Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

DIANA PETERFREUND

Diana Peterfreund grew up in Florida and graduated from Yale University with degrees in Geology and Literature. She has been a costume designer, a cover model, and a food critic, and her travels have taken her from the cloud forests of Costa Rica to the underground caverns of New Zealand. She is the author of the four books in the “Secret Society Girl” series, as well as young adult novel Rampant , a contemporary fantasy about killer unicorns, and its sequel, Ascendant . She has also written film novelization Morning Glory , several short stories set in the killer unicorn world, and critical essays about popular young adult and children’s fiction. Diana lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and daughter, and is hard at work on her next young adult novel, a post-apocalyptic retelling of the Jane Austen classic, Persuasion .

“Cool. It’s a freak show,” says Aidan. “I didn’t know they had those anymore.”

I don’t think we’re supposed to call them freak shows. Though I know my parents would freak if they knew I was anywhere near one. Too much nudity, too many pathways into the occult.

The tent is near the back of the carnival, decorated with garishly painted plywood signs and lit by a string of lights at the entrance flap that does little more than cast long shadows, obscuring most of the ads.

So far, the carnival has been pretty lame. There’s a Ferris wheel, but it costs four dollars to go around a single time—Yves says they must have to pay a fortune for insurance. The hot dogs look ancient and shriveled, and taste more like jerky. The cotton candy is deflated, the funnel cake soggy, and they aren’t selling anything cool like deep-fried Twinkies. I had to beg my parents to let me come too. You see, the fairgrounds back up to the woods, and I’m not allowed anywhere near the woods anymore.

Maybe if we played some games on the midway it would have been fun, but Aidan pronounced them childlike and insipid, suitable only for jocks and their sheeplike followers, and we all agreed. Except for Yves, in a move clearly designed to recall my collection of bobble-headed monkeys that we’d amassed over several summers spent being childish and insipid at the Skee-Ball range down the shore.

Yves loves telling cringe-worthy stories about the dumb stuff we used to do, especially since last fall. Most especially whenever he catches me flirting with Aidan.

“Ewww,” says Marissa, insinuating herself and her bare-midriff top between Aidan and me. “A two-headed cow? Is it, like, alive?”

“Probably not,” says Yves from behind us. “I bet it’s pickled.”

I look over my shoulder and wrinkle up my nose at him. Yves’s eyes are dark, framed by even darker lashes that were always too long and full for a boy. His hands are balled up in his jacket pockets and he’s giving me one of those long piercing looks that have been another one of his specialties since last fall.

Summer refuses to go inside the freak show, citing how inhumane it is to put people with deformities up on display. But a quick glance at the signs out front reveals only one sideshow performer whose “qualities” don’t seem self-inflicted: the wolf-boy. The others are a tattooed man, a sword swallower, and some guy called the human hanger who looks like his claim to carnival fame is dangling stuff from his body piercings. Gross. Maybe my parents have a point. I move down to examine the next sign, and freeze.

VENOM

THE WORLD’S ONLY LIVE CAPTIVE UNICORN

They said it couldn’t be done, but we have one!

Be one of the few to see this monster …and SURVIVE!

There’s a bad drawing beneath the words, nothing like the blurry photos on the news, or the pictures you’ve seen of the corpses. The unicorn on the sign looks like one from the old fairy books, white, rearing, its mane flying out behind it in artful spirals. Just like a fairy tale, except for the fangs and the blood-red eyes.

I stumble back and almost trip over Marissa. “A unicorn?” she says. “But it can’t be a real one.”

“Of course it’s not,” says Aidan. “They’d never be allowed to put it on display. Way too dangerous. It’s probably pickled too.”

Marissa points at the sign. “But it says it’s alive.”

“Maybe a fake one,” says Katey, clinging to her boyfriend, Noah. “They have this patented process where they graft the horns of a baby goat together, and it grows up with one horn. Like a bonsai tree. We learned about it in Bio class.”

I shudder and move away from the tent. Before unicorns came back, people used to do that and pretend it was this gentle, magical creature. No one realized the old stories were lies.

“Well, that’s totally worth five bucks,” says Aidan. “I want to check it out. A killer unicorn! You know they never caught the one that killed those kids in the woods last fall.”

“They can’t,” says Noah. “They say no one can catch one, and no one can tame one either. This one has got to be a fake.”

My arms tangle up, hugging myself to keep out the cold. But it’s a warm spring evening. Nothing like last fall, with its cold gray skies, crisp leaves, bloodcurdling screams.

Summer shakes her head vehemently. “Yeah, I’m definitely not going in now.”

“Come on,” says Katey. “It isn’t a real one. If it were, it would be on TV, not stuck in some sideshow tent.”

“Fine,” Aidan says to Summer. “Be lame.” He cocks his head at me, grinning. “Let’s go.”

If my folks disapproved of body piercings and the occult, then a unicorn was definitely off-limits. Especially for me.

“Wen?” Yves’s voice comes from way too close. He’s the only one outside my family who knows. “You don’t have to.”

I turn to him. He’s offering me his hand like we’re still six years old. Like holding his hand will be as simple as it was when we were kids. Like holding him can be as natural as it was last fall. But like I told him then, it was an accident. A mistake.

I stare at him. He’s holding out his hand like things can ever be the same between us again.

“Hey!” I call to Aidan and the others. “Wait up.”

It isn’t a fake.

I can tell the instant I’m inside the tent, though I can’t even see it yet. But it smells like last fall in here, the weird scent that at the time I thought was someone burning leaves, or plant matter rotting after the October rains.

The interior of the tent looks like a museum gallery, with a dark, winding path snaking past individual exhibits that stand out like islands of amber red light in the gloom. Noah has already pulled Katey into a dark corner behind the sea serpent bones to make out. I can see them even better inside the blackened tent than I could in the glare of the midway.

It’s the unicorn that does this to me. Its evil tingles along my nerve endings, waking them, tuning them like a drug so that everything is clearer, stronger, slower.

The two-headed calf is, in fact, pickled; a fetal calf mutation preserved in a giant tank that glows green to heighten the creep factor. Aidan and Marissa gape at it, then skip over to watch the sword swallower do his thing. I close my eyes and try to push the unicorn out. I’m hot all over, like that time my cousins Rebecca and John and I got into the brandy at Christmas.

The sword swallower licks the sword from end to end, grinning at us, then leans his head back and lifts the rapier into the air, poising it carefully over his mouth. I watch each inch of it descend into the man’s gullet, see every movement of his neck muscles, every twitch as he fights to suppress his gag reflex.

The suppressed magic breaks free, loosing within me a painful clarity, every moment of time stretched out to encompass unbearable detail. I can hear Marissa’s heartbeat, quickened because of the sight before her, quickening more when she shivers in disgust and leans against Aidan. Blood pounds in my ears, like that time my cousins Rebecca and John and I bet to see who could hold their breath longest at the bottom of their pool.