Katherine Dunn - Nightmare Carnival

— Are you ready? he called out, and his words echoed back and forth between the high walls before dying out in a faint burst of calliope music. — Have you made your choice? He lifted his cane and pointed down. Below the stage sat a massive flat-topped megalith, with five black marble boxes resting on its rough surface, each carved on the top with the name of an ancient carnival, culled from histories lost forever, as the brochure had said. Within each box, though, anything but dry history resided. Chaos, essence, power, folding in on itself in infinite spirals. Waiting for an incubator, a warm walking womb to carry it to its new home, to release. Unchecked primal appetite, that could consume anything, even a woman with an endless appetite of her own. I felt my breath shallow out, my heart beat fluttery and weak.

I reached out and touched the box labeled Kronia . It vibrated slightly under my fingertips. After a pause, I pushed it back.

— Masks and merriment, as I recall. Too weak, I said. The barker nodded and smiled.

I picked up the box labeled Navigium Isidis , and immediately placed it on top of the Kronia box. — Floats, processionals, parades. I think she’d be amused. I don’t want to amuse her.

At the far edge of the floor, a chair moved. I felt the contents of the space shifting, as if rousing itself from a too-long dream. A low sigh wafted across the room, or perhaps it was only the wind, or the ghost of a dream of the wind.

Three boxes were left on the stone. — Bacchanalia , I said, picking up the one to the left. I placed it on top of the stack. — Savage. She’d be disoriented, repulsed. But not incapacitated.

— Are you certain, madam? the barker said. — Wine-soaked madness and lust in the night? Nothing to stop you from partaking as well, if you desire. If you aren’t dismembered, that is.

But I had moved on. Saturnalia , said the next box. I lifted it up.

— What’s this one again?

— Pageants. Very theatrical, said the barker. — I must warn you: there will be many, many clowns.

I added Saturnalia to the stack. A single box remained. Dionysia , it said. I ran my fingertips over the carved letters. The barker smiled.

— Great festivities within, he said. — A carnelevare of god- frenzied transformation, which subsumes and liberates all.

— I don’t want to transform her, I said, adding the box to the stack. — I don’t want to liberate or destroy her.

For the first time, the barker looked unsure. — What is it that you want, then?

— I want something so wondrous and primal, she’ll never be able to leave it. I want to fill her up, completely. I want her to fall in love.

The warehouse floor grew quiet. — There are no boxes left, the barker said. — There are no more choices.

I reached out, placing both hands flat on the megalith as I contemplated the stack. The stone was warm and smooth, except for spider-thin scratches. I moved my fingers over them. Back and forth. A sixth name, in a language I did not recognize, running across the surface. A secret, sixth carnelevare.

— No more choices, the barker repeated.

— There never was a choice. This is the one I’ve always wanted, I said. — The carnival with no name.

— The first. Do you know what it is you’re asking for? The barker motioned to the dusty rides and ruins scattered across the warehouse floor. — It won’t be like any of these. No sequins or carousels or quaint colored lights.

I pointed to the black boxes. — The other carnivals I considered were nothing like that.

The barker’s cane came to rest on the pitted surface of the megalith. — Nothing since the dawn of history has been like this.

I said nothing. There was nothing more to say. After a time, the barker nodded.

— As you wish, he said. — The conception will be — complex. I will need time.

— I have thirty days.

— Thirty days out there, you mean. He pointed to pale blue sky outside the high windows. — In here, it will be as long as I need it to be.

— All right.

— I am compelled to caution you: your body will change. Your mind will change. And there will be pain.

— I’m a woman. There always is.

Outside the house, days have come and gone. Months have bled away. Within these walls, the universe pauses to watch.

In the undiscovered country of my torso, from out the limitless valleys of my most intimate self, another monster emerges, another child of the carnelevare, horns and hooves slicing through skin and muscle and bone and capillaries. By my side, the Grand struggles, but I do not lessen my grip. Massive clawed hands clutch at my slick thighs, hoisting its heavy furred body up and out and into a room so spattered by my blood that I cannot tell where my body ends and where the house begins, except there is no beginning and ending, it is all one and the same, an ouroboros of continual birth. And the monster cleans its bull-shaped face against my stomach and licks my breasts, and crawls away, far into the house, and something else begins to emerge from my body, worse or better, I cannot tell. This is the sixth carnelevare, the great removing and raising of the flesh, the coming of a god so old it does not remember its name, and with it all its attendants beautiful and hideous, bursting forth from every orifice of my flesh to celebrate the mystery of all mysteries.

The floor beneath me shudders beneath my sudden burgeoning weight, and I hear the crackling of tree limbs, the cracking of bones. The dislocation of my jaw, the colossal clang of bells. Vastness pours out of me like an ocean. And the backwash of darkness rolls over my mind like a breaking wheel, and I float in the spirals of those faded painted galaxies of my childhood, holding my great-great-great-great-grandmother’s slender hand. Who lives around all those stars, can they see us, what are their names, my nine-year-old self asks her as the ghost of my mother daubs specks of gold and silver paint across the fathomless blue, and my grandmother replies, I am the only human in the world who will ever know.

Together we look up, and up, and up, and from our starry perch we see the deep woods of all the worlds, the labyrinths and groves, we see the satyrs and stags and bulls and the wolves and women and men. Masked and naked, they dance and contort around frightened fires, they chant their prayers and pleas into the shadowed cracks of the world, they laugh and crash together in god-fevered horror and cry out as the sparks of their devotion float up and wink out with their ecstasy. They gyre together and pull apart transformed, endless variations of monstrosities kaleidoscoping out of their frenzied couplings. And I am the night, and out of the night and the woods their god comes to them, into them, into her, in the strike of lightning and the shuddering of the earth, in the terminal vastation of his song.

— Close your eyes, I whisper.

— Never.

I sigh, and the fires wink out one by one, and I sink back down to the floor, to a room filled with clear light and the silk rattle of morning through the tree’s wintery bones.

I force my sticky eyelids open. My body feels empty, still. I blink, and the ceiling swims in a thin wash of red. I can’t tell if I’m dead or alive. I’m not breathing, and I cannot feel the beating of my heart. There is no pain, I realize in shock: the complete absence of such an all-consuming presence makes me light, free. I roll slightly, slowly, and sit up. I am covered head to toe in blood, and I am whole. My right hand holds the mangled, broken wrist of a woman’s severed arm, the grip so tight and deep beneath her flesh that I cannot see my fingertips. Crimson-brown gobs of placenta and blood cover every inch of our joined skin. Under the drying gore, I recognize the Grand’s flower-carved wedding ring. I leave the ring on the couch, with the arm.