Katherine Dunn - Nightmare Carnival

I’m stunned by the magnitude of this confession. I’d been fooled by the glamour of his name and his history; I’d thought he would greet this moment with all the dignity of his station. I stand over him, this diminished patriarch, mewling like some abandoned infant, and I’m overwhelmed by disgust. I don’t know where it comes from, and the force of it terrifies me.

“Well, you can’t,” I say, my anger a chained dog. “You don’t get to. You don’t get to miss her.”

He stares at me. His mouth opens, but I cut him off. I grab the mound of ripe flesh from the altar and thrust it into his face. Cold fluids run between my fingers and down my wrist. Flies go berserk, bouncing off my face, crawling into my nose. “This is the world you made! These are the rules. You don’t get to change your mind!”

Fifty years ago, when Uncle Digby finished his story and finally opened the gate at the very first Skullpocket Fair, we all ran out onto the brand new midway, the lights swirling around us, the smells of sweets and fried foods filling our noses. We were driven by fear and hope. We knew death opened its mouth behind us, and we felt every living second pass through our bodies like tongues of fire, exalting us, carving us down to our very spirits. We heard the second gate swing open and we screamed as the monsters bounded onto the midway in furious pursuit: cannibal children, dogs bred to run on beams of moonlight, corpse flowers with human bodies, loping atrocities of the laboratory. The air stank of fear. Little Eddie Brach was in front of me and without thought I grabbed his shirt collar and yanked him down, leaping over his sprawled form in the very next instant. He bleated in cartoon-like surprise. I felt his blood splash against the back of my shirt in a hot torrent as the monsters took him, and I laughed with joy and relief. I saw Christina leap onto a rising gondola car and I followed. We slammed the door shut and watched the world bleed out beneath us. Our hearts were incandescent, and we clutched each other close. Somewhere below us a thing was chanting, “Empty your pockets, empty your pockets,” followed by the hollow pok! of skulls being cracked open. We laughed together. I felt the inferno of life. I knew that every promise would be fulfilled.

Six of us survived that night. Of those, four of us — exalted by the experience — took the orders. We lived a life dedicated to the Maggot, living in quiet seclusion, preparing our bodies and our minds for the time of decay. We proselytized, grew our numbers. Every year some of the survivors of the fair would join us in our work. Together, we brought Hob’s Landing to the worm.

But standing over this whimpering creature, I find myself thinking only of Christina Laudener, her eyes a pale North Atlantic gray, her blond hair flowing like a stilled wave over her shoulders. We were children. We didn’t know anything about love. Or at least, I didn’t. I didn’t understand what it was that had taken root in me until years later, when her life took her to a different place, and I sat in the underground church and contemplated the deliquescence of flesh until the hope for warmth, or for the touch of a kind hand, turned cold inside me.

I never learned what she did with her life. But she never took the orders. She lived that incandescent moment with the rest of us, but she drew an entirely different lesson from it.

“You tell me those were all lies?” I say. “I believed them. I believed everything.”

“Gretchen wasn’t a lie. Our life here wasn’t a lie. It was glorious. It doesn’t need to be dressed up with exaggerations.”

I think of my own life, long for a human being, spent in cold subterranean chambers. “The Maggot isn’t a lie,” I say.

“No. He certainly is not.”

“I shouldn’t have survived. I should have died. I pushed Eddie down. Eddie should have lived.” I feel tears try to gather, but they won’t fall. I want them to. I think, somehow, I would feel better about things if they did. But I’ve been a good boy: I’ve worked too hard at killing my own grief. Now that I finally need it, there just isn’t enough anymore. The Maggot has taken too much.

“Maybe so,” Wormcake says. “But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

He gets up, approaches the windows. He pulls a cord behind the curtains and they slide open. A beautiful, kaleidoscopic light fills the room. The Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair is laid out on the mansion’s grounds beyond the window, carousels spinning, roller coaster ticking up an incline, bumper cars spitting arcs of electricity. The Ferris wheel turns over it all, throwing sparking yellow and green and red light into the sky.

I join him at the window. “I want to go down there,” I say, putting my fingers against the glass. “I want another chance.”

“It’s not for you anymore,” Wormcake says. “It’s not for me, either. It’s for them.”

He tugs at the false mouth on his skull, snapping the tethers, and tosses it to the floor. The tongue lolls like some yanked organ, and the flies cover it greedily. Maybe he believes that if he can no longer articulate his grief, he won’t feel it anymore.

And maybe he’s right.

He removes the fly-spangled meat from my hands and takes a deep bite. He offers it to me: a benediction. I recognize the kindness in it. I accept, and take a bite of my own. This is the world we’ve made. Tears flood my eyes, and he touches my cheek with his bony hand.

Then he replaces the meat onto the altar, and resumes his place on his knees beside it. He lays his head by the buzzing meat. I take the pickaxe and place the hard point of it against the skull, where all the poisons of the world have gathered, have slowed him, have weighed him to the earth. I hold the point there to fix it in my mind, and then I lift the axe over my head.

“Empty your pockets,” I say.

Below us, a gate opens, and the children pour out at a dead run. There goes the angry girl. There goes the weepy, buzz-cut kid. Arms and legs pumping, clothes flapping like banners in the wind. They’re in the middle of the pack when the monsters are released. They have a chance.

They just barely have a chance.

It is that unnameable time of a late December morning, that nighttime hour that bleeds into tired dawn. My great-great-great-great-grandmother sits in the living room, in the dark. I hear the rustling of her ancient newspaper as she turns each delicate page. The furnace has shut down after its daily muted roar, and a distant tick sounds through the walls as the metal ducts contract and cool. Other than the paper’s whispers, it is the only sound in the house.

In the same dark, around the corner, past the foyer, I stand in the middle of the hallway, in my stained nightgown and robe, the ones I left behind some fifteen years ago when I left this place, my childhood home. My mother’s house, so lovely and modern and clean — before the Grand moved in and took over, like she takes over everything. The outline of my overweight body hovers in the large black-stained mirror at the end of the hall, by the always- locked front door. A distorted Pierrette with a marshmallow body and mouthless face. I raise my hand. A second later, the creature in the mirror reluctantly moves. I can’t blame it, I know why. The Grand can’t see me, but she knows I’m there. She reads in the dark. She outlines her lips bright red in the pitch black of windowless closets. She embroiders tiny, perfect stitches in absolute gloom. Even during the day, the curtains in all the rooms are drawn, the lamps turned off. — This is how it used to be, she tells me over and over again. — When I was a child, we didn’t have electric lamps. We didn’t have radios. There were no televisions or computers; we weren’t compelled to entertain ourselves all day. We were self- contained. Everything we needed came out of ourselves, out of our own family. This is how it was in the world. This is how it will always be for me.