Carniepunk Page 17

  “She,” Madame Laida said, and shrugged. “The Cold Girl. She likes carnivals, turns out. The boss thought he was buying some freak attraction, but she was nothing like that. She latched onto us back in the Dust Bowl days, and she’s been with us ever since. Doesn’t show herself much anymore, though. I think she’s taking a special interest in you.”

  “What . . . what do you mean, I’m . . . going to—”

  Laida’s eyebrow cocked upward. “Do you really need the details? Honey, really, it’s lots better if you don’t know. You can’t avoid it, so there’s no point in getting all upset about it. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but we don’t have a lot of time to waste here; your prince of a boyfriend isn’t going to let you just vanish. Here. Give me your hand. I might be able to do something to help.”

  Instead of doing as she said, I clutched my hand closer to my chest and stood up so fast I knocked the chair over onto the worn old carpets. Madame Laida looked unsurprised. I wasn’t sure anything ever surprised her. She shrugged and took a long pull on her cigarette that transformed half of it into embers and ash, and behind the smoke I saw her eyes flash red.

  “Well,” she said, “how you go about it is your business. I was just going to give you a little comfort, but if you don’t want it, I guess we’re done here. Sorry, kid. Life sucks sometimes, and my job isn’t to change that.”

  “But—” I couldn’t get my head straight, couldn’t get my breath now. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Run,” she said, and tapped the ash off her smoke into a silver tray I was sure hadn’t been on the table before. “Go on, girl. Run for your life. Cold Girl’s waiting out there somewhere for you. She’ll find you.”

  “Help me!”

  “Can’t.” This time she smoked her cigarette all the way down to the butt and stubbed it out in the tray. She blew the smoke at the crystal ball again, and inside, gray mist swirled in nauseating patterns. “And wouldn’t if I could, hon. People like me don’t get involved if we want to keep on breathing; this is the business of immortals. It’s the way it works. Time for you to go now.”

  She made a little fluttering motion with her hand, and I felt myself getting physically shoved, as if a strong wind were pushing me . . . but there was no wind. My hair didn’t even flutter.

  I fought it, but I couldn’t stop myself from being pushed to the opening of the tent, and when I grabbed for the fabric to stop my slide, it seemed slippery under my fingers.

  And then I was outside, and there was no opening at all.

  “Hey!” I shouted, and grabbed at the fabric, trying to find the way back inside. “Hey, wait, you can’t— Madame Laida! Help me!”

  “Hey, Kiles,” said a voice from behind me that stopped me cold. Frozen. “Help you with what?”

  “Nothing,” I whispered. Tears suddenly bloomed in my eyes, and I shook all over. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Guess you are. Guess you shouldn’t have gotten all up in my business, bitch. Did you like what you saw?”

  All of a sudden Jamie’s arm was around my throat, pulling me off balance, choking me. I gagged for breath and went up on my tiptoes as he pulled backward. He still had friends with him—only three of them, including Alan. I didn’t know where the others had gone. Maybe he didn’t trust them enough. I gagged and gasped and hoped that one of his buddies would do something, anything . . . but they just stood there, not looking at me at all.

  Jamie’s breath puffed hot against my ear as he said, “I will break your neck if you try to run,” and I felt all the resistance go out of me. He meant it.

  “We’re going to walk now,” he continued. “We’re going to just go quietly to my car, right, babe?”

  Jamie pressed something sharp into my back, low and to my side. “This is a knife. And it’s right over your kidney. You know what happens if I cut your renal artery, Kiley? You really want to learn how fast you can bleed out?”

  I was terrified, and I kept walking. Maybe it wasn’t actually a knife, but this was Jamie, and I didn’t know him anymore, I really didn’t. The others fell in behind us, and we moved through the outer darkness around the tents. The noise and glitter and cheap tinsel shine of the carnival fell behind us. There weren’t any lights out in the parking lot.

  Or any people.

  “Kiley?”

  I stopped. The blade dug in a little, and I stopped breathing.

  “I want my phone back, bitch.”

  I don’t know where it came from—maybe from the matter-of-fact way Madame Laida had told me I was going to die. Maybe it just didn’t matter anymore.

  Or maybe I’d finally grown a spine.

  “You’re a monster,” I said. “You want your phone? You want to show everybody what you did? Brag about it? Fuck you, Jamie! Go crawl around and look for it!”

  I took his phone out of my pocket and threw it as far as I could into the dark. Far enough, I hoped. At least it would keep them occupied for a while. If I was really, really lucky, maybe it would be lost in the dark, and the cops would find it later. Game over, Jamie.

  Alan took his own phone out and tried to call Jamie’s, but it really was busted this time; nothing sparked out there in the shadows.

  “Go!” Jamie barked at his friends, and Alan and the two others loped off to search. “Don’t come back without it!”

  He hit me in the head when I started to laugh, so hard that the world wobbled and went black and red, and then he hit me again and it went completely, utterly dark.

  —

  I WOKE UP in a ditch, and I knew I was dying. It was dark, and cold, and I felt the sticky warm trickle of blood down my cheek.

  I couldn’t move. I was facedown in the sand, covered with trash and weeds, and whatever he’d done to me, I couldn’t feel anything much from the waist down; my legs were useless lumps. I was too weak to move my arms much, and when I tried, the pain was white-hot, boiling like lava inside me. I screamed, weakly, but the night and the wind swallowed it.

  So alone, but I could hear the distant tinny chaos of the carnival music. He hadn’t bothered to take me far before he’d done it.

  I guessed he thought that my murder would be blamed on the carnival workers. And he was probably right about that, though Coach Lamar would tell people he’d seen me with Jamie. Still, nobody would believe that Jamie would do a thing like that. No, it’d be the strangers in town, and I’d be just another random, sad victim.

  I drifted, and eventually the music went quiet. It turned darker, I suppose because the carnival shut off the lights. I passed out at some point.

  —

  WHEN I WOKE, it was brighter. The sun beat down on me. I could hear the rattle and growl of cars and trucks passing on the road. I couldn’t have been too far from people, from help, but everything seemed as far away as the moon.

  When I turned my head, I could see the sloping sand walls of the ditch. They stretched up to infinity. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pull myself out. When I tried, the sand slipped through my fingers and the pain, oh, God, the pain was like being drowned in acid.

  I slept, or went unconscious, numerous times. The cut from my head stopped bleeding but I was still losing blood somewhere else.

  I felt so tired.

  —

  THE COLD GIRL came, on the second night. There was a sound she brought with her, a hissing rattle like sleet against windows. She was pretty but unreal, like a mannequin, and her skin was as white and cool as snow in moonlight when she stood in the ditch and looked down at me with a strange, beautiful, terrible smile.

  Then she lowered herself gracefully to her knees. I’d never seen anything as beautiful as she was, or as awful; and when she leaned over to look into my wide, staring eyes, I felt a surge of cold go through me, as if what blood I had left in my body had frozen into hard chunks.

  Her eyes were black. Not like the night sky that wheeled overhead; that was really a dark blue. No, this was black, true black, an absolute absence of light and color. A well into nothing
at all.

  And then, slowly, they swirled into a brilliant fiery red.

  “I smelled your fear miles away,” she whispered. Her pale white hair brushed my face like snowflakes, and her voice sounded like it was echoes of screams. “Many towns ago. You were marked already for this. That means you’re mine.”

  I couldn’t talk. My mouth was as dry as sand. The best I could do was croak something out, and it didn’t actually sound like “What are you?” but she smiled anyway and brushed my lank, blood-stiff hair back from my face. I’d thought her smile was cold, but her fingers—it was like being brushed with liquid nitrogen. I could feel my skin freeze and crystallize under that loving touch.

  “Your people have lots of names for me,” she told me in a thousand voices, all screaming, screaming. “But I guess the one you really understand would be vampire. I can save you, if you want saving. Do you?”

  You’d think I’d say yes. Something in me struggled and squealed still, like an animal in a trap, but that part was already dead, really. It just didn’t understand that it was gone.

  “No,” I whispered. I could make that understood, at least. “I don’t want to hurt anymore.”

  “Such a bright child.” She kept stroking my face, and the cold pain, that felt good now—it felt hard and cutting and right. “Shhh. This is the second night of your dying, and there’s no one to watch over you while you slip away. I could just take you if I wanted. I don’t always ask, you know.”

  The cold, oh, God, it was in me now, over me, weighing me down and tying me into the earth with bonds of ice and stone, and I felt everything, everything go. No more blood. No more pain except the cold whisper of her touch, the bright shine of stars, the rattle of sleet.

  “Let me show you,” she said, “what your life with me could be. Now, rise up.”

  I couldn’t, but somehow I did. I stood to face her. I was moonlight and chill white flesh, and I knew the crimson was in my eyes, just like it was in hers. I felt so . . . so different. So other. I had the shape of Kiley Reynolds, and the knowledge, but all that humanity . . . that was gone, tied to the sad little beaten piece of flesh lying in the ditch at my feet.

  “You have until the sun rises to drink,” she told me. I heard the dry clattering sound of sleet again, felt it on my skin. I heard screams and music rising inside me, and something else. Something powerful. “Right now, you walk as a shade, a shadow. If you drink, you will rise in flesh and join me. But only if you drink. Otherwise, when the sun rises, you die. Drink, and be like me.”

  I wasn’t like her. Nobody was like the Cold Girl—I understood that immediately and instinctively. She was the spirit, and I was an echo . . . but an echo she had shouted back at the world, defiant and full of fury.

  But I did know what she wanted. What she expected. It rose up inside of me like that smoky gray replay of Jamie’s brutality inside Madame Laida’s crystal ball.

  I looked down into the ditch. It wasn’t deep after all, only a couple of feet, really. My body lay there, half covered in blown dirt and trash. A snake had slithered up on my legs and fallen asleep, though I couldn’t have been very warm for him. My eyes were open, dark and blind, but I was still breathing, just a little.

  Still dying, drop by slow, agonizing drop.

  But human pain didn’t hurt anymore.

  The whisper of ice faded, and when I looked up I saw empty flatland, stars, and realized that the Cold Girl was gone.

  The moon was up, full and white, and it showed me the road I needed to follow. The carnival was in full swing, music wheezing, lights flashing. People moved like ghosts inside of it, but I wasn’t going there. Not yet.

  It wasn’t far, only a steady, relentless glide back to the borders of our small town. I passed silent houses, blind black windows reflecting like empty mirrors. I passed winter-stripped trees, and as I did, their branches whipped and rattled and icicles formed on their tips.

  I was passing the park next to the high school when I realized that I wasn’t the only wanderer in the night. There was someone sitting on the child-sized swing, slowly rocking it in small, depressed arcs. I couldn’t see clearly, but it looked like a boy.

  I didn’t mean to turn his direction, but there was a sense of loss around him, something that shivered dark in the air around him. The closer I got, the thicker it became, like a living cloak of darkness . . . and it smelled sweet and delicious.

  He was dressed in a black hoodie, and I couldn’t see his face. His jeans were ripped; his kicks were filthy and battered. He looked up at me and took in a deep, startled breath, but he didn’t say anything. He stopped the motion of the swing and sat perfectly still, hands tight around the chains. I didn’t say anything. He hesitated, then let go with his right hand and pulled his hood back.

  “Kiley?” he said. “Kiley Reynolds?”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t Kiley anymore. I was something else . . . but the name reminded me of who that crushed, bleeding thing was lying in the ditch. Still dying.

  “It’s Matt,” he said. “Matt Saretti. From your English class. I saw you at the carnival.”

  One of the wallpaper people, just like me, Matt ate, he slept, he existed, and no one cared. I’d never really looked at him before. He seemed . . . nice.

  “People are looking for you,” he said. “Your mom—your mom’s going batshit. They’ve got flyers up all over town. Where have you been?”

  Somewhere on the other side of this park, Jamie was sleeping. I could feel him out there, taste the strange, bitter discord of his nightmares.

  I had time.

  I sat down in the swing beside Matt and pushed just a little to set it rocking back and forth, a slow pendulum movement that scraped my bare white feet over the dirt. To make myself real enough to affect wood and metal was a little difficult, but with concentration I managed to do it. The plain white dress I was wearing fluttered in the breeze of movement.

  All around the park, dogs howled, and nightmares bit, and the innocent shivered and slept on, troubled.

  “I’ve been busy dying,” I told Matt. It was hard to talk. Hard to find the words when everything inside me was frozen solid, locked tight. All the pain and fear and despair. “I’m still dying.”

  He swallowed hard. “Are you . . . are you a ghost?”

  I considered that, because I wasn’t sure. “I think so,” I said. “Because I’m mostly dead now.”

  “But not all the way.”

  I shrugged.

  Matt let the silence go on for a few seconds, and then he said, “Do you want me to find you? Save you?”

  I looked at him and smiled. He made a thin, terrified sound, and I think he would have run away if he could have, at that point. “I don’t need help,” I said, and every word was as bright and sharp and cutting as ice. “I’m what happens when there is no help.”

  He licked his lips and asked, “Are you going to kill me?”

  For the first time I realized that the warm, sweet, tantalizing fragrance that had drawn me to him was his life. His blood, pulsing through his veins. I could see it running under his skin in faint red trails, sweet, so sweet, and I felt so hungry and empty.

  But something stopped me. Something odd in his voice. “Why do you want to die?” I asked him.

  He flinched as if I’d hit him. “Why do you?”

  “I didn’t ask to die,” I said. “He killed me. There’s a difference.”

  “But you said you’re still alive. You could be saved. But since you don’t want me to save you, you must want to die, right?”

  I waited for an answer to come to me, but nothing did. There were no reasons, really. Finally I said, “I’m tired of hurting.”

  Matt stared at me without blinking. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  And for a moment, just a moment, I felt the ice shift inside me. Felt something melt, just a little.

  Just enough to make me resist the hot, pure whisper of his blood.

  “I’m sorry, Matt. I’m not here for
you. I can’t be here for you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not the guilty one.”

  He flinched, face tight and drawn. “I am,” he said. “I’m guilty.”

  I shook my head very slowly. “I’d know if you had great sins,” I said. “I can taste it, all the guilt out there. It tastes like blood. But yours . . . yours isn’t real. It’s in your head.”

  “But—”

  “You want me to prove it?”

  I pointed at one of the houses out there in the dark. “That one’s a thief,” I said. “He breaks into houses and steals stuff to pawn, for drugs. He raped a woman four years ago when she caught him in her house.” After a second, a light went on in the house, and a shadow passed across the window. Inside, the man was shivering, chilled to the bone, and he didn’t know why.

  I pointed at another one. “That one beats her children. One of them died, but her husband told the cops the boy fell down the stairs.” I heard a thin cry of anguish from the woman inside as her nightmares twisted hard. Another light blazed on.

  I pointed to a window of yet another house, and then another. “That one poisoned his wife twenty years ago. And that one, he and his friend beat up a homeless man just for fun.”

  All the nightmares, screaming, and it felt good to bring them out.

  To punish.

  I looked back at Matt and said, “You see? It’s not in you.”

  He watched me stand up and finally said, “Where are you going?”

  “I have something to finish,” I said. “And tomorrow I’ll be gone.”

  I started to walk away, across the grass. Where my feet touched it, the blades turned silver as they froze.

  “Wait!” Matt called. I looked back at him. “Tell me where to find you! Let me help you!”

  “I’m not worth saving,” I said. “I should have done something when I had the chance.”

  “You’re worth it to me,” he said, and stood up. “Kiley. You are to me.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said. “But you can’t save me now. Good-bye, Matt.”

  “Kiley!” I kept walking. “Kiley, I’m going to find you! At least tell me where to look!”