Page 12 of Carnival of Crows

Except for the Ringmaster. He hadn’t moved. He stood beside the black horse, one hand resting lightly on the brass pole as he watched me. The carousel lights moved over his face in slow bands of gold and shadow.

I lifted an eyebrow. “Are you just going to stand there all night?”

His mouth curved. Not a smile. Something more dangerous than that.

“The Ringmaster never stays in one place for long.” He stepped closer, lowering his voice so the others couldn’t hear. “But wherever you wander tonight you can be certain I won’t be far behind.”

The carousel jolted beneath us. He stepped smoothly off the moving platform just before it began to turn. The lights carried him in and out of view until he disappeared into the fog.

He’s trouble, I thought to myself as the carousel rose beneath me, lifting Lucille toward the canopy. Beautiful, broad-shouldered, green-eyed trouble dressed in a tattered red coat. And apparently, I was going to be seeing a lot of him tonight.

CHAPTER 6

Damien

Iwas supposed to keep moving. The Ringmaster wasn’t meant to linger. He drifted through the park, appearing without warning beneath broken signs and behind fogged windows. He welcomed guests at the gates, redirected traffic when lines grew too long, checked in with actors, and made sure no one did anything stupid enough to require an ambulance.

He absolutely did not stand in the shadows beside a rotting game booth waiting for one woman in particular to finish riding the carousel.

And, yet there I was.

Half-hidden beneath the sagging canvas awning of the old Milk Bottle Toss, watching Luci rise and fall on a black wooden horse.

I folded my arms across my chest.

Objectively, this was creepy, slightly stalker-ish behavior. Good thing the whole premise of this park was being surrounded by creepy things.

The carousel carried her past again.

Her dark hair lifted in the wind, the orange streak catching beneath the amber lights. She was laughing at something one of her friends had said, one hand wrapped around the brass pole while the other pressed against her stomach.

Even from here, I could hear it. In the darkness of the park, it was a sound so bright it seemed out of place. It was beautifully unrestrained. The sound struck me somewhere beneath the ribs.

There were hundreds of other people in the park. I should probably acknowledge some of them.

A family stood near the entrance to the midway, the father trying to convince his son, if I had to guess, that the scarecrow propped beside the map wasn’t real. But then the scarecrow twitched and the kid screamed so loudly that three people turned around. When the actor sprang off the post, mimicking the kid’s scream, the boy shook his head and kept saying “nope, nope, fuck no” while his parents and siblings dissolved into laughter. The scarecrow bowed deeply and wandered off through the fog, straw spilling from the tears in his burlap sleeves.

A few booths away, wooden pins clattered beneath the striped awning of the Devil’s Bowling Alley. Someone cheered. A bell rang. Then one of our midway barkers shouted, “A winner! Mark the date! We may never see another!”

Across the midway, a pair of contortionists crawled beneath the rusted tracks of the old kiddie coaster, their limbs bending at angles that made passing guests recoil.

The Widowed Bride wandered, shuffling, her dirt-stained veil dragging across the pavement. She carried a bouquet of dead roses in one hand and a severed groom’s head in the other.

Farther down, a trio of carnival freaks surrounded a group of kids. I say, “kids,” but they had to be at least eighteen because it was Blackout Night. If I had to guess, they were all right around there though. The Tall Man leaned over them on stilts, his coat brushing the ground. The Bearded Lady smiled with rows of pointed teeth. Between them, the Human Pincushion dragged one long metal skewer across his cheek.

One of the teenagers tried to act unimpressed, but when the Bride approached them, shrieking for help, he shook his head furiously and stepped behind one of his buddies.

I smiled. This was my favorite part. Not the scares themselves, but the reactions. The laughter that comes after the fear. The way strangers grabbed one another when something moved in the dark. The way grown men cursed and then immediately looked around to make sure no one had seen them jump. Every shriek that echoed through the park made the years of work feel a little more real.

For a while, this was just a pipe dream that I’d kept to myself. Til Cassie and I had been celebrating our twenty-fourth birthdays in the back room of a bar in Portsmouth. Technically, her birthday was a week before mine, but we’d always combined them. It was easier. One cake. Twice the alcohol.

Sometime after midnight, with Cassie barefoot and wearing a plastic crown she’d stolen from a bachelorette party, I’d started talking about the park. Not intentionally. The words had simply fallen out of me.

I told her it was bullshit that it had been sitting empty for so long. That our grandparents had spent their lives building something everyone in town remembered, only for their children to lock the gates and watch it collapse. That somebody should do something with it.

Cassie had taken a long drink and asked, “What would you do?”

I don’t know what came over me, but I told her.