Katherine Dunn - Nightmare Carnival

“I live back east. My regular employers are having a disagreement.”

“Dare I ask what they do?”

“Big brains. Quantum physics, exobiology, anthropology. They’re famous, infamous, one of those things. A pair of mad scientist types. They’d love to build a time machine or a doomsday device for the kicks.”

“Sounds like wacky fun. I could use a spin in a time machine, for sure.”

“Backward or forward?”

I shrugged, bored.

“Sorry your bosses are trying to kill each other. Family feuds are the worst.”

“It’s all the shooting that made me nervous.” He turned away and scanned the ground again.

“What’s the argument about?”

“The ethics of temporal collocation of sapient organisms.”

“No shit?”

“I shit you not. Mainly, they’re at each other’s throats about a dog.”

“Oh, I get that. I’d kill over a good dog.”

“Hmm. This one sure as hell is. Or it will be, after they build it.”

“Build it? Are we talking about a robot?”

“A cyborg. It — he — is a war machine. Weapons contractor is financing the project. My bosses are making history. Rex has a positronic brain. First of its kind, and Toshi and Howard are fighting over the ethics. Look, stick around a few days, we’ll fly to the compound, I’ll show you. Easier that way.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Man, I wish Rex was online. We’d make short work of. ” He cleared his throat and stood. “Be seven or eight years before the prototype is even in alpha phase. Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

“Do what the old-fashioned way? Aren’t you on vacation?”

“So to speak. Personal business. I traveled with this carnival as a kid. Ran away from a bad scene at home. The Gallowses took me in, gave me a job, made sure I got an education. They’re my uncles and they’re in trouble.”

“A debt of honor. How sweet.” Sweet like rat poison. Daddy the Marine had taught us kids a whole lot about honor. Honor had put him and my eldest brother into early graves. Can’t say I have much use for the sentiment.

“I didn’t pick you out of that bar just because you’re a looker,” Beasley said. “You’re something special.”

“Huh, that’s some heavy duty charm you’re laying down.”

“Yeah, it’s exhausting. I’ll stop.”

“Since you’ve already had your way, I’m steeling myself for the worst.”

“The Gallows Carnival is cursed. I’ve come to put things in order.”

“Wait, what? A curse?”

“Right.”

“Like voodoo, desecrated-Indian-burial-grounds kind of curse?”

He pointed to a splotch of maroon on the grass.

“Stay tuned.”

I decided to give Twenty Questions a break. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and tagged along as he inspected a rusty overgrown fence. Soon, he found a break in the wire. A black funnel bored through a copse of pine trees, juniper, and nettles. The hole had obviously been formed by the crush of a massive body wallowing its way through the tangle.

Then the breeze shifted and the reek of putrefying flesh almost knocked me down. Beasley handed me his hat and unlimbered his rifle. He carried a flashlight in his left hand. Its beam didn’t cut very far into the darkness.

Motioning for me to stay put, he crouched and moved into the burrow.

“Bad idea, Beasley. Bad, very bad.” Over the stench of death, I whiffed something else, something born of musk, dank fur, sweat, and piss. This was the lair of a ravenous beast, a creature of fang and lust. The combination of scents, the crimson aura of the den, made me dizzy, made my nipples hard and my thighs weak. I slapped myself across the mouth and that shocked me out of my little swoon.

Maybe slightly too effective. Every birdcall, every snapped twig caused me to twitch. The shadows in the trees became sinister. I gave serious thought to leaving Beasley there, strolling back to camp. I’d have coffee with a nip of bourbon and wait to see if he ever returned.

“Jess.” His voice floated from the tunnel, muffled and strange. “Dial 911. Ask for Sheriff Holcomb. Tell him to come right away.”

I made the call and identified myself. The dispatcher asked the usual questions and said a squad car would be on site shortly. Beasley crawled from the den, shirt torn and stems in his hair. He tossed a man’s severed head on the ground. Dead two or three days at most. The left eye was still intact. Blue as milk. Hours later, I still saw my shadow reflected in it, the beetles and the flies crawling around, unsure where to start.

“Five or six bodies in there,” Beasley said in a hoarse voice. He lighted a cigarette. Reached for his hip flask of whiskey, glanced at the sun, and reconsidered. Then reconsidered again and down the goddamned hatch. “Gonna have to reassemble the pieces to know for sure. Lotta pieces.”

“Cops are on the way.”

I’m not sure if I said it to reassure myself or to warn him that there’d be no more axe murdering on my watch. I ninety-nine percent dismissed the possibility of his involvement in a massacre. My instincts are hellishly sharp when it comes to detecting the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. Beasley had issues. Cold-blooded murder wasn’t one.

The sun inched across the sky. Beasley checked his watch every couple of minutes.

“Did the carnival lose a tiger?” I said. “Or a lion? The neck wound is. chunky. That’s how a big cat might savage its prey.” As if I knew jack shit about big cats or mauled corpses. My mouth pops into gear when I’m nervous.

“The Gallowses own three panthers. All accounted for. This ain’t a wild animal attack. This is a whole other thing.”

I couldn’t stop staring at the head, its mouth agape, teeth and tongue clotted in gore. I ran my thumb along the scar on my throat, felt a sympathetic pang, and relived the searing slash of the blade as it sawed on through.

“Here’s the sheriff,” Beasley said. He looked me in the eye, hard. “Be careful.”

“We’re hunting rabbits?” I always try to be brave.

“Don’t get cute with him. He’s not your friend. Take my word.”

I decided to heed his warning. A bad black vibe pushed forward thick as the dust from the cop cars tearing along the road.

Two Lewis and Clark County police cruisers nosed into the field. Several cops in midnight blue suits and white Stetson hats trudged the rest of the way to us. They patted the guns on their hips. One had a German shepherd on a leash. Poor dog wanted fuck-all to do with the murder scene. He pissed himself and cowered between the legs of his mortified handler, a lantern-jawed gal in mirrored shades.

Beasley shook hands with the sheriff. Two dogs deciding whether to sniff asses or just get to tearing each other apart.

Blond bearded and heavy through shoulders and hips, Sheriff Von Holcomb seemed at least a decade underseasoned for the post. On the other hand, one glance at the austere panorama and I concluded that finding a taker for the position might mean the electorate couldn’t afford to be too picky.

“Huh, well fuck a duck.” Sheriff Holcomb toed the severed head. He covered his mouth with a bright red handkerchief. His deputies took tape measurements and snapped photographs of the crime scene. The unluckiest of them all, a goober with a painfully large Adam’s apple, got sent into the burrow with a Maglite and a camera.

“Any idea who we’re lookin’ at here?”

“Alfred Fenwood.” Beasley passed the sheriff a bloodied driver’s license. “Don’t know him. Drag the bars, you’ll find Al likes cheap beer and long walks along the highway after dark.”

“We got missing-person reports galore over the past three weeks. Hikers, ranch hands, some folks snatched out of parking lots. Lots of wild animal calls, too. Ripped-to-hell pets, the usual sort of crap.” The sheriff glanced at me slyly, propped his boot on the head like a kid resting on a soccer ball, and slipped off his wedding band and made it disappear.