of them try to float. But the air is escaping from their bodies, and as they lift off the ground they bump right back on to it in a stumble. He hears the air escape, it’s like a hiss that surrounds him. Some of them limp. The stronger animals try to help the others, sausage dogs carrying exhausted little rabbits on their backs, elderly elephants, constructed from a dozen different balloons, supported on the shoulders of the young.