Katherine Dunn: Nightmare Carnival

Sensible action slipped my grip. I walked toward a massive rectangular tent, domain of Hondo the Panther Lord, as I’d been instructed. My flesh tingled the way it does when I’ve gone over my limit of booze. Weird, since I hadn’t had a snort since early in the day. I wiggled my fingers and clucked my tongue to test the theory. All systems go.

An offering, Victor had said. A human sacrifice, he’d said. Okay, he hadn’t said that, merely implied it. How much danger was I in? My hair-trigger alarm system kept sending garbled messages that filtered through static. Meanwhile, there went my sun-darkened hand on the mesh screen, and there went my feet, bearing me into a den of beasts, and there awaiting my arrival, crouched Satan, golden-black in the glare of a kerosene lantern suspended from a hook.

I call her Satan because she smoldered with an inner radiance that I’d intuited from a thousand glimpses of the devil’s likeness in illuminated manuscripts of the holy and the occult. Her shadow spread across the floor and up the wall, massive and primeval and bestial.

Satan, a.k.a. Deputy Cooper, wore blu-and-white uniform pants streaked in dirt, and nothing else. Broad shouldered, narrow hipped, sinewy, her feet sank into a puddle of gory mud. Before her lay the carcass of her K-9 partner, its jaws caked in red. She’d skinned it with a flint knife from the Neanderthal King exhibit.

Deputy Cooper slowly pivoted and revealed that the dog had eaten some of her face before it died. No, I didn’t vomit, quite.

“Damnedest thing,” she said. “I was chilling in the cruiser. Baxter tore through his kennel and went right for me.”

I almost didn’t recognize the deputy, for obvious reasons. She’d also ditched the mirrored shades. Her shape twisted and thickened into steroid-fueled contortions. Her hands were bigger than Mary the Magnificent’s, and those long, sharp nails weren’t press-ons. She lacked much in the way of body hair. That was incongruous, I guess. Folklore and Hollywood have conditioned us to expect pointed ears and a fur coat.

We were alone in the tent. Earlier in the day, a crew had loaded the animals into traveling enclosures and cruised toward Idaho. Victor had said that the phantom of Milo wouldn’t require the meat of a panther or wolf. The only force acting upon the Black Magician was his lust for Vinette. All else was pantomime. The dog’s corpse and Deputy Cooper’s wrecked face suggested Victor might not have possessed total command of the facts.

None of this was following the script. Dead dog, mutilated cop, me armed and dangerous.

“Good fucking god, Deputy.” I pulled the derringer from my purse, aimed at her head, and cocked the hammer. The pistol felt like a toy in my fist, in the presence of evil. Had I believed in evil prior to this instant?

She drove the flint blade into the ground and straightened. Blood oozed over her breasts, painted her belly and thighs. The blood flow showed no sign of slowing. Black-gold blood.

“You smell. great,” she said through impressive canines.

“Thanks,” I said. “Get on the ground.”

She tilted her partial death’s head. Her eyes were bloodshot and yellow.

“I’m going to eat your whoring heart, Nettie.”

“Okay, lady.” I pulled the trigger, saw a tiny hole bore into the exposed bone of her skull. A wisp of smoke curled from the wound.

Deputy Cooper blinked.

“There’s mud in your eye,” she said.

Her arm looped around fast and smacked me across the chest. Oof, let me tell you. Back in junior high a kid walloped me full force with an aluminum bat. This felt kind of similar, except somebody had filled the bat with rebar and Babe Ruth slugged me with it. A flash of insight suggested that in a parallel reality, the blow had struck claws first and my insides had splashed all over the place.

I flew backward through the tent opening and landed on my ass. Here came the skull-faced wolf woman, striding toward me. Mary, dressed in her carnival tights that showed off a lot of grotesquely bulging muscles, stepped out of the shadows and clobbered her across the back of the neck with a steel wrecking bar. The steel clanged meatily. Deputy Cooper dropped to a knee and Mary hit her again like she was chopping into a log.

Deputy Cooper caught the bar on the third swing, ripped it from Mary’s grasp, and slung it away. She covered her ruined face with her hands and wailed. Neither woman nor animal should be able to produce such a cry. The kind of sound you experience once and hope to never hear again. The deputy shuddered and collapsed into a fetal position and remained still. She appeared to diminish slightly, to sag and recede, as if death had taken from her a lot more than twenty-one grams. Made me seriously reevaluate my contempt for the Catholic Church and its hang-up with demonic possession. Sir Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. In my humble opinion, that goes double for sufficiently advanced lunacy being indistinguishable from supernatural phenomena.

“I suppose that’s one way of solving the problem,” Mary said.

“ Is it solved?” I said.

“The Gallowses will have to send a postcard with the news. I’m taking Lila away from here.”

Beasley’s mention of the sword swallower who got chopped to bits in Malaysia occurred to me. I kept it to myself.

“Thanks, Mary. Adios.”

She nodded curtly and walked away. Deputy Cooper lay there, one eye glistening as wisps of steam rose from her corpse.

I gained my feet and stumbled along the concourse. Dim lights peeped here and there from the recesses of shuttered stalls. The moon swallowed all else. I swear the moon resembled Deputy Cooper’s flayed skull, and it wouldn’t stay put, it rolled across the heavens to glare at me. I staggered to an empty squad car parked on the grass between the shooting gallery and a temporary-tattoo stall.

Yep, keys in the ignition, shotgun missing from the console rack. The interior reeked of wet fur. I jumped in, got her revving, and then floored it, barefoot on the cold pedal. I raced along the dirt road that curved away from the carnival. A veil of dust covered the sky and the damnable moon in my wake.

Crippling pain set in as the bouquet of survival chemicals polluting my veins diminished. Cracked ribs for sure, deep-tissue bruises in my back, everywhere. I’d bitten my tongue and jammed my neck. My feet hurt. It began to settle into my frenzied brain that I’d commandeered a patrol car, was mostly naked, had helped murder a sworn officer of the law, and worst of all, left ten grand behind. Perhaps I should turn around and retrieve the money, at any rate. Hard to split for parts unknown without a few dollars in one’s pocket.

That’s when the wheel wrenched in my hands. The cruiser slewed violently and I couldn’t work the pedals fast enough to avert disaster. It left the road at forty-five, flipped over, and skidded upside down until it came to a halt in the bushes.

The crash tossed me around inside the cab. Ruined my hair and tore my gorgeous dress all to shit. Might’ve loosened a tooth or two as well. I was partly stunned when Sheriff Holcomb got the driver-side door open and pulled me out and dumped me onto the soft ground without ceremony. He looked pissed. The pistol in his hand accentuated my impression of his mood.

“Nice shooting, Tex,” I said with groggy reproach.

“Jumping Jesus lizards,” he said. “My rig is totaled. Biggest clusterfuck I ever did see.”

“I bet you’ve seen a bunch too.”

He holstered his pistol with an expression of regret.

“What the hell are you doing in Coop’s car? Where is she? I heard a shot. What the fuck happened?”

“Easy, easy. Give her a second.” Beasley emerged from the gloom, rifle in hand. He knelt at my side and checked for broken bones. Contusions, mainly, but I didn’t mind the attention. While he worked, I closed my eyes and related the appalling tale of the past few minutes. I considered editing out the part where I put a slug into Deputy Cooper’s brain — admittedly, it might not have killed her, the wrecking bar swung by a carnival performer who could bench a grand piano was the most likely candidate. Once I started spilling, I couldn’t stop, though.